There are good reasons that Bob Dylan made Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people of the 20th century, and there are even better reasons why Greil Marcus knows them. No other journalist has immersed himself in Dylan's music for as long, nor as thoroughly, nor critically, nor artfully as Marcus, one of America's most celebrated music writers. With selections from Rolling Stone, Creem, Interview, the Village Voice, et alia, his new anthology, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010 is the author's long-overdue greatest hits collection chronicling Dylan's artistic evolution for four-plus decades.
Becoming a Dylan Writer
“I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses,” Marcus writes in the introduction of this, his third book about Dylan. “I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it—I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it, through it, inside it, behind it, was my way of doing that.”
A longtime PhD and now a professor at Berkelely, Marcus's fixation with Dylan began back in 1963, when he was 18 years old and attending a Joan Baez concert in New Jersey. This was at the early launch of Dylan's career, when Baez was championing him as the Next Big Thing in folk, shoving the scruffy 22-year-old onstage at her performances for a couple duets and solos. “I barely noticed the end of the show,” Marcus continues. “I was transfixed. I was confused... something in his demeanor dared you to pin him down, to sum him up and write him off, and you couldn't do it.” Excited, Marcus promptly ran backstage to meet Dylan, and thus began the relationship between the soon-to-be writer and one of his life's obsessions.
“Ah, Bob Dylan!”
While the bulk of today's music writers are preoccupied with alliteration, flipping madly through Thesauruses in search of clever adjectives (mind-melting molten guitar hooks, etc.), Marcus has always been more concerned with substance. Unlike Ralph Gleason and Robert Shelton—traditional music critics who transitioned into writing about pop music in the mid '60s—Marcus comes from the first generation of actual pop music writers spawned from the counterculture. Much of his approach—that search for substance—can be attributed to the cultural values of those times, when what an artist had to say politically or artistically or intellectually meant more on the hip meter than shoe types and tattoo styles.
Hailing from the school of “New Journalism,” Marcus shows off his early stuff in a 1972 piece for Creem magazine, detailing a night he and some friends sat around listening to George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh on a radio program teaser for the upcoming film release. “We turned off the first half-hour of Ravi Shankar,” the author quipped, soon leading into a criticism of the concert as an ironic and pretentious feel-good fest. “I found most of it dull, and after a bit the show began to bother me immensely,” wrote Marcus, who found Dylan's Performance of “Just Like a Woman” to be one of the concert's only redeeming moments: “If the genius of this man seems occasional now, when it comes it is staggering, and nothing can touch it. Ah, Bob Dylan!”
Dylan's Perpetual Verve
In this reckless age of commercial dreck and one-hit wonders, when musicians come, make a splash, then quickly disappear into the creases of history (until VH1 drags them off some used car sales lot in Nebraska for a clip on Where Are They Now?), it's the rare talent that can remain vital to American culture for five decades and counting. While some of Bob Dylan's enduring success may be anchored to the huge impact of his 1960s song catalog, his ability to take risks and constantly reinvent has been equally if not more crucial.
In Marcus's reckoning, Dylan's mid-'60s albums—Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde—were the first reinvention of Dylan's career. As he wrote in a 1970 review of Dylan's double album Self Portrait for Rolling Stone: “Out of that Dylan gained the freedom to step back and get away with anything he chose to do, commercially and artistically.” But in Marcus's view, Dylan's biggest shift came with the 1992 release of Good as I Been to You, an album of Dylan covering traditional folk songs that had an early impact on his style. For Marcus, this “almost unnoticed” album constituted not a reinvention, but a complete reincarnation: “From that point on there was a new story to follow—and it was so strong, so surprising, that it cast everything that had preceded it in a new light. That is the arc of this book.”
Dylan on Tap, in All Varieties
From a review of Bob Spitz's 1989 Dylan biography for the Washington Post, to Marcus's liner notes for Bob Dylan and the Band's 1975 album The Basement Tapes, the anthology peels Dylan apart from a number of viewpoints. While some of the essays are directly focused on some aspect of Dylan, others are only Bob Dylan-related, for instance a digressive feature about Dylan's son Jakob's band, The Wallflowers. Meanwhile, readers will find a smattering of Marcus's longtime music column, Real Life Rock Top 10, laced throughout the book.
Highlights include Marcus's interview with Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorcese about the 1978 film The Last Waltz, as well as the essay “Where is Desolation Row?” However, the most brilliant piece in the anthology (and perhaps of Marcus's career) is the Rolling Stone feature, “High Water Everywhere.” In one of those rare moments where journalism crosses the threshold of art, using pull quotes from various sources—including Noam Chomsky, Dylan, even Herman Melville—Marcus stitched together this pastiche, or what might be called “journalistic poetry,” in reaction to the 2001 terrorist attacks, and in a fine homage to his most time-honored subject, the illustrious Mr. D.
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus
PublicAffairs
October 26, 2010
496 pp.
$29.95
ISBN: 978-1-58648-831-4