Sunday, Oct 12, 2014 4:30 PM UTC
“When that cop killed Michael Brown, and when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, they were killing Barack Obama”
Greil Marcus explains why the sick new American racism is only getting worse, and explores his brilliant new book
Topics: Books, Barack Obama, George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin, The Beatles, Van Morrison, Joy Division, Lipstick Traces, Editor's Picks, Etta James, Elvis Presley, The Handsome Family, Bob Dylan, Race, Greil Marcus, Entertainment News, Politics News
Greil Marcus is a critic of music and culture who has helped redefine the job description. Known for his books like “Mystery Train,” “Lipstick Traces” and “The Old, Weird America” (on Dylan’s “Basement Tapes”), he’s forged a personal brand of criticism that blends traditional close reading with the styles of Leslie Fiedler and Pauline Kael, as well as deep, almost free-associative mediations on American history.
His new “The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs” — as eccentric as any of his previous books — has drawn him more attention than anything he’s written in a decade. These songs — whether by Joy Division, The Flamin’ Groovies, Etta James — tell their stories through the context they summon around them.
Marcus can be a bit like Van Morrison, the subject of his book “When That Rough God Goes Riding”: sometimes portentous and devoid of humor, but often lyrical and sometimes transcendent. “The History” is Marcus at his best.
We spoke to the Berkeley-based Marcus from New York, where he is teaching this term. (Disclosure: Marcus and I are both published by Yale University Press.)
Let’s talk about “The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” It’s an understatement to say that, for you, a song is not just a number that was recorded once and that it belongs only to the first musician to perform it. What’s a song to you, and how does that work in this history of yours?
Well, I guess the way it works, in this book anyway, is that a song becomes a thing in itself. Yes, it’s written by someone, it’s performed by a person or a group and it goes into the world with various names attached to it. But it makes itself felt as a thing in itself, as its own object, as its own subject. People don’t necessarily know or care, and there’s no reason why they should, who the people making this record are, what their hopes and fears are, what their motives were, what situation in life they were in when the song came out of them, whether they were in a point in their career where they desperately needed a hit, or simply a matter of building on previous success, or if somebody was in rehab, or going through a divorce, or you know, had just signed up for a program to become an astronaut. People don’t know and don’t need to know any of that. That’s irrelevant.
The song becomes a kind of repeating event out there in the world, and people make of it what they will. And often the people who are listening are other musicians. Or maybe they’re not musicians yet or singers yet, but they want to be. And maybe it’s this song or any other song that’s made them want to do that. And maybe at some point in their lives that will happen. But in any case, musicians will take up these songs that are out there in the world and they’ll try to play them. They’ll feel that this song is not finished, this song, this story told isn’t complete, that they have something to add to this story, they want to feel, they want to understand and experience what it would be like to sing this song as if it were their own, as if they had thought of it, as if it comes out of them completely new.
In a lot of ways, that’s the story that this book traces again and again. It takes a song and then it look for, stumbles on or just reaches forward to other people who have taken up this song themselves, whether it’s the Five Satins with “In the Still of the Night” in 1956, and then this forgotten group of white guys from the University of Texas a year or two later, two or three years later, when their band, which came very close to having a national hit and then was completely and instantly forgotten, is on its last leg, they’re about to break up, and they’re rehearsing one afternoon. They’re just singing all the songs that they use to warm up on, and it just so happens they’re taping it when the band breaks up and they leave. The record company comes into possession of this rehearsal tape and then many, many decades later, an archivist is putting together “The Domino Records Story,” the Austin, Texas, local label that this group called The Slades recorded for.
And this archivist stumbles across this tape and he decides to put it out, he decides to put it on the “The Domino Records Story” CD, and there it is again in the world. And it does add something new and completely different and kind of shocking to the song as everybody all around the world knows it, “In the Still of the Night.” That’s just one story.
And I think you get at the way a song changes if it’s taken up in a film or a novel, in the way that we can never hear Louis Armstrong’s “Black and Blue” in the same way because of the way it’s used in “The Invisible Man.”
