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Marcus has always had a propensity for stylistic hyperinflation and intellectual wooliness, but it has worsened as he has gotten older. It only occasionally afflicted his early and fascinating Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll Music (1975)—which has an excellent chapter on The Band—but it made Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989) almost unreadable and Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991) scarcely less so. Today one can say of Marcus's writing what Mark Twain said of Wagner's music: it has some wonderful moments, but some absolutely terrible quarters of an hour.
This decline is a shame, because if Marcus could either discover the virtues of editing or cut back on the caffeine and sugar he would be a fascinating commentator on the contemporary scene at least. In Invisible Republic, his instincts always lead him in the right direction, even if they can't make him keep his verbal car on one side of the double yellow line.
Above all, he understands both the centrality of Dylan to American culture and the centrality of The Basement Tapes to Dylan. Sometimes brilliantly, Marcus traces Dylan's summer in the house called Big Pink back through Harry Smith's enormously influential 1952 collection (recently reissued on cd), Anthology of American Folk Music—"Smith's Anthology is a backdrop to the basement tapes. More deeply, it is a version of them, and the basement tapes a shambling, twilight version of Smith's Anthology"—and back to figures like the Carter Family, Clarence Ashley, and Dock Boggs, and then further back into a folk culture bereft of names.
Of the basement recordings, Marcus writes, "the stronger the songs get, the older they feel," and this is the most important thing to say about them. No wonder Robbie Robertson couldn't tell whether Dylan had just written "Tears of Rage," "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," "I Shall Be Released," or had found them. As Elvis Costello once said, "I think he was trying to write songs that sound like he's just found them under a stone."
But the songs from the summer in Big Pink's basement aren't the only Dylan songs that sound that way. That's how his career begins, with covers of old songs and "new" ones that aren't really new at all: "Girl from the North Country" is obviously a take on "Scarborough Fair," while "Blowin' in the Wind," as Marcus notes, steals its melody from a song sung by runaway slaves in the midnineteenth century. And from time to time in Dylan's career he has found it necessary to reconnect himself with those folk traditions: sometimes just by following their styles, structures, and patterns of instrumentation, as in that landmark of American music, Blood on the Tracks (1975), but sometimes simply by recording some great old songs that he hadn't written. Fans were puzzled and frustrated when he did it the first time, in the country standards of 1970's Nashville Skyline; perhaps they were more used to the idea by the time he did Good As I Been to You (1992) and the especially potent World Gone Wrong (1993), which are all old folk and blues classics. After all, by then, as we will later see, there was reason to think that good things would come from such a return to the sources. Ad fontes!
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