Ask Greil: August 7, 2025

Hello Mr. Marcus, I have a personal, somewhat random question. It isn’t necessarily for an article. But it is something I’ve been wondering about for a few years, and with the 25th anniversary of the reissue of your book The Old, Weird America (if I am getting the dates right), I figured I’d just ask.

I studied American Studies in school. And, constantly, we talked about that term: the old, weird America. It felt like it was repeated so much that it became ingrained in my everyday speech. Frankly, it also changed my life. I took a class on The Anthology of American Folk Music, read your work, and, from there, went on to work at the Oxford American and then to Mother Jones. Your writing made me want to write, and even more so to read. It led me, in a wayward journey, to editing. So, thank you.

And with that self-indulgent wind-up, I basically wanted to ask a simple question. What do you think of the term now, 25-ish (I guess a few more, since it was 1997 for the original book) years later? I see it used casually all the time. And yet, I don’t really know what you think of how it’s become a placeholder for a way of thinking. Do you still like the term? Do you think it’s used well? Maybe that’s too big a question for a simple email. But it’s been on my mind so much that I figured I’d just be a journalist and, even if I have nothing to write about it, go ahead and ask. Is it a term you still like? Is it one you still use? And how do you feel about how it’s become the default way of talking about anyone interested in delving into that era of recordings the Anthology not only enshrined but created?

Thanks for indulging me—and for your writing, which changed my life. I’m a huge fan. All the best, Jacob —JACOB ROSENBERG

Thanks for your kind words about my work. They mean a lot.

“The old, weird America” popped into my head when I was reading Richard Cándida Smith’s revelatory Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California, about the outsider art enclaves in the Bay Area and Los Angeles mostly in the postwar period. He quoted Kenneth Rexroth (there’s a wonderful satiric portrait of him in Ross Macdonald’s The Galton Case) referring to “The old, free America,” a phrase that pissed me off, both because it suggested America, which is what I was writing about, was a thing of the past, a finished thing (an idea, or a conviction, or a fear, that Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer and Philip Roth often wrestled with, but not Leslie Fiedler), and because it reminded me of Ronald Reagan wanting to return to the free America of his youth, when you didn’t need a driver’s license.

This is what I wrote in the introduction to the 2011 edition of The Old, Weird America:

When this book was first published in 1997, it was called Invisible Republic; that is how it turns up in Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One. That is because neither of the original publishers, in the U.S. and the U.K., liked my choice of a title: “The Old, Weird America,” which already titled a chapter. I wrote up a sheet of fifteen or twenty titles, sent it to both publishers, and both picked “Invisible Republic.” There was no problem until the book was published: then it turned out that the title was so vague it connoted and connected to absolutely nothing, and no one could remember it (“Invisible Nation”? “Invisible Music”? “Visible Republic”?). At the same time, almost every comment on the book used “The Old, Weird America” as a headline—and when in 2000 Frances Coady at Picador USA gave me the chance to put out a new edition with a new title, I took it. Except it wasn’t a new title; it was the title the book always contained and always wanted, like someone who always has to correct the spelling of his name.

Thanks, I think, to the cadence of the title, which was, distantly, something the poet Kenneth Rexroth once came up with, “the old, weird America” took on a life of its own. It became a catchphrase, most often floating free of any source or attribution, as if it were itself a piece of some nineteenth-century folk song. Malcolm Jones, writing in Newsweek in 2008 on Gregory Gibson’s Hubert’s Freaks, about a Times Square emporium frequented by Diane Arbus, summed it up all too well:

“The one thing Gibson does that irks me is drag in cultural critic Greil Marcus and his quote about ‘the old weird America,’ which includes everything from sideshows to the Harry Smith folk music collection—everything that, say, Edmund Wilson would not have recognized as culture. Marcus coined that line in reference to the spirit that Bob Dylan tapped in his Basement Tapes, which indeed do not sound mainstream. There’s a germ of truth in his formulation, but it’s been taken up by so many people in the last decade and used in so many different instances that it’s almost lost all meaning. It’s just that it sounds so good, as though it’s alluding to a misty, funky version of Brigadoon that lies just outside the normal precincts of American culture. But except for maybe circus freaks and those African Americans who wore blackface in minstrel shows—now that was strange—there’s nothing particularly weird about the cultural stuff that got ignored until the last half of the 20th century, unless you want to make the argument that Blind Blake is weirder than Charles Ives or that Howard Finster is stranger than Robert Rauschenberg.”

