Music: 'If I told you what our music is really about, we'd probably all get arrested", Bob Dylan announced in 1965. And so, good as his word, he hasn't told: for 45 years now Dylan has been the ultimate fifth amendment artist, writes David Wheatley.
Folk music? "Folk music is a word I can't use. Folk music is a bunch of fat people." The searingly personal Blood on the Tracks? Inspired by Chekhov's short stories, according to the first volume of his Chronicles. And his single most famous song? "The word he used most often when talking about the song was 'vomit'", Howard Sounes reports in his Dylan biography, Down the Highway. The young Bruce Springsteen's experience offers more clues: he was listening to the radio when "on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind". The song was Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone, recorded on Bloomsday 1965 and the opening track on the blistering Highway 61 Revisited.
Forty years later, Greil Marcus has written a whole book about the song, but as his dedication ("To the radio") suggests, it's about much more than that too. It's a book about how music follows us through our lives like a soundtrack, an "unmapped country . . . hanging in the air as a territory of danger and flight, abandonment and discovery, truth and lie". It's also, once again for Marcus, a book about America, "the old, weird America" he did so much to record in his 1977 study of Dylan's The Basement Tapes: Invisible Republic.
On one level Like a Rolling Stone is simply a long, vinegary snarl of condescension and rage. Like many great Dylan songs (It Ain't Me Babe, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, What Was It You Wanted), he's telling someone, woundedly, woundingly, where to get off. But more than that, he's telling his audience, or a certain type of audience, where to get off too. Marcus's subtitle is Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, and the decision after Bringing It All Back Home to go full-tilt electric still represents the most decisive of all the many crossroads in Dylan's career. At the centre of this story is the Manchester gig in 1966, the so-called "Royal Albert Hall concert". After a crowd-pleasing acoustic first half, the electric guitar comes out and the catcalls begin. A cracking Ballad of a Thin Man elicits a cry of "Judas!" from the audience and Dylan answers "I don't believe you, you're a liar", before telling the band to "play fucking loud".
Marcus's method throughout is to mix memoir and anecdotes with more anoraky stuff about the studio sessions and just about anything else that comes to hand - sweeping Blind Lemon Jefferson's grave, the Newport Folk Festival, the heyday of the Top 40, even a brief excursus on the Pet Shop Boys. It's a jaunty ramble of a book, a bit like the 16-minute Badlands from Time Out of Mind he discusses at one point; and like that song it's hard to know how seriously the author wants us to take it all. There's a fine line between stupid and clever, as David St Hubbins remarked in This is Spinal Tap, and when it comes to Dylanology there's a fine line between what Marcus is up to and AJ Weberman looking for clues in Dylan's garbage.
IN TIM ROBBINS'S 1992 film, Bob Roberts, an American politician hijacks Dylan for his own right-wing agenda with a hilarious rewrite of Subterranean Homesick Blues, and reading this book I wondered if the permatanned eurosceptic, Robert Kilroy-Silk, could have had Like a Rolling Stone in mind back in the days when he drawled "How does it feeeel?" at the unfortunates on his morning chat-show. Who knows, with those lines about having "no direction home" he might want to adopt it now as an anti-asylum seekers anthem. Maybe it's a perverse proof of Dylan's greatness that a simple phrase such as "how does it feel?" sounds like it belongs to him now, no matter who's saying it. Or maybe the problem with Dylan, like the Bible and Shakespeare, is that his songs are full of quotations - quotations from himself.
But Dylan's greatest song? Depending on the day of the week I might nominate A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, Gates of Eden, I Shall Be Released, Million Miles or the Blood on the Tracks outtake, Up to Me, instead. Reading this all-over-the-place but likable and reverent book is a good reminder of how spoilt for choice we are. Or alternatively you could just get your old records out and play them all over again. "Once upon a time you dressed so fine . . ."
David Wheatley is a poet and critic
Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. By Greil Marcus, Faber and Faber, 283pp. £12.99