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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In his surprisingly straightforward memoir, Bob Dylan takes us through his explosive early years, the curse of being "the conscience of his generation" and, more recently, his artistic redemption.
Oct 8, 2004 | Wide open. That's how Times Square looks in the 1960 photo on the cover of the first volume of Bob Dylan's memoirs, "Chronicles." The neon is there -- at that time, for the Automat, BOAC airlines, Canadian Club, Admiral appliances. But unlike every other Times Square photo you've ever seen, this one shows a vast street, a large swatch of sky; there's room to breathe and space to claim. It looks like the main street in an old western as seen by the stranger in town. Only in this case the stranger isn't a gunslinger but a folk singer.
Wide open. That's how Dylan describes the world in front of him as a young singer about to make his name in the last paragraph of the book. And it was the phrase he used to describe America itself when he praised the first volume of Peter Guralnick's Elvis biography, "Last Train to Memphis": "Elvis as he walks the path between heaven and nature in an America that was wide open."
Wide open. It's not a phrase anyone would think of to describe Bob Dylan -- at least the Dylan of legend. The Dylan whose public image was set long ago: Dylan the "protest singer," Dylan the messiah, Dylan the prophet, Dylan the recluse, the cagey, obscure Dylan, the born-again Dylan, all of the images of Dylan thrown up by obsessive fans, English majors, and rock critics of the sort played by Jeff Bridges in the Dylan movie "Masked and Anonymous"; a pompous, pontificating ass who winds up impaled on Blind Lemon Jefferson's guitar. Whether or not the images were true, whether Dylan ever tried to be a messiah or a prophet, whether or not, despite his reputation for obscurity, there was an apparent emotional sense to be found in his riddles and metaphors, was beside the point. To think that the popular picture of Dylan might not be true would screw up a perfectly good ready-made image, would mess with the sound bites and the editorial I.D.'s ("Dylan, whose songs of social injustice made him the voice of the '60s...").
Wide open. That's exactly what we are not to any celebrity who publishes a biography. We know what to think of celebrities. They're all egomaniacs and publicity whores -- doesn't matter if they're Paris Hilton or Bob Dylan. That's how all the pomo Hedda Hoppers have told us to think about celebrity. Forget about the work; it's the image that matters. Irony is the new Jesus. Crucified on Sept. 11, it rose again to sit at the right hand of ... well, maybe not God, but at least Maureen Dowd.
Dylan's work and utterances, even the garbage outside his New York apartment in the '60s, have been given a ruthless and shallow parsing. There are plenty of people who expect everything that comes out of Dylan's mouth to be either revelatory or nonsensical. Last year brought an example of the latter expectation when critics who had grown up with the oblique humor and elliptical imagery of Dylan songs reacted, when confronted with the same qualities in "Masked and Anonymous," as if they were seeing a self-indulgent travesty for which there was no precedent. They killed the movie (one of the most potent and challenging American movies in recent memory) almost out of sheer laziness. Seizing on holes in the narrative or the oddball scenes, the reviews complained in the manner of high school kids assigned poetry who whine about how hard it is to understand.
What may throw some readers about "Chronicles" is how modest and straightforward it is. Neither a hallucination, like Dylan's "Tarantula," nor a coffee-table fan's scrapbook (there are no photos), "Chronicles" starts in without any preamble, any fuss. The opening and closing sections recount Dylan's memories of being a young singer in Greenwich Village, just signed to Columbia by the legendary John Hammond (who would count Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday and Bruce Springsteen among the talent he got for the label). In between there are sections on his domestic life as a young husband and father in 1960s Woodstock following his near-fatal motorcycle accident, and a long section on the recording of his 1989 album "Oh Mercy."
