Chronicles: Volume One

Dylan was born in 1941 as World War II raged in Europe. It was a time when “you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning” (28). His father didn’t fight in the war because of polio, but all his uncles shipped out overseas. They came home and never spoke of it. By the time Dylan was in grade school, the Cold War conflict between the US and the USSR was in full swing, instilling fear in his generation. However, by the time he was a young man in New York, the Red Scare was over, even though there were “plenty” of aspiring “[r]adicals of all stripes” around (30).

Dylan spent his first months in New York City crashing on couches, floors, and spare rooms. He especially enjoyed staying with Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel, a couple who lived south of Canal Street. He often returned home just before dawn and woke in the afternoon after Ray and Chloe had left. He spent the afternoons listening to the radio and the sounds of the city, the trains and church bells, and looking out the window imagining the myriad stories of New York’s residents. He scanned the radio “for songs with folk connotations” (32), but most of what he heard “reflected nothing but milk and sugar and not the real Jekyll and Hyde themes of the times” (34). He claims that this was because the 7-inch record format—typically used for “flimsy and uncrystallized” radio singles (34)—couldn’t capture the “street ideologies that were signaling a new type of human existence” (34). Dylan longed to make a 10-inch LP record, which to him was the format of serious musicians, matching his folk songs, which weren’t “light entertainment,” but a “preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality” (34). Dylan had no intention to disrupt or change popular culture, he just didn’t want to be a part of it.

Ray and Chloe had a huge library, a place where “you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness” (35). There were copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Dante’s Inferno. The books “were really something” (38), and Dylan “[dug] through them like an archeologist” (39-40). However, he stuck mostly to poetry, such as the works of Poe, Shelley, and Byron. He enjoyed reading them aloud, finding Milton’s “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” as compelling as a folk song.

Dylan was inspired by 19th-century American politician Thadeus Stevens and former US President Teddy Roosevelt, both of whom he felt “could have stepped out of a folk ballad” (40). Dylan was also inspired by the art books in Ray’s library and the instructional manuals that taught readers “how to deliver a baby” or “how to perform an appendectomy in the bedroom” (41). He read biographies and flipped through photo books of acrobats. Nineteenth century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who was known as “the premier philosopher of war” (41), fascinated Dylan, who had dreamed as a boy of attending West Point and dying in battle until his father had revealed that only those with family connections could get into such an institution. Dylan soon discovered that connections were also important in the music world. He was constantly frustrated that musicians who weren’t any better than him got opportunities just because they knew the right person, which “left [Dylan] feeling naked” (43). 

The Gaslight wasn’t a fancy club, but it was always full. There was always a line to get in, and Dylan felt like he was playing to 10,000 people during his 20-minute sets. The club was stifling, so between sets, the performers usually hung out upstairs, where musicians like Van Ronk, Hal Water, and Paul Clayton played poker. On his breaks, Dylan would also go to the Kettle Fish Tavern across the street, where experimental comedians like Richard Pryor and composers like David Amram performed. 

Dylan only gradually realized he should write his own songs, since he was consumed by learning and playing the work of other musicians, particularly as the real-life stories behind some songs amazed him. For example, the song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill” was about a Swedish immigrant who “could have come out of a mystery novel” (52): a union organizer convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence and executed by a firing squad in Utah in the early 20th century. Hill’s conviction inspired marches around the county, but the state wouldn’t re-examine the evidence. Dylan had heard a number of protest songs and had some ideas about what made a good one. However, his first song “of any substantial importance” (54) was written for Dylan’s idol, Woody Guthrie.

Dylan wanted to be revolutionary—a mood that was in the air. Spanish cubist painter Pablo Picasso had recently “cracked [the art world] wide open” (55). American experts warned that television “was destroying the minds and imaginations of the young” (55). Dylan muses whether the evolution from full-length operas and symphonies to three-minute pop songs was another indicator of declining attention spans. He read longer poems to train himself out of these “short song cycles” (56).

When Dylan had first moved to New York, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was his bible. However, while he loved Kerouac’s writing style, he soon got bored with Kerouac’s chaotic protagonist Moriarty, whose rebellion seemed pointless to Dylan—unlike that of Dylan’s real-life friend Ray, who had a mysterious power. Ray smoked opium that he cooked himself in the apartment’s kitchen and had a large stock of firearms, even though he “was anything but a macho tough guy” (59). He was unapologetic and authentic in a way Dylan admired.

