One reporters opinion: nostalgia seems to hold the same relationship to memory (and historicity) as sentimentality does to actual sentiment... something warm and fuzzy and superficial... versus something that contains a deep and complex resonance in review... a tangential thought to the point of your article reproduced here. "New Picnic Time" or "Ray Gun Suitcase" have stayed in rotation over the years for me, the same way as, say, Tricky or Alice Coltrane have, as random examples... these are a continuing living presence, as it were, removed from the time they were released, and I encountered them... for me, something like listening to REM's "murmur" would be a nostalgic thing, as opposed to being a continuing relevant presence outside of its specific time, like the aforementioned musical examples... obviously this would be all very subjective in terms of WHAT artistic production remains part of anyones personal creative discourse, as opposed to triggering that feeling of nostalgia, but I do find myself pondering this very question, the difference between nostalgia and a continuing relevance... also very grateful that you have championed Mr Thomas work over the years one of the handful of major American Writers to appreciate what he created, so thank you for that.
Your succinct quote about Mr Thomas made a number of his obits...In 2025, the lyrics of "Woolie Bullie" from the "Pennsyvania" LP no longer seem like the cranky ramblings of "a man muttering in a crowd"...we have lost a very fine and underrated artist here.
I have a terrible memory for names and dates but I can still see the madras shirts on The Kingston Trio as they play their banjos and I sing Tom Dooley and then move on to Eight Days a Week while I do the dishes. Nostalgia has its moment in a day - at the end, just before you fall asleep. Reading your column about nostalgia is more a morning activity. Wake up! See the world through fresh eyes.
Terribly ironic that were it not for the twisted cretin, there would have been no "Real Love." I do love it; it was leagues better than "Free as a Bird." George's solo on that lovely green Hamburguitar makes it. Strange that it was not more well-received at the time of its release.
JFK's assassination and the early Beatles music are inextricably intertwined in my memory. I remember buying "She Loves You" on 45 rpm. It was released on Sept. 16 1963 in the US.
Fun fact: On November 22nd 1963 the Phil Spector Christmas album was released. I take it that most Americans didn’t immediately rush out to the stores to purchase it, but waited until just before the holiday.
I was one who didn't rush out to get it. But as time went on and the songs from that album, especially Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," were all over the radio every year, I began searching for it, and commercially it no longer existed. In 1967, there was a conference on rock 'n' roll at Mills College in Oakland featuring Bill Graham, Ralph J. Gleason, Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane, and Phil Spector--all dead now--and my wife and I went. After everyone had finished talking, with Spector attacking Graham for how poorly he supposedly treated Lenny Bruce for a Fillmore show shortly before he died, my wife went up to Graham and asked him why he had started charging at the Fillmore coatroom; he called her a slimy cunt. I went up to Phil Spector and told him how much i loved his Christmas album and how it was impossible to find. He pulled out a business card and said, "Write your name and address on this and anything you want and send it back to me." I did and a week later the Christmas album arrived in the mail. A couple of years later, when I started at Rolling Stone, I met the staff photographer, Baron Wolman, also now dead; we got to talking, he'd also been at the conference, and thought he had a picture of Spector and me. I was stunned to see it--he's handing me the card.
I'm not able to include it here, but will post it on Substack by itself.
Thanks much for this with the bit about David Thomas. For my own memorializing, after revisiting old favorite songs of his and seeking out videos of him live in concert, I re-read your lengthy Thomas history in "The Shape of Things to Come". Really wish I'd seen him in concert as, from what I've witnessed in the clips online, his stories and asides add a lot to the songs and makes them more other-worldly than the original studio versions.
Partial side-note... In the "Things to Come" piece I was struck by your description of Pere Ubu himself: "fat, stupid, ugly, fascist, gross above all, the huge, clumsy monster embodying authority without intelligence, power without reason, respectability without honor." Sounds a lot more familiar now than it did when I first read the book!
When I got the first col of Joel Whitburn's Billboard Book of Number One Hits I immediately turned to that epochal pop year of -- 1974. The year is famous as the nadir of 70s pop but I was 13 and even worse 14, living on Maui (then and now the most physically beautiful place I have ever coexisted with), and the memories of the tension between Paradise's sensory perfection and adolescent misery's clunking reality are my nostalgia. Same goes for pop -- looking at Whitburn the year's grace notes (Elton, Philadelphia, Grand Funk hitting it right only twice) it's kitsch ("OOGA-SHAKA OOGA OOGA OOGA-SHAKA, Bachman Turner Overdrive stuttering) and even it's horrors (John Fucking Denver, The Night Chicago Died) bring back the tapestry of that year in a way that the subsequent radio blandout of The Years that Needed Punk never could. I was 26 when I thumbed through the Whitburn but still was overcome with the melancholy thrill of the decade becoming itself and me becoming me.
Only after the Swedes got through with it. Thomas 's original got re-released sometime in the 70s and was so prevalent that I thought he's covered it (Wiki has nothing) It was bland enough for Debbie Boone's 1977.
I was only four when JFK was killed, I only realized that something bad happened. My dad came home early, my mother hovered near the TV, Cronkite took his glasses off, looking devastated. I knew something had changed.
Even though I didn't grasp the full.meaning of the event, it served as a historical marker in my life. Everything was either before or after the assassination. The meaning of it grew as I became older and still affects me. That day changed my life.
