Chronicles, Volume One
- Feb 28, 2016
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 13
★★★★★
Man, what a whirlwind of a book! Four days from start to finish—I never wanted to put it down. If you're a fan of Dylan, of his music, of his words, of whatever you think or thought he was or is about, Chronicles, Volume One is pure electricity. Breezy and rhythmic, you can (or I could, anyway) hear Dylan's voice telling you the story as plain as day. (I've never listened to an audio book, but it had to be like that, only better, as nothing can sound as good as the voice you imagine in your head.)
Cut up and rearranged like a Quentin Tarrantino movie (Pulp Fiction comes to mind), but sometimes less linear, and frequently more stream of consciousness than that, Bob Dylan covers a huge swath of time, from his childhood days in Hibbing, Minnesota, to his time in Minneapolis and his early days in the New York scene before jumping to the making of the albums New Morning and Oh Mercy. But, like I said, not in that order. It's an intentional construct, and it works well here because, at the end, he almost brings us back to the exact same spot where he began. Almost, but not quite, and in the intervening pages we're left changed by the journey, so even if they'd been exactly the same, we wouldn't have seen them in quite the same way.
Of course, this is titled Chronicles, Volume One, and having read this 12 years after its publication date, it's interesting to ponder the prospect of a second volume. Sure, loads of time, decades even, were left out here. But it felt intentional, not as if a dozen or more chapters had been readied to be portioned out over multiple volumes. This was the meat: the early years, the discovery years, the empty years, and the rebirth years. And though uncle Bob weaves a hell of a story, (even his worst stories are better than most), it's hard to imagine another volume adding up quite the way this one does. Still, I'd love to see him try.
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