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Bob Dylan has finally completed the first part of his long-awaited memoirs. Dylan initially delivered 30,000 words, but his publishers, Simon & Schuster, understandably thought this a trifle short. The singer has now doubled the word count. The first of three volumes will relate his time in the early 1960s, traipsing around New York clubs, listening and then composing. – (Times online)
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WerbungKlar, ich werd’s kaufen und lesen, aber der Verdacht, dass sich da wer an einer Kunstform versucht, die er nicht beherrscht, ist da.
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Wenn wir schon alles falsch machen, dann wenigstens richtig.Chronicles
Autobiografie – Die 60er Jahrevon Bob Dylan (Autor)
ISBN : 3-455-09385-X
Originalsprache : Amerikanisch
Originaltitel : Chronicles
Seiten : 28819,90 EUR (D)
20,50 EUR (A)
33,60 SFR (CH)Erscheint am : 15. November 2004
Am 11. April 1961 stand er zum ersten Mal auf einer großen Bühne: Der neunzehnjährige Bob Dylan spielte als Begleitmusiker der Blues-Legende John Lee Hooker im New Yorker „Gerde’s Folk City“. Plötzlich war er da, im Big Apple, das Milchgesicht aus Minnesota. Und schon ein halbes Jahr später unterschrieb er seinen ersten Plattenvertrag. Das Album „Bob Dylan“ erschien 1962, und mit ihm begann die Zeit der internationalen musikalischen Proteste – „blowing in the wind“. Angeführt von Bob Dylan in New Yorks Greenwich Village.
Dann kam ein Moment, der vielen als Verrat erschien. Auf dem Newport Folk Festival 1965 schloss Dylan seine Gitarre an einen Verstärker an und gab damit das Signal zum Übergang vom Folksong zum Rock, dem ein ganzes Heer von Musikern folgte. Die Zeit der Drogen, Flower Power und Hippies begann. Er heiratete, hatte einen Motorradunfall, der ihn fast das Leben kostete, ihm aber auch eine Zeit der Besinnung verschaffte. Und einen musikalischen Neubeginn: den Klassiker „John Wesley Harding“. Das ist der Hintergrund eines Lebens in den sechziger Jahren, wie man es sich bewegter kaum vorstellen kann.Dylan, Protagonist der internationalen Rockszene und Identifikationsfigur ganzer Generationen, hat nie viel über sich erzählt. Jetzt tut er es.
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Originally posted by dock@25 Jan 2004, 23:07
Dylan initially delivered 30,000 words, but his publishers, Simon & Schuster, understandably thought this a trifle short. The singer has now doubled the word count.Da liefert er doch die Werbeslogans gleich mit:
NEU! JETZT MIT 100% MEHR INHALT!oder
ZWEI WÖRTER ZUM PREIS VON EINEM!
Kleingedruckt: Mindestabgabemenge 60.000--
What's a sweetheart like me doing in a dump like this?„Chronicles: Volume One“ & „Lyrics 1962-2001“
„the first in a series of the artist's self-penned personal histories“ / „first-person narratives focusing on significant periods in Dylan's life and career“
(Simon and Schuster über „Chronicles“, 24.8.2004)Das Verlagshaus Simon and Schuster teilte am 24.8.2004 mit, dass der erste Band von Dylans Erinnerungen unter dem Titel „Chronicles: Volume One“ am 12.10.2004 in den USA erhältlich sein wird.
Das 304 Seiten umfassende Werk behandle Dylans Karriere in den 60er Jahren. Die erste Auflage soll bei 250.000 Exemplaren liegen.
In Deutschland soll der Band am 15.11.2004 bei Hoffmann und Campe erscheinen. Die gebundene Ausgabe soll ca. 320 Seiten umfassen.
Ebenfalls am 12.10.2004 soll in den USA „Lyrics: 1962-2001“ erscheinen.
Die ca. 1200 Seiten starke zweisprachige Ausgabe der Songtexte soll in Deutschland (wie „Chronicles“) am 15.11.2004 erscheinen. Die Songtexte ins Deutsche übertragen hat der Schriftsteller, Übersetzer und Herausgeber (deutsche Werkausgaben von Rudyard Kipling und J. L. Borges) Gisbert Haefs.
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Habe ein ähnliches Buch , von 2001(Verlag)
Writings and Drawings heisst es und ist von 1973:-)--
Die Amerikaner erfanden das Internet, die Deutschen regulieren es. Jeder macht das, was er am besten kann. (Paul C. Paules über das Multimediagesetz)The Book of Bob
Bob Dylan is about to publish a remarkably candid, long-awaited memoir. He gave us the first excerpt, and we sat down for an extraordinarily wide-ranging talk
By David GatesNewsweekOct. 4 issue – When I tell Bob Dylan he's the last person I'd have expected to turn autobiographer, he laughs and says, „Yeah, me too.“ It's not just that he guards his privacy so carefully that he's arranged to meet in a motel room someplace in the Midwest—which is all he'd like us to specify—to talk about his forthcoming book, „Chronicles, Volume One.“ (Dylan supposedly got in without being spotted, but there's a funny vibe here. Why is our pot of coffee on the house?) His early public persona was built on self-protectively enigmatic statements and artful misdirection, like the yarns he used to tell about being a traveling carny; even Robert Zimmerman's stage name was an invention. And the songs that made Dylan so burdensomely famous—exhibit A, „Like a Rolling Stone,“ with Miss Lonely, her diplomat and the Siamese cat on his shoulder—seemed to tell his personal truth, and a lot of other people's, by means of surreal evasion. „I'm used to writing songs,“ he says, „and songs—I can fill 'em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book like this, you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted.“ He's clearly proud of the book, but he didn't enjoy writing the thing. At all. „Lest we forget, while you're writing, you're not living. What do they call it? Splendid isolation? I don't find it that splendid.“
Dylan, 63, looks younger and healthier than he did when I spoke with him in 1997, the year his spooky, world-weary album „Time Out of Mind“ re-established him as a vital contemporary—after what he claims was a quarter century of artistic „downward spiral“—and introduced him to a new generation of listeners. Back then, he was just recovering from a near-fatal infection of the tissues around his heart. Now, sitting at a small table with a view of the parking lot, sad little suburban trees and a lowering sky, he seems like a wiry kid eager to get outdoors—but he's also perfectly happy, as before, to shoot the breeze about music. „When I was talking to you earlier,“ he begins—as if it had been a couple of hours ago, rather than seven years. He gives a shout-out to Elvis Costello („'Everyday I Write the Book'—I just did that“) and to Carole King: „'You've Got a Friend' on some level means more to me than a lot of my songs do.“ He testifies to his admiration for Bing Crosby and for Willie Nelson, his informed skepticism about hip-hop („There's a lot of clever minds behind that, no question about it. But you know, less is more“), and his overall pessimism about the present-day scene: „I don't think music is ever going to be the same as what it meant to us. You hear it, but you don't hear it.“ Like all modernists, he's a nostalgic—what else would you be modernist about?—but he's clearly excited about his own recent music. These days, he says, with that familiar rising inflection, „I'm sort of doing what I want to do? I mean not sort of what I want to do, I am doing what I want to do. Or what I believe I was put here to do.“ He's got six or eight songs toward a new album, and he hopes to finish more before he goes back on the road next month. Then he wants to start re-recording many of his old songs, this time „with the proper structures. A lot of these songs can have, like, a dozen different structures to them. I can't hope to do all that. But I can provide a few things for future generations.“ He takes another sip from his Styrofoam cup.
