Ask Greil: June 29, 2025

There’s been a lot of death in the ether, lately, with David Thomas, Garth Hudson, David Johansen, and now Sly Stone. It took me back to your great piece “Rock Death in the Seventies: A Sweepstakes.” Scabrous and funny, a swipe at rock criticism itself (“you want to rate records, I’ll rate someone’s entire life”). I’ve never read anything remotely like it. How did it come about. Was it really a reaction to the abuse of the word survivor? (And, by the way, the footnotes are priceless.) —CHUCK

That’s it. First the press of mindless cliche meant to erase all moral questions so we can get on with our business. Then a shibboleth turning into a spectacular good and corrupting every form of culture, especially pop music (just this week I head Gloria Gaynor on the radio, with the interviewer asking her about the meaning of “I Will Survive” as if it were a philosophical breakthrough rather than a cheesy pop song that would be unbearable even without words).

And I really had been saying that in piece after piece and it was like being run over by a herd of stupid words and catchphrases. So I just decided to get it out of my system by mocking it. And in a few minutes I was having more fun than I’d ever had writing anything. I began to feel like Lenny Bruce.

“Rock Death in the Seventies”—it was just great until the seventies ended. Which is to say until December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was shot. I looked back on what I’d done and felt sick. And, not to be pious about it, I also realized that by who he was and how he died, his death threw all of my scales of morbidity off and rendered all my rankings redundant. Shot to death by a fan carrying The Catcher in the Rye? All other rock deaths just went down five points. And why didn’t he shoot J. D. Salinger instead?

That night, Albert Goldman, who was probably already salivating over the book he was going to write to destroy John Lennon’s claim to be anything more than a hustler posing as a seer, was on TV, talking about how really, this was John’s own fault. He was living in New York but he wasn’t a real New Yorker—real New Yorkers, like Albert Goldman, would have known how foolhardy it was to walk around as if you were an ordinary person. Just . . . asking for it. I’ll never forget it, any more than I’ll ever forget all the people who called that night and all the people I called. And knowing that in the small cabal Rolling Stone was then, I was going to have to contribute to the issue we were going to start putting together the next day and it had better be good.

A chill went through me today when the alert for Sly Stone came on my phone. Right now I’m going over the second set of proofs for a 50th anniversary edition of my book Mystery Train. Yes, I’ll have to make some changes in the back sections. And hope, more consciously than yesterday, that I’ll be around to see the results in print.

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Brian [Wilson], like Sly, but maybe to a lesser extent, existed in some netherworld for the past several decades. I never really knew what to think, or what his story was, just that it was an uncomfortable situation. Whatever was genetic, whatever others did to him, whatever he did to himself—it wasn’t clear that he really had control over his life after the early 1980s. Maybe even after the mid-’70s; he often looked confused and frightened in his “Brian’s Back!” period, like he was resigned to being trotted out for the next four decades. At the same time, I have no clue and it’s none of my business. You have written that you prefer the pre–Pet Sounds stuff. We know Paul loved him. Did his name come up much in your post-mid-’70s interviews with musicians—specifically, with punks? You’re not really a fan of speculative questions, but would anything have gone differently if the band had played Monterey? Thanks, as always. —RS

I’m not an interviewer, but I don’t recall the Beach Boys coming up in conversations I’ve had with, say, Elvis Costello, John Fogerty, or Bruce Springsteen. I have the feeling they would not have been treated well by the oh-so-self-consciously hip Monterey crowd in 1967, even if they’d played “Good Vibrations” with their theremin. I remember an article from the late sixties or early seventies bemoaning their marginalization by taste-makers, titled “If Only They’d Called Themselves The Band.” Their best champion was the late Paul Williams, in the original Crawdaddy, celebrating Beach Boys’ Party! and Wild Honey.

