Conversations with Greil Marcus

A Critic on His Music

3 A Critic on His Music John King/1981 From OutTakes, January 16, 1981. Reprinted by permission of the author. Not many rock critics have made a name for themselves. The musical form is over twenty-five years old, yet most reviews still consist either of strings of superlatives (“the awesome vocal is propelled by thunderous guitars and a pounding bass”) or snide putdowns (“Dobrewski sings like an albino orangutan in heat”). Intelligent, vivid writing is all but unknown. It does exist, however, and Greil Marcus proves it. For twelve years he has written about the music and the world it affects; he writes regularly for everything from Rolling Stone to the Village Voice to New West, the California magazine where his “Real Life Rock” column appears. He has also published two books recently. One he edited: Stranded (1979), for which he had twenty rock critics write essays on the one album each would take to a desert island. One he wrote: Mystery Train (1975). The latter is nothing less than the finest study done of popular music’s complex role in American society. “Well, then, this is a book about rock and roll—some of it—and America. . . . It is an attempt to broaden the context in which music is heard; to deal with rock and roll not as youth culture, or counter culture, but simply as American culture.” This goal would not even occur to most rock critics, but—using Elvis Presley , The Band, Sly Stone, and Randy Newman as examples—Marcus succeeded in showing how rock ties into American life and American dreams. “Echoing through all of rock and roll is the simple demand for peace of mind and a good time. While the demand is easy to make, nothing is more complex than to try to make it real and live it out. . . . Finally, the music must provoke as well as delight, disturb as well as comfort, create as well as sus- 4 CONVERSATIONS WITH GREIL MARCUS tain. If it doesn’t, it lies, and there is only so much comfort you can take in a lie before it falls apart.” Marcus is a critic of the music, yet he is also an unabashed fan. His love of the music stretches back to 1955 [sic] when he first heard “All Shook Up” on the radio, and he is still drawn to music that, quite simply, grabs him. “Neil Young’s played the same goddamned guitar riff for fifteen years and I’m still not tired of it. . . . The rock version of ‘Hey Hey, My My’ sounds like someone is taking the amplifier apart.” Marcus was a twenty-three-year-old political science major at the University of California, Berkeley when he began writing for the underground San Francisco Express-Times. It was an era of constant rioting and student/ police confrontation, and the music on the radio—from the Beatles’ “Revolution ” to the Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers to the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man”—reflected the tumultuous atmosphere. Marcus: “Some of us always used to say that rock and roll isn’t music. They’d say what is it? We’d say ‘life itself.’” At thirty-five he still lives in Berkeley, but it’s north Berkeley now, in a tastefully furnished hillside home surrounded by oak trees. Although the critic has an almost scholarly look about him, his tastes have not softened at all; in New West he constantly surveys the New Wave and “postpunk” music coming out of England, and he is planning a book on the British music scene. “Obviously, one of the things that draws me to punk stuff is that once again the music has become politicized. I looked over at the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and in some ways that scene was very familiar to me.” John King: You’re a very powerful writer: you constantly employ strong metaphors and sharp, decisive juxtapositions. Is this ever done mainly for effect? Greil Marcus: I’ve been accused of hyperbole, but I don’t write anything that I don’t believe. Often when I’m dramatic I regret it later because it looks fake even when it isn’t. I’ll give you an example. . . . I was writing about John Lennon after he was killed, and the day that I was writing the article a friend of mine called and told me a story. The night John Lennon was shot, about 8:30 that night in...