Ask Greil: June 7, 2024

Sir: As a lifelong admirer of your singular journalistic brilliance—and a delighted owner of all of your magnificent books—I was devastated by your recent piece on the ongoing students Gaza protests in the US. [Ask Greil, May 10]

If you have time, may I ask you to take a look at this linked piece [“To bandy about the serious accusation of anti-Semitism in unserious ways is dangerous” by Daniel Levy]—and hopefully hear your thoughts.

Regards —DECLAN CAHILL, Dublin, Ireland

Daniel Levy had the good fortune to work with two of the most  honest, open, forward looking leaders in Israel’s history. The events unfolding now are under the hand, or the heel, of the worst people who have ever suppressed and controlled not only Palestinian Territories but Israel itself. I have an agoraphobic niece who was born and grew up on a kibbutz a mile from the Lebanese border (now living in temporary housing well to the south) who demonstrated in public against the Netanyahu takeover of the Supreme Court, a step into the light that was shocking to all who knew her. The response of the government to the Hamas massacres was at best a moronic, anti-strategic act and at worst an effort by Netanyahu to protect himself and a war crime by his cabinet allies who would indeed favor the genocide that is not now taking place—that’s an idiot slogan, like ‘THE ONLY SOLUTION IS INTIFADA REVOLUTION,’ which is in fact a call for genocide of the present population of Israel, including Arab Israelis who would be eliminated by Hamas as collaborationists.

I did not address everything about this situation and I didn’t mean to. I was asked a question by a reader, about public anti-Israel or pro-Hamas demonstrations, and I tried to compose a response. Daniel Levy, with his just-too-cool references to Israeli hip-hop, has nothing to do with what I wrote or what I meant to say. There are infinite voices worth listening to—something that any variant of “There is only one solution” denies.

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To my surprise, I think your analysis of the Gaza situation is simplistic. I agree that Hamas intended to provoke a “seemingly indiscriminate response.” The terrible question you ignore is: Why did the Israeli government (which I distinguish from its citizens) respond in such a brutal way? Why, indeed, did Netanyahu give Hamas what it wanted, in such a way that the whole mess just got much worse? I would go a step further—you focus on hatred of Jews, which is real and bubbling under our society, I agree; I suggest that hatred of “Arabs” is also real and also bubbling under our society. Palestinians are viewed as Arabs—you know better, I know better, but prejudice spills all over the place. I have no answers. But I do think that the statement “we are seeing just how many people hate Jews, have always hated Jews, and have waited all their lives for a chance to say so” is facile rhetoric, and contributes nothing valuable to the discussion. —PETE SHANKS

I’m not aware that students identified by themselves or others as Arab, Palestinian, or Arab- or Palestinian-American have been subjected to the same kind of calling out, shaming, excluding, silencing, and in some cases violence—the argument in acts that ‘You do not belong here,’ as if any student does not forfeit their own privilege of attendance by asserting the right to deny it to others—that has been inflicted on Jewish students at, I am disgusted to say, my own beloved Berkeley, where I was a student from 1963-71 and a teacher 1970-71 and 2000-19, Harvard, Columbia, and elsewhere.

As for the Netanyahu government response, I’ve addressed this in another Ask [see previous] at the same time as this one, as best I can.

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Have you watched any of your friend John McWhorter's appearances on Glenn Loury's podcast? Loury is a self-described conservative, McWhorter a self-described liberal-but-not-leftist, but they don't seem to disagree on a whole lot, particularly when it comes to racial matters. The two jointly endorsed The Trayvon Hoax, in which a right-wing documentarian who's seen too many Michael Moore films sets out to prove that a prosecution witness in the Trayvon Martin case (who was not at the scene of the crime) lied about her identity. (Along the way, the filmmaker interviews George Zimmerman, whose veracity is accepted as a given.)

More recently, McWhorter and Loury recommended another documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis, which argues that George Floyd's death was an unfortunate accident and anyway Floyd's own fault (and that, maybe, the FBI conspired to railroad Derek Chauvin). They subsequently walked back their rave after a thorough, devastating debunking of the film by the journalist Radley Balko. Interestingly, Loury was apologetic and self-reflective, "chastened" as he put it, while McWhorter went on the defense: "you can't always be a hundred percent sure," he offered, and "we did our job".

I find it truly depressing that someone whose intellectual curiosity I've admired believes that enthusiastically getting behind a piece of reactionary propaganda like The Fall of Minneapolis, and leaving it up to another journalist do the work of interrogating it, is part of his job description.

