Greil Marcus Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (Henry Holt)
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In a scattered prose style that suits his historical method, Marcus keeps circling back to the image of the mask as a key to the American ethos. The poker face starts out as the handiwork of the Puritans and becomes something of an heirloom that, as it passes from generation to generation, is frequently employed by hucksters and demagogues, sometimes to deceive, sometimes to conceal fear. But for such an ingenious and kaleidoscopic approach to history and folklore, Invisible Republic takes a surprisingly narrow view of Bob Dylan. While Marcus describes The Basement Tapes as a document of musical synthesis and invention more formidable than I had ever imagined, he makes his claim at the expense of almost a quarter century of genius–that is, everything Dylan did between 1968 and 1991.
Marcus pointedly omits that period from his annotated back-of-the-book discography and declares that Dylan spent all those years in “the prison of his own career.” He doesn’t spell out the details of the imprisonment; perhaps he’s merely expressing a sort of roundabout approval for Dylan’s two recent records of traditional folk material, Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993). But I have to ask: what kind of prison would allow Dylan to collaborate with artists as diverse as Sam Shepard, Kurtis Blow, Sly and Robbie, Johnny Cash, and U2, plus heavy metal guitarists, gospel singers, ex-Beatles, ex-Sex Pistols, and Michael Bolton? To embark on a seriously unpopular voyage as a born-again Christian (during which he made some damn good music), to play a cowboy (named Alias, appropriately enough) in a Sam Peckinpah movie, to publish a book of drawings? In what artistic shackles could he have written and recorded “Tangled Up in Blue,” “I Believe in You,” “Jokerman,” and “Blind Willie McTell”?
Another band changing its tune under intense scrutiny almost did the same thing in 1967: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was originally conceived as the name of the band releasing the record. Since then big artists have often given bogus names to their experiments and one-off projects: the Honeydrippers, the Hindu Love Gods, the Traveling Wilburys, the Dukes of Stratosphear. Behind the playfulness of the monikers may be a fear of pissing off the likes of Mark David Chapman, or maybe just a desire to detach from the past. As Dylan sang in one song from the Basement Tapes sessions that didn’t make it onto the official release, “I’m not there, I’m gone.”
