Book Review: Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume 1
February 4th, 2005,Like people in other places, Minnesotans–Bob Dylan among them–usually know something about their native sons and daughters who become famous. In the closing pages of his new autobiography, Chronicles: Volume I, Dylan mentions other famous Minnesotans that he felt “akin to”: Roger Maris, Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Eddie Cochran, an early rock-and-roller. “They were all from the North Country,” Dylan writes as he remembers his youthful self on the brink of musical stardom in New York City. “Each one followed their own vision, didn’t care what the pictures showed. Each one of them would have understood what my inarticulate dreams were about. I felt like I was one or all of them put together.”
With a single-minded purpose, enraptured by the folk music that he would later master and transform, Dylan pursued those dreams from Hibbing to the Twin Cities to eventual success in New York and beyond. His songs have always had a passionate following and inspired extravagant praise, even among the intelligentsia. One leading literary critic, Christopher Ricks, recently published a book on his songs, Dylan’s Visions of Sin.
As for this first volume of Dylan’s Chronicles, it is powerful but also curious–powerful because it conveys the passion he has for music, curious because it employs a confusing, nearly stream-of-consciousness style of narrative that jumps around in time. The rewards of the book outweigh these weaknesses, however, as Dylan proves himself to be an unsurprisingly poetic prose writer, if often an idiosyncratic one.
Other reviewers can do more justice to Dylan’s commentary on his career and on music history; as for my views on those issues, suffice it to say that the book is strongest when Dylan is describing his musical influences and the apprenticeship that brought him to his first professional recording session in New York. Dylan wonderfully describes his experience of hearing the music and words of such disparate artists as Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Woody Guthrie, and many others. That said, I will focus on Dylan’s views on the Upper Midwest.
Out of Hibbing
Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the northern Minnesota city of Duluth in 1941. The family later moved farther north to Hibbing, a small town in the mining region called the Iron Range. Dylan recalls his early years in northern Minnesota with general fondness, and one wonders if he has made the focus of his picture too soft:
“The world I grew up in was…still mostly gravel roads, marshlands, hills of ice, steep skylines of trees on the outskirts of town, thick forests, pristine lakes large and small, iron mine pits, trains and one-lane highways. Winters, ten below with a twenty below wind-chill factor were common, thawing spring and hot, steamy summers–penetrating sun and balmy weather where temperatures rose over one hundred degrees. Summers were filled with mosquitoes that could bite through your boots–winters with blizzards that could freeze a man dead. There were glorious autumns as well.
“Mostly what I did growing up was bide my time. I always knew there was a bigger world out there but the one I was in at the time was all right, too.”
Though he professes acceptance of his life in Hibbing, there is a hint of dissatisfaction in his comment that he was simply “biding his time.” In another passage he recalls a visit to his hometown for his father’s funeral, when he sees again “the flimflam, …the Simple Simons” of small-town life. And he remembers the cultural divide that separated him, a lover of art and music, from his much more practical family. When a teacher tells his father that young Robert has the temperament of an artist, his father asks, “Isn’t an artist a fellow who paints?” The opportunities in Hibbing for an artistic youth would certainly have been limited.
Limited and remote as it was, the life of northern Minnesota, especially its radio, exposed Dylan to a wide variety of music ranging from polka to country to popular ballads. He loved rock and roll from the start and formed his own short-lived bands. He sought out and briefly played piano for Bobby Vee, a regional rockabilly singer from Fargo, North Dakota, who would later gain national success. Eventually blues and folk music would claim his soul, however.
Though northern Minnesota is on the American periphery in geographic terms, culturally it did no feel that way for the young Dylan. He claims to have felt connected to the musical currents of the entire country, including the South, from the very beginning:
“Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I came from…Duluth to be exact. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors. The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”
With visions of Jack Kerouac’s road in his mind, Robert Zimmerman left Hibbing in the spring of 1959 on a Greyhound bus bound for Minneapolis, “looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it…” He had already experimented with new names when performing in northern Minnesota. Now he picked one that would stick. When he arrived in Minneapolis, he introduced himself as Bob Dylan.
Next week: Dylan arrives in the Twin Cities.
Weather Note
In our topsy-turvy climate, we are now enjoying record-high temperatures, with Minneapolis-St. Paul setting a record of 50 degrees today. We have beautiful sun in this midwinter thaw.