Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 782.42164092 EAN: 9780743244589 ISBN: 0743244583 Label: Simon & Schuster Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 320 Publication Date: September 13, 2005 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Release Date: September 13, 2005 Sales Rank: 6596 Studio: Simon & Schuster
Product Description: '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.
Amazon.com Review: One would not anticipate a conventional memoir from Bob Dylan--indeed, one would not have foreseen an autobiography at all from the pen of the notoriously private legend. What Chronicles: Volume 1 delivers is an odd but ultimately illuminating memoir that is as impulsive, eccentric, and inspired as Dylan's greatest music.
Eschewing chronology and skipping over most of the 'highlights' that his many biographers have assigned him, Dylan drifts and rambles through his tale, amplifying a series of major and minor epiphanies. If you're interested in a behind-the-scenes look at his encounters with the Beatles, look elsewhere. Dylan describes the sensation of hearing the group's 'Do You Want to Know a Secret' on the radio, but devotes far more ink to a Louisiana shopkeeper named Sun Pie, who tells him, 'I think all the good in the world might already been done' and sells him a World's Greatest Grandpa bumper sticker. Dylan certainly sticks to his own agenda--a newspaper article about journeymen heavyweights Jerry Quarry and Jimmy Ellis and soul singer Joe Tex's appearance on The Tonight Show inspire heartfelt musings, and yet the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy prompts nary a word from the era's greatest protest singer.
For all the small revelations (it turns out he's been a big fan of Barry Goldwater, Mickey Rourke, and Ice-T), there are eye-opening disclosures, including his confession that a large portion of his recorded output was designed to alienate his audience and free him from the burden of being a 'the voice of a generation.'
Off the beaten path as it is, Chronicles is nevertheless an astonishing achievement. As revelatory in its own way as Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited, it provides ephemeral insights into the mind one of the most significant artistic voices of the 20th century while creating a completely new set of mysteries. --Steven Stolder
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Average Rating:
Rating: - Basically a bogus look backward
Around every 20 pages, there's a phrase that's faintly reminiscent of the early years, the intellect that penned "it's allright, ma" etc. But so much of what he claims happened is just not reality. For instance, if you went by his words, from the late 60s onward he'd take off years at a time to play with his kids on the living room floor, go camping, rafting, etc a big stay at home family man, presumably married to the same woman, etc.
That's all false; so how much else is false? Basically, he's lived in a cocoon for 4 decades surrounded by yes people, and it's had the result you'd predict. It's actually more a work of fiction, or one of those invented autobiographies of a historical figure by a current author where everyone knows it's bogus.
Rating: - the truth...but what is truth?
`Chronicles' covers the notional formative years of the Bob Dylan from birth through the string of incredible albums that re-defined folk and protest music. He has been called everything from Judas to Jesus. An intensely private person about himself and his family, he is as little known as a person as anyone of whom I can think. His interviews - take the one with the journalist in `Don't Look Back' as a case in point - seem to be more of an act of deliberate dis-information. He also exhibits consummately contrarian reactions to what his fan base want and expect him to do.
So, when I received a copy of this book, I was curious as to what I would be reading. This sense of trepidation was not helped by what seemed to be - for me, at least, a rough beginning. The writing style seemed disjointed, at time almost somnambulant; at other times a textual muttering from the sort of person you didn't wanted seated ... Read More
Rating: - I Was Wrong
From his autobiography, it appears that I was really wrong about my conception of Bob Dylan. He wasn't a "protest singer" or "leader of progressive causes and disaffected youth", but rather a father, husband, well-read intellectual and musician. It's interesting to get Dylan's take on such golden oldies as Ricky Nelson and Roy Orbison. His book is also peppered with references to many people with whom I'm unfamiliar, but this didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of this candid autobiography
Rating: - Not like Writing Lyrics
This is a very enjoyable and most importantly, readable book. Who would have thought Dylan could write so well, be such a good story teller in straight forward language? After spending years listening to his lyrics I have to admit that I was surprised by how well this is written. Surely songwriting and penning an autobiography are very different arts, but Dylan does it. Apparently sans the ghost writer.
This book is full of the early years in NY, sleeping in other peoples places, working his way into the in-crowd, meeting his hero, Woody Guthrie. Be sure to pick up this gem as well! Bound for Glory (Penguin Modern Classics) Great stuff. He does get a little off-track with the making of a particular LP, "Oh Mercy" but works his way back round to the before time.
Was he really asked to join Peter, Paul and Mary?
We got a look at girlfriend Suzy that appeared on an album cover, very ... Read More
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- Basically a bogus look backward
- the truth...but what is truth?
