Ask Greil, March 12, 2024
I’m wondering if you’ve been following the evolution of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez towards realism and the growing feelings of betrayal among her original followers. Specifically, have you been noticing how similar it is to Bob Dylan going electric? I have little doubt that we’ll soon be hearing people yelling “JUDAS!” at her public appearances. I imagine her looking around and seeing that her competition was composed of dullards, cowards and weaklings, and that she was throwing a golden opportunity away on an agenda without a constituency. The prospect of inheriting the Bernie Movement might well seem as useful as Bernie Sanders getting a comb for his birthday—or Bob Dylan spending the rest of his life leading the Folk Song Army.
All of which for some reason led me to play with the idea that the life and works of Bob Dylan might well be the closest real life equivalent of a King Arthur who (a) actually existed and (b) actually came back. Which is to say a blessing, but one that was mixed in a way that wasn’t anticipated. That is to say, in some phases keeping his earlier promise, and in others going in ways that were in turns rich, strange and regrettable.
About AOC, who I’ve always liked for her sense of humor and her dance moves, yes, I’ve noticed, and been glad to see it. Except for Omar, among those in the then if not now Squad she alone communicates that she‘s having fun. I hope it takes her farther. It’s quite interesting that so-called and self-anointed progressives would much rather lose than win. I don’t know about King Arthur and the politics of the Round Table, but I do know that except when Jesus was Lord, Dylan was never a purist. That strain is still there. It may be for AOC too. But my sense is that for her fun is a ruling value and it’s more fun to strategize at a bar than sneer at all those who aren’t as good as you are.
I think I remember that you are not a fan of Mark Fisher, but I wonder what you think of "the slow cancellation of the future" and neoliberalism's creeping destruction of culture. To put it another way, is it just me, but does there seem to be very little popular music that sounds "new." Or am I just getting old?
Thanks for your time —PAT WALSH
I don’t know if neoliberalism is Fisher’s characterization or yours, but whenever I hear the word my guard goes up. What does that mean? Empowering corporatism at all levels and taking whatever political measures are necessary to achieve what, in other words, is a morally bankrupt politics with the sole goal of setting social stratification in stone? I guess that’s what it means, but what does that have to do with the liberal tradition in European or American history? It’s a cheap slur meant to allow self-named progressives to place themselves above ordinary life.
With that out of the way—well, the cancellation of the future, if that’s underway, has far more to do with the organization and self integration of the fascist right in this country and throughout Europe, and Russia and some of its satraps as well as, recently, Brazil, and for the moment, Argentina, and India and, at least in terms of its currently sitting government, Israel, not to omit Hamas—never mind traditional autocracies and theocracies like Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and so on. These are the forces that want moneyed white male empowerment at all levels of political and social life and the diminution and exclusion of everyone else. That is a true project. Neo-liberalism, if it exists, is a path of least resistance. It may be invidious. But it’s not a project. It’s a blob and you can’t fight a blob. The fascist project can be fought, first by speaking clear and plain language, which the term neoliberalism isn’t. Just this month, in a Vanity Fair story by Brian Stelter, Brian Schatz, U.S. Senator from Hawaii, said what I’ve been arguing for years, and he didn’t equivocate: “If you want to sound like you’re a thoughtful, moderate, deal-making pragmatist, then you’re not supposed to say what is true, which is that there is now a—not even a loose alliance—a pretty explicit alliance between fascists all over the planet that includes Donald Trump.” This is what a decent world is up against—though I have no doubt people who like to toss around the notion of neoliberalism would say it’s that that laid the ground and what’s the difference?
