Not finished with it yet, but mostly am loving this story. The rambling boho poet style Dylan perfected in his songs is evident in every sentence of this first installment of his autobiography–which is surprisingly coherent. Devoid of the mystifying metaphors embedded in his song lyrics, Dylan here talks straight about his early days in New York City, where he came from the midwest as a young man, intent on singing his songs to anyone who would listen.
It’s no secret that I love reading stories about how the artististic imagination develops, and Dylan’s book, at least the first 100 pages or so, is determined to share just that. My disappointment is that he leaps straight from being a loner with no home who strums and sings his way through the coffee houses to a misunderstood icon with a wife and children who just wants to be left alone.
What’s missing, at least so far, are the parts where he finally got the recording contract he’d strived for, when he’d finally had a couch of his own to crash on, when he first began to write the songs that would make him famous. He just skipped right from singing folk ballads and yearning to be able to put into words all the stuff he was feeling to being burned out by the business of being an unwilling voice of a generation.
Knowing Dylan’s penchant to tell a story in his own way, I’m hoping he gets to these “first taste of success” details later in the book. And even if he doesn’t, this bio is studded with gems of wisdom that will be balm to any aspiring artist. Here’s Dylan on how his own particular path developed:
“I can’t say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn’t have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world. I guess it happens to you by degrees. You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs…”
The Dylan who travels back in time to recapture his youth can be poetic, philosophical, irreverant, and sometimes quite funny. His honesty is compelling and you can feel him searching for answers to the kind of questions that great artists must get asked every day. Questions like “Where do you get your ideas?” and “How do you think up that stuff you write about? Where does it come from?”
Part of his answer has to do with a fascination for the Civil War era, which he admits to studying assiduously as he tried to form a way of saying the things that still remained inexpressibe inside him:
“Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”
Dylan saw links between his own generation and those that had passed; he saw the struggle for freedom, for equality, for the end of suffering as a universal thing, an on-going problem having to do with the nature of man. He’d spent years becoming an accomplished musician, and it took many more before he found his songwriting voice. In the meantime, he read widely from history, science, philosophy, poetry, and fiction.
“I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later.”
More later, both from me as I unearth more wisdom from this first installment of his autobiography, and from Dylan, who plans to continue laying down his story for the rest of us in future volumes.
[LATER]
Finished the book. There are metaphors, some of them tangled, but worth working through because YES he does go back to the magic moments when things started to click for him. Aside from a long chapter about a recording session in New Orleans, Dylan pretty much avoids his personal life in favor of trying to make clear how he became an artist. And the journey is every bit as fascinating as how much he drinks before a show or how many wives he’s had. Even more. He really nails the whole artistic development process, and it’s magical. Not to be missed.