I have, I confess, never understood the reverence in which Bob Dylan is held by music fans of the generation prior to my own.

I mean, I understand it as a fact, as a thing that is inescapably true; and I think I understand its as a historical contingency, much the same as I can understand the importance of the Beatles in the same way. But with the Beatles, despite being largely indifferent to their music for its own sake, I can at least easily perceive the mastery and magic, feel how it might have moved me had I been exposed to it at the right time by people who loved it enough to share that love.

(It probably bears noting here that I was raised in a household where Radio 2 daytime shows were pretty much the only soundtrack to the entirety of the 1980s, which is to say a household in which it would be quite easy to know nothing at all of the counterculture of the preceding two decades save the fact that there had maybe been such a counterculture, and perhaps some dark muttered asides about the sort of people who were involved with it. I was raised on Neil Diamond, ABBA and the Carpenters. Top of the Pops was something that common people watched. I first saw MTV in the TV room of my boarding house at school in late 1991, in the form of third-generation VHS recordings of Madonna’s more salacious videos of the time. Culturally ignorant wasn’t even the half of it.)

But anyway: the Beatles, yeah, OK, I can see (or rather hear) it. But Dylan? No amount of retrospectively-acquired historical awareness has ever managed to get me past that nasal strangled-cat yowl. The man’s voice and singerly demeanour has always provoked in me a deep resistance, even as I’ve come to admire his songs as performed by others, and even some singers who are widely claimed to be inheritors of (or at least pretenders to) his style. I just don’t get it… but I continue to feel that I would at least like to understand, in that limited and intellectual way, what it is that everyone else gets about him.

That said, I didn’t pick up a copy of Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic (from an already much-beloved-by-me second-hand-obscurities bookstore, tucked down a side-street in the touristic heart of Stockholm’s gamla stad) first and foremost in the hope of better coming to understand the appeal of Dylan; it was, at most, a secondary consideration. I picked it up because I’ve been fascinated by Marcus as a writer since I read his Lipstick Traces—to which I had been pointed by various sources, perhaps most influentially the claim that it was something like a hybrid of bible and instruction manual to the Manic Street Preachers in their early years—and was deeply impressed by it, not only as a work of music criticism and interpretive cultural analysis, but also simply as a piece of writing.

I hadn’t known that anyone wrote like that about music; and in the years since, I’ve come to suspect that no one else really does or ever has, even as some of Marcus’s more recent writings have come to seem like they’re retreating into the crankiness and reaction that seems to befall anyone who makes it into their late seventies and still manages to find people who’ll publish them. (Hell knows I’m probably more than half way there… and I don’t mean that just in terms of the count of years.)

So I picked up Invisible Republic in the expectation of being transported by the writing, and maybe learning a bit more about the appeal of Dylan along the way, from this book that is billed as an exploration of the notorious Basement Tapes that Dylan recorded with a bunch of collaborators and cronies in a basement near Woodstock in the summer and autumn of 1967.

One could write a book as long as this one in trying to describe it, but suffice to say that Invisible Republic is not really about the Basement Tapes as artefacts—though there is a discography at the back, naturally, with all the details of different takes and bootlegs and influences and pastiches and so forth—so much as it makes use of the Tapes and their instigator as a way into the much larger question of what America (which is to say “the United States”, though that sobriquet is among the many ideas that is purposely vexed in the course of Marcus’s narrative, and is as such sidelined in favour of a deliberately broader and less well-defined “America”) means, what America is (or was, at least ideally speaking) for, what it might have been but now might never again or ever be.

I seem to remember Quinn Norton writing something to the effect that the Constitution is the true religious text of the US, the one unquestionable dictated-by-a-higher-power document that cannot be questioned, but can nonetheless be interpreted almost infinitely. There’s definitely something of that going on here, with Marcus trying to wring a heretical reading from the Constitution, along with various other foundational documents and utterances that have shaped that nation before and since its founding—in all their flaws and corruptions, their failures and fallings-short—by using Dylan’s Tapes, and the American folk musics of the first half of the C20th by which the Tapes are so greatly influenced, as the glasses in some ramshackle cultural telescope through which the American dream (or its ghost, or ghosts) might be seen, darkly and distantly.

