Ask Greil: March 9, 2026

Graham Parker, Garth Hudson, Liberace, and the Vulgar Boatmen

A trusted friend I bonded with years ago over the Feelies and the films of Hal Hartley recently turned me on to the Vulgar Boatmen—a band I’d never heard before that night and haven’t stopped obsessing over since. The VBs did what all great bands do to me: they sent me down a rabbit hole, reading everything I could about them and their curious backstory, even leading me to a low-budget but passionately made documentary available only on YouTube. Scouring PDFs of liner notes for their self-released compilation Wide Awake, I stumbled on an essay and found myself increasingly excited by how precisely the author nailed the appeal of the Boatmen and their unselfconscious craft—and wasn’t surprised at all to see that you were the author! Any thoughts on the Vulgar Boatmen so many years later? —MICHAEL BIGHAM

The Vulgar Boatmen remain unique. They tapped into a mystical strain in 1950s–1960s teenage male love-song laments—to me captured perfectly in the Safaris’ 1960 “Image of a Girl” and James Girard’s 1976 novel Changing All Those Changes—where desire is all mixed up with self-presentation and you can never decipher longing from pose. Their subtleties in tone, texture, sound, pacing, and words are unparalleled. It’s no accident Jonathan Lethem titled his 2007 novel about a rock band that plays only three or four shows, if they even rise to the level of the word, and convinces you they had something to say and a way of saying that was theirs alone, after a Vulgar Boatmen song.

I became friendly with the guitarist and singer Robert Ray, a film and literature professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Growing up in Memphis, he had a background in music in many ways much deeper than mine. He told tales of the “5” Royales playing high school parties and introduced me to the wonders of Lowman Pauling and “The Slummer the Slum,” and of seeing a well-dressed young woman burst into tears when the Sex Pistols played in Memphis in 1978. He’s written a lot of interesting books on film, from The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy to, with Christian Keathley, a BFI study of All the President’s Men and the forthcoming Anatomy of a Murder. He’s someone whose mind never stops working, just like the characters in his songs, who overthink everything and erase all the borders between fantasy and everyday life while trying to remember that song they heard that explains everything and since they can’t have to write and play it themselves.

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Hello, Greil: first a Substack hack and now this story has emerged. Please let us know what you make of it. Much obliged. —CRAIG PROCTOR

Substack apparently isn’t commenting. There’s a lot of online response to the effect that the article is a hit job, following earlier attacks, and wildly exaggerated. Because of my childhood political education and then seeing that all play out in action during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, I am as close to a free speech absolutist as you can get. When Eldridge Cleaver, speaking for the Black Panthers at Cal, called for the banning of speech he didn’t like, calling Republicans and Johnson-Humphrey Democrats “rabbits,” I knew that wasn’t the side I was on (though to my shame I voted for him for president as the Peace and Freedom candidate in 1968 because I couldn’t vote for Humphrey; my father made the same mistake with Truman, voting for Norman Thomas, but at least Truman won). I realize that Substack is a private company and can censor or not as it chooses. But my arguments with German friends over the post-war criminalization of Nazi speech and symbolism in West Germany and then Germany as a whole went nowhere. They didn’t understand how the First Amendment couldn’t have political limits and I didn’t understand how their laws didn’t make verboten Nazi propaganda more alluring. You could see that play out in British and American punk, and don’t think there wasn’t a punk contingent in the AFD at the start. So I’m not troubled. As for the article itself, with its “Substack Makes Money from Hosting Nazi Newsletters” headline, the implication is that they’re soliciting such trade, or that it’s part of their business model. I suppose it could be. But I doubt it.

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Seeing your recent comments on Sam Cooke, I flashed back to The Greatest Night in Pop, Netflix’s oral history of the “We Are the World” sessions, and Bruce Springsteen’s appraisal of Steve Perry: “He’s got that great voice. Up in that Sam Cooke territory.

One can only imagine how much that spiked your blood pressure.

I admire Springsteen’s generosity toward other musicians, and I don’t dislike Perry nearly as much as you do . . . but Sam Cooke territory??

You’re friendly with Springsteen—do you think he was indulging in a bit of good-natured trolling? —STEVE O’NEILL

Given that the “We Are the World” film would be on the top of my list of movies I’ll never see, this was news to me. Now it’s on my list of things I wish I didn’t know. Though to my undying shame I have to admit that, recently rewatching all of The Sopranos, at least the first minute of “Don’t Stop Believin’” at the end of the last episode sounded kind of interesting. And I’ve always admired Jakob Dylan for the audacity of “Sam Cooke didn’t know what I know.”

