Ask Greil: June 25, 2024

You've written about how valuable YouTube is in helping you track down hard-to-find songs; how about the unsought material that YouTube finds for you?

I dialed up a couple of Joe South songs I've always liked (the only ones I'd heard, really) and a day or two later was gifted with a Joe South playlist. Now, I won't make any arguments for South's genius, but he sure is engagingly weird, maybe one of the great unrecognized musical eccentrics: the quasi-religious "Gabriel" ("come on down to Atlanta and blow your horn"), the anti-redneck "Redneck", so unapologetically judgmental it could only have been written by a white southerner ("God said 'brain,' you thought He said 'rain' and ran for cover") and the very strange, late-career "Oprah Cried." That's not even counting Bettye LaVette's screeching cover of "Games People Play."

Have the algorithms hipped you to anything particularly memorable that you wouldn't have otherwise encountered? —STEVE O’NEILL

YouTube is useful when you go to check on something, but yes, the real action has always been on the stack on the right so full of what you never imagined would change your day, become a lifelong return destination, or a whole new rabbit hole to get lost in. I think the best for me was when I was just trying to make sure I was remembering a song correctly and boom, here’s this assemblage of Moby Grape live recordings. And they were unknown and thrilling. But not as good as one of the comments: “What? Did the devil loan you his record collection?”

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Major League Baseball has long celebrated the legacy of Jackie Robinson, having an annual day(s) where all players wear the now retired number 42, to honor the memory of Robinson. But it rings false as MLB has never been fully integrated either on the field, in the clubhouse or in the front office. Fewer black athletes than ever are becoming professional baseball players and a lot has been written as to why that is a fact and the social underpinnings are troubling. Now, we have the death of Willie Mays, who stood for so much that baseball wants to see as its own reflection: Talented, integrated, gracious and happy ballplayers. And Mays whose very name was synonymous with baseball at its popular height in the 1950's and 60's, (America's Game), never dared to publicly challenge the racism of his time. He was not at the famous Cleveland Summit where black athletes in 1967, including Bill Russell, Jim Brown and (then) Lew Alcindor, rallied in support of Muhammad Ali's refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War. Not a single baseball player attended the summit. Not Mays, not Hank Aaron (who much later stepped forward as a civil rights advocate at the time he was breaking Babe Ruth's home run record and receiving death threats from bigoted haters), not Frank Robinson, who became baseball's first black manager and had plenty of personal fortitude. The following year, black ballplayers refused to play at the start of the 1968 season in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's murder and a couple of years later, Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause which essentially made players 'high paid slaves' in Flood's words. That ended his career, not surprisingly. I'm sure as a Bay Area native, you have fond memories of Willie Mays, as do all baseball fans for his talents were wonderous, but whatever his civil rights battles were, they were mostly private, sad to say. —JAMES R STACHO

I imagine that in some part of his being, every day Willie Mays said to himself, not in these words, but in his own, I am my own revolution. How did he feel that night in 1963 when in the bottom of the 16-inning scoreless tie with Warren Spahn and Juan Marichal on the mound for every pitch he ended it with a home run? Oh, I feel so fine, I am so lucky to be allowed to play this wonderful game? Or was it, Take that, you fuckers. Go back down in the ground, you Klan killers. You’ll never catch me.

A lot of people saw that. A lot of people felt that. There’s no way to measure to what degree Willie Mays might have inspired the people at the Cleveland Summit to do what they did even if he didn’t do it, even if he thought, I had to do my service, go on and do yours—which I doubt.

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Hi, Greil, when David Byrne jarringly starts to repeat the (violence-evocative) muttered phrase "Double beating/double beating" in the middle of the Talking Heads' aspiration-anthem "Stay Hungry" (from Buildings and Food), do you think that he's actually giving a wry nod to the skip-rope/dance-tempo instructions in Shirley Ellis's "The Real Nitty-Gritty"? Please advise. Thanks. —CRAIG PROCTOR

I'm sure you're right. But your question has been driving me over the edge all week. I have a strong memory of a Talking Heads collection—live, archive, I'm not sure, I thought it was The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads but it's not on the advance copy of that I have—of Talking Heads, or maybe their earlier incarnation as the Artistics, doing Shirley Ellis's "The Name Game." But I can't find any reference to that online and nothing on my shelves—not that there's much. I couldn't bear the band from their first single and album. Remain in Light is deep, rich, funny, expansive, and so in its way is Stop Making Sense. The rest never meant a thing to me. But I still believe that "The Name Game" is out there somewhere.

