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American pop philosopher and all round music-lover Greil Marcus (imagine him as what Paul Morley sees when he looks in his magic mirror) seemed to find a fresh way of approaching the subject. Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes doesn’t deal with what parts of Bob Dylan’s life did or didn’t happen. There’s enough material on that both by the musician and the ten score biographers who have so far not written a definitive life. Instead Greil Marcus deals with perhaps the most interesting and enigmatic part of Bob Dylan’s career.
The story goes that after Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and was booed off stage, creating a catastrophe even bigger than 1994’s ‘headless in Seattle’, he took to riding motorbikes, and on one occasion almost certainly drove one straight into a tree. There were no Paul McCartney is dead theories and he was never rumoured to sleep in a special tank. However he did take to retiring entirely from the limelight, and in a basement hooked up with microphones known as The Big Pink, recorded songs that seemed to transcend from early folk music and appeared to almost roll straight off his tongue without any real planning.
Greil Marcus doesn’t take us straight to Bob’s basement recordings with Atlanta band the Hawks, but rather looks at who Bob Dylan was just before this happened. There is the night spent drunk and singing out of tune with a debauch Johnny Cash, and there is the tour of England and the crowd banter, including the shows that couldn’t go on. But then there are the moments when Marcus’ writing reaches a point where you actually feel as though you are in the room with Bob Dylan. It’s an almost haunting experience in which you feel that Bob Dylan both understands and rejects you as a person.
There is precious little though about Bob’s true love Joan Baez, their relationship remaining as ever a shut book which we may never know, but there are the adventures Dylan takes through Gospel and Blues and early Folk. At the same time there is a feeling of just how big this Bob Dylan character was, in the opening pages Greil Marcus refers to Bob Dylan as ‘that turning point’ and the shock of seeing Bob Dylan turning up at Newport on a July evening as everyone was tiring down and amping up must not be taken for granted.
Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes therefore does not have the biographical aspect of I’m Not There, it never delivers Bob Dylan’s carefully crafted personal introspective as his journals do, what Basement Tapes offers is a portrait of a man who held his time in the palm of his hand, and crushed it. And that is why it still remains the best book ever written about a musician.
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