Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan
When I think of California, I think about Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan. The former is California's favorite son, while the latter is ... from Minnesota. I'm not sure how I made the initial connection, but at one point, I learned that Jobs was a big fan of Bob Dylan.
Well, whenever I spent some time in San Francisco or cruisin' down the US 101, there were always Bob Dylan's songs keeping me company. I guess the freewheelin' of Dignity just has this California vibe to it.
Bob Dylan is an artist that some of us love, most people don't understand, and some even despise him. To me, he's the ultimate artist, and the more I listen to his songs, the more I hear them.
I even included one of my favorite lines in the chapter of my first book:
"How far are y'all going?" Ruby asked us with a sigh.
"We're going all the way 'til the wheels fall off and burn."
—Bob Dylan, Brownsville Girl
Chronicles: Volume One is his memoir from before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Like other fans, I was a bit disappointed for not learning more about what the master poet is like. But he tells what he likes.
If you're a fan, you'll enjoy this book. It takes some patience to understand it. But if you're hunting for a biography, this isn't what you're looking for. Maybe in Volume Two.
Some of my highlights from Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan
Happiness isn’t on the road to anything. That happiness is the road.
I’d never been to California. It seemed like it was the place of some special, glamorous race.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks about feeling old at the beginning of his life…I felt like that, too.
After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back.
Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination,
Northerners think abstract. When it’s cold, you don’t fret because you know it’s going to be warm again…and when it’s warm, you don’t worry about that either because you know it’ll be cold eventually.
was feeling stuffy—needed to get out of town. Something wasn’t clicking, like when the world is hidden from your eyes and you need to find it.
New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.
Many hundreds of miles of pain went into it.
know that he wanted to understand me more as we went along, but you can’t do that, not unless you like to do puzzles.
Mostly what I did growing up was bide my time. I always knew there was a bigger world out there but the one I was in at the time was all right, too.
felt like I had discovered some essence of self-command, that I was in the internal pocket of the system feeling more like myself than ever before.
Woody made each word count. He painted with words.
She seemed very mature, seductive, intense, magical. Nothing she did didn’t work. That she was the same age as me almost made me feel useless.
I didn’t know much about Joan Baez. I had no idea that she’d always been a true loner, kind of like me,
