The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (Paperback)

~ (Author) "In the dressing room in London, the guitarist was looking for a melody..." (more)
Key Phrases: basement songs, basement tunes, teenage prayer, Bob Dylan, New York, Dock Boggs (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"It is the speculative intelligence with which Marcus chases the specters and wraiths of this country's musical past that emerges as the exhilarating feat of [The Old, Weird America] . . . No previous writer has so transportingly or authoritatively revealed Mr. Dylan against receding vistas of American music and culture."--Robert Polito, The New York Times Book Review

"The year's best work of criticism, hands down . . . Marcus draws bold freehand loops around Dylan's music, loops so wide and loose that they take in not just the breadth of American folk music, but huge chunks of American history as well. This is the best kind of history book, one that acknowledges that mythology is sometimes the truest kind of fact."--Stephanie Zachareck, Newsday

"Marcus has always been set on discovering how much a performer can bring to bear on his or her material, and how much a critic can bring to bear on those performances . . . He offers his readers a breathtaking sense of freedom."--Charles Taylor, Salon

"Nearly everyone will be dazed at one point or another along the mystery trip that Marcus leads, because his desire is not to settle your notions but to vaporize them . . . But Marcus knows where Dylan is at all times, in his absence as well as his presence. That's because, on the haunted back roads of [The Old, Weird America], these two elusive old masters, tricksters both, have fully met their match."--Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone

"Chances are, twenty years from now, [this book] will stand as one of the classics of American criticism."--Mikal Gilmore, The Observer (London)

"His work is very likely the most imaginative criticism being done, but it's more than that: It's a light in dark times."--Luc Sante, New York

"Dylan once famously described folk music as 'nothing but mystery.' Here the mystery is thoroughly explored and gloriously deepened."--Ross Fortune, Time Out (London)

"A poetic encounter with the latent stories of America's manifest dreams . . . Nonfiction novel of the year."--Graham Caverny, Arena

"The wisest, funniest book about rock since Marcus's own 1975 Mystery Train."--Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone

"Discussing such virtually unknown singers as Dock Bogs and Clarence Ashley, Marcus lays out a thesis about the authority of radical individualism in American culture. He finds in [their] songs an idea of America as a place where what matters most is not the distribution of goods or the regulation of morality, but rather the way 'people plumb their souls and then present their discoveries, their true selves, to others' . . . This is, in many ways, his most subtle book. Marcus's love for the gnostic of self-creation, of the idea of infinite possibility, is tempered here by a profound awareness of the power of tradition, of the way in which the new makes sense only because of, not despite, the old."--James Surowiecki, Boston Phoenix

"Marcus finds in the 'Basement Tapes' an unfinished synthesis of free speech and the shaggy-dog story, the two obsessions of [his own] writing, and perhaps finally of American history."--Anthony Miller, New City (Chicago)

"We owe God a death, and Greil Marcus owed all God's children a lifework on Bob Dylan. And here it is, one heaven of a book . . . What Marcus brings to these songs is a variety of good things: fierce fervor, social convictions, a loving discrimination, never a touch of envy, and an extraordinary ability to evoke in words the very feel (throaty, threatening, thorough, thick with thought) of a man's voice, of this man's voice."--Christopher Ricks, The Guardian (London)
-- Review

Review

"It is the speculative intelligence with which Marcus chases the specters and wraiths of this country's musical past that emerges as the exhilarating feat of [The Old, Weird America] . . . No previous writer has so transportingly or authoritatively revealed Mr. Dylan against receding vistas of American music and culture."--Robert Polito, The New York Times Book Review

"The year's best work of criticism, hands down . . . Marcus draws bold freehand loops around Dylan's music, loops so wide and loose that they take in not just the breadth of American folk music, but huge chunks of American history as well. This is the best kind of history book, one that acknowledges that mythology is sometimes the truest kind of fact."--Stephanie Zachareck, Newsday

"Marcus has always been set on discovering how much a performer can bring to bear on his or her material, and how much a critic can bring to bear on those performances . . . He offers his readers a breathtaking sense of freedom."--Charles Taylor, Salon

"Nearly everyone will be dazed at one point or another along the mystery trip that Marcus leads, because his desire is not to settle your notions but to vaporize them . . . But Marcus knows where Dylan is at all times, in his absence as well as his presence. That's because, on the haunted back roads of [The Old, Weird America], these two elusive old masters, tricksters both, have fully met their match."--Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone

"Chances are, twenty years from now, [this book] will stand as one of the classics of American criticism."--Mikal Gilmore, The Observer (London)

"His work is very likely the most imaginative criticism being done, but it's more than that: It's a light in dark times."--Luc Sante, New York

"Dylan once famously described folk music as 'nothing but mystery.' Here the mystery is thoroughly explored and gloriously deepened."--Ross Fortune, Time Out (London)

"A poetic encounter with the latent stories of America's manifest dreams . . . Nonfiction novel of the year."--Graham Caverny, Arena
ar"The wisest, funniest book about rock since Marcus's own 1975 Mystery Train."--Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone

"Discussing such virtually unknown singers as Dock Bogs and Clarence Ashley, Marcus lays out a thesis about the authority of radical individualism in American culture. He finds in [their] songs an idea of America as a place where what matters most is not the distribution of goods or the regulation of morality, but rather the way 'people plumb their souls and then present their discoveries, their true selves, to others' . . . This is, in many ways, his most subtle book. Marcus's love for the gnostic of self-creation, of the idea of infinite possibility, is tempered here by a profound awareness of the power of tradition, of the way in which the new makes sense only because of, not despite, the old."--James Surowiecki, Boston Phoenix

"Marcus finds in the 'Basement Tapes' an unfinished synthesis of free speech and the shaggy-dog story, the two obsessions of [his own] writing, and perhaps finally of American history."--Anthony Miller, New City (Chicago)

"We owe God a death, and Greil Marcus owed all God's children a lifework on Bob Dylan. And here it is, one heaven of a book . . . What Marcus brings to these songs is a variety of good things: fierce fervor, social convictions, a loving discrimination, never a touch of envy, and an extraordinary ability to evoke in words the very feel (throaty, threatening, thorough, thick with thought) of a man's voice, of this man's voice."--Christopher Ricks, The Guardian (London)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Picador (September 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312420439
• ISBN-13: 978-0312420437
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #391,480 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Please post this review--customers deserve information, September 18, 2001

By	J. Smith - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and essential for any Dylan and American folk fan, August 12, 2006

By	Chris Stolz (canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

(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."

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Reach excedes grasp, August 12, 2006

By	Stephen A. Rauworth (Durango, CO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.