This reader thought he knew this era-shattering Dylan song and its contexts; but this book kept enriching it start to finish, and showed as well how it nearly did not happen, could have easily been abandoned in the drafts of the studio or the maze of putting Bloomfield and Kooper in on it. I was a CT kid in the shadows of Forest Hill concert, and in truth I was applauding that electric guitar like it was some Blakean breakthrough into the heavens of poetry, same thing when I heard the Byrds sing Turn Turn Turn or Tambourine Man. Re Dylan, Marcus keeps raising spectral contexts out of the airwaves, shows how the song breaks into the `great time' and afterlife of music created by Sam Cooke and Robert Johnson. This books shows how Dylan was using the top 40 as an access into that depth of folk-pop poetry coming out of the future, making a future America happen in the present, endure as a legacy and obligation. I can see how a poet such as Dylan would be grateful for such a reading, breaking his poetry into the invisible republic of the spirit.

Marcus, especially in this book, reminds me of James Agee. Not Agee the reactionary film critic, but the ecstatic Agee of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - the way he could look deeply and lovingly at a sharecropper's cabin and find every splinter and stain luminous and profoundly human and dignified. Check out Agee's riff about listening to Beethoven with your head crammed into the speaker and cranking it up until it hurts. When Marcus digs into his obsessions it can be like that, revealing details of perception and levels of feeling that you can't imagine having missed.

On the downside, Marcus also shares Agee's tendency to lapse into rambling and grandiosity, and the words can pile up and stumble over themselves, leaving you wondering what the hell he's talking about. He has so many ideas and passions, and wants to draw connections between his subject and so many other things. When it works it can be fascinating, but sometimes it's a bit of a stretch, and you wish he would at least not try to cram them all into one sentence/paragraph/page. In this book especially, I often found myself wishing for a stronger editorial hand to rein him in and clear up some of the log jams. It raises an interesting question about how far you can push journalism in the direction of literature and have it still be effective. After all, Agee's great tome began as a magazine article that got out of hand...

But I like to watch Marcus' mind at work, even when he goes off the deep end. He's one of my favorite writers to argue with; I may occasionally think he's full of it, but I admire the effort. When so much music writing is either lame fanboy drivel, shallow blurbage, or arid academic nonsense, it's a pleasure to read someone both passionate and scholarly who is prepared to dig so deeply, to stake a claim that this music (whatever it is - in this case Dylan's) really matters.

There are many interesting facts regarding the cultural and musical importance of this song and many good anectodes from the studio. However, the interesting parts could have made a decent magazine article (and have already) while the rest is quite rambling and bloated. Still, a decent enough book and if you don't know much about the song or its importance, not a waste of time.

I happen to believe that Bob Dylan is the most important American artistic voice of the last half century at least. I also happen to believe that Like a Rolling Stone is the best rock song ever. If one does not believe those two things, Greil Marcus' hyperbolic huffing of a book is not going to convince you. Only Dylan's work will do that. If, on the other hand, you do already agree, Marcus' hip pomposity is pointless. Is the man capable of writing a sentence without layered metaphors and with fewer than twenty-five words? By the evidence in Like a Rolling Stone, no. If you want to know what Dylan is and means, read his own Chronicles, not this.

This is about Bob Dylan, based on the title of his most famous song, or maybe about his music and others who also sang his songs. Or maybe it is about the culture and trends of that time, or about the uncertainty of American cultural identity. I don't know. I was left puzzled and a bit frustrated.

The author writes very impressionistically, and it is sometimes hard to tell what he is talking about. He includes some interesting details about particular songs and their performances, but this is not a chronological epic. The author jumps around and uses creative associations and metaphors.

Thus it is difficult to relate one song to another, one event to another, to get a picture of what was really happening in Dylan's life and music or in the culture around him, to which his music supposedly speaks. I kept feeling like something was about to happen, to be revealed, to unfold dynamically out of the somewhat surreal scatter of events, people, places and songs. But it never happened.

No culminating event occurred; no point was ever made. No summarizing reflection ever arrived to clarify the muddle and tie the pieces together.

Marcus seems to present some keen insights about Dylan (real name Robert Zimmerman) and the times, and many other music groups and songs, events and places, trends and impressions, but most of the time it is not clear just what the insight is.

Maybe that is the insight, as a commentary on the times and the spirit Dylan is thought to represent. Is this an ode to one song; a tribute to the writer-singer? A personal flight of skittish memory clips?

Somewhat frustrating reading on what would have been a good topic.