Ask Greil: January 8, 2025

I’m sure you will share your thoughts on the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. I admired how the actors could sing and play so much like their famous real-life characters, but the movie itself falls short for me as most of these musical biopics tend to do. Perhaps it would have made a better mini-series? Or think of a great noir drama, The Bad And The Beautiful, where a ruthless talent played by Kirk Douglas, makes all the right artistic decisions and is successful, but in doing so, exploits and destroys all the relationships he has with the people who helped him achieve that success. It’s told in flashback Rashomon-style from various perspectives. So, in the Dylan movie, we could have had the Seeger/Baez/Russo (Rotolo) POV and how they were let uplifted and ultimately let down by Dylan. Have it take place at the ’68 Carnegie Hall concert honoring Woody Guthrie. But don't try to stick Johnny Cash in there for some stupid plot device! —JAMES R STACHO

That’s a wonderful movie. It’s a role Heath Ledger plays in Todd Haynes’s Dylan movie I’m Not There—as you pretty much say, it’s coded in the story. I think everyone is going to have a side character in the new movie that particularly comes across for them—for me it was Bob Neuwirth and Woody Guthrie, not, to my surprise, Pete Seeger (or maybe Ed Norton did Seeger too well, and his rectitude just turned into an undertow). That’s the fun of it. People really want to talk about it.

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Regarding A Complete Unknown, from Gandhi to Great Balls of Fire!, biopics give me the heebie-jeebies. I knew this one would give me a double-dose before stepping foot in the movie house. That said I thought Ed Norton as Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez were great. Timothée Chalamet did a heartfelt job, and the music was faithful. I was glad when it was over, went home and listened to John Wesley Harding. I have no desire to see it a second time (unlike I’m Not There and Masked and Anonymous). I read that Bob Dylan has 5 albums in the Top 100 albums, and that seems like a good thing.

Am finally getting acquainted with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl. It’s a world unto itself, and I’m digging it. Did you ever write about this concert and/or release?

Thanks always for this fine column. —BILLY INNES, San Francisco

I wrote about Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks tour performances in my book When That Rough God Goes Riding. I’ll be writing about the Dylan movie in my next Top 10 column. Unlike you, I do want to see it again, to make sure my memory of certain details is correct and that certain shots were as good as they seemed, but it can’t be compared to Masked and Anonymous or I’m Not There. Those are imaginative works more interested in opening doors than closing them, which is to say dedicated to dramatizing questions rather than providing answers, which is what the reductive term and concept biopic is all about. It’s why I’d rather see The Rose than a fictionalized Janis Joplin movie. Speaking of which, have you ever heard Jonathan Richman’s version of “The Rose”?

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I don’t remember you mentioning Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric in any of your writing. I would assume it came up short to you. If so, how did it come up short and what writings out there (if any) do you think did better what Wald’s book was trying to do? —BEN MERLISS

Elijah is a lovely and interesting person, but I’d found his earlier books on Robert Johnson and the Beatles based on pseudo-heretical provocations, so I didn’t read the Dylan book—fearing it was going to be another nobody-booed-at-Newport revisionist number. It may not be that at all, but I also felt I’d read more than enough about this world-shaking controversy that where I lived, in California, never registered at all.

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Just wondering if you ever picked up on Hjortsberg’s final work titled Angel’s Inferno. Picked up a trade edition several months back and read over Thanksgiving week. (Good railway reading, and it helped me tune out the Christmas drivel that seems to start earlier every year. Bah, humbug as my man said.) —ED CZLAPINSKI

The ending of William Hjorstberg’s Fallen Angel shook me up like no other book I’ve ever read. I remember walking around the room with it still in my hand, in a daze, the walls no longer seeming solid, the door no longer opening to anywhere else, muttering “No, no.” So of course I read Angel’s Inferno. I didn’t expect it to carry the awful spells of the first book, and it didn’t, but I was disappointed anyway. I hope he—1941-2017—wasn’t.

