Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic

...It was not Lomax's kind of music at all, and yet here was Dylan saying that it really was that kind of music, that all of his music—or the best of it, anyway, like "Highway 61"—is and always has been that kind of mysterious music, a fact that few people, friend or foe, have ever fully understood...

...Dylan's near-fatal fall from a motorcycle during a pause in the 1966 tour interrupted...

...As I shuffled to the auditorium parking lot, a perfect stranger slipped me a contraband cassette of the as yet unfinished master tape, as if making some prearranged drop-off...

...Historical "facts" served hierarchy, while tradition was liberating because it grew from a voluntary personal response to the repertory of the past...

...and never again would he play rock music with the brilliance and burning desperation (born, in part, of audience hostility) that he and the Hawks, soon to be renamed the Band, had played before his accident...

...For one thing, this town is more drunk...

...Smith had a taste for the wilder, more fantastic, scarier, and subjective side of American folk music, including such tunes as Kelly Harrell's "Charles Giteau" (the purported scaffold peroration of President James A. Garfield's convicted assassin, Charles Guiteau) and "My Name is John Johanna" (a creepy Arkansas tale of a rattail-haired giant and his walking skeleton workmen...

...this town can ap104 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 pear full of village idiots, like those bearded geezers set up on the corner, harmonizing on what sounds like a 1957 Dell-Vikings B-side they can't remember...

...Ellen Willis—who, remarkably, knew what was happening—sympathetically described the new Dylan as "a fifth columnist from the past...

...I]t was as if [Dylan] saw traditional music as being made less by history or circumstances than by particular people, for particular unknowable reasons," Marcus explains, "reasons that find their analogues in haunts and spirits...

...It's a shame that Harry Smith, dead these seven years, isn't around to hear these new songs, or to be introduced from the stage at one of Dylan's concerts...

...The tobacco sheds of North Carolina are in it and all of the blistered and hurt and hardened hands cheated and left empty, hurt and left crying,' Woody Gurthrie himself wrote of Sonny Terry's harmonica playing," Marcus notes...

...n DISSENT / Spring 1998 BOOKS rock fans can recite the events that signaled this great divide in pop culture—the booing of Dylan's amplified performance of "Maggie's Farm" at Newport in July 1965, the even more hostile reactions at Forest Hills later that year and in England and Europe in 1966...

...As he pondered those recurrences, Marcus heard something oddly uplifting in Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, something, he writes, that "removed [Dylan] from the prison of his own career and returned him—or his voice, as a sort of mythical fact— to the world at large...

...Four years later, however, at Newport, when Dylan took the same farm story, twisted it some more, changed Penny's name to Maggie, and amplified everything, the folkies rebelled and an enraged Alan Lomax menaced Dylan's sound equipment with an ax...

...I FIRST GOT my hands on Time Out of Mind on the same concert night that Dylan spoke of Alan Lomax...

...Marcus begins Invisible Republic in the middle of this familiar story, with an emotionally and musically perfect-pitch account of Dylan's turbulent 1966 tour...

...It's hard to imagine one of the Anthology singers composing a lyric involving Phaedra or Ophelia, as Dylan did...

...And after making that connection, Marcus made another one, detecting in the basement tapes the recurring spirit of a virtually forgotten recording, Harry Smith's six-volume Anthology of American Folk Music, from 1952...

...Elliptically, though, through a haze of pot and whatever else he was enjoying, Dylan tried to explain himself, when he told an interviewer in Austin, Texas, that folk music is not Depression songs . . . its foundations aren't work, its foundations aren't "slave away" and all this...

...When he was about eighteen, he abandoned plans to study anthropology at the University of Washington and drifted down to Berkeley, where, after falling in with the demimonde of painters, communists, and poets, he began collecting commercial recordings of string bands and gospel singers dating back to the 1920s and 1930s...

...Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings, 1997, re -issue 6 CD set N MID-CONCERT on a sweet northern Virginia night last August, Bob Dylan, looking relaxed and rejuvenated after a grave illness, peered out over his electric guitar and spoke to the audience, something he hardly ever does...

...Weird messenger...

...and I hadn't a clue that the wasted Village seer to whom I someDISSENT / Spring 1998 n MI BOOKS times sold books about the Cabala (only one of several such wasted Village seers I knew vaguely in the sixties and seventies) had had the slightest influence on anyone who was worth influencing...

...Even in its rough form, played through a friend's Volvo's tape player, the music sounded like an immense improvement over Dylan's last few albums of original material, full of striking love-sick lamentations and ur-American rhythms, from Louisiana voodoo to western swing...

