The Greil Marcus Stranded Book

It's ILM: The Book!

durned if I know why. at least Meltzer says as much his "Whore" compilation, he acts like Dean and Marcus shut him out or something. and yeah, one song I like on "Highway 61" besides the hit is the one about riding a mail train, that is a very good one, and Marcus's discography at the end did turn me on to some good records, like Buster Brown's "Is You Is or Ain't My Baby" and several others I have enjoyed throughout the years.

Are there any writers as young as me, Kogan, Allred, George Smith, Metal Mike Saunders, etc, in Stranded? (Tom Carson, maybe; anybody else?) If not, I'm even more pissed that Phil is limiting his new book to people who are (or who he thought were) under 40. (Though the fact that Kogan, Allred, Smith, Saunders, and I are so dependent on that rockist old Stranded canon for our ideas and tastes, unlike all those independently minded kids in their 20s and 30s, may well be a valid reason. Oh wait..)

Fuck, I should edit a book with ONLY writers between 40 and 55 in it. It just might blow the other two out of the water. (Not that I have time, or that I would've had time to contribute to Phil's book had I been invited. And I'm looking forward to it anyway, and it looks like it could be great. But the "over 40 = brains turned to cottage cheese" delusion is still worth complaining about. So I did.)

The appendix ROCKS. Marcus' blurbs on Bryan Ferry, "It Don't Come Easy," and Hunky Dory made me seek them out.

FWIW Tom Carson was by far the youngest writer in the original Stranded, unless Debra Rae Cohen is in there (I forget).

Very true. I was talking to another critic (one slightly older than Chuck, I think) about exactly that when I first got the thumbs-up for the book - he said "his generation" had gotten hosed w/r/t anthologies, etc. And he's right.

There goes Matos again, standing up for his surrogate daddies, The Dean and Greil and dissing Meltzer in the process - par for the course, right?

Matos is your head stuck so far up their asses that you're denying that someone like Meltzer was capable of making them nervous when it came to including him in Stranded? Read Whore again (or maybe for the first time) and see for yourself.

Because I figured that in the 25-26 years since Stranded, music had changed in a whole bunch of maybe-superficial-to-serious-fulltime-critics-but-vastly-more-important-to-the-record-buying-public ways (the rise of hip-hop being only the biggest example), and I wanted to get essays from writers young enough to have been formed in that crucible without having any experience of a world when things sounded different. Somebody over 40 had to put hip-hop into the context of what they knew already, and would likely view it as something Other or tangential to what they loved; somebody under 40 was likely to hear hip-hop as something that had always been there (because if we're to assume that one starts seriously listening to music around age 12 - which would be 1977 at the earliest, and probably sometime more like 1985-86 since most of my contributors are actually in their early 30s, like me - it would have been), or hear it as culturally dominant and thus filter other stuff through hip-hop rather than filtering hip-hop through rock. Am I making any sense? Probably not.

your assumptions are cock-eyed nonsense.

for straters: somebody over 40 who's been listening to hip-hop since its birth might have some perspective on its development and even be able to fit the music into a larger historical context, as opposed to a younger somebody who hears hip-hop as part of the pop landscape, i.e. takes its revolutionary impact for granted.

xp

couple xxxx posts in there

if there's any positive mention of disco in the marcus anthology I'll eat your copy of it while listening to Boney M.

The least rockist major music critic ever may well be Michael Freedberg of the Boston Phoenix, who I believe is in his mid 60s by now.

Well, hip-hop was just one big obvious example.

>as w/all generalizations it's sorta limiting

Of course.

Bear in mind I also had to get money from a publisher for this. And "A New Generation Speaks Its Mind/Fuck You, Dad" is a very good marketing hook when sequelizing an existing anthology, particularly one viewed as canonical.

Not to defend the poster who was being obnox-o to Michaelangelo,* but I don't think he was saying this and I don't ever remember anyone else saying it either. Meltzer hardly wrote for the Voice at all, anyway - maybe twenty pieces total over almost a decade. He wrote for like Creem and Zoo World and stuff in the seventies.

* When Michaelangelo was only questioning that Doors thing - something that only came from Meltzer's speculative ruminations about why he wasn't asked to contribute to Stranded anyway

xpost k/l's comment about the Dead at the Pyramids, I have no idea about the chronology of the Dead. I have the original edition of "Stranded" around here somewhere--it came out in '79, right?

and Chuck makes a good point above when he talks about all the people--I'm one of 'em--stuck in between the boomers and Gen X. We were on our own. I remember the Beatles and Stones when they were new, but I never sat down and actually listened to most of that stuff until new wave/disco time; I remember buying the first Clash album and "Who's Next" and "Beatles for Sale" the same day, or "Saturday Night Fever" and Allman Brothers "Eat a Peach" and the first Marshall Tucker album at the same time, it all ran together for me. People I knew five or six years older than I were appalled that I liked Parliament or disco, and people six or ten years older just accepted that stuff like that had always been around. I like to think I benefitted from a slight struggle or a slight dissonance back then, and figure I got something out of connecting music from around 1980 with music from a decade earlier. And yeah, the appendix to "Stranded" gave me a lot to work with, as did Christgau's '70s guide a few years later; and as much as I like Meltzer I don't think I would have gotten the same kind of grounding in *records* I probably would like or needed to know about from him, and don't think I was savvy enough then to take what he was saying for what it was worth. Just knowing about the records and getting them to listen to, that obviously counted for a lot back then.

yeah eddie i wasn't aiming that remark at you. i just get a bit fed up when people like "sri" use meltzer to bash xgau and marcus, espec considering they've been far more active, interesting and engaged critics for the last 20 years if not more. i agree that he should have been in stranded, tho, who knows why that didn't happen.

