Becoming Bob Dylan

The age group targeted by the average Top 40 pop song would have remained the same, however, as it’s been since the dawn of the era of mass-youth-pop-culture-consumption in the 1950s. Pop music is basically made for kids. This is notwithstanding the fact that there is also a lucrative market in “classic rock” and other nostalgia categories, whereby people continue listening to and re-buying, in ever-changing formats, music that they first enjoyed as, well, children.

There is also, then, a market for books of analysis and criticism that seek to explain to people just why this music that they enjoyed in their teen years continues to occupy a place in their emotional universe, and, indeed, why there is no need to be ashamed of it, since there is a great deal more depth in those little ditties than may meet the eye–or ear. (And this is not to mention the ongoing reviews that must be written of all the new singles and albums hitting the market.)

Inevitably, trying to concoct serious writing about inherently unserious music can lead to self-indulgent perversities and crazy extrapolations of the imagination. This can’t be helped. Consumers must be fed, and pages must be filled with words, and duly dispatched. What happens, however, when the same critic comes along and applies those same bad habits to music that is both popular and of serious worth?

That’s a snippet (and I do mean a snippet) of what Greil Marcus writes in this book just about the moment in-between the first bang on the snare drum and the rest of Bob Dylan’s 1965 recording of “Like a Rolling Stone.” That song, and in particular that recording of it, is the central subject of the book.

Now, I would not be the one to try to argue that Bob Dylan’s work does not deserve serious examination and appreciation. Hundreds of books have already been published, and countless others will be, inspired by what is probably the greatest single body of songwriting in the history of the United States. There is a lot that has been said, and probably a great deal more that remains to be said, about some of the most enduring and beguiling songs that one could hope to hear; songs that spring from the Bible, the blues, folk, history, poetry, and many points besides, and from a giant American creative spirit who has straddled the decades of the second half of the 20th century and continues to create interesting work now into the 21st.

But the moment of silence in-between the crack of the drum and the rest of “Like a Rolling Stone”? Do we really have to squeeze our sensibilities in there, and wallow around in the murk of the subconscious, freeze-framing each moment of perception and blowing it up to 20 x 30 poster size?

Well, that’s what you’d best be prepared to do if you wish to enjoy Like a Rolling Stone. Greil Marcus, billed at a recent talk at Columbia as “perhaps the most celebrated writer on American popular music and culture,” has made it his trademark to inhabit those spaces, and draw his readers down (or up?) there with him. As opposed to a critic who bases his analysis on some mutually understood groundwork, Marcus often demands that you cozy up inside his cranium and follow every neuron as it sparks inside what some might consider his rock’n’roll-addled brain. His own very personal response to the music is set down for the reader as being the essential one, by means of little more than bold assertion.

Indeed.

Another thing that you may bump into while wandering around in Greil’s brain is his politics. They are revealed in quite a brutal fashion in a column of his that was published the day after the 2004 election, in a fantasy obituary for George W. Bush that details (among much other bad news) millions killed because of his actions in a second term, and the Bush twins dead in a drunk-driving accident that also kills seven others. There is nothing quite as dramatic in Like a Rolling Stone, but Marcus’s own politics cannot but inform his consideration of the work of Bob Dylan.

He explains why, on Dylan’s first (eponymous) album, the preponderance of songs dealing with death was highly relevant because, in the early 1960s, death was real–because, you see, of the threat of nuclear annihilation and hostility to civil-rights activists–as if, somehow, death was (or is) any less real at any other time in history. Dylan has, in fact, always placed death in the central spot in his work, which it also occupies, whether faced or not, in human life. You can draw a line going from Dylan’s first album of gospel and blues songs right through “It’s Alright Ma” (“for them that think death’s honesty won’t fall upon them naturally life sometimes must get lonely”) all the way to his most recent “Sugar Baby” (“look up, seek your Maker, ‘fore Gabriel blows his horn”). It’s one of the key aspects of his work that distinguishes it from the pop music of his contemporaries with which he has, at least on a commercial level, competed.

