I published the following piece in a tabloid issue of First in 1998 and then posted it at this website after Bob Dylan released Love and Theft in 2001. I took it down once Greil Marcus became an occasional contributor to First. In the era of Substack, though, journos’ back pages find new readers and it seems timid rather than tactful to hide “I.R.” in a memory hole.
Re-reading my piece now, I’d take the late Carmelita Estrellita’s essay on the Basement Tapes over mine (or Marcus’s). (I’ve reposted her lovely piece here.) Still, it’s a kick to see that when I urged readers to “keep listening out for voices of the black nation,” I was holding out for Obamatime (as well as for Congressmen Clyburn and Bennie Thompson).[1] Some folks lent me their ears, though certain responders—aware, perhaps, I’d been scorned by Marcus as a “fascist moron”[2]—made me feel like their down low dog. I’m flashing on a black academic—en route to a career as a well-regarded cultural historian and biographer—who offered over-the-top praise of my essay at a public affair after looking over his shoulder to make sure nobody overheard him. A Timesman (and friend-of-Greil) once copped to “lingering aggravation” at my ‘’too gleefully negative” treatment of Marcus though he allowed I’d “hinted at something that was sort of true.” He accused me of aiming to be provocative. But I was just trying to be precise.
OTOH, once I got past my own defensiveness, I had second and third thoughts about the less than generous tone of my piece, which may have been “pitched too high” as one sharp reader suggested. After all, Marcus dove into the Black Atlantic plenty of times and he got in-deep much earlier than me. I’m recalling just now his unforgettable line on a reggae record (could it have been Garvey’s Ghost?): “surf music with slave ships on the horizon.”
Back to my attempt to catch a wave in 2001. I locked on how Dylan lifted the title of Love and Theft from my old comrade Eric Lott’s 1993 study Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. I linked the title to Dylan’s self-consciously “colored” voicings in any number of tracks on that album, proposing that his blacking-up added resonance to my critique of Marcus’s blankness about race in Invisible Republic. I noted how Dylan seemed to have reconsidered his original praise of Marcus’ Republic. In an interview, Dylan had averred that Marcus overplayed the connection between Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and his own songs. I hope I didn’t sound like I was crowing when I cited Dylan’s change-up; I’ve surely learned since that you really can’t follow moody Bob’s lead for long on any subject. I was reminded of his variousness when I read in John Szwed’s Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith. There’s a memorable set-piece when Dylan played a tape of (his not-good 80s album) Empire Burlesque at Allen Ginsberg’s house. Homeless Harry Smith was living with Ginsberg at the time and Dylan was hot to have Harry hear his new stuff, though the numen of roots music was unengaged: “Turn that s— down.” (Maybe an and-one for Greil Marcus who hates 80s Dylan too.)
I’m not going to pretend my protest against Marcus’ 1997 text is urgent biz now (though Marcus’ book lives on in new editions under the title, The Old Weird America, and it is Black History month). But, for the record, the case I made for Tramaine Hawkins in this essay will always be right on time.[3]
Bob Dylan once teased himself and his core audience by invoking (in his epic 80’s rap “Brownsville Girl”) a stiff icon from another time — “I’m standing in line to see a movie starring Gregory Peck…I’ll go see him in ANYthing.” But Dylan is no joke now, he’s a live presence in contemporary pop life. Live 66 — the hit double-CD capturing the Manchester performance from his famous English tour in 1966 — makes his confrontation with righteous folkies (“JUDAS!”…”Play fucking loud.”) news.
Greil Marcus — often cited as America’s best rock critic — deserves credit for cultivating the public that’s getting kicks from Live 66. Marcus returned to Dylan’s electrifying tour — and the rock and roll half of the Manchester show — in the opening chapter of his recent book Invisible Republic. Coupled with the 1997 release of Dylan’s inspired Time Out of Mind, Marcus’s replay helped prepare the way for the latest Dylan revival.
But. If Invisible Republic keeps influencing the culture that revival could be traduced because Marcus mixes up memorable Dylan performances — on stage, film, in the basement of Big Pink — with consensual wisdom about race in America. His Republic amps up doomy notes struck in less-than-vital centrist jeremiads like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America and Todd Gitlin’s The Twilight of Common Dreams. It provides mainline critics of multiculturalism and affirmative action with a useable, musical past. You could hear the echo immediately in the rock and roll rationale — “One Nation Under Elvis” — advanced in Michael Lind’s recent Mother Jones polemic against black identity politics — “The End of the Rainbow.”
