Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102741 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Critic Greil Marcus, author of Dead Elvis, The Dustbin of History and Mystery Train has produced a startling and provocative meditation on one of the great underground classics of American music, the fabled Basement Tapes recorded in the summer of 1967 by Bob Dylan and musicians who would soon be known as The Band. Invisible Republic is not merely the story of the Basement Tapes and their unusual bootleg history, but a critical analysis of the various influences that seem to have led Dylan and his friends into creating this body of work, which is exuberant, haunting and mysterious. Marcus presents a lively and offbeat social history of America while telling the stories of such characters as the eccentric folk song anthologist Harry Smith and a banjo-picking Virginia coal miner named Doc Boggs. Marcus writes with passion, and as he himself says, an "obsession". His analysis of how five men in a basement in 1967 happened to create an alternative folk music for America is not only highly entertaining, but is like a long refreshing dive into a vast lake of American music. --Jake Bond

Synopsis
Focuses on the production of the Basement Tapes, the suppressed recordings made by Bob Dylan and The Band in 1967 in Big Pink, Woodstock. This book returns to the folk/mythological preoccupations of Greil Marcus's "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music".

From the Publisher
Long-awaited book on Dylan's legendary Woodstock recordings
Invisible Republic is Greil Marcus's long-awaited book on the scores of legendary recordings Bob Dylan and the Band made in Woodstock, New York in 1967, in the basement of a house called Big Pink - music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it was thirty years ago. Starting with Dylan's historic rock'n'roll debut at the 1965 Newport Rock Festival and Dylan and the Band's subsequent tour of the US and Britain in 1966, Marcus recreates the outrage provoked by Dylan's supposed betrayal of folk music and folk values, and makes it clear that the Basement Tapes, secret music never intended for release, were Dylan's response. Dylan had described folk music as 'nothing but mystery'; Invisible Republic, moving back into the great, gothic dramas of American traditional music, unfolds as a mystery story, with Dylan himself as the detective. "Books this good should be burnt" Mark Sinker, The Wire

Customer Reviews

Presenting the background of Dylan's music
"Basement Tapes" by Greil Marcus is not a biography about Dylan, it is more. Marcus tries to point out from which background Dylan was inspired. It make it possible to understand Dylan music and lyrics in a way Dylan understand it by himself. Marcus gives the reader the feeling of the time before Dylan entered the stage. "Basement Tapes" is not only a book for Dylan fans. It is a book for those how are interested in the times when music was more than rock, blues or folk. Marcus has the ability not only to present facts rather to describe the feelings, fears and the lifestyle of the musicans which where Dylan's idols. It is definetly one of the best book about Dylan.