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The news of the deaths of both Sly Stone and Brian Wilson in the same week while notable, is not nearly as notable as the great music both artists produced during a few short creative years of their otherwise long lives. And why is that, do you think, that a lot of rock artists from the ’60s produced great and popular music in amazing creative bursts and then spent the rest of their lives and careers never reaching that same standard? Is it the fickle public? The pressure? The marketplace? What accounts for no or at least very few, remarkable second, let alone third acts (besides the incessant touring and cranking up the hits shows) in the careers of our beloved ’60s stars? —JAMES R STACHO

There’s no answer to this question, but you can speculate. It’s not unusual for creative people to latch onto the zeitgeist in their twenties or early thirties, their own zeitgeist or that of their time, and make art so rich they define their time, even put their name on it, and then find themselves adrift, bereft, with a no purchase on the world, their style going stale, faking it for the rest of their lives. There are ways in which you can read Hemingway with In Our Time in 1925 and The Sun Also Rises in 1926 and then go on and decide he said what he had to say, found his voice and then lost it. The same with Salinger—people celebrated Franny and Zooey and the books that came after, but you can see how no one would have read them if The Catcher in the Rye wasn’t there to make the rest seem far more than they were. There aren’t many artists like Philip Roth, who found great success right out of the box—he won the National Book Award for his first book—and did his best work much later in life.

Then there is the drug culture of the sixties. Some people came through it. A lot of people died. A lot of people looked back and wondered what happened to them. A lot of people weren’t even able to do that.

And there is another way to look at it, which that the zeitgeist chooses who it wants to speak for it, and then goes away, leaving those people on their own, to find their hands empty. Sly Stone had a political consciousness, and a political conscience, but even if Brian Wilson didn’t, he like Sly was caught up in the time, felt the world changing, felt the world saying now is the time as clearly as anyone, and both were impelled to do things that had never been done and canny enough to understand that there would be an audience for radical art, an audience that would satisfy their greatest dreams and give them the resources to indulge their most base desires and fantasies. And then the same voice said, the time is over, and they were left stranded.

And you can’t understand, you can’t feel, the last years of the 1960s and, for those who were part of that moment, the years and even decades that followed, without taking into account the enormous psychological shock, the down-to-your-toes despair, the bad dream coming back to attack you in the middle of the night when you’re wide awake, the nihilistic numbness and cynicism, brought on by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968—which for some were even more personally and, in the long view, politically, publicly, catastrophic than the assassination of JFK five years before—an act (it was two “acts,” but it felt like one and it feels like one to me now) that, in 1968 and after, could be seen as a kind of prophecy in action, a redrawing of the map of the future. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald has Nick thinking about the fixing of the 1919 World Series as far more a psychic crime than a legally criminal one (not that anyone was ever prosecuted): “playing with the faith of 50 million people.” That is what Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray did, and I don’t think it’s a thought too far to say that in some part of their motivation that’s exactly what they meant to do.

Sly and the Family Stone played the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. As the band begins to vamp into “Stand!” Sly begins to give a speech. “A lot of people stood in the sixties,” he says. “A lot of people went down—for standing.” He goes on, and it’s so strange—a few months after “the sixties” finished on the calendar, he’s already speaking of a vanished, historicized time, out of reach as lived experience, barely retrievable as memory, consigned to books you won’t write yourself and won’t be able to trust. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (which the Beach Boys once recorded—not one of their finer moments, but which Sly took into himself) came back and bit him on the neck. He simply put into words and voices what anybody felt in that moment, something a lot of people couldn’t put into words because they wouldn’t believe it. When Hemingway found that the war was behind him, that it was behind the times, he was left in a meaningless present, and wrote To Have and Have Not and Green Hills of Africa and . . . shot himself. At least Brian Wilson and Sly Stone could wait out their time, and their times, with Sly at least knowing where he was when he left.

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I got into the Beach Boys in the late ’90s and spent some time collecting various Smile bootlegs to see what the fuss was about. I concluded that some interesting songs had come out of the project but it was overhyped.

Yet when Brian Wilson Presents Smile came out in 2004 I loved it. I still don’t know (or really care) how closely it approximated what Wilson had planned in 1967; what I appreciated was that the new work connected the fragments and odds and ends of the Smile project into an organic whole, and how those connections—from the sequencing to the segues and pairings of stray themes—were surprising and amusing, giving a weird unity to the flow of the three “movements.” A pile of cryptic ruins had been reassembled into an amusement park ride. I still prefer Brian Wilson Presents to The Smile Sessions, where the collected bones and muscles lack ligaments.