This notion of the stronger presence of death in the early 1960s exemplifies the inherent weaknesses in trying to put Dylan’s work in a historical context, as Marcus puts some time into doing with the song “Like a Rolling Stone.” Everyone knows the context of the mid-sixties–it’s the most belabored and overconsidered time period of modern American history, after all. It would be far more interesting, surely, to take Dylan’s work completely outside the old clichés of time and place and see how it stands for the ages, assuming the writer believes that it does.

Imagine, if you will, that Dylan had not appeared on the recording scene in 1962. He shows up, instead, 10 years later, in 1972, and, following the same chronology, releases his breakthrough “Like A Rolling Stone” in 1975. Would we now be treated to a book by Greil Marcus telling us how perfectly the album summed up the mood of post-Watergate America? “When Bob sings (‘You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal!’) he is almost chasing Richard M. Nixon into that helicopter!”

It would be as valid as any of the juxtapositions of historical events–such as the Watts riots and the Vietnam war–with Dylan’s musical output as Marcus makes here. And that’s a tribute to the timelessness and power of Dylan’s work to the same degree as it is a criticism of Marcus’s strategy.

Marcus will benefit with this book, as he has in the past, from being the only one taking on the particular subject matter in a serious, albeit highly idiosyncratic, way. So, his previous Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997) is commonly considered an essential work. But it’s not as if there are other books on the “Basement Tapes” out there to compare with Marcus’s quirky, though self-assured, vision.

Readers hungry for sheer information will enjoy aspects of this book, even if they are left feeling a little used by some of the flights of fancy. Dylan did not grant Marcus an interview, but he was allowed to listen to the complete recording-session tapes for “Like a Rolling Stone.” Marcus makes his transcriptions and observations about those recordings the epilogue–and it’s fascinating stuff for any dedicated fan. Marcus does well in conveying the spirit of the musicians, the singer, and the producer pursuing something mercurial that insists on slipping away again and again. Even when they’ve achieved what becomes the master take, they continue; but instead of improving upon that performance, it only gets farther away from them. Although the production is credited solely to the late Tom Wilson, Marcus suggests that Dylan’s later producer, Bob Johnston, made key changes to the mix before its release–a theory endorsed (though not trumpeted ungraciously) by Johnston himself, who was interviewed for the book.

Marcus also displays his wide musical knowledge throughout, exploring a variety of connections, spiritual and otherwise, to Dylan and, in particular, to “Like a Rolling Stone”: from Son House to Chuck Berry and Leon Payne. There are countless paths to wander when you enter that forest, but certainly the most audacious line Marcus draws is one connecting, on some metaphysical plane, Dylan’s 1965 recording of “Like a Rolling Stone” and the Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 pop hit “Go West,” a song originally done by the Village People.

“The way of life the song calls for”? Again, we’re somewhere in Marcus’s skull, but not too sure whether we want to linger. His characteristic bold assertion aside, he offers no real evidence that Dylan “demands” his listeners follow any particular way of life. The song is certainly about what you might call an extreme moment of liberation or maturation–one that is, at once, terrifying and exhilarating. Like many of Dylan’s greatest songs, it sounds one way when you assume it is directed at some hapless subject of his scrutiny, but opens up on quite different levels when you consider that the singer may be directing his lines at himself.

The young Bob Dylan had crammed a great deal into his career to this date. He had written songs as varied and enduring as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”–songs good enough by themselves to justify most writers’ careers–but at this point his talent was launching itself to a whole new level. Already the subject of real ire from people who accused him of abandoning folk/protest music, he was now facing the noisy hatred of those who would accuse him of committing some Judas-like sin for playing an electric instrument. For a 25-year-old trying to keep his head on straight and shepherd a wild creativity within, it had to be disturbing stuff. With “Like a Rolling Stone,” he lifted himself artistically to the point he had to reach in order to give his talent its needed outlet–and managed to sing about that terrifying and liberating moment at the same time. Effecting the transformation, and crystallizing it, simultaneously, in a song. Quite a special achievement, in a body of work replete with them.

Sean Curnyn is writing a book on political and moral themes in the work of Bob Dylan.