| April 22nd, 2005 08:46 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Greil Marcus, the thinking man's critic, leads the way home -- to Dylan, of course
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
Friday, April 22, 2005 / SF Chronicle
Greil Marcus met Bob Dylan twice. The first time, an unknown Dylan was making a guest appearance at a 1963 Joan Baez concert in New Jersey, and Marcus approached the young singer after the show. More than 35 years later, long after Marcus established himself as the premier writer on the subject of Dylan, they met again when Marcus was invited to present Dylan the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award, shortly after the publication of Marcus' book on "The Basement Tapes," "Invisible Republic."
"You only scratched the surface," Dylan told him.
The gray-haired 59-year-old critic may look professorial in his owl-eyed glasses, sport coat over T-shirt and jeans, telling the story from behind a lectern to a roomful of enthusiasts last week at a bookstore appearance for his new book about Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads." But he can't conceal a boyish glee in the corners of his smile. Despite many long years and countless thousands of words, Marcus remains, first and foremost, a fan.
"I like the way he sings," he said the next day in his Berkeley home. "In certain Bob Dylan songs, in the tenor of his voice, the timbre of his voice, the whole country is present -- 400 years, 3,000 miles this way, 2,000 miles that way -- it's all present."
Marcus works in an attic office above the shady Thousand Oaks home where he and his wife of 38 years, Jenny, raised their two daughters, Emily, 35, and Cecily, 33. In a rambling series of interlocking rooms under the peaked roof with windows that overlook treetops to the bay, shelves stuffed with CDs, records, tapes, books and videos fill almost every wall. Above a couch and table set aside for conversations floats a plastic inflatable advertising the album "Led Zeppelin II."
His chambers provide a perfect setting for the ivory-tower author of "Mystery Train," the first scholarly examination of rock's roots in cultural history, which he wrote shortly after he and his family moved into this home in 1973. In books as intellectually dexterous and ambitious as "Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century" and "Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in the Land of No Alternatives" (a book Marcus' longtime pal and fellow critic Dave Marsh called "an insult to Elvis"), Marcus has established himself as the thinking man's rock critic, the Pauline Kael of pop. When he taught an American studies seminar at Princeton in 2000 on "Prophecy and the American Voice," the subject of the book he's working on, Bruce Springsteen sat in.
"It's funny Greil is so estranged from the East Coast intellectual establishment," said Marsh. "Of all the people who write about pop music, he's their darling."
His publisher, in fact, gave Marcus the idea for his latest book. Marcus hated the idea at first -- all book ideas from publishers are suspect -- but he couldn't stop thinking about it. By the end of the next day, he found himself scribbling notes on the project.
"It was very obvious," said his editor, Clive Priddle. "Publishing editors don't come up with anything except obvious ones."
"Like a Rolling Stone" (PublicAffairs) is Marcus at his companionable best. Practically dashed off in 30 days -- he spent nine years writing "Lipstick Traces" -- his new book is about Dylan's most important song, "Like a Rolling Stone." It is not a biography of a song with a strong social history, like Marsh's book "Louie Louie," Marcus told the book-signing crowd, a couple of whom were actually taking notes.
"To me, the song is like an event," he said, "a battle in a war, a natural disaster, a runaway train -- something that happens."
"I wanted this book to be simple, direct, to the degree that I'm capable of that," he elaborated the next day. "That's why I wanted to have a single focus. Even when I'm talking about other things, you always know you're going to get back to home, and home base is this song and why is it different, why is it so big? That's the question that's always there. I didn't want there to be any interpretation in the book -- what does this mean? Or even new criticism interpretation -- how does this mean? I didn't want 'mean' to be in it. I wanted 'happen' to be in it. I wanted the event to be in it. I didn't want to talk about Bob Dylan's significance as an artist in the 20th century or the 21st century. Or his role in the counterculture or anything. I wanted to talk about him as someone struggling with his own work, his own music and getting stuck in it. I wanted this to be a simple story, a small story with a big sound at its heart. And I didn't want it to get away from me."
Marcus has long been an important chronicler of Dylan's career, as far back as the November 1969 issue of Rolling Stone with Dylan on the cover, giving one of his first interviews since his motorcycle accident, in which Marcus wrote a landmark account of the existing Dylan bootlegs. No matter where his writing takes him -- from unlistenable punk to ossified hillbillies -- he always ends up bringing it all back home to Dylan.
"The stuff he writes about Dylan is his best," said Marsh. "It's the best, obviously, anybody's written about Dylan."
In listening to the music Dylan and the Band recorded together in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1967 called "The Basement Tapes," Marcus heard the ghosts of old folk songs and mountain music that led him back to something he called "old, weird America." He originally titled his book "Old, Weird America," but his publishers changed it to "Invisible Republic." Since the phrase Marcus coined gained currency, recent editions of the book have been retitled "Old, Weird America."
"In fact, it was a version of something Kenneth Rexroth said, when he talked about 'the old free America' in something he wrote about Carl Sandburg. I thought, 'What a stupid idea -- the old free America, back when we were free and now we're not.' But to me, I was listening to 'The Basement Tapes' and old American folk music and everything I heard sounded weird, strange. To me, the old, weird America -- I like that. That was a nice idea. But now you see that phrase used everywhere, and it has nothing to do with me. It's as if it came out of the ground, and that's a great compliment. I stumbled on something there."
Dylan liked "Invisible Republic." He even gave the publisher a jacket blurb for the paperback ("Greil Marcus has done it again ..."). For his new book, Dylan also allowed Marcus unprecedented access to all of the session tapes from "Like a Rolling Stone," recorded June 15 and 16, 1965, at Columbia Records' Studio A in New York. In those two days, Dylan and the session musicians (including guitarist Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band) managed only one completed take, the one that became the final master.
"Listening to the whole session was not like sitting in a recording studio," Marcus said. "There are few things more boring than listening in on somebody else's recording session. But this is a tape of people trying to get at something that resists them. That's one of the interesting things about 'Like a Rolling Stone,' it resists whoever tries to play it. It almost is a thing in itself. It's almost as if it has its own body and its own mind. I think in this case, it was so big, Bob Dylan was trying to say so much, with so much vehemence, so much was riding on this song, this absolutely had to be it. This had to be something that would not only leave the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the dust, it would leave his previous career in the dust. It would make it irrelevant. It would allow him now to go forward and do things he'd never done before. All that goes into the way that he sings it."
Dylan demurred, however, when asked for an interview to discuss the sessions.
Although his own memoir, "Chronicles," would soon rob him of his excuse, the book had not been released yet when Dylan's manager sent back his reply to Marcus' request:
"Bob doesn't remember much about that time of his life and he thinks you can write about his life better than he can talk about it."
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Greil Marcus will read from "Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads" at 7 p.m. Monday at the Booksmith, 1644 Haight St. Call (415) 863- 8688. He will also read and sign books at 7:30 p.m. May 2 at Cody’s Books, 2454 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley. Call (510) 845-7852.
E-mail Joel Selvin at [email protected].
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| April 22nd, 2005 09:40 PM |
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| MrPleasant |
Self Portrait is not "shit"! |
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