Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes

by Greil Marcus

A study of the legendary recordings made by Bob Dylan and the Band in Woodstock, New York, in 1967, analyzes the Basement Tapes, secret music never intended for release, in terms of their place in contemporary American music and their role in Dylan's career.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Cultural, Criticism, Art

286 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1997

About the author

Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics. In recent years he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Minnesota, NYU, and the New School in New York. He lives in Oakland, California.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

I need to make a little pile of cultural artifacts which have exactly the right idea and then proceed to do it in the wrongest, crassest or most migraine-inducing sesquipedelian manner possible. Then when my pile is completed I will dance around laughing and sprinkling petrol whilst the hi fi blasts out either The Martian Hop, or Surfin' Bird or Beat on the Brat with a Baseball Bat, haven't made up my mind, and I will torch the whole lot. It will be the Great Bonfire of Missed Opportunities (positively Barthelmian). A recent example would be Alexander Theroux's egregious "The Grammar of Rock" - oh what a great idea, oh how awful the resulting book. (I might chuck on great parts of my own life, come to think of it - good ideas done in the wrongest possible way? Yes, that was me too.) Theroux is in the psychiatric division here (he's taken a lot and now he's gonna dish it all out again) but Marcus is in the obscurantist division, he just has too many brains, you just can't read him. Hmmm - is he just a monstrous meretricious absurdist poseur who happens to like the same stuff as me or does he actually have some great insights which I'm too stupid to suss out? Some days I eat the Greil, some days the Marcus eats me.

The exactly right idea GM had, by the way, was to think that when Dylan was doing the Basement Tapes he was on to something - he really was.

Inscription for Greil Marcus's tombstone :

A wop bop a loobop a lop bam weltenshauung.

[Jonfaith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seldom is it noted that springing hope can prove a real pain in the ass. I continually harbor and hope. There are always lists and plans: prerequisites for other texts clamor for attention. This vein continues however vain. I am thinking of reading all women in April, this highlighted by reading Second Sex in Serbia. There is module on slavery I was imagining for May. We shall see. Wait, I haven't really broached The Weird Old America, have I? Well that treatment is tantamount to Marcus' fleeting placement of The Basement Tapes within the text: they remain central, yet absent. It is fitting that Marcus cited Camille Paglia as that appears to be his lodestar, though he lacks her scrutiny as well as her writing panache. Marcus establishes The Basement Tapes as a nexus for myriad paths of American expression and legacy. Tracing these routes is intriguing but hardly conclusive. I think I prefer Nick Tosches in such free association . When considering this challenge for 2016 it was obvious that reading five books by or about Bob Dylan would be much more problematic than achieving the same with Derrida and Dickens. Marcus gives us hagiography, Dylan the mystic awakened something eternal when he went electric. One almost imagined William James, perhaps Robert Graves on Sufism . One can glean of course that the Nirvana song Polly harkens to a ballad Pretty Polly from the 17C. Again Marcus entertains without marshaling the requisite evidence.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to give this four stars because of the profound influence it had on me the year or so after I read it. It's a silly book, to be honest. I was surprised that even Greil Marcus would go quite so far out on such an esoteric and wobbly premise. Bob Dylan and the Band's Basement Tapes as a portal to the lost soul of America? Hmm. I myself own the exhaustive Basement Tapes collection "A Tree With Roots," and let me tell you: mostly it's drunk guys singing drunken things badly.

But it's Marcus' wild ride into the lost, weird world of the USA--the one to which Harry Smith testified in his legendary Anthology of American Folk Music--that snags the imagination and leaves its mark. He has Dylan's wacky characters lead us by the head into a through-a-glass-darkly dream of a corn whiskey/magic river/molasses stank America that's absolutely irresistible for its drama and mystery. It may not actually ever have existed, mind you, but it's been the spirit possessing middle-class kids and forcing a twang into their tunes Harry Smith conjured it up back in 1952.

Long story short and for better or for worse, this book made me start playing and listening to a hell of a lot more folk and country music.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry Greil Marcus, I quit you. Marcus' MYSTERY TRAIN tried my patience, but INVISIBLE REPUBLIC (here with a different title) is absurd in its hamstrung mythology. Marcus labors on a point - that the BASEMENT TAPES are an evocation of "that old, weird America," a weird but perfect marriage of The Band and Dylan, could be said in a long article. But Marcus invokes De Tocqueville, a catalog of blues legends, and Jonathan Edwards - in ONE CHAPTER. Meanwhile he recites the same stuff about Dylanography (that when he went electric, he sutured a culture in half and was responsible for any number of late 60s disillusions) in his purple prose.

The most pretentious aspect of my copy of the book is that its subject wildly endorses it. Marcus would probably like to think of himself as Dylan's ghostwriter; he perpetuates a legend that automatically perpetuates itself, only in terms much more magisterial than what comes naturally.

But don't let this be a condemnation of the TAPES themselves - they're remarkable. Buy THE BASEMENT TAPES; listen to them and relisten to them as I have. Just don't read this book.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this book about two years ago, and this is what I wrote then:

It was certainly very informative and Marcus made an interesting case about how Dylan and the Band drew on the old, weird America of the past (Kill Devil Hills, Smithville) in the summer of 1967, when they recorded the famed Basement Tape Recordings. It is a bit surrealist, drawing on the conscious and subconscious influences in art/music, on the role of masks and personas, and the essence of time. The discography is, perhaps, more interesting than the prose. Marcus never fails to introduce me to old recordings that are new to me (in 'Mystery Train' this was particularly true with the music of Harmonica Frank Floyd), in this case to the recordings of Geechie Wiley and Dock Boggs, and many of the tracks on the ever-so-hard-to-find Genuine Basement Tape recordings.

Over the past couple of years much of the book had been forgotten, but some tiny details stuck with me, for they resonated with me for some reason or another. I decided to pick this book up again not because it had any profound impact on me at the time or because of a love of Greil Marcus’ writing style (I actually find his style a bit tangled and unfocused at times), but rather because of the recent official release of the Complete Basement Tapes by Columbia Records, the 11th installment of its Bob Dylan “Bootleg Series” at the beginning of this month.

The Basement Tapes were recorded in 1967, during what some argue was the most prolific period of Bob Dylan’s musical career. They were, as The Band’s Robbie Robertson says, never meant for anybody to hear: “We went in with a sense of humor. It was all a goof. We were playing with absolute freedom; we weren’t doing anything we thought anybody else would ever hear, as long as we lived. But what started in the basement, what came out of it . . . came out of this little conspiracy, of us amusing ourselves. Killing time.” Some say that the basement tape sessions were intended to fulfill part of a contractual obligation to Columbia Records, with the covers and parodies being just warm-up exercises to help Dylan and The Band (then The Hawks) find their sound. Others suggest that these recordings were meant to be offered to other musicians, which seems logical as 14-tracks were pressed as an acetate and sent to other artists (soon recorded by the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary, – whose recording equipment was used for these legendary sessions – the Byrds and Manfred Mann).

Beginning with the release of Great White Wonder in 1969, the record that is often credited as the beginning of the bootleg industry in music, the basement tapes soon were being sold on the streets. Great White Wonder was quickly followed by many other vinyl pressings with a variety of interesting titles. And in the 1990s and early 2000s several CD sets were released, claiming to offer all or most of the material from these famed sessions, among them The Genuine Basement Tapes and A Tree With Roots.

Aside from bootleg recordings, every now and again a track would officially be released giving listeners a taste of what was put down on tape in houses in and around Woodstock, New York in 1967 (most notably in the house affectionately known as “Big Pink”). “Quinn the Eskimo” was recorded for Dylan’s critical flop 2LP album Self Portrait. In 1975 Columbia released a 2LP set titled simply The Basement Tapes, which included on it 16 basement recordings, plus 8 demos by the Band. The most remarkable thing about this album was the inclusion of an alternative version of the song “Too Much of Nothing,” very different from the oft-bootlegged one, and the inclusion of the never-before-bootlegged “Goin’ to Acapulco,” which led many to believe that there was much more basement material out there than what first hit the streets in 1969. On Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume II, released in 1971, a couple re-recorded versions of basement songs surfaced. And when Columbia Records initiated the Dylan “Bootleg Series” in 1991, collections of rare and (more often) live Dylan performances, some basement tape tracks appeared, but not very many. And despite fans’ expectations, it took 11 bootleg series releases and 23 years for the complete basement tapes to finally achieve “official” release.

Having searched for bootleg copies of these recordings – with no success – for many years, I was ecstatic when I heard about this release and I had anticipated it for months before it actually hit store shelves. I had finally (just before reading news of the release) found The Genuine Basement Tapes on eBay for about $125 (much more than I wanted to pay). I had assumed that the Columbia box set would be pricey – perhaps around $50-60 – but I didn’t expect anything near the actual price at which this box set hit markets: $150! Finding it on sale for $120, I bought it (somewhat reluctantly), knowing that it contained almost 40 more tracks than The Genuine Basement Tapes set and was reputed to have the best sound quality to date (still quite poor for some tracks, relatively).

That was on November 4th. I listened to all of the tracks twice through. Most of them were unfamiliar to me – I knew they were out there somewhere, but I had never heard them (though I searched for them determinedly) – and others I had heard countless times before (those that had been officially-released here and there over the years). After two listens (about 6 hours through each time) I decided to revisit Marcus’ book to help me better evaluate the songs and when I did all I can say is that I was not prepared for what lay ahead of me. I entered a labyrinth that took me on a journey through time, from the “old, weird America” to the present (not just 1967, when these tracks were recorded, but to today – and even beyond, into the great unknown).

Now for a bit more on Marcus’ work itself. Marcus writes at the beginning: “Heard as something like a whole—as a story, despite or even because of its jumble of missing pieces, half-finished recordings, garbled chronologies of composition or performance—the basement tapes can begin to sound like a map; but if they are a map, what country, what lost mine, is it that they center and fix? They can begin to sound like an experiment, or a laboratory . . . .” I began listening to the music as a map, listening along the way to the originals of the covers and to influences that Marcus points out in the text, from the recordings of Geechie Wiley and Dock Boggs to “Rabbit” Brown, Frank Hutchison and countless others. Often times I would encounter a song and find a lyric that Dylan lifted for one of his songs, something he has been doing throughout his career, just as many in the folk tradition have done for centuries before him. One example was when listening to the Bascom Lunsford song “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” (recorded in 1928), in which the following line appears, “Cause a railroad man he'll kill you when he can/And drink up your blood like wine,” which Dylan recycles in “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” from his classic amphetamine-drenched 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. Another example was in the song “James Alley Blues,” recorded by “Rabbit” Brown, which Dylan has not only covered, but which includes some lyrics that Dylan recycled for “Crash on the Levee.” In recent years he has done this perhaps with even greater frequency than he did at the start of his career.

Countless writers and musicians have lifted lines or melodies from others, and it is part of not only the folk tradition, but many literary traditions as well (Ferlinghetti remarks on this somewhere; so does TS Eliot). Marcus in this book gives us a blueprint for discovering some of these recordings and if we follow the paths he lays out in this book, without deviation, we find that the roads actually go much deeper in some cases, into forbidden forests and up winding mountain roads. I tried to stick only to the roads Marcus shows us in his map, but—despite warning signs – I found myself sometimes sneaking down hidden alleys, building bridges, turning around at various roundabouts and dead-ends and sometimes finding that certain roads were much longer than I had at first anticipated.

I spent hours with this book over the past couple of weeks, mostly lost in the 40(+) page detailed discography. I had expected my adventures with this text to be a fun three-day voyage (at most), but I found instead that my trip was much more complicated than I had anticipated, with rocky terrain, innumerable detours and many signs reading “No Exit.” There is indeed no real exit from this world once you enter it. It draws you in and shows you all sorts of interesting things about not only the music, but about yourself and about the collective American experience (if the reader is an American). In some tracks on the basement tapes we really do just hear guys goofing off, having fun, killing time. But on other tracks we find hints of betrayal, seduction, lust, deception, warning, desperation, that are part of the collective American experience, going back to the beginnings and running through the present (and beyond).

I took the first exit that I could from this work, but I still left a good deal of terrain unexplored. This is a work that one can easily get lost in and spend months or even years on. And it is not easy to find a way out. At best, we can escape. But it also has a mesmerizing effect, and the book, – even if the writing itself is not my ideal – much like the music discussed therein, has a very seductive appeal. It calls out to us and draws us in. This book for now goes back on the shelf, to be pulled down again for reference when needed or when it calls out my name again. For the uninitiated reader, beware: it’s a long, tiring Homeric epic, peopled with one of the strangest casts of characters you’ll ever meet. Yes, there are sirens and lotus-eaters to be found here, and also swindlers, murderers, preachers, performers, reformers, jilted lovers, poets and a whole array of social misfits. Enter at your own risk, but take heed that you may never find your way back home again and if you do it might be very different from the way you left it, and/or you may find yourself changed.

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

May 24, 2021 Update A Revisit for #BobDylan80. Updating to my more recent review format.

The New/Old Weird America
Review of the Holt paperback edition (1998) of the original Henry Holt & Co. hardcover (1997)

This was the original 1997/98 edition of what was later reissued as The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (2011). It was a completely fascinating account of the continuum that Greil Marcus perceived in the early 20th century folk and blues recordings documented on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music through to the music produced by Bob Dylan and his then-regular backup group (who later became famous as "The Band") when they woodshedded and recorded at the house that would later be immortalized as Big Pink in upper New York State after Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident. Later the tag-line was appropriated and updated as "The New Weird America" to describe various contemporary performers whose music harkens back to early folk and blues roots. A lot of the mysterious aura about the Basement Tapes at the time was built around the fact that most* of the songs hadn't been officially released in 1997 and were only available through bootleg recordings.

I'm saying goodbye to several dozen books due to a water damage incident and I thought I'd write at least a little memorial to each of them and about why I kept them around.

Trivia and Links
16 songs by Dylan and The Band were released together with 8 songs by The Band as "The Basement Tapes" in 1975 and the complete collection of 139 songs (many in several takes) was officially released in 2014 as "The Bootleg Series Vol. 11 The Basement Tapes Complete."

[Carol Storm · Rating 1 out of 5]

The old, tired, hippy-dippy doper, telling the old, tired lies in garbled language no one can understand. Is rock and roll fun to listen to? Was Bob Dylan a genius? Can a spoiled, aging Baby Boomer redeem himself for a lifetime of sloppy, lazy scholarship with one last book that will prove beyond a doubt that the real meaning of America can only be found in obscure Dylan recordings no-one has ever heard but a tiny elite of leftist academics?

Yes, yes, and no.

As Tennessee Williams once said, "you got to use that kind of language about a thing, it's ninety proof bull, and I ain't buying none of it."

[Rama Bauer · Rating 1 out of 5]

O' Greil Marcus! What had you wrought with this piece of overly analytical long-windedness about Dylan and The Band's BASEMENT TAPES? How could you so masterfully suck all of the life and enjoyment out of such profoundly freewheeling and spirited recordings? And what did Dock Boggs and Geeshie Wiley ever do to deserve such pretentious dribble from your pen? O' Greil Marcus, you have so much to answer for....

(Seriously, it's shit like this that gives cultural studies a bad name.)

[Jonas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is pretty cool. One of Dylan's most mythical albums is the Basement Tapes. Most fans know the story: After the fabled motorcycle accident disabled the dude and turned him into a recluse he healed and reared a family somewhere in Woodstock. Sometime during this period he and The Band (who were working on their first album) bided their time in the basement of the big pink and jammed the night away. The recordings done on a simple reel to reel tape machine, were then bootlegged heavily, other bands then covered some of the tunes and The Band kept a few for themselves. Because of this interest a two record set was eventually released. But what of the rest of it? Of course the best tracks were picked and mastered, but when it's Dylan and the band, there have to be more gems.

The harder core of Dylanites have probably heard the sprawling 4 disc booty equivalent. It's a monster! Some tracks come up like three or four times and others are just extensive ramblings. I love the sucker because it's so goddamn heavy. Greil Marcus felt the same way.

Marcus is an established Dylanologist and has written enough Dylan stuff to fill a fat farmboy's belly. It only makes sense that he'd pour his obsessions over these tracks and come up with some kind of answer. This is what Dylan fans do...try and figure the man out.

His response is this book. It takes the ramshackle lyrics and stuffs them into the cultural epoch of a coal miner, horse driven and train-stitched America. Racism, oppression and lots of dust cover the idealogical landscape.

Now when i read the book i really really tried to "grok it with fullness" but it's just so goddamn heady. I listened to tracks and read passages over and over again, but instead of being constantly enlightened i found it just jarred the flow of the read. Still, there were times when i was totally enraptured and some of Marcus' ideas still permeate when i listened to 'da tapes, but i probably would have just had other eurekas of my own.

So although this book didn't give me the keys to, it still successfully brightened up the basement for me. It gave the album a bit more of a narrative, which is, as i opened up with, pretty cool.

[Foley Stocks · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are many negative reviews of this book, which primarily claim some form of purple prose, pretentiousness, or simple absurdity - that Greil Marcus is stretching to connect these points of culture and American history to the songs of Bob Dylan's The Basement Tapes.
Yet, while people often have a tendency to crudely narrativise history, it isn't really applicable here. Of course, the historical and social currents of the past inform (or shape) future art. And this is especially prescient with someone like Bob Dylan, who was at the cutting edge, and is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of all time.
Admittedly, Marcus' style of writing is perhaps not to everyone's taste (even if I personally find it engaging) - and in some places might suggest it is something it is not.
But, this is not an arbitrary, retroactive mythologising of American history funneled into some omniscient intentionality on the part of Bob Dylan, pontificated on like a theologian deciphering the act of a deity, as these responses would suggest, reminiscent of the classic atheistic 'fairy-tale' retort. Art cannot exist in isolation, and a release as compelling and enigmatic as The Basement Tapes begs for an exploration into the deeper, clashing, sometimes darker history on which Dylan builds.
And this function of the book is dense and certainly engaging: incorporating Clarence Ashley, who, "[as he sang,] paid in full every claim Dylan would make about traditional music," Dock Boggs, "ashamed to admit he ended up in the wrong place because his money didn't run out before the booze did," Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Geeshie Wiley, and so on, illustrating the traditions and the way in which they develop before Dylan's own subsequent contribution. Not only this, but in looking at Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, Marcus acknowledges the effect of prior categorisations of those elements of a certain history, acting as a filter to contemporary public consciousness (ironically, in relation to those negative responses, this is antithetical to any sort of dogmatism).
The result is a richer understanding of what one is properly listening to in The Basement Tapes - factoring in this new knowledge leaves the listener with a more (or perhaps just differently) meaningful experience as well as a better grasp of where Dylan (and the members of 'The Band', formed afterwards, which cannot be ignored, but sometimes are) was truly innovative.
I feel as though any Bob Dylan fan should make time to read this.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came for the book, I stayed for the discography (more on this later)! I haven't read Marcus for a long time, and I had kind of forgotten that I struggle with his style. I love how he pays equal attention to the words and the music - it's very common among Dylanologists to focus almost exclusively on the lyrics. Marcus writes sensitively and and intelligently about both. He is great at offering close readings of Dylan's songs on the legendary Basement Tapes, showing how they relate to classic folk songs and murder ballads of the old, weird, America. His chapter arguing that "Clothesline Saga" is an answer song to Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Jo" is my favorite part of the book, not because I found it convincing, but because he gives such a sensitive and acute reading to Gentry's all-time classic.
HOWEVER, at least half the book is nothing like this. Marcus has a tendency to go off on poetic, beautifully written, but abstract generalizations about America and music that I found hard to follow and/or lost patience for. I kept yearning for the close readings .... which brings us to the discography, which runs 70 pages. Note: The whole book is under 300 pages. I absolutely loved this part of the book, where Marcus goes song by song through every track on the Basement tapes (there are a lot of songs on the Basement Tapes), and has something interesting to say about each one. So, three stars for the book, five stars for the discography!

[Matt Shake · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the content and concepts within this book were fascinating, I really could not stomach Marcus' ridiculously obtuse writing style. I think he forgot that there's a reason he's not Bob Dylan. At times it's like he thinks he's supposed to make his prose as opaque as Dylan's rhyme. I did not read the book to become more mystified about the Basement Tapes, I read the book to become more enlightened (notice the root word "light" within that word, Mr. Marcus) about the context that the Basement Tapes were written within. Indeed, the parts that were best were not about Dylan's songs at all, they were about the biographical parts about traditional artists like Dock Boggs. The best thing I got from this book was exposure to Mr. Boggs, so for that I am glad I read the book. Too bad Marcus was too busy being cute, he'd have written one hell of a book that plain ol' crackers like Boggs and I would have understood better.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marcus, who used to review rock records, now seems to be mostly writing books. He specializes in connecting whatever performer he is interested in to various historical trends and cultural figures. It can be witty and deft at times, but for the most part the tone and the endeavor is serious. I enjoyed his book on Johnny Rotten (real name John Lydon) and the Sex Pistols in which he connected them to John of Lyden, a Dutch religious fanatic who led a movement of crazies several centuries ago. Here he connects Bob Dylan and the Band's Basement Tapes recordings to sundry unusual threads of American folk culture.

The connections are tenuous in places. For example, he refers to Constance Rourke's still widely read study "American Humor" and the concept she introduces of the mask, a protective, deadpan device worn by performers, salespeople, and con artists throughout American history - but this does not seem to really fit Dylan and his crew. There are other references to novels and the like which I had a similar reaction to. But things do click when he digs into the past of American folk music, and links the Basement Tapes to Harry Smith's famous Anthology of American Folk Music. There are many weird old songs and oddball performers there that Smith rescued from obscurity, and who plainly had an influence on Dylan. Marcus is good at digging up this strain of eccentric artistry (which he calls the Old Weird America) and presenting it to the reader. He discusses Frank Hutchison, who lived through the West Virginia Mine War of 1920-21 (something I did not hear about in my high school history classes, but should have) and gives us a long section on the life of Dock Boggs, a rough-edged Tennessean who may have been a big influence on Dylan. In other places, he rambles about Smithville and Kill Devil Hills, fictional places that represent the cultural space he is interested in.

Marcus also gives us some idea of how and under what circumstances the Basement Tapes were made, and he spends time (too much of it) sharing his bombastic impressions of the songs. However, he tells us virtually nothing of the history of the recording's release, whether or not it was successful, and how the record company did (or didn't) deal with it. It might have been interesting to hear some more about how Dylan and the Band felt about the project. For big fans of the record (and I am one, I love its raw, eccentric, moody power), this book will probably be a useful adjunct, and for those who are interested in some of the other things Marcus explores here, it would probably be an interesting read. Dylan himself seemed to enjoy it, and like Johnny Rotten before him on "Lipstick Traces", provided a complimentary quote to grace the cover.

[Pete daPixie · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Invisible Republic' from Greil Marcus, published in 1997, seems to come from some place further back in time. Or perhaps this book documents a timeless art form baptised in the subconscious waters of oblivion. The electric ghost who howled in the bones of your face from Newport to the Royal Albert Hall, through a hail of confusion, social upheaval and times that were a changin', vanished into the backwoods of Woodstock and the basement of Big Pink.
An eminently readable journey through folk memory, out from the old country and passed along through the mysterious underground like bootlegged whisky, mixin' up the medicine, to be carried down from the mountain top by a great white wonder.
The very extensive discography is as valuable as the main text. A great book to read, after a war. But what's it to ya Moby Dick...this is chicken town.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the way Marcus writes about rock. Part of me thinks it's BS, and yet he gets under the skin of the music, which to some extent is essential, otherwise such books tend to bore me. With Marcus, when he's in stride, he reads like poetry. It's impossible to sustain that for an entire book, but just go along for the ride, and when you hit one of those passages, you'll know. In this particular effort, you get Dylan, Americana, myth, history, and music, all converging into some sort of dream that Whitman might of liked. Look for Marcus's discussion of Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe," and Dylan's responding parody, "Clothesline Saga." The discussion captures both the BS and Beauty of Marcus at his best.

[Alex Hotovy · Rating 1 out of 5]

shut up

[Jeff Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm slightly confused by this book, hence the three stars...

In many ways this has absolutely nothing to do with the legendary 'Basement Tapes' of Dylan and (what would be) The Band. In many ways it has everything to do with them. If you are looking for an account of their recording, who did what, where and when...skip to the Discography at the back, or just read a different book.

If you want to know why the Basement Tapes happened...then read on...but again, not if the 'why' you are looking for is about what Dylan was doing, where he was, who agreed with who, who set up the recording tapes etc etc. The 'why' that this book explores is what was happening culturally and, after the tumultuous 'electric' transition, where Dylan turned for solace. A telling statement from Dylan explains the fundamental difference between himself and acts that followed a short time after (Springsteen for example) "They weren't there to see the end of the traditional people. But I was".

This book looks at those artists, the recordings and legacies that they left; their influence on the choice in songs covered in the Basement and those that were written during those sessions. Dock Boggs and Ashley Clarence get good coverage, and the chapter on Harry Smith is excellent. The book also reminded me of a Geeshie Wiley song I had all but forgotten about and was most happy to hear again.

But this is where I get confused - it doesn't really go into the detail that it could, but lurks around in an imaginary place between the two worlds, neither one nor the other. It's alright, but just made me want to read other books...which in itself is no bad thing...

[Rick Burin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Greil Marcus is not a man who worries nights about being called pretentious. There’s certainly a place for music writing that isn’t purely about context, lyrics, instruments and personnel, and some of this fabled tome is great – but most of it is borderline unbearable.

Marcus loops together American references that tower like telegraph poles across an arid, fatalistic past, as he would put it, which is to say that he reads an awful lot into Dylan’s Basement Tapes, coming close to analysing these shuffling, raucous, careening, inspired, absurd, scuzzy, bootlegged roots recordings half to death, and linking to five centuries’ worth of American phenomena in ways that range from the inspired to the frankly irrelevant.

He’s right that Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music is an analogue (though more through chance, as Dylan wasn’t purposefully constructing a song cycle, just spending several months jamming and experimenting), and the passages on artists like Frank Hutchison and Dock Boggs have moments of real insight, but Marcus can’t write a clean, clear sentence to save his life, and a lot of his ideas and pronouncements – upon closer inspection – often don’t ring true, or really mean anything at all. Even when he’s telling important old stories (of Johnny Cash, Winthrup, or the West Virginia Mine War), examining the tyranny of the multitude in folk music, or cleverly unpicking songs like ‘Clothes Line Saga’ or ‘Tears of Rage’, it seems there’s always a stretch into hollow pretension just around the corner.

I know it’s heresy, but I found the book really irritating: a man endlessly farting on about whatever comes into his head.

You know what’s a much better use of time? Just listening to The Basement Tapes.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Huge swaths of this book make absolutely no sense at all, but who expects Greil Marcus to make sense *all* the time? The incomprehensible bits are worth it for when the bizarreness works. His free form recitation of of Dylan Goes Electric myth is the only thing I've ever read that conveys the earth-shattering importance of the moment. I've always thought it sounded absurd, and, in retrospect, it is...but it wasn't at the time and only Greil Marcus can describe what it felt like then.

All of American history fights to get mentioned. The stories about musicians Frank Hutchinson and Doc Boggs somehow include Appalachian miners strikes, The New Folk movement of the 50s, the Great Depression and modern country radio. It doesn't make sense, but that's okay.

The weakest parts are those about the Basement Tapes. Partly because they are least comprehensible and partly because I don't really trust or believe him here. I don't hear what he hears. Is this really a moment of mystical inspiration, capturing on tape the very spirit of America before it was lost forever? Or a recording of a bunch of drunk guys jamming in a basement? I keep listening for the former, but can't find it.

[Brent · Rating 2 out of 5]

Marcus’ seems to lack both structure and direction in this one. Too reliant on lyrics and subjective interpretation of the recordings. I still don’t know why America is old and weird, although I got hints of it. For all Marcus’ prosaic flourish, sometime a more pointed approach achieves perspicacity and avoid turgidness.

[Gracie · Rating 4 out of 5]

bought this baby at city lights so maybe that’s why it’s four stars but bob dylan is the physical manifestation of the american national unconsciousness !!!

[Gregsbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good history of the origins and aftermath of the folk music revival -of interest to fans of Harry Everett Smith.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

This land has always been haunted.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to learn more about "The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes" as the cover of the 2011 edition says, do not buy this book. However, if you want to learn more about the music that influenced Dylan and The Band at Big Pink, and in my mind, many of the songs that Dylan selected for his Theme Time Radio Hour series, this Greil Marcus book is a must read.

Yes, it does cover many of the songs Dylan and The Band recorded during the Summer of 1967, but the book really focuses on Harry Smith's 1952 six album set entitled the "Anthology of American Folk Music." Most of the music found on Smith's anthology are old 78s primarily of southern artists that paved the way for future blues and folk artists. One can't wonder how big on an influence Smith's anthology was on the American folk music revival of the early Sixties. No doubt it had an influence on Dylan and probably other artists like Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk to name a few.

Besides spending a large chapter delving into Smith's anthology (it is still available, now on CD), Marcus reminds us of Virginian Dock Boggs. Early in his career, he only recorded twelve sides. Later, Mike Seeger of The New Lost City Ramblers recorded more of Boggs' unique style of singing and banjo playing.

The best part of the book are the Works Cited and the extensive Discography sections at the end. Will I read the book again? Probably. Now that I have Harry Smith's American folk music anthology set in my music collection, I want to review that chapter in more depth.

In the last few pages, Marcus makes an interesting observation regarding Dylan. Marcus writes:

"Few performers have mad their way onto the stage of the twentieth century with a greater collection of masks than Bob Dylan. From the balladeer who first presented himself not as the son of a respectable middle-class Jewish family from northern Minnesota but as a vagabond runaway who had no idea if his parents were dead or alive, to the dandy who when controversy over his turn to the pop arena erupted declared that his investment in folk music had been a con from the start, he was, it was sometimes said, a different person every time you saw him. As an artist he was funny, outrageous, prophetic, denunciatory, appalled, unpredictable; inside any of those qualities you could hear wariness, slyness, thinking, a will to stay a step aheah, in control."

Masks indeed. It seems his Spring 1966 tour of the UK not only unnerved Dylan, but unmasked him as well. As Marcus points out, listen to Dylan's performance of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" in Liverpool on May 14, 1966. Marcus believes it was this tour that sent Dylan into seclusion to work with The Band and record hundreds of hours of tapes.

Yes. Dylan is a man of many masks. Think of his film "Masked and Annonymos." Think of the white face "masks" he wore during The Rolling Thunder Review. The list of masks could go on and on. It makes me wonder how well Dylan would fair in Octavio Paz's "The Labyrinth of Solitude." Only the late Paz and Dylan himself can answer that question. For the rest of us, we'll just have to wonder.

[Mark Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Music writing at its best,I like the first chapter especially, relating the songs of the Basement tapes ( and its numerous bootlegs ) to the mysterious stranger mythologies of the American Western,'the man with no name' . His starting point is Dylan's break with electric,( the famous 'Judas 'moment at Manchester Free Trade Hall) and his re-connection with a deeper and more authentic voice via blues artists such as Dock Boggs ,who surfaced via the eclectic Harry Smith anthologies that made their way round the Big Pink house where the Basement Tapes started.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

At one point Marcus is analyzing a piece of writing by Howard Hampton, summarizing "...this is not an interpretation I would ever think of...or rather it is not an interpretation at all. It's not an attempt to define or decode..., but a response to a certain provocation."

