Posted: Thursday, October 14, 2004 7:00 pm
l. kent wolgamott column
Who would have guessed that Bob Dylan's favorite politician in the early 1960s was Barry Goldwater?
Or that he picked up some of his edgy songwriting style from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Pirate Jenny"?
Or that he was ready to retire from recording and songwriting in the late '80s, burned out on the process and discouraged about his future?
Those are among the many revelations in "Chronicles: Volume One," the immensely readable first installment of what is supposed to be a three-volume set of Dylan memoirs.
Unceasingly candid, "Chronicles" reveals much more about Dylan than he's let out in any of his carefully guarded interviews over the years. In fact, he talks about how he deliberately manipulated his image in the late '60s and early '70s to get away from his legions of admirers and his unwanted tag as the voice of a generation.
"I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world," he writes. "I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of."
Dylan's solution to his problem: make inexplicable records and manipulate his image by doing things like going to Jerusalem and getting photographed wearing a skullcap, instantly becoming a Zionist.
That kind of candor permeates "Chronicles" and is illuminating when Dylan tells a long story, such as recording 1989's "Oh Mercy" with producer Daniel Lanois. I've read lots of books and articles about the recording process and have never come across anything that captures the tension and trial of that effort more effectively than does Dylan's account.
The fact that he is a great writer, no matter the form, probably helps. Most celebrity memoirs and autobiographies are "as told to" affairs in which a ghostwriter gets the subject's words, usually through interviews, then shapes them into a book, usually a chronological history.
If you're looking for that kind of straight-ahead narrative with Dylan, you've come to the wrong place. He circles around from the '50s to the '80s and back again, tying encounters in one decade with remembrances of another. That means his account of his early days in New York, crashing on couches and scuffling around the folk scene, comes late in the book, and his abdication of the "voice of a generation" throne comes early.
Because of that, some Dylan fanatics have already found "Chronicles" to be frustrating.
There's no explanation of his infamous motorcycle accident, just a single mention of the wreck that has long been attributed as life-changing. There are no remembrances of "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival, meeting The Beatles or recording most of his famous songs and only brief passing references to his work with The Band.
But those omissions didn't bother me. That kind of step-by-step accounting is for biographers and mythmakers.
With "Chronicles," Dylan is aiming at exploding myths and portraying himself as he see himself a folk singer who escaped from the Iron Range of Minnesota, idolized Woody Guthrie, wrote some songs he thought were good and a lot he didn't, became a family man and found his musical place again late in life.
He delivers that viewpoint using very detailed recollections to the point of remembering specific people as he walked across specific streets years ago and an honesty that gives at least some degree of insight into what he is really like. But in a couple of places, Dylan essentially says he's unknowable to outsiders and, by implication, to himself.
That might be what makes "Chronicles" so fascinating. It might just give away more than he thinks it does.
Anyway, I read the book in two sittings and will undoubtedly read it again. And I'm hoping Dylan follows through and produces a few more volumes. Maybe he'll fill in the expected blanks. But he might just surprise with more little insights like the ones about Goldwater and "Pirate Jenny."
Thompson concert
On Tuesday night, Richard Thompson presented "1,000 Years of Popular Music" at the Rococo Theatre. Thompson's likely the only person on the planet who could pull off that kind of concert. You can read more about the show, and take a look at a set list at www.journalstar.com/local.
Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.