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You mention in the new edition of Mystery Train that you once worked with Harold Bloom on an essay about Walt Whitman. Was that essay ever published? If so, is it still available to your knowledge? —CHRIS PETERS

In 2006 Werner Sollors and I were beginning to edit what came out in 2009 as A New Literary History of America, which was a project proposed and organized by Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press. Harold Bloom wanted to do the entry on Whitman, but when told that all of the chapters in what turned out to be a more than 1,100 page book were to be about 5,000 words, he said he couldn’t possibly take it on at less than ten. So we split the entry into two parts. I was thrilled that he wanted to work with me, as he’d used pieces of mine on John Irving for an anthology, not least because he was an inspiration and mentor for Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, which was a great confirmation for me when I was stranded in the wilderness of Lipstick Traces. But Bloom wasn’t in good health. He tried to wrestle with the pieces but it was too much, and ultimately the Whitman entry passed to his colleague Angus Fletcher. But you can go to Bloom’s Library of America edition of Whitman’s Selected Poems and take it from there.

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Hello Greil, I hope all is well. A piece of artwork popped up online that made me stop in my tracks, the Italian release poster for 1955’s Sincerely Yours starring Liberace—one of the most preposterous but compelling movies I’ve ever seen. The poster is a lush and lavish (you can see it here) depiction of Hollywood romance as seen from the European perspective of artist Luigi Martinati. The filmmakers tap dance around the obvious and while it is preposterous, there’s a tragic undercurrent to the whole film that stuck with me. I remember Michael Segell’s great profile in Rolling Stone “It’s All Wunnerful for Liberace,” where the writer paints a quite happy portrait of the artist—he exuded the aura of a man who reveled in his good fortune and lived it up in a style that would rival Jayne Mansfield’s pink swimming pools. I thought, and still do, that he was several rungs below Eddy Duchin (who got his own sob-story biopic) in the “look how fast I can play” sweepstakes. But he lived large, Elvis-style till, like Elvis, the life killed him. Did you ever consider what got him there—his music? Or is that a footnote to the rest of his life. —CHARLIE LARGENT

That’s a truly stunning poster. And cast: Dorothy Malone (a real career, but unforgettable in a tiny role as a super sharp rare books clerk in The Big Sleep) and Joanne Dru (who had a vogue in the ’60s and ’70s when auteur critics in the mode of Andrew Sarris made her out as special because she appeared in movies directed by Howard Hawks and John Ford but made a mark in the impossible role of Ann Stanton in All the King’s Men). But I haven’t seen Sincerely Yours (today I’m planning to watch Taxi Driver and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) and life’s too short. The late Dave Hickey’s “Liberace: A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” told me all I wanted to know, and told me I wanted to know more than I thought. But that’s because Dave could almost always find diamonds in rhinestones.

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Reading the 50th anniversary edition of Mystery Train—a book that changed—and still changes—my life in more ways than I can count and for which I cannot thank you enough—I was reminded that Furry Lewis recorded “Good Looking Girl Blues” in 1928, two years before the Carters did “Worried Man Blues” and which contains the “Train I ride, 16 coaches long” lines.

I know it doesn’t really matter to the argument, but isn’t it more likely that Sam Phillips & Junior Parker took their inspiration from a local bluesman (who presumably got the lyrics from another local bluesman) rather than a country act? —SAM HAGEN

The “Train I ride is 16 coaches long” linked with “I’m worried now” is a folk lyric fragment that goes back to the 19th century, probably to about the time railroads began to criss-cross the country. You can find it in Charley Patton and the earliest country recordings. But while Furry Lewis was from Memphis, and you might think his words had a currency that would make a frame of reference for Junior Parker and Sam Phillips when they came up with “Mystery Train,” the Carter Family’s 1930 “Worried Man Blues,” the result of A.P. Carter’s song catching and song crafting, composing out of those common coin lines, had what the Furry Lewis song lacks: dread, displacement, the sense of a world that makes no sense—the sudden arrival of the Depression as a violation of the natural order. It was that, and the depth and subtleties of the performance, that made it a huge hit and seared into the cultural memory of the South, and it was Elvis’s refusal of those qualities, all of which the Junior Parker original of “Mystery Train” carried, without denying their pull and power, that allows his version to still communicate as a kind of miracle, a record that has only gained in power over these 71 years.

