Q&A: Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan has proved that his prose can be as elegant as his poetry. In his new memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan takes us on a circular ride through the most intense periods of his professional life, from Greenwich Village in 1961 to his retreat to Woodstock in 1968 and his regeneration in the late Eighties. It's less an autobiography than a historical document — a philosophical and personal analysis of life in America — and it will make your head spin. Ladies and gentlemen, Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan, checking in from a tour stop in Manhattan, Kansas.

In Chronicles you write about the guitar technique that Lonnie Johnson taught you. Only a serious musician could comprehend the language you use. Why'd you choose to go into such great detail?
I think it might be helpful for people to understand that my style has got a structure to it. Maybe I wrote that for people who play. Some people might pick it up. Why? Do you find it irrelevant in some way?

On the contrary.
I can't say whether a bus driver would find it interesting. To me it was important.

You also describe watching La Dolce Vita "intently, thinking that I might not see it again." Do you have a photographic memory?
I leave my mind open. I don't fill it up with a lot of things. I'm very careful as to what I get distracted by. With the book, what I try and do is put a feeling across. It's not the kind of book where it's a short life and a merry one. It's more abstract, drawn out over long periods of time. I worked the book, if you want to call it that, in patterns. I portray life as a game of chance. It works on a variety of levels, like some of the best songs do.

You write about the night Woody Guthrie sent you to his house in Coney Island to get a box of his lyrics. What would have happened if you'd found them?
I don't know if I would have been capable of doing much with them at all, really, though I suppose I would have. I don't think I would have made a record of that stuff, like the record that eventually came out [Billy Bragg and Wilco's Mermaid Avenue Vols. 1 and II]. Who'd really heard of me?

You downplay a chunk of your career in Chronicles. Am I crazy to love Street Legal, Slow Train Coming and Infidels?
Not at all. I can play those songs, but I probably can't listen to those records. I'll hear too many faults. I was just being swept along with the current when I was making those records. I don't think my talent was under control. But there's probably good stuff on all of them. Shelley said the point was to make unpremeditated art. I don't think those records fall into that category.

Lyrically, does it get any better than "It's Alright, Ma"?
It's hard to live up to that kind of thing. You can't try to top it — that's not the point. Lyrically you can't top it, no. I still can play that song, and I know what it can do. That song was written with a hunger that can break down stone walls. That was the motivation.