Ask Greil: April 19, 2024

I always liked the picture on the back of the Mr. Tambourine Man LP of Dylan playing with the Byrds. Googling it, I understand that he joined them for an encore at Ciro's on Sunset Strip. Have you ever heard this? Do you know if a recording exists? I would kill to hear it. —J DEVON

I remember looking at the back of that first Byrds album in 1965 and thinking the exact same thing. And every other time I looked at that picture in the years to follow. It seems odd if no one recorded it: someone with Dylan, the Byrds, Columbia, given that both were on the label, or someone in the audience. A bootleg box set once appeared that seemed to include every possible 1965 Dylan audio moment capturable. But it wasn’t there. A Dylan representative says there’s no tape.

Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn, and Bob Dylan are the three of the six on that stage that night who are still around. They would know. But they’re not talking, so far. I’d write to McGuinn c/o his Folk Den and ask—who knows?

I had occasions to ask McGuinn—it was on my mind. One was at a concert celebrating the Smithsonian Folkways CD reissue of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music at Wolf Trap in Virginia in 1997, where McGuinn had performed a time-traveling version of “East Virginia Blues”—he made you believe he’d lived every word, and died humming the tune—and, with McGuinn, Jeff Tweedy sang Rabbit Brown’s “James Alley Blues” as if he’d written it (both collected on The Harry Smith Connection). Afterward they were talking and writers don’t interrupt musicians talking to each other. The second was at a memorial service in San Francisco in 2012 for Kathy Goldmark, who formed the Rock Bottom Remainders. He was sitting in the row in front of me. It didn’t seem like the right time.

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Hi Greil — A few years ago, I discovered Bonnie Guitar’s music via an anthology put out by Jasmine called Candy Apple Red: Singles As & Bs 1956-1962, and fell in love with her pure, still voice (I recall you mentioning similarly swooning over her parlor ballad version of “Dark Moon,” which is included). One particularly intriguing find was “Tell Her Bye,” which to me sounds like the kind of classy early ‘60s girl group song that wouldn’t be out of place being sung by any number of teenaged girl singers at the time (Connie Francis, the Shirelles, etc.), although I don’t think any of them could have brought the same mix of understated resolve and quiet desperation to it that Bonnie did (or played such a great guitar solo, natch). I was wondering what you make of this recording seemingly aimed at the teenage market by an artist a generation older (she was pushing 40 at the time)? Is it Mom trying on her daughter’s clothes, even if they don’t fit quite right? Or is it a woman who’s been around the block a few times now having the wisdom to know exactly how this is going to go down?

The Koko-Mojo label recently put out a series of anthology CDs titled Blues Meets Doo-Wop. Each one is pretty evenly split between bluesmen backed by vocal groups and vocal groups backed by bluesmen (or singing bluesy songs). I was glad to see Vol. 4 includes one of my two favorite examples of this particular fusion, “Eyesight To The Blind,” but sad that it missed the entertainingly bizarre “I Ain’t Fattening Frogs For Snakes” (both by The Larks, with Tarheel Slim backing them on guitar). I wonder what Sonny Boy Williamson, who several years later was by all accounts not impressed by all the young, upstart British kids desperately trying to play the blues, must have thought at the time of these irreverent takes on a couple of his signature songs?

From one doo-wop fanatic (albeit one born far too late to experience any of it firsthand) to another, I hope you enjoy them! —JAMES L.

I love the Larks, who I didn’t discover until coming across beat up doo-wop collections in used record stores in the late sixties. They had the same smooth tone as the Prisonaires in “Just Walkin’ in the Rain” but were tougher underneath—I mean in their sound, not as people. There’s something about their “Eyesight to the Blind” that makes it more convincing than any other version. Maybe it’s the modesty of their tone, which takes all the bragging out of the song. “Ain’t Fattening Frogs for Snakes” is fun until you realize it’s an allegory about racism, the trap black people fall into when they act like white people expect them to, thinking it’ll do them good, only to find it gets them pushed back even further. I like “When I Leave These Prison Walls.” They never lost their gospel lightness: the way they seem to float over clouds.

The Bonnie Guitar number doesn’t stand out for me—unlike you I hear grown-up ‘50s pop. Reading the label, I noticed that the song was cowritten by the woman who cowrote “Long Black Veil,” one of those once in a lifetime affairs, like “Ode to Billie Joe,” that condemns its creator to an exile from one’s own flash of genius. And I never use the word genius, but it fits here, as something that is no one’s province, that no one owns, as part of Freud’s idea of it: “Everyone knows genius is incomprehensible.”

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Dear Greil — Kirsty MacColl has written/recorded several excellent songs but her best will always be “They Don’t Know.” Like you I discovered it years after hearing Tracey Ullman’s superb version. Her other classic would have to be that great rocker “There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis.” Just thought you’d like to know. —CRAIG ZELLER

To me there’a something sad and contrived about the chip shop Elvis song, maybe my least favorite song-about-Elvis. When I was teaching in New York from 2006-2013, staying on Washington Place just off 6th Avenue, there was a guy who every morning took up residence in a doorway a few blocks up 6th. He dressed in black. He had a black pompadour, and very Presley-like facial features: it was unmistakable.   

He never did anything. He didn’t sing, hum, talk to anyone, not even himself. I have no idea what he thought he was doing—I speculated every day—though I’m sure he knew. Wanting to make sure no one ever forgot, like the woman who brought flowers to Valentino’s grave for years and years? Thinking that if he stood there long enough the spirit would come down and inhabit his body and he would be Elvis, like Eddie Murphy in that wonderful Saturday Night Live sketch where he’s hit by a car and wakes up moving and talking in a familiar way and then looks in the mirror? Or just doing what he wanted to do?

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I've been kind of a fan of Miley Cyrus's for a few years now, even though her appeal as this generation's "I Don't Care Girl" might be wearing thin. I don't even know if she's a good singer but she's got a great voice—deep and throaty as Tallulah Bankhead's. Her recent appearance at the Grammys just underscored all that—plus "Flowers" is quite the sneaky earworm.

But last night I saw a video that made her seem whole to me—a performance at the Whiskey a Go-Go where she covered The Cranberries's “Zombie.” Finally, a song to match that voice. Plus her look, the ruined glamour and smeared mascara, struck a chord. She's always delighted in teasing her scandalous ways, but that performance suggested the role that could define her: Sally Bowles. She could be tremendous. The cherry on top? Have her play the master of ceremonies too. We could have our cake and eat it too. Meanwhile Olivia Rodrigo, equal parts Miley and Taylor, is inching her way to the top of the heap. —CHARLIE LARGENT

For me, this is hard to watch, hard to listen to. Miley lives up to the song. She rails against annihilation, crime, and folly. But Dolores O’Riordan’s death—her suicide, or as the news stories insisted the accident of her drowning drunk in her hotel bathtub, as if that’s somehow better—seems to be what the song is about now, at least in Cyrus’s hands. So maybe a stronger role than Sally Bowles. Maybe Mata Hari.

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Hi, it’s my first time writing, I didn’t even know until recently that you had a site. So glad to know!

I want to thank you for so much great work over so many years. I first became aware of your work at 17, way back in 1976. Since then, you’ve turned me on to countless things that are so very important to me. Again, my thanks.

I have many things I’ve wanted to say/ask for years but I’ll just bring a few of them up right now.—MIKE M
Thanks for this long question-o-rama—I’ll take up your questions one by one.

First of all, I’m wondering why you don’t make some basic changes in the body of Mystery Train when you publish new versions. I do understand why you wouldn’t want to make changes to the bulk of the text, and I do also understand that you update the notes whenever you publish. However, there is one passage that especially stands out for me and that seems to me should be updated. This is where you quote Carl Perkins’ “Put Your Cat Clothes On.” It’s pretty clear that he sings “I slicked up my hair so I liked like a dilly,” rather than a “guinea.” Since “guinea” is an ethnic slur I’d think that you might want to change this now, or at least footnote it. Is there a reason why you choose not to?

Because I don’t hear what you hear, I hear what I hear. (I have no idea what a ‘dilly’ might be or what it might have been to Carl Perkins. Silly-dilly?)