Unrelated, but I recently watched your Windham-Campbell lecture. It was stunning, I thought, and up there with your best work; there's so much in it that I'd love to hear more about, but for now one small question: what did Admiral Halsey say when your grandfather accused him of killing your father? —STEVE O’NEILL

I met John McWhorter in April 2002 at a conference of neo-cons at the University of Chicago on culture after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Mark Lilla, one of the organizers, invited some people who were not conservatives but who didn't automatically conform to leftist pieties and shibboleths, such as Jim Miller and myself. Just how blinkered the general tone of the thing was came home to me during an organized lunch break, when one of the participants defended George W. Bush's administration with, "So they handed the right a sop by making John Ashcroft Attorney General—"  "Since when is the Attorney Generalship a sop?" I said. "And what makes you think Bush is not the right himself?” But McWhorter talked about 1940s radio plays because he liked them. We got along. He was at Berkeley then, and not happy. He went on to the right-wing think tank the Manhattan Institute before moving to Columbia, where he is now. He has always been on the right and, from what you say, less discerning in their media bubble than he is taking apart what people really say when they say what they're saying. We correspond about pieties and shibboleths.

Thanks for what you said about my Windham-Campbell talk. A different and longer version makes up the first of three parts of my book What Nails It, part of the Yale University Press series "Why I Write," which will be out in August.

I was never told what Halsey said to my grandfather, who died in 1951, when I was six. I would imagine he stared straight ahead and didn't say a word.

[Publishing info on What Nails It.]

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It's been announced that Robert Hilburn is publishing A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman this October with Newman's full approval.

How do you take this news? Do you think Robert Hilburn was the right author for the job? —BEN MERLISS

I didn't know about this, and I was thrilled to hear it. I’m reading the book now; it’s as humanly detailed and wide-screened as one could hope for. Bob Hilburn is the right person in spades. He was there, on the ground in LA for the whole story,  from before it began til—after it's ended? In his interviews he as often brought out the most thoughtful responses from people. I think people trust him. They respect his experience, and the fact that he never picked targets to make himself look better. He respected his own subject matter.

And it's more than fortuitous for me. I'm currently in the middle of revising the back sections of Mystery Train for a 50th anniversary edition next year, and this means I’m fortunate to be able to get that book into it. Really, I can't wait to finish it.

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Hey Greil - I got to thinking about another Springsteen concert we both attended. The Devils and Dust Tour at Oakland’s Fox Theatre. You were standing immediately in front of me in the Will Call line, waiting with a younger couple. You passed the time speaking with them at length about the Seattle music scene. It was a pretty enjoyable way (for all within earshot) to wait in line.

I remember Bruce being in a less than great mood that night. If I remember correctly, he’d been the subject of a semi-scandalous front page tabloid story earlier in the day. I cannot imagine that would add to a day’s joy. Testy mood and all, though, I remember that the song performances were flawless. The song I love most from D&D, along with “Matamoros Banks,” is “Black Cowboys” (which wasn’t played that night). Any thoughts on that show from nearly 20 years ago?

And, yes, New Order is definitely a dance band. Granted the early show of theirs that you saw sounds like a moody gem, I used to go to Wolfgang’s Dance Dance every Sunday night in San Francisco’s North Beach. A New Order song never failed to fill the floor. And New Order was played a-plenty at Wolfgang’s.

Which brings me back to the question to which I truly wish to learn your answer.

How does a critic such as yourself—one whose words carry weight (at least they do amongst my tribe)—review albums such as Spacemen 3’s Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To or Lou Reed’s Berlin—if one isn’t of that life or those worlds? Having done my tenure decades ago with a speed-freak, I can tell you firsthand Lou was spot-on-the-mark with Berlin. And knowing how accurate a chronicle Berlin is in recounting such a sordid way of life, it makes Lou’s Take No Prisoners rant about Christgau feel 110% deserved.

If my memory serves me, I recall you once writing that you don’t dance. Fair enough, not everybody does. If you’re not of the dance/club world, how do you approach monumental albums such as Underworld’s dubnobasswithmyheadman, New Order’s Best Remixes/No or Fat Boy Slim’s You've Come a Long Way, Baby?

Dripping sweat, grinding bodies and/or dancing solo in one’s own world all seem pretty essential to fully appreciating the worth of some of these albums. Take them out of context, and isn’t it a bit like a colonialist offering an opinion of villagers he deems primitive?

