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This month features Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan, Simon & Schuster, 0743230760, £16.99
Astonishingly (to me, at least), Bob Dylan has succeeded writing the best ever book about Bob Dylan.
The best because it puts Bob Dylan in doubt.
Even the name.
Robert Zimmerman, according to Bob Dylan, started off masquerading as Elston Gunn. Then Robert Allen. Then he heard of ‘a West Coast saxophone player named David Allyn’. This looked ‘more exotic, more inscrutable’. So Robert Allen became Robert Allyn. ‘Then sometime later… I’d seen some poems by Dylan Thomas. Dylan and Allyn sounded similar. Robert Dylan. Robert Allyn. I couldn’t decide… But Robert Dylan didn’t look or sound as good as Robert Allyn… Bobby Dylan sounded too skittish. Bob Dylan looked and sounded better than Bob Allyn.’
But not only the name is in doubt, the man is, too:
‘Once in the midsummer madness I was riding in a car with Robbie Robertson, the guitar player in what later was to be called The Band… He says to me, “Where do you think you’re gonna take it next?”
‘I said, “Take what?”
‘“You know, the whole music scene.” The whole music scene! The car window was rolled down about an inch. I rolled it down the rest of the way, felt a gust of wind blow into my face and waited for what he said to die away – it was like dealing with a conspiracy.’
(This kind of conversation later turned into Dylan’s ‘Idiot Wind’ lyric ‘Even you, yesterday/ You had to ask me where it was at/ I couldn’t believe after all these years/ You didn’t know me any better than that…’)
And not only the man is now in doubt, the times are, too.
This is a meticulous book, and in nothing more so than the cover image, a Don Hunstein black and white photograph of Times Square. A 1950s-reeking, not a 1960s image.
And what Dylan remembers, as few do, was that in America the early 1960s were still, really, the 1950s.
Perhaps he sees this so clearly because he was one of the folks that brought the 1960s forward into themselves.
One of the most brilliant things about Chronicles is how little the period details resemble the I heart 1961 version of events – how uniconic they are.
To take only one example, Dylan is loyal to the uncool, commercial folkies who led him slowly away from rock’n’roll (his true roots) and towards the real stuff:
‘The popular perception of folk music were things like “Waltzing Matilda”, “Little Brown Jug”, and “the Banana Boat Song” and all that stuff that had appealed to me a few years earlier so I didn’t feel the need to put it down.”
His first recording date was as harmonica player with Harry Belafonte. This has always seemed drastically uncool. But Dylan won’t have it:
‘There was never a performer who crossed so many lines as Harry. He appealed to everybody, whether they were steelworkers or symphony patrons or bobby-soxers, even children – everybody.’
Some things are cooler than cool. Ubiquity is cooler.
Mick’n’Keef used to take the piss out of Bill Wyman for collecting every programme, newspaper article, set-list. But it’s clear that Dylan, right from the beginning, has been spotting his own train (slow and fast). If his archive isn’t massive, then his recall is astonishing; if his memory isn’t photographic, his research is dead-on.
Yet at the same time, Dylan is the least deceived by ideas of his own iconic status. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t believe he is iconic. Of the 1980s, he writes:
‘My fame was immense, could fill a football stadium, but it was like having some weird diploma that won’t get you into any college.’
(Incidentally, Chronicles goes part way to explaining one minor biographical mystery: why, in June 1970, he bothered to go to Princeton and pick up his diploma - as memorialized in the song ‘Day of the Locusts’. This doubtful Dylan isn’t averse to a little by-proxy respectability. He name-drops.)
It was a put-on – thank God - the mumbling, washed-up, curly mulleted rock star wash-up of the 1980s. That might have been how Dylan felt himself to be. (Sections here about the recording of ‘Oh Mercy’ make this pretty plain. As well as confirming that, the first time I saw Dylan live – with Tom Petty at Wembley Arena – he was at the utter nadir of his career.) But inside him, all along, was a furiously articulate autodidactic product of the Bohemian 1950s.
Take his reading matter. Ginsberg and Kerouac get a look in, but not much. The writer Dylan really raves about is Thucydides.
Now, this is all arguably another bout of mythmaking, another masquerade. Chronicles isn’t unevasive. Sometimes the leavings-out are bizarre:
‘It was 1987 and my hand, which had been ungodly injured in a freak accident, was in the state of regeneration. It had been ripped and mangled to the bone and was still in the acute stage – it didn’t even feel like it was mine.’
We are never told what the freak accident was. Which leads me to suspect it was a freak tin-of-peaches-opening accident, or involved a slippery bathroom floor.
But I believe Dylan’s version of Dylan (and of the 1960s) more than Griel Marcus, Robert Sheldon, Clinton Heylin, Michael Gray, Christopher Ricks and all the other Dylanologists.
Because it is so doubtful.
Chronicles is a book about certain brands of American authenticity and the desire for them. Dylan, it is clear, is an outsider. A Jewish boy from the North Country. Far from Presley, far from Robert Johnson. The folk culture he obsesses over does not belong to him. It belongs, in a another bizarre uniconic detail, to Mike Seeger:
‘What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes, in his genetic makeup. Before he was even born, this music had to be in his blood.’
Where Dylan strains most in his yearning for authenticity is in his attempts to link himself to the Deep South, via Highway 61 and the Mississippi, both of which start out near to Hibbing and Duluth, Minnesota – Dylan’s own two start-points.
Perhaps this outside-looking-in aesthetic explains why Dylan has always appealed most of all to provincials, provincials like me.
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