Oceans of ink have already been spilled on the subject of Bob Dylan's recently published autobiography, Chronicle, but I love Bob as much as the next guy so, why shouldn't I get to throw my two cents in? Damn it, I think I will.
A few months ago a writer for the New York Times Review Of Books made the observation that hundreds of years from now, people will look back with awe on the days that Bob Dylan walked the earth. This writer (whose name I can't recall -- sorry about that) likened Dylan to William Blake or Mohammed in terms of his prophetic gift, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. Dylan is a titan -- it's staggering how much of his work bears the mark of genius -- and it's no overstatement to describe him as a great prophet. However, as his autobiography reminds us once again, he's a mighty strange prophet.
This is a fascinatingly weird book. It starts off like a conventional biography, with Dylan reminiscing about his early days in New York, but things get strange in fairly short order. Not surprisingly, Dylan is a gifted prose writer in terms of his descriptive skills, and he has a remarkable memory too. What sets the book apart, and makes it recognizably Dylanesque, are the bizarre asides and observations sprinkled throughout the text. Dylan has a real gift for kooky bon mots (when he tosses out two in a row, he begins to sound like he's writing a song) and some of the things he comes up with are flat-out nutty: He says, for instance, that he's "always been a fan of Ricky Nelson's and felt kin to him, but Nelson's kind of music was all a mistake." Listening to one of Nelson's songs one afternoon at the Café Wha?, Dylan recalls that "Ricky's song ended, and I gave the rest of my French fries to Tiny Tim." Is it just me, or is there something weird about this sentence? And, who would've guessed that Dylan's a fan of Johnny Rivers, Bobby Vee, actress Diana Sands, Harry Belafonte, Charlie Daniels, basketball player Pete Maravich, Ice-T, and Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill? Dylan's capacity to surprise never seems to diminish.
He puts a lot into his descriptions of people he admired early in his career -- Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, Izzy Young, Woody Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams -- and his willingness to reveal his influences is commendable. Nor does he pull any punches on the subject of how ambitious he was as a young man. The portrait he sketches of himself depicts a single-minded and calculated student who had no interest in anything he couldn't learn from. Dylan was particularly interested in American history and the music that chronicled it. In the first section of the book he offers a thorough recounting of what he was reading during the early '60s, the music he was listening to, and the people he met -- and it makes for fascinating reading.
The middle section of the book seems like it was written by someone else entirely. It's essentially an extended rant about the toxicity of fame, communicating in no uncertain terms Dylan's distaste for the late '60s, and his unbridled hatred of the scrutiny he's been subjected to ever since he hit the big time. It's at this point that the information in the book begins to get a little weird too. Dylan refers to his wife, but never mentions her name; later in the book, he's jumped ahead twenty years and again mentions his wife. As any card-carrying Dylan fan can tell you, Dylan's first marriage ended during the '70s and was the thinly disguised subject of the album Blood On The Tracks and the film Renaldo And Clara. Exactly who are all these wives? And how come wives and girlfriends are the only players in his story who aren't identified by name?
From there, Dylan offers an extended meditation on his bouts with writers block, a serious hand injury he suffered, and his periods of crippling ambivalence about performing. We get a blow-by-blow accounting of the making of Oh Mercy with producer Daniel Lanois, then the book closes with reminiscences about his childhood and family, a brief stay in Minneapolis, his first love, Suze Rotolo, (the only lover who gets mentioned by name), and his introduction to visual art. Ultimately, it all seems a bit random, as if whatever bobbed to the surface of his memory bank was tossed into the book. But here's the amazing thing about Bob Dylan; we continue to examine whatever he offers us, expecting to find something great and deep and wise embedded within it. Even more astonishing is how often he delivers on that promise. However, it's impossible to read Chronicle without being struck by what a very peculiar prophet he is.
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