Ask Greil: March 1, 2025

Hi, Greil, thanks as always. Curious on your thoughts on the popular nostalgia that started in the early ’70s—or 1969, if you want to count Sha Na Na, I guess. Annoying? Troubling? Simply nice to hear old songs in communal ways again, whether on the radio or on stage or on soundtracks? Think it was a partial sea change, where people would rather hear the stuff they’d already heard a thousand times? Not that musicians hadn’t looked back—Beatles, Stones, MC5, Byrds, Dylan, Everlys, etc. I always thought that The Wanderers made the best use of a soundtrack full of older songs. Apologize if I overlooked it, but did you ever write about that movie or its ending? Thank you. —RS

Hmm…Sha Na Na. I have never been able to erase the memory of riding in a car with those guys at the end of Woodstock. They explained that were the greatest doo-wop group ever, because while all the previous singers were just guys off the street, they were professionally trained members of the Columbia University glee club. A more perfect analogy for Columbia’s expropriation of the black Morningside Park neighborhood, protests against which turned the campus upside down in 1968, could not be imagined.

Nostalgia has been defined not as a desire to relive or revisit one’s own past, but as a longing for what one has never in fact experienced. A lot of Trump people believe they deserve the white person deference and domination of an America they have heard about, that has been passed down as resentment and disempowerment, but which they have never truly lived. I have no market research to back it up, but my sense is that the audience for Happy Days and The Wanderers—and Sha Na Na—wasn’t made up of people who had lived consciously through those referenced times but who were buying them as a simpler age they are made to feel sorry they’d missed.

Given your question, I watched The Wanderers again, which like that morning with Sha Na Na I remembered all too well. I was hoping I’d like it more than I did in 1979. I remember the director, Phil Kaufman, who I’d gotten to know when he was filming Invasion of the Body Snatchers in San Francisco, talking about the Richard Price novel that we’d both loved—it was his son Peter who had him read it—and the movie that he was planning. But the novel was both comic and tragic, a small, down to earth story that echoed, and the movie was a clown show with a few indelible set pieces—the love scene to the Shirelles’s “Baby, It’s You” (I lived that out) and the black football team’s cheerleaders coming onto the field to the Isley Brothers’ “Shout,” whenever the Ducky Boys appear. What was on the screen was a crew of clueless jerkheads, and then and now I didn’t believe anything they said or did and didn’t care—though the ending, with Greenwich Village somehow transposed for a night to the Bronx and Richie passing a folk club and seeing Bob Dylan sing “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” meaning that life had already passed him by, that, with his pregnant girlfriend and his forced marriage on his plate, he was going to live his whole life in the past, was painful. The movie was a hit, but I can’t see the people who were around at the time making up the box office, rather people younger, or older, trying to buy some version of cool they could try on or regret.

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What, for you, is the most unbearable songwriting cliche? For me it has to be the ever present “I’ve written this song for you” genre. —JON

Oh, I have to say Elton John’s “Your Song” gets me every time.

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Hi Greil, Yesterday I learned that Michael Shannon, the superb grave-faced actor, is fronting an R.E.M. cover band and sounds better than he has any right to sound. Somehow this band has the cachet to appear on Jiminy Cricket’s Tonight Show. Here’s the link.

Shannon’s vocal quality seems...unfair? Can he dance, too? Even if you’re not an R.E.M. fan, you have to admit it’s a noble performance of a noble song. But I would’ve seen him performing Delta blues or those Dylan brimstone tunes before touring on a Fables of the Reconstruction reconstruction, one which seems endorsed by the band itself.

Can you think of anything comparable? Meryl Streep covering Siouxie’s “Spellbound” and touring on Juju? —ROBERT LOSS

I’ve followed Michael Shannon since I first saw him as the madman-as-truth-teller in Revolutionary Road, even seeing him in Off-Broadway shows in New York. Recently at a Blood on the Tracks tribute concert at the Dylan Center in Tulsa he did what was described to me as an “intense” version of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” and then “Maggie’s Farm.” For Real Life Rock I tried to get the show written up by one of the participants, but got nothing usable, and then tried to get to get videos of both Shannon performances but so far no luck. If that changes I’ll report back.

