Greil Marcus April 13, 2005

ne month after Bob Dylan and his band played the Paramount?which included performances of 'Like a Rolling Stone'?noted critic and cultural historian Greil Marcus is here with a book on that forty-year-old song (and much more), Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (Public Affairs). "Marcus' engaging exegesis on the musical and cultural ramifications of Dylan's 1965 six-and-a-half minute hit is not just a study of a popular song and a historic era, but an examination of the heroic status of the America visionary artist . . . Dylan's 'music of transformations' induced a conflicted, confused America to look at its social disasters of racism, drug abuse, and Vietnam, Marcus says, while simultaneously permitting it to strip away its illusions and hope for a better future . . . Marcus displays a comprehensive knowledge of American popular and political history, tracing the song's roots back to Robert Johnson and Hank Williams and spotting its influence on such disparate artists as Frank Zappa, the Village People and various contestants on American Idol." - Publishers Weekly. Greil Marcus' other books include Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces, The Dustbin of History, The Weird, Old America, and, most recently, the co-edited (with Sean Wilentz) anthology, The Rose & The Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad.