A work of autobiography or fiction or both? Do the fractured narrative and time shifts work? Should he stick to making records? Your opinions and thoughts are very welcome.

I read this about 4 months ago, on the recommendation of literary, non-Bob fan friend of mine.
Can't say I was thrilled, it seemed too random, to rambling and offered too few insights into the man & his place.
I tried very hard to find the Dylan "voice" in my head (works well reading Clive James, but you need a Clive James voice, not a Bob Dylan voice for that) but couldn't.
I have no idea if this was a cobbled together bunch of journal extracts, memoirs or fictions.
I'm not convinced he even wrote it, maybe he just rambled into a tape machine & it got typed up.

Some of it flowed but in a rather aimless fashion.
It was a pleasant diversion, but somewhat pointless.

I understand there is an Audio version read by Sean Penn, which is meant to be sensational.

i'll be more than happy to join in here but won't be able to get the book until the weekend and it'll take me a week or so to get through. am i out of the time scale? should i just wait for the next one?

I think a month was the time frame & it's not a heavy duty read.

Just read it in the last couple of weeks and loved it. Unlike the John Peel autobiography, I didn'thear Dylan's voice as I read! I loved the style, including the jumps around in time, which only seemed strange when I consdered them afterwards. While reading, the connections seemed perfectly logical. Just like having a chat in a pub with conversation veering from subject to subject and from era to era.

There's no way of knowing how much of it is fact. I've dabbled with writing stuff down from my childhood and who knows how much actually took place and how much, over the years, I've elaborated or fabricated into "real memories". Certainly as I read the book, I assumed it was all true.

For me, the most pleasing aspect of the book was how normal he sounded and how rationally he discussed some of the mythologising that went on about him. The image of him trying to escape his media-inflicted role as "spokesperson of a generation" is so human.

His passion for folk music is endearing and, in that volume at least, it's noteable how little he says about his own development as a song-writer, taking things in a wholly unique direction.

Great man. Great book. But that's just my opinion.
Cheers!

I wrote something very cynical about this book in another thread, but that was shortsighted. The book is an entertaining read. The best parts, imho, are where Dylan enthusiatically discusses various musicians whose work he admires. It's just like having an interesting conversation with a fellow music fanatic.

I also like how Dylan reminds us how things have changed in the music "biz" since his early days--how terms like "singer/songwriter" didn't exist, how recordings considered seminal weren't widely available. And in the context of the times, it's not surprising that initially Dylan gave no thought to writing his own material--most folksingers just covered the classics back then.

The time shifts are in keeping with the nature of the author, and aren't nearly as jarring as they could be. While it certainly helps to be familiar with the man and his myth, I think non-devotees might also like the book. All in all, it's enjoyable if not earthshattering, and that's enough for me.

Just one thing--has anyone ever asked Bobby Vee about this Dylan-as-his-sideman business? Sounds like bullshit to me! But then again, maybe not...

I found the structure was something of a tease – a long build up to the start of his career, then, just as it was about to get really interesting — jump to another time and place (a trick he has also used in songs such as Tangled Up In Blue). I think this was either deliberate playfulness (keep us guessing etc) or a reflection of his limited attention span (i.e. got bored and needed to change things around a bit).

Ok, just bought it from Amazon £3.99, I'll be back in a month!

Or you could report in as you go along.

Give us a page by page update. :)

I'd be worried that someone will spoil the plot!

t

or a bit of both, perhaps

so is this in the vein of burroughs-ive never even heard of him writing a book, unlike Cave-who can write

:lol: :applaud:

read it a few months back when it came out in paperback.
I liked it; quite a relaxed style of writing he's got and thought it'd make for a good screenplay.
As to the "facts" of the matter, who can say? unless he was keeping a diary / journal he's relying on memories from 40 years ago for some of it. But there again, does it really matter if it's fact or fiction. part of the whole dylan enigma thing is his ability for invention, re-invention and playfullness.
It's a bit like when people refer to dylan as "a poet" - I tend to disagree and suggest that he's more of a wordsmith; I think his writing in Chronicles underlines this viewpoint.
Also, like a previous comment made, i admire his being able to acknowledge his debt / influences to other players / musicians / songwriters and the fact that he would openly lift stuff from them and trade stuff.

