Ask Greil: January 18, 2024

Hi, Greil, all best things in the New Year.

1/ Ruth Seymour's obit eventually brought me here. A bit of "Ubu Unplugged" for your files, on the off chance you missed it back then, and in case you ever give David and gang the Rough God-style full book treatment. David even provides a potential title "The Platonic Ideal of Ralph Kramden." (Deirdre mentions Weill, but the accordion number also brings Vigo's L'Atalante to mind.)

2/ Wondering if you can confirm or deny being the actual author of the brilliant Bangs impersonation "From the Cloud of Lester Bangs" which accompanied your deftly compiled Carburetor Dung collection of his work as a diverting postscript. Most of my friends have assumed so since 1987, but there have been a few dissenters. Please advise. (From the Wayne Newton and Dave Marsh framework through to the Rick Nelson and Singing Nun references, it was richly wry in both conception and execution.) Take care, thanks. —CRAIG PROCTOR

About the Pere Ubu: Thank you for this little treasure chest. I don’t think Thomas has ever sounded more like the performer, the voice, that he wanted to be. He’s running on the momentum of persona transforming into art into real life: this is who I really am, not just this bag of skin and bones and a face and a mind full of resentment and loathing, so that when he goes off like a rocket singing “What Happened to Me” in French it sounds better than it does when the trio does it straight. And that lecture about the mission, the lost cause—David has given that self-mocking sermon for years and it’s a dart to the heart every time.

I’ll listen to this over and over. They should have released it. So glad you found it.

As for “From the Cloud of Lester Bangs,” it’s a good story.

Dave Marsh, who came up with the subtitle for the Lester Bangs collection I edited, “Rock and Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock and Roll” (people should have remembered that when the controversy over Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize broke out), received the first communication by mail not long before Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (Lester’s title), which came out in 1987, four years after Lester died, was going to press. We were both flummoxed. Though neither of us believed in an afterlife, and there was one off note—in the first letter the putative Lester refers to me as Marcus, and no one who knew me would ever refer to me as anything but Greil—there were moments when we were half convinced it was for real. The tone was just too right. Then the Wayne Newton letter, and the whole Boss-Marsh-Newton-Springsteen confusion was even more of a Lester flight of the imagination. We simply decided that whatever they were, the letters had to open and close the book cold, and let the truth emerge, somehow—and Knopf didn’t blink.

I don’t remember if we figured it out or he came clean—and we were both so disappointed to find out that it was all earth-bound in the end—but the letters were a prank, or a gift, from Mark Shipper, the umatched rock satirist who in 1980 published his hilarious and touching alternative history of the Beatles, Paperback Writer. This was his coup de grace.

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What was the last comedy album you listened to, and what did you think of it? —OLIVER HALL

I haven’t listened to anything recent in ages. I often play the Richard Pryor set …And It’s Deep Too! straight through. I play Robert Klein albums a lot—he’s no genius, he’s not the Firesign Theatre or Monty Python, whose albums I played hundreds of times while writing Lipstick Traces, but there’s something honest, unforced, small about his stuff that keeps bringing me back. I play comedy albums while I’m writing. No other time.

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What are your full views on The Maltese Falcon, both book and film? I’ve only seen you mention them in passing before. —BEN MERLISS

I can best respond to questions that are engaged rather than passive, that give me something to rub against. What do you think of The Maltese Falcon, book and movie? Regarding another Ask, what biographies of movie actors have you found entrancing or insulting, and what was it about them that made them so? The Ask column is meant as a literary forum: a conversation rather than someone issuing judgments from on high. Or operating as a recommending librarian. Ok?

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I could have sworn someone asked you this before but no luck in searching. What is your recollection of the first time you heard Music From Big Pink? And did you take to it immediately? The latter is of interest to me because as someone quite a bit younger than you I know I'm not alone in saying Big Pink and the Band in general didn't register immediately at all. I'd read a lot about them (including Mystery Train) but by the time I dove in I... didn't get it. Many plays over many years did the trick for me, but my impression is that in 1968 the response to it was immediate. Thoughts? —TERRY

It was immediate. Whatever the chart position of the album, in many communities it was number one, and number one all year. In Berkeley—and this was true in any place that years before harbored a folk or blues scene—you heard the songs coming out of windows. FM rock radio had begun in San Francisco in 1967, so by 1968 there were radio outlets all over where “Chest Fever” got more play than “Crimson and Clover” did on AM (though the best FM stations were playing the long version of “Crimson and Clover”). You’d see groups of people singing “The Weight” as they walked down the street.

