Book Review--Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume 1

Bob Dylan is a strange man. So I really didn't know what to expect from his autobiography. My curiosity, plus a couple of good reviews, led me to buy it. And I was pleasantly surprised. It's damned interesting. He gains a lot of points for being honest about how crappy his music was in the 80s. He writes quite well (though I suspect that there was a ghostwriter involved in the process). He seems really honest with his feelings about the world. And his narrative structure is really interesting. When I saw that this was Volume 1 but that it talked about the 1980s, I thought, "OK, there's not enough interesting music that is going to come out of this man in the future to justify a volume 2." But what he does is just tell stories from different periods in his life. Much of the book is on the folk scene in New York and his arrival on that scene and how he discovered different folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. He has one section on how much the idolization he received in the 60s upset him and how annoying hippies were (which I can sympathize with), and he has one very long section on the making of Oh Mercy, his only real good album between Blood on the Tracks and Time Out of Mind.

He doesn't talk at all about his early albums, his move to playing electric with the future The Band backing him up, his role in creating The Band's revolutionary album, Music from Big Pink, the creation of Blood on the Tracks, his conversion to Christianity in the late 70s and the albums that followed, or his comeback in the late 90s. So as you can see, there's a lot for him to talk about in another book.

Among other things he could talk about is how he used people up and spit them out when he was done with them, such as he did with Jack Elliott who mentored him in the early 60s as the link to his hero Woody Guthrie or with the many other people he did similar things to on the way. But I guess that's not real shocking. After all, what autobiography is not self-serving to some extent? And really, this was is more honest than many I have read.