Ask Greil: May 10, 2024

Trouble every day. Songs still play. Criminals dead. Criminals alive.

As Mike Love sang, it's student demonstration time. Whaddyathinkman? —LEN

This article by Bret Stephens from's today's New York Times, May 8, posted online May 7, pretty fully captures what I think about the actions on American campuses. I have spent far too many hours lying awake in the middle of the night trying to lay out my response to your question to forego something so incisive and clear when it falls in my lap. But I do have a few more things to say.

The October 7, 2023 massacres perpetrated by Hamas in Israel were not an uprising.  They were not a cry for help. They were not a spontaneous protest caused by years or even generations of oppression and deprivation. They were a carefully planned and rigorously trained military operation with one specific strategic purpose: by means of an attack so heinous it would produce an overwhelming and seemingly indiscriminate response by Israel, to derail the then-pending rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, with the other Gulf Arab nations likely to follow, thus isolating, containing, and even undermining Hamas's patron Iran. It had a greenlight from Iran and, though I've seen no evidence that this is so, or even any spectulation in any publication, I believed from the start that the operation had a quid pro quo ok from Vladimir Putin, to get Russia's war on Ukraine off the front pages. Hamas set a trap and Israel, with the most lawless, immoral, corrupt, and incompetent government in its history, walked right into it. Hamas was not surprised, not outraged, not inflamed.  The Israeli response was planned for and elicited, which is to say the deaths of people in Gaza, whether women, children, grandparents, whole families, was planned for and elicited. Every death of a person in Gaza is a win for Hamas. It is precisely what Hamas wants. Hamas is happy to sacrifice a generation of Gazans if that takes them one step further toward their goal of eliminating Israel.

The massacres had a second purpose, with several parts. They were meant to smash the illusion of Israeli invulnerability, to prove that Israeli citizens could not depend on their armed forces to protect them (Israel's nuclear weapons are truly a paper tiger, as nuclear weapons are useless in a close regional conflict), and that, with the pledge that such an attack could and would be repeated, as campus chants have had it, "a thousand times over," until Israel was wiped off the map, that no Israeli, and by extension no Jew, could expect a future, or a life without fear. This was so because the Hamas massacres were a symbolic reenactment, though with real dead—just as the Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 were a symbolic enactment of the destruction of the United States, with real dead—of the extermination of the Jews in Europe in the first years of the 1940s, the event called the Holocaust, a term I don't use because it implies it was some kind of act of nature, some inevitability, some God's will, as opposed to a planned event meant, ultimately, to reach every Jew on earth. That was also what the Hamas massacres were meant to do: to leave images of horror in individual minds and collective memory so evil they can never be erased. Most specifically, in terms of images, the Hamas massacres were a reenactment of the Nazi massacre of Babi Yar.

Babi Yar, near Kyiv, Ukraine (Soviet Union), September 1941

The protests as they have developed on college campuses are now objectively, and often openly, not pro-Palestinian, or humanitarian, or pacifist, but pro-Hamas, which means they are an affirmation of the the Hamas massacres. And despite the claims, made not only online, or on posters, or in chants and shouts and flyers on campuses, but in civil proceedings, at public meetings, at debates at city councils over calls for a cease-fire—an oxymoron, as Hamas has declared that the massacres will be repeated until its goal of eliminating Israel is achieved, which is to say that a ceasefire is a ceasefire only until Hamas violates it—that the massacres never happened, that they were committed by Israeli soldiers disguised as ordinary Palestinian citizens, or, like the massacre at Sandy Hook, carried out by crisis actors—arguments I saw and heard made by a woman dressed in her keffiyeh, which, like the Holocaust, should be called what it is, a Jew-killing scarf, at a meeting of the Oakland City Council—it should not be forgotten—or it should be known in the first place—that rallies and actions affirming the Hamas massacres took place in the streets of New York and other cities, and at Harvard and other colleges, before any Israeli response to the Hamas massacres took place. The Hamas massacres removed the cover of politeness and silence and disapproval that has if never completely to a strong degree kept the hatred and loathing of Jews that is an indelible and functional part of Western civilization, a legacy of Western civilization, covered up. Now the cover is off, and 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.

I could go on, but I want to tell one small story, that may signify nothing, though it is all I have. I was born in San Francisco and grew up there and in Palo Alto and Menlo Park. I went to college at Berkeley and lived there until 2011, when we moved to Oakland. My family has on my mother's side been in San Francisco, or on the West Coast, or in Hawaii, since the 1850s. My mother's father and my father's father were in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Though it wasn't true for my father, who was born and grew up in San Jose, and who as an attorney in San Francisco after the Second World War had to confront the reality of law firms that would not hire Jews and business clubs that would not admit them, except for one small incident I have never experienced anti-semitism. And that was one day in second grade at Elizabeth Van Auken Elementary School in Palo Alto. Before class, the kid sitting at the desk next to mine turned to me and said, "Do you believe in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ"? as if, it seemed  to me in the moment, he was asking if I liked vanilla ice cream. I said, "No, I'm Jewish," with the same sense of import as if I was saying "No, I like chocolate." He immediately took the pencil in his hand and jammed it into the flesh between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, leaving a broken off piece of lead under the skin. I was more stunned than anything else; it was the most absurd, inexplicable, meaningless thing that had ever happened to me.

When my father came home from work that evening, I told him what had happened, and showed him my hand, as I had already done with my mother. He opened his hand and showed me a small grey-black spot right between thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The exact same thing had happened to him, at the exact same time in his life, in San Jose.

Mine is still there, too.

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I found your critique of Bob Dylan's Slow Train Coming extremely helpful in identifying what was missing from Dylan's musical and theological understanding as he attempted to create original gospel music. In particular, I appreciated your observation that “What [Dylan] does not understand is that by accepting Christ, one does not achieve grace, but instead accepts a terrible, lifelong struggle to be worthy of grace, a struggle to live in a way that contradicts one’s natural impulses, one’s innately depraved soul.”

It seems to me that Dylan addressed your criticisms in a positive way as he progressed in his gospel era. In a review I wrote of Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series, Volume 13, 1979-1981, I pointed out that his theology of grace appears to be more mature in tracks such as “Covenant Woman,” “I’ve been broken, shattered like an empty cup / I’m just waiting on the Lord to rebuild and fill me up.” Would you agree? —DAWN EDEN GOLDSTEIN

I think you can learn as much from Dylan’s on-stage preaching and sermons and denunciations (some quite funny) as from his songs during his formal Christian period. And from the sequence in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There with Christian Bale and the way the Dylan figure embraces fellowship and membership in a community where people want nothing from him and he can truly trust others. And from a student in a class I was teaching at Cal in 2000 on Prophecy and the American Voice, where both a book of those sermons and Time Out of Mind were on the syllabus, and everyone was insisting that the record was “a breakup album”—and it may be hard, now, to remember or to reconstruct just how shockingly bleak, nihilistic, blasted, and destroyed the songs and their performance felt as they landed on an unsuspecting world in 1997—and one student broke the discussion, impatient and almost angry with the obtuseness of what was being said: “Yes, it’s a breakup album. But it’s NOT about breaking up with a lover. It’s about breaking up with God.” And I remember something a woman said to me when Slow Train Coming came out. “What’s it like?” she said. “Oh,” I said, “it’s arrogant and demanding and bullying and absolutist and—”  “Well,” she said, “you wouldn’t expect him to change, would you?”

Your own essay in Angelus maps the territory. But this was a shattering, seemingly life changing event for this person. And when neither the world nor one’s life changes as you were certain it would, or certain that it already had, that is shattering in turn. There is no question that the experience of conversion and apparent revelation stayed with Dylan as he went back into the world, and the world came back to him.

I’m no fan of “Every Grain of Sand.” To me it’s just one more in a long line of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” knockoffs. But when you hear Dylan sing about, say, the 1927 Mississippi flood in “Highwater,” maybe you’re hearing someone interested in writing and singing songs about single grain of sand, and valuing them as such rather than having to find the whole world in each one, remembering the promise God made to Abraham: that “his offspring will be as numerous as grains of sand on the seashore”—and how that worked out.

Listen to the grains of sand that make up Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong in the early ‘90s, the albums that set the stage for Time out of Mind, and you’ll hear what a grain of sand looks like when it gets up and walks and says its piece and then sits down and keeps its mouth shut. Complete. Right. Leaving you with something to think about or forget as the moment chooses.

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Good Afternoon Mr. Marcus - I am an IB student from Argentina currently studying in Spain. I am very interested in music as well as journalism. Therefore, I am writing an extended essay for my English class about the cross between music and journalism in 1970s American culture as reflected through Cameron Crowe's film Almost Famous. I am a big fan of your work, especially Real Life Rock so I was wondering if you would be willing to provide me with some insights.

The main question that I would be answering in my essay would be "To what extent does Almost Famous show the cross between music and journalism in the 1970s American rock scene, and how does this portrayal show music journalism's evolving practices and influence during that era?"

If you have seen Almost Famous, do you believe that the film reflects the world of music journalism accurately? As a rock critic yourself, how do you think that music journalism affected American culture? Do you think that music journalism played an important role in the rise of rock and roll in the ‘70s?

Thank you for your time. —EMMA BAGLIETTO

Dear Emma: I can't answer your question about the interrelationship of music writers and the emergence of what maybe we should call Modern Rock from the Beatles on into the ‘70s, other than to say that it gave nascent writers of a critical inclination and a sense that something new and permanently altering, in a social sense, was happening, so much to write about, in the process enriching and widening the scope, range, and purpose of American critical literature. In some cases I'm sure specific pieces and reviews gave specific performers a boost, a sense that someone was listening, even understanding, what they were doing, and giving them a greater sense that it was worth it.

As for Almost Famous, my favorite part is Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs.  Either he or Cameron Crowe or both truly got him. I remember my wife saying, "Well, that's not much like the Lester we knew," and it wasn't, because I played something of an older brother role for Lester and in turn he did the same for Crowe. But just to focus on the Rolling Stone/rock criticism aspects, I can say a few things, which is that what's shown and played is nonsense. The Lester Bangs's character's advice on how to fool Rolling Stone editors—neither Ben Fong-Torres or Jann Wenner would have bought the Crowe character's gosh-wow and would not have put a supposedly unknown band on the cover, just on one kid's say-so. But what was really both hilarious and creepy was the decision of the writer to throw out his fawning piece and do a real warts-and-all portrayal and Stay True to the Story. I never met Cameron—we corresponded once, when he wrote me in a very friendly way after a piece I wrote on the Eagles. When I left Rolling Stone in 1970 he had yet to arrive and when I came back in 1975 he was off on other adventures. But he was famous, or notorious, for writing features, almost all cover stories, that made their subjects, some often savaged in the Records section, look so good, that before very long many bands refused to be interviewed for a Rolling Stone story unless he was assigned to do it. So that bothers me to this day, even if the "Tiny Dancer" scene almost makes up for it.

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RIP Steve Albini. I didn't recall you mentioning him in your writing but was happy to find this little item on something you wrote in your column about a diary he wrote for Forced Exposure (which I unfortunately have never seen). Did you cross paths with him or his work often? Have you revisited the Forced Exposure piece you praised? —TERRY

I never met Steve Albini. I thought Big Black was a terrific outfit, that Rapeman was unfortunately a logical extension, a vile notion without music to back it up, and that his production for Nirvana a bizarre mistake, thinning out the sound so badly you could imagine it was some kind of sabotage. It was the diary I loved. It seemed like a complete contradiction of the attitude he was selling.

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Well, since I'm here… I've been wanting to ask about Trump too. The Manhattan trial has been dispiriting to watch and I've found myself only intermittently tuning in to detailed reports. Which makes me wonder, uncomfortably, if I've just become so numb to the situation. A scary thought, given the stakes and given that THIS MAN WAS ONCE OUR PRESIDENT! And may well be again. Is that Trump's ultimate "coup"? Just making his enemies so sick of him we tune him out, desperate for civility and decency wherever we can find it in public life? Where do you think this is all going? —TERRY

The stolen documents trial will be delayed and if not killed with a Trump victory thrown out by the stooge running it. The Georgia case will be sunk because of Fanni Willis compromising it. The DC case will be delayed until after the election. If Trump wins he will kill it. If he loses he will go to trial and he may be sentenced to prison. Which doesn’t mean he will ever go. Which leaves New York. I wouldn’t bet a penny on anything there.

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Dear Greil,
Following up on your response to Nathan Phillips [April 19]—Irma Thomas went in for the girl group sound more than once. Have you ever heard “He’s My Guy”? That’s a beautiful record that could’ve been written by Barry-Greenwich (it’s actually Van McCoy).

Also —did you happen to catch Bill Maher’s recent interview with John Fogerty on Youtube? Some of Maher’s dismissive comments on fifties rock ‘n roll and early Beatles records were downright stupid. I was really surprised Fogerty didn’t push back harder. The best was when he claimed to be a huge Elvis fan. But when Fogerty mentioned “Mystery Train” he’d never even heard of it. “Mystery Train”! —CRAIG ZELLER

The thing is with Irma Thomas and me—after I heard “Wish Someone Would Care” is when I think I started to grow up. To get at least a glimpse of how low low could be. How deep the hole could be when the bottom falls out. I played the song over and over. I was afraid of it when I heard it on the radio. And after that no overproduced soul record like “Time Is On My Side” or a nice pop record like “He’s My Guy” seemed real to me. I didn’t think the person who sang “Wish Someone Would Care” could ever be happy again. That’s how romantic I was. But oh, I saw her on YouTube at JazzFest in New Orleans doing “Time Is on My Side” with the Rolling Stones and she took it all and brought it home—I mean to her house—and locked the door. And yesterday I went to see the Twins beat the Red Sox and after talking about Robert Johnson, one of the people I was with mentioned that his son at Tulane had just seen that show. Again, as always: six degrees of separation is usually about two.

As for John Fogerty and Bill Maher, it does sound odd that John didn’t say “You want to go outside with that?” but I can’t be censorious about Maher. I’m sure he loves the Elvis he knows, even if the only song he knows is “Unchained Melody.” Not everything travels. I was crazy about Elvis when I was a kid. The first record I ever bought was “Hound Dog”—in order to keep it #1 on the KYA chart and beat back “School Days” (didn’t work). But the Sun stuff wasn’t played on the radio in the Bay Area. The first time I heard “Mystery Train” was when Larry Miller played it on his graveyard shift show on the local foreign languages station, KMPX—which soon became the first play-anything FM rock station in the country. I was stunned. That was Elvis? Hey, there’s something out there I know nothing about and I’d better find out what it is! That was 1967. But if I’d stopped listening in 1966 I could still say I loved Elvis. Until “Mystery Train” my favorite song was probably “Don’t.”

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Hey Greil - Many thanks for leading me to your review of the Springsteen concert we both attended [see April Real Life Rock Top 10]. You nailed it. Not only did you make a further believer of me (in both yours and Springsteen’s abilities), but you also made a subscriber as well. Looking forward to reading you, both present and past (looking through the archives, I feel as though I’ve stumbled upon an online treasure trove). I’ve got to say, you and Bruce very much make me look forward to reaching my seventies.

