This book begins with a rumor in Berkeley in the mid-1960s and ends on Election Night in Minneapolis in 2008. In one moment a small crowd holds its breath as a person pretending to be Bob Dylan performs from inside a wooden box; in another, Dylan appears for the first time at his erstwhile alma mater, the University of Minnesota, and on a night when the country voted for change, invests songs he has carried with for nearly half a century with new meaning. Between these two events, Greil Marcus, (Mystery Train, Liptrick Traces, and the Old Weird America) has followed Bob Dylan's work with a fan's intensity and a detective's persistence. Here, that ranges from a Rolling Stone piece on Dylan's 1970 Self Portrait to a recognition of the depths of Time Out of Mind nearly thirty years later. And a whole lot of in between - long investigations into the tangled stories told by old American music, and pithy twenty-five or fifty-word comments on records, books, concerts, radio commercials, and nearly anything else under the sun. The end result is a sparkling and enduring chronicle of a more than 40-year engagement between an unparalleled singer and a uniquely acute listener. Discussion with Matt Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces.
8 сен 2024