Anyway, I wanted to see if you had any thoughts on the 2004 album. I don’t think you wrote about it at the time, so I’m guessing it didn’t do much for you, but I can avow that it made the previously inert Smile project come alive for me. —IA

I am anything but a Beach Boys completist, and have never kept up with the different configurations of official, fan club, and bootleg versions. I thought the tracks identified as from Smile on 20-20 were lovely, and when Surf’s Up finally appeared I thought it was a fully realized vision on its own terms and suggested what the whole project might have been. But I am leery of calling anyone, especially an artist, a genius, because it’s meaningless and seems meant to protect that person from the responsibilities of normal life and even of decency, or to bully the reader into, as Pauline Kael once put it, believing everything, say, Brian Wilson did was a work of genius, because he was a genius, it was his work, and . . . ergo. When it comes down to it, “Barbara Ann” might mean more to me than anything from Smile, and “I Get Around,” definitely. Jon Pareles had an acute piece in the New York Times about the use of vocals in the Beach Boys (especially re “I Get Around”) and Sly and the Family Stone that without getting into zeitgeist or genius-mongering said more about the uniqueness of their work and its relation to everyday life than all the hosannas being pumped out automatically by people whose actual lack of emotional connection to what they’re writing about is all too clear.

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John Fogerty is set to release 20 of his CCR classic songs on a new album ironically titled Legacy scheduled for August release. The songs are re-recordings of the versions generations of fans have heard on radio and record. As a lifelong fan of John and CCR, I find this tactic disappointing and the kind of thing John himself railed against when he had no control over his song catalog in the past (he now has mostly regained control due to copyright expiration laws when the calendar reached 50 years!), the problems mainly having to do with his old nemesis, Saul Zaentz, the former and now deceased head of Fantasy Records, and John’s own naivete surrounding what type of contracts he was signing when CCR first started. An artist re-recording their catalog is usually done for financial and publishing reasons, with Taylor Swift being the most recent and prominent songwriter to have done this. I don’t know Taylor Swift’s catalog, but I am well acquainted with all the CCR classics and those original recordings have stood the test of 55 years worth of time (you wrote the liner notes to Chronicle, the original mid-’70s Greatest Hits double LP) and I cannot imagine how they will be supplanted by the vocals of an 80 year old man and his family (two sons) of amateur musicians. John under the advise of his wife Julie, a sort of suburban Yoko, has become a traveling oldies act of the Branson Missouri variety over the last 20 years and while I suppose his show is better than his old bandmates’ versions when they toured as Creedence Clearwater Revisited, I think a better use of his time would be to tidy up his recording career and catalog so that devoted fans like myself can have all the interesting work John has and hasn’t provided (outtakes, demos, et al.) over the years in a nice box set. I loved his original Blue Ridge Rangers album which was his first solo record and bootleg versions of the never released 1976 Hoodoo make me wish he had continued recording when he was still young and at the peak of his powers. No doubt the new versions of old songs will sell a little better than any new album John might release now and it will partially erase history (he hopes) and not provide any additional income to his surviving bandmates and his late brother Tom’s estate. But it’s a cheap and cardboard epitaph for a great career, IMO. —JAMES R STACHO

I listened to the re-recorded version of “Up Around the Bend,” a record I’ve always thought of as a kind of miracle. It took everything good about the hits that came before it and went past them like a Corvette passing Ford sedans, in a way that could have thrilled the Ford drivers even more than the person driving the Corvette. I remember a dinner with the great Rolling Stone interviewer and literary critic Jonathan Cott where it seemed as if all we did was talk about that song in terms of BUT WHAT ABOUT THAT PART? or NO, THAT’S MY FAVORITE PART! and having so much fun because with whatever good you said about that song you couldn’t be wrong.

There was no reason to listen to the new version. It’s just a copy. ChatGPT could have done it as well.

That said, John Fogerty went through many financial horrors that must have left him sleepless for nights on end, doubting his own worth or even honesty, wondering if his life had been a waste and a fraud—that’s what depression, the feeling of no-way out, can do. In fact he put things into the world that hadn’t been there before and left the world richer for it. Just listen to the opening of “Effigy”—it’s so full of foreboding, of curse-upon-yourself, it takes nerve to keep listening. So I don’t begrudge John Fogerty a dime or a moment of satisfaction, or revenge, on Saul Zaentz, on the world, he might get from whatever he does with his songs.

