Customer Reviews

THE OLD, WEIRD AMERICA: THE WORLD OF BOB DYLAN'S BASEMENT TAPES

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This is a retitled re-issue of _Invisible Republic_. For its content, then, it clearly deserves a 5-star rating (at least from here). However, you ought to know what you will be getting if you already have that classic.

(this is the updated verion of Marcus' "Invisible Republic")

In 1965, Bob Dylan played Newport with an electric band. Playing songs from the groundbreaking "Highway 61 Revisited", Dylan-- in one of the finest performances of his career-- was roundly booed by the audience and condemned by critics.

Why?

Greil Marcus' fascinating book starts with this question: why were audiences so hostile to Dylan's new material and style? Marcus' thesis is that Dylan on Highway 61 rediscovered the folk music that America had forgotten, a folk music which had been co-opted by the '30s (and subsequent) Left, a music which was much older and much, much weirder than the work of Woody Guthrie and other late '50s exemplars of the folk tradition. Audiences were in for a shock when Dylan's surreal imagery and often apolitical but weirdly resonant lyrics replaced his plainer earlier folk tunes and protest songs.

The book's former title is an allusion to Ralph Ellison's novel "The Invisible Man," whose protagonist is invisible to his fellow Americans because they choose not to see him. In the same way, the very, very weird music of Dock Boggs, Mississippi John Hurt and many others, documented with loving care by Harry Smith, the compiler of the seminal "The Anthology of American Folk Music," was invisible to mainstream audiences during the 1950s and '60s, just as the history they documented was invisible to the majority of its time. It is a countercultural history in song of the U.S., including everything from slave narratives, love ballads, ancient blues, mythical re-tellings of political events, etc. This music is much richer and more complex than the mid-twentieth century folk music familiar to Dylan fans.

Marcus illuminates the connections between Dylan's mid-60s work and the "The Anthology of American Folk Music" and shows how Dylan's leap forward-- into surrealism, wild juxtaposition, historical allusion, electric instrumentation and only elliptical allusions to politics-- was also a leap backward into the Anthology's traditions.

This is one of those books whose ideas make the head spin. Marcus writes clearly but manages to keep the imagination running on overdrive. Like Pynchon, Levi-Strauss, Murakami and Dylan himself, the work is as much a set of ideas as an invitation to connect the many dots. As well as a fascianting tour through the work of Dylan, the Band and the Anthology, this is partly an alternative history of the U.S. and a pretty incisive reminder that folk music, as Dylan once said "is pure mystery."

This is what seems to be a word-for-word reissue of Marcus's Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, confusingly given a completely different title. In the Author's Note, Marcus says this is the title he originally wanted to give it. I have to say, they still got it wrong. The new subtitle, The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, is an improvement, but still doesn't completely address the main fault with every title and subtitle given so far - the book isn't really about Dylan, and only tangentially about the Basement Tapes. It's just as much about Harry Smith and his Anthology of American Folk Music, and in fact gives probably as much space to the relatively unknown Dock Boggs as it does Dylan or The Band, and it's just as much an attempt to mythologizes history as it is a work of musical criticism.

This isn't necessarily a complaint - one could argue that folk music's primary function is to mythologize history, and Marcus is simply attempting the same thing as the musicians he writes about. Boggs, for example, would make a logical choice for a book with this intention, as there's not that much written about him (especially compared to Bob Freakin' Dylan) and Harry Smith gives in the liner notes and Boggs gives in his own recorded conversations cloak him in both mystery and danger, two of Marcus's defining elements of the "old, weird America."

And this is what's best about the book, and its intentions - Marcus frequently does succeed at his central aim of showing the ominous mythic undercurrents of not just the music of Dylan, The Band, Dock Boggs, or any of the musicians singing of this old, weird America, but also the irony of, for example, civil rights protesters' sense of betrayal when Dylan essentially denounced his leadership of them and took away their mythic prototype, or the eerie forlornness of the Cumberland Gap or North Carolina tar fields that produced the Carter Family, Frank Hutchison, and of course the eminent Boggs.

But the book has its flaws, most of them stemming from the fact that most music critics (besides Marcus, Nick Tosches and Samuel Charters come to mind) the subject and delivery just aren't up to the task of a book-length work. Marcus's impeccable Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock `n' Roll Music is a thematically cohesive collection of meditations on the relationship between fact and fiction, myth and antecedent which works nearly perfectly, mostly because none of the individual pieces runs over 10 pages. The Old, Weird America feels like one of Marcus's less fastidious editors told him to take a related 10-page article and somehow make a book of it, and Marcus decided to fill in the blanks with tired half-metaphorical imagined Americana like "Smithville" (named after Harry Smith - get it?) and "Kill Devil Hills" that he beats into the ground over the last half of the book. (Unlike Tosches, though, at least Marcus spares his audience the boring and pretentious details of his own personal and professional life to make his word count.)

