The Basement Tapes Turn 50 (or 58)
A pile of songwriting demos from 1967-68 that generated oodles of ink
[Columbia first released The Basement Tapes (recorded 1967-68)on June 26, 1975, which seemed to peel open the tentative 1970s. Greil Marcus wrote the liner notes. Invisible Republic appeared 22 years later, and the Boston Review of Books ran my then exasperated stance on Dylan’s late career. Some of this counts as pure pique: Marcus was simply clearing his throat for Like a Rolling Stone, The History of Rock and Roll in Ten Songs, and especially Folk Music, books that carried these ideas further, and give Republic a different context. I remember thinking of the whole “old, weird America” (its paperback title) as a head fake; our country has only grown weirder, more wayward and violent, since. After a disastrous run (from 1983’s Infidels to 1990’s Under the Red Sky), it felt like defending Dylan, glossing over his profane inconsistencies, did his better work a disservice. Plus, traffic from this link on greilmarcus.net has crashed my server numerous times, so boomerang’s your uncle.
That Sinead moment still stings—never thought I’d feel embarrassed attending a Dylan show…]
FOR THE PAST twenty-odd years, Bob Dylan has played out one of the most excruciating endgames of any rock career. The steadfast still flock to his shows for the odd flash of inspiration, but after one too many of his inert performances, even the hard-bitten lose faith. At his 30th anniversary celebration in 1992, surrounded by friends like Roger McGuinn, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Neil Young, and Lou Reed, Dylan played the fading rock icon as a pale, puffy ghost, the burned-out shell of the protean voice-of-a-generation who had written the evening's parade of classic songs. Can anyone imagine the Dylan of an earlier era allowing Sinéad O'Connor to be booed off stage for defying the Pope—without so much as a retort?
Alongside fiascoes like his ambivalent 1985 Live Aid set, his indecipherable 1991 Grammy appearance, this 30th Anniversary performance reinforced the impression that Dylan was more a casualty of the sixties than a survivor.
This Dylan makes no appearance in Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, a literary fantasia on the fabled 1967 Basement Tapes. Rock's most erudite and graceful stylist, Marcus is best known for Mystery Train, his 1975 treatise on rock as American myth, and Lipstick Traces, a forbidding historical tour of the avant-garde by way of the Sex Pistols. His passion for Dylan began with early articles for Rolling Stone: an early bootleg discography in 1968 and a famous pan of Self- Portrait, the 1970 Dylan twofer that was a lot more prophetic than anyone imagined.
To Marcus, Dylan is the whole of sixties culture rolled up into one cultural spark plug of a rockabilly intellectual, the era's self-conscious primitive with an aesthetic gene pool that reaches back to Kentucky warbler Dock Boggs and folkie anthologist Harry Smith.
In Invisible Republic, he tries to justify what was great about Dylan's sixties and pretends that no amount of artistic dissipation can alter it. Like the later Dylan it ignores, Invisible Republic falls prey to the hoariest clichés about rock critics and their conceits. To begin with, Marcus has mastered the short form so thoroughly that his longer work lacks coherence. His one-offs are so thick with insight and broad in taste that he has no peer as a magazine journalist (as in Mystery Train, Invisible Republic's some of provocations land in the endnotes). In short takes, Marcus brushes up against greatness; in the long form he leaps from Dylan to Alexis de Tocqueville to Don Henley in a single paragraph. The book lacks an overarching theme that gets developed, restated, and carried to a satisfying conclusion. Along the way, Marcus gets even higher on his own fumes than he does on Dylan's:
For then, in the shifting humors of the old Americas that loom up in the songs, neither a secret identity nor a faked death, more or less what has been acted out in "Clothesline Saga," would be worth a dollar or a dram, and anyone listening would have to answer for which song he liked best, for who she really was.
Marcus' identification with Dylan is even more vexing than his feverish ID with Elvis Presley, his other great subject. As a result, The Basement Tapes have a lot to answer for. To Marcus, Dylan is the whole of sixties culture rolled up into one cultural spark plug of a rockabilly intellectual, the era's self-conscious primitive with an aesthetic gene pool that reaches back to Kentucky warbler Dock Boggs and folkie anthologist Harry Smith.
Although Dylan and the Band's work on the Basement Tapes is possessed by greatness, Marcus' hyperbolic style, like that of Pauline Kael (to whom the book is dedicated), distorts his judgment. In any case, no music could live up to what Marcus writes about Dylan and the Band ("their ringing voices make it plain that what they're really selling is America, because in America the fantasy of the country sells everything else and everything else on sale sells the country"). There's no way Elvis Presley could live up to people's idea of Elvis, so he squandered it on Vegas comebacks, Cadillacs, and peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, and in Mystery Train and Dead Elvis, Marcus turned that spectacle into indelible subject matter.
He remembers the music in pithy, vivid strokes: "Desolation Row" is "a funny, tense, graceful eleven-minute parable of utopia as absolute exile and twentieth-century culture as the Titanic."
Dylan carries an even larger burden than Presley, according to Marcus. Over 280 pages, he bloats the Dylan myth up beyond recognition [these words open Marcus’s book, and have somehow fallen into place]:
More than thirty years ago, when a world now most often spoken of as an error of history was taking shape and form—and when far older worlds were reappearing like ghosts that had yet to make up their minds, cruel and paradisiac worlds that in 1965 felt at once present and impossibly distant—Bob Dylan seemed less to occupy a turning point in cultural space and time than to be that turning point. As if culture would turn according to his wishes or even his whim; the fact was, for a long moment it did.
There are important ideas behind all this smoke. Marcus is at his best when recalling the fifties' folk revival, the emergence of Dylan as the conscience of the early sixties Civil Rights Movement, and Dylan's "betrayal" of folk ethics by going electric at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965. He remembers the music in pithy, vivid strokes: "Desolation Row" is "a funny, tense, graceful eleven-minute parable of utopia as absolute exile and twentieth-century culture as the Titanic." There may be nobody better at translating abstract sounds into descriptive, meaningful words, and Marcus's ear is tuned in to every nuance, every flutter of Dylan's harmonica…
more
The Basement Tapes—Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol 11 (Deluxe Edition, 6 CDs), from 2014, goes on forever, and you always want more
Greil Marcus’s review of Self-Portrait (“What is this shit?”) in Rolling Stone, 1970
More on Triplicate and Chronicles Vol. I, and Dylan’s third cursed book
“We needn't bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975. It would have been the best album of 1967 too. And it's sure to sound great in 1983…” Robert Christgau
noises off
From the archives: Michelle Williams and Nicole Kidman go for the Big O in “Taboo Sex Jingles”; Woodstock at 20, then, and now; and the Firesign Theatre catalog finally gets the book the material deserves
“This time it has made an almost equally bold decision: to create, at a moment of crisis for the US and its place in the world, an alternative model of American global leadership,” from “Can the Church Evolve?” By Fintan O’Toole in NYRB
riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link