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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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This is a long story, and I’m lucky to be able to tell at least part of it.

Wilbert Harrison was born in North Carolina in 1929; he died there in 1994. In between he made his mark. In 1952, the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had their tune “K.C. Lovin’” recorded by Little Willie Littlefield. It didn’t make the charts, pop or R&B, but it got around. In 1959, the under-the-radar rock ’n’ roll singer Wilbert Harrison redid the number on the New York producer Bobby Robinson’s Fury label. Robinson was a legend: his career in music went back to 1946, when he established Bobby’s Record Shop in Harlem, and lasted into the late 70s and early 80s, when he produced early hip-hop 12”s by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and the wonderful Funky Four Plus One—though not their best records. He died in 2011 at 93, just like my father.

Wilbert Harrison’s “Kansas City” was a jump, a party, a destination—a huge leap past the old Littlefield record and a leap into a future for Wilbert Harrison. It almost didn’t happen. The record was released, it went on the radio, but Robinson, tied up by a suit by another label that claimed Harrison had signed with them, couldn’t get the record into the stores. Singer after singer, from Little Richard—his version would end up as the basis for Paul McCartney’s unhinged version with the Beatles—to the then-obscure Ronnie Hawkins in Toronto put out cover versions, hoping to fill the gap. But the logjam cleared and Wilbert Harrison ended up with the number-one record in the country.

After that it was a long slog through small clubs up and down the east coast, trying to keep a career going. In 1960 “Good Bye Kansas City” made the charts—at #102. “Let’s Stick Together,” a song about trying to stave off divorce (“Consider our child”) was distinctive, but it had a vague sound and a soft beat, and didn’t make the the charts at all, pop or R&B. By 1969, still with Robinson, but now on his Sue label, Harrison gave it another try. Just as he’d redone the Leiber-Stoller song, now he redid his own. He called it “Let’s Work Together.” It was no longer about a marriage, at least not one between a mere two people. After the assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy, with the election of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War tearing the United States apart, it was about the state of the nation. It got some airplay on soul stations—if my memory is right, and I’m not sure how else it could have happened, the Rolling Stone writer Langdon Winner, who had grown up in San Luis Obispo and as a pianist led many high-school bands, most notably the Revels (I heard their “Church Key” on the radio in high school) and who lived just down the block from me in Berkeley, heard it on KSOL or KDIA. I was the Records Editor—we didn’t usually review singles, but for Langdon the record was a clarion call, and he had to get the word out. This is what he wrote in the issue dated September 20, 1969, with the Woodstock Festival on the cover.

Let’s Work Together, Part 1 & 2, Wilbert Harrison One-Man Band (Sue 69-SU-11)

Wilbert Harrison is one of the countless rhythm and blues stars of the 1950s who flashed briefly before our eyes and then vanished into oblivion. Along with Shirley and Lee, Huey “Piano” Smith, Buster Brown, the Monotones, and hundreds of other R&B singers, he gave us a couple of marvelous hit recordings, but could never sustain the impetus required to become a Chuck Berry or Little Richard. His biggest hit, “Kansas City,” ten years old, is still a favorite “oldie but goodie” on white pop radio stations. It is a sad commentary on the artistic sensibilities of these same stations that Wilbert Harrison’s latest single, “Let’s Work Together,” has been greeted with almost total silence. Here we have what is probably one of the five best songs of the last year

—and as records went, 1969 was some year—

—listenable, driving, joyous music—which few listeners outside of the South will ever hear.

In recent years Wilbert Harrison has been struggling to earn his livelihood by playing small blues clubs in New York and along the eastern seaboard. His artistic inclination as well as the press of financial necessity have led him to develop a “one-man-band” format in which he plays drums, guitar, and harmonica. Unlike most one-man bands, however, there is none of the “Look, Mom! He’s playing the zither with his little toe!” balderdash. Just a solid but simple beat with wonderfully ragged blues and boogie chord changes.

Even though the record is augmented with a couple of overdubs, “Let’s Work Together” shows how effective Harrison’s one-man ensemble has become. After a shrill, twice-repeated fanfare by the harmonica and and a few bars of the beat—chunk-ka-Chunk! chunka-ka-Chunk!—Wilbert begins moaning the lyric. “Together we will stand / Divided we will fall / Come on people now / Let’s get on the ball.” Each word is carefully filtered through the nasal passages and then abruptly swallowed. Harrison obviously had the same diction teacher Jimmy Reed had. Simply priceless.

The music is good enough to make the words irrelevant, but the lyrics shine through as a kind of double bonus. Deceptively simple, they express a collective of affirmations about love and race in America which many performers have sought but few have found. “Let’s work together / Yeah, let’s work together / Together we will stand / Every boy, girl, woman and May-an.” At one point Wilbert’s voice leaps from a C to a G, an event which accentuates the radiant happiness which each chorus builds. This is a song that lifts my spirits every time I listen to it.

And there’s Wilbert yelling out during the instrumental break, just like he used to. Who is the “Tina” he keeps shouting about? What is that word that no one could recognize in “Kansas City” which he calls out again and again om this one—”Mus sack!”? “Mustache!”? “Musta!”? Five dollars to the first person who can tell me what it is.

As far as I’m concerned, Wilbert Harrison is back. I shall eagerly await the arrival of his new album which will be released in a couple of weeks. The fact that white middle class radio stations refuse to play “Let’s Work Together” is only further evidence of their moronic, tasteless programming. They can’t tell the gems from the cow pies.

This wonderful record has been on the market for five months. If you want to hear it, you’ll just have to shell out a buck.

