Good honest writing, that I found enjoyable.

tape borrowed from OCPL but not listened to on Dec '08 trip to Norwell, listened on Nov'09 DC trip; uninspired reading by Sean Penn makes for lackluster listening. No music. no other members ? ( )

Bob Dylan in his own write. Not a tedious analysis of his lyrics or themes, or a chronological account of his life and music, or a smug and cryptic memoir. No indeed.

Bob's writing is crisp, metrical, and economical - not a word seems to be wasted. He speaks openly about his childhood, musical influences, performance craft and songwriting: amid vignettes of his daily life. Despite the sainthood that many in the music world accord him, Bob writes here as a regular guy: albeit one with different issues to most of us.

This is not the type of book that the likes of Anthony Scaduto, Clinton Heylin, or Robert Shelton have written about him. As full of minutiae and access to Dylan as they are - they are on the outside looking in. This is Bob Dylan himself telling us what he sees - and this may surprise some people.

I was surprised and delighted that his reaction to the song "Pirate Jenny" was very similar to mine.

Unputdownable.

It's brilliant if it's just another joke he's pulling on everyone. ( )

Bob Dylan Chronicles -- No Direction Home -- Never Ending Tour: I'm making way again reading Chronicles, it's my second time through. It takes the entire book to understand what makes an artist an artist, and when Columbia Records signed Bob, it had the power to make him become as the one whom we all know him as today. He follows along the tradition of folk music, and yet, within that tradition he learned so well the ways of the past that he would be accepted as an artist even before he has written the music.

Knowing the book is Dylan's autobiography, I expected to read from the perspective of, or, having a given notion that a story would be told about how the songs were written, by the manner they could be inspired. The latter meaning that finding the inspiration is the deeper more profound nature of the story as Bob does write constructively in the similar form as are his lyrics and music. The catch phrase there being the musical form and with this he tells a lingering story of meeting up with Bono who leads him on to record another record in New Orleans with Danny Lanois.

It is fair to say that even to this day most of the songs are still sung with an affliction of a dialect that captures our time as the measured space from that time the song was first inspired. The passages written throughout the storyline of the book put together a grandeur more complex understanding of just how omni-present ones life becomes to have achieved what Bob has accomplished, beginning within the moments he knew he could play guitar, so handedly playing the music he enjoyed whilst underlying his own talent allowing him to simply play along... In the course of such sanctity he reads one great book after another, as it is the same way he listens to records, and then seeks for artists following relentlessly his own spirit until finally meeting his immortal icon Woody Guthrie, bed ridden. Woody listens to Bob play and Bob stays with Woody until they each can find no end to the meaning of the words their music could have lived for himself.

On the surface the story writes about the times he grew up as a child amongst friends and family living in the iron ore range that is still the driving force of America's industrial revolution. Virtually every car made in Detroit would have been fabricated with the ore that was for a time Dylan's boyhood home and upbringing.

It is in New York though, that if you were from the area yourself or in the same way knew of any other place brought into the discussion, then pieces fit together about the goings on of the emerging cultural lives in such backgrounds as Greenwich Village. It's the most intricate detail to understand how Bob goes about learning an insightful dictation of knowledge that elapses his own will and eventual transformation of self to the impresario that lives the life his words give rise to within the lyric of their own musings.

Ones immediate impression is within the forces of living about New York City, as an artist, Dylan travels in this virtuous manner of that as a performer to such brevity and light, guided by this talent that the magnitude he reveals himself as, is that merely as a person who lived through folk music learning to sing while playing guitar. Generally speaking it's more than just a good time.





It's Alright Ma From deluxe edition Don't Look Back outtakes
- 1965