Ask Greil: August 17, 2026

Creedence and cool, the prematurity of Greg Tate's death, open questions in "John Wesley Harding," blackface and the return of Jim Crow, and a backstage confrontation

In the early 1990s I was in college in Athens, Ohio, and I had really thirsty ears, but information moved differently back then, so I was doing whatever I felt I had to do to survive as a listener, and sometimes survival looked like having to save up my buttons for selections from the half-rack of budget cassette tapes at Revco Drug (hey, we’ve all been there). The layout at this Revco was such that only one person at a time could look at the tapes, and one day while I was poring over them in the slow, Talmudic manner of the broke, I become aware of someone kind of orbiting the adjacent aisles, then eventually standing right behind me, heavily. I settled on an overlong Alex Harvey Band best-of (I’d recently read about an artist I liked covering “Faith Healer,” so I wanted to hear the original), and turned around right into the grill of the one Jorma Kaukonen, who at the time was (and maybe still is?) running some sort of guitar trail ranch thing in the pines outside of town. He growled at me, “You took all that time just to buy *that*?!” He had a gold ring in each ear, a gold front tooth, and was wearing an oily post-Crosby poncho that had about it a slight aspect of live muskrat. It was absolutely the closest I’ve ever come to seeing a pirate in real life, and even though I’m now sure his scoffing was nothing more than good-natured townie razzing, I was then a thoroughly shook freshman, and for a long second I truly, seriously, and ludicrously believed something bad might happen—like he might whip out a blunderbuss and send me to Davy Jones’s (or worse!). Tense moments.

Anyway, at this mnemonic intersection of imagined violence and erstwhile Bay residents, I’m wondering if, apart from being pronounced dead by Rod Stewart, you’ve ever been physically threatened by a subject. Like, Lucinda Williams ever show up outside your job with nunchucks or anything? —JAMES CAVICCHIA

Once. It was at an early Elvis Costello show at the Berkeley Community Theater, a medium size hall, holding about 3,400 people, where in years past I’d often gone to see Bob Dylan, the Band, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison. He clearly didn’t want to be there. He played for about 40 minutes and left—I mean he walked off as if he’d rather be anywhere else. The crowd applauded as if to convince themselves this was really good, they’d gotten what they came for, but in about a minute reality broke through and there was a sudden sour feeling that swallowed the night.

For some reason, I don’t know why, I decided to try to go backstage and say hello. I’d written a lot about him, in Rolling Stone about his first album and first US show, more in New West. I went into a room: he was there, along with his manager, Jake Riviera, who cultivated an image as a thug—I don’t know if he thought he was imitating Peter Grant or the Kray Twins. I went over to EC, made to shake his hand, saying “Welcome to Berkeley.” Riviera stepped between us, slapped my hand away, and said as growlingly as he could, “If you write a word about this I’ll kick your ass.” I turned around and left and of course wrote up the whole meaningless encounter, because if a journalist is warned against reporting what they saw they have to report the threat.

Oddly, this squalid little encounter led to EC—I have never been able to call him Elvis—and I becoming friends. He produced the best response to Lipstick Traces I received from anyone: a collage made of advertisements from the likes of airline and hotel magazines running over pages that all but rewrote the book. I’ll never forget the shock of awe and pleasure in his face one day in my living room when I played him Charlie Rich’s “Feel Like Going Home.” So you never know.

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I recently came across a video clip of CCR on American Bandstand and I was a bit surprised they appeared there as Dick Clark was not exactly an exemplar of Woodstock Nation. But even the Doors did an appearance after their first album, so maybe it wasn’t as unhip as I remember. Anyway, there is a snippet of Clark asking John Fogerty a couple of questions, i.e., how was it to follow up the success of “Proud Mary” (CCR had the Green River album out at that time which was a huge hit, although the title track doesn’t seem to me to be Top 40 radio, but maybe you could amplify on what 1969 was like musically—everyone else has) and what the future held for the group (1970: bigger success; ’71: Tom Fogerty leaves; ’72: everybody leaves). While Fogerty avoided being a “Proud Mary” one-hit wonder in spades with all the great songs he wrote, his vision of continuing CCR ended in ashes. You wrote the liner notes to their greatest hits collection Chronicle back in ’76, if you had a rewrite, would you say anything else after all this time has passed? —JAMES R STACHO

I was at my local bookstore the other day and noticed a book on Creedence that I didn’t know. I looked at the publication page and was surprised to see that it had come out just a few years ago.

