Forever young

Published 13 December 2004

Christopher Bray on the greatest ever rock memoir, and a few of its cliche-ridden rivals

''In writing songs," Bob Dylan once said, "I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie." And in writing books, too, one feels bound to add after reading the first volume of Dylan's projected autobiographical trilogy, Chronicles (Simon & Schuster, £16.99). Like Cezanne, Dylan never shies away from giving you the big picture. But his details are often no more than mute suggestions, notes towards an image that never quite solidifies. Like Cezanne, Dylan is less interested in capturing moments than in evoking the movements of time.

In other words, anyone looking for a straightforward chronological trudge through Dylan's early years is in for a disappointment. The first ten years of his life are over in a page. Nor is that page anything like the first in the book. As with the lyrics of "Tangled Up In Blue", Chronicles flits hither and thither across the years. We start with a section on the 20-year-old Dylan arriving in New York, jump forward the best part of a decade to the making of New Morning, and then take a mighty leap to the close of the 1980s and the writing and recording of Oh Mercy. Finally, we return to the early 1960s, to the signing of Dylan's first recording contract. "Oh, but I was so much older then," as one of his earliest cubist conceits has it. "I'm younger than that now."

Such modernity, the book makes plain, was influenced as much by the cinema as by anything literary. At one point, Dylan likens his manager - the aptly named Albert Grossman - to the actor Sydney Greenstreet; and though our young hero is forever reading Balzac and Byron, it is the ghost of Humphrey Bogart that most frequently haunts his prose. Scolded by a traditionalist critic for his surreal lyrics, a defiant Dylan all but quotes Bogie's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon: "I wasn't going to take a step back or retreat for anybody." A few pages later, Dylan realises that his modernist urge must at some stage lead to throwing away the folkies' rule book: "Not today, not tonight, some time soon, though." Welcome to Casablanca, in which Bogie gets that famous speech about how choosing love over duty inevitably leads to regret: "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and forever."

Despite its inventory of influences, however, Chronicles is a singular book. Never has a rock star put pen to paper with such skill. Dylan is rightly suspicious of people who treat his songs as if they were merely verse ("If my songs were just about the words, then what was Duane Eddy . . . doing recording an album full of instrumental melodies of my songs?") yet there is no gainsaying his way with language.

Nor, alas, is there any quibbling with Clive James's claim - made in a Creem article reprinted in Benjamin Hedin's excellent anthology Studio A: the Bob Dylan reader (Norton, £17.99) - that Dylan's problem as an artist has always been his over-reliance on inspiration and his under-reliance on perspiration. "One night," Dylan tells us in Chronicles, "I wrote 20 verses for a song called 'Political World'." Fine, but how many of them were any good? Answer comes there none, largely because Dylan is too busy writing another song. "'What Good Am I?' . . . came to me all at once; don't know what could have brought it on." Stravinsky thought the only way to find your muse was to work when she was nowhere in sight, but Dylan has never had any truck with such diligence. "When it's right," he writes, "you don't have to look for it." But as anyone remotely skilled at anything knows, elbow grease remains the best polish, and that line about Duane Eddy would read better if Dylan had taken the time to find an alternative to the repetition of "my songs".

Still, Dylan's prose is up in the paints next to Nick Mason's Inside Out: a personal history of Pink Floyd (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £30). As the only member of the band to have been around for the whole four decades of its existence, Mason is on the inside track when it comes to documenting the Floyd's history. A pity that his publisher didn't find him a better helpmate than Philip Dodd, the kind of ghost-writer who doubtless believes he avoids cliches like the plague. Mason's story is all "formative years" and "burning ambition" until, at an early gig, the guitarist Roger Waters has an old penny thrown at him, whereupon Mason summons the spirit of John Major and the coin in question becomes "a not insubstantial projectile". As for its production and pictures, however, Inside Out is a winner - as glossy and colourful as The Beatles Anthology, on which it is plainly modelled.

The Fab Four themselves are honoured with The Beatles Literary Anthology (Plexus, £16.99), a volume that avoids the usual pop jabber and finds space for ruminations by contributors as distinguished as Noel Coward, Kenneth Tynan and Philip Larkin. The book is worth buying just for Blake Morrison's wonderful semi-obituary of John Lennon ("The Sound of the Sixties") and Paul Johnson's hilariously wrong-headed "The Menace of Beatlism" (first published in these pages 40 years ago). Strange to relate, Johnson turns up again in Karl French's Abba: unplugged (Portrait, £16.99). One day back in the 1970s, the French family arrives at the Johnson household for Sunday lunch, whereupon the host insists on playing them "this terrific new song by these two wonderful Swedish lesbians". Alas, there are too many such Hornby-ish incidents in French's book and not enough insight or criticism. Abba wrote some of the most melodiously intelligent pop songs ever. They deserve a properly musicological study.

The man to do it may be Elvis Costello. Costello has been a devoted Abba fan these past three decades and, as readers of his pieces in Vanity Fair magazine know, he can tell his treble clef from his Three Degrees. The same cannot be said for Graeme Thomson, whose study of Costello's life and work, Complicated Shadows (Canongate, £16.99), stops plodding only when it starts limping. David Buckley's The Thrill of It All: the story of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music (Andre Deutsch, £20) is similarly witless - all the more disappointing when you consider the droll irony in which Ferry has always drenched his work.

Robbie Williams's memoir Feel (Ebury, £18.99) is the surprise of the season - a highly interesting book about a not very interesting pop star. I would say everyone should read it - except that, judging by the sales charts these past three months, everybody already has.

Christopher Bray's critical biography of Michael Caine will be published by Faber & Faber next autumn

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