In telling his own story, Dylan adds to the mystique

October 05, 2004|Globe Correspondent

Chronicles: Volume One, By Bob Dylan, Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $24

The first volume of Bob Dylan's ornery autobiography is a fascinating, maddening time-travel ride. Though oddly structured and lacking context, the book's easy, conversational style still makes "Chronicles: Volume One" engaging. In the end, it's easy enough to forgive its jumpy chronology and to excuse how much Dylan leaves unexplained.

Ambiguity and mystery, so potent here, have long been key to Dylan's mojo.

"Chronicles" stresses Dylan's life in New York in the early '60s and highlights "New Morning," a 1970 album, and "Oh Mercy," a 1989 disk that Daniel Lanois produced. It touches winningly, if fleetingly, on Dylan's early years in Minnesota's Iron Range and artfully weaves the artistic and the historical.

Explaining "Everything Is Broken," an "Oh Mercy" tune, Dylan writes, "Danny didn't have to swamp it up too much, it was already swamped up pretty good when it came to him. Critics usually didn't like a song like this coming out of me because it didn't seem to be autobiographical. Maybe not, but the stuff I write does come from an autobiographical place."

That unamplified statement is nearly as tantalizingly vague as the praise Dylan bestows on his wife as he explores New Orleans during the "Oh Mercy" recording days. He recalls, "The one thing about her that I always loved was that she was never one of those people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness. Me or anybody else. She's always had her own happiness."

But the question is, which wife? Although Dylan, who was divorced from first wife Sara in 1977, never identifies his wife or children here, he gives the impression of being a family man fighting to protect his brood from the slings and arrows of his outrageous celebrity. Dealing with the kind of spin that politicians envy, such "factuality" guards Dylan's privacy but also whets the appetite for more color and truth.

He is more explicit about the cultural landscape. We learn that for him the Civil War is "the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write," that mysterious bluesman Robert Johnson is a touchstone, and that roots songwriter Woody Guthrie is a role model.