Becoming Bob Dylan

Like a Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan at the Crossroads

by Greil Marcus

Public Affairs, 256 pp., $24

BOB DYLAN ONCE REFERRED TO rock critics as "40-year-olds writing about records that are geared for people that are 10 years old." He made that comment about 20 years ago, so now one must suppose that those same critics would be in their sixties or thereabouts--Dylan's own age.

The age group targeted by the average Top 40 pop song would have remained the same, however, as it's been since the dawn of the era of mass-youth-pop-culture-consumption in the 1950s. Pop music is basically made for kids. This is notwithstanding the fact that there is also a lucrative market in "classic rock" and other nostalgia categories, whereby people continue listening to and re-buying, in ever-changing formats, music that they first enjoyed as, well, children.

There is also, then, a market for books of analysis and criticism that seek to explain to people just why this music that they enjoyed in their teen years continues to occupy a place in their emotional universe, and, indeed, why there is no need to be ashamed of it, since there is a great deal more depth in those little ditties than may meet the eye--or ear. (And this is not to mention the ongoing reviews that must be written of all the new singles and albums hitting the market.)

Inevitably, trying to concoct serious writing about inherently unserious music can lead to self-indulgent perversities and crazy extrapolations of the imagination. This can't be helped. Consumers must be fed, and pages must be filled with words, and duly dispatched. What happens, however, when the same critic comes along and applies those same bad habits to music that is both popular and of serious worth?

The first sound is so stark and surprising, every time you hear it, that the empty split-second that follows calls up the image of a house tumbling over a cliff; it calls up a void. Even before "Once upon a time," it's the first suggestion of what Dylan meant when, on that night in Montreal when he was plainly too tired to bait an interviewer so uninterested in his assignment he hadn't even bothered to learn how to pronounce his subject's name, he cared enough about "Like a Rolling Stone" to seriously insist that no one had written songs before--that no one had ever tried to make as much of song, to altogether open the territory it might claim, to make a song a story, and a sound, but also the Oklahoma Land Rush.

That's a snippet (and I do mean a snippet) of what Greil Marcus writes in this book just about the moment in-between the first bang on the snare drum and the rest of Bob Dylan's 1965 recording of "Like a Rolling Stone." That song, and in particular that recording of it, is the central subject of the book.

Now, I would not be the one to try to argue that Bob Dylan's work does not deserve serious examination and appreciation. Hundreds of books have already been published, and countless others will be, inspired by what is probably the greatest single body of songwriting in the history of the United States. There is a lot that has been said, and probably a great deal more that remains to be said, about some of the most enduring and beguiling songs that one could hope to hear; songs that spring from the Bible, the blues, folk, history, poetry, and many points besides, and from a giant American creative spirit who has straddled the decades of the second half of the 20th century and continues to create interesting work now into the 21st.

But the moment of silence in-between the crack of the drum and the rest of "Like a Rolling Stone"? Do we really have to squeeze our sensibilities in there, and wallow around in the murk of the subconscious, freeze-framing each moment of perception and blowing it up to 20 x 30 poster size?

Well, that's what you'd best be prepared to do if you wish to enjoy Like a Rolling Stone. Greil Marcus, billed at a recent talk at Columbia as "perhaps the most celebrated writer on American popular music and culture," has made it his trademark to inhabit those spaces, and draw his readers down (or up?) there with him. As opposed to a critic who bases his analysis on some mutually understood groundwork, Marcus often demands that you cozy up inside his cranium and follow every neuron as it sparks inside what some might consider his rock'n'roll-addled brain. His own very personal response to the music is set down for the reader as being the essential one, by means of little more than bold assertion.