„Chronicles,“ which will be in stores Oct. 5, may have been a detour from Dylan's real work: it occupied him on and off for three years, writing on a manual typewriter in capital letters, to make it easier for an assistant to read and retype. But it's hardly an arty curiosity like his post-Beat, all-lowercase 1966 novel „Tarantula.“ It's an attempt by the most influential cultural figure now alive—no? who else?—to give us a straightforward look at his life. It comes along, coincidentally, at a moment when mainstream literary writers are busy arguing for Dylan's importance: in the British critic Christopher Ricks's study „Dylan's Visions of Sin,“ and soon in „Studio A,“ a collection of pieces on Dylan by the likes of Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody and Sam Shepard, as well as Dylan himself. (Simon & Schuster has also issued an updated collection of Dylan's lyrics—and Scribner has reprinted „Tarantula.“)
„Chronicles,“ written at the urging of Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal, is neither a cradle-to-one-foot-in-the-grave autobiography nor a true memoir, tightly focused on a single crucial period. Instead, as Dylan puts it, „It's like I had a full deck, and I cut the cards and whatever you see you go with that. I realize there's a great gap in it.“ What he saw ended up as an evocation of his early days in Greenwich Village, chapters on the genesis of two lesser-known albums, „New Morning“ (1970) and „Oh Mercy“ (1989), and a section on his forced retreat from his own celebrity. (It's the subject of the exclusive excerpt that follows this piece.) The Biblical title Rosenthal suggested made intuitive sense to Dylan. „'Chronicles' just means—I'm not sure what it means“—he laughs—“but it would seem to be some kind of thing where you can make right use of the past.“
Critics may complain that the book doesn't include the back pages they want most: his famous 1966 motorcycle accident gets a single sentence, and there's nothing about his 1977 divorce, his 1978 conversion to evangelical Christianity or the origin and the making of such masterworks as „Blood on the Tracks“ (1975), „Slow Train Coming“ (1979), „Infidels“ (1983) or „Time Out of Mind.“ (He did write about „Blood on the Tracks“; that chapter, and much more that he's written, may appear in subsequent volumes—“When I slink into the corner, maybe.“) But Dylan has a different sense of priorities. „I mean, I'm in possession of what really matters.“ And one thing that seems to matter overwhelmingly is other people. He's written sharp-eyed portraits of everyone from the poet Archibald MacLeish—who wanted Dylan to collaborate on a musical play—to the opium-smoking bohemian couple who put him up in the Village. Jack Dempsey even gets a cameo on the first page. „You know how I would remember stuff? I would remember people,“ he says. „Once I figured out who was there, I could make something of it. I didn't go strong on anybody, you know? I think I went rather light. But in saying that, I'm not a big fan of polite literature, so there would have to be an edge to it.“ Dylan's songs have always teemed with people, from the real-life Hattie Carroll and Hurricane Carter to such indelible figures as the clueless Mr. Jones in „Ballad of a Thin Man“ and the back-stabbing wanna-be in „Positively Fourth Street.“ But „Chronicles“ should dispel any notion that Dylan spends his real life exclusively absorbed in the splendid isolation of his private visions. While everybody was obsessively watching Dylan, he was watching them.
There's always been something uniquely strange about Dylan's fame, the often-creepy intensity with which people have been drawn to him—or rather, to his mystique. „The songs definitely had a lot to do with it,“ he says. Well, yeah. It went dangerously past ordinary adulation. At its worst, in the late 1960s and early '70s, Dylan experienced a disorienting, terrifying and downright infuriating combination of stalking and deification. As he writes in „Chronicles,“ „It would have driven anybody mad“—and it goes a long way toward explaining why arranging for an interview with him still feels like setting up a meeting to pass nuclear secrets.
As Dylan sees it, his fame distorted not only his life but his art; he reacted to it with new music calculated to baffle expectations, and he ended up baffling himself. „I didn't know what it was I was really doing. I was going on reputation. Which buys you a certain sum, but you're not in control. And until you gain control, you're never quite sure you're doing the right thing? In my case anyway? So I went for a long time precisely on that fame that we're talking about. But—it was like a bag of wind. I didn't realize it was slipping away until it had slipped away.“ And how long did this go on? „Artistically speaking, it would have to have begun sometime in Woodstock—not personally, but in a public way—till maybe when that 'Time Out of Mind' record came out.“ I command myself to keep my mouth shut. He's talking about the 25 years that produced „Blood on the Tracks,“ „Slow Train Coming,“ „Shot of Love,“ „Infidels“ and its sublime outtakes, and—no. Let's not argue with the man who's in possession of what really matters. I take another sip from my cup. A china cup. Not being Bob Dylan, I had no problem making a run to the restaurant down the hall, though the coffee was still on the house.
Outside the window, rain's now falling on the parking lot. Dylan must have seen so many of these gloomy Midwestern days when he was growing up in northern Minnesota. The photo on the cover of „Chronicles“ shows Times Square in 1961, the year he came to New York, but as a kid, he says, „I had no idea of what a city was like. And I think it probably made me who I am today. The country where I came from—it's pretty bleak. And it's cold. And there's a lot of water. So you could dream a lot. The difference between me now and then is that back then, I could see visions. The me now can dream dreams.“ His early songs, he says, were visionary, however much they drew on his meticulous observation of the real world around him. „What you see in 'Chronicles' is a dream,“ he says. „It's already happened.“
You would have to be Bob Dylan—which is what all those stalkers must ultimately have wanted from him—to grasp fully what he's trying to tell you. But it must have to do with his having to accept the loss of his original mode of creation, in which the songs seemed to come to him without his knowing what he was doing. Does he still have that same access to—I don't know how to put the question. He helps me out. „No, not in the same way,“ he says. „Not in the same way at all. But I can get there, by following certain forms and structures. It's not luck. Luck's in the early years. In the early years, I was trying to write and perform the sun and the moon. At a certain point, you just realize that nobody can do that.“ In the myth that he's structured to explain himself to himself—and he really is the one in possession of that truth—“Time Out of Mind“ must mark the point of that acceptance. „Chronicles,“ the „dream“ in which he found himself constrained to tell the literal truth, is his attempt, at long last, to explain himself to us.
in Deutschland ab dem 1.10.04 erhältlich !!