i thought this was a great reader

i liked the fact that he'd mainly avoided the obvious periods and concentrated more on what he considered crisis points

One thing I enjoyed was some of the sections when he talked about the "practicalities" of putting groups together and making records, something I know very little about. I particularly liked his suggestion that Mick Jones would have been the perfect guitarist for his group.

I think it started out as sleevenotes for his albums that were due to be reissued, so that may have determined what he wrote about.

Did anyone think he rewrote history rather (i.e. he passes off his country period as a strategic move to shift the audience's expectation)? Was this really the case at the time? Or did he just fancy writing some nice country songs because he felt happy and relaxed with his new family life?

my sense is that the whole basement tapes, woodstock period was a flight from being rampantly creative, being on tour all the time and being on big drugs. just him, the wife, the kids and some mates. what are you going to produce apart from gentle country rock.

it's my favourite dylan era. from basement tapes, thru john wesley harding, nashville skyline and (even) self portrait

I'm reading it without any real knowledge of him or his music, so I can't comment on things being his version so much, but at the moment, I get the impression that a certain amount of editing has been done in terms of sequence and 'cutting and pasting', if you like, to give the book the feel of a movie maybe? Not a bad thing,

all it is, they're doing a repackage campaign of his stuff and they asked him to do sleeve notes for three albums from different bits of his career. without checking i think it's his first (62?), new morning (70?) and oh mercy (89). they turned out great and so instead of wasting them on cd packaging they bound them up in a book. all the stuff about impressionistic, unreliable narrator, editing his past, yadda-yadda, it's as simple as this.

whatever, it's a beautiful book and he writes like a dream. don't be put off by tarantula, or even by the opacity of a lot of his song lyrics. it's a wonderful read and it will make you happy

I truly loved the book. I spent decades not really caring one way or the other about Dylan -- happy enough to hear Like A Rolling Stone on the radio -- then just chanced into a concert of his in 2002. I was completely floored by a guy who could easily be going through the motions, but was clearly still making an effort to find his way toward a new sound. He played with energy, humor and creativity that I still find surprising, now having seen him a couple of times since as well.

He and Mark share this similarity, I think, a refusal to be bound by expectations. The only other musician I'd put in their lot is John Lydon, whose book is also very much worth a read.

So perhaps I was especially primed for Chronicles, having only recently begun to truly appreciate what he was up to. Some of my favorite parts of the book were tiny details. He's an excellent ice skater, a side effect of growing up a boy in Minnesota where hockey was all there was to do. Images of New Orleans. His continuing fondness for motorcycles -- the motorcycle accident that has been mythologized as the crisis point for his disappearance from the public eye has clearly been overstated.

There were two revelations that came to him that struck me as crucial, and while obvious enough, I'd never heard discussed before. One was his discovery that he could naturally memorize huge swaths of words. It gave him the courage to start writing long songs, since he now knew he'd be able to remember them when performing.

The other was what it means to perform. He mentions bottoming out while on tour with Tom Petty, seeing what a true performer Petty was, and how soulless he was himself (in 1987, anyway). Although he didn't mention this as much, his relationship with The Grateful Dead clearly had an impact as well -- he performs upwards of 100 nights a year, and has never repeated a setlist once. It's one of the joys of watching him work -- he clearly calls the songs as he goes, and sometimes the band catches up, and sometimes they don't. Again, not unmindful of our boy Mark.