Still, it’s much too late to change the tune. For better or for ill, true or false, the old, weird America is what this book went looking for, and the map it came back with, full of holes or not. I’ve been lucky to have had readers to argue the question from all sides.

Since then there have been many more serious, or venal, attacks on the phrase, the concept, and the person who came up with it (I’ve assumed for a long time that my newspaper obituary will read, “Alleged to have coined the phrase . . .”), as exclusionist, othering, racist, and for all I know, settler-colonialist.

The phrase also had its root in one of Bob Dylan’s explanations of the allure of what he called traditional music, from a 1965 interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, quoted in the book (and I’ve quoted it many times): “There is—and I’m sure nobody realizes this, all the authorities who write about what it is and what it should be, when they say keep things simple, they should be easily understood—folk music is the only music where it isn’t simple. It’s never been simple. It’s weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts. I’ve never written anything hard to understand, not in my head anyway, and nothing as far out as some of the old songs.” And I defy anyone to listen to William and Versey Smith’s “When That Great Ship Went Down” as collected by Harry Smith on his 1952 American Folk Music and not have the word “weird” come to mind before anything else. The Smiths may not have sounded weird—odd, inexplicable, untranslatable, outside the known world, Why do they sound like that?—to themselves or their neighbors, but probably to people the next town over, and, I’d bet, to the Paramount record men who recorded them in Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1927, as in, I’ve never heard anything like this before. I bet I can sell it.

For me, it wasn’t meant to keep anyone or any sound behind a closed door. It was my attempt to open a door. I think it might have helped do that. But it wasn’t my intention to paint a slogan on it.

And it’s sort of a curse. It has, as you say, titled the book for 25 of its 28 years, but I never know what to call it. I go back and forth between titles. Most publishers want the second title. But when a new edition came out in France this year, the publisher said, Can’t we call it ‘La republique invisible’? and I said sure. And it gave him and the designer an idea for a cover that it would have never had otherwise.

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There are times when phrases just stick in your mind. For example, in your 1969 review of Let It Bleed, you mention the cover and credit sheet were done by “the inflated Robert Brownjohn.” I first read your review more than 40 years ago, and I still can’t think of Robert Brownjohn without putting “inflated” in front of his name.

Over the weekend, my wife and I watched From Russia with Love for the umpteenth time, and it was only then I realized the credit sequence was not done by Maurice Binder, who did almost all of them until he died in the ’90s, but by Brownjohn, who also did Goldfinger. Which led me down a rabbit hole of Brownjohn’s graphic design works.

I happen to like the Let It Bleed cover, though I’m with you on the credit sheet and the title font (too much Helvetica). But what made you call him “inflated”?

P. S. If you can explain what Dave Marsh meant when he docked “Life in the Fast Lane” 10 spots for “rancid ideology” in his Book of Rock Lists, I’ll be in your debt. But I still recall “rancid ideology,” whatever it is. —TODD LEOPOLD

You may have read that review 40 years ago, but I wrote it coming on 56 years ago and still remember every detail of doing so, because of the bottomlessness of the music, the thrill of wrestling with it, and what felt like my own breakthrough as a critic as the words appeared on the page. I framed Rolling Stone art director Robert Kingsbury’s full page facing illustration of Susanna York from the piece’s paired title, David Bailey’s sixties elegy Goodbye Baby and Amen, and it’s still hanging on my wall over my desk, and one stray sentence is still bothering you. Robert Brownjohn, who I probably haven’t thought of since, was the hot designer of the moment for big budget album cover work. That bothered me; I thought there was nothing there and that the cover and sleeve work for Let it Bleed was no fun at all.