Right. Right. And whether it’s “Money” with Barrett Strong, and then the Beatles four years later, whether it’s Buddy Holly’s “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” that he records singing into a tape recorded in his apartment in Greenwich Village in January of 1959, and he’s dead a month later. And the Beatles stumbling on this song as they’re about to break up, as their story’s coming to an end during the “Let It Be” sessions, and giving it a sense of loss and tragedy that it never had before. And giving themselves a sense of loss and tragedy that their music never had before.
I guess, without necessarily conceptualizing it, what I was looking for in this book was a way to let various songs tell their own stories, and then to argue or just to say … and this is what rock ‘n’ roll is. This is what rock ‘n’ roll is about. It’s songs moving through time, sweeping up all sorts of people, and each song making its own history, which in itself contains the whole history that rock ‘n’ roll has made. In other words, ignoring chronology, ignoring genre, ignoring iconic performers. It’s not about that at all.
So you mentioned chronology, genre, some other things. The conventional way to tell this story, if the story is the history of rock ‘n’ roll, the conventional way to do it would be to start with the Sun Sessions, do a Chuck Berry song, do a Lennon-McCartney song, and so on. Why did that seem to you insufficient or maybe even a false way to tell this tale?
I mean, there are two reasons. I don’t know how long ago it was, but it was maybe in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when I was thinking about this stuff. And a phrase popped into my mind, that what rock ‘n’ roll is — really what any cultural form is — but I think particularly rock ‘n’ roll, and I’m just talking about all pop music from the late ’40s to the present that has any verve or edge or excitement or depth at all. Whatever shape it takes. Any art form. But with rock ‘n’ roll, more immediacy, more sense of the moment, more sense that whatever you’re hearing could disappear at any time, because it’s not something with a grand tradition behind it. It doesn’t have scholarly industries propping it up; it’s on its own as an art form. Put it that way.
Rock ‘n’ roll is a continuum of associations. It’s a conversation going on between records and people and people and songs, wherever they’re performed, wherever they’re heard. It’s a continuum of associations, it’s not a chronology, it’s not a conventional history, it’s not a this, then and that, it’s not a story of progress, you know, some kind of improvement, some kind of aesthetic development. It’s not that at all. So that’s one side of why I didn’t write the kind of conventional book that you’re talking about.
The other reason is, it’s been done. It’s been done over and over again. It’s been done really well by, say, Nik Cohn or Jim Miller with the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. And it’s been done really terribly. But whatever it is, we all know the story. We all know the narrative. It’s a master narrative, it’s been chiseled in stone. Who in their right mind would want to do that again?
Fair enough.
Plus, I, just personally, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve already written a lot about a lot of people. And I’ve done as well as I can. What was I supposed to do, go back and write about Elvis and pretend that like all the books on Elvis I’ve written didn’t happen, and now fake it and try to write something different? But I can’t imagine why anybody would want to do that at this …
Mmhmm. I’m not sure who could pull it off, either.
All of the songs in your book are unexpected and some are genuinely obscure. Six of them originate in the period from ’56 to ’60. You work them through time, forward and back, so they’re not limited to the late ’50s. But I’m wondering why do these ten songs seem like the right ones, and why does the late ’50s produce so many of the songs you want to concentrate on, besides the obvious fact that it’s beginning of rock ‘n’ roll history?
Well, for me, the book just doesn’t feel that way. I mean, I understand how it would seem that way to somebody opening it up. But for example, one of the songs you’re talking about is “All I Could Do Was Cry” by Etta James from 1960. So that’s one of the six songs from 1956 to 1960. But I came to that song … you know, I must have heard it when it came out or in the years following. But it never made any impact on me. I never registered it, never thought about it, didn’t own it. That song came to me because of Beyoncé’s performance of it in “Cadillac Records” in 2008.
