Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads

by Greil Marcus (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.40

  'Marcus seems to understand Dylan and the song intuitively. His ideas burn with a fierce intelligence and the song takes on a new life in that crucible.' Hanif Kureishi Sardonic, bitter, threatening, compassionate, gleeful, and most of all loud, Like a Rolling Stone is much more than a song. Six minutes and six seconds in length, it was released by Dylan despite the received wisdom of the day as to what constituted a single. Published on the 40th anniversary of its release and recording, Greil Marcus' extraordinary book reconstructs the context in which the song first appeared, in terms of Dylan's own career (his controversial transformation from folk singer into rock n roll singer) and the world at large (Vietnam, the Watts Riots, the burgeoning counter-culture of the time). This is itself the stage for Marcus' recreation of the song on the page - its emergence from fragments, its words, its sound, its discovery of itself. An analysis and critique of an artist at the height of his creative powers, it affords a unique insight into the mistakes, inspirations and bloody mindedness that come together only in the very highest cultural moments. 'An ability to discern an art movement, or an entire country, lurking inside a song.' The New Yorker