While haunting Green Apple Books I came upon your book/collection Double Trouble. Somehow this book never made my radar. I’m looking forward to it!

Also found were Dave Marsh’s book The Beatles Second Album. This one is fun! I’ve not read Dave in years. He’s just about always engaging. I also found Ellen Willis’s Out of the Vinyl Deeps.

I love Ellen’s writing. Her works reinforces my belief that context is an essential component when it comes to assessing a work. For instance, could a compelling case be made for someone who takes psychedelics being more credible/having added insights when it comes to reviewing an album by Animal Collective or Spacemen 3? Might someone who goes to clubs and concerts where there’s dancing be more qualified to write about New Order or Daft Punk?

This is why I often find Robert Christgau’s negative/snarky “Consumer Guide” reviews to be of little use. As a former public school teacher, I’d try my best not to give a bad grade merely because a paper or project wasn’t my cup of mud. Plus there’s something painfully passé… verging on colonialistic… to dismiss and/or berate something just because it’s not of one’s world.

Returning to Ellen Willis… From all I’ve heard from others, along with what she writes, Ellen Willis loved to dance, and that comes shining through on the written page, well as providing an added richness and layer to her writing. It speaks volumes about Ellen’s writing that half a century later her work still holds sway.

Writings from you, Ellen Willis, and Dave Marsh have opened up more gates and lifelong loves than I can count. Your Real Life Rock books have done much to help shape the two music programs I host for Vallejo’s community FM radio station (one is an album show, the other is random music). Which leads me to my question for you—what would be on your list of dos and don’t for a radio host? I’m curious what qualities consistently keep you tuned in to a radio station when listening to music. And, in turn, what will have your hand on the dial lickety-split?

Also, if you had music ability that matched your writing ability (and for all I know you might), what artist would you most want to perform and/or record with?

Thank you always for this fine column. —BILLY I

Radio: Listen to Bob Dylan as DJ in his "Theme Time Radio Hour." Do research and tell stories. Front and back announce. Never assume anything is obvious. Relate your reaction to the first time you heard a given song if it was in any way memorable. Ask listeners to write or call with their answers to questions.

I used to fantasize about playing harpsichord on Rolling Stones records, never mind that the only musical instrument I ever played was the bugle. I play a record player.

Dave Marsh's books for me are best when they have what appears to be a narrow focus. The Beatles Second Album book is a delight, but the best is his "Louie Louie" book.

New Order and dancing? The first time I saw them was at the I Beam, a gay club in San Francisco, just after they formed in the wake of Ian Curtis's suicide. Their music was so solemn and otherworldly I don't recall anyone dancing to it. I was caught up by the blanket of miasma, yet with a rhythmic force that implied a different world outside the walls of the place but created it inside. A friend I was with made a cassette of the show that I played over and over with an increasing sense of wonder. I realize they loved disco and made their own version. But to me it was more like a philosophy lecture as tableau vivant.

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I recently read actor Sterling Hayden's 1963 autobiography Wanderer and I was absolutely blown away by his story and the quality of his writing. As a lifelong fan of film noir, I always knew of Hayden the actor: The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing. Oddball classics like Johnny Guitar and Dr. Strangelove. Later cameo star turns in The Godfather and The Long Goodbye. Always a large, looming presence, with his granite looks and baritone voice. But Hollywood was never his bag, according to him. He was an expert sailor, living on the high seas as a young man and captaining supplies and munitions through WWII as an OSS officer. He changed his name to John Hamilton during the war so he wouldn't get attention as a movie star, so you don't see him in the clips which always show Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable as wartime servicemen. Hayden was briefly a card-carrying Communist, always believed in the betterment of man, paid a price for joining (and soon quitting) the party. Won custody of his young family in an expensive and messy divorce with his second wife, thumbed his nose at the court as he did for all authority when he thought he was right and took his family on a sea voyage in 1959 which is the basis for his first book. And he writes like Melville! He hardly had any formal education, but was a voracious reader and his books (his second and last, a novel, Voyage, is on my reading list next) were bestsellers and critically acclaimed. His late life interviews on talk shows like Tom Snyder's Tomorrow reveal an always perpetually stoned or drunk combination of Hunter S. Thompson and John Lennon: he was highly self-critical and laid bare his problems and personal issues. I recommend in addition to his own books, Sterling Hayden's Wars by Lee Mandel. Also this excellent video bio on YouTube courtesy of Cinema Cities as well as Tom Russell's great song “Sterling Hayden.”

