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 From Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes To A Treatise On America. By Gregory McNamee Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, by Greil Marcus (Henry Holt). Cloth, $22.50
Marcus extracts perhaps just a few too many resonances of meaning
from a bunch of guys in their 20s sitting around a living room
and beating on various musical instruments while waiting for hard
rain. Still, he makes good sense most of the time, which isn't
an easy thing to pull off in the pomo-crit enterprise. And even
when he doesn't, Marcus sets up some arguments that will send
readers to spinning their Howlin' Wolf, Blind Lemon Jefferson,
and Bobby Zimmerman platters and Folkways anthologies while thinking
of a suitable retort.
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© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth |
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GREIL MARCUS, A thoughtful and ironic student of popular culture,
is a master at following slender threads of evidence to their
(usually) logical conclusions. Following a labored postmodern
tactic of hit-and-miss inquiry that involves ransacking whole
libraries, he's turned out good books (Mystery Train, Dead
Elvis) and not so good books (Lipstick Traces, The
Dustbin of History), all of them attempts at ferreting out
what might be called the hidden history of our times.
Marcus' misses are a lot more interesting than most scholars'
hits. Invisible Republic is a case in point: From a tiny
fragment of pop history--namely, Bob Dylan's holing up with the
members of The Band in upstate New York in 1966 in a retreat that
would yield multiple bootlegs and the official 1975 release The
Basement Tapes--Griel crafts a multi-faceted treatise on American
society. Those contraband sessions turn up some surprises in Dylan's
half-remembered, half-invented versions of the folk standards
on which he built his career, some of which came back from memory's
grave on the recent albums Good As I Been to You and World
Gone Wrong. For Marcus the sessions are a point of departure
to talk, in no particular order, about the history of the blues,
racism, coal-mining strikes, the big-band sound, Jeffersonian
idealism, the American penchant for violence, and the creation
of legends. About all this he has much to say, and as Marcus travels
his odd path from one historical datum to another, he makes some
remarkable discoveries, all set to a good beat.