Übersetzung folgt am 15.11.04 !!
ebenso eine Neuauflage seiner Texte bis 02 !!
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Auszüge aus Chronicles !!
'On the Run'
By the late '60s, Dylan had been anointed—by whom and as what, he didn't know. An exclusive excerpt on the infuriating, dizzying wind tunnel of fameI had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses. Even the horrifying news items of the day, the gunning down of the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X … I didn't see them as leaders being shot down, but rather as fathers whose families had been left wounded. Being born and raised in America, the country of freedom and independence, I had always cherished the values and ideals of equality and liberty. I was determined to raise my children with those ideals.
A few years earlier Ronnie Gilbert, one of The Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, „And here he is … take him, you know him, he's yours.“ I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction. Elvis had never even been introduced like that. „Take him, he's yours!“ What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn't belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. I'd left my hometown only ten years earlier, wasn't vociferating the opinions of anybody. My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilization. Being true to yourself, that was the thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.
People think that fame and riches translate into power, that it brings glory and honor and happiness. Maybe it does, but sometimes it doesn't. I found myself stuck in Woodstock, vulnerable and with a family to protect. If you looked in the press, though, you saw me being portrayed as anything but that. It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat—someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn't the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was—a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn't a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad.
Early on, Woodstock had been very hospitable to us. I had actually discovered the place long before moving there. Once, at night, driving down from Syracuse after playing a show, I told my manager about the town. We were going to be driving right by it. He said he was looking for a place to buy a country house. We drove through the town, he spied a house he liked and bought it there and then. I had bought one later on, and it was in this same house that intruders started to break in day and night. Tensions mounted almost immediately and peace was hard to come by. At one time the place had been a quiet refuge, but now, no more. Roadmaps to our homestead must have been posted in all fifty states for gangs of dropouts and druggies. Moochers showed up from as far away as California on pilgrimages. Goons were breaking into our place all hours of the night. At first, it was merely the nomadic homeless making illegal entry—seemed harmless enough, but then rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest began to arrive—unaccountable-looking characters, gargoyle-looking gals, scarecrows, stragglers looking to party, raid the pantry. Peter LaFarge, a folksinger friend of mine, had given me a couple of Colt single-shot repeater pistols, and I also had a clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle around, but it was awful to think about what could be done with those things.
The authorities, the chief of police (Woodstock had about three cops) had told me that if anyone was shot accidentally or even shot at as a warning, it would be me that would be going to the lockup. Not only that, but creeps thumping their boots across our roof could even take me to court if any of them fell off. This was so unsettling. I wanted to set fire to these people. These gate-crashers, spooks, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life and the fact that I was not to piss them off or they could press charges really didn't appeal to me. Each day and night was fraught with difficulties. Everything was wrong, the world was absurd. It was backing me into a corner. Even persons near and dear offered no relief.
Once in the midsummer madness I was riding in a car with Robbie Robertson, the guitar player in what later was to be called The Band. I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system. He says to me, „Where do you think you're gonna take it?“
I said, „Take what?“
„You know, the whole music scene.“ The whole music scene! The car window was rolled down about an inch. I rolled it down the rest of the way, felt a gust of wind blow into my face and waited for what he said to die away—it was like dealing with a conspiracy. No place was far enough away. I don't know what everybody else was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. That was my deepest dream. After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back. Woodstock had turned into a nightmare, a place of chaos. Now it was time to scramble out of there in search of some new silver lining and that's what we did. We moved to New York City for a while in hopes to demolish my identity, but it wasn't any better there. It was even worse. Demonstrators found our house and paraded up and down in front of it chanting and shouting, demanding for me to come out and lead them somewhere—stop shirking my duties as the conscience of a generation. Once the street was blocked off and our house was picketed by firebrands with city permits, demonstrators roaring and snorting. The neighbors hated us. To them it must have seemed like I was something out of a carnival show—some exhibition in the Palace of Wonders. They would stare at me when they saw me, like they'd stare at a shrunken head or a giant jungle rat. I pretended that I didn't care. Eventually, we tried moving West—tried a few different places, but in short time reporters would come sniffing around in hopes to gain some secret—maybe I'd confess some sin. Our address would be printed in the local press and then the same thing would start up. Even if these reporters had been allowed in the house, what would they find? A whole lotta stuff—stacking toys, push and pull toys, child-sized tables and chairs—big empty cardboard boxes—science kits, puzzles and toy drums … I wasn't going to let anybody in the house.
As for house rules, we didn't have many. If the kids wanted to play basketball in the kitchen, they played basketball in the kitchen. If they got into the pots and pans, we put all the pots and pans out on the floor. My house was chaotic inside as well as out. Joan Baez recorded a protest song about me that was getting big play, challenging me to get with it—come out and take charge, lead the masses—be an advocate, lead the crusade. The song called out to me from the radio like a public service announcement. The press never let up.
Once in a while I would have to rise up and offer myself for an interview so they wouldn't beat down the door. Usually the questions would start out with something like, „Can we talk further upon things that are happening?“ „Sure, like what?“ Reporters would shoot questions at me and I would tell them repeatedly that I was not a spokesman for anything or anybody and that I was only a musician. They'd look into my eyes as if to find some evidence of bourbon and handfuls of amphetamines. I had no idea what they were thinking. Later an article would hit the streets with the headline „Spokesman Denies That He's a Spokesman.“ I felt like a piece of meat that someone had thrown to the dogs. The New York Times printed quacky interpretations of my songs. Esquire magazine put a four-faced monster on their cover, my face along with Malcolm X's, Kennedy's and Castro's. What the hell was that supposed to mean? It was like I was on the edge of the earth. If anybody had any sound guidance or advice to offer, it wasn't forthcoming. My wife, when she married me, had no idea of what she was getting into. Me neither, actually, and now we were in a no win situation.
For sure my lyrics had struck nerves that had never been struck before, but if my songs were just about the words, then what was Duane Eddy, the great rock-and-roll guitarist, doing recording an album full of instrumental melodies of my songs? Musicians have always known that my songs were about more than just words, but most people are not musicians. What I had to do was recondition my mind and stop putting the blame on external forces. I had to educate myself, get rid of some baggage. The solitude of time was what I didn't have. Whatever the counterculture was, I'd seen enough of it. I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese. What the hell are we talking about? Horrible titles any way you want to look at it. All code words for Outlaw.