So it’s the appearance of this … you know, for me … I read a wonderful piece the other day in The Pitchfork Review; it’s this great new magazine that the Pitchfork music site has started putting out. And it’s about a guy and how when he was 15 years old he hated “Astral Weeks,” and now he’s 30, he’s loves it, and why he hated it, and why he loves it now, and it’s a wonderful little essay. But one of the things he says is really interesting. He says, “This album came out in 1968.” He said, “That is an abstract concept to me. I was born in 1987. I can ask my parents about 1968, but it’s not a marker in my life.” He said, “As far as I’m concerned, ‘Astral Weeks’ came out when I first heard it. It came out in 1998, along with …” and he named five or six other things that either did really come out 1998 or that he just that he first heard there. And I thought, that’s the right way to look at it.
And so, in a way, for me, “All I Could Do Was Cry” came out in 2008, not in 1960. Then I go back and discover the song, discover how great it is, discover the stories it tells, but without Beyoncé’s version ever shrinking because of that, ever becoming less of an event. So I just don’t … I know it’s there, but it doesn’t feel like that to me.
One of the songs is the Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is To Love Him,” which came out in 1958. There’s no way on earth I ever would have written about that song. It’s really terrible. It’s embarrassing. I never would have written about that at all, except that in early 2013 while I was just beginning to write this book, I heard Amy Winehouse’s version on the radio. She was already dead, she had recorded this in a disc-jockey studio in 2006. And I just heard it. And I heard what she did with it, and I heard the way she opened the song up as if she had spent years studying it. Years with the idea there’s something more here than anyone’s ever heard. I know it’s there, I can’t find it, I’m gonna keep singing it, I’m gonna keep rearranging it, until the song gives up its soul. And she did that. And I just said, “I have to write about this.”
It wasn’t a question of this as opposed to something else, or “Is this really the song that I should include in this book?” A lot of the songs in this book just appeared. Just made their way into it while I was working. There were a couple of songs, the first two that I write about, that from the time I came up with the idea of the book, I always knew I would include. They had to be there, and they had to be first. And after that, it was all … I didn’t know what would be in the book. Didn’t have a clue.
You use the phrase, for what I think is your second book, “Lipstick Traces,” you call it a “secret history.” That phrase has caught on and been used by other people since. I’m wondering A) where you got the phrase and B) if you see that as what you do in general as a writer on music and culture.
Well, the phrase “secret history” has a long history. It refers to spycraft. There are lots of books, you know, “The Secret History of World War II,” which means the espionage war. Or the secret history of Mata Hari, her life as a spy, that sort of thing. So it’s a very conventional term in that way. But I got the title … or I got the phrase, the idea, whatever you want to call it, from a novel published in the late ’70s by Robie Macauley, who was an editor, I believe, at Random House, but I think this was his only novel. He died not long after it was published. And it was called “A Secret History of Time to Come.” And it is a novel about the future, about what’s left after a nuclear war, precipitated by a race war in the United States, wipes out civilization and what’s left. And so “A Secret History of Time to Come.”
And that phrase was so beautiful to me. It was so perfectly balanced, it was poetry and it just stayed with me. So I stole it. And as far as what I do, I know why I do what I do. I know why I’m drawn to framing things as mysteries, as unfinished stories, as stories that need to be completed, as dead people who need to rise up and live their lives. I know why I’m interested in what seems to be hidden or unspoken or occult. It’s my own story, which there’s no need to tell. But I’ve always felt that neuroses aren’t necessarily a bad thing if they don’t completely rule your life. A neurosis, an obsession, whatever you want to call it, is a source of energy, it’s a source of intellectual curiosity. And if you’re aware of what your neuroses are, what the hell? Ride them. Make them into horses and get on them and let them take you where you want to go or where they want to take you.
People … it’s funny, people used to make fun of Pauline Kael because all of her book titles seem to have something to do with sex. You know, “I Lost It At the Movies” or “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and on and on and on from there. And I’m sure once that got going, Pauline had tremendous fun tweaking people by never giving up on that. But this book has a very nice, blank title. So there’s nothing mysterious there.