...Above all, the Berkeleyans' aesthetic sensibilities diverged from those of the more "progressive" historicist folklorists back East, including the Lomaxes and, even more, Popular Front–inflected folkies like Pete Seeger, who would go on to lead the folk revival in which Dylan got his professional start...

...between the biblical desolation of Rev...

...And Alan . . . Alan was one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music...

...It just never came out for me," he later explained...

...Marcus's direct linking of Smith's Anthology and The Basement Tapes is, to be sure, a contrivance, which sometimes creaks under the weight of his own metaphoric and allusive excesses...

...Apart from "Jokerman," "Silvio," some amusing japes with the Traveling Wilburys, and one or two cuts on Oh Mercy (1989), his new material was tedious...

...First of all, there is the packaging, including the CD's twenties' vintage blue Columbia label, with its archaic technical slogans ("Vivatonal Recording...

...Above all, there is the album's sixteen-and-a-half minute concluding track, "Highlands," which begins by quoting Robert Burns—a song of longing for what might be Scotland and might be heaven, which becomes a lament about imprisonment in a world of mystery, and then mutates into a DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 105 BOOKS tale of urban loneliness and failed connections that sounds like an Edward Hopper painting put into music...

...I N 1952, of course, the tensions between, on the one hand, Lomax-style and Seeger-style folklorism and, on the other, Smith-style folklorism would have been hard to detect...

...Art was the speech of the folk revival," Marcus astutely notes, "and yet, at bottom, the folk revival did not believe in art at all...

...at the March on Washington, in a speech that, more than thirty years later, "still sounds like a miracle unfolding, a waking of the dead...

...Harry Smith INVISIBLE REPUBLIC: BOB DYLAN'S BASEMENT TAPES by Greil Marcus Henry Holt and Company, 1997 286 pp $22.50 TIME OUT OF MIND by Bob Dylan Columbia Records, 1997 ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC Harry Smith, ed...

...Lomax, the great ethnomusicologist, the premier collector of old American folk tunes— sure, some of us had heard of him...

...Jones...

...I don't know if many of you heard of him...

...But as Marcus shows, Dylan was also up to something that most critics and fans, distracted by the amplifiers and seemingly surreal subjectivist lyrics, did not notice at the time: he was, in effect, escaping the folk revival by reviving a different sort of traditional sensibility, found in portions of Lomax's collection and, even more, in Harry Smith's (which Dylan had first heard in Minneapolis in 1959 or 1960...

...his biological father may have been the czarina's excowboy husband or may have been the young Aleister Crowley—Smith, while still a teenager, investigated and recorded the rituals and music of nearby Indian tribes...

...Wasn't it Lomax, along with Pete Seeger, who'd tried to cut the power cords to Dylan's amplifiloci n DISSENT / Spring 1998 ers at the famous 1965 Newport Folk Festival...

...And that, Marcus says, was not all...

...Yet by equating poverty with art, Marcus contends, the folkies' version of socialist realism ended up negating both art and the artist...

...Like a vagabond unlicensed professor, Marcus appears to be reviving yet another tradition, a tradition of trying to see America (and American culture) whole, as a definable thing, not merely as a gaggle of subcultures—what used to be called American studies before American studies turned into identity politicking and postmodern ironizing...

...Two solo albums of acoustic folk and quasi-folk standards, Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), showed Dylan in better form, getting back to basics as a gargly-voiced singer and strummer of fatalistic songs like Stephen Foster's "Hard Times...

...Beginning in 1965, as Marcus indicates, Dylan's music shattered the folk revival's received identities and understanding of the world—but in doing so advanced a musical tradition in which Dylan had long before taken his place, alongside Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Clarence Ashley, and so many others, the tradition of the old weird America...

...Among the few who were not surprised, though, were Marcus's readers—for Dylan's current work is wholly in keeping with the themes that Marcus develops in Invisible Republic...

...on the other stood Dylan, a detached, pouting hipster in Ray-Ban shades and psychedelic threads, the epicenter of mid-sixties cool...

...Finally, through Smith, he was able to link Dylan to a bygone, hermetic, fabulist land which Marcus calls "the old weird America"—a mythic place, populated by cuckoo birds and spike drivers and John the Revelator, to which Dylan has, over the years, added his own ragmen and amphetamine-fogged ladies and Judas Priest...

...Like his fellow mysterian (and also a sometime popular-music critic) Luc Sante, Marcus has become particularly interested in how historical legends and oracular styles have uncannily recurred over the centuries in America, leaving us, as Sante puts it, as "custodians of a history of which [we] are seldom consciously aware...

