Synopses & Reviews
Greil Marcus saw Bob Dylan for the first time in a New Jersey field in 1963. He didn't know the name of the scruffy singer who had a bit part in a Joan Baez concert, but he knew his performance was unique. So began a dedicated and enduring relationship between America's finest critic of popular music "simply peerless," in Nick Hornby's words, "not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian" and Bob Dylan. In
Like A Rolling Stone Marcus locates Dylan's six-minute masterwork in its richest, fullest context, capturing the heady atmosphere of the recording studio in 1965 as musicians and technicians clustered around the mercurial genius from Minnesota, the young Bob Dylan at the height of his powers.
But Marcus shows how, far from being a song only of 1965, "Like a Rolling Stone" is rooted in faraway American places and times, drawing on timeless cultural impulses that make the song as challenging, disruptive, and restless today as it ever was, capable of reinvention by artists as disparate as the comedian Richard Belzer and the Italian hip-hop duo Articolo 31. "Like a Rolling Stone" never loses its essential quality, which is directly to challenge the listener: it remains a call to arms and a demand for a better world. Forty years later it is still revolutionary as will and idea, as an attack and an embrace. How does it feel? In this unique, burningly intense book, Marcus tells you, and much more besides.
Review
"On the history and reverberations of the music...Marcus is near the top of the game. How does it feel? Pretty good, most of the time." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"There has been much written about Bob Dylan, and even more as of late. But it seems that Dylan is large enough to sustain any number of books and theses and worshipful riffs, and so into this flood of words comes Greil Marcus' Like a Rolling Stone. Marcus cultural critic, master of digression wisely skirts worship, while remaining full of awe, going for the whole culture by way of a single song." Anna Godbersen, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
Synopsis
The preeminent musicologist and prolific author presents a rhapsodic appreciation of his and Bob Dylan's favorite song one that defined an era but has, remained timeless in its originality and power.
About the Author
Greil Marcus is the author of Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces, Dead Elvis, In the Fascist Bathroom, The Dustbin of History, The Old, Weird America and Double Trouble. He has written for numerous publications, among them the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Threepenny Review, Artforum, Esquire, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and Granta. In 2000 and 2002 he taught at Berkeley and Princeton, and he currently lectures in the U.S. and Europe. He lives in Berkeley, California.