Conversations with Greil Marcus

Interview

43 Interview Brent Brambury/1989 From CBC Radio: Brave New Waves, broadcast on November 16, 1989. Transcribed by Joe Bonomo. © Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Used by permission. Brent Brambury: It was Benny Spelman who said, “Lipstick traces on a cigarette, every memory lingers with me yet.” Let’s talk about the first time you heard the Sex Pistols and “Anarchy in the U.K.” Was that the first song you heard? Greil Marcus: It was the first Sex Pistols song I heard. It was their first record, and when I first heard it there was a lot of noise coming over from England to California, where I live, about this strange new trouble festering in London and this unlistenable, outrageous music that was coming along with it. So I went into my local record store, bought the record, took it home and played it, and basically thought That’s nice. It wasn’t until the Sex Pistols released their third single, “Pretty Vacant,” which is probably their easiest to hear, that it suddenly clicked for me and I thought, My god, there’s something wonderful here. I went back, listened to “Anarchy in the U.K.” and was just about knocked flat. So, I became a fan. BB: When you introduce this book, you say “Real mysteries cannot be solved, but they can be turned into better mysteries.” It would be misleading to say that [Lipstick Traces] was a book about music, because it clearly is not, but why does putting the Sex Pistols into a kind-of historical context make them, for you, into a better mystery? GM: Well, because what I wanted to do when I began this book was to try and make sense of why the music the Sex Pistols made, and the music that was being made by people that came after them—everyone from X-Ray Spex to the Gang of Four, and many, many others all over the world—seemed to be so much more powerful, so much more lucid—even in the clamor—than 44 CONVERSATIONS WITH GREIL MARCUS any music I’d heard before; that, to me, was a mystery. To the degree that it can be made into a better mystery: what I meant by that was, there’s a great story behind all this, there was a great wind of history, almost, blowing into that music and driving it. And that’s the story that I set out to tell. Lipstick Traces begins with music, ends with music, and in the middle there are many, many strange tales of people forgotten, people virtually unknown even in their own time, stretching across most of the century, and even beyond it. BB: Especially into the Medieval ages. Did you believe, or did you think, when you sat out to work on this mystery . . . that it would take as far afield as it ended up taking you? GM: Oh, no, not in the slightest. I thought I was going to write a nice book about punk, and I would get to write about all my favorite bands, which of course I didn’t. I got off the track very quickly, and discovered, I think, a new path, and it took me back to Dada, to the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, to Paris in the ’50s and ’60s, with groups that called themselves the Lettrist International, the Situationist International, groups that were trying to radically transform both art and society. And as you mentioned, it took me back to the Middle Ages to heretics, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Anabaptists, people who were trying to find a away to refuse, to deny and negate virtually everything that was taken for granted in their society—as did, I think, the Sex Pistols, as did the Dadaists, as did the Situationists. BB: “Negate” is kind of the key word here, because everything that you look at has this negationist entity in itself. The first chapter of the book is called “The Last Sex Pistols Concert,” so you begin at the very, very end and you show how the whole thing was sort-of built to self-destruct, that there was an inherent, encoded destruction in the Sex Pistols themselves, that this was the end of everything, and that even in the music itself, and the art, there was a sense that this was going to consume itself or it was going to “burst into flames”—to use the phrase from the...