Ask Greil: September 27, 2024

I read your latest book, What Nails It, with great interest. As a historian who often writes on myth and memory’s refraction of the past, I have developed pat answers to why I wrote about what I do and why, ultimately, I study history. Adopted at birth, I have also long attempted, sometimes consciously, often subconsciously, to push away this obvious, central moment as having any impact on my writing at all. This year, at the age of fifty, I met my birth mother and (through an unrelated conversation with my adopted mom) found out the source of my given name (Courtney), which had always been a weird burden as a child. In a striking noir twist, a crow plays a role in both interactions. In a flash, everything seemed to click into place. The personal and the professional collided in a surprising, if long overdue, bang. It may have taken me until the age of fifty to begin to understand how my being adopted impacts the way I view memory and history, but here we are. The way we constantly make and unmake the past. The way threads continue to connect across time even as the landscape erodes. All of these pieces just immediately began to resonate so much more clearly. Why does one write? Why does one study the past? Easy questions with infinitely complicating answers. “There are,” as you write, “whole worlds around us that we have never seen.” This email has become more of a “Comment to Greil” instead of an “Ask,” but I wanted to tell you that I was quite touched by your new collection of essays. —COURT CARNEY

Thank you so much for writing. It’s a great confirmation for any storyteller to hear that their work might have led others to tell their stories, too.

Over the past few years I’ve heard variations on the inscrutability of childhood and parentage that didn’t allow for your confrontation, no matter how satisfying or fraught it might have been, with your birth mother. These are people, even into their fifties and older, discovering that the person they were raised to believe were their birth fathers were not, and that the men whose identity they carry were their mothers’ long ago lovers, and now long dead, and that even their own siblings knew the truth but were forced to say nothing, thus deforming every relationship in sight.  

That might lead some people to shut up forever. It might lead others to talk about it to strangers on the street. Or it might lead some to write not about it but from it—which ultimately, if you’re lucky, means talking about it to strangers on the street—but in a manner that relieves the burden or even the crime of accosting people and screaming at them, and allows anyone who ever might come within earshot the honest right to say, Sorry, I’m not interested.

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Hi there: I received a used LP copy of Roxy Music’s Manifesto in the mail today that had one loose typed page of text tucked the jacket. The opening words were immediately familiar—the start of a review I’d read before…a Rolling Stone review published under Mr. Marcus’s byline, so I wondered if it might be a first draft?

Hope you’re well. Best —Derek Gentry, Newton, MA

I can tell you precisely what happened here, embarrassments included.

This was my copy of Manifesto. I loved Roxy Music and thought this was on the bottom rung of mediocrity. I can’t remember if I got rid of the album then, or much later when a convenient CD box of Roxy albums came along when I was moving out of a big house to a small one and needed to disabuse myself of 100s of LPs. Either way, I’d stuck an early draft of my Rolling Stone review of the album inside. Why? So I wouldn’t lose it and then did?

My god. The terrible typing. The terrible writing. I’d written good things before that, but whatever ability I had deserted me that day. I listened to the record; I didn’t hear it. Talk about mediocrity: the word doesn’t begun to cover the stupidity of the ideas in the review. “Roxy Musuc has not gone disco” when they so obviously had? It’s as if I wrote the lede before listening and liked it too much to drop it. The idea that a band had to ‘go somewhere’ with each new record? I was appalled when I saw it in print and it may still be the worst thing I ever wrote.

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I was wondering if Lana Del Rey features in your new book, What Nails It. I think you really get Lana and always have done from the start, even when she was getting slagged for her SNL performance. I always look forward to your words on her
in your Real Life Rock posts—it is great having two books on them as well. I would love more writing from you on her, I love your takes on “Venice Bitch” and “A&W American Whore” so much. —CINDY STERN

Lana Del Rey is not in What Nails It. The book is about critical occasions—incidents and happenstances that spark critical thinking. She certainly could have been in it. But I did give my wife a Lana Del Rey “Young and Beautiful” card today on her birthday.

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The recent debate takedown by Kamala Harris over Trump delights me no end. I don't think even her eventual election would thrill me more. It was such a vicarious thrill to see Trump reduced to a puddle of rage. And I have a theory as to how Kamala is doing this, if you'll bear with me. I think she is his succubus, draining his power away with her charm and beauty. Those handshakes (and she shook his hand again at the recent 9/11 ceremony) are casting a bewitching spell on Trump, who although a rancid racist misogynist, appears taken with her on some level. After all, Kamala Harris' father was Jamaican (and a Marxist professor per Trump) so she knows her voodoo. For further reference, see the documentary on the Ali v. Foreman fight When We Were Kings. In it, George Plimpton contends that Foreman's power was drained by a succubus, represented on film by singer Miriam Makeba. Goofy, no? But no goofier than dog eating immigrants in Ohio! —JAMES R STACHO

No, it’s incarcerated immigrants undergoing taxpayer funded sex change operations who are eating the dogs and voting as both male and female.

