\I'm just average, common too / I'm just like him, the same as you / I'm everybody's brother and son / I ain't different from anyone,"" Bob Dylan sang on ""I Shall Be Free No. 10."" He meant it. There will never be an appropriate biography for Bob Dylan. It would consist of broken words never meant to be spoken. There's far too much music mythology at stake to piece together a tell-all work. Dylan needs the tales to round out his identity. Without a few parables and some strange yarns, he's just a man who has known better days.
In ""Chronicles: Volume One"" a book written by his own hand, Dylan puts down some pieces of the story of his life. Other writers have tried to explore and expand certain themes or eras of Dylan's past and have only managed to explain occasional moments in an ever-evolving life. Christopher Rick's ""Dylan's Visions of Sin"" compartmentalizes the troubadour with virtue and vice. David Hajdu's ""Positively Fourth Street"" ties Dylan too closely to his folk roots. Only Dylan really knows how to write about himself.
He does it with plenty of people and just enough wistfulness to remind readers that he would rather not be the legend that he's become. His cast of characters is sometimes confusing with figures appearing on one page and vanishing from memory in the next. It seems like he's saying, ""Don't get up gentlemen, I'm only passing through.""
He also wants to assure the world that he wasn't supposed to be the leader of the acoustic revolution or the ultimate peacemaking hero. He writes, ""I really was never any more than what I was-a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze."" It's a message he has said before. ""Don't follow leaders,"" he sings on ""Subterranean Homesick Blues.""
""Chronicles"" explains how Dylan read about all those names, from Ezra Pound to Neil Young to Buddha, that he sews together in his songs. He writes about the process of discovery and illumination at a friend's bookshelf, but doesn't explain how his particular creative process puts Romeo next to Cinderella or Cain and Abel with the hunchback of Notre Dame.
Dylan may have stayed in Mississippi a day too long and was left blowin' in the wind for much of the '80s, but he still knows how to craft a work of significance. ""Chronicles"" will stand beside Highway 61 Revisited and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in terms of worth. The book legitimizes him in another medium, checking in as far more practical of a book than his profoundly bad book of poetry, ""Tarantula.""
Ever since ""Love and Theft's'""release on Sept. 11, 2001, Dylan's sense of mortality has heightened. ""Chronicles"" is another product of Dylan's need to make sure that his words are told and his songs are sung. His touring is just as frequent as ever as he approaches his mid-60s and his bootlegs pop up with almost yearly regularity.
Now, Dylan has had time to reflect, reevaluate and reminisce. He freely writes of his veneration for Woody Guthrie and how his role as a family man superseded his identity as a musician. Dylan is honest without being overbearing and he becomes seemingly more ordinary as the book goes on.
""Chronicles"" is neither an explanation nor a summary. It gives out details and uses names only when Dylan finds it necessary. During his stay at Woodstock he can say ""my wife"" and his loyal following will know who he is alluding to. He waves off names of albums and various roles he played with phrases like ""a country-western record"" and ""a part in a movie"" that involved cowboys.
It seems like Dylan doesn't care for the details. But then he'll rattle off lists of books he read over 40 years ago or quote an article from The New York Times. His book is enlightening and entertaining by revealing plenty yet keeping some secrets. Of course, the Minnesota native has been doing this ever since he got out of the North Country.
Pete Hamill had this right since 1974 when he wrote of Dylan's democratic art in the liner notes of Bob's masterpiece Blood on the Tracks. The jokerman keeps doing the same thing with ""Chronicles."" He is using pieces to tell a story. Bob Dylan's faithful, like they have always done, are left to fill in the blanks.
""Chronicles: Volume One"" is written by Bob Dylan and published by Simon and Schuster.