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What do you make of the Brian Thompson/Luigi Mangione uproar? Personally, I’m amused by the media’s performative shock over public sympathy for Mangione. At the NY Times Bret Stephens upped the outrage: Thompson was not just an innocent victim, but a “working class hero.” Corn-fed boy from a small rural community, beautician mother (horrors!), childhood spent toiling on farms (actually, the source cited by Stephens specifies that Thompson spent his summers doing farm work, but how good a story is that?)

Working class, for sure—where the hero part comes in, Stephens doesn’t get around to telling us.

Mangione may be every bit as bad as the media make him out to be...but I can’t help thinking he could’ve inspired a Woody Guthrie song; maybe something about how some folks will kill you with a ghost gun, some with a computer keystroke. —STEVE O’NEILL

There’s a not obvious New Yorker online piece by Jessica Winters on the subject that does go into Woody Guthrie outlaw ballads on “Pretty Boy Floyd” et al. and the immediate Ballads of Luigi popping up online. No, an outlaw will never drive a family from their home: Jesse James didn’t care about the house, he just wanted to kill the family.

My sense of this is squalid. I don’t believe there were social motives involved, whatever Unabomber cover might be there. This person seems to be a self pitying incel narcissist who thought it would be cool to kill a big shot (maybe he even did-his-own-research to pick a good one) and play the mysterious masked assassin. The only comment that has struck me as remotely interesting was on Saturday Night Live last night noting that the anti-corporate folk hero stopped at a Starbucks before and a McDonald’s after.

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In a recent Ask Greil [Dec. 11 2024], you mentioned you once got a Willie Mays autograph and asked Y.A. Tittle for his autograph, but apparently, did not get it. For those who don’t know Y.A. Tittle, he was a great passing quarterback who played for the 49ers and later the Giants in the NFL. The indelible image, of course, is Tittle (ironic name, since he never won a title) on his knees, helmet off near the end zone, with blood streaming down his nose. As I grew up in Chicago, my Dad would recount the ’63 NFL championship game between the Bears (who won) and the NY Giants at Wrigley Field and how one of the important plays was when Y.A. Tittle was knocked out of the game by the Bears defense. With the NFL blackout rule in effect, my Dad and his friend had to travel a ways to get to a bar that could broadcast the game. The day was frigid, the bar served free buffet and he remembered it all fondly. Years later, when I watched the NFL Films film of the game, it really was kind of boring (I guess you had to be there, if only in the moment) and Tittle was cheap shotted with a hit to the knees which only kept him out for a play or two. But that’s where memory (my Dad’s) and reality (me) differ and he had passed away before I saw that film anyway. I hope Tittle wasn’t a jerk about his autograph. He seemed like a nice man in retirement and one of his daughters became a teacher and published poet who wrote about her father’s football exploits. It's kind of sweet and a YouTube search should uncover it for anyone interested. —JAMES R STACHO

I got his autograph. It was at the 49ers practice facility in San Mateo before the 1958 season started—the one that ended with the heartbreaking playoff game against Detroit. I was there. My first pro football game. If I remember correctly the 49ers had a 28-0 halftime lead and lost.

Yes, I know the picture of Tittle and the blood on his face. But the Tittle whose autograph I wanted was the quarterback who in 1957 and 1958 threw the Alley-Oop to R.C. Owens to end games like two Supermen suddenly descending to make a joke out of any team’s defense.

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Hello Greil. Merry Christmas. I just came across “I Am a Cliché” from Raw #7, which I hadn't seen since it came out in 1985. I completely forgot that you were a Raw contributor. Can you say anything about that experience? Also: I was in a band called Ozzie (named for Nelson, not the other guy) back in the late ’70s. We played Mabuhay quite a bit. Did you ever see us and if so do you have any comments? Love seeing your work continue. Thx. —WILLIAM FULLER

In 1977 I was writing a book column for Rolling Stone and Art Spiegelman published his first book of comix, the autobiographical Breakdowns. He sent it to me, I wrote back. We got to know each other and I became an eager reader of RAW, from the first issue, following especially the sequentially appearing chapters of Maus. With “I Am a Cliché,” Art gave me the drawings and asked if I could come up with some kind of story to link the drawings together. He was uncomfortable with the sexual violence but ran everything in the most dramatic way possible.