She didn’t dent his rock solid hold on 45% of the electorate. I don’t think he could have reeled in very many who weren’t already believers. She could have given confidence to some who needed it. She was brilliant BEING HERSELF—having a candidate so radiant, who can break out into a smile at the right moment, is why she is already far stronger than any of the failed Democrats from Carter on down. But she never answered a question that was asked. She reverted too often to canned phrases and convention slogans. And today the North Carolina Supreme Court blew up early voting I just spent hours writing postcards to facilitate. There’s too far to go.

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Hi, Greil, hope you're feeling well. Looking forward to your new book.

You had positive things to say about Bob Greene's early columns. He had a bad end to what had become a mediocre career. Wondering what you think of Running and Billion Dollar Baby. Both surprised when I read them not long ago. Thanks. —RS

I reviewed Bob Greene’s collection of Chicago Sun-Times column ‘Johnny Deadline: Reporter’ in my Rolling Stone Undercover book column in 1976. I’d already had a fine time with the Alice Cooper tour book Billion Dollar Baby, but had the feeling when I finished it that somehow I hadn’t been anywhere and if I had there hadn’t been anything where I’d been. I thought Greene had an ear for a story and deep reservoirs of compassion and empathy.

After he lost his column at the Chicago Tribune for what turned out to be only one of countless incidents where he used his fame and status and access to print to seduce young women, especially starry-eyed or ambitious journalism students, there was a devastating portrait in Chicago Magazine in 2003 that essentially used Greene’s own words to portray Greene’s entire career as a fraud from beginning to end. He said, speaking publicly about how he wrote and why, that the columns that had produced the deepest emotional response from readers—on the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics in 1972, on looking back on experiencing the assassination of President Kennedy as a teenager—were just angles, that he had only contempt for those he’d moved because that was just proof at how stupid his readers were and how well he was able to manipulate them.

And what got me—what convinced me that this was someone I hoped I’d never run into, in this life or for that matter hell—was his referring to the the assassination as Kennedy “having lunch.” As in having his lunch handed to him. Where is he now? I have no idea.

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Did you know of a band The Del-Vettes? I knew a member of the band Robert Bob Good from the organization I work for and met him way past that part of his life in rock n roll. Bob died last month and I remembered he was in that band. Just curious if you knew of them and your thoughts. Thanks! —SEAN HARKESS

In 1966 half the bands in the Bay Area looked like the Del-Vettes. The half that played bars and clubs in the suburbs, not the Fillmore or the Avalon or the Matrix. Same suits, same hair, same bland faces. They never got out of town, which is why you know the Del-Vettes (great move, naming yourself after a Corvette, or really after Corvettes, one for each guy in the band) and I know Peter Wheat and the Breadmen (horrible but unforgettable name—can you imagine taking a date to see a band called...).

Their “Lazy Time Around” may be a Shadows of Knight knock off but it’s so extreme. It gets more so. They weren’t afraid of their own sound.

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You probably already know about this, but just in case you don't, I thought I'd point out this piece of Blues Project/Danny Kalb ephemera (since you brought him up in RLRT10). The instrumental Batman and Robin album credited to the Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale was actually recorded by the Blues Project with Sun Ra. More info here.

Also, I looked in the anthology The Crawdaddy Book to see if it included the review you remembered so well. It did not, but in his summary of Issue #9, Paul Williams wrote: "Jon Landau contributed short reviews of new albums by Charley Musselwhite's Southside Band and the Young Rascals and an in-depth analysis of the Blues Project's Projections." So the review was probably by Jon Landau. There are several references to the Blues Project in the index of the book, and those comments are generally positive. This is the only direct mention of Kalb (in a review of their Going to Au Go Go album): "'Spoonful' is a bit too long; and though the bottleneck lead is lovely, I think Kalb runs wild on some oof the guitar solos." —MARK

I spoke to Jon Landau about the review and he confirms it was his. He was surprised by the album as he’d seen the band play—with their original singer. Tommy Flanders—and was knocked out.  

What I didn’t mention is that when one looked at Blues Project album covers the one thing you couldn’t not notice was Danny Kalb’s terrible comb-over. That was why, following YouTube videos of later performances of “Two Trains Running” (which David Browne notes Muddy Waters complimented—he was very generous toward such white followers as the J. Geils Band and Fleetwood Mac), coming across a much later performance by an unashamedly bald Kalb, picking out Son House’s “Death Letter Blues,” was so moving.