...Marcus quotes the critic Richard Candida Smith: The avant-garde on the West Coast had a preference for cosmological-theosophical over psychological-sociological understandings of art and the individual's relationship to larger forces...

...These passages are, unfortunately, merely suggestive, the looming shapes of a more ambitious work that I hope Marcus writes some day...

...In 1965 and 1966, Dylan did not try to hide his literary interests, even as he mocked vacuous, conformist literary men like Mr...

...True, Dylan tried to cover his tracks, by announcing that his folk singing had always been a con, a way to get attention...

...It's great, though, that Alan Lomax has stuck around long enough for both...

...In fact, it is a direct steal of "Down on Penny's Farm," a story of mistreated tenant farmers—recorded by the Bentley Boys in 1929, transcribed in John and Alan Lomax's Our Singing Country (1941), and included by Smith as his song number 25...

...He didn't say if Sonny Terry was in it...

...Dylan negated this negation of art, artists, and self in his great electric songs of 1965 and 1966, including "Highway 61 Revisited," "Like a Rolling Stone," "Desolation Row," and "Visions of Johanna...

...Raised in and around Seattle by a pair of deluded Theosophists—his mother thought she was the czarina of Russia...

...There's a distinguished gentleman here who came, I want to introduce him, named Alan Lomax...

...These became the basis for the Anthology, which included eighty-four sides from relatively well-known (Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Carter Family), soon-to-be rediscovered (Dock Boggs, Mississippi John Hurt), and utterly obscure performers (J.P...

...But in the event, nobody, not even Dylan, made the precise connections, as Marcus does now...

...ABOVE ALL, those albums reminded Marcus of Dylan and the Band's famously cryptic Basement Tapes from 1967, which had since appeared in a complete (bootlegged) five-CD version...

...Dylan rasped, "Thank you, Alan...

...Yes, he's here, he's made uh, a trip out t'see me, I used to know him years ago, I learned a lot there...

...Then there is the music's texture, with its soggy, boggy, squitchy background topped off with a Hammond B-3 organ accompaniment—the closest that Dylan has ever come to recapturing what he once called the elusive "wild mercury" sound of Blonde on Blonde...

...between the more magical currents of the American folk imagination circa 1927 and those circa 1967...

...And although some of the poetry is thin, and there are some clinkers among the lyrics, especially when Dylan falls into what Willis once described as his rhyming compulsion—"Now I've been to London, and I've been to gay Paree/I followed the river and I got to the sea"—there are also hair-raising songs of lacklove, depression, and impending death, full of rumbling skies and church bells and girls who turn into birds and swinging chariots and misbegotten travels through Missouri...

...Here the streets are even less well marked than the streets in Smithville...

...Roses growing right up out of people's hearts and naked cats in bed with spears growing right out of their backs and seven years of this and eight years of that and it's really something that nobody can really touch...

...At bottom, what the world of hype, led by the Top-40 deejay Murray the K, began to call Dylan's folk rock—Dylan, for his part, called it "historical traditional" music—was not just an electrification of the lines and chord structures of Smith's songs and Lomax's, but an amplification of their mystical spirit...

...Reading Marcus's Invisible Republic (which appeared late last spring) and then listening to Dylan's output on stage and on CD over the succeeding months has given me the feeling that the critic and the artist have locked into some strange, empathetic communication...

...His solid performance of greatest hits on MTV Unplugged in 1994 had a few supporters talking about a minor Dylan renaissance...

...Fifteen years later, however, those tensions exploded in and around the figure of Bob Dylan...

...Then the drummer clicked out a beat, Dylan chuckled mischievously, and the highvoltage band slammed into, of all things, "Highway 61 Revisited...

...His singular voice sounded shot at last, and his career was spinning in circles...

...On the anthology's cover, and in an accompanying booklet, Smith jumbled together references to Crowley, Pythagoras's monochord, and the early modern English mystic Robert Fludd, as if all of them, Marcus writes, "and the likes of Jilson Setters, Ramblin' Thomas, the Alabama Sacred Heart Singers, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, and Smith himself were calling on the same gods...

...For another . . . [t]he Bible is everywhere, but less invoked than tested against the happenstance of ordinary affairs or invasions of the uncanny...

...Rather, life—a certain kind of life—equaled art, which ultimately meant that life replaced it...

...On one side of the divide stood Bobby Dylan, the folkrevival and civil-rights-movement darling, a soulful man-child in his work shirt and denims...