It wasn’t long after that I read about Stephen Spielberg producing the movie An American Tail, an animated film where, as in Maus, European Jews were mice and their oppressors, as in Maus, Nazis, cats. Whether it was a theft or not, it seemed certain to wipe out the story and make anything Art did look like an imitation of Spielberg. People had been suggesting Art publish Maus as a book but he wanted to wait until it was complete, and who knew when that might be. I called him up and said he had to publish now, get it out before the movie sideswiped his project, and he did, with Part 1 (in the end American Tail went nowhere while Maus was a huge success and won the Pulitzer Prize).

When Art finished the book, he sent a copy as soon as it was ready. At the time, my wife was managing the gift store/boookstore at our local synagogue. She loved the book and wanted to carry it—this was long before the book had received any attention. Art put together a box of ten and signed each copy with an elaborate self portrait. They sold out immediately and soon he was sending box after box—it had to be one of the bestselling books in Berkeley. And then it was all over the world.

I remember Ozzie but don’t have any specific memories. A great name. A good idea.

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Hi Greil. Assuming you watched it, and maybe you’ve already composed thoughts about it, what did you think of Keb Mo and Susan Tedeschi’s performance of Robert Johnson’s “Walking Shoes” at the Kennedy Center Honors for Bonnie Raitt? Lot going on there, a song by a relatively obscure Black musician in his time who was lionized decades after his death by white blues players, played at this culturally august/suspect event celebrating an inarguably great white woman blues musician, performed by two talented but NPRish players who are that much further removed from the source. Plus there was that set design backdrop and some other guitarists playing in the background. Johnson’s recordings are too powerful to ever water down, but have the songs reached such a point of cultural respectability that they can be bougie wallpaper? Or is it still a big deal that such songs can be presented in that environment? Shooting this off before the Dead have even been feted, so no idea how that might have played out. And is Arturo Sandoval who we should really all be focused on? Thanks for all that you do, seasons greetings and all that. —ERIC DAWSON

I spent too much time online looking for that segment, but I’ve seen them do that song elsewhere. Tedeschi always brings what she has has to a number, and she can get it off the ground, but Keb Mo (what an alluring name) is the ground, as in flat, dull, featureless. But really, I don’t care about the context or respectability or embourgeoisement. The songs have such shape and body that so often they make their own contexts in foreign settings, as in the minds of countless people who in identitarian terms could not be less like Robert Johnson, such as me or perhaps you. And anyway, as far as turning the music into pure harmless mainstream diluted nothing, there was that time when a president of the United States sang “Sweet Home Chicago” at the White House…

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Greil—Conceding all the inherent problems with “biopics,” I get the feeling there’ll be more and more of them in the coming years about pop stars from the ’60s through the ’90s. I’ve often thought there’s a good one to be made about Cass Elliot. She turned up in both Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Rocketman, the Elton John film, and also (obviously) in the two Laurel Canyon documentaries from a few years back. She strikes me as one of those people who was connected to everybody for a moment in the late ’60s and early ’70s—and, no surprise, I’m a big fan of a lot of music she made. Do you think there’s a film there? —ALAN VINT

I’m not a producer. But I’d imagine that over the years people have taken options on treatments for a Mama Cass picture. And they all hit the same wall. “After all, didn’t Charlize double her weight to win that Oscar?” “Yeah, but she didn’t have to die on camera with food on her mouth.” Oh. I know, that’s not supposed to be true. But movies are fables, and in this case the fable is already there.

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Dear Greil, A happy and healthy New Year to you and your wife. I know you bow to no man in your love for the Chi-Lites. I recently bought the Brunswick Complete Singles Collection and was astonished to discover “Being In Love,” a head-over-heels stunner that Smokey would’ve killed for. Along with “Stoned Out Of My Mind” this is one of their rare forays into happiness. I’d like to think that “Being In Love” was a sequel for the man who was so alone and forsaken on that park bench in “Have You Seen Her.” Incredibly this was the B-side to “Oh Girl”!