(Combining his unusual memory with a deep repertoire is part of what makes him so unpredictable live. In 3 shows last year in Boston, where I live, he played 43 different songs out of 45 total. And the two he repeated sounded quite different on the two nights he played them. Along the way, he manages to equally annoy every part of his audience, since so many of them are attached to a single point in his career, and songs played the way they heard them on the records...to which Bob's suggestion is that they stay home and enjoy the records. The shows are about where he is today, and where he's going. You'll have fun if you go along for the ride.

Did I mention that Bob and Mark remind me a lot of each other?)

It was interesting to see the gap between who his influences are, and who we think they are. Some of them are obvious, but he was explicit in his attempts (I think successful) to transcend them. This is another area where he doesn't need to hit the nail on the head -- I was outgrowing traditional folk music, and they hated me for it -- to get his point across. We know all that already anyway, and the last thing I think we needed is to hear another re-telling of Newport '65.

He talks a lot about Civil War-era music, and the image of riverboat gamblers, too. The extent to which he's adopted this persona wholeheartedly for the past decade is a reminder that autobiographies are written from a fixed perspective in time -- there are clearly periods in his career where those sounds and images have resonated less for him than they do now.

Finally, I enjoyed the balance between embracing the myth and rejecting it. He speaks self-consciously of standing on the mountain and calling down fire in his younger days, and if you watch his performances from the time, particularly in the movie Don't Look Back (Visions of Johanna and It's All Over Now Baby Blue in particular), you can see that he meant this in utter earnestness, with no hubris intended. That's just what he was doing. At the same time, he was a kid in his twenties, trying to make life for himself with his family, and tour buses stopping by his house and strangers crawling across his roof weren't helping any.

It being Bob, I wouldn't expect him to give it to us without a little embellishment, but there wasn't anything here that didn't ring generally true to me. I also thought parts of it were hilarious. Given the relentlessness of our public pursuit of him, I thought Chronicles was a more gracious offering than we had any right to expect. I respect him even more for it.

I clearly got more out of Chronicles than some others here. That's fine. I still can't imagine anyone not being highly entertained by it. An excellent first choice.

I sometimes wish he'd put all this energy, wit and intelligence into writing some new songs. But maybe he felt he's done enough of that already. Some of the phrases in the book would have made great lyrics in their own right. I wonder if he was tempted to find tunes for them.

I agree. I think the last two records have some of the best things he's ever written on them (Not Dark Yet and Mississippi to name two examples). I'm glad he's working his band hard, but I'm ready to hear some new songs too.

Stephen,

slightly off topic but Dylan related.

Was the magic roundabout character Dillon Dylan-inspired? :o

Sorry, I wanted to ask something more serious but couldn't resist :D

Have you heard the (double) album 'Any Day Now' by Joan Baez? :unsure:

If not, you should. A comprehensive collection of Bobby Dylan covers, if you didn't know about it (I suspect you did).

It's very good. :)

From Wikipedia:

"There is speculation about possible interpretations of the show. One theory is that the characters represented French politicians of the time (Dougal being De Gaulle for instance). Another is that each character was addicted to a different type of psychotropic drug as Dylan was named for Bob Dylan. Neither theory is likely to be true."

What do you think of Chronicles, Stranger?

not read it. Don't think I will either, his sleevenotes left me a bit :rolleyes: :confused: really.

Anyway, the Joan Baez album?

I've replied to the PM.

However I wish to recommend the Joan Baez album to other Dylan fans here.

It is very good indeed. :applaud:

Listening to it on lovely old vinyl now. :)

Got it when I got an invoice for the Stones' Satanic Majesties Rejoice (with mirror cover ^_^ ), but with astronomical '1st item' postage (from the US), so decided to get value on the postage check the 'sellers other items'. Didn't even know about the album til then... :)

Also just got the latest CD of 'Highway 61 Revisited', brings me back memories of listening to it the first time travelling across the desert to Palm Springs with mountains (well big hills I guess) on the horizon... :)

Chronicles is a good read - but nowhere near as awesome as wishful-thinking baby-boomer reviewers made out. (Bryan Appleyard, take a bow).

