This was nonsense, in terms both of his biography and of his music. That is why the judgment of John Hammond, who found Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker and many others, matters far more to him than stories about his personal life, about which this book, despite some amusing and telling anecdotes, offers few details. But his main point concerns not so much the music or the songs but the fact that, while changing and adapting over the years, he has stayed true to himself. As he has done in the past, he insists here on the influence of the mysterious and legendary Mississippi blues singer Robert Johnson, as well as on the help he received from the jazz guitarist Lonnie Johnson (no relation to Robert). Sketchy and elliptical, Chronicles is more interesting for its insights into Dylan’s several mentors and friends than into Dylan and his music.

(The book’s subtitle, “Volume One,” suggests that there may be further installments.) Significantly enough, it is this event that frames Dylan’s recent memoir, Chronicles, an account of his career until the end of the 1980’s. Born in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, he had come to New York with a strong sense that the popular-music scene was “wide open.” He was right about that, and his own songs, which in fact often decried social injustice, caught the attention of John Hammond, Columbia Records’ legendary talent scout. Protest songs were all the rage then, and Robert Zimmerman, already billing himself as Bob Dylan, did not like to be thought fashionable. “This ain’t no protest song,” a very young aspiring poet said to an audience at a New York City nightclub specializing in folk music circa 1961, “’cause I don’t write no protest songs.”

Chronicles by Bob Dylan