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Hi Greil - On the Criterion Channel right now, there is a collection of noir films from 1950 (I believe this is the peak year of the genre in terms of quantity and, for many, quality) streaming. Many great films from that year are on there, but a favorite of mine remains Nicholas Ray's In A Lonely Place. Bogart's Dixon Steele is one of his finest roles and the film remains contemporary in that Steele is certainly someone who would be in risk of being "cancelled" today for his anti-social behavior. Another Ray film, however, really stuck with me from that same collection and year—Born to Be Bad starring Joan Fontaine & the underrated Robert Ryan.

It's a noir film that doesn't really involve criminals, gangsters or detectives although there is a "femme fatale" of sorts but even Fontaine's character is not really bad per se. She is an ambitious social climber and is probably punished doubly for being that and a young, single woman. Curiously, the film also has a gay character (implied) who finds common cause with her being an outsider himself. "Bad" probably qualifies as a noir because it has a jaundiced view of relationships and whether true love can ever be realized amidst a culture of transactional relationships. I just found it to be a really mature and undersung entry in Ray's career.

Have you seen Born to Bad? Any thoughts on it if so or Nicholas Ray or 1950 as the peak noir year? Thanks! —ANTHONY VOLPE

If I took all the movies traveling today under the after-the-fact French critics’ genre invention film noir, In a Lonely Place, which I go into at some length in ‘A Talk in Tulsa,’ from 1923, which you can find here, would be at the top—along with Detour, Out of the Past, and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. All of those movies have terrible, cursed endings—the kind of endings that led French critics to name an even harder style, film maudit.

I hadn’t seen Born to Be Bad. Watching it yesterday right after The Talented Mr. Ripley, it was clear from Joan Fontaine’s first curling smile that she would lie, cheat, and kill to get what she wanted: as Robert Ryan says to her while falling for her once again, “If you ever breathe an honest breath I want to be there to see it.” That’s a great line, but neither Ryan nor Nicholas Ray puts enough behind it—and Ryan as a mild, decent person is not exactly drawing on his strengths. The movie for me never gets off the ground. There doesn’t seem that much at stake. Ray doesn’t seem interested. That every time Fontaine embraces Ryan or Zachary Scott—if anyone was born to be bad it was the characters Scott played best, as in The Mask of Dimitrios—it’s in precisely the same manner he shows he wanted to get it over with. And no film noir worth the name has a happy ending, or for that matter is merely unhappy. If the criminals don’t kill each other they fall into a despair so deep they can’t even imagine themselves out of it. With Born to Be Bad even Fontaine is smiling after losing her big bet.

Robert Ryan as underrated? Compared to Robert Mitchum, yes, he wasn’t as good—but aside from Bogart or Stanwyck in their era, who was? On either side of the law, as a sheriff or a detective, a racist or an anti-Semite, Ryan played to the limit—in Crossfire, I Married a Communist, Day of the Outlaw, Odds Against Tomorrow. (Looking through his filmography, I found him as the lead in a 1958 Playhouse 90 live TV production of The Great Gatsby—that I have to see). John Huston should have cast him as Ahab in Moby Dick instead of Gregory Peck. Ryan too was a liberal—one of the most engaged anti-McCarthyism, world-government, Civil Rights voices in Hollywood—but it didn’t have to show on screen, and Ahab was no liberal. Look for J.K Jones’s 2015 The Lives of Robert Ryan—especially for how Ryan was protected from the blacklist—and you’ll see why he will only grow in presence as the years go on.

