ORNERY BUT NEVER ORDINARY from page 39

like this coming out of me
because it didn't seem to be
autobiographical. Maybe
not, but the stuff I write
does come from an autobi-
ographical place."
That unamplified state-
ment is nearly as tantaliz-
ingly vague as the praise
Dylan bestows on his wife
as he explores New Orleans
Mt.
WI.1
during the Oh Mercy
recording days.
He recalls: "The one
thing about her that I
always loved was that she was never one of those peo-
ple who thinks that someone else is the answer to their
happiness. Me or anybody else. She's always had her
own happiness."
But the question is, which wife? Although Dylan,
who was divorced from first wife Sara in 1977, never
identifies his wife or children here, he gives the impres-
sion of being a family man fighting to protect his
brood from the slings and arrows of his outrageous
celebrity. Dealing with the kind of spin that politicians
envy, such "factuality" guards Dylan's privacy but also
whets the appetite for more color and truth.
He is more explicit about the cultural landscape. We
learn that for him the Civil War is "the all-encompass-

ing template behind everything that I would
write," that mysterious bluesman Robert
Johnson is a touchstone and that roots song-
writer Woody Guthrie is a role model.
In Chronicles, we follow Dylan through
Minneapolis' cultural hotbed Dinkytown and
virtually smell the New York of 1961, when he
befriends folksinger Dave Van Ronk and
crashes at the pad of a highly literary, opium-
smoking couple, where he begins to reconsti-
tute the folk song.
We learn of his affair with Suze Rotolo, the
girl walking with him on The Freewheelin' Bob
Dylan album cover. On the other. hand, we
learn next to nothing of the mid-'60s records
that cemented his artistic reputation, or of the
throwaways, like "Self-Portrait" and "Down in
the Groove," that corroded it in the '70s and
'80s. Perhaps he'll treat those in later volumes.
Chronicles affirms Dylan's idiosyncrasies and
his mastery of the vernacular. As his best songs also
show, he's a great reporter with a talent for vivid detail.
Here he recalls Billy the Butcher, an early '60s
Greenwich Village eccentric who sang nothing but
"High-Heel Sneakers," an old Tommy Tucker blues
shuffle:
"The Butcher wore an overcoat that was too small
for him, buttoned tight across the chest. He was jittery
and sometime in the past he'd been in a straitjacket in
Bellevue, also burned a mattress in a jail cell. All kinds
of bad things had happened to Billy. There was a fire
between him and everybody else. He sang that one
song pretty good, though."
Through the book, Dylan skillfully ducks

CHRONICLES

and sways his adoring, pressuring public. He discusses
his attitude toward celebrity and its connection to his
drop-off in creativity, if not output, for more than two
checkered decades. And there are insights into the well-
spring of his motivations.
Weavers singer Ronnie Gilbert once introduced
Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival by saying, 'And
here he is ... Take him, you know him, he's yours."
"What a crazy thing to say! Screw that," Dylan
writes, still smarting after all these years. 'As far as I
know, I didn't belong to anybody then or now I had a
wife and children whom I loved more than anything
else in the world. I was trying to provide for them,
keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept
promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman or even
conscience of a generation.
"That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs
that were dead straight and expressed powerful new
realities ... My destiny lay down the road with whatever
life invited, had nothing to do with representing any
kind of civilization. Being true to yourself, that was the
thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper."
Constantly calibrating his music and image, Dylan is
a self-absorbed professional who can nonetheless be
self-critical. His complexity comes through in the first
part of an autobiography originally scheduled for pub-
lication two years ago. With this book, Dylan finally
has begun to write his own story.
Chronicles is packed with ruminations on musical
theory, sharp and humorous commentary, flashes of
poetry — and facts filtered and colored to flummox,
entertain and illuminate. El

