Book description
His foremost interpreter revisits more than forty years of
listening to Dylan - weaving individual moods and moments into a
brilliant history of their changing times. The book begins in Berkeley
in 1968, and ends with a piece on Dylan's show at the University of
Minnesota on election night 2008. In between are moments of euphoric
discovery: from Marcus' sleeve notes for the 1967 Basement Tapes to
his exploration of Dylan's reimagining of the American experience in
1997's Time Out of Mind. And rejection; Marcus's Rolling Stone piece
on Dylan's album Self Portrait -- often referred to as the most famous
record review ever written -- began with 'What is this shit?' and led
to his departure from the magazine for five years. Marcus follows not
only recordings but performances. books, movies, and all manner of
highways and byways in which Bob Dylan has made himself felt in our
culture. Together, the dozens of pieces collected here comprise a
portrait of how, throughout his career, Bob Dylan has drawn upon and
reinvented the landscape of American song, its myths and choruses,
heroes and villains. They are the result of more than forty years'
engagement between an unparalleled artist and a uniquely acute listener.
Greil Marcus was born in San Francisco in 1945. He is the author
of Mystery Train, Invisible Republic, Listening to Van Morrison,
Lipstick Traces and Double Trouble, and the editor of Lester Bang's
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. In 1998 the curated the
exhibition '1948' at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York
City. He was described by John Rockwell in the New York Times as 'a
writer of rare perception and a genuinely innovative thinker.' Greil
Marcus lives in California.
