I was in high school when he wrote infamous reviews about Queen and cover stories about Springsteen, and I followed him through his Rock & Rap Confidential days through to E Street Radio.

And I still page through that list of 1001 singles with the mix of exasperation and exhilaration Marsh probably intended.

I don’t think anyone loved rock ’n’ roll more than Dave Marsh, and even when you disagreed with him that was the common ground you shared.

RIP. —DEREK MURPHY

I was trying to think of my favorite book by Dave and couldn’t come close. In a literary sense, in terms of focus, erudition, grace, and fun, maybe The Beatles’ Second Album. For audacity and scholarship, the Louie Louie book. For the desert island, The Heart of Rock & Soul. But most of all—these are books that no one else would ever have written. He arrived and he left. He was his own creation.

You led off your most recent Real Life Rock Top 10 with an amusing salvo criticizing Christopher Nolan’s most recent magnum opus The Odyssey. While I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and appreciated its epic David Lean–like scale in an actual theater, I did not approach it either from a scholarly or political POV, but just as an experienced older movie goer: it held my interest and was well done IMO. But I’d like to ask you why you dismissed it as you did? It has become a sort of national Rorschach test for our culture this summer, i.e., many dislike the film for its casting or its not staying true enough to the actual source material, but why exactly didn’t you like The Odyssey? You haven’t sold out to the other side, have you? LOL —JAMES R. STACHO

The Odyssey is what happens when you throw too much money against a wall, invite a thousand or so people to watch, and expect that a story, characters, and sense of time passing will somehow emerge from the mess.

In this case someone—maybe a very smart publicist, maybe an editorial cabal—decided that, to sell tickets or newspaper ads, this could be presented as if both the future of the movies and Western civilization were on the line. Thus the New York Times over the course of more than a month ran so many op ed pieces on the thing they finally ran one asking if it wasn’t time to stop discussing it and then more pieces explaining why the theme could never be exhausted.

I found it easy to ignore this when I bought a ticket, went into the theater, and watched the movie. From the start, I felt as if this was made by people who thought it might be a good idea because, you know, lots of stuff happens on the way to the big shootout. But because the casting was ridiculous, the notion of verisimilitude deemed square, and drama framed as one thing after another, for me the movie very quickly became a guessing game over whether the next set up would top the previous one in stupidity. That could actually be kind of fun, for a while.

But there’s nothing there. People will not be watching this in ten years and no essays on it will appear. It will disappear as if it had never been, just like Eyes Wide Shut, which went through a similar world-historical frenzy and is now remembered as an episode in the Tom Cruise–Nicole Kidman fake marriage.

The other night I watched a very similar movie: the Michael Mann Miami Vice with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. In one sense it was just as dumb. It had the same ending. But the characters were more sympathetic, the plot more complex, and Farrell and Foxx more fun to watch than Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway.

Was this herd of white elephants any fun? And I have no idea what selling out to the other side means. What’s the other side?

I continue to be involved with our old alma mater, UC Berkeley. For two years before the pandemic I lectured on the beginnings of American music for Cal Discoveries Travel on a paddle wheeler from Nashville to New Orleans. Recently I was asked to give a 1/2 hour lecture at a lunch in December on the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll. Ken Burns has done a remarkable job covering the roots of jazz and country music. He hasn’t covered the ten years leading up to Elvis’s first commercial single: Arthur Crudup’s “That’s Alright.” I’ve now read several books including Let The Music Speak, Before Elvis, The Sound of the City, and The Devil’s Music. What these four books taught me was how complicated and intertwined the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll were involving Jim Crow segregation, radio technology, economics, merging of genres, and a couple of white trailblazers including Sam Phillips, Dewey Phillips, Alan Freed, and a disc jockey in Philadelphia who agreed to play some 78s a couple of Black kids brought by his studio one night. So my question to you is: How do I condense these complicated beginnings into a 1/2 hour introduction to this topic and what 3 or 4 records would you include as examples? I know that you know the answer is not as simple as pinpointing “Rocket 88” as the first rock ’n’ roll record. Turns out Bill Haley changed his band’s name from the Saddlemen to the Comets to rebrand himself as more than a hillbilly or country and western act. He was rockin’ in the early ’50s along with a few other white musical pioneers looking to cross over and make black music (blues, jump blues, boogie woogie, race records) appealing to a white audience. Thank you in advance for your advice as to how to distill this complicated topic that Ken Burns has probably intentionally avoided. Hope your health has improved. —ROBERT SPROUL

In about 1967, in my senior year at Cal, I met someone who idly said, “You know, they should teach a course on rock ’n’ roll.” “How long?” somebody asked. “A semester?” Even with what little I knew at the time, I knew that would never work. A year, I thought. No—a MAJOR.

It’s that complex. There’s no such thing as “An Introduction to . . .”—it has to be an IMMERSION. And that can be done in a brief and foreshortened way.

You could frame the kind of talk or course or discussion you’re thinking about around the notion of a new music, a new sensibility, emerging in a brief window of time, imagining, over the few records you’re positing, that these three or four records represent a fact of thousands of people engaged in a new, semi-clandestine conversation that is in the process of going public, and it’s this new national convention of voices you’re hearing.

Set the scene: it’s a little more or a little less than ten years since the end of the War and the end of the Depression. The country is in the midst of an unprecedented economic expansion. New schools and highways are being built everywhere. Racial segregation is beginning to fray and even, at the hands of an ever growing civilian army of black patriots, to crack. And unheard voices are beginning to be heard—and those who hear them, such as Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, Patti Smith, John Lennon, Lou Reed, Marvin Gaye respond with . . . I want to be heard, too!

All over the country. A new map. Play (or shuffle as you like):

• Penguins “Earth Angel” / Los Angeles 1954

• Elvis Presley “Good Rockin’ Tonight” / Memphis 1954

• Five Satins “In the Still of the Nite” / New Haven CT 1956

• Chuck Berry “Johnny B. Goode” / Chicago 1958

And ask the people you’re taking to or with: What do you hear?

Have a question?

In 1974, in Dylan’s rented house in Malibu, there hung an oil portrait of a Black man who no one has been able to name for fifty years. I’ve made a case that the portrait is of Bob Kaufman, the Beat poet who took a decade-long vow of silence, and that the canvas itself may be a curious collaboration: Dylan’s original conception, executed or corrected by the man teaching him to paint that year, Norman Raeben.

I don’t expect you to adjudicate the case. But the portrait raises a question you or one of your readers might be able to answer, or point me to someone who might know more. Whether Dylan painted it or not, why would he be showcasing a portrait of Bob Kaufman in his home, or when asked about the sitter replied it was of “A Poet Friend from San Francisco”? I’ve found that in one of Dylan’s 1965 notebooks Kaufman’s name follows two lines that would appear in “Jet Pilot.” And reportedly there’s a card or letter in the Dylan Archives where a mutual friend of Kaufman and Dylan writes to Dylan concerning a rumor that Kaufman had died. Outside of those two leads, nothing. Was Kaufman just a casual acquaintance? More?

I’ve laid the whole strange case out in this link, for anyone who wants to follow it. But my question remains: How does a poet who deliberately chose obscurity end up on the radar of one of the most famous singer-songwriters in history? Did Dylan see Kaufman at the Gaslight when the Beat Poets and the folkies shared the stage for a brief moment? Did Ginsberg or Ferlinghetti introduce the two?

Unfortunately many of the people I could asked have departed the stage, and the few who remain, Wavy Gravy and David Amram among them, aren’t responding . . . not surprising when both men are in their 90s. But perhaps you or one of your readers know more. In any case, thanks for both Real Life Rock Top 10 and Ask Greil. —FRED BALS

This is a fascinating and rich account that you should be publishing. But the mystery you posit seems evanescent to me. As you show, it’s evident that Bob Dylan, working from a photograph, either for his own pleasure or as a tribute, made a crude portrait of a revered and well known member of the North Beach poetry milieu, someone whose work or life touched him. Now, Michael McClure—there’s a face to challenge any would-be painter. I once did a reading with him and he was so handsome he was hard to look at, like Hedy Lamarr’s daughter when she was a student at Cal and you’d pass her on the street and wonder why the air seemed to change. Just put down your brushes and give up: God had already finished the job.

I don’t think I’ve ever read your thoughts on Lo and Behold, the Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint Basement Tapes cover album. Great names, sounds like a bunch of Nixon lawyers. I love it but they ain’t Fairport Convention, that’s for sure. —STEVE CANSON

So many interesting people found their own songs in the original Basement demo that was sent around by Dylan’s publisher—the source of the bootleg tapes and then the bootleg LP that began their journey to the public. I mean, ELVIS sang a bit of “I Shall Be Released” one day in the studio, ending with what sounded like both a pronouncement and a judgment, and who was he speaking to, the guys on the session, or himself, or time itself? He simply said—issued—“Dylan.” And with a finality that seemed to say there was nothing more to say about anything. The Coulson et al album was I guess a brave idea. I listened to it once and somehow never picked it up again.

1. Was Folk Music your attempt to write your own version of Chronicles Vol. 1?

2. In Folk Music, you identify the album Slow Train Coming as part of Bob Dylan’s story as you see it even though it’s no secret you’re not a fan of the album. How do you think one should approach the album as part of his story even if one isn’t a fan of the album? —BEN MERLISS

1. No.

2. The fourth song, “Slow Train,” has a groove. But as far as his story goes, there are two things people said at the time of the album’s release that have always stayed with me. One is from Joel Selvin’s review of Dylan’s first Born Again show at the Warfield in San Francisco in 1979, to the effect that while people often attribute religious conversion to a painful experience hard or impossible to make sense of in any other way, “This guy is feeling no pain.” The other is from Jerry Wexler, who co-produced the album. “It has a good sound,” he said when I called to ask about recording the album. “But his mother is probably sitting shiva for him right now.”

Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88” is generally credited as the first rock ’n’ roll song, but I think Professor Longhair’s “Boogie Woogie”, recorded in 1949, was actually the first. I’m from New Orleans and got to see Fess many times, so I’m biased. What are your thoughts on this? —TOM GARVEY

Once more into the breach . . . there are whole books on this question. Suggestions—or claims, or demands—go back to records from the twenties. I’ve spent as much time playing with this question as with any other, even if my choices seem set in stone.

As I hear it and see it, this is absolutely a postwar question, and it’s a matter of rhythm. New rhythms were emerging after the war, and socially, politically, they were more than a metaphor: they were an embodiment of the feeling that after the war, which after all was meant to redefine and redescribe the world, and in many ways did, the change in life, in ordinary, day to day life, so many felt was inevitable hadn’t come. People came home, and looked around, and said, as Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller would write (with Randy Newman arranging) for Peggy Lee so many years later, but in what they called their Weimar period, is that all there is? So people found themselves enacting that thought, that wish, that complaint, that need, that desire, for that missing change. In a different way the same brass ring was being grabbed by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Rhythms opened up, either through delicacy and fragility—the Orioles, “It’s Too Soon to Know,” 1948—or with a momentum that was all speed with the mufflers disabled—Fats Domino, “The Fat Man,” 1949. Compare that to Louis Jordan and the Ink Spots at the same time—the change is overwhelming, even shocking. More life, a different life!—at least in the realm of what people heard on their radios, nothing would ever be the same. And you can hear that the performers hear the same thing: as they sing and play, you can hear them saying, nobody ever sounded like this before. We are the first to step into this new land.

Condolences on the loss of Dave Marsh, whom you seemed to admire greatly and count as a friend as well as a colleague.

Last week, I listened to Terry Gross’s 1997 Fresh Air interview with him, which included a discussion about the song “Louie Louie” and his book about it. Few songs could inspire an entire book that remains interesting throughout, but Dave Marsh proved “Louie Louie” is definitely one, as he mined that song and its cultural and aesthetic significance beautifully.

I recall you mentioned in one of your columns in the last year or so that he could no longer communicate, but I can't recall you mentioning how long this had been the case. Listening to the Fresh Air interview, I couldn’t help but wonder if he had a chance to hear Bill Orcutt’s conceptual take on “Louie Louie,” titled The Four Louies, which combined the song with Steve Reich’s “Four Organs,” and if so if he might have communicated his thoughts to you about it.

What do you make of it, and this live version, which incorporates a dozen musicians?

As always, thanks for all your work and thoughts. —ERIC DAWSON

Thanks for sending the Bill Orcutt Louie Louies. I especially like Four Louies Live—it so captures the cavernous drum sound that in the Kingsmen’s version seems to all but swallow the record as it was being made. But both Four Louies performances go on too long without anything different happening.

It is an endless story. I think my favorite “Louie Louie” moment came when KALX in Berkeley held a “Louie Louie” marathon, planning to play every recorded version they could find—that was a nation-wide-college-radio craze in 1983, probably started by KFJC of Foothill College on the San Francisco Peninsula—that started off with someone playing the tune on a touch-tone phone. As the show unfolded people began recording their own versions and bringing them down to the station, raising the possibility that the show would never end. And in a way it hasn’t.

There have been a lot of books on a single song. But none approach Dave’s Louie Louie for archaeology and glee.

Do you recognize Americana as a musical genre? —ERIK BERNSTEIN

It’s always been a (not very successful) marketing strategy, because it presumes a reachable and somehow organized audience around the idea that there are people who want to seek or have confirmed an identity of self-reflection: not as real or imaginary Americans, but as . . . Americanans?

In 1905 Emma Bell Miles, an educated city woman who married an illiterate mountain man, wrote a piece for Harper’s called “Some Real American Music,” where she perhaps introduced the notion for the first time: music that contained and even argued for a distinct American cultural identity. She wrote about the passed-down Appalachian ballads that despite their British or Scots ancestry had, in their voyage to and journeys across what became the United States, taken on a voice and a mind that was distinct and new and timeless. I think people who followed the originals of American popular music in the same way—Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and on down—made music that could have been stamped “ONLY IN AMERICA.” Who could have been more American, a self-proclaimed American explorer and explainer than Chuck Berry? But a label like Americana would for such figures have only been constraining—not bringing them to an audience, but narrowing it.

It’s interesting that the band that is often pointed to as “the beginning of Americana” or as “the precursors of Americana” or “the pioneers of Americana” is the Band, that is, Canadians, who while madly in love with united states of American music were always interested in a Canadian identity, from Richard Manuel’s “We Can Talk About It Now” (“I’d rather be burned in Canada”) to Robbie Robertson’s “Acadian Driftwood.” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” might be taken as an Amercana template—but doesn’t such a template reduce such a big, finally universal song? Failed self-imitations like “Shoot Out in Chinatown” and “Last of the Blacksmiths” are template Americana—and terrible, the concept curdling even before the fact.

Maybe the best band ever even marginally promoted or discussed as Americana were the Be Good Tanyas—another Canadian band. Yet they seem to map the country to the south, to bring it to new life as they play and sing it, whether it’s “Rowdy Blues” or “Waiting Around to Die.” They seem to touch the hidden heart of the country. What if you rewrote the history of the place based solely on the stories and emotions in those two recordings—because it’s not the songs that are original to them, but the performances, they way the trio understands them and gets their idea of what the songs are across? You could do it.

But I think the falsity of the category, or whatever it is, is revealed when you try to use it. To says “Those recordings capture Americana” is to say nothing. Who cares, really? Does that mean they sold more than the Townes Van Zandt or Kid Bailey songs they covered, or should have? But to say they capture America is something else, and something that doesn’t need a label.

. . . you’ll get tons about Dolly Parton, so I can only beg your indulgence. I’d appreciate your thoughts on the below. First an excerpt from a Facebook post, UK music writer David Stubbs:

Lester Bangs, I seem to remember wrote about Elvis Presley when he died that the world would never be as united in a sense of grief and affection around the loss of one figure (he forgot Dutch punk group The Tits and their single “We’re So Glad Elvis Is Dead”). While I concede Elvis’s crucial role as a rock ’n’ roll originator I would suggest not only that the world is a good deal more united in grief and love, with no dissenting voices, following Dolly Parton’s passing but that Dolly Parton was a far greater American, a far greater person than Elvis Presley.

. . . and for clarification (or not), Dolly on, and as, Elvis. —ANDREW HAMLIN

Oh, fun. Fun fun fun. Dolly Parton talking about Elvis being shown only from the waist up, saying that meant nothing, SHE knew exactly what was going on, imagining Elvis as a girl, Elvis as her, she as Elvis, and how they’d have to show her from the neck up . . . and then “All Shook Up” (the first record I ever bought) and . . . It’s not special. She looks great and she’s fully present as a person but, Mr. Stubbs, in America, especially in death, if we know who we are, we don’t rank people. We are born equal and everyone is equal in death. To say Dolly Parton was a better person than Elvis or anyone else is to reduce who she was, who she so consciously and forever made herself to be. In favor of scoring a few points off her. Can you imagine Dolly Parton saying she was a better American, a better person, than anyone else? Of course not. I’m going to quote myself, from the end of the Elvis chapter in Mystery Train: “Elvis takes his strength from the liberating arrogance, pride, and the claim to be unique that grow out of a rich and commonplace understanding of what ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ are all about: No man is better than I am. He takes his strength as well from the humility, the piety, and the open, self-effacing good humor that spring from the same source: I am better than no man.” I never felt more born into the national conversation of which this column is meant to be a tiny part than when Charles Kuralt quoted that on CBS when Elvis died. If those words don’t apply much to Dolly Parton then they’re worthlesss. But I don’t think they are. And Stubbs misreads Lester.

Lester meant that the members of his generation would never agree on anything as they did not in the moment of Elvis’s death but in the moment of his arrival, when he changed the world and changed them—Lester and anyone he could imagine reading him. Just like Dolly Parton.

Anyway, at this mnemonic intersection of imagined violence and erstwhile Bay residents, I’m wondering if, apart from being pronounced dead by Rod Stewart, you’ve ever been physically threatened by a subject. Like, Lucinda Williams ever show up outside your job with nunchucks or anything? —JAMES CAVICCHIA

Once. It was at an early Elvis Costello show at the Berkeley Community Theater, a medium size hall, holding about 3,400 people, where in years past I’d often gone to see Bob Dylan, the Band, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison. He clearly didn’t want to be there. He played for about 40 minutes and left—I mean he walked off as if he’d rather be anywhere else. The crowd applauded as if to convince themselves this was really good, they’d gotten what they came for, but in about a minute reality broke through and there was a sudden sour feeling that swallowed the night.

For some reason, I don’t know why, I decided to try to go backstage and say hello. I’d written a lot about him, in Rolling Stone about his first album and first US show, more in New West. I went into a room: he was there, along with his manager, Jake Riviera, who cultivated an image as a thug—I don’t know if he thought he was imitating Peter Grant or the Kray Twins. I went over to EC, made to shake his hand, saying “Welcome to Berkeley.” Riviera stepped between us, slapped my hand away, and said as growlingly as he could, “If you write a word about this I’ll kick your ass.” I turned around and left and of course wrote up the whole meaningless encounter, because if a journalist is warned against reporting what they saw they have to report the threat.

Oddly, this squalid little encounter led to EC—I have never been able to call him Elvis—and I becoming friends. He produced the best response to Lipstick Traces I received from anyone: a collage made of advertisements from the likes of airline and hotel magazines running over pages that all but rewrote the book. I’ll never forget the shock of awe and pleasure in his face one day in my living room when I played him Charlie Rich’s “Feel Like Going Home.” So you never know.

I recently came across a video clip of CCR on American Bandstand and I was a bit surprised they appeared there as Dick Clark was not exactly an exemplar of Woodstock Nation. But even the Doors did an appearance after their first album, so maybe it wasn’t as unhip as I remember. Anyway, there is a snippet of Clark asking John Fogerty a couple of questions, i.e., how was it to follow up the success of “Proud Mary” (CCR had the Green River album out at that time which was a huge hit, although the title track doesn’t seem to me to be Top 40 radio, but maybe you could amplify on what 1969 was like musically—everyone else has) and what the future held for the group (1970: bigger success; ’71: Tom Fogerty leaves; ’72: everybody leaves). While Fogerty avoided being a “Proud Mary” one-hit wonder in spades with all the great songs he wrote, his vision of continuing CCR ended in ashes. You wrote the liner notes to their greatest hits collection Chronicle back in ’76, if you had a rewrite, would you say anything else after all this time has passed? —JAMES R STACHO

I was at my local bookstore the other day and noticed a book on Creedence that I didn’t know. I looked at the publication page and was surprised to see that it had come out just a few years ago.

I would have thought this story, not that expansive or emblematic of that much outside of itself in the first place, had been pushed, mined, or exploited as far as it would go. A little band, scorned by its so-called peers in San Francisco, comes out of a Berkeley-adjoining town no one’s ever heard of and where no one ever goes and makes no effort to be part of any scene. Their story has no hook, their first album gets panned in Rolling Stone by its then best reviewer, Barry Gifford, who goes on to write widely read novels and David Lynch movies, and yet, as another reviewer, I think Bruce Miroff, puts it, they have a sound that can cut through the static on the cheapest car radio. Maybe that’s the best image of the band: someone blasting the radio and shouting whatever song it is out the window. And it’ll be “Up Around the Bend” and you’ll spend the rest of the day wondering why it sounds so good. Or the rest of your life. And then there’s “Effigy” which no one will shout, but heard late at night with the bedside radio on might keep you up for hours.

In other words, I don’t really care about the guys in the band and what they did or didn’t do with their lives. A group that made a slew of distinctive fully realized satisfying life-questioning life-affirming records is somehow, in common commodified memory, reduced to a one-hit wonder, and that hit is “Creedence, that top 40 band that had a lot of hits and was really great, you know, ‘Proud Mary’?”

To me there are only two questions worth asking. The first is one that now, looking back, I wish I’d included in my tiny Chronicles liner-notes: with a little Bay Area paranoia and distrust of anything handed down from New York or LA, why it was that none of the hits so pervasive that they became a common language was ever listed at number one when at any given moment all of the singles listed at #2 so obviously were. The second is, just what is it that made their records so different, so complete? Start with “Bad Moon Rising.” Go to “Lodi.” Come back to “Up Around the Bend.” Those are questions that any person and any writer could answer in their own way. They are questions with answers.

Creedence was never part of Woodstock Nation. They very purposefully didn’t dress for that party. That wasn’t a nation where they felt like citizens. And they weren’t invited, because they weren’t cool. And they didn’t need it. Kind of like, in a strangely inverted way, the Doors.

You don’t seem to be the biggest fan of Bob Dylan’s 2006 album Modern Times (other than of course “Ain’t Talkin’”). It was my favorite of the three albums that many say comprise a trilogy of sorts marking his renaissance (I’m not sure I share that view and I can’t remember if you do) for a reason that I don’t see many people talk about.

It had space enough for each song to receive the breathing room they needed to truly reveal their power as songs. This resulted in a smoother flow than either “Love and Theft” or Time Out Of Mind. Don’t get me wrong. Modern Times isn’t necessarily a superior song collection to either of its predecessors, but with one or two exceptions “Love and Theft” sounded a little too boxed in overall while Time Out Of Mind had a rougher flow that made it harder to appreciate as a whole package (even though I love many songs from that album). Musically speaking, Modern Times felt almost like a nocturnal inversion of Highway 61 Revisited. My questions are: What is your response to my take? And what do you think I’m missing in making this observation? —BEN MERLISS

For me, it was slow going, a meander, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” really, after all this time, why not “Rock Me Mama” if you want to sing the redundant blues? “Nettie Moore” and “Working Man’s Blues” stopped me, for melody and stories just out of reach but—the initial theme of “Ain’t Talkin’” opened up horizontally and as a void at the same time and I knew, I said to the person I was with, I could chase this song for the rest of my life and never get to the bottom of it and I can’t wait. I agree that there is no flow, no overall rhythmic theme, in “Love and Theft” as there is on Time Out of Mind, but instead a door opening and then closing behind you. I’m glad you find more there than I do.

Have a question?

Someone once suggested that Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind should become a volume in the 33 1/3 series and that you should be the one to write it. What do you think? Would you do so?

I know I said in the past that TOOM isn’t my favorite album in the past, but this is mainly because the pacing becomes problematic for me towards the end. I also know you don’t think Daniel Lanois’s production was wrong for the album and except for “Can’t Wait” and “Dirt Road Blues” I don’t disagree. I love the best the album has to offer as much as I’ve loved anything by Dylan and I respect your viewpoint on the album. —BEN MERLISS

It should be a 33 1/3 book, and it should be a novel. I once called it a Puritan western—I think that’s a path that Mary Gaitskill or Percival Everett or Salman Rushdie or Jonathan Lethem or Don DeLillo could take. There’s a story there, and it’s one, as I’ve said before, that was captured in a seminar I taught in the spring of 2000 at Cal called “Prophecy and the American Voice.” The class material ranged from John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” to Martin Luther King’s address to the March on Washington to Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” to a collection of Dylan’s onstage sermons in the early 1980s to Time Out of Mind. During the class on that album, just about the last class, people were talking about it, as people tend to do about almost anything, as a break-up album, and at one point a student named Amy Vecchione lost patience. “Yes,” she said with vehemence. “It’s a break-up album. But it’s not about breaking up with a woman. It’s about breaking up with God.” And the whole album, really the whole class, came into focus—a focus I never quite maintained in The Shape of Things to Come, which came out of all that. But what sweep there is in that comment, and that album, and that rhythmic climb in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”—

I picked up the new reissue of Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk (new introduction by Hanif Abdurraqib, published by Questlove’s AUWA imprint at Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and I saw that Tate had included you on the dedication page: “Greil Marcus, who questioned my hunger for heroes.” I also read your brief Artforum note from 1992 about Tate’s writing. When you think about him and his work, what memories come to mind? —EMMERICH ANKLAM

I didn’t know Greg. We met to shake hands a couple of times and corresponded a bit after he’d started writing for the Village Voice. He was clearly thrilled by deconstruction and was constantly referring to Fredric Jameson as a savant and inspiration. I thought Jameson was an academic hustler peddling knockoffs of French trendiness and wrote Greg to ask why he was putting himself in the shadow of someone who didn’t have a fraction of his talent, mission, or style.

If you look at Daphne Brooks’s edited collection Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince, Tate appears in the pages both in his own words and as a lodestar for Brooks and many others: a self-launched shooting star who had begun to map where a new, absolutely polyglot sensibility could go, what unexplored cultural continents remained to be discovered and understood. Despite Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, there was a sense of blockage I got from his writing after Flyboy in the Buttermilk; Flyboy 2 was dispiriting by comparison.

Tate was not a careerist. He wasn’t out to build a career, but to live and work in culture. His death seemed radically premature, as if he had his whole critical life ahead of him, as if he were Jimi Hendrix or Charlie Parker, yet he was 64.

I’ve just been listening to John Wesley Harding again. What an extraordinary thing. Like a mighty old tree. With all the main songs almost the same tempo slightly slower slightly faster, it has for me the extreme clarity of a fever dream in the paintings of de Chirico. As true now as it was then? Its careful advice as relevant to America today? Such a sense of disturbing calm in its utterly consistent almost untouchable sound world. Personal too? Surely Bob is the drifter in the drifter’s escape. What I’d love to know is how the album landed at the time. It must have been an age of new prophets, I’m thinking of people like Timothy Leary and a kind of madness he had already lived through and rejected. How did the album bear witness through that terrible year of ’68 with its modesty playing against such extremes? —JOHN GIBSON

You raise what’s an almost infinitely complicated and interesting question. What’s going, on, what went on, where are we now?

In 1966 Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde, his third rock ’n’ roll album, grand, expansive, glamorous, maybe most of all a manifesto of hipness as the court of all values. He had been touring through the year from the US to Australia to France and the UK with a signal rock ’n’ roll band no one had ever heard of, including when it played with him, no name on the posters, no introductions or even an announcement from the stage, and they were a juggernaut: “Like a train running by your head,” Marlon Brando was reputed to have said. “The loudest thing I ever heard.”

Then in the summer Dylan went back to Woodstock and shut up. The rest of the year came and went with nothing but rumors. That didn’t happen in the world of people who sold records. They put out two, maybe three a year to make sure nobody forgot because a career wasn’t going to last more than three years, maybe five. From Dylan, not a word, an interview, a single, so he was crazy, he was a junkie, he was in a coma, he was dead, he had quit the field. 1967 came and went. At the very end of the year, really heard as the first sound of 1968, comes this quiet, insinuating album, a dim, beige cover, opening with a strum and the name of some character the record was named for who was “a friend to the poor” and you were back in some folk-music paradise and suddenly the cover of your copy of Sgt. Pepper looked gaudy and fake, trying too hard, when the truly hip, people who were born that way, never seemed to try at all.

The record seemed to open a door to a future, or anyway a year, of modesty and contemplation, after all the noise and counterculture Summer-of-Love-Monterey-Pop propaganda of 1967, a different way of walking and a different way of talking: keeping your eyes open, thinking it all over. That’s how you listened to the sermons, or were they moral history lessons, of “Dear Landlord” and “I Am a Lonesome Hobo” and “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” the riddles of “As I Went Out One Morning” and “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” and “The Drifter’s Escape,” the nightmare of “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” from which you actually got to wake up, and then the end of that long day of serious philosophy with a look at the weather with “Down Along the Cove” and a drink by the fire with “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” It was so soft spoken, with Charlie McCoy’s bass playing so playful and free, but you could feel that the singer, or the sound, was also raising the stakes. It was the war, Jon Landau wrote at the time: it wasn’t about the war, it wasn’t a protest against it, but “Dylan has felt the war”—the way Vietnam was making its way into every breath of American life, underpinning everything with uncertainty, guilt, and dread—or what Norman Mailer called “an unearned freedom from dread.”

And then 1968 broke out. The war exploded all over the world. All over the world, people rose up to demand a different government, a different life. In Prague and Mexico City revolts were crushed with such brutality no one ever knew how many were massacred. Martin Luther King was assassinated, then Robert F. Kennedy as he ran for president, Chicago showed the country the face of power, and Richard Nixon came back from the dead and shut the door.

So it was history that revealed that there was one song on the album that at once anticipated all these things and more, and could contain them, that could carry the spirits, the absurdity and fear of the time into any future. That was “All Along the Watchtower,” as Dylan played it as a parable from some Gnostic Bible; as Jimi Hendrix played it as a great adventure onto the unknown; as Neil Young played it as a judgement, in an arrangement Bob Dylan then took up on stage and kept for years.

When you go back to the album, as you’re doing now, it slips that history. It plays as someone playing with songs, and maybe wondering what America as a country, as legacy, as a promise, as a burden, actually is, and how to live in it, how to tell the story to a seven- or nine-year-old who’s asking you, “Daddy, what does it mean when it says on the TV that somebody went to school and shot people?” Except that they already know because they do shooter’s drills at school as history mutters the song that they’ll catch up with sooner enough under its breath.

Hi Greil. Are you going to make the material of your talk “Blackface Then and Now” into a book or an article? The talk I viewed on YouTube from 18 years ago was utterly fascinating and so revealing of the times we live in today. Is there more of your material on this anywhere else? —JON GIBSON

I’m more than glad that you feel that way, and after I developed that talk and giving it both in my New School classes at at universities and conferences, adding material about sorority rush at Ole Miss and racist attacks on Barack Obama, whatever came along in this continuing story—Percival Everett’s The Trees took it to new dimensions of metaphor and social revision—it seemed to me it could be a book, despite the extant and continuing literature on the subject. So I brought it up with the editor I was then working with, only to be told, “Blackface books don’t sell,” a dismissal that hit particularly hard since a year or two later he published a book on blackface by somebody else.

I came to the conclusion that my approach—dive into the swirling cauldron of the subject and some point of view, or at least an unused handle on the matter, will emerge—convinced me that I’d said what had to say and that if I wanted to fiddle with it in the future I could. But I realize now that my engagement with the question—the fun of playing with the material, from Al Jolson’s 1926 “A Plantation Act” to “The Savages”—was really a response to the way the ascendancy of Obama had opened up the parameters of American history and the American experience, making all questions new. Today, with the return of Jim Crow and what used to be called in the South White Democracy across the Federal government and more and more states, with the Justice Department fighting against all the states holding out, it would all look and feel very different. The evil would overwhelm all humor, all ambiguity, all contingency. Maybe someone tougher than I am can meet the day.

Browsing through Ask Greil comments from 2022, I see that you responded to someone who disparaged Stevie Ray Vaughan with “There’s no there there.” People like what they like, and I won’t try to argue you out of your opinion. But I will share a story about finding Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “there.”

My story starts early in the pandemic, when, as a 73 year old with a couple of additional risk factors, not to mention a general aversion to serious illness, I stayed home as much as I could. And I bought a stationary bike to get some exercise. But what to listen to while I was riding?

My initial playlists were my old favorites, sorted for potential pep stimulation. But somehow, tunes like “Jailhouse Rock,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”—songs that had sustained me, man and boy, for over six decades—weren’t getting the job done. So I began poking around for new (to me) material.

Enter Stevie Ray Vaughan, dead for 30 years at that point. I was totally unfamiliar with his music. I’ve never lived in Texas, and frankly found the hype round the Austin music scene kind of off-putting. But in 2020, I found a few of SRV’s blues covers on YouTube, and they worked. For me. Listening to SRV, I rode my stationary bike two or three hours a day, lost 25 pounds, and never got covid. That’s enough “there” for me.

Specifically—not that you asked—a 45–50 minute playlist might have looked like this.

• “Boot Hill” (1984 version)

• “Look at Little Sister” (Carnegie Hall)

• “Pride and Joy (Carnegie Hall)

• “Wham!”

• “Shake for Me”

• “Crossfire”

• “They Call Me Guitar Hurricane” (aka “Guitar Slim Boogie”)

• “Cold Shot” (Carnegie Hall)

• “The Things (That) I Used to Do” (Carnegie Hall)

• “The Sky Is Crying” (1984 version)

• “Oreo Cookie Blues” (1987 live, Lonnie Mack, vocals)

I also have a recollection, which I have been unable to verify, that you once compared SRV unfavorably to Dick Dale in their “Pipeline” duet from Back to the Beach. Apologies if I’ve misattributed your opinion, although I think it’s a fair assessment. I bow to no one in my admiration for Dick Dale; in fact, I can claim to have special ordered his Surfers’ Choice Lp in Wichita, Kansas, in 1962—hardly a man is now alive, etc. But it’s not really surprising that the guy who invented surf guitar music was better at it than a Texas blues player.

Tangentially, I’ll offer a link to Johnny Waleen’s surf guitar version of “Mystery Train,” in case it’s unfamiliar.

And while it takes them awhile for them to get around to incorporating “Pipeline” into this jam, here’s a link to a version of the song by SRV and his brother Jimmie on a double-neck guitar.

But the ultimate question is which entity—Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, California; or Greil Marcus’ Stevie Ray Vaughan—had less there. You and your readers can decide for yourselves with this clip from the SRV and Jeff Beck “Fire Meets the Fury” tour finale on December 3, 1989, live in Oakland, CA. —ROBERT MITCHELL

Gertrude Stein gave Oakland its inferiority complex. In 1964 I was trying to organize a statewide convention of a youth group and at one point the only place we could find in the Bay Area was the Leamington Hotel in Oakland. That was obviously so unappealing it was decided to advertise the event as taking place in “Greater San Francisco.” (We finally found a better place in the city.) In 1967 a poster that’s still on my wall went up in the East Bay for a Fillmore-style show: it pictured a very genteel 1920s combo over the headline “THE NEW WORLD HAS HIT OAKLAND!” It was so embarrassing. In the 1970s the A’s and Raiders and Warriors ruled their leagues. Now, as the end of the great Oakland movie Blindspotting anticipates, they’re all gone.

I’m glad Stevie Ray Vaughan got you through hard times, even became an absent soulmate, and opened up musical avenues you wouldn’t have found without him. But aside from Johnny Winter and ZZ Top I’ve never found the Texas crowd from the ’70s on living up to their New York press. For me Vaughan’s playing lacks definition: rhythmic, emotional, intellectual. He doesn’t play in the same world as Peter Green, Hubert Sumlin, Jimi Hendrix, and dozens of others. I’d call it greasy—knowing that from a different point of view that would be the highest praise.

But Christopher Nolan is here now with this ludicrous travesty to pick up the slack.

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My question is: I’m 66, on pension only with few media contacts (though many NMA friends) and wonder if you’d have any ideas on how I could take this further? Having done the Substacks while living on welfare (and getting almost 80,000 views by now) has been fulfilling, but I’ve always dreamed of a radio documentary series, a book, a tour, a film, and most of all a reunion of whoever’s left of the 1,400 performer-composers for the 50th anniversary of the festival in NYC in 2029. I may live under the minimum wage, but I am relatively happy and always dreaming! Thanks for the inspiring writings in any case, Mr. Marcus! —GEORGES DUPUIS

I can’t tell you how to expand your project or receive institutional support, but can say that poking around your archive turns up wonders. I stumbled on the shockingly contemporary expressionist poster for the 1920 German film The Golem and it took me back to first seeing the picture in 1964 and feeling very unnerved, as if someone had been keeping secrets from me all my life. So I can urge people to enter your generous cosmology and get lost.

Before the Beatles, did anyone ever imagine that popular music could change the world? —MICHAEL ROBBINS

All the way back. By setting romantic love against power the troubadours meant to undermine the social order, raised a vision of the world in which the church was irrelevant or ceased to exist—a vision realized in the act of love, in the seeking of the beloved, and one’s self, rather than God—and raised a vision of democracy, where each person had a song to sing, and a need and duty to find that song and sing it to the world. What would this changed world look like? What would people do? Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights was an attempt to show it.

About eight hundred years later, a disaffiliated assemblage of heretics, all raised in the church, stumbled upon the old call, and took up the personal, portable, mostly stringed instruments they could use to tell their stories, and acknowledged a need and a desire to tell stories—to tell the world how the world looked to them—and swept the country and then the world. Do you think Little Richard singing—announcing—hoping?—“All around the world, rock ’n’ roll is all they play” wasn’t an argument that music had already changed the world, or an argument that it could?

I imagine that the first person to really understand that music could and already had changed the world was Elvis. He looked out from the stage and saw a world that he had never seen before, that he could not have expected to see, and realized this was something he had called for and made. He knew perfectly well it was political, that it was revolution without a cause beyond itself: permanent revolution. You can hear it in his voice, his words, as he stands on stage in Tupelo in 1956 for an all-Mississippi homecoming with the crowd so possessed with itself he sounds genuinely afraid that it might consume itself as he introduces “Blue Suede Shoes,” in a phrase that showed how he understood and had embraced the song to its toenails: “This is a song that says you can do anything. But don’t. Just don’t.”

Did rock ’n’ roll end racism? Of course not, as all the black musicians who suffered arrests and violence can testify—as all the blues musicians dead or alive could have testified when Eric Clapton, whose life was saved by the sounds of black Americans, condemned black people—but it dramatized and argued for its absurdity. Elvis knew that when on stage he described his songs as a gnosis that had always been there, announcing one song as something he recorded “back around the time the stock market crashed”—which meant, what? That in his subconscious, or under his tongue, he was saying rock ’n’ roll had caused it?

Changing the world was what rock ’n’ roll was for. It emerged simultaneously in urban centers all over the country because of a feeling, an itch, an intellectual conclusion reached, that the world had to change, which meant it had to be changed, and by singing a song you could enact that change and show people what it looked like.

This is not grand utopian fantasy. It’s simple social fact. And facts, as John Adams said, are stubborn things. Or, as Ronald Reagan put it, stupid things. Like “doo-wop do wah, doo-wop doo wah, doo-wop do WAH”—you know, the beginning of “In the Still of the Night.”

Hi Greil, I know you mentioned Charlie Gillett a couple of months ago. I was wondering if you realised just how important Charlie was in the UK.

When The Sound of The City was published in ’71 I was 17 and genuinely thought that apart from Elvis, the Music World started with the Beatles. No one on mainstream British radio played American music from the ’50s. You couldn’t buy the records. Then this book arrived opening up a lifetime of listening, from Louis Jordan and Amos Milburn onwards.

Charlie then started Honky Tonk on Radio London, playing the sounds of the book. It literally changed the lives of many people. 10 years later Charlie started playing global music on the radio (especially West African) and once again introduced a completely unknown music to the UK.

My question is: Did The Sound of The City land in the US in a similar way?

Please keep well. —RICHARD

Robert Christgau gave a talk on just this question at an EMP conference some years ago and you might look for that on his website. Certainly the book was a shock to me—from the scribbled charts on the cover to the cast of characters I’d never heard of that in Gillett’s telling were central to a story I thought I knew. That I then embarked on a desperate search for the obscure 1950s 45s (no internet, no reissues or archival collections—you had to track down collectors or wait for the right people to read Charlie’s book and get on the case) and found that that many of his crucial fulcrum records really weren’t that great didn’t matter. He both structured the story and opened it up. The hundreds of histories and revisions that followed all go back to this shocking and epochal book.

Hi Greil, Long time fan. Here’s my very simple question. You are in some ways a California writer and I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about Lana Del Rey? She frequently invokes CA mythology (the name itself sounds very old Hollywood, old CA), and at times she seems to invoke Laurel Canyon and Joni Mitchell. I think she’s brilliant, for example the mixture of longing and filth in “White Mustang” or the numb romantic vision of “Video Games.” It never feels ironic but often troubling yet beautiful. Would love to hear your take. —JOHANNES GORANSSON

I’ve written a lot about Lana Del Rey in my Real Life Rock columns and this little forum: she’s one of the most sustaining and sustained performers around that I know of. I love all of her albums and favorites constantly change—and yes, her project of rewriting California, especially the Beach Boys—maybe reinscribing is a better way to say it—is a big part that for me. But from the time I saw her so-mocked first appearance on SNL, I found myself saying, This is interesting, this is different, what’s going to happen next? And then the killer “Young and Beautiful” and all the ways it’s threaded through The Great Gatsby and the story started all over again.

Some time ago, I asked how and why Warren Zevon wasn’t in the R&R HoF. You answered perfectly. And now WZ is finally in. I have the same question about the J. Geils Band. Totally deserving, in my view. Thanks. —VINCENT VIAGGIO

Peter Wolf is an insufferable jerk, as his autobiography, Famous People Who Have Met Me, attests all too well, and that may have gotten in the way of appreciating that his singing on John Lee Hooker’s “Serves You Right to Suffer” is a lot more convincing than it needs to be. That may also get in the way of Magic Dick’s harmonica playing, which ought to get the band through the gilt-plated doors all on its own. And it could be that the whole idea of a white blues band is today just too embarrassing to credit, even though the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Fleetwood Mac made their own contributions to the form and even the language. Which is to say nothing of the J. Geils Band as they were once described as “the Coasters with an ’80s follow through” for their Top 40 hits “Love Stinks” and “Centerfold,” which are fine enough to burn the Rock Hall down, which it half deserves for establishing its special Garbage Wing and then integrating its inductees along with the Coasters.

I’ve been cynical about the HoF since before it opened. But I’m also aware of how much inclusion and even more so exclusion means to performers, especially those, like the members of the Shangri-Las, who have never been nominated. I’ve looked the late Mary Weiss in the face and seen the pain all through it as she talked about the sense of erasure that brought. So while it would devalue anyone good to be in a hall of fame that includes Journey, I’d vote for the J. Geils Band in a second—I do vote every year. And maybe not vote for anyone else to give them the tiniest leg up.

Have a question?

Came here to ask if there will ever be an update on the Rock and Roll Death Index. And if Lennon was a perfect 30. Yeah, I've been reading your stuff that long. —JOE FITZGERALD

No. That walking tumor who shot John Lennon threw the whole system out of whack and showed how sick it all was.

Most of us are familiar or at least have heard of rock’s “27 Club”—a litany of rock stars who died at that age—and every July one can mark the anniversaries of both Rolling Stones Brian Jones’s and Doors frontman Jim Morrison’s deaths, two years apart, in 1969 and 1971, respectively. A lot (too much) has been written about these doomed stars over the years with there being some speculation that in the cases of Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones, it was not accidental OD from drugs, but murder most foul to blame while Morrison and Janis Joplin may have shared the same French Connection heroin that led to their deaths.

The “had they lived” what might have beens are all intriguing:

Would Brian Jones have formed a supergroup band after getting fired by the Stones?

Would Hendrix and Joplin have both continued their quest for more ambitious artistic musical outlets?

And what would the Doors’ last two albums they were obligated to record for Elektra have sounded like with their lead singer? No amount of AI today can cover up the fact that those songs w/o Morrison were just not good enough and on the rare occasions when Jim was sober, he not only made the Doors material better with his vocals, but also his songwriting and creative input.

Your old Rolling Stone colleague, Ben Fong-Torres, conducted one of the last interviews with Morrison in February 1971, and listening to the recording of it recently, I was struck by the fact that not only was Jim sober for once, he was well spoken, articulate, and committed to recording those remaining two albums (they had just finished recording LA Woman by then) before he suggested that all four band members would get a chance to pursue solo projects, e.g., film for Morrison, jazz music for drummer John Densmore, etc. He certainly didn’t sound like a guy on his last legs when discussing his future, and I don’t think any of the aforementioned rock casualties, while certainly contributing to their own deaths, wanted to check out just yet and all had ambitions ahead of them. Your thoughts? —JAMES R STACHO

There are books lining out future careers for all the people you mention and a lot more. Some are almost convincing. But if we look at the history of pop music, where it’s by definition a question of widespread if not mass attention, fame, and money, there are very few careers that are sustained over any substantial period of time as creative endeavors that countenance the world beyond the intent that they seemed to define and which defined them. I’m not talking about performers or bands that continue forever replaying the same hits with a changing or even static cast, whether we want to call them legacy or legendary or hack or has been acts. Who continues to engage with the world, the form, themselves? Who has escaped the prisons of excess, flattery, theft, fraud, conspiracy, self-delusion, riches, bankruptcies? I’m not talking about musicians in other fields, like Miles Davis, or artists in other realms, like Martin Scorsese or Gerhard Richter. I’m talking about Bob Dylan, who is both a world figure and a cult artist, Randy Newman, who is a misanthrope working within a bubble of Toy Story money (his recent duet with Taylor Swift on “You’ve Got a Friend” is both fulfilled and perverse from both sides), Elvis, for that brief rebirth in 1968 and the epic musical drama that combines “That’s All Right” and “That’s Not Alright” aka “If I Can Dream.” Who didn’t use themselves up, who wasn’t used up?

The new film Peter Asher: Everywhere Man is a portrait of somebody who outlived and escaped fame and went on to a second career, a second life, and is still around to tell the tale. Otis Redding was peaking both artistically and in the market when he died. He might have gone on to different things, even in different fields. Jimi Hendrix had worlds to conquer and the politics of the years to come might have destroyed him, marginalized him, or allowed him to trivialize almost anyone around him, especially with that album he made with Jim Morrison and Charlie Parker and Amy Winehouse on Buddy Holly’s Prism label.

We could go on. What do you think?

I loved . . . and continue to love . . . Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. It’s a book I’ll gladly reread every few years, and find doing so is much like getting reacquainted with a longtime friend. That Dylan perhaps played loose with the facts is secondary compared to the joy I get from reading this book. In the end, I doubt any life will be harmed or worsened because of Dylan’s omissions and embellishments.

I also continue to enjoy The Philosophy of Modern Song . . . but not quite as much or as often. Unlike Chronicles, I can only read PoMS in small doses. Dylan’s battle-weary, grizzled, blood-feud-fighting Civil War general persona begins to wear thin after two or three entries. Also, unlike Chronicles, I sometimes wonder if parts of PoMS were written by the same writer(s) who helped script the Theme Time Radio Hour programs. Still, I’m glad Philosophy of Modern Song is around for when I’m in the mood.

So, I was initially glad to learn that Dylan would be releasing new prose via his Patreon platform (for those with a paid subscription). Based on the titles, it sounds as though these works come in the form of imagined unsent letters from one historical/cultural figure to another.

Based on their titles, these pieces are often between people who lived in different periods from one another (Harry Houdini & Jackie Wilson, Gene Vincent & Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin & Marlene Dietrich) or between people who had no known connection (even if they shared the same oxygen). These pairings often feel as though they stepped out of unused or unwritten verses of Dylan’s “Desolation Row.”

However, just about as soon as my interest in these Patreon pieces was piqued, a deluge of articles and comments from bewildered, head-scratching folks appeared, with most complaining that these Patreon offerings were entirely AI generated. And that was enough to keep me from plunking down $5 a month for a Bob Dylan Patreon subscription.

From perusing Dylan’s Patreon site, it looks as though these pieces are “curated” by Bob, with no claim of Dylan actually writing any of them. It also looks as though the Dylan Patreon page has less than 2,000 paid subscribers, so I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s been hesitant about taking the Patreon plunge.

Have you read any of these Dylan/Patreon letters and stories (or know of anyone who has)? If so, are they worth reading . . . or are they AI slop . . . or are they something else entirely?

Thanks always for this column. —BILLY INNES

I’ve started a few of these Plato-to-Eddie Cochran (never forget his home state) numbers but came away thinking the correspondences were Dylan’s ideas and the text was by someone or something else. Chronicles is so WRITTEN—you can feel the thought and choice that went into every sentence. Philosophy had that noir snap. There are real books and there is marking time.

Ernest Hemingway once said that the true ending of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is when Jim is recaptured and the rest is just cheating. I find it hard to disagree. The book became very painful to read when Tom Sawyer recentered the picture. I found it hard to believe that Jim would take Tom’s treatment of him with as much passivity as he appeared to (broken teeth and all) and it wasn’t even funny by Twain’s own comic standards. Ultimately, getting shot with a flesh wound didn’t seem like the right kind of karma for Tom. I didn’t even read past the chapter of Jim’s recapture when I re-read the book earlier this year.

Do you agree or disagree with my take? And if you disagree, what is it you think I’m missing? —BEN MERLISS

You take your place in a long line here. It’s one reason Percival Everett had to rewrite Huckleberry Finn as James, in the process saving the book from itself and the country from the book. But think of it this way. Twain opened the story with this: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” But he didn’t say “Persons attempting to keep the author in the style to which he and his family have been accustomed to will be refused.” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a great commercial success and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the basic commercial move: a follow-up, a sequel. It was also an attempt to save Tom Sawyer from itself and the country from itself. But it wasn’t going to work: all the fourteen-year-old boys reading the new one were paging ahead to find out where Tom was. So Twain had to wheel him in and let him fuck everything up. Maybe he was hoping some people would get the joke, see through what was happening. But it was just another book and he was risking everything on getting Grant’s memoirs into print and I imagine he didn’t look back.

First of all, sorry to hear about your health issues. Hope you’re on the mend. My family has had a lot of them this year. Not fun.

I wrote you a couple of years ago and you published a lot of what I wrote and responded to it, which I really appreciated. I have many, many things I’ve wanted to check in on, but I’ll keep this short and hit you with the rest of ’em some other time.

Actually, I am attaching something pretty long that I think you might be interested in. It’s a letter I wrote to Ron Rosenbaum regarding his Things Have Changed book on Dylan. I never write these kinds of letters but there are so many egregious mistakes in his book, never mind his thesis, that I felt like I had to do it. I wonder if you’ve read it. (You needn’t bother, really.) I want to send it to him but I don’t know how to reach him. Trying to track him down through his publisher.

Just a couple of things I wanted to ask and comment on aside from the letter. You may have been asked about them already and I just missed it but in any case . . .

• Did you ever see Hendrix? I’m wondering if you might have seen one of the shows he played in Berkeley in May of 1970. I don’t think you’ve written much about him, apart from his SSB performance at Woodstock and your mention of “Little Wing” in Mystery Train. I just wondered if you ever saw him and how it felt.

• I’m also wondering what you think of Another Side of Bob Dylan, and what you thought about it when it came out. I’ve been listening to it for the first time in years and I think it’s a really weak album, although it obviously does have a few great songs. The contrast with The Times album, which of course was released only months earlier, is so stark. I’m curious as to how you felt as a fan upon first hearing it.

• Also wanted to say that I strongly agree with many of your comments on the Tour ’74 box set. It’s amazing how much better the LA version of “Rolling Stone” released on Before the Flood is when compared to the other performances from the tour. There are some good ones but none as relentless and dynamic as that one. In fact, it might just be my favorite of all the versions he’s ever performed, including even the ’66 performances. (I’m glad I can hear all of them, though. I wouldn’t want to have to choose just one!) From ’66, I think the best ones are from Manchester (of course!) and from Edinburgh. The whole Edinburgh show is fantastic, and the audience seems to have been one of the best on the tour. (In fact, if I remember correctly—I’m not going to check it right now—he says something like that at the end of the show.) The 1966 box set is a gift from God!

• I’m also curious about what you think of Springsteen’s (and Landau’s) embrace of “dynamic pricing” (George Orwell would be proud!). Springsteen was about the last guy with any integrity out there but for me he started to lose it with his Super Bowl Chevy ad, and the pricing thing is outrageous. I still love Bruce—his 1978 show was the best I’ve ever seen or hope to see—but it’s really disappointing to me. I wonder what Dave Marsh (former publisher of Rock & Roll Confidential, where he used to call this kind of stuff out) thinks. I have no doubt he thinks it’s OK, since Bruce can do no wrong in his conflicted eyes. I will say that I do very much respect him for going after Trump so strongly. We are living in dangerous and depressing times. Helicopters were hovering over my house last fall when ICE came to Chicago—it was sort of unreal to have them in my face when I walked the dog.

• Finally, I saw the Who in Chicago last fall and they were embarrassingly awful. The sound was ridiculously bad, for one thing. Townshend himself said from the stage that if he was in the audience he’d ask for his money back! I’d left by that point, though. I wish I knew how to get in touch with him. I’d give him my Venmo info! The sound issue was especially annoying because I read later that they did a soundcheck for “VIPs” who paid even more money than the already ridiculous ticket prices for the privilege of being there. Maybe if they’d done a real soundcheck they could have fixed the problems.

Well, not as short as I meant it to be! Apologies!

Thought I could attach the Rosenbaum letter but now I can’t figure out how, so I’m just going to cut and paste it because I’d like you to see it, making this submission even longer. Maybe it’s too much. Up to you just how far you’d like to go in!

Here’s the letter. The Neuwirth reference is to a story he tells about Neuwirth putting him down—quite appropriately! I tried to be nice in the letter rather than ripping him. Enough bad vibes out there these days!

To: Ron Rosenbaum
Re: Your Things Have Changed book.

Dear Mr. Rosenbaum,

It’s hard work to write a book. I’ve never written a book. So you have my respect for the work you’ve done.

But, as I read your book, I found so many errors and questionable assertions that I felt I needed to write to you.

If this comes across as sarcastic or dismissive I apologize. I’m not gonna go all Neuwirth on you, but it’s hard not to call you out sometimes. Apologies if you’re offended but it is what it is, as they say.

You describe yourself as “an investigative writer . . . who deals with the unexamined or poorly examined,” and yet your book is full of poor examinations and many factual errors. Never mind your thesis, which I will comment on later. You have a right to that and you make your case, such as it is. But it’s hard to believe that a book with so many basic factual mistakes could even be published. Here’s a list of some of them, in no particular order . . .

“Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” is indeed a great song. Too bad that Dylan never recorded it, even as a demo, never mind releasing in on Bringing It All Back Home! I wish he had! How can you make such a basic mistake? How is it that no one catches it before the book is published?

Dylan’s early ’60s girlfriend’s name is Suze Rotolo, not Rutolo. This mistake is made more than once. Every serious Dylan fan knows or should know this.

The Tour ’74 inaugural show on Jan. 3 in Chicago did NOT open with “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” although it was the opener—and closer—for most of the concerts on that tour. It was the LAST song he played that night. You were there but you don’t know that? The opener—on this night and the next—was “Hero Blues,” originally recorded in 1962 but never officially released. (When asked about it Dylan responded “Gotcha, huh?”) It was the perfect song with which to open the tour, and it rocks hard.

George Harrison did not write a song called “Something There Is About You”! Duh! That’s a Dylan song. Harrison’s song is called “Something.” I’d say that’s pretty well known!

The Beatles and Dylan were not “close friends”, though that might describe his later relationship with George Harrison. And the Beatles were certainly not “flabbergasted” by Another Side of Bob Dylan. Who would be? It’s a minor and transitional album. It was The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album that brought him to their attention and blew them away when they heard it in Paris in early 1964. Again, this is well known. Many people have written about it over the years and various Beatles have talked about it in interviews.

Dylan was not “jump started” by Rubber Soul. He had already recorded and released Highway 61 Revisited months before Rubber Soul came out. And he was certainly not “jump started” by Revolver! Blonde on Blonde was released before Revolver. The next recordings Dylan made after the release of Revolver were the Basement Tapes, which are hardly influenced by the Beatles. He was inspired by the Beatles’ early stuff—1963–64—which led to him “going electric.”

It’s true that Dylan never recorded a version of “The Death of Emmett Till” after the Witmark demo in December of 1962, but it was recorded six times before the demo, including three times on radio shows. All of these recordings are available on bootlegs. The song was not “re-discovered” in 2007. It was well-known well before that. Anyone who wasn’t aware of it has no business writing a book on Bob Dylan. Moreover, Till was murdered in 1955, not 1956. It’s unlikely that this mistake is a typo, since it’s made more than once in your book.

Regarding the Forest Hills concert in August of 1965 . . . who exactly has called it “the greatest Dylan concert ever”? I’ve read an awful lot of criticism on Dylan and I’ve never seen that. In any case, anyone who would say that is either a fool or deaf. Every 1966 concert is better, every 1974 concert is better, every Rolling Thunder Revue concert is better, etc., etc., etc. If you want to go back to his pre-electric concerts there are the Town Hall and Carnegie Hall shows in 1963, the Halloween show in 1964, and the Gaslight Cafe performance in 1962, to name a few. All of these put the Forest Hills show in the shade. Sure, it’s subjective, but the tapes tell the story. The electric set at Forest Hills isn’t actually even very good, much less part of “the greatest Dylan concert ever.” How could it be? It was his first time playing a full electric set and he played it with a group of musicians who had never played together before. The show pales when compared to literally hundreds of other Dylan concerts.

Also, the Forest Hills show most definitely did NOT feature the first public performance of “Like A Rolling Stone,” as you state more than once in your book. That occurred at Newport a month earlier. The film A Complete Unknown (which you refer to on the first page of your book) leads up to and ends with this moment, which is one of the most famous moments in Dylan’s career, and indeed in the entire the history of rock ’n’ roll! How is it possible that you don’t know this?

Your statement that there was no booing at Forest Hills except for when a fan ran on to the field is easily disproved by even a cursory listen to the performance (available on bootleg). Some in the audience do cheer, but the recording includes lots of booing after every single song in the electric set. Dylan even says “Aw, come on” at the end of “I Don’t Believe You” as fans yell “We want Dylan!” If you were there it’s hard to understand how you wouldn’t have heard this.

“Like a Rolling Stone,” by the way is not “contemporaneous” with “Sympathy For The Devil.” “Rolling Stone,” of course, was recorded and released in 1965. “Sympathy” was recorded and released in 1968.

A minor point, but worth mentioning . . . in “Desolation Row” Dylan doesn’t sing “sellin’ postcards of the hanging”. It’s “sellinG”. Along the same lines, Dylan doesn’t have Hattie Carroll “emptying ashes” in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” it’s “ashtrays.” I do like your many references to the line “on a whole other level” throughout your book, though. It’s the best line in the song.

Regarding your reference to Adolf Eichmann and the murder of “five million Jews”, you’ve lost another million somewhere. It’s SIX million, as most everyone knows and as Dylan himself references in “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues.”

You also offer many opinions in your book, which I would argue are often dubious, to say the least. To wit . . .

You describe Sid Vicious as “gentle.” That’s a first! Are you kidding? He was aptly named! He attacked the writer Nick Kent with a tire chain! Maybe he had some problems, maybe some things he couldn’t work out, but he can hardly be described as “gentle.”

You speculate that Dylan’s “I could not get across” in “It Takes a Lot to Laugh” might actually be “I could not get a cross.” Again, are you kidding? That reading doesn’t even make sense in the context of the song. No way.

You believe that a member of the audience yelling “Rock ’n’ roll!” is “heavier than a member of the audience yelling that Dylan is ‘Judas’”? Wow.

You write that the only songs from the Basement Tapes that “belong in the pantheon” are “This Wheel’s On Fire” and “I Shall Be Released.” Have you never heard “Tears of Rage”? Not to mention “Down in the Flood,” “Million Dollar Bash,” “I’m Not There,” “Clothes Line Saga,” or “All You Have to Do Is Dream”? These all belong, along with many more.

You write that Planet Waves is “Dad Rock”. First of all, what exactly IS “Dad Rock”? You don’t define it. But whatever your specific definition of that term is, I get the drift and I don’t think so. “Tough Mama”? “Going, Going, Gone”? “Never Say Goodbye”? “Hazel”? “Something There Is About You”? “Dirge”? These songs are “Dad Rock”? No.

You write that “Wedding Song” is “for all too many all the Dylan they know.” Really? Not “Like A Rolling Stone,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” or “Forever Young”? (To name just a few!) I’d argue that “Wedding Song” is actually pretty obscure.

You say you were in attendance at Electric Lady Studios when Dylan and John Lennon co-produced a session for David Peel. Seems doubtful to me. Lennon was wearing a “Free Bob Dylan” button around this time, and he’d put Dylan down by referring to him as “Zimmerman” on the Plastic Ono Band album not so long before any Peel session. Is it likely that they would have been working together at that time? Again, you say you were there, but of course you were there at Forest Hills and you say there was no booing, and you were there at the first Tour ’74 show in Chicago and you think that he opened with “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine.” Neither of these statements are true, so I think it’s fair to doubt your Peel story.

I’d love to know what was actually recorded at this supposed session, and whether anything from the session was ever released. Lennon worked with Peel, that’s well known, but I’ve never seen any reference to Dylan and Lennon working with him together, and I’ve read pretty much everything worth reading on Dylan and on Lennon. So, with all due respect, I have to question your recollection. It’s hard to know how to deal with this, really. It’s not like you’re just reporting that it happened, you say you were actually there. Were drugs involved? Perhaps it was a hallucination. Seriously, I don’t know how else to explain it. Memories fade over time, so it’s understandable that you might misremember the opening song of the first concert of the 1974 tour. But it doesn’t seem possible that you would remember being at a session with Bob Dylan and John Lennon if it didn’t actually take place. You clearly believe that it happened . . . but where’s the evidence? If I’m wrong about this I stand corrected and I apologize, but I’m dubious about it and I’d love to see some proof. In the end, I guess I have to give you the benefit of the doubt, but it doesn’t sound right to me.

You write that you have a “proprietary feeling” about your 1978 interview with Dylan. Why? Describing Blonde on Blonde as “thin, wild, mercury music . . . metallic and bright gold and whatever that conjures up” is perfect, but it’s Dylan’s description, not yours. Sure, you asked the questions, but Dylan supplied the answers. They’re HIS words.

You also write that you “still feel somewhat guilty” about perhaps starting Dylan on “the Jesus path” in ’78. How, exactly, would your interview have done that? You’re giving yourself way too much credit, or blame, as you would have it.

Dylan’s Nobel Prize speech mentions Buddy Holly rather than Woody Guthrie as “the dawning of it all” because he heard Buddy first. Simple as that. His Guthrie obsession came later.

Not to judge too harshly, but does your description of your editor Julia Zafferano as “open-minded” mean that she doesn’t think fact-checking is important? What kind of editor allows so many mistakes in a book?

How exactly does the term “Dylanologist” “barely conceal an ignorant sneer”? It’s a pretentious term (A. J. Weberman’s, of course), but I don’t think there’s any sneer implied in it. Is “Bobulator” any better? (Glad you are “recovering”, by the way. Who would want to be known as a “Bobulator”?!)

Dylan tipping his hat on the cover of Nashville Skyline is “ambiguous”? No. He’s saying hello, not goodbye. It’s a welcome—just look at the smile on his face! You’re reading meaning into things that have no special significance.

You write that in the early ’70s downtown NYC “seethed with secret theories about his disappearance from the scene after the (later debunked) motorcycle accident.” I don’t think this is true. It may have been true in 1967, but I don’t think anyone was thinking too much about this in the early ’70s. I mean, by the end of 1970 he’d released four post-accident albums so his “disappearance” was relatively short-lived (only about 18 months). I wasn’t there, so maybe I’m wrong, or maybe it’s just the people you hung out with. In any case, the accident hasn’t been “debunked” either. He had an accident. How serious it was is another question, but it was certainly a watershed for him and led to changes in the way he chose to live. “Seethed” is an interesting choice of words here. A strange choice.

In what way is the film I’m Not There “focused on celebrity”? I don’t see that at all and I’ve never heard of anyone else seeing it that way.

What are you talking about when you refer to the “motorcycle-black leather-jackets-and-shades Dylan of early album covers”? On the cover of Highway 61 Revisited Dylan is wearing a Triumph Motorcycle shirt, and he has shades in his hand, but that’s the closet any of his album covers comes to your description. And there’s no black leather in sight.

On to your opinions regarding Dylan’s “Born Again” period and his involvement with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship . . .

You maintain, first of all, that much of Dylan’s career amounts to an argument with God as to why He or She or Them or It permits the kind of suffering and pain that millions of Jews experienced in the Holocaust. I disagree and I don’t think you make the case. Some of his songs might be seen that way, but hardly a majority, let alone his whole career.

Regarding his “Jesus” period (1979–81), you of course believe that Dylan was “brainwashed” by the Vineyard Christian Fellowship during this time and you’re not shy in making that case. (I do understand that this is what the book is all about, so of course you try to make the case.)

Some of your characterizations . . .

• Dylan as a “lapdog of dogmatists.”

• The Vineyard Christian Fellowship as a “mind control sect.”

• The Vineyard “stole his soul”, and “turned him into a puppet.”

• The Vineyard as “those who stole his soul” and “turned him into a robotic preaching automaton.”

• “The born-again Jesus freaks stole his soul for three years.”

• Dylan had confidence “before the Jesus freaks stole his soul.”

• The “sacrifice of his soul” to Jesus.

• The Jesus freaks “exploit his misery and steal his soul.”

• The Jesus “betrayal.”

• Dylan’s born again period as a “catastrophe” and a “cultural crime.”

• Dylan “escaped somehow.”

• Dylan “re-emerged from these shackles.”

• Dylan “eventually recognized it and waged a struggle” to recover.

• This period is the “incontestably ludicrous low point Dylan’s career—his three years as a Jesus-freak scold.”

You also write that after watching the concert “preaching” videos from this period “any empathetic human being will be horrified about WHAT’S BEEN DONE TO HIM” (my caps).

Again and again, this assertion that Dylan was “brainwashed” during this time. It’s sort of offensive, really, because it characterizes Dylan as a man with no control over his own life . . . for three years!

You write regarding Sean Wilentz, Greil Marcus, and other critics and writers that “few will let Dylan be Dylan.” This is actually a perfect description of what you do in the book. It’s YOU who won’t let Dylan be Dylan, because you are making the case that Bob Dylan (of all people!) had no agency for three years, that he was completely under the influence of others, people who “stole his soul.”

You also write that you “will accept no temporizing about this theft.” Well, I guess that settles it then! But no, not really. Unfortunately, you have to accept that not everyone shares your opinion. In fact, you have to accept that Dylan himself doesn’t see it that way. I don’t know what it is that so angers you about this period in Dylan’s career but obviously it burns you up. You can’t accept the idea that Dylan himself charted that course, that he knew exactly what he was doing and sincerely had the feelings he had at that time.

I think it’s worth noting that Dylan has always been absolutely secure in his own opinions and actions. He has never cared about what his audience may expect or what critics say. If he was unduly influenced by others from 1979 to 1981 then that would be the only time that’s happened in his 65 years as a recording artist. I don’t believe that it did.

It’s also worth noting that Dylan has always, throughout his career, been interested in God, and in Jesus. The Old Testament God is of course referenced in “Highway 61 Revisited” (“God said to Abraham ..”), but Jesus is in many songs sung or written by Dylan well before his “Jesus period”, including “Jesus Christ” (Woody Guthrie), “People Get Ready” (Curtis Mayfield), “Masters of War” (“Even Jesus would never forgive . . .”), “Sign on the Cross,” “Shelter from the Storm” (“They gambled for my clothes” . . .), “With God on Our Side” (the reference to Judas Iscariot). There may be more examples—these are off the top of my head—but in any case, it’s clear that Dylan was always interested in Jesus.

Regarding “Mississippi,” it was first recorded in October of 1996 for Time Out of Mind. Why would Dylan wait 15 years before recording what you see as a mea culpa for his Born Again period? And it wasn’t released until 2001 on Love and Theft, which means that he didn’t offer that supposed mea culpa publicly until twenty years after the period in question. Does that seem likely?

More specifically, Clinton Heylin’s research (published in Still on the Road) has shown that the song has its roots (well, more than just its roots) in a chain gang song called “Rosie,” “collected” by John and Alan Lomax and released on record in 1934. The song includes the line “Ain’t but the one thing I done wrong / Stayed in Mississippi a day too long.” That’s that, wouldn’t you say? It’s not a song about the Jesus period. It has nothing to do with that. The line you cite was taken whole from another song that Dylan didn’t write!

Again, you’re reading things into Dylan’s work that simply aren’t there. “Mississippi” is not a song about a “mental state of enslavement.” The line “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way” isn’t “fairly explicit.” It’s not explicit at all. What you are seeing and hearing is your own projection of what you want Dylan to say and think. He’s never disavowed the work he did in this period, in songs or in interviews.

You’re entitled to your opinions, of course. But I would argue that the facts don’t really justify them. You don’t have to like the songs and you can deplore his “preaching”, but you can’t say with any credibility that he was “brainwashed” at the time he recorded those songs or did that preaching.

As far as the factual errors I pointed out, there’s no excuse for them. We’re not talking about obscure facts: these mistakes are basic. As I wrote earlier, to state that “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” appears on Bringing It All Back Home is such an obvious mistake that it’s almost impossible to believe it made it into your book. All of these many mistakes mar the book and diminish your credibility.

One other thing I wanted to note. I offer it not as any kind of I-know-more-about-Dylan-than-you-do gotcha but just because I think you would be interested and I doubt you’re aware of it because if you were I think it would have been in the book.

This is in regard to Salinger’s influence on Dylan (which I do believe is real). At the Royal Albert Hall concert on May 27th, 1966 (the last show of the tour, and Dylan’s last official concert for almost three and a half years), he refers to Salinger in his introduction to “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” where he tells the audience that “. . . you can just go out and read some books . . . read J. D. Salinger!”. You should check it out, it’s on the Live 1966 box set.

Again, I offer all of this criticism respectfully. I hope you take it in the spirit in which it’s given . . . and perhaps make some factual corrections in the next edition of your book.

—MICHAEL MERTZ

I’m sorry if your compendium of stupefying errors in the Rosenbaum Dylan book doesn’t reach him or his publisher. I wrote a paragraph about the book and how awful it was in the December 2025 number of my Real Life Rock Top 10 column here. I’d started a list of mistakes and repetitions and self-references but it was like looking at the Augean Stables. You’ve done heroic work in the annals of what might be called anti-writing.

I kept missing Jimi Hendrix, arriving late (San Francisco) or leaving early (Woodstock).

I can’t believe Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey really need the money.

Things people miss about Another Side of Bob Dylan: he looks Byronic on the cover. “My Back Pages” is a wonderful piece of rhythm but lives its real life in the hands of the Byrds and at the Dylan 30th anniversary concert when everyone on earth who was male and ambulatory sang it in turn as if they’d waited years for the chance. When it’s funny—“Motorpsycho Nitemare”—it’s really funny. “It Ain’t Me Babe” seems like a signal performance, but what Dylan did with it with the Hawks in 1965 and 1966 makes you realize it was just a sketch for a mystery he has never ceased trying to solve.

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San Francisco was a backwater as far as the music and media industries were concerned. That gave Rolling Stone its independence from those very forces. The Bay Area’s inbred disdain for Los Angeles and its chip-on-its-shoulder attitude to the East in general and New York in particular (it used to drive me nuts when people assumed I was from New York because they couldn’t imagine that anyone Jewish and not stupid could come from anywhere else) was crucial to the publication’s authority and unpredictability. In the Bay Area we simply were not part of the New York–LA nexus of publicity and schmoozing. Though really, it was grooming: I can’t tell you how many writers in New York and LA believed the record industry’s house hippie Danny Fields really was their friend. I found the same was true when in 1975 I became the Rolling Stone book critic. But Jann did want to be part of a world where Jackie Kennedy and Warren Beatty knew his name: knew that just as they had something to offer him, he had something to offer them. It was when the magazine became the house organ for Saturday Night Live that it sank into a trough of back-slapping it took maybe 20 years to get out of. I can’t believe that now the same rich man’s son owns Variety, Rolling Stone, and Artforum. Still, it seems like an ugly but appropriate conclusion to a time when Ingrid Sischy and Jann did things that no one, even themselves, ever expected, sometimes with every new issue, every time you turned your head.

Of the handful of rock music icons who continue to tour and perform live, I find only Bob Dylan listenable in that he has adjusted his sound and setlists to his age and abilities as they are now instead of the nostalgia trip the one encounters watching Paul McCartney or the Rolling Stones. Dylan seems relevant to me today in ways the others do not. In part, it’s due to his musicianship and tinkering and changing familiar songs into very different versions from what they sounded like even 10 years ago, but he seems to belong to a heritage he encountered as a young man, the old blues musicians who were rediscovered in the early-to-mid 1960s by college audiences and who performed at those Newport Folk festivals where a young Dylan got to see them and meet them personally. Did you see any of those pre-WWII blues artists back then like Skip James or Son House and what do you think of Bob Dylan today as a musician and performer? —JAMES R STACHO

Berkeley was a center of country blues performances when I arrived there in 1963, and before that. Lovers of—you could even say believers in—Mississippi and Texas blues from the 1920s and ’30s formed a kind of free and open cult. Rolf Cahn and Debbie Green brought that culture from Cambridge after 1959 and opened such country blues clubs as the Cabale and the Blind Lemon and later the Jabberwocky. Those spots along with the Berkeley Folk Festival hosted everyone: Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Dock Boggs, so many people who became central to my sense of American music and American democracy as such. And I missed it all. I had friends who I later learned had been part of that scene, but somehow the word never got passed or I wasn’t listening. I was reveling in and starting to write about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Lovin’ Spoonful. It wasn’t until early 1970, after Altamont, when rock ’n’ roll as an idea, a world, made me sick, that in the little Berkeley store Record City I discovered the treasure chest of country blues put out over the previous years by the Berkeley label Origin Jazz Library. It was on their sampler Really! The Country Blues that I first heard Skip James, Garfield Akers, Son House, Charlie Patton, Tommy Johnson. My life took a turn for the better. I still have that LP and play it with undimmed disbelief.

As for Bob Dylan, I wasn’t in town for his recent Berkeley shows at the Greek Theatre. I heard about it from any number of people, and the sense I got was that if you were in the mood, if you were receptive to the idea of this golem draped in cloth playing songs you would have known if you could decipher his intentions, you likely would have come away thrilled with a sense of possibilities, of recognizing how much you didn’t know but had just found out. But see below for more.

Classic Rock. I was born in 1961 and was introduced to Top 40 AM radio by my older sister when I was 5 or 6. Top 40 radio of that time was glorious and, do I dare say, diverse. In the late ’60s hit radio would play a song by the Doors and follow up with the 5th Dimension. In the ’70s (my teenage years) the rock ’n’ roll station (Indianapolis WNAP) we listened to played Top 40 hits and rock LP cuts (“Stairway to Heaven,” live “Free Bird,” etc.). So we’d get an Aerosmith cut then maybe Ted Nugent, then Gladys Knight and the Pips. As Disco came along mid-decade and produced a lot of hits (some of them were very good), the rock listeners started jumping ship to a new AOR station (WFBQ) that had started up in 1978. That summer WNAP went to “All Disco” on the weekends, and their fate was sealed. In less than a year WFBQ was THE rock ’n’ roll station in the market.

The AOR Playlist was all white (’cept for Jimi Hendrix) and the “classic rock” played rarely was from before 1967 (“Like a Rolling Stone” was the oldest song played that I remember). The “new” music they played pretty much avoided anything Punk, until Blondie and the Cars broke through (not punk).

