Backward Book Club: The Old, Weird America

Well, your authors here decided to start up this blog while both participating in a backward book club. It happened rather accidentally a few weeks ago. We're both experiencing some Dylan mania (it tends to happen to me this time of year) and I had lent Will my copy of Greil Marcus's Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, his study of Dylan going electric told through the lens of the writing, recording, and performing of the title song. In it, Marcus is on point. He is also at times obsessive. But goddamn if its not one of the best accounts of one of the most discussed and written-about times in popular music history. And he has the smarts to treat it like a time period rather than one event. You get a real socio-chronological map, if such a thing exists.

This is why I've decided to start The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. This is an earlier Marcus book from 1997, but it actually picks up where Like A Rolling Stone, which came out later, leaves off: just after the 1966 world tour. As you can tell from the title this one concerns the Basement Tapes, which were recorded in the Big Pink house with members of what would later become The Band (at this point, no longer the Hawks, calling themselves alternately The Honkies or The Crackers) in addition to other people who happened to be passing through at the time. This was after the world tour with The Hawks at which Dylan was heckled within an inch of his life and sanity. You know, when he looked like Cate Blanchett. Anyway, after the tour and the motorcycle crash, Dylan went into seclusion and recorded... well, he recorded a lot of songs. They circulated for years as bootlegs, and were finally released in the mid 1970s as a two disc set. The songs are strange, and many of them simply meander and go nowhere lyrically or musically. But you can hear so much happening in them, as a student of Americana or pop culture. The Band coming together and finding their sound is my favorite among these, but Marcus is really psyched on Dylan reaching down into the American landscape and digging up the roots for the sake of... well, no one but himself, really, as even Robbie Robertson (The Band's guitarist) is quoted as saying "A lot of stuff, Bob would say, 'We should destroy this.'"

Either way, if you're like me and dismissed The Basement Tapes as having been shelved so long for a good reason, give it another shot. Marcus has made me extremely frustrated that these songs sat unplayed in my iTunes library for so long. And I can already see a new map forming in the pages of The Old, Weird America.