The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
Previously published as Invisible Republicand already considered a classic of modern American cultural criticism,The Old, Weird Americais Greil Marcus's widely acclaimed book on the secret music (the so-called "Basement Tapes") made by Bob Dylan and the Band while in seclusion in Woodstock, New York, in 1967—a folksy yet funky, furious yet hilarious music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it was more than thirty years ago.
Read more
As Mark Sinker observed in The Wire: "Marcus's 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, are where that community as a whole gets to speak." But the country mapped out in this book, as Bruce Shapiro wrote in The Nation, "is not Woody Guthrie's land for made for you and me . . . It's what Marcus calls 'the old, weird America.'" This odd terrain, this strange yet familiar backdrop to our common cultural history—which Luc Sante (in New Yorkmagazine) termed the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes"—is the territory that Marcus has discovered in Dylan's most mysterious music. And his analysis of that territory "reads like a thriller" (Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly) and exhibits "a mad, sparkling brilliance" (David Remnick, The New Yorker) throughout. This new edition of The Old, Weird Americaincludes an updated discography.
Liked The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
