… to point out that Chronicles is designed to manipulate our perceptions is simply to affirm that it’s genuine Dylan. The book is an act, but a splendid one — his sense of strategy vis-a-vis his audience hasn’t been this keen in 30 years — and it’s a zesty, nugget-filled read. His assessments of other musicians are as acute as they are idiosyncratic, partly because (no great surprise here) he instinctively zeroes in on their personae in the guise of talking about their music, as in this jambalaya of observations about Roy Orbison: ”He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. . . He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal.” Better still is a terse explanation of what separated Hank Williams from most 50’s country-and-western singers: ”There was nothing clownish about him.”
~Tom Carson (The New York Times Sunday Book Review)

Continue reading Bob Dylan Chronicles Vol 1 Mind Mapped – part 1 →