Product Description

In 1965, one song defined a generation caught the questing spirit of the era and changed the rules of the possible in popular music for all time. At that point it was the longest hit single to be released, at six minutes and six seconds in length nearly three times longer than the average single. Greil Marcus's extraordinary book captures the heady atmosphere of the recording studio in 1965 as witnessed by many clustered around the mercurial genius from Minnesota, the young Bob Dylan. "Like a Rolling Stone" reconstructs the context in which the song first appeared, in terms of Dylan's own career and the world at large. It is an analysis and critique of an artist at the height of his creative powers and offers a unique insight into the mistakes and inspirations that occur when history is being made.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #229627 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Review
"'Greil Marcus is simply peerless, not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian.' Nick Hornby 'Part rhapsody, part social history and part biography, always entirely passionate.' Guardian"

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

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.

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.