‘Guinea’ was slang for both African or any black person, as well as Italian. ‘Cat clothes,’ in Memphis in the ‘50s would have meant black pimp clothes from Lansky’s, post-zoot-suit drapes. So I hear the classic white cry, at the same moment voiced by Kerouac and Mailer: I want to be black! At least for a couple of hours.

Next, and this has to do with the notes (which are a source of never-ending joy to me!), I think the following bits bear correcting. One is negligible, but the others seem to me to be pretty significant. I don’t think it’s anyone in the Band who introduces them as “future leaders of Canada”. Sounds like Ronnie Hawkins himself. Trivial, for sure, but still…

It could be, but it doesn’t sound like him to me. It feels like something Richard Manuel would say. There’s only one person left to ask, and Garth is not really communicating these days.

More importantly, I really don’t think it’s Scotty Moore who says “Damn, N-word” on the Sun sessions tape. Sounds more like Bill Black to me, and even in 1954 I just don’t think Scotty would have used the word. Impossible to be sure, I guess, but I really don’t think it’s Scotty and if it’s not it seems wrong to attribute it to him. I don’t know, I kind of liken it to Sam Phillips using it and I don’t think he would have (or did) either.

Sure, he used it when he quoted his friends’ reactions to him spending time with Black artists, but that’s a different context. Scotty was a gent, even in Memphis in 1954. Sam Phillips, too. Bill Black … not so sure.

Again, there’s no way to know—and there’s no way to know what might come out of anyone’s mouth in a moment of tension or release, and this was both. Whoever’s saying it—and someone is, and it’s not Sam Phillips—it’s meant as a big, big compliment, as if it was coming from, as above, Mailer or Kerouac. The dialogue that precedes the outburst makes that clear: Phillips praising the new sound, another voice saying excitedly, “I had it too!” Elvis saying “What?” and then the second voice answering, the “Damn, nigger!” coming across as, I just don’t believe it. Again, there’s no one left to ask, but I just don’t hear it from the stoic, both-feet-on-the-ground Bill Black.  

I also take issue with your characterization of Dick Cavett interviewing Sly (one of the great sequences in the history of R&R on TV, in my opinion). I love Sly (though I had higher hopes for his book—don’t know why!) and I don’t have any special feeling for Cavett but I don’t think it’s fair to say that Cavett makes cocaine jokes or insults Sly during that interview, or that it’s a set up. Although he’s unquestionably articulate (“There’s a pressure on all of us”!), Sly’s also coked to the gills; sniffling, wiping his nose, etc. I sincerely think Cavett is interested in what he has to say, despite no doubt being put out by the delays waiting for the band to take the stage; delays clearly caused by Sly doing blow in the bathroom. We can agree to disagree, of course, but I really think you’re misinterpreting it.

I think it’s plain that when in response to Sly describing in detail how he writes songs, Cavett says, Well, you don’t really mean you write them, as opposed to just jumbling them out in your head, and Sly says that’s exactly what he means, Cavett could not be more condescending and Sly could not be more lucid.

Just a few other comments …

Some years ago I read a piece online by you about your biological father. I can’t remember where I read it but I do remember being amazed at some of the vitriolic and insulting comments written in response. All I can say is that it must be hard to be famous, even on your level (no put-down meant). You probably have a pretty thick skin but some people really are assholes. I wonder if you find it hard to lay yourself open to every schmuck with a computer these days. (I’ve also gotta mention the question I saw on your site recently about Christopher Cross & Boz Scaggs. Obviously, whoever wrote that meant no harm but… wow! I’m thinking that those kinds of questions must make you wonder who your readers actually are. I did get a kick out of your response, I have to say.)

I don’t remember the comments you’re taking about, which is probably a good thing. I do have a thick skin regarding responses to my writing. I figure I had my turn, now it’s someone else’s. If someone doesn’t like what I write it’s stupid to argue, No, here’s why you should have liked it, not to mention pointless, and on top of that megalomaniacal. If I’m accused of making a factual error I didn’t I’ll say so.

Next, I think it’s amazing not just that you have relatives buried near Hank Williams but that your wife has relatives who knew Bob Dylan’s family in Minnesota. This is especially wild, considering how you ended up so connected to Dylan. Six degrees, I guess.

More like two degrees.

