Ask Greil: July 14, 2023

Any thoughts on the Roger Waters situation? Either on him personally or the larger context of his professed political views? —VINCENT

Roger Waters is an anti-Semite. That is, he hates Jews. Lots of people do. Maybe not more than 10 or 20 years ago, but with less of a sense of prohibition, without shame. That’s why every synagogue in the nation has an armed guard for services, religious school, and every other sort of activity.

British anti-Semitism is its own beast, automatic among the upper classes, cultivated on the left. Waters may even think he’s Of the People. But for his bloviations about how people aren’t getting the irony, that by playing a character from The Wall he’s sending an anti fascist message—all you have to do is watch, to see the joy and fervor in his face, to know what a thrill it it for him to stand up in an SS uniform and fire the big gun to know exactly who he is and what he wants. 

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This morning I read your essay "Life and Life Only" (Rolling Stone, Jan. 22, 1981) and was struck by the following passages:

"The secret message behind the election of Ronald Reagan on November 4th was that some people belong in this country, and some people don't; that some people are worthy, and some are worthless; that certain people are sanctified, and some are evil; and that, with the blessing of God, God's messengers will separate one from the other. It's as if the Puritans have reached across three hundred years of American history to reclaim the society they once founded -- accepting the worst vulgarization of their beliefs if it means that, once again, God and his servants will be able to look upon America and tell the elect from the reprobate, the redeemed from the damned.

"Such a message likely did not, in any logical manner, inspire Mark Chapman. But such a message, which tells people they are innocent and others are to blame, can attach a private madness to its public justification. It can inform love affairs and it can inform politics. If Klansmen and Nazis had the right to kill Communists in Greensboro, and a jury said they did, then on a certain moral level, you and I and Mark Chapman have the right to kill whoever it is that troubles our lives. I think this is why this unprecedented event has occurred now, and not before."

Did the 1980s truly dawn upon such hopelessness? All I remember (besides Reagan's election and Lennon's shocking death; I was too young for either to resonate one way or another) is the third grade. How do you feel about the decade, in retrospect (especially in light of what we've since endured?) —CORY FRYE

Reagan was elected, and re-elected, by huge margins. He and the people around him and those he appointed to destroy the agencies and departments they administered claimed a mandate for anything they wanted to do. Administration spokespeople declared the the government had to be guided by “the president’s philosophy,” as if by electing him the nation had also passed a law mandating a personal standard of legitimacy, or a national religion. The Republican Party put out ads listing among party attributes “a personal relation with Jesus Christ.” By pursuing a private foreign policy that had been explicitly prohibited by Congress, he effectively conducted a coup again his own government. And his election in 1980 might very well have been sealed by treason: by contacts with Iran to ensure the American hostages it held, at the same time holding Jimmy Carter hostage, would not be released before the election, in exchange for the diplomatic opening Iran was seeking. That set the template: If we can get away with this, we can get away with anything.

I’ve written in my book Lipstick Traces, which was begun in 1980 and finished in 1988, and in pieces on the Mekons collected in my book Ranters and Crowd Pleasers aka In the Fascist Bathroom, of my despair, and that of others, over what Reagan did to change the meaning of the country, its history and its legacy—which he did in a transformational way. He read many people out of the American story and enshrined others as rulers by natural right.

Today that legacy is fully apparent. People feel not only justified but called to conduct mass murder against people who to them have no right to a place in American society and no rights to the protection of its charter: black people in a market, Jews in a synagogue, gay people in a nightclub. As a governor and as a presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has already banned transgender people from existence and black people from history. By the end of the Republican primaries you may find people calling for the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions and prison for women who have them. You may find their supporters demanding that transgender people be burned at the stake: “A couple more like this any you won’t hear any more about this nonsense.”

What were Ronald Reagan’s signal words as governor of California, the philosophy he carried into the presidency? “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House when Reagan was elected, said “It’s a sin this man is president.” The political writer Walter Karl called him a “vile tyrant.” That’s what a lot of people wanted then and it’s what a lot of people want now.

Plus you had punk erased by the New Romantics, which was a version of the same thing, and Ian Curtis’s suicide in May of 1980, which you can see now as a prefiguration of John Lennon’s murder: to tweak Gramsci, “the old world is shot in its doorway, and the new world refuses to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

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The recent death of actor Alan Arkin prompts me to mention that the film adaptation of Joseph Heller's acclaimed novel Catch-22 not only derailed Simon & Garfunkel (Only Living Boy In New York) but ended any hopes Arkin might have had of becoming a Dustin Hoffman like leading man in film. Instead he settled for being a reliable character actor after his steady rise in the late 60's suggested bigger stardom on the horizon. Any thoughts on why Catch-22 both as a movie and a potential TV series (Richard Dreyfuss as Yossarian) failed while M*A*S*H succeeded both at the movies and as a TV series? Was it that anti-war sentiment worked for army doctors in Korea as opposed to flyers in WWII? —JAMES R STACHO

One reason Alan Arkin didn't break out in the Catch 22 movie is that the movie was enervated and seemingly afraid of its subject. It needed a wilder director—say, Billy Wilder—or one with a beat sensibility—such as, M*A*S*H-wise, Robert Altman. Or Stanley Kubrick. And the role needed an actor with a stronger physical presence: Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, in a more enlightened world, Denzel Washington.

