Chronicles | Bob Dylan

episode SUMMARY:

In this episode of the Books for Men podcast, Douglas Vigliotti discusses the book Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan. Vigliotti highlights Dylan's influence on American music and his role as a cultural icon. He also mentions Dylan's unique writing style, his ability to blend fiction with reality, and his use of words in a captivating and thought-provoking way. Vigliotti recommends reading the book to gain insight into Dylan's journey and experiences as a musician but emphasizes the importance of timing and the cultural context in which Dylan rose to prominence. He also delves deeper into Dylan’s songwriting skills (more specifically.) Vigliotti concludes by encouraging listeners to share the podcast and rate it on various platforms and also mentions that full transcripts and a newsletter with book recommendations are available on the website BooksforMen.org.

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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So this week, it's sort of been a long time coming. I guess one of my favorite genres, if you listen to the podcast is the Rock autobiography or the Rock memoir. A couple of weeks ago, I featured Bruce Springsteen's, Born to Run. I featured a bunch on the show previously, Keith Richards, Life, and one about Tom Petty, and the list goes on and on and on. But as far as the genre is concerned, this book is easily in the top three. I made mention of that in the Bruce Springsteen episode, and it is Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan. So the funny thing about the title is that there was supposed to be a volume two, but in true Bob Dylan fashion, he never wrote it.

(00:56)

Or maybe he has, and it's never been published. I don't really know the backstory of that. All I know is this is a volume one and there is no other volume to date. So I guess I should just start by saying that there probably is no single artist, aside from maybe Elvis, who influenced the shape of American music like Dylan come to think of it. I've actually heard, I think it was maybe Chuck Klosterman might've been somebody else. I don't remember. It was some cultural critic who said that in a thousand years, or I'm paraphrasing in the very far future when all the tides have washed away, all of the artists, it'll be a competition between those two who reps the rock and roll landscape. So who do history books look back on as the spearhead of the rock and roll movement? But it's all to say that if you can't start with the idea in mind of how influential Dylan was, then you're missing a big piece of the puzzle, not just on a cultural level, but also in understanding this author of this book.

(02:03)

And honestly, that's what makes it such a gem of a book really. You get to hear from this very iconic figure in cultural history. Look, why was he so influential? Well, you have to consider the time period and where the country was at musically during the time. And so in short, there was never introspective pop music. It was a very brand new thing, and Dylan was kind of the spearhead of that. There was a lot happening in the early sixties when Dylan rose to prominence. He did so by speaking truth into songs, really. He talks a lot about that in the memoir, he says, “…big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and express powerful new realities I had very little in common with and even knew less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.”

(03:05):

And if you follow any of Dylan's career, he's kind of notorious for doing his own thing and not really paying attention to trends or what people think of the current music that he is creating or producing. Nothing was more apparent to this than when he so famously went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, abandoning his trusty acoustic guitar, which brought him to prominence, as I had just mentioned, singing basically folk songs about real life and people just gravitated to this. And it became the popular cultural music of the day. It inspired everything that came after it from many of the artists that you've heard me talk about on this podcast like The Beatles and the Stones and Springsteen and Petty and all these other artists that I've mentioned on the podcast. But even that is bringing the lens a little bit too much into focus because everybody that came after was affected by what Dylan did.

(04:07)

Prior to Dylan, you had the popular music of the time Frank Sinatra or Elvis or these types of figureheads where the entertainment aspect came before the singer-songwriter. They weren't writing their own music, they weren't speaking the truth into songs. They were bringing truth into their performances, but it was just a completely different thing. But I should mention that Dylan, just like every other artist did have his influences. It just wasn't the popular music. So Woody Guthrie, Dave Von Ronk, all things that you'll read about in Chronicles, they weren't the popular music of the day, they were the inspiration for Dylan. But this is an important element to remember about anything. Not only does there have to be the individual who is talented enough, unique enough, skilled enough, just whatever, enough to be able to carry this torch through, the culture has to be ready for it.

(05:10)

And so timing becomes incredibly important. And with Dylan, the youth culture and culture in general were ready for it. There was a lot of unrest on a national level, and the rebellion and definition of youth culture or teenage culture were literally formed during this time period. And the musicians of the time became the gods in many ways. It wasn't just his skill and his talent, it was also the right time for the culture to receive this type of music. It was a very unique alchemy that does not take place often on a societal level. It happens in subcultures all the time. We see new artists rise to prominence based on their interjection into a, that they are the mouthpiece for. But it's very rare that an artist is the mouthpiece for an entire generation. And that is whether he wanted to be anointed to that or not, he was considered to be.

(06:13)

Actually, the basis of the book is his journey from the Midwest to New York City in the early sixties as a young Robert Zimmerman. So he even changed his name to Bob Dylan. And there's a bit about that, why he chose Bob Dylan. I will save the suspense. You could read the book. I highly recommend you do, obviously. But then other than that aspect of the memoir, it's hard to tell why he focused on some moments and not others. But it's interesting, pulling from the most recent book that he wrote, The Modern Philosophy of Song came out last year. He has a line in there that says, “A big part of songwriting, like all writing is editing, distilling, thought down to essentials. Novice writers often hide behind filigree, and in many cases, the artistry is in what is unsaid.” I think that in a way, even though he is only sharing little tidbits throughout this memoir and selecting very random what it seems like when you look at the body of work in the grand scheme of things, moments in his life, like the writing of Oh Mercy, where he talks about how he was basically a burned down wreck during this time period.

