Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256249 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-19
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Mojo, Book of the Month
Marcus's genius is his ability to pull the reader into this mythic, swampy head-trip.

Guardian Guide
Part rhapsody, part social history and part biography, always entirely passionate

Uncut, Book of the Month, July 2005
Such an audacious, revolutionary voyage deserves a bold and magisterial log. Forty years on, Greil Marcus has delivered it.

Customer Reviews

Well worth acquiring
This is a great book, If you read it as one man's intelligent take on one of the greatest records of all time, then it is a work of inspired genius. If you want the history and the facts, go read one of the hundreds of Bobographies (although there are facts and tales a plenty here). If you want to be drawn into another world, one you half know already through your intimate relationship with this terrific song, then get this.

Passionate.... but rubbish
While Greil Marcus's flights of fantasy sometimes work (Lipstick Traces comes to mind here), Like A Rolling Stone simply falls flat on its face. Marcus makes little connection with wider trends in the musical and political culture of the decade -- which was one of the book's intentions -- and succeeds only in reminding us that he remains quite a Dylan fan. He devotes far too much space to tedious transcriptions of studio chatter during the recording of the song, digresses on to some cover versions and ends up discussing the Pet Shop Boys' cover version of the Village People's 'Go West' (I kid you not), suggesting that he'd run out of both ideas and inspiration. Parts of this book might have formed the basis of a neat chapter in a wider study of Dylan's 1960s (or the decade's key songs) but as a book, it reeks of a marketing ploy.