...In the stillunreleased film of the 1966 tour, Dylan tests the limits of musical correctness by telling an English rocker and blues fan, mordantly, that "Leadbelly is sort of inarticulate...

...people talk funny here...

...Either Marcus has been reading Dylan's mind or Dylan has read Marcus's book—or, maybe, both things have happened...

...As it happened, Dylan was also building toward Time Out of Mind—an album whose power caught most of the critics (and even many die-hard Dylan fans) by surprise...

...What subsequently came to light as his greatest song of the period, "Blind Willie McTell," collected dust for years in a Columbia Records vault, unreleased...

...As Marcus relates, Smith started out as an improbable, self-taught, pioneering bohemian folklorist...

...The reminder would have been even stronger had Columbia Records not decided, four years later, to cancel the much-anticipated bootleg volumes 4 and 5—a stunning, two-CD recording of Dylan and the Hawks's historic Manchester, England, concert in 1966, now available together from the bootleggers as Guitars Kissing & the Contemporary Fix...

...Sister Mary Nelson's "Judgment" (song number 47 in the Anthology) and "Tears of Rage...

...And I hope that one day Dylan, no wasted seer, gets the chance to single out Greil Marcus, the latest unlocker of the secrets of this kind of music and of the republic from which it springs...

...We all knew every word of every song on it, including the bad ones...

...his experiments...

...Whereas Lomax, like his great folklorist father, John, and numerous others was chiefly interested in pure, "authentic" material, as transcribed in churches, cotton fields, and juke joints, Smith made it a point to collect only what had been commercially recorded—that is, music that people had once actually paid to hear...

...Greil Marcus is one of the few...

...Its foundations are—except for Negro songs which are based on that and just kind of overlapped—the main body of it is just based on myth and the Bible and plague and famine and all kinds of things which are nothing but mystery and you can see it in all the songs...

...I remember Harry Smith from twenty years later, as an aging Village dopester and would-be shaman (he was fifty...

...And yet, Marcus insists, Smithville and Kill Devil Hills resemble each other "like outposts on the same frontier," not just in terms of musical forms but "in the way they match the unknown to the obvious, in the high stakes the citizens of both towns place on a bet that may not be legal anywhere else—the bet that anything can be transformed...

...Take, for example, one of the quintessential early Dylan songs, "Hard Times in New York Town," a seemingly straightforward Guthriesque tale of a country boy's mishaps in the big city...

...By my count, at least fifteen songs in Smith's Anthology, nearly one in five, also appear in Alan Lomax's canonical compilation of transcriptions, The Folk Songs of North America [1960...

...rather, in breaking with the old guard, he was returning to his roots, rerevising his earlier revisions of American folk music—and doing so commercially, shamelessly so, just as Clarence Ashley, Uncle Dave Macon, and the rest of Harry Smith's troubadours had attempted to do half a century before...

...Well established (along with Ellen Willis) as one of the few sixties rock critics who has become more interesting with the passing of time, Marcus has in recent years turned himself into a cultural historian-cummysterian, with a gift for tracing the underground connections between such unlikely figures as the French Situationist Guy Debord and the British punk rocker Johnny Rotten...

...Electrical Process...

...Nestor, Ernest Phipps), male and female, black and white, Anglo and Cajun, sacred and profane (withoutnoting which was which...

...The citizens are more adept at disguises...

...No wonder that Dylan, momentarily unmasked, wept onstage...

...Bob Dylan I could really believe in god when I heard Bob Dylan on the radio...

...So, if you've got anybody to thank, it's Alan...

...The sacred, which need not involve a personalized deity, was valued over the profane...

...But hadn't Lomax, the high priest of gut-bucket traditionalism, once bitterly denounced Dylan as a sell-out...

...But there were important differences...

...rOR DYLAN, in 1961, it was easy enough to turn a song about country woes into one about city woes, and win the folk revivalists' hearts...

...And yet, as Marcus shows, when the recuperating Dylan and his sidemen quietly holed up in Woodstock, New York, they continued what they had begun, in a more protected and playful setting, fashioning a musical response to the hatred that they had stirred up...

...I'd seen a copy of his folk-music anthology a few years earlier at Izzy Young's Folklore Center, but hadn't listened to it (being, in 1966, barely fifteen and deeply into the new, electric Bob Dylan...

...SEAN WILENTZ is the director of the program in American studies at Princeton University...

...Aging 102...

...Yips and low cheers came from the crowd...