This is why I find a great amount of Christgau’s “Consumer Guide” ages as poorly as the comedy of Joan Rivers or Don Rickles (who’s a nice guy, as I’ve no doubt Christgau is). It’s hackneyed schtick. It’s even more cringey when the likes of Christgau is so on the wrong side of aesthetics. Dylan’s Red Sky album is superior to Oh! Mercy? Really??

“Ok, Boomer” is what I say beneath my breath while reading the Dean of Rock [Criticism]’s attention-getting absurdities.

Or maybe Bob Christgau is a dancing fool…and I’m leaping to wrong conclusions when he writes a dismissive review of a work that is engrained in scene that would have nothing to do with Christgau?

I reckon a lot of musicians have suffered and endured his colonial-like superiority for the sake of getting a review or free press. Much like a sex-worker has to endure the foul breath of an unattractive man.

It’s easy to see without looking too far that Christgau—with his snark and deluded superiority—is out of his league & element as often as not. Christgau is too thin-skinned to respond to these queries regarding the nature of music criticism. But I’ve seldom gotten the sense that your ego is too fragile to tackle such matters. And that’s a pretty stellar quality to carry through one’s writings over the decades.

So, I’m really interested in music writing and would appreciate your insights regarding reviewing works not in a critic’s comfort zones.

Also, I find myself loving Nick Cave’s “Wild God” more and more with each repeated play. Please tell me what flaws I’m ignoring and overlooking. For real, Greil, this new song of his makes me want to live through 2025’s coming chaos and dread, knowing that Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds will likely tour North America during such a helter skelter year. Oh! And “Wild God” (at least in my book!) is a worthy equal to “Jubilee Street,” “Tupelo” or “The Mercy Seat.”

Finally will you be going to see Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Brittney Spencer this summer? That line up sounds like a triumph… And one that makes the thought of living to at least 100 (if one can do so with joy) seem like a desirable thing. I’m looking forward to it (both the Outlaw Music Festival, along with the coming golden years).

Much appreciation for this column and best always —BILLY I

Just a few comments:

If you want to take issue with Bob Christgau you should write in to his Christgau Sez feature on his Substack newsletter.

I don't know how I can write about things I haven't experienced and have no desire to. A great English professor I had at Cal, Larzer Ziff, once said that a real novelist had to be able to write as if they were male or female, old or young, black or white, for that matter dead or alive: in other words, they had to have an imagination and trust it. (He also talked about writing his books in six weeks, something I thought was science fiction until forty years later when I was able to do it myself a few times.) I've long thought that at its best the lines between criticism and fiction are meaningless. Look at Pauline Kael's review of Shoeshine in I Lost It at the Movies—if that is not a short story as much as a review, what is a short story?

I remember that show by Bruce Springsteen at the Fox as absolutely shocking in its intensity, fury, precision, rage, and love. I've never seen any performance from him in any way like it. He seemed to be absolutely alone, to make his shows with the E Street Band into one gross cartoon.

There was a moment about twenty years ago, during a test screening for the Telluride Film Festival of a movie I remember nothing else about, when a Willie Nelson song appeared at the exact moment when someone with no imagination would use a Willie Nelson song, I realized I never wanted to hear another note from him again, and nothing since has changed my mind.

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Dear Greil: I was just re-reading some of your “Treasure Island” entries in Stranded. You obviously had a blast putting it together.How long did that take and have you reconsidered doing an updated version including all your favorites since 1979?
Also could you speak about your love for the Poppy Family’s “That’s Where I Went Wrong”? Now this is a level of heartbreak that fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell could never match. —CRAIG ZELLER

I did it in a gleeful rush after all the essays were in. I'd decided early on that as the editor I couldn't contribute formally. But I wanted the book to cover the territory. And celebrate Bryan Ferry. Get in and get out. Say as much as possible in the fewest words. 

After Stranded came out I started scribbling in the margins with new things to include and things I'd left out. But the flood of reggae and punk and the the reissue boom brought on by the CD made that impossible. (Along with my vow to keep all of my records in a single big shelf—for years I'd pare it all down to make room for the new, then I had to give up.) And no one ever said anything about the last entry, a doo-wop record I made up.

As for "That's Where I Went Wrong," I'm talking to the Martian. I explained why this and why that and why not that and finally it breaks in and says, "Ok, but what do you really love?" And that's the motive behind the whole set, which can come down to something so small as the way Susan Jacks lets out the title line of "That's Where I Went Wrong."

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Hi Greil - First of all, I thought it amusing that in Ask Greil [5/10] a question that mentioned a Dave Marsh book I hadn't heard of (The Beatles' Second Album) led me to a mixed review of it on heydullblog.com written by Devin McKinney... who had a question farther down in today's Ask Greil. Coincidence?