Greil Marcus — author of Mystery Train, Dead Elvis, etc. — is a well-known Elvis idolater, but Bob Dylan serves as Invisible Republic‘s representative American. There’s nothing necessarily tendentious (or fresh) about Marcus’s claim that Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) transcended his racial/ethnic origins to invent voices with national resonance in the 60’s. More than a decade ago, English musicologist Wilfrid Mellors’s A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (1984) placed Dylan as an omni-American cross-over artist who wailed over racial walls. Unlike Mellors, though, Marcus isn’t out to light up the dark sides of Dylan’s integrated art-life. He means to ideologize Dylan’s pop persona, to project on to it his own bias against race-conscious politics and culture. Marcus’s American Rhapsody must be resisted now that his hero is busy being born all over again.
Marcus hears mystic chords of memory on tapes of Dylan’s loose sessions with the Band in 1967 and on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music — a lively compendium of hillbilly and blues recordings popular with Greenwich Village folkies in the 50’s. (The Anthology was re-released in 1997 with the original liner notes and a new booklet — edited by Marcus — featuring essays on Smith’s achievement.) Marcus suggests there’s a special, hidden link between the bootleg Basement Tapes and the Anthology. But Dylan has often played with lyrics and melodies from what he calls “old-timey” music and, as Mark Schone has pointed out (in the New York Observer), only 3 of the 89 tracks from the Basement can be traced back to Smith’s collection. (Dylan never mentioned the Anthology before the 90’s and apparently has only the vaguest memory of hearing it in the 60’s: “I imagine I heard it over at somebody’s house, some older kind of person who had this record.”) Marcus dismisses Dylanists who wonder about the absence of direct links between the Tapes and the Anthology as “beancounters.” He offers himself as the avatar of a secret, shared sensibility. (Not an uncommon pose for Marcus who proposed to reveal the “secret history of the Twentieth Century” in his 1989 treatise on Johnny Rotten, Lipstick Traces.) While both Dylan and Smith are/were at home on the creative margins of American culture, the “invisible” bridge between the Basement Tapes and the Anthology indicates Marcus’s Republic is a bullshitter’s paradise.
Marcus has recently been caught in a fib about ur-ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s response to Dylan’s famous performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He reported in Republic that Lomax tried to cut the power cables with an ax when Dylan went electric. But Marcus seems to know that never happened. Confronted (by Mark Schone) in an interview, he allows “I should have said, ‘Some people say,’ rather than describing it as something that actually happened.” Which won’t do. While there’s nothing wrong with passing on a myth that hints at the passionate response to Dylan’s rock ‘n’ roll at Newport, to pretend it might be fact would be indefensible. Marcus’s second thought not only inspires doubt about his fantastical/historical method, it provides evidence of his animus toward Lomax. Marcus claims to be only one in a crowd of “people with deep roots in the Folk Revival” who have been put off by Lomax’s personality. But it’s worth noting — since Marcus never acknowledges this — that Lomax’s 90’s memoir of musicking in the American South, The Land Where Blues Began, is marked by a clarity about the racial dimension of roots music that makes it the antithesis of Marcus’s colorless Invisible Republic.
Marcus’s melange of history, fantasy, local color, true crime and musical commentary isn’t argued consecutively — it’s word-processed, added on a screen or two at time — but his book’s organizing conceit underscores his commitment to the occultation of race. Marcus connects the Basement Tapes and Smith’s Anthology with imaginary American towns — “Union/Kill Devil Hills” and “Smithtown.” The maps he makes out of the music mask the presence of African Americans. “You don’t see many black people in [Kill Devil Hills]”; Smithtown “is a small town whose citizens are not distinguishable by race.”
Marcus makes much of the fact that Smith chose not to identify the performers on his Anthology by race. Hearing the Anthology as a testament to Smith’s personal taste rather than to any received ethnomusicological imperative, he links it to Dylan’s break with the Folk Establishment. Dylan, himself, has recalled (in the booklet accompanying his 80’s Biograph collection) his battles with “tight thinking” folkies which began long before he went electric — “If you sang Southern Mountain blues, you didn’t sing Southern Mountain ballads and you didn’t sing blues. If you sang Texas cowboy songs, you didn’t play English ballads…It was really pathetic. You just didn’t…I didn’t pay much attention to that. If I liked a song, I would just learn it and sing it the only way I could” — but he traces his resistance to the original rockers who set his world on fire in the 50’s not to Harry Smith (or to the circle of folkies influenced by the Anthology): “My earlier rock and roll background made me different from your regular folk singers…I played all the folk songs with a rock and roll attitude. This is what allowed me to cut through the mess and be heard.” Marcus sticks with the standard line on Dylan’s 60’s pop move — i.e. out-of-time folkie turns into-the-moment rocker. But that line needs to be revised to allow for the influence 50’s rockers had on Dylan. (Live 66‘s liner notes by Dylan’s old friend Tony Glover who played with the pre-folkie Bob in garage bands are more helpful than Invisible Republic on this score.) Dylan’s history as a shocking rocker began a decade before Newport when he fronted a rock ‘n’ roll band that outraged adults at a high school Assembly in his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Standing at the piano, young Bob pounded on the instrument so hard the pedal broke off. One teacher was astonished because “I had always known Bob as just an unassuming student…it was like a spirit had taken possession of his soul;” another adult was harsher, recoiling at Bob’s “African shrieking.” A phrase that hints how foreign R&B must have sounded to white Midwesterners in the 50’s.
Dylan took the measure of that cultural distance during an 80’s show when he remembered how he grew up “in a place that was frozen still eight months a year…listening to mostly country music, Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Hank Penny, all kindsa Hanks.” Introducing a cover version of (Little Willie John’s) “The Fever,” he recalled his first exposure to the music that moved him out of his own private Fargo. It was on a winter visit to a friend who lived across Lake Superior. Somehow young Bob ended up in a Detroit bingo parlor listening to a dance band play “the Fever” — “I was about 12 or so and that was my first time face to face with Rhythm and Blues.” Dylan’s tale isn’t literally true — he was 12 in 1953 and “The Fever” didn’t come out until 1956 by which time young Bob was already well-steeped in Little Richard and late-night R&B radio. But, as rock critic Paul Williams points out, there must have been a moment when “R&B first presented itself to Robert Zimmerman’s amazed eyes and ears and nothing was ever the same again.”
Dylan, of course, matters because he’s an original — not just another white guy singing or playing black. And, sure, he is an American original as Marcus would have it. Someone who grew up on hillbilly music as well as R&B. But Dylan’s famous commitment to self-transformation, his undying faith that I could be an Other flows out of his experience of black music — that “Changing Same.”
II
Dylan changed from a solo folkie back into a rock and roller each night on his 1966 tour. What seems most transforming now, though, is the sound he found alone in “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Dylan’s nervy harmonica on Live 66‘s “Tambourine Man” feels newer than his folk-rock. Marcus gets close to the sensation when he evokes (in Republic) the bootlegged version from the Leicester show:
What you hear are two long harmonica solos, each pressing well past two minutes, a cradle rocking in their rhythm, until without warning the sound rises up like a water spout, hundreds of feet in the air, the cradle now rocking at its top, then down again, safe in the arms of the melody.
I don’t know what inspired Dylan’s harp-playing in this instance — and Marcus (who’s off to Smithtown immediately) doesn’t try to locate its source. But my ears identify “Tambourine Man’s” gusher with the improvisational imperative in black musics. Recalling the magic of the Village in the 60’s, Dylan referenced — along with beat writers and blues and folk musicians — “Jazz, Monk, Coltrane.” Could his impulse to pour it all out live on “Tambourine Man” be related to the sheets of sound heard in the Jazz world circa 1966?