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Dear Mr. Marcus, You write in response to a reader:

“So I would say this. Like what you like and hate what you hate. Don’t ever apologize, to yourself or anyone else, for anything in the world that draws you in or repels you from it.”

This attitude, unfortunately, is held by ignorant people (and groups) who never apologize for their efforts to ban books, art, free speech, what have you. —ROSA

As a critic, I live my life by saying what I think—and trying to figure out what I think and why, which is what criticism is. That doesn’t mean I think what I think should have the force of law: that people shouldn’t be able to read books I don’t like or be made to read those I do.

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Of the trilogy of American 1950s pop icons (James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis) who still resonate (and make lots of money for their respective estates) today, Dean is the biggest “what if” because whereas Elvis and Marilyn made more art, a lot of it bad, Dean left us with only three great movies. Of course, had he lived, he would have made bad movies, too. But he would have starred in some great ones as well, some we’ll never know because maybe they weren’t made, but more were made with other actors, many of whom were inspired by Dean or in the case of Brando and Montgomery Clift, inspired Dean himself.

It was said that Dean’s next movie after Giant was to be the biopic of middleweight champion Rocky Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me. Paul Newman got to star in that decidedly mediocre movie, but it did co-star Pier Angeli, Dean’s real life love, and that would have been interesting. I’d guess Newman would have lost out to Dean in other movies like The Left Handed Gun. Who better to play Billy the Kid? Or Dean could have replaced Robert Wagner (somebody should have) to play Jesse James or the lead in A Kiss Before Dying. Now, would Dean have been cast opposite Liz Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof instead of Newman? Hard to beat Newman in that movie or in his later iconic roles in The Hustler or Hud, but Jimmy might have been Hollywood’s first choice.

The substitutions are almost endless: Jimmy opposite John Wayne in The Searchers instead of Jeffrey Hunter. Dean and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones (sorry, Tony Curtis—maybe you get replaced in Sweet Smell of Success, too!) Is Dean the Cooler King in The Great Escape instead of Steve McQueen? Dean would have been better than Clift in his post-accident career, making movies like Lonelyhearts and Suddenly Last Summer more watchable. Wild River would have teamed Dean up with Elia Kazan again. Dean could have killed off Clark Gable even sooner, maybe during filming of The Misfits, by his method acting ways. Warren Beatty gets blown away by Dean in Splendor in the Grass (Kazan, again) and Bonnie and Clyde. How about a 40 year old Dean playing Sonny Corleone opposite Brando in The Godfather?

Ok, I’ll stop and ask you, as a kid growing up in the fifties, how aware were you of James Dean? Was his legend that instantaneous or did it build through the ’60s? As a small boy, I remember saying to my aunt, who babysat me before I was old enough to go to school, whenever Jimmy Dean, country singer/actor/future sausage kingpin, came on TV, that there was the other Jimmy Dean, and he was dead and died young. How I came to know that at age 4 or 5, I don’t know, but my aunt watched a lot of TV and saw movies, and I probably got it from her. But she was actually my mother’s aunt, my great aunt, and would have come of age during the WWI era, so it’s saying something that she knew about James Dean as well. —JAMES R STACHO

I wasn’t aware of James Dean until after he died, when the store where I bought Uncle Scrooge and Archie comic books was full of magazines with him on the cover speaking from beyond the grave. I saw Giant when it came out, with my family, and without knowing anything about Dean was fascinated by the way that by the end he’d turned into an old man—I don’t think I’d ever seen anybody age on screen before, or at least not in such a dramatic manner. I didn’t see Rebel without a Cause until I was 13 or 14, on TV, and remember being totally with him as he couldn’t make Jim Backus understand him. I didn’t see East of Eden until much later, when I was in my 20s and married, at the Telegraph Repertory Theatre in Berkeley, and was just destroyed by the Oedipal story—I had waking nightmares about it for a long time.

I think you have to imagine that had he lived, Dean would have been pulled farther into drugs, and grown closer to the Beats—and found Hollywood ever more false and constricting. He would have done more theater, and he would have wanted to direct. By 1959 he might have been making On the Road with Nicholas Ray again, Dean bankrolling it and producing. Dean would of course be Sal Paradise, with Paul Newman as Dean Moriarty. But then it would get weird. Burroughs would hear about the project from Kerouac, and insist on playing his character Old Bull Lee, and Ray would love it. But Dean would slap back by casting Lenny Bruce as the Allen Ginsberg character Carlo Marx.