It was tough moving around—like the Merle Haggard song, „… I'm on the run, the highway is my home.“ I don't know if Haggard ever had to get his family out with him, but I know I did. It's a little different when you have to do that. The landscape burned behind us. The press was in no hurry to retract their judgment and I couldn't just lie there, had to take the bull by the horns myself and remodel the image of me, change the perception of it anyway. There aren't any rules to cover an emergency of this kind. This was a new thing for me and I wasn't used to thinking this way. I'd have to send out deviating signals, crank up the wrecking train—create some different impressions.
At first I was only able to do little things, local things. Tactics, really. Unexpected things like pouring a bottle of whiskey over my head and walking into a department store and act pie-eyed, knowing that everyone would be talking amongst themselves when I left. I was hoping that the news would spread. What mattered to me most was getting breathing room for my family. The whole spectral world could go to hell. My outer image would have to be something a bit more confusing, a bit more humdrum. It's hard to live like this. It takes all your effort. The first thing that has to go is any form of artistic self-expression that's dear to you. Art is unimportant next to life, and you have no choice. I had no hunger for it anymore, anyway. Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn't work. It was impossible now for me to observe anything without being observed. Even when I walked to the corner store someone would spot me and sneak away to find a phone. In Woodstock I'd be out in the yard and a car would come rolling up, some guy would jump out of the passenger side, point in my direction and then walk away—and a bunch of sightseers would then come down the hill. Citizens would see me coming down the street and cross it, didn't want to get caught—guilt by association. Sometimes in a restaurant (my name was widely known but my face not so at the time) one of the eaters who recognized me would go up to the cashier, point in my direction and whisper, „That's him over there.“ The cashier would tell someone and the news would go from table to table. It was like lightning struck the place. Necks would stretch. Folks chewing their food would spit it out, look at one another and say, „That him?“ „You mean that guy that was sitting over there at that table with the bunch of kids?“ It was like moving a mountain. My house was being battered, ravens constantly croaking ill omens at our door. What kind of alchemy, I wondered, could create a perfume that would make reaction to a person lukewarm, indifferent and apathetic? I wanted to get some. I had never intended to be on the road of heavy consequences and I didn't like it. I wasn't the toastmaster of any generation, and that notion needed to be pulled up by its roots. Liberty for myself and my loved ones had to be secured. I had no time to kill and I didn't like what was being thrown at me. This main meal of garbage had to be mixed up with some butter and mushrooms and I'd have to go great lengths to do it. You gotta start somewhere.
I went to Jerusalem, got myself photographed at the Western Wall wearing a skullcap. The image was transmitted worldwide instantly and quickly all the great rags changed me overnight into a Zionist. This helped a little. Coming back I quickly recorded what appeared to be a country-western record and made sure it sounded pretty bridled and housebroken. The music press didn't know what to make of it. I used a different voice, too. People scratched their heads. I started a rumor with my record company that I would be quitting music and going to college, the Rhode Island School of Design—which eventually leaked out to the columnists. „He won't last a month,“ some people said. Journalists began asking in print, „Whatever happened to the old him?“ They could go to hell, too. Stories were printed about me trying to find myself, that I was on some eternal search, that I was suffering some kind of internal torment. It all sounded good to me. I released one album (a double one) where I just threw everything I could think of at the wall and whatever stuck, released it, and then went back and scooped up everything that didn't stick and released that, too. I missed out on Woodstock—just wasn't there. Altamont—sympathy for the devil—missed that, too. Eventually I would even record an entire album based on Chekhov short stories—critics thought it was autobiographical—that was fine. I played a part in a movie, wore cowboy duds and galloped down the road. Not much required there. I guess I was naive.
The novelist Herman Melville's work went largely unnoticed after Moby-Dick. Critics thought that he crossed the literary line and recommended burning Moby-Dick. By the time of his death he was largely forgotten.
I had assumed that when critics dismissed my work, the same thing would happen to me, that the public would forget about me. How mad is that? Eventually, I would have to face the music—go back to performing—the long-awaited ballyhooed reunion tour—gypsy tours—changing ideologies like tires, like shoes, like guitar strings. What's the difference? As long as my own form of certainty stayed intact, I owed nobody nothing. I wasn't going to go deeper into the darkness for anybody. I was already living in the darkness. My family was my light and I was going to protect that light at all cost. That was where my dedication was, first, last and everything in-between. What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Not a damn thing. The press? I figured you lie to it. For the public eye, I went into the bucolic and mundane as far as possible. In my real life I got to do the things that I loved the best and that was all that mattered—the Little League games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school, camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing, fishing… I was living on record royalties. In reality I was imperceptible, my image, that is. Sometime in the past I had written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn't know if I ever would again and I didn't care.
The actor Tony Curtis once told me that fame is an occupation in itself, that it is a separate thing. And Tony couldn't be more right. The old image slowly faded and in time I found myself no longer under the canopy of some malignant influence. Eventually different anachronisms were thrust upon me—anachronisms of lesser dilemma—though they might seem bigger. Legend, Icon, Enigma (Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite)—stuff like that, but that was all right. These titles were placid and harmless, threadbare, easy to get around with them. Prophet, Messiah, Savior—those are tough ones.
From „Chronicles, Volume One“ by Bob Dylan. To be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. © 2004 by Bob Dylan.
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Sunday Telegraph interview
Interviewed by John Preston.
When it was announced two years ago that Bob Dylan was writing his autobiography, there was general astonishment among his legions of obsessive fans. Here, after all, was a man who has spent his life hiding behind carefully erected smokescreens of privacy and elusiveness. While other rock stars may have spilled details of their albums, their affairs and their addictions with delirious abandon, Dylan has always kept his public utterances to a gnomic few. All across the Internet questions flew back and forth. Would Dylan ever complete the book? How were his powers of recall? And perhaps most critically – particularly for anyone who has attempted to read Dylan's only other published work, his I97I novel, Tarantula – would it make any sense?
But Dylan hasn't spent more than 40 years wrong footing people for nothing. Not only did he deliver Chronicles Volume One on time, but it turns out to be a remarkable book, richly atmospheric and full of insights into his work, along with vivid impressions from his life.
Then came another surprise: Dylan was prepared to talk, to give his first interview to a British newspaper in 20 years. And there was one more shock in store. Normally interviews with Bob Dylan tend to be tortuous affairs, full of yawning silences and mumbling evasions. But when I spoke to him at his farm in Minnesota where Dylan has been taking a rare break from performing, he confounded expectations by being friendly, relaxed and only too happy to chew the fat and reminisce.
He was quick to point out that it wasn't actually his idea to write the book. Rather, his publisher suggested it and despite a few misgivings he decided to have a try. „In part, I guess I wanted to set the record straight,“ he says in his light, mid-western accent, “I knew there had been other books about me and I'd even read a couple of them – although – frankly you can't spend time reading books about yourself, no matter who you are.”
