INVISIBLE REPUBLIC: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.<i> By Greil Marcus</i> .<i> Henry Holt: 286 pp., $22.50</i> : BOB DYLAN: The Recording Sessions 1960-1994.<i> By Clinton Heylin</i> .<i> St. Martin’s: 256 pp., $14.95 paperback</i>

Rock fans often play the game of selecting a “desert island disc,” the album they’d carry into oblivion. Mine, and perhaps Greil Marcus’ (in 1979, he edited a book of essays on the subject, “Stranded,” without picking a disc himself) would be “The Basement Tapes,” recordings that Bob Dylan made in 1967 with Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and, eventually, Levon Helm, who afterward declared themselves the Band. For these songs, finally released in 1975, and then only in part, are a soundtrack for oblivion, a leap into shadows. Not to mention cheesy fun.

Titles like “Too Much of Nothing,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)” deliberately spin their wheels; they’re put-ons, doodles built out of old folk music, new rock attitude and an early whiff of the tribalism that would eventually unravel the counterculture. Having just finished touting his new electric wares (the ‘65-’66 revolutions “Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61” and “Blonde on Blonde”) before apoplectic audiences, who revered “Blowin’ In the Wind”--baiting the media all the way--Dylan used “The Basement Tapes” to jump ship. Someone else could speak for everyone; he was going to raise his own consciousness, conjure his own community. It was a respite that essentially lasted forever.

Yet the magic of “The Basement Tapes” is that the universe Dylan and the Band discover playing only to impress each other feels as large as the one they’ve abandoned. The range of Dylan’s singing is extraordinary: Old Testament prophet one second, deadpan provocateur the next, a giggling silly-billy with the timing and gravity of a bluesman. The members of the Band match his moods: They rock and they roll, with Hudson’s organ sweeping in like the credits to finish everything off. Lewd and worldly wise, drunk but respectful, a testament both to friendship and to exile, these are mysteries you can never fathom, a spirit you can’t exhaust.

And that makes them perfect subjects for Marcus, a rock critic whose gift has always been for exploring that portion within the ephemera of pop culture that’s irreducible. “The Basement Tapes” he wants to think about aren’t the ones Columbia released two decades ago (with Marcus’ liner notes) but a set of five bootlegs, marketed as “The Genuine Basement Tapes,” that’s both larger than the original--including outtakes, a huge number of covers, alternate versions--and smaller: It leaves out all tunes (one-third of the official release) that Dylan didn’t sing lead on. The author of “Mystery Train,” with its classic chapter on the Band, subtitled his new book “Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes” for a reason.

Yet even then, Marcus is pursuing a more specific tale: the link between the songs Dylan was driven to sing during the basement sessions and a six-record Folkways release titled “Anthology of American Folk Music” compiled in 1952 by an occultist, bohemian, experimental filmmaker and collector of 78s named Harry Smith. The selections, drawn from the earliest commercial recordings of regional music, were chosen, Smith would later acknowledge, “because they were odd”: Appalachian murder ballads and badman blues sung by black and white performers (Smith refused to distinguish) in voices that ranged from gleeful cacophony to a fatalist calm. To the young Dylan, who recorded tunes from the anthology as a college kid in Minnesota, then with the Band, then most recently in two albums of folk material released in 1992 and 1993, Smith’s portfolio proved that traditional music could be as surreal and revelatory as rock itself.

For an in-depth account of the “Anthology,” read the chapter in “When We Were Good” (Harvard University Press), Robert Cantwell’s history of the folk revival, or wait for August, when Smith’s handiwork will receive a much-deserved reissue. For minutiae on the basement tapes, there’s Clinton Heylin’s “Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions 1960-1994”, now out in paperback.

But Marcus writes a different kind of history. He’s a critic, a democrat with severe standards, who in previous essays, whether about Elvis Presley or about the Sex Pistols, has always been obsessed with the occasional legacy of popular art--the way that under certain circumstances (“The Basement Tapes” or a Harry Smith favorite like singer Frank Hutchison, whose eerie reserve came from watching unionizers lose West Virginia’s mine wars), the history that passes through a song is like none that could otherwise have been written. As Marcus puts it, in his typically barbed, forbidding prose:

“Thus the artist’s work, commonplace and trivial on its face, may be charged with a power no intention could create and no particular geography or life-span can enclose: the burning sensation produced when an individual attempts to resolve the circumstance of his or her own life. Fashioning the sort of aesthetic artifact that dissolves into eccentricity or ethnography as soon as written history is pressed upon it, the artists may succeed in passing on the barest hint of a forgotten story and, blind to its source, the full weight of the impulse to tell it. That is how old stories turn into new stories; that is how stories get told.”

