Greil Marcus SOUNDS OFF

[April 13th, 2005] The publication of Greil Marcus' Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads is a landmark for the heady music critic. The book marks the 40th anniversary of "Like a Rolling Stone," a 6-minute, 6-second barnburner of a record that Dylan somehow got on the radio. The seminal song also launched Marcus' career as a music journalist and his first scribblings on Dylan, two events that coincided in a review of "Like a Rolling Stone" published in the fall of 1965 in his college paper, Berkeley's The Daily Californian.

The 225-page book is a thorough dissection of Dylan's masterpiece. "It was an event," Marcus writes, "not the event of its commercial release, or even the event of when it reached the public at large, but the event generated by the performance itself." WW spoke to Marcus about the major event, and those other minor ones.

WW: You say the recording of "Like a Rolling Stone" was so much due to chance. What would Dylan's legacy have been had that song never happened?

I think he would be much more of an art figure than a cultural presence, or even a historical actor. In other words, he would be someone who was appreciated, someone who was loved, reviled or dismissed. But it would be so much more on the basis of the quality of his art as opposed to the fact that this is someone you couldn't ignore, someone you had to have an opinion about, someone you had to take into account. I think it's this song that doesn't so much put him on the map as it makes him part of it.

Did the song divide listeners when it was released?

I don't know if I would say that is true. It was a pop song-a pop hit-and, I mean, I lived in California and the whole "Is Bob Dylan betraying folk music?" nonsense didn't make it all the way to California. My friends and I were baffled at the supposed controversy back East in the summer of 1965. I think the people who were still clinging to the notion that folk music was pure and the radio was corrupt just kind of dropped away, or their voices were no longer heard.

When you talk about the folk scene rejecting Dylan, isn't there something larger going on that's a part of being a music fan? Are those rejections meaningless because they represent such a small group of fans?

I'm sure there was an element of that in it, that "Our Bobby is now out there in the world." But I think whether this whole incident is trivial or not-and I think historically it's very trivial-it isn't trivial in the sense that the controversy, the rancor, the rage, the condemnation that Dylan faced every night went into his music and made it stronger. He was fighting a battle, and he was fighting it with his music. So I think to the degree that people were calling him every obscene and horrible name in the book, phoned in bomb threats to his concert halls, threatened to boycott him, stood up and walked out, threw things at the stage, that brought the combativeness and sense of high stakes-that's already there in "Like a Rolling Stone."

You write about the politics of the charts in 1965 extensively in the book. Do you follow the charts closely now? Do you feel like there is as much at stake as there was back then?

In 1965, not only was there the sense that the best music being made was showing up in the Top 40-that it wasn't a restrictive format-in fact it was a format that was really in flux. Radio stations didn't know what people wanted to hear-didn't know the most efficient way to sell their commercials-so they were very open to trying almost anything, and that meant a lot of left-field stuff really hit. But the other factor is that stations or markets in other parts of the country were not the same. A record could be No. 1 in Detroit and not chart at all in San Francisco or New York. There was a real sense that what was going on was on the radio, and that hasn't been true for a long, long time, because of much more demographically targeted radio formats and because what's a hit here is likely gonna be a hit there or vice versa. And now there are much more narrow playlists in every format.

So what is the barometer now?

It could be true that the barometer is really ringtones. That may be where the taste of the nation is being exercised most intensely and where the whole notion of young people identifying with this or that performer is most direct. Who's on your cell phone this week? God knows that's where a lot of the money is being made, in downloading ringtones.

What's the most significant thing to happen in popular music in the past year?

I think "Hey Ya" still being on the radio. The notion that a song can continue to find its way from station to station, format to format, person to person and not go away-I think that's just wonderful.