Ask Greil: January 16, 2023

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Thanks for the opportunity to ask you this question. One of my favorite pieces by you is your late ‘90s appreciation of character actor J.T. Walsh.

I was wondering if there are any character actors working today (folks who have been around during the last 10 years) that you are a big fan of, or who approximate a similar appreciation for you that you had for Walsh. —STEVEN WARD

Patricia Clarkson. She never holds still in her characters. She can be hateful, she can draw you to her, she can be scary, she can be tough, and a Marvel director wouldn't know what to do with her. But really, though he’s most often a leading man, Harvey Keitel: the ultimate Jew-as-Italian. And John Turturo, the ultimate Italian-as-Jew.

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What impressed me most about Luhrmann's Elvis was that it reminds you that the man changed the world—and that the world made it possible for him to change it. For me, the little touches make the movie: Elvis saying he wishes he were as good as James Dean; Priscilla whispering to Elvis, "Memphis is burning," as the Colonel sprinkles fake snow on a diorama; Doja Cat drifting through the postwar Tennessee streets. Sure, the flamboyance is too on the nose, the chaos too scripted. But I don't think the movie lies to you. It just invites you to lie to yourself. Anyway, I thought of John Berryman's line: "I'm scared a only one thing, which is me." —MICHAEL ROBBINS

My favorite parts are the Little Richard performance, B.B. King as Elvis's mentor and conscience, and Col. Tom signing that contract selling out Elvis—he could get $1,00,000 for a single show in Germany and this version of Parker shops him at $1,000,000 for a year in Las Vegas. The waste, the waste. I mean, even if he'd retired in 2000, today there'd be home tapes of him fooling around with "Anarchy in the UK" and "The Message." 

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What is your view on Irish music and culture as you have lived it, whether it’s the Chieftains, The Bothy Band, Moving Hearts, Riverdance, et al.? —BEN MERLISS

I’ve been to Dublin. I know someone there. I don’t know anything about Ireland, except for the heresy of finding the Chieftains no fun. I do know that when the Chieftains’ version of “Long Black Veil” came out, with Mick Jagger singing, more than a few people were so convinced by his accent (for this modern American song) that they swore (1) it couldn’t be Mick Jagger and (2) they could tell which county in Ireland the real singer was from.

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One passage in your writing I've thought about the most is in When That Rough God Goes Riding, toward the end of the chapter on Astral Weeks:

"‘To this day it gives me pain to hear it,' [Lewis] Merenstein said in 2009 of the record he produced, then pulling away from what he just said: 'Pain is the wrong word—I'm so moved by it.' But pain is exactly the right word: the pain, the fear, of knowing that to acknowledge that the music exists at all is to acknowledge that, because it might not have, it doesn't." 

I've read other things from other people that start to make a similar point—broadly, that deeply beautiful works of art can cause us pain even as we enjoy them—but these analyses most often fork off into one of two general directions: a) "perfect things make us sad even as we enjoy them because we know they can't last" or b) "perfect things make us sad even as we enjoy them because they make more acute the imperfections of the surrounding world."

In either case, I don't know that I've ever read anything that takes it as far as you have here, saying that the very precarity of such art's creation does, in some way, annihilate it. Astral Weeks doesn't hurt us because it's over in forty-some minutes, and it doesn't hurt us because when it's over it leaves us in a world less magical that its own. Astral Weeks hurts us because to feel fully the muchness of what it is, we have to let in the nothingness of everything different it might possibly have been. As Terrence Holt said about something else, "It's worse than chaos... It's infinity." And against that kind of vastness, what can survive, really?
  
It's an idea that still stops me in my tracks, and is still frightening to read, because it opens such a void underneath so many of the things I love. It's exactly right, though. And it has been a great help to me in naming, mapping, and processing a fine vein of sadness that has run like sap through a lifetime of intake. It is, again, something I think about a lot.

My question is, have you written any more about this anywhere? I've read a lot of your stuff, but certainly not all, and while I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't something you've ever gotten into further, I'd sure love to know if you had. And if you haven't, do you know anyone else who has?

