All Intensive Purposes

Greil Marcus is one of the authors whose stuff I'll pick up sight unseen; I've just read his latest, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, about the single and the moment in the country and the culture when it was released. The recorded version of the song is the musical equivalent of lightning in a bottle: Marcus describes the efforts on the part of Dylan and the studio musicians to capture the song -- they got in once, the version we all know from the radio, and did not find it again. Dylan and various back-up musicians struggled in the following months and years to make it work again, with varying success, as Marcus describes.

Having missed the mid-60's, I nevertheless appreciate Marcus's efforts to make sense of it decades later, perhaps more than Alan Light, who wrote a not-snark-free review of Like a Rolling Stone in yesterday's New York Times Book Review:

..."I've written a lot of books and after reading Dylan's book, I realized I would never write a book [as] good [as Chronicles]," Marcus said recently. Yet that hasn't stopped him from trying. Marcus's latest--published eight years after Invisible Republic, his exploration of Dylan's "Basement Tapes" album with the Band--is a "biography" of the singer's signature hit, a single that Rolling Stone magazine recently selected as the greatest song of all time. (Some readers might begin to wonder if Marcus's next book will be an exegesis of the chorus to "Jokerman.") Marcus ... can still deliver blazing insight. His description of the pure sonics of "Like a Rolling Stone"--a sound so complete and perfectly realized that it "never plays the same way twice"--forces you to approach a 40-year-old song with new ears. The song "promises a new country," Marcus writes; "now all you have to do is find it." But too many tropes in Marcus's cultural criticism are starting to feel overfamiliar, and too much of his own Dylanology is starting to fold in on itself. This book's subtitle is Bob Dylan at the Crossroads; the opening line of Invisible Republic was "Once a singer stood at a world crossroads."

One can quibble with some of this -- most of the Basement Tapes were not released on the album with that name, and circulate as bootlegs, and rather than writing that the single of "Like a Rolling Stone" was "perfectly realized," Marcus writes about how the musicians were just trying to hold it together in the third and fourth verses -- but the overall sense of it is fair enough. If you didn't like Invisible Republic(now sold under the name The Old, Weird America), don't bother with this one. But I liked both books very much, and reading Like A Rolling Stone has got me listening to "Highway 61 Revisited" over and over again in the last few weeks. Marcus has much, much more to say than most critics.

A happy Fourth of July to everyone in Dylan's America.