The review got across. In San Francisco, DJs on KSAN, heir to the original free-space rock ’n’ roll radio outlet KMPX, a foreign-language station transformed by Larry Miller’s late-night shows into a full time new music utopia, began to play it. Among the DJs was Big Daddy Tom Donahue, who in years before had ruled local Top 40 radio (“This is Big Daddy Tom Donahue,” his shows began, “here to clean up your face and mess up your mind”) and with his partner Bobby Mitchell promoted rock ’n’ roll package shows at the Cow Palace. He jumped on the record. Soon the KMPX-KSAN inheritors around the country followed the lead. The record was being heard. People were singing it. People were covering it (Canned Heat’s version passed the song on to dozens of other bands). And it began to sell. Langdon reviewed the promised album as a full-page piece in the December 27, 1969 issue of Rolling Stone—the Altamont issue. That same month the record entered the Billboard charts. Sue took out horribly embarrassing ads in the record industry trade magazines: “This hit record took nine months to be born and Langdon Winner is the father!” Billboard stopped the song at #32, but it was heard and loved by far more people than most of the records that charted higher. It was a social vision, it was about the country—it was about whoever heard it.

In 1970 Tom Donahue called me up. He was promoting a crowning show for Creedence Clearwater Revival—along with Sly and the Family Stone the best and biggest band in the Bay Area and the country, scorned by the tribunes of the San Francisco Sound (“Anyone can play that shit” every musician not in the band would say), with their jeans and Pendleton shirts from a nowhere high school in a nowhere town, El Cerrito, a suburb north of Berkeley where Berkeley people never went (I went to a high school dance there in 1962—I’m positive it was the pre-Creedence Golliwogs playing, because, really, who else could it have been?), dismissed as rednecks on their own ground—and, casting Harrison’s #32 top slot into doubt, never listed higher than #2 on the Billboard charts though single after Creedence single was plainly the most heard song in the country again and again in 1969 and 1970. This show was going to be their Homecoming Prom. “Do you know how I can get in touch with that Kansas City man?” Donahue asked—I wasn’t sure if he didn’t remember Wilbert Harrison’s name or if he was just too hip for me. “We want him to open for Creedence”—and by “we” he meant himself, and also the band. I had him call Langdon, who knew who to call at Sue. It happened. Wilbert Harrison came on with his one-man-band contraption and if he didn’t steal the show, he was part of it. He came across. It was probably the largest crowd he ever played for.

After the show there was a party for Wilbert at Langdon’s place. He was there with his whole kit—like any R&B musician I’ve ever met in any situation where there were at least a dozen people, he wanted to play. His drum had “HIT!” painted on it. His smile was enormous. And Langdon got to ask him what that “Mus sack!” word was. “Mercy!” Harrison said. “From the church. ‘HAVE MERCY!’”

Have a question?

I’ve not seen much commentary from you on George Clinton, P-Funk, Bootsy, Parker, or the Brides of Funkenstein. Considering the vision and quality of output of Clinton’s projects over the years, I’m curious regarding your take. —PHILLIP OVEREEM

I listened to a lot over the years. We took our seven-year-old daughter to the Oakland Coliseum for the Mothership tour thinking that the landing would give her a lifetime memory (she fell asleep waiting for it—we almost did too). But not everyone can keep a story going for years, and sometimes a single piece is the story, for the band or the fan. I’ve played “Maggot Brain” over and over for hours at a time, here and there whenever I think of it, and it has always seemed more unlikely, unpredictable, unenclosable by any concept you might dream up. I can’t believe it ever happened, that it sustains itself seemingly forever, unless I remember what George Clinton told Eddie Hazel about his guitar solo: “Play like your mother just died.”

Hi Greil, Over the years I’ve enjoyed this column’s discussions about Western movies. Yet, outside of a brief discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, I don’t recall any discussions about Western literature.

Blood Meridian, while masterfully written, left me empty and wondering why I was giving any of my time to a subject matter so repulsive. I’ve never had much patience nor interest in books by Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. The Westerns penned early in Elmore Leonard’s writing career sometimes made long train trips more enjoyable, but once finished Leonard’s Westerns seldom had any staying power.

Larry McMurtry remains the only writer of Westerns whose books I love and continue to reread. Lonesome Dove serves as a bridge between the worlds of John Ford and Sergio Leone. Lonesome Dove’s follow-up, Streets of Laredo, might be one of the most terrifying books I’ve ever read. Along with those books, Buffalo Girls and Anything for Billy are pretty satisfying as well.

Did you ever cross paths with Larry McMurtry? And as someone who’s fond of the Western in cinema, are their any novels of the Old West that you’d recommend.?

Thanks always for this fine column. —BILLY INNES

I confess I’m not a westerns or McMurtry reader. I tried Lonesome Dove and got nowhere with it despite its worship by a trusted Texas friend and our older daughter. Other than The Last Picture Show, which I read because I was so entranced by the movie, the one McMurtry I read was The Last Kind Words Saloon which had to be named for Geeshie Wiley’s 1930 “Last Kind Words Blues,” a long time obsession. I called up McMurtury and asked him why he’d called the novel—about the Earp brothers and sign that travels all over the west—after that phrase. He’d read a piece in Harper’s by John Jeremiah Sullivan on obscure blues artists called “Unknown Bards,” which focused on Wiley and her record, and wanted to tell a story derived from those words. That was gratifying. He also wrote the review of A New Literary History of America I most value. Unfortunately we never met.

Greil, I’m enjoying looking for new discoveries in the notes to the 50th Anniversary Mystery Train but I think you need to listen to “Ubangi Stomp” again. It sure sounds to me like the “n” word that Warren Smith sings is “natives”. It’s even clearer in versions by Jerry Lee Lewis & John Prine, there’s also YouTube videos of people I’ve never heard of and multiple song lyric sites that agree. —JAMES REUTER

You’re right. But that was a second, rerecorded release—with the word changed for various reasons. I’d like to think it’s because Sam Phillips realized it was a terrible mistake, or even that someone like Jack Clement gave the ok without Sam’s knowledge—rather than that Phillips figured out very quickly the word would kill the record outside of the south. But there’s just no question. When I first heard the record I tried to unhear it—no way.

I am reading your wonderful, terrifying book Invisible Republic, coming to page 45’s ICEy “who are you” and later in the same passage, referring to Lo and Behold!, the description of the American archetype of the “con-fidence man”, giving new shape to the pres-id-ent situation from what first reminded one of Steve McQueen’s The Blob back in 2016—good lord, how prescient, who’da known, reading you bk when writing of the Rolling Stones in Rolling Stone, et al, that a prophet of Biblical proportions, walked among us? Thank you. —JOHN EBERLY

Not sure who the prophet is. The Blob, or Steve McQueen?

Generally, you seem to own or at least know about every written and recorded document having to do with Elvis and Dylan, but just in case: One Night in Pearl Harbor.

The set runs from Sun classics to post-Army RCA potboilers, so it’s a mixed bag with an Elvis-to-audience sound ratio that mostly favors the audience.

Still, Elvis and the band seem like they’re having fun not being in Acapulco, and I’ve always thought “Reconsider Baby” was an underrated E blues cover.

Just wondered if you’d heard it and what your reaction is. —DEREK MURPHY

There’s wild footage of the “Reconsider Baby” performance in the 2018 HBO Thomas Zimmy documentary The Searcher, as I was able to comment in the new Notes and Discographies section of the 50th anniversary edition of Mystery Train that came out earlier this year. Elvis sounds like a master on the audio, but also laying back from the song, but there’s not a hint in the audio of what he’s doing to the audience with the rest of himself.

Dear Greil, So I ran into the Martian (he’s here visiting relatives in Roswell for the holidays). He’s become fascinated with the concept of rock & roll Christmas records and was asking me for some of my favorites aside from obvious classics like Spector and Springsteen.

I made him a list that included the Penguins’ “Jingle Jangle,” Elvis’s “Santa Bring My Baby Back (to Me),” Bobby Lloyd and the Skeletons’ “Do You Hear What I Hear / You Really Got Me,” the Brave Combo’s “It’s Christmas,” Denise Montana’s “Merry Christmas All,” Davitt Sigerson’s “It’s A Big Country,” Stevie Wonder’s “What Christmas Means to Me”, the Ramones’ “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Wanna Fight Tonight),” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Christmas All Over Again”and the Youngsters’ immortal “Christmas in Jail.”

What are some of your favorites? Inquiring Martians would like to know. —CRAIG ZELLER

Well, I think we have to consider religion. I assume Martians would worship the martyred apparition that loomed over London on its way to the destruction of human life on Earth in the nearly unbearably apocalyptic UK film Quatermass and the Pit, which I went into in some detail in Lipstick Traces, a book which according to an AI post I stumbled on today has recently been retitled “Real Cool.” But assuming that’s not the case, you could position the Martian to resist the dominant US ideology of what Michael Ventura, following certain Enlightenment writers, calls Christianism by introducing it to the Sonics’ 1965 “Don’t Believe in Christmas,” a Northwest punk rant about not getting any Christmas presents. If that leaves your visitor unconvinced, switch gears and if with luck you can find it online, cue up the late 1960s Columbia album A Music Box Christmas. Small children will listen in awed silence and adults will cry. And if that doesn’t work, remember that all the best Christmas songs were written or produced by Jews and play the Drifters’ version of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” which to me has always sounded like a fabulously funny and moving attack on the very idea of white by the premier 1950s group of African American rock ’n’ roll singers. Berlin himself supposedly loved it.

Hi Greil, I read Lipstick Traces the year it was published and it changed my life.

My question is, how do you explain John Lydon’s current iteration as an apparent MAGA enthusiast and Trump supporter? —CARLON YODER

Who knows why anyone does anything. Like Sinéad O’Connor, John Lydon is a real punk, which means that sooner or later he’s going to piss off absolutely anyone. When you are no longer recognizable in public, as the one-time Johnny Rotten now is,

you might do anything to stay in the public eye, to get a rise out of someone, even yourself. But the real answer is less comfortable and not snide at all. Trump is a real punk. He has absolute contempt for anyone who is not himself, and that includes his wife, his children, his satraps, his ass-kissers, his supplicants, and most of all anyone stupid enough to believe, or ever have believed, a word he says. John Lydon would like to be Donald Trump. Donald Trump is already John Lydon.

I still owe him more than I can ever repay.

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Any interest in these albums or did they just drop off your map after Sell Out? (I’ve neglected to mention Live at Leeds because live LPs are just a different category for me. Also, I do note that you listed Townshend’s Who Came First, which I too consider some kind of unsung mini-masterpiece.) —HENRI D.

Tommy doesn’t make it. I tried to convince myself it was fun, inventive, alive in the review I wrote for Rolling Stone—as the Records Editor I assigned it to myself—but editor Jann Wenner saw through it and suggested we not publish it—as Records Editor I had the final word—and I knew instantly he was right. The result was that Rolling Stone never reviewed it at all. Quadrophenia I never listened to all the way through. It was like a giant decorated crane falling on top of all of London. And Who’s Next—well made, a triumph of craft, a natural and permanent hit—the movie Behind Blue Eyes opening this week with the phrase and the song embedded in global culture—and for just those reasons lacking heart, cold at the center.

For me the great drama is the first three albums—Happy Jack aka A Quick One at the top—and Pete Townshend’s first solo album, Who Came First, which is just so close to “Who’s on first?” (You can watch the whole routine on YouTube), because there you can hear places the band could never get to. “Pure and Easy” has such warmth, it’s such a vision of wholeness, the world in balance, without ever ignoring danger and risk and failure and even bad faith. It’s all in what the music wants and is afraid it might not get, might not deserve, but it does deserve it.

On the first album the true sound is in “The Kids Are Alright.” Keith, so expansive at the end of choruses and especially at the end of it all feels like he’s playing the whole world, as if the whole world is his drum kit (and it is). The emotional balance of the words and the unexpected vehemence they carry—the crashing “I DON’T MIND!” followed by the casual, friendly “I know them all pretty well.” And at the center, on the UK version, that thrillingly abstract, art school, John Cage meets Steve Cropper and loses two falls out of three guitar solo—that “What is that?” feeling, that stop the record right there and pick up the needle and play it again feeling, the sense that this band, this art form, is opening doors to new worlds. Then “Happy Jack”—ok, sure, tell me about a toad on the Isle of Wight—you don’t even necessarily hear that, for an American maybe you could hear it and not translate it. But you were in a world of wit and surprise and musical freedom and no guilt. And The Who Sell Out, as if to answer the question, “Is there some way we could have more fun?”

