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Chronicles: Volume One Paperback – September 13, 2005

by Bob Dylan (Author)

4.5 2,597 ratings

Book 1 of 1: Chronicles

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WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the country, Bob Dylan.

“I’d come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.”

So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan’s eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan’s New York is a magical city of possibilities—smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book’s side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota, and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

By turns revealing, poetical, passionate, and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan’s thoughts and influences. Dylan’s voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful, and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

Book 1 of 1

Chronicles
Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publication date

September 13, 2005
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.9 x 8.44 inches
ISBN-10

0743244583
ISBN-13

978-0743244589
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"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."
-- Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone

About the Author

Bob Dylan has released thirty-nine studio albums, which collectively have sold over 125 million copies around the world. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and has been awarded the French Legion of Honor, a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. His memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, spent a year on the New York Times bestseller list.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (September 13, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743244583
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743244589
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.44 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #55,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #123 in Rock Music (Books)
- #125 in Rock Band Biographies
- #547 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies

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4.5 2,597 ratings

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Bob Dylan
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Bob Dylan
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Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, artist and writer. He has been influential in popular music and culture for more than five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when his songs chronicled social unrest, although Dylan repudiated suggestions from journalists that he was a spokesman for his generation. Nevertheless, early songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" became anthems for the American civil rights and anti-war movements. After he left his initial base in the American folk music revival, his six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" altered the range of popular music in 1965. His mid-1960s recordings, backed by rock musicians, reached the top end of the United States music charts while also attracting denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.
Dylan's lyrics have incorporated various political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed to the burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the performances of Little Richard, and the songwriting of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, Dylan has amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning 50 years, has explored the traditions in American song—from folk, blues, and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and the Great American Songbook. Dylan performs with guitar, keyboards, and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour. His accomplishments as a recording artist and performer have been central to his career, but songwriting is considered his greatest contribution.
Since 1994, Dylan has published six books of drawings and paintings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries. As a musician, Dylan has sold more than 100 million records, making him one of the best-selling artists of all time. He has also received numerous awards including eleven Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award. Dylan has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Minnesota Music Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Pulitzer Prize jury in 2008 awarded him a special citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." In May 2012, Dylan received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Alberto Cabello from Vitoria Gasteiz (Bob Dylan) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Ann M. L. Johnson

Chronicles I by Bob Dylan

Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2005

Verified Purchase

This gentle and poetically lyrical mystic comes forth in a candid and charming storytelling style that anyone can appreciate. For those who have followed his career since the beginning it's a real treat, a long awaited boon to add to the long list of memories, lines and memorabilia. There's also the distinct sense of hearing his voice as you read and turn the pages. There is no sense of verbosity, no rankling fussiness or bitterness, and no arrogance or crowing in this tender telling of a profound life story. Within these pages you will find only vibrant verbal threads which anchor the weaving of a lifetime's story; this is the beginning to a story of one man, a man who has lived a truly sincere, humble and matchless life. This is the best told story, to date, of this delicate, quicksilver, steely-filigreed man and his intense devotion and dedication to his muse as revelation, offered up for the past forty years to our eyes and ears and hearts through his prolific and uncompromisingly honest artistic expression. Perhaps, thus so, even to the angels.

His prose is as rich and varied as any poem or song he has written, which is not so startling as it comes off the same tip of the tongue and pen that has inspired so many. There's a palpable sweetness here, along with what I glimpse as a sly bit of impishness that informs the reader in a quiet easy way of a common song and dance man called upon by unseen forces to write and sing songs, to strive, and to bring his personal dedication and tremendous artistic vision and creativity directly to the forefront for the act of creation, in itself, despite and regardless of intense public scrutiny and evaluation from the masses for good or ill.

This is his story and he's telling it the way he must, his way, through the rhythms of his own memories. This story does not go the way the reader might suggest; it's not his to tell. Instead, the telling is told from a masterful maker of images through words, painted lyrically with a keen awareness for each brushstroke as he informs the reader of intimacies and details, discreetly revealing his majestic humiity through a succulently sophisticated and tantalizing tale, literary and delightful in its telling.

As with all true artists, his turn of the phrase is unique, elegantly and eloquently his alone, which cannot be missed. His telling of his story is a cool drink of water and goes down very easily. It transcends. In its wake is left an almost delicious anxiety in the anticipated thirsting for more of this graciously engaging story. He would possibly label it as Desire. He leaves everybody wanting for more.

It's a joyous and brave blessing brought to bear that he has chosen to share this intimacy with us in this beautiful and unhinged world to which he has given and shared so much. We can honor his endeavors by reading this wonderful book, and by listening closely and allowing ourselves to be touched by his words as he lets us into the matchlessly poetic and lyrical thoughts revealing Bob Dylan's life's adventures of a common song and dance man.

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Holly Golightly

Compelling read

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2021

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What an extraordinary book. I loved it so much that after I’d finished it, I went right back and read it again. Also found myself underlining phrases that just astonished me, which I haven’t done in decades.