It was a new perspective on the country and the world seen in a mirror that reflected back the present as Daniel Boone’s frontier. It was like a new language that people were born knowing but had forgotten. So it was a kind of explosion. And it affected other musicians just as much. 

Look up Al Kooper’s Rolling Stone review of Music from Big Pink. Read Nik Cohn’s page on the Band in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. You’ll see—you’ll hear—the sense of shock and celebration the record brought out in so many, the shock of being displaced into your own time—what Melville called the shock of recognition, which was also the smile of recognition.

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Greil, I am reading this recent book: Klan War by Fergus M. Bordewich and came upon this quote:

For the next three hours, Butler laid out the articles of impeachment, disappointing listeners in the gallery who expected a slashing attack, until the end when he scathingly declared Johnson, who gained power only by the virtue of John Wilkes, "BY MURDER MOST FOUL DID HE SUCCEED TO THE PRESIDENCY AND IS THE ELECT OF AN ASSASSIN TO THAT HIGH OFFICE, AND NOT OF THE PEOPLE."

Have you seen the book? Your thoughts?

Happy Holidays. —ED GRAZDA

I’m printing that out and posting it on the cover of my copy of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Everyone says the phrase “Murder most foul” is from Macbeth and it is but this transmission is far closer to home and at once honors Shakespeare and Lincoln and Bordewich himself. The linguistic political, and religious echoes in the terrifying phrase ‘the elect of an assassin’ are not decipherable.

JFK’s Profiles in Courage distorted and whitewashed Johnson’s impeachment. The Republicans, most of them, wanted him gone. The charges were contrived and insufficient. But there’s evidence that the senator JFK celebrated as standing on principle and securing Johnson’s one vote acquittal was bribed—along with others on both sides. So good nothing like that could happen today. Except on the Supreme Court.

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Wishing good health for the coming year. Like you, I’ve no desire to hear the new Dylan Budokan. But I have bootlegs from summer shows in Europe (Paris, Blackbushe, etc.) and fall US shows (Charlotte in particular) which are for me vastly superior to the early shows. More for the band than Dylan’s performance. It’s unfortunate that Budokan was released with pristine sound and we’re left with poor to fair sounding later concerts. I wondered if you’ve ever heard the later shows and whether they are more listenable than Budokan. —VINCENT

I saw the basic show in Oakland in 1978 and really didn’t want to go back there again. I’m not a completist. Which can have its drawbacks. In 1969 after hearing a tape of Dylan and the Hawks at Manchester in 1966 I knew there couldn’t be anything better. Until I heard the show from Newcastle, which probably isn’t better, but takes place in a bigger dimension.

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Were you ever a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson? —BEN MERLISS

I read Treasure Island over and over. At 10 I thought Long John Silver was the best character I'd ever come across. I found Kidnapped very upsetting and only read it once.

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Which of your books do you feel was the least understood (at least based on reviews or reader feedback)? You have said you are fine with receiving bad reviews but does it pain you to be completely misunderstood? I recently came across a pan of The History of Rock and Roll in Ten Songs (I can't point to it as it was just "in passing" as it were and I didn't bother to bookmark it) and all I could think was, "this guy just doesn't get it." Meaning, not that his opinion wasn't valid but that he seemed to read a completely different book than the one I read. —TERRY

I know I write elliptically and in metaphors, which is too much trouble for some people, including reviewers who think they don’t have time for writing that asks for engagement and mostly just want to get it over with. I had to confront this from the start, in 1975, when my late friend Tony Glover said that the trouble with my book Mystery Train was that “you have to think while you’re reading it.” To me that was both a great compliment and a problem. I wanted the book to read like a flowing conversation, where any ideas or arguments or reframing of the questions of what culture is and what it’s for would simply be carried along in the interchange between the writer and the subjects, without the intellectual ambitions of the book ever calling attention to themselves. And I’ve tried to work in that way ever since, with myself as my own ideal reader: Never mind writing: do I care enough about this to keep reading?

Some books that I think have most purely distilled what I can do, for whatever that may be my worth, have been ignored, like The Dustbin of History or Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations (terrible title) or Under the Red White and Blue. Others, like Lipstick Traces, have been taken up by critics and readers and lived a life. Some, like Invisible Republic aka The Old Weird America, have presumably found their readers because they are so consistently plagiarized.