(07:32)

Or he writes about when he was touring with the Heartbreakers and then also followed by the time he mangled his hand and he was really down and out about that. You also get a little bit of the man, so he talks about little league games and going to birthday parties, it's hard to imagine Dylan as a dad, but he is one. And so that's in the memoir. I will say, and I should have mentioned this probably a lot earlier, is with Dylan, it's always hard to tell how much is true and how much isn't in what he's actually saying. In comparison to every other artist that I've mentioned on this podcast, Elvis for one, nobody leverages the mysterious, the ambiguity, the illusion like Bob Dylan. That is sort of his thing. It's his shtick, so to speak. I don't know of any artist who has done that quite like he has.

(08:27)

And so when you're reading this book or listening to an interview with him especially, it's always hard to decipher what part is true and what part isn't, because you probably know that 50% is made up. This is something that I love about his personality. It's also something that one of my favorite writers of all time, Hunter Thompson, knew how to do extremely well blend fiction with reality. That is what Dylan does essentially. You always get a sense that he's toying with the listener or the reader or the media especially. He doesn't pander to any of that. He never has. And that's what makes him so endearing to so many people. He writes in one of my favorite Dylan songs, that is later Dylan in 2000 or the late nineties. It was for the movie The Wonder Boys, “Things Have Changed” is the name of the song, and he has a line in there that I always remember and love, “Only a fool in here would think he's got anything to prove.”

(09:24)

I love that line. There are so many different ways that you can take it, but it's so in line with his personality in general, which probably brings me to his songwriting. I haven't talked a little bit about that. He might not be your favorite songwriter as he's not my favorite songwriter, but he is in a class of his own when it comes to lyricism. There's no doubt about it. I won't call it poetry because I do believe that melodies do aid the words, even though he did win the Nobel Prize for introducing poetic expression into song or something of that nature. I'm trying to quote it, but I'm going off my memory. It's definitely something like that. It reminds me of another quote that he wrote in The Modern Philosophy of Song. So not this memoir, but he says, “All the self-styled social critics who read lyrics in a deadpan drone to satirize their lack of profundity only show their limitations. They're as useless as the police officer reading the transcript of Lenny Bruce's act in the courtroom during his obscenity trial. Just as that police officer misses the essential spark in Lenny's performance. So do the others miss the magic that happens when lyrics are wed to music.” And I always love that because it's rock's greatest poet or lack of a better term, saying that you can't have lyrics without the melody, without music. But at the same time, I don't want to downplay Dylan's writing because nobody writes like him. And when I say nobody, I mean nobody just like the mysterious nature of the man himself. He's almost never on the nose with his lyrics in his choice of words, really gives you enough to keep you guessing, but also keep you coming back. He's very often wordy and a maximalist in his style in that he uses a lot of words.

(11:17)

It's almost like getting hit over the head with a machine gun. I can only think of maybe one song off the top of my head where minimalism is a feature in the writing, and that's, “Most of the Time,” which I believe is on Oh Mercy, which he writes about in the book coming full circle. But anyway, I don't want to digress, and I want you to know that he takes that same amazing quality of wordsmithing in his songs and applies it to this memoir. The prose is unmistakably Bob Dylan and I will share a couple of lines from the memoir right now, and then I will wrap this up. And if you want a whole sleuth of them, then I would highly recommend signing up for the newsletter because there will be a bunch. I have way too many quotes to not share, but like I said, here are some of my favorites.

(12:07)

“I had done it once was enough. Someone would come along eventually who would have it again—someone who could see into things. The truth of things—not metaphorically either—but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it was and reveal it for what it was with hard words and vicious insight.” And of course, he was talking there in reference to his own, I don't want to say deterioration as an artist, but not being able to bring the same thing to the art that he once did. And here's a line that I love. It's him describing another individual. You may not love it the way that I love it, but I think it's just a hell of a way to describe somebody. He says, “He seemed to have some golden grip on reality, didn't sweat the small stuff, quoted the Psalms, and slept with a pistol near his bed.”

(12:57)

And then, I can't remember if this one comes from The Modern Philosophy of Song or Chronicles, but this is the type of insight that you'll hear in the book. Dylan is outspoken about creativity and music and all of the above, really in his own way. And he says this, that has always rang really true to me. And it's, “As a matter of fact, the argument can be made that the more you study music, the less you understand it. Take two people—one studies contrapuntal music theory, the other cries when they hear a sad song. Which of these two really understands music better?” So I don't want to keep going on and on, but you could tell that I have a lot of revere for this artist, and I think you should too because he's that important in this book is one that you should read.

(13:47)

But this episode is a wrap. Thank you so much for listening. As always, I want to remind you that if you enjoyed it, then please share it with somebody else who you think might enjoy it, whether they're a friend or a family member, or of mouth, is everything. It's spreading awareness and this podcast specifically, it's to inspire more men to read and to double down on that support. Take 30 seconds to rate, like, follow, subscribe, all of that good stuff or any of that good stuff on whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on because it does help more people find the show. And lastly, for more information, you could visit BooksforMen.org where you can get full transcripts for every episode, as well as sign up for the newsletter, which is a roundup of every episode complete with full book and author information, all the best quotes, as well as newsletter only book recommendations. Again, you could sign up for that at BooksforMen.org.