I’m an English major, have worked in publishing, and have read a lot of biographies. Autobiographies are especially difficult to write and it’s tough to come across without sounding stuck-up, pedantic, or stupid. I don’t know how Dylan did it, but he manages, with simple words, to weave a quiet masterpiece.

It’s not linear or fact-filled…but to me, that’s part of the charm. Facts are great, but you can look them up. To get his thoughts is more interesting.

I’m also from Northern Minnesota and particularly enjoy Dylan’s insights about that, which really ring true, such as (p. 271): “In Northern Minnesota fallout shelters didn’t catch on, had no effect whatsoever on the Iron Range. As far as communists went, there wasn’t any paranoia about them. People weren’t scared of them, seemed like a big to-do over nothing.”

It’s such a remarkable book…and remarkable author…that I’m surprised the editing isn’t better (which is the publisher’s responsibility). For example…on p. 292, the city names of “Sauk Centre” and “Albert Lea” are misspelled.

No matter…I look forward to forgetting some of this book so I can be amazed when I read it AGAIN.

5 people found this helpful

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Ted Lehmann

The Dylan You'd Like to Know Reveals Himself

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2017

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Chronicles Volume I by Bob Dylan

It should come as no surprise to those who have listened to Bob Dylan's music, watched his elusive appearances, and followed his unforthcoming interviews, that Dylan often doesn't help you to understand who he is. In what purports to be the first volume of his autobiography, Dylan lets you know who he is and how he got there, but don't expect a straightforward narrative explanation. Just as in his songs and too infrequent appearances, he insists in this wonderful book that you do your work, too. If you do it, however, and are at least marginally aware of the details of his life, you will find this extended riff on Bob Dylan's early years in New York as well as his reflections on family, fame, recording, and more to be deeply informative and most satisfying. In Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster, 2004, 320 pages, $27.00/11.99)

He arrives in New York on a cold winter day, alone with only his guitar for company, not knowing anybody, but curious and open to his own experience. He's searching for Woody Guthrie, even then hospitalized in New Jersey, whose muse has drawn him to folk singing and wandering. He finds his way into the Greenwich Village of the late fifties with only the folk songs he's studied and learned, his dogged persistence, and his intelligence, and then burrows himself in the folk music culture of this interesting period roiling with cultural change in America reflected in the musical and social life of The Village. He begins visiting and then performing at little hole-in-the-wall venues where, during the afternoons, anyone can take the stage to sing, recite poetry, or find their own mode of expression, working for tips. He keeps his eyes open, soon meeting people who welcome him to flop on their couches or mattresses in their apartments. He meets, and cultivates in his own elusive way, Dave Van Ronk, and many other artistic and music business lights in the Village.

Dylan describes crashing with Ray Gooch, whose Village apartment was filled with books that he dived into. In an extended riff, Dylan writes about what he read, saw, studied, picked up, put down, returned to and groped through to gain understanding, all the time soaking up a world of literature, history, and art he had become ready to indulge in and integrate into his yearning and experience. He's a virtual vacuum cleaner for seemingly random ideas, musical, literary and artistic, which he slowly but surely integrates.

In its own discursive way, Dylan's story emerges. He writes about how Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan through an interesting search for a name reflecting the personna he was constructing for himself. It, like much of the rest of the book, makes sense in its own seemingly rambling way. He begins to change, as well, in his concept of himself as a singer, moving from traditional and contemporary folk music to what he refers to as “topical” songs, being careful to remove himself as a “protest” singer, but rather an observer of the contemporary scene. While the narrative seems to wander, it's actually pretty straightforward, laced with references to reading, listening, interacting with the music community and the world in thoughtful and insightful ways.

While the book seems to jump around a good deal, it, nevertheless, captures the person I think Dylan, at least, wants to be. As his celebrity increases, his resistance to being made into something he thinks he's not does, too. He consistently styles himself as a folk singer finding songs in his experience and his internal self. He resists becoming a symbol for the fantasies of others seeking to make him into a symbol. He describes the harassment from “pilgrims” seeking him, along with his growing sense of needing privacy and solitude to do his work. Robbie Robertson, of the Band, asks him, “Where do you think you're gonna take it?” as if he were a single driving force behind music. Life seems to represent his resistance to being styled in some way by others. He writes, “It was impossible for me to observe anything without being observed,” exploring the cost of his celebrity on the family life and creative existence he says he wants to pursue and fulfill. I can find nothing in the narrative that points to his seeking celebrity, much less the iconic status he has achieved. His reactions to attending this year's Nobel Prize award ceremonies represent a consistent response from him, as does the graceful statement he sent in.

