Chronicles: Volume One

Bob Dylan is a legendary American singer-songwriter, Nobel Prize laureate, and the author of Chronicles. The memoir traces several key periods of Dylan’s life and career between the 1960s and 80s.

Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, Dylan grew up in the small town of Hibbing, Minnesota. He grew up with “a witches’ brew of pastimes” common to small-town America: “swimming holes and fishing ponds, sledding and something called bumper riding, where you grab hold of a tail bumper on a car and ride through the snow, Fourth of July fireworks, tree houses” (232). He was “[biding] [his] time,” aware “there was a bigger world out there” but in no rush to join it (232).

In 1959, Dylan took the bus to Minneapolis and stayed with a cousin in his fraternity house while he began to incorporate himself into the growing folk music scene. His lodgings were simple, but “[f]olk music was all [he] needed to exist” (236), and it quickly became an all-consuming obsession. Dylan spent all of his time playing and listening to folk music, frequenting folk clubs and record stores. Arriving in New York marked the true start of Dylan’s project of self-discovery and creation. He came in search of his idol, Woody Guthrie, and quickly inserted himself into the Greenwich Village folk scene. He began playing at various folk clubs and meeting and learning from other musicians. Dylan arrived in New York without “too much of a concrete identity” (55), and his time there was essential to developing his persona as an artist and songwriter. One important part of this was changing his name, going by Bob Dylan for the first time. Dylan also spent significant time consuming all the art and culture he could get his hands on. He read novels and poetry and the newspaper, spent time in the public library and learned about history, and visited art galleries and theatre productions. Although he maintained a single-minded focus on folk music, he knew that developing a “philosophical identity” was essential to becoming a songwriter. He didn’t initially aspire to write his own songs, but as his understanding of the world began to “change and stretch” (73), he started to imagine that he could do things with folk music that hadn’t been done yet.

From the beginning, Dylan rejected the expectations of the public and the music industry. His career was marked by his refusal to “explain anything to anybody” (8). He was wholly focused on “putting the song across” (18) and never tried to change anything about himself or his music to appeal to a broader public. He maintained this conviction even as his popularity exploded, and he quickly became frustrated with how critics and the public attempted to politicize his music and his persona. Dylan hated being labeled the “conscience of a generation” (115) and even recorded music that sounded more “bridled and housebroken” (112) in the hope that the public would lose interest in him. He often considered giving up music but always came up with something else, often what critics were least expecting. In Chronicles, Dylan often portrays himself as living in a kind of alternate reality, one in which, for example, “Denzel [Washington] could play Woody Guthrie” (187) in a movie. He suggests that folk music is a “mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes” (236), and he immersed himself until he began “to feel like a character from within these songs” (240), perhaps making him more or less immune to the demands of the real world.