Chronicles: Volume One

by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan's celebrated first memoir, narrated by two-time Academy Award winner Sean Penn, is now available as an unabridged audio edition for the first time ever!

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

“I’d come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.”

So writes Bob Dylan in Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan’s eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan’s New York is a magical city of possibilities—smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book’s side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota, and points west, Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

By turns revealing, poetical, passionate, and witty, Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan’s thoughts and influences. Dylan’s voice is distinctively generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful, and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

Genres: Collections, Music

320 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 11, 2004

About the author

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, poet, and, of late, disc jockey who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems of the anti-war and civil rights movements. His most recent studio album, Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006, entered the U.S. album charts at #1, making him, at age sixty five, the oldest living person to top those charts.

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2016).

Reviews

[Mike Kerr · Rating 5 out of 5]

He Just Loves the Art of Music

I’m sorely under informed when it comes to music.

In this book, Dylan has been a fascinating study of a creative mind, a soul that wants to leap forward relishing the thrill without getting tangled in categories and movements.

He just loves the art of music.

[David Silverman · Rating 5 out of 5]

understanding Dylan world

An incredible first person tale of the personal and musical growth of an absolute genius. Some amazing insights in how he became inspired to write songs and perform them.
Looking forward to reading more

[Barbara Hepfinger lopez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love Dylan

I really

loved the book and the Writing style but i need

volume 2 and 3 and 4. Please Bob

[Jenn Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite this being an autobiography, the enigma that is Bob Dylan lives! Beautifully written in an almost-stream-of-consciousness that brings echoes of his hero Beat writers, you come away feeling that you still don't know who Bob Dylan is but I don't think that's a product of his protection of his privacy but more so that Bob Dylan doesn't know who he is yet either. If you want to feel what the folk and protest music scene was like, read this book! If you want to know the artistic process of one of our most treasured living singer/songwriters, read this book! Will you 100% understand either? No, but it will be a beautiful journey you take with a narrator who doesn't see what the big idea is. He'd tell you he has no process. He simply tells stories through music. But this book gives you enough of him so that by the end, he's a somewhat complete unknown.

[Jacob Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dylan writes surprisingly more like Cormac McCarthy at times than I would have imagined. He gives you a very sensory look into moments of his life and builds a great atmosphere for the events he describes. Like Johnny Cash’s autobiography, there’s not a linear timeline so much as a series of retellings that give you a better look into the core of the person.

Very interesting and worth reading if you have a baseline understanding of Dylan’s history.