Book Review: “Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus”
The outline for Greil Marcus’s approach to analyzing Bob Dylan in his latest book, the aptly titled Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus , can be found in two pieces. The first is a review of the famously messy 1970 album Self Portrait , in which a young Marcus, apparently too stunned to form a proper argument, strings together fifty short observations over twenty pages. Some are fragments of conversations; some are takedowns of the album’s attitude and atmosphere (“I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly.”); some are muted appreciations of individual songs (Marcus is fond of “All the Tired Horses,” “Living the Blues,” “Copper Kettle,” and precious little else); and some are lengthy quotations from other people. The point, obviously, is that Self Portrait is such an exquisite and inscrutable train wreck that every approach the listener makes toward it is always already doomed to failure; another mus...