US: Greenwich Village was underwhelmed yesterday when Bob Dylan's autobiography hit the stores. Deaglán de Bréadún reports from New York
Welcome to Dylan Country. MacDougal Street in New York's Greenwich Village is the place where it all began. On January 24th, 1961, a skinny kid from the American midwest got up and performed at the Cafe Wha'? The world was never the same again.
The Cafe Wha'? is still there today and still a music club. Both the street and the whole Village area are rich in Dylan landmarks: the place where Bob wrote Blowin' in the Wind or A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall or where he met and broke up with the girl who inspired Don't Think Twice It's All Right.
Now Bob has put it all - or some of it - in a book. Being Dylan, he hasn't done it in the conventional way. The first of three volumes of memoirs, collectively titled Chronicles, was published yesterday by Simon & Schuster, and already the critics are divided between those highlighting various gaps in the narrative and others who hail it as a work of genius.
Strange to relate, three leading bookshops in The Village yesterday were seriously underwhelmed by the appearance of this new literary production from a former resident. One branch of the Barnes & Noble chain didn't even have the book on the shelves, and it was like pulling teeth to get the shop assistant to extract it from a cardboard box downstairs. Another Barnes & Noble branch had 15 copies in a fairly obscure corner, and the manager wouldn't discuss the likely demand. "You have to call the corporate office."
The local Shakespeare & Co bookshop had no copies in stock as yet, but a customer, Ms Tamar Arnon, who works in nearby New York University, had read an excerpt in Newsweek magazine and was looking forward to reading more of Dylan's back pages. She regretted that Bob was apparently disowning his position as the icon of the Sixties.
"He was, and is, a great voice of that generation'." Dylan had helped people a great deal by expressing the thoughts and feelings of the time. "He did it so beautifully and so weirdly," Ms Arnon said. "But you expect Bob to be weird."
Longtime Greenwich Village resident Mr William L. Katz, himself the author of no less than 40 books on US life and history, was also keen to read Dylan's story. "During the Vietnam war he crystallized the feelings of many people, and his music even mobilised a lot of young people."
He said Dylan had come out of the tradition of the great radical folksinger Woody Guthrie who used to carry a slogan on his guitar, "This machine kills fascists".
Meanwhile, in the book Dylan pays tribute to the Clancy Brothers "and their buddy Tommy Maken", who were an early influence on his music. "All through the night they would sing drinking songs, country ballads and rousing rebel songs that would lift the roof."
He also describes an evening with Bono of U2. "Spending time with Bono was like eating dinner on a train," Dylan recalls. The pair of them worked their way through a crate of stout the Irish rock star had brought with him.
"Bono's got the soul of an ancient poet," Dylan writes. "He can roar 'till the earth shakes."
But already most attention has focused on Dylan's antipathy in the book towards his more fanatical disciples. He paints a nightmare picture of his life in upstate New York: "Roadmaps to our homestead must have been posted in all fifty states for gangs of dropouts and druggies. Moochers showed up from as far away as California on pilgrimages. Goons were breaking into our place all hours of the night."
To ward off the attentions of these "rogue radicals", a friend of Dylan's gave him two Colt revolvers and a Winchester rifle, "but it was awful to think about what could be done with those things". Bob's outrage recalls the retired army colonels of popular legend: "I wanted to set fire to these people."
Perhaps the book's most remarkable revelation is that, when the counter-culture looked to him as their rebel leader, Dylan admits that, "what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard".