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Editorial Review:
Greil Marcus has been called "simply peerless, not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian" (Nick Hornby). It's appropriate, then, that he should choose to explore one of the most defining moments in American music: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes.
It was 1967--the Summer of Love. Bob Dylan and five other musicians (later known as The Band) met in a bungalow in Woodstock, New York, and wrote and produced music that ignored the psychedelic sounds of the time, songs that would eventually become known simply as "The Basement Tapes." The group mined the history of American music and their own talents to produce legendary tracks that were bootleg issues before appearing in official release.
That is the alchemy that was practiced in the Basement Tapes laboratory, and "in that alchemy," Marcus writes, "is an undiscovered country, like the purloined letter hiding in plain sight." Marcus explores this music and the cauldron of the American experience in which it was formed in a book that illuminates America, then and now.
Description of Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes:
While focusing on a select group of musicians performing privately in a brief window of time, noted music and culture writer Greil Marcus cuts to the core of the American musical legacy to study it as a slightly blurred snapshot, full of shadow and mystery. Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes centers around the now legendary recordings made by Bob Dylan and The Band in 1967, and how this music signaled a change in American music by capturing the essence of the moment within the context of a rich folk tradition. During these casual sessions they recorded more than 100 songs, some originals, but most borrowed from barely remembered folk, blues, and country musicians.
This music they derived from had been part of the American fabric in an anonymous way that can only be explained as folklore and myth, and they breathed new life into it while adhering to its legacy. Though never intended for release, these recordings molded into the tradition of music as oral history, and appropriately, a few tapes were passed hand to hand, then some were pressed as bootleg records, which then spread like rumors. This folk revival conjured up a collection of timeless stories that many had heard in a slightly different form without ever knowing who started them. Just as Dylan did with the Basement Tapes, Marcus's exhilarating book extends beyond music and into the psyche of America, making the present more clear by putting the past into focus.
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes Reviews:
Divisive But Entertaining 
2008-05-10 - Greil Marcus's book isn't so much about Bob Dylan's album "The Basement Tapes" as it is "inspired by" the Basement Tapes. One reviewer here describes it as "fan fiction". I see the point, and to a degree agree with it, but I think there is a bit more meat to the book than that description encompasses.
The strange thing is that I didn't even think that much of Bob Dylan's "The Basement Tapes". I always thought of it as some jams by a great band with some half-finished lyrics slurred and snarled and mush-mouthed bluffed over it. The album made me wish Dylan could have stayed on amphetamines a little longer. His central nervous system and heart probably enjoyed the break, but the Basement Tapes ain't no Blonde on Blonde. With that said, I still love this book, maddening though it is.
Like in his earlier book, "Lipstick Traces", Marcus is interested in making cultural/historical connections. Showing how music from the recent past ties into much older traditions. Some of these connections are brilliant, some are completely mad (but he gets points for audaciousness nonethless) and some I remain dubious about.
What the Basement Tapes have to do with the West Virginia coal war of the 1920's I still don't have a clue, but what I learned of the coal war in this book made me interested enough to order a book Marcus recommended.
Even if the connections aren't really there this book does stimulate your curiosity.
And I can see where the divisiveness comes into it. It's the old argument that "folk music is about social protest" versus the "folk music is about flowers growing from the skulls of murdered lovers in their graves".
Woody Guthrie versus Harry Smith. Marcus comes down on the Harry Smith side and perhaps disparges the Guthrie side more than is warranted. After all there is a bit of both in Dylan himself. From Masters of War to Hurricane to Jokerman. From Boots of Spanish Leather to Mr. Tambourine Man to Desolation Row.
If you're looking for a straightforward biography of Dylan or a historical record of the Basement Tapes sessions, this isn't it. This is as much about union wars of the 1920's and songs about men murdering their pregnant girlfriends and old coal-mining, bootlegging banjo players who sang a few songs back in the 1920's that still get played today and how they might all be connected (or maybe not). Its the kind of book that makes you want to read even more books, or listen to even more music with this book as a starting point.
Weird Americana 
2006-12-14 - Music is a hard thing to write about. You can go clipped and dry in your appoach, with dates and names and other history, which can be pretty dull. Or you can, if you live and believe it like Greil Marcus obviously does, do the stream-of-consciousness thing. Despite its unevenness I think I prefer the Marcus approach. This book is not going to appeal to everyone. The actual Basement Tapes of the title really don't take up but a small portion of the book. Instead, Marcus uses the Tapes like a touchstone for everything authentic - and vanishing, in American culture. "Old Weird America," Marcus calls it. Indeed. Dylan is of course important, since he's the last musical genius (according to Marcus) to understand this. When Marcus does discuss a song on the Basement Tapes, he often, to my mind, overstates his case with pretty wild hyperbole that has me thinking whatever he's smoking, it must be good. But I'm willing to go with that. The payoff comes when he discusses, for example, Dock Boggs (an important figure for Dylan) and the often violent Southwest Virginia music and gun scene in the 1920s. Knowing something about the area, this was indeed a treat, and a high point for me in the book. Also good, is the discussion of folk music compiler Henry Smith, whose efforts would later prove to be so important to Dylan and the folk movement. Smith is an important figure, with a personal history that is both compelling and weird. Another standout is Marcus's discussion of the Bobbie Gentry classic, "Ode to Billie Joe" and its counterpart or answer on the Basement Tapes, "Clothesline Saga." "Clothesline"is a strange, and funny song, but it shares, as Marcus points out, similar Americana turf with Gentry's Ode: deadpan, even lethal, and as traditional as Twain, Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. The kind of understandings you can't download from today's music world.
Dear Mr Marcus I Subsidize Thee!
2005-08-06 - Whew!!! That's gotta be the looooooongest liner notes to a cd I've EVER read! But don't get me wrong. I'm glad for anyone to help me ponder those baffling incomprehensible lyrics of the Basement Tapes and unravel them into something mind-blowingly expansively connected up to the larger cosmology - just as Harry Smith did - which has the insights that pull a lid off and expose the process. But believe me right now, I saw Invisible Republic and bought it and aborted reading it almost immediately due to this guy's unbeLIEVable indulgent but erudite and stuffy method of making his points. Ah, but that concept of Invisible Republic - it was a direct hit nonetheless by Marcus. And the man's voratious apetite for mystery and detective work has something to be said on the supportive side for him. Marcus is more right and dead-on than his high falutin' convolutin' prose let's him let on. This book is actually an invaluable piece of decode-ology and a wonderful historical peice on a subject that will probably not get as good a recording of itself by anyone else. And it should have a peculiar effect should it find its way into school rooms or universities up the line in the future! (After all, this is a scholarly writ about the unscholarly and unschooled, but higher wisdom outside the trappings of acedemia.) Marcus is an alchemist himself and that's precisely why this book flipflops from lead to gold and back again. But if you like Camble*-ian mythological explorations by someone who's willing to stand outside of myth himself in order to initiate the rest of us into the process, then tolerate this chap. It is well worth the journey he guides us on! [* Joseph Camble is probably the most authoritative source ther is on mythology]
Silly ! 
2002-01-22 - I know this book revolves around an abstract idea linking Bob Dylan`s basement tapes to an old , lost America ( the invisible Republic ) , but , oh dear , where do I begin ?
" Invisible Republic " is one of the worst books I`ve ever read , I just hope people don`t take Greil Marcus`s ludicrous theory on the basement tapes to be gospel ( no pun intended ) . This is a classic case of an author`s ego winning out to common sense .
It`s hard enough to read a book , if you`ve lost all faith in the author`s integrity , thanks to the laughably tenuous links that he uses to back up his theory , but when you have to wade through reams of portentious , almost unreadable prose , to reach the same conclusion , it`s almost torture . This book is full of pretensious , self-indulgent nonsense that only very gullible people could believe , but I suppose any Bob Dylan book sells , and Greil Marcus is fully aware of this .
One of the best books on Dylan and American music
2000-10-24 - I don't understand some of the other customer reviews of this book. Were the basement tapes created in a vacuum, or were the ghosts of American folk music floating around that basement in Big Pink ? And could this book be more timely with the epochal Smithsonian 1997 re-release of the Harry Smith Anthology ? This is exactly the book I wanted and Marcus was the only one who could do it. Admittedly some of the ideas are far-ranging, perhaps far-fetched, but we have to give the creative critic the same artistic license we give the artist. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but when it does it gives you a lot to think about and really helps to place Dylan within the context of the history of American music. And even since Dylan turned his back on the folk movement you can still hear echoes to this day of the influence of the Smith Anthology in his music. The way he absorbed it and reconfigured the songs (which are essentially the canon of American folk music)for his own purposes throughout his career, particularly during the making the tapes which may be his finest work, are key to understanding the timeless quality of his music. And how about that bravura opening section, the best description I've read of what was at stake during the first electric tour with The Band ?