Are you familiar with this great song and what are a few of your favorite Chi-Lites records? —CRAIG ZELLER

Well, it is Smokey. But for him, a B-side. For the group: “Have You Seen Her” and “The Coldest Days of My Life,” which I like to think of as an answer record to the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” as in, “You talking about cold? I’ll show you cold.”

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Hi, Greil, I was just reading Mikal Gilmore’s tribute to the very-recently deceased Stanley Booth on the occasion of his birthday. Altamont was mentioned. I’ve read your own account of that horrible day many times, and I believe I recall reading that, in its aftermath, for quite awhile you couldn't listen to rock ’n’ roll, that you found a sort of refuge in country blues and very little else.

I also remember your chapter on Rod Stewart in, I believe, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, where you write very movingly about the Every Picture Tells a Story album. I find myself listening to this record often during the bitterly cold New York winters; and, over the last Arctic week, it has been a balm of sorts as I await with utter dread the inauguration of a man I loathe, and his droogs, into office. “Seems Like a Long Time” and “Mandolin Wind,” in particular, feel to me like reminders that all is not greed and AI and cruelty and soullessness, that there is still good in the world, that there is still warmth, and perhaps reasons for hope—or would, if they hadn’t been recorded almost 55 years ago.

It occurred to me: coming out in May of 1971, a year and a half after Altamont, did this album, of which you once wrote so affectionately, help you to find your way back into listening to rock ’n’ roll after what sounds like a near-PTSD experience at Altamont?

Thank you for everything you've written. —TOM ANGELO

Rod Stewart was a deep exception during that time after Altamont, even a kind of companion. I’m not sure when it was that Micky Waller, the drummer in the Jeff Beck Group—for what he does in “Every Picture Tells a Story” my favorite drummer ever: for those same few minutes, I used to tell people, he deserved the Nobel Prize, and the first time someone asked, “For what?” I said “Peace,” and then, “No, no, Physics!” and I still believe that—came into the Rolling Stone office on Brannan in San Francisco carrying a copy of The Rod Stewart Album, asking who he could talk to about getting it reviewed. I remember the place being in a hubbub, so it was probably just after Altamont, when the place was jammed up with writers and editors and cops. I was the Records Editor, I’d liked Rod Stewart in the Jeff Beck Group, I said he could talk to me.

He handed me the record and I looked at the songs listed. “Street Fighting Man”—that seemed like a strange choice: what could anyone possibly add to what the Rolling Stones had already done with it? “Rod wanted to do it so people could hear the words,” Waller said. I took it home, played it, played it again and again. And realized it was different. In a strain that would deepen over his next three albums, there was a writer and singer’s sensibility that accepted pain, and struggled to find a likely pointless way to offer comfort in the face of it. Beneath the surface there was a grasp of time passing and of time that had already passed, that came from Rod’s time as a folkie, but really, this was soul music, this was someone who you could imagine felt Sam Cooke’s death as a personal loss, because it meant Rod Stewart could never, someday, approach Sam Cooke and hand him a record, as Walker was handing a record to me, and have Sam Cooke tell him he was alright.

I asked Langdon Winner to review the album: today I can say what was special about it, but I couldn’t then. He loved it as much as I did. But he couldn’t get a handle on it either. So I reviewed it, in February 1970, all too aware of how I was falling short.

His music took on shades that were both darker and lighter on his next album. Years later I’d devote a twenty-minute talk the Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle to his explosion of Eddie Cochran’s “Cut Across Shorty” as an untouched portrait of everything rock ’n’ roll was ever meant to be, not to mention of the meaning of life. But no: with the next album that turned out to be “Maggie May.” And then it turned out to be “Every Picture Tells a Story,” a song I could and can play for an hour straight. And then, on Never a Dull Moment, the warmth, the shy smile, that gesture of comfort and succor, in “You Wear It Well.”

Thanks, Rod. You’ll turn 80 this week. I will in June. Hope we make it through the year.

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