Ask Greil: January 24, 2025

Hi, Greil. I have a two-part question.

What is the most dispiriting live show you have seen (aside from Altamont)?

On a brighter note: What is the best show you ever saw by accident/happenstance?

My first Dylan show was a lark. I tucked my car into a radiator shop near Target Center in Minneapolis and set off to find a scalper. I got in for face value but missed the opener, “Drifter’s Escape.” This was days after the O.J. acquittal. Imagine having such a catalogue.

Best —CHRIS HESLER

Ordinarily I wouldn’t answer because I hate rankings, by me or anyone else. But this got me thinking.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a show as “dispiriting”—or shaming, humiliating, something that left me feeling conned, cheated, and unclean—as far more movies than I could ever count. Garbage, pretentious or not, that I fell for because of advertising, trailers, critical hype, or self-hype: this looks important, I ought to see it, everyone’s talking about it (even if not anyone you actually know or respect), I don’t want to be left out. But the most depressing show I ever attended was easy to find: David Bowie on his Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars tour when it landed at Winterland in San Franciso in 1972.

That year and for years after I spent a lot of time at a little record store on the corner of Hearst and Euclid in Berkeley, just across the street from campus, just down from the fabulously named hair salon A-dorno, looking through the racks and talking music with the owners, Russ Ketter and Doug Kroll, the latter a former student and now lifelong friend. They were anglophiles with pipelines into stuff no one here had heard about, and great enthusiasts. Thanks to them I took home Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World and anything else they pressed on me, and Hunky Dory converted me: this was the real thing, different and unnerving and putting a smile on my face with his songs about Andy Warhol (how perfect that almost a quarter-century later he’d be playing Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s great film Basquiat), the rhythm in “Changes,” and the mysteries in “Life on Mars?” which remains a touchstone to this day. I’ve written about it and out of it again and again, every time I’ve heard a new version by anyone else.

Then came Ziggy Stardust, which did nothing for me, but Russ and Doug and everyone else working at the store was going, so we went too. Winterland is a repurposed ice-skating rink, but no arena or stadium: it’s where the Rolling Stones played that year in their small-scale $5 a ticket apology for Altamont. The place held more than the Fillmore, though—it’s where Hendrix played, where the Band held its Last Waltz, the last place I saw the Doors in 1967.

This night the buzz had not reached the Bay Area, so militantly resistant to anything that smelled like a con, or that might have proved San Francisco less cool than it insisted on being. So instead of a loud and eager crowd of 3,000 there were maybe two or three hundred people there for a show based on the assumption of stardom and worship. We huddled in front of the stage, to be close to whatever this was going to be, but also for warmth: with the place nearly empty drafts were blowing. Bowie came on and did his show as if the place was packed and his every gesture would be greeted with gasps, his every word gospel. “Give me your hands,” he shouted, playing the messianic figure the songs called for, and a few people raised their hands and wagged them, but everything was falling flat. The whole premise of the show demanded a following and after a few songs it was plain the only place to go was home. Good song here and there, but that was it. I loved Pin Ups, but as a cover album of favorite oldies that was almost a way of escaping from the persona that was still on sale. There were good songs here and there, but until “Young Americans” nothing seemed to touch the Zeitgeist or even reach for it.

The best show I saw by chance has always stuck in my mind. Years after, in 2012, I tried to get it down in a piece for Wendy Lesser’s journal Threepenny Review. This is what I wrote:

Why do I remember this? It was in a basement bar in Aspen some time in the late 1960s. I have no idea what we were doing there—maybe I’d thought I’d heard of the band the hand-lettered sign outside had announced, though it turned out I hadn’t.

They were a loud, completely typical bar band playing covers. Almost all current hits. Not badly, but in that setting, so what? Nobody cared. It wasn’t so loud that you couldn’t keep talking, and that’s what everybody was doing. In real life Creedence’s “Lodi” played a thousand times more often than the song ever played on the radio, and it was on the radio for years. The band didn’t cover “Lodi”—“If I only had a dollar / For every song I’ve sung / And every time I’ve had to play / While people sat there drunk”—but they didn’t have to.