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Hello Greil, I hope all is well with you. I recently re-read your wonderful essay on Quatermass and the Pit, a Hammer film from the fall of 1967. What a magnificent film, what brain candy! What dialog: Colonel Breen: "Your imagination is running wild." Quatermass: "Isn't yours?" To take such a genuinely thought-provoking premise—the origin of religion here on planet Earth—and present it so concisely within the bounds of a low-budget science fiction thriller is a small miracle. I'm glad you focused on the stunning end scene, our shell-shocked heroes trying to recover themselves in the aftermath of what they've experienced (the music is perfect, "Deserted Harbour" by Dennis Farnon). It could still (more than ever) be advertised as "ripped from today's headlines" and with a certifiable fascist announcing interment camps and mass deportations, it's a more vital work of art than ever. I wonder if you ever led a class in a discussion of the film? I saw it with friends at the Egyptian in Hollywood a few years ago and the after movie discussion was reminiscent of late-night college gab-fests when a new idea has been introduced and you couldn't let go of it. —CHARLIE LARGENT

I've never taught that movie or its endless reverberations because I don't teach my own work, but it's a great temptation. What is worth seeking out is an extraordinary film that came out of Jon Savage reading that part from Lipstick Traces and writing a  documentary called Punk and the Pit, a 1994 BBC Arena production directed by Paul Tickell. It intercuts some of the most extreme and even disturbing footage of UK punk bands—including what appears to be an onstage animal sacrifice—talk about the pagan surfacing through the crust of official culture—with footage from the original 1958 BBC production of Quatermass and the Pit. I don't know how you'd find it, but Arena is a an elite division of the BBC and there ought to be some kind of accessibility to its library. 

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I just (re)read the Guardian article you wrote in 2014—“Amy Winehouse To Know Him is to Love Him.” I must have read it back then but wanted to tell you how your words about her interpretation of the song are just so right. One of the most beautiful interpretations of a song I have ever heard. I still miss her and yes, we were robbed, but thank you for writing that piece. —BETH GROSSMAN

Thank you. There's so much left to say about what she did, never mind what she didn't have the chance to.

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Hi, Greil - I gather that Minnesota is familiar terrain for you. What do you think accounts for the way it has punched above its weight in popular (and not-so-popular, yet influential) music across so many decades and genres? I know the glib answer: It's too cold for anything but garage rock in the basement. But that's a narrow tranche. Minnesota can claim Bobby Vee and his very famous protege, plus an Artist too obvious to name. Disparate styles down the decades have kept the place relevant. I can't think of a mid-sized state that compares.

Full disclosure, lest I sound like a booster: I'm a transplant to Minneapolis, so I'll always be "from away."

Best, and thank you. —CHRIS HESLER

Well, leaving aside that Bobby Vee was from North Dakota (he did make his first records in Minneapolis), I don't think you can blame the cold, though people in Portland might tell you the reason so many great bands formed there in the 1990s was that it always rained. But it's always rained in Portland and it's always been cold in Minnesota.

I think it might have more to do with Minnesota Nice. It may have faded over the years, along with every other form of decorum, restraint, deference (driving on the freeways in the Twin Cities will prove that), but deep down it's a force. As Sarah Vowell wrote in Radio On, "Forget the Big Bad Wolf, the fear of God, the hands of time--they can't stand up to Minnesota Nice." So a tension is established, between the instinct to behave as you know you should, to honor and respect, to acknowledge and give thanks, to take manners, in the definition of Ms. Manners, a way of being in the world that makes other people comfortable, and the will, even the bad dream, to slip the restraints, even escape them, even blow them up. That's not just Bob Dylan and Hüsker Dü and the Replacements (never a band I loved, but just one album title puts them on the map, "The Shit Hits the Fans"). It's also Fitzgerald. And it's the speech by Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, at the Democratic Convention of 1948, bringing to the floor the Minority Report on Civil Rights—which included a Federal anti-lynching law, the abolition of poll taxes, and the desegregation of the military—a report that was adopted, after which Strom Thurmond of South Carolina led Deep South delegations out of the hall, formed a new, anti-civil rights party, and took the Solid South away from President Truman, thus killing his campaign according to everyone other than Truman, who won anyway. Listen to how he begins—pure Minnesota Nice—and where he goes—pure "With God on Our Side."

