Clear View, Session 2: Greil Marcus
by Francesco Tenaglia
Amongst all writers, those who devoted themselves to the muse of music, Euterpe — in truth, all the sisters contributed, in different ways, yet we will stick to the traditional job descriptions — are the most difficult to place. Uncomfortable, like the pal who ended their evening sitting just behind the taxi driver on your way back home. Maybe it’s because music, in some ways, is an initiation ritual. An introduction to loves, loss, anger, consumption. More than any other art, its nature is an industrial entertainment initially designed for an emerging consumer demographic — we’re talking of recorded popular music. Its adepts sometimes forget about the gigs with age, discover grown-up leisure pursuits like gardening and battlefields like the culture wars, while some remain trapped in a melancholy vapid cult of youth insignia. But pop, too, has changed in time: it has been the engine of social changes that flew at a warp speed. It was the Pied Piper that — those who had ears to hear — followed into strange worlds and a thousand planes. It put on a Sunday dress, it spat on the audience, it stole the thunder from Hollywood stars.
The great writers of popular music spoke of the 20th century as no one else had been allowed to: Simon Reynolds’s dense and captivating analysis, Ian Penman’s mighty exactitude, Lester Bangs’ promethean riotous vitalism, Jon Savage’s chronicle of Victorian ghosts roaming the gutters of 1960s London, Paul Morley’s hyperbolic nonchalance (just mentioning some big shots, without venturing in the academia).
And then there’s Greil Marcus: he changed everything.
Marcus majored in American Studies and Political Science at Berkeley. He wrote — divinely — for Rolling Stone, Creem, Village Voice, Artforum. His first book, Mystery Train (1975) is one of the finest things ever written on American music, but it is Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989) that consecrates him internationally: it is an history of countercultures read through the avant-garde movements of the 20th century. Dadaism, Lettrism, Situationism. A titanic enterprise, unprecedented. And it opened the floodgates. Marcus has published dozens of books up to the last one: Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (2022), a book dedicated to the singer-songwriter on whom he perhaps spills the most ink and (so tells me the editor) inspired the very idea of Berfrois. As the format of this column requires, I ask Marcus for an image to start the conversation with and he sends me the collage you see up there; he made it himself many years ago.
Francesco Tenaglia
My first question is, predictably, what is the picture and why did you pick that?
Greil Marcus
Well, it was an old concert poster. It was not old when I was working on it. And I just followed the basic design but I overlaid my own Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan collage. I was so caught up in that music and so much other music at the time that I just had to find some way to express that. it had not occurred to me to write about it. This was lots of fun. I spent many hours constructing this piece and I am just shocked that I still have it, that it did not deteriorate after all these years because it is going back to 1966. I played around with it and I cut stuff out of magazines, and just had a lot of fun with it. And that was my first attempt at rock criticism, I guess.
Tenaglia
Interesting. The shape may lead one in assuming that the poster is promoting a fictional festival, am I wrong?
Marcus
Well, actually it was not a festival poster. It was a poster for the first rock and roll dance in Oakland at that time hence the headline: “The New World has hit Oakland”. And Oakland at that time was thought of as a complete backwater. A place that did not even want say its name. When the Warriors, the local basketball team, moved from Philadelphia to Oakland, refused to call itself the Oakland Warriors. They called themselves the Golden State Warriors so, they would not have to reference the city. Oakland was kind of an embarrassment. So here in this poster trumpeting, we are really catching up: we were really becoming part of a big new thing. “The New World has hit Oakland”. I just thought that was so funny. And so I fooled around with that poster. I have no recollection of what is underneath my design. I just kept that headline as part of my collage.
Tenaglia
And this New World it refers to, would that be? 60’s psychedelia or the British invasion?
Marcus
That would be the San Francisco sound so the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish — who were, in fact, a Berkeley band, right next to Oakland. That is what it meant: It meant we are hip too, or at least we are trying to be hip. That is what that message says.
Tenaglia
It made absolute sense to me that you have proposed this image as a starting point for this conversation because, in a way—I am not sure if it started out as to be the beginning of an artistic practice—there are a lot of bands that stayed with you in your writing.
Marcus
Sure. Well, I made another one at the same time, which got somewhat damaged over the years, some pieces fell off. But it was done in the same manner but it was all about the Beatles song, A Day In The Life which was being played on San Francisco radio stations long before the Sergeant Pepper album was released in 1967. So that was the second one I did in early 1967. So this other one is from probably late 1966. Like I said, I cannot believe I still have them, that they did not deteriorate. But somehow, I kept them. And then a couple of years ago I said, I better get these framed or they are really going to fall apart. So I did that.