Folk musician Mike Seeger, “the supreme archetype” of a folk musician (69), first pushed Dylan toward a big change. Dylan met Seeger at a bohemian party for folk musicians, Broadway and Off-Broadway actors, choreographers, and even labor organizers. Dylan had met many of the attendees before, but because he “wasn’t from the North Carolina mountains” or “a very commercial, cosmopolitan singer” (64), the other folk musicians didn’t have much interest in him. Seeger, however, made a point of saying hello. To Dylan, Seeger had been born with music “in his blood” (71); Dylan felt like he’d have to work his whole life to do what Seeger did instinctually. However, the encounter also cemented another idea: Folk songs change depending “on who’s playing and who’s listening” (71), so it occurred to Dylan that he could write his own songs—ones Seeger didn’t know.

Dylan “was riding the changes” happening across the country and could feel his consciousness “beginning to […] change and stretch” (73). Without knowing it, he was hard at work developing his own philosophical identity. Ray and his friend Paul Clayton often talked late into the night about high-concept ideas, like how New York City was “the capital of the world” (73). One afternoon, Dylan went to meet a friend at a local coffee house, but when he arrived, he found the owner dead in the doorway. He had been stabbed. Dylan and his friend walked away without doing anything. The incident was “unpleasant and sick,” but it was powerful and “jarred [Dylan’s] mind” (75). It made him think of the Civil War, which he had heard Ray and Paul discussing the night before. 

When Dylan first arrived in New York, he had to decide what he would call himself. He had assumed he would go by his given name, Robert Allen, but then he read an article about saxophone player David Allyn and liked the look of the “y.” After reading Dylan Thomas’s poems, Dylan considered chaining Allyn to Dylan, which sounded similar. However, he didn’t like the sound of Robert Dylan, so he eventually settled on Bob. He’d always been called Robert or Bobby, so the new name took some getting used to, but it felt right.

The artists that worked the circuit of folk clubs in Greenwich Village were mostly playing old-timey music. Even those few artists who wrote their own songs generally set new words to old melodies, creating “topical songs” that told stories about real events—the precursors to future “protest songs.” In an Irish bar called the White Horse Tavern, Dylan listened to “guys from the old country” playing “rebellion ballads” (83) that got stuck in his head. He was starting to see what his own songs might sound like, he “just didn’t know how to do it yet” (84).

Dylan “did everything fast,” but he knew he needed to slow down “if [he] was going to be a composer with anything to say” (84). He started frequenting the public library, where he read newspapers from the mid-19th century, finding articles about slavery, “reform movements, antigambling leagues, rising crime, child labor, temperance, slave-wage factories, loyalty oaths and religious revivals” (84). He read about Abraham Lincoln and “the Southern womanhood thing” (86). He felt that “America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected,” that the times he was living in were not so different from the days of the Civil War, and that “[t]he godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that [he] would write” (86). He learned as much as he could and “left it alone” to germinate in his mind (86).

At the Gaslight, Dylan often played with Len Chandler, whose “thing was writing topical songs” (87). They would often read the newspaper together, looking for songwriting material. There were stories about France, which had recently tested an atomic bomb and been kicked out of Vietnam, as well as articles about “new modern-day phobias” and women “challenging the status quo” (88). He and Len felt that “everything around [them] looked absurd,” and Dylan didn’t want his songs to “conform to modern ideas” (89). With “the dominant myth of the day” being “that anybody could do anything,” modern culture felt “almost like a war against the self” (90).

At Ray’s place, Dylan also listened to jazz and bebop records. He liked modern jazz, but the lack of “ordinary words with specific meanings” threw him (95). One day, he heard country singer Hank Williams playing on the Grand Ole Opry radio show, and Williams quickly became one of Dylan’s favorites: Williams’s music held “the archetype rules of poetic songwriting” (96). Later, critics would accuse Dylan of breaking these rules.

One of Dylan’s main motives for going to New York was to visit his idol, Woody Guthrie, in the psychiatric hospital where Guthrie spent the last years of his life. Dylan took the bus to New Jersey to play songs for Guthrie, who was housed in “an asylum with no spiritual hope of any kind” (99). One day, Guthrie told Dylan about boxes of unfinished songs in the basement of his house in Coney Island, New York. When Dylan arrived, he was received by Guthrie’s son, Arlo, and his babysitter, but he left without the manuscripts. Forty years later, the songs were recorded by Billy Bragg under the direction of Guthrie’s daughter.