Grateful Dead Live at the Pyramids (Arista). Who knows what it'll sound like: the concept is staggering. Recorded 1978/release pending.

I don't know why I discussed this with edd s hurt here once before. Maybe we were talking about the Pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee?

Yeah, I remember eventually thinking that Zurvans thing was a fake too, but I didn't want to take a chance with Mike D.

"Are you still pleased with your Stranded selection of Beggars Banquet, and the accompanying essay?

Yes! I still love/play the record and find what I said interesting! "

and he should be proud of it, pretty deft and unimpeachable (if admittedly not much else, its short, but that's a good thing!)

I don't remember talking about this; and it would've been great had the Dead did something at the Memphis Pyramid. But I always thought the Dead live at Pyramids recording actually occurred..? No? I've often wondered about the Zurvans, too.

xp

Wait, so the Masked Marauders LP isn't in Stranded's discography? I just checked the book, and it's not there! Why did I think it was? Or what am I confusing it with? (Anyway, I actually saw a copy of that album today. In an antique store, for $12. Way too steep for my budget, but until now, I wasn't entirely sure whether somebody had made it up - a' la the Zurvans' "Close The Book" -- or what.)

It was definitely in one of those books back in the day. Maybe it was in the original Book Of Rock Lists? My copy finally fell apart so I couldn't tell you.

I'm at least partially probably conflating it with Rag's Rock N Roll (Atlantic), which also may or may not be real, and which Dave Marsh weaves a possibly invented-on-the-spot (or possibly not) Stones hoax story about in the appendix of his 1985 The First Rock & Roll Confidential Report book. But yeah, I could have sworn Masked Marauders was in some appendix, too -- a Marcus one, I thought. But I'm not finding it in any of the likely candidates on my shelf. (So yeah, maybe Rock Lists, which I haven't owned a copy of in forever.)

bump!!

can we talk a little bit more about the Marcus epilogue. what are your thoughts on his list?

I'm loving it

I know the appendix like I know my name--it influenced me more than any piece of music writing ever. I started wondering if he revised it as I looked over this thread, but when the book was reissued, didn't he make a point of saying he resisted revising it? Yet I know I read something somewhere about what he would have included had he revised it...maybe that was an interview? I'm a little confused at this point.

it's in this interview http://rockcriticsarchives.com/interviews/greilmarcus/02.html

Scott Woods' site...I've heard that guy's bad news.

Finally understand this statement a week later.

I still do not.

Think he is actually a friend of clemenza's and clemenza is being ironic- they co-authored a book and there is some stuff on that website that they did together. Unless they had a falling out that I don't know about.

meta

can we talk about our discoveries from the Marcus list?

Dee Clark's Raindrops is blowing my mind at the moment

My fault--sorry.

If you want to hear a totally great Dee Clark song, look for "When I Call on You" by the Kool Gents. In a little blurb I wrote on it once, I actually had Marcus in mind; it's very much like Nolan Strong's "The Wind," which I know he loves, yet I've never come across any mention of "When I Call on You" in anything he's ever written.

The Wind is a classic of course, but When I Call On You is news to me. thanks a lot, great song

sorry, my computer died so I couldn't reply earlier.

from the Stranded list: Robin Luke's Suzie Darling is a find, as is the Elegant's Little Star and about 30 other songs.

One Stranded pick I tried for 25 years to get my hands on was the Colonel Jubilation LP. At a certain point, I started to wonder if it was a joke, like the Zurvans. Once file sharing became prevalant, getting hold of it was quite easy. I only listened once; it didn't make much of an impression on me, but I should go back and give it another try.

maria and i are going to the monday thing. see ya there, boston!

Harvard University’s Committee on Higher Degrees in American Studies is pleased to announce the Fall 2013 Massey Lecturer:

GREIL MARCUS
“Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations”

Monday, October 21, 5:30 p.m.
“Inflection: ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown,’ Bob Dylan”

Tuesday, October 22, 5:30 p.m.
“Disappearance and Forgetting: ‘Last Kind Words Blues,’ Geeshie Wiley”

Wednesday, October 23, 5:30 p.m.
“World Upside Down: ‘I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,’ Bascom Lamar Lunsford”

All three lectures will be delivered in the
Sackler Auditorium
485 Broadway
Cambridge, MA

Free and open to the public.

A reception will follow the lecture on Monday, October 21st, in the Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Posted about Gothika elsewhere--meant to add that it might contain the only Greil Marcus joke in a big-budget Hollywood movie ever.

(I'm kidding, but the scene I'm thinking of does fit.)

me and my boys at harvard tonight. great time. greil killed it. gonna steal like half a dozen lines from him at least.

https://scontent-b-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc1/3801_10152588755537137_256138507_n.jpg

boy, rufus and cyrus have grown up fast...

Greil, Scott, and Bob Christgau, right? Awesome

<oblig WithTheBeatlesjoke alt=PleasePleaseMejoke>

That is so rad.

Nice one, Scott!

I saw Greil do a Dylan talk at the Library of Congress once, and while there was a bit of pretention to it, I mostly was impressed

Scored an original hardback copy in decent shape for around $6 this afternoon.

Over 20 years ago I picked up a well-loved and partially underlined/highlighted og copy of the paperback that after about 8 years in my care fell completely apart as the binding glue gradually crumbled--the only time that's ever happened to me with an old book.

Nice

Anyone have a way I can read Rob Sheffield's interview with Marcus (50th anniversary edition of Mystery Train)?

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/music/articles/greil-marcus-50-years-mystery-155928466.html

Works--thanks!

Biggest revelation: he's writing a “listening to Bryan Ferry” book.