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Wondering if you still care about or listen to Pussy Galore. Pulled a couple of their records off the shelf the other day and thought it was like some bizarro novelty disc from days yonder, a cobwebbed curio fished out of Dr. Demento's garage. —TERRY

I loved the band from the moment I heard them on KALX in Berkeley, the campus station, with “Cunt Tease,” thinking “Are you kidding me? On the radio? This defenseless college spot?” I never missed an album. I searched for their cassette re-recording of Exile on Main Street. For me it was more Julia Cafritz than Jon Spencer. They had an incandescent flair.

It was Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion that was the novelty act—just by the cheesiness of the name and that the music was like a contradiction of blues. In a way it always struck me as modern blackface. Pussy Galore lived up to their name. There really wasn’t anything like them. They sounded like they were having fun. Kids scribbling obscene pictures in their notebooks in class and showing them to each other and saying we really ought to have an official school exhibition of these fabulous drawings but since that’s not going to happen why don’t we write some songs? 

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Hi Greil - Three matters for this round of Ask Greil…

1. Have you had the good fortune to come across Laura Tenschert’s podcast “Everything Dylan”? While not every episode contains earth-shattering revelations, it’s just about always enjoyable. I think what I love most about this podcast series is that Tenschert, first and foremost, is an intelligent, all the while unapologetic and enthusiastic, fan. I get the feeling she’d find the joy that comes from sitting on a back porch while Down in the Groove, Dylan & the Dead or The Complete Budokan plays in the next room.

Tenschert’s upbeat tone is a welcome relief from the prissy & snarky vitriol that the likes of Christgau and Heylin heap upon Dylan works that are not to their liking.

If I were to suggest a single episode of the “Everything Dylan” podcast, it would be (hands down!) “Dear Bob”: Sinead O’Connor’s Letters to Bob Dylan. This episode’s ensuing 100 minutes is one of the most emotionally gripping, harrowing and raw-nerved audio collages that I’ve ever heard. At times that episode’s contents left me in a pool of tears. Each and every one of us should have a monthly Real Life Rock list, and her “Dear Bob” episode definitely tops mine for the month of June.

2. I know you’re not as enthusiastic about Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as I am.
I put Cave in the same league as Dylan, Springsteen and Bowie. Any thoughts/impressions on the two songs released so far from their forthcoming Wild God album? As for myself… I can hardly wait.

3. Regarding the Trump conviction. I’ve no doubt the MTGs, Mike Johnsons, and Vivek Ramaswamys of America would downplay the seriousness of murder had Trump been convicted of such a crime. Still, I am amazed at the dizzying spins of martyrdom and victimization the GOP is giving to Trump’s recent conviction. Granted, I was a young pup back in the days of Watergate… but didn’t Nixon’s sycophants know when to call it a day by the time Nixon resigned?

So, I have to ask: if this perverse “weaponization-of-the-justice-system”spin holds sway with November’s voting majority, then why should any of us lose a minute of sleep worried about the fate of democracy in America? Especially if democracy amounts to little more than shilling the rubes?

With much appreciation for this column - BILLY INNES, San Francisco

Thanks for these tips. But the “Everything Dylan” Sinead O’Connor podcast. Which starts out with such a well crafted account of O’Connor’s apostasy—and you really have to wonder how Dylan could have missed the parallel to the response he got when he took up rock ’n’ roll onstage in 1965, and why it took Kris Kristofferson to do for O’Connor what Johnny Cash did for Dylan, to stand up and say, LET HER SING! LET HER SPEAK!— well, with all that, the program hits a rock and springs a leak that never closes as soon as Tenschert and her guest start ruminating while all but admit g the have nothing to say and I’m sitting there saying LET HER WRITE!  LET HER SPEAK 

Wild God is Nick Cave at his most pompous and pretentious—but that’s who he is, and I was seduced and beginning to drift into the song until. . . The holy chorus came in and turns the pompous and pretentious setting up about ten notches and I jumped over to Cave and Pretty Polly—I mean PJ Harvey singing “Pretty Polly”—I wish. It was “Henry Lee,” which was good enough.