I was hoping that singing the songs of the Great American Song Book would inspire Dylan to write one himself but so far he has not. His songs are about lost love, obsessive love; unrequited love, abandoned love, or fantasies above love. Not to say they aren't great songs but for me not great love songs! Do you have a favorite Dylan love song? —NANCY
While I don't understand the premise—lost love songs aren't love songs?—I suppose if you wanted to put them together, from "Don't Think Twice" (the song that made me a Dylan fan, for the way he rides the lovely melody, not the sentiment in the words) on through "Just Like a Woman," "I Want You," "Lay Lady Lay," "Love Sick," "Sugar Baby," "Scarlet Town," whatever comes next—it still wouldn't amount to a songbook, which is something that other people are supposed to turn to as a kind of bible, and draw from as an eternal fount of wisdom. Unless it's Van Morrison, I don't want to hear anyone else sing "Just Like a Woman," and that maybe only on that one lucky day in 1971 when he was doing a radio show. I guess I'd like to hear Lana Del Rey do "Love Sick." But we're not talking about the same thing.
Have you commented on Sly Stone's recent memoir? I just finished reading it—didn't take long. Maybe I should have expected that it was going to be sketchy, short on details, etc. His love of wordplay was amusing, until it became glib, annoying; his first 20 years is rushed through, and I guess the last 30-40 years haven't been all that noteworthy. But the reviews! I guess it's this habit of people being so happy that a veteran artist has made it this far that they're grateful for anything that we get from them (this makes me think of your critical reviews, which I appreciated, of Hackney Diamonds and Rough And Rowdy Ways). Maybe something is better than nothing, but... suffice it to say, I feel I'm in the minority regarding this book.
Your suggestions for better reading about the history of the band (or Sly himself) are welcome, as is any comment you have on the memoir—maybe you got something more from it? Thank you. Cheers! —STUART WENGER
Your reading of the book is the same as mine. I ran a long reminiscence of the Vallejo milieu Sly came out of by Michele Jordan, who was part of it, in Real Life Rock Top 10 in lieu of a review. The best book is Joel Selvin’s Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History. There is no great book on the band and its times with literary ambitions: nothing even like Nick Hornby or Hilton Als’s playful short books on Prince, let alone the sort of deep dive that could have been made by the late Greg Tate, Hendrix biographer David Henderson, Marley biographer Roger Steffens. The band’s performance in Questlove’s documentary Summer of Soul will tell you a lot about who the band was and how different they were from everyone around them—what sort of better world they meant to enact, which Sly spells out very clearly and eloquently in his book.
I was wondering if you have any thoughts on Lee "Scratch" Perry. The film: The Upsetter: Lee Scratch Perry was on Criterion recently (gone now)—a real eye opener and history of Reggae. He is like Sun Ra on steroids. His song “People Funny Boy”—the first Reggae song is very good. —ED GRAZDA
I recently listened my way through the daunting Lee Perry retrospective box King Scratch on Trojan: two double LPs, 1968-1977 ("And Beyond," it says confusingly), productions for the Upsetters, Prince Django, Max Romeo, Augustus Pablo and more, but about half records under his own name, plus two double CDs that comprise 75 tracks 1968-2002. It's infinitely fascinating, and it draws you into a kind of trance, or stupor, playing nothing else for days.
Despite any number of ordinary or uninspired productions (the Heptones' version of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released"), the lasting feeling was of one great drone, as if Perry heard that extended chord at the end of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" and decided it should never end, that it could be the basis for not only a new kind of music but a new way of being in the world, and also, "Something about that feels like Kingston." You get the sense there's no bottom to this story, that this music will not only play forever in the ether, it is the ether. And even the ordinary work is just something that fails to transcend: you can feel the attempt to get there.
Back to "I Shall Be Released," which I'm playing now. Perry drops the vocals way back into the murk, like a memory of the song, brings a bass pulse up front, and then you're simply listening to, being carried off by, the pulse, as if the Heptones are listening to it too. Then one of them—or someone else?—steps up and starts talking about tomorrow, as if it's a concept that won't really come into focus, and finally the song they can't do anything with with a straight arrangement becomes a new song built on the forgotten sand of the old one.
I also had another feeling, all through it: it didn't make any sense that he could die. I can't explain that.
