Ask Greil: February 16, 2025

I read your contribution to “Here It Is Saturday” a week or two ago and that got me thinking about who could play Philip Marlowe now. The name I came up with was Jon Hamm. HBO could make six seasons with each season devoted to one novel. (Or seven, if they did Playback.) I think Marlowe the character and Hamm-as-Don-Draper, the one role where the man and the role met perfectly, share a few key traits. Each has some principle(s) he will not betray. (In Draper’s case, his one principle, as voiced in Mad Men’s pilot, was that advertising told people that “everything is OK.” No matter how curdled he became in other areas of his life, he never stopped believing in this.) Both men conveyed a sense of being apart—of existing somehow a step or two outside of the regular run of humanity. And both always seemed to be observing what they were experiencing at the same time they were experiencing it.

I’m not optimistic that HBO, or any other production outfit, would be able or willing to devote the money to making a series like this. (The fact that the latest version of Perry Mason only lasted two seasons wouldn’t help.) And whether there are writers and directors who could get it right, I don’t know. But I think it could be good—maybe even coming in third among all the Marlowes, after the Bogart/Hawks/Faulkner version, and Cast a Deadly Spell, with Fred Ward playing a character called Harry Philips Lovecraft, but who is clearly Marlowe by another name. —BILL WOLFE

You got me going. I’ve been trying to think about this as broadly as possible, following the recent Marlowe novels written by present day writers, one bringing a much older Marlowe into the 1990s, playing with time frames, imagining Marlowe as black, female, Hispanic, Asian, gay. You need someone who can be funny, who is tough but also sentimental, alluring and anonymous, and maybe most of all lonely. Many of those who I’d love to see take on the role—and here the writer and director have to be up to reimagining the character, the setting, the political climate as much as the actor—are perhaps too old, but include Jeffrey Wright, Keanu Reeves, Bill Pullman, Kevin Spacey. Then Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody. Bowen Yang might be able to pull it off—wharever his range it hasn’t been tested. Most obviously and easily cast is someone you mention yourself: Matthew Rhys, just moving offices from Perry Mason’s to Marlowe’s. There is Sterling K. Brown, who was so powerful in American Fiction. Vincent D’Onofrio was pretty much Marlowe combined with the Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook in Criminal Intent—we could say too old, now, too heavy, but who knows? But the best might be the Irish actor Andrew Scott. He’s shown many shades, but his roles in All of Us Strangers and Ripley make me want to see him here. Not that I disagree at all about John Hamm.

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Hello Greil, I hope you are well and enjoying a good beginning to the year—all things considered. The time is certainly right for a new surge of protest songs and I wondered how they’d begin to show themselves…. I didn’t expect the first eruption to occur at the Super Bowl. But I think it did…. Kendrick Lamar’s show, transforming his nemesis Drake into MAGA incarnate and ending with an American flag comprised of African American dancers—the Red, White, Blue, and Black—was message enough. But the appearance of Uncle Sam Jackson in full patriotic regalia was inspired. The cheeky image was right out of the more inspired scribblings of hallowed undergrounders like R. Crumb and, in particular, Art Spigelman, whose cover for Comic Art magazine showed a burly Uncle Sam jamming a gas pump directly into a vein tied-off by an American flag. Naturally right-wingers saw all this satire as the real thing, a capitulation to Trump’s “New Golden Era.” I saw it as a slap in the face of the man in the glass booth who would make his escape before Lamar had finished his set. Not a bad beginning to a new Golden Age of protest. Unless, of course I’m misreading it and Jackson/Lamar were on the level. In which case, I’ll retire to bedlam. —CHARLIE LARGENT

I think the idea of a coded protest is not going to make your case. Bob Dylan may have once said he didn’t want to do so-called finger-pointing songs. But when, as in “Who Killed Davey Moore?” he pointed a finger at every conceivable actor who in one way or another set the stage for a boxer’s death in the ring, he opened up a public debate on that question, and on the nature of culpability itself. He posited a public conversation. If indeed Kendrick Lamar staged a pageant to criticize Trump by proxy…well, there’s only one person sensitive enough to slights and slurs to make that connection, a person who can’t control himself in such situations, and who does make slips—as, today, discussing his plan for the United States to take possession of Gaza and “own it,” he spoke the real fantasy, saying, as regards what he framed as a “real estate” deal, “I will own it.” So if Trump defends Drake and attacks Lamar, as he is, now, comparing the Super Bowl receptions of himself and Taylor Swift, that will prove your point—but, as it were, in the realm of private disputes that have no real public, which is to say political, dimension. In other words, protest isn’t gossip, and if Lamar did what you’re suggesting, gossiping is all he was doing.

Saying no—saying this is wrong, this cannot stand, a killer stands among us—saying, and it takes nerve to say it, “Who among us will cast the first stone? I will cast it”—is not easy. In essence it means finding a way to make people realize the emperor has no clothes. You don’t do that by dressing up. You leave yourself naked in the public square, but in a way that allows people to realize that you are clothed in the truth, and it’s not about you at all.

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Hey Greil, Am curious if Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl show made an impression on you. I found it riveting and have watched it at least a dozen times since. From his saying “The revolution ’bout to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy”…right smack in the presence of Super Bowl attendee Donald Trump to the wicked grin he flashed when saying, “Say, Drake…I hear you like ’em young.” It may be the most rock ’n’ roll performance I’ve ever seen on that stage (with the exception of Prince). For every ignorant naysayer who balks at the inclusion of Hip Hop in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Kendrick’s performance this past weekend was more “Rock & Roll” than anything I’ve ever seen on that hallowed hall’s stage (with the exception of Prince’s guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”).

Also, before I close this…I just read your book What Nails It. I liked it so much that I read it a second time upon finishing it. For a fellow who seldom gets too autobiographical, this book could serve as a primer of when it is beneficial to a reader for a writer to share some of life’s details. If the fates allow, I’ll look forward to reading What Nails It a few more times in the years to come.

Thanks always for this column. —BILLY INNES

I suppose I lean on the Lil Wayne side of all this. That Lamar can equate the Revolution with trolling Drake to me says more than I want to hear. The revolution is taking place as we discuss something else and it’s not being televised.

I’m glad my book came across for you. I was lucky to have the chance to write it.

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I am trying to find the 1973 interview you mention in a footnote on page 265-66 of Mystery Train, i.e. about Leiber & Stoller, the response to “Hound Dog” by others in the commune they lived in when the 1953 record was released. It is a pretty hilarious story and you have a quote from Barbara Rose. I’ve searched with no success. I’m doing a “before Elvis” set on my radio show (The Radical Songbook, piratebutteradio.com) and will quote from your book. It’d be great to learn more. Thanks for your writings. I have learned a lot from you. Take care. —MICHAEL FUNKE

Sometime in the early 1980s, I heard from Michael Roloff, the publisher of Urizen Books, a small company that emphasized modern German literature, and especially books by Peter Handke. I knew that work and also the 1978 Urizen edition of Isabelle Anscombe’s 1978 Punk, which collected photos of London punks posing on the street—each person seeming to have just at that moment come into their own, everyone communicating pride, confidence, or a sly sense of a secret yet to be told. There was also a brief introduction comparing punk stages to the 1916 Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and the spookiest picture of Johnny Rotten I’d ever seen. The book had a kind of founding influence on my Lipstick Traces of eleven years later—where I reproduced that Johnny Rotten picture.

Michael wanted me to write an introduction for a book of lyrics by Jerry Leiber for Weimar cabaret-styled songs he had written with Mike Stoller in the manner of “Is That All There Is?” their 1969 hit with Peggy Lee. To help he sent me the transcript of an interview he’d done with Leiber, Stoller, and Leiber’s then wife, the art critic and historian Barbara Rose, where the whole story of the early 1950s interracial, male and female, illegal Los Angeles Communist commune that Leiber was part of came up. It’s an extraordinary story about Stalinist condemnation of popular culture and the idiocy of the commodity-brainwashed masses, to which Leiber and Stoller were accused of contributing with junk like Big Mama Thornton’s 1952 R&B hit with their song “Hound Dog.”

I looked at the lyrics to many songs that were never recorded or released, and they were dead on the page. The book never came to pass. But I did keep the interview, and for the 2008 edition of Mystery Train—after I’d met Mike Stoller at the Paris Cartier Center’s 2007 exhibition on early rock ’n’ roll, and was able to flesh out the tale—I used it as a long footnote on “Hound Dog” to pass the story on.

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Have you given up on contemporary music? You almost never write about anything current unless it’s someone you’ve followed for a long time—like Kim Gordon. In particular, as the author of the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia on Girl Groups, I wonder if you hear anything in artists like (all of whom I enjoy) Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Charlie XCX, Baby Queen (“Quarter Life Crisis”—great title) and Olivia Rodrigo? —CHUCK

It’s true there’s less music of the moment in Real Life Rock Top 10 than there used to be, though always there were columns with nothing contemporary at all. The idea was never to keep up, to be a guide to anything. In 1986 the first column included a track off a Columbia promo album by a band called the Reducers, Billy Ocean’s “When The Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going,” a track by Lime, “Brand New Hairdo” by the Costello Show, but also a tiny rubber Godzilla toy, a cut from a Sam Cooke anthology, a Sandy Denny collection, a Bette Midler number from a movie, and a biography of the Appalachian singer and song collector Bascom Lamar Lunsford and a critical essay on Little Richard. Everything there caught my ear and moved me in one way or another. I could, if I tried, find the people you mention and many more interesting, for some reason, in some context, but they don’t move me, so I don’t care.