Before I forget, I also wanted to mention how striking it was for me to see the photo of Robert Johnson on the cover of the (fabulous!) Brother Robert book. Really made me see him in a new way—as a real person, y’know? Amazing! I remember the day I say the first photo booth pic and how I almost fell out of my chair. It so perfectly it matched the fantasy image of the Doomed Bluesman. It was almost too much to take in. Still is, actually, but the new one shows him as simply a human being, which is pretty great.

Finally, you of course would never remember but I met you in Chicago many years ago when you were on a book tour for Dead Elvis. I was there with my friend Bill Wyman. Later than night I heard you on the radio with the late “Chicago Eddie” Schwartz—you would remember him, he weighed about 400 lbs.! Anyway, during the course of his interview with you he put in a call to Bill Bixby (a “co-star” in Spinout) to talk about Elvis. In those pre-call waiting days Bixby picked up… and immediately tried to get off the phone. I remember wondering what you must have been thinking, having had no previous experience of the antics of “Chicago” Eddie. I guess you’ve had weirder things happen in your travels, though.

Anyway, that night I asked you to autograph a few of your books, which you were kind enough to do. They included Rock & Roll Will Stand, which I referred to as “this silly book,” only to have you reply well, that’s not a silly book. Of course it isn’t, and I still enjoy reading it. I was just referring to the fact that it represented your earliest work and trying to come across as cool. You were gracious enough to sign it for me anyway, and I’ve been waiting 30 some years to apologize to you. So… sorry!

Good or not, it wasn’t silly. It was a true expression of that time and place, and maybe more than that place, or even more than that time. Of all those who contributed, only four —Phil Marsh, Langdon Winner, Mike Daly, and myself—are still around.

And yes, I remember that night in Chicago with Bill Wyman very clearly. Especially him telling me “Chicago’s a very friendly town and I’m going to take you to a place to prove it.” As we approached the bar/restaurant he had in mind, two guys came out, stopped, looked at us: “You don’t look like you’ve been here before,” one said to me. As if I shouldn’t try it now? “You’re going to like it here,” he said. We did.

I also remember mentioning to you that I had seen Dylan recently (early 90s, I guess) and asking in so many words “uh, what’s the deal?” To which you responded “I think he’s nuts.” Enough on that subject for now but I’ve always gotten a chuckle out of that.

I don’t remember that either.  

One last thing… I agree that “Penny Lane” is “shimmering” and “Helter Skelter” is “bruising,” and I agree that in the later Beatles John’s songs defined struggle while Paul’s denied it (you really are such a fucking great writer—no smoke blown here—you’re able to nail certain things in such a pithy way. I’m always amazed, even when I disagree with what you write), but I have to disagree with the idea that all of the best or most important late Beatles work was John’s. Umm, “Hey Jude”? (to cite one example). I take your point but I think a few caveats are in order.

After the first time I heard “Hey Jude” I knew I never wanted to hear it again. And every time I have I’ve felt just as oppressed as I did then. I was a John person. I’m glad I’ve come around to see what a full and thoughtful and funny and serious and unpredictable person Paul is now and probably always was. But really, “God’s Song” and anything Paul did on his own before “Smile Away” and “Jet”? This is nirvana versus a country estate.

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Just sent a long one but have one other issue I’d like your thoughts on.

I’ve always been a big Stones fan and I’ve read your Sticky Fingers review from ‘71 but I wonder what your 2024 thoughts are regarding “Brown Sugar.” My 20-year-old son is outraged by the song. I’ve tried to argue to him that it can be heard as ironic, that the Stones always trafficked in outrageousness and transgression, etc. but he can’t hear it that way. Instead, he hears it as sexist and racist and I’m kind of coming around to that POV. Finally, he asked me if I’d play it for a Black friend and I had to admit that I wouldn’t.

I’m wondering what you think. (Kind of feel like I’m writing to dear Abby!)

