Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes - Softcover

Marcus, Greil

9780330336246: Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 033033624X ISBN 13: 9780330336246

Publisher: Picador, 1998

Out of a house called Big Pink came music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it was over thirty years ago. 'Marcus's contention is that there can be found in American folk a community as deep, as electric, as perverse and as conflicted as all America, and that the songs Dylan recorded out of the public eye, in a basement in Woodstock with the group who would later become The Band, are where that community as a whole gets to speak ...Books this good should be burnt' Mark Sinker, Wire 'We owe God a death, and Greil Marcus owed all God's children a lifework on Bob Dylan. And here it is, one heaven of a book ...what Marcus brings to these songs is a variety of good things: fierce fervour, social convictions, a loving discrimination, never a touch of envy and an extraordinary ability to evoke in words the very feel (throaty, threatening, thorough, thick with thought) of a man's voice, of this man's voice' Christopher Ricks, Guardian 'You will want to read its most provoking parts over and over and chances are, twenty years from now, it will stand as one of the classics of American criticism' Mikal Gilmore, Observer 'A rare ability to describe the genesis of a song and make it sound better than any song you have ever heard' Tim Adams, Times Literary Supplement

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Review:

Critic Greil Marcus, author of Dead Elvis, The Dustbin of History and Mystery Train has produced a startling and provocative meditation on one of the great underground classics of American music, the fabled Basement Tapes recorded in the summer of 1967 by Bob Dylan and musicians who would soon be known as The Band. Invisible Republic is not merely the story of the Basement Tapes and their unusual bootleg history, but a critical analysis of the various influences that seem to have led Dylan and his friends into creating this body of work, which is exuberant, haunting and mysterious. Marcus presents a lively and offbeat social history of America while telling the stories of such characters as the eccentric folk song anthologist Harry Smith and a banjo-picking Virginia coal miner named Doc Boggs. Marcus writes with passion, and as he himself says, an "obsession". His analysis of how five men in a basement in 1967 happened to create an alternative folk music for America is not only highly entertaining, but is like a long refreshing dive into a vast lake of American music. --Jake Bond

From the Publisher:

Long-awaited book on Dylan's legendary Woodstock recordings
Invisible Republic is Greil Marcus's long-awaited book on the scores of legendary recordings Bob Dylan and the Band made in Woodstock, New York in 1967, in the basement of a house called Big Pink - music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it was thirty years ago. Starting with Dylan's historic rock'n'roll debut at the 1965 Newport Rock Festival and Dylan and the Band's subsequent tour of the US and Britain in 1966, Marcus recreates the outrage provoked by Dylan's supposed betrayal of folk music and folk values, and makes it clear that the Basement Tapes, secret music never intended for release, were Dylan's response. Dylan had described folk music as 'nothing but mystery'; Invisible Republic, moving back into the great, gothic dramas of American traditional music, unfolds as a mystery story, with Dylan himself as the detective. "Books this good should be burnt" Mark Sinker, The Wire

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