"The voice of his generation" speaks
Bob Dylan, who may be the only interview subject on "60 Minutes" older than the show's correspondents, is to be interviewed by Ed Bradley on Sunday (you know, the one with the earring).
I have been reading Chronicles, Vol. 1, and can tell you it is one of the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time. A number of the reviews I've read have been harsh, implying that Dylan is obfuscating or failing to "open up." What the #$%* did these people expect? He's Bob Dylan. For an exception, read Janet Maslin's excellent review. But then, she used to be a movie critic, so she understands the kind of perspective shifting and grainy film stocks Dylan likes mixing and matching to effect.
But the book does tell us a lot. Namely, we get the sense of where and how young Mr. Zimmerman was able to absorb so many ideas and images which he's spent a lifetime rearranging into the collages that are his songs. As an added bonus, he paints a picture of Greenwich Village -- now fallen even lower than the tourist trap it had become in the 70s/80s -- that restores its strangeness. And he tells us, pretty openly I'd say, why he appeared to have gone insane for about two decades in the 70s and 80s, doing things like pouring whiskey over his head and walking into a department store so's to get the press, the fawners, and the prototypical stalkers to write him off as having lost it, and maybe then leave him and his family alone. And how he himself knew he'd lost his muse ("the awful roaring in your head") around that time, too.
But mostly, it's just a real pleasure to read as he connects one seemingly unconnected thought with another, and weaves in and out of an American mythology in which he recognizes he's a part. He definitely boasts -- and deservedly so -- that he's part of a long line that includes Poe, Melville, Whitman, and Guthrie and many others that he rescues from obscurity.
He writes with the kind of ease and facility with language that marked his greatest albums, such as Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde (which, when you add Bringing It All Back Home, have to be the greatest three albums that any artist has ever released in a two year period), but adds the "Old Him" weariness of his more recent work.
I have been reading Chronicles, Vol. 1, and can tell you it is one of the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time. A number of the reviews I've read have been harsh, implying that Dylan is obfuscating or failing to "open up." What the #$%* did these people expect? He's Bob Dylan. For an exception, read Janet Maslin's excellent review. But then, she used to be a movie critic, so she understands the kind of perspective shifting and grainy film stocks Dylan likes mixing and matching to effect.
But the book does tell us a lot. Namely, we get the sense of where and how young Mr. Zimmerman was able to absorb so many ideas and images which he's spent a lifetime rearranging into the collages that are his songs. As an added bonus, he paints a picture of Greenwich Village -- now fallen even lower than the tourist trap it had become in the 70s/80s -- that restores its strangeness. And he tells us, pretty openly I'd say, why he appeared to have gone insane for about two decades in the 70s and 80s, doing things like pouring whiskey over his head and walking into a department store so's to get the press, the fawners, and the prototypical stalkers to write him off as having lost it, and maybe then leave him and his family alone. And how he himself knew he'd lost his muse ("the awful roaring in your head") around that time, too.
But mostly, it's just a real pleasure to read as he connects one seemingly unconnected thought with another, and weaves in and out of an American mythology in which he recognizes he's a part. He definitely boasts -- and deservedly so -- that he's part of a long line that includes Poe, Melville, Whitman, and Guthrie and many others that he rescues from obscurity.
He writes with the kind of ease and facility with language that marked his greatest albums, such as Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde (which, when you add Bringing It All Back Home, have to be the greatest three albums that any artist has ever released in a two year period), but adds the "Old Him" weariness of his more recent work.
posted by John at 4:56 PM
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