Tenaglia
They document a time when your strong interest in music was clear. What was — if there was — the moment that brought you closer to rock?
Marcus
Well, when I was 10 years old, I was a huge Elvis fan. And then Chuck Barry, and then Little Richard, and then the Monotones and everybody else so I was a constant top 40 listener like everybody else I knew. In terms of what was going on in San Francisco in 1965, ’66, I do not remember any one particular incident but at a certain point my wife and I, we were not married yet, began to go to the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium every weekend to see whoever we wanted to see. I remember in early 1967, The Doors would play in San Francisco almost every weekend and we would go to see them every weekend. So, it was just something to be part of and it was tremendous fun. And it was full of novelty. You never knew what you were going to see or what you were going to hear or who you were going to run into, what was going to happen. And it was part of life. And the radio was still part of all that too. But the radio in early 1967 was beginning to change. There was a foreign language station in San Francisco, an FM Station, which in those days was a dimension of radio that nobody listened to. Maybe there would be some obscure news station on it or classical music station or a foreign language station where they would give an hour of programming to maybe 20 different languages in the course of the day, whether it was Tagalog or Senegalese or Spanish, German, Swahili, anything you can name.
And one DJ came to the station and said, “I would like to do a rock and roll program”. And they said, “Well, we got a slot starting at midnight to 2:00 AM, you can have that”. So he started playing all these wonderful records that you never heard on the radio at midnight. And word began to get around, people would stay up until midnight and then turn on the radio and listen for the next two hours, which then became four hours and then became six hours. And then essentially, with other DJs, took over the entire station. And mostly we were listening to records we already had. In other words, we could listen to the same music in our own apartments if we wanted to, but the thrill of hearing this kind of secret music in public, on the public airways, was very, very special. And it made you feel as if you were part of something bigger. So that is why people would stay up late at night to listen to music that they could play themselves if they wanted to. And this is before computers, before YouTube, before any form of internet. Now of course, you just go to your computer or your phone, you can play anything you can think of and it will be right there. But nothing like that was true then.
Tenaglia
I think the main change with the radio is the idea of an implicit shared experience. you may have assumed that there were a—be it more or less large—chunk of your social circle, keens or people who were geographically close who were being exposed to the same stuff and the same time.
Marcus
People would have listening parties. They would invite their friends over. So instead of one or two people listening to radio, it might be seven or eight or nine.
Tenaglia
Another thing I thought of when I saw your art piece was it was a collage, I am not sure if there’s a direct relation, but the technique played a strong role in historical European Avant-gardes of the 20th century—dada and surrealism—which play a huge part of your book Lipstick Traces
Marcus
Sure. I did not know about any of that then. But Dada had seeped through culture. Dada art forms had just become part of the language without anybody knowing where the language came from. So that it became almost instinctive. If you wanted to do something, this seemed like the natural way to do it. Without any notion that it had a history, that it had a beginning, that it was not always there.
Tenaglia
Yes, other music genres were related to art movements—you can trace psychedelic visuals to Art Nouveau—but punk was probably way more explicit, also because of the, widely known, relations between art schools and scenes.
Marcus
And a lot of that had to do with punk flyers, the little sheets, photocopied sheets, that would be put up on telephone poles or hoardings or pasted onto other billboards, announcing a punk show. And those pieces were always collages. They would take a face, they would put the face on the flyer, then they would put a new design on top of the face, or there might be something coming out of somebody’s ears or a hat from a different era that did not really fit, would go onto the top of the head or a thousand other things. And a lot of these were made by art students. Were made by people who had gone to art school and they knew about dada specifically, and they knew about surrealism specifically. So they were very self-consciously imitating or following those forms. As opposed to what I was doing and so many other people were doing 10 years before.
Tenaglia
In Lipstick Traces, you create connections between punk and a multiplicity of cultural phenomena, relationships that go back to the Middle Ages, but certainly one of the crucial points is the connection between Situationism—considered by many to be the last properly understood avant-garde movement of the 20th century— and the cultural climate of the movement. In this sense punk would have been the bearer and continuation of early 20th century forms of modernism.