Jump ahead to 1983, WFBQ is still THE rock and roll station in Indianapolis. One hot August Saturday that summer they were broadcasting from the Indiana State Fair and the DJ said that people kept coming by their booth and requesting a certain record that the station did not have, but would “see what we can do about it.” DJ mentions it a couple of more times without saying what record it was. No Spotify to instantly access a tune in 1983. Finally the DJ announced that they had the record and they were going to play it “only once.” The song was “Little Red Corvette.” This was the song of that summer. After the record was over the DJ apologized for playing Prince.

Over the years I have talked to too many white male rock fans my age who absolutely HATE Prince. Rock ’n’ roll came about with white teenagers and black teenagers listening to the same records in segregated America. Powers that be reacted as expected (including record companies) and next thing you know Pat Boone is unawaringly singing Little Richard’s ode to gay male sex (awopbopaloobop). There were periods when a diverse audience was listening to the same records (Motown, late ’60s/early ’70s soul, Sly Stone and then disco). But rock came to mean white music. That’s why I love hip-hop, even though I don’t listen to much, because it brought together a diverse audience (which is one of the reasons older rock ’n’ rollers despise it). —BOB RYNERSON

I can understand why some male people hate Prince. They think he acts like a girl and looks like rough trade. He does everything they were told not to do if they didn’t want to turn off every woman on earth and all the women on earth from Sinéad O’Connor to the ones in his songs seem to flock to him. As a semiologist he turns all signs of masculinity into jokes, to the point where the word itself sounds stupid. And he really could play the guitar better than anyone of his time (Peter Green went farther with “I’ve Got a Mind to Give Up Living” in 1970 and then he pretty much did). But a DJ actually playing “Little Red Corvette” and then apologizing? The guy had the wrong job. I’m sure there was a lot of trash around the station for him to pick up.

Hi, Greil. When and where you grew up, what was the prevailing multi-generational public social music, if there was one? Like, when there was some big free something in a nearby park—open to all, kids bring your parents, parents bring your kids, wheel granny out, etc.—what kind of music were they playing?

I grew up in upstate South Carolina in the eighties and nineties, and the big Everybody music there and then was Beach music: chiefly slow-drag shuffle-tempo R&B that was propulsive enough to let you know you weren’t in the parlor anymore, but nothing that would excite things to where you might need to have to set down your drink. It was cool enough to not alienate the kids, it was laid-back enough to not agitate the grown-ups, it was deep and familiar enough for black folks to get into, and—perhaps most crucially—it was deburred enough that it allowed white folks to enjoy black music without having to think too much about black people, and if you went to any event involving rented canvas and free hot dogs, this was probably the music you heard there.

Now, a few times a year, when I’m feeling strong enough, I’ll put a bunch of it on while I’m doing dishes or whatever and try not to go under. Or, depending on the day I’ve had, maybe not try.

Anyway, how did they do it where you were?

P. S. I know you probably hear more of this than you’d like, but thank you so much for doing this. Your willingness to act as prison librarian for no fewer than two generations of musical obsessives really is an incredible generosity. —JAMES CAVICCHIA

It was suburbia in the ’50s in the Bay Area: I don’t recall music in parks or around swimming pools or at political rallies. (It was also the polio era and for a long time you stayed away from public places and stayed out of public swimming pools.) I don’t think we want to count marching bands at football games. My father would play songs from the ’20s and ’30s on the piano and we—five kids, eventually—would sing along, especially to novelty songs. At the Quaker school where I went there were a lot of folk songs, especially pacifist and Popular Front songs—and square dancing, which I hated to the point that when I heard “Swing your partner!” I felt ill. High school dances are a blur. The only really social music I knew was Top 40 radio and everyone at school arguing about the songs and who was better and listening to the radio at night and feeling part of some national conversation, our own republic where maybe Chuck Berry was president except for the way that we knew in some secret place in our hearts it was really Ray Charles or Little Richard. But all generations out here in public singing together? At ball games, because in those days you really were supposed to sing the national anthem and it felt good to try.

Prison librarian? I like that. I’ll try to live up to it.

Have a question?

Bob Dylan’s 6/14 show in Berkeley was superb, even better than I expected. The band kept up a simmering nocturnal tension for almost the whole ninety minutes—so low-level that until the music stopped for just a second, you could forget how strong it had become. The sound was a fine mesh of taut wires, single strands snapping with the sound of a lone guitar or piano note. It feels like a missed opportunity that the Twin Peaks Roadhouse never booked him.

My friend Michael, who got a last-minute call to announce the openers on stage both nights, said that certain renditions reminded him of the Vulgar Boatmen and Dire Straits. I started thinking about D’Angelo’s Voodoo for its scientifically tight looseness; this show didn’t swing the same way, but I heard distant kinship. “Crossing the Rubicon,” done as a blues military march, gathered so much energy I wished the band had played it that way on Rough and Rowdy Ways, though on second thought it may have overpowered the rest of the album.

Of the Dylan shows you’ve seen in more recent years—say, since 2000—is there one you wish you could experience again for the first time, or one that surprised you the most? And is there a particular show you didn’t get to see but wish you had? —EMMERICH ANKLAM

There are a lot of shows based on what I’ve heard or read that I’m sorry I missed—even if I didn’t altogether trust what I’d read or heard. You just never know what anyone is going make of the conundrum Dylan can make of his performance. One person’s ceiling is another one’s floor, as one of his songs put it.

The show I’d like to see again would be either of two following the release of Tempest, either in New York or Oakland. The songs from that album come across directly but there’s no getting to the bottom of them. The more you hear the less certain you are of where you are. On stage at that time in the mid 2010s he was so expansive, acting them out with grand gestures like someone doing “Famous Scenes from Shakespeare” at the Virginia City Opera House in 1885.

I’m in Minnesota. I’ve seen fascinating shows here, but the one I most regret missing is one at a minor league ballpark where he went back to 1959 and sang Bobby Vee’s “Suzie Baby” and introduced Bobby Vee from the audience. I’d met Vee—by then back to Velline—at an oldies show in LA in the ’70s and at a Dylan conference at the University of Minnesota in 2007. Now he was deep into capture by Alzheimer’s. But he was there. My daughter was there. She described a train on a nearby track blowing its whistle as it went on by: “The perfect midwestern moment.”

I confess, Bob Dylan recently covering old Bob Dylan Basement Tapes songs, i.e., “Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby,” leaves me overjoyed and if ever Dylan were to do one of those shows/tours (how many does he have left?) featuring a “hit” album, let it be his entire Basement Tapes collection! Alas, he dropped the song after only a couple of shows, but doing 12 bar blues from his Summer of ’67 collection should be what it’s all about IMO. —JAMES R STACHO

With around 131 actual basement tapes recordings, that’d be some show. I think I’d settle for “This Wheel’s on Fire.” I was kind of shocked to hear he’d taken up “Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby”—I stumbled over it on the basement tapes bootleg set I found in the 1990s, and fell into its cauldron of laconic apocalyptic fury, this throwaway musically bland come-on that’s actually about the end of the world. Wow. That’s when I thought, there’s a book in here somewhere.

I recently read that you were quoted in a 2012 interview that during your early years at Rolling Stone magazine, publisher and founder Jann Wenner pressured you as editor and another writer to turn a favorable review of Paul McCartney’s debut solo album McCartney into an unfavorable review because Wenner wanted to cast John Lennon as the greater artist among the Beatles and Wenner was friendly with Lennon and Yoko. Later, Wenner would conduct the famous “Lennon Remembers” interview published in RS and in book form where John was highly critical of his former song writing partner. Did Wenner try to exert his influence on RS writers this way often and if so, did such behavior influence your decision to leave the magazine when you did? —JAMES R STACHO

I’ve told this story before, but I don’t mind telling it again, because it illustrates something important about Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone.

In April 1970 I was the records editor at Rolling Stone and Langdon Winner, my friend, neighbor, and fellow Political Theory grad student at Berkeley, was a frequent record reviewer and feature writer. As editor, my arrangement with Jann was that the Records section was an independent republic within the country of Rolling Stone. Jann could make suggestions or requests or objections, but final decisions were mine and the only way to overrule them was to fire me. There were never any exceptions while I had the job.

Langdon had reviewed McCartney, Paul’s first solo album, where he played all the instruments, and which, for reviewers but not the public, came with a self-interview where Paul, as his own band, denigrated the Beatles and promoted his new music as an escape from and transcendence of their triviality. When in the office Jann looked over Langdon’s review, which made no mention of the press material, he said it really needed to address that issue. I said that in terms of criticism it didn’t and that in any case it was Langdon’s legitimate choice to ignore that. We talked about this for about twenty minutes before Jann said he had other things to do, we weren’t getting anywhere, and why didn’t we go out for dinner and continue discussing it. So later Jann and I and his wife Jane and my wife Jenny went out to Tommaso’s, a favorite and legendary Italian joint in North Beach (that according to what I’ve heard recently reopened and is good again after years of decline), where to the amusement of Jenny and Jane Jann and I argued for three hours over Langdon’s review. Finally Jann convinced me. I said I’d take it up with Langdon. So we went home to Berkeley and I walked down the hill to Langdon’s place and spent three hours arguing with him until I finally convinced him too. He rewrote the review—the tone didn’t change, but the context was expanded and the whole piece came out richer for it. When Langdon later edited a book of Rolling Stone record reviews, he said to me that this whole business—spending an entire day fighting over a single record review—was an example of why “Rolling Stone is a great magazine and Jann is a great editor.”

This had nothing to do with why I left Rolling Stone. I didn’t quit; I was fired. But that’s another story.

Dear Greil, To what place does music criticism go?

Amidst the unravelling of hegemony, the foreclosure of so many avenues of transmission, are we finally leaving the 20th century? If so, where does criticism go? How does it live? —SEB B. GROSSMAN

Your question reminds me of, for rock critics old enough to have seen it at the time, a horribly embarrassing moment in the wonderful 1977 movie Between the Lines. It’s about a struggling Boston underground newspaper that has moved sideways to an alt-weekly (from counter culture anarchy to serious investigative reporting exposing the corruption of local government combined with what was called service journalism—“The Ten Best Croissants in Cambridge,” etc. and is about to be bought by a corporate outfit that’s going to turn it into shit. Jeff Goldblum plays the paper’s rock critic, who spends his time trading off what little celebrity he’s been able to cobble together cadging drinks off starry-eyed readers who think he must be cool and that if they tell him they read his review of the last Byrds album four times he might tell them how he wrote it, what he really meant, and how his editors butchered it. He starts talking about what he’s going to do next, the big piece he has to write, that’s calling to be done and maybe only he can do it: “Whither Rock?” It was so perfect; that was a time when deluded writers would actually use a word like whither.

Which is to say, nobody knows, and the question is both beside the point and answers itself. Write. Read. Argue. I once wrote a piece that brought forth a long letter from a reader that contained the most acute critical sensibility and dynamic and original literary style since Lester Bangs came into his own. I asked him why he was wasting his time writing to me when he ought to be publishing his own stuff and offered to knock on some doors. Soon he was writing for the Boston paper that spun off from the one that inspired Between the Lines and many other places besides. He had a screamingly funny and inflamed voice and our correspondence sustained me for years. Which is to say the question you’re asking is one you have to answer for yourself.

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Dear Greil: I have two 17-year-old students working on a podcast, trying to understand what “Classic Rock” is. Is it “white-guy music?” Is it just marketing? Is it just rock and roll? Who decides what is and isn’t?

Do you think it’s a style of music? Something else?

As GenZers, they don’t really listen to the radio, so these names don’t have much to do with radio stations for them . . . Anyway, I wonder if you would just reject the question as uselessly semantic or if you think it’s worth thinking about.

Thanks for considering. —PAT WALSH

Classic Rock is what you said: Marketing and White-Guy Music. It’s a strategic concept meant to enforce a narrow worldview and shrink an historical episode into a segment of radio programming that could compete in a fragmenting commercial landscape where Top 40—which is to say a radio republic where most people, as being exposed to and with access to the same music, could make their choices and argue about them with other people, speaking a pop lingua franca—was being replaced by an ever-more diced-and-sliced formatting of AOR, Easy Listening, Heavy Metal, R&B, Disco, and on and on in a radio landscape where people were presumed to have nothing in common and nothing to say to each other, which was also an argument about the United States, and then the world, as such. Classic Rock was invented to sell a concept to people of (mostly) a certain age to reinforce an identity that could be further mined to segment commercial choices of all sorts: in other words, if you could profile the sort of person who wanted to hear the Rolling Stones’ “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It)” you could also—and this is before algorithms—commercially profile them in terms of residence, shopping, car ownership, and so on. To rationalize this, that meant even further segmenting, leading to such perfectly predictable phenomena as the Classic Rock Weekend programmed for Classic Rock Stations all over the country across a certain weekend where something like two or three hundred informational segments, on, for example (I will never forget this), “Stevie Nick’s Writing” (yes, I know it’s “Nicks,” someone entered it in error or didn’t know), and out of all the programmed elements, featured three on black musicians, all of whom were Jimi Hendrix.

Rock ’n’ roll as a concept and a fact, as history and practice, as lived experience and legacy, actually did exist and continues to do so. It found its first and most natural home with the invention of Top 40 radio, which in hundreds of local variations across the United States functioned as a forum, a lottery, a madhouse, and an elementary school. Thus, in a early edition of Rolling Stone, editor Jann Wenner could take up the question of the best American rock ’n’ roll band and range widely before settling on Booker T. and the M.G.s, a mixed race quartet that had its own hits and also functioned as the house band for the Stax-Volt labels in Memphis, and everybody one might presume to be reading the paper could be presumed to understand what he was talking about.

Daphne Brooks recently published, as editor, a more than 500 page book of essays, interviews, and interjections on the legacies of David Bowie and Prince. If your 17-year-old students, or anyone else, want to get a sense of what rock ’n’ roll was, what it, as a form and and idea with its own all-world brain, always wanted to be—the Platonic form that has been realized over and over and has been instantly recognized for what it is, as in the exclamation, on hearing say, __________, “That is rock ’n’ roll,” or even “Is that rock ’n’ roll?”—I’d suggest they start with them—Bowie, whose first record came out in 1967, and Prince, whose first record came out in 1978, and who both died in 2016—and then go backwards and forwards, and see what they find. Or they could look into my The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs—which could have as easily been written, by me or anybody else, including perhaps, someday, your students, about any different ten songs—and see where that takes them. And listen to echoes of what the critic and later singer Richard Meltzer once yelled in my ear at a party in Robert Christgau’s apartment sometime in the 1970s, when it seemed everybody was arguing about this band and that genre, “DON’T THEY REALIZE? IT’S ALL ROCK ’N’ ROLL!” by which he meant—what I’ve spent my life fooling around with.

Hi Greil, I hope yours has been a swift recovery. Good thoughts are with you.

The 1965 Bob Dylan concert in Berkeley . . . with the woman directing her son to “listen to the words” during “Chimes of Freedom” . . . I thought she’d said this during “Gates of Eden”? Did she say this twice to her son during that show? Poor kid must have felt like he was at school instead of a concert.

A good portion of your May 2026 Real Life Rock column touched on the topic of protest songs. Amongst today’s troubadours attempting to document these weird times are Jesse Welles and Carsie Blanton. I was wondering if either of them have made their way across your radar.

Although he strikes me as a much less interesting version of Phil Ochs, Jesse Welles has gained some recent prominence with Grammy Award nominations, appearances on late night talk shows such as Colbert, and a duet with Joan Baez that (sort of) went viral. I’d like to like him and his songs, but I don’t. His frumpy vagabond persona feels like a tired schtick, and his topical songs leave me cold, as though he ran a list of topics, grievances, and headlines through an AI program . . . and out came a batch of unmemorable songs. I can’t imagine anything he’s written thus far will be remembered in a year or two.

Carsie Blanton is a bit more interesting and a bit more stirring. A couple of her recent songs, “The Price of Eggs” and “Everything Is Great,” led me to delve into her past albums. I like her . . . she’s got a spunk to her that’s has me taking notice, bringing to mind a cat that has its claws extended. Her songs sound as though they’re penned by someone who’s got the glint of the guillotine in her eye. A month after first hearing her, I still go back to listen again. And while that’s not exactly the same as a song lasting through the ages, it’s a start.

And while I’m not so sure any singer or song could begin to convey what it’s like to turn on the new these days, I will say that “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Black Boys on Mopeds,” and “Helpless” have been getting a lot of plays lately.

Thank you for this column (as well as the Real Life Rock column) . . . both are a balm for these troubled times. —BILLY INNES

To me these are both variations on the glories of smug. The video for “The Price of Eggs” adds truckloads of cringe.

There’s real death in “Black Boys on Mopeds” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (and think about what Bob Dylan did in that song, beyond the construction, the execution, the contribution to a then-developing conversation: he ensured that a certain person condemned to obscurity would be remembered for generations after her, that her name, in someone else’s words, would live in infamy). It cost something to make these two songs and sing them, and that cost is passed on to the listener. What is the price of eggs in that song? Nothing.

As for “Helpless”? As in Neil Young? As in the National Lampoon radio spot “The last half hour of No Neil Young Music was brought to you by . . .”?

Sorry if I’m in a bad mood today. Protest songs will do that to me. I appreciate what you say about my column. And as for “Gates of Eden” rather than “Chimes of Freedom”? Could be. It was precisely 61 years ago. I’ll never forget the incident, even if the exact parameters shift with the necessities of making an argument.

1. I’d like to extend my prior question on books to read about the Civil War to books and other media on the ’60s Civil Rights Movement. After that I promise I won’t ask for more such recommendations here unless I have a relatable reason I can articulate. I’m aware of your admiration for Taylor Branch’s work but for now that’s all.

2. I don’t doubt you dislike the title of Richard F. Thomas’s recently revised book on Bob Dylan, but what do you make of his premise on which the book is based? —BEN MERLISS

I haven’t read many of the countless and I’m sure often essential memoirs of participants in the Civil Rights movement. One exception is Casey Hayden on the SNCC “beloved community,” in the January 1995 edition of the journal Witness, for its sense of almost Shaker-like isolation within the greater society within where the micro-society tried to exist and illuminate. There’s a sense of sardonic and pained defiance of historical dismissals of naivete that has always stayed with me. You can find it on Amazon. I would.

I haven’t read the Richard Thomas book. I was once at a conference where he began a talk on Dylan, and I knew within a minute that I’d be asleep in five so I went to listen to someone else.

Have a question?

I guess you’ve seen Rod Stewart’s interaction with King Charles—“ratbag” was pretty good but what struck me was the distancing: “well done with the Americans,” as if for Stewart Donald Trump has replaced Sam Cooke as the country’s avatar.

Have you travelled abroad during what I suppose we have to call the Trump Era?

I’m a Canadian living and working in South Korea, where Lee’s presentation of the golden crown to Trump was met with a national grinding of teeth, and at the suggestion of some Korean friends I’m for the first time in my life considering wearing a Canadian flag pin when I go out in public. You know, just in case.