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Saw your post about Springsteen’s denunciation of Trump in Manchester, and had two questions:

1. When you say his speech was stronger than the music, do you mean the songs were deficient or simply not as pointed as the spoken words?

2. Do I recall an essay you wrote during the Born in the U.S.A. Tour in which you imagined Springsteen denouncing Reagan from the stage in ways even his most pungent material did not?

Sounds like the same dynamic at work in both instances, with Springsteen actually acting as you wished he had 40 years earlier. —DEREK MURPHY

To your first question, yes, I thought the music lacked the flair and vehemence Bruce found in his speeches; I’d heard these songs with more life in them before.

And your second: you’re right. This is what I wrote in Artforum in December 1985 in my column Speaker to Speaker:

When Springsteen plays in a coliseum filled with 60,000 people, what is at issue is not the size of the audience, but the intensity of its desire to be confirmed as an audience. When he sings about dispossession in contemporary America, when he violates the ruling political fantasies of the nation, there are many in the audience who do not believe a word he says, and many more who will never, not even in their most private thoughts, live out a word he sings. Yet not a single person says no. When, between songs, Springsteen speaks even more eloquently (and, without the comforts and supports of music, far more riskily) about dispossession in contemporary America, there is respectful silence. That silence—the absorption of a pop moment that is also a deflection of its content—is the enemy: the silence is an affirmation that the structure of the event has contained, has swallowed, its content.

Sitting in the midst of 60,000 people, thrilled by Springsteen’s “I’m Goin’ Down” and “Cadillac Ranch,” I wondered what would have happened, what could have happened, if he had exchanged his pointed metaphors for denunciation. What would have happened if he had said what I like to imagine he believes: that those who currently rule the country are evil people, with evil motives, doing evil things? Most likely Springsteen does not believe that—does not, at least, believe in that kind of speech. But I don’t think he was saying all that he believes. I think he was saying all he thought he could get across. What would have happened, though, if Springsteen had said no with rage instead of forgiveness, tried to blow away the empowerment of stardom and stood on the stage as a crank? I can’t help wondering if the solipsistic hysteria surrounding Springsteen’s show—a process that turns the star even more than the fan into an object, that robs his every subjective word of its particular meaning—could have been breached.

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Hi Greil, I hope all is well. Thank you for all you do, but thanks especially for your recent reprints of “Tube,” mainly because they feature one of my favorite literary forms, the capsule review. Yours are like great popcorn, and the saltier the better. I love the shout-out to The Adventurers (who the heck remembers that high-priced soaper except that it was famous for being so forgettable). These entries remind me of Kael’s capsules at the back of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a section so well-read in my household that the pages came loose. Your latest, featuring everything from Godzilla and the Smog Monster to Citizen Kane, confirmed that, no matter how all-encompassing today’s boob-tube is, the ’70s were the gold standard for gonzo late-night viewing. Not to mention non-gonzo essentials like Charles Champlin’s Film Odyssey on PBS, a finely curated film class like no other—but that’s another story. I’m hoping there’s more of “Tube” in our future. —CHARLIE LARGENT

That column ended in 1975, right about the time my book Mystery Train was published and City went out of business. (There are only one or two columns left to run here.) The magazine was bought by Francis Coppola, who relaunched what had been a seat of the pants operation as a much fancier, oversize, full color City of San Francisco magazine. He ran photo spreads by Annie Leibowitz and hired Manny Farber and Patricia Paterson as film critics. I lost my dedicated space but could still run columns when I had something to write about, which usually I didn’t. Columns take life from what’s running around them, by participating in a dialogue with other writers and readers, and the tone of what I was writing went from spunk to respectable, even sentimental, which was no fun. But Francis said he wanted every movie on tv in those birth of cable days reviewed in a weekly guide, so I wrote capsules on 50 or more movies at a time, most of which I hadn’t seen. That WAS fun. But the writing had lost its context and I left it well before the magazine, like all San Francisco San Francisco magazines, folded.

