Name: Mat Connor's review of Chronicles by Bob Dylan
Item: Chronicles
Rating: 5
Author: Mat Connor

Bob Dylan

An unprecedented publishing event - the first volume in a series of memoirs by one of the most important and influential musicians and songwriters of our time.

Chronicles

louane

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the country, Bob Dylan. “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.

Volume One

Mat Connor

Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume One is even better if you imagine him reading it to you in his Theme Time Radio Show voice. He always sounded so cool on that show, like an evil cartoon lizard who started drinking gin from a baby bottle and has been smoking cigarettes for fifty years. It's perfect. 

I'm knee deep into one of my bi-yearly get obsessed with Bob Dylan phases so of course I'm a sucker for this. Chronicles isn't your typical memoir, in part because his biographers say a lot of it is made up. It might not be factual, but it feels true. It reminds me of the great quote from the Rolling Thunder Revue documentary: "When somebody's wearing a mask, he's gonna tell you the truth. When he's not wearing a mask, it's highly unlikely." Bob is wearing a mask here.

Here are a couple of my favorite quotes from the book:

Discussing a conversion with Bono: "We were talking about things that you talk about when you're spending the winter with somebody."

Describing his dynamic with Daniel Lanois (Producer of Oh Mercy): "I know that he wanted to understand me more as we went along, but you can't do that, not unless you like to do puzzles."

I'm going to store that last line in the attic and have it ready to use at the perfect moment. I'm sure he wouldn't mind the appropriation. He's known for borrowing lines too. I won't sound as cool as him when I say it though.

Mia Caven

I will always have an infinite love for Bob Dylan of whom I grew up on. However, this book fell a little short for me. It’s basically a list of dates and events instead of an emotional POV from Dylan. I assume that it is part of his personality, to be full of facts, but the lack of humour or love or emotion was is what made it hard for me. Nonetheless it was still an interesting read I enjoyed.

Kathy Jedrzejczyk

So far I think it's cool to read this book because I just finished the Eric Clapton autobiography. They seem to have a completely different style and approach to the whole thing. Clapton's truly read like an autobiography. Dylans seems more like a story. It's totally Bob Dylan-esq. I'm not really sure who most of the people he mentions are. For most of the book I'm just like... WTF? It seems like he just randomely starts talking about things and I don't know what the Hell is going on or what it has to do with the price of tea in China.

Ryan LaFerney

Chronicles: Volume One outlines the growth of Dylan's artistic conscience. Writing in a language in the accessible language of a street poet, he lingers not on moments of success and celebrity, but on the crises of his intellectual development. But, Dylan's career and his brilliance, have often been attributed to how he reacted to success. And Dylan paints a vivid picture of how this success was defined by himself and likewise, by the media throughout. 

Just when we get to where he is making it big - we skip to the famous motorcycle accident. He skips the years of his greatest records (one could argue)! Perhaps saving those years for the second volume of his chronicle, Dylan recalls the times when he was sick of his public persona and made more lackluster (?) albums like "Self-Portrait" and "New Morning." He then skips again to his comeback work with producer Daniel Lanois in the late 1980s. Dylan ends, where he begins, with discovering Woody Guthrie, hitching a ride to New York, and signing to Columbia Records. And the rest is history.

This memoir is insightful, vague, obtuse, profound, disordered, and fascinating - much like Dylan himself. Don't expect a complete picture of the man you thought you knew and don't completely expect linear storytelling. Settle in for the journey of a man, trying to find the creative spark at each and every turn.

Manoj Nayak

"Abridged dissapoints"
 the abridged narration is too hurried and doesnt do justice to the listener. I strongly recommend audible to put up the complete version.

What was most disappointing about Bob Dylan’s story?
The abridged version had just a paragraph on Joan Baez , disappointing for me.

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Chronicles by Bob Dylan

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