Bob Dylan fans suggest songwriter avoided ‘painful’ moments of his career in Chronicles autobiography

Fans of Bob Dylan believe the legendary songwriter avoided the “painful” moments of his career in his Chronicles autobiography.

While the book was a hit with fans wanting to learn more of Dylan as a person, some were left wondering why the particular eras featured in Chronicles were chosen. Fans have plenty of theories over why the times were chosen, but some believe it was to work around the harder points of his life. Blood on the Tracks is a period notably absent from the album, though Dylan spends much time talking of Oh Mercy and his tours with Grateful Dead. A post to the r/BobDylan subreddit saw one user ask: “Why do you think Dylan chose the particular eras he wrote about for Chronicles Vol. 1?

“Chronicles is great as its own work, but why do you think Dylan chose the particular eras he wrote about (debut album, New Morning, Oh Mercy) to represent his biography? The dude is probably chock-full of incredible life stories from different eras of his life. Just seems like the ideas are rife for future volumes, regardless of how much he embellishes things.”

Fans have suggested the writing Dylan presents in the book are each a period defined as a “fresh start”. One user who had read the book three times in the year of its release suggested: “I think with the debut album – I mean, that’s the start of his career, so it would make sense to focus on that. Oh Mercy, as far as I recall, he’d spent some pages talking about a deep creative slump, and Oh Mercy was him rising from the ashes. It was like a fresh start to his career.

“I don’t remember if he focused on Blood on the Tracks and Desire, if he didn’t and chose New Morning, it could have been because he was going through so much marital drama in the Blood on the Tracks and Desire years that he just wanted to avoid writing about it (or he didn’t want to mentally revisit it)?”

Another user agreed, adding: “I agree. He avoided writing about the marriage breakup, electrified Judas years before the bike crash, and born-again Christian time, all periods of his career which could have been too painful for him to explore, for one reason or another.”

A third user has suggested the point of Chronicles is not to share truths of the past but to explore the “mythmaking” which surrounds Dylan. One user wrote: “Chronicles is less a proper biography than it is Dylan engaging in his own mythmaking. I think the book is very pointedly concerned with the creation and continuing development of the idea of ‘Bob Dylan’ more than it is in relaying his life story.

“The section on the debut album is about the initial creation of the Dylan persona, and all of the influences, characters, and circumstances that fed into it. The New Morning section is about his retreat from that persona, and his decision to keep it ever-changing as a way of avoiding the level of public attention he had in the folk/electric years.

“The Oh Mercy section is about him rediscovering his passion for music after burning out in the 80s, and finding that spark that inspired him in the first place back in his Greenwich Village days. I would take everything in the book with a big grain of salt. Dylan’s pretty clearly embellishing things to present a very particular, mythic version of himself, while giving the appearance of revealing his intimate details.

“I think this is especially true in the first section. I find the book very revealing in terms of how Dylan tries to position himself within musical, literary, and broader American history (not dissimilar to what he’s doing on his late-period albums), but like almost all of his work, the actual man underneath remains a mystery. Which, personally, is exactly what I want out of Bob Dylan’s memoir.”