October 5, 2004

So You Thought You Knew Dylan? Hah!

he Old Him is the hellhound who taunts Bob Dylan. From time to time this 1960's deity surfaces, driving nostalgists to rhapsodies (the Old Him is back!) but making Mr. Dylan angry enough to want to bite himself. Or at least that's how he puts it in his flabbergasting new memoir, "Chronicles: Volume One."

He was biting mad, he says, when, just before his 30th birthday, he was lured to Princeton University by the promise of an honorary doctorate, only to hear himself proclaimed "the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America." He was even angrier when Robbie Robertson of the Band, one of the rare Dylan contemporaries who will not read this autobiography with total fascination, dared to treat him as the music scene's reigning guru. The setting was Woodstock, N.Y., but "I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system," he now says.

Which part? Here's a promise: it's no part you might have expected. As the Sphinx holds forth with what is, to put it mildly, atypical frankness, he admits to remarkably unhip tastes and unlikely points of reference. He wonders why he was not one of the three members of Peter, Paul and Mary. He has nice things to say about the Kingston Trio, Senator Barry Goldwater, Mickey Rourke, Frank Sinatra Jr., Bobby Vee. He feels a kinship with Ricky Nelson, though only one of them grew up on a hit 1950's television show. "It was like he'd been born and raised on Walden Pond where everything was hunky-dory, and I'd come out of the dark demonic woods," he writes, "same forest, just a different way of looking at things."

He loves "Moon River." He says that "polka dances always got my blood pumping." Military history interests him, so much so that he responds less deeply to the historical events of his lifetime than to those of the Civil War. "The godawful truth" of that struggle, he says, "would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write."

This book recaptures its author's first stirrings of creativity with amazing urgency. Mr. Dylan is fully present in re-experiencing the dawn of his songwriting career. "You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs," he says. Instead, he remembers feeling the need to "convert something - something that exists into something that didn't yet."

And he is just as vital about the sensations of his later years, the dismal sense of being burdened by the Old Him's 16-ton legacy. "It was like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat," he writes about his most celebrated songs. "I couldn't understand where they came from." In this memoir he convincingly roams from the height of promise to being "a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows," stuck in "the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion."

Deliberately, no doubt, "Chronicles: Volume One" beggars the efforts of biographers to reconstruct Mr. Dylan's inner workings. With no great interest in the supposed landmark events of his life or even in the specific chronology or geography of his movements, he prefers to mine a different kind of memory. And he once again makes his homage to Woody Guthrie - another figure not known for autobiographical exactitude - with a writing style both straight-shooting and deeply fanciful. Describing his first exposure to visionaries and revolutionaries who stirred him (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Martin Luther), he writes: "It was like I knew these guys, like they'd been living in my backyard."

Gone is the druggy logorrhea of his 1966 novel, "Tarantula," as Mr. Dylan - a man who says he now owns a bumper sticker reading "World's Greatest Grandpa" - looks back on his life. Yet "Chronicles" is hardly tame. It is lucid without being linear, swirling through time without losing its strong storytelling thread. And it begins and ends at more or less the same place: the calm before the storm, the eve of the Old Him's phenomenal celebrity. As the book begins, he is introduced to the fighter Jack Dempsey, who mistook Mr. Dylan for a fellow slugger. Of course, Mr. Dempsey was right.

The Holden Caulfield of Hibbing, Minn. (or so he sometimes casts himself), arrived in Greenwich Village circa 1961, wide-eyed at its larger than life characters. He sketches them succinctly and boldly, though that hardly qualifies as a surprise. Dave Van Ronk, who gave Mr. Dylan his first chance to perform in a New York club, "was passionate and stinging, sang like a soldier of fortune and sounded like he paid the price." A woman named Chloe Kiel "was cool as pie, hip from head to toe, a Maltese kitten, a solid viper - always hit the nail on the head." When she offered to decorate his shoes ("those clodhoppers could use some buckles") and he refused her, Chloe said: "You got 48 hours to change your mind."

Chloe lived with Ray Gooch, and Mr. Dylan often stayed at their apartment - or so he says, in the midst of describing the hallucinatory cornucopia of books and artifacts that he found there. He inhaled a wealth of knowledge and who knows what else; this is not a book to offer chapter and verse about the author's wild side. But this period of discovery is thrillingly recalled, and the author's literary opinions are riveting. He had no use for "Ulysses," found Balzac hilarious and says he once derived an album from Chekhov's short stories. What he called typically quacky critical interpretation greeted these Dylan songs as autobiographical.

How could he escape such scrutiny? The book turns darkly funny in describing his exasperation. Years later, in Woodstock and then other places, he was hounded by fans and tourists, "gargoyle-looking gals" and "scarecrows," "creeps thumping their boots across our roof." He claims to have both doused himself in liquor and visited Jerusalem in his efforts to become less popular - and eventually it worked, despite the occasional "whatever happened to the Old Him?" stories from journalists. "They could go to hell, too," he says.

Part of "Chronicles" is devoted to Mr. Dylan's efforts to reinvent himself by many different means. He was invited by Archibald MacLeish to collaborate on a play - a play that wound up closing on its third day. He kept on writing songs, "but they weren't the kind where you hear an awful roaring in your head," he says. "I knew what those kind of songs were like, and these weren't them." He considered venturing into the business world. (A wooden leg factory was one possibility.) He took a new numerological approach to live performances - and here, briefly, the book turns strange. It's also difficult to believe in the revived creative energy that he attained in a song that rhymes "breeze" with "cheese."

Those interested in the roots of Mr. Dylan's music will have a field day tracking down this book's arcane references - Darby and Tarleton's recording of "Way Down in Florida on a Hog," to name but one. He is at his most comfortable discussing favorite songs, and eventually he also warms up to the subject of favorite women. "The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves," he writes about first catching sight of Suze Rotolo, an old flame who figures in his earliest records. She is a fixture in the folksinger's Eden, from which Mr. Dylan is being ejected as this book reaches its cliffhanger finale.

"Chronicles: Volume One" leaves much to be said in future installments, and much good reason to look forward to them. Meanwhile, like it or not, the Old Him is back under the microscope.

And while this is no time for Mr. Dylan to write his own epitaph, still, he has done it: "Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all."