NOTE: In a strange case of inverted logic, the most solid critical research is provided in the 40-page discography at the back of the book, with some revealing background research on both Dylan and the folk songs mentioned in the body of the book. Dylan and American folk music aficionados looking for something they don't know already will probably want to pick up this volume just for those last pages.

I like Greil's approach, which worked so much better in the recent "Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads", of honing in on small detail to produce something profound. Maybe this book can be considered practice for the latter, because it simply didn't work here. I welcome experimental writing, but in this case the wash of minute detail combined with nonlinearity produced confusion rather than clarity. I'm afraid for me the insights are Greil's alone rather than universal. To his credit though, in the same way I'd rather see an ambitious indie movie that fails than a Hollywood blockbuster, reading this is worth a shot. I may try again some time.

Taking Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes as a starting point this book wanders through the foundations of American music investigating some shadowy folk byways.

While the metaphor (actual towns populated by the characters in the songs) is a little overwrought the overall effect of the book is powerful.

I found it particularly exciting to see links to other musicians I like such as Nick Cave and Kirstin Hersh.

Now that the editorial review is up, you will not make the mistake that I did when all I had to go on was the title. The only difference that I can see: a two-page preface that tells us why the book is being reissued under another title. Since I ordered a new copy of _Invisible Republic_ at the very same time I ordered this book, I am (having fetched it from the post office five minutes ago) more than a little miffed.

_The Old Weird America_ is the greatest description of the mystery of rock and roll ever put into prose. Rock is an ancient mystery religion-- insight, gnosis emerges when the terror and strangeness has been absorbed and transmogrified. Lead into gold, the wound of Amfortas healed, the mountain rooted down by the mole. The first time I heard Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes , I felt that terror. I was afraid of Tiny Montgomery, of Silly Nilly, of the Coachman. I knew that there was no relief for me until the world of the Basement Tapes was as real as the four walls of my bedroom. Now that it has become that familiar, there still is no relief. Rock and roll means never shaking the hell hound on your trail, no relief from the exasperated humiliation of begging Mrs. Henry to look your way and pump you a few. The ironic, elusive fantasy of the Million Dollar Bash always somewhere in the near future, with Rosemary waiting there to put it to you plain as day, and give it to you for a song.

Greil Marcus has somehow parlayed his college degree in the obsolete "myth-symbol" school of American Studies into a career as a philosopher of American music. In the process, he has conjured up some of the worst books ever published on rock and roll. Marcus confuses "myth" with the LSD-fuelled '60s fan dreams of musicians as shamans, elves and hobbits. Imagine Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan & Robert Plant attempting to be critics while still on the Kool Aid that produced "Prophets Seers and Sages, The Angels of the Ages", "Stairway to Heaven" and Morrison's ideas about rock concerts as Dionysian rites. Marcus fashioned "Mystery Train", his first sycophantic journey into over-stimulated ego-crazed fan-boy fantasy. Then, after spending too many nights rolling joints on the sleeves of John Wesley Harding and trying to figure out which one was Quinn The Eskimo, Marcus encountered Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and completely lost his mind. In this horrible re-issue of "Invisible Republic" Marcus treats early American folk artists like Dock Boggs and Robert Johnson as if they were mythical beings rather than men. He then tries to turn Dylan's Basement Tapes into a natural successor to the "mystery school" of these artists. Mere words cannot express the mediocrity of Marcus's meditations. Please, if you have any soul, avoid this book. But dont let Marcus's mind-rot put you off Dock Boggs and Harry Smith's Anthology and Dylan's Basement Tapes -- Marcus does have good taste in music, he just doesn't have anything worth saying to say about it.

Greil Marcus Should Marry Bob Dylan...he's already written a long love-letter. True there are a lot of interesting musical relationships brought out in the author's discussion, but the details of the Basement Tapes are just not there. Marcus' approach is that of an ethno-musicologist, and one who is too close to his subject. Personally, the bias from the start of the book and the torturous prose were very hard to stomach. I can not recommend this book to anyone, and it will keep me away from anything else by Greil Marcus again. I only wish I could have been warned before I bought it.

This book starts as bombastic, bloated, unintelligible drivel--and goes downhill from there. The best thing about it is the cover. The second best thing is that it is biodegradable, so it won't hurt the environment when you toss it into the trash, where it belongs.