Front and back cover of the official 1975 "Basement Tapes" album
Of all the big-name old-school rock critics, Greil Marcus is one I had always intended to get around to but never had. Given my newfound free time, I decided now would be a good time to start. While several of Marcus’s books intrigued me – I’m already familiar with Lipstick Traces just from other people’s citations – I settled on Invisible Republic (aka The Old, Weird America) because of its focus on Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes. The album The Basement Tapes draws from a series of recordings made in 1967 that were never intended to be released, but which nevertheless trickled out to the public through bootlegs (including the first ever rock bootleg, 1969’s Great White Wonder) and cover versions (most famously Manfred Mann’s “The Mighty Quinn” and The Byrds’ “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”). In 1975, The Band’s Robbie Robertson compiled some of the best basement recordings, as well as some Band-only, non-Dylan demos, to create the officially-released album called The Basement Tapes. The result is my favorite album, for the following reasons:
1) Not only is every song on the album good, but it has one of the highest percentages of gobsmackingly great songs of any album I’ve heard: “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood),” “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” “Too Much of Nothing,” “Open the Door, Homer,” “Tears of Rage,” “Orange Juice Blues (Blues for Breakfast),” and “Yazoo Street Scandal,” just for a start. The only other album I can think of that comes close to having as many 5-star tracks on it is Singles Going Steady – which, like The Basement Tapes, is a compilation, albeit one that’s not your standard greatest hits package.
2) Not only does it feature two of my all-time favorite artists (Bob Dylan and The Band), but it has them working together and bringing out the best in each other. As much as I love Blonde on Blonde and The Band, neither has quite the heft to be my favorite album. The Basement Tapes does.
3) The songs are based in traditional American forms of music – blues, country and, most essentially, that mysterious backwoods folk, the type of which formed the basis of the Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music compilation. This genre of music has fascinated me since before I can remember. Was it from spending my summers, age 10 to 17, at camp in Appalachia? Was it from my grandmother, singing old songs as we washed dishes in her small-town (now rural) Mississippi kitchen? Or was it, as Marcus implies, because these songs dwell in the collective unconscious, written by no one and thus belonging to everyone, harkening back to the weird old days before nationalization and the advent of frequent travel smoothed out all the wrinkles in regional American culture?
4) Compounding the mystery of the old folk songs is the mystery of the basement tapes themselves. The theories of why Dylan collaborated with The Band in their house after his near-fatal motorcycle accident, choosing to record some songs and not others, are too many to list here. But other mysteries abound: why did Dylan start over with a fresh batch of songs for John Wesley Harding, recorded only a few months later? How was Dylan able to hammer out so many great songs, seemingly off the cuff? Why was “I’m Not There (1956),” one of the standouts not only among the basement recordings but in all of Dylan’s catalog, only ever recorded in one take and never played again in his entire career? Why are the lyrics, despite being nearly indecipherable and frequently nonsense, so compelling? On top of these questions, the low-fi and often distorted sound of the recordings (especially the ones not overdubbed for the official Basement Tapes album), some of which break off early or start in media res, make the songs sound older than they are, and like they were piped in from another dimension. The recordings owe less to Highway 61 Revisited and more to Robert Johnson’s old warbled singles, or even the supernatural eeriness of the earliest recording of the human voice. Listening to the basement tapes, it’s hard to believe that Bob Dylan is still alive, walking the same earth as the rest of us (not to mention Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson). But counteracting the ghostliness is the private glimpse into how Dylan constructs his songs and the charm of listening to him and The Band goofing off and revisiting their influences.
What I hadn’t expected before reading Invisible Republic was how much Marcus would focus not only on the official Basement Tapes album, but the entire body of recordings made at the same time, most of which remain available only on bootleg albums. I was aware of these other recordings, but it was Marcus’s writing that influenced me to finally seek them out. Yesterday morning was spent continuously listening to the first two volumes of The Genuine Basement Tapes, as I compared what I heard with Marcus’s “Discography” notes and with the official versions of those songs I already knew.
After hours of being seeping in Dylanalia, the obvious choice of movie was I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s non-biopic portrait of Bob Dylan’s various personae. Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Dylan as Jude (The Mighty?) Quinn got the most acclaim when the movie was released, but I thought that segment suffered from being too literal in places, such as the direct quotes from Dont Look Back and the overlong enactment of “Ballad of a Thin Man.” (The machine gunning at Newport was pretty cool though, and “See ya later, Allen Ginsberg” was a nice subtle counter-reference to the forced “Just like a woman!”) Instead, I was most drawn to the lyrical, almost abstract segment featuring Richard Gere as an aging William Bonney. Judging from reviews, this seems to be the most misunderstood segment of the movie – due in large part, I suppose, to being drawn so heavily from the basement tapes (as well John Wesley Harding, Desire and, of course, Dylan’s appearance in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid). This segment also is the one densest with references, from characters named Homer and Mrs. Henry, to town denizens who looked like they walked straight off the cover of The Basement Tapes (see above), to young “Woodie Guthrie’s” exclamation “This is chicken town!” But in addition to drawing from Dylan’s work, the portrayal of fictional Riddle County in I’m Not There owes a lot to Marcus’s mythologized description of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina in Invisible Republic – the year-‘round Halloween store was a particularly nice get, and one I wouldn’t have picked up on had I not read that chapter the night before. (Marcus is thanked in the movie’s end credits, so I’m not just making baseless connections based on the fact that I happened to read Invisible Republic and saw I’m Not There in the same week.)
Invisible Republic, like I’m Not There, opts for a fractured approach to its subject. The basement tapes are little more than a starting point for Marcus to branch off and talk about Harry Smith, Dock Boggs, the Child ballads and anything else pertaining to the titular “invisible republic” that influenced Dylan yet also exists apart from him. There’s no coherent, consecutive narrative to be constructed out of something that’s undocumented, that’s invisible. This “old, weird America,” still extant but now barely visible, is as ultimately unknowable as the nature of the basement tapes, or Bob Dylan himself.
Look, Sally, Look 