„Some of the books were more accurate than others, but no one knew the full story, apart from me. So I sat down and started tapping away on my old manual typewriter. Initially the book was going to be about the background to some of my albums, but then it took on a life of its own. The chapters about my early days in New York were supposed to be about how I recorded my second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. But somehow I never quite got there. Every few weeks I'd send off some pages to my publisher and ask if they thought they were usable. They seemed happy and so I just kept on going.
Dylan found writing Chronicles a very strange experience. „For a start I'm used to writing songs and I use a lot of symbol and metaphor. People can misinterpret that. But here I was determined to write a book that no one could misinterpret. It was difficult, though. Writing a song is a more straightforward process: you go verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and pretty soon you're done. With a book you can't use the same dynamics.“
But Dylan's main problem – at least to begin with – was that he wasn't sure how reliable his memory would prove to be. „However, as I wrote, my memory seemed to unlock. I surprised myself with how much came back. I found I could visualise what people looked like and what they were wearing and even how particular rooms were furnished.“
The book starts with Dylan freshly arrived in New York from Minnesota, and being signed up by Columbia records. At Columbia, he was taken under the wing of one of the label's most respected producers, John Hammond, who had only heard two of Dylan's original songs, „but he had a premonition there would be more“.
From the word go, Dylan hung up a large mask between himself and the world. He changed his name, partly in tribute to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas – in the past Dylan has always denied naming himself after Thomas, but now he seems happy to acknowledge his influence. He also changed his background. When people asked him where he'd come from and how he'd arrived, he claimed to have ridden into New York City on a freight train.
In fact, as he admits with a chuckle, he had driven in from the Midwest in a four-door I957 sedan. But there could be no doubting his determination to succeed. Apart from anything else, he felt he had been singled out by destiny.
“I did have that feeling; I'd had it since I was a kid, you know. I grew up in a very isolated place and throughout my boyhood years I felt like I was like a dog hunting in dreams, always looking for something, although I wasn't sure what exactly. But from the start I had this absolute confidence. While I didn't know how I was going to get there, it didn't surprise me when I did. If I hadn't have had that confidence, I would have gone off and done something else.“
Dylan was born in I94I and brought up in the iron-ore mining town of Hibbing. When he was a boy his heroes, he recalls, were Robin Hood and St George, the Dragon Slayer. His Jewish seamstress grandmother, whom he plainly adored, had emigrated from Odessa in Russia, losing a leg along the way. Originally his father, Abe, who worked for the Standard Oil Company, wanted his son to become a mechanical engineer. Dylan, however, had, other ideas. At one stage, he insists he thought seriously about enrolling in the army and going to West Point. „Yeah, that was something I'd forgotten all about, but then it came back to me as I was writing.“
Instead of West Point, Dylan headed south for New York City. As he describes it, the New York of the early I960s sounds like a Greenwich Village version of La Boheme, full of blazingly intense intellectuals hanging about in book-lined lofts and smoky folk clubs.
It was a world apart from anything he'd been used to in Hibbing, and Dylan plunged into it with ravenous zeal. At a friend's apartment, he devoured books – Rousseau’s Social Contract, Machiavelli's The Prince, even the I9th~century Prussian General, Karl Clausewift's treatise on military strategy – cramming his head full of anything he could pick up. „A lot of these books were too big to read,“ he recalls, „like giant shoes fitted for large-footed people.“
Soon Dylan was performing in the folk clubs, modelling himself on his great idol, Woody Guthrie. At the time Guthrie was dying with Huntingdon's chorea in Greystone Hospital, a sanatorium in New Jersey. Eager to meet his hero, Dylan went to see him. „He had no idea who I was when I first turned up. But very few people were going to see him then. Hardly anyone even knew who he was, certainly not in the sanatorium. I never saw any other visitors there. I don't think he was lonely necessarily, but he seemed to like my company. I must have, gone to see him about a dozen times. I'd bring him cigarettes, play songs and we'd just talk about this and that. It was a terrible place; like an asylum really. I always found it very draining psychologically going there.“
Meanwhile, the Greenwich Village folk devotees weren't too sure what to make of Dylan. “Basically, folk performers fell into one of two categories. Either they were commercial and had highly stylised nightclub acts, or else they did southern mountain music. But I didn't do either of those things. I came from a rock 'n' roll background, although I did my best to hide that because I knew they'd be disapproving.“
Under Guthrie's influence, Dylan began writing his own songs. „I had a similar sense of destiny there. In one sense, writing songs was a gradual process and yet in another it seemed to happen very quickly. Over the course of a year I started writing a lot, but the experience I'd already had stood me in good stead. I'd learned a lot by the time I started writing my first songs.“
In September I96I, the critic Robert Shelton, writing in the New York Times reviewed a concert that Dylan had given at Gerde’s Folk City. “His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica, or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.“
A year later Dylan had written his great anti-war anthem, Blowin’ in the
Wind. It was the first in what was to be an extraordinarily long line of classic songs. But as soon as he’d mastered one form, Dylan was keen to move on, to experiment with new structures and instrumentation. Within four years he appeared to have left folk music behind. At the I965 Newport Folk Festival he played the electric guitar while outraged folk fans in the audience tried to boo him offstage.“In retrospect,” he says, “I think it was very hard to domesticate and tame my talent. However, some people seemed to think that listening to songs should be like listening to dull sermons. I didn't want anything like that. But at the same time I felt very much a part of the folk music tradition. All the lyrics I wrote came out of that idiom.”
It was a tradition that Dylan insists he never wanted to break with, even when he went electric, and as he puts it wryly, “gathered some notoriety I always kept in touch with older musicians, people in their fifties and sixties, like Mississippi John Hurt. Hard-core rural folksingers. They understood the complexity of my language and what I was trying to do. They didn't have any problem with it.”
Throughout the I960s, Dylan’s fame and reputation continued to escalate, to the point where he was constantly being referred to as „the spokesman of his generation“. It was a label he detested; he'd never sought such a role and he found the pressure of people's expectations increasingly hard to bear.
„Not only did I not want it, but I didn’t need it. I couldn’t understand it either. None of us like to be defined by what other people think of us. I wasn't the toastmaster of any generation and that notion had to be pulled up by the roots.”
All he wanted, he says, was to be left alone with his wife and children enjoying „a nine-to-five existence with a white picket fence and pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice“.
Following a motorcycle accident in July I966, he fled to Woodstock in upstate New York in an effort to put some distance between himself and his would-be disciples. But the fans, along with the mayhem, quickly followed. Soon, maps were being sold showing where Dylan's home was. Whenever he went out to a restaurant, the whole place would fall silent and everyone would start staring at him.
