If you did not grow up in the '60s, and don't happen to be a music aficionado, this may be hard to understand. There is a war on and a presidential election just a month away, yet the fact that Bob Dylan—a man with only a few hit records, and those hits all decades ago—published his autobiography and agreed to be interviewed about it caused current events to be shoved aside and got this senior citizen a place on the cover of Newsweek.
Of course, if you are of a certain age, no explanation is required. To his everlasting misery, the impact of his early songs like "Blowing in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" meant Dylan was labeled the Voice of a Generation. But this deeply idiosyncratic artist was not any sort of a populist; and over the years, this confusion between Dylan and his audience resulted in endless fascination and occasional estrangement.
As an autobiography, there is nothing straightforward about Chronicles except the writing, which is direct and lacks the surreal incoherence of Dylan's previous forays into prose. Still, what many would consider the major touchstones of his career and life are never mentioned. The years that produced Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks are left out. Likewise Dylan's riotous first electric concert at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, as well as his years as a fire-and-brimstone Christian songwriter. Though a wife makes a couple of cameos, she is never identified, and as Dylan has been through more than one marriage, it is hard to even be sure which Mrs. Dylan is meant. Five children are mentioned and there is an allusion to grandchildren, but little more is said on the subject of his family life.
Instead, Chronicles opens with the portrait of the artist as a young man arriving in New York from the provinces with an eerie confidence about his abilities and his future. Dylan hadn't yet written any songs of note. Rather, he was peripatetic and packed with restless energy he realized he needed to learn to harness. "I even sang my songs fast. I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say."
Chronicles passes over the burning hot success of Dylan's creative breakthrough years to focus on the unrelenting fame that followed him out of the '60s. With obsessive fans stalking him, protestors staking out his home, and even fellow musicians asking where he would lead the revolution, a freaked-out Dylan felt the need to escape the almost messianic expectations of his audience.
So, Dylan vanished into family life and mediocrity. As he tells it, by the 1970 album New Morning, he was no longer trying to write "bigger than life," but just to write some average songs in hopes of getting his life back:
"Message songs. There weren't any. As if I was going to make a career of that anyway .... Regardless you could still feel the anticipation in the air. When will the old him be back? When will the door open and the goose appear? Not today. I felt like these songs could blow away in cigar smoke, which suited me fine .... Maybe there were good songs in the grooves and maybe there weren't—who knows? But they weren't the kind where you hear the awful roaring in your head. I knew what those kind of songs were like and these weren't them."
Though he made significant music after New Morning, including Blood on the Tracks and numerous songs as good as anything in his past, Dylan ignores all of that to illustrate in Chronicles how, even decades later, he still can't escape the overwhelming desire for the "old him." Finally, in 1989—in the midst of a seriously pathetic period know to fans as the Mumble Years—Dylan was finally beginning to reconnect with his muse when he entered the studio with Daniel Lanois in hopes of moving forward, only to find his producer still looking back:
"We need songs like 'Masters of War,' 'Girl From the North Country,' or 'With God on Our Side.' He'd be nagging at me, just about every other day, that we need songs like those. I nodded. I knew we could, but I felt like growling. I didn't have anything like those songs."
Eventually, on Time Out of Mind (1997) and especially on Love and Theft (2001), Dylan would once again be producing discs that could stand with his greatest achievements. And Chronicles convincingly shows why, in order to get to that point, Dylan, as much as any of his fans, had to spend decades getting over being Bob Dylan.