Bob Dylan: Bringing It All Back Home to Desolation Row

Stuart Mitchner

There's a Princeton moment in Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One (Simon and Schuster, $24), but it comes at a low point in this otherwise exhilaratingly upbeat book, surely one of the most impressive self-portraits-of-the-artist ever produced by an American musician. Charlie Mingus, Art Pepper, and Artie Shaw (who died last week), have written admirably about their lives and their music, but Dylan has accomplished something more: at age 63, he's succeeded in investigating and narrating the story of his development with a force and freshness close to the spirit of his best work.

The Princeton moment came on graduation day 1970 when the University gave him an honorary degree as the 17-year X brood cicadas were making the din heard here again last June. He was shaken and angered by the citation, which said he was "the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America." The "New Morning" chapter, named for the album containing a song about his visit here ("The Day of the Locusts"), explains his outrage. It's not just that the citation echoes the misguided, media-magnified conception of his role that resulted in the various nightmarish invasions of privacy he describes in this chapter; the wording also suggests that he was speaking for Young America, when of course what he was saying and singing was beyond anything Young America could imagine or articulate. What made Dylan a legend in his time, among other things, was the outlandish uniqueness of what he was expressing.

Typically, Dylan plays fast and loose with his own title. If this book is a chronicle, so is Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. It begins in 1961 but zooms all over the place at will and on a dime, jumping to 1970, then to 1987, only to double back to end when and where it began: New York, 1961. At that point, with a page and a half to go, he jumps from music business Manhattan to baseball and Roger Maris and a somewhat formal, unlikely tribute to his home state, one of the numerous weird, spasmodic digressions this amazing book constantly performs and transcends. You might wonder "Why on earth Roger Maris?" It's the summer of 1961, for one thing, and Maris is in the process of breaking Babe Ruth's record; for another, Maris happens to be from Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan's hometown, which gives the author an excuse to engage in a quasi-ceremonial salute to Minnesotans like Sinclair Lewis, Charles Lindbergh, Scott Fitzgerald, and Eddie Cochran. The truth is that no excuses are needed for the man who put Shakespeare in "Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" and created "Desolation Row." Everyone's invited to the party. Just to name a few who turn up in Chronicles, there's Gorgeous George, the subject of an epiphany from Dylan's Minnesota rock and roll youth; Thaddeus Stevens (who "had a clubfoot, like Byron"), Balzac (who "questions everything"), Carl von Clausewitz (who "looks like Robert Burns or Montgomery Clift"), Jesse James, Adolph Eichman, Caryl Chessman, John Wayne, Judge Thatcher and Becky, and Judy Garland, all down there with Albert Einstein "who was famous long ago for playing the electric violin on Desolation Row."

This is one of the most quotable books you'll ever read. You could cite plenty of seeming absurdities, but you'd better do it with a wink. Dylan's best songs abound with quotable absurdities, and his best lines here are like the best lines in his best songs: they make you shake your head and smile. You don't have to go looking to solve enigmas or rummage through the great man's garbage searching for clues the way the ultimate Dylan freak, A.J. Lieberman, did. That was trivia, dirty nappies, grocery lists, and receipts. In this book Dylan gives you what Hemingway called "the true gen." This is how it was to be storing up the influences, inspirations, and frustrations and knowledge on all levels that fed into Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.

You don't have to love or even like Bob Dylan to love or like this book. It's possible certain fans of his will like it less than people who come to it expecting to read the self-promoting rants of the putdown artist who wrote "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Positively 4th Street." Among the numerous remarkable things about Chronicles is the descriptive excitement expressed over and over again concerning the work and presence of other musicians, writers, poets, and characters like Brown Sugar, a New Orleans DJ ("Wherever she was, I wished I could put myself in there") and the nameless tenor man who pulls Dylan clear of the funk that made him walk out of a San Francisco recording session with the Grateful Dead.