My feeling has always been, I had my chance, now it’s yours. I’ve never quarreled in print with people who, to me, misread, mischaracterize, or even willfully distort and dismiss what I’ve done (and that happened especially with the first US reviews of Lipstick Traces, which were rough—luckily, I was insulated by the first review the book got, by Jerome McGann in the London Review of Books, which remains the best and most gratifying piece the book has received anywhere). I hated the Village Voice tradition where when someone had a book panned they’d write a letter to the editor condemning the character, education, sex, or geographical location of whoever criticized them, as if that left their criticisms, which were never addressed, prima facie illegitimate—to the point that when I made a terrible error in a Voice music piece, and no one noticed, I wrote the Voice a letter, under my own name, attacking myself in the most base and contemptuous manner, and then, as writers were always allowed to respond, replied with a further attack on myself for attacking me. I thought this satire, which also served to correct my original error in print, might embarrass some people to be a little less pompous, at least in public, but of course it didn’t. I have only written in after a review when someone accused me of saying something factual that I didn’t say or not saying something that I did.

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Respectfully Mr. Marcus, I'm not sure I agree with your adherence to St. James's logic where Aftermath is concerned [see Dec. 18 2023], because it didn't stop you from singling out "Paint It Black" as one of The Rolling Stones "Definitive Moments," from Aftermath in your "Stones On The Trail" article from 1975. Nor did it stop you from identifying "Not Fade Away" as a better opening to The Rolling Stones debut album when you reassessed it in 2004 even though it had been a hit in the UK. "It's All Over Now" likewise though you appeared to appreciate its sequencing on the American 12X5. You also chose the US Between the Buttons over the UK one in your Desert Island Discs despite its inclusion of the UK singles "Let's Spend The Night Together" and "Ruby Tuesday." Again with respect, I don't see why Aftermath should now be held to a different standard regarding UK vs. US albums.

Then again I might have missed the point where you came to your decision about the logic of St. James. Maybe it was later than the earlier writings of yours I’ve cited. Maybe you could point me in the direction of that statement if I simply haven’t come across it yet. And as I mentioned before, everything here is stated with all due respect. —BEN MERLISS

I was kidding about the Court of St. James. I do like the UK Aftermath. The slick material Decca used for the UK cover was much better than the clunky cardboard London used for the US version.

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Hi Greil: At the age of 60, I was surprised by how many times I played (and loved), from start to finish, 20 year-old Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts. It filled a void that this year’s Rolling Stones and (sort of) Beatles releases were unable to satisfy.

In a year that had a wealth of offerings the crown jewel of 2023’s releases, hands down, has got to be the 7 CD box-set, Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos. There were many days during the latter half of the year where I’d gladly lets this play for hours.

Did either of these releases make your radar? What albums did you listen to most often for enjoyment? —Billy I.

I found the Stax set tiresome. For me it revealed the formulas behind the label’s hits in a way that the hits never did. I listened a lot to Robert Johnson. Whenever I just didn’t know what, I put him on and it never failed to make me wonder. Having the Mack McCormick book to go through along with it this year was part of that. But right now I’m listening to the Bleachers’ “Modern Girl.”  What it has to do with modern girls I have no idea but it’s both hilarious and a runaway train. And, as the friend who sent it to me explained, a parable of Chekhov’s tomato. I guess so—but what comes across for me is that Jack Antonoff can blither through this song as if he’s finally discovered why the Rivingtons made a religion out of Papa Ooo Mau Mau and is determined to let the whole world know.

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Are there any other Bob Dylan albums besides Blood On The Tracks and Time Out Of Mind that you would consider to be brought down a little by just one song, but are otherwise solid albums? —BEN MERLISS

Interesting question. I’d say that fine as they are, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and “Down Along the Cove” from John Wesley Harding really belong on Nashville Skyline.

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Dear Greil,

My brother loaned me a copy of Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island not long after it was published. I loved the premise and read the book over and over, intrigued and inspired by the range of prose styles and approaches to the material, and fascinated by the preface, itself a small, wry, revelatory essay about integrity and devotion. The epilogue, “Treasure Island,” had what is to this day my favorite piece of writing about The Beatles, your commentary on “Strawberry Fields Forever” b/w “Penny Lane.” I found my own copy of the book and returned the loaner to my brother.

Some time later, I finished my Ph.D. in English and found my way into the English department at Mary Washington College, a public liberal arts college in Virginia. There I met a colleague named Bill Kemp, a Shakespeare scholar (fittingly) and, as I soon learned, a film and popular music enthusiast. He was also a fine prose stylist. Everyone in the department taught freshman composition, and I was often in Bill’s office moaning about how hard it was to get committed, attentive writing out of my students, most of whom wrote either stilted five-paragraph essays or “research” papers that were largely bloated book reports. Often we would moan together, then muse about alternatives.