On to my question. There are a plethora of rock memoirs these days, and I've read a bunch, from the entertaining (Elton John's) to the insufferable (Donovan's). But many memoirs lack the kind of distance, scholarship, and context a good biographer can provide.

So: What are some of the best rock/pop/musician biographies? Offhand, Guralnick's Elvis and Sam Cooke tomes, Bob Mehr's thorough Replacements story Trouble Boys, and a few Beatles works come to mind for me, but I'd love to know your take.

I'd particularly like to read a good one about Bob Dylan, since his own Chronicles Vol. 1 only provided part of the story, and some of it was more spinning by the ol' Trickster. Do any—Heylin, Spitz—measure up?

Thanks —TODD

This is such a wonderful subject. I or anyone else could go on for hours. Days.

I've always had trouble with doorstop biographies and autobiographies of musicians—Springsteen's, Elvis Costello's. I get lost, I lose the thread. And there's something of that in Peter's invaluable Elvis books, especially Careless Love. Partly it's a question of style. Neither they or the Sam Cooke or Sam Phillips books are Peter's best writing.  He probably rightly doesn't, can't, allow himself the intimacy, the imaginative transference, of his writing on Charlie Rich or Skip James or nearly all of the figures in Lost Highway. Those books are as much music as prose. So that's why whenever the question comes up I go right to Nick Tosches's Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, which was the best rock 'n' roll biography when when it was published in 1982 and in a lot of ways still is, even though when it appeared Lewis had forty years and God knows how many dead wives ahead of him. It's short, it's as much writing as story, you can revel in Nick's style, you can be put off, but he is trying, through his writing, to get inside not just Jerry Lee's soul but his fingers as they hit the keys. The one exception, for me, in terms of length, is RJ Smith's Chuck Berry: An American Life, from 2022. It's nearly 400 pages, but it reads quickly, because a line has been thrown out and RJ is reeling it in: his realization, which is is more that, more revelation than argument, that from the start of his career as an artist and a performer Berry was refighting and rewriting the Civil War. And while the book is capacious, it's not a matter of not leaving anything out: the book expands from within. And it has been criminally ignored. I saw almost no reviews. It's a major work about a major artist and it might as well have never been published. Maybe it will have a second life, somewhere down the line.

Credited only as "with," David Ritz's books on/about/for/from black performers—they talk, he asks, he probes farther, he hits a wall, he finds a way around it, then he writes the book—are singular: that is, they are not like any other books, and every one is different. The ones that sing for me, where you feel you are overhearing a story more than being given it, are under their names, Etta James, Rage to Survive and Bettye LaVette, A Woman Like Me.

The best books are Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume 1 and The Autobiography by Chuck Berry. No one is going to touch those. Of the hundreds of books on Dylan, the only ones that ever mattered to me were Howard Sounes's Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, first published in 2001 but better in the 2021 updated edition, and the first, 1972 edition of Michael Gray's Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan. For Sounes, it's not his revelations about secret marriages or the like, though his digging through public records is heroic and yields stunning results of all sorts. More thrilling, for me, is his interview with William Zantzinger and his tale of how after a return to Hibbing Dylan reunited his high school band and actually played shows, albeit not exactly in public. The Bob Spitz book I read; it's lively, but it's also kind of disgusting, given that all Spitz wants to do is live up to his hero, Albert Goldman. My favorite Clinton Heylin book is Dylan's Daemon Lover: The Tangled Tale of a 450-Year-Old Pop Ballad, which for all the debt it owes Tosches's Country is a deep dive into a small pool that turns out to have no bottom. I can't read his Dylan biographies, and not because of the cut-and-paste oral history if not really composite format. They're mean-spirited, for me driven more by resentment and envy than anything else. As for Michael Gray's book—and the later editions are rich and rewarding, with blind spots, but they're not remotely the same book as the first edition—when I first came across it, in 1973, I almost gave up on Mystery Train, my own first book, which I was just starting. I couldn't believe the realms of knowledge from so many realms Gray drew on so effortlessly, how enticing and intriguing his correspondences and arguments were, how light his style, how engaged he was and how he engaged the reader in his questions and answers. Reading, I felt completely ignorant of everything. I thought, I'll never write this well. I can't even remember how or why I kept on anyway. The book was so intimidating.