Do you think most Americans understand just how unpopular Trump has made them? Do they care? —STEVE O’NEILL

I haven’t had any querulous let alone hostile encounters in France, Italy, or Argentina during this cursed period—the places outside the US I’ve been during this time. It’s pretty much confined to “How can you live with that idiot?”—and it’s often blind and self-satisfied: when I was in Argentina last year they already had their own Trump in Javier Milei. It’s nothing compared to the hostility we felt in France during the Vietnam War—with the French conveniently forgetting they’d started the conflict the US took over after they turned and ran. (Never mind what was going on in Algeria and with Algerians in Paris in the same period.) So hats off to Rod as always. Why don’t people recognize that “Every Picture Tells a Story” will do as a proof not only of what a song can do but what it’s for?

Dear Greil, Just wondered if you read Bob Spitz’s Stones biography.yet.

Also, have you heard Morrissey’s tribute to Lester Bangs on his latest CD? Best line: “This nerd hangs on your word.” —CRAIG ZELLER

I haven’t read the Bob Spitz book and never will. For two reasons: based on his Dylan biography, which I did read and did my best to convince other people not to, he’s a prurient hack from the Albert Goldman Famous Writers School, and because—especially with their hideously puffed up and embarrassingly fake last two albums—I neither need nor want to know 1,000 more pages about whoever the Rolling Stones were or are and where they’ve been and God forbid where they’re going. I’ve read and for that matter reviewed a lot of memorable books about the Rolling Stones, from Stanley Booth on the 1969 American tour and far more—it travels under different titles—to Rich Cohen’s 2017 The Sun, the Moon, and the Rolling Stones, which is alive on the page, opens doors with the right word and closes them too, and short.

Bob Seger spent a long time trying to write a song he wanted to call “Lester Knew.” He never could. I’ve always liked hearing Lester’s name in R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank’s 2018 Public Theater play How to Be a Rock Critic caught the person I knew (and it’s so sharp and witty it’d work if it were about a fictional character). But I found the Morrissey tribute unbearable—I couldn’t listen to it all the way through. And I think Lester would have felt the same. It’s that smooth, weighted tone of voice, a voice that can find and treasure grandiosity in a laundry list—go back and read Lester’s 1969 review of It’s a Beautiful Day and see if you can see any distance between that music and this song. I mean, it unmade my day. Like Bob Spitz’s writing, it made me feel unclean. So now I’m going to go walk my dog in the rain.

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I like the feel of the song, the weight it seems to carry and pass on. The sense of leaving your home, maybe your family and your name and your language behind, to go to a foreign land for the chance at a better life or maybe to just not be shot as a conscript or burned out of your neighborhood. The notion in the line you quote seems like a reflexive, leftist condemnation of the immigrant who gives it all up for the chance to get rich—or, in the real world, to not be poor. But for me the song is strong enough, and open enough for the listener to bring in any associations or memories or family histories of their own regardless of what the person who wrote the song might have meant to say.

Mr. Marcus, I have an urgent question and, if you happen to be receiving emails here, I would love to hear from you. I’m researching “All along the Watchtower,” and there is something for which I can find no literature. Hendrix changed Dylan’s 4th line. Instead of “None of them along the line know what any of it is worth” he sings "None will level on the line, nobody of it is worth, hey!”

Can you offer any thoughts? Thank you! —EFFIE PAPANIKOLAOU

He fooled around with the lyrics as anybody, including Bob Dylan, would have done. Just as at the Monterey Pop Festival, in 1967, when he played and sang the second-best version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” a few lines into the last stanza said, “Yeah, I know I missed a verse,” which he so obviously had, “don’t worry about it.” And nobody ever has, except to regret that they didn’t get to hear him sing “After he took from you everything he could steal,” which might have come off like an atom bomb. On the other hand, what he sings in “All Along the Watchtower” makes no sense. I don’t think he was confused. I think he was caught up in the moment, forgot the words, this is what came out, the take sounded great, so what the hell—put it out.

Ever written a song? —LEN

Three. In 1969, as you can follow the story here, in a Berkeley garage with the pianist Langdon Winner and members of the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, I wrote the lyrics for a song called “I Can’t Get No Nookie,” a takeoff of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” which Langdon orchestrated as a version of their “2120 South Michigan Avenue.” It was released through Warner Brothers as a single on Deity Records, traveled all over the world as the real thing, was performed by Marty Balin in his Jefferson Airplane side project Grootna, and was denounced by the head of the FCC as “obscenity on the air.” It was sung in his Mick Jagger voice by Brian Voorhees of the Skiffle Band, who for his Bob Dylan voice refused to sing the lyrics I wrote for “Cow Pie,” a parody of the songs on Nashville Skyline. A few years later I wrote a song called “Rock Critic’s Blues,” which was performed once in a Boston club by people I can no longer remember, just as I can only remember the last line, “This boy’s got writer’s block,” which was meant to be accompanied by a version of the echoing chord that preceded the last line in each of the verses of Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway.” My favorite memory out of all this came years later, during a book tour in Germany, when someone in the audience asked me what “nookie” meant.

I’m curious if you have an opinion on the recordings Roy Orbison made after leaving Monument and before his ’80s comeback. I listened to the MGM Years box set and found it frustrating, with far too little of the high drama that made his Monument sides exhilarating. A subdued Orbison might have succeeded with better material, but there wasn’t much at MGM. The highlights tended to be oddballs like “Tennessee Owns My Soul” or “Southbound Jericho Parkway.”

The latter, from 1969, is the weirdest damn thing Orbison ever recorded, one of the most ’60s songs about the ’60s. It’s either a monstrous piece of kitsch, straining for relevance, or an ambitious, honorably awkward, compassionate dramatization of the generation gap and alienation of middle-class family life. Or both!

I can’t tell if the stark lyrics and schizoid arrangement are strengths or weaknesses, but it’s Orbison who keeps the song from collapsing on itself, through the gentleness of his voice. As in his best songs, he’s a sensitive man trying to play stoic, occasionally wavering. At the end, standing over the human wreckage, he can’t suppress his anguish.

The song was written by Bobby Bond, who worked in country but was a Dylan fan (as the penultimate line shows); his biggest credit was Waylon Jennings’ “Six White Horses,” a fine anti-war song and sadly relevant. The producer and arranger were Don Gant and Tupper Saussy, though “Southbound Jericho Parkway” was far better than anything they did for the Neon Philharmonic. It’s a fascinating freak. —IA

This is all new to me. I listened to Roy Orbison on the radio and when he fell out of the Top 40 after the inescapable and slightly deranged “Pretty Woman” (that threatening gargling sound) I didn’t hear him. This is both completely bizarre (proof that psychedelia could infect anybody) but also suggestive: after all, if Jimmy Webb and Richard Harris could get a world-historical hit out of “MacArthur Park,” which Harris couldn’t even say correctly—I’d bet no one who ever heard it has been able to forget it; schizophrenia is just not THAT common—why not? Can you imagine if Roy had done it for his Black and White Night? Or made the Travelin’ Wilburys do it? It could have broken that world’s-worst-band on the spot.

Have a question?

Dear Greil, When Punk came up, I was a bit too young to understand it. I discovered Elvis in 1975 when I was 10 years old, went to my first concert in 1977 (Boney M), then George Harrison and John Lennon became my heroes and after I discovered the Woodstock generation (especially the Band), while everybody around me at the time was listening to NDW (Neue Deutsche Welle—I grew up in Germany). Punk I only discovered after I read your Lipstick Traces, which opened up a lot for me and even somehow NDW then, but that was in 1998 already. Thank you so much for this awakening! Sorry for this long introduction, but all the names I have mentioned still mean a lot to me, and that is why I want you to ask a question about Lennon.

There is this box set Power to the People which includes all the songs and sessions of Some Time in New York City. And this is a revelation, as I never apreciated the album that much, but now with the new mix it is an amazing journey to listen to. Now you can also hear how well Yoko fits into the music! So far, so good, but the best song on the album is still the one about women’s liberation, that has a forbidden n*****-word in the title and was left off the box set because of that. The otherwise so rich box set seems like a failure to me without this song, and I wonder how one can find a personality like John Lennon offensive or whatever, because he uses this word to make clear the degradation of women. It is a song about liberation and empowerment and it is censored just for these reasons, which is ridiculous; at least I think so. Have I become too much a Punk to defend the use of this word in today’s world in order to have a historically correct edition of Lennon’s work that expresses all the values the new generation stands for? But of course just like the Punks, Lennon knew the power of the word and the healing power of provocation. Can the healing ever begin, when the medicine of words is forbidden?

Last comment on Some Time in NYC: John and Yoko together with Frank Zappa & the Mothers—this combination is amazing enough and it works very well! I wish they had done something together in the studio! —CHRISTIAN

How does one navigate that word? When I was in second grade someone at my not all white school taught us the “eney weenie miney Mo” chant, which ended with “catch a THAT WORD by the toe, if he hollers let him go” (the last clause used as the title for the great Chester Himes novel). I didn’t know what a THAT WORD was. I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard and sang it for my mother when I got home. She immediately turned angry and told me never to say that word again. I was confused; she didn’t say what word. Some years later when my father was reading Huckleberry Finn out loud to me and my brother and sister he explained that he was going to have to use a very bad word that we should never use, and explained why. When I opened my lecture on Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days in my class in folk language at the New School from 2007 to 2014, I used the many historical quotations on John Henry that Whitehead collected for an introduction to his novel, many of which contained the word, I asked my TAs to read them out loud with me in a round-robin manner, but said that if anyone felt uncomfortable doing so they could bow out. Usually one or two people did. Before we began I told the class we were going to be using a hateful and offensive word and that if anyone wanted to leave during this part of the class they should. No one ever did and no one ever complained. When I published with Yale they absolutely refused to let me use the word, even in quotations: it had to be something like “n…..”. Today the New York Times will not allow the word “slave,” using instead some variant of “enslaved person,” presumably to convey the idea that the person or group of people referred to was defined in terms of a condition, not an identity or a status, which is in truth precisely what slavery condemned people to and how they were forced to live their lives.

I don’t have the Power to the People box. But that whoever responsible for it would omit that song for whatever reason is not really that far from the Trump administration removing all references to slavery from national historical sites. Whatever the motive, the result is the same: not only to wipe evil from history, and to pretend—or argue, for Trump, to insist—that it never existed.

Hello, My name is Grace. Years ago I came across a passage that stayed with me ever since. I’ve tried to find it again many times without success, and after all this time I’m led here.

I’m wondering if it might be from you, or possibly something written in response to your book When That Rough God Goes Riding. The passage used imagery like this:

But my [xxx] isn’t a monolith. It shifts and morphs as I hold it up in different lights . . . While inspecting the ridges I thought I’d learned by heart, suddenly a different face is revealed . . .

I realize this may not be yours at all—but I thought I’d ask on the chance it rings a bell. Any direction would mean a lot to me.

Thank you for your time. —GRACE

That’s me to a T, if not a cliche. AI says it’s likely from my Van Morrison book. On “Madame George”? There are a few sentences I’ve written that I KNOW I wrote, and can even remember when and where and why. But most are in a cloud somewhere. And not even THE Cloud. But reading it again . . . I don’t know. I would never use any variant of the word “morph.”

I’m guessing the Twitter/X account @GreilMarcus is not actually you?

Just had this Twitter account follow and like my new single. Suspecting it’s a fraud? If you are interested the band name is Novelistme if you fancy taking a listen. —ANDY PRUCE

Not me. I don’t use any social media. No moral problem—I have enough to keep up with.

Listening to the studio outtake of The Band’s “Don’t Do It” on Apple Music and Amazon Music. Levon sounds great. But they’ve removed Richard’s one note insanity on the piano. They’ve sucked the soul out of the song. Am I mishearing this? —STEVE CANSON

Nope.

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Secondly, I was listening to Dylan’s “Sugar Baby” recently and I got to thinking about the seeming intentionality with his track listings, more specifically how so often the last songs on his albums are the best tracks, even on the “bad” albums. Though he’s obviously more known for his infamous and downright perverse notions of when to leave songs off of an album (“Blind Willie McTell” and “Series of Dreams” stand out), he also has a habit of saving the gems for the last song. I didn’t care for “Love and Theft” at all (I thought Time Out of Mind was far superior) as I felt that Dylan was surveying a certain style rather than inhabiting the “real Dylan”. But “Sugar Baby” immediately grabbed me and feels like the real Dylan. There are so many others: Empire Burlesque is roundly criticized by many Dylan devotees (you included I think, though I have a soft spot for the album) but then “Dark Eyes” appears at the end, and the real Dylan appears; Desire, another album that divides Dylan fans, has “Sara” at the end, the most undeniably “Dylan” track on the LP; “Every Grain of Sand” on Shot of Love also is along those lines. I can’t think of another artist or band where, even on their most dismissed albums, there’s so often a standout track at the end. —TIM JOYCE

Regarding Eno, I thought Here Come the Warm Jets and more so Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) were thrilling—and that the glow dissipated almost immediately, and I never went back to them as I continually went back to Stranded, Country Life, Avalon, and especially Flesh + Blood and the later Roxy live album Heart Still Beating. Not to mention Bryan Ferry’s solo albums, most often These Foolish Things and As Time Goes By. I simply made a connection with Bryan Ferry, or vice versa, and it’s never faded. It’s not a matter of persons or conundrum or anything other than finding the capacity to be swept away from all preconceptions by a given piece of music, often one that at first and after that seemed both completely unlikely and preordained, like “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.”

I’ve long been fascinated by the way Bob Dylan ended his albums. As they appeared, my friends and I would delve endlessly into the placement of songs on Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, especially how and why they ended.

Dylan ending The Times They Are A-Changin’ then and now seems like the first move, as we used to say of a performer contemplating or acting to recast a career: ending this “there’s a world to win” album with a goodbye. An exit line that seemed literal (“I’ve said what I have to say, go find someone else listen to”) and a warning (“Any word could be my last”).

Clearly “Desolation Row” (which at shows before Highway 61 Revisited was released did not close the night and which was always greeted with laughter, and Dylan didn’t shy away from treating it as a standup routine) was the first big move: a devastating portrait of Western Civilization and its opposite, or underside, or fraternal twin, this bohemian outpost, a kind or combination skid row, hobo jungle, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. And most of all a subtly dramatic piece of music that nothing could follow. I’ve never forgotten a friend saying in wonder and surprise after we’d played the album for the fourth or fifth time one night: “He likes it on Desolation Row!”

Dylan seemed to be seduced by himself, by what he’d pulled off. With the Blonde on Blonde double album —that is, two lps, four sides—he doubled down twice over: he made a whole last side out of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Has anyone listened to it since? It was a dull and sentimental title, idea, and an endless bore, because of an attempt to create and live in a world it was a functional number about someone he knew and you didn’t: it was private before and after it was public, and that’s why it didn’t make a place in the world, didn’t make a world, even though giving it its own whole side of an lp was a trumpet of its importance before anything else. Enormous energy was expended by people trying to convince themselves that they liked it, or that there was anything there.

If there was still any calculation going on, Dylan slipped his own trap with his next album—after essentially shifting the ethos of “Desolation Row” into a deeply supple language of its own on John Wesley Harding from the title song to “The Wicked Messenger,” he, as the phrase would have it if it hadn’t already, took the piss out of it all with two pleasant little ditties where, as someone pointed out at the time to make just that point, he rhymed “moon” with “spoon.”

With Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft,” and Modern Times, there’s clearly an attempt to create a trilogy, to put his past work in the shadows, to set out like a one-person Lewis and Clark to remap the continent of American song, to speak many languages to prove that they are one. And to top himself. He ends Time Out of Mind with “Highlands”—the first time I heard it, listening to a cassette of the album in an office in Los Angeles in the spring of 1997, I had no idea how much time had elapsed from the beginning of the track to the end. I was kind of shocked when I was told it was only sixteen minutes. Here’s the dare set down, Bob Dylan to himself and the world: follow this. So then four years later there’s “Sugar Baby,” which is even more of a detective story, not as long but it feels just as complete if not more so, a structure and progression so elusively familiar it casts a spell you can’t get out from under. It still sounds to me as if the singer is talking to a horse—the song is that open. When I read on the expectingrain.com Dylan clearing house that the tune was based on a 1927 Gene Austin faux southern ballad called “The Lonesome Road”—and it was, just as the rest of “Love and Theft” explored the kind of stuff my father, born in 1917, kept as sheet music in his piano bench—I played “Sugar Baby” for him, and he made the connection instantly. “I remember that,” he said. There’s a way that “Sugar Baby” seems to me deeper, more elusive, more I’d-Choose-This-as-the-Last-Song-I’ll-Ever-Hear than “Highlands.” And then topping himself again, on Modern Times, with “Ain’t Talkin’,” which is modern only in the sense of proving that the oldest symbols and themes can be refashioned so that it seems no one has ever noticed them before, even though you can kind of imagine that “Ain’t Talkin’” is really nothing more than the complete text of an unpublished song from 1854 that the editors of Little Sandy Review discovered in the University of Minnesota Library and passed on to this Dinkytown kid who was hanging around in hopes it would give him something to do instead of raiding their record collections for the kind of songs that were implying that such an ur-text existed. I knew when I first heard it that it was something I’d happily never get to the bottom of and never lose interest in, if not solving it, trying to hear everything that was there.

After that—well, the great closing number to what is Bob Dylan’s most recent great album, Tempest—it’s just staggering, “Long and Wasted Years,” “Early Roman Kings,” “Pay in Blood,” “Scarlet Town,” nothing obvious, everything threatening, everything the storm the album is promising—ending with a rewrite of “The Titanic” that is longer than “Desolation Row” but a different kind of song, something that it all about inner self-referentiality, in melody and rhythm and orchestration, so that you can play it over and over and feel as if it’s twenty-four hours long but not quite long enough. Except, in an act of perversity, forgetting, or, again, taking the piss, it’s not the closing song, only the second to last, so you really have to go back and play it again before getting to the dying fall of “Roll on John.”

And then, I guess, “Murder Most Foul.” I devoted a chapter of a book to saying ten percent of what I or anyone else might say about this song, this event, this bomb dropped when no one was looking, this longer-than-“Highlands” chronicle of the COVID years just barely or not quite before the fact. It’s the last track of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Except that it doesn’t work as the last track: you don’t hear it that way. In the, ah, let’s say philosophy of modern song, how you hear it and how it functions in culture, it’s placed last on the album, but it was heard first. It broke the weather report that day in 2020 when suddenly people all over the world were asking everyone they knew if they’d heard it and it seemed as if the answer was always yes. As life, it’s the first song on the album, just as “Like a Rolling Stone” was the first track on Highway 61 Revisited. Put “Like a Rolling Stone” last on the album and it would seem kind of anti-climactic after “Desolation Row,” wouldn’t it?

This is a wonderful game. I’m sure Bob Dylan is still playing it.

Thoughts on Sinners? I think one would have to go back to the days of Cecil B. DeMille to find an American movie so forthrightly against the dangers of miscegenation. —RYAN S.

I’m not really in a position to answer because I walked out right at the point where a woman said they had to get the garlic and I thought, “I’ve seen this movie too many times already.” Already, I had admired the thought and research and perspicacity of using “Pick Poor Robin Clean” both as a musical number on its own terms and as a metaphor for the cosmology of the movie itself, and at the same time I felt myself unmoved by the execution of the idea, as if Ryan Coogler didn’t trust the song to speak for itself, to make its own point.

