Conversations with Greil Marcus

Introduction

ix Introduction “There is an infinite amount of meaning about anything,” Greil Marcus said to an interviewer. “And I free associate.” For more than four decades, Marcus has explored the connections among figures, sounds, and events in culture, relating unrelated points of departure, mapping alternate histories and surprising correspondences. He is a unique and influential voice in American letters, and a collection of his interviews is overdue. Marcus was born in 1945 in San Francisco, California, and he lived there and in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Berkeley, where he settled and wrote until 2010 (he currently lives in Oakland). He received his B.A. in American studies in 1967 and, a year later, his M.A. in political science, both from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1968 he published his first piece, a review of Magic Bus: The Who on Tour, in Rolling Stone, where he became the first records editor. Renowned for his ongoing “Real Life Top Ten” column, Marcus has been a writer for a number of magazines and websites, and is the author and editor of eighteen books. His critique is egalitarian: no figure, object, or event is too high, low, celebrated, or obscure for an inquiry into the ways in which our lives can open outward, often unexpectedly. When Marcus listens to a song, reads a book, or watches a film, he hopes to be surprised , allowing cultural associations, suggestions, and evocations to materialize on the surface of his thinking, whether he’s essaying the Sex Pistols, Bill Clinton, Appalachian balladry, Elvis’s legacy, a contemporary American novel, or last week’s Top 40 hit. His work is characterized by native curiosity and precise patience borne out of respect for these as-yet-unheard correspondences , for the ways in which assumptions about a given text might prismatically move through that text to project revelation and discovery. Little of Marcus’s personal life is revealed in these wide-ranging discussions. Skeptical of the autobiographical impulse, Marcus remarked to Tony Fafoglia in 1988: x INTRODUCTION I think that if you want to use the word “I” in a piece, you have to earn the right. I don’t mean that you have to be around a long time. I mean that in terms of the writing of a given piece, you have to justify leaping out, and you have to see that somehow the authority is backed up. You can’t just assume that the reader ought to give a shit about you or anyone else. Two years later, in a conversation not included in this book, Marcus was struck by interviewer Lorenzo Buj’s interpretation of a line in Lipstick Traces : “Lost children seek their fathers, and fathers seek their lost children, but nobody really looks like anybody else. So all, fixed on the wrong faces, pass each other by.” Buj pointedly asked Marcus if he is one of these sons or fathers. Marcus replied, “Well, to explain that passage I’d have to get very personal,” and I’m not going to do it. That is one of those things that any writer stumbles on. That’s a line I wrote, and I wrote it because it made sense of what I was trying to explain and describe at that point in the book, with no personal motive for me at all. . . . And it was only later, rereading that passage that I realized that was probably the most autobiographical or confessional line in the entire book. A decade and a half later, Marcus remarked to Oliver Hall, “I just have a very strong sense of privacy. There are things about my family background that I find actually interesting, and sometimes I talk about them, but I don’t think my life itself is very interesting.” Marcus sifts these “things” in his important 2008 memoir “Tied to History ,” revealing a complex past as the source of lifelong critical passions. “I’m perfectly aware that there is this theme running through all of my work, and I know what its sources are,” he acknowledged to Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes in 2010. “I know what its personal neurotic sources are, and I’ve even written about that recently. I took me a long time. I didn’t think that it was anyone’s business or that anyone would care. But then there was an occasion to do it, so I did it.” The occasion was “Telling Childhood: New Stories about...