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Re your discussion of “Ain’t Talkin’” in Folk Music: The line “Heart burning, still yearning” and the title are most likely borrowed from the chorus of the Stanley Brothers song, “Highway of Regret”—not that it makes them any better as lyric material. The lines are from the chorus, which goes “Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’/down that highway of regret/hearts burning, still yearning/for the best girl this poor boy’s ever met.” Not earthshaking writing, but good enough when sung at a fast tempo. Enjoying the book! —ROBERT BULKLEY

Unlike Bob Dylan, who loves the Stanley Brothers, and John Fahey, who in his book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life credits them as the principals turning him down the...highway of regret, I’ve never quite made the connection. So I didn’t know their “Highway of Regret” and the signal cop that Dylan ran with for his “Ain’t Talkin’.” If I had I certainly would have spent time with it in the chapter on that song in my Folk Music book.

“The highway of regret”—it’s so corny, so received, so much bad poetry, that in Dylan’s song it sticks out like a foot to trip up its verse. With the Stanley Brothers, as you say, it’s the chorus, and it’s buried, all but thrown away, so it doesn’t intrude or call attention to itself, which bad poetry just has to do. And yet—I have to stick with Jack Scott’s “The Way I Walk” as the truer ancestor—as stance, as word play, as opening a door. There isn’t that much to “Highway of Regret,” and “Ain’t Talkin’” is an epic—something Graeme Buckley caught when he used it as a soundtrack to a collage of his favorite moments from Westerns, one of the great YouTube coups of our time.

The song expands, takes in more territory, as imagery, idea, emotion, ballad, story-making, songcraft, every time it’s played. There’s really no end to it. And so much more anyone could say about it. I’m glad you’re liking the book.

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Hi Greil. Has anyone written a history of Leiber and Stoller? Because surely they are at the heart of the rock ’n’ roll revolution if anyone is. To write “Riot in Cell Block #9,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “Is That All There Is?” is genius in the highest order. I love the story about how hating Elvis’s version of “Hound Dog” and being commissioned to write for Jailhouse Rock they just put it off till the producer showed up saying he wasn’t leaving till they had written the songs. Four hours later we had “Baby I Don’t Care” and the others. The combination of the interracial commune and rock ’n’ roll seems so crucial, let alone their genius in throwing rock into classical music with their production on Coasters records—all brilliant. Is there a book? They must have been amazing guys. —JOHN GIBSON

Not to be churlish—maybe a bit—but you can use the internet as well as I can. There’s their own Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography, with all-world music-book “with” author David Ritz (I like his Marvin Gaye and Etta James books the best). And there’s Baby, That Was Rock & Roll: The Legendary Leiber and Stoller, by the late and great music critic and historian Robert Palmer and the former New Yorker theater critic John Lahr.

I haven’t read either. I can tell you about meeting Leiber and Stoller at the 2007 Cartier Center exhibition Rock ’n’ Roll 1939-1959 in Paris. Mike was modest and friendly. Jerry was gruff, in a hurry even when he was standing still, and very much the hipster in a black leather jacket. They were on a panel together, taking questions. One person asked how they, as white people, could have worked with so many black performers, especially those in the early ’50s in Los Angeles, without exercising white privilege. “We weren’t white then,” Leiber said. Asked about their Coasters song “Baby, That Is Rock & Roll,” always taken as a proud defense of a new music, Jerry said that it was anything but: it was a coded attack on rock ’n’ roll, an evisceration of the form as worthless on its face—“When we wrote ‘You say that music’s for the birds,’ that’s exactly what we meant.” It was surprising to hear that, to put it mildly.

Later, at the exhibition dinner, which included, at our table, Tina Turner and Wanda Jackson, with Little Richard waiting to perform, Mike Stoller said that Jerry was not comfortable being there and so was attacking both the event and himself for taking part. When Little Richard took over, with Tina and Wanda taking the stage as he sang “Jenny, Jenny” and a certain person of that name sitting next to me beamed, Mike was beside himself. “The energy!” he said. “Even now!” When it was over Jenny got up and peeked behind the curtain, seeing Richard’s band members helping him off, him seemingly in a daze. She was convinced he didn’t know where he was.

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