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Hi, Greil—A passing mention of Haight-Ashbury in one of your “Tube” columns prompted me to reflect that I couldn’t recall you ever saying much about that famous neighborhood. I would imagine that it wasn’t “your scene,” particularly, but even so—did you ever spend much time there in its ’60s heyday? Any memories, fond or otherwise, that you’d care to share? Thanks, as always. —CHARLES OLVER

You’re right, I wasn’t around there in the mid-’60s. I was in Berkeley and there was a real double snobbery at work. We thought Haight hippies were a bunch of morons and they thought Berkeley people were intellectual idiots who didn’t believe in fun, even if we were at the Fillmore or the Avalon every weekend, or the Jabberwocky up Telegraph to see Country Joe and the Fish.

I remember walking down Haight in about 1968, with junkies lying on the street. The only time I ever spent there was for readings at Booksmith and Plymouth martinis at Persia au Zum Zum, where Bruno, the owner and bartender, would throw people out if he didn’t like the expression on their face or if they tried to order anything else. We were always proud it never happened to us until one night when we went there with a friend in her 40s who laughed when Bruno asked for her ID. “You can stay,” he said to us, “but she has to go.” We weren’t going to leave her waiting on the street for half an hour so we all left. And felt so creepy we didn’t go back.

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What’s a really solid history or account of early rock & roll (a book, I guess I should specify)? James Miller’s is undercooked & Nik Cohn’s is too idiosyncratic. I saw that you dug Ed Ward’s second volume of The History but what about the first? I have students who’ve never heard a record by Little Richard. —MICHAEL ROBBINS

I think the reason you can’t find a satisfying history that both maps the territory and captures the spark of a shift that upended all structures of cultural hierarchy and strictures of taste—as Nik Cohn put it, suddenly you could be black, white, purple, moronic, or anything on earth, “and you could still clean up”—is because the history of the music, the style, the life, the business, the crime, the sacrifices, the epiphanies, is so rich and complex. That’s why to really learn about Buddy Holly you have to read Charles White’s biography of Little Richard and to understand Elvis you have to read Preston Lauterbach’s Before Elvis.

Nik Cohn’s Pop from the Beginning was a revelation to me in 1969. I had a book on rock ’n’ roll coming out later that year and, worried about the competition, asked Baron Wolman at Rolling Stone who’d read Cohn’s book because one of his photos was in it, if it was any good. “Well,” he said, “it’s very opinionated.” Well, yeah, I thought, isn’t that what a book about rock ’n’ roll should be? It’s crazy with enthusiasms—whole chapters on Eddie Cochran, who in his book is the Platonic form of rock in a single body, a single shooting star—or P. J. Proby, a zero who to him is something like the ultimate philosopher of the form. It’s full of hatreds—to Cohn Buddy Holly was “the patron saint of every no-talent kid who ever tried to make a million dollars. He was founder of a noble tradition.” He’s a great writer and there are many phrases from his book that lodged in my memory that I can quote verbatim, just as I’m doing now, and many more that remain as intellectual touchstones. Put that book together with his graphic imaginary history with Guy Peellaert, Rock Dreams, and you’ve got a lot for your students to be seduced by. And there’s Charlie Gillett’s more scholarly but in its way just as cultish The Sound of the City, which is a regional study of record labels that too was like entering into a world I thought I’d lived through and about which I found I knew almost nothing—but I can’t quote a word from that.

You have students that have never heard Little Richard? See if you can pull the scene in Club Handy in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis where Austin Butler’s EP and Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s B. B. King are watching in pure awe as Alton Mason’s Little Richard throws out “Tutti Frutti” as if he’s Plastic Man. It never happened, but it will show them who, what, Little Richard was.

And I can’t keep from mentioning the double page in Cohn and Peellaert’s 20th-Century Dreams, for the two-page spread of Elvis, having just been made an honorary Federal narcotics agent, breaking into Bill Clinton’s dorm room to bust him for pot. The whole point of the Cohn “Dreams” books—and I’m sure the ideas were his—was to show you something outrageous and make you realize that deep down they were your fantasies too. Isn’t this?

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Your capsule summaries of The Waltons and A Cry in the Wilderness in the May 13, 1975, Tube column contain references to fumigation and extermination. My wife speculates that you were having a cockroach problem that spring—true? —MIKE FURLOUGH

In those days we lived in Berkeley. We never saw a cockroach. Then one day we stayed in a fancy hotel in New York and brought one home in a suitcase.