Marcus links a few stories in this book. He describes an American mask that hides both humor and rage, a mask worn by Yankee peddlers and Melville’s confidence man, or a black “Anthology” singer dispassionately recounting the sinking of the whites-only Titanic, or by Dylan on a basement absurdity like “Lo and Behold,” where he enters town on a Ferris wheel, exultation turning to shame with only the slightest hitch of intonation. He fantasizes Smithville, an “Anthology” town, the “old, weird America” filled with apparitions of alienation like Clarence Ashley’s “Coo Coo Bird,” who gets to holler only on the Fourth of July. This he contrasts with Kill Devil Hills, the rough and tumble town of “The Basement Tapes.” Kill Devil Hills is a looser place than Smithville, but there’s a secret behind its binges: the imminent demise of all that Republican Smithville knew as America.

But the subtlest story Marcus tells has to do with how the folk revival, founded like its vaster cousin, the civil rights movement, on notions of a better, purer nation, leveled art into a pageant of righteousness and authenticity, treating Dylan’s rocker impulses as the Judas kiss, impelling him to reforge his music in a basement, drawing on memories of people like Clarence Ashley and Frank Hutchison. “Those who had left their stages as betrayers of immemorial traditions,” Marcus writes, “discovered deeper traditions. . . . The traditional people, still living, were laid to rest and raised up with new faces.”

No other rock critic can tear through musical or American history as Marcus can. In one bravura set piece, he delves into the basement song “Clothesline Saga,” revealing it to be a loaded exaggeration of Bobbi Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” itself already a comment on willful moral blindness. Courting charges of pompousness without a blush, he invokes Martin Luther King Jr. marching on Washington, Lincoln’s second inaugural address and the Puritan John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” speech. His research is scrupulous, including one of his trademark discographies, in this case running down the bootleg tracks one by one, every word acutely chosen--those really are “lumpy” drums in “Four Strong Winds.” But he’s unafraid to trust his imagination where it better fits the spirit he’s chasing, the spirit that produced weird, self-canceling outtakes like “Sign on the Cross” and “I’m Not There.”

Still, is this the spirit of “The Basement Tapes” I’d pack for that island exile? Admittedly, the five CD bootleg that “Invisible Republic” forced me to track down (good hunting) is a wilder, more demanding experience: Even more than Marcus, Dylan loved to ransack through history and overcharge his imagination, and these 100 tracks are the results, with none of the mess cleaned up. But a messy plenitude, not a sense of disappearance or loss, remains the dominant note of the sessions. Where’s the fun--the, yes, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll--what Robbie Robertson remembers as “reefer run amok,” the cover songs inspired by AM and country radio, the mood of grown teenagers fraternizing that Dylan would also return to, just before his ‘90s folk records, as a member of the Traveling Wilburys and in songs of his own like “Wiggle Wiggle”? You can’t leave out the cheesiness, and it wasn’t all masked. Why doesn’t Marcus mention that Tiny Tim, of all people, sat in for still other basement tape sessions (is that Dylan he’s dueting with on “I Got You Babe”?)

For that matter, Dylan wasn’t such a purist as to fully reject the sententiousness of the folk revival. That was part of his raw material, too, which was why the bootleg basement tapes include Pete Seeger and Ian and Sylvia covers and why the most famous outtake, “I Shall Be Released,” became an even bigger anthem than “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

As Marcus points out, Dylan and the Band were in their early to mid-20s when “The Basement Tapes” was recorded; yet in “Invisible Republic,” they seem much older. There’s truth to this: It’s the folk revival inheritance Dylan never fully relinquished, even as he turned his back, singing “I’m younger than that now.” And like all edgy exaggerations, this classicist side of the 1967 sessions seems more and more contemporary as time goes by and rock ages too.

But Dylan was larger than that; his imbibing of American vernacular included the deeper sources that “Invisible Republic” has identified, the shallow pop thrills folkies scorned and even some simple-minded Joan Baez earnestness. That’s why “The Basement Tapes,” a laying to rest and raising up of rock as much as folk, still seems like a world homey and mysterious enough to explore for a lifetime. With ‘60s culture almost as distant to people of my generation as Harry Smith’s “traditional people” were to Dylan, it’s liberating to notice that there was a moment when rock felt like an escape from authenticity, not just another version of it.