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.