I'm leaving out dozens of books that count. Carrie Brownstein's. Michelle Leon's.  David Lee Roth's. Sly Stone’s. But deep down, my favorite book, because it's so naked, so unprotected, so questing, so what happened and what was it about and why was I there and can I ever leave is John Densmore's Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors. Read it, and the music will sound different. It will sound more contingent, more unlikely, deeper—more.

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The recent death of basketball legend Bill Walton prompts me to ask if you were either a fan of Walton's when he won two championships at UCLA under John Wooden or when he later had success in the NBA, leading the Portland Trailblazers to their only franchise championship thus far in 1977. Not only was Walton a superb athlete, probably the greatest passing center until Nikola Jokic, but was a counterculture icon, as this article from The Nation last year describes. Later in life, Walton was embraced for his happy hippie persona, whether it was being the Grateful Dead's biggest (at 6'11", very likely) fan or his goofy stream of consciousness broadcasting schtick covering basketball on TV. Tributes after his death, all describe a very caring human being who described himself as lucky despite having his basketball career and later in life severely compromised by crippling bone injuries to his feet and spine. It's uncertain if his later life over the top ebullience was a cover to chase away the depression that had him contemplate suicide after yet another back surgery years ago, but he remained a positive force until the end. Like this Bob Dylan lyric (and Walton worshipped Dylan) about Lenny Bruce, Walton's epitaph could read: “He sure was funny/And he sure told the truth/And he knew what he was talking about.” —JAMES R STACHO

I loved Bill Walton with UCLA, and while his game was complete, what I loved about it was, as you say, the passing. No look, because he saw all around the court all the time, that's how it seemed, but it was more than that: he saw all around the game, the specific game, the history of the game, every game that had ever been played. But even more than that, his passes felt ethical, as if they contained an ethos, a spirit of comradeship, generosity, fellowship: each pass was a handshake.

I never saw more than a shadow of that player in the NBA. The NBA game liberated some players and imprisoned others.

None of the obituaries I saw mentioned his involvement with Jack Scott, and Scott's involvement with the SLA, driving Emily and Bill Harris and Patty Hearst across the country after the massacre in Los Angeles—that is, the stories that Walton paid for it, or at the least knew what was going on. I'm not aware that Walton ever discussed it, or that any evidence of any kind turned up, and Scott, who was unquestionably harboring fugitives, and aiding their escape, was never charged with anything. Why not? Someone was being protected—but when it comes to the SLA, you can’t believe half of what you see and and less than that of what you read. And 869 Grateful Dead shows is too many. 

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Hi Greil. I absolutely loved the “High School Hit Parade.” But no love here for The Mothers of Inventions’ “Status Back Baby”? I would place it above “You and Your Sister” even though the Vulgar Boatmen need more exposure, because apart from the mention of a “dance this week,” that song doesn’t seem necessarily super high-school redolent. Also maybe because I heard “Status Back Baby” a few months before entering high school myself and said “Gulp. Is this what it’s gonna be like?” —EDWARD HUTCHINSON

"Status Back Baby" is a conceptual masterpiece—up to a point. It catches how all of high school is about status, and how magical and elusive status is. You may not be able to define it, but it's immutable. What I mean is, the song is a joke you get and then it's over. But high school status is never over. I've never been to a high school reunion, but friends who have say that whatever the year, people—those who are still alive—immediately reform their original cliques. And I'm not aware that in high school anyone actually loses their status, or achieves it if they don't have it to begin with—it's like a form of predestination. There were two girls in my freshman class who were seduced and thrown over by seniors, who made sure everyone in the school knew it. They wore scarlet letters for the next four years. I remember one of the two singing "Angel Baby" at a high school dance—she seemed to take the song into another dimension. But that letter was still there.

So the Mothers song I think I should have included is "Brown Shoes Don't Make It."At my high school brown shoes were so disgusting, indicative of a lack of cool so deep it was sure to swallow anyone who evinced it, that the ruling status jocks, the Big Kahunas, held a day where they roamed the halls calling out anyone wearing them, like the pod people pointing out the remaining humans in Phil Kaufman's remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: "BROWN SHOES! BROWN SHOES!" Frank Zappa went to high school in San Diego, I went to high school in Menlo Park, but they were the same school. I can't remember if I ever wore brown shoes to high school, but if I did it was only once. That song can still scare me.

But on the other hand—anything can be turned inside out. In the 2016 high-school-kids-form-a-band-and-play-a-show movie, Sing Street, set in a punishing Catholic school in Dublin in 1985, where black shoes are required even if the pair of brown shoes on your feet are all your family can afford, their second best song is a punk anthem of pure defiant glee: "Brown Shoes."

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