I first read Greil Marcus’s work in Rolling Stone in 1969. Over the years, I’ve read Marcus’s books on Bob Dylan–Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, and Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010–and his history of rock & roll, Mystery Train. Over decades, Marcus wrote a column about Rock Music, novels, and movies. Those columns have been collected in two thick volumes and I just finished reading them.
The best way to describe these books is to give you some samples of what you would find amid the 1000+ reviews of albums, the hundreds of book reviews, and dozens of movie reviews.
Madona, “Blond Ambition Tour” (Oakland Coliseum Aren, May 20, 1990) It doesn’t matter how cooly are: this great production showcases gestures as shocking now as any Elvis Presley put on televisions in 1956 and its a prissy myth that only those who disapproved of Elvis were shocked. Here, the interracial hermaphroditic porn of “Like a Virgin: was merely a warm up for the blasphemies of “Like a Prayer,” with as a dance raised the must to the level of Foreigner’s “I want to Know What Love Is,” cut in with Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” “This,” Madonna said on May 31 in Toronto, when police arrived with an order that she alter her performance, “is certainly a cause for which I am willing to be arrested.” (p. 63)
Nick Hornby, How to Be Good (Riverhead) The narrator tells her husband of 20 years she’s “been seeing someone.” “I’m presuming that you’ll be moving out in the next couple days,” he says.
“The affair’s over, she says. “As of this minute.”
“I don’t know about that,” he says. “But I do know that no one asks Elvis Presley to play for nothing.” (p. 262)
The same method and format continues in More Real Life Rock:
William Bell, This is Where I Live (Stax) Starting with “You Don’t Miss Your Water” in 1961, Bell had many hits on the R&B charts with Stax into the ’70s. This feels like the album he should have made in 1967 but wasn’t ready for: with every smoothly delivered lesson about satisfaction and pain, you sense how hard each one was to learn, and how finding the right words–the right tone to make what you have to say mean anything–is much harder. With the most delicate, modes, contemplative soul guitar: in 1967 it would have been Curtis Mayfield, but it’s producer John Leventhal, who does the same for Rosanne Cash. Can’t Leventhal have Cash and Bell make their next album together? (p. 80-81)
Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel (1953, republished by NYRB Classics, 2016) Loves on the run after the big score, with a line a many named Peter Greenbaum could have written: “I was too stinking rich and bloody and scared to listen to my real name.” (p. 261)
Bruce Springsteen, Letter to You (Columbia) An eighties or even seventies Springsteen album with a decades-older self-questioning voice–the best of both worlds. (p. 288)
I’ve enjoyed all of Greil Marcus’s works that I’ve read. If you want to check out the running commentary in the Rock world from 1986 to 2021, here’s where you’ll find out what was going on. GRADE: A (for both)
TABLE OF CONTENTS: Real Life Rock: The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986-2014
Introduction — ix
The Village Voice, 1986-1990 — 1
Artforum, 1990-1998 — 69
Salon, 1999-2003 — 165
City Pages, 2003-2004 — 341
Interview, 2006-2007 — 377
The Believer, 2008-2014 — 393
Acknowledgements — 523
Credits — 525
Index of Names and Titles — 527
TABLE OF CONTENTS: More Real Life Rock: The Wilderness Years, 2014-2021
Introduction ix
Barnes & Noble Review, 2014-2016 1
Pitchfork, 2016-2017 67
Village Voice, 2017-2018 131
Rollingstone.com, 2018-2019 181
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019-2021 227
Acknowledgments 309
Index of Names and Titles 311