I wish I could ask Dave Marsh what he had in mind. But he can no longer communicate. I imagine he caught the aura, if not the smell, of entitlement and privilege that seeps out of “Life in the Fast Lane,” and the way ideology truly is made out of the way the song disguises personal celebration as social critique, thus elevating the values of money and power over truth and beauty. And the troublesome fact that it’s a great song that while doing all the other stuff also embraces truth and beauty.

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Excellent call on Charlie Gillett’s Sound of the City. One of the few books I bother to re-read every ten years or so. (And the source of an exceptional playlist drawn from the end pages.) Wondered if you had any thoughts on Arnold Shaw’s Honkers and Shouters. The two have remained valuable resources over the years. —CLIFFORD J OCHELTREE

I had Honkers and Shouters on my list and somehow it fell off. The title describes the tone and life of the book.

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Have you seen this photo of Jimmy Swaggart speaking at his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis’s funeral? It’s a nice shot, Swaggart’s upraised index finger mirroring Jerry Lee’s in the picture behind him, but before I read the caption I thought: “why is Jimmy Swaggart preaching in front of a picture of Johnny Rotten?” Then I thought: “that is a sharp suit Johnny’s wearing!” —STEVE O’NEILL

That is a true classic and a classic reading. But since it’s unlikely Jerry Lee can return the favor by speaking at Jimmy Lee’s funeral, given your ID I’ll bet Johnny Rotten would come through.

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When you read Julio Cortazar’s book Hopscotch, in what order did you read the chapters? And, do you suppose it really matters in what order one reads the chapters, despite what Brother Cortazar wrote? —JOHN CALLAHAN

I’ve only read the book in the order in which it’s printed. I’ve been told there are at least 16 different sequences one could devise. I’ve tried following the prompts at the end of each chapter but I’ve always felt that sequencing bled the narrative of any punch and momentum. To me it’s a big, fat, oozing 19th century novel. Or for that matter 18th: for all of his formal existentialism, Horacio feels to me like a version of Tom Jones—the foundling, not the singer. Or, really, maybe both.

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After many years of being thwarted, it seems, I *finally* saw Gang of Four for the first time this past Easter Sunday (talk about the sacred and profane) in Somerville, MA (or Gang of Two since the deaths of Andy Gill and Dave Allen). Ted Leo (someone who I have caught live several times over the years) and L7/Belly’s Gail Greenwood were worthy of the task of helping the Leeds post-punkers on their “Long Goodbye.” I thought the show kicked ass and they were also joined on stage by some friends—Throwing Muses’s Tanya Donelly and Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller for a few songs (an unexpected Easter Egg). Speaking of Ted, he was able to do Gill’s bridge call and response in “Damaged Goods” justice.

My impression of the show was also bolstered by seeing Jon King and Hugo Burnham in person at the Harvard Bookstore a few days prior (and the same week of Trump’s showdown with Harvard) to talk about King’s recent (and great) memoir, To Hell With Poverty! Shame they are retiring from performing live after this tour because we need them (and others like them) now more than ever. Their music sadly resonates some 46 years later as authoritarianism continues to rear its ugly head.

Were you able to catch them this time for the “Long Goodbye”? Can you share some live memories of the Gang? King speaks highly of your friendship with him in his memoir as well. Any recollections you have of your time with him as well (or any of Go4 really)?

Finally, I never really bought into the idea that Go4 peaked with the first album (seems like American critics were on board with Solid Gold from the start—I think it’s almost as good as Entertainment! for sure). But, I happen to like many cuts off of Songs of the Free, Hard (“Is It Love?” is a lost Chic B-side), and the underrated Shrinkwrapped (Go4 have taken to reviving a lost cut, “I Parade Myself”, on this tour). I know you wrote the liner notes to their Brief History of the Twentieth Century compilation but I have never been able to get my hands on a copy. Do you have any later favorites from their post-1980 catalogue that you believe speak to us today? Thanks. —ANTHONY VOLPE

I saw the Gang of Four at Sony Hall in New York on April 24 and wrote about it in the May number of Real Life Rock Top 10. The best piece on the Long Goodbye tour I saw was by Charles Taylor in his Substack “Crackers in Bed” column of May 28, “In the forest we don’t care: On Gang of Four and the language of punk,” taking in both the show I saw and the one you saw, followed by Gina Arnold’s Substack “The Raymond Chandler Project” column of May 24, “Punk in the Present Tense: Gang of Four at the Chapel, May 23, 2025,” on the show in San Francisco. Given how interesting, how original, how passionate, how thoughtful those two pieces were, I expected to find a dozen more at least nearly as good—a tribute to how passionate and thoughtful the show was—and thought they’d make a great little book, and even approached a publisher about the idea. But that was all I found.