Also, someone publicly proclaiming something they're not going to say ("I am not going to use the currently mandated euphemism ‘enslaved person’") [see “Ask Greil",” 11/10/22] always feels a bit performative, but in the context of writing that has found room for things like "n*gger," "c*on," "k*ke," b*tch," and "c*nt"—sometimes even in multiple (Hi, M*chelle)—that kind of objection seems especially odd to highlight. Did something happen? Are you really out here getting so mandated? —JAMES CAVICCHIA

I’m moved that what I wrote struck you so strongly, but it now seems somewhat off the mark: almost the whole of Astral Weeks is suffused with pain, the pain of loss, the need to memorialize because anything and anyone that or who once seemed like the center of the universe has been forgotten or, worse, repressed. But that the music here might not exist at all, if the circumstances surrounding its making were just slightly different (the butterfly effect, but from one side of a single room to the other, not Japan to Paris), doesn’t necessarily evoke that pain of loss, here of could-have-been-lost. It isn’t present for me listening to the “Like a Rolling Stone” sessions, and realizing that over two days there was only one completed and usable performance, that the song came that close to being abandoned and never entering the world at all—I can’t imagine a world without “Like a Rolling Stone.” To me it’s more like “Sweet Thing”—it so strains for the brass ring and so effortlessly grasps it that it casts a shadow over ordinary life: I live in the light of the Garden of Eden, says art to Adam and Eve as they scraped for a living in the desert, why do you live in the darkness? I can see my hand in front of my face, Adam or Eve says. Your sight is blindness, says art: you will never see me. That’s what I meant when I wrote recently about how many lifetimes it would take to see half of what’s in Jackson Pollock’s “Alchemy.” Something like “Sweet Thing” impoverishes everyday life even as it elevates it. Except on days that are not everyday, as when I arrived at the wedding of a friend’s daughter “Sweet Thing” was playing, and I fell in love all over again.

And about your second question: while I think you’re right that I could have found a less self-flattering way to say it, highlighting the neologistic euphemism ‘enslaved person’ was my way of calling out what is clearly a new mandate for people writing for the New York Times that is spreading elsewhere. It’s presumably meant to grant humanity and dignity to the s*lave: to make slavery into a (temporary?) status, not an identity: “They may call me a slave, but that’s not who I really am!” But it’s a diminution. Slavery was precisely meant to wipe out one’s identity and replace it with another. Which was nothing. Slavery was not a status: it was a totalitarian project meant to deprive people of their humanity in their own eyes and those of others. The premise was even worse than the fate of those consigned to hell in Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor: “those God forgets”; slaves were not recognized by God. “Enslaved person” blunts that reality, softens it. There’s a reason Solomon Northup didn’t call his book 12 Years an Enslaved Person, even though, according to the laws and mores of his time he was not, if we are trapped in the prison of the concept, legitimately a slave at all. He was a free black person in the north who was kidnapped and sold into slavery on a fraudulent basis: legally slavery for him was a status. But he lived slavery. He was a slave. There was no but. There was no out. There was no “They’re slaves, but I’m not, not really.”

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The cliché about the “only certainties in life” can add another to the list when you live in Canada: you are certain to hear Canadian songs on the radio that only get air space through state-mandated quotas.

It's a funny system which undoubtedly butchered my generation's chances of having a real connection to the radio. To begin with, I’m pretty sure the art of broadcasting has been dead in Canada (or at least Ontario) for as long as I’ve been around (the ‘90s). I never grew up with a station that had an inspired song selection, and there was maybe one radio personality out of 50 who actually had a personality. I knew classic rock stations would get requests and always play “Summer of 69” because of the nostalgia within it and the nostalgia developed for it. But when I hear the Top 40 station still play “Stereo Love” covered by Mia Martina every year since it came out in 2009, I think, “there’s no damn way everybody is asking for this nondescript Euro-schlock to be played again and again”

All that is to say, I’m beginning a deep dive into understanding how we Canadians got to this point. One fact I stumbled on was that Ritchie Yorke (one of your ten worst rock critics circa 1982) was supposedly a major advocate for the Can-Con quotas and drafted a book in support called Axes, Chops & Hot Licks: The Canadian Rock Music Scene. The title! The content I imagine it holds within! This will no doubt be good for some laughs.