Thanks —MIKE M

I went back and looked at that 1971 Creem piece on Sticky Fingers, and all the self-torturing over "Brown Sugar." In all the years since I've never not heard it without being consumed by the conflict between the racist jubilation—the death drive of the piece—and the thrill of their pulling off a perfect piece of rock 'n' roll. There's no apology, no ambivalence in Mick Jagger: "If I'd been there then, this is exactly who I'd be." But a song like that belongs to everyone and everyone makes of it what they will.  The artist Kara Walker performed it at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012, as Karaoke Walkrrrl, straight, with chaser—she tore it up and put it back together. This is what I wrote about it in Real Life Rock Top 10 when it was running in the Los Angeles Review of Books, on January 8, 2022, on the occasion of the Rolling Stones dropping the song from their shows:

For last fall’s US tour, celebrated band the Rolling Stones announced that they were temporarily dropping their 1971 hit “Brown Sugar” from their set, even though they had apparently played it even more times than “Satisfaction,” due to, you know, Black lives matter, at least for the time being. Guitarist Keith Richards, known for never cutting his cloth to fit your fashion, was not happy with the current environment of so-called cancel culture: “Didn’t they understand,” he said, without going into further detail about who they might be, “this was a song about the horrors of slavery?” — even if in Mick Jagger’s performance he sounded like nothing so much as a British sex tourist in South Carolina in 1845. “I’m hoping,” Richards said, “that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere down the track.”

But what the artist Kara Walker did with the song in 2012 at the Whitney is proof that — I have no idea of what, except that Kara Walker can wring every last drop of energy out of the song while writing its history for all the years it has been circling the earth. Appearing in a beige hoodie and a cap with SECURITY on the front, with pianist Jason Moran, bassist Tarus Mateen, guitarist Brandon Ross, and drummer Jamire Williams, she opened with a long, at first scabrous, increasingly loud and urgent poem. The first sentence started with “Taking it in every hole, five massive cocks,” and ended with “Papa’s got a brand new bag.” With the band vamping atonally behind her for more than five minutes, a break led into a lecture on art history:

“What is Dada without the severing of language from meaning? What is Early Modernism without the primeval Negro? What is Futurism without the machine gun? […] What is Degenerate Art without Jew, Black, mulatto? What is Expressionism without the denial of social inequities? Where is Pop without Motown? What about Conceptualism? Where was that without the riots in Detroit, Newark, Watts? […] Where would we be now, the young artists of today, without Willie Horton, James Byrd, Rodney King, saviors of your political moment? And when James Byrd Jr. was torn apart on a country road in Texas, Relational Aesthetics was born.”

In other words, Black people died for your art — which had everything to do with her “Brown Sugar.”

She took off her hoodie and cap, glamorous with bare shoulders and a black leather top and skirt, as images began to flash on the screen behind her: Mick Jagger dancing, silhouettes from her own 2007 slavery-sex-and-violence exhibitionMy Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, which was also a version of “Brown Sugar,” though now it was vice versa. Brandon Ross hit the harsh, openingBop-ba, ba da da da da. There was some noise from the crowd of perhaps a hundred people seated and standing. “I’m going to need audience participation this time!” Walker shouted gleefully. “You all know the words!” she said, as if that was anything but a simple thing to say: So why do you know all the words?

So she dove in, dancing and waving and pointing like Jagger, looking absolutely like herself, backing away from nothing, seizing every image in the song as if she’d savored it her whole life, when the song was ending changing it to “I ain’t no schoolmarm but I know what I like” and “Just like a white boy should” as “pink sugar,” “scraped scum,” and “brown cum” flashed on the screen. She fell to her knees and her face convulsed in desperation and pain as a photo of a lynching that because of the setting Walker made looked worse than any other lynching photo you might have ever seen appeared behind her.

But her performance had come true halfway through the song. “I can’t hear ya!” she shouted. “Like a black girl should!” The camera panned to the audience. Stonefaced. Not moving. Maybe a few people trying to compose a look of bemusement, as if to say, you can’t shock me. But not a whisper of physical or emotional response to what Walker was doing or who she was. Just sit there and it will be over. Please.

So yes, I think your son is right. There's no reason for him to ever listen to it again.  But I would suggest he listen to Kara Walker—it’s on her website—and maybe he'll go there if, really, he doesn't altogether want it out of his life.

