Well, who’d have thought Dylan would come out with something like this? Robert McCrum gives it a thumbs up in the Observer – “Chronicles takes its place next to On the Road and Guthrie’s Bound for Glory as an essential record of an American artist’s manifest destiny.” This is a bit over the top: there are some great moments in the book, some great lines, but there’s also some really clunky writing. If it hadn’t been Dylan, any editor would have sent the manuscript back covered with red lines. The guy is not a prose writer. But that lack of editorial intrusion means you also get some wonderfully strange stuff. Here’s Dylan on Roy Orbison:
With Roy, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountain top and he meant business. […] He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he’d start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, “Man, I don’t believe it.” His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious – no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile.
I don’t even know what he means half the time (“With him, it was all about fat and blood”), but it’s so strange, so idiosyncratic, so strong, that it just takes you along like the best Dylan songs always did. But then you get passages like this:
It was 1987 and my hand, which had been ungodly injured in a freak accident, was in the state of regeneration. It had been ripped and mangled to the bone and was still in the acute stage – it didn’t even feel like it was mine. I didn’t know what had befallen me, and this was a bizarre shift of fate. All potentialities had gone to pieces. With a hundred show dates scheduled for me starting in the spring it was uncertain that I would be able to perform. This was a sobering experience.
I imagine that the early chapters were pretty much written at the time. They have much more energy. He comes across as a typical autodidact in some ways, with an exaggerated respect for people who seem to know a lot of stuff, and a keenness to show that, yeah, he’s read a lot of these heavyweights like, you know, Thucydides, and sure, T.S.Eliot’s worth reading… But basically he’s just a guy – a musician, not an intellectual – who found himself in the impossible position of being elected as the spokesman of a generation, and not unnaturally he hated it. It doesn’t explain how come for a few years he was just so far ahead of the game that it was scarcely believable, but then what would explain that? It just happened, and we’ve got the recordings to prove it. What more did we expect?
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