The column has always taken on some of the color and tone of wherever it’s appearing. Substack to me is just the other writers there I read, especially Nick Hornby, Hanif Kureishi, Bill Hogeland, and Gina Arnold. I find myself drawn more to wrestling with what makes certain new novels different and compelling—lately Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, and Colson Whitehead’s last three, and taking all the time and space they seem to want, and I always feel like I’m scratching the surface, if that. I want to write about more movies. I want to be blindsided by a song, but in truth my frame of feeding reference is not what is used to be. I never listen to the radio in the car, which used to be half of my musical life, because I haven’t driven for three years. I’m sent almost no CDs. I go to the record store regularly and look around and take home what looks interesting. Is the past more interesting than the present? Maybe. But when I hear something old and it feels new, like I’ve never really heard it before, heard all or even a fraction of what’s in it, it’s not the past, and I love to write about that.

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I look forward to Ask Greil monthly since it started. I have asked a question once before and you so kindly answered. Answered so well too! (I may have submitted 2 questions over the years your replies were appreciated again.) Anyway I think I like most of the readers here really look forward to the Dylan questions. I’m sure you know that the Dylan fans drive your readership…so thank you again of course you make sure the Dylan questions are always included and multiple usually. My question is this: You have written so poetically and beautifully and honestly of Dylan over the years (and yes in all your books in other subjects…which I’ve read ) but I do wonder? … It seems you have a resistance to really just openly saying you love Dylan and admire him and his work. Sometimes you straight up show disdain for some of his work that serious fans really like. You make sure to make a point of not being a Dylanologist or completist. I can believe that and that is fine…but…to say you can’t remember one song from Desire? Really. Now is that just being cute and getting a point out in a masked way that you hate that album…or do you really not know one song on Desire? That’s hard to fathom to be almost embarrassing based on your knowledge of musical history. —JAMES O’DONNELL

I know songs from Desire. “Isis” set a high bar and consistently grew through live performances. I just can’t tell you all the songs and in what order they appear, because I don’t care. As opposed to, say, John Wesley Harding. The difference is that I was pulled into the world of that record the first time I heard it played, on the radios, first track to last, and every time I hear it, each song sounds more unlikely, even unresolved, than it did before.

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Greil—My favourite moment among many in A Complete Unknown is between Dylan and Baez, right after Baez asks Dylan to play “Blowin’ in the Wind” for her and she joins in halfway through (paraphrasing).

Baez: “So that’s...what?”
Dylan: “I don’t know.”

I thought that beautifully captured the template for the entire film—people reacting to Dylan, trying to process what they were hearing—and something fundamental about the mystery of great art, the point where explanations aren’t needed or even possible. —ALAN VINT

To me that’s weak dialogue, poor writing. The script asks a question and then can’t think of an answer.

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Dear Greil, I’m wondering if you ever experience the “trust the art, not the artist” struggle that some of us grapple with. I’m thinking that especially since you have had to opportunity to meet with or get to know some of your icons, you may have had to learn to understand the difference between accepting or even idolizing genius and accepting or making peace with that genius’s personal flaws or bad behavior.

Some artists are understood to be “difficult,” whatever that means, and some might be truly awful humans. Some (fewer) are reported to be totally regular or even exemplary human beings. Great genius often comes in a complicated human package.

I personally struggle with really loving, deeply, someone’s music, even though I know they may be at best “enigmatic,” and at worst, tyrannical or unkind or awful in various ways.

And, if I expect someone to be exemplary, and that person is proven to be quite human and flawed, the fall off the pedestal is painful for me.

How do you manage to admire genius and ignore behavior that offends? Rock and roll has had offending (certain) others as a core value for a long time…and yet idolizing someone’s work without admiring the person proves difficult for me.

I’m interested in your thoughts. —SHARON McCARRELL

I have to admit I have no ethical standards around this question. I’ve found that despite better intentions, my ability or proclivity to ignore vile acts by people whose work has become part of my life depends entirely on how much the work means to me. I didn’t decide to boycott Woody Allen movies because, when trying to justify his then-affair with his supposed paramour Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, which is to say the sister of his own children with Farrow, he said she wasn’t really a daughter or a sister, because she was adopted—and thus fair game for anyone who wanted to turn her out, whether toward himself or the street. This didn’t disgust me only because of my own sense of what is right and what is wrong, but probably more because of the fact that I was adopted, and never considered my siblings, with the same mother but a different father, anything less than my brothers or sister—though my own circumstances informed, in a considered way, my sense of right and wrong. It was that when I then went to Woody Allen movies they turned my stomach because his life outside of them made it impossible to see them as anything but exercises in self-flattery, exculpation, and manipulation of both his actors and his audience. In the same way, I came to doubt—to lose my ability to be moved by—Pete Seeger’s sincerity, which is the essential element of his music, given that this person who was so ready to embrace so many as his brother always made it a point to never mention Mike Seeger, who I knew, as I didn’t know Pete Seeger, as his half-brother. Even though he always referred to his similarly familial sister Peggy Seeger as his sister—because, I had to conclude, she shared his Communist Party politics, and thus was his sister under heaven, and Mike didn’t, making him his brother only in a legal, accidental and ultimately meaningless, manner.

So I would say this. Like what you like and hate what you hate. Don’t ever apologize, to yourself or anyone else, for anything in the world that draws you in or repels you from it.

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