Hayden lived a lot in the Bay Area—were you and Rolling Stone magazine aware of what a true rebel he was? He really deserved a cover story. Still does. I think of the Seinfeld joke where George and Jerry are in the coffee shop lamenting “What in God's name are we doing? Our lives! We're like children. We're not men!” It's funny, but true. And all of us, I dare say, compared to Sterling Hayden... My god! Hayden would lambast his own life and existence, but his chosen epitaph was “He Tried.” It's the best any of us can do, I suppose. —JAMES R STACHO

I saw him in a laundromat in Paris in 1967. I’m not sure I was aware of him outside of TV, Suddenly, Dr. Strangelove, and his naming names at HUAC. He seemed enormous, disheveled. I was impressed that a movie star had to do his own laundry in a public place. I figured he was broke. It was a displacement to see him in The Godfather and then to discover him in retrospect in The Killing.  

The Tom Russell song is everything I hate about singer-songwriters. Sententious and sentimental and phony and self-flattering  But I don’t know Hayden’s books and he sounds like a new Jack London.

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A close friend of mine took his two seven-year-old twin boys to the Broadway Michael Jackson musical. I asked how he and they liked it and got responses about the super talented music and cast, along with critiques like not liking "the way the story was told" and "no character development." But the audience and kids loved it. Frankly, I'd forgotten the show was still running. I refrained from asking my friend some things on my mind... like the idea of taking two young boys to this thing. I am NOT a proponent of cancel culture and my only reason for asking your opinion is my perplexity about how this show is running on Broadway when so many people have endured ostracism for much less, either morally or factually. My wife thinks it's obvious that MJ is a great figure in music and my friend and his boys were just there for entertainment... Maybe I just have it wrong, but I find it ill-advised and creepy. Then again, I'm 76 and in no mood to alienate the precious friends I have around me. Thoughts? —VINCENT VIAGGIO

I find the mass forgetting that Michael Jackson was a cruel and manipulative child molester—and that the parents of some of his victims essentially sold their children to him so they could receive enormous hush-money payments—and that Michael Jackson paid out millions to keep people quiet—mind-boggling. Certainly a lot of work was done to make it happen—like setting up life-size cardboard replicas of THE KING OF POP all over the world—I remember seeing one in Spain and feeling complete shock ("Don't they know?")—but really, you'd think the Leaving Netherland documentary should have buried this. I'm not unfamiliar with the way that atrocities from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to countless lynchings before and after are subject to public repression, erasure, and not, unless, sometimes, until the generation of those who were there has vanished, ever passed on. But this is not like that. This is R. Kelly, Woody Allen. And I don't think you can just say Jackson's fentanyl OD was a good career move, or the ultimate cover-up. I think it's far more complicated than I could solve even if I wanted to seriously think it through, which I don't—involving race, pedophilia, body-hatred, money, more money, and the unwillingness of people to accept that as their hero was living a lie, they were too.

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Any thoughts on the apparent necessity of online critics "weighing in" on the new Taylor Swift album 24 hours after it was even available? This seems like a venal practice to me but perhaps the mechanics of the marketplace demand it? —SHAWN

Even assuming advance listening copies, I know just what you mean. The symposium in the New York Times today is embarrassing in its certainty that the whole world is listening to what these so thoughtful, so serious people think, when nobody has the nerve, if even the inclination, to talk about how the music sounds and feels, as opposed to what it, which means the words, means, let alone suggest that, maybe, the music is uninspired and dull, so who cares if you don't want to listen?