The best chapter by miles was the one dealing with his feelings of artistic burn-out in the 80s. It's unusual for artists to lay themselves bare like that... normally it gets camouflaged as My Drug Hell etc etc. YAWN.

However the main thing I took away from this book is that Bob Dylan doesn't appear to know the difference between "incredible" and "incredulous". Voice of a generation MY ARSE!

i thought it was a cracking read.

i liked the way in this volume he didn't concentrate on the obvious periods mainly but more on crises.

I enjoyed Chronicles, despite finding the lengthy "Oh Mercy" sequence a bit turgid.
Much preferred the glimpses into boho NYC in the 60's. I don't know why on earth I was surprised, but Dylan can write.

One anecdote left me reeling though, where he describes jamming with Cecil Taylor...
:blink:
Now there's a bootleg I'd like to hear.

The book is nothing whatsoever like the sleevenotes. He comes across as funny, modest, thoughtful and insightful, rather than simply playing cryptic games with language (as in Tarantula). You should give it a go.

Well, maybe chapter by chapter! It arrived from Amazon yesterday and I read the first chapter on the bus to and from work today. I've really enjoyed the narrative voice so far, didn't expect to that much as I got bored with the BBC4 documentary and switched it off a few month back. Never really been a Dylan fan.

Even though it is full of "who the hell are they?" namechecks I got a real feel (at least in my imagination) of the bars and coffee houses of NY he frequented. Lovely language throughout, such as "... and then head for New York where he'd lay low, wait for something to blow over and fill up his pockets with wampum"

So far so good then, its off to "the Lost Land" next.

It gets better, I think. Are you still reading, or did you get fed up and throw it out of the bus window?

Ha! :D

No still reading!0 This one's a longer chapter though, and I couldn't get a seat this morning.

And so Chapter 2 in which our hero tells us New York is cold and snowy. Did he just get by through singing songs? Lots more name dropping, but sometimes people I've heard of - Harry Belafonte, Woody Guthrie. He spends time in several libraries, sees a dead body, meets some people, lives with a junkie couple who have a room full of guns, lives on any number of sofabeds, doesn't eat pork for the same reason as Malcolm X. What year is this?

He keeps losing band members (sound familiar?) but seems to be doing OK singing other peoples songs. This chapter is all about his influences, lyrically, musically, socially. Fascinating stuff, really enjoyable savouring the words on the page.

Turns out the guy's a good writer. Who knew? :whistle:

I agree, this was one of the great pleasures of the book. I found myself reading sentences aloud to my wife, not even for what he was saying as much as the richness of the language.

Chapter 3, it's 68, or 69, or perhaps 71, maybe 1970, can't tell. Bobby's gotten famous by now and appears not to like it, weirdos hanging outside his house, all he wants to do it bring up his kids, determined not to be the spokesman for a generation.

But, hold on Bob, but whilst the press put you on a pedestal, and there was little advice around (as there is now) on how to deal with sudden fame, you could have told them all to fuck off. Or maybe you did? Maybe you couldn't? Maybe it'll all be in the next chapter/volume. I have to read on. (it's a pleasure to do so)

I mentioned a Dylan fan friend that I was reading this, and though he went misty eyed as he remembered the sumptuous prose he remarked that Bob never tells you the name of his wife, nor his kids. Selective history - maybe that's the perogative of an autobiography.

The whole chapter is built around his fame meaning that Archibald McLeish (top American poet, if you pardon my ignorance of these things) can try to get Bob to write songs for a play what he is writing. Bob trys, but doesn't like what MacLeish wants to do with his songs and tells this icon of American poetry to stuff it. The songs come good for Dylan (New morning - can't say I've heard it, then I've nat heard much Dylan), the play is a turkey and closes after 2 days.

Trip to London on the train coming up so I should have it finished by Wednesday!

Two years on: I'm still waiting to find out what you thought of chapter four...