Ask Greil, May 10, 2025

In a recent column you noted how all members of the Ramones and New York Dolls died young. Could it be that the rock and roll life style might be inherently toxic, that it can lead to health problems and an early death? I’m not in that world in any way, but I assume for some it’s characterized by excess drugs/alcohol/cigarettes, long nights and sleep deprivation, bad food, unprotected sex, the stresses of being on the road and traveling away from home for long periods, the depression that comes when your life peaks at an early age and the money and fame that you loved and craved and once had inevitably fades, sometimes leading to actual poverty. All of it takes its toll on the human body and spirit. It’s tragic that David Johansen needed to raise money from his fans to fight the disease that killed him at only 75, an age when many people still have lots of time left to enjoy life. Your thoughts. —RON CAUTHEN

Well, sure. There’s that moment in The Last Waltz where Robbie Robertson says, with a kind of wistful vehemence, “The road is responsible for a lot of sickness”—and it’s as if he’s capitalizing Road as he speaks, personifying it, giving it agency and motive, as if it’s a purposefully demonic or anyway corrupting force, and the wistful or contemplative tone suggests he’s not and won’t say all he knows, has witnessed, or done. But I’d say, in my ignorant and distanced way, that access to drugs, particularly heroin and later fentanyl, is a through line here. But not the most important one.

I don’t know what has protected Keith Richards for so long, or for that matter what protected Jerry Lee Lewis. I don’t know why this year Eric Clapton, Bob Seger, Rod Stewart, Van Morrison, Neil Young, and many more are turning 80 without, apparently, watching their backs. But money, and the lack of a financial need to tour, great fame, and access to a creative future, didn’t help Michael Jackson, Prince, or Tom Petty, who it seems to me were flirting with suicide if not actively courting it.

We don’t know motives, and motives may not be controlling. When Kurt Cobain killed himself it seemed to me that part of what was there was what I called, when I was asked to write about it for Rolling Stone, the folk virus: the belief, endemic in the purist punk scene he was part of in Olympia and Seattle, that if what you did reached large numbers of people that meant it was shallow and meaningless, to the point that what you meant, or thought you were meaning, could be so twisted and corrupted by the process of pop music that you would end up responsible for crimes committed by those inspired or justified by your own work—as Cobain was so tortured over some of his listeners raping and torturing a woman to a soundtrack of his music. But of course he could have killed himself in despair that he would never escape heroin, or want to, or that he would ruin his daughter’s life, or, the suicide’s most common belief, that everybody would be better off without them, and fuck you too.

I think people lack ready access to the best medical care. I know from experience what that looks like and how it works. It saved my life because I had people who were able to advocate for me and people who were dedicated to saving others from death and damage. But people refuse care, they deny they need it, and so often when they seek it, because they’re too young for Medicare and don’t have the money to pay for it, they can’t get it. That is, to use a phrase I hate but in this case it’s also politics, the bottom line.

As for David Johansen “at only 75,” well, I know and miss so many people, siblings and friends, who did and didn’t have the medical care everyone deserves, who didn’t make that. Or even come close.

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About Peter Wolf you write:

“Forget your fucking rulebook! What do you want to say? Or are you still afraid your teacher is going to fail you? So you write C papers for the rest of your life.”

Fair enough, though about Dylan’s latest book you could say, “Forget the artifice! What do you want to say? You are inscrutable to the point of incoherence.” —PETER REYNOLDS

If by Dylan’s latest book you mean The Philosophy of Modern Song, there are chapters where he’s spinning his wheels, trying to get a handle on how to write about music in a way that he might have thought he needed, something more formal, more academically analytical, than what he already knew how to do, as with his account of first hearing Robert Johnson in 1961: react, and then analyze your own reaction, which is what criticism is. Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t get as far into the book as the chapter on Johnny Paycheck and “The Old Violin.” But there, as other music writers have been accused of doing, he might seem to be finding more in the performance—more depth, more motive, more story—more of the singer’s autobiography, more fiction—than, so the complaint goes, could possibly be there, which is what philistinism is: the refusal to believe that, finally, anything means anything. And it all rests on Dylan’s zeroing in on one incident in the song, when Paycheck seems to step back from it, and you can’t tell: is it a mistake that threw him off? A fake pause that pumps up the emotion in a phony way? Something else? And yet it makes a black hole in the performance, into which it almost disappears, and then somehow Paycheck pulls it back, yet with something missing.

As with many other readers, I’m sure, what Dylan wrote there took me to the internet, and in seconds I’d found what he was talking about. And saw how restrained he’d been. He could have written the whole book about this one event. Someday, someone else might. Or just carry it with them for the rest of their lives.