— Carlo Wolff Featurewell. corn

to change this. He moved his
family around. And he started
performing strange little acts:
how Jews throughout history have had to
"Unexpected things like pour-
defend themselves against such insinuations.
ing a bottle of whiskey over my
Maybe he'll even address the issue of kashrut.
head and walking into a depart-
Alas — and of course — he did none of
ment store and act pie-eyed,
the above. Instead he quoted something he'd
knowing that everyone would be
heard Malcolm X, of all people, say on the
talkinc, amongst themselves
radio: "I don't eat something that's one third
when I left."
rat, one third cat and one third dog. It just
To really shake things up, he
doesn't taste right." The response cracked up Bob Dylan at the Western walk reports, "I went to Jerusalem,
Johnny Cash, and Dylan called Carter "quite Feb. 20, 1983, attending his
got myself photographed at the
a character," but it made me feel cheated.
son's bar mitzvah
Western Wall wearing a skull-
Cheated? OK, that's a bit strong. And it is
cap. The image eras transmitted
somewhat silly to expect Dylan-the-autobi-
worldwide instantly, and quickly all the great rags
ographer to be a cheerleader for Judaism. (He hasn't,
changed me overnight into a Zionist."
after all, been terribly outspoken about it in the past.)
Oy! Thing is, Dylan neglects to say that the trip to
Which makes me think Why do we Jewish Dylan
Israel was for his son Jesse's bar mitzvah. (In a similar
fans feel this strong need to claim him for ourselves?
way, he doesn't see the need to mention his own
Aren't the scraps of Jewish information, such as the
Minnesota-based bar mitzvah either.) As for his
well-known factoid that Dylan's real name is Robert
Zionism, he doesn't say anything about it in Chronicles,
Zimmerman, enough to sustain our pride? The answer,
but I'd advise the curious reader to look into the song
of course, is no.
"Neighborhood Bully."
It may be unfair to the man, and his new book, but
The coy attitude toward his Jewishness can be
we can't help but hope that Dylan feels, at least secretly, uncomfortable for the reader simply looking to crown
a kind of Jewish pride.
Dylan King of the Jews. He is not, and never will be,
The most overtly Jewish moment in Chronicles
our Representative Jewish Artist.
comes when Dylan has become famous, moved to
Besides, Dylan really isn't about giving comfort to
Woodstock, started a family and grown quite paranoid.
his audience, any audience. He is always, and only,
(It's that feeling of, "Someone's got it in for me, they're
himself And to that, as music fans if not Jews, we
planting stories in the press," that he sings about on
more or less have to say, 'Amen."
"Idiot Wind.")
He didn't much like the way he was treated.in town
—Ken Gordon, Jbooks.com
or by the counterculture or by the media, so he set out

A Nice Jewish Cultural Icon? Sort Of.

I

f you bought Chronicles:I/Olume One (Simon &
Schuster) hoping to hear Bob Dylan say, "I'm
Jewish," you wasted $24.
Same goes if you thought that relocating the musi-
cian from stage to page would force from him a lucid
statement about his Christian period.
Want to know if the rumors that he attends Chabad
House High Holiday services are true? Then you're
sure to be let down.
Chronicles demonstrates that Jewish concerns aren't
the first, or even second or third, thing on Dylan's
mind. And yet we know — everyone knows — that
Dylan is a Jew, and we're thrilled by this fact.
So we wind up scrutinizing Chronicles with talmudic
intensity, looking for evidence that Dylan is indeed a
member of our tribe, a familiar habit to many Jewish
Dylanologists.
Consider the following scene. Dylan and some of his
songwriter pals — Joni Mitchell, Kris Kristofferson,
Graham Nash — sit around one night singing songs at
Johnny Cash's house, with various members of the
Carter family, whom Dylan describes with the cliche
"the royalty of country music," in attendance.
After each player in the circle performs, someone
offers a complimentary critical bromide, such as "You
put all of yourself into that tune." Dylan plays "Lay,
Lady, Lay" and hands off the guitar to Graham Nash.
Then Joe Carter asks, "You don't eat pork, do you?"
As a Jew and a Dylan fan, I expected something .
here. I thought: Now he'll admit to being Jewish and
tell this fellow where he could cram his possibly anti-
Semitic query. Here's a chance for Dylan to talk about

.

❑

2005

43