Mr. Chairman, fellow Democrats, fellow Americans:

I realize that in speaking in behalf of the minority report on civil rights as presented by Congressman DeMiller of Wisconsin that I'm dealing with a charged issue—with an issue which has been confused by emotionalism on all sides of the fence. I realize that there are here today friends and colleagues of mine, many of them, who feel just as deeply and keenly as I do about this issue and who are yet in complete disagreement with me.

My respect and admiration for these men and their views was great when I came to this convention. It is now far greater because of the sincerity, the courtesy, and the forthrightness with which many of them have argued in our prolonged discussions in the platform committee.

Because of this very great respect—and because of my profound belief that we have a challenging task to do here—because good conscience, decent morality, demands it—I feel I must rise at this time to support a report—the minority report—a report that spells out our democracy, a report that the people of this country can and will understand, and a report that they will enthusiastically acclaim on the great issue of civil rights.

Friends, delegates, I do not believe that there can be any compromise on the guarantees of the civil rights which we have mentioned in the minority report. In spite of my desire for unanimous agreement on the entire platform, in spite of my desire to see everybody here in honest and unanimous agreement, there are some matters which I think must be stated clearly and without qualification. There can be no hedging—the newspaper headlines are wrong. There will be no hedging, and there will be no watering down—if you please—of the instruments and the principles of the civil-rights program.

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.

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Dear Mr. Marcus,

I have long been an admirer of your writing. Just recently I read your brilliant analysis of The Great Gatsby and its cultural significance. I am writing because sitting here listening to the new box set ‘Elvis Memphis’ I am curious as to whether you are deriving as much pleasure from them as I am.
Sincerely —KEVIN BARR

There’s wonderful stuff there. But I was hoping for a lot—a lot, like whole wasted afternoons—of outtakes, studio banter, fooling around, the stuff that had made so many odd Elvis collections irreplaceable, maybe for just that one moment when...

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Walter Mosley once described Chester Himes as a better writer than Ralph Ellison? What would you say to that? —BEN MERLISS

There’s nothing I’ve found in Himes—who I confess in the Harlem detectives books I find hard to follow—to match the most visionary and formally surreal sections in Invisible Man—the opening, which make up some of the best pages of modernist fiction written by anyone anywhere in the 20th century, and the riot scenes. Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go is a first rate social realist protest novel, but as fiction it doesn’t come close to early Roth, which is not great Roth, or Ann Petry’s The Street, or maybe, for that matter, Mosley’s own Devil in a Blue Dress. But really, unless we are trading pages, you can’t make a comparison. In his lifetime Ellison completed one novel and two essay collections. Himes published many novels, that built on each other and make up a grand claim on postwar life in America. In his way, Himes made a greater intervention—or a more sustained and sustaining noise. Do you rank that above a few pages you can’t forget? I don’t. But it may be a question. For Mosley, it might be, when he read him, who made him say, I want to do that! And we can bet it was Himes. But I could also be, I can’t do this. But I could do that.

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Dear Greil: 

Hello again. I hope that you and your family are doing well, and that you're all in good health.

I have a few questions for you regarding Lauryn Hill and her family. I don't know whether you've ever written about her in depth before, although I've noticed that you've spoken dismissively of her in passing: in your Days Between Stations column on Jess Klein, you wrote that Macy Gray made "hordes of vocalists following Lauryn Hill and the Fugees' insensate melisma" sound "stupid, like human wah-wah pedals" (yikes!) and in your review of  Chant Down Babylon (appearing first in the November 16th 1999 edition of Real Life Rock Top 10) you wrote that "Lauryn Hill drops her Laconic Goddess of Disdain routine all over ‘Turn Your Lights Down Low,’" (eek!). I know you were never her biggest fan. And I must admit, I'm not exactly her biggest fan myself. I was too young to  get in on Fugees-mania (I was hardly more than a baby when The Score was first released), and by the time I got to high school, Lauryn Hill was already more icon than singer. I can remember my friend telling me, when I was around thirteen or so, that I had to listen to The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill at least once—that it was an album every girl had to listen to, as if it was vital like vitamins or something—and then listening to it and being somehow strangely unmoved, or moved more by the theory of the album than the practice of it, the actual experience of listening to it. To this day, I think there's only one song off that album—her swaggering bragging track "Lost Ones"—that I actually flash on and come back to listen to as a song (as opposed to a piece of trivia, a source of other songs, etc.). And perhaps the only Lauryn Hill recording that has genuinely moved me is a one-off: a televised performance of the Wailers' "Chances Are." Please watch it here [editor’s note: video not sharable]. It's certainly worth a watch. For approximately the first thirteen seconds of the video, the backing band—the keyboard-player especially—sound like they're about to burst into Bob Dylan's "Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" (it is as if they've got their Bobs mixed up!). But when Ms. Hill starts to sing, she sounds (somehow) like the Sad-Eyed Lady herself. The whole thing sounds like nothing so much as "Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" from the Sad-Eyed Lady's point of view, which is a strange and striking thing to hear. Here, for once, her melisma signifies going out of control—reaching outside of herself, grasping towards something (the power she heard in the Wailers' version of "Chances Are"?) that shimmers out of reach—as opposed to imposing her control (her awesome technical proficiency) over a song.