The difference between todays Republicans with Trump, and Nixon and his: Barry Goldwater was not Nixon’s sycophant. He wasn’t as interested in power as he was in his own probity.

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I know it's getting hard to keep up with Neil Young releases these days, but have you listened to "Before and After"? I don't think there's anything on it that's the best interpretation of the given tune, but I enjoyed it. It's like Old Man Neil sitting in his living room playing all his old favorites for you. Truth in advertising issue, though: There's no Before, it's all After. —ROBERT FIORE

I haven’t listened to it. I lost track of this project sone time ago. So I go to Amoeba Records and look around and take home what looks interesting. But right now I’m too overwhelmed by Fuckin’ Up to consider Neil playing quietly. I am not a Harvest person.

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I'm currently in the middle of re-reading your Doors book (the front flap of the dust jacket is my bookmark this go-around, and the back flap is still marking a later page from the last go-around, and I don't know what will happen when they meet—will they explode? kiss? break on through?), and find myself thinking again that this might be your most total work. From the most galactic concepts down to the physical feeling of bootleg vinyl in your hand, it feels full-spectrum in a way that kind of stands alone in your oeuvre. I would imagine this has a lot to do with your first-hand experience of the phenomenon and physical proximity and all that.

Anyway, I know you have previously talked greasy about Joan Didion's apparent belief that California-ness was next to godliness, but have you ever considered doing a full-on psychogeography type book on this formative matrix of yours? Something situated somewhere between that book that one woman wrote on post-Pistols London and that feverish Vachel Lindsay thing where he talks about golden whales and red boars and great bears gobbling raisins by the handful on Mount Tamalpais or wherever? I guess you could make the argument that that's what you've been doing for a long time now, just that it's a psychogeography distributed across many years and many media, but I don't know—reading you write about the Doors and Walter Mosely and high school and Inherent Vice and all the rest, it's hard not to hear the hooves of something woollier beating underneath. 

Three things quickly—two for your files, one for your consideration:

One, Sly Stone in dub. I've always wondered why Jamaica didn't pick up more on Sly—his particular vision, fragility, oddness, and bounce would seem to be a natural. I was slightly let down to realize that Boris Gardiner's "Every N*gger Is A Star" was not a cover, but who knows—maybe it sort of is. 

Two, speaking of covers/not covers: I don't know whether you've ever listened to Suicide's "Born In The U.S.A.," done live in 1987 before a Paris audience that is not receptive—against their boos, Alan Vega assures "We'll fuck it up, don't worry about it!" An engagingly bizarre roll call of artists (Ricky Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Hot Chocolate, et al.) and their "catchphrases" ("Up on Blue-berry Hill!" "Folsom Prison Blues!" "Sister Ray!"), it's more than ten minutes long, and very heavy/too heavy on Bill-Murray-lounge-singer smirk, but at the halfway mark he gets around to your man: "And then there's Bob Dylan! Highway 61!  Highway 61!  Hey, God said to Abraham, kill me a son! Kill me a son! In the U.S.A.! Bob Dylan!" 

Three, as a fellow lifelong victim of name mispronunciation (with the possible exception of a short period in the 1980s, during the brief public ascent of pro golfer Mark Calcavecchia), I'm always on the lookout for strategies, and was recently reminded of a good one while looking through some DVDs in a box on the curb: Standup comic Hannibal Burress, tired of people mispronouncing his name, did an hour-long special and titled it Animal Furnace. Boom. One quickie compilation of film writing titled Reel Darkness and you too could enjoy these same results, maybe. I mean, I'm sure you've by now made your peace, but that might be one to have in the quiver, you know?

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2 lazy 

2 crow 

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4 day,

—JAMES CAVICCHIA, Chicago

I wish I could dive in as you have. But "Everyday Music" as a dub of "Everyday People" has neither dub murk and mystery or anything to add to the song. Taking one melody line and repeating it for two and a half minutes sounds like somebody's mistake. As for Suicide, life's too short and their "Born in the U.S.A." is too long. I appreciate your pointing me toward both, as they took me on the right hand YouTube stack back to Steve Miller's "My First Mind."

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