That is a sentiment I tried to bear in mind as I read in order to restrain my impatience at Marcus's frequently bombastic rhapsodies about every note played by Bob Dylan and the Band during the 65-66 tours and the summer of recording what became the basement tapes. The strength of his response is in part a reflection of the 60s generation's continued sense that they lived through and created something unprecedented and since unparalleled.

Also I can't help feeling that the current availability of all this music in digital form demystifies things a bit - anyone who cares to can acquire the 14 CDs or so of the 1966 World Tour and the complete 5-CD Basement tapes without any samizdat subterfuge, hand-offs at train stations etc. As such, that "shocking, bloody" chord Robbie Robertson plays at the Manchester show or wherever, sometimes turns out just to be a G major.

The best parts of it, to my mind, are the more conventionally rock-crit historical - the "Old Weird America" chapter (with which the book was re-titled after its first release), an excellent overview of Harry Smith, his "Anthology of American Folk Music" and the milieu in which it came out, is indispensable, and the chapter on Dock Boggs is also informative and compelling.

Note to historians: I actually read the 1997 Picador edition titled "Invisible Republic".

[Nigel Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do struggle with Greil Marcus.

The premise of the book is interesting; that Dylan and The Band, through the informal recordings that became the basement tapes, channelled “ the old wierd America” - songs that represented an “Invisible Republic” - some of which were collected by Harry Smith in his Anthology of American Folk Music.

Throughout the book, Marcus illustrates the stories behind some of these songs and the characters that made them, being particularly good with people such as Dock Boggs and threads them through to the Big Pink in ‘67. Through its discography the book also analyses the basement tracks and as such is a useful guide.

What I struggle with is Marcus’s esoteric criticism that for me goes so far out there as to become almost meaningless but loads the basement songs with heavy portent. The man thinks too much !

Dylan was in Woodstock to recover from the unsustainable expectations being put upon him as the anointed spokesperson of his generation coupled with the bile that met his ‘66 electric tour. No wonder the poor guy was speeding out of his eyeballs throughout. I imagine he’d reached a point of absolute exhaustion. The Big Pink songs were a way of winding down with the people who supported him throughout the previous year and they had fun with, particularly in Dylan’s case an encyclopaedic knowledge of old tunes.

The book is worth reading as it does evoke some interesting themes, but some of Marcus’s stylings are a bit rich for my blood and so it loses a star for me.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw Greil Marcus come and speak to promote the release of this book. It was fascinating. He's been studying the Basement Tapes since before they were commercially released and he has a lot of ideas and suspicious connections to talk about. As some random guy in a coffee shop told me when he saw me reading this book, "I'll bet my friends and I can come up with a book full of iffy connections about any double album, but that doesn't mean we'd publish it when we sobered up."

In spite of this, it is a great book and I never listened to Bob Dylan, much less the Basement Tapes the same way again. The book largely concerns itself with Anthology of American Folk Music, a box set of recordings that partly formed the basis of Bob Dylan's tastes. Marcus claims that The Basement Tapes were Bob Dylan's answer to that anthology.

He succeeds in convincing the reader that there is indeed a secret American parallel history that we know nothing about and that is absolutely gone from the earth. He also succeeds in showing how the Basement Tapes and Anthology of American Folk Music are points of entry into this secret past. He doesn't succeed in telling the stories memorably, or without seeming a little to possessive and nerdy about them.
as A.J. Weberman said in the 70s, "Greil Marcus hordes his basement tapes". Too True.

[Timothy Hallinan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this directly after I finished Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, thinking Marcus might do for American folk rock (especially, Dylan's Basement Tapes) what Rob Young did for British electrified folk. And he does, to a point; he explores the insular weirdness of folk songs, with their murky murders and the character names that mutate from singer to singer -- someone could (probably has) written a book about the evolution of Staggerlee -- and a lot of it is interesting and informative.

But where ELECTRIC EDEN is wildly over-researched and overwritten, but still dazzling in the way that a recluse's room-size tinfoil kingdom is (you know that Young put absolutely everything he had into it), too much of THE OLD WEIRD AMERICA seems actually to be about Greil Marcus, and this is nowhere more true than in the prose, which seems at times to be striving for an English that's as impenetrable as Dylan's sometimes is.

Still, I enjoyed a lot of it, even if it required some skimming.