A good day to note the most notable thing about Bob Dylan's Chronicles. As the capstone on the edifice of the official Dylan narrative of genius recovered, the book is suposed to function as an example of his restored capacity to be insightful, ludic, witty and great.
How thoroughly it tracks the other story! The book, though presumably written "at one time," is astoundingly inconsistent — but the inconsistency is perfectly clear. The pieces concerning the early sixties are superb and charming, filled with off-kilter descriptions, lucid evocations, a steady stream of little revelations, and detailed recollections that seem able to illuminate what it is that we already know.
The parts concering the late sixties are less suffused in splendors of haphazard dailiness, but replace that with ferocity and splenetic willfulness -- sometimes a self-serving falsity that itself makes for great set-pieces — an inimitable sharpness buoyed by intensely interior refusal.
The rest is awful.
Nothing is more awful than the endless passage before and during his trip to New Orleans to record Oh Mercy, a seemingly endless sludgy meander spiked with howling clichés as, like the most pitiful hack bio, he goes thorugh the songs one by one, recounting how he thought them up and what they're really about, man. Amazingly, several of the songs just came to him, all at once! Wow! And the only potentially interesting digression, in which he feels revivified by an odd, forgotten picking style, devolves into dull, quasi-mystical ranting.
This, in stop-action, recounts the story of Dylan's genius in a way we recognize far better, stripped of the narcissistic Boomer fantasy of brilliance regained. It was there in 1960, it was there in different form in 1968, and it wasn't there after 1975. It didn't come back. His vision failed (as it must, as it must). His monstrous self-regard became ordinary. He stopped seeing the world in intereresting ways; he stopped feeling about the world in intense forms: the songs weren't so good any more. If the book supports any historical account, alas, it's this one — all too clearly. It's all over now, babies blues.
Posted by jane at May 24, 2006 04:30 PM | TrackBack