Music |
Bob Dylan
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Rock
"Lou Levy, top man of Leeds Music Publishing company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and His Comets had recorded ‘Rock Around the Clock.’"
Now I ask you: Of all the ways you might have imagined that Bob Dylan would begin his memoirs, would you have dreamed…that?
If you’re like me, you’d expect something more cryptic ("The ragman draws circles") or political ("How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?") or lyrical ("Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed"). But the lead of a magazine profile? No way.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the surprises that Dylan delivers in what’s billed as the first in a series of memoirs. But "surprises" may not be the right word — "put-ons" may be more like it.
In the beginning of his career, when Bob Zimmerman, son of a Minnesota storeowner, morphed into a Woody Guthrie clone, he was the very embodiment of passionate liberalism and poetic truth — Tom Paine meets Rimbaud. Well-respected books testify to his ambition, his cruelty to friends and colleagues, his contempt for the press. [If you’re interested in a more likely chronicle of Dylan’s early years, read "Positively Fourth Street" — there’s a link to it at the bottom of this review.]
You’ll find none of that here.
This Dylan is a guy who had "come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down." He had thought for a time of going to West Point. He had no great commitment to social justice or nuclear disarmament. Later, he would dream of a house with a white picket fence.
Maybe Dylan really believed this stuff way back then. Or, more possibly, believes it now and has simply backdated his opinions — forty years and a lot of living can play tricks on memory. Or maybe he’s doing what he’s done all along, what artists always do — tell his story as fable, create mystery around truth, cover his tracks. After all, what does he owe us? He’s given us his music. This book was never going to be a cry from the heart, a plea for understanding; it was, I suspect, more like an activity, something to do on the road while Dylan roams the world on an endless concert tour.
So Dylan meanders through his early days in New York, presenting charming portraits of the people he meets along the way, the books he reads, the music business circa 1962. "I had no ambitions to stir things up." Right.
But this writing has a purpose — it loosens Dylan up. Unlike a Real Writer, who writes and cuts and rewrites and cuts, Dylan writes and writes, saving every precious word. And, slowly, he writes himself into the book’s true subject, which is music: how you make it, where it comes from, what you do when the magic’s not in your fingertips anymore.
"A song is like a dream," he writes, "and you try and make it come true." Now he’s getting somewhere, you think, and then, suddenly, you hit a rich vein — the 60-page story of making a record in New Orleans with Daniel Lanois as the producer. Bono had recommended Lanois, and Dylan finds him a good collaborator ("He wanted to dive in and go deep. He wanted to marry a mermaid") but their work together doesn’t get off to a great start ("The tune was gaining weight by the minute and none of its clothes were fitting").
The process of creation — that’s a safe place for Dylan, and suddenly he’s free to write. And joke. Other people enter, and they have their say. The book breathes. And the reader leans in, enchanted by the tale.
I have mixed feelings about "Chronicles" the book. I have none about the audio version. It’s read by Sean Penn, who has, as an actor, the most perfect pitch for accents and who nails Dylan here. He’s hip, but not too. Annoyed, but not self-righteous. He is, in short, the Dylan you imagine when you think of the private Dylan.
I can’t imagine a better road trip than to listen to Sean Penn read Dylan — and then to listen to Dylan. Even a daily commute would be ennobled by Sean and Bob. But not quite as ennobled as a road trip with Dylan’s music.
To order the audio CD read by Sean Penn from Amazon.com, click here.
To order the audio cassette read by Sean Penn from Amazon.con, click here.
To order ‘Chronicles’ as a book from Amazon.com, click here.
To order "Positively Fourth Street" from Amazon.com, click here.
