Bob Dylan writes his life

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.

Mr. Dylan spends part of the book (but by no means a big part) debunking his image as a social and political radical. Some of what he reveals will astonish. As a boy, for example, he wanted to go to West Point. “I wanted to be a general with my own battalion.” More amazingly, in the 1960s, he writes, “My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater who reminded me of Tom Mix,” and wryly adds: “there wasn’t anyway to explain that to anybody.”

That’s certainly a Bob Dylan no one knew back in those days. He did not want to be “the mouthpiece, spokesman, or … conscience of a generation,” he now claims. Nor did he seek appointment as “the Big Bubba of Rebellion” or the “High Priest of Protest.” These were visions of his role created for their own purposes by press and public and to which he never subscribed, he says.

What did Mr. Dylan want? Privacy for him, his wife, and children, for one thing, and privacy was in short supply once he attained celebrity. But he also wanted to be free to practice his art and allow it to take him where it would unfettered by a public’s expectations.

“I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper,” writes Mr. Dylan, sounding very much like one of his songs. He adds that he wasn’t “someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire,” explaining that “all I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities.”

That’s a big claim, and an arguable one. The skills needed to express “powerful new realities” are given to very few artists. But where Mr. Dylan is right on the money is when he sums up what he sees as his accomplishment. “What I did to break away was to take simple folk changes and put new imagery and attitude to them, use catch phrases and metaphor combined with a new set of ordinances that evolved into something different that had not been heard before.”

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