Ask Greil: April 4, 2026

Roxy Music, vampires, friendship, and the Civil War

I asked you a question about Roxy Music a couple of years back, about their first two albums, and you said something along the lines that the self-titled debut and For Your Pleasure weren’t part of the Roxy cosmology to you, as your passionate interest in the band really started with Stranded. Being that the first two were the only ones with Eno, I’m interested in what you think about the first four Eno albums. Do any of them resonate with you? Any particular songs?

Secondly, I was listening to Dylan’s “Sugar Baby” recently and I got to thinking about the seeming intentionality with his track listings, more specifically how so often the last songs on his albums are the best tracks, even on the “bad” albums. Though he’s obviously more known for his infamous and downright perverse notions of when to leave songs off of an album (“Blind Willie McTell” and “Series of Dreams” stand out), he also has a habit of saving the gems for the last song. I didn’t care for “Love and Theft” at all (I thought Time Out of Mind was far superior) as I felt that Dylan was surveying a certain style rather than inhabiting the “real Dylan”. But “Sugar Baby” immediately grabbed me and feels like the real Dylan. There are so many others: Empire Burlesque is roundly criticized by many Dylan devotees (you included I think, though I have a soft spot for the album) but then “Dark Eyes” appears at the end, and the real Dylan appears; Desire, another album that divides Dylan fans, has “Sara” at the end, the most undeniably “Dylan” track on the LP; “Every Grain of Sand” on Shot of Love also is along those lines. I can’t think of another artist or band where, even on their most dismissed albums, there’s so often a standout track at the end. —TIM JOYCE

Regarding Eno, I thought Here Come the Warm Jets and more so Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) were thrilling—and that the glow dissipated almost immediately, and I never went back to them as I continually went back to Stranded, Country Life, Avalon, and especially Flesh + Blood and the later Roxy live album Heart Still Beating. Not to mention Bryan Ferry’s solo albums, most often These Foolish Things and As Time Goes By. I simply made a connection with Bryan Ferry, or vice versa, and it’s never faded. It’s not a matter of persons or conundrum or anything other than finding the capacity to be swept away from all preconceptions by a given piece of music, often one that at first and after that seemed both completely unlikely and preordained, like “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.”

I’ve long been fascinated by the way Bob Dylan ended his albums. As they appeared, my friends and I would delve endlessly into the placement of songs on Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, especially how and why they ended.

Dylan ending The Times They Are A-Changin’ then and now seems like the first move, as we used to say of a performer contemplating or acting to recast a career: ending this “there’s a world to win” album with a goodbye. An exit line that seemed literal (“I’ve said what I have to say, go find someone else listen to”) and a warning (“Any word could be my last”).

Clearly “Desolation Row” (which at shows before Highway 61 Revisited was released did not close the night and which was always greeted with laughter, and Dylan didn’t shy away from treating it as a standup routine) was the first big move: a devastating portrait of Western Civilization and its opposite, or underside, or fraternal twin, this bohemian outpost, a kind or combination skid row, hobo jungle, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. And most of all a subtly dramatic piece of music that nothing could follow. I’ve never forgotten a friend saying in wonder and surprise after we’d played the album for the fourth or fifth time one night: “He likes it on Desolation Row!”

Dylan seemed to be seduced by himself, by what he’d pulled off. With the Blonde on Blonde double album —that is, two lps, four sides—he doubled down twice over: he made a whole last side out of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Has anyone listened to it since? It was a dull and sentimental title, idea, and an endless bore, because of an attempt to create and live in a world it was a functional number about someone he knew and you didn’t: it was private before and after it was public, and that’s why it didn’t make a place in the world, didn’t make a world, even though giving it its own whole side of an lp was a trumpet of its importance before anything else. Enormous energy was expended by people trying to convince themselves that they liked it, or that there was anything there.

If there was still any calculation going on, Dylan slipped his own trap with his next album—after essentially shifting the ethos of “Desolation Row” into a deeply supple language of its own on John Wesley Harding from the title song to “The Wicked Messenger,” he, as the phrase would have it if it hadn’t already, took the piss out of it all with two pleasant little ditties where, as someone pointed out at the time to make just that point, he rhymed “moon” with “spoon.”

With Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft,” and Modern Times, there’s clearly an attempt to create a trilogy, to put his past work in the shadows, to set out like a one-person Lewis and Clark to remap the continent of American song, to speak many languages to prove that they are one. And to top himself. He ends Time Out of Mind with “Highlands”—the first time I heard it, listening to a cassette of the album in an office in Los Angeles in the spring of 1997, I had no idea how much time had elapsed from the beginning of the track to the end. I was kind of shocked when I was told it was only sixteen minutes. Here’s the dare set down, Bob Dylan to himself and the world: follow this. So then four years later there’s “Sugar Baby,” which is even more of a detective story, not as long but it feels just as complete if not more so, a structure and progression so elusively familiar it casts a spell you can’t get out from under. It still sounds to me as if the singer is talking to a horse—the song is that open. When I read on the expectingrain.com Dylan clearing house that the tune was based on a 1927 Gene Austin faux southern ballad called “The Lonesome Road”—and it was, just as the rest of “Love and Theft” explored the kind of stuff my father, born in 1917, kept as sheet music in his piano bench—I played “Sugar Baby” for him, and he made the connection instantly. “I remember that,” he said. There’s a way that “Sugar Baby” seems to me deeper, more elusive, more I’d-Choose-This-as-the-Last-Song-I’ll-Ever-Hear than “Highlands.” And then topping himself again, on Modern Times, with “Ain’t Talkin’,” which is modern only in the sense of proving that the oldest symbols and themes can be refashioned so that it seems no one has ever noticed them before, even though you can kind of imagine that “Ain’t Talkin’” is really nothing more than the complete text of an unpublished song from 1854 that the editors of Little Sandy Review discovered in the University of Minnesota Library and passed on to this Dinkytown kid who was hanging around in hopes it would give him something to do instead of raiding their record collections for the kind of songs that were implying that such an ur-text existed. I knew when I first heard it that it was something I’d happily never get to the bottom of and never lose interest in, if not solving it, trying to hear everything that was there.

After that—well, the great closing number to what is Bob Dylan’s most recent great album, Tempest—it’s just staggering, “Long and Wasted Years,” “Early Roman Kings,” “Pay in Blood,” “Scarlet Town,” nothing obvious, everything threatening, everything the storm the album is promising—ending with a rewrite of “The Titanic” that is longer than “Desolation Row” but a different kind of song, something that it all about inner self-referentiality, in melody and rhythm and orchestration, so that you can play it over and over and feel as if it’s twenty-four hours long but not quite long enough. Except, in an act of perversity, forgetting, or, again, taking the piss, it’s not the closing song, only the second to last, so you really have to go back and play it again before getting to the dying fall of “Roll on John.”

And then, I guess, “Murder Most Foul.” I devoted a chapter of a book to saying ten percent of what I or anyone else might say about this song, this event, this bomb dropped when no one was looking, this longer-than-“Highlands” chronicle of the COVID years just barely or not quite before the fact. It’s the last track of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Except that it doesn’t work as the last track: you don’t hear it that way. In the, ah, let’s say philosophy of modern song, how you hear it and how it functions in culture, it’s placed last on the album, but it was heard first. It broke the weather report that day in 2020 when suddenly people all over the world were asking everyone they knew if they’d heard it and it seemed as if the answer was always yes. As life, it’s the first song on the album, just as “Like a Rolling Stone” was the first track on Highway 61 Revisited. Put “Like a Rolling Stone” last on the album and it would seem kind of anti-climactic after “Desolation Row,” wouldn’t it?

This is a wonderful game. I’m sure Bob Dylan is still playing it.

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Thoughts on Sinners? I think one would have to go back to the days of Cecil B. DeMille to find an American movie so forthrightly against the dangers of miscegenation. —RYAN S.

I’m not really in a position to answer because I walked out right at the point where a woman said they had to get the garlic and I thought, “I’ve seen this movie too many times already.” Already, I had admired the thought and research and perspicacity of using “Pick Poor Robin Clean” both as a musical number on its own terms and as a metaphor for the cosmology of the movie itself, and at the same time I felt myself unmoved by the execution of the idea, as if Ryan Coogler didn’t trust the song to speak for itself, to make its own point.

I felt, as far as I got, that the film didn’t trust its own premises enough to play with them, to have full and complex oppositional characters, to generate actual suspense, which has to do with moral questions, not just what happens. Thus the racial essentialism you’re talking about fills the gap. I have the feeling, again based on my incomplete knowledge of what I’m presuming to talk about, that this movie is not going to wear well—and may be superseded by a different director working off different source material.