That’s the story for me. A great story. We saw them first in 1967 and never missed them after that. The loudest band we ever heard. The funniest. The friendliest. I’ve always believed the guy at the bottom of the stage in Jann’s photo of the band in San Francisco that I used for the cover of my first book had to be me—he’s wearing glasses and a TA’s sport jacket, just as I would have. Has to be. Doesn’t it?

Hi, Greil—I’m going to out myself as a Gen Xer right away to remove any confusion. My first proper concert was the Kinks in January 1982. Later that year I saw the Who on their so-called farewell tour. At the time it felt like my last chance. I was all of fourteen and of course Townshend, Daltrey, and Entwistle looked like fossils on that giant stage. [The Kinks, playing a hockey arena, were tremendous.] A few years later in Chicago I passed on an Iggy Pop show at Cabaret Metro, thinking he was washed up. Ha!

I guess the question is, have you ever written off a performer as being past it, only to be surprised later?

Peace, as always —CHRIS HESLER

I wrote off the Rolling Stones around the time of their American Express deal. I was surprised by Mick Jagger’s commitment to “Blue and Lonesome” on their Chicago blues tribute and by their recent single “Zydeco Sont Pas Salés.” I expect to be surprised in the future by some unexpected folk ballad or country blues.

For our honeymoon in June 1966 we went to London. We saw the Yardbirds in the tiny Brixton Ram Jam club. We brought back copies of the cooler UK version of Aftermath to give to friends. They could have quit then—or, as Nik Cohn wished, all died in a plane crash before their 30th birthdays—and they’d still be the best.

Could you say where that amazing Joshua Clover comment (“Even if ‘Desolation Row’ is not his greatest song—I might make the case for 4 or 5 others, depending on the year—it’s where all the bodies are buried”) quoted in your book Folk Music originates? I haven’t been able to find it in anything he wrote. —VERLAINE MILLER

It was an email he sent to me. Let me know if you’d like information or comment on his writing. It’s such a rich and unpredictable legacy.

Hi Greil—Thanks for “Don’t Look Back.” It’s haunted me all week.

In the aftermath of Sly’s death I looked everywhere for anything I could find, and I found this: “So Is the Sun” by the World Column, a great Northern Soul song which feels like an ancestor to “I Want to Take You Higher” and a lot of the Family Stone’s aesthetic; and this incredible album I’m Just Like You: Sly’s Stone Flower 1969–1970—Sly’s production work over the time of and before Riot. Rhythm ace galore and some incredible songs, particularly “Life & Death in G & A (Parts 1 & 2)” by Joe Hicks. Existential funk at the border. What do you think? —JOHN GIBSON

I spent a little time looking, and found that “So Is the Sun,” which would have been a major copyright case if it had come out before Sly and the Family Stone’s 1968 “Higher,” came out in 1969, which would have made it vice versa, if Epic wanted to sue Tower, which was such a fly by night label it probably would have been a waste of time. But they started out as the all-white Seagrams in Indiana and turned into the black and white World Column, and Indiana was a Klan state in the 20s, so that’s no cheap move.

One of the many highlights of Mystery Train’s chapter on Sly Stone and Stagger Lee is your intense examination of Across 110th Street. When you read Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, were you surprised and/or pleased to find that Elvis also loved the film? According to Myrna Smith of the Sweet Inspirations, Elvis told her “the entire story, acted out every role, [and] recited practically every line.” It was one of “his greatest acting performances”!

And do you realize that if you and Elvis had ever met—in some alternate universe where he’d lived long enough to read Mystery Train and somehow be introduced to you—the two of you might have spent the entire meeting talking about Across 110th Street? Elvis likely would have been too shy to talk about himself and your chapter on him, and he might not have been familiar enough with the other artists to venture an opinion, but he just might have said “Great book—I loved the section on Across 110th Street! Remember the part when . . . ?” And then the two of you would have spent a couple hours going through the movie. If the multiverse theory is true, then this surely happened. —IA

Thank you—that moment in Careless Love went right by me. But what a marvelous fantasy. And it sounds as if Elvis took in movies so completely because he was both a fan and a pro: he could watch a movie with an eye to what role he might have played in it. And about Mystery Train—well, he did read Jon Landau’s ”In Praise of Elvis Presley.”

Have a question?

Did you ever disagree with David Thomson over one or more movies? —BEN MERLISS

Of course. Sentient and sympathetic beings who agree on most fundamental questions of value, politics, sports, child raising, or weather probably disagree about movies more than anything else. David and I once planned a book together about the use of songs in movies where each of us chose a movie we loved for its music and then both of us wrote about it. As I recall we started with McCabe and Mrs. Miller, with all of its Leonard Cohen songs, and the result was two good and completely different essays. Then David chose An American in Paris, which he loved and, never mind the music, I found an unmitigated piece of shit, as morally compromised as it was boring and hateful, all coming down to the paintings the Gene Kelly character was supposedly making—to me they crossed over from kitsch to evil. What we produced was not, in a literary sense, let’s say, ah, compatible. Then I chose Streets of Fire, which I think is a rich and unpredictable film of imagination and daring, especially for the staging of the big Diane Lane numbers “Going Nowhere Fast” and “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young,” and David found so vapid he could find nothing to say about it. So we continue our friendship without having to duel over it.

Dear Greil, Did you ever summon the stamina to plow through Tracks II? I did and lived to tell the tale.

This outrageously overpriced, ridiculously packaged box set containing seven unreleased Springsteen albums has to be one of the biggest disappointments of the year. Through the magic of YouTube I listened to the whole damn thing three times over the course of a month taking it one album at a time. At least half the material is borderline mediocre and two of the albums—Faithless and Inyo—are shockingly dull. That being said, there are several pretty good songs here that would make one really good CD. Which is what I did. But nothing on Tracks II is a match for “Lonely Night in the Park,” the exuberant Born To Run outtake Bruce released in August. (To see so many overblown undeserved rave reviews for this scattershot of a box had me shaking my head in amazement.)

I still think Springsteen’s the greatest. But a good portion of Tracks II was a chore to get through.

