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"Dylan Speaks!" is the headline of many a review of Bob Dylan's new memoir Chronicles Volume One, echoing the famed exhortation marketing Greta Garbo in her first talkie. After reading his book, one can almost imagine Dylan speaking in a Swedish accent and - hand to forehead - "I want to be alone." And, honestly, you can't blame him; he'd had his fill. Coming as he did in the era immediately following Elvis and Beatlemania with the screaming thousands, the Hard Days Night-esque car chases, and the fans sleeping in his hotel hallways, Dylan had something extra.

In addition to all that mess, Dylan had the misfortune of being called the Voice of His Generation, and people took him very, very seriously. From A. J. Weberman (the famed "Dylanologist," infamous for going through Dylan's trash looking to expose Dylan's "secrets") to the "goons that were breaking into [his] house all hours of the night," Dylan had his hands full.

The story that Dylan tells, then, is one of escaping and one of discovery. Escaping the "gate-crashers [and] demagogues" following him from his home in Woodstock and beyond, to discovering himself as "Bob Dylan," from a boy from the small town of Hibbing, Minnesota to the streets of Greenwich Village. He bookends the tale with his recounting of his own birth as an artist and - tellingly - fills the middle with two famed fallow periods. The first about the circumstances surrounding his 1970 record New Morning and the second about the recording of his 1989 effort, Oh Mercy.

Chronicles holds its share of known facts - That he idolized Woody Guthrie, for example - but it also has its share of surprises - that he feels kin to Ricky Nelson (!) and that his "favorite politician was ? Barry Goldwater" (!!).

And both will please the reader equally as he tells his tale in a meandering, colorful manner that never feels forced in any way.

Though New Morning is certainly not an embarrassment, (and when said it is, one is called to mind Bruce Springsteen's speech at Dylan's induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame saying "that if there was another young guy out there writing ? 'Every Grain of Sand' they would be calling him the new Bob Dylan.") it also couldn't be said to be his finest hour. And Oh Mercy, while amazing in comparison to Down in the Groove (the LP that preceded it), pales a bit placed next to Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks - which is the point Dylan is making. He takes pains to state that he knows what he did, and that he wants his audience to know that it was contextual, that he couldn't make it happen again if he tried. And he has. In a 1978 interview, he speaks of trying to capture that "thin, wild mercury sound" that he had with Blonde again with the somewhat unfairly maligned Street Legal. Whatever one might think of "The Changing of the Guards," off Street, it's easy enough to notice that it isn't "Visions of Johanna." And Dylan knows it.

That said, he seems to have moved past the inert period of his career and the creative resurgence that he hints at in the recording of Oh Mercy is still in evidence today. That he's still making vibrant albums such as "Love and Theft" and even writing and starring in a movie (Masked and Anonymous) is impressive - all the more when compared to his contemporaries.

When Dylan writes that he read through Guthrie's Bound for Glory "like a hurricane, totally focused on every word, and the book sang out to me like the radio" it's not surprising. And not because he ended up somewhat of an acolyte of Guthrie's, but rather the tone of Chronicles echoes the prose of Bound in many ways. From the rambling style to the fantastic (possibly apocryphal) tales that he weaves, he is still paying homage to his teenage hero. As a fan of Dylan's it would be hard to read Chronicles with any less fervor.

Recommendations:

No Direction Home: the Life and Times of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton
Behind the Shades by Clinton Heylin
Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie