Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes Review

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(More customer reviews)Music is a hard thing to write about. You can go clipped and dry in your appoach, with dates and names and other history, which can be pretty dull. Or you can, if you live and believe it like Greil Marcus obviously does, do the stream-of-consciousness thing. Despite its unevenness I think I prefer the Marcus approach. This book is not going to appeal to everyone. The actual Basement Tapes of the title really don't take up but a small portion of the book. Instead, Marcus uses the Tapes like a touchstone for everything authentic - and vanishing, in American culture. "Old Weird America," Marcus calls it. Indeed. Dylan is of course important, since he's the last musical genius (according to Marcus) to understand this. When Marcus does discuss a song on the Basement Tapes, he often, to my mind, overstates his case with pretty wild hyperbole that has me thinking whatever he's smoking, it must be good. But I'm willing to go with that. The payoff comes when he discusses, for example, Dock Boggs (an important figure for Dylan) and the often violent Southwest Virginia music and gun scene in the 1920s. Knowing something about the area, this was indeed a treat, and a high point for me in the book. Also good, is the discussion of folk music compiler Henry Smith, whose efforts would later prove to be so important to Dylan and the folk movement. Smith is an important figure, with a personal history that is both compelling and weird. Another standout is Marcus's discussion of the Bobbie Gentry classic, "Ode to Billie Joe" and its counterpart or answer on the Basement Tapes, "Clothesline Saga." "Clothesline"is a strange, and funny song, but it shares, as Marcus points out, similar Americana turf with Gentry's Ode: deadpan, even lethal, and as traditional as Twain, Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. The kind of understandings you can't download from today's music world.

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