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A patron at my library just checked out David Talbot’s Season of the Witch, about San Francisco in the 1970s. I remember liking it when I read it. Not to diminish it all by running through everything: George Jackson, The Castro, SLA, Harvey Milk, the Dead, Getty, Cockettes, Jonestown, Charlie O, Zebra Killers, Zodiac, Rolling Stone, the last Sex Pistols show, I know I’m missing stuff. You lived through it, at least most of it, I assume (I don’t know when/if you moved around for a bit). Was being there enough? Was the news enough? Magazine stories? Did you feel the need to read every book that came out about all or most of these events? Or does always lumping together everything trivialize it? Read some Shilts, liked the Sylvester book, liked Tom Clark, have always wondered about the best SLA and Jackson books. Thank you, as always. —RS

Was being there enough? Being there was far too much. It was a series of overwhelming, back against the wall shocks. My wife calling to say, “Are you sitting down?” and it wasn’t just a figure of speech. When she told me that George Moscone and Harvey Milk had just been shot, if I hadn’t been sitting down I would have hit the wall or the floor. Then a friend calling from New York: “What’s going on out there?” That question was like an echo chamber, trapped in the years before and the years to come.

For anyone to presume to wrap everything up in one place is, I think, inevitably to trivialize this string of events, many of them linked in ways that were denied at the time or ever after, into a smear of anomalies. Putting a hip title on it all is worse. For me the book was glib, even a little satisfied: no way he’s going to run out of stories!

There is probably a library of good work I don’t know. And a lot that was never published. Reading the daily paper during the Dan White trial, it became clear that the DA was throwing the case. It became clearer by the day. As the Rolling Stone book columnist at the time, I was given a manuscript by a reporter who had covered the trial on what happened and why, with deep and killing detail—as a book it was never published, and when it appeared as a magazine article it was a pro forma summary with no point of view whatsoever. What happened? I don’t know.

What I read at the time has stayed with me. There isn’t that much, but it’s worth tracking down. First, Jo Durden-Smith’s 1976 Who Killed George Jackson? a truly great book that I wrote about at length in New West.

Then Kenneth Wooden’s 1980 The Children of Jonestown, a haunting book which may have you screaming with rage, which I reviewed as my last Rolling Stone Undercover book column.

There is Howard Kohn and David Weir’s two-part 1975 Rolling Stone story on what happened to Patty Hearst and the other surviving members of the Symbionese Liberation Army after most of them were killed in the Los Angeles fire, “Tania’s World.”

And, as you mention, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic from 1987 by Randy Shilts (1951–94), about the denial and silencing of the AIDS crisis. I’ve always thought of it in the same way as Taylor Branch’s 1988 Parting the Waters, the first of his three-volume history “America in the King Years.” Neither writer is Philip Roth, but neither is the judgement-from-on-high Robert Caro either. Shilts’s book has the epic sweep of Branch’s, and the same granular persistence, the way small or forgotten events can become central, turning points, nightmares.

If you look for these, I think you’ll be brought into a time and a place that you wish you’d never heard of.

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I came across this mash up of the Doors’ debut album on YouTube where the songs and band are re-imagined as if it was recorded 10 years earlier, in the late ’50s. There are a lot of these floating around for other bands, but like you, I know and love The Doors’ music. I found this send-up to be charming with the songs becoming more rockabilly or country than anything else. And it’s quite good, don’t you think? —JAMES R STACHO

All I could get to play was “Back Door Man,” which was done as a standard 1959 Chicago blues and unlike Howlin’ Wolf or the Doors was no fun at all. I did like the way the four of them were styled, though.

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Greil, Your Real Life Rock columns have been invaluable to me. Early to music but late to music criticism, I only discovered them (in anthology form) five or six years ago, but they’ve brought me such joy (especially in the pandemic years). The older columns are especially rich—just as my cultural memory was first forming. It is great to dive into a cultural moment decades past where, say, that since-legendary Prince album is nested next to a super-obscure new wave song that my streaming algorithm rec would never find.

But I have been long fascinated by something: in 11/89 you reference an unreleased Public Enemy recording Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in which, among other ridiculous things, they sample the documentary Shoah(!). I cannot find this thing anywhere—not just a bootleg recording, but even references to it or information on it. Nothing. The only web searches that ping anything remotely related seem to ultimately tie back to your original column. Needless to say, given all of the ugly nonsense Professor Griff got up to in those years, I can’t imagine this would be the sort of thing they would want to curate/preserve. Still, it’s fascinating how this seems completely lost to history, especially given that it sounds exactly like the sort of sensational, awkward artifact from a cultural powerhouse like PE that would be destined to find its way to peer-to-peer/bootleg trading communities, etc. Or maybe I am expecting too much of the internet to reach back to ancient 1989.

Do you remember the circumstances of hearing this or anything else about it? —BRANDON SMITH

I’m glad the columns come across for you, from all those years ago or now. The Public Enemy record is something I made up. Given Griff’s antisemitism, which was traveling at the time as old/new conspiracies to eliminate black people in certain cult-like hip-hop circles, Chuck D.’s refusal to disavow him, my own disputes with other writers over how invidious this really was, I wasn’t going to let it die. Put up or shut up. They shut up, so I decided not to. It’s like the last record in my Desert Island list at the back of Stranded: Zurvans. “Close the Book.” That doesn’t exist either. Or, you know, maybe it does. In some doo-wop heaven.

