Book Review (Continued): Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume 1
February 11th, 2005,This week I continue my review of Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles: Volume I. Last week’s review (see below) considered Dylan’s account of growing up in the northern Minnesota town of Hibbing.
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After arriving in Minneapolis on a Greyhound bus from Hibbing in the summer of 1959, Bob Dylan immediately traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic one and began to hang out in the Beatnik coffeehouses of Dinkytown, the area around the University of Minnesota. He had left “very narrow, provincial” Hibbing and never intended to go back.
Staying that summer in a fraternity house (he does not tell us that it is Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity at the university), he soon met kindred spirits in the big city and with their help began to soak up new influences. Folk records were not easy to come by at that time, so he learned of old and new folk singers–the New Lost City Ramblers, Dave Van Ronk, Blind Lemon Jefferson, John Jacob Niles, Woody Guthrie, and many others–by listening to records in libraries, at other people’s homes, or in record stores. He heard other performers who came through town as well. It was an informal education in folk music, from traditional English and American ballads to songs by newer folk artists.
Dylan calls this world of folk music his “parallel universe”:
“Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it…Folk music was all I needed to exist. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes… I had no other cares or interests besides folk music.”
During that first summer in the Twin Cities, he was playing his guitar “morning, noon, and night.” When he wasn’t practicing, he was performing in coffeehouses, pizza places, on the street, and at house parties, supporting himself with the little money he made. He often played with another young singer, John Koerner. It was the start of a performing career that would hardly pause until years later.
By the fall of 1959 he was living above Gray’s drugstore in Dinkytown. At this point he learned about Woody Guthrie’s music for the first time. “Stunned” by its power, determined to be “Guthrie’s greatest disciple,” Dylan sang nothing but Guthrie songs until local folk music maven Jon Pankake–a “classic traditional folk snob,” according to Dylan–confronted him and shook him up by comparing him to Jack Elliott, another folksinger influenced by Guthrie. Dylan had to finally admit Pankake was right. He still had a ways to go as an artist.
Although Minneapolis-St. Paul was much bigger than Hibbing, Dylan knew he was “still stuck in the boondocks” compared to another folksinger his age that he admired, Joan Baez. Baez had already been on television and had made a record in New York. Eventually, he knew it was time to go to the American cultural capital: “Just like Hibbing, the Twin Cities had gotten a little too cramped, and there was only so much you could do. The world of folk music was too closed off and the town was beginning to feel like a mud puddle. New York City was the place I wanted to be.”
Dylan left town one morning in the winter of 1961 with a suitcase, a guitar, and a harmonica rack and hitchhiked his way east to find Woody Guthrie. He was heading to a place “where life promised something more.”
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These are some of Dylan’s musings and memories on his life in the Upper Midwest. As with any autobiography, the reader must take the narrative with a grain of salt. Any writer has an agenda, and that agenda may not include complete truth and accuracy. Is Dylan attempting to create a youth worthy of his legend, falsely presenting himself as an earnest student at the foot of the folk music tradition? Tom Carson, reviewing Chronicles in the New York Times, is a harsh critic of Dylan’s book in this regard. For him, “calculated image-tending dominates the agenda” in the book as Dylan attempts to present himself as “a 20th-century incarnation of primeval Americana.” Carson writes:
“The voice is transparently fraudulent, eliding one side of the young Bob Dylan (his callowness) and playing fancy chess games with another (his ambition). Yet simply as writing, it’s some of the best fake ‘Huckleberry Finn’ I’ve ever read.”
Carson also comments on a strange omission in the book that I noticed as well: Dylan makes no mention of being Jewish. One must wonder why. Did his family not see themselves as Jewish? What was it like to be Jewish in Hibbing? Did it play any role in forming his identity? Not if this book is any indication.
Carson’s criticism seems too heavy, to my mind. Dylan might have grown up as a middle-class kid in Hibbing, relatively privileged compared to Twain’s Huck Finn, but why is his story not as authentic a piece of Americana as any other? If his autobiography bears any resemblance to what really happened, Dylan’s story is a remarkable one. To start in an obscure corner of America and end up in the limelight is no small feat. And going out of your way to master the old power of poetry and music–in effect creating your own apprenticeship independent of any formal school–is even more admirable.
For me, Dylan’s thoughts on the songs that influenced him and their considerable effect on him ring true. Such experiences are necessary for a person to choose the impractical, even scorned road of being an artist. These descriptions of his musical education are also what make him believable when he says later, about his days of fame in the 1960s, that he did not want to be the political spokesperson for a generation. He loved the art and craft of music–not just folk music in the end–and was not seeking anything more. He had mastered the power of the song and the lyre, and young people looked to him as a kind of prophet. His misfortune (as well as his good fortune) was doing so during a time of social upheaval.
The comparison to Huck Finn does not seem outrageous. Taking chances, lighting out on his own like Huck–these are elements of Dylan’s story. He left the familiar surroundings of home and took up a guitar on the street and in the humble coffeehouses of the Twin Cities, then left again to try to make it in the nation’s cultural capital, where failure was much more likely. In doing all this, in taking risks to pursue his dreams, he showed more courage than most of us.