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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Does he tell all? No. First, because it's none of our damn business. A man who has been scrutinized the way Dylan has, who has had people literally crawling through his windows and pontificating on what his role should be, knows something about the necessity of keeping at least part of it all to himself. Second, because he realizes nothing is more boring and less revealing than the sort of memoir that would've included lines like: "And then I met a young Canadian guitarist named Robbie Robertson."
Dylan holds things in reserve. The motorcycle accident gets one line. He summons the ardor of youth to write of his famous love affair with Suze Rotolo, the young beauty walking through Village slush with him on the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" ("She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen"), and treats their breakup with the discretion of a true gentleman ("She took one turn in the road and I took another. We just passed out of each other's lives").
Dylan is revealing about the things that matter. As a writer he makes the distinction between fond reminiscence and false nostalgia. Without offering any cheap psychological explanation, he gives a pretty good idea of where the sideshow quality of his '60s songs came from. On the first page, Dylan is introduced to Jack Dempsey in the boxer's restaurant on 58th Street. Old blues legends and new folk singers, like Dave Van Ronk and Fred Neil, populate the Village. Dylan crashes with the likes of the wandering descendant of Southern generals and his woman, a hatcheck girl and model for Cavalier. And all the time young Dylan is imbibing the mixture of books on the shelves of the apartments where he stayed and the music coming out of the clubs and jukeboxes. It's "Desolation Row" as a boulevard of promise. You understand why T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound occupied the same song as fishermen, Einstein, Robin Hood, fortune tellers, tightrope walkers -- they all shared space in Dylan's head.
There's a similar catholicity in his musical taste. Dylan talks about his love for the "old-timey" ballads he was discovering as he scouted out rare folk and blues sides or learned songs from other singers, talks about how he felt divorced from the culture's preoccupation with the here and now (a preoccupation that's infinitely worse today). "What was not a mistake," he writes, "was the ghost of Billy Lyons, rootin' the mountain down, standing 'round in East Cairo, Black Betty bam de lam. That's the stuff that was happening. That's the stuff that could make you question what you'd always accepted, could litter the landscape with broken hearts, had power of spirit." The old newspapers (from about 1855-1865) on microfilm at the New York Public Library began feeding his ambitions as a composer. "It wasn't like it was another world," he writes, "but the same one only with more urgency ... The age that I was living in didn't resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way."
But Dylan was no purist. When he is writing about the variety of music he heard as a kid, on the radio and at fairs, and later in New York clubs and coffeehouses and lofts, he calls up the variety of influences on the young Elvis Presley that Guralnick wrote of in "Last Train to Memphis." Reading "Chronicles," you also know why Dylan would be reviled in the folk community a few years down the road.
It may not have been hip to say so in the Village in the early '60s, but hearing "Travelin' Man" coming out of a jukebox reminds the young Dylan of why he loves Ricky Nelson. It's the most perceptive tribute that the still-underrated singer could have hoped for: "Nelson had never been a bold innovator like the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships. He didn't sing desperately, do a lot of damage, and you'd never mistake him for a shaman. It didn't feel like his endurance was ever being tested to the utmost, but it didn't matter. He sang his songs calm and steady like he was in the middle of a storm, men hurtling past him."
