Chronicles: Volume One

When Dylan’s father passed away, he returned home to the Midwest for the funeral. Dylan’s father had always believed that “an artist [was] a fellow who paints” (108); Dylan lamented the loss of the opportunity to better understand one another.

Back in the town of Woodstock, New York, where Dylan lived with his wife and three children, he received a letter from playwright Archibald MacLeish, Tony Award winner and Poet Laureate of America, asking him to compose music for a play he was writing. Dylan and his wife drove up to Massachusetts to meet with MacLeish. They spent the afternoon talking about art, literature, and poetry, but Dylan left sure that he didn’t want to work on MacLeish’s play, which was “delivering something beyond an apocalyptic message” about “man’s mission is to destroy the earth” (113). Nevertheless, Dylan promised to think about it.

In 1968, “America was wrapped up in a blanket of rage” (113). The news was full of riots and student protests, with “everything on the edge of danger and change” (114). Dylan had recovered from a serious motorcycle accident and “wanted to get out of the rat race” (114). The press called him “the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation” (115), but Dylan had no interest in anything but providing for his family, and he felt nothing in common with the generation he was supposedly speaking for.

Home life soon became untenable for Dylan and his family, as strangers accosted them, “gate-crashers, spooks, trespassers, [and] demagogues” (117) constantly broke into their home, and activists demanded that Dylan “stop shirking [his] duties as the conscience of a generation” (118). Everywhere the family moved thus became “a place of chaos.” While Dylan dreamed of “a nine-to-five existence” (117), external pressure mounted: Joan Baez released a protest song that called on Dylan to “lead the masses” (119), and the press chased him until he felt like he was “on the run” (120). Longing to escape the constraints of counterculture, which had misread his lyrics, Dylan tried undo his revolutionary leader public image. He published a photo of himself at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and labeled himself a Zionist, emphasizing his Jewish heritage. He also recorded a “bridled and housebroken” (122) country-western album, hoping critics would dismiss him and the public would forget about him.

Dylan rented a house in East Hampton, New York, where he was able to find relative peace with his wife and now five children. He painted landscapes and took his kids go-carting and digging for clams on the beach. When Dylan was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Princeton University, he invited fellow musician David Crosby to go along with him to accept it. The ceremony introduced him as “the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America” (133), and Dylan was furious. He had been working hard to change this public perception and worried this would cause backsliding.

As Dylan considered the pieces he had begun working on for McLeish’s play for a new album, he went to see record producer Bob Johnston in Nashville, Tennessee. Johnson spent much of the trip trying to convince Dylan to move there. He pointed out celebrities’ homes and insisted that no one would bother Dylan. They assembled a crew of musicians and began recording. There weren’t any “message songs” on the record, New Morning. It “sounded okay” to Dylan, and critics called it “a comeback album”—an appraisal that recurred often throughout Dylan’s career.