But of course, I know that I am in the minority, here, in being mostly underwhelmed by Lauryn Hill. So many thoughtful music critics—Carvell Wallace, in his 2016 Pitchfork review of The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, and Tom Breihan in his 2016 Stereogum essay on "Doo-Wop (That Thing)", to name just two, off the top of my head - write about Hill as if she is at least a hero, at most a secular saint. In 2017, NPR put The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill at #2(!) on their list of The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women. And while I still feel as though there is (or must be) some great essential essence about Hill's music that I somehow can't hear, I will admit to being fascinated by her life story, and by her family. By the fact that she was once married to Rohan Marley (so she is technically a Marley herself, and I am fascinated by all the Marleys); that her son YG Marley is an artist in his own right, who had a major TikTok hit (and minor - #34 - Billboard Top 100 hit) this year with a versioning or do-over (new lyrics; modified version of the old riddim) of the Wailers' "Crisis", retitled "Praise Jah In The Moonlight." That one of her other sons, Zion Marley, is also an artist in his own right, who has just released a single, titled "Best Of Me", that may be poised to become a hit. 

So my real questions for you—and I'm sorry it took so long to get to the actual questions—are these: have you ever gone back and re-listened to Lauryn Hill's music, and, if you have, have you revised your opinions of her? Do you still think she's a "stupid" "human wah-wah pedal" practicing "insensate melisma", ? Why do you think her melisma is insensate—insensate meaning both "foolish" and "brutal" —or more insensate than other artists' melisma? If you haven't changed your opinion of Lauryn Hill, what do you think so many critics—and music listeners— hear in her music, that you don't hear? What did you think of her performance of "Chances Are"? Have you listened to YG Marley's "Praise Jah In The Moonlight" yet, and if you have, what do you think of it? (That's what I'd REALLY like to know). Have you listened to Zion Marley's "Best Of Me", and do you think that it could be a hit? 

I would feel truly honored—more honored than I can say—if you could answer these questions for me. 

I hope you're having a great day. Take care. 

Sincerely —ELIZABETH HANN

I never meant to say Lauren Hill was stupid. I would never do that. And I didn’t. I said Macy Gray and others made her sound stupid, insensate, by which I meant thoughtless, or unthinking—doing what everyone else was doing, what the current musical fashion demanded.

She became very big very fast in a very prestigious way, which was right there in the elegant and enticing The Miseducation of album title. There was no follow-up. She had five of Bob Marley’s would-have-been grandchildren. To me it’s not an interesting story, but then I am never interested in a performer’s biography.

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Interesting review of the Thunderclap Newman book in the latest RLR. I've always loved "Something in the Air," for exactly the reasons you do; the first time I heard that startlingly incongruous barrelhouse piano solo—so wrong, in context, but so right, also in context—I never wanted it to end and I couldn't wait to hear the whole thing again.

I do feel the need, however, to point out a typo in the item: guitarist Jimmy McCulloch didn't die in 2002, as written (you probably transposed it from the fact that Keen died in 2002), but in 1979, at the age of 26. McCulloch is a fascinating minor rock figure; still a teenager when he was in Thunderclap, he achieved brief renown in the mid-70s as the lead guitarist in Paul McCartney's Wings. I'd always assumed that his tragic early death was yet another typical example of too-much-too-soon rock excess, but according to Wikipedia it was more complicated than that:

"Although McCulloch was a heavy drinker and marijuana smoker, he was not known to be a user of hard drugs. After complaining of feeling anxious, exhausted and unwell in general, he was given a prescription from his physician that contained small, legal amounts of morphine, cannabis and alcohol. The subsequent autopsy revealed that his medication had caused heart failure. Reports that he died from a heroin overdose were based on a misconception of facts."

Anyway, I'm very happy that you're doing better and that you're still doing everything you do. Looking forward to the coming reissue of Mystery Train. —HAROLD WEXLER

I had looked it all up and obviously got my notes mixed. I somehow think the errors pointed out so far are appropriate for such a dense and long column.

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