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You are a Bay Area native and I assume, a fan of the great Steph Curry, who is the latest great NBA player in a line of succession that can go back, at least, to Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. However, it’s the WNBA which has drawn the most buzz of late, last year and the impending season and it comes from one source: the magnificent Caitlin Clark, who is a Steph Curry type of player, hitting logo-length threes and dribbling around defenders like they were traffic cones. But she also has, call it not “white man’s burden,” but perhaps, the burden of being perhaps the game’s greatest player who also happens to be white. Larry Bird could carry that and not let it bother him in the ’80s, Pete Maravich not so lucky in the ’70s. While the social psychology aspect of Clark’s almost Beatles-like fame (she sells out stadiums the rest of the WNBA could not even half-fill) can be troubling at times, it’s not her fault that she happens to be young, gifted, and not black. She comes to us from Iowa, the Corn Belt, looking like she stepped out of a 1950s sitcom, as Norman Mailer described Julie Nixon when he was covering the 1968 GOP Convention in his Miami and The Siege of Chicago. No doubt that while she reigns supreme in the WNBA, the league will prosper. However, when either time, injury, or failure overwhelm her as it must every athlete, no matter how great, I don’t think women’s pro basketball will withstand it and it might well return to the glorified minor league it has been for 25 years BC, Before Caitlin. Your thoughts on the phenomenon that is Caitlin Clark? —JAMES R STACHO

To me this is a pointless and even destructive way of looking at the world. It sets up a spurious racial competition and feeds the idea of white superiority. I don’t know if Larry Bird was a wonderful guy off the court, I thought that the likely NBA mandated rivalry between him and Magic was nonsense, but he was a crybaby in the game and used the situation to intimidate refs and writers into giving him a dispensation neither he nor anyone else deserves. Clark seems unlikely to go that route. And we have no idea where she will be in three years.

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I’m not sure if you were close to Joshua Clover who passed away recently, though I know some of his work has shown up in your Real Life Rock column. I know of him almost entirely through his music criticism, though based on the few things I’ve seen online about him in the last week his interests and his ideas and his activism stretched all over the place (I was aware of his poetry but less so about his political involvements). Seems like a remarkable figure in so many ways, almost intimidatingly so. My condolences if you were close. If you have any thoughts to share about your interactions with him, or what his work has meant to you over the years, I’d be thrilled to hear it. —TERESA A

This is hard to address. Joshua was a longtime friend whose mother (Carol Clover, author of Men, Women, and Chain Saws) I’ve known even longer. We worked together and argued. I knew his health was tricky for a long time but I was shocked by his sudden death. I found myself crying when told my wife what I’d just seen in an email. His work (whether it’s his book-on-a-single Roadrunner or his poetry collection The Totality for Kids or his outrageous fanzine Sugarhigh written under the name Jane Dark) is dynamic, unafraid, and wicked, but I find myself thinking of his sardonic smile and his big red and yellow tattoo on his right arm.

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Hi Greil, Reading Folk Music and What Nails It, for me your writing is more musical, and mind expanding than ever. I started reading What Nails It as one person and concluded as another, yes the writing and ideas were that profound for me and answered more than the question of why I read. I kind of spun over myself with this line on page 79: "The way a guitar passage in a song seems to physically turn over as if it were a person." My favorite guitarist is George Harrison, and your words immediately brought him to mind. I especially like his work on the Beatles’ first few years of songs. These are often brief solos, or “blurts” of notes, that baffle and amaze me. Do you have any thoughts on Harrison’s earlier guitar work? Sending love, and appreciation for a lifetime of reading and looking forward to more. —ALAN BERG

I instantly thought of “What You’re Doing” (to be completely honest, I often think of “What You’re Doing” as soon as I hear the word “Beatles”). George starts out with a simple pattern that you could call folk-rock: it made me think of Roger McGuinn in the Byrds, but since this came out before anyone had heard a record by the Byrds it’s plain who was listening to who.

It’s an almost solo vocal by John, reaching high, coming down only a bit, over and over. The song in his hands is all about wringing pathos out of the melody, and the drama of that quest comes with the first moment of the bridge, that “Why should it mean so much”—the kind of introspection in the middle of a well-written pop song that made the Beatles so much more than that, that made you hear your own life in their songs, but suddenly sharper, more clear, leaving you somehow more intelligent, or feeling so, than you were before.

John is trying to explain the world. Why is it like this? George is playing warmth, patience, a feeling for the passing of time. Small notes doing a big job. In the actual solo, predictive of the separated notes in Pete Townshend’s solo in the Who’s “The Kids Are Alright” and Lindsey Buckingham’s in Fleetwood Mac’s now PayPal massacred “Go Your Own Way,” George’s touch is so spare, ruminative between the sounds, it can feel that he’s not accompanying the singer in any meaningful way, but playing his own song, which in this case could already be called “All Things Must Pass.” And he does that throughout the story the Beatles told and lived out.