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

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. After a career of principled coyness, Dylan takes pains to outline the growth of his artistic conscience in this superb memoir. Writing in a language of cosmic hokum and street-smart phrasing, he lingers not on moments of success and celebrity, but on the crises of his intellectual development. He reconstructs, for example, an early moment in New York when he realized "that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale...that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself." And he recounts how, in that search for larger reach, he actually went to the public library’s microfilm archives to learn the rhetoric of Civil War newspapers. Skipping the years of his greatest records, or 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 emphasizes that he was "indifferent to wealth and love," and readers looking for private revelations will be disappointed. But others will prize the display of musical integrity and seriousness that is evident in his minutia-filled accounts of his influences in folk and blues. Ultimately, this book will stand as a record of a young man’s self-education, as contagious in its frank excitement as the letters of John Keats and as sincere in its ramble as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, to which Dylan frequently refers. A person of Dylan’s stature could have gotten away with far less; that he has been so thoughtful in the creation of this book is a measure of his talents, and a gift to his fans.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal
There's no word yet on how far this first volume goes, but we'll bet that Dylan doesn't leave any answers blowin' in the wind. Look for the complete Lyrics (ISBN 0-7432-2627-8. $45), pubbing simultaneously. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Dylan, true to mercurial form, manages to be obscure and forthright in the long-anticipated first volume of his autobiography. For all his frankness, which catches many reviewers by surprise, he omits as much as he reveals. Less a straight biography than a series of well-written and compassionate vignettes, Dylan describes hundreds of past acquaintances in stunning detail, but then excludes or downplays what many consider to be key points of his biography. This sense of frustrated expectations colors what are otherwise glowing reviews; it is as if the critics are waiting to see what the proposed Volumes Two and Three hold before they give Dylan their final nod of approval. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From AudioFile
Only in the audiobook world could this comparison be made, but this wonderful production of Bob Dylan's CHRONICLES has some surprising similarities to another Simon & Schuster memoir--Chuck Barris's CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND. Sound blasphemous? Both are riffs on the curse of celebrity, both transcend high and low art, both challenge the memoir format, and both revel in the oddities of post-WWII Americana. (Dylan credits his early inspiration to the TV wrestler Gorgeous George.) Most strikingly, Sean Penn's beat reading shares a rhythm and tone with Barris--his is an ideal voice for a reluctant pop hero desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Acolytes and scholars have long argued over the meaning of Dylan's often cryptic songs. Now they have a new source of unparalleled authority to guide their interpretations in the first installment of his long-awaited memoirs, which jumps around chronologically, much as Dylan has veered stylistically over the years. It lurches from youth in Minnesota to arrival in New York City in 1961 to creative slump a decade later to the stirrings of creative revival in the 1980s. Most evocative is Dylan's depiction of early '60s Greenwich Village, which paints the burgeoning folk scene so vividly that it seems to have happened last week. Among the surprising revelations is Dylan's confession that his mundane output in the early '70s was the result of withdrawal into domestic life and a conscious attempt to reject the pressure he had felt as the "voice of a generation." Another surprise is that the book is so straightforward. As opposed to his obtusely surreal novel Tarantula (1971) and his famously evasive interviews, Dylan here is honest, bordering on confessional--that is, if he is to be taken at face value, always a risky proposition with this elusive artist. Dylan envisions this as the first of three volumes of memoirs, so fans shouldn't be upset that he ignores his most significant work but let the omission whet appetites for the sequels.
Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Okay. So. Bob Dylan.

Here's the thing with Dylan, folks: Lots of people have problems just accepting what he's giving them. At this point in time, we are so darn tickled to hear that our cantankerous favorite has given us another little piece of his life that we are just about beside ourselves. We hear the word "memoir" and we attach a certain expectation to it. We want history. We want truth. We want explanations. We want to know what those songs are about, finally. Can you see where I am going with this? If you want to enjoy this surprisingly enjoyable book, you will need to check your expectations at word number one. What we have here is a slightly random account of Bob Dylan's struggle with his destiny as "voice of a generation." It does not seek to explain, only to intimate. He only ever refers to his wife as "my wife." He rarely gives exact dates, skipping 20 years ahead by simply saying, "Years later￯﾿ﾽ". Oh, and no, he does not tell us who the heck he's talking about in "Positively Fourth Street."