That’s not a question that would naturally occur to Marcus. But I’m struck by his lack of attention to Dylan’s R&B inspirations because he’s often written — in Mystery Train and elsewhere — about what it was like to get the fever for rock ‘n’ roll during the 50’s deep freeze. Marcus’s own immediate response to that music, though, seems to have been more ambivalent than Dylan’s. Marcus allowed in Mystery Train: “I didn’t like — that is, I didn’t understand — what the Big E did to the girls I went to school with or the way he looked on his first album, demented tongue hanging down his chest lost in some ecstasy completely foreign to me.” Bob Zimmerman’s Yearbook ambition was “to join Little Richard;” Marcus wasn’t about to come with him: “I recall hearing Little Richard’s ‘Rip It Up’ for the first time, loving the sound but catching the line, ‘Fool about my money, don’t try to save’ and thinking well that is stupid.”
Marcus’s Litle Richard memory reminds me of a famous passage (by Amiri Baraka) about another classic R&B singer: “If you play James Brown — say ‘Money Won’t Change You’ — in a bank, the total environment is changed. Not only the sardonic comment of the lyrics, but the total emotional placement of the rhythm, instrumentation and sound. An energy is released in the bank, a summoning of images that take the bank, and everybody in it on a trip. That is, they visit another place. A place where Black People live.”
Marcus once helped listeners hear their way there. Mystery Train featured a chapter on Sly Stone that’s still a useful guide to the black pop music of the early 70’s. But it’s been decades now since Marcus was alive to the energies Baraka invokes above. There is certainly no “place where Black People live” in his Republic‘s imaginary towns.
Marcus’s “Kill Devil Hills/Union” and “Smithtown” belong to what he calls “the old weird America,” borrowing the cadence of a phrase used by Kenneth Rexroth — “the old, free America.” Marcus writes he almost became “dizzy” when he first came across Rexroth’s words. He must know they wouldn’t have that effect on most African Americans. Which may be one reason why he changes “free” to “weird.” But Marcus seems intent on remaining dizzy. Stuck on texts (by D.H. Lawrence, Constance Rourke, F.O. Matthiessen etc.) pored over by generations of American Studies majors, Marcus avoids newer works of social history that show how the ethos of the old weird/free America was shaped by white supremacy. (“The hard side of racism,” Alexander Saxton points out in The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, “generally appeared in nineteenth century America as a corollary to egalitarianism.” Or as Noel Ignatieff puts it in How the Irish Became White, “In antebellum America, a citizen…was distinguished by three main privileges: he could sell himself piecemeal; he could vote; and he could …engage in mob attacks against black people.”)
Marcus’ obliviousness to wages of whiteness is evident when he provides a labor-history backdrop to Anglo-American bluesman Frank Hutchison who recorded in the late 1920’s. Marcus finds the legacy of West Virginia’s mine wars lurking as an “occult social drama” — note the penchant for mystification — in Hutchison’s music. Black laborers in West Virginia’s coal fields show up in his narrative — “There were few slaves in Logan before the Civil War and until the coal boom of 1910 not many black families after it” — but only as an afterthought. Their sudden, shadowy presence doesn’t remind Marcus of the United Mine Workers’ serious race problem — Spero and Harris’s classic 30’s study The Black Worker noted coal-miners’ “frequent manifestations of racial antipathy against the Negro.” Nor does it move him to consider the possibility a white country bluesman like Hutchison (who tagged behind a black laborer, drawn by the sound of his guitar as a child) might have been alluding to that problem when he sang:
“They make you b’lieve, the world is upside down
I’ve traveled this world
Boys, it’s all around”
The bias that distorts Marcus’ labor mystery-mongering becomes even more pronounced when he treats responses to the uproar of folk voices in the 1920’s and 30’s. Marcus whites out what’s unique about blues people’s oral traditions when he quotes a literary critic to explain why folk audiences were won over by records of traditional songs.
“We cannot escape our life in these fascist bodies,” Camile Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae, “as a black ten-inch 78 turned, for a moment one could. One could experience freedom from one’s physical body, and from one’s social body…”
That Marcus would go for Paglia’s notion of liberation isn’t surprising given the neo-gnostic traces in his own work. Some fear of the “fascist body” probably lies behind his attitude to contemporary African and Black Atlantic dance musics which he tends to ignore in his monthly columns on pop in Interview and Art Forum. (It certainly helps explain his mad magazine rant, a few years ago, against C&C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat” — an un-exceptionable piece of urban body music.) Marcus doesn’t like sweating to the beat which may be why he’d love to beat you down:
Walking up the aisles of Winterland as the Sex Pistols played, I felt a confidence and a lust that were altogether new. Thirty-two years had not taught me what I learned that night; when you are pushed, push back, when a shove negates your existence, negate the shove. I felt distant from nothing, superior to nothing. I also felt a crazy malevolence, a wish to smash people to the ground, and my eyes went to the ground where I saw small children (what sort of parents would bring little kids to a place like this; I wondered thinking of my own at home) and thought of smashing them. (Lipstick Traces)
Marcus knows from punk lust, but he can’t touch the feeling of the black people who danced together to blues records. Alan Lomax serves as a sweeter guide to their responses in The Land Where Blues Began:
Robert Johnson…began to sing out of the [jukebox] and the couples who had been dancing Harlem became Mississippians again, slow-dragging round the floor…the pull of the rough boards on flat-footed shoe soles making their bodies vibrate against one another.
Marcus has claimed he experienced a “shock of recognition” the first time he heard Robert Johnson. His writing about Johnson and other bluesmen shows that shock stopped at his neck. For some years now Marcus has seemed intent on severing these musicians from the body (and souls) of their people. The blues, Marcus has written (in The Dustbin of History) “was not a protest against racism, sharecropping, even lynching—it was, like The Sound and the Fury, a protest against life.” That might sound profound, but it’s just fustian. Though plaints of bluesmen weren’t targeted responses to discrete elements of the Jim Crow system, their sense of alienation was overdetermined by the realities of racism. Yet Marcus (incredibly) dismisses the “particular racial, economic, or social conditions of the Deep South.” Blues singers, he writes, discovered “men and woman are not at home in the world…the same fact Melville had discovered in Moby Dick, that Faulkner was raging against in The Sound and The Fury, that the writers of Greek tragedies had chewed over more than two thousand years before that.” Marcus uses his literary canon to blow off what’s un-natural about blues people’s feelings of homelessness. Two Thousand Year Old Humanisn becomes a cover for four hundred years of inhumanity.
Marcus’s “literate” kitsch comes with Americana. “Bluesmen were born,” he intones, “with the freedom of movement that from the time of Daniel Boone was enshrined as the first principle of American life.” But the white man’s freedom was a freedman’s necessity. Forget Marcus’s Ace Boone Coon. Listen again to Lomax:
Walking the roads, riding the blinds, hoboing from one construction camp to another…faced with the police, the walking boss, the chain gang guard, the nigger-drivers…Always looking for a home, finding it, quarreling, being kicked out, moving on again — you gotta keep moving, you gotta keep moving — [This] was the unique and constant experience of very many working-class black males, and it was among them, among their artists, that the blues arose.
Marcus refers in Republic to the “invaluable” Blues In The Mississippi Night — a conversation between bluesmen Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson recorded by Lomax in 1947. Their trialogue confirms these artists knew they were singing/playing their way out of a race-based structure of feeling. It was the first record of black working class men talking straight about the strange horrors of the Southern system. Marcus quotes Blues In The Night in the course of evoking Bob Dylan’s abbreviated version of “a song about a black man who’s murdered for refusing to back down,” yet he still won’t concede black musicians in the Deep South called out and responded to their own oppression. His downsizing approach not only narrows the meanings of blues (and sorrow songs and gospel music), it allows for inflated claims about Bob Dylan’s performances — “[‘The Ballad of The Thin Man’] is a blues, no more, on some nights the biggest blues anyone has ever heard.”
III
Marcus has grown deaf to cultural and political resonances of African American music, but he equates the resistance Dylan encountered during his rock and roll move in the 60s with that confronted by black children in Little Rock who faced down mobs to integrate schools. Marcus isn’t just Hiroshima Mon Amouring after Significance here. There’s a kind of stealth righteousness in his asides on Civil Rights. He means to endow his Republic with the Movement’s moral caché.
Marcus isn’t much interested in the process by which heroically patient organizers convinced beat-down Southern blacks to stand up and fight for their freedom (a fight they partially won though the radical edge of their struggle was blunted by class divisions within their own community). It’s the interracial dimension of the Movement — not the intra-racial one — that he chooses to recall. What matters to him is that a beloved community of whites and blacks “dropped race” for utopian moments.
