BOOK REVIEW-Bob Dylan Chronicles (vol.1)

After a 40 year career during which he has reportedly reinvented himself a half dozen times, Bob Dylan remains one of the most enigmatic popular artists ever. He has seldom granted interviews and was cryptic and sometimes insolent on those occasionswhen he did. And as familiar and well-loved as his music has been to us, let's face it, half the time we didn't know what he was talking about. The media, playing to fans hungry for any news about His Vagueness has created a larger than life mythology that is really all we have to go by. First there was Electric Bob at Newport (was he booed? was he not?). After that there was Bob the Recluse After the Motocycle Crash, Born-Again Bob,Hasidic Bob and Bob the Actor.

The first third of Dylan's long awaited memoir (with 2 more volumes promised) is an intimate, if at times unfocused look at whatever the author happened to be thinking about at the time. In this stream of consciousness style, he takes the reader on an odyssey that begins with his arrival in Greenwich Village, spends a considerable amount of ink musing on his influences both musical and literary, offers two chapters on the genesis of the New Morning and Oh Mercy recording sessions in the seventies and eighties, and then it's back to New York City where seemingly only two years have elapsed.

In this short book (I read it in two evenings), Dylan reveals himself as a man in love with and thoroughly knowledgeable about American folk music, and that includes American popular music in all its forms. He shows himself to be a vulnerable, complex artistic personality, at times insecure and at others grandiose. He consistently lets the reader know what a burden it's been to have had so much attention focused on him, and yet he seems to draw attention to himself by this introverted stance. He is at his impersonal best when doing character descriptions. Whether he is creating a loving portrait of one of his musical mentors, or describing the clerk at the general store, he still has a colorful and poignant way with language. What emerges in Bob Dylan Chronicles Volume I is a somewhat clearer picture of the man, although by no means does he give us anything to dispel the mythology that surrounds him. What's more, it's unlikely that he'll give it all up in Volumes II and III. The mystique has served him well.

(this review previously appeared in the Brattleboro Reformer)