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List Price: $15.00 | | Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Salesrank: 7367
Released: September 13, 2005 |
| Our Price: $7.95 |
| Used Price: $1.47 |
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| Media: Paperback |
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Editorial Review:
"I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else."
So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities -- smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.
By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.
Description of Chronicles: Volume One:
One would not anticipate a conventional memoir from Bob Dylan--indeed, one would not have foreseen an autobiography at all from the pen of the notoriously private legend. What Chronicles: Volume 1 delivers is an odd but ultimately illuminating memoir that is as impulsive, eccentric, and inspired as Dylan's greatest music.
Eschewing chronology and skipping over most of the "highlights" that his many biographers have assigned him, Dylan drifts and rambles through his tale, amplifying a series of major and minor epiphanies. If you're interested in a behind-the-scenes look at his encounters with the Beatles, look elsewhere. Dylan describes the sensation of hearing the group's "Do You Want to Know a Secret" on the radio, but devotes far more ink to a Louisiana shopkeeper named Sun Pie, who tells him, "I think all the good in the world might already been done" and sells him a World's Greatest Grandpa bumper sticker. Dylan certainly sticks to his own agenda--a newspaper article about journeymen heavyweights Jerry Quarry and Jimmy Ellis and soul singer Joe Tex's appearance on The Tonight Show inspire heartfelt musings, and yet the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy prompts nary a word from the era's greatest protest singer.
For all the small revelations (it turns out he's been a big fan of Barry Goldwater, Mickey Rourke, and Ice-T), there are eye-opening disclosures, including his confession that a large portion of his recorded output was designed to alienate his audience and free him from the burden of being a "the voice of a generation."
Off the beaten path as it is, Chronicles is nevertheless an astonishing achievement. As revelatory in its own way as Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited, it provides ephemeral insights into the mind one of the most significant artistic voices of the 20th century while creating a completely new set of mysteries. --Steven Stolder
Chronicles: Volume One Reviews:
Peer deep inside the Artist's mind 
2009-12-11 - "If my thought-dreams
Could be seen
They'd probably
Put my head in a guillotine"
- "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"
Sooooooooo good. There can't be too many books that allow such access into a genius's mind. Especially such a private one like Bob!
You know how you thought this guy Dylan must think different than other people? Well, Chronicles Vol. 1 proves it. Here you get a firsthand view into the disjointed and original "beginner's mind" of the best song-writer since David the Psalmster.
Some Highlights:
We get to see just how much reverence Dylan had for his folk heroes. And he describes the reasons for his adulation better than anyone else can talk about folk music. You get to see how what rap was/is to so many black youth, that's what folk was to Dylan. He exposes himself as an encyclopedic fan, but more than that his passion is transmitted.
It is hilarious and amazing when Dylan goes into much detail about how when he was first playing with the Grateful Dead, he became hugely embarrassed because he didn't know how to play his own songs. He took his wife and jumped on his motorcycle and took off to Baton Rouge IIRC (if I remember correctly). And then in the midst of all that frustration, he came up with an entirely new way to play those same old songs. (This is kind of apparent if you listen to or watch Dylan performances in the 70's.)
He basically made up new chords, a simplified TEMPLATE, which he could pull all his songs through in order to play them live, with other people -- if I understood him correctly.
And it's in sections like that where you get to see a lot of Dylan's thought-streams (thought dreams seen?). That is really the gift of the book. Utterly fascinating!
Bum around with the young kid in Greenwich Village in the early 60's. He tells you what books he was puling off the bookshelves of people whose apartments he was crashing at. He gives great personality profiles of those people... Dylan knows what you want to hear, and how you want to hear it. He doesn't follow traditional book-writing protocol, or grammar. He writes like he talks, and like he thinks, I would guess. Really, he writes like he PERCEIVES. So you're actually getting access to HIS PERCEPTIONS. That is very personal and not something you'll find in such raw honesty most anywhere.
so good - Chronicles Volume One
2009-12-09 - I listened to the audiobook version read by Sean Penn. I "couldn't put it down". Dylan's dedication to and love of music struck me right off. Serving the song. He paints strong images, the scene and vibe in New York when he was starting out performing, fame rolling in like a silent steamroller, and the energy spent to protect his family's private life, then later in his career, recording in New Orleans with Daniel Lanois. Dylan comes across as a loving, imperfect person. His writing is direct, subtle, poetic and descriptive. He illuminates aspects of his creative process and shares impressions of his journey while still leaving the reader some mystery.
very good 
2009-10-19 - Bob Dylan Chronicles Part 1 was used when I bought it. It was advertised as good or very good condition and this appears to be true (barring any missing pages of the last 60)
No guru, no method, no teacher 
2009-09-29 - Bob Dylan has always insisted he is no guru or prophet. If further evidence is needed to back him up, it is in this book. Just a guy who writes songs and sort of sings. We begin with Bob in New York in 1960: taking in the scene, laying the groundwork for his career. Mostly he describes places where he stayed. There is scant mention of his relations with the various people who helped him. Then a jump to the late 60s, married with children. His wife and kids remain shadowy figures in the background. Bob jumps randomly around place and time. His account of the making of Oh Mercy exhausts all but the most diehard fan. Don't mention the `p' word! Borrowings are rife. `Summoned magic shadows into being' comes from Sax Rohmer's Return of Dr Fu-Manchu, and `the booming of war drums' from Jack London's The God of His Father. The title of course comes from books of the Old Testament. Web searching will reveal many other borrowings. One expects Bob might have given an assessment of his life and career. His meanderings don't link up to form a main stream.
Freaks me out
2009-09-26 - The way he winds around with time...where you start out in one place, and suddenly end up somewhere else, in place and time, is what makes the book so cool. Some writers might get blamed for going off on a tangent and not sticking with the subject at hand for this technique---- I think it works really well here, and makes it like a Bob song. I hope the rumors about a possible "ghost writer" are completely untrue. It would be like being lied to, and the thing that is appealing about this book, is that he seems to be coming forth with apology and trying to talk from the heart, putting the trickster act aside.
