Bob Dylan’s much anticipated autobiography hits United States bookstores on Tuesday, offering a rare, first-hand insight into the reclusive singer’s life, the genesis of his career and struggle with celebrity.
However, any fan seeking a sensational tell-all confessional in the style of most rock music memoirs will be sorely disappointed.
Chronicles: Volume One wanders far from the normal autobiographical path, eschewing any chronological structure and providing instead snatches of a life, filled with anecdotes about anyone from the boxer Joe Dempsey to U2 frontman Bono.
The non-indexed book is perhaps most notable for what it leaves out.
There is nothing of his shocking switch from acoustic to electric sound, his conversion to Christianity, or the breakdown of his marriage to Sara Lowndes, which spawned the highly acclaimed 1975 album Blood on the Tracks.
His near-fatal motorbike crash in 1966 gets only the most cursory mention.
”I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered” he writes.
The 293-page book is split into five chapters, three dealing with his early adult days in Minnesota and New York City, and two with the making of two of his lesser-known albums: New Morning (1970) and Oh Mercy (1989).
The memoirs offer an atmospheric portrait of the Greenwich Village scene of the 1960s and the first rumblings of the social and political upheavals to come.
”America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes,” Dylan says, describing the germination of the counter-cultural persona that would define much of his career.
”It wasn’t that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick.”
Apart from music, the other subject that generates the most passionate passages in the book concern Dylan’s discomfort with the intrusiveness that came with celebrity and attempts to pigeonhole him as the voice of a generation.
At one point he recalls being awarded an honourary degree by Princeton University and being introduced to the student body as ”the disturbed conscience of Young America”.
”Oh Sweet Jesus! It was like a jolt … The disturbed conscience of Young America. There it was again. I couldn’t believe it. Tricked once more… I was so mad I wanted to bite myself.”
The annoyance spills into fury when recalling how hordes of fans would make the pilgrimage to his family home in Woodstock.
”Roadmaps to our homestead must have been posted in all fifty state for gangs of dropouts and druggies.
”I wanted to set fire to these people,” he recollects.
Celebrity crops up again in a Guinness-lubricated conversation in the late 1980s with Bono, who Dylan describes as having ”the soul of an ancient poet”.
”We talked about fame and both agreed that the funny thing about fame is that nobody believes it’s you.”
Of his two-year relationship with the folk singer Joan Baez, there are no details, apart from his stunned reaction to seeing her perform on a CBS television broadcast before they had ever met.
”I couldn’t stop looking at her, didn’t want to blink. She was wicked looking — shiny black hair that hung down over the curve of slender hips, drooping lashes, partly raised. The sight of her made me high.”
One figure who does loom large is the folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose music he credits with transforming his own singing and songwriting style.
”It made me want to gasp. It was like the land parted,” he writes of listening to Guthrie’s recordings for the first time.
”It was like the record player itself had just picked me up and flung me across the room.”
Dylan, who spent three years punching out the book on a manual typewriter, acknowledged in an interview with Newsweek that his approach to writing it had been unconventional.
”It’s like I had a full deck, and I cut the cards and whatever you see, go with that,” he said. ”I realise there’s a great gap in it.”
An audio version of the book is also being brought out, read by the actor Sean Penn. ‒ Sapa-AFP