"Garbo talks!" was the two-word advertising slogan for the Swedish star's first sound picture, Anna Christie (1930). One has a similar reaction to Chronicles: Volume One: "Dylan talks!"
It isn't that he has never spoken before; over the years, he has given plenty of interviews. But he has always taken pains to manufacture an elusive identity for himself, usually answering questions in a maddeningly gnomic manner and frequently lying outright. A dedicated practitioner of that dreadful 1960s phenomenon, the put-on, he kept himself hidden behind a variety of joker's masks, always poised to waltz away from responsibility for any word he uttered.
No longer. In Chronicles, Dylan talks, and for the first time in public he talks with apparent frankness and feeling. The result is a superb book: strange, idiosyncratic, unpredictable, sui generis, by turns shrewd, frustrating, funny, and occasionally revelatory. It confounds our expectations: the Bob Dylan living inside Bob Dylan's head is not the person most of us assumed was there. No snarling wiseass, no hippy, no political radical, but rather a modest and serious artist surprised, even terrified, by his fame, with broad (and often square) musical tastes, as much bemused by as proud of his talent, a family man pleased to sport a bumper sticker proclaiming him the world's greatest grandpa.
Dylan talks, and one of the glories of Chronicles is that, in talking, he conveys a singular voice and consciousness. This, among other things, means that anyone hoping for a neat, chronological account of his life and career will be disappointed. The book hopscotches around the life in a stream of free-associative reminiscence, and in the process omits or stints on some of the moments one might regard as key: first album for Columbia, first awareness of major stardom, transition from folk to rock, amplification brouhaha at the Newport folk festival. These are mentioned glancingly or not at all. Instead, the reader feels he has caught Dylan on a quiet night in a mood of unaccustomed loquacity, where, over a glass of wine, he ruminates about what it felt like to be Bob Dylan. Folksy solecisms abound, and many anecdotes go on for pages without ever arriving at anything resembling a point, but somehow it is all part of the pleasure. He is a congenial and unpretentious companion, and he seems to have no agenda beyond candidly sharing a piece of himself.
There are vivid observations on almost every page. About visiting Woody Guthrie in hospital: "The place was really an asylum with no spiritual hope of any kind. Wailing could be heard in the hallways. Most of the patients wore ill- fitting striped uniforms and they would file in and out walking aimlessly about while I played Woody songs. One guy's head would be constantly falling forward on his knees. Then he'd raise up and he would fall forward again. Another guy thought he was being chased by spiders and he twirled in circles, hands slapping his arms and legs… Patients rolled their eyes, tongues, sniffed the air." About one of his mentors, Dave Von Ronk: "Von Ronk's voice was like rusted shrapnel." About performing after he felt his inspiration had deserted him: "It's nice to be known as a legend, and people will pay to see one, but for most people, once is enough. You have to deliver the goods, not waste your time and everybody else's…There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him." About fame: "After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back."
Always considered the hippest of the hip, the figure whose life and attitude defined 1960s hipness, Dylan is more than willing here to portray himself as terminally unhip. He expresses his enthusiasm for Harry Belafonte (and astutely identifies the rage lurking behind that singer's affable façade), for Bobby Vee, for Rick Nelson (with whom he claims to feel a personal and artistic affinity), and even describes an evening in the Rainbow Room where he and his wife enjoy a performance by Frank Sinatra Jr. Frank Sinatra Jr? Could Dylan be backsliding, could the put-on once again be rearing its ugly head? No, there is no hint of irony in the description, just unvarnished collegial respect: "Maybe because I felt a connection - I reckoned that we were about near the same age and that he was a contemporary of mine. Anyway, Frank was a fine singer."
