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Dylan on Dylan
By Ben Shalev

In the early 1990s, Bob Dylan released two albums of his interpretation of old folk and blues songs. These were his first albums that didn't include songs he wrote, and the surprising decision demanded an explanation. But since Dylan is Dylan, he didn't explain a thing, at least not directly. One of his albums, "World Gone Wrong," bears some sort of brief, condensed, puzzling and electrifying oration in which Dylan takes the listener into a world of old songs and explains why he is so drawn to them:

"Broke Down Engine" by Blind Willie McTell, for example, "is a song about trains, mystery on the rails - the train of love, the train that carried my girl from town - the Southern Pacific, Baltimore and Ohio, whatever - it's about variations of human longing - the low hum in meters and syllables - it's about revival, getting a new lease on life, not just posing there - paint chipped and flaked, mattress bare, single bulb swinging above the bed."

This isn't how a person speaks of songs he loves. It's how a person talks about songs that are at the core of his soul, about his sacred writings.
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Dylan's burning belief that "folk singers could sing songs like an entire book, but only in a few verses" is one of the main themes of "Chronicles, Part 1," the first volume of Dylan's autobiography, now being published in Hebrew. In that respect, the book is an extension of the brief oration from "World Gone Wrong." Fortunately, it's less condensed and easier to read, but as a literary text, it is no less wild, liberated or riveting.

"Open the book in any place, go to any page, and it will take off at full speed," Dylan writes of the autobiography of his idol, the singer Woody Guthrie. The same can be said about his own autobiography. And although Dylan is a fan of mystery and not the most reliable storyteller (there are a few ludicrous and brow-raising paragraphs in the book), "Chronicles" radiates honesty and sincerity and even the singer's surprising drive to show the reader "where he's from," to share how he evolved into an artist. Perhaps this was the incentive for writing the book.

Loosely based on the truth

Chronologically, Dylan focuses on a mere fragment of his career. Three out of the five chapters in the book take place around 1961, when Robert Zimmerman was already Bob Dylan but hadn't yet become "Bob Dylan," and the final two chapters take place in 1968 and 1988. Emphasizing the beginning of the road and ignoring later pivotal stops is one of the main things that makes this book so fascinating. It would be interesting to hear what Dylan has to say about the scandal he raised in 1965 when he traded his acoustic guitar for an electric one, but it's no less interesting - and much more unexpected - to hear him speak about a much earlier founding moment, the day in the late 1950s when he traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic guitar, with which he could express his passion for folk music.

And while it would be interesting to hear what Dylan has to say about his conversion to Christianity in the late 1970s and his later return to Judaism, it's no less absorbing and much less predictable to hear about his first spiritual awakening: when he joined the church of believers in American folk music. For Dylan, then 20, "folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and get sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not of individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect. I could believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified."

Folk songs are the essence of the truth precisely because they are elusive. They don't require a concrete truth, but an abstract one. They speak of archetypes, not individualism. Is there a stronger guiding principle in Dylan's songs, in Dylan's persona?

"Sometimes you say things in songs even if there's a small chance of them being true. And sometimes you say things that have nothing to do with the truth of what you want to say ... whatever you are saying, you're saying in a ricky-tick way. There's never time to reflect. You stitched and pressed and packed and drove, is what you did." In another place he writes, "I was gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth and what you heard depended on which side you were standing. If I ever did stumble onto any truth, I was gonna sit on it and keep it down."

A loose link to the truth has characterized the stories Dylan has written about himself since the beginning of his career. In the beginning of "Chronicles" he describes his first encounter with the public relations representative from Columbia Records, where he had just signed. The meeting foreshadowed the ridiculous, traumatic collisions with the press that awaited him. Dylan, then 20, fed the rep fables about being kicked out of the house at a young age, working as a truck driver and a construction worker, and arriving in New York on a freight train. "He tried to get me to cough up some facts, like I was supposed to give them to him straight and square."

Boxer with a guitar

"Chronicles" is filled with Dylan's stories, and it's hard to know whether to believe them. Did his father, stricken with polio, really jump into a blazing car and save the burning driver with his own body? Maybe. Was the legendary blues singer Robert Johnson really taught to play guitar by a farmer whose last name was, astonishingly, Zimmerman? Please, Bob. And even if we assume that the young Dylan really did meet Jack Dempsey, what are the chances that the famous boxer told him, "you look too light for a heavyweight, kid, you'll have to put on a few pounds"?