I felt, as far as I got, that the film didn’t trust its own premises enough to play with them, to have full and complex oppositional characters, to generate actual suspense, which has to do with moral questions, not just what happens. Thus the racial essentialism you’re talking about fills the gap. I have the feeling, again based on my incomplete knowledge of what I’m presuming to talk about, that this movie is not going to wear well—and may be superseded by a different director working off different source material.

It’s not as if the theme and the idea of vampire movies is sterile. There is Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 Near Dark, which can be both funny and appalling, often at the same time, and by the end had me more interested in and rooting for the clan of vampires than the good people who survive them (and the vampire death scenes are fascinatingly original). There is Night of the Living Dead—which has its own disturbing and shocking racial politics. There is, perhaps in best contrast to Sinners, Elias Merhige’s 2000 Shadow of the Vampire, about the making of the original Nosferatu, and the problem that Max Schreck, who played the vampire, actually is one.

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I’m writing this just after reading your reply about the unfulfilled promise that was and is Graham Parker.

His first two records came out when I was 15, and a bit later I also heard a terrific Parker show on one of those syndicated programs FM radio used to run on Sunday nights.

For a while I was an unrepentant fan incapable of discernment (I liked Stick to Me and The Up Escalator, the latter of which I still insist has better songs overall than Squeezing Out Sparks despite the weak arrangements), but eventually the thrill was gone.

The sad tone of your comments echoes my own thoughts on Parker, which amount to “why?” and “what if?”

At least Elvis and Rod Stewart stood on the summit before falling off the mountain.

But Graham will always be one of the greats to me, and I’m grateful he showed up when he did. What a guy. —DEREK MURPHY

I don’t think Graham Parker’s promise was unfulfilled. There are few two first albums as complete in sound and vision, self-discovery and self-presentation, a band taking someone’s scribbles and hunches and turning them into songs, as with Howlin Wind’ and Heat Treatment. And there were shows I was lucky to see at the time; to repeat myself, “rock ’n’ roll at its limit.” So no, he didn’t go on to match what he’d done, and then fell behind himself. From a fan’s and a listener’s selfish point of view, so what? He got to places most people will never find on any map.

I know you don’t really want to use this platform for reading guides and recommendations, but I’ve been trying to figure out without as much success as I’d hoped what books and writings on the Civil War have spoken to you the most given that it seems to be a recurring theme in your own writing however subtly most of the time. Whenever I come across such a book I think I might want to read, I can’t help thinking “I wonder if Greil Marcus has read this and decided in his own words that ‘it’s not a book.’” —BEN MERLISS

I’d start with Edmund Wilson’s passionate, skeptical, and deeply patriotic Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. It appeared in 1962 and no one has even tried to follow its paths. Then Lincoln’s letters and speeches—there are several well-edited collections. Then U.S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, which is a great work of literature on its own terms, but also a military history, without which there is no understanding of the war as as a social movement and a trauma from which the country never recovered—and that can be read alongside James McPherson’s 1988 Battle Cry of Freedom.

But you also ought to go farther afield. Moby-Dick is a playing out of the conflict in metaphor before the fact. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a reckoning with its causes and results. Percival Everett’s James is a prequel and the to my mind stronger The Trees an enactment of its legacy.

And read the newspapers. The Civil War has never been settled. The Trump administration is refighting it today by removing all references to slavery from historical sites and removing all historical references to actions and thoughts of black people of any era from official historical reference as examples of DEI—and resurrecting and repurposing the Confederate monuments that were erected in the 1880s and 1890s as part of the post-Reconstruction reimposition of black servitude. And I say this as a Californian raised in the postwar Bay Area suburbs, as insulated from the Civil War as anyone could be, and yet the great-grandson of an Alabamian who fought for the South in the war and the great-great nephew of two Hawaiian coffee farmers named for Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln.

Good day! Did the first edition of Psychotic Reactions come with a Dylan postcard? I found one in an edition I found at a library sale, with a mustache drawn on Fred McDarrah’s 1965 photo of him. Lester’s writing is on the back. Just was curious. Thank you! —MATHEW BARTKOWIAK

THAT one came with a postcard—but no other. Must have been owned by a friend of Lester’s. Hope you like the book.

Dear Greil, Have you seen any good crime dramas on television lately? I thought last year’s Task on HBO was a standout and quite moving. I’m currently hooked on Undercover, a Belgian-Dutch series on Netflix. Very intense. Seen either one of those? —CRAIG ZELLER

I draw a blank. We miss the UK cop shows and PI murder mysteries. We’ve been on rewind: all seasons of The Sopranos (I’d forgotten, or maybe it didn’t completely register before, what a worthless band of killers the crew descended into before the final near wipeouts), all of Mad Men (why IS Don Draper so compulsively adulterous, to the point where the character simply doesn’t make sense? And the show always needed a lot more Maggie Siff. And the Marshall McLuhan character is for the ages). Now catching up with #2 of The Pitt which seems to have lost the thread. I hope they don’t have Noah Wyle calling in everyday from the Black Hills or wherever he’s going to check in, let alone called back when we find out what the hidden trauma his replacement is carrying around like a tumor really is.

As I’m reading the new edition of Mystery Train, I keep thinking about one sentence at the very beginning, from your original 1975 Author’s Note: “As much as anything, rock ’n’ roll has been the best means to friendship I know.”

Do you still agree with that line? Reflecting on the years since 1975, do any specific memories of rock ’n’ roll and friendship come to mind now? —EMMERICH ANKLAM

I could, as they say, write a book, though I’m not sure it would sustain anyone else’s interest for as long as it would take. It’s a never-ending story.

I think of any number of episodes, interruptions, surprises. Pam Brown onstage at a dance at Menlo-Atherton High School in about 1961 in a white dress (I don’t actually remember, but it had to be) singing Rosie and the Originals’ “Angel Baby” and stopping time (two years later we went on our one date). She was impossibly pretty. I considered going to my somethingth reunion if she or another classmate were to be there, but after checking around it was clear she wasn’t going to be and the other had died. Maybe you could call that a fantasy friendship.

In high school my best friend was Barry Franklin. Never doing homework, we’d drive up and down the El Camino at night, listening to the radio, running endless jokes about the songs and how stupid and irresistible they were (Steely Dan’s “All night long we would sing that stupid song / And every word we sang I knew was true” is real life for millions of more people than me). To this day he posts a song of the day, the week, the month, whatever it might be, and I and who knows how many other people post right back. I’ve learned how vast the pop universe is, how, like the real one, no one will ever find the beginning or see the end.

I remember meeting a seemingly insular, almost withdrawn person in college. He was clearly interesting, but it was hard to know why. Apropos of something, I mentioned a Top 40 placing that pissed me off. He proceeded to tell a long story about how when he was—10? 15?—he’d spend his nights creating alternate Top 40 charts reflecting what he felt were the rightful positions of records based on his objective notions of how good they were, which meant how long they’d last in the common imagination, how different they were from everything around them. (Later we found out he and Warren Zevon had been best friends in high school.) During Vietnam he left for Canada and became involved in terrorist activities of the Greek political diaspora during the reign of the military junta (at one point he sneaked back to Fresno to see his parents; his roommate was an FBI informant and he was arrested at the bus stop, but jumped bail and made it back to Canada) and after the regime fell was deeply in involved in the Papandreou government. Years later, after he’d studied with Hannah Arendt at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and gotten married, we sat together as our friend Jim Miller presented his book The Passion of Michel Foucault at Cal, facing a hostile audience of people who’d known Foucault when he was there and were incensed that Jim had dared to write about Foucault’s time in San Francisco S&M clubs and how that related to his work. Later, Jim said to me, “You won’t believe what Stan just told me.” “He told you he was gay,” I said. “How did you know?” he said. I’d never thought about it, it had never occurred to me, but Jim’s words were a trigger and my answer just popped out.

A British rock critic friend and I saw a lot of each other when he was in graduate school and later in Coventry with his wife or in London (there in 1977 with Charlie Gillett I asked them “What about the Sex Pistols and all these other bands?” and they both said it was a hype we’d never hear of again) or when they visited in Berkeley. It seemed like a constant friendship, and a great marriage—they traveled all over the world. Their house was a jewelbox—every nook and cranny reflected a visual or cultural or symbolic choice. They didn’t want, didn’t need children—they were a world in and of themselves. Then the marriage broke up (“We never argue,” they’d once said, which struck us as not a good idea, but who knows how anyone’s marriage works), it was disturbing, it involved scamming and fraud on the part of the woman who came between them, then he fell in love with another woman, they married, had children, we never met her or saw him after that, and our friendship went into the air. Many years later I’m working on my Bryan Ferry book and I remembered he’d written something about Ferry in Creem in the ’70s. I looked it up and it was a marvelous account of an uncomfortable interview surrounded by a revelatory portrait of where Ferry had come from and where he was. I emailed him and we picked up right where we had left off as if not a day had passed.

Through one daughter I heard Sindhu Zagoren’s otherworldly version of “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.” Through the other I learned how great Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” is—through Johnny Cash.

I could go on. Every friendship is different and the songs and records that are part of them are too.

The 50th anniversary edition of Mystery Train is available on Bookshop.org and at bookstores everywhere.

The 50th anniversary edition of Mystery Train is available on Bookshop.org and bookstores everywhere.

Have a question?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a question?

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seemed like ordinary talk from where I was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sure to be appealed, of course. The music industry has always operated on the assumption that songwriters should not decide what is done with their own music. —MARK SULLIVAN

Thanks for sending this. Aaron Moss is exactly right comparing the extension of US copyright law to the world to our seizure of Venezuelan oil or Greenland’s rare earth for exploitation by corporations ready to kick back money to Trump either politically or personally; Vladimir Putin, Trump’s hero, has made himself one of the richest people in the world through extracting tribute throughout his empire, and Trump wants nothing more to someday feel himself his equal.

That this decision should rest on the disposition of composers’ rights to one of the most degraded and glorious results of the Top 40 era of rock ’n’ roll is, though, wonderful. Something in our education, where art, going back to 15th and 16th century Florence and Paris, is still synonymous with royalty and power, might lead us to assume major questions of law, should they turn on musical copyrights, should by right, which when the concept emerged meant by the grace of God, be settled with such enshrined cultural treasures as, say, “White Christmas” or “Like a Rolling Stone”—which, as productions by Jewish people, who in the Europe of the Medicis and the Bourbons, were subject to exile and banishment and seizure of property at the whim of rulers, and who only found freedom to invent and live as themselves in the United States, both compounds and subverts the story. It would be even more perfect if the writers of “Double Shot,” which is, to put a fine point on it, so devoid of artistic intent as to seem less written than, you know, sort of the result of a very drunken can-you-top-this parlor game, were Jewish too, but no such luck (though it seems that at least one current party to the suit that has turned copyright law into an arm of Trumpian imperialism, Robert Resnick, probably is, though only in a Shylockean, not creative, manner).

I love the Swingin’ Medallions’ “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love).” Along with “Louie Louie” it’s the only rock ’n’ roll song I’ve ever sung onstage, under the protective cover of the Rock Bottom Remainders’ Critics Chorus of Dave Marsh, Joel Selvin, Matt Groening, and Roy Blount, Jr., all of whom have so far defied the rock ’n’ roll actuarial odds by still being alive, because they were somehow able to make a living as writers, not musicians. That it has persisted both as music and as legal, or imperialistic, or so to speak, real American history makes me happy.

Greil—I’m 64, and a few years ago I thought I should take some college classes, having gone directly from high school into the working world. Eventually I got to UC Berkeley where I discovered the American Studies program, and got my degree in 2024. Christine Palmer was my advisor—I was disappointed to learn I’d just missed a class she co-taught with you. (My thesis was on the visual representation of the banjo in the Americas, and nearly all my studies centered on music in some way. I’m a bassist and I play in a few bands, mostly bluegrass-related, in the East Bay.)

Your recent comment on bursting into tears at Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” brought back a bittersweet memory of Prof. Palmer playing it for her class of mostly young folks, excusing herself for its duration so she didn’t break down.

Anyway, another random, decades-long reader here grateful for your work, and happy for the recent excuse to read through your catalog.

All best. —SCOTT UNDERWOOD

I remember, in that class on American song, Christine spending an hour opening up Solange Knowles’s A Seat at the Table. For someone who could never get past the opulence of Beyoncé’s video albums, the depth in the modesty of the music was a revelation. Christine brought things you might never have known or cared about to life. One semester when she was off I used her office, and spent most of my time there reading her library. It was a privilege to work with her. The American Studies program through the first two decades of the 2000s was a place of commitment, passion, and discovery.

In your recent “Ask Greil,” responding to a question about the recent Richard Manuel book, you referenced the lines “Doncha see / There’s no need to slave / The whip is in the grave” (saying that these lines, “as they’re sung say volumes more about the legacy of the Civil War than ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. . . .’” I tried to find the song these lines are from, and Google pointed me to several wrong songs, like Dylan’s “No More Auction Block” and “The Whip Is in the Grave” by the Handsome Family (which I couldn’t find online). Finally it suggested the song “Black No More” from the recent musical of that name. I can’t find that song either. What song has those lines? I’d love to hear it. —WILLIE WILLIAMS

The song is “We Can Talk” on Music from Big Pink, from 1968. I went into as much detail as I could about possible floating antecedents and minstrel show cousins in the notes to the new edition of Mystery Train. But really, I don’t think there is one. It may have been something Richard Manuel’s grandfather used to say when someone told him to stop wasting money on tobacco and do something useful for a change.

Do you have any thoughts on Paul Burch’s novel Meridian Rising other than your quote on the cover? —MARK HAGEN

I loved the book. It was like being plunged into a cultural carnival with a special Jimmie Rodgers midway. This is a variation on what I wrote in the new Notes section of the 50th anniversary edition of Mystery Train that came out last year:

Presented as Rodgers’s own lost memoir surrounded by the memories of those who knew him, the novel follows Rodgers’s path through encounters with everyone from Laurel and Hardy to the Mississippi Sheiks to Blind Willie McTell. There’s Charley Patton (“The only fellow other than me I ever met who could sing in meter while his guitar jumped time”), traveling under his gospel alias Elder J. J. Hadley, whom Rodgers asks to preach at his funeral; Patton, who would live only one more year than Rodgers, responds by coming up with a one-train-to-heaven/one-train-to-hell sermon on the spot. There are Rodgers’s words on blackface you can’t credit he didn’t say (“Hey, I was trying to make a living. Believe me, there’s nothing lower than that racket”). And there are the times in Dallas when Rodgers encounters a “dark-complexioned man in a pin-striped suit and a fierce guitar picker, set up on the corner outside my hotel. Red shoes. Sharp crown. Pickin’ ‘Waitin’ on a Train’ with a funny chord that made his box sound like a harp. I’ve seen him many times since. But seems like somebody always interrupts me before I can get close. No matter where I am, within a day he’s there. Playing right outside my window. All last winter I was in an oxygen tent at Methodist Hospital in Houston. And he was there too. I couldn’t hear nuthin’ but that high wailin’ sound, singing me my own song like it was coming from outer space.”

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Have a question?

I just saw Deliver Me from Nowhere, which as a decades-long Springsteen fan I found to have the same flaws as his career: too self-serious and overblown at times.

But the Soul Stirrers scene is as powerful as you said, and it hints at just how relentlessly Landau and Springsteen reached for greatness that was often out of their reach.

You’ve written reverently of Cooke, and while he probably wasn’t the greatest gospel singer of all time, I’ve wondered where you place him on the soul spectrum that includes Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Jackie Wilson, and maybe in a strange way Elvis, Charlie Rich, and John Lennon. —DEREK MURPHY

At first I was going to respond directly in terms of “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Then I realized that the Sam Cooke songs I love most are also “Twistin’ the Night Away,” “Another Saturday Night,” “Wonderful World,” and even the eight bars of humming he does in a soul cutting contest with the LA DJ Magnificent Montague on a 1963 radio interview. And that made a response much more complicated. I could compare Aretha’s “Ain’t No Way,” Ray Charles’s “That Lucky Old Sun,” Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now),” Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,” Charlie Rich’s “Life’s Little Ups and Downs,” Elvis’s “Any Day Now,” and John Lennon’s “God” to “A Change Is Gonna Come”—they’d all fall short, and so would God itself—but what about the other side? So I’ll go with Rod Stewart, for his version of “Twistin’ the Night Away” and his promise that the last song he’d ever sing in public would be “A Change Is Gonna Come” because, I’ve always thought, he knew he could never live up to it, so after shaming himself in the the face of the song he slunk away never to be seen again. As far as I know he hasn’t sung it yet.

Greil, In an essay which the American Scholar has accepted, I talked about how I discovered Wilfrid Sheed when I read an Undercover column you wrote about his novel Transatlantic Blues, where you called him America’s best book critic. Now I can’t find that column anywhere? Did I hallucinate it?

The whole quote from my essay, for context:

Then, in 1978, I discovered Wilfrid Sheed. In an appreciative Rolling Stone review of the novel Transatlantic Blues, Greil Marcus wrote of Sheed that it must be frustrating to be the best book critic in America while having your novels dismissed as brilliant but minor. Wait, what? I’d never heard of Sheed before reading Marcus’s review. Now, in my adolescent way, I wanted to know everything about him.

—KEVIN FENTON

It was my Undercover book column for Rolling Stone, February 9, 1978. I’m glad it stayed with you. And I’d love to see your piece when it comes out.

Any thoughts on Billy Bragg’s effort on Minneapolis, “City of Heroes”? —RICHARD KRUEGER

I couldn’t listen to it. With Billy Bragg I’m a one-song fan. “Levi Stubbs’ Tears” is not only a break-your-heart-of-stone intervention—into anyone’s emotional complacency—but something no one else would have thought of, let alone pulled off. But all I hear here is self-satisfaction, I-told-you-so, almost floating over the perfidy of fiends and how he always saw it coming. And I think he oversells his accent.

At the end of your 1976 review of Bob Marley’s Rastaman Vibration album, you said you’d wait to see if Bob Marley would challenge the reggae form. At the risk of this being too broad a question: How have your views on both Bob Marley and reggae music evolved since that review and your subsequent one of Exodus? Or at least how would you start to say they did? —BEN MERLISS

I could almost go as far as Denis Johnson, who in an early novel imagined that in the not distant future Marley would be worshipped as a god: “War” and “Concrete Jungle” and “Redemption Song” and “No Woman, No Cry” will get you there. But Bunny Wailer, who made “Redemption Song” first as “Ballroom Floor,” and Peter Tosh for the shouted passage in “Get Up, Stand Up” aren’t talked about as much—and Bob Marley isn’t really talked about, is he? Bunny Wailer and Tosh made as deep a dive, even if only once or twice. And really, so did Johnny Cash and Sinead O’Connor.

Maybe in ten or twenty years all their ghosts will surface. Then we might find out the answers to your questions.

Just finished What Nails It . . . in one sitting. I loved it, and I’m taking great pleasure in recommending it to discerning readers and writers in my network. I have one question: Do you know if Kirk Varnedoe “attended” the Rugby School in England, or merely visited it? I can’t find any evidence of him attending/enrolling but wondered if perhaps you had an inside scoop. Many thanks! —HOWELL MALHAM

You’re right, I’m wrong. Varnedoe went to a lot of schools, but Rugby wasn’t one of them—apparently the closest he got was Stanford. I must have transposed something I read into something else that was just too perfect for the great point I thought I was making. But I really did hate that “High and Low” show.

