Bob Dylan writes his life

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CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE

By Bob Dylan

Simon & Schuster, $24, 293 pages

REVIEWED BY STEPHEN GOODE

He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in the Spring of 1941 in St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minn., but found the name he became famous under two decades later when someone in the Twin Cities asked him who he was. He answered, "instinctively and automatically . . . Bob Dylan."

Or at least that's the explanation Bob Dylan, folk singer and American icon, offers in his volume of autobiography, "Chronicles," and it has the ring of truth. Not that Mr. Dylan isn't above fabrication. A couple of pages into Chronicles, he admits to telling a publicity man at Columbia Records in the early '60s, where he cut his first record, that he came from Illinois, had worked in construction in Detroit, and arrived in New York City hobo-like, on a freight train.

None of that was true. But it sounded good and it helped to cultivate the wild-child image the ambitious young man wanted to spread about himself and continued to do so in song, interview, and film, all of which followed rapidly as hiis name became known worldwide in what appears now as a very short period of time.

In the five measured and beautifully written essays that make up this book, we are given as close a look at this enormously influential latter-day troubadour as we are likely ever to have, at least from his own pen. Mr. Dylan's memory for detail is phenomenal and he has a talented writer's gift for knowing what to tell us, and what to leave out.

"Chronicles" isn't particularly chronological. The five pieces, with such names as "The Lost Land," "New Morning," and "Oh Mercy," jump around in time. But they are always coherent and suffer very little from the ambiguity (and downright opacity) that some of Mr. Dylan's songs are famous for.