Greil Marcus

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Arizona

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's 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's 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.

Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan At the Crossroads

834eedd5-04fe-4c6f-a4c2-d9fced24c931-1

Bob Dylan at the Crossroads

Greil Marcus saw Bob Dylan for the first time in a New Jersey field in 1963. He didn't know the name of the scruffy singer who had a bit part in a Joan Baez concert, but he knew his performance was unique. So began a dedicated and enduring relationship between America's finest critic of popular music-- "simply peerless," in Nick Hornby's words, "not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian"-- and Bob Dylan. In Like A Rolling Stone Marcus locates Dylan's six-minute masterwork in its richest, fullest context, capturing the heady atmosphere of the recording studio in 1965 as musicians and technicians clustered around the mercurial genius from Minnesota, the young Bob Dylan at the height of his powers.

But Marcus shows how, far from being a song only of 1965, "Like a Rolling Stone" is rooted in faraway American places and times, drawing on timeless cultural impulses that make the song as challenging, disruptive, and restless today as it ever was, capable of reinvention by artists as disparate as the comedian Richard Belzer and the Italian hip-hop duo Articolo 31. "Like a Rolling Stone" never loses its essential quality, which is directly to challenge the listener: it remains a call to arms and a demand for a better world. Forty years later it is still revolutionary as will and idea, as an attack and an embrace. How Does it Feel? In this unique, burningly intense book, Marcus tells you, and much more besides.

Category - Non Fiction / Music

Format - Hardcover

Condition - Excellent

Listed - 8 months ago

Views - 8

Ships From - Arizona

Est. Publication Date - May 2005

Seller Description

Additional Information

Publisher Description

Like a Rolling Stone

By:

$5.00

Condition

Format

Meet the seller

Discover more