There are a lot of their songs that can be missed. I go back to “We Live As We Dream, Alone.” I agree about “I Parade Myself”—I never really heard it until this last tour. I kind of wish they’d have written a “The Long Goodbye” number, though—about the book, not the goodbye.

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Hi Greil, It’s July 4, and the President of the United States pretty much declared his outright hatred for half of the country. Glad I’m a registered Republican (changed affiliation during 2024’s primaries, hoping to bring about a different GOP nominee).

All of this makes me further appreciate Bruce Springsteen’s spoken introductions as heard on his Land of Hope & Dreams EP. And the songs ain’t so shabby either. This EP serves as good balm with each passing day’s news cycle.

The Land of Hope & Dreams EP also cements my long held suspicion that just about every release of Springsteen’s since 1987’s Tunnel of Love would work better as pared down EPs (or, at the very least, heavily edited albums that fall under the 45 minute time marker). This is why Magic is probably the most satisfying album of Bruce’s in these past 35+ years.

Unless one is Bob Dylan, the ability for a CD or streamed album to hold more than 45 minutes’ worth of music is better for the worlds of classical, jazz, opera and fine art music, along with career compilations/retrospectives and concert albums.

All this brings to mind last Friday’s release of Tracks II: The Lost Albums. 7 albums totaling 320 minutes is a lot to digest in one week’s time (and initial impressions are just that).

For certain there are moments of power and beauty to be found in this collection. But as individual albums there isn’t a one that wouldn’t benefit from my “would’ve been even better as an EP” idea. Curious as to your take on this so far. I’m guessing that some of it might be a topic or two for an upcoming Real Life Rock column . . .

Speaking of Real Life Rock . . . I’m a bit confused with what you wrote regarding the Neil McCormick/Daily Telegraph headline, “BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S 83-SONG ‘LOST ALBUMS’ IS THE GREATEST MUSICAL TREASURE TROVE OF ALL TIME.” You wrote, “Even if the headline were true it’d be false.” While I don’t at all agree with the “greatest musical treasure trove sentiment, I shrug my shoulders and figure that what’s false to me might be a truth for Neil McCormick (or whoever pens Daily Telegraph headlines). So, short of being hyperbolic, how is it false?

Thanks always for this fine column. —BILLY INNES

It’s false because Greatest of All-Time, which has now been packaged into a brand as GOAT, is false on its face. It’s a false category. To people on the East Coast and by statistics Tom Brady is the Greatest Clutch Quarterback of All Time. But no one in the Bay Area is going to give an inch on Joe Montana, including me. And probably you.

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Hi Greil, I’ve been thinking about the Dylan’s Instagram account’s audio reels of historical figures’ “Voices from the Grave,” especially the Andrew Jackson “. . . one of his final speeches,” a fabricated lecture presenting fictionalized opinions, especially on slavery and Native Americans, that contradict historical reality. Jackson’s political acts also seem to eerily parallel that of our current president. The Stephen Foster “. . . speaks from the grave” reel is also intriguing, not least because it was followed by a Instagram reel of Paul Robeson’s 1930 performance of “My Old Kentucky Home,” which of all the recordings the Dylan Instagram account has posted is “no longer available.” Perhaps it was a technical glitch, or deliberate Dylanesque irony on the cultural wars that follow Foster’s legacy. I thought I’d submit an article on my thoughts on the “Voices from the Grave” series for your “Real Life Rock Top Ten.” The article can be found at this link.

In any case, I don’t think the “Voices from the Grave” series gets the attention it deserves. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. —FRED BALS

As I am not on any social media I know nothing about this. Your long article doesn’t convince me I’m missing anything in what seems like a playful, nihilistic game of making mostly loathsome characters into good old boys, which may tell us more about what “good old boys” actually signifies than the characters themselves.

