Chronicles: Volume One
Book | Bob Dylan
America’s greatest songwriter opens up.
Even if Chronicles turned out to be an incomprehensible piece of crap, it would still be fascinating on some level, simply for providing such an extensive glimpse into one of the most notoriously inscrutable sensibilities, private personalities, and unprecedented artistic pioneers of modern music. Fortunately, Bob Dylan's autobiography also turns out to be intriguing on both an aesthetic and an informative level, making it not only one of the most significant personal memoirs of the rock era but also one of the most eminently readable. If there's anyone's career we want a worm's-eye peek at, it's Dylan's, and we get it here, as the author recalls - in a sometimes-astounding degree of detail - everything from his earliest days in Greenwich Village at the start of the '60s to his stutter-step-laden sessions with producer Daniel Lanois for the 1989 album Oh Mercy. There's not much of a conventional arc to be found here - the book's almost random-seeming array of reminiscences are arranged much like Dylan's finest lyrics, with an organizational sense that transcends mere linearity.
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