He is evocative about his Minnesota roots, and tender in his descriptions of family. But there is a noteworthy lacuna: he never once discusses his Jewishness, or adverts to it. Unless…While describing his early years in Greenwich Village, he does offer one interminable, puzzling anecdote that begins with his listening to the radio and hearing Malcolm X's colourful condemnation of pork, and then continues on without a break or perceptible transition to an evening ten years later in Nashville, at Johnny Cash's home, in company with a large assortment of famous musicians and including Joe Carter, a cousin of Johnny Cash's wife, June Carter. Joe unaccountably starts twitting Dylan about not eating pork, and Dylan responds by quoting Malcolm X's words. The anecdote is so pointless that one begins to wonder, could this possibly be a story whose subtext is the persistence of rural antisemitism? Regardless, it just sits there in all its inexplicable, isolated glory, and the subject is mentioned nowhere else.
Unexpectedly confessional is his account of the various personae he has adopted throughout his career - desperate attempts to escape from his own reputation, he claims, rather than expressions of personal conviction - and startling and moving is his account of a protracted period of creative sterility, a crisis one would never have suspected in so prolific a songwriter: "Sometime in the past I had written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn't know if I ever would again and I didn't care." He got past it, and he describes how at considerable length, but I defy any reader to make sense of the incoherent yet oddly endearing description of how he managed.
Dylan is a unique figure in rock history, poet, troubadour, recluse - an artist who single-handedly redefined what a song can do - and the last 40 years of popular music are inconceivable without him. There were times when it seemed a personal furtiveness was essential to his legend. No longer. This splendid book proves the legend can survive - indeed, thrive on - exposure.
Frank Zappa is a rock legend of a different sort. He never enjoyed Dylan's fame, and his hit singles were few and far between (a rare example is the novelty record "Valley Girl," featuring his daughter Moon Unit), but his manifest intelligence, musical sophistication and iconoclastic (although often adolescent) humour earned him a cult following, along with the grudging respect of his rock star brethren. Barry Miles's new biography of Zappa is, in its ambitious scope, unlikely to be superseded, so for better or worse it should probably be regarded as definitive. It is not a very good book, but for a comprehensive account of Zappa's life and career it is the place to turn.
What Miles provides is, in its way, a conscientious chronicle and the labour that went into the book is right there on the page: every school attended (and there were many), every important teacher (not nearly so many), every personal relationship (few), every bandmate, every gig, every record - virtually every track, and frequently every splice and edit - is accounted for. Some stories are told more than once, and in one perplexing case, told twice virtually verbatim over the course of about four pages.
To his credit, while clearly a fervent admirer of Zappa's work, Miles is not a hagiographer. Indeed, it quickly becomes clear that he doesn't much care for Zappa the man, and few readers will be inclined to argue. Insufferably arrogant, cold, manipulative, selfish, bullying, preachy, superior, dismissive of his fans, always inclined to sneer first and ask questions later, Zappa frequently claimed he never had a friend and had never been in love, and after reading this book one accepts such assertions at face value.
Although Miles has accumulated innumerable facts about his subject - about which it is probably advisable to take his word - he is far less reliable on other matters. In fact, his text bristles with errata. He refers to "California Ivy League clothes," a contradiction in terms. He calls Mondo Cane, the Italian exploitation film from 1962, Mondo Carne, although I suppose one can say in Miles's defense that Meat World at least sounds like a Zappa title. He calls the Yucca Trail, a street in the Hollywood Hills, Yukka. He tells us, "Lenny Bruce was literally hounded to death by the censors…" Bruce was unquestionably hounded by censors, but he died ("literally") of a self-administered heroin overdose. Alex de Renzy's 1970 film Pornography in Denmark is referred to as Censorship in Denmark. He calls the subject of a Zappa production number "obstruse," presumably conflating "obscure" and "abstruse." Oddly for an experienced rock journalist, he refers to "the Pink Floyd." And he writes of Pierre Boulez: "Such was his influence that shortly after meeting him, Stravinsky took up twelve-tone writing, as did Aaron Copeland" (and yes, Copland's name is misspelled), suggesting a causality ludicrous to any serious musical historian.
About matters not directly Zappa-related, Miles is slovenly and ill-informed. And he is not a graceful writer. Nevertheless, for the reader with a consuming curiosity about Frank Zappa and no concern for literary niceties, this is a book that should satisfy. For anyone else, Bob Dylan's is the book to buy, and to treasure.
