From: LOHJKHJKHJK@HJKHJKHJ.COM   
      
   The Sunday Times - Books   
      
      
      
   October 17, 2004   
      
   Chronicles by Bob Dylan   
   REVIEWED BY BRYAN APPLEYARD   
      
      
      
   CHRONICLES: Volume One   
   by Bob Dylan   
   Simon & Schuster £16.99 pp293   
      
      
   Fans of Bob Dylan - I have been more or less craven for 40 years now - have   
   come to expect many startling things of their hero. There was the icy   
   refusal to be claimed by folkies, protesters, rockers, popsters or, indeed,   
   anybody. There was the vicious, brittle, hipster wit, alternating with   
   exquisite, lovelorn tenderness. There were the sudden spiritual   
   conversions - to orthodox Judaism, to born-again Christianity - combined   
   with improbable, unthinkable aesthetic U-turns. And, most heartbeaking of   
   all, there were the sudden, drab intrusions of mediocrity and sloppiness   
   into the glittering flow of his genius.   
   Anything could happen with Bobby and it usually did at least twice. But the   
   one thing none of us expected was that he would ever write a good book. His   
   novel, Tarantula, had its moments but it didn't work, and his written as   
   opposed to sung poems lay flat on the page. But now here comes Chronicles,   
   an extremely good book indeed, actually a great one. If you are not weeping   
   with gratitude by the end, then, frankly, the age has passed you by.   
   Dylan may well be, as his most lucid critic Christopher Ricks has suggested,   
   the greatest living user of the English language. Many find this hard to   
   understand. How can writing so apparently cliché-laden and awkward be   
   considered great? This is to miss the point. No cliché in Dylan stays quite   
   where it belongs, and each awkwardness, like those in Thomas Hardy's poems,   
   conceals a verbal revelation. Dylan, undereducated but always supremely   
   intelligent, encounters language the way Buster Keaton encounters the world,   
   with an innocent and alarmed but penetrative gaze.   
   But this is only half of the story, and a misleading half at that. Dylan   
   writes songs, not poems. The distinction is fundamental yet seldom fully   
   appreciated, perhaps because so many of his apologists have come from   
   literary backgrounds and have failed to grasp the depth and breadth of his   
   assimilation of sung forms. The first thing to say about Chronicles is that   
   it hugely and triumphantly corrects that imbalance.   
   "I practised in public," he says of his apprentice years on the New York   
   folk scene. But, in private, he listened with stricken intensity. We all   
   know about Woody Guthrie, of course. Dylan was partly in New York in 1961 to   
   visit him as he lay dying of Huntington's Disease. But here we also learn   
   about him listening to Dave Van Ronk, Roy Orbison, Cisco Houston, Hank   
   Williams, Jack Elliott and even Joan Baez. He takes apart, analyses,   
   imitates and reworks every song he really admires. When he encounters the   
   best, he is speechless and humble. Without the great bluesman Robert Johnson   
   and Kurt Weill's bleak Pirate Jenny, he admits he would have achieved   
   little. His own chilling masterpiece Blind Willie McTell - not mentioned   
   here - is a modest confession that his world may not be made for the   
   absolute authenticity of the old blues masters.   
   The book begins with those early New York years and returns to them at the   
   end. In between, he bounces poignantly and pointedly around his life,   
   devoting a fifth of the book to the recording of Oh Mercy!, the album that   
   began his resurrection from the bad days of the 1980s and slow progress to   
   the magnificent near-death experiences of Time out of Mind and Love and   
   Theft. Myths are wryly corrected along the way. He did not jump a freight   
   train to get to the city, but hitchiked from Minnesota, arriving rather   
   comfortably "in a four-door sedan, '57 Impala". The freight-train lie was   
   idly made up for a record company PR man while Dylan eyed up "a blazing   
   secretary" in a neighbouring building. "If you have to lie," he comments   
   later, "you should do it quickly and as well as you can."   
   In fact, he elevated lying to high art. In the late 1960s, his fame had   
   become an intolerable burden - "like having some weird diploma that won't   
   get you into any college". Alarmed by the threats and demands of his   
   increasingly crazed fans around the time of his magnificent but politically   
   quietist album John Wesley Harding, he deliberately released two albums   
   (Nashville Skyline and Self-Portrait) to convince them that he was no longer   
   a rock, pop or protest star. "Art is unimportant next to life," he writes,   
   "and you have no choice."   
   But, typically, the albums were art. Both were flamboyantly complacent, yet,   
   even as red herrings, they were strangely brilliant musically. Equally   
   brilliant was his appearance in a yarmulke at the Wailing Wall. It was   
   another diversion, intended to bore his fans to death by a return to his   
   faith. Probably his later conversion to fundamentalist Christianity was   
   another diversion, but he does not admit this here. To be honest, I'm not   
   convinced that any of these gyrations were really for the benefit of his   
   family. He just loves shattering any self-image before it can become fully   
   formed. Rimbaud's "Je est un autre" had become his motto while in New York.   
   This all becomes high comedy when he describes receiving an honorary degree   
   at Princeton University, a story later to be told in the song Day of the   
   Locusts. Dylan turns up with the magnificently stoned Dave Crosby. He   
   listens patiently to the citation. The one thing he doesn't want to hear is   
   that he was "the conscience of Young America". But, sure enough, that's what   
   the guy says. Cosmically paranoid, Dylan flees while Crosby summarises the   
   scene - "Bunch of dickheads on auto-stroke."   
   Crosby is just one of the dozens of characters that leap, fully formed, from   
   these pages. There's Albert Grossman, later to be Dylan's manager and the   
   subject of Dear Landlord, packing a .45 and looking like Sydney Greenstreet.   
   There's the poet Archibald MacLeish, "the aura of a governor, a ruler -   
   every bit of him an officer". And, fleetingly, there is his own family,   
   clearly beloved but somehow blurred and distant. All of them, that is,   
   except for the grandmother, who tells him with a prescience that is   
   shattering but possibly too good to be true that happiness isn't on the road   
   to anything. Happiness is the road. These days, Dylan is happy, perpetually   
   touring on the happy road to nowhere.   
   His evocation of places, meanwhile, should just go straight on to every   
   school syllabus. "Everything in New Orleans," he writes, "is a good idea."   
   And, in that city, he sees "chronic melancholia hanging from the trees". New   
   York was never colder or more crowded than in these pages, and America never   
   more limitless. Also the South was never more different from the far north   
   from which he sprang, possessed, he says, like all northerners, with a gift   
   for abstraction. Significantly, in the New York public library, he buries   
   himself in the history of the civil war between North and South. "Back   
   there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)