My questions to you are, do you have any commentary on the above-mentioned culture quota system, and can I borrow your copy of Axes, Chops & Hot Licks? —JOHN O FROM TORONTO

Well, if nothing else you must have All-Drake-All-the-Time... Except when it's "The Last Half Hour of No Neil Young Music has been brought to you by. . ." all the time. I think the policy might have made sense in the beginning, to give Canadian artists some breathing room in the American cultural world-historical umbrella Wim Wenders has described: "The Yanks colonized our unconscious"—and he meant by songs and movies. But it would seem a long time since the music should have had to stand on its own feet. One thing I loved, and understood, about Top 40 radio in the ‘50s and early ‘60s was that it was the most unbridled, unashamed, loud and gaudy form of laissez-faire capitalism anyone had ever contrived. As Nik Cohn put it, "Anarchy had moved in." Would any rational capitalist system, never mind the most benevolent socialist regime, or for that matter a ‘70s Peace Love and Understanding commune in Sedona, Arizona, in 1971, ever permitted "The Book of Love" or "Bo Diddley" or "If You Wanna Be Happy" through the cracks? They would have had to move "The Message" up through three committees or encounter groups before deciding it was just too harsh, even if it was, you know, kind of catchy. What you're saying is that's exactly what you missed. 

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Happy New Year Greil, and good luck with your new endeavor on Substack. The story about losing your glasses in Hawaii was interesting [12/6/22]—how you looked for them everywhere and then they showed up just when you had given up and stopped searching. It's a good lesson about how little the universe cares about us, and how so much that happens is just dumb luck. We don't like to believe that, but I think it's true. Speaking of weird theme music choices, the VISA commercials during the Canadian World Cup broadcasts had Glen Campbell's cover of "It's Only Make Believe." Conway Twitty/Glen Campbell for an international event appealing mostly to young people? Very odd. The opening music for the broadcasts was, I'm sure, the first few chords of the guitar intro to "Then He Kissed Me." Your misreading the title of Gavin Butt's book reminded me of when I did something very similar. I had loaned my brother the second volume of Peter Guralnick's Elvis bio, and after I got it back, I was putting it back on my bookshelf and was shocked to see that it was subtitled The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. I've had that book for 20 years and I had always thought the subtitle was The Unmasking... When I told my brother about it, he said that he had always thought that too. Weird how sometimes you see what you expect or want to see.

Burton Cummings recently played a concert commemorating his 75th birthday in Winnipeg... at the Burton Cummings Theatre. There was a lot of media coverage, of course, and a lot of it centered on the Guess Who playing at the Nixon White House in 1970, and being told not to play "American Woman," although now they say that their manager just made up that story to help their street/rebel cred. Jackson Browne played the Burton Cummings about ten years ago and made a good joke about "Was the theater named after him, or was he..." Browne was quite funny and his concert was really impressive. At one point, some smartass yelled out a request for "Doctor My Eyes," which Browne had just done a few minutes before. Browne said "Where the fuck were you 10 minutes ago? Maybe in 10 years I won't catch that...." Very sharp. All the best —PETER DANAKAS

Regardless of how cynical it might have been, “Share the Land” justifies him getting a theater in his name.

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Greil: Along with the Shangri-Las, my own special HOF pleading would be for Dionne Warwick and Tommy James. I think for a lot of people my age (61), Warwick's late-'60s radio hits are among your first and best Top 40 memories; add to that her earlier hits ("Walk on By," obviously), "Then Came You" with the Spinners later, and I'm perplexed she's not in. (A recent CNN documentary may give her an extra push.)

Tommy James had a couple of huge hits I don't care for ("Hanky Panky" and "Mony Mony"), one I like a lot ("I Think We're Alone Now"), and three I love: "Crimson and Clover" (brilliant), "Crystal Blue Persuasion," and "Draggin' the Line." Three of those were also big hits for others, so he's had some influence, too.

Do you think either one belongs? —ALAN VINT

I swear on the grave of Garfield Akers—wherever it is—that I will never get trapped by this game. But it’s like eating one potato chip.  

