Amazon.co.uk Review
Critic Greil Marcus, author of
Dead Elvis,
The Dustbin of History and
Mystery Train has produced a startling and provocative meditation on one of the great underground classics of American music, the fabled Basement Tapes recorded in the summer of 1967 by Bob Dylan and musicians who would soon be known as The Band.
Invisible Republic is not merely the story of the Basement Tapes and their unusual bootleg history, but a critical analysis of the various influences that seem to have led Dylan and his friends into creating this body of work, which is exuberant, haunting and mysterious. Marcus presents a lively and offbeat social history of America while telling the stories of such characters as the eccentric folk song anthologist Harry Smith and a banjo-picking Virginia coal miner named Doc Boggs. Marcus writes with passion, and as he himself says, an "obsession". His analysis of how five men in a basement in 1967 happened to create an alternative folk music for America is not only highly entertaining, but is like a long refreshing dive into a vast lake of American music. --
Jake Bond
Product Description
Out of a house called Big Pink came music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it was over thirty years ago. 'Marcus' contention is that there can be found in American folk a community as deep, as electric, as perverse and as conflicted as all America, and that the songs Dylan recorded out of the public eye, in a basement in Woodstock with the group who would later become The Band, are where that community as a whole gets to speak ...Books this good should be burnt' - Mark Sinker, "Wire". 'We owe God a death, and Greil Marcus owed all God's children a lifework on Bob Dylan. And here it is, one heaven of a book ...what Marcus brings to these songs is a variety of good things: fierce fervour, social convictions, a loving discrimination, never a touch of envy and an extraordinary ability to evoke in words the very feel (throaty, threatening, thorough, thick with thought) of a man's voice, of this man's voice' - Christopher Ricks, "Guardian". 'You will want to read its most provoking parts over and over and chances are, twenty years from now, it will stand as one of the classics of American criticism' - Mikal Gilmore, "Observer". 'A rare ability to describe the genesis of a song and make it sound better than any song you have ever heard' - Tim Adams, "Times Literary Supplement".
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