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The recent FX TV series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans depicts the famous author Truman Capote openly as a gay man with a sex life. This may not sound significant in 2024, but previous characterizations of Capote, while they suggest or infer he was gay, do not want to examine his private life. Here director Gus Van Sant shows Capote was openly gay at a time (the 1970s) when it was socially unacceptable to do so and Hollywood has always either avoided Capote altogether or when making him the central character in a movie (Capote, 2005; Infamous, 2006) concentrates on his actions as a writer/investigator in the era of In Cold Blood, his famous non-fiction fiction book. The actual 1966 movie In Cold Blood has no Capote whatsoever; the reporter depicted as a square jawed liberal right out of central casting. And Philip Seymour Hoffman's 2005 portrayal of Capote was so sanitized it could have been plopped right in the 1966 film without a fuss. But in Feud, we see Capote with his long time companion, writer Jack Dunphy, in tender moments and arguments; we see Capote cheat on his boyfriend with other men who abuse him (John O'Shea) or simply pick up younger men he wants for sex. Actor Tom Hollander performs Capote as a real person for once, not merely imitating the famous look and voice, but giving him depth. The women in Feud, famous socialites of the era, like Babe Paley and Lee Radziwill, do not fare so well, and are shown as vindictive dragon ladies when Capote writes of their scandalous lives in an Esquire magazine article. The real Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy's sister, had an interesting friendship with Capote and he tried to help her in her brief late ‘60s acting career to no avail as the critics rightly deemed her an amateur dilettante. But I'd still love to see the TV play of the famous noir movie Laura where Radziwill plays the title character opposite the likes of Robert Stack and George Sanders. The 1944 movie is a classic and I can't help but think that Capote himself would have made a great Waldo Lydecker, Laura's mentor, who like Capote, was a gay writer of great wit and sophistication. Lastly, Rolling Stone magazine hired Capote to report on The Rolling Stones tour in 1972 with Radziwill in tow interviewing Mick Jagger. Were you on staff at the time and do you have any memories of Jann Wenner hiring Capote? The actual piece, I understand, was never published. —JAMES R STACHO

I watched the whole series, at first for Naomi Watts, who after Mulholland Dr. I'd see in anything and have never been disappointed, then for Diane Lane, who because of Streets of Fire and A Walk on the Moon I always look for, no matter how weak her parts can be. Watching Chloe Sevigny here, who I followed after Kids and Boys Don't Cry and Metropolitan and American Psycho, convinced me she's not really very good, or doesn't care anymore, and can still get cast in anything and everything, just like Adam Driver, who I watched last night in Ferarri and felt like all I was seeing was a makeup job going from one room to another. But the series was compelling on its own terms. Tom Holland pulled out all the stops in presenting Capote as a complete shit with a talent you couldn't turn away from and a heroic work ethic. It's interesting to wonder if his preening queen self wasn't as much an act, in the milieu that's drawn, as Philip Seymour Hoffman's much more circumscribed portrayal was—and had to be. Do you think a Hollander-like Capote would have gotten anywhere in Kansas looking for what turned into In Cold Blood? So here the guardrails come off, and for Gus Van Sant too. In the past he's always seemed to be holding back, being too careful with his material. Compare Capote and the Swans to Drugstore Cowboy, which despite a good cast only really comes to life when William Burroughs shows up. Here he had to decide if he wanted to stand back and deliver his usual balanced and reasonable picture or dive in and revel. He didn't go as far as everyone involved with Fellow Travellers, which was as open and complex and painful a series about sophisticated and complicated gay life as you could imagine on TV, he didn't seem to flinch at anything, either. He built the show well: for me at least, it was only near the end that there was a sense of Capote as a serious person, trying to do serious work, instead of a parasite, and the conflict was what made the end an ending, so that you really wish he'd finished Answered Prayers and you could read it. 

Jann Wenner hired Capote to cover the Rolling Stones for their 1972 tour, probably for an insane amount of money. In the interview with Andy Warhol that Rolling Stone published when Capote didn't write anything, he's just as condescending and distant and obviously wrong for the assignment as he turned out to be. In Robert Frank's movie about the tour, Cocksucker Blues, there's a terrible sequence when Capote, Andy, Lee Radzidwill and the rest of his hangers-on show up and you can feel Jagger's skin crawl, just like feel your own skin doing the same thing. It's like that true moment in Oliver Stones's The Doors when the band is at a Warhol party—Warhol played by Crispin Glover at his most inhuman—and Kyle MacLachan 's Ray Manzarek tries to drag Val Kilmer's Jim Morrison away: "These people are bloodsuckers."