Dear Greil, Do you have any close friends or relatives that are Trump supporters? And how do you deal with it? —CRAIG ZELLER

Not even close. Both my wife (from Minnesota) and I (San Francisco) come from families of devoted Democrats. We had friends who voted for Reagan in 1980, and my Philadelphia family were mostly Republicans in the 1950s and ’60s, but they were business people who voted their own private interests as they understood them. I never took them seriously in political terms, and I didn’t understand the business mentality. I went to a Quaker school from 4th through 8th grade where many teachers were pacifists, COs who’d been to prison, refugees from Nazi Germany, and people who’d lost public school jobs due to the Red Scare, and even if I sometimes found the atmosphere of the school corny and naive, it left a mark.

Aside from one stray relative in Minnesota who I’ve never met, I know no one who ever voted for Trump unless someone is lying. I’m not interested in meeting anyone who did.

I have two political memories that have stayed with me. One was talking to two recent citizens who had come from Mexico not long before and ran a shoe repair shop I went to. It was Election Day in 1980, and I asked who they were voting for; I knew it was their first time. “Reagan!” they shouted. I asked why. shocked, given that they’d been in California when he was governor. “We’re voting for the winner!” they said—because that made them winners too. The other was in 1994 when the GOP took Congress because of Clinton’s tax increase, which saved the economy and led to greater prosperity and government solvency than people had seen since the 1950s. We were at a bookstore reading on election night with our friend Sarah Vowell. She came in with red eyes and never stopped crying. She was serious. She knew what was at stake. Now we all do. People have taken sides. Politically, people have dug trenches. We’re all living in mental foxholes—except for people who are being dragged from their homes and sent to prison camps in Texas and Florida. Are they still in America? Yes. And no. As Norman Mailer said after the demonstrations against the nomination of Hubert Humphrey in Chicago in 1968, heroic Minnesota Democrat swallowed by the Vietnam War, we will be fighting for the rest of our lives.

2–7 Bruce Springsteen, “Streets of Minneapolis” (YouTube, January 28, and First Avenue, Minneapolis, January 30), Scared Ketchup/Sean Haines, “ICE, F**K You” (YouTube), with comment and contributions from Michael Robbins, Steve Weinstein, Robert Christgau, and Cecily Marcus. Part of the meaning of a song is in the talk it sparks. When Springsteen put up a song he’d written and recorded just days before as an attempt to—what? Intervene in a situation? Say his piece? Show solidarity?—speak to the Federal occupation of Minneapolis, he was already following others doing the same. The AI video of “ICE, F**K You,” a blistering piece of hardcore with the sweep of an opera, was already there. It was widely shared, but also self-enclosed. This was different: this was a performer using his renown not only to enter an ongoing torrent of events but to create, or enact, a parallel event. So it was something that countless people instantly wanted to talk about, to talk back not only to the song but to whoever might hear it, to join its community and the greater community the song was meant to address.

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On Saturday, March 7, I’ll be in conversation with Daveed Diggs for an event organized by the Bay Area Book Festival and held at the California Ballroom (1736 Franklin St., Oakland). Tickets are available here. From the Eventbrite page:

Join legendary music critic and cultural historian Greil Marcus in conversation with Tony and Grammy-award winning actor, writer, and producer Daveed Diggs for the 50th-anniversary celebration of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music.

First published in 1975, Mystery Train is a landmark work of music journalism that forever changed how we understand rock ’n’ roll—not as youth culture or counterculture, but as American culture itself.

Lauded by Bruce Springsteen as his #1 must-read music book and named one of TIME’s all-time best nonfiction books, Marcus’s genre-defining exploration of artists like Elvis Presley, the Band, Sly Stone, and Randy Newman still resonates across cultural thought today.

Marcus and Diggs, each a groundbreaking creative force in his own right, will revisit the book’s enduring legacy and discuss why music continues to define the American ethos.

What I was drawn back to most helplessly in 2025 was the daily invasions of what had passed for reality by the person occupying the presidency of the United States. My sense from 2016 on, ranging from conviction to doubt to certainly to irrelevancy, that Donald Trump is a Russian agent, whose charge is to destroy the United States as any sort of impediment to the goals of Vladimir Putin, and whose reward is the unlimited ability to enrich himself and keep legal title to the Trump Organization, which Putin may control through debt, really had no bearing on what at its heart seemed a rule of insult for its own sake. I spent nights from 2 to 4 AM trying to drive away an obsessive compulsion to dwell on the most elusive and blatant details of this rule of vermin by rereading Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald—whose heroes, the late Jenny Diski once said, were “hard men with soft democratic centres”—which I now know I will likely be doing for the rest of my life.

The other thing that drew me back in 2025, though it was made earlier and I only saw it once, was The Brutalist. The resonance, that sixties word, of the title alone was unlimited. Awake in those same hours, the word Brutalist could take on different meanings, whether applied to the movie’s characters, the story, the architectural style, the history, the legacy, the prediction inherent in the action, and on and on. When we left the theatre, my wife said the only picture she could compare it to was Citizen Kane and that seemed right, at the time, as an equivalency of ambition, style, subject: the capture of a country and its fantasy and curse. But as time went on, the difference came out. Orson Welles’s Kane remains unknowable, and the suspicion is there that that is because there really isn’t much to know, in the character or the creator. Pauline Kael called the movie “a shallow masterpiece” and The Brutalist can show how she was right. As an actor, Adrien Brody bleeds depth; there is blood filling up a room and he’d still be hurling doubt and desire and fury and wish for peace and the suspicion that any such thing is a lie dissolving the story, his character, himself, and anyone watching. Trump means to close the story of a nation, an experiment, a possibility; in The Brutalist, it all remains open, three doors, there’s a monster behind each one but they are not the same. So in memory, which is all I need, and maybe more than I would get if I watched the actual movie again, I may be reading that too for the rest of my life.

I recently came across an interview on YouTube of you and Jonathan Taplin talking about his then-new book (2021) The Magic Years which chronicles Taplin’s life and career including his time working as road manager for The Band. As all five members of The Band are dead, Taplin is one of the last surviving people to have worked with them and his remembrances were appreciated. The two of you touched upon some interesting topics and Taplin remarked that if Facebook had existed in 1955, the polio vaccine would have been dismissed as a hoax or conspiracy and that conspiracies in general from JFK to Vietnam gave rise to Trump today. But the draw for me is The Band, and there recently has been a biography of Richard Manuel which I have not yet read and wonder if you have read it? After all this time, I was afraid the book couldn’t be fair or accurate but turn into something of a hagiography instead of a remembrance. And I still have yet to read Robbie Robertson’s unfinished follow-up to his Testimony biography entitled Insomnia about his years working with Martin Scorsese who Taplin himself worked with as producer of Mean Streets in 1973 preceding, it would seem, Robbie’s own relationship with Marty by several years before The Last Waltz, thus making Taplin the lynchpin to that famous working relationship between musician and filmmaker. —JAMES R STACHO

It was very gratifying to have that talk with Jonathan Taplin. I’d met him before, but his publisher was someone I’ve known and worked with since 1971, so the connection was solid. I found so much of his book painfully moving. I felt he didn’t pull punches but also didn’t go for any sucker punches. He always struck me as a fair and considered person and the book bore that out.

As I said in the December 2025 Top 10 column, Robbie Robertson’s Insomnia is very much worth reading if you bring an interest to it. I looked at the Richard Manuel book and found corner cutting right from the start. It’s a terrible story and making him out to be more than he was makes his actual singularity impossible to see. Really, the unanswerable question, a question that hovers just over the horizon of possibility, is the who-where-why-how of “Doncha see / There’s no need to slave / The whip is in the grave,” lines that as they’re sung say volumes more about the legacy of the Civil War than “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and that’s not the kind of question that interests that writer.

Hi Greil. Who would have thought that 50 years later I would still be picking up Mystery Train for a passage or a phrase that seems to summon or address a present moment as I did today. The passage on the imagination in the Randy Newman chapter has simply become more true, but the one I read today and maybe every two years is the passage about the personal responsibility of good and evil and culture in the Sly chapter. How could all this be still so pertinent? Was our historical decline birthed in those years?

This year I almost died, and as these experiences do they tend to clarify some things. I realised that of the people I had to thank for the blessings of my life one was you. When I read Mystery Train in the ’70s, as one who was deeply in love with the music it was like being hit by lightning. Immediately it earthed me, it made me realise the music had a history and a place, and therefore it made me see my country and my place in that light. I am from New Zealand. In a word it gave my dreams and efforts a reality and a broader context, a tradition. I tried to apply the same keen eyed passion to all the work I did. It was a priceless gift. And many of the phrases of that book and many of your others are burned in my brain.

So before the year goes out I just wanted to say thank you. —JOHN GIBSON

It means more than I can say to have a reader confirm that, at least in some ways, I’m not wasting my time, or necessarily someone else’s. I know what you mean about almost dying clarifying matters. I’ve seen it happen with other people when the experience made them realize they’d been living a life they didn’t want, throw it all over, and start again—leading to rebirth or disaster. In my case it meant a recommitment. At the lowest point I played Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” over and over because I knew it would make me burst into tears every time and that was a proof that the world outside my hospital room still existed and I might rejoin it someday. Aren’t iPhones wonderful?

Scratching my head trying to understand modern America, I was recently rereading D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and came across a phrase in the Moby Dick chapter that seemed to sum it up: “monomaniacs of the will.” This reminded me of your comment in Mystery Train about “the Randy Newman dilemma.”

When Dark Matter came out I searched everywhere for a review by you. I could only find one line. Having lost track of him since the film soundtracks I played the CD while driving. I wasn’t prepared for what happened.

One song completely shattered me and I had to pull over and sob for it felt like 10 minutes. A total gut punch. The song was “Wandering Boy.”

It seemed to me like “Old Kentucky Home” a song hiding in old clothes—the folk song “Wandering Boy”—but it seemed also to call up a line in the God song: “I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we.” This is the world of Wandering Boy. The family unit is no more, just a father representing them. His son has been swallowed up whole by the culture. Everything is gone. The economy is unbearable. “I hope he’s warm and I hope he’s dry and that a stranger’s eye is a friendly eye.” But the father’s acceptance is more unnerving.

It reminded me of one the last Goya paintings, the dog howling against the gold sky.
But then it got weirder. So the guy who wrote that is also the guy who provides the old timey soundtrack that justifies the same country and place. That’s some tightwire. What do you think? —JOHN GIBSON

I think I let “Wandering Boy” slide because at the same time it was too much to take and had a nice, soft ending. I found this today, Randy explaining his song, which past the Charles Ives material only confirms that it’s not a good idea to explain your work, especially if it’s a song (which is why I can’t listen to Lily Allen just as I can’t read Olivia Nuzzi):

I listened to this pianist give a talk about Charles Ives’ “Concord” Sonata, and he said it’s based on a tune from the early 1900s, “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” He played it, and it’s fantastic—I liked it better than the “Concord” Sonata. So I just took the title and wrote this song. As a family, we went to this Labor Day party in the neighborhood for years. I was there when I was 10 years old and when I was 50 years old. You would see a little kid at 5, and then you’d see him again 20 years later, for one day. There was one bright-eyed 11-year-old kid there, and my dad said, “He’s gonna be president some day.” But he had a tough time with heroin and a lot of other things; he was not president. It was about having that kind of promise—jumping off the high board, yelling, and being real happy—and then falling off the grid for some reason, into the big hole. There’s no net in this country. In Sweden, you can’t get down there to the gutter. But you can here. So I tried to imagine what it would be like if one of those homeless guys that I see on the street a little ways away from here were one of my sons. And then I wrote the song. And it came hard. I was choking up when I was writing the thing. I would play it for someone, and I’d get to, “Where’s my wandering boy . . .”—anything that makes you cry must be something to do with yourself.”

Today, though, it’s particularly hard to listen to with a privileged junkie in jail for cutting the throats of his parents. I could listen to the song more if it ended with “Goodbye.”

Hi, I am a teacher and my high school class is reading Mystery Train. They are enjoying the book very much and they told me that they wanted to let you know. I teach at an all-boy Jewish school in Dallas. I have been a fan of yours for many years and I told the class that you were the best music writer I have ever read. Plus, I love the Band, Elvis, and the Sex Pistols. —DARRYL SMYERS

You know, there’s an echo in your lovely message. In about 1952 or ’53, at Elizabeth Van Auken elementary school in Palo Alto, we were reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, which seemed to be taking place in another world. Our teacher told us we could write her. We did and she wrote back. The books were suddenly present.

Greetings to you and your students. Of the people I write about in Mystery Train, only a few are still here. But the book is, and I’ll keep chipping away at it as long as I can. I know the stories in it will go on telling themselves.

Have a question?

Dear Greil, Alright, so Remembering Now is Van Morrison’s best set of original material in many years. But what about 2023’s sadly overlooked Accentuate the Positive? It’s a collection of covers many quite familiar (the Everlys, Big Joe Turner, Little Richard) and some from out of left field (Johnny Restivo and Helen Humes). Either way Van is having a blast throughout. You can practically see him kicking up his heels every time he grabs his alto sax. Seriously, he should have called this “Van Morrison’s House Party.” Your thoughts? —CRAIG ZELLER

Great title for an album that for me was one too many collections of other people’s songs. I guess I really need him to pick out two or three words and repeat them over and over until they say, “There’s this guy over here, and you know what? He’s not like anybody else.”

The Rolling Stones have apparently cancelled/delayed their European Tour for the summer because Keith Richards does not want to endure, if that’s the word, four months of continued touring. It had/has to end sometime for the Stones, but is this it? Would Mick Jagger consider (of course he would!) touring with Ron Wood and a hired backing band minus Keef? Would Richards sue them if they toured as the Rolling Stones without him? And who, if anybody, could replace Keith as a guitarist, I mean, besides the million or so guys who learned their chops copping off of Stones records? A quick Google search reveals Mick Taylor is still alive and Brian Jones isn’t. I doubt if Jagger wants to bring back Taylor, however. And for all the rock purists who would consider a Stones tour minus Keith Richards an even greater apostasy than them touring this late in their lives with him, I would guess 90% of their audience doesn’t care about the guitar players, just as long as Jagger is there out front, energized by whatever demon bugs have burrowed beneath his skin after leaving the as-yet undead, bloodless corpse of Richards. —JAMES R STACHO

I hope Keith feels better and can go on to do what he wants to do. Same for everybody else.

In case you haven’t heard it, I wanted to send on this link to Charlie Feathers’s version of “He’ll Have to Go.” Remember reading your appreciation of the song (in general) and Elvis’s version of it (in particular). Feathers takes it in a different ahem direction—instead of expressing regret or trying seduction, he sounds deranged—like someone from a low budget film noir who is menacing the heroine on the phone. In sum, convincingly creepy. —PAUL SCHWARTZ

Along with this song there are just too many numbers on Elvis’s last album—the last released while he was still singing, last he lived to see—that sound like farewells, goodbyes, sketches for his own obituary. This is especially delicate—nothing is pushed, and barely anything is backed away from in self-parody, which for Elvis was a defense mechanism: a way of protecting himself from the depths in his own music and maybe from inciting too much passion in that one fan who couldn’t bear it and would know who to blame—his own Mark Chapman. There really is a drama here.

Charlie Feathers always had a screw loose, even if he loosened it himself. In his last years recording he seemed to be smelling out untested directions the Sun sound could have gone: slap-back echo as Will and Idea, maybe. He does go far enough away from anyone else whoever sang this song to make you wonder where he means to go, like to whose grave. They’re two different songs as the two different people sang them. “He’ll have to go.” Was Feathers singing about Elvis, as in he’s dead, I’m not, I win?

I’m currently reading the oral biography, released last year, about the MC5. You are quoted in an interesting passage about the group’s 1969 show in Berkeley, which culminated in a fake bit of riotous theater by the group which you say felt like “a parody of the ’60s.” That's funny, but what I’m interested in asking you about is the short section on Lester Bangs’s Rolling Stone review of Kick Out the Jams, which, if I’m not mistaken, you edited? I’ve seen the review and am aware that Bangs panned the LP (and later recanted), but what astonished me was John Sinclair saying that the review “ruined our career.” At first this seemed like ridiculous sour grapes hyperbole on his part, but there’s a part of me that can certainly see it as a contributing factor (there’s also the fact that it’s not a remotely radio-friendly record), given that Rolling Stone was one of the few rock publications taken seriously and whose reviews many readers presumably took as some sort of gospel. Of course there’s no way to measure if this is the case but from your uniquely involved vantage point, how do you see it? And did Bangs himself ever speak to you afterward about the review? Did he harbor any guilt or bad feelings about panning something he did later admit to liking? —TERRY

As Lester wrote in the April 4, 1969 issue of Rolling Stone, kicking off his review of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams”—if i remember correctly, his first piece for the paper—“About a month ago the MC-5 received a cover article in Rolling Stone proclaiming them the New Sensation, a group to break all barriers, kick out all jams, ‘total energy thing,’ etc. etc. etc.” The feature he was referring to, which was visually loud, full of oversize photos and headlines in a type face oddly unlike Rolling Stone’s usual design, was very odd. It was a scream of hype so loud it discredited itself. I remember barely reading it, because it was a big ball of air. Lester read it too. Then he heard the album. He felt tricked, by what he read, by whoever wrote it, by himself. His closing lines caught what was to make him such a hero to other writers. “‘Kick Out the Jams’ sounds like Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’ as recorded by the Kingsmen. The lead on ‘Come Together’ is stolen note-for-note from the Who’s ‘I Can See for Miles.’ ‘I Want You Right Now’ sounds exactly (down to the lyrics) like a song called ‘I Want You’ by the Troggs, a British group who came on with a similar sex-and-raw-sound image a couple of years ago (remember ‘Wild Thing’?) and promptly disappeared into oblivion, where I imagine they are laughing at the MC-5.”

I didn’t edit the review; I didn’t become Records editor at Rolling Stone until a few months later. I remember reading it and thinking, like a lot other people, “I wish I could write like that.” The review came over the transom. There was no party line at Rolling Stone. Jon Landau once published a devastating take down of Cream—a column that appeared facing a full page ad for the new Cream album. Reviewers argued with each other in the same pages about the same records. Lester read the story, bought the album, thought he’d been had, and spoke out. For John Sinclair to say that this little review ruined the band’s career is both ridiculous—who went on to produce the band’s second album? Rolling Stone idol-killer Jon Landau—or, if even remotely true, only shows that they had very little worth ruining. I don’t think Rolling Stone readers took reviews that ran there as gospel—but in any case, the idea wasn’t to lay down the law, tell people what to think. It was to spark conversation and argument. People who liked music fought about what they loved and hated all the time—the reviews in Rolling Stone at their best were meant to be part of that conversation.

Lester didn’t, as you put it, recant. As he did with the Troggs, about which he later spent a day banging out thousands of words in a thrill of critical delirium, he changed his mind. He moved to Detroit and without ever losing his third eye heard things in the Detroit and Ann Arbor bands he hadn’t heard before, and he wrote about that, in long, expansive, and untrammeled pieces for Creem. He began to fight under a different flag, but it was always the same war.