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Bob Dylan Chronicles Vol 1 Mind Mapped – part 1

bob dylan chronicles vol 1

… 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)

Author Bob Dylan
Country United States
Language English
Subject Bob Dylan
Genre Autobiography
Music
Publisher Simon & Schuster
Publication date
October 5, 2004
Media type Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages 304 pp (first edition, hardcover)
ISBN ISBN 0-7432-2815-4 (first edition, hardcover)

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

The 10 Best Memoirs Written By Musicians

music books

The 10 Best Memoirs Written By Musicians

When musicians decides to write their memoirs they are often uneven (this is a kind statement). They often struggle to give words the life that do in their songs, this “new” format may not come naturally to them. That said, many of these men and women have great stories to tell and often provide compulsive reading. They do stumble in their wording and structure from time to time, but the stories are compelling and they succeed in capturing the spirit of their cultural moment with astonishing insight.

These twelve ten books are great examples of how it can be done if the authors manage to adjust to the new form. They are good period, not because they are written by famous artists, but because they reflect all the creativity, movement and human drama you’d expect from people driven by art. We kept it to memoirs, so no fictional prose (sorry, Nick Cave), no poetry (sorry, Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen), there are some of the books that touches different genres but all these books are mainly memoirs.

They are not necessarily the best biographies about artists written (although sometimes they are) but they are the best books written/narrated by the musicians themselves!

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