Marcus’s attempt to connect the experience of SNCC’s endangered activists with the music made by Bob Dylan and The Band — six white guys killing time in Woodstock — seems willful even if you accept his model of the Movement. He’s probably reaching when he interprets the “news” in Dylan’s “Clothesline Saga” — “The Vice President’s gone mad” — as a sly reference to Hubert Humphrey’s role in denying the Mississippi Freedom Democrat Party seats at the 1964 Democratic convention (which took place before Humphrey was Vice President and years before the song was conceived). Dylan might have flashed on Humphrey’s transformation from crusading liberal to party hack for a second as he was making up “Saga.” They were both from Minnesota after all. But Dylan’s stir-crazy “I” looks back in boredom not indignation. “Saga” is a put-on — a stoned hoot about the grey dailiness of life in America’s Heartland (and Beltway). Marcus hears a message to a “secret” liberal public about a world turned upside down in the organ music that backs up the song’s final, vaguely “sinister” plot-twist; I hear Dylan and the Band playing around with pot-induced paranoia. The Midwest absurdism of “Clothesline Saga” is miles (and reefers) away from the sensibility of the Movement.
Marcus mentions a skeptic referred to the Basement Tapes as “deserters’ songs.” That comment is probably truer to their essence than Invisible Republic‘s Our Country And Our Culturalism. Marcus doesn’t want to face up fully to Dylan and The Band’s secession from the 60’s. (Dylan seems to have been more honest in tracks like “Going to Acapulco” or “I’m Not There” — I wish I was there to help her — but I’m not there, I’m gone”). Marcus wants to preserve the Tapes as a liberated zone — “So much of the basement tapes are the purest free speech: simple free speech, ordinary free speech, nonsensical free speech, not heroic free speech.”
That last not is not nothing. It’s why the town — Union/Kill Devil Hills — Marcus finds in the Tapes remain distant from the 60’s’ moral highlands (except, perhaps, when Dylan confesses he’s “not there”). Marcus’s celebration of the Tapes is likely to deflect attention from pop music that soundtracked the 60’s’ highest sense of possibility. Innocent readers interested in the era’s cultural politics would be better off reading Peter Guralnick’s history of southern soul music (Sweet Soul Music) or Charles O’Brien’s 80’s appreciations of Sam Cooke, The Rolling Stones and (especially) Aretha Franklin:
We get to the bridge, and Aretha sings the word “freedom!” Now, up to this point, the lyric has said essentially, Don’t play with my love, think about what you’re doing. This cry for freedom doesn’t seem to follow. But it is not the song, “Think,” subject of copyright, somebody’s private property, that engenders this cry. Rather, the song’s (and Aretha’s) historical setting does that. Where she might, less exceptionally, have filled that bridge with an oo-whee!, Aretha felt it just as natural to sing of freedom, as if oo-whee! and freedom were interchangeable words, hitting on the truth that they probably are.” (“At Ease in Azania,” Critical Texts, 1989. Posted here.)
Compare Aretha’s “Think” with some of the nonsense on the Basement Tapes: “All round for reason has told us, but—brutus force, the dealer blowing her tongue. So close to cactus, a stymied rejoinder, found us all within us, we knew, tout les environs, et. al., taking each other for a harmless’ — [the Band’s Garth] Hudson sniggers as a mandolin goes berserk.”
The Basement Tapes often rise above this sort of nada, yadda, yadda but Marcus’s breathless wonder at even the blanker bits indicates he’s not someone you’d trust to determine — in O’Brien’s phrase — how “pop music exists in its time justly.”
Marcus offers his own rationale for pop historicizing in Republic: “the artist’s work, commonplace and trivial on its face, may be charged with a power no intention could create and no particular geography or lifespan can enclose: the burning sensation produced when an individual attempts to resolve the circumstance of his or her life.” i.e. Freedom!? Yet he has to go back to the 1920’s — to Frank Hutchison and the West Virginia Mine Wars — for his (burnt-out) burning sensation because there doesn’t seem to be a take on the Basement Tapes that conveys the time of its time. He suggests the Tapes matter precisely because they “escaped the monolithic pop immediacy of their year—a year of such gravity, it could feel at the time, that it was like a vacuum, sucking everything into itself, suffering nothing to exist outside its own, temporal frame of reference.” This reads like a half-repressed response to O’Brien’s evocations of pop politics in the 60’s. (Marcus was struck by O’Brien’s essay when it came out; he praised it in the Village Voice and wrote even more highly of it in a letter to the editor of the journal in which it appeared.)
