Conversations with Greil Marcus

Making Too Much of a Song: An Interview with Greil Marcus

28 Making Too Much of a Song: An Interview with Greil Marcus Tony Fafoglia/1988 From Listen Up, December 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author. Greil Marcus is one of the original batch of American rock critics. Marcus, along with Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Dave Marsh, and Jon Landau were among the first writers to deal seriously with rock and pop culture in this country in the ’60s. Marcus’s credits are lengthy and distinguished. He authored the book Mystery Train which consisted of pro- files on such pivotal American music figures as bluesman Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, The Band, and Sly Stone. What set this book and Marcus’s approach apart from others was his ability to place the work of these artists into the broader context of American mythology and culture. He also edited the excellent collection of writings by the brilliant rock critic, the late Lester Bangs, entitled Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung published this year in paperback by Knopf. Marcus has also written for Rolling Stone and Artforum magazines. Listen Up spoke with Marcus this year about his ideas on the evolution of rock criticism, the role of the rock press and its influence on the music as well as his views on his own work. Part One Listen Up: I wanted to ask you about the evolution of rock criticism over the years, and if you have any idea as to where you think the origin of it started. Greil Marcus: Well, people were writing interesting stuff about rock and roll from just about the beginning. Ralph Gleason in San Francisco was writing serious and interesting stuff about Elvis Presley in 1955. And Colin MacInnes, who wrote Absolute Beginners, was writing about ’50s British TONY FAFOGLIA / 1988 29 pop music in ’57 and ’58, and writing quite sophisticated, interesting stuff. But people generally didn’t pay attention to that. Rock and roll fans didn’t read it, and serious tastemakers didn’t really pay attention. And I don’t think rock criticism, as something that people thought about, as something that people thought even needed a name, started until about 1965, around the time when it became clear that something utterly new in rock and roll was happening, with the Beatles, when there was just this upsurge of experimentation and creativity, a kind of attempt to draw on all kinds of sources to make a new music. I think the reason that rock criticism really took off then is that people who had been ten years old or so when rock and roll began, a little younger , a little older, were now in college, and so they were being exposed to all kinds of new books and authors and ways of thinking, a whole intellectual ferment, and they were reading Plato, and Walt Whitman, or William Burroughs, whatever they happened to be bumping up against. When you’re eighteen, when you’re nineteen, and you’re reading stuff like that, it’s absolutely overwhelming, and it seems to connect to anything, and when something else is going on that’s overwhelming, say the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, then that’s going to connect to everything that’s around. I think all of that came together. I know that’s what it was like for me as a student. I first started writing about rock and roll in about ’64 or ’65, not stuff I published. I’d sort of sneak it into the papers I was writing for classes. But it’s also about 1965 that Paul Williams in Boston, Jon Landau, also in Boston, Richard Meltzer, who was at Yale, all began to write about rock and roll with extraordinary seriousness, and also extraordinary playfulness. I assume you’re familiar with Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock, which is the perfect example of this kind of heedless undergraduate all-encompassing synthesis: it, in a very extreme way, represents what a lot of people were fooling around with at that time. Richard was simply the most ambitious and irresponsible of all of the various people who were doing that then. But there were other people right about the same time. Ed Ward who is still a very active critic, began to write for Paul Williams ’s magazine projects. Richard Goldstein was beginning to do essentially straight and responsible pop reporting for the New York Times. I’m not exactly sure when he started doing that, ’65 or ’66, but...