Autobiography/Chronicles: Volume 1 by Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan's Chronicles - Volume 1 begins and ends in the New York of the 1960s. As he says in Talking New York: "Rambling out of the Wild West/ Leaving the towns I loved the best/ Thought I saw some ups and downs till I came to New York Town", writes Philip King.
Dylan's journey from Duluth via St Paul to New York is documented in detail elsewhere by his many biographers but this is different. This is not reported speech/interviews with friends/ enemies/critics/commentators/philosophers and academics. These are the words of Bob Dylan, and mighty fine they are. They ring true. Coming from the master of disguise, these words are revealing, passionate, poetic, musical and insightful.
Chronicles has five sections. The first two, Marking Up The Score and The Lost Land, tell of learning his trade and opening his ears in New York City. New Morning recounts the making of the 1970 record of the same name, produced by Bob Johnston. Here he also reveals himself as the family man, the father of children, and describes the constant strain involved in keeping them close.
Oh Mercy recounts the writing and recording of the Daniel Lanois-produced 1989 record; River of Ice concludes with Dylan's return to the New York of the early 1960s. Though not chronological, the sections sit well together. Everything is linked. Dylan does some hard travelling out but always returns to the source. And what sources.
Woody Guthrie is a towering presence. In St Paul, Dylan meets Flo Castner who asks him if he has ever heard Woody Guthrie; "I said 'Sure, I heard him on the Stinson records with Sonny Terry and Cisco Heuston'." She played him a solo Woody Guthrie set of 12 double- sided 78 records. " It was like the record player itself had picked me up and flung me across the room . . . for me it was an epiphany, like some heavy anchor had plunged into the water of the harbour." He went on to read Guthrie's autobiography Bound for Glory: "I went through it cover to cover like a hurricane totally focused on every word, and the book sang out to me like the radio."
Having arrived in New York City, Dylan sought out Woody Guthrie and found him in the Greystone Hospital in New Jersey. "Woody always asked me to bring him cigarettes - Raleigh cigarettes - and usually I'd play him his songs during the afternoon."
Dylan wrote one of his first great songs, Song To Woody in acknowledgment of all that Guthrie meant to him, and to America. "Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Ledbelly too/ And all the good people that travelled with you/ Here's to the heart and the hands of the men/ That come with the dust and are gone with the wind."
His reading is prodigious : Kerouac (of course) Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke and Montesque, Verne, T.S. Eliot and Wells. He committed to memory Byron's Don Juan; was listening to the Kingston Trio and Roy Orbison; "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 met Theolonious Monk at the Blue Note on Third Street. "I told him that I played folk music up the street, Monk said 'We all play folk music.' Monk was in his own dynamic universe, even when he dawdled around. Even then he summoned magic shadows into being." He listened to Judy Garland, Bobby Vee, Ricky Nelson and on the same page talks of Sleepy John Estes, Jelly Roll Morton, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.
Bob Dylan describes his journey around New York City from Walt Whitman's house on 7th Avenue to Poe's house on 3rd Street and his own first apartment on 4th Street which he shared with Suzy Rotolo. He brings us into his world; he opens the door, he builds his bed and his table and he falls asleep to "the sound of the night train rumbling and fumbling through Jersey, the iron horse with steam for blood". He describes hearing bells in New York City in 1961 "across the street from where I stood was a church with a bell tower. The ringing of the bells made me feel at home, too. I'd always heard and listened to the bells. Iron, Brass, Silver bells - the bells sang."
These bells reprise and repeal on Oh Mercy the 1989 record produced by Daniel Lanois in New Orleans. The Oh Mercy section of Chronicles spans 76 pages and is one of the most revealing and insightful pieces of writing on the creative process I have ever read. His hand is smashed. His muse has flown. "Too many distractions have turned my musical path into a jungle of vines - I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of my self and I needed to find him . . . When and if an idea would come, I would no longer try and get in touch with the base of its power. I could easily deny it and stay clear of it, just couldn't make myself do it, I never expected to write anything again, didn't need any more songs anyway."
"A song is like a dream and you try and make it come true" and they came little by little. First the words Political World, Everything is Broken, What Was it You Wanted?, Disease of Conceit. The songs were beginning to come alive, Dylan says "these then and some other songs I wrapped up and put away to stay where they lay, kept them in a drawer, but I could sense their presence".
Bono came to call and asked if Dylan had any songs. He went to the drawer and showed the lyrics to Bono (of whom he says "He's got the soul of an ancient poet, you've got to be careful around him"). Bono called Daniel Lanois there and then and set Bob Dylan on the road to New Orleans and Oh Mercy, it wasn't an easy ride. I have stood in the same room in New Orleans with Daniel and felt the tension. With Dylan, this tension was ratcheted to the highest notch and you can feel the heat of this creative collision coming off the page: "I didn't think we were communicating very well and it was beginning to break my bloody heart." Dylan tells us that Lanois, like Sam Philips, likes to push artists to the psychological edge and that a lot of what he did was "pure genius".
In the New Morning section of Chronicles, Dylan rails bitterly against the intrusion of the press and the media, and equally against those fans (numbered in the millions, it seems, in the 1960s) who insist on seeing him not as an artist, but as a Messiah. Celebrity clings to Dylan like a shroud. In a bleak episode of Chronicles he writes with palpable despair of how his attempts to live a normal life are successively undermined by the lost and the delusional , the junkies, the stalkers, the voyeurs ,the freaks who keep up an unrelenting barrage on the family.
He had taken refuge, or so he thought, in Woodstock, but was constantly inundated with people climbing on his roof, staring in his windows, hammering on his door, looking for The Answer. Tortured by endless inane inquisitions into his political philosophy, frozen into a posture of defensive hostility, he cannot believe that he is still expected to be the New Messiah. "I am not the spokesman for anything," he says.
Later, an article with the headline "Spokesman denies that he is a spokesman" hit the streets. You feel his anger and his loneliness throughout this section. Appalled when introduced thus at the Newport Folk Festival: "And here he is, take him - you know him, he's yours," he wistfully wonders "What kind of alchemy could create a perfume that would make reaction to a person lukewarm, indifferent and apathetic? I wanted to get some."
Throughout the Chronicles he recognises his debt to the wisdom and talents of others, to Johnny Cash whose "words were the rule of law and were backed by the power of God". John Hammond at Columbia, who signed him and introduced him to the stabbing music of Robert Johnson; "when Johnson started singing he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armour". Joan Baez, "who had a voice that drove out bad spirits". The Beatles, "who offered intimacy and companionship like no other group". Dave Van Ronk, his mentor and guidance counsellor during his early days in the Village. His record producer Bob Johnson: "Johnson had fire in his eyes, he had that thing that people called momentum." Harry Belafonte: "his presence and his magnitude was so wide. Harry was like Valentino . . . I made my professional recording debut with Harry playing harmonica on one of his albums called Midnight Special . . . with Belafonte I felt like I had become anointed in some kind of way."
Chronicles invites us into the interior life of a great creative artist. For the first time we can get some sensation of the voltage of a creative energy at full spark, and the flaccid desolation when that current no longer flows; "Folk songs were the way I explored the universe, they were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say. Folk music glittered like a mound of gold."
Philip King is a musician/song writer and film producer/director. His films include Bringing it All Back Home, Rocky World with Daniel Lanois, Freedom Highway, U2 - The Joshua Tree, Sé Mo Laoch, Other Voices and The Raw Bar.
He is currently producing a film celebrating the life and work of John McGahern
Chronicles: Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, Simon and Schuster, £16.99