The book deals a lot with Dylan's desperate desire not to be anyone's spokesperson, let alone everyone's. The audio version is performed by Sean Penn, who I can only describe as doing Dylan to a perfect "T." The slightly unorganized chronology is focused loosely around Dylan's arrival in New York circa 1961, his anxious retreat to Woodstock to escape the public eye, and the recording of Oh Mercy in New Orleans in the late '80s.

The most moving parts of the book, however, come when Dylan talks about his childhood and family in Minnesota. He often refers to his brown-skinned grandmother who smoked a pipe and seems to have been the genetic impetus for young Robert's word-slinging savvy. There is a certain honesty in his telling here that makes us feel like this time and these people are the only things in his life that he never needed to lie about, regardless of whether or not he ever did. It's one of those rare cases where the realities of these things are actually more remarkable than he could have made them up to be.

The book is great for strange little stories and vignettes: Dylan's first trip to Woody Guthrie's house; how an unnamed jazz singer rescued our hero from obscurity; the time Robbie Robertson asked him where he was going to "take" the music scene; a motorcycle ride through Louisiana to meet a guy named Sun Pie; a girl named Chloe who let him crash at her Greenwich Village pad in the '60s. We also get completely outrageous musings on the pentatonic scale and a random mentions of Machiavelli and Ice-T. All of these are effective tidbits. In a way, these things are more important than an exhaustive rehashing of the studio sessions for the first five albums or whatever. They are what Dylan remembers. They are what he had, day to day. They are not what a reporter or reviewer gave him; or us.

If nothing else, Bob Dylan sure can turn a phrase. He engages the reader (as he does the listener) with his seemingly accidental forays into absolute down-home clarity. My favorite line in the book comes when he describes David Crosby as a guy who "could freak out a whole city block all by himself." He uses metaphor in his distinctly recognizable way, so that we know this book is pure Dylan. Who else could come up with, "My haystacks weren't tied down, and I was beginning to fear the wind." If anyone else had said that, we would call it "Dylanesque." Elizabeth McMillan

ANNOTATION

Listen to excerpts from Chronicles: Volume One, the audiobook, read by Sean Penn:

Conscience of a Generation (2:37)
Johnny Cash (2:27)
On Writing Songs (3:17)
The Gaslight (2:27)
Visiting Woody Guthrie (3:32)

©2004 Bob Dylan. All Rights Reserved. (p)2004 Simon and Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"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 I, 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 - smokey, 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 I 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 I into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

FROM THE CRITICS

Richard Harrington - The Washington Post

… lucid, cogent, coherent, crystal clear. You hear Dylan's inimitable voice, his cadence, his dry wit, twists of phrase, the rasp, rush and tumble of memories -- all beautifully articulated. … Chronicles delivers what Dylan has so parsimoniously dispensed in selected interviews over the decades: genuine insights into his work. Like James Joyce's largely autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chronicles offers a way to understand the mind and art of its author at a crucial juncture, when Dylan is finding the voice that speaks to and (despite his protests) for a generation, when he's busily reinvigorating bardic tradition.

Tom Carson - The New York Times Sunday Book Review

… to point out that Chronicles is designed to manipulate our perceptions is simply to affirm that it's genuine Dylan. The book is an act, but a splendid one -- his sense of strategy vis-a-vis his audience hasn't been this keen in 30 years -- and it's a zesty, nugget-filled read. His assessments of other musicians are as acute as they are idiosyncratic, partly because (no great surprise here) he instinctively zeroes in on their personae in the guise of talking about their music, as in this jambalaya of observations about Roy Orbison: ''He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. . . He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal.'' Better still is a terse explanation of what separated Hank Williams from most 50's country-and-western singers: ''There was nothing clownish about him.''

Janet Maslin - The New York Times

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 … 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.

Library Journal

There's no word yet on how far this first volume goes, but we'll bet that Dylan doesn't leave any answers blowin' in the wind. Look for the complete Lyrics (ISBN 0-7432-2827-8. $45), pubbing simultaneously. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

The New Yorker