Product Description

"I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else."

So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities -- smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13016 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-13
• Released on: 2005-09-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
One would not anticipate a conventional memoir from Bob Dylan--indeed, one would not have foreseen an autobiography at all from the pen of the notoriously private legend. What Chronicles: Volume 1 delivers is an odd but ultimately illuminating memoir that is as impulsive, eccentric, and inspired as Dylan's greatest music.

Eschewing chronology and skipping over most of the "highlights" that his many biographers have assigned him, Dylan drifts and rambles through his tale, amplifying a series of major and minor epiphanies. If you're interested in a behind-the-scenes look at his encounters with the Beatles, look elsewhere. Dylan describes the sensation of hearing the group's "Do You Want to Know a Secret" on the radio, but devotes far more ink to a Louisiana shopkeeper named Sun Pie, who tells him, "I think all the good in the world might already been done" and sells him a World's Greatest Grandpa bumper sticker. Dylan certainly sticks to his own agenda--a newspaper article about journeymen heavyweights Jerry Quarry and Jimmy Ellis and soul singer Joe Tex's appearance on The Tonight Show inspire heartfelt musings, and yet the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy prompts nary a word from the era's greatest protest singer.

For all the small revelations (it turns out he's been a big fan of Barry Goldwater, Mickey Rourke, and Ice-T), there are eye-opening disclosures, including his confession that a large portion of his recorded output was designed to alienate his audience and free him from the burden of being a "the voice of a generation."

Off the beaten path as it is, Chronicles is nevertheless an astonishing achievement. As revelatory in its own way as Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited, it provides ephemeral insights into the mind one of the most significant artistic voices of the 20th century while creating a completely new set of mysteries. --Steven Stolder

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. After a career of principled coyness, Dylan takes pains to outline the growth of his artistic conscience in this superb memoir. Writing in a language of cosmic hokum and street-smart phrasing, he lingers not on moments of success and celebrity, but on the crises of his intellectual development. He reconstructs, for example, an early moment in New York when he realized "that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale...that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself." And he recounts how, in that search for larger reach, he actually went to the public library’s microfilm archives to learn the rhetoric of Civil War newspapers. Skipping the years of his greatest records, or perhaps saving those years for the second volume of his chronicle, Dylan recalls the times when he was sick of his public persona and made more lackluster albums like "Self-Portrait" and "New Morning." He then skips again to his comeback work with producer Daniel Lanois in the late 1980s. Dylan emphasizes that he was "indifferent to wealth and love," and readers looking for private revelations will be disappointed. But others will prize the display of musical integrity and seriousness that is evident in his minutia-filled accounts of his influences in folk and blues. Ultimately, this book will stand as a record of a young man’s self-education, as contagious in its frank excitement as the letters of John Keats and as sincere in its ramble as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, to which Dylan frequently refers. A person of Dylan’s stature could have gotten away with far less; that he has been so thoughtful in the creation of this book is a measure of his talents, and a gift to his fans.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal
There's no word yet on how far this first volume goes, but we'll bet that Dylan doesn't leave any answers blowin' in the wind. Look for the complete Lyrics (ISBN 0-7432-2627-8. $45), pubbing simultaneously.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Basically a bogus look backward
Around every 20 pages, there's a phrase that's faintly reminiscent of the early years, the intellect that penned "it's allright, ma" etc. But so much of what he claims happened is just not reality. For instance, if you went by his words, from the late 60s onward he'd take off years at a time to play with his kids on the living room floor, go camping, rafting, etc a big stay at home family man, presumably married to the same woman, etc.
That's all false; so how much else is false? Basically, he's lived in a cocoon for 4 decades surrounded by yes people, and it's had the result you'd predict. It's actually more a work of fiction, or one of those invented autobiographies of a historical figure by a current author where everyone knows it's bogus.

the truth...but what is truth?
`Chronicles' covers the notional formative years of the Bob Dylan from birth through the string of incredible albums that re-defined folk and protest music. He has been called everything from Judas to Jesus. An intensely private person about himself and his family, he is as little known as a person as anyone of whom I can think. His interviews - take the one with the journalist in `Don't Look Back' as a case in point - seem to be more of an act of deliberate dis-information. He also exhibits consummately contrarian reactions to what his fan base want and expect him to do.

So, when I received a copy of this book, I was curious as to what I would be reading. This sense of trepidation was not helped by what seemed to be - for me, at least, a rough beginning. The writing style seemed disjointed, at time almost somnambulant; at other times a textual muttering from the sort of person you didn't wanted seated next to you on mass transit. After a while, I realized how wrong I was.

If you choose to believe the story is factual - and I do - then it is the ultimate detailed, technical and brutally candid description of how Bob Zimmerman engineered - with deliberate planning - the invention of Bob Dylan. And this is not to say that talent was not there. It was, and in great abundance. What was not there was naivety.

If you choose to believe the story is fictional, then it is brilliant writing, again the result of talent and a lack of naivety.

I Was Wrong
From his autobiography, it appears that I was really wrong about my conception of Bob Dylan. He wasn't a "protest singer" or "leader of progressive causes and disaffected youth", but rather a father, husband, well-read intellectual and musician. It's interesting to get Dylan's take on such golden oldies as Ricky Nelson and Roy Orbison. His book is also peppered with references to many people with whom I'm unfamiliar, but this didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of this candid autobiography