Greil Marcus’ Back Pages

“I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/And just for that one moment, I could be you”—Bob Dylan, “Positively 4th Street.” Greil Marcus waits until the closing chapter of Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs to drop the above lyric, one of hundreds that makes it into the book’s dense 239 pages, on the subject of an entirely different song, Dylan’s late-career opus “Murder Most Foul.” To Marcus, “Murder Most Foul” is really Dylan inhabiting John F. Kennedy in the seconds after he’s shot, a collision of past and future that breaks time completely, just long enough for Kennedy to call Wolfman Jack and request a few final songs.