Now I have to go lie down and take a rest. That Nebraska box is just around the corner. —CRAIG ZELLER

What can I tell you? I received the box in LP format, but was not able to get to it as I was listening to Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry albums exclusively to set up for a listening book on Ferry, which I’m just starting. But then we were moving to Minnesota for three months where I don’t have a turntable. So I went to Amoeba Records in Berkeley assuming I could exchange the LP box for the CD equivalent. But no! They would only give me the wholesale price in exchange which left me well short of the retail price. So I cobbled together some old credit slips and waited for the CD box on special order because they were only carrying the vinyl (“Which isn’t moving anyway”). It came in the day before I left but the box was just as big so I had to ship it. But I’m still trying to start the Ferry book so it’s still waiting.

I am not looking forward to the Nebraska box because to me the released version is a thing in itself and the electric versions a sort of willful attempt to miss the point. But I am more than curious to see the movie. For a lot of reasons, most of all to see my old friend Jon Landau as a fictional character. Like seeing Sid Vicious played by Gary Oldman. I hope.

Do you like any of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ (with or without him) post-’68 hits? —BEN MERLISS

I wish. Phil Spector liked to talk about people who made records and people who made—he would bear down on the word—contributions, meaning people who shaped and deepened rock ’n’ roll as an idea and a form. “Shop Around” was a contribution: it broke the radio, made you say, Who ARE they? What IS this? So was “Going to a Go-Go.” “I Second that Emotion” was a record. But “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage” was something more: the absolute perfection of idea and form that no one would ever approach. Including Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. And it’s all written into the song: those opening and closing movements, somewhere between a fanfare and a funeral march, almost say “unfollowable.” And in a small way that worked subliminally that record broke—or realized?—the form. A ten-word title, and yet it’s a poem in and of itself, perfectly balanced, alive to its own music AS a title. The conventional, in Motown terms all but mandated usage would have been to place parentheses around the second phrase, but instead it was rolled out not as a syntactical tease but as an absolute and irrevocable fact. No way around it, no way out.

And that was 1967.

Two questions in relation to the O’Jays:

1. Sometimes you say a song is best heard on a specific album and sometimes you don’t. Do you believe that the O’Jays’ song “Ship Ahoy” is best heard on the album of the same name? I like the album, but not as much as I’ve always wanted to (I still prefer the preceding Back Stabbers as an album) and I’m curious to know how you yourself feel about the song in the context of the album.

2. I know that “For The Love Of Money” is not your favorite O’Jays song. I was wondering if you’d ever seen the fully live version of the song they did on Soul Train with the late Kurtis Teel on bass. I think the more aggressive musicality actually improves the intended message of the song. Do you agree or disagree and why? —BEN MERLISS

“Ship Ahoy” for me is a thing in itself, so it doesn’t matter how it comes to you—on that album, on a compilation, on someone’s mix tape. It will claim the time the song takes to play. Thanks for the Soul Train performance of “For the Love of Money.” It still does nothing for me, but as my father always said, that’s what makes horse races.

1 Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, written and directed by Scott Cooper (20th Century Studios). The 1982 Nebraska as if it were written by Bruce Springsteen’s inner child, not a thinking person trying to make sense of where he lived now; it would have been nice if there were a scene of Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce walking into a post office to mail a tape and a picture of Ronald Reagan on the wall. But the movie found moments that stick. When in the midst of White’s bedroom recordings there’s a cut to a record studio where “Born in the U.S.A.” is happening, it’s absolutely there, with the line “Hiring man says, Son, if it was up to me” coming across as a whole novel in those ten words, for the way they’re written, for the way, now, they’re sung. As “Nebraska” takes form, when you see a page in a lyric note book with a third person replaced with a first, you can feel the stakes being raised. Near the end, White and Jeremy Strong, who plays Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau, sit in a room together. Landau puts on the Soul Stirrers’ 1955 “Last Mile of the Way,” with Sam Cooke—before he was, as they called it, turned out as a pop singer—going far beyond anyone else’s last mile, and you hear the quiet on their faces, their understanding that the music they’re hearing is beyond anything they will ever do. Only “Reason to Believe,” at the end, rang false in its uplift. “I had dinner at home with him and his wife, [Patti Scialfa], before we started filming,” White said in an October 29 story by Ryan Coleman in Entertainment. “We spoke a lot about ‘Reason to Believe.’ What I take away from that song, and what he thinks people misunderstand about that song. I believed that there was hope in that song, and he said, ‘That’s not the case.’” I remember talking to Springsteen about the song at the time, about how far people can go to convince themselves that a cynical song that touches them doesn’t mean what it says:

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We must mobilize every asset we have—spiritual, moral, educational, economic, and military—in a crusade for national renewal. We must restore to their place of honor the bedrock values handed down by families to serve as society’s compass.
—Ronald Reagan, September 9, 1982

In the summer all the lights would shine/There’d be music playin’ people laughin’ all the time/Me and my sister we’d hide out in the tall cornfields/Sit and listen to the mansion on the hill.
—Bruce Springsteen, “Mansion on the Hill”

. . . schools can avoid taking attendance [as a requirement for the receipt of] federal per-pupil monies. This last provision will put the farmworkers’ and coal miners’ children back to work without cost to local schools.
—Mary C. Dunlap, The Sentinel (San Francisco), July 10, 1981. On the Family Protection Act, an Omnibus bill endorsed by Ronald Reagan

Now mister the day that lottery I win I ain’t never/Gonna ride in no used car again.
—Bruce Springsteen, “Used Cars”

That we are created equal has never meant that Americans were supposed to live alike. What it does mean, what it has always meant, is that the citizens of this republic cannot be treated in law and by government as mere social and economic functions. Yet this is exactly how the Reaganites propose to treat the citizens of the commonwealth. The administration intends to bestow wealth upon the wealthy because it is their function to invest in productive enterprise. The administration intends to impoverish the poor because it is their function to perform menial services and not be a drag on investors . . . .