One day I asked Bill if he’d ever read Stranded. He had not. I told him I’d been thinking it would be a radical move, and perhaps effective as well, to use the book as a freshman composition reader. I loaned him the copy I’d bought. Several days later, he reported back: this book was a find all right. How might we set up a course around it?

Now the conversation intensified. The book had been published almost twenty years ago. What could it offer students in the fall of 1997, our target for the debut? I’m not sure who came up with the obvious answer—probably Bill—but there were no two ways about it. We’d tell students why this book mattered, what it represented in terms of possibilities for writing, and help them address the challenge before them: the book needed an update, and they needed to write it.

Then we mapped out the stages of the project. Each student would write four essays over the course of the semester. The first essay would be what Bill called “break your head,” an assignment I'd adapted from an anthology called Ways of Reading. Students would read Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” and try to illuminate its argument. (Percy’s “The Man on the Train” is a later version of “The Loss of the Creature,” and incidentally, Bruce Springsteen’s favorite work by Percy.) That was the warm-up, and a chance for us to see what challenges might lie ahead for us as teachers. In their second essay, students would announce their desert-island discs in a manner responding to, and imitating, one of the essays in Stranded. The third essay would be a research essay delving into the recording they’d chosen. Here is where students began to realize that the tiny credits on their CD booklets were meaningful and might reveal things about the album that vague descriptions of “atmosphere” couldn’t touch. In the fourth essay, they would have to combine the personal, the analytical, and the factual into a work of prose nonfiction we would publish to the then-exotic World Wide Web, where it could reach a potentially global audience.

For each of the essays, Bill and I contributed short, urgent sentences we called “Bits of Wisdom.” For the fourth essay, we included a benediction: “May the Marcus be with you.”

Bill and I added plenty of other “herbs and spices,” so to speak, including a “Treasure Island” assignment for practice in making memorable sentences, but that’s the main dish. And how was it? Did it lift our drooping spirits and make us think we had found a better way to teach “freshman comp,” one that would be both instructive and delightful for us and for our students? Did our students actually become better writers?

Yes, pretty much across the board.

Scheduling logistics and various career trajectories meant that we ran the Stranded class for only three years, but golden years they were. Server changes and the “maturing” (read: corporatization) of the educational Web meant that the Stranded website—each year’s new Stranded update—is no longer available, except in bits and pieces on the Internet Archive. (Here’s a link to the remnants of the fourth essay assignment.) Once a student asked us to take his essay down, which we did. Another time a student was contacted, two years after our class, by a student in Africa who’d fallen in love with his essay on Tupac Shakur. “You speak for me,” he’d written. Yet another time a student got a huge publicity packet from her desert-island artist, whom she’d written for additional information. (We’d told students that if they wrote about living artists, their artists might in fact read their essay. Just raising the stakes and making it real.) And almost all the students, especially in the first two years, felt they’d made something remarkable, something extending far beyond the walls of the classroom, something they’d never expected to learn but couldn’t forget: it’s possible to write something polished and meaningful, in an academic context, for a broad audience, about one’s deepest loves.

We told them we’d let you know about the project, but way led on to way and we never did. Bill died about four years ago. Our shared memories of our Stranded classes were at the heart of our friendship all the way to the end. I kept thinking, “I have to write Greil Marcus.” And so, at last, I have. Thank you for Stranded. And as I’m told the Norwegians say, “thank you for that you are you.” —W. GARDNER CAMPBELL

Dear Gardner,

As a teacher myself I will treasure these stories. Stranded—as named by my wife for Oxford’s series of Desert Island books, which except for this one never appeared—was a star-crossed project. First a chance for people to write at length about something they cared about and get decently paid for it. Then the book going to ground over the Nick Tosches piece and rescued by Robert Gottlieb at Knopf.

That it could be used as a writing guide or spark never occurred to me and makes perfect sense. All the different approaches, styles, means of attack—that’s what gave the book life in the first place. I wonder if the anthology Sean Wilentz and I edited on the American ballad, The Rose and the Briar, with a number of pieces written by musicians and poets and novelists as well as critics, would work as well.

It means a lot for you to share these stories unfolding over such a time. I’ll make sure the still living Stranded veterans, with too many gone but perhaps more still here than actuarial tables might suggest, see them too.

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