It’s not as if the theme and the idea of vampire movies is sterile. There is Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 Near Dark, which can be both funny and appalling, often at the same time, and by the end had me more interested in and rooting for the clan of vampires than the good people who survive them (and the vampire death scenes are fascinatingly original). There is Night of the Living Dead—which has its own disturbing and shocking racial politics. There is, perhaps in best contrast to Sinners, Elias Merhige’s 2000 Shadow of the Vampire, about the making of the original Nosferatu, and the problem that Max Schreck, who played the vampire, actually is one.

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I’m writing this just after reading your reply about the unfulfilled promise that was and is Graham Parker.

His first two records came out when I was 15, and a bit later I also heard a terrific Parker show on one of those syndicated programs FM radio used to run on Sunday nights.

For a while I was an unrepentant fan incapable of discernment (I liked Stick to Me and The Up Escalator, the latter of which I still insist has better songs overall than Squeezing Out Sparks despite the weak arrangements), but eventually the thrill was gone.

The sad tone of your comments echoes my own thoughts on Parker, which amount to “why?” and “what if?”

At least Elvis and Rod Stewart stood on the summit before falling off the mountain.

But Graham will always be one of the greats to me, and I’m grateful he showed up when he did. What a guy. —DEREK MURPHY

I don’t think Graham Parker’s promise was unfulfilled. There are few two first albums as complete in sound and vision, self-discovery and self-presentation, a band taking someone’s scribbles and hunches and turning them into songs, as with Howlin Wind’ and Heat Treatment. And there were shows I was lucky to see at the time; to repeat myself, “rock ’n’ roll at its limit.” So no, he didn’t go on to match what he’d done, and then fell behind himself. From a fan’s and a listener’s selfish point of view, so what? He got to places most people will never find on any map.

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I know you don’t really want to use this platform for reading guides and recommendations, but I’ve been trying to figure out without as much success as I’d hoped what books and writings on the Civil War have spoken to you the most given that it seems to be a recurring theme in your own writing however subtly most of the time. Whenever I come across such a book I think I might want to read, I can’t help thinking “I wonder if Greil Marcus has read this and decided in his own words that ‘it’s not a book.’” —BEN MERLISS

I’d start with Edmund Wilson’s passionate, skeptical, and deeply patriotic Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. It appeared in 1962 and no one has even tried to follow its paths. Then Lincoln’s letters and speeches—there are several well-edited collections. Then U.S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, which is a great work of literature on its own terms, but also a military history, without which there is no understanding of the war as as a social movement and a trauma from which the country never recovered—and that can be read alongside James McPherson’s 1988 Battle Cry of Freedom.

But you also ought to go farther afield. Moby-Dick is a playing out of the conflict in metaphor before the fact. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a reckoning with its causes and results. Percival Everett’s James is a prequel and the to my mind stronger The Trees an enactment of its legacy.

And read the newspapers. The Civil War has never been settled. The Trump administration is refighting it today by removing all references to slavery from historical sites and removing all historical references to actions and thoughts of black people of any era from official historical reference as examples of DEI—and resurrecting and repurposing the Confederate monuments that were erected in the 1880s and 1890s as part of the post-Reconstruction reimposition of black servitude. And I say this as a Californian raised in the postwar Bay Area suburbs, as insulated from the Civil War as anyone could be, and yet the great-grandson of an Alabamian who fought for the South in the war and the great-great nephew of two Hawaiian coffee farmers named for Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln.

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Good day! Did the first edition of Psychotic Reactions come with a Dylan postcard? I found one in an edition I found at a library sale, with a mustache drawn on Fred McDarrah’s 1965 photo of him. Lester’s writing is on the back. Just was curious. Thank you! —MATHEW BARTKOWIAK

THAT one came with a postcard—but no other. Must have been owned by a friend of Lester’s. Hope you like the book.

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Dear Greil, Have you seen any good crime dramas on television lately? I thought last year’s Task on HBO was a standout and quite moving. I’m currently hooked on Undercover, a Belgian-Dutch series on Netflix. Very intense. Seen either one of those? —CRAIG ZELLER

I draw a blank. We miss the UK cop shows and PI murder mysteries. We’ve been on rewind: all seasons of The Sopranos (I’d forgotten, or maybe it didn’t completely register before, what a worthless band of killers the crew descended into before the final near wipeouts), all of Mad Men (why IS Don Draper so compulsively adulterous, to the point where the character simply doesn’t make sense? And the show always needed a lot more Maggie Siff. And the Marshall McLuhan character is for the ages). Now catching up with #2 of The Pitt which seems to have lost the thread. I hope they don’t have Noah Wyle calling in everyday from the Black Hills or wherever he’s going to check in, let alone called back when we find out what the hidden trauma his replacement is carrying around like a tumor really is.