I would have thought this story, not that expansive or emblematic of that much outside of itself in the first place, had been pushed, mined, or exploited as far as it would go. A little band, scorned by its so-called peers in San Francisco, comes out of a Berkeley-adjoining town no one’s ever heard of and where no one ever goes and makes no effort to be part of any scene. Their story has no hook, their first album gets panned in Rolling Stone by its then best reviewer, Barry Gifford, who goes on to write widely read novels and David Lynch movies, and yet, as another reviewer, I think Bruce Miroff, puts it, they have a sound that can cut through the static on the cheapest car radio. Maybe that’s the best image of the band: someone blasting the radio and shouting whatever song it is out the window. And it’ll be “Up Around the Bend” and you’ll spend the rest of the day wondering why it sounds so good. Or the rest of your life. And then there’s “Effigy” which no one will shout, but heard late at night with the bedside radio on might keep you up for hours.

In other words, I don’t really care about the guys in the band and what they did or didn’t do with their lives. A group that made a slew of distinctive fully realized satisfying life-questioning life-affirming records is somehow, in common commodified memory, reduced to a one-hit wonder, and that hit is “Creedence, that top 40 band that had a lot of hits and was really great, you know, ‘Proud Mary’?”

To me there are only two questions worth asking. The first is one that now, looking back, I wish I’d included in my tiny Chronicles liner-notes: with a little Bay Area paranoia and distrust of anything handed down from New York or LA, why it was that none of the hits so pervasive that they became a common language was ever listed at number one when at any given moment all of the singles listed at #2 so obviously were. The second is, just what is it that made their records so different, so complete? Start with “Bad Moon Rising.” Go to “Lodi.” Come back to “Up Around the Bend.” Those are questions that any person and any writer could answer in their own way. They are questions with answers.

Creedence was never part of Woodstock Nation. They very purposefully didn’t dress for that party. That wasn’t a nation where they felt like citizens. And they weren’t invited, because they weren’t cool. And they didn’t need it. Kind of like, in a strangely inverted way, the Doors.

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You don’t seem to be the biggest fan of Bob Dylan’s 2006 album Modern Times (other than of course “Ain’t Talkin’”). It was my favorite of the three albums that many say comprise a trilogy of sorts marking his renaissance (I’m not sure I share that view and I can’t remember if you do) for a reason that I don’t see many people talk about.

It had space enough for each song to receive the breathing room they needed to truly reveal their power as songs. This resulted in a smoother flow than either “Love and Theft” or Time Out Of Mind. Don’t get me wrong. Modern Times isn’t necessarily a superior song collection to either of its predecessors, but with one or two exceptions “Love and Theft” sounded a little too boxed in overall while Time Out Of Mind had a rougher flow that made it harder to appreciate as a whole package (even though I love many songs from that album). Musically speaking, Modern Times felt almost like a nocturnal inversion of Highway 61 Revisited. My questions are: What is your response to my take? And what do you think I’m missing in making this observation? —BEN MERLISS

For me, it was slow going, a meander, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” really, after all this time, why not “Rock Me Mama” if you want to sing the redundant blues? “Nettie Moore” and “Working Man’s Blues” stopped me, for melody and stories just out of reach but—the initial theme of “Ain’t Talkin’” opened up horizontally and as a void at the same time and I knew, I said to the person I was with, I could chase this song for the rest of my life and never get to the bottom of it and I can’t wait. I agree that there is no flow, no overall rhythmic theme, in “Love and Theft” as there is on Time Out of Mind, but instead a door opening and then closing behind you. I’m glad you find more there than I do.

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Someone once suggested that Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind should become a volume in the 33 1/3 series and that you should be the one to write it. What do you think? Would you do so?