Marcus
Sure. I still think that. I think it is just true. I was hardly the first person to make the kind of connections that I make in Lipstick Traces, but I think I followed them up more than most other people did. And that was simply because when I first heard the Sex Pistols and the bands that appeared in their wake, what struck me overwhelmingly was that there was something different. This is not something that the history of rock and roll, with which I was very familiar, prepared me for. You could not trace a straight line back and say, “Well, this comes from this and that came from that”. No, this seemed to come out of some other place. And I did not know what that place was. So I began to try and figure it out. And my starting point was simply that the Sex Pistols music and the design of the sleeves of their 45s somehow reminded me of May ’68 in Paris. I did not know why, but it did. There was no question. So I just began to poke around in the dark. And poking around in the dark opened up many, many different roots that led to the book I wrote. Spent nine years following those roots and writing the book.
Tenaglia
It took a lot of research I imagine.
Marcus
Well, the first book was Mystery Train, it came out in 1975 and it was very, very difficult to write for me. It was a very hard and miserable time writing that book. I had never written a book before. I had no idea how to do it or what was supposed to go in it or what would fit or what would not. Would make sense, what would not. And it was really a horrible experience. I know the book does not read that way, but that is what it was. And when I finished that book, I said, okay, this is it. I do not want to think about another book. I do not know if I ever want to write another book. It is just too miserable. And after about five years of writing reviews and features, working for Rolling Stone, writing for Creem. Writing longer pieces, even up to 5,000 words, began to feel very constricted and frustrating. And a friend said to me, “Look, it is time for you to write another book. That is clearly why you are uncomfortable, why you are not satisfied with what you are doing”. And I said, oh, okay. That is a good idea. I wonder what I should write a book about without having a clue. Without having any notion of what that would be. Little did I know, Mystery Train took two years to write. I never imagined that I would be embarking on a project that would take nine years. Took three years of doing the basic research, going to Europe, finding archives, talking to people who have been involved in different movements. Going to Zurich, going to Amsterdam, going to Paris, making a lot of different trips. And after three years I started to write again with no idea where I was going. The first thing I wrote was a chapter that now appears in the middle of the book, not at the beginning. And then it was six years of flailing around and trying to bring this material into focus, which for better or worse, I finally did. And after that, I actually had enormous fun writing that book. Was not miserable, it is not a terrible experience. It was just fun all the way through. So I was ready to, “Okay, let us do it again. Let us do more quickly”. More, more, more. So I have been publishing. Those were my first two books. There were 14 years between them. Lipstick Traces came out in 1989. I did another book in 1991, another in 1993, another 1995, another 1997. And then I have just been off to the races ever since then.
Tenaglia
A vey long research in fact. Perhaps, now it would take less time. What do you think, as a music writer, of the internet meta-archive and how it has changed the way we consume musical phenomena?
Marcus
The one thing is that there is no longer such a thing as an obscure reference, or there barely is. In other words, if I make reference to Uncle Dave Macon in something I write, and I do it in a way that sounds interesting, that sounds enticing, somebody might want to pursue. But the person who is reading has never heard of Uncle Dave Macon, has no idea who this is. That person can then go to their phone, write in Uncle Dave Macon, immediately hear a song by him from 1924, and maybe get a little information as to who that person was. And if they are interested, they can continue and get a lot more information and then go back to what I wrote and see if it makes sense. In other words, there is this instant world Library, Library of Alexandria at anybody’s fingertips. I think that is a absolutely wonderful thing. I will never forget taking a walk with a friend of mine in Minneapolis about 10 years ago. We were walking around a lake and we are talking about this and we are talking about that. And I told him about a song that was just full of mystery, that nobody knew anything about the person who had recorded it. Since then, research has been done, some things have been discovered, but certainly not the whole story. All there was was a name which turned out to be a somewhat false name. But there was no information whatsoever about who the person who made this recording was. And the recording is unbelievably charismatic. I mean, you hear it, you say, what is this? What is going on? Where is this from? Who is this person? How could she be saying what she is saying? And what is she saying? Is it this or is it that? The record is its own detective story without an ending? So I am telling my friend about this record from 1930 by a woman named Geeshie Wiley, and it is a song called Last Kind Words Blues. And after I talked to him about it for maybe five, ten minutes like I am doing now, I simply pulled out my phone and played it for him as we were walking around the lake. And so after I gave him this buildup, he could hear what I was talking about. He had a context in which to respond that allowed him to hear maybe more than he would have heard if it just came out of nowhere. Or, though, it might have had even more power if it just came out of nowhere. I think that is great. I think that is wonderful. That expands the conversation. That allows anybody to talk to anyone about anything. I think that is wonderful.