What the Reaganites really care about is this: they want capitalism in America to become what Karl Marx thought it would be by nature—the transcendent force and the measure of all things, the power that reduces free politics to trifling, the citizen to a “worker,” the public realm to “the state,” the state to an instrument of repression protecting capitalism from the menace of liberty and equality . . . . Marx’s description of capitalist society is the Rea­ganite prescription for America. That is the meaning of National Renewal.
—Walter Karp, Harper’s, October 1981

I have interwoven lines from Bruce Springsteen’s new solo album with words on Ronald Reagan’s USA because any separation of the two would be a fraud. Nebraska (CBS)—recorded last January in Springsteen’s New Jersey living room with acoustic guitar and harmonica, with a bit of synthesizer and an occasional backing vocal added later—is the most complete and probably the most convincing statement of resistance and refusal that Ronald Reagan’s USA has yet elicited, from any artist or any politician. Because Springsteen is an artist and not a politician, his resistance is couched in terms of the bleakest acceptance, his refusal presented as a refusal that does not know itself. There isn’t a trace of rhetoric, not a moment of polemic; politics are buried deep in stories of individuals who make up a nation only when their stories are heard together. But if we can hear their stories as a single, whole story, they cannot. The people we meet on Nebraska—the mass killer Charley Starkweather; a cop who lets his brother escape after a barroom killing; the kid who watches his father patronized by a used car salesman; the man who loses his job, gets drunk, shoots a night clerk, is given life, and begs for death; the man who discards his beliefs and goes to work for the Mob; the mill workers who’ve grown up in the glow of the mill owner’s mansion—cannot give their lives a public dimension, because they are alone; because in a world in which men and women are mere social and economic functions, every man and woman is separated from every other.

Two songs here outstrip anything Springsteen has written: the title tune, about Charley Starkweather (“From the town of/Lincoln, Nebraska/With a sawed-off .410/On my lap/Through the badlands/Of Wyoming/I killed every/Thing in my path”), and “Highway Patrolman.” With the voice Bob Dylan used in “With God on Our Side”—a young man’s voice with hundreds of years of unwanted knowledge in it—Springsteen’s patrolman, Joe Roberts, tells us who he is, what he does, what he’s about: “I always done an honest job/As honest as I could.” And then the story is twisted, just a bit, a turn at once off-hand and purely ominous: “I got a brother named Franky/And Franky ain’t no good.” With a timing too delicate to measure, Springsteen barely rushes the first two words of that last line—and then with the same sort of timing pulls back from the last three. The words curl; he hooks the story right in your heart, and then pulls slightly: not to reel you in just yet, simply to make sure the line is fast. The same grace is there in “Used Cars,” as the boy in the backseat watches the car salesman looking over his father’s hands, watches his mother nervously twisting her ring; it’s there when the music rises, almost secretly, as it becomes clear that generations of workers, not just one boy, will spend their lives in the shadow of the mansion on the hill.

The countless details of craft and compassion that underlie this album portray a world of desperately meaningless killings and state executions, a world in which honest work has been trivialized and honest goals reduced to a bet on the state-run lottery, in which the rich live as a different species, so far above the aspirations of ordinary people as to seem like gods. And it is a world in which blind faith in America, the subject of Springsteen’s brutally sardonic “Reason to Believe,” the last word of Nebraska, has become the cruelest ruse: the belief of a man standing over a dead dog that “if he stood there long enough/That dog’d get up and run.”

The only acts of rebellion presented on Nebraska have to do with murder. They are nihilistic acts committed by men in a world in which social and economic functions have become the measure of all things and have dissolved all other values. In that context, these acts make sense. And that is the burden of Nebraska.

Real Life Rock Top Ten

1. Au Pairs, Sense and Sensuality (Kamera import)
2. Ted Hawkins, Watch Your Step (Rounder)
3. Peter Gabriel, “Shock the Monkey” (Geffen)
4. Amy Heckerling, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Universal)
5. Arkansaw Man (Modern Masters 12″)
6. Yaz, Upstairs at Eric’s (Sire)
7. Nightingales, “Elvis—The Last Ten Days” (Cherry Red import)
8. Pulsallama, “The Devil Lives in My Husband’s Body” (Y America)
9. Ravyns, “Raised on the Radio” (Full Moon/ Asylum)
10. Don Henley, I Can’t Stand Still (Asylum)

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It helps that Idle was well connected and that George Harrison drops by to play an interviewer. (Apparently Harrison and Ringo Starr serenaded Idle with “Ouch!” later.) Some of the humor can be hit or miss, but oh, that Monty Python understatement: When describing Ron Nasty’s Hitler-resembling love, Chastity, the narrator describes her as “a simple little German girl whose father had invented World War II.” Ouch, indeed.

And I love the Beatles-adjacent That Thing You Do!, which manages to capture what I imagine to be the excitement of the time. That great scene in which the gang hears their song played on the radio for the first time—Liv Tyler screeching down the street, Ethan Embry and Tom Everett Scott turning on all the radios in the appliance store . . . it never fails to fill me with joy.

(Fun fact: If my guitar tab is right, Adam Schlesinger essentially rearranged the chords to “Please Please Me” to create the title song. A clever double joke, since in the movie “That Thing You Do” starts as a slow ballad until it turns into a rocker, just like “Please Please Me” was supposed to be a slow Roy Orbison–like song until George Martin asked the Beatles to make it faster. God, I miss Adam Schlesinger.) —TODD LEOPOLD

I really don’t want to seem to one-up anyone, but all I can find online for The Brian Epstein Story is the 90-minute version, which is a chop that removes the heart, soul, texture, detail, and vision of the work, which runs two hours twenty minutes at its real length. I regret being so adamant about this, but it’s a singular work and if you’re not seeing it all you’re not seeing it.

I forgot All You Need Is Cash. Truly one of the best Beatles movies—produced by George, if I remember correctly—or books, TV shows, or fantasies there is (though I wish someone had made a movie of Mark Shipper’s Paperback Writer alternate history, where the Beatles end up at the bottom of a bill opening for Peter Frampton).

Thanks for the great contextualization of A Hard Day’s Night relative to its time and place of origin. You wrote: “Britain had won the war but left a nation of people who felt like losers.” I think you can hear that in the classic exchange on the train:

Businessman: “I fought the war for you lot!”