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I was delighted reading what you wrote about “They Don’t Know” and was curious if you had any thoughts on another song Tracey Ullman covered, Irma Thomas’ “Break-A-away.” I know that your feelings about Thomas’ output weren’t terribly enthusiastic but I do think this is a special record. In 2008 while terribly depressed I saw a DJ in my hometown (Wilmington, NC) spin Thomas’ record, which I had never heard before, and two women in their early twenties absolutely exploded with delight and started a sudden exodus toward the previously deserted dance floor. The DJ, a Spaniard named Sergio Bastida who it later turned out was friendly with Alex Chilton for years, followed this with lots of stunning and well-turned classics from the famous (“ABC”) to the obscure (Little Phil and the Nightshadows’ “60 Second Swinger”), and it was an electrifying night. So I started going out every time he performed and even danced in public, wildly out of character. Those same two ladies were always there whenever Sergio was, and always requested “Break-A-Way.” I vividly remember how hard their feet would come down on the floor during the part of the song when the drums totally take over at the end of one of the choruses (“no-no-no-nonono”) and how much joy that moment engendered in the room regardless of how many people were around. Sergio moved back to Spain after a couple of months; we had become friends but the language barrier was severe enough that I didn’t say a lot of what I wanted to, and never remembered to figure out what this song was. So it lingered in my brain for over a decade until I finally was able to connect it to the Ullman cover one morning when the memory of the song and the dancing was just haunting me to a point I couldn’t shake it until I furiously googled the lyrical and (using the voice feature) musical fragments I remembered. You’d almost think that the punchline to the anecdote would be that the environment of those evenings was what had made the song, but no, when I pulled it up all the power of it was intact and I have listened to it a lot since then. But can that just be because of how I first encountered it? Who knows. —NATHAN PHILLIPS

I never knew Irma Thomas went in for the girl-group sound. It's as unexpected and fun as Etta James doing the same thing with "Two Sides to Every Story." And thanks for your great story.  This is what it's all about: songs as we live them, trip over them, can't believe we could have ever lived without them when the chances of hearing them at all are so slim.

And how many great "Breakaway" records in whatever spelling are there? The Beach Boys, Toni Basil dancing to her own version in Bruce Conner's 1966 movie—

and probably dozens I haven't heard. 

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In 1978 I was 14 years old and luckily heard a Bob Dylan song while playing my mom’s albums. It changed my life. (Even though in retrospect I had to go back 16 years worth to catch up ) Anyway, as a young impressionable kid wanting to devour all things about Bob I came upon writings in books and magazines by you and Dave Marsh. I recall wincing at times at harsh criticism from you on Dylan (my hero then) and remember a publication of best albums around 1984 and Dave Marsh writing something to the effect of Dylan is finished, get out of the way, Bruce is all that matters and Dylan is embarrassing. My question is, do critics such as yourself or DM ever say, I apologize, I was wrong about Dylan (especially in Marsh’s case) or is there a code that forbids you take back what you felt to be true? —JAMES O’DONNELL

I can't speak for Dave, but in 1977 I dismissed Fleetwood Mac, the band's first album with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, as outside of Christine McVie nothing special given the add-on of two "uninteresting Americans." When Rumours came out I apologized in so many words, not only because I'd been wrong, but because by then I'd found out that we'd gone to the same high school.

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I sense that you're not really a fan of Paul Simon, but I tried to deduce your full views on him before I decided to ask the following in a less conventional way:

How do you think Paul Simon comes up short next to Bob Dylan? —BEN MERLISS

Well, he’s shorter. And his songs are smaller. They take place in a circumscribed, altogether middle class milieu of values with extra money, like Woody Allen movies. They’re clever, relying on a narrow shared frame of reference. Visionary is the last word you’d ever apply to his music. He’s never imagined a world outside himself; he’s never imagined himself outside himself.