What do you make of Keith Richards' take on "Waiting for the Man"? —TOMISLAV
It’s absolutely terrific. There’s snap in the rhythm and his singing is right on it. There’s more commitment to the song than you can find on the Stones’ last two albums, especially Blue and Lonesome, which could have been so much and largely because of Richards, who seemed to be asleep through the sessions, turned out to be a load of nothing no matter how hard Jagger tried.
But—as Richards emphasized over and over in his Life, the first thing he learned was that he never had to wait. He had people delivering the highest high-grade stuff to him from the best laboratories.
Hi, Greil, thanks so much for clearing up the Cloud of Lester Bangs mystery. Very glad of your appreciation for Pere Ubu’s appearance with Deirdre O’Donoghue. Following up on that, David Thomas mentions Vachel Lindsay as a formative influence, alongside more obvious choices like Beefheart, Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. Wondering if you could comment on Lindsay in this context, a writer consigned to the margins for the most part, but often pitched into the middle of appropriation debates due to the inclusion of his incantatory Congo-themed poem in mid-20th [century] poetry anthologies edited by Oscar Williams. However, based on U Penn’s audio collection of Lindsay’s 1931 performances, would you surmise that Thomas is speaking primarily of sound and rhythm, of idiom and utterance, rather than any thematic terrain? Lindsay is largely forgotten, so what do you make of Thomas naming him as a central forebear? Thanks. (PS: Lindsay’s reverberant 1917 “Gates of Gaza” poems in the U Penn collection currently make for unsettling listening: “The bold Jack-Johnson Israelite”, etc.) - CRAIG PROCTOR
"The Congo" was probably the first poem I learned in school—that "Boomalay boomalay boomalay boom" got under my skin and can play automatically. His words always seemed so BIG. Thank for sending the links to his recordings: he should have been making records with the Rev J.M. Gates. Imagine a duet on "Death May Be Your Santa Claus."
I asked David Thomas about it. He wrote right back: "Clearly Vachel’s vocal breakthroughs were formative. Rather than in a flat self-absorbed recitation typical with poets, he sang-spoke his works. I nearly copy him outright. But I am also inspired by his reimagining of his environment, as illuminated in his drawings—finding the extraordinary at the root of the ordinary. For instance, how he connects the Illinois state capital building (?) mystically back into time, to the origins of man’s cultural journeys."
I read Greil's essay regarding his father's tragic passing in World War 2, and thought it was well written and heart wrenching. My father also went through the hurricane, while he served on the USS Altamaha, and it was the worst thing he went through in his entire life. I've read most of the published resources on the typhoon, and also have picked up a few items related to the typhoon on eBay. One of the items is a 1945 press photo of Lt. Commander James Marks, who it is clear was responsible for the sinking of the USS Hull and your father's passing. If you would like me to send this photo to you, or send you a scan, let me know. After reading your account, I really don't want it anymore, and it would be more appropriate for your family (you could throw darts at it). —BILL MACGOWAN
Dear Bill,
Thanks for your offer. Marks is well documented in Bruce Henderson’s Down to the Sea. But I don’t want his picture around either.
Greil
Hi Greil - Thanks for the years of provocative writing.
I was interested in your reference—in the Valentine’s Day “Days Between Stations” column—to “They Don’t Know” by Tracey Ullman. You’re certain to know the original, by Kirsty MacColl, which I first heard in an Edinburgh record store while hitchhiking around the UK in 1979. Only a fool would buy a seven-inch single to stash in a backpack while thumbing rides for two months without coming anywhere near a record player. I am that fool.
I still have the 45, and am still of the opinion that the Ullman version doesn’t come close to MacColl’s original. Opinions… yeah, yeah.
You described the Ullman rendition as the sweetest love song you knew ( in 1998)—maybe so. But she was a comedian and, to my ears, she was playing for laughs. MacColl’s delivery is honest and unaffected and simply glorious. As she matured as an artist, she made records that were more sophisticated and edgy, along with a few where she too was clearly playing for laughs. But she never sang a song better than “They Don’t Know”.
I’m not trying to right any wrongs here; I’m just wondering if, all these years later, the song may have been sold short because a funny girl got the hit?
