Folk implosion

How Bob Dylan plugged into American tradition

by James Surowiecki

INVISIBLE REPUBLIC: BOB DYLAN'S BASEMENT TAPES, by Greil Marcus. Henry Holt, 286 pages, $22.50.

THE STRANGE FACT of the matter is this: nothing that Marilyn Manson or Nine Inch Nails do on stage will ever anger and shock people as much as Bob Dylan did one night in 1965 when he shouted "Let's go!", launched into "Maggie's Farm," and gave the Newport Folk Festival its first taste of what a folk singer playing an electric guitar sounded like.

On that night, and on every night of the US and British tour that followed it, Dylan met with boos and shouts of contempt. The object of an almost spiritual adoration, he became the target of the kind of rage directed only at those who have betrayed. In going electric, in abandoning the lyrical verities of folk music for messier and more idiosyncratic words, Dylan seemed to many to be willfully shattering not only the sound he had helped popularize but also all the political and social hopes that it had come to embody. As Greil Marcus puts it in his enthralling new book about Dylan and his ancestors, Invisible Republic,

[Dylan] turned away . . . from an entire complex of beliefs and maxims that to so many defined was good and what was bad. Thus when he appeared before them holding a garishly shaped and colored electric guitar . . . he signified no mere apostasy but the destruction of hope.

Odd, perhaps, that pop music could become the vehicle for such emotional and ideological fervor, that anyone could care that much about what songs Dylan chose to sing. But there it is. People did feel that much. They were that angry. Dylan was that important.

Marcus's work, from Mystery Train (1975) to Lipstick Traces (1989), has always run the risk of ascribing a cultural authority and value to his subjects that perhaps, one wonders in those moments of little faith, exist only in his head. But in Dylan, Marcus has found a subject equal to his most elaborate flights of fancy.

What's so fascinating about Invisible Republic is the way it's precisely not about the public Bob Dylan or his music. Instead, the book is about the music Dylan made after that fateful tour, when, following a motorcycle accident that nearly killed him, he fled the world to a house in upstate New York and spent almost a year making the music with his friends that would come to be known as the basement tapes. Marcus is interested in what that music tells us about the distance Dylan had traveled from the Newport stage, but he's also interested in what that music can tell us about America.

The basement tapes came out of one of the strangest and strongest traditions in American popular culture. They were in dialogue with folk and blues songs steeped in mystery and allegory and violence, and in what Marcus sees as a peculiarly American faith in the power of self-representation. As Dylan described this music: "It's never been simple. It's weird. . . . I've never written anything . . . as far out as some of the old songs."

Much of Invisible Republic tries to explain why these old songs matter. In discussing such virtually unknown singers as Doc Boggs and Clarence Ashley, Marcus also lays out a thesis about the authority of radical individualism in American culture. He finds in these songs an idea of America as a place where what matters most is not the distribution of goods or the regulation of morality, but rather the way "people plumb their souls and then present their discoveries, their true selves, to others." As always, Marcus is drawn to the traces of past works, past ideas, that haunt the present. In Marcus's version of history, nothing ever really disappears for good. Everything can be made to live again.

Marcus has always been fascinated by cultural artifacts that exist as public secrets -- songs and words that anyone can find if she just knows where to look, but that most of the time simply go unnoticed. He's not interested in these old folk and blues singers because he finds them charming or quaint; he's interested in them because he thinks their work says something essential about America. Without understanding the sheer strangeness of these songs, Marcus suggests, you cannot understand the sheer strangeness of the American project. In that sense, even though much of Invisible Republic is devoted to seemingly marginal figures, it is decidedly not a book about marginality. Marcus doesn't look at those left out of traditional history to figure out what America was not; he looks at them to figure out what America was.

{ Dylan, then, becomes the prism through which this "old, weird America" is refracted. In 1965, as Marcus would have it, Dylan "seemed less to occupy a turning point in cultural space and time than to be that turning point," but two years later he was a turning point for a very different world. Having moved past conventional folk music, having produced two successive works of modernist genius in Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and having struggled against the resentment and anger of those who believed that with these works he had codified his betrayal of them, Dylan retreated to Woodstock and to the house called Big Pink.

There, in the summer of 1967, Dylan and the Band played for no one but themselves, recording whatever came into their heads, reworking old songs, creating new ones, and messing with both until the difference between new and old was completely blurred. Some of the more than 100 recordings would become hits when re-recorded by other bands or, later, by the Band itself. And when Columbia released an album comprising 15 of the songs in 1975, that record made the top 10. But most of the tracks remained unheard, as intended -- fruits of a time when Dylan turned from the overwhelming demands of the present and discovered a more unburdened way of speaking.

What Dylan was able to find in the basement of Big Pink, Marcus writes, was "the freedom to say what you mean without immediately having to stake your life on every word." In most contexts, this language would sound overwrought and hyperbolic. After all, how likely is it that any of us would have to think about staking our lives on every word that came from our mouths? And how likely that we could even recognize the fact of not having to do so as a kind of freedom? But Dylan was not like any of us. Indeed, Invisible Republic begins with the 1965-1966 tour to show just how unlike us he had become, how much weight all of his words were forced to carry, and how liberating it must have been to get out from underneath that weight and speak without worrying if people were going to take what you said as the Truth. It's this, in part, that makes the basement tapes so affecting even in their most frivolous moments. Dylan was finding something, Marcus explains, that he must have thought was gone forever "simple free speech, ordinary free speech, nonsensical free speech . . . a voice that can say almost anything while seeming to say almost nothing, in secret."

The greatness of the basement tapes, though, lies in what Marcus calls "the passion in the flatness, stoicism in fear, the remorse in the deadpan." Underneath the playfulness of the songs lurks something deeper and edgier. When Dylan found himself able to speak freely, you might say, he found himself once again able to speak truly. Similarly, it's Marcus's willingness to embrace that kind of paradox that makes Invisible Republic so convincing a performance. This is, in many ways, his most subtle book. Marcus's love of gnostic self-creation, of the idea of infinite possibility, is tempered here by a profound awareness of the power of tradition, of the way in which the new makes sense only because of, not despite, the old.

It's an odd conclusion, perhaps, to reach about America, which is so often seen as the country of the perpetual present. But it seems like the right conclusion to reach about Dylan, who broke with one version of the past -- the one represented by the earnest folkies at Newport -- only to go further back and reimagine another, less pious and more mysterious, that suited him better.

James Surowiecki is a regular contributor to the PLS, Lingua Franca, and the Motley Fool.