American movies have never known what to do with a picaresque American novel that plays with the boundaries of realism without veering into European nihilism or surrealism: that’s why there’s never been a good Huckleberry Finn movie, let alone one of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—or why there will probably never be a good, or any, movie made from Percival Everett’s The Trees or anything by Paul Beatty, though I’d love to see Jordan Peele try. 

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It was your glowing, one sentence quote ("More fine stories than you can count") that led me to get Ray Padgett’s Pledging My Time, the book of interviews with a variety of musicians who’ve played live with Bob Dylan over the decades. I’m glad I did, as it is loads of fun to read! Can you think of any other performers whose band mates could provide a book as revelatory as this? Van Morrison or Miles Davis maybe?

Also, before Dylan’s Bootleg Series comes to a close, do you think extensive compilations from the Dylan & The Dead tour or the Dylan/Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers tour are possible/likely releases?

Thanks always for this wonderful column. —BILLY I.

Bob Dylan is just so promiscuous when it comes to accompanying musicians. That and the fact that so many of the people he played or recorded with, from about 1958 to now, are dead means that the Padgett book only includes a fraction of those who might have stories to tell. O the Hawks/Band, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Levon Helm are gone. Of those who played on "Like a Rolling Stone," Mike Bloomfield, Joe Macho, Bruce Langhorne, Paul Griffin, and Bobby Gregg are dead: the only people who played on the record who are still alive are Bob Dylan and Al Kooper. Countless people played with—or for—Frank Sinatra, but there are a lot less of them left, if any. And to what degree they interacted with him, or were even in the same room with him, is another question. You'd really want to ask Gordon Jenkins and Nelson Riddle, and you can't.

I have no idea what the bootleg series might encompass in the future. I don't know if the purchase of Dylan's masters along with his copyrights by Universal would inhibit the project. I can say that at the one Dylan/Petty-Heartbreakers show I saw, the band tried their best, but most of the numbers Dylan himself addressed came out sounding like "One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall." And given that that Dylan's sojourn with the Grateful Dead ruined Dylan shows for decades after, with insensate Deadheads standing up to do their idiot Deadhead dances for any and all songs, I hope neither figures.

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Favorite Charlie Parker song? —BODAN

Though I’m tempted to say more about the private recording based on Hank Williams’s “Move It on Over,” I really can’t use this forum for lists, even lists of one. It would crowd out everything else.

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I wondered if you’ve read Jennifer Eagan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Given the praise it received and the subject matter, I expected to love it. But I found it completely flat. The novel was a complete blank to me and now, sometime after reading it, all I remember is that at one point the type got bigger. —CHUCK

I agree. It took me years to get around to it. There was something proprietary about it, as if she'd taken ownership of the whole milieu—that was the feeling I got from the buzz around the book, and it put me off. I finished it, but couldn't tell you why. Maybe the suspense of wondering if somehow the rabbit would come out of the hat at the end. And I even read the follow up. But they're both zeros in my memory.

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Did you ever happen to catch The Candymen, who later morphed into the Atlanta Rhythm Section? I saw them several times and they were an amazing band. —KENNETH BASS

No. But Robert Christgau has a wonderful piece about them when they first went out on their own, after forming as Roy Orbison’s band, in his first book, Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967-73 (1973, with an expanded edition in 2000). Ending with the story of how, after making themselves the world’s best cover band, thanks to the Beatles they had to write their own songs. Which was the end of the Candymen.

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This is about William Faulkner: What is it about The Sound And The Fury and Absalom, Absalom! that in your mind puts them above other works of Faulkner’s like Light in August or (my own personal favorite) As I Lay Dying? —BEN MERLISS

To really answer that is a book, not an e mail.  But I can put it this way.  With The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner was trying to do two things simultaneously. He posited the American South as a Biblical landscape, as the Cosmos, and rewrote its history, fate, past and future—that is, of humanity as such—as his own Bible, with its own moral precepts, punishments, and glimpses of salvation. Absalom was King David’s son, who was killed, against David’s orders, after the army Absalom raised to overthrow this father was defeated and he was captured—thus David cried out, ‘Absalom!’  The phrase from which The Sound and the Fury is taken is from Macbeth, not the Bible—but as likely the greatest English sentence ever written it sounds as if it came straight from the King James Bible. Faulkner’s ambitions for these two books were both specific and boundless, and he did not betray them. He both joined, preserved, and extended the tradition of which the books were a part and, at least with The Sound and the Fury, helped create and extend the explosion of 20th century modernism, joining one hand with Picasso and the other with Pollock.