I know I said in the past that TOOM isn’t my favorite album in the past, but this is mainly because the pacing becomes problematic for me towards the end. I also know you don’t think Daniel Lanois’s production was wrong for the album and except for “Can’t Wait” and “Dirt Road Blues” I don’t disagree. I love the best the album has to offer as much as I’ve loved anything by Dylan and I respect your viewpoint on the album. —BEN MERLISS

It should be a 33 1/3 book, and it should be a novel. I once called it a Puritan western—I think that’s a path that Mary Gaitskill or Percival Everett or Salman Rushdie or Jonathan Lethem or Don DeLillo could take. There’s a story there, and it’s one, as I’ve said before, that was captured in a seminar I taught in the spring of 2000 at Cal called “Prophecy and the American Voice.” The class material ranged from John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” to Martin Luther King’s address to the March on Washington to Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” to a collection of Dylan’s onstage sermons in the early 1980s to Time Out of Mind. During the class on that album, just about the last class, people were talking about it, as people tend to do about almost anything, as a break-up album, and at one point a student named Amy Vecchione lost patience. “Yes,” she said with vehemence. “It’s a break-up album. But it’s not about breaking up with a woman. It’s about breaking up with God.” And the whole album, really the whole class, came into focus—a focus I never quite maintained in The Shape of Things to Come, which came out of all that. But what sweep there is in that comment, and that album, and that rhythmic climb in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”—

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I picked up the new reissue of Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk (new introduction by Hanif Abdurraqib, published by Questlove’s AUWA imprint at Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and I saw that Tate had included you on the dedication page: “Greil Marcus, who questioned my hunger for heroes.” I also read your brief Artforum note from 1992 about Tate’s writing. When you think about him and his work, what memories come to mind? —EMMERICH ANKLAM

I didn’t know Greg. We met to shake hands a couple of times and corresponded a bit after he’d started writing for the Village Voice. He was clearly thrilled by deconstruction and was constantly referring to Fredric Jameson as a savant and inspiration. I thought Jameson was an academic hustler peddling knockoffs of French trendiness and wrote Greg to ask why he was putting himself in the shadow of someone who didn’t have a fraction of his talent, mission, or style.

If you look at Daphne Brooks’s edited collection Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince, Tate appears in the pages both in his own words and as a lodestar for Brooks and many others: a self-launched shooting star who had begun to map where a new, absolutely polyglot sensibility could go, what unexplored cultural continents remained to be discovered and understood. Despite Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, there was a sense of blockage I got from his writing after Flyboy in the Buttermilk; Flyboy 2 was dispiriting by comparison.

Tate was not a careerist. He wasn’t out to build a career, but to live and work in culture. His death seemed radically premature, as if he had his whole critical life ahead of him, as if he were Jimi Hendrix or Charlie Parker, yet he was 64.

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I’ve just been listening to John Wesley Harding again. What an extraordinary thing. Like a mighty old tree. With all the main songs almost the same tempo slightly slower slightly faster, it has for me the extreme clarity of a fever dream in the paintings of de Chirico. As true now as it was then? Its careful advice as relevant to America today? Such a sense of disturbing calm in its utterly consistent almost untouchable sound world. Personal too? Surely Bob is the drifter in the drifter’s escape. What I’d love to know is how the album landed at the time. It must have been an age of new prophets, I’m thinking of people like Timothy Leary and a kind of madness he had already lived through and rejected. How did the album bear witness through that terrible year of ’68 with its modesty playing against such extremes? —JOHN GIBSON

You raise what’s an almost infinitely complicated and interesting question. What’s going, on, what went on, where are we now?

In 1966 Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde, his third rock ’n’ roll album, grand, expansive, glamorous, maybe most of all a manifesto of hipness as the court of all values. He had been touring through the year from the US to Australia to France and the UK with a signal rock ’n’ roll band no one had ever heard of, including when it played with him, no name on the posters, no introductions or even an announcement from the stage, and they were a juggernaut: “Like a train running by your head,” Marlon Brando was reputed to have said. “The loudest thing I ever heard.”

Then in the summer Dylan went back to Woodstock and shut up. The rest of the year came and went with nothing but rumors. That didn’t happen in the world of people who sold records. They put out two, maybe three a year to make sure nobody forgot because a career wasn’t going to last more than three years, maybe five. From Dylan, not a word, an interview, a single, so he was crazy, he was a junkie, he was in a coma, he was dead, he had quit the field. 1967 came and went. At the very end of the year, really heard as the first sound of 1968, comes this quiet, insinuating album, a dim, beige cover, opening with a strum and the name of some character the record was named for who was “a friend to the poor” and you were back in some folk-music paradise and suddenly the cover of your copy of Sgt. Pepper looked gaudy and fake, trying too hard, when the truly hip, people who were born that way, never seemed to try at all.

The record seemed to open a door to a future, or anyway a year, of modesty and contemplation, after all the noise and counterculture Summer-of-Love-Monterey-Pop propaganda of 1967, a different way of walking and a different way of talking: keeping your eyes open, thinking it all over. That’s how you listened to the sermons, or were they moral history lessons, of “Dear Landlord” and “I Am a Lonesome Hobo” and “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” the riddles of “As I Went Out One Morning” and “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” and “The Drifter’s Escape,” the nightmare of “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” from which you actually got to wake up, and then the end of that long day of serious philosophy with a look at the weather with “Down Along the Cove” and a drink by the fire with “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” It was so soft spoken, with Charlie McCoy’s bass playing so playful and free, but you could feel that the singer, or the sound, was also raising the stakes. It was the war, Jon Landau wrote at the time: it wasn’t about the war, it wasn’t a protest against it, but “Dylan has felt the war”—the way Vietnam was making its way into every breath of American life, underpinning everything with uncertainty, guilt, and dread—or what Norman Mailer called “an unearned freedom from dread.”

And then 1968 broke out. The war exploded all over the world. All over the world, people rose up to demand a different government, a different life. In Prague and Mexico City revolts were crushed with such brutality no one ever knew how many were massacred. Martin Luther King was assassinated, then Robert F. Kennedy as he ran for president, Chicago showed the country the face of power, and Richard Nixon came back from the dead and shut the door.

So it was history that revealed that there was one song on the album that at once anticipated all these things and more, and could contain them, that could carry the spirits, the absurdity and fear of the time into any future. That was “All Along the Watchtower,” as Dylan played it as a parable from some Gnostic Bible; as Jimi Hendrix played it as a great adventure onto the unknown; as Neil Young played it as a judgement, in an arrangement Bob Dylan then took up on stage and kept for years.

When you go back to the album, as you’re doing now, it slips that history. It plays as someone playing with songs, and maybe wondering what America as a country, as legacy, as a promise, as a burden, actually is, and how to live in it, how to tell the story to a seven- or nine-year-old who’s asking you, “Daddy, what does it mean when it says on the TV that somebody went to school and shot people?” Except that they already know because they do shooter’s drills at school as history mutters the song that they’ll catch up with sooner enough under its breath.

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Hi Greil. Are you going to make the material of your talk “Blackface Then and Now” into a book or an article? The talk I viewed on YouTube from 18 years ago was utterly fascinating and so revealing of the times we live in today. Is there more of your material on this anywhere else? —JON GIBSON

I’m more than glad that you feel that way, and after I developed that talk and giving it both in my New School classes at at universities and conferences, adding material about sorority rush at Ole Miss and racist attacks on Barack Obama, whatever came along in this continuing story—Percival Everett’s The Trees took it to new dimensions of metaphor and social revision—it seemed to me it could be a book, despite the extant and continuing literature on the subject. So I brought it up with the editor I was then working with, only to be told, “Blackface books don’t sell,” a dismissal that hit particularly hard since a year or two later he published a book on blackface by somebody else.

I came to the conclusion that my approach—dive into the swirling cauldron of the subject and some point of view, or at least an unused handle on the matter, will emerge—convinced me that I’d said what had to say and that if I wanted to fiddle with it in the future I could. But I realize now that my engagement with the question—the fun of playing with the material, from Al Jolson’s 1926 “A Plantation Act” to “The Savages”—was really a response to the way the ascendancy of Obama had opened up the parameters of American history and the American experience, making all questions new. Today, with the return of Jim Crow and what used to be called in the South White Democracy across the Federal government and more and more states, with the Justice Department fighting against all the states holding out, it would all look and feel very different. The evil would overwhelm all humor, all ambiguity, all contingency. Maybe someone tougher than I am can meet the day.

