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Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Vol. 1

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from: Alex Ross
to: Alex Abramovich

Preserving the Past

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004, at 5:20 PM ET

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Dear Alex,

"Who knew Dylan could write prose, too?" is our new Slate headline. People are always impressed when a rock star, if you want to call Dylan that, proves to be something other than a gibbering idiot. Our man's liner notes, interviews, and other prose ephemera over the years have shown that he has a powerful, individual way with the King's English. What's surprising here is not the classy beatnik prose but the eagerness to preserve the past. On page after page he's sitting back and watching others. He himself is often merely an incidental character in the narrative: He comes most to life when he's lavishing adjectives on someone he likes. (My opinion of Bono went up 100 percent after reading Dylan's paragraph about him.) And this shouldn't be such a surprise, either. I'm with you in thinking that "Dylan's great strength, in any medium, stems from his unwillingness to separate his person from the vast American panorama." The songs are obviously autobiographical, but they are also landscapes thronged by people in which the singer moves around mysteriously. Neither you nor I will ever forget the "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" he sang in Portland in '98: For a few minutes, Hattie became a living presence in that soulless corporate space, tenderly cared for by the emotion in Dylan's voice. I get the feeling that he finds it easiest to summon up emotion for people who are dead or otherwise gone, but he's not alone in that.

You wonder why Dylan devotes such a long section to Oh Mercy. We are promised thoughts on other records in later volumes of Chronicles—evidently Dylan has piles of notes on his recording sessions—although his recent confession that he detested the writing process suggests that Chronicles Vol. 2 may be a long time coming. Perhaps the emphasis on Oh Mercy is random, but I suspect it's not. Here again is a case where popular perceptions of Dylan's career are at odds with his own. From his perspective, certain happenings in the late '80s—tours with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead, the Oh Mercy sessions—revitalized a creative urge that by his own admission was in danger of flickering out. I happen to love Oh Mercy, although as so often with Dylan's post-Blood work, some of the better takes and songs didn't make it onto the album. (To hear the grand, spooky "Series of Dreams"—"Everything stands down where it's wounded/ And comes to a permanent stop"—you need the three-CD Bootleg Series set. There's a heavier recording of the suicidally ironic "Most of the Time"—"I don't cheat on myself, I don't run and hide/ Hide from the feelings that are buried inside/ I don't compromise and I don't pretend/ I don't even care if I ever see her again/ Most … of … the … time"—on bootlegs. And so on.) I'm one of those freaks who pokes through even the crappiest albums in order to see Dylan's personality shining through the cracks. As a classical nerd, I tend to worship pop artists who have long, winding, composerlike careers, who reveal a little more of themselves each year rather than putting it all down in one perfect document. So, I was happy to sit in on Oh Mercy: The chapter reveals how he thinks and works on an average day.

I also want to take on a question that Toronto critic Carl Wilson poses on his blog: "How much do you buy his disavowal of ever having had activist intentions? His political period actually was very short-lived, but do we think he was being opportunistic, simply exploring a thread of the folk tradition at a moment that seemed to call it forth (that's kind of the way it's portrayed in Chronicles) or trying to change the world and then getting frightened away when the world almost did seem to change in answer to the songs he was blowin' out into it?" In my long New Yorker piece, I was pretty dismissive of Dylan's politics, preferring to see him as an aesthete consumed in music. After reading Mike Marqusee's Chimes of Freedom, on Dylan and the end of the Old Left, I thought differently. I'm not so sure Chronicles reveals Dylan's early '60s political period as opportunistic or aestheticized. There's a deep nostalgia for the entire folkie universe, page after page on its characters and lore. The book doesn't delve much into politics as such, but the Old Left's earnest convictions—Communist, socialist, New Deal, what have you—seem inseparable from the funky realness of the scene. On the other hand, the cynical-radical mid-'60s period, in which Dylan made such a nasty break with the Old Left, is hardly touched on. It's like a nightmare he can hardly bear to think about.

The last paragraph of the book begins: "The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect. In a few years' time a shit storm would be unleashed. Things would begin to burn. Bras, draft cards, American flags, bridges, too—everybody would be dreaming of getting it on. The national psyche would change and in a lot of ways it would resemble the Night of the Living Dead." I won't quote the rest, because the final sentence of the book is too scarily brilliant to be taken out of context. Thank you, Alex, for this conversation, and thanks, Bob, for passing through.

Allen Ginsberg later gator,
Alex

the book club
entries
1234
from: Alex Ross
to: Alex Abramovich

Preserving the Past

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004, at 5:20 PM ET
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Alex Abramovich is writing a history of rock 'n' roll. He lives in Astoria, Queens. Alex Ross is the music critic for The New Yorker.
Photograph of Bob Dylan on Slate's home page by David Cheskin/Reuters.
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