Beatle: “I’ll bet you’re sorry you won.”

The subversive audacity of that line still stuns me—the suggestion that just 20 years after the war, some faction of the British public would prefer living under fascism to having to deal with these smart-ass longhairs!

My older brother saw the movie as a teenager; he said the girls in the audience were screaming like they were at Shea Stadium. The signal moment for you was John’s smile at the end; my brother remembered the little jig George did while playing, and the effect it had on the girls at the Fairlawn Theatre. For me it was “I’ll bet you’re sorry you won”, and George tormenting the television exec who thinks his presenter is the voice of youth: “she’s grotty . . . we turn the sound down and say mean things about her.”

A five-minute snippet of the Beatles’ animated TV series recently showed up on my YouTube feed. I’d heard of the show, but figured it was short-lived, lasting maybe until “She Loves You” slipped off the charts. In this episode, though, the boys, who all sound like the same BBC announcer (except for “Ringo” who does a pretty good Ringo) are in Help-era suits and haircuts. They fall down a well into another world, where they calm the alarmed brown-skinned natives by playing “Tomorrow Never Knows” after which they’re chased back up the well by brown-skinned native girls bent on miscegenation and I just don’t know where to start.

Who was this made for? Irony-loving college students? Seven-year-old acid heads? Did the cartoons register with you at all at the time? —STEPHEN O’NEILL

Thanks—I guess. What’s this? Bad licensing deal? An Uncle Scrooge story without empathy, imagination, and perfect imagery? But there was a flash of recognition: the first Beatles were Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Blue Cheer? “Summertime Blues” Blue Cheer? Bubblegum? Okay, I always thought if the Osmonds locked Donny out of the studio and stuck with Merrill singing lead they might have become a halfway decent hard rock group I’d never have heard of (probably better for all concerned) but are you SURE you're talking about the same Blue Cheer? —KEVIN BICKNELL

The same Blue Cheer. I know they tried to sell themselves as an abrasive act. But cheery blues is a contradiction in terms. They were like the white blues band in Ghost World doing “Cotton Pickin’ Blues” with an elderly black ragtime guitarist as an opening act. They weren’t as bad as they were supposed to be. They just had less than no reason to exist.

Dear Mr. Marcus, I happened upon your lecture relating to your book Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations. (I am a little behind things—living in Australia.) The reason that I came across it was my longstanding interest in Lunsford’s version of “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.” I was particularly taken with you having discovered the origin of the “forty dollar bill” of the lyrics. (I had no idea that there actually was such a bill c. 1798.)

My question is this: Might it be equally likely that the reference was to the “forty dollar bill” issued by the Confederate States of America during the Civil War? (See, for example, these images.) —STAN GOTTSCHALK

It very well could be a reference to Confederate $40 bills. But they were issued in a scattershot manner by various banks, and the Revolutionary/early Constitutional era $40 bills were much more common, if varied. Mine—found on eBay, of course—bears an imprint of Philadelphia, 1778, and was issued by the government.

Have a question?

Hi Greil. In the latest Ask Greil column there is a discussion about the marketing strategy involved with the latest John Lennon doc about the One to One concert. It seems a bit sad that the new doc gets so little comment. To me John Lennon’s singing in it was an absolute revelation.

Few would disagree that John was one of the greatest singers of rock ’n’ roll ever. I think I’m right in saying this was the first time that he had presented live his new material from his “Sgt. Lennon” album, Plastic Ono Band, to the public. I became obsessed with this record after reading the “Lennon Remembers” interview and had found the single of “Mother.” I played it at least 5 times before school every day for months. It was always a revelation and an absolute mystery.

I think John Lennon was always an incredibly serious singer—he was always talking about it. In the One to One concert he totally reinvents “Cold Turkey.” He gives “Give Peace a Chance” to Stevie Wonder. But I was totally fascinated of course by way he sang “Mother.” He said once that he had listened over and over to Jerry Lee Lewis to get the feeling in that song. Jerry Lee—angel and devil. Angel in “Peace in the Valley” on The Million Dollar Quartet, a few notes in and Carl, Elvis, Johnny Cash go for a few moments into deep space with Jerry flying above them. But Jerry Lee was devil just about everywhere else. Sly, dangerous, and free. On a duet on Tom Jones’s TV show he is so relaxed spinning through an incredible range of sounds, it’s hard to know Satan from God.

One other comment I think might be pertinent here: John said that the positive side of not having parents was that he was free. Free to think? Free to totally commit to singing?

In the concert John does this weird thing before every phrase—is he chewing gum or something? He turns away and the then turns back into the mic—out—in. There was a comment about classical pianist Alfred Cortot—it was said he would play a note, hear it, and change what he did next. I think this is what John is doing here. It’s a way of locking yourself into the present. For a jazz musician the moment before you play is all. In that moment you listen to your whole life. In John’s case I think we see here a freedom of imagination and depth and a commitment to totally lock into the present to bring it all home from a place of utter honesty. I have never stopped missing him, never stopped listening to him. Thank you for your column—after he was shot it was the only thing that made any sense to me. —JOHN GIBSON

It’s good to hear that the emotional charge John Lennon was able to lodge in so many hearts still reverberates in testimony like yours. There are so many moments when what he was able to do with the turn of a syllable or a drop in tone could shift meaning and response to another dimension. For me it always been the way he lifts the word “was” in the terrible lyric “I was the dream weaver” in “God”—which just proves again that in rock ’n’ roll lyrics are nothing and nuance is all.

In the Real Life Rock Top 10 of September 5, 2025, you mention a trip the Mekons plan to take on the Mekong River in 2027.

Is that for real? Are they really doing that?

Thank you. —JOHN CALLAHAN

I thought it was a joke too. But completely real, to the degree that anyone can count on something for 2027.