I'm struck by the need Dylan expresses, which seems very real to me, to live an ordinary family life in the midst of everyone else's desire to turn him into a symbol for something much larger. In the end, Dylan remains a song writer and story tell of unusual grace and breadth. He experiments, as he writes, “throws everything at the wall,” and much of it seems to work for some audience beyond his desires to be a more solitary, family oriented, singer and writer of songs. For, first of all, he's a writer. But the more I listen to him, the more I find him to be a wonderfull, affecting, and honest singer.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Bob Dylan can write. And he can think and sing. What some people might find surprising is that he's a real person, filled with all that portends, yet driven by the external forces of fame and celebrity to become something more. While he doesn't seek sympathy, reading his Chronicles evoked it in me. I find myself liking the person who emerges while, as has become my habit with books by and about musicians, listening to his songs with increasing understanding and empathy. Chronicles gives the reader entree into the real person Bob Dylan is. But, and it's a big But, the reader has to allow him his reality. In that “But” lies the enormous strength and charm of this book. By the middle, I found myself wishing him the peace of a privacy so difficult for him to achieve.

Dylan's description of a decade-long low period in his career, from the late seventies through the eighties he describes a sense of disconnection from his own work, his sense that his career was going nowhere, that he no longer wanted to perform...just going through the motions. Leaving a rehearsal for a tour with the Grateful Dead, he drops into an obscure San Francisco jazz joint, hears a singer simply killing it, and has a revelation which turns him around. During the following European tour with Tom Petty, he sings eighty long-neglected songs from his catalog without a repeat and senses new energy and inspiration. Again, taken at his word, it rings completely true to me. There's an integrity to the writing as he digs within to describe the indescribable. I've always thought of Dylan as being non-communicative except in performance, but Chronicles is a performance, too, a journey where he takes the risks of self-discovery and finds what he's looking for.

His chapter called “Oh Mercy” referring to what has been described as his “comeback album,” discusses song writing and performance, giving huge insights into Dylan's process. How he thinks, jumps from idea to idea while a concept emerges. He resents other people's over-analyzing, but gives himself to the willing reader and consumer of his music. But it must be on his terms. He won't let you take over for him or force him into a mold. His account of the period spent working in New Orleans with producer Danny Lanois to produce Oh Mercy captures the spirit of trying to build a collaborative relationship as well as presenting an impressionistic view of the city and a motorcycle trip with his wife to bayou country that's a joy to read, an extended riff that also helps reveal Dylan's creative process.

“Folk music was all I needed to exist. Trouble was, there wasn't enough of it. It was out of date, had no proper connection the the actualities, the trends of the times. It was a huge story, but hard to come across.” (235) Dylan refers to himself throughout the book as a folk singer, rejecting the critics and fans who would make him into a cultural icon, a leader of a movement, a poet who spoke for and to a generation. For this refusal, for his stubborn insistence to follow his own muse and music, he paid a price, and kept his integrity and at least some independence. Over the more than fifty year course of his career, he has continued to discover himself and his music, while never kowtowing to the rapidly changing world of pop music, but always being aware of what's going on, listening, watching, learning.

Dylan was a voracious consumer of the work of other singers and, later, song writers. Soon after leaving home, he discovered Woody Guthrie, whose work consumed him and helped set his course, until he heard “Ramblin” Jack Elliot, who had traveled with Guthrie, and whose confident singing awed him. Throughout the book, Dylan, explores the influences, both musical and literary, influencing him as well as examining his own inner workings. The amount of careful thought and deep searching that went into thinking through this book should not be underestimated, either in depth or in carefully structured writing. For anyone interested in Bob Dylan Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster, 2004, 320 pages, $27.00/11.99) is must reading. I enjoyed it and learned a lot, too. I bought the book from Amazon and read it on my Kindle App. fd

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Vivian Wolfe

great background stories

Reviewed in Canada on March 23, 2024

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Easy to read, couldn't put it down!

Luiz HD Silva

Escrito pelo próprio Dylan.

Reviewed in Brazil on September 18, 2021

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Me senti andando pelo Greenwich Village nos idos dos anos 1950 e 1960.

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BANIENKA

Version anglaise plus fournie

Reviewed in France on July 31, 2022

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J’ai la version française , mais je voulais aussi la lire dans la langue d’origine et je ne suis pas déçue. Le livre est d’excellent état et je recommande de le lire.

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Oggie

A must for Dylan followers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 30, 2021

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Really enjoyed this one and will likely read it again. Written in such a typically 'Dylanesque' way that you can almost hear him speaking the words. Interesting to read how, despite an almost obsessive pursuit his own folk style, he changed direction just when he was arguably at the height of his fame. I must admit I am one of those who prefer the early Dylan, but still admired his writing when he moved away from the acoustic scene. He speaks openly about the outrage of fans and the angry criticism he faced during that time. An interesting account of the difficulties he faced in getting started as a performer. For someone often regarded as off-hand and aloof, his self criticism is refreshing, as is his praise for other artists.

3 people found this helpful

Elisa Lipkau

An important book

Reviewed in Mexico on March 6, 2019

Verified Purchase

Its a great book, it lets youknow a lot about American Popular music in the 1930 after the depression, it opens the way to get to know a little about America's forgotten idol Woody Guthrie. Its a basic book to any music lover

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