I got hooked on American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s music in May 2021. Ammi and Abbu had passed away, one after another, in the space of a week. I caught Covid-19 the day we buried Abbu, and had to isolate myself for 10 days. The unsettling reality of life without my parents hadn’t fully sunk in yet. Plodding along in unimagined territory, I was on a lonely guilt trip.

It was then that Dylan’s lines from ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ hit me with force.

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?

I must have listened to the song a thousand times. Morning, noon and night. On repeat. It gave me solace. Praying — the go-to coping mechanism for most people — didn’t work for me. Praying requires focus, which recedes into the distance when you’re at the gates of Depressionville. Nothing else worked. But Dylan delivered the goods for me.

I’m not into Western music at all. But Dylan’s is otherworldly. A minimal use of instruments. Deceptively simple lyrics. An authentic voice — one that tells you that the guy has “seen life, done deeds and lived romances.” His quirks and aloofness lend him a certain mystique. Winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, and then reluctantly going to Stockholm to accept it in a private ceremony, speaks to the eccentricity of one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time.

I bought his autobiography — if it can be called that — on a whim last week. Chronicles: Volume One is an odd book. For starters, there’s no Volume Two, even though the first one appeared in 2004.

Another oddity is that its contents are arranged in no particular order. The book reads like a long series of short character sketches — sketches of the interesting people that Dylan ran into over his 45 years of writing and singing songs. It comes across as the transcription of a long monologue.

Columbia was one of the first and foremost labels in the country and for me to even get my foot in the door was serious. For starters, folk music was considered junky, second rate and only released on small labels. Big time record companies were strictly for the elite, for music that was sanitised and pasteurised. Someone like myself would never be allowed in except under extraordinary circumstances. — Excerpt from the book

The language is of particular interest to me. It isn’t book-like. The arrangement of words suggests they were spoken first and written later. Using ‘me’ in place of ‘I’ — something so common in colloquial writing that a trained sub-editor can spot it even when they’re half asleep — seems deliberate in Dylan’s case: “Once, me and Clayton were sitting, drinking wine…”

The text is entirely free of hyphens. I bet you couldn’t find even one of those pesky marks used for modifying the noun following. Also, he omits pronouns as and when he pleases. Contractions litter the pages. Then there are the typos — mic/ mike — and these are in my post-2016 paperback, not the first edition that’s supposed to be laden with keyboarding errors.

But all this points to one thing: that here is an authentic book, not a ghostwritten tome workshopped by a team of for-hire content developers. The voice is solely Dylan’s. The text is so original, it’s uncanny.

One of the most enjoyable bits is his retelling of how he hated — hated — being the “spokesman of a generation” that came of age in the 1960s. The book stops short of him outright cursing, but one can sense he vehemently loathes the “stragglers looking to party” in the name of social change.

“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,” he writes.

“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, [John F.] Kennedy’s and [Fidel] Castro’s. What the hell was that supposed to mean?”

Dylan doesn’t even try to be holistic. The autobiography has next to nothing on his childhood, his marriages, his kids. He doesn’t care what the reader might want to know. He’s written something and you should be content with it.

Despite so many oddities — or perhaps because of them — Chronicles: Volume One was on The Guardian’s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. It was a delightful read for me, though I lack even rudimentary knowledge of Western music. Getting a glimpse into the life of a cultural touchstone of our time feels like a privilege. I can only imagine how enjoyable it would be to actual enthusiasts of Western music.

The writer is a member of staff. He tweets @KazimAlam

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 9th, 2023