Subtly, the numbers the band was playing got a little older, a little less obvious. And then at one point the leader stepped closer to the lip of the stage and said, “And this next one is the best song Paul Revere and the Raiders ever did!”

Paul Revere and the Raiders were a Portland band that dressed up in costume-story Revolutionary War outfits. In 1963 they recorded “Louie Louie” in the same Portland studio where the Kingsmen recorded their version. The Kingsmen had the national hit, but the Raiders’ recording was all over the radio on the West Coast, if only for its weirdly distracted opening (“Grab your woman, it’s Louie Louie time!” someone shouts with untrammeled delight. “Uh, hey, yeah, that’s right,” someone answers, as if the first person has told him it’s impolite not to remove one’s hat when entering a house). But the best song Paul Revere and the Raiders ever did? That was “Just Like Me,” I said to myself, siting in the bar—even though I was sure the band was going to play “Kicks.” “Kicks” was a big hit in 1966, a terrific song, so good it sort of rolled over its own anti-drug message (“You better get straight / But not with kicks / You just need help, girl”); it delivered what it said it was protesting against. But “Just Like Me,” from the year before, was completely meaningless. It was just a shout, an engine of hysteria. You couldn’t believe it ever got recorded—how do you make a 45 out of people running in panic out of burning studio, or for that matter running with joy into one?—let alone on the radio, and it seemed to appear on the radio and vanish in the same moment. Did I hear what I thought I heard? Who was that masked man?

The band went right into “Just Like Me” and played with such drive and desperation I was convinced they actually were Paul Revere and the Raiders, moonlighting, maybe hiding out from an old, pre-“Kicks” drug arrest warrant, trying to see if they could get over on a crowd without their Paul Revere costumes and their name.

I’ve thought about that night, that stage announcement, hundreds of times. I wonder why I’m remembering it, and I know: it was the heart of the leader as he made his declaration, his complete abandonment of any pretense toward cool, his testament that he and the band were now going to play a song they loved, and they were going to do everything they could to live up to it. I don’t know if, immediately, everyone in the place was on their side, but the song was. I have the Paul Revere and the Raiders 45, but I’d trade it for a tape of the other band’s version if I had the chance.

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Hi, Greil, just wondering if you encountered footage of the “Ka mate” haka recently initiated by Te Maori Party MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke in the New Zealand Parliament to protest a Treaty Principles Bill. Opening translated “lyrics” run: “It is death / It is death / It is life / It is life.” In earnest no doubt, and so not perhaps precisely “situationist,” but your chapter on the “Assault on Notre Dame” is never far away when an entrenched public institution is confronted so dramatically and unexpectedly. Any thoughts would be most welcome. Either way I draw your attention to a rare political highlight from November 2024. Many thanks. —CRAIG PROCTOR

I didn’t know this. It’s quite powerful. You can imagine Serge Berna and Michel Mourre brought the same glee to Notre Dame in 1950, not to mention the fervor. The woman speaking shoots fire from her eyes, but all three of the legislators are having a very good time. It calls up a situationist slogan from 1966, “If you make the social revolution, do it for fun”—and the words always attributed to Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” That man, who you can imagine brought his hat just to orchestrate his old soft shoe, can dance. Thank you for adding to the story as it continues its journey through history.

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I recently re-read what has to be the first official Bob Dylan biography published in 1971 by Anthony Scaduto. The book offers first person accounts of Dylan’s early days from interviews with people who were there at the time ranging from Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk and many others. I recommend it to anyone whose interest in Dylan has been piqued by the recent biopic A Complete Unknown. I know I got more out of the book at age 64 than I did 50 years ago, but one passage which wouldn't have been such a big deal then has me puzzled today, i.e., Dylan talked of having a new album ready circa ’71-72. Scaduto writes: That album will contain totally fresh material, and friends who have heard some of the songs believe it will be another reversal of field that will startle Dylan fans...Dylan’s reply: “Nobody’s gonna be startled.” He refused to discuss the album further except to say he produced it himself. He is so secretive about his new work that few people at Columbia Records have heard the tapes and only Columbia president Clive Davis has access to them. The album and the TV show(!) have been scheduled for public release in June, 1972, but there was no sign of either by midsummer (this from the 1973 paperback edition). “The album is all ready to go,” a Columbia executive said at the time. “The TV show seems to be holding things up.”

Huh. Now we know that no such album was released between New Morning (1970) and Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid soundtrack (1973). What Dylan did release was Greatest Hits Volume II which included new versions of a few Basement Tapes songs not yet officially released at that time. There were a couple of singles, “George Jackson” and “Watching The River Flow,” and he wrote some songs with Allen Ginsberg around that time as well. But aside from the slight “Wallflower” released on one of the early Sony Bootleg Series (the first one) I don't see any evidence that Dylan had enough original songs for a 1971-2 album. Your thoughts? —JAMES R STACHO

Hmmm…it doesn’t sound like Self Portrait, does it? Or a great prank? Or the first Christian album? You’d have to ask a Dylanologist (and by the way, The Dylanologists by David Kinney is a good book, as is Scaduto’s posthumous The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players & Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan, full transcripts of interviews Scaduto did for his biography). I just listen to the songs and write about what calls out; I couldn’t tell you the songs on Desire.

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I liked that you thought the scene where Dylan plays the song he wrote for Woody was revealing; I was more moved by it than anything else in the movie. But I will still see it again because that time is so seminal in our lives. —DAVE GETZ

Dylan wrote the song later, but in a stronger way, with real life background the film doesn’t account for, it makes sense. Dylan, as he writes in Chronicles, dove headfirst into Woody Guthrie in Minneapolis (which in this film is barely a reference—this Dylan could have come from Salt Lake City or for that matter Long Island). He went to New York determined to meet him, to prove they were soul mates. Why wouldn’t he have had the equivalent of a birthday cake in his pocket?

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Pretty new to your writing and I was just wondering is there a place in your work where you wrote about all of Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited? I guess I am also asking if you had written about every single Dylan song? —KEVIN MOONEY

I’m not a Dylanologist. I’m not a completist. I haven’t written about everything on any Dylan album except The Basement Tapes Complete for an annotated discography in a book about the sessions, where in the text of the book itself I focus on just a handful of songs.

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Dear Greil, Thanks for all the great writing and for bringing so much great music to my attention. Close to you on College Avenue in Elmwood is Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream. It is selling “Elvis the Fat Years” ice cream with Dairy, Egg, Peanut, and Bacon as listed ingredients. Why don’t more people know that the Elvis of the Jungle Room recordings is one of the greatest Elvises? In failing health, his band waiting around for hours for the spirit to strike the King and for him to show up in the basement of his house, Elvis pours out his heart on a series of sad songs, one after another. Chatter before and after the songs reveals the King to be in good spiritis, too. Impressive beyond words. And it’s all on YouTube. —PAUL SCHWARTZ

I think the reason the Jungle Room sessions failed to make a mark is that the music, and after the tragic rendering of “She Thinks I Still Care” (not that I’ve ever heard a version of this song that was anything less), the singing, is florid and monochromatic. It seems, for all the pieces crammed into the room, isolated and out of time.

As for that Fat Elvis ice cream. I probably should have tasted it. I’ve passed the place enough times. But I never will. It’s sort of like branding Elvis Dilaudid.

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Hi Greil,

The Vogue Theatre in Presidio Heights has a showing of Gimme Shelter every December 6. I’d not seen this in a movie house the 1970s. I was struck by some of the conversations from within the festival crowd. All of which had me wondering. I’ve seldom been in a place or situation where the presence of one or more cameras doesn’t change the chemistry of people in a room or situation. How much or little a role did the presence of cameras have on that day (aside from their being the likely cause of the late start, no small factor)?

You’ve mentioned that the best concert you’ve seen of The Rolling Stones was Altamont. How was the sound there in real life? It still sounds as though it’s coming through a transistor radio no matter with theater’s sound system. Also, have you watched the movie? I don’t think I’ve read any mention of it from you. I can understand if you skipped that one. I can’t imagine ever wanting to see footage of a car crash I’d been in.

