Book 68 - Bob Dylan "Chronicles"

[jazzy_dave]

Bob Dylan "Chronicles" (Simon & Schuster)





Look at the average rock n roll autobiography and you'll find a lot of name-dropping, a lot of "I was so drunk that I..." stories, and the age-old "I really screwed up, but then I fixed things and now I'm on top of my game" section. Even the best celebrity autobiographies (Johnny Cash's is damn near literary) follow this general template.

Bob's book has a little "how I got my groove back" to it, but you will find it generally devoid of the kind of name-dropping you might expect (he doesn't even talk about the time he and John Lennon threw Phil Ochs out of a taxi!), and very little dishing of any kind really.

What Bob has written here is basically a rambling kunstlerroman, a sort of artistic coming-of-age story. He tells you how he started out, what drew him to folk music and what he found there; he then skips the most fruitful artistic period of his career to tell you how and why he got so burned out in the early 70s, and how he rekindled his creative fire in the late 80s. He tells you what he thought of a lot of novelists and poets he read, what musicians were important to him, and why.

For a music lover like me, that's infinitely more interesting than the average showbiz autobiography, and it really elevates this book far above what you'd generally expect. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to everybody, but if you're a Dylan critic, a music lover or a songwriter especially, give it a shot.