I’m dubious about Warwick, unless she and Lesley Gore can be inducted together for the two-sided single “Don’t Make Me Over” and “You Don’t Own Me.” Lesley Gore deserved so much better. So much more. And Tommy James should walk right in. I always thought “Hanky Panky” was fluff until one day I was overwhelmed by its building intensity—and heard “Be Bop a Lula” uncoiling inside of it like a snake. “Crimson and Clover” was good on the radio but it wasn’t until I heard the long version with its endless tumbling fuzz-as-the-meaning-of-life guitar solos that I realized how much Tommy James wanted and how much he got. But it’s really his irresistible book Me, the Mob, and the Music that to me takes him there. Find someone who’s already in there who’s got their name on a book about the number one rock ‘n’ roll gangster—and Tommy James is far from the only one who could write it—so completely lacking in either apology or cynicism and I’ve got a nice velvet painting of Morris Levy you can have for free. Or a million dollars. Depending.

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I wasn’t exactly sure in what way Swift’s Midnights was the musical equivalent of Dylan’s “autopen” scam [“Real Life Rock,” Dec. 19]. Could you please expand on that? —ANDREW MACDONALD

It sounds to me as if it were made by a machine, and I don’t mean Taylor Swift herself is a machine.

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Re: Dylan's Christian songs you recently commented that "BD said in an interview" that they were "very possibly lies." I take very little of what he says about these things at face value—I think he can be particularly evasive when it comes to religion—but I'm curious is this interview available?

Thanks and I hope you are well. — ERIC GREENE

That comes from an interview with Paul Zollo, "The SongTalk Interview," from SongTalk, 1991. I found it in Younger Than That Now—The Collected Interviews with Bob Dylan, published by Thunder's Mouth in 2004. Here's the relevant part:
PZ: Would it be ok with you if I mentioned some lines from your songs out of context to see what response you might have to them?
—and he quotes from "Absolutely Sweet Marie":
"I stand here looking at your yellow railroad/In the ruins of your balcony..."
BD: …Now, you know, look, that's as complete as you can be. Every single letter in that line. It's all true. On a literal and on an escapist level.
—Zollo goes on to quote more songs, finally reaching:
“But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency...”
BD: Now, don't tell me… wait... Is that “When You Gonna Wake Up?"
PZ: No, that's from "Slow Train."
BD: Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. Wow. There again. That's a song that you could write a song to every line in that song. You could. 
PZ: Many of your songs are like that.
BD: Well, you know, that's not good either. Not really. In the long run, it could have stood up better by doing just that, maybe taking every line and making a song out of it. If somebody had the willpower. But that line, there again, is an intellectual line. It's a line, “Well, the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency.” That could be a lie. It just could be. Whereas “Standing under your yellow railroad,” that's not a lie.

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Hi Greil and happy and hopefully, healthy 2023 to you. One of the first columns of yours I ever read was your review of Bob Dylan's 1978 album Street Legal in Rolling Stone. I re-read it in your book Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010 and it included a postscript [noting] that RS editor Jann Wenner reviewed the album himself in a later issue of the magazine. You panned Street Legal and I think JW said something like the drums sounded like shoeboxes. But he liked the album a little more than you did especially “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power).” Then, when Dylan released Slow Train Coming in '79, JW did the review and praised it highly. I know you never liked much of Dylan's so called Born Again period. And that began a 20-year search by critics for Dylan's “comeback.” Whether it was Infidels, Empire Burlesque, or Oh, Mercy! there were always reviews and promotions of those albums as comebacks. No one could entirely agree until Time Out Of Mind, and with that 1997 release, Dylan was finally granted a reprieve from having to make a comeback. And with the possible exceptions of his Sinatra recordings or his Christmas album (I'll bet the 1968 Greil Marcus would never have imagined those future releases, much less Self Portrait in '70) Dylan's latest studio work has been well received by critics. You've mentioned a forthcoming review of the soon to be released TOOM outtakes from Sony's Bootleg Series. When can we expect to read your thoughts on that and why did critics coalesce in their praise of that particular album before all the previous comebacks? —JAMES R STACHO

I don’t understand the notion of ‘the critics’ as some self-reinforcing cabal of cowardly opinion, let alone an entity that can control public taste and grant or withhold approval at will. Particularly at Rolling Stone in the 1980s, there was some insensate desire to rescue Dylan from his pop apostasy with Jesus and return him to the world: therefore Infidels had to be a masterpiece—it had protest songs!—and then everything after had to be the real comeback after it became clear that the previous real comeback wasn’t it because no one was listening. But not everybody bought into that. As Dylan’s records became increasingly diffuse, desperately trend jumping with flavor of the month sidemen, and terrible haircuts, people just lost interest. I couldn’t tell you what’s on those records. 

