The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes [Paperback]

Greil Marcus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2001

Previously published as Invisible Republic and already considered a classic of modern American cultural criticism, The Old, Weird America is Greil Marcus's widely acclaimed book on the secret music (the so-called "Basement Tapes") made by Bob Dylan and the Band while in seclusion in Woodstock, New York, in 1967--a folksy yet funky, furious yet hilarious music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it was more than thirty years ago.

As Mark Sinker observed in The Wire: "Marcus's contention is that there can be found in American folk a community as deep, as electric, as perverse, and as conflicted as all America, and that the songs Dylan recorded out of the public eye, in a basement in Woodstock, are where that community as a whole gets to speak." But the country mapped out in this book, as Bruce Shapiro wrote in The Nation, "is not Woody Guthrie's land for made for you and me . . . It's what Marcus calls 'the old, weird America.'" This odd terrain, this strange yet familiar backdrop to our common cultural history--which Luc Sante (in New York magazine) termed the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes"--is the territory that Marcus has discovered in Dylan's most mysterious music. And his analysis of that territory "reads like a thriller" (Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly) and exhibits "a mad, sparkling brilliance" (David Remnick, The New Yorker) throughout. This new edition of The Old, Weird America includes an updated discography.

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
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)

About the Author

One of America's most original and incisive critics of pop music and pop culture, Greil Marcus is the author of Double Trouble, Dead Elvis, Lipstick Traces, and Mystery Train. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Picador (September 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312420439
• ISBN-13: 978-0312420437
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,015,262 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #89 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( D ) > Dylan, Bob

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 52 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

Format:Paperback

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.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars The Old, Weird America April 14, 2009

By John Proctor

Format:Paperback

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.

25 of 29 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

Format:Paperback

(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."