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It was a massive, intensely syncopated THUMP that at first overwhelmed everything else. Everyone knows Levon Helm is a great drummer, but this time he played like a star. He was working right at the heart of rock ’n’ roll—sometimes Richard Manuel joined him on a second set of drums, and while it was fun to watch, musically I couldn’t tell the difference. It was the authority of Levon’s beat that let Dylan, Robbie, and Garth Hudson sing and play with a freedom that with any less of a foundation would have seemed merely personal; with Levon there it was still personal, and also shared, sympathetic, dependent—on stage, and out in front of it.

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Reading Mr. Marcus at his best… is like watching a surfer glide shakily down the wall of an 80-foot wave, disappear under a curl for a deathly eternity, then soar out the other end. You practically feel like applauding. He makes you run to your iPod with an ungodly itch in your cranium. You want to hear what he hears. It’s as if he were daring you to get as much out of the music as he does.