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Was your last June 26 ‘Ask’ (unless I read it wrong) a long-lost missive from the 1990s? Bob Seger has been in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for nearly 20 years. And a "one-hit wonder?" That part must have been trapped in 1975. Finally, the "Like a Rock" campaign was for Chevy Trucks. Perhaps not a great endorsement of the effectiveness of the work, but you better have a word with your factcheckers. Bob paved the way for Bruce and many of his lessers, one J. "C." Mellencamp being perhaps the most notable. Kind of like The Everlys in their underappreciated influence, but without the sibling rivalry.

Another question: Why don't you write something nice about Todd Rundgren? It's not too late! —DAVID VAWTER

I don’t have fact checkers. That’s all on me. It’s no one else’s responsibility. I can’t be too troubled about these mistakes, though. I don’t have the time or inclination to check who’s in the Rock Hall and who isn’t, and Seger seemed like just the sort of person the mandarins would sniff at. I can’t bring myself to care whether it was Ford or Chevy—I remember the commercial—great outro—not what it was selling. I make worse mistakes all the time. And I’ll stand by “Night Moves.”

Oh, Todd Rundgren. Ok, something nice: the production on Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band” is really great. He made it a hit. Otherwise I’ve disliked him since “When I Get My Plane” on I think the second Nazz album, thought it might have been the first. Talk about bourgeois values wiping out rock ‘n’ roll.

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Why have Jefferson airplane and that whole mid-late ‘60s scene pretty much been put on the shelf and forgotten? Too much hype and pretension? Too many drugs? No one left with enough brain cells to write a decent history? If you know of any good books on the subject let me know. Thanks. —BILL HAYWARD

There's no obvious answer here. It may be that the most beloved groups—at the time—were not as good as they seemed: Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Or that their best music was off in stray corners. Or that the best bands didn't meet San Francisco's horrible hipness quotient: you could argue that the best San Francisco Sound albums were the first and second Moby Grape records and the Steve Miller Band's Children of the Future, as cynical a production as came out of the town, but one that escaped genre and seemed to believe, in spite of itself, that the future was real and might even be new. Or that, after the glow had faded, and one could have read that even if no Bay Area band ever made the top ten again, the legacy would never fade, here came Creedence Clearwater Revival—the least commercial or practical band name ever—and Sly and the Family Stone to leave everyone in the dust and put the great legacy away in a box.

But there was something going on, something of many parts: Janis Joplin, Marty Balin, Chet Helms, Bill Graham, Joe MacDonald, the Mime Troupe, the Diggers, Grace Slick, the Charlatans, so many gone, so many forgotten. There was, as there is in all such scenes, a sense of freedom and possibility, that Paris in the ‘20s legend of try-anything-and-get-away-with-it—because, really, who's looking? And a bedrock of old-time music, folkie treasures from the ‘20s and ‘30s. That's why some of the most indelible music came across like lost dreams, great epics, sinking ships: the Charlatans' version of "The Coo Coo" aka "Black Jack Davy," the Grateful Dead’s "Viola Lee Blues," Janis Joplin's "Down on Me," the Charlatans' "Reunion" version—from 1969, I think, which is to say a reunion four years after their heyday—of "Alabama Bound." There we're talking about Lead Belly, Cannon's Jug Stompers, Vera Hall, Clarence Ashley. And moments outside of all of that, of transcendence: Country Joe and the Fish's "Section 43." And the thrill of feeling that you were in the right place at the right time on a map and a calendar you'd drawn up yourself.

There are good books. Charles Perry's The Haight-Ashbury—Charley was an original Rolling Stone person, bald, always wore a patterned tie, an epicure, a man of many languages, not all of them spoken. He wrote less an insider's book than a scholarly one. Barney Hoskyns, from far away and long after, caught more of the spirit and the ethos of the place and time in his Beneath the Diamond Sky. 

As in all free spaces, the thrill was in hearing people finding their own voices, or simply trying to. And I think you can hear that best in a live recording by the Great Society, the band Grace Slick left to join Jefferson Airplane. Her husband Jerry Slick was the drummer and her brother-in-law Darby Slick played guitar and wrote the song originally titled "Someone to Love." They recorded it with Sly Stone producing for the local North Beach label. It didn't have life to it. But years after the band disappeared, the song appeared, in its full body, bigger than the Jefferson Airplane ever made it, but smaller, too, because you could feel yourself inside the small San Francisco club where it was taped, on an album called Conspicuous by Its Absence. Simply as the kind of music that suddenly made sense and for a moment made everything else sound like nonsense, it captured the San Francisco Sound—as style, beat, ambition, rebellion, bohemian snarl—part Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," part Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me, Babe," part the Beatles' "Don't Bother Me," with juice from Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog"—like nothing else.

