The final chapter of Chronicles, River of Ice, takes us back to Dylan’s apprenticeship in the folk scene of Minneapolis, his migration east to find Woody Guthrie, his Village days, and a reprise of some of the first chapter with more detailed portraits of Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, Suze Rotolo among others, plus Robert Johnson, his first recording contract, and ends interestingly with his awareness that he needs a new path and an apostrophe to musicians, artists and writers from the midwest. This is a useful and practical way to end the first volume of a serial autobiography–it grounds the author firmly in his place. It also has the luxury of that free-form, free-association quality that you find in his songs. It runs directly against the organizing principle of autobiographies–Time. Dylan observes in the Chronicles that he has no use for nostalgia–come to think of it nostalgia is not a form, an organizing structure that you find anywhere in Dylan’s songs–it would be interesting to explore this–nostalgia is usually a displacement technique–and his real achievement in this autobiography is to tell the story of the chronological past as if it were the lived present. Masterful, really. The “new path” that Dylan would adopt has a surprising source: Brecht and Weill’s songs–mostly opera, miniscule folk in scope. I sure wish I could hear the version of “Pirate Jenny” that Dylan heard–his description is more menacing than the Youtube versions. Just like the fine exposition in the Oh Mercy chapter of the pentatonic scale, this chapter speaks eloquently of the free-form verse structure of songs like “Pirate Jenny”–its epic scope, its free associations. I wish I had the time to sit down and take each one of Dylan’s songs apart and notate its form–nobody has experimented with so many forms as Dylan has!
I wish I could hear all the songs mentioned in this book: Dead Shrimp Blues, More Pretty Girls Than One, Death of John Henry, Buffalo Skinners, Death of Floyd Colllins, Way Down in Florida on a Hog, Old Greybeard. . . Time to check out the Youtube.
A very satisfactory read this book was. Now to Woody Guthrie’s autobiography–Bound for Glory.