But it's inescapable. The idea that a writer might live with a record, to see if it says more or less after a week, even a month, let alone longer, which is what people who pay money for music do, because if something doesn't come across right away you don't want to be out of your money, you want it to speak to you, and you'll likely wait until it does or you know there's just no blood in this stone, has gone the way of lead times. With everything online, the lead time is as long as it takes to write 500 or 1000 words and post it, which can be an hour. If you can't be first you'd better not be last, and last call is sundown.

So don't read anything that comes out the first day, and the inevitable followups from professors and marketing analysts in the week that follow, after which all these people will have moved on to something else, or spent a whole day on a deep piece about the dynamic between Jupiter and Diana, aka Swift and Beyoncé.

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How does this strike you:

I’ve had the fancy for many years that “The Weight” was, not consciously but in some other way, Robbie Robertson’s version of “A Day in the Life.” Each is about a nameless wanderer on a series of paths, having a series of encounters that grow increasingly estranging and unreal. There are implications direct or indirect of Hell; a descent and a reemergence, with everything now changed from what it was, ending in acceptance, stoicism, or numbness, depending how you hear it.

Put it this way: “A Day in the Life” could be renamed “The Weight,” and it would make sense. The reverse, also true.

Then there’s the drumming. I think it’s Ringo’s greatest performance, especially the chilling whisper of cymbal after “I just had to look”: the breath of death on the wanderer’s neck. Levon’s approach, fatigued and persevering, is all his own, but his fills are pure Ringo. We know that later in life the two became close friends and were mutual admirers. I’ve never seen the quote where Levon identified Ringo as an inspiration, but I’m sure it exists somewhere.

This isn’t to say that “The Weight” was fashioned from the rib of “A Day in the Life.” Only that it thrills me, listening to either song, to feel the link I imagine is there. —DEVIN MCKINNEY

Dear Devin,

That's a wonderful new way to hear the song, and it brings out the unspoken, long-distance collaborations that were taking place all through the late sixties as people were swept up in new music as their own lingua franca and reveled in speaking it. And you couldn't be more right about the odd, offbeat rhythm Ringo makes, the subtlety of everything he does. And it leads to the way he and Robbie together—filmed far apart at the same time and talking to each other—begin the all-over-the-world performance of "The Weight" in the "Playing for Change" video, which I watch all the time, and if you haven't you should right now.

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The recent death of O.J. Simpson, coupled with the hush money trial of Trump, has people comparing the two twisted men. I recently re-watched the documentary O.J. Made In America and Trump and Simpson do share traits, e.g., compulsive liars who live in a fantasy world of their own lies and who were/are able to develop a slavish following of admirers. Their paths diverge, of course, as Simpson was born black and grew up in poverty, had actual accomplishments of his own skill and ability, and was personable and charming when called upon to act so in the company of white people who could help his career. Simpson was a woman beater, while I don't think Trump has ever hit anyone with anything except a lawsuit. One is now dead and reviled, while the other remains in some sort of living death and is mostly reviled and relying on lawyers who could never be called a Dream Team, as Simpson's criminal trial lawyers were in 1995. I don't think Trump's trial(s) will ever generate the interest or passion that Simpson's did, but one hopes for an eventual conviction on something and imprisonment for Trump, as Simpson suffered toward the end of his increasingly bizarre life. Find a photo of the two together in the 90's and let's all make up our own captions, e.g., the real men of Shameless. —JAMES R STACHO

Simpson was a killer who was run straight through a racist justice machine, from Mark Fuhrman’s illegal evidence to being sent to prison for the crime he was acquitted for rather than for the jerrybuilt charges that were on the record. He didn’t, as far as I know, try to sell the country down the river and destroy its past, present, and future. And OJ was actually good at something.

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