What most people with any interest in either Bob Dylan or American music as a fact and an idea seemed to miss were the exquisite, no-hay-banda collections of old ballads and blues—music from the twenties through the forties, tweaked and combined but mostly strictly traditional—in 1992 and ‘93 as Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. They were both invested with passion and drew out reserves of craft that had barely been touched in years, with an intellectual commitment that was altogether new. Time Out of Mind came out of that.

How that happened, all the stages that argument went through, is on the forthcoming Time Out of Mind box. I’ll be writing about it in a “Real Life Rock Top 10” column set to run January 20. I just have to write it first, and I may be writing about it for the rest of the year. That may bore readers to death but the music will not bore listeners.

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Reading Folk Music side by side with The Philosophy of Modern Song. Unintentionally, blew through David Hackett Fischer's African Founders more rapidly than expected. Much early commentary on the Dylan book focused on the near absence of women or perceived misogyny. In conversation with others I suggested that the selection of songs by Dylan may have had more to do with choosing recordings about which he had something to “say.” Not a matter of the “best” but music which motivated his muse.

As an outgrowth of those thoughts my mind wandered to your process. Which came first? The songs as motivation or did the chosen themes select the songs as framework?

Side note. My wife appreciated the mention(s) of Tony Glover, her late cousin. —CJ OCHELTREE

The songs came first. They were pieces I hadn’t written much about before, that I wanted to write about, as attractions (“Ain’t Talkin’’’) or conundrums (“Blowin’ in the Wind”) or as time travelers (“The Times They Are A-Changin’”). I didn’t know what themes they would turn up. The book wasn’t written to make a point or state a thesis. It was written for fun.

Tony was an old and dear friend.

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I was underwhelmed by Mr. Halberstadt’s book [12/22/22]. Doc Pomus’s story is worth the full length of a book, but Mr. Halberstadt fell short of making it work in book form. I noticed you hadn’t mentioned the book in your notes for The History Of Rock And Roll In Ten Songs, like you did the documentary AKA Doc Pomus (which I agree with your assessment on and feel it managed to articulate Pomus’s story the way it seemed meant to be told), and I wondered if you might have felt the same way about the book as I did. Mr. Halberstadt’s research appeared stellar and accurate, and the book’s primary flaw seemed to be in the editing, with Halberstadt losing touch of the flow after the beginning of Pomus’s songwriting career. This of course doesn’t mean you’d feel the same way if you did end up reading it. Peter Guralnick and Dave Marsh both endorsed the book upon release in 2007 (with the latter calling it “possibly the greatest rock biography ever”), and so I expected to enjoy it more than I ultimately did. The biggest disappointment for me, however, was the skimpy selection of excerpts from Pomus’s diaries which didn’t manage to hold Halberstadt’s narrative together in the same way as say Brian Epstein’s diary excerpts as used for Debbie Geller’s In My Life. I wondered what other possible narratives could have coalesced around the writings of Pomus’s unshared in Halberstadt’s book.

Did you ever have such high expectations for a book that ended up disappointing you Mr. Marcus? —BEN MERLISS

“Western Voices,” the first half of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, was so swirling, like a dust storm, so suffused with what felt like a soul-stepping attempt to understand the people he was writing about, the squalor of their material and spiritual lives, unafraid of letting the mystical coexist with the ordinary, that to turn the page to “Eastern Voices,” and to be plunged into the deeper squalor of transactional speech, the self-flattery, the reduction of all people and stories to commodities, was soul killing, and book killing.

The TV movie with Tommy Lee Jones and Rosanna Arquette is worth it.

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Greil— I think a lot about your assertion that Dylan had a connection with “The Old, Weird America” that differentiates him from other artists like Bruce Springsteen. I think the comparison may hold up for The Grateful Dead and other jam bands (Phish), and I wonder if this comparison is a consistent theme in your critical work.

Thanks for your writing! —DAVID AXELROD (not the one from CNN)

I’m not on the lookout for potential citizens of the Invisible Republic, as the artist Bruce Conner once declared himself, but it’s a fun game to play. Bruce Springsteen crossed over into that territory as he drove in circles in “Stolen Car.” The Grateful Dead were there with “Cold Rain and Snow.” Phish were arrested at the border, stripped of their guitars, and told to go home.

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