...And no wonder that, thereafter, when Dylan refused to turn back, BOOKS almost everybody, rockers as well as folkies, missed the point...

...It is enough, for now, that he has given us his Dylan book—and with it, as if he could not have planned it better, an enriched understanding of what Dylan is up to right now, his latest "historical traditional" recurrence...

...But only when the CD actually appeared did I really notice the Marcus connection...

...According to the standard view, young Dylan hit the New York scene as a Woody Guthrie imitator, became a star as the boy genius of folk protest music, then turned against his musical and political friends (and became an even bigger star) by going electric and singing songs of acidulous self-absorption...

...Likewise, Dylan and company innovated at Woodstock...

...Dylan's concert performances often amounted to semi-coherent chantings of songs new, old, and ancient...

...and he confirms the story's elementary veracities...

...In 1991, the bootleg series volumes 1-3 finally brought "McTell" to the world, but also served as a reminder of Dylan's long-term decline...

...THIS WAS not one of Dylan's vintage putons...

...The recognizable events and persons of Dylan's earlier compositions—break-ups with his (unnamed) girlfriend Suze Rotolo, the slaying of Hattie Carroll or of Medgar Evers, a comic imaginary phone chat with President Kennedy—gave way to mythic or imagined persons in wholly magical situations: Ma Rainey and Beethoven unwrapping a bedroll, Captain Arab's crew encountering Columbus, Abraham, and Isaac on Highway 61, Madonna and Louise and Johanna adrift amid coughing heat pipes...

...Elaborating a wonderful metaphor that extends over two chapters of Invisible Republic, Marcus describes an imaginary town conjured up by the basement-tape songs—Kill Devil Hills, he calls it—and contrasts it with a town conjured up by the Anthology, which he calls Smithville: Smithville folk would recognize this place— the jail is full, and some people still remember when the Fourth of July was the biggest day of the year—but they might have trouble keeping up...

...Not intended for public hearing, the basement sessions stretched out over several months DISSENT / Spring 1998 •I03 BOOKS and produced just over a hundred recordings, including original songs, revamped folk chestnuts, pop standards, faux pop standards, and masterful inebriated nonsense—a collection that, Marcus claims, sounds like "a shambling, 'twilight version of Smith's Anthology...

...When I found him mentioning Dorothy in Oz and Joe Pesci and deeply obscure forties mystery novels, I couldn't help being reminded of Robbie Robertson's comment about some of the basement-tape recordings: "Reefer run amok...

...Dylan continued his respectful little speech...

...A whoop went up from the crowd...

...Whatever the case, Invisible Republic ranks as the most brilliant study of Dylan's work to date, and an important element in the unexpected recent resurgence of Dylan's aura and musical career, capped by the three Grammy awards he received in February for his latest release, Time BOO KS Out of Mind...

...The folk revivalists' idealized life was, naturally, a life of suffering, poverty, and struggle, uncorrupted by greed and money and moral ambiguity—a politicized, left-wing version of Lomax's folk authenticity...

...Thanks to Marcus—and thanks to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which re-issued the Anthology in CD form last year—I now know better...

...who lived in the Chelsea Hotel, frequented the occult section of my father's bookshop, and was reputed to be a brilliant filmmaker...

...There was a considerable overlap between Smith's efforts and those of the more mainstream folklorists of the thirties, forties, and fifties...

...Smith's "Anthology was our bible," the singer and ex-Dylan mentor Dave Van Ronk once recalled of the fifties Greenwich Village folk scene...

...Indeed, Smith's Anthology appeared on the echtNew York label, Moses Asch's Folkways Records...

...Marcus is not, by any means, saying that either Dylan or his friends merely imitated the Anthology singers...

...After his gospel songwriting period ("Gotta Serve Somebody") in the late seventies, Dylan moved dangerously close to becoming a hasbeen...

...Still, it is a helpful contrivance, one that explains a great deal about Dylan's often misunderstood music, above and beyond the basement sessions...

...In Smith's Anthology, and in the basement tapes, he hears the echoes of even grander American prophecies, warnings, and judgments, as pronounced first by John Winthrop aboard the Arbella, later by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg and at his second inaugural, and finally by Martin Luther King Jr...

...Instead of the language of allegory and home truth that rules in Smithville, the currency is the shaggy dog story, from tragic parable to slapstick sermon, sometimes the one hiding inside the other . . . Smithville has its suicides and its homicides...

...And sure enough, with Marcus's help, the connections begin to open up, between the Anthology's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," the revised version of the song that the young Dylan recorded on his first album, and then the re-revision that appears on the basement tapes...