Dylan grabs a book off the shelf in someone else's library and next thing we know he's slinging ideas and impressions at us. Some music comes on over the radio; it's Ricky Nelson, and he gives us his take on Ricky Nelson ("He sang his songs calm and steady like he was in the middle of a storm, men hurling past him") or Roy Orbison ("He was singing his songs in four or five octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff"). The Beatles also enter by way of a radio ("so easy to accept, so solid") in a place called King Tut's Museum in darkest Louisiana. He gives you his fresh first impressions of Joan Baez on record, years before he knew her, and if you think a putdown's coming, you'll be disappointed: "A voice that drove out the bad spirits.... When she sang, she made your teeth drop."

Snobs and pedants could have a field day making fun of the glitches, redundancies, bizarre transitions, and mid-sentence changes in tense. A copy editor would tear out his or her hair. "Are you sure you really want to, uh, bring in baseball at this point. It does, uh, seem somewhat off the subject, as it were." If the book is deceptively all over the place, so are the songs. It's Dylan's style: he's a master of derangement; he keeps the reader ducking and dancing the same way his songs keep the listener wondering. It's no accident Rimbaud, with his "total derangement of the senses," was an early influence.

Before I run out of space, here are a few of the things that make this book such a pleasure to read. First, there's the whole New York section, the sense of the city, the time and the place, and the way Dylan gets it down forty-three years after the fact. He makes a narrative home base for himself in the form of an apartment, which becomes all but interchangeable with the author's growing consciousness and which happens to house an amazing library, all kinds of music, a curiosity shop of interesting objects, and two people you could build a movie around, Ray and Chloe. Chloe likes to put fancy buckles on old shoes and wants to put some on Dylan's and when he says he doesn't want any buckles, she says "You got forty-eight hours to change your mind." You have to love Chloe. Dylan does, the way an author loves a character. Chloe offers a whole review's worth of quotations. She belongs with the Sad Eyed Lady, the Rolling Stone, the Girl in the Pillbox Hat. She's "cool as pie, hip from head to toe, a Maltese kitten, a solid viper" who "had her own ideas about things, told me death is an impersonator, that birth is an invasion of privacy." And the beauty of it is Dylan accepts her power; he doesn't try to top her (remember, he's just starting out); his reaction is "What could you say?" You have to think that Chloe's imagination had some impact on him: "She had her own primitive way of looking at things, always would say mad stuff that clicked in a cryptic way." You could hardly find a better description of Dylan's own peculiar magic. "According to her, Dracula ruled the world and he's the son of Gutenburg, the guy who invented the printing press." And they've all got buckles on their shoes, down on Desolation Row.

The New Orleans section is another gem. Dylan's account of the recording sessions for the album O Mercy puts you right there feeling with the songwriter who's fighting to save or see his work through, to find some balance between resisting and submitting to a producer with very definite ideas of his own. And it's thanks to the frustrations of the session that we get what is probably the most brilliant narrative sequence in the book, Dylan escaping the studio for a motorcycle jaunt around the bayou with his wife culminating in their arrival at the domain of a character called Sun Pie, owner of the aforementioned King Tut's Museum. Dylan vividly establishes an atmosphere, weaving together a whole complex of details, and then lets Sun Pie hold forth about how the Chinese were the first Indians in America. As he does with encounters all through the book, he draws energy and clarity from his visit to King Tut's Museum and goes back to the recording session refreshed and ready to see his songs through.

Sometimes Dylan's way of connecting with people reminded me of another memoir I read and reviewed not long ago, Bill Clinton's My Life. Clinton had the same eye for character and the same hunger to read and absorb. As an ex-president whose art was politics, he was lumbered with obligations and formalities Bob Dylan had no need to deal with. My guess is Clinton would love this book, which has risen to number two on the New York Times non-fiction best-seller list recently dominated by My Life. How lucky we are that Bob Dylan can write his story himself and write it so much more wisely and compassionately than the biographers who have come and gone and will come again.