„It all turned into a nightmare,“ he remembers. In the end things got so bad that Dylan – ostensibly the great pacifist – was reduced to keeping guns in his house in case he and his family were attacked.
I wondered if he'd actually come close to having a nervous breakdown at the time. „I guess I did. None the less, you have to try to get on with your life and do the best you can. But it was terrible and also very disorientating. In the early years everything had been like a magic carpet ride for me – and then all at once it was over. Here was this thing that I'd wanted to do all my life, but suddenly I didn't feel I could do it anymore.
„Also, I was changing too. Now I had a wife and kids and different responsibilities. I realised I had to try to settle for another type of life; to take enjoyment out of little things. A lot about fame tastes good, or can do. Apart from anything else, you can use it to do a lot of good. But I wasn't seeing any of that back then.“
For several years Dylan took himself out of the limelight. His marriage to Sara Lowndes fell apart and he concentrated on trying to bring up his four children. “I remember thinking that art was sublime excrement, and I decided to turn my back on it for a while.“
Creatively, he foundered. He describes the experience as like being in a long dark tunnel. When I asked him how long it took him to emerge from the tunnel, he sighs and says, “Oh, a long time … But I got there in the end.”
It was in the I980s that Dylan hit his lowest ebb. His record sales plummeted and so did the quality of his live shows. Audiences stayed away, put off by Dylan’s ramblingly atonal delivery and his apparent indifference to his own material. “In reality,” he says, I was just above a club act.”
Unsure what direction to follow and unable to write any new songs, he found his old ones hanging heavy round his neck. “I was carrying a package of rotting meat … The glow was gone and the match had burned right to the end. I was going through the motions. The whisky had gone out of the bottle.“
For a he thought seriously about quitting, never recording or performing again. Then one evening in a bar he saw an old jazz singer whose style of performing came as a revelation to him. “Suddenly, it was like this guy had an open window to my soul.“ All at once he saw how he could sing with his voice „bypassing“ his brain, and „blasting up from the bottom of my lower self“.
From then on, things began to improve – slowly at first, and then with gathering momentum. His I989 album, Oh Mercy, was hailed as his best in years. His next, Time Out Of Mind won him a Grammy for album of the year in I997, and Things Have Changed, the song he wrote for the 2000 film Wonderboys won him as Oscar. Dylan was so delighted with his Oscar that lie took to carrying it on stage with him and displaying it to his audience.
It was in the late I980s that Dylan embarked on what soon became known as The Never Ending Tour – and he's been more or less on it ever since, criss-crossing the globe, playing about I50 concerts a year and seldom stopping for more than a month at a time.
I asked him if he thought he could ever have felt fulfilled if he had retired. „I'm not really sure. I think I would have missed the performing. I feel I need to perform more than I need to write. Having said that, though, I do get caught up in writing. Every time I come up with a new song it's like the first rose of May.“
A few years ago after he had been hospitalised for a heart condition Dylan said that „any day above ground was a good day“ as far as he was concerned. But life has looked up a good deal since then. His last album, Love and Theft, released in 200I, was hailed as one of the best things he has ever done. Now here he is, aged 63, a grandfather several times over, trawling through his back pages for what he says will eventually be a three-volume autobiography.
„I found writing the first volume quite an emotional experience in places. But then I'd put it aside and not look at it for a while. To be honest, I also found it quite a tedious process. I'm not a professional writer and I just didn’t get that sense of exhilaration that some writers feel. But I guess I'll keep on going. I've certainly got a lot more things to write about.“
There was one other question I wanted to ask. However much Dylan may hate being labelled as a spokesman of any kind, it's something he can never shake off completely. So did he think that the United States and Britain should have invaded Iraq?
Dylan barks with loud wheezy laughter. „Maybe I'll tackle that in the next book.“
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war am Samstag in der SZ !
Bob Dylan
Geständnisse einer Maske
Er schenkt uns sein Leben. Der Schurke hat eine riesige Autobiografie in die Maschine gehauen, alles, alles reingetippt. Und nur in Großbuchstaben. Der Buchherbst hat seine Sensation.
Von Willi Winkler
Gesund soll er ausschauen, viel besser als all die Jahre. Er lacht sogar, wenn es sein muss. Und Kaffee trinkt er, aus einem Styroporbecher. Und: er redet. Bob Dylan redet? Weil er ein Buch geschrieben hat. Sein Buch. 63 Jahre alt ist er jetzt und durch viele Formen geschritten, war Jude, Christ, wieder Jude, wieder Christ und immer Fundamentalist, nämlich Bob Dylan, Autor und Sänger von „Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues“ und „Tangled Up in Blue“, hat Fans und Verächter zu gleichen Teilen verstört über die Jahrzehnte und bekommt, nein, es ist keineswegs ausgeschlossen, in der übernächsten Woche womöglich endlich den Nobelpreis für Literatur.
Darauf wird er gut verzichten können, obwohl man sich gern vorstellt, wie die Bunte dann deutsche, also leer ausgegangene Autoren nach der Entscheidung fragt und den Martin Walser an seine Bemerkung erinnert, was man denn an diesem „herumzigeunernden Israeliten“ (M.W. 1978 über B.D.) eigentlich so toll finde.
Seine Musik, könnte man sagen.
Seine Lieder.
Also ihn.
Dieser Bob Dylan hat auf eigner Schreibmaschine mit lauter Großbuchstaben ein Buch getippt (oder doch auf ein allzeit bereites Tonband gesprochen), das endlich die Wahrheit über sein Leben bringen soll. Genug Lügen sind über ihn verbreitet, jetzt sollen, so hat er es wieder und wieder angekündigt, die Fakten folgen. Drei Bände „Chronicles“ sind vorgesehen, und der erste Band erscheint jetzt. Niemand hat ihn bisher zu lesen bekommen, aber bei amazon.com steht er bereits auf Platz 7.
Nur unter konspirativsten Bedingungen – „auf seiner Farm in Minnesota“, „irgendwo in einem Motel im Mittleren Westen“ – ließ sich der Autor für ein paar Journalisten sprechen und offenbar nur in Gesellschaft eines stark eingerosteten Autos, neben dem er sich fürs Cover von Newsweek fotografieren ließ. Dort erschien eine Kostprobe aus dem Buch, die aber ebenso wie das von dem Schauspieler und Regisseur Sean Penn gesprochene Hörbuch nicht allzu viel über den Autor verrät.
» Warum sollte er jetzt plötzlich plaudern, alles austratschen, was unsereins schon immer wissen wollte? «
Wenn er all die Jahre so kostbar tat mit seinem Leben, warum sollte er jetzt plötzlich plaudern, alles austratschen, was unsereins schon immer wissen wollte? Ja, warum? Nun, zum Beispiel, weil wir’s wissen wollen. Aber, das weiß er schon selber: „Mir gehört das, worauf es ankommt.“ Drum verfügt er allein drüber. Und in sehr freier Weise.
