In 1967, Bob Dylan and the Band retreated to the basement of a house in upstate New York and recorded a series of songs for their own amusement. Bootleg copies of these private recordings, dubbed ''the basement tapes,'' became widely available. However, it was only after Rolling Stone magazine demanded their official release that Columbia Records released the best-selling The Basement Tapes in 1975, transforming Dylan's private recording whimsy into a matter of public record.

The Basement Tapes is one of the more curious and bizarre of Dylan's 41 albums, a series of songs that range from the silly to the sublime. In Invisible Republic, music journalist and author Greil 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.

To put this in context, remember that between 1962 and 1964 Dylan penned ''Blowing in the Wind,'' ''Masters of War'' and ''The Times They Are A-Changin'.'' Such songs caused him to be revered among folk music fans as a new voice who knew and honored the folk tradition.

To folk revival purists, folk music was far more than melodies and words: The origination of this music among common people represented the cultural embodiment of a utopian vision of the world. By 1964 Dylan's powerful anthems had elevated his position within the folk community. ''In a signal way,'' Marcus asserts, ''he was the Folk.''

That changed with a few guitar chords at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan plugged in an electric guitar and aroused the hatred of the folkies in the audience. As Dylan roared through ''Maggie's Farm,'' folk stalwarts Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger had to be restrained from cutting the power cords with an ax.

So, when Dylan went electric in 1965, he was no longer ''the Folk'' to folk revival purists. He had ''turned away from ... an entire complex of beliefs and maxims that to so many defined what was good and bad.'' Going electric, Marcus states, ''signified no mere apostasy, but the destruction of hope'' to folk revival fans.

Dylan's next two studio albums, 1965's Highway 61 Revisited and '66's Blonde on Blonde, were both electric. And when Dylan retired after his motorcycle accident in 1966, it seemed that his folk days were through.

This was far from the case. What Marcus argues in Invisible Republic is that the basement tapes not only reveal that Dylan never left the folk revival (electric guitars notwithstanding) but rather re-created it in his own vision.

To understand Dylan's place in the folk revival, you need to go back to 1952, when an eccentric fellow named Harry Smith gathered a bunch of his favorite records together and released them as the Anthology of American Folk Music (which has just been reissued by Smithsonian Folkways), a recording considered the ''founding document of the American folk revival.''

The anthology made old recordings of gospel music, Appalachian ballads, Memphis blues and other traditional songs from the late 1920s widely available for the first time, exposing thousands to the Carter family, Frank Hutchinson, Bascom Lunsford, Furry Lewis and scores of others. Although the anthology was more a reflection of Smith's eccentric tastes than it was an academic or authoritative collection of true folk material, it was still an important and impressive achievement. ''The Anthology was our Bible,'' one folk revivalist intoned.

If the anthology was the text, then the picture it presented was of ''the old, weird America,'' a world filled with murders, angry lovers, tricksters, preachers, wars and jokes. Marcus calls this mythical America the ''mystical body of the Republic,'' a fictional place where the American experience existed for all to see. In the words and music of the anthology, America began to make sense, and this image was sacred to the folk community.

Enter Dylan in 1967, down in the basement with the tape deck running. The remarkable achievement of Invisible Republic is Marcus' convincing argument that the musical tales in The Basement Tapes construct a world similar to, but different from, that which appears in Smith's Anthology. These are worlds where morality, values and actions take on metaphorical and allegorical significance - the places where we can find the images and symbols to help understand the American experience.

This is a potent and important assertion, for it implies that Dylan's artistic strengths equal that of the traditional musicians of Smith's Anthology. Marcus asserts that, rather than destroying the world that the folk revival held so dear, Dylan retrieved and reinvented in The Basement Tapes ''certain bedrock strains of American cultural language.'' Essentially re-creating the past, Dylan had become, once again, ''the Folk.''

Invisible Republic successfully combines music history, literary references, political and social history and interpretive biography into a well-crafted work of keen insight and cultural analysis. Although erudite, the book never becomes academic, and it delivers its well-argued conclusions while remaining highly readable. Marcus convincingly shows that, in The Basement Tapes, Dylan possessed a visionary understanding of both tradition and modernity as well as the relationship of the individual and society to both (a trait he still shows on his brilliant new album, Time Out of Mind).

Invisible Republic is much more than a book about one album in Dylan's career. It is a major work of cultural history, at once compelling, engaging and entertaining.


Originally appeared on November 9, 1997, in the Greensboro, NC, News & Record