Mick Hartley

Appropriately enough, with the Normblog Dylan Poll coming to its climax, I happened on a remaindered copy of Greil Marcus’ “Invisible Republic” (his book about the Basement Tapes) the other day. Not being a great fan of Marcus I never bought the book when it came out, but I figured I couldn’t lose at £2.95.

Has anyone ever managed to get through it? I made it to somewhere round page 60 before giving up. There’s some nuggets buried away in there, but I found it deeply turgid and self-important, which is a shame when you consider how open and unpretentious and just sheer enjoyable the Basement Tapes are. The songs are performed almost as throw-away items: just Dylan and the Band jamming in the basement at Big Pink – a bunch of musicians completely free from the pressures of recording studios and deadlines.

The wonder of it is that Dylan manages to sound as though he’s making it up as he goes along; it’s such a phenomenal outburst of creativity. Robbie Robertson has a nice quote about how half the time they didn’t know if Dylan was coming out with old tunes or if they were his own compositions. He just plugged in to that wealth of folk/blues/country (mapped by Harry Smith, as Marcus points out, in his Smithsonian Folkways recordings) and these amazing songs came out.

I didn’t vote for any of the BT songs in the NDP: they’re all so seemingly light-weight on their own. But it may be my favourite Dylan album. And if you haven’t voted yet, you’ve got one more day. I confess I’m curious to see what the results will be.