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I confess, I have not and will not see the new Superman movie, only because Superman, Spiderman, any comic strip super hero movie, is just not for me. But I have noticed that both Superman as Clark Kent and Spiderman as Peter Parker both work for NYC newspapers, The Daily Planet and The Daily Bugle. Their bosses are Perry White and Jonah Jameson, respectively. I noticed years ago that Jameson has an editor named Robbie Robertson and the character is portrayed as African American and first appeared in print in 1967, a year before anyone (mostly) would have heard of the the real life musician, Robbie Robertson, who you knew in later years and who became famous with The Band from 1968 onwards. Was Spiderman creator Stan Lee just using alliteration in naming his character Robbie Robertson and it became a funny coincidence that there was and would be a famous rock star by that name or was Stan Lee a fan of Bob Dylan and The Hawks? Did you ever mention to the real Robbie about the comic book Robbie? And is there any link between the fictional Jonah Jameson and legendary Motown bassist James Jamerson? Forgive me, it’s summer! —JAMES R STACHO

It’s summer. When I was in college, the looniest, most flyaway papers came in, driving TAs like me as batty as they were; professors said, “It’s spring.”

Robbie Robertson is not that uncommon a name. I came across one in a 1950s issue of a Hollywood gossip magazine, about the same time one Robert Johnson was writing “The Elvis Diaries” for a movie magazine.

I haven’t seen the Superman movie. From across the street it looks good. As a comic book reader I loved the TV show. Never missed it in the ’50s. Phyllis Coates as Lois Lane was to my 7 year old self the epitome of what a woman should be. Jack Larson’s Jimmy Olsen was my idea of everything I didn’t want to be. He was even less Jewish than the Daily Planet publisher.

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Dear Greil, Are you alright? It’s been a month since you posted anything. Maybe you took a well deserved vacation. Maybe you’re just relaxing after finishing the 50th anniversary edition of Mystery Train. Or maybe you’re just in a trance from listening to the Dylan/Streisand duet of “The Very Thought Of You” (though they can’t top Ricky Nelson’s version). Bob and Barbra should do a whole album together. Really, they could be another Paul and Paula. —CRAIG ZELLER

Ok, you got me to listen to it. I didn’t want to hear Streisand. I still don’t. He’s got more soul, and more craft. He thinks through the lines, which is why they don’t vanish in the air. But neither of them could pull off “First Quarrel.” Lana Del Rey and Jack White?

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When you were writing Under the Red White and Blue, did Ned Beaumont from The Glass Key ever cross your mind as a Gatsby analog? Obviously you chose The Long Goodbye, but I think it’s possible Hammett himself might have had Gatsby in mind when he created the character. Beaumont discovers that even among gangsters there is an officer class that you either belong to or you don’t, and once he’s discharged what he sees as his duty to his employer he goes off in search for a patron worthy of his loyalty, taking the girl with him. So, a wish fulfillment Gatsby.

In my wish fulfillment Gatsby, not overly concerned with chronology, Wolfsheim decides Gatsby’s nautical experience is too valuable to abandon, so he arranges a fake death and sends him to Los Angeles to attend to his organization’s west coast interests. In Hollywood Gatsby finds himself in a quantum zone between credence and disbelief, where any factual claim he might make about himself is both provisionally believed and provisionally disbelieved. Resumes are not checked, but if it did turn out that he actually did not go to Oxford everyone would say that they knew it all along. His problem back east had not been that his tales of Oxford weren’t true but that he was not the sort of person who goes to Oxford.

His air of class and winning manner soon make him Hollywood’s bootlegger of choice, waved through the gate of every studio lot in town. Indeed, he is seen on the back lots so often that many assume he is a supervisor they have not yet been introduced to. Ben Hecht refers to him as “Wolfsheim’s Shabbas Goy.” The only customer Gatsby drinks (but does not try to match drinks) with is an ex-DA’s investigator cashiered for untimely integrity, now building his trade as a private ticket. At one point Gatsby tells him, “You’re the only cop who ever paid me.” He even sells the shamus his old Marmont when he feels the need to move up to something armor-plated.

