#429 Bob Dylan's Autobiography

**David Senra** (0:00)
I had just signed a contract with Leeds Music, giving it the right to publish my songs. Not that there was many great deal to hammer out, I hadn't written much yet. Lou had advanced me $100 against future royalties to sign the paper, and that was fine with me.
John had taken me over to see Lou. John had only heard two of my original compositions, but he had a premonition that there would be more.
John was John Hammond, the great talent scout and discoverer of monumental artists, imposing figures in the history of recorded music. Artists who had created music that resonated through American life. He was legendary. He had followed his own heart's love, which was music, which he endorsed and defended with his life.
No one could block his way, and he didn't have any time to waste. It's one of my favorite sentences in the book. No one could block his way, and he didn't have any time to waste. I could hardly believe myself awake when sitting in his office, him signing me to Columbia Records. It was so unbelievable. It would have sounded like a made up thing.
Folk music was considered junky, second rate, and only released on small labels. But John was an extraordinary man. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts, and had faith in the things to come. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Chronicles Volume 1 and is written by Bob Dylan. In fact, he wrote it with no help at all. He wrote every single word himself. He didn't even have an editor. So I want to go to the very beginning of the book. First few pages is just blurb after blurb of praise for the book. And there's just a ton of praise for the book. I think it's probably the best written autobiography I've ever read in my life. In fact, Rolling Stone put this as the number one. It's number one on the list of the top 50 musician biographies and autobiographies.
But I want to read one of the blurbs that I think really speaks to why this book is so important.
And it says, Bob Dylan hasn't really written the story of his life in this fascinating, captivating, intimate, accessible, and widely acclaimed memoir. Instead, he's written mainly the story of his birth when he transformed himself from Bobby Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. So I heard Bob Dylan say something when he was a much older man that I think speaks to what takes place in this book and what that review really hits on.
And Bob said, life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. And so before I jump back into the book, I want to talk about one of the most interesting things is the fact that Steve Jobs from the very early days when he was in his 20s, all the way to the point when he was dying, he would talk about the influence that Bob Dylan had on his work. And there's actually a lot of ideas, I think, for entrepreneurs. Steve mentions Bob Dylan probably 15 times in the biography that he worked on with Walter Isaacson before he was dying or as he was dying or said. So I went back and I pulled all the notes about what Steve said about Bob Dylan and I'm just going to run through them. In fact, Steve Jobs was obsessed with Dylan before he started Apple. One of the first things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did together, which tracked down underground recordings of Bob Dylan records. Steve would also collect these printed out brochures of Bob Dylan lyrics, and then he'd spend hours interpreting them.
In that biography, Steve says that he managed to collect hundreds of hours of Dylan's recorded concerts and would lay in bed listening to the concerts in headphones. So close to the end of his life, Steve Jobs is sitting inside his house with Walter Isaacson in his biography, and they're listening to Bob Dylan records. And he says something to Walter I think is really important, because it's going to pop up in the book over and over again. And I think it's one of the main takeaways from the book. And Steve Jobs picked up on it immediately, and Bob Dylan, I think, did this intentionally. But Steve said to Walter, no one else could have been Bob Dylan. So after Apple releases the iTunes store, he actually gets to meet, Steve Jobs gets to meet, and he has a two-hour one-on-one conversation with Bob Dylan. And there's something that Dylan told him that resonated with Steve's own approach to creating new products. And so Bob was talking about the way the music came. He says that the songs, quote, the songs just came through me. It wasn't like I was having to compose them. And at the very end of the Steve Jobs biography that was written by Walter Isaacson, Steve gives this fantastic, such like just this conversation about what drove him, why he did what he did in his career. And I think it obviously really hits home because he knows he's dying as he's saying these words. And he's talking about learning from the Beatles and learning from Bob Dylan and the importance of always trying something new. And he talks about like, you know, why do you keep, he kept trying to invent new technology, try to create new products.