BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, September 27, 2004
POSITIVELY NEWSWEEK.
The number-two newsmagazine opens Debate Week with something of far
more consequence than politics: a cover story on Bob
Dylan, who's written a
memoir called Chronicles, Volume I.
David Gates opens his
interview
with Dylan this way: "When
I tell Bob Dylan he's the last person I'd have expected to turn
autobiographer, he laughs and says, 'Yeah, me too.'" No kidding.
Since the beginning of the television age, no major cultural figure
has lived as public and yet as inscrutable a life as Dylan. Judging
from the candid, straightforward tone of the excerpt
- a meditation/rant on the hell of living with the Dylan legend -
that inscrutability is about to get a whole lot more, well,
scrutable.
It was Gates who interviewed Dylan
in 1997 on the occasion of his late-blooming masterpiece Time Out
of Mind. Gates observes that Dylan is weirdly dismissive of the
work he did between the late '60s and Time. But there's no
question that Time signaled that Dylan had found a way of
living with himself and his legend, and of recapturing the
inspiration he'd once had, if not quite all of the gifts of youthful
genius. In the new interview, Dylan - and Gates - explain it like
this:
"The difference between me
now and then [Dylan says] is that back then, I could see
visions. The me now can dream dreams." His early songs, he says,
were visionary, however much they drew on his meticulous
observation of the real world around him. "What you see in
'Chronicles' is a dream," he says. "It's already happened."
You would have to be Bob Dylan
... to grasp fully what he's trying to tell you. But it must have
to do with his having to accept the loss of his original mode of
creation, in which the songs seemed to come to him without his
knowing what he was doing. Does he still have that same access to
- I don't know how to put the question. He helps me out. "No, not
in the same way," he says. "Not in the same way at all. But I can
get there, by following certain forms and structures. It's not
luck. Luck's in the early years. In the early years, I was trying
to write and perform the sun and the moon. At a certain point, you
just realize that nobody can do that."
Dylan is also said to have written
six to eight songs for a new album, which will be his first since
2001's "Love and Theft."
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