One reporters opinion: nostalgia seems to hold the same relationship to memory (and historicity) as sentimentality does to actual sentiment... something warm and fuzzy and superficial... versus something that contains a deep and complex resonance in review... a tangential thought to the point of your article reproduced here. "New Picnic Time" or "Ray Gun Suitcase" have stayed in rotation over the years for me, the same way as, say, Tricky or Alice Coltrane have, as random examples... these are a continuing living presence, as it were, removed from the time they were released, and I encountered them... for me, something like listening to REM's "murmur" would be a nostalgic thing, as opposed to being a continuing relevant presence outside of its specific time, like the aforementioned musical examples... obviously this would be all very subjective in terms of WHAT artistic production remains part of anyones personal creative discourse, as opposed to triggering that feeling of nostalgia, but I do find myself pondering this very question, the difference between nostalgia and a continuing relevance... also very grateful that you have championed Mr Thomas work over the years one of the handful of major American Writers to appreciate what he created, so thank you for that.
"Ray Gun Suitcase" is the one that brought me all the way in to David Thomas.
Your succinct quote about Mr Thomas made a number of his obits...In 2025, the lyrics of "Woolie Bullie" from the "Pennsyvania" LP no longer seem like the cranky ramblings of "a man muttering in a crowd"...we have lost a very fine and underrated artist here.
I have a terrible memory for names and dates but I can still see the madras shirts on The Kingston Trio as they play their banjos and I sing Tom Dooley and then move on to Eight Days a Week while I do the dishes. Nostalgia has its moment in a day - at the end, just before you fall asleep. Reading your column about nostalgia is more a morning activity. Wake up! See the world through fresh eyes.
Terribly ironic that were it not for the twisted cretin, there would have been no "Real Love." I do love it; it was leagues better than "Free as a Bird." George's solo on that lovely green Hamburguitar makes it. Strange that it was not more well-received at the time of its release.
JFK's assassination and the early Beatles music are inextricably intertwined in my memory. I remember buying "She Loves You" on 45 rpm. It was released on Sept. 16 1963 in the US.
David Thomas , truth teller….
Fun fact: On November 22nd 1963 the Phil Spector Christmas album was released. I take it that most Americans didn’t immediately rush out to the stores to purchase it, but waited until just before the holiday.
I was one who didn't rush out to get it. But as time went on and the songs from that album, especially Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," were all over the radio every year, I began searching for it, and commercially it no longer existed. In 1967, there was a conference on rock 'n' roll at Mills College in Oakland featuring Bill Graham, Ralph J. Gleason, Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane, and Phil Spector--all dead now--and my wife and I went. After everyone had finished talking, with Spector attacking Graham for how poorly he supposedly treated Lenny Bruce for a Fillmore show shortly before he died, my wife went up to Graham and asked him why he had started charging at the Fillmore coatroom; he called her a slimy cunt. I went up to Phil Spector and told him how much i loved his Christmas album and how it was impossible to find. He pulled out a business card and said, "Write your name and address on this and anything you want and send it back to me." I did and a week later the Christmas album arrived in the mail. A couple of years later, when I started at Rolling Stone, I met the staff photographer, Baron Wolman, also now dead; we got to talking, he'd also been at the conference, and thought he had a picture of Spector and me. I was stunned to see it--he's handing me the card.
I'm not able to include it here, but will post it on Substack by itself.
The photo with Phil Spector is available here (first image in the post): https://greilmarcus.net/2014/12/19/a-christmas-gift-for-you/
Thanks much for this with the bit about David Thomas. For my own memorializing, after revisiting old favorite songs of his and seeking out videos of him live in concert, I re-read your lengthy Thomas history in "The Shape of Things to Come". Really wish I'd seen him in concert as, from what I've witnessed in the clips online, his stories and asides add a lot to the songs and makes them more other-worldly than the original studio versions.
Partial side-note... In the "Things to Come" piece I was struck by your description of Pere Ubu himself: "fat, stupid, ugly, fascist, gross above all, the huge, clumsy monster embodying authority without intelligence, power without reason, respectability without honor." Sounds a lot more familiar now than it did when I first read the book!
When I got the first col of Joel Whitburn's Billboard Book of Number One Hits I immediately turned to that epochal pop year of -- 1974. The year is famous as the nadir of 70s pop but I was 13 and even worse 14, living on Maui (then and now the most physically beautiful place I have ever coexisted with), and the memories of the tension between Paradise's sensory perfection and adolescent misery's clunking reality are my nostalgia. Same goes for pop -- looking at Whitburn the year's grace notes (Elton, Philadelphia, Grand Funk hitting it right only twice) it's kitsch ("OOGA-SHAKA OOGA OOGA OOGA-SHAKA, Bachman Turner Overdrive stuttering) and even it's horrors (John Fucking Denver, The Night Chicago Died) bring back the tapestry of that year in a way that the subsequent radio blandout of The Years that Needed Punk never could. I was 26 when I thumbed through the Whitburn but still was overcome with the melancholy thrill of the decade becoming itself and me becoming me.
But Blue Swede's OOGA-SHAKA "Hooked on a Feeling" is a great record.
Only after the Swedes got through with it. Thomas 's original got re-released sometime in the 70s and was so prevalent that I thought he's covered it (Wiki has nothing) It was bland enough for Debbie Boone's 1977.
That's a helluva piece, Greil.
I was only four when JFK was killed, I only realized that something bad happened. My dad came home early, my mother hovered near the TV, Cronkite took his glasses off, looking devastated. I knew something had changed.
Even though I didn't grasp the full.meaning of the event, it served as a historical marker in my life. Everything was either before or after the assassination. The meaning of it grew as I became older and still affects me. That day changed my life.