One day in the course of his duty on Poverty Row he runs into a young extra named Faye Greener. She has a voice that sounds not like money but like dreams that never come true, and this leads to a rapport. With her main squeeze in the county lockup to repent tardy gratuities on his cockfighting business and her most ardent suitor (who she referred to only as “The Creep”) awaiting trial for trampling Shirley Temple, she is open to romantic adventure. To Faye Gatsby embodies elements of every hero of melodrama she’s ever dreamed of: mysterious past, a secret sorrow, piracy on the high seas, organized crime and hints of a noble lineage denied. In a clinch Gatsby would often muse on what movie star she was playing in her mind—Clara Bow? Garbo? Thelma Todd? Ruby Keeler? The romance blossoms. Gatsby builds them a lavish but inconspicuous residence on unincorporated land with escape routes to the north, south, east and to the coast. Soon Faye and Jay are the premier hosts in Hollywood. If the truth were told their guests were of much the same caliber Gatsby hosted in West Egg, but in Los Angeles they are the cream of the crop. Gatsby’s intimates become so eminent that he can tell Wolfsheim to take a hike.

With Gatsby, Faye’s instinct for picking the wrong man has finally failed her. Unlike Homer Simpson, Gatsby can actually bring her into contact with persons of influence in the business. Eyes that normally glazed over when a hostess says she has a “great idea for a movie” quickly narrowed, and attention quickened. Contrary to her biographer’s sneering dismissal, Faye’s imagination is wired to the America id, with a flair for dreaming the same thing just different enough to make it feel new. Soon Faye is second only to Marguerite Roberts among the ladies of the MGM story department, with a covey of stenographers to translate her hallucinations into English. She is never importuned sexually because no one wants to find out if Gatsby is the jealous type. As every leading man she dreams up is some version of Gatsby, his spectral image will haunt the Late Late Shows for decades to come.

With repeal rearing its ugly head Gatsby sells his liquor business and throws as a silent partner with Laird Brunette in a gambling ship he’s about to launch off the shore of Bay City. (In later years he will glimpse the shamus being escorted to Brunette’s office and give the escorts the high sign). As he finalizes the transfer of his business Gatsby tells the new owner, “All you’ve got to remember is when the boat is on its way in and the coast is clear, go to the end of the dock and turn on the green light.” —ROBERT FIORE

“A voice that sounds like dreams that never come true” is one for the ages. My problem is that I find Karen Black unwatchable, so Faye Greener can’t carry me through your wonderful story.

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Hi Greil—My favorite book of yours is Ranters & Crowd Pleasers, though I seem to have unfortunately misplaced it. Read many of those pieces several times over. Thanks for such inspired thinking and about punk and post-punk in particular. My question is a follow-up to one of the pieces in the book, about MTV, with a Big Country song (that is a detail I forget, but I know it’s not “In a Big Country”) as emblematic of everything that was wrong with MTV if not rock videos in general. I know you have written about the odd music video here and there. “Man on the Moon” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” come to mind. But in more recent years, has anything caught your eye? Do you ever even SEE music videos? In advance of asking this question I watched a few Lana Del Rey clips but none did much for me. They looked nice. But I’d be surprised if no one is doing any interesting work in that area. You?

Yesterday, chasing the story of founding OneRepublic bassist Tim Myers declaring his anti-Trump candidacy for Lt. Governor of California, I found myself watching the video for my favorite OneRepublic song, “Counting Stars” (I’d already watched Myers’s “California Dreamin’’’ campaign video). I realized I hadn’t looked at a promotional as opposed to a fan’s homemade video for a long time, and was struck by how much money and planning and casting and money and expertise and money and cleverness and money had gone into this parable about a revival meeting which someone must have thought related to the song though I couldn’t figure out how. There are unofficial videos for “Murder Most Foul” all over the place and sone of them are riveting, professional, full of wit and pain and style. But official videos are ads, and all these years into the form, not exactly the Crocker Bank “We’ve Only Just Begun” ad with the Carpenters’s song used in such a way that it could make you cry. For a fucking bank! you said as you tried to pretend you had something stuck in your eye.