I’m a third of the way through Stanley Booth’s The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones. I’m guessing I’ll learn even more about that day.

Speaking of Stanley Booth, twice I read the mention of Memphis Spaghetti in your columns. This jogged my memory that there’s a place in the Lower Haight, Memphis Minnie’s, that makes this. Oh wow…that was a meal that warmed me for hours on a cold winter’s night. Will definitely have it again!

Thanks always for this column. —BILLY INNES

At the start of the day I was in the crowd sitting on the dirt close to the stage. It was packed in a comfortable way. In a naive Woodstock gesture I offered the guy next to me half of one of the sandwiches I’d brought. “I don’t want your fucking sandwich,” he said, knocking it to the ground. Hmmm, I thought. That’s interesting. Maybe this isn’t going to go the way I expected. Then the naked fat man started dancing a few steps away from us, but really trying to trample people. The Hells Angels jumped off the stage and beat him to the ground with pool sticks in an attack that seemed to go on for minutes even if it was seconds. The crowd instantly surged away, like a tide going out. When it was over the crowd just as instantly reformed and I found myself standing on one leg with no one willing to move to let me sit down. I stood that way until I was lifted out of the crowd and passed onto the stage. For the rest of the day I wandered around backstage and around the edges of the crowd, watching and talking to people I knew. There were jerry-built towers at the sides of the stage for cameramen, but I don’t remember being aware of any cameras all that time.

The sound as I heard it, and on tapes of the Rolling Stones’ performance I got from the filmmakers, was loud, clear, jagged, and terrifyingly intense. You can hear the fear of the whole day and the fear of the band as they played. That put a particular form of energy into the music as it was made, something that has never returned, that can’t be retrieved or replicated. As if they’d ever want to feel as they felt on that stage again.

I saw the movie more than once. I can’t remember what I thought of it. Maybe just that it came as close as film could to the actual events, which wasn’t close at all.

But speaking of “Gimmie Shelter” (not the movie but the song, as it was misspelled on Let It Bleed and a usage on which I’ve insisted ever since, just to show they couldn’t spell “gimme”), here is something worth noting. Mick LaSalle recently announced that he was retiring as the film critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, where he’s worked since 1985. But he continues to write Saturday critical pieces and his invaluable weekly Pink Section Ask Mick LaSalle column, where he always addresses a questioner in the manner in which they address him, no matter how ridiculously. This is an entry from January 19-25—you won’t find rock criticism on this level in the New York Times. Or Pitchfork. Or on anyone’s Substack page I’m aware of.

Oh Master Teacher Mick: There’s a nugget I picked up somewhere that Camus’ “The Stranger” is an easy book to read, but a hard book to read well. What are some movies that are easy to watch, but hard to watch well? —Tom Grossman, Oakland

Oh Master Student Tom: I can’t think of a movie, so I’ll give you a song instead—the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” It’s usually thought of as a song about external forces threatening people’s lives, and about how love is the choice that can avert catastrophe. But it’s not about that at all. Rather, it’s an extremely dark song about how something within people makes war, conflict and destruction inevitable.

Throughout the song, Mick Jagger and Merry Clayton are singing about how war is “just a shot away.” But then at a certain point Jagger says that “love, sister, it’s just a kiss away” in the same frantic way that she was singing about war.

Why is she frantic? Because he is threatening her. Love isn’t a kiss away. Sex is a kiss away. And now, perhaps because of the civil chaos surrounding them both, he feels he has more freedom to give way to impulse—and more inclination to impose his will. The song ends on a note of doom and inevitability, with the point being that there’s no escape from rapacious human nature. People are intent on destroying themselves and each other.

Thus, in “Gimme Shelter,” we have one of the greatest songs of the 20th century that also helps explain the 20th century. And the fact that it’s so subtle that most people don’t grasp its full meaning makes it even more of a masterpiece.

Is he right? It doesn’t matter. He’s got you thinking and arguing with him, maybe with yourself, as that is what thinking is, right from the start.

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