Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the crossroads.

LIKE A ROLLING STONE: BOB DYLAN AT THE CROSSROADS

BY GREIL MARCUS 

NEW YORK: PUBLIC AFFAIRS. 283 PAGES. $25.

The easiest way to write the biography of a song is to yank it out of the ground and brush the dust off its roots in order to determine what it sounds like, what it says, and how it compares with other songs (or books or poems or plays or movies) that came before it. But doing so can turn a vibrant composition into a dead, dangling thing that no longer holds much meaning for anyone, a limp specimen with no place to grow, down or up. Greil Marcus's new study of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" is another kind of song biography entirely: not an autopsy, but a reading in which the roots of the song are left alive and thriving. Marcus understands that the pedigree of Dylan's song is so extended and mixed it can never be fully traced anyway, and recognizes that in the case of a piece of music like this one--so simultaneously inclusive and expansive that it's an event in itself, one that keeps unfolding forty years after it first hit--that kind of knowing is impossible.

"Like a Rolling Stone" grew from any number of direct and indirect influences: The specters of other pieces of music--from Son House's "My Black Mama" to Hank Williams's "Lost Highway" to Muddy Waters's "Rolling Stone"--breathe in unison with it. And when Marcus describes the recording of the song, in June 1965, with all its false starts and dead ends, we see how perilously close it came to never existing at all: "The singer is trying to find his way into his song, plinking notes on the piano. There's a feeling of uplift, dashed as soon as he begins to sing. His voice sounds as if it's just come back from the dry cleaners three sizes too small." But Marcus is even more interested in the way Dylan's song shaped contemporary culture and pointed the way toward the future. It sprang into being in "that noisy, murderous, idyllic summer of 1965"--the summer of the Watts riots, but also the summer smack-dab in the middle of what is now the most sentimentalized decade of the century--and continued, through the years ahead, to re-form itself in infinite ways, both in Dylan's subsequent readings of it and in various cover versions, grand and ridiculous alike.

To Marcus, "Like a Rolling Stone" is a song that never really ends. When the public first heard it, on the radio in that summer of '65, it took "six minutes to break the limits of what could go on the radio, of what kind of story the radio could tell." That story is still being told; it's a narrative with no direction home and thus plenty of room to grow.