Im „Buch der Chronik“ (auf Englisch: „Chronicles“) des Alten Testaments, bei Martin Luther noch „Chronica“ geheißen, wird sehr aufwändig die Abstammungslinie des Volkes Israel erzählt, und so weiß man, dass dem Ur-Vater Adam Seth nachfolgte (denn Kain hatte doch Abel erschlagen und kam damit nicht mehr für die Nachfolge in Frage), dann Enosch, Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Henoch, Metuschalach, Lamech und schließlich Noah, der wiederum Sem, Ham und Japheth zeugte, die mit dem Zeugen dann gar nicht mehr aufhören konnten, was die Nachfahren erst recht ermutigte, bis die Chronik der Zeugungen und der Söhne (Töchter spielen einfach nicht die Rolle im Buch der Bücher) unweigerlich zum König David führt, den der Richter Samuel salbt, und den Höhepunkt des Königreichs Israel unter Salomo bringt, der den schönsten aller Tempel in Jerusalem bauen lässt.
Keine Lust auf den Anfang bei Adam und Eva
Aber der Autor der neuen Chronik hat erkennbar keine Lust, wieder bei Adam und Eva und Hibbing und 1941 in den Eisenerzgruben von Minnesota anzufangen, den Weg nach New York und Newport zu beschreiben, die jugend- und drogenbewegte Entwicklung von „Judas!“ und Sara-oh-Sara bis an die Klagemauer in Jerusalem und zum Budokan in Tokio nachzuerzählen.Und die Herzbeutelinfektion.
Und der Papst.
Die zweite Ehe.
Noch ein Kind.
Der Oscar für „Wonderboys“.
Der leckere Werbe-Clip neulich, für „Victoria’s Secret“.
Oder warum er so ruhelos umherzieht, fast jeden zweiten Tag ein Konzert gibt. Sondern von dem dahinsiechenden Woody Guthrie berichtet er, der seit Jahren an der unheilbaren Krankheit Chorea Huntington leidet und inzwischen im Greystone Hospital lebt. Kaum angekommen in New York, fährt der 20-jährige Bob Dylan hinüber nach New Jersey und erlebt eine gespenstische Irrenhausszene: im Flur schreien und heulen und (sind wir doch in der Bibel?) zähneklappern die Kranken, von Spinnen fühlt sich einer verfolgt, einer trägt einen Zylinder und hält sich für Uncle Sam, einer schmatzt, weil er wieder damit beschäftigt ist, zum Frühstück Kommunisten zu verspeisen.
Dylan pfeift aufs patentierte Schema
Bob Dylan, der noch Robert Zimmermann heißt, spielt dem verehrten Meister Guthrie dessen eigene Lieder vor und findet Anerkennung. Das würde man im klassischen Bildungsroman die Designierung nennen, der Ältere segnet den Jungen, dessen Talent er erkannt hat, und erwählt ihn zu seinem Nachfolger. Dylan pfeift aufs patentierte Schema und bringt uns eine vollkommen absurde Geschichte vor: Woody Guthrie sagt ihm also, bei sich zu Hause, unterm Bett, da finde er eine Schachtel mit Songs, und die seien für ihn, ein Geschenk, ein Vermächtnis!Der junge Mann steigt in Manhattan brav in die U-Bahn und fährt bis an die Endstation nach Coney Island, wo er die beschriebene Häuserzeile sieht, drauf zugeht und sich unversehens in einem Sumpf findet, den er dennoch zielstrebig durchwatet. Nass und steif gefroren bis hinauf zu den Knien, langt er bei Guthries Haus an, eine Babysitterin tut ihm auf, keine Ehefrau daheim, nur der Sohn Arlo, der den Penner hereinlässt, aber natürlich nichts weiß von einer Schachtel mit wertvollen, unveröffentlichten Songs seines kranken Vaters.
Vierzig Jahre später seien die Songs Billy Bragg und Wilco in die Hände gefallen, und die haben sie dann aufgenommen. Vierzig Jahre später!
Zeit und Raum sind aufgehoben
Aber Zeit und Raum sind aufgehoben bei diesem Schriftsteller, der Anfang ist das Ende und doch nur ein Versuch, den Leser irrezuführen. Rhapso- und ein wenig psalmodierend erzählt Bob Dylan diese und andere Geschichten aus seinem Leben. Er ist freundlich zu seinen Mitmenschen und will niemandem weh.Die Feinde von einst, die Freunde, die ihn eifersüchtig belauerten; Joan Baez, der er sich erst an den Hals warf, um sie dann doch sitzen zu lassen; der Manager Albert Grossman, der ihn auf mörderische Tourneen schickte; die Kollegen alle: Sie treten kaum mit ihren chronikalischen Namen auf, denn hier muss sich ein Einzelner, ein allerdings maßlos gefeierter Einzelner gegen die immer anbrandende Masse der anderen behaupten.
Vielleicht ist er schon auserwählt geboren, jedenfalls macht sich dieser Königssohn keine Mühe, eine Karriere aus der Finsternis ans Licht oder nur von unten nach oben nachzuerzählen.
Er war immer schon da, und dann wollte er immer sofort weg.
Weg aus dem Licht, fort mit dem Ruhm. In Ruhe sollen sie ihn lassen, und die Musik, seine, die ist doch nichts weiter als Musik. (So kann man sich täuschen.) Gelesen hat er auch in dieser ersten Zeit in New York wie ein Verrückter, Machiavellis „Fürsten“ durchgearbeitet, den „Contrat social“ von Rousseau und „Vom Kriege“ des guten Herrn Clausewitz. Wer weiß, wozu’s gut ist, später.Aber wollte er nicht mal, noch in Minnesota, vor New York, wie der Autor von „Masters of War“ jetzt einer kuhäugig staunenden Weltöffentlichkeit entbirgt, auf die Akademie nach West Point, Offizier werden, in den Krieg ziehen, General, Außenminister, Präsident werden sogar? „Hatt’ ich ganz vergessen, fiel mir aber beim Schreiben wieder ein.“ Toll.
Es war doch alles ganz anders, sagt er.
