Bob Dylan's songlines

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2005 by Michael Karwowski

Chronicles, Volume One. Bob Dylan. Simon & Schuster. [pounds sterling]16.99. 293 pages. ISBN 0-7432-3076-0. Lyrics, 1962-2001. Bob Dylan. Simon & Schuster. [pounds sterling]35.00 610 pages. ISBN 0-7432-3944-X.

The publication of the first volume of Bob Dylan's autobiography represents an event of some note. A cultural icon of the twentieth century who wrote some of its most memorable songs, Dylan is almost equally famous for a reticence that makes Garbo seem like a socialite. One might be forgiven, then, for being somewhat sceptical as to how revealing Chronicles, Volume One, might prove to be. What is surprising, therefore, is that it is not only revelatory, but sometimes devastatingly so. Dylan, known as a master of metamorphosis throughout his forty-year-career, has managed to reinvent himself yet again into possibly the strangest transformation of all, as a raconteur of genius!

First, the form: five chapters, each like a pebble thrown into the reservoir of memory to ripple outwards from a very particular moment. Three of these chapters, the first two and the fifth, are about Dylan's early years as a struggling folk singer in Greenwich Village, New York, with the last echoing the first. The two middle chapters deal, respectively, with Dylan's so-called 'disappearance' at the height of his fame in the late 1960s, and the recording of his celebrated album Oh Mercy in 1987. The point about this form is that it leaves almost untouched the mid-60s, in other words, the years that established Dylan's legendary status as a songwriter. The effect is to create the black hole of a whirlpool at the centre of the book round which Chronicles swirls. But while the method leaves much of the mystery of many of his greatest songs intact, it tells us far more than we were entitled to expect about the man and the artist who is Bob Dylan.

Not surprisingly, much of the critical comment about the book has concentrated on the seminal years that produced 'the poet musician that I would become', in Dylan's own words. But it is the relatively unheralded middle chapters that are actually the most revealing. In the second of the two, Dylan recalls a conversation with Bono, singer of the Irish group, U2, in which 'both agreed that the funny thing about fame is nobody believes it's you'. True to form, both chapters reveal a man who bears little or no resemblance to the Bob Dylan of public perception.

The first, New Morning, named after the 1970 album of the same name, reveals a man bemused and enraged by his elevation into 'the spokesman of his generation'. To someone who did not have to experience the agonising consequences of that cultural martyrdom, this chapter is absolutely hilarious in the way that a Charlie Chaplin who trips over his outsize trousers is funny. As Dylan, then a family man, remembers it, referring to the antiestablishment fervour of the late-60s: 'The events of the day, all the cultural mumbo-jumbo were imprisoning my soul--nauseating me ... I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of'.

But that's not the way his generation saw it: 'Rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest began to arrive'. Dylan's determination to dissociate himself from the social hurricane he had unleashed fell on deaf ears. As one newspaper headline put it: 'Spokesman denies that he's a spokesman'. In short, Bob Dylan became a victim of his fame: 'I felt like a piece of meat that someone had thrown to the dogs'. The tragic upshot was that the man who had brought serious meaning to the meaninglessness of pop music was reduced to almost regretting his genius and actively avoiding any expression of creativity that would draw attention to himself. Of his album, New Morning, for instance, he writes: 'I felt these songs could blow away in cigar smoke, which suited me fine'.

Herein lies the profound pathos of this book and, incidentally, the explanation for something that has perplexed all true Dylan fans ever since: why is it that when Bob Dylan writes truly great songs, he does not include them in his albums? Dignity and Series of Dreams, for instance, both masterpieces, were not included on Oh Mercy. Fortunately, then, Simon & Schuster has also published Lyrics, 1962-2001. For, here, we have the lyrics to Dylan's entire oeuvre so far, what he is about, irrespective of the demented effect he might produce on his society. Also, in what is a beautifully-produced volume, the Bob Dylan phenomenon is revealed in simple black and white rather than in the bleeding Technicolour of fame.