Michael’s Musical Musings: Chronicles Vol 1 - by Bob Dylan
“The big car came to a full stop and let me out. I slammed the door shut behind me, waved good-bye, stepped out onto the hard snow. The biting wind hit me in the face. At last I was here, in New York City, a city like a web too intricate to understand and I wasn’t going to try.”
Bob Dylan’s first moments in New York City are remembered in his autobiographical Chronicles Vol 1. I’ve read this book a few times since its publication in 2004. I even received the audiobook voiced by Sean Penn as a gift, and thought Sean’s no-nonsense voice was perfect casting. I found the book insightful and detailed, with a very Dylanesque non-nostalgic warmth. One gets the feeling that Bob regularly ruminates on various topics, thinks about dichotomies, includes the smaller against the larger pictures, gravitates towards Life’s array of oddities, and comes across more as an astute observer than someone passing judgment.
Since seeing the recent A Complete Unknown, I wanted to re-read some of the book’s details since the movie freely played with time and events. Three of the five chapters in the book chronicling his early years in Greenwich Village are by far the most absorbing. These chapters vividly recall meeting his heroes Woody Guthrie, Dave Van Ronk, and Joan Baez, serial sofa crashing, and playing the coffee house circuit. The other two chapters are also engaging, one during the time of his New Morning album release in 1970 and the other detailing the making of his Oh Mercy album in 1989, but I found his diatribes about the downsides of fame much less interesting than his music-related memories.
One fascinating tidbit was the incredible force Dylan encountered when he first listened to records by Woody Guthrie and later by blues artist Robert Johnson. These albums floored him with their stark guitar playing and accompanying austere vocals. Listening to some old 78s recorded by Woody, Dylan writes:
“…these songs…one after another made my head spin. It was like the land parted…Guthrie had such a grip on things. He was so poetic and tough and rhythmic. There was so much intensity, and his voice was like a stiletto.”
Or when first hearing Robert Johnson:
“From the first note of the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up. The stabbing sounds of the guitar could almost break a window. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.”
A reviewer of Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song observed:
“…it is not just the breadth of Dylan’s musical knowledge that is on display here, but the depth of his listening. He has an unerring ability to pinpoint what sets a song – or a singer, or a group – apart from their contemporaries.”
Dylan is our proverbial “fly on the wall” in the early days of the Village when musicians and comedians were cutting their teeth in quirky coffee houses, many of whom later became beloved and famous. At Cafe Wha?, stand-ups like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, and Woody Allen would regularly hold court. Musicians included Dave Van Rock, Peggy Seeger, Reverend Gary Davis, Richie Havens, Fred Neil, et al. Others hard to categorize were Hugh Romney, who later became Wavy Gravy, the oddly endearing Tiny Tim, and a street poet named Moondog.
This fortuitous incubation period would soon yield the wildly popular Peter Paul and Mary singing Dylan songs and ultimately spreading the music and energy into college campuses, expanding the Newport Folk Festival, bringing Civil Rights to the forefront, and giving birth to beloved artists like Gordon Lightfoot, Tom Paxton, Ian and Sylvia, Phil Ochs, Eric Anderson, and many others. The folk boom (or, as Martin Mull coined, “the great Folk scare”) placed untold volumes of acoustic guitars into young people’s hands across the land. And Dylan was riding the wave of this movement with an amazing number of songs including “The Times are A-Changing”, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Girl From the North Country”, and “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”. Yet, in the early years of the Village scene presented in Chronicles, he has not written any songs of note. There are distinct indications he’s about to start…but he’s not quite there.
It’s astounding he can remember so many minute details, or at least he has the ability to recreate the minutia of an apartment where he crashed. Recalling which books they had on their shelves, which records they owned, various works of art or memorabilia…what the weather was like on a particular day. It’s an endless treat to peer through his eyes into that world. As depicted in the Cohen Brother’s film Inside Llewyn Davis, many folks of means gladly supported musicians by inviting them to “crash at their pad”. The folk singers and performers were famously not making much money since they were mainly in it for the love of the craft, finding overlooked traditional songs to sing, and enjoying the camaraderie with other musicians and performers.
The fourth chapter outlines the making of the album, Oh Mercy, released in 1989. This was Bob’s 26th studio album and was generally hailed by critics as a ‘comeback’ from his two poorly reviewed previous efforts. The project was produced by Daniel Lanois, who is known for lush sounds and highly regarded finished product. One writer criticized the production but praised the songs.
"Taken over by Daniel Lanois, master of a shimmering and distinctive electronically processed guitar sound…Oh Mercy is overdone. It's irritating to hear Dylan's songs so manipulated, but there are sufficient nice tracks—“Most of the Time","Shooting Star” both simple and direct, among them—to make this by far the most coherent and listenable collection of his own songs Dylan has released since Desire".
Typically, we don’t have the luxury of hearing the backstory or the inside story of how a project began, developed, and came to fruition. Here we have the ‘blow by blow’ info from Dylan on his first meeting with Lanois, the detailed descriptions of New Orleans (where the album was recorded), his interactions with the studio musicians, and most importantly, how a song develops from a rough idea to a finished track. Except for the Beatles’ producer, George Martin, most of us don’t know the exact role of a record producer. Some are very ‘hands-on’, steering the ship in a specific direction, while others prefer to be in the background, letting the artist take the lead. Daniel Lanois, as producer, was definitely in the former category. At one crazy point in the studio, Dylan writes:
“He got so frustrated, he flashed into a rage, swung around, flinging a metallic dobro like it was some kind of toy and smashed it to the floor with furious actions.”
Ultimately, the two finished Oh Mercy to some applause and even collaborate on another project in ten years time. Chronicles circles back, in the penultimate chapter, again piecing together thoughts and insights of the Village:
“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.”
I'm sad to report there are no indications that a Volume 2 is in the making.