Hohepriester des Protestes
Der legendäre Unfall 1966 – Ist Dylan tot? Querschnittsgelähmt? Debilisiert? – war nichts weiter als eine Gelegenheit, sich dem Geschiebe, Geziehe, Gezerre der bösen Welt zu entziehen. „Ich hatte einen Unfall mit dem Motorrad, war verletzt worden, aber ich erholte mich.“ Vom Ruhm, der so schnell über ihn gekommen war, von „Bob Dylan“, den sie haben wollten. „Denn ich war gesalbt zum Chef der Rebellion, zum Hohepriester des Protests, zum Zar des Dissidententums, zum Großmeister des Ungehorsams, zum Führer der Freischärler, zum Kaiser der Abtrünnigen, zum Erzbischof der Anarchie, zum Großmonster. Alles nur Codenamen für den Außenseiter.“Denn er wollte nicht mehr das „Sprachrohr meiner Generation“ sein, auserkoren von – was für eine hinreißende Bezeichnung! – „schelmenhaften Radikalen“, kein Messias, kein nichts. Meint er das ernst? Er hatte doch nicht etwa einen Nervenzusammenbruch, fragt ihn der Sunday Telegraph fürsorglich. „Doch ja, wahrscheinlich. Trotzdem muss man irgendwie weiter machen, so gut es eben geht.“ Nach den großen Platten, den großen Tourneen, den großen Frauen, nach Ruhm, Warhol und Kiffen mit den Beatles wollte er nur noch seine Familie.
Also heiratete Bob Sara, zeugte mit ihr Jesse, zeugte Anna, zeugte Samuel, zeugte Jacob und träumte (’s ist doch wohl nicht wahr!) „von einem Acht-Stunden-Tag, einem Haus mit Bäumen vor der Tür, einem weißen Gartenzaun und rosanen Rosen hinten draußen“. In Woodstock ganz oben im Staat New York fand er ein Haus für sich und die wachsende Familie. Aber keinen Frieden. Sie waren doch auf der Suche nach ihm, die Hippies, die Außenseiter, all die Leute, die den Outlaw brauchten, damit sie am Montag wieder halbwegs beruhigt zur Arbeit und in den Acht-Stunden-Tag fahren konnten.
» Wenn sie mich sahen, starrten sie mich an, als wär ich ein Schrumpfkopf oder eine riesenhafte Dschungelratte «
Bob Dylan
Wie hätten sie ihn da ausgerechnet in Woodstock in Ruhe lassen können, in der Künstlerkolonie, wo das wilde Tier, der Rätselmann doch frei und für alle zu bestaunen herumlief? Drum belästigten sie ihn im Restaurant, lauerten vor seiner Tür, kamen bis aus Kalifornien angefahren, um aufs Dach seines Hauses zu kraxeln. „Wenn sie mich sahen, starrten sie mich an, als wär ich ein Schrumpfkopf oder eine riesenhafte Dschungelratte.“ Was ihm für Bilder einfallen!Schließlich bewaffnete er sich und legte sich ein Arsenal an Revolvern und Schrotflinten zu. Geschossen hat er dann doch nicht, sondern ist weggezogen nach New York, wo ihm dann ein anderer Fan auflauerte, der jeden Tag den Müll durchmusterte und eine „Befreit-Dylan-von-der-Nadel“-Kampagne begründete. Das hält keiner aus ohne einen wenigstens kleinen Nervenzusammenbruch.
Folgen einige sehr kryptische Bemerkungen über die Platten, die er in dieser Zeit aufnahm, an deren Titel er sich gar nicht mehr zu erinnern scheint, die er vielleicht sogar verachtet, aber das musste er doch tun, sagt er, damit er seine Fans abschüttelte und das „Sprachrohr einer Generation“ nicht mehr machen musste, die er gar nicht kannte.
An Herman Melville denkt er, den die Mitwelt vergaß, nachdem er den „Moby-Dick“ veröffentlicht hatte, und man weiß nicht, ob er das beklagt oder nicht vielleicht doch gut findet: Vergessen zu Lebzeiten, unerkannt, wenn er auf die Straße geht, losgelöst von seinem Werk und: befreit. So sind die „Chronicles“ ein weiterer Versuch, sich zu befreien vom Ruhm und ihn endlich ins Unermessliche zu steigern. Gibt ja nicht so viele, von denen man jedes Wort auf den Knien seines Herzens entgegennähme.
Bald geht Bob Dylan wieder auf Tournee. Im Oktober, wenn sein Buch in den Läden liegt (und am 15.November in der Übersetzung von Gerhard Henschel auf deutsch bei Hoffmann&Campe), fährt er ihm nicht hinterher, hält keine Lesungen und auch keine Signierstunden (lächerlich!), sondern bereist wie immer die Welt. Singt „Desolation Row“ oder „On A Night Like This“ oder „Man In The Long Black Coat“, über die Frau in der Bar, die vom Tode zum Tanze aufgefordert wird, „and he had a face like a mask“.
Diesmal erreicht er die amerikanische Westküste, tritt in Santa Clara und Fresno auf, geht dann auf die College-Tour durch Berkeley, Davis, Irvine und Santa Barbara, berührt San Diego, um sich dann Boulder, Iowa City, Kenosha und De Kalb zuzuwenden. Biblisch.
Die Chronik, sie höret niemals auf.
(SZ am Wochenende vom 2./3.10.2004)
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Die deutschsprachige Ausgabe soll am 15.11.2004 bei Hoffmann und Campe erscheinen. Sie soll ca. 320 Seiten umfassen, die Übersetzung aus dem Amerikanischen ist von Kathrin Passig und Gerhard Henschel. (nix Biermann!)
Eine Lesung mit Günther Amendt, Gerhard Henschel und Kathrin Passig findet am 16.11.2004 in der Kabarett- und Kleinkunstbühne „Polittbüro“ in Hamburg, Steindamm 45 statt.
„Lyrics: 1962-2001“
„Lyrics: 1962-2001“ soll in den USA am 12.10.2004 erscheinen, auch ein Termin 1.10.2004 wird angegeben.
Die ca. 1200 Seiten starke zweisprachige Ausgabe der Songtexte soll am 15.11.2004 erscheinen. Die Songtexte ins Deutsche übertragen hat der Schriftsteller, Übersetzer und Herausgeber (deutsche Werkausgaben von Rudyard Kipling und J. L. Borges) Gisbert Haefs.
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Mich würde interessieren, was ihr von dem Winkler-Text haltet, den Dock oben zitiert hat.
Es ist eine sehr schöne Seite in der SZ mit riesigem Dylan-Foto.
Aber der Text hat für mich so etwas nichtssagend Schlaues, dass ich doch etwas frustriert war. Winklers Buch ist ja auch so ein seltsames Teil, eigentlich doof!--
FAVOURITESwinkler ist ein idiot und der Text nicht wirklich aussagekräftig…hab ihn halt zufällig entdeckt..und sein dylan buch ist schlimm..
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Das Problem, dass ich mit Winkler habe (und übrigens auch mit Greil Marcus) ist, dass ich, obwohl er keinen erkennbaren Unsinn schreibt, nie weiß, was er mir eigentlich mitteilen will.
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Wenn wir schon alles falsch machen, dann wenigstens richtig.
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