From the moment he became a name that people began to recognize, Bob Dylan has maintained he can't -- or won't -- be known through his personal history. At age twenty he told interviewers he rode boxcars and had worked carnies, that he'd driven a bakery truck and worked construction. It was all "hokum -- hophead talk" he says now, but it was a way of keeping people out of the private details of his life. This attitude, of course, had the effect of giving Dylan a sense of myth and mystery, whether he intended it or not. He is a key to understanding the social and cultural changes of the Sixties, but the key has never been willing to talk about what happened.

That is, until now. In Chronicles: Volume One (Simon and Schuster) -- a collection of open, revealing memoir-meditations -- Dylan has chosen to share some of his passages of life. He goes deep into a handful of periods -- his early, prerecording years in New York; his self-imposed late-1960s exile in Woodstock, New York; and his late-1980s malaise, as he recorded the 1987 disc Oh Mercy. These are all times when Dylan was on the verge of epochal discoveries, or reeling from their aftereffects. If you're looking for divulgences about Dylan's rumored drug-dazed flameout in 1966, at the peak of his fame, or about his guarded love affairs and marriages, you won't find those remembrances here. He mentions a wife here and there across the decades, but it isn't always the same wife, and he never gives her a name.

But what he does reveal about himself is far more interesting. For one, Chronicles makes plain that Dylan isn't the distant figure who became more internalized after the height of his fame in the mid-Sixties. Just the opposite: He has always watched his world -- our world -- closely. He remembers everything and everybody. As a result, we're inside Dylan's head like we've never been before, and it's a mesmerizing place.

The book opens -- and it closes -- circa 1961-62, in New York. Dylan, still underage, has come to Greenwich Village from the Midwest. He tells this part of his story in vivid language -- plain-spoken yet as distinctive as any of his best lyrics. He conjures up rooms full of living history, full of the famous and the unknown, and he tells us how they walked, talked, looked and why they mattered, from Harry Belafonte and Woody Guthrie to Jack Dempsey and Tiny Tim (the latter whom Dylan shared french fries with when they were both working for food). Through it all, Dylan has intimations that something big might crack open inside him. "I could transcend the limitations," he writes. "It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity." He looks everyplace for ideas: in the ancient histories of Tacitus and Thucydides; in the poems of Ovid, Milton and in Edgar Allan Poe. In the New York Public Library, he settles into reading American newspapers on microfilm from 1861 to 1865 -- the Civil War era, in which America was divided and kinsman killed kinsman. "You wonder," he writes, "how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies.... Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The god-awful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write."

Near Chronicles' end, Dylan returns to the same time and place -- Greenwich Village in the early 1960s -- and fills in more details. The moment when he would see how to grasp his art and meet the times inches closer here. He meets seventeen-year-old Suze Rotolo, with whom he has a famed, tempestuous romance, and who takes him to the city's museums, where he sees works by Goya, El Greco, Kandinsky and Picasso. The latter particularly grabs him. "Picasso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open," he notes. "He was revolutionary. I wanted to be like that." Rotolo also introduces him to the paintings and constructions of modernist Red Grooms, who rendered the inhabitants of the everyday world in ways uncommon to art. Grooms' work jolts Dylan. "There was a connection in Red's work to a lot of the folk songs I sang," he writes. "What the folk songs were lyrically, Red's songs were visually -- all the bums and cops, the lunatic bustle, the claustrophobic alleys.... Subconsciously, I was wondering if it was possible to write songs like that."

In the middle of the book, we turn the page and we are in a starkly different place. It is 1968 -- six years later. Dylan is now living in Woodstock -- a remote and bucolic place. He came here in 1966, following a motorcycle accident, purportedly to recuperate. "Truth was," he says, "that I wanted to get out of the rat race." What he wants now is seclusion, time alone with his wife, Sara Lowndes (never mentioned by name in Chronicles), and their three children. He wants time to live a normal American life, occasionally playing music with his neighbors, musicians from his backing band, soon to be known as the Band. But this is 1968. People come to his home; they want Dylan active in their causes, at the barricades -- or worse, they just want a piece of him. "These gate-crashers, spooks, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life," he writes. "Everything was wrong, the world was absurd. It was backing me into a corner. Even persons near and dear offered no relief." He takes his family back to Greenwich Village, but the same thing happens there.

Dylan doesn't want to be seen as a revolutionary, as the voice of a generation -- "the Big Bubba of Revolution," he writes, "Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy..." He determines not to make any more art that might invoke the fires outside. "Art is unimportant next to life," he says, "and you have no choice. I had no hunger for it anymore, anyway." Dylan goes on to claim that he would make 1969's Nashville Skyline and 1970's Self-Portrait as a means of pushing his audience away. He also drops in the comment that in this phase he recorded an entire album based on Chekhov short stories and that "critics thought it was autobiographical -- that was fine."

This is fascinating stuff, and Dylan relates it all in a powerful voice, both broken and full of rage. But there are curious omissions. During the same late-Sixties period when he felt so trapped and disillusioned, Dylan recorded the so-called Basement Tapes near Woodstock with the Band -- a 100-song body of work that many regard as perhaps his deepest and most weird creation. He also recorded John Wesley Harding -- a masterful record that helped pull rock & roll back from the extremes of psychedelia with a rustic honesty that would inspire future country rockers and the singer-songwriter movement. Instead of mentioning this, he centers on 1970's New Morning, a pleasant enough but middling effort. "I felt like these songs could blow away in cigar smoke, which suited me fine," he writes.

Then he moves ahead seventeen years, to 1987, another time of misery. He's no longer sure he should write or even play music. Soon he finds rejuvenation in a low-end jazz bar in San Rafael, California, where he is rehearsing for a tour with the Grateful Dead. But this isn't salvation. Neither is the making of another fair-to-middling record, Oh Mercy, which is the chapter's putative subject. When real salvation happens here, it's in the form of an epiphany that stretches back to his Village days, when holding a guitar was a vital act that could lead to mind-blowing possibilities. This is Chronicles' most elegiac chapter, and it unfolds like a symphony. Again, Dylan passes over an awful lot of ground to get us here, avoiding mention of Blood on the Tracks (perhaps his greatest album) or Slow Train Coming. Rather, he talks about feeling lost in the wilderness, making his way through, biding his time, as he renewed his vision.

Chronicles' stories are about real invention and inspiration, but they are also about demoralization, about how withdrawal or half-efforts or even failures can work their own saving grace. Dylan tells these stories unflinchingly, from an internal vantage that few, if any, ever expected from him. He uncovers these moments, measures and owns them, and then he moves on. It's a remarkable achievement, and like Henry Miller's best personal writings, it is a story that opens up the times that it portrays, and then reveals the possibilities of the human spirit. They aren't always easy possibilities. After all, it's life only, but it's never been written this way before.

[From Issue 960 — October 28, 2004]