Twisted and fed

When I was a wee lass, I used to sit and listen to my mom's LPs in the living room. She had mostly musicals (flashback to Sunday in the Park with George), Simon & Garfunkel, and the like, but a few gems from my family's sort-of-hippie days in California in the mid-1970s managed to creep in there. But I never could understand the Bob Dylan phenomenon. Being a snotty little musical theater kid who took a couple of years of opera lessons, I thought Dylan's scratchy off-key delivery was hilarious and painful. And the lyrics sailed right over my head.

Then sometime in high school, my big brother undertook my conversion to Dylan fandom—I think Another Side finally tipped the scales—and now I really do get it. I believe the hype and hyperbole. He's a weird, weird genius.

So, that's the back story on why I picked up a shiny new copy of Chronicles recently in a moment of weakness at Cody's. (It was on deep sale...may the used bookstore gods have mercy on my soul.) This first volume of Dylan's autobiography jumps around too much chronologically and topically, but it's full of casual insights and poetic observations. It's also just cool to hear his stories about kicking around the folk scene back in the day, when it was new and charged and political.

To wit, some of his killer prose about a city on all of our minds:

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen...the city is one very long poem. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. The devil comes here and sighs.