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As I’m reading the new edition of Mystery Train, I keep thinking about one sentence at the very beginning, from your original 1975 Author’s Note: “As much as anything, rock ’n’ roll has been the best means to friendship I know.”

Do you still agree with that line? Reflecting on the years since 1975, do any specific memories of rock ’n’ roll and friendship come to mind now? —EMMERICH ANKLAM

I could, as they say, write a book, though I’m not sure it would sustain anyone else’s interest for as long as it would take. It’s a never-ending story.

I think of any number of episodes, interruptions, surprises. Pam Brown onstage at a dance at Menlo-Atherton High School in about 1961 in a white dress (I don’t actually remember, but it had to be) singing Rosie and the Originals’ “Angel Baby” and stopping time (two years later we went on our one date). She was impossibly pretty. I considered going to my somethingth reunion if she or another classmate were to be there, but after checking around it was clear she wasn’t going to be and the other had died. Maybe you could call that a fantasy friendship.

In high school my best friend was Barry Franklin. Never doing homework, we’d drive up and down the El Camino at night, listening to the radio, running endless jokes about the songs and how stupid and irresistible they were (Steely Dan’s “All night long we would sing that stupid song / And every word we sang I knew was true” is real life for millions of more people than me). To this day he posts a song of the day, the week, the month, whatever it might be, and I and who knows how many other people post right back. I’ve learned how vast the pop universe is, how, like the real one, no one will ever find the beginning or see the end.

I remember meeting a seemingly insular, almost withdrawn person in college. He was clearly interesting, but it was hard to know why. Apropos of something, I mentioned a Top 40 placing that pissed me off. He proceeded to tell a long story about how when he was—10? 15?—he’d spend his nights creating alternate Top 40 charts reflecting what he felt were the rightful positions of records based on his objective notions of how good they were, which meant how long they’d last in the common imagination, how different they were from everything around them. (Later we found out he and Warren Zevon had been best friends in high school.) During Vietnam he left for Canada and became involved in terrorist activities of the Greek political diaspora during the reign of the military junta (at one point he sneaked back to Fresno to see his parents; his roommate was an FBI informant and he was arrested at the bus stop, but jumped bail and made it back to Canada) and after the regime fell was deeply in involved in the Papandreou government. Years later, after he’d studied with Hannah Arendt at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and gotten married, we sat together as our friend Jim Miller presented his book The Passion of Michel Foucault at Cal, facing a hostile audience of people who’d known Foucault when he was there and were incensed that Jim had dared to write about Foucault’s time in San Francisco S&M clubs and how that related to his work. Later, Jim said to me, “You won’t believe what Stan just told me.” “He told you he was gay,” I said. “How did you know?” he said. I’d never thought about it, it had never occurred to me, but Jim’s words were a trigger and my answer just popped out.

A British rock critic friend and I saw a lot of each other when he was in graduate school and later in Coventry with his wife or in London (there in 1977 with Charlie Gillett I asked them “What about the Sex Pistols and all these other bands?” and they both said it was a hype we’d never hear of again) or when they visited in Berkeley. It seemed like a constant friendship, and a great marriage—they traveled all over the world. Their house was a jewelbox—every nook and cranny reflected a visual or cultural or symbolic choice. They didn’t want, didn’t need children—they were a world in and of themselves. Then the marriage broke up (“We never argue,” they’d once said, which struck us as not a good idea, but who knows how anyone’s marriage works), it was disturbing, it involved scamming and fraud on the part of the woman who came between them, then he fell in love with another woman, they married, had children, we never met her or saw him after that, and our friendship went into the air. Many years later I’m working on my Bryan Ferry book and I remembered he’d written something about Ferry in Creem in the ’70s. I looked it up and it was a marvelous account of an uncomfortable interview surrounded by a revelatory portrait of where Ferry had come from and where he was. I emailed him and we picked up right where we had left off as if not a day had passed.

Through one daughter I heard Sindhu Zagoren’s otherworldly version of “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.” Through the other I learned how great Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” is—through Johnny Cash.

I could go on. Every friendship is different and the songs and records that are part of them are too.