The killing of right wing, hate spewing, violence advocating MAGA bug Charlie Kirk brings to mind, for us older folk or those of us who actually take an interest in honest history, the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who was also shot to death after gaining fame as a hate spewing, violence advocating bug in his day. Unfortunately, whereas GLR is in the dustbin of history, at least for the time being, Kirk will be canonized by his fascist following. But rarely do we see justice meted out in such an efficient fashion in life to which I say good riddance. —JAMES R STACHO

A friend of mine asked today if this would be our Reichstag fire—an event used to justify suspension of civil liberties and the imposition of an authoritarian state, something already underway with ICE roundups, disappearances, deportations to the likes of Sudan, and federal takeovers of cities. But that would imply that the Trump forces had Kirk killed. This is not the way to resolve differences. We will find that the killer in this circumstance had no noble motives, just as the man who killed George Lincoln Rockwell was just an alienated member of Rockwell’s own party. I looked it up and was shocked that the killer served only eight years.

Kirk might have become president. He might have descended into obloquy after an affair or looting his own organization. When we find out who killed him, believe me, it won’t be anyone you’d like to be.

I appreciated your thoughts on and memories of the Grateful Dead. If you don’t mind, I have a couple more questions about the San Francisco Sound of the 1960s.

Off the top of my head I can think of you, Ellen Willis, and David Talbot as three writers (and no doubt there are more) who have cited Moby Grape as the best of the bands to emerge from San Francisco during the 1960s.

As someone who came upon all this about 10 years after the fact, I’d be inclined to say that Moby Grape was a band that had potential to be the greatest of all the bands that came out of SF during that era. Songs such as “8:05,” “Indifference” and “It’s a Beautiful Day Today” (and there are more) deserve to be remembered more than they are . . . and I am glad that guys such as Robert Plant don’t allow Moby Grape to be completely forgotten.

Still, if you stroll around the city’s Mission District you’ll hear Santana coming out of boomboxes. And, no, the passing of time hasn’t made them any more interesting. In North Beach there are scattered plaques and markers related to various members of Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother Holding Company. And just as Muzak used to be the required soundtrack of department stores, there are a handful of retail nostalgia shops in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood that play nothing but Grateful Dead during their hours of business.

Yet, nowhere do I see Moby Grape remembered or mentioned beyond sometimes seeing their name listed on the reproduction of an old concert poster.

Any thoughts as to why the likes of Janis, Grateful Dead, Santana, and Jefferson Airplane live on in memory and in popular culture . . . and Moby Grape seems to be all but forgotten? Also, how were Moby Grape’s live shows compared to the other bands out of San Francisco? And finally, what is it about Moby Grape that leads you (along with others) to give them the nod for being the best out the bands that made up the SF Sound? My hunch is a part of it is that Moby Grape was nowhere near as sloppy, boring, or insipid as some of the other SF bands could be when at their noodling, off-harmony worst. I’d welcome reading your thoughts about Moby Grape relative to the other SF bands.

Thank you always for this column. —BILLY INNES

When he was writing about the crowds that gathered at the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom every weekend in 1966 and 1967, the late Sandy Darlington, in the San Francisco Express-Times (I always loved the idea of a barely extant underground newspaper with the generic name of a real city daily), called them The Community. And as The Community became conscious of itself it developed rules and mores, behaviors and codes, insiders and outsiders, a sense of the raw and the cooked. Moby Grape was The Cooked. Cooked by Columbia Records and their predator manager, who didn’t understand that the way to sell—well, let’s not use a word as vulgar as sell, let’s say spread the word about—a cool, hip, revolutionary, anti-establishment San Francisco band was through near subterfuge, word of mouth, strategically placed interviews on KMPX and with Ralph Gleason or Jerry Hopkins—or Sandy Darlington. Not that these people could be bought—they couldn’t. But they were committed to helping sustain a scene that seemed like the light of a new day and they loved music and Moby Grape, as they would have heard as they played “Dark Star” at the Avalon—were a great band. Even if they didn’t come out of the folk and old-timey scenes of authentic America like Janis and the Dead and the Charlatans . . . well, that was a problem, maybe, what with Bob Mosley and Jerry Miller coming out of northwest dance bands playing Top 40 covers and wasn’t Peter Lewis so pretty he could have been Loretta Young’s son—but hey, wait, he was! And then they go and let Columbia put out every track on their first album as singles as if they were or worse wanted to be a Top 40 band—and, as the capitalist subconscious of The Community didn’t fail to integrate, none of them were hits. So they were not as cool as they should have been, or as big—to spread the word to the unenlightened, of course, not to make money—as they should have been. And then to get caught with underage girls on the night of their big record release party—that gave The Community instant license to dismiss and revoke them. To protect itself. To maintain its purity. The San Francisco new sound world turning its back on Moby Grape was like folkies booing Bob Dylan. It felt great. It felt righteous. And the band never recovered—regardless of the fine, sometimes great, always different, always unique music they went on to make, I think at least some of them believed it too. They didn’t belong. They didn’t deserve to. And you know, when you get right down to it, the name wasn’t very cool, was it?

At the time, I took some plastic cartons and put them together in such a way that they really did look like a sperm whale and painted it purple and hung it from the ceiling of the apartment we lived in. Many ceilings later it’s still there.

Dear Greil, I’m not quite as bowled over by Van Morrison’s Remembering Now as you are but I do keep coming back to it and it’s certainly one of his best efforts in years.

Two of the best movies I’ve seen in recent years were Belfast (the whole soundtrack was Morrison) and Past Lives which used Them’s “Don’t Look Back” to devastating effect. Have you seen either film and what did you think? —CRAIG ZELLER

Belfast draws great weight from its Morrison songs—until it doesn’t, until it’s too many. “Don’t Look Back” is hardly an obvious choice in Past Lives—they might have used “Here Comes the Night,” and it might have been too much, too strong. But the whole movie is about restraint, and so the song just floats, not getting in the way of the actors, not speaking for them.

All that said, for me the great Morrison movie moment comes in Breakfast on Pluto, when Cillian Murphy’s transgender young woman Kitten approaches the front door of her birth mother, who will not know her. It seems to play as if Neil Jordan could only afford about a minute of the song, but is also possible that if it played out into another it would just drown the picture. As it is it’s not enough, it leaves you feeling cheated, robbed of something you can’t name, just like Kitten. Oh, but that lift as the song begins: is anything in life going to satisfy the desire in that moment of art?