Marcus said...
by Jason Anderson
What follows is a partially edited transcription of an Oct. 15, 1998 phone interview with Greil Marcus, reprinted
for the pleasure of the world's rock-crit pedant types. The interview was done shortly before he went to France
to promote the French-language edition of his 1989 book, Lipstick Traces, which depicts a "secret history"
that connects Dadaists, Situationists and the Sex Pistols, but largely concerns the subjects of his talks in Toronto
and his 1997 book, Invisible Republic, an examination of themes and ideas in Bob Dylan's `basement tapes' and the
music of the Anthology of American Folk Music.
How much esteem is there for Guy Debord [key Situationist philosopher] now? Has he been forgotten?
"I don't think he's been forgotten at all. All his books have been republished or are in the process of being
republished by another publisher. A French friend of mine told me that there was a big page in one of the glossy
magazines this summer, what's in, what's out the kind of thing that everybody runs. And Situationists were definitely
in, for whatever that's worth. And Debord was a superb writer as a stylist he's someone you can take great pleasure
in reading, and that kind of writing stays alive, regardless of whether the ideas are trendy or condemned at any
given moment."
Considering how much you've written about the Band, I'm a bit surprised that you've never come to Toronto and seen
what became of Yorkville. Did you ever come to a point in your research where such a trip would be useful?
"No. I talked with Robbie and his wife Dominique and they had a strong sense of what Toronto meant to them,
and it didn't really matter what Toronto might mean to me in that context. Sometimes I like to 'ambient-research,'
which simply means going to a place where something of great importance to me has taken place, and just seeing
what it feels like there. It sounds kind of dopey, but I find it really helps. I was in St. Louis last week and
I was going out to dinner with a guy and he said, 'Would you like to go to the very spot where Stagger Lee shot
Billy Lion?' And I said, 'You bet I would.' So we drove to this place which is just outside of downtown St. Louis,
as it is today. It used to be in a black neighbourhood and was where Bill Curtis' saloon was. Now there's a modest
modern office building. Of course the place looks like absolutely nothing. But the notion that an event that almost
immediately passed into myth and legend took place at this very spot was really powerful. So I like to do that
kind of research. I remember talking to a woman who was doing a book on kidnapping she was focusing on the Lindbergh
case. And I said, 'Did you ever go to the site of the kidnapping?' And she'd done a lot of primary research but
it never occurred to her to do that. And she said, 'Why would I do that?' She wasn't going to discover any new
clues or anything, if the house even still exists. And I really couldn't come up with a better explanation than
a sort of belief in ghosts. In that historical sense, I believe in ghosts. The Band's history was too recent for
me to find any ghosts in Yorkville when I was writing Mystery Train."
The subject of your lecture in Toronto is the 1996 biennale in Florence -- what was compelling about this event?
"It was the notion that a city, a fixed place with its own history, could be invaded or decorated or revealed
or explored by people who were gonna come in, do what they were gonna do and leave, and maybe leave no trace that
they'd ever been there except in the memories of people. I'd been to Florence a lot of times before and I thought
I knew the city decently if not extremely well, and here were all these different designers who had either been
offered or had chosen spaces in which to install whatever work they wanted to do. This involved a lot of museums
and a lot of churches that was pretty much where everything was. There were places that everybody who goes to Florence
is pretty familiar with, and they were decorated or filled with interesting constructions. But there were also
places that you had never seen, you would never have encountered.
"So on the one hand, the fact that as you would walk through Florence, you would see these big red banners
everywhere, which meant, 'There's something in here, come on in and have a look.' And most of those were in places
you had never noticed before. So you would discover parts of the city that you would probably go back and visit
again the next time you were there, or presumably if you were a resident, you'd take a look at like you'd never
had, because tourists know a city's attractions better than its residents I don't know if that's true for people
who live in Florence, but it's really true for people who live in the United States. And there were times when
people really seemed to be working with the ambience of the building, or maybe trying to draw on its history. And
there were times when the designer simply took it as a crude setting and paid no attention whatsoever to the aesthetic
or spiritual mood of the place and took it over in a more violent manner. There were really very, very few of the
20-some installations that weren't pretty amazing. People really