I'm in Sydney for some meetings.I'm working from an internet cafe in Glebe after checking out Glebe Books and Fish Records. The internet connection is very slow and the computer keeps freezing. I'm really only checking in.
I find inner Sydney very nomadic, mobile, optimistic and bohemian. It's ethos is about moving on (the highway?) cars and sex. I remembered the music of Chuck Berry and the anthems of the early Bruce Springsteen of Born to Run or Born in the USA.
AS I walked around I wondered about the winter light, bruised hopes, the broken dreams, urban loneliness and failed connections----the dark and the forboding pulse of life suggested by city woes---from the perspective of the hinterland and Adelaide.
At Glebe Books I bought Greil Marcus' The Old Weird America, which is a reprint of Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. The Fish Music store did not have a CD of Dylan and the Band's 1967 The Basement Tapes Why not? Too yesterday? Too American? Too nostalgic? I pretty much gave up listening to Dylan after Blood on the Tracks, and I saw most of his latter output as evidence of long-term musical decline.
The Marcus book is a study of Dylan's The Basement Tapes session with The Band. What is Marcus saying about this music? Marcus contends that The Basement Tapes is far more than an odd collection of tunes. Rather, he asserts that the tapes reconnect Dylan to his "lost" folk roots through their portrayal of a rich metaphorical landscape ripe with insights into American culture. I too had once listened to the roots of American folk music: gospel music, Appalachian ballads, Memphis blues (Skip James + Mississippi John Hurt) and other traditional songs from the late 1920s such as the Carter family, that provide bedrock currents of American cultural language.
Mark Sinker observed (in The Wire no 113 Music And The American Dream Revealed?):
"Marcus's contention is that there can be found in American folk a community as deep, as electric, as perverse, and as conflicted as all America, and that the songs Dylan recorded out of the public eye, in a basement in Woodstock, are where that community as a whole gets to speak."But the country mapped out in this book is not Woody Guthrie's land for made for you and me . . . It's what Marcus calls 'the old, weird America ..the strange yet familiar backdrop to America's common cultural history termed the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes"
Why no mention of poverty and crime, migration and exile, hopelessness and broken dreams? That was all around me I was walked around in inner Sydney. And it is all over the USA. Or is that the world of the lefty folkies loke Peter Singer singing country woes?