All the best —IAN CAMERON
This is very painful. I didn’t know the Kirsty MacColl record, and now listening to it back to back with the Tracey Ullman it’s a step past it. Though the doubled vocal makes it feel like more of a confection, it has a fuller sound; the Ullman sounds tinny by comparison, and that takes the emotion down too. I don’t at all think the Ullman is any kind of comedy routine. I swooned over and over when it came out—with the way it all deepens when the line “I get a feeling when I look at you” shifts the melody and you really can believe nobody else knows what she knows. Our younger daughter played it as walking out music at her wedding as a gift to me—and of course it broke me apart in that moment. But now I’ll be living with both and I’m sure the pendulum will swing back and forth, back and forth. Thanks for letting me know there was more to the story.
I’d appreciate an opinion about the changes in music writing over time.
Today, when I read record reviews from the late 1960s, the writing often seems to describe the music in more technical terms. An early Paul Nelson review (in Crawdaddy, I think) offered a positive appraisal of the Byrds’ “Set You Free This Time”, where he described the arrangement and instrumentation. I don’t recall Nelson mentioning what the song was about, or what he might have recognized in the lyrics. Crawdaddy, I believe, is one of the genesis chapters of modern rock writing. But such reviews were no more illuminating than the teenagers at the end of Dick Clark’s mic (“It’s got a good beat…”). And I’m surprised how long a mostly musical description of a new record was acceptable to the major periodicals. It’s easy to find this kind of writing of major releases through the early 1970s.
As few years later, it all seemed different. In reviews of the late seventies, it’s hard to find more than scant descriptions of the music in terms of its half-notes and tempos. When that kind of text was included, it only seemed to frame the song for the reader, not to illustrate it. Writers seemed quick to examine the recording artist, in the light of their new work, as much as the record itself. They used vectors of the musician’s previous work to contrast what the new release said about the artist. That assessment was factored with how the song or album made the writer feel. Jazz, too, was written of this way and often has been since, where it used to be tweeded-and-briar-piped lectures from music teachers.
The new school approach means more to me, and if it had not been adopted, I don’t think my interest in popular (or unpopular) music would have been nurtured. On the other hand, this column of review writing could get high-and-mighty and abstract for its own sake. Sometimes I thought the reviewer was just showing off his or her vocabulary.
But why did this sea change occur?
Was it the result of people employing a liberal arts education without having first played a guitar? Or was it because they frustratedly traded a guitar for a typewriter? Did the new kind of pop songwriting force a reviewer to think of modern rock records as short-stanza literature, and so met it on those terms? Or did somebody just say, “That sells better, guys”?
Thanks, always —GLENN BURRIS
Over time—since before I started writing—I was struck by particular music writers because of how they were or weren’t conforming to the styles and formats of the time. Tom Nolan, from LA, who went on to write a biography of Ross Macdonald, might have been the first, in an LA pop magazine that was about the only place you could read about rock n roll on the West Coast in 1965, outside of Hit Parader and movie magazines. Paul Williams in Crawdaddy a little after that. Barry Gifford in the Rolling Stone record section. Years later I was struck by what Ann Powers was doing in SF Weekly and what Danyel Smith was doing in the East Bay Express and got together with them both, hoping maybe I could help them in the way Ralph Gleason had helped me. I wrote to Greg Tate when it was plain he was the most interesting and dynamic new voice in a good while, but who seemed too worshipful of some dubious semiologists, saying he was better than they were and didn’t have to write as if he was beholden to them or anyone else. I was fascinated by the way Mary Gaitskill and Bret Easton Ellis, neither of whom wrote so-called music pieces, were doing some of the best rock criticism of their time in their novels, especially Veronica and American Psycho.
It was years if not decades ago that I realized the record review, as a stand alone piece of work, was a dead form that could produce nothing new or interesting—as opposed to Christian Bale telling Willem Dafoe with his new Huey Lewis CD that “Huey’s too black-sounding to me” in the film of American Psycho, itself directed and cowritten by the former music critic Mary Harron.