He was great as a Thanksgiving turkey on Saturday Night Live all those years ago. But his video with Chevy Chase for “You Can Call Me Al” was skin-crawling.

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Hi, Greil, here's Crowe with Gladwell discussing his unrealized or abandoned Elvis-movie-themed script and songs written with Nancy Wilson on their honeymoon in 1986, decades before "Bubba Ho-Tep." Any commentary you might provide thereon would be most welcome. (The "demos" therein are intended as "fictional demos," but "My People" in particular seems like something that should be brought to your attention) Many thanks —CRAIG PROCTOR

Cameron Crowe wrote a fine script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Since then he went from the wildly over praised but had its moments Almost Famous to the atrocity of Vanilla Sky, with the small-bore and perfect pitch Singles in between. The big hits are forgettable. So I am dubious about the supposed Elvis movie being “A lost masterpiece.” It’s always convenient to call something people can’t hear or see for themselves a masterpiece. And in any case I can’t find my way into the podcast. And I wouldn’t trust Malcolm Gladwell on Elvis, let alone on ‘movie.’

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Hey Greil - Did you see Springsteen a couple weeks back? I feel so fortunate to have been at his second San Francisco show. He may no longer be the Tasmanian Devil he once was, but he’s still a fireball. Of the dozens of times I’ve seen him, I haven’t felt as emotionally connected to what I saw and heard on Easter since seeing him at SF’s Winterland on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour.

Also, I’m glad to see folks like you and Bob Dylan speak well of Jann Wenner. The mountain of good he’s brought to the modern world is a mountain when compared to the Masters controversy. Who might you have included/excluded if you’d had a hand in editing Wenner’s book?

Last—honest—I’ve done my internet searches. I was trying to figure out your beef with Lucinda Williams. I’ve a friend who’s noted she just about always sounds like she has a tummy-ache when she sings. But, dang…her voice can’t be enough for such ire (or maybe it can). If it’s a matter of authenticity…that’s not going to change one iota how fine an album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is.

Thanks always for a column I always look forward to reading. —BILLY I

We were at the same Springsteen San Francisco show. I wrote about it at length in my last Real Life Rock Top 10 column.

I have no beef with Lucinda Williams. I’ve never met her. I’m not aware she’s ever read a word I’ve written, and why should she? I merely think she’s a dyed in the wool phony. She’s all shtick. Her substitute for soul is mush-mouthing, which always seems  like a way for her to flatter herself with self-belief: she suffers more deeply than other people, but her triumphs are brighter than those of ordinary mortals. She’s said that in everything I’ve heard.

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Wondered if you’ve ever seen this clip of Jerry Lee Lewis singing “High School Confidential” in England c. 1964 and the start of Beatlemania in America.

It’s hard not to compare the Beatles almost courtly performance on Ed Sullivan with the happy madness captured here.

Also hard to escape the feeling that the invasion was really in the opposite direction the whole time. —DEREK MURPHY

What a great little film. I love the way it focuses on the audience, who are so self-consciously driving themselves into it, to get there, to that place where they're no longer self-conscious. The US invasion was so consequential for the UK. The car crash that killed Eddie Cochran and injured Gene Vincent made Cochran an icon, a heaven to aspire to, that you can hear most clearly in the Who. It's remarkable the number of people for whom seeing Buddy Holly in the flesh was life-changing, a moment treasured and mulled over for the lifetime—Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson (his account of meeting Holly after a show in Toronto, in his Testimony, may be the highlight of the book)—and Mick Jagger. Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Carl Perkins, so many more, bringing the Truth—where what the Beatles and all who followed them to the USA brought the idea and the proof that the world could be made fresh.

I still love to see Jerry Lee playing the song from a flat-bed truck at the high school at the opening of the High School Confidential movie. He's so skinny, his hair would have gotten him kicked out of school if he'd still been in it, and what a forever B-movie cast: not just Russ Tamblyn, believable so many years later as the same skiv in Twin Peaks, and Mamie Van Doren, the cheapo Jayne Mansfield, who was the cheapo Marilyn Monroe, but Charles Chaplin, Jr.! Michael Landon! Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet! (not really, but they would have been perfect playing a creepy teacher and principal on the take from drug runners).

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