That USian faith will always remain a mystery to those not immersed in it, I suspect—as is true of all such faiths—but Marcus’s writing is a sincere attempt to explain it to you (and perhaps also to himself), just as Dylan’s music (to hear Marcus tell it) is a sincere attempt to tell its story.

As such, there was a moment where my ongoing work on an essay that applies narratological concepts to the practice of futuring suddenly clicked with a passage from the book:

In the basement tapes, an uncompleted world was haphazardly constructed out of the past, out of Smith’s Anthology and its like, out of the responses people like Bob Dylan, Mike Seeger, and so many more brought to that music, its stories, and to the world—another country—implicit within it. The uncompleted world of the basement tapes was a fantasy beginning in artifacts refashioned by real people, dimly apprehended figures who out of the kettle of the folk revival appeared in the flesh to send an unexpected message. the vanished world they incarnated—as history, as a set of facts and an indistinct romance; as a set of artifacts, as a work of art, complete and finished—was going to die, and you were going to be the last witness.

Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic, p196

Here I could suddenly see Marcus’s [music / story / world] triad as something not that far from Mieke Bal’s [text / story / fabula] model of narrative, and thus grasp Dylan as a sort of author, attempting to channel and preserve the half-understood and fast-fading stories of a world—a fabula, an America—which had already all but disappeared at the time the Tapes were recorded, if indeed it had ever fully existed beyond the minds and utterances of those “dimly apprehended figures”, captured amidst the crackle of shellac 78s.

And, like I say, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to care about that America in the same way: I can appreciate its tragic beauty and horror intellectually, perhaps, and see how its long cultural reach has shaped the more global mythologies of the latter half of the C20th and beyond, but it’ll never matter to me like it matters to Marcus. There’s no way it could, really: geography and history preclude the necessary closeness.

But to see how much it matters to Marcus, to see him reach into and through and beyond Dylan and the band which would become the Band and the Tapes that they made, and into the all-but-ignored history of, say, Appalachia in the early C20th, all hard-scrabble horror and amok capitalism, to see him engage in an almost heroic act of interpretation, to see him write about songs in a manner that is so far beyond mere description or advocacy or even reasoned analysis that even to label it as meaning-making seems to fall far short of what’s actually going on… this is to see that, in the Tapes and in Dylan, there is a ‘there’ there, at least for Marcus.

Which in turn lets me see that there’s something in Dylan that exceeds my ongoing failure to perceive it, even if it is perhaps only—at its best, which is to say as it appears here, in the hands and mind of someone who can write like this, who makes a music of his words about music, even if not always with melodies or rhythms to which I can hum along or tap my feet—a gateway to something greater than an artist and their work.

Or, to put it another way: Marcus does (partly) for me with Dylan what Dylan did for Marcus with the folk music of a lost and crushed America, which is no mean achievement.

This morning, having finished the book last night, I cued up the Basement Tapes as an experiment: to see if, like one of those infuriating Magic Eye pictures that were popular around the time Marcus was writing this book, they might finally resolve into an image with depth and meaning for me.

But no—a strangled cat yowls atop an atemporal mish-mash of musics from a moment when one system of generic categories was breathing its last, and its replacement had yet to establish its place: familiar, alien, absolutely unbearable.

At least I appreciate now, thanks to Marcus, that this is a haunted music. But its ghosts will never have faces that I recognise.

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[ “This year I’ll write a short something about every book I read,” he tells himself, and the first such “short something” he writes comes out at more than 1,500 words… *eyeroll* Maybe I need to set constraints on this exercise, if only as a way of preventing me spending half my year blogging about books to an audience of half a dozen people. ]