About book The Old, Weird America: The World Of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (2001)
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.
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.
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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.
—Steve
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.
—Geoff
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.
—Timothy Hallinan