I've played it hundreds of times. I never can believe it: the thermonuclear final guitar passage, the little jump of notes between verses, what Grace Slick does when she shows up to tell you everything else she's done was just a set up for what you weren't expecting, the rumbling presence of some kind of sea monster hiding in the depths of the song:

and equally heroic, as a loser's testament, the last wave goodbye, the Charlatans's real "Alabama Bound":

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What does a modern working band in rock today have to do to crack through the mile-thick crust of Nostalgia that sits atop both the business and the culture of rock and roll? Some of us have no business making AutoTune pop for 19-year-olds. —SHAGGY SNODGRASS

Beyond naming your band Born Yesterday or Hell Is The Past I have no idea.  I don’t mean to be flip. 

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Hi, A bit older than you, I was listening to Lenny Bruce records and Miles and Coltrane in high school in east Texas. Here’s my R&R hall of fame question: Is there any room for the excellent Texans Delbert McClinton and Doug Sahm? After all, Willie made it this year! —DICK HOLLAND

We’ll have to call a halt to this question after this one: hey, why not Lester Bangs or Dave Marsh? They did more for the music than a lot of the people there.  

Doug: there’s no good guy award. Delbert: a great blues artist, as writer and singer. Yes, just to confuse the voters.  

And a new rule: no one is inducted twice. Baseball players don’t go in for each team they played for. Otherwise, if those in charge weren’t so focused on how many times someone’s been on the cover of Rolling Stone, Corin Tucker should be in not just for Sleater-Kinney, but Heavens to Betsy, Cadallaca, Filthy Friends, Corin Tucker Band, and her duet with Eddie Vedder on “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

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Hi Greil,
If I could do a play, or film, of the Dylan-Lennon cab ride (which I’ve watched and shown to friends many times), I would cast (or CGI) Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin at the peak of their early 1950s stardom. And change none of the dialogue. Two of the top minds in their fields, the competitive atmosphere that you could cut with a knife, with Dylan trying to bait Lennon and receiving the same disdainful laconic responses that Martin was so good at in responding to Lewis.

Plus, while Lewis never threw up on stage, his constant playing to the crowd for laughs is mirrored in Dylan’s constant awareness that the camera is rolling. Just a thought. I hope you’re feeling well. —JEFF MAKOS

Oh, that’s SO fabulous. Bring ‘em back. Have to get the show going right now!

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You've mentioned Lester Bangs and Lenny Kaye recently so . . . Which peers of yours (meaning writers about music/culture you have encountered) do you admire for their writing and/or insight? —RICHARD DENNIS

From then to now there have been and are far too many to note. I'll mention those who are gone, all from the U.S.: Lester Bangs, Sandy Darlington, Steve Strauss, Paul Nelson, Ellen Willis, Nick Tosches, Paul Williams, Robert Palmer, Ed Ward, John Morthland, Peter Laughner, Ralph J. Gleason, Jane Scott, Greg Tate. And those I'm not remembering right now. And those whose lives and deaths I don't even know about.  

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I enjoyed reading your talk from Tulsa. I suggest that there is a lot more to be found and considered on the topic of noir and film noir in the work of Bob Dylan by looking at his paintings and drawings.

Over fifty different films have been identified as source material in his recent works, and plenty of them are film noir titles.

You wrote about Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow. There’s more juice to be found by considering Wise’s The Set-Up, from a decade earlier. Dylan has a series of paintings and drawings based on a shot from The Set-Up. The film is based on narrative poem of the same name by Joseph Moncure March. Bits from this poem, and its companion piece, The Wild Party, turn up in lyrics found on Tempest.

In that you wrote a book on The Manchurian Candidate I wonder if you’ve seen Bob Dylan’s drawing from the Mondo Scripto series that appears to reference the scene where Sinatra fans out the deck, showing every card to be the queen of diamonds. Dylan has replaced Sinatra with a woman. What do you make of this? —SCOTT WARMUTH

You couldn’t be more right about this. I had to leave out a lot of material, cut off a lot of possible routes. In terms of focusing on films, I could have worked from many others—but it was the scene around the piano that started the whole train of thought, and so I had to set that up.

I’m less drawn to Dylan’s visual work because unlike what to me is a merging of languages in the way other work speaks in new ways in his music, there’s a sterility in the ways he copies/repositions others’ images for his own.

I’d like to read him on The Philosophy of Modern Movies.