Expecting Rain

Bob Dylan - on the road, performing, writing songs, painting, creating collages, making radio , telling stories ...

Every picture tells a story -
some stories paint a picture!

A lot of the stories in Chronicles Volume One created special pictures in our heads - and some have
changed our picture of Bob. Particularly I love Bobs humor in many ways !
Please post your favourite passages of Chronicles Volume One!
I´ll start with that:

I thought about not only posting passages of the Chronicles but also discussing again some parts of it.
Surely there exists some topics on ER to this , but I think sometimes a new thread starts a new conversation.
Chronicles speak about his life and within they speak of America and the world in fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties.

For me, as an European, who has never been in the USA, this book tells a lot of stories about
"Another side of America", converting the albumtitle from 1964

Maybe you can run it through google books and find out where he picked out some of the most descriptive stuff.... that'd be real interesting. This book, most of all, needs an index and detailed annotation.

There are hundred of books about Bob Dylan. For me, Chronicles is the best book about Bob Dylan at all
nevertheless it is written by Bob himself !
But of course in the same case it is a artwork of literature !
I love the "sound" it is written in.

In the parts of familylife and the story of his serious injury of his hand we could see another side of Bob -
he is very grounded , he likes to do some artisan work in the house.

>>This book, most of all, needs an index


Michael Gray's index must have taken him a month to compile. It's available for a small charge.

The book is a great read and full of stories and pictures, as you say. The only problem with it as memoir is that you can't believe half of it and the other half probably happened to someone else. As literature, however . . .

Yes, I was thinking hard version rather than PDF.... I know one was available, but I didn't know or care at the time, and it's been sold out for years. Either way, neither of them got into the whole intertextuality bit as far as I know.

This brings to mind the 'Adrian's' restaurant scenes from Stallone's 'Rocky Balboa' Two years between the book & the film's release, I wonder when the film script was written?

Maybe the Dead really did dose him in '87. They dosed about everybody else.

Some of Chronicles has been noted to contain errors. I consider it merely an exellent adjunct to some of the better researched bios that have been done on him.

maybe Chronicles is one of those books that you should just read.... enjoy.... read again....
and just go with the flow..... and don't question where the flow is coming from....

*** I hate to know how they do special effects in the movies too.....

thinkin´you´re right ...

I just re-read Chronicles this past fall & enjoyed it just as much, if not more, the 2nd time around. I think curtis is right about the "sound" of the language in the book. Dylan has always struck me as an artist who uses words as much for their sound as for their meaning. Kerouac was another writer (& one of Dylan's influences) who did the same thing.

For me, the first time I read Chronicles, I was really struck by how much of a Beat book it is - how neatly it fits that Beat tradition of telling about your life and travels, in a way that's true but not necessarily factual. I think it's a great book to read side-by-side with Kerouac's On the Road. Which is what I did this past fall: read Chronicles again, then read On the Road again.

My absolute favorite passage in Chronicles is the whole "Sun Pie" episode. One biographer surmised it was "surely fictional". But I don't care how accurate or factual it is. It's just great writing.

Dylan as a writer has never been as good without his real muse, music, underneath it. I'm glad we have it, and hope for more, but it's no great writing unless you really wish it to be.

^^ oh, I disagree . For me Chronicles is extraordinarily,-an exceptional good literature. Bob likes to "paint" concrete scenes. They
get alive at that moment again. How he describes persons -mostly there is much love and respect in it. There are a lot of colourful
short stories -a patchwork.
By the way - I read today the covertext of BIABH again. The covertexts of JWH and BIABH are great poems for me too.
" i accept chaos. i am not sure whether it accepts me."

That's part of his talent as a songwriter. Chronicles didn't quite live up to that, but I wasn't expecting it to, anyway.

I hope ha can manage another volume or two, because he has to settle down enough to do it, and I'm thinking he may not.

He himself spoke about that - Volume one has been a lot of work - and that he doesn´t have the time for it now.
Was it in the Rolling Stone Interview??

I have him quoted as saying that it took him two years, and that he found the process a lonely experience.

Yes, writing is lonely - especially writing long works of non-fiction/fiction. Very lonely. And one does need time to be settled & quiet (to a degree) to do it.

I do think Chronicles is great writing - I was completely prepared to be underwhelmed, having read bits of Tarantula & not really like his liner notes much at the time of my 1st reading of Chronicles (I've come to appreciate those now a little more). But I wasn't expecting Chronicles to be good or well-written and it was. I was shocked.

That book scan from the post above is illustrative. A lot of what makes Chronicles so colorful is the characters found himself around. I mean, Jack Dempsey's restaurant in the early 60's? There was all kinds of glitterati passing through that place in those years.

They don't have those places anymore. Those places sprung out of the canyon and valleys of the end of WWII, and they're all gone now.

It is the end of something ... Greenwich Village in January 1961 - passed away , but it stays in mind of some, who lived
there . I read in a thread here around - there was a grandfather, who told stories about that time at christmas this year.

I appreciate this part. It speaks for itself - I mean.
Almost every time I prefer to read Bobs own words than to read
interpretations about him from other ones.
But his own words are also interpretation of this situations he lived in
in January 1961.

That is so key. Putting the song in front of yourself when performing. Think about it.
That's generally when it works best. That's what Bob is still doing.

Yes - for sure. I heard only one concert in 2012, but it was so wondeful at all...