Easily ranks as one of the most brilliant and fresh studies of Dylan's work to date. Marcus has in recent years turned himself into a cultural historian-cum-mysterian, with a penchant for tracing the underground connections between such unlikely figures as the French Situationist Guy Debord and the British punk rocker Johnny Rotten. In Invisible Republic, he makes another connection, detecting in Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes of 1967 the recurring spirit of a virtually forgotten recording, Harry Smith's six-volume Anthology of American Folk Music, from 1952 (see entry below). Finally, through Smith, Marcus was able to link Dylan to a bygone, hermetic, fabulist land which he calls "the old weird America" - a mythic place, populated by cuckoo birds and spike drivers and John the Revelator, to which Dylan has, over the years, added his own ragmen and amphetamine-fogged ladies and Judas Priest. Beginning in 1965, as Marcus indicates, Dylan's music shattered the folk revival's received identities and understanding of the world - but in doing so advanced a musical tradition in which Dylan had long before taken his place, alongside Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Clarence Ashley, and so many others. The linking of the two recordings is, to be sure, a contrivance, which sometimes creaks under the weight of his own metaphoric and allusive excesses that make the book hard to follow at times. Somewhat more accessible is a two-hour radio interview Greil Marcus gave in 1997 on this subject in the course of which he also played some music never officially released. The interview is available online at
http://www.bobdylan.com/oldsongs/anthology.html.