The Sanction Chronicles by Dylan Strickland

The city was full of stuff like that.'Ĭhronicles is peppered with vivid sketches of the stars of New York's folk demimonde: Fred Neill, Cisco Houston, Len Chandler, Paul Clayton (whose suicide a few years later Dylan does not mention), the blues guitarist and Marxist intellectual Dave Van Ronk ('no puppet strings on him ever'). In Dylan's memory New York is 'cold, muffled, mysterious', a city of epiphanies: 'I passed a horsedrawn wagon full of covered flowers, all under a plastic wrap, no driver in sight. This is the flickering urban landscape of 'Visions of Johanna', peopled with 'all kinds of characters looking for the inner heat', mingling in cluttered, carefully observed Greenwich Village apartments. New York at the dawn of the 60s is recreated with warmth and detail. None the less, in the course of his meandering narrative, Dylan touches on a fascinating variety of topics - personal, musical, historical. Nothing about the fundamentalist Christian phase or about his Jewishness. There's nothing about singing at the 1963 march on Washington or going electric at Newport in 1965 or the 'Judas!' heckle in Manchester in 1966. What's not in the book could fill tomes (and already has). In the middle, there are less enjoyable but revealing excursions into two later junctures in the singer's career, studies in alienation, frustration and compromise. Here he draws a touching portrait of himself as an ambitious young artist, trembling on the brink of self-realisation. The bulk of the book is a captivating evocation of Dylan's first year in New York city (1961), with flashbacks to his boyhood in Minnesota. And where Bound for Glory offered the uplifting tale of Guthrie's discovery of his vocation as a people's singer, Chronicles traces a more equivocal journey, one involving loss as well as discovery.

Where the master's book was rumbustious, optimistic, teeming, the disciple's is ruminative, sometimes puzzled, and in the end painfully lonely. Instead of the open skies and sharp outlines of Bound for Glory, Chronicles is full of smoky, jumbled interiors. In structure and style, Dylan's memoir recalls Guthrie's, but its mood and preoccupations are different.

The Sanction Chronicles by Dylan Strickland