Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes.

Popular music is both the most banal and most mysterious thing imaginable, and it's almost impossible to write about. A good song carries in each phrase fragments of thought, feeling, and sensation, all going by in a flash. it refers to things everybody knows but it's rooted in the specific muck of whoever wrote/sings it. If it's live it includes the quick, erotic language of the body, a language at once too subtle and fundamental to be understood by the mind. So, along comes the intellectual writer and - oops! He's squeezing down on the poor thing so hard you think he'll kill it, except he can't even get his hands on it. Unless he's Greil Marcus.

Invisible Republic, Marcus' latest book, is a history, an analysis, and an adoration of Bob Dylan's basement tapes. He starts with Dylan's notorious performance at Newport (where Pete Seeger tried to cut his band's power cables) and the subsequent outrage at Dylan's apparent betrayal of folk music, positing that those so outraged had no idea what folk music really was - the crackpot mystic spirit of the "old, weird America," much more dark and complex than earnest ballads like "Which Side Are You On?" could countenance. As Marcus quotes Dylan: "It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There's nobody that's going to kill traditional music. All those songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. . . . traditional music is too unreal to die."

For Marcus, the basement tapes are a particulary eccentric continuation of this tradition. In his imagination the songs on the tapes become a town he calls Kill Devil Hills, a place populated by loonies, loungers, doomed girls, rapt sluts, preachers, criminals, con-men, and rounders. They are the relations and descendants of Smithville, i.e., the famous Anthology of American Folk Music created in 1952 by visionary nut Harry Smith, a place of ha'nts, crime and revelation, where "everyday is Judgement Day." Marcus tells their story as a great sub-historical pageant that looms and dissolves with the inky dynamism of a Max Fleischer cartoon. His cast of characters and walk-ons includes Jonathan Edwards, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Ranters of seventeenth-century England, Randy Newman, novelist Steve Erickson, and Lincoln's bust in The Manchurian Candidate. Costarring with Dylan are itinerant singers Frank Hutchison and Dock Boggs (the resident of Smithville most often found in Kill Devil Hills), who, according to Marcus, asks the musical question, "Given the chance to destroy . . . who wouldn't take it?"

Marcus doesn't grope and crush his subject in the way many critics do because his writing works much like music: It flies by in a comet tail, pieces of thought, feeling, sensation, and image all scrambled together. These components are often not fully developed in the way one would typically expect of an essay, but rather play off each other with the enigmatic grace of sound. When it works, it's brilliant and sensually delightful, broad, almost corny, at one turn, piercing and refined at the next. Here, he describes Dylan's performance at Newport:

Dylan puffs himself up with the declamatory intonations of Humphrey Bogart at the end of The Maltese Falcon, Mary Astor in his arms but spurning her pleas for deliverance: "I won't because all of me wants to." The rhythm is lost. Then "Phantom Engineer," an early version of what on Highway 61 Revisited would be called "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," and again the music is running. With Dylan singing a barbed Plain States drawl and his rhythm guitar pressing for speed, Bloomfield jumps the train and drives it: "I remember," said Sim Webb, Casey Jones's fireman when the Illinois Central 638 smashed into a freight tram near Vaughn, Mississippi, on April 30, 1900, "that as I jumped from the cab, Casey held down the whistle in a long, piercing scream." Bloomfield gets that sound.

When this style doesn't work though, it can be vague and rambling, pursuing a too-abstract goal with the bombastic tenacity of a star guitarist who, planting one foot forward, leans into a solo and just won't let up no matter what. There's a sense of cataclysm to it that seems to have more to do with Marcus' taste for cataclysm than anything else; every second is Judgement Day, and once that happens, well, you can pretty much sleep through it.

I read one such passage to a friend who is not educated, nor intellectual, but who is a huge Dylan fan. "It's like a necklace of turkey wishbones," she said. "You come across one, it's pretty cool. You put 'era on a string and wear 'em around your neck, it's a geek show."

It wasn't meant as a compliment, but it could be taken as such; you could applaud this book as a geek-show, the kind that makes you blink, scratch your head, and look at the world with different eyes for a moment. Or more to the point, hear it with different ears.

Mary Gaitskill is the author of, most recently, Because They Wanted To (Simon & Schuster), a collection of stories.