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Greil, What are your memories of the controversy around John Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” comment in the summer of 1966? How did it look and feel to you at the time? I was 7 then, and obsessed with the Beatles. To me, watching crew-cut kids on TV burning albums, they might as well have been aliens come down from another planet. “They will need to buy new copies,” I thought. I had no idea what a Bible Belt was—maybe something you’d get beaten with. Without being able to articulate it, I think I considered myself part of a great “we” of Beatles fans—and “we” were surely in the vanguard, whatever these crazy people thought; and we had the best songs. Now, 60 years on, in the country we’re living in today, the whole episode looks very different—like an omen. Any thoughts? Thank you. —JOHN STEWART

It seemed like ordinary talk from where I was.

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Hi Greil, Have you heard this? An editor at the fine music site Aquarium Drunkard took a ton of fan-recorded Band recordings and made a 40-minute mashup of “The Genetic Method.” Thought you might enjoy it and possibly even cite it in the next edition of Mystery Train. —EDWARD HUTCHINSON

I appreciate this remarkable compilation, but—but while Garth Hudson’s improvisations fantasias foolings-around as a kind of coffee break for the rest of the Band before they went into “Chest Fever” were a thrill when he first introduced them, I think more and more he lost interest in actually building themes, working around quotations, throwing the familiar against the unknown—those moments when the likes of “Shenandoah” would appear and then vanish, and then maybe creep back a minute later, where you could really glimpse decades passing by as if in the sky—and the pieces devolved into noodling. To me what it was all for, in my experience, not Garth’s intentions, was to build to a point of inevitable and irresistible RELEASE when he finally broke into that dramatic fanfare and “Chest Fever” actually began. And then it was a race, through the barely decipherable but alluring lyrics, Levon Helm and Richard Manuel seeming to reach right out of the songs to catch a line like pulling a bird out of the air—“Like a viper in shock.”

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Greil, Halfway through EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert we hear a snatch of “I Shall Be Released.” I think it’s just the chorus, sung over shots of Elvis being nice to a handicapped girl. Beautifully sung. Have you seen the movie? It’s a tour de force of editing! All best wishes. —MICK GOLD

Elvis loved that song. On the RCA Elvis in the 1970s box there’s a moment of him singing the song—it feels like he’s communing with it—in the studio. “Dylan,” he says forcefully at the end, as if they were brothers.

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Hi Greil. This is not a question, but the US women’s and men’s hockey wins at the Olympics (and the ensuing controversies) made me think of this performance, which never fails to both make me laugh and give me chills. If you’ve never heard it, well worth a listen. Best wishes. —NICK STEWART

Thanks for this remarkable show. All of it. Warren Zevon was the best. Here he is, tossing off a nothing song with a melody he’s used many times before, and it comes to life. The poor guy, condemned to live out his life as a goon—and you thinking of it when the US hockey team was visiting the Goon in Chief. In a way I’m glad Warren isn’t around to see this. But I think he’d come up with something to meet the moment.

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Dear Greil, This April will mark the 50th anniversary of Graham Parker’s classic Howlin’ Wind followed seven months later (!) by the equally great Heat Treatment. Those albums made me a fan for life and like Van Morrison I’ll never count him out despite some very uneven albums over the years. How do you assess his recording career post-Rumour, and did you see any of his reunion shows with the Rumour some years ago? —CRAIG ZELLER

I felt a deep connection with the people in the Rumour when I traveled with them for a week in 1977. All of them were thinking people, fun and friendly, and some, late at night, opened up, especially the drummer Steve Goulding, who I’ve remained friends with as he moved to Gang of 4 and the Mekons. Graham Parker and I had some long talks that have stayed with me for their sadness and passion. Howlin’ Wind and Heat Treatment are definitions of what rock ’n’ roll is, was meant to be, can be, should be. “Discovering Japan” might be a little more than that. But Stick to Me was a bust—the songs were good, the heart was there, but was it Nick Lowe or Mercury that somehow ruined it? Their grip slipped, or Graham’s did. There was a resentment there, that recognition and money and respect weren’t living up to what they were worth, and what they thought they were worth. There were commonplace humiliations. I remember one radio interview where afterward the perfectly cliched DJ with his razor cut and his moustache demanded a tour jacket straight off one of the band members’ backs or he wouldn’t play their records—small time, but just as ugly as if it weren’t. A sourness crept in, especially in the records Graham went on to make. So no, I haven’t kept up. But there were times in 1977 and 1978 when those first two albums kept me alive.