Music writing now needs the writer to construct their own critical context where discussion and conversation makes its own sense. That’s why Robert Christgau’s ‘Consumer Guide’ works—and more saliently, as he might say, why it continues, as a form, not just because of its putative subject matter, to elicit the unflagging interest of its writer.
Hi Greil - Over the years I’ve experienced a significant change of heart towards albums that initially left me cold—Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic, Japan’s Tin Drum (along with a lot of David Sylvian’s work), Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues, Bowie’s Blackstar (and that’s just in recent months). But better late than never, I figure. My desire to hear or appreciate these albums has varied based upon relevance/interest, context, circumstances experience and ever evolving tastes.
This is why I’d not want to review Peter Gabriel’s IO, knowing there’s a chance I might come to love it in 5 years. A lot of times I’m able to recognize that something is of quality, even if I don’t get a feeling of joy or excitement upon hearing it. What, if any, are a few such albums for you of late? How often is your initial reception/critique of an album your lasting one? Given the amount of music you must have to digest, how often do you find yourself revisiting albums you may have initially dismissed?
Along those lines has been a revisitation and reevaluation of Dylan’s Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love. I was able to make an hour’s worth of strong, well-crafted and heartfelt songs that keep me engaged—side one of Slow Train Coming, along with a handful of other songs from that period. You and Nick Cave definitely both recognize the undeniable spite and anger that comes from this period of Dylan’s work (although, like me, Cave finds it worthwhile).
“Gotta Serve Somebody” is like the angry hangover after “Rainy Day Women.” “When He Returns”—an anguished voice singing “When the ship Comes In” from a different vantage point. “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” is a worthy addition to Dylan’s weary prophet, apocalyptical songs. Sinead even further highlighted the angsty grace of “I Believe in You” (and I imagine Van Morrison would be able to do same with the song). “Every Grain of Sand” resides in the Ethereal Plane with “Red River Shore” and “Chimes of Freedom.” Going to a couple of fiery ‘79/‘80 shows likely provided me some positive associations with a smattering of songs from that period. “Serve Somebody” sent a jolt when the curtain came up (or did they open?) at The Warfield. After seeing Dylan’s lackluster 1978 show in Oakland, the show I saw shortly after Slow Train’s release was electrifying.
Also, am just now starting to read the novels of Dashiell Hammett. Red Harvest is nothing short of mesmerizing. I still haven’t read The Maltese Falcon (although I always love watching the John Huston film). As someone with ties such as yours to San Francisco, I’d also be interested in your take on both book and movie.
Thanks always for this column —BILLY I
I rarely find that an album that, let’s say, I think I should like more than I do sounds better at some later time. I have heard a couple of live versions of “Slow Train Coming” that convinced me it’s a decent song (though I still cant think about it, let alone hear it, without hearing Billy Ocean singing “Your love is like a slow train coming”), but I never want to hear any of his ideologically determined Christian songs again. I don’t care how well crafted they are, if they are. They’re not alive. They’re not human. Except for “Pressing On” as I heard it in San Francisco in 1979 and as Todd Haynes staged it in I’m Not There, not in any live or studio recording I’ve ever heard.
For Hammett, read the story “The Big Knockover” and then watch the Coen Brothers’ adaptation Millers Crossing. The movie of The Maltese Falcon is better than the book, which leaves me cold—unlike the never talked about The Dain Curse. But maybe that’s because when I first read it, I was completely confused by the way all the dates and even scene-setting details had been changed to set the story in the 1940s, which made no sense because you still had all these 1920s customs and devices in there. I later found out that Knopf had some in house person rewrite the book to make it seem more current so it would keep selling. You won’t find that one anymore.
Thank you for mentioning The Dain Curse.
As an aside, the "baby!" before the last verse on the Ullman version was provided by Kirsty - so in a small way she's been there all along. After belatedly discovering her glorious original on the Stiff Records box set I couldn't help but imagine an alternate history where it'd been part of the small inroads that label made into the U.S. circa '79. My teenage self would've been enraptured.