Dylan chose to open "Chronicles" with the meeting with Dempsey. This strategic place, and the "mistake" Dempsey made by thinking Dylan was a boxer, perhaps says a lot about how the singer perceives himself. Dylan frequently sang about boxers, and "Chronicles" is full of metaphors from the boxing world. Woody Guthrie would "throw in the sound of the last letter of a word whenever he felt like it, and it would come like a punch ... Woodie Guthrie tore everything in his path to pieces," he writes. He repeatedly depicts himself as a young man whose imminent traits are vigilance, keenness and concentration; a person in a state of constant struggle, who knows his target well and attacks it with all his might. A boxer with a guitar.

Boxers must be wary of distractions. Dylan tells much about figures in the folk music scene in Minneapolis and Greenwich Village, New York, but hardly discusses people who are not involved in music. And in the chapters about later periods, he hardly says a thing about his family.

Fantasy about a house and garden

The three chapters about Dylan's formation as an artist end on a metaphoric note: He drank up all the folk songs in the universe, sang them in every shabby coffeehouse that allowed him on stage, and only then felt the urge to write his own songs, to discover what was hidden in the haze. He was later exposed to totally different influences, like Arthur Rimbaud and Kurt Vile, and then reached the gate from which he would break through into the public consciousness. "Soon I'd step in, heavy loaded, fully alive and revved up." Cut.

The years 1961 to 1968, when Dylan was a key symbol of a huge cultural revolution, aren't mentioned in the book. Why does he feel the need to continue the story from 1968? Maybe because that was the major slump of his career. He felt lost, chained, paralyzed. He hated the world, especially anyone who idolized him - meaning everyone. When he told journalists he didn't represent a generation, the resulting headline was, "The spokesman denies being a spokesman." He attempted to escape with his family to the countryside, but the hippies who idolized him found his hideout.

"Roadmaps to our homestead must have been posted in all 50 states for gangs of dropouts and druggies," he writes. He contemplated shooting them.

Even those close to him didn't understand. Ruby Robinson, his guitarist, asked him in the car one day, "Where do you think you're gonna take it?"

"I said, 'take what?'" Dylan writes.

"'You know, the whole music scene.' The whole music scene! The car window was rolled down about an inch. I rolled it down the rest of the way, felt a gust of wind on my face and waited for what he said to die away - it was like dealing with a conspiracy. No place was far enough away. I don't know what anybody else was fantasizing about, but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. That was my deepest dream."

Twenty years passed, and Dylan stumbled into many dark holes. In 1988, when "Chronicles" picks up again, Dylan is standing on the edge of a deep abyss, but suddenly experiences a creative breakthrough and begins working with producer Daniel Lanois on his comeback album, "Oh Mercy." The word "excruciating" is an understatement to describe the prolonged process of creating the album, which Dylan describes in both fascinating and tiresome detail.

In Dylan's description of his descent into darkness appears his Israeli episode. Dylan mentions the notorious September 1987 concert in Hayarkon Park. For that performance, as opposed to his worst albums, Israelis have had a hard time forgiving him. Will they find any condolence in the fact that Dylan also thinks it was dreadful?
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  1.   Dylan 00:28  |  leon 18/04/07
  2.   Dylan on Dylan 06:28  |  Kate 18/04/07
  3.   Dylan on Dylan 07:32  |  Mike 18/04/07
  4.   Dylan on Dylan 07:53  |  Dick McKenna 18/04/07
  5.   Ruby & Vile 09:17  |  Kalle 18/04/07
  6.   Robbie Robertson - agree with 2 09:21  |  David 18/04/07
  7.   Bob Dylan 16:58  |  Stanley Grumet 18/04/07
  8.   Bob Dylan ROCKS!! 17:07  |  Lady Gatta 18/04/07
  9.   Returned to Judaism? 20:02  |  Jim 18/04/07
  10.   #9 Don`t worry Jim... 20:50  |  Piijjar 18/04/07
  11.   Weill, weill! 22:59  |  sh 18/04/07
  12.   He did return to Judaism... 23:53  |  Lady Gatta 18/04/07
  13.   Neighborhood bully- the best one about ISRAEL!!! 23:57  |  Lady Gatta 18/04/07
  14.   Dylan`s still Christian 06:07  |  Mike 19/04/07
  15.   HE DID CONVERT BACK TO JUDAISM...THATS THE FACT 18:07  |  LADY GATTA 20/04/07
  16.   No he didn`t 21:21  |  Chuck 20/04/07
  17.   No he didn`t 21:21  |  Chuck 20/04/07
  18.   DYLAN-THE ULTI MATE 06:08  |  ARON PIEMAN KAY 24/04/07
  19.   What about Dylan Thomas-now there`s talent for you 04:31  |  noel 28/04/07
  20.   תערוכה על בוב דילן 19:12  |  אוסי נחמן 15/11/08
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