Marcus’s acknowledgements hint at a certain intellectual defensiveness. He not only anoints writers who imitate him, but shamelessly dedicates Republic to Pauline Kael. Then, after thanking her for being the first to make it through the manuscript, he nods to T.J. Clark (probably the most respected cultural historian of our time).
Marcus’ big name-dropping is only one expression of his hegemania. As a punk-lover, Marcus once made radical noises. But he’s at his elegiac ease in America now. In a Village Voice interview, Marcus said he felt removed from this country during the Reagan era but came home in his head when Clinton was elected.
The President appears to offer a benediction in Invisible Republic. Marcus has Clinton grinning appreciatively as Dylan “unspokenly dedicates” a song to the President at his 1992 Inaugural. Dylan, thankfully, has distanced himself from Marcus’s salute to Clinton. In the midst of Time Out of Mind‘s “Highlands,” he muses,”I think what I need is a full-length leather coat” — then turns from this less than lofty object of desire to a subject that sounds beneath his contempt — “Somebody just asked if I’m registered to vote.”
That’s one response to invisible republicanism, but Marcus’s Inaugural overreach brings back an even better one. Marcus doesn’t claim Clinton’s presence had much of an influence on Dylan’s set at the Inaugural, but his bland anecdote reminds me of a moment when another American politician played a key role in one of the supreme musical performances of the past decade. The politician was Jesse Jackson who served as a witness when singer Tramaine Hawkins got her “Change” at the summit of an amazing gospel event in San Francisco. The show is preserved on Tramaine Hawkins Live (1990) — Jackson contributed liner notes — and there’s a concert video that adds a dimension to Tramaine’s transfiguration.
Tramaine appears exhausted right before her “Change.” Slim to begin with, she’s like a wild reed who’s been whipped around in the storm created by her 60-member gospel chorus. Recovering for a moment from a twenty-minute medley, she wipes her forehead, then just lets the sweat flow. She gazes directly at Jesse Jackson (who’s standing with a man-friend in the audience) and starts to testify. Her eyes politicize her words—“You changed me completely”—and her singing proves their truth. She just went up yonder in her medley, now she uses her voice to pull God out of the sky. She takes Him all up in her and then sounds about to give birth. She doesn’t forsake her highest notes, but strains to find her Motherlode down below. Her hollers (Holloways?) serve to confirm the black and beautiful power of her born-again voice. She’s no longer at His mercy, but Jesse is at Hers. He’s paradized—proud, embarrassed, and frozen in place as the focal point of her performance. As the grand chorus shouts—CHANGE!—linking revelation with black nationism, Tramaine connects with the whole audience –“Everybody here tonight say CHANGE! Do you believe in CHANGE!” Then she leads them on to her final you-can-make-it-if-you-tri-Umph- “What a WON a WON a WONDERFUL change has come over me.”
I doubt Tramaine looks to Jesse for her Change now. It’s been years since he seemed the embodiment of African American aspiration. But, if you want the answer to invisible republicanism (and Dylan’s cynicism), keep listening for voices of the black nation.
…
Notes
1 I might’ve been holding out for Marcus’s Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs as well. Marcus wrestles with Dylan’s role in the civil rights movement in this work, which he published in 2022.
2 Marcus came hard at me in a Slate diary for inviting him (in the course of an email exchange after he saw my review) to respond to my piece or write something else for First of the Month. I’m lucky I missed his public umbrage in the moment as it might have kept me from importuning him again, which I did a little on down the line. Marcus ended up becoming a contributor to First and his post-9/11 meditation on terror and intellectuals helped define the magazine’s collective response to that attack on America. There’s a permanent link to Marcus’s piece on this site’s homepage here.
3 Pace Martha Wash. The performance video of Tramaine Hawkins Live is no longer on YouTube, but the sound of “Changed” should still come through. Or try “Fall Down.”
The high wind is blowing;
We are alive and can see each other,
You and I.