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Dear Greil, Congratulations on your recent milestone birthday. You made it.

In your honor I played “One Fine Day” and “Da Doo Ron Ron” along with one of my all time favorite girl group obscurities “My One and Only Jimmy Boy” by the Girlfriends.

Speaking of singles—do you ever listen to your old 45s and how many do you still have in your collection?Also what was the first 45 you ever bought?

Once again, many happy returns. —CRAIG ZELLER

As I’ve maybe said too many times, but it’s the story I’ve got, the first 45 I ever bought was Elvis’s “All Shook Up.” It was number one on the Bay Area charts, had been for weeks, but Chuck Berry’s “School Days” was predicted to knock it out of the top spot so I bought it to keep it there. I felt like I was voting in an election. (Chuck won anyway.)

Unlike the hundreds of LPs I sold when I moved from a big house to a small house, I have never parted with any of my 45s, except for the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’’ on Candix which I gave to Tom Smucker (Why the Beach Boys Matter) because I knew it would mean more to him.

Along with all my Phil Spector 45s, which sound so much MORE than any of the same songs in any other format, I think my most treasured single is the Chantels’ “If You Try”—which I found only a few years ago in a little record store on Great Jones Street in New York.

I have no idea how many I have. 200? 300? Not too many not to be able to remember just about every one.

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In one of the most unremittingly grim news cycles I can remember, a rare bright spot was the failure (so far, at least) of Andrew Cuomo’s attempt at a comeback; it was a mean pleasure to watch that odious character demonstrate just how out of touch a candidate can be, from mocking Mamdani’s use of social media as a campaign tool to believing that an endorsement from Bill Clinton would help seal the deal (was Cosby unavailable?).

I’m guessing that you have your reservations about Zohran Mamdani, but does his ascension, along with that of AOC, give you any hope for a re-energization of the Democratic Party? —STEVE O’NEILL

I think there may be room for Mamdani and others like him in the Democratic Party, though to what degree he wants to be part of it—Bernie Sanders may have wanted its nomination, but he has never acted as if he were part of it—has yet to begin to play out and is to a great degree up to him. I’m not in New York, I have voted there but I don’t now, so anything I might say doesn’t reflect access to Mamdani’s commercials, those attacking him, watching his speeches and his campaign, and daily news other than what little is in the New York Times national coverage.

I was struck that when I was in New York early in the year and saw a Mamdani poster in a bodega and later asked various New York friends who he was—it struck me as odd that someone with a Muslim name was campaigning—and no one could tell me. That says a lot, as AOC’s victory did before, about how empty the Democratic party seems to a lot of people and thus how someone can come from apparently nowhere and blast the past, even if he or she alienates or simply doesn’t come across to segments of Democratic voters, which in New York, in this case, means a lot of black people and a lot of Jewish people. I wish I knew to what degree Mamdani’s prevarication, if not outright dishonesty, over his acceptance of the call to “globalize the intifada,” accounted for his small Jewish vote, as opposed to anti-Muslim suspicion, say, but to me it ought to have damaged him across the board. “Globalize the intifada” has a clear meaning, as it has always been used by Hamas and Hezbollah and other terrorists and by their US and European supporters: it means kill Jews—globally. It doesn’t mean, as Mamdani has said, support for Palestinian rights or self-determination (Palestinians had self-determination when they put Hamas in power in Gaza, if not, thanks to Hamas, since). If that’s a gauge of how he will act as mayor, or as a would-be national figure, that’s a bad sign, not for him, but for the party and the city.

That said, my impression of watching the response to him reminded me more than anything of Eric Adams’s winning campaign. He seemed like someone people could feel good about voting for. There may have been significant virtue signaling—people signaling to themselves. Adams ended up as a mostly disastrous actual mayor, corrupt in ways small and large, secretive, incompetent, withdrawn, conspiracy-minded. Brad Lander seemed like someone who could actually be a mayor—you know, govern. Mamdani may be a great public face, but if he wants to succeed he might well appoint Lander first deputy mayor and let him be the administrator for his administration.

As for Cuomo, he didn’t deserve to be in the race, let alone win. And he was crushed.