The essential Bob Dylan
It all started in 1959, when a scruffy 18-year-old piano player and wannabe rock-and-roller told his new band leader to call him by the stage name Elston Gunn, shunning the birth name that had so far defined Robert Zimmerman's life growing up in an insular Jewish community in tiny Hibbing, Minn. He would soon change his name again--to Bob Dylan--another in a decades-long series of efforts to define himself on his own increasingly enigmatic terms. But as he complains in his new autobiography-- Chronicles: Volume One --due in bookstores this week, Dylan soon discovered that his listeners had other ideas.
Captivated by moving, often cabalistic lyrics that invited their interpretation, his fans and the press saw in him something far more than the folk musician saw in himself.
Saddled with such onerous monikers as Spokesman for a Generation and, even, St. Dylan, he became a recluse. He retreated with his family to artsy little Woodstock, N.Y., where he was nonetheless pestered by a growing horde of zealous followers who had come to view Dylan as sort of a modern-day prophet.
Secrets and mystique . Desperate to reclaim a "normal" life, he decided that the only way to break the spell was to break the mold. So instead of writing more protest songs, he cut a banal country-western album, Nashville Skyline , even taking on a country twang. It was yet another example of an almost pathological determination to defy his definers. It's a path that has more recently led him to pen and star in last year's inscrutable film Masked and Anonymous and to appear in ads for the lingerie company Victoria's Secret.
Yet Dylan's grandest effort at subterfuge may be his new book, an autobiography that lucidly plumbs his 1960s-era back pages but leaves out crucial details, such as those about his near-death motorcycle accident in 1966 and his later conversion to Christianity.
He put out a book that may not leave us any more informed about him than when we started, says Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis.
In other words, Dylan, now 63, has written an autobiography the same way he does everything--on his own terms. -Alex Markels
This story appears in the October 11, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.