What did anyone expect, upon hearing that Bob Dylan had written a memoir? What would the style be, what would it want to say? Would it be like those liner notes he wrote in the '60s, full of secondhand Beatitudes rendered superfluous by the real poetry, verbal and musical, inside the jackets? Or would it be a return of that awful Tarantula-speak, liner notes writ large in Dylan's first and only "novel" -- "between the shrieking mattress in the kitchen & Time, a mysterious weekly," etc. -- written in 1966, published in 1971, and read almost never?
What Dylan has delivered with Chronicles, Volume One is probably the one thing no one expected, not really: the best book, potentially, there will ever be about Bob Dylan -- the darkest, the funniest, the most twisted and angular, the richest and most sensual, the only one a reader might fall into and never hit the bottom. I say "potentially" only because the book is titled Volume One, and so remains to be finished. But if things happen as they ought to and Dylan produces another two or three volumes before he dies, what we'll have on the shelf and in our hands will be not merely the best Dylan book but one of the great American books.
"Sometimes you just think of things you've seen, old memories that you've salvaged from the rubble of your life." Thus Dylan lays out the anti-logic of a narrative whose chronological drift likens it to a William Faulkner novel, but whose style is drawn from the itinerant literary tradition: Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory, Richard Farina's Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me, and -- beware, sacred monster approaching -- On the Road.
The book begins where it ends, in the "cold, muffled and mysterious" New York City of 1960-61 -- for Dylan, a "lost land" of borrowed rooms, large personalities, and living history. He roots about in this Greenwich Village past as if it were an inviting, well-heated attic filled with fascinating arcana. Dylan wakes on someone's couch, looks around, and spots something -- an object, the view through the window -- that spins him off into memory. Then, two or 20 pages later, he moves to another room, where he remembers seeing something else. The memories come, and he is spinning again. We learn of his immersion in the newspaper archives of the New York Public Library, sucking the ancient yellow pulp for a taste of what Greil Marcus called "the old, weird America" -- its intensities and freedoms, its workaday mysticism and out-frontness. Fascinated by the Civil War, he has vague premonitions of its relevance to the dawning decade.
Young Dylan spots the past disguised in the present, hears ancient philosophers through the static of mid-century discourse. In this chronicle without a chronology, the tense changes back and forth from past to present, even within the same sentence. "I read the biography of Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican,” Dylan writes. “He lived in the early part of the 1800s … . He's from Gettysburg and he's got a clubfoot like Byron." As if old Thaddeus could drag his clubfoot from inside a book to stomp and roar around Dylan's little attic. Though a misfit, Dylan reckons himself the object of manifest destiny, more than once using those exact words. He is a proud freak in a gelatinous mainstream culture, consorter with ghosts and oddballs, and loyal to his own fierce perceptions. "I had a heightened sense of awareness,” he writes, “was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot" -- i.e., the American artist who seeks, as if helplessly, the popular medium while disdaining and distrusting all that popularity might bring.
He feels all the connections; myth and modernity are one to him. And so, feeling misplaced in time, he is driven to reimagine his own time. And then he skips right over the tight, tense, productive years in which he did just that. It's 1968: He hates the new America and doesn't know what it wants of him. "The events of the day, all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul -- nauseating me." Dylan's sustained snarl at all those who sought to appropriate him as the voice, soul, conscience, fingernails, and follicles of a troubled generation -- "I wanted to set fire to these people" -- is unpleasant and unforgiving, but there is no more powerful account of how it feels to be slowly pulled apart by both a hungry mass audience and the force of historical events.
Instead of sinking beneath it, Dylan uses this predicament to renew his contrarian instincts. After all, he asks, "What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing." Thus he records the pure country Nashville Skyline and the disastrous pseudo-bootleg Self-Portrait, and two years of anguish culminate in late 1970 with New Morning, an album Dylan is proud to admit "had no specific resonance to the shackles and bolts that were strapping the country down, nothing to threaten the status quo." A thin, modest, painless album with two or three beauties -- as far as the Bard of Woodstock was concerned, that would have to be enough.
The time machine lurches again, this time to 1987, New Orleans, and the sessions that would produce Dylan's umpteenth comeback album, Oh Mercy. He's feeling used-up, uninspired. "It wasn't my moment of history anymore,” he writes. “There was a hollow singing in my heart and I couldn't wait to retire and fold the tent." Two men help to bring him out of his funk and back into the world, more obdurate and eccentric than before. One is producer Daniel Lanois, who wraps Dylan's songs in a resounding haze and sensual echo to create his first really new sound in years. The other is Sun Pie, an old man of indeterminate background, proprietor of a souvenir shop on a lonesome stretch of Louisiana highway. Dylan wanders in and experiences an impromptu monologue on race, society, history, and cosmology, all grounded and unified by the mesmerizing madness of one man's cracked and weathered intonations.
In some ways this chapter is the crux of the book, containing its essential moment of self-confrontation. Dylan is Sun Pie -- the solitary crank lurking along the American roadside, full of opinions, holy inspirations, mad theories. He knows it and we know it, and Dylan is hushed and humbled by this chance encounter with his unlikely doppelganger. Is what either of them says insanely logical, or just insane? Doesn't matter; the listener may sort that out. What matters is the voice -- its singularity, its tones, its intractability, and the fact that, in this country at this date, it is still speaking.
Dylan has been re-creating himself as this bedrock, old-line American crank for a long time now, his voice becoming ever more gnarled and private, the sound of a loner sharing thoughts with himself as he rambles the prairie or rides the riverboat. And I've felt less compelled than others by this Dylan. He has always worn costumes and played parts, but this new part places safe limits on his crazy, multiform talent. Only occasionally (in songs like "Most of the Time," "Tryin' to Get to Heaven," and "Dixie") has he stepped outside the knotted-pine archetypes and stumblebum-genius molds we remember from American Lit class or popular imagination and renewed himself as a singular voice and temperament, past age or nation -- not one who has settled for moving within the familiar, Smithsonian-sanctioned tradition of the American folk artist.
But the "nation" part of that equation is essential to Chronicles, because Dylan insists on the Americanness of himself and his story. That's just fine. The Smithsonian might applaud this work, but it wouldn't know what to do with it. The language is crazy and the bend of thought crazier, the prose equivalent to a ballad that mutates into an epic philosophic discourse, then into a stand-up routine, then into a hazy survey of an old man's vast memory warehouse. With a few hundred pages to fill, the crank persona must work harder, must dance with itself to dazzle its audience.
Like Sun Pie's, Dylan's voice has been, at different times, either tentative or ferocious, lazy or engaged, tangential or monumental. It has lit up imaginations and reinforced prejudices. But it's never been generic, and it's never ceased sounding its yawp. More than anything, it's that voice -- wizened, generous, piercing, full of blarney -- that invites the reader into this ramble through several lifetimes' worth of stories and memories, that keeps the ramble rolling and the history churning. All moments feel connected here, and the whole of life might be contained in a moment of life.
"Outside," Dylan writes, "I heard a woodpecker tapping up against a tree in the dark. As long as I was alive I was going to stay interested in something." From our least-known hermits and neighborhood eccentrics to our greatest poets, this has been the secret credo of the great American crank. Dylan has spent his career working toward that echelon, and with Chronicles, he's reached it.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
