I just finished Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Vol. 1, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, in case you don’t believe me that it’s really damn good. With autobiography becoming nearly synonymous with self-serving crap, it’s especially exciting to read something that doesn’t make its author/subject out to be some kind of saint.
Let’s face it – he’s Bob Dylan. He could have gotten away with 300 pages of “kiss my ass, I’m Bob Dylan” because, well, he is. But Bob refuses to credit his talents or anyone else’s to something magical that you or I will never touch. I especially like what he has to say about bluesman Robert Johnson:
“There’d been a fast moving story going around that he had sold his soul to the devil at a four-way crossroads at midnight and that’s how he got to be so good. Well, I don’t know about that. The ones who knew him told a different tale and that was that he had hung around some older blues players in rural parts of Mississippi, played harmonica, was rejected as a bothersome kid, that he went off and learned how to play guitar from a farmhand named Ike Zinnerman, a mysterious character not in any of the history books.”
The myth of Dylan isn’t as clearly defined as Johnson’s, but he’s no less mythical of a figure. In speaking about Johnson, Dylan is reiterating what he has been insisting about himself – that he’s not any kind of supernatural talent, just a guy who listened to a lot of music and learned from it.
It’s exhilarating to read an artist of Dylan’s unquestioned talent debunking this idea that the creative juice is passed out at birth and you either got it or you don’t. That idea has given us a lot of lazy writing, lazy music, lazy art. I suppose it’s romantic to think that the great ones just sit down and let it flow with no consciousness of craft, but it’s also pretty naïve.
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