Tenaglia
You’re right, maybe ten years ago I feared a phenomenon of stagnation, the fact that people had begun to be interested in old things even just because they were old. Partly the phenomenon mentioned by the critic Simon Reynolds in his text Retromania. Just last year we had a conversation on similar topics, starting with the Beatles documentary that had just come out.
Marcus
The Get Back series?
Tenaglia
Exactly. A canonical figure who figures a lot in your even more recent writing is Bob Dylan. An enormously popular and at the same time enigmatic character. Why are you so interested? What is the meaning of his work for you?
Marcus
Well, I do not know what the significance of Bob Dylan is. I certainly do not have any idea of what the meaning of Bob Dylan is, if he has a meaning anymore than anybody else has a meaning. If somebody said, what is the meaning of Francesco? What is the meaning of Greil Marcus? I do not know. I do not have a meaning. I am just a person doing this and not doing that but I never get tired of listening to Bob Dylan. I never get tired of living in his songs. Whether they are old or whether they are new. Does not mean I like everything. Of course I do not. No persons would like everything anybody else does. But I am fascinated by the way his songs work and I love to listen to them. I think he is a wonderful singer, always has been. I think there are catacombs inside his voice. There is never a single signifier at work in a song. There are always many. There are always many shades of voice. There are insinuations rather than arguments going on in his music so that it can be infinitely fascinating if you are drawn to it. And as a writer, my response to something that fascinates me is to write about it. Not to solve a puzzle, not to solve a mystery, but simply to make the story present and maybe bigger or wider. To live in the world of the songs. That is all I am doing in the writing that I do. People often ask writers, why did you write this book? What is the message? What is the purpose? What good were you trying to do for the world? Or what were you trying to explain? Or who were you attempting to reach? The truth is that writers write about what they want to write about. What interests them. And they may create a context in which this seems to have some greater meaning or purpose but, really, you write about what you care about.
Che Guevara used to say that the only real reason for revolution, the only thing that drew people to become revolutionaries was love. And I think what he meant by that was love for life. He wanted to live more fully than he had as a bourgeois dentist. And so he joined the Cuban Revolution and he lived his whole life as a revolutionary because he wanted his life to be alive in every moment down to his fingertips. I think that is what he meant. And writers are very similar. They do not write to make the world a better place. They write to make the world even more interesting than it seems to be. And they do that by pursuing their own fascinations.
Tenaglia
What interests me very much about Dylan is the way in which—via the controversies about the betrayal of acoustic folk music—he is one of the characters who has raised the ideas of “authenticity” of artistic creation globally to a mainstream and global level.
Marcus
Well, if music is a museum and all you aspire to is to become an exhibit in that museum, but obviously you have to replicate what is already in the museum. If it is a museum full of coats of armor, then you have to go out and get a really great coat of armor made and walk around in it and say, look, I am a knight. I look like a knight. I act like a knight. So I am an authentic knight, even though knights disappeared hundreds and hundreds of years ago. On the other hand, authenticity really means doing what seems real to you, what impels you in the most fierce and vehement way possible. Leaving nothing out. So people did not say but they could have said, when Bob Dylan switched from acoustic folk music to rock and roll with a band. People, they said, oh, he is abandoning folk music. He is turning his back on Woody Guthrie. He just wants to be rich and famous as a rock and roll star. People did not say, well, he is just a fake Elvis. He is just pretending to be Little Richard. This is not authentic at all. Nobody said that because the idea of authenticity in rock and roll was completely meaningless. Nobody ever thought in those terms. That is part of the folk ideology. Has nothing to do with rock and roll. There was no sense of, you have to be this and you have to be that. Nobody said The Beach Boys were an inauthentic rock and roll band because they were middle class and white and from Los Angeles as opposed to being poor and from Mississippi. There was not an authenticity test, but there could have been. It is a meaningless thing to talk about. When Bob Dylan is singing songs that are associated with Frank Sinatra. Is he an inauthentic Sinatra? Of course not. Because he is not trying to be Sinatra. He could not possibly be Sinatra. He could not sing like Frank Sinatra more than I could. But the song is something else. The song is something that exists on its own terms, and if you are drawn to it, as a writer, your impulse is to write about it. As a singer, your impulse is to sing it, to see if you can. See if you can bring something to the song that has not been there before.
About the Interviewee
Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic.
About the Interviewer
Francesco Tenaglia is a writer, curator and professor that lives and works in Berlin and Milan.
Post Image
A screenshot from the video to The Beatles – A Day In The Life. Reproduced under fair use.
