Restless Hello

The Dylan Industry never rests. It forges ahead, impervious to time, place, fashion, and fancy, growing larger by the year while the man at the center of its attentions—when not doing the steering himself—tends to remain cagey, canny, private, poker-faced. Paul Williams, the author of five Dylan books and counting, once noted that there's always a Dylan retrospective going on somewhere. The Dylan Industry makes sure this stays so; it maintains a steady thrum and kicks into gear every three or four years, generally timed to a major Dylan event. The last couple times were albums: 1997's Time Out of Mind (its momentum sustained by Live 1966, a legendary bootleg officially released for the first time the following year) and 2001's "Love and Theft." Although 2004 saw the issue of the over-praised The Bootleg Series Volume 6: Live 1964—Concert at Philharmonic Hall (Columbia/Legacy), now the spotlight's on a book—and, the Experience Music Project hopes, on a related exhibit.

The most interesting thing about the Dylan Industry is that it's self-generating, and nowhere more than in publishing, the Industry's epicenter. The literary market is never short of new Dylan product, especially this year—I've seen no less than a dozen new or updated books in 2004, and I've probably missed a few. Needless to say, no normal person need bother with most of them. This isn't always an insult: Oliver Trager's Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Billboard) may be classic forest-for-trees fanaticism, but it's info-crammed enough for a professional to find handy as a reference. But try to find any use for A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood on the Tracks (Da Capo), in which British writer Andy Gill provides pompous commentary while co-author Kevin Odegard recalls, in monotonous detail, which instruments he and his fellow musicians used while playing on the half of the album that was recorded in Minneapolis.

This year has also seen microscopic studies by Michael Gray (the third edition of Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan) and Christopher Ricks (Dylan's Visions of Sin, the highest-profile of these books—aside from Dylan's own—thanks to Ricks' clout as a poetry-world heavy). There's David Boucher's comparative study of Dylan and Leonard Cohen; Jim Ellison's useful, if frustrating, Younger Than That Now: The Collected Interviews With Bob Dylan (which misses two classics—Playboy, 1966, by Nat Hentoff, and Rolling Stone, 2001, by Mikal Gilmore); and Benjamin Hedin's less useful Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader. There's even a Rough Guides volume by Nigel Williamson that sums it all up nicely, as is the series' wont, though it's pretty humdrum critically: When Williamson writes, "'Love and Theft' is not as important an album as Time Out of Mind," it's essentially code for "Time Out of Mind is a lot more boring than 'Love and Theft.'" And then there's Dylan's Lyrics 1962–2001, which has been kicking around in various guises since 1973 and is exactly what it looks like.

So, shockingly, is Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster), the first of three projected memoirs by Dylan himself. If you've set foot in a bookstore or picked up a mass-market publication this fall, you have probably figured out that this tome—one of the shortest of the new books—is the Big Kahuna in all of Dylania right now. The undercurrent of every review I've seen of the thing has been sheer disbelief that it even exists. "A lot of the Dylanologists I talked to when I was putting this together were shocked it even came out," says Jasen Emmons, the curator of EMP's new exhibit, "Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956–1966," which opens Saturday, Nov. 20. "It had been rumored for so long that everyone was convinced it would never happen."

Or worse, that the result would be evasive in some manner: Maybe gnomic on the order of Tarantula, Dylan's first book, written in 1965 and issued five years later (essentially a semipoetic absurdist riff, a long version of the liner notes from one of his '60s albums), or maybe a glossy rundown of hard facts that would skip or deny the thornier aspects of his life. But it turns out that Dylan remembers more than you'll ever forget, and he remembers in detail. It's tempting to compare the reception of the book with that of Brian Wilson Presents Smile, the wholly rerecorded version of a scrapped, 37-year-old Beach Boys album that several influential critics are calling the album of the year. The difference is that even in unfinished, bootlegged form, Smile always depended to some degree on the listener's willingness to be swept away by Wilson's aural fantasias. Even at his most fanciful, Dylan has never offered much in the way of escape.

Which isn't to say that Chronicles doesn't traffic in nostalgia to some degree. It's just that the nostalgia belongs entirely to Dylan and not his fans. The three periods he writes about—from high school to his signing with Columbia Records (which scene begins and ends the book), encompassing his apprenticeship in Minneapolis' and New York's folk scenes, and the making of two albums, 1970's New Morning and 1989's Oh Mercy—have little resonance for the public at large; after fallow periods, both albums were considered "comebacks" upon release, but today nobody but hard-core Dylanologists considers them major works.