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Browsing through Ask Greil comments from 2022, I see that you responded to someone who disparaged Stevie Ray Vaughan with “There’s no there there.” People like what they like, and I won’t try to argue you out of your opinion. But I will share a story about finding Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “there.”

My story starts early in the pandemic, when, as a 73 year old with a couple of additional risk factors, not to mention a general aversion to serious illness, I stayed home as much as I could. And I bought a stationary bike to get some exercise. But what to listen to while I was riding?

My initial playlists were my old favorites, sorted for potential pep stimulation. But somehow, tunes like “Jailhouse Rock,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”—songs that had sustained me, man and boy, for over six decades—weren’t getting the job done. So I began poking around for new (to me) material.

Enter Stevie Ray Vaughan, dead for 30 years at that point. I was totally unfamiliar with his music. I’ve never lived in Texas, and frankly found the hype round the Austin music scene kind of off-putting. But in 2020, I found a few of SRV’s blues covers on YouTube, and they worked. For me. Listening to SRV, I rode my stationary bike two or three hours a day, lost 25 pounds, and never got covid. That’s enough “there” for me.

Specifically—not that you asked—a 45–50 minute playlist might have looked like this.

• “Boot Hill” (1984 version)

• “Look at Little Sister” (Carnegie Hall)

• “Pride and Joy (Carnegie Hall)

• “Wham!”

• “Shake for Me”

• “Crossfire”

• “They Call Me Guitar Hurricane” (aka “Guitar Slim Boogie”)

• “Cold Shot” (Carnegie Hall)

• “The Things (That) I Used to Do” (Carnegie Hall)

• “The Sky Is Crying” (1984 version)

• “Oreo Cookie Blues” (1987 live, Lonnie Mack, vocals)

I also have a recollection, which I have been unable to verify, that you once compared SRV unfavorably to Dick Dale in their “Pipeline” duet from Back to the Beach. Apologies if I’ve misattributed your opinion, although I think it’s a fair assessment. I bow to no one in my admiration for Dick Dale; in fact, I can claim to have special ordered his Surfers’ Choice Lp in Wichita, Kansas, in 1962—hardly a man is now alive, etc. But it’s not really surprising that the guy who invented surf guitar music was better at it than a Texas blues player.

Tangentially, I’ll offer a link to Johnny Waleen’s surf guitar version of “Mystery Train,” in case it’s unfamiliar.

And while it takes them awhile for them to get around to incorporating “Pipeline” into this jam, here’s a link to a version of the song by SRV and his brother Jimmie on a double-neck guitar.

But the ultimate question is which entity—Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, California; or Greil Marcus’ Stevie Ray Vaughan—had less there. You and your readers can decide for yourselves with this clip from the SRV and Jeff Beck “Fire Meets the Fury” tour finale on December 3, 1989, live in Oakland, CA. —ROBERT MITCHELL

Gertrude Stein gave Oakland its inferiority complex. In 1964 I was trying to organize a statewide convention of a youth group and at one point the only place we could find in the Bay Area was the Leamington Hotel in Oakland. That was obviously so unappealing it was decided to advertise the event as taking place in “Greater San Francisco.” (We finally found a better place in the city.) In 1967 a poster that’s still on my wall went up in the East Bay for a Fillmore-style show: it pictured a very genteel 1920s combo over the headline “THE NEW WORLD HAS HIT OAKLAND!” It was so embarrassing. In the 1970s the A’s and Raiders and Warriors ruled their leagues. Now, as the end of the great Oakland movie Blindspotting anticipates, they’re all gone.

I’m glad Stevie Ray Vaughan got you through hard times, even became an absent soulmate, and opened up musical avenues you wouldn’t have found without him. But aside from Johnny Winter and ZZ Top I’ve never found the Texas crowd from the ’70s on living up to their New York press. For me Vaughan’s playing lacks definition: rhythmic, emotional, intellectual. He doesn’t play in the same world as Peter Green, Hubert Sumlin, Jimi Hendrix, and dozens of others. I’d call it greasy—knowing that from a different point of view that would be the highest praise.