Chronicles: Volume 1
By Bob DylanSimon & Schuster, $24
Bob Dylan’s first foray into autobiography turns out to be as allusive — and elusive — as his Shakespearean universe of songs. He deliberately, perversely even, avoids the obvious in this beautifully written, thoroughly American exercise in myth massage. There’s nothing about “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival or recording such epoch-marking albums as Highway 61 Revisited or Blood On the Tracks, though. Instead, he replaces self-aggrandizement with thoughtful sepia-toned ruminations on American history, songwriting as theft and the cost of being the involuntary conscience of a generation. “I wasn’t a preacher delivering miracles,” he says. “It would have driven anybody mad.”
Chronicles begins and ends in 1961 with Dylan cutting his first publishing deal. In between, he jump-cuts from the Greenwich Village folk scene to the genesis of 1970’s New Morning to the uneasy New Orleans recording of his overlooked 1989 album Oh Mercy. It may be scattershot, but not a page goes by without a gnomic comment, wry joke or head-spinning revelation (“If I didn’t exist, someone would have to have invented me”). What more could you ask of the man? Volume Two, please.
