‘John, we need your autobiography.’ ‘I thought I’d express my life experience in song.’ ‘That’ll be fine.’ This would be an odd agreement, and one the world would (rightly) be less than thankful for. But though not everyone plays music, we all have a relationship with prose. And recent years have seen a trend in rock memoirs away from the traditional ‘as told to’ (the method responsible for the footballer’s hagiography that often, in Martin Amis’s phrase, ‘runs the full gamut of human emotions from “gutted” to “chuffed”’) and towards autobiography proper: books written by the artists.
That can be a problem. The ability to play the guitar like ringing a bell does not vouchsafe your ability to construct a prose edifice that will beguile for 500 pages. This thought has crossed my mind several times in the past year, as I’ve sweated through huge books from the likes of Elvis Costello, Robbie Robertson and Johnny Marr.
Of course the alpha work here, the black obelisk in whose shadow everyone else is still banging bones, is Chronicles. The repercussions of Dylan’s autobiography were seismic and, in various ways, everyone else is still playing catch-up. There are reasons for this. In Chronicles you saw Dylan simply being Dylan. Not to oversimplify, but — in the same way that memoirs like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory or Updike’s Self-Consciousness are completely revealing while remaining utterly oblique — Chronicles wasn’t a book about Bob Dylan. It was a Bob Dylan book, every phrase stamped with its maker’s hallmark. The autobiographies by musicians that truly work — Patti Smith’s Just Kids; the first 100 or so pages of Morrissey’s Autobiography — are very much in this vein.
The problem with Born to Run, then, is one of tone: its creator’s voice just does not register as convincingly on the page as it does in his music.
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