When do you know your life's not going to be easy? Soon after people stop calling you by name and start referring to you as the High Priest of Protest, the Duke of Disobedience, the Big Bubba of Rebellion, or the Archbishop of Anarchy.
Bob Dylan has been called all of these things and more. Which explains why his desire to simply raise children and live in a house with a white picket fence will raise more than a few eyebrows.
We know this because the man himself says so. Earlier this week, Dylan decided to give the rest of the world a peek into what his life has been like, with Chronicles: Volume One, the first in a series of three memoirs. In the months leading up to its release, publishers promised all kinds of juicy details, while fans, vinyl records in hand, salivated restlessly.
Going by initial reports trickling in, however, the veil of mystique hasn't exactly been pulled back. Pop's reluctant 63-year-old icon is still telling his story, but he's not really referring to it as an autobiography. Instead, what readers are being given -- albeit in a style described as 'easy' and 'conversational' -- includes a jumpy chronology, tales of Dylan's early life in New York in the 1960s, stories behind albums like New Morning (1970) and Oh Mercy (1989), his opinions on the frustrations of fame, casual references to his 'wife' (he has had two), and tales of meeting greats like Woody Guthrie, Thelonious Monk, Tom Petty and Bono.
This isn't Dylan's first attempt at a book. Those familiar with the abstract poetry or surreal prose of 1966's Tarantula, however, may be pleasantly surprised by the vivid detail of Chronicles. The ability to capture nuances, that makes up so much of his song writing, surfaces with consummate ease.
Coming two years after it was scheduled for publication, it boasts all kinds of facts, reflections on musical theory, humorous commentary, little bits of poetry, and random stories that may sometimes make sense to hardcore fans alone. If you're looking for dates and names, you might want to look someplace else.
Needless to say, one of the reasons the book may still be popular is because, despite 43 albums and hundreds of unauthorised biographies, Dylan remains an exasperatingly mysterious figure. He hasn't written the memoir to counteract anything either. 'I didn't have to write an apology,' he is quoted as saying. 'I wasn't trying to explain anything to anybody. I was intrigued by the whole process with words and how they would flow and with how certain people would light up my memory.'
What exactly do we learn? That the Civil War was the 'all-encompassing template' behind everything he would write, that he had an affair with Suze Rotolo, the girl walking with him on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, that he was fantasising about a 9-to-5 existence at the height of his stardom, that his first stage performance was as a non-speaking Roman soldier, and that his favourite Dylan cover is Johnny Rivers' Positively 4th Street. We also learn about his birth in Duluth, childhood in Hibbing, one year of college in Minneapolis, early folk days in New York's Village, a father who wanted him to be a mechanical engineer, and a grandmother who said, 'Happiness isn't a road to anything; that happiness is the road.'
What we learn little about are some of his most seminal early albums, his only sibling, David, his divorce, his famous 1966 motorcycle accident, and the even more publicised conversion to Christianity in the 1970s. And this after he insists no topic was off limits in Chronicles! He was probably referring to later volumes.
Among the more interesting passages is one that dwells on how Robert Allen Zimmerman eventually picked the name 'Bob Dylan.' He talks about experimenting with Bobby Dylan and rejecting it because there were too many other Bobbys, then trying Bob Allyn and dropping it because it sounded like a used-car salesman, before finally settling on the name that generations have grown to mull over.
Referring to the book, Dylan says he doesn't trade on his reputation to write one. 'It can't stand if it's only written for people who know about me or are familiar with my work. This book has to reach people who might not have heard my name before.' The volume ends at the same place it begins, in the office of a song's publisher who rejected the singer's tunes and asked him to try writing a song about a baseball player instead!
Surprisingly, while writing about his most celebrated songs, Dylan says it was 'like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat.' Happier passages focus on his ideas about sharing music. Heavier feelings surface when he examines the rigours of being in the spotlight. Speaking about a period in the mid-1980s after a hand injury, he writes, 'I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck ... I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic ... I'm in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion.'
His music continues to inspire though, and critics believe his work in the 1990s is as astonishing as his earlier period. Not bad for a man who admits to owning a bumper sticker that reads 'World's Greatest Grandpa.'
'As far as I know,' writes Dylan, 'I didn't belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities...'
For over 40 years, people have looked hard for the man behind the music. They may not find exactly what they're looking for in Chronicles. But, like all of his music, they definitely will find something.
