1967: fight for civil rightsVietnam War, Sergeant Pepper of the Beatles, Velvet Underground, beginning of the Doors… At the same time, Bob Dylan recorded pieces that renewed the American cultural language.
No doubt this is the release on screens in 2024 of the biopic A complete strangerdirected by James Mangold and dedicated to the early years of the future Nobel Prize winner for literature (2016) in the musical underground of Greenwich Village, which prompted Belles Lettres to reissue two works originally published in 1977 for the first (Rolling Thunder Logbook), twenty years later for the second (Invisible Republic).
THE “ basement records »
Two books therefore, two unique texts and two distinct approaches to one and the same phenomenon. Two authors as well: one, Sam Shepard (1943-2017), prolific playwright, representative of the counterculture of the 1960s-1970s, also actor, writer and screenwriter – among others – of Zabriskie Point by Antonioni in 1970 or by Paris Texas by Wenders in 1984. The other, Greil Marcus, essayist and critic, also a journalist for the magazine Rolling Stoneauthor of numerous works such as the famous Lipstick Traces, Mystery Train or even Like a Rolling Stone. He is considered one of the greatest specialists in American popular culture.
If the title Shepard gave to the story of a musical road trip with Dylan is clear, the title of Marcus’ book appears somewhat enigmatic. So what is this “ Invisible Republic », this clandestine America ? An America hidden in a basement ? In fact, the original subtitle, Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapesprovides insight – in fact not so simple, except for Dylan fans. These Basement Tapes“ basement records », are the title of an album released in June 1975, but composed of much older pieces.
After the relative failure of Bob Dylan World Tour 1966due to the hostile reception from the public, accusing Dylan of having, since the Newport Festival in 1965, abandoned (apparently) folk for rock, and after the cancellation of a new tour following a motorcycle accident, Dylan recorded nearly 140 pieces from June to October 1967, in Woodstock, in the basement garage of a house called Big Pink, with musicians who would later become The Band.
Throughout the titles, Dylan and his instrumentalists will, during informal sessions, compose a unique anthology of the American musical universe. Blues, of course, country, calypso, even jazzy sounds or Hispanic melodies, as well as the cover of old standards as well as original compositions, produce a set of disparate elements. These underground tapes, Marcus points out, which were initially not intended for publication, were when they were released “ official » hailed as an event.
From pioneers to the sixties
For the author of The invisible Republicthese recordings should be considered as a sort of laboratory in which certain fundamental features of American cultural language were updated and reinvented in a few takes, in a few months.
1967 was the year of what was called the Summer of Lovethe year when they were released in record stores Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the Beatles, Are You Experienced by Jimi Hendrix, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground & Nico by Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, or even The Doorsfirst LP of the eponymous group. But 1967 was also an apocalyptic year when the Vietnam War experienced both worsening and stagnation. It was again the year of Summer of Ragewith race riots that left many dead in Newark and Detroit.
However – and this is the whole point of Marcus’s book – in this changing historical context and from these underground tapes, we find the framework of songs which connect a culture anchored in deep America to a counter-culture then under construction, of which he draws and designates forms of contiguities, discontinuities and continuities.
Marcus sifts through these pieces coming, in large part, from a history of American popular music, recorded in the 1920s-1930s, rediscovered at the dawn of the 1960s by the rigorous work of ethnomusicologists like Alan Lomax, who recorded artists then totally forgotten like Skip James, Son House, Dock Boggs – who subsequently became living legends for an audience that was certainly limited, but particularly demanding. These recordings form, according to Marcus, the soundtrack of a world which no longer existed, a world (that of the pioneers, then of the Great Depression) which had eroded, but of which these songs constituted the witness mounds.
At the border of several genres, they carry a whole section of history and stories, those of social demands, but also news stories, murders, racial violence. Through these folksongs and blues, it is a dive into the depths of an America where violence, utopia and puritanism are intertwined.
Following Dylan, Marcus becomes the archaeologist of an invisible America all the better hidden because it is, like Edgar Poe’s stolen letter, exposed to all eyes. His book reflects a whole section of the cultural history of the United States at the end of the 1960s, against a backdrop of the Vietnam War and struggles for civil rights. It shows that folk, blues or rock culture, embodied among others by Dylan, offers a vehicular transmission of the constitutive myths of America – a real historical contribution, allowing a deciphering of the cultural objects and social facts which built the United States.
With small, sensitive touches
If Marcus’s book abounds with examples and reveals stimulating erudition, Shepard’s account of the Rolling Thunder Review is in a completely different handwriting. Project screenplay for a film that will never see the light of day, Shepard’s testimony is both a diary and a travel diary. In small, sensitive touches, short chapters of one to four pages, he evokes more than he describes brief moments, as if captured during this six-week tour in the fall of 1975.
While rock concerts were played in stadiums of 20,000 seats or more, Dylan’s project was based on the idea of a traveling revue intended, like a circus or a small theater troupe, to play only in small towns, initially on the east coast. For almost two months, a whole collective of artists, and not the least (Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, but also Allen Ginsberg), accompanied Dylan on a tour that we could see as the last avatar of a generation beat & folk emblematic of the counterculture of the sixties, at a time when musical styles, like American society (end of the Vietnam War, rise of new musical styles like disco or punk), were experiencing profound changes.
As in Marcus’s book, it is indeed a clash between several Americas that this book bears witness to. This Rolling Thunder Review is a series of improbable encounters between several faces of America, several worlds, several eras, which interfere to end at Madison Square Garden, with Muhammad Ali, around the protest song by Dylan Hurricanein order to bend justice on the conviction of the boxer Rubin “ Hurricane » Carter, a boxer convicted in 1966 for a triple murder he did not commit.
A swirling palimpsest, a collage of stories, testimonies, songs, but also photographs and press cuttings, these two books retrace key moments in the cultural history of the United States – and, much more broadly, of a period of Western cultural history.