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Editorial Review:
Greil Marcus's popular appreciation of his, and Bob Dylan's, favorite song--a book that Rolling Stone called "essential insight into the living history of rock & roll."
Greil Marcus has written the definitive biography of the greatest pop single ever made. Recorded in Columbia's Studio A in New York on 16 June 1965, "Like A Rolling Stone" was instantly of its time-and so strong it has escaped time altogether. The musicians gathered in the studio never managed a second successful recording: they caught it once and only once. Then it was gone, arguably never to be bettered in Bob Dylan's countless live performances of the song.
Dylan's career as a folk singer--and the career imposed upon him, his unwanted role as "voice of a generation"--had hit a wall. Marcus recreates the brilliantly competitive pop world of 1965, and the energy, the anger, the thrill and the horror that Bob Dylan turned into a revolutionary six-minute single. Forty years later it remains the signal accomplishment of modern music. It drew to itself disparate traditions of American music and speech; it redrew the map of the country itself; it left behind a world that was not the same. The whole adventure is here.
Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads Reviews:
Under Par Holy Greil 
2009-12-05 - Now I am one of Mr Marcus's fans, his obstruse and poetic whimsy often stimulating further thought. In this instance, while not utterly dismissive, I'm in agreement with most of the negativity posted here. At his best, Marcus's reading of songs, a fascinating seduction into their texture, tone and lyric power, virtually note by note can be exhilerating to the extent that I envy his creative insights. Excess rules with this effort. You just have to shrug at some of the contextural minutia and strained social relevances that he tries to connect to various songs. Up front, the album was pivotal in my development. It was my first LP. Hitherto I was a Pitney ballad devotee. But yes, I was transfixed that Saturday morning when I spun that disc. It wasn't the title track(I'd never heard of it or Dylan other than by reading a commendation in that morning's national rag of ,'Another Side Of'...not available at the local shop, and being deflected to this other,newer disc by the same artist)that hooked me. It was the entire sound, particulary the haunting and mesmerising, Desolation Row, It Takes a lot to Laugh, the outrageous title track, and Ballad of a Thin Man. Goodbye Gene! Marcus's take on these songs is much appreciated. So too his feel for the majestic Sam Cooke's, Change is Gonna Come, my all time favourite song. In all, this is a book I feel no need to return to or recommend...the first time I've admitted that about any of the author's commentary.
Greil Marcus flips through his index cards
2009-09-25 - Greil Marcus has made his name as rock critic by insisting that the tide of History is directly mirrored by the pop music of the period. This can make for exhilarating reading, because Marcus is, if nothing else, an elegant stylist given to lyric evocation. But it is the same elegance that disguises the fact that he comes across a middling Hegelian; the author, amid the declarations about Dylan, The Stones, The Band and their importance to the spontaneous mass revolts of the Sixties, never solidifies his points. He has argued , with occasional lucidity, that the intuitive metaphors of the artist/poet/musician diagnose the ills of the culture better than any bus full of sociologists or philosophers, and has intimated further that history is a progression toward a greater day. Marcus suggests through out his more ponderous tomes--"Lipstick Traces", "Invisible Republic", "The Dustbin of History"
--that the arts in general, and rock and roll in particular, can direct in ways of getting to the brighter day, the next stage of our collective being. The problem , though, is that Marcus is only a compelling writer when the object of study remains a vague cluster of political and aesthetic notions enshrouding specific historical events--he is quite good, at times, in describing creative process and the build of energy as musicians collaborate on a song they're writing and recording, but he drifts into a swamp of inchoate mysticism that will infuriate the reader. Unlike Walter Benjamin, who had mystic proclivities, or even Norman Mailer, likewise of an odd spiritual cast, Marcus does not leave us with a trail of insights, nor is he especially quotable if you had to draw out a sentence or paragraph that embodied a book's thesis. Morris Dickstein could do that, evinced by his classic study of sixites culture "The Gates of Eden". Marcus does not stick around to answer the harder question: what are you driving at?
Marcus, though, isn't the one to draw us the map.But what has been aggravating with Marcus since he left the employ of Rolling Stone and began writing full length books and essays for cultural journals is that he chokes when there's a point to be made--he defers, he sidesteps, he distracts, he rather gracelessly changes the subject. Again, this can be enthralling, especially in a book like his massive "Lipstick Traces The Secret History of the 20th Century" where he assumes some of Guy DeBord's assertions in Society of the Spectacle and situates rock and roll musicians in a counter-tradition of groups that spontaneously develop in resistance to a society's centralized ossification and mounts an attack, through art, on the perceptual filters that blind the masses to their latent genius.
He never quite comes to the part where he satisfyingly resolves all the mounting, swelling, grandly played generalizations that link Elvis, The Sex Pistols and Cabaret Voltaire as sources of insight geared to undermine an oppressive regime, but the reader has fun along the way. Marcus wants to be a combination of Marcuse and Harold Bloom, and he rarely accomplishes anything the singular criticism either of them produced in their respective disciplines, political philosophy and literary criticism, but he does hit the mark often enough to make him a thinker worth coming back to.
One would wonder about the value of coming back to this man's store front, though, if his book Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. Marcus is one who has written so much about Dylan, or has absorbed so much material about him, that he can produce a reed-thin on one song and pretends that it is much, much more than what it really is. The problem is a lack of thesis, a conceit Marcus at least pretend to have with his prior volumes; depending entirely on third-hand anecdotes, half-recollected memories and a flurry of details gleaned from any one of the several hundred books about Dylan published in the last 30 years, this amounts to little more than what you'd have if you transcribed a recording of the singer's more intense fans speaking wildly, broadly, intensely amongst themselves, by passing coherence for Sturm and Drang. For the rest of us with a saner appreciation of Dylan's importance , Like A Rolling Stone is messily assembled jumble of notes, press clips and over-told stories; Marcus , obvious enough, attempts an impressionist take on the song, but the smell of rehash doesn't recede, ever
In the Immortal Words of Elvis Costello . . .
2009-07-30 - Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. This was the book that cured me of my belief that you have to finish reading any book you start. You leap at the first chance to escape the drunken bore at a party, right? Putting this book back on the shelf? Same thing.
Candidate for the worst rock book (on the best song) 
2009-06-27 - Hard to imagine how this could be worse. Pompous and Flatulent at the same time. BEWARE
Marcus on Dylan 
2009-01-09 - This probably a 4 1/2 star book. Marcus is an eminent Dylanologist. He was part of a symposium on Dylan at the Skirbal, near LA.
Marcus not only dissects the Highway 61 Sessions, but goes deeply into a discussion of Blues and R& B Music. He discusses Clyde McPhatter and the various groups that Clyde was part of, which pleased me greatly. (You can Still find the Drifters "White Christmas" on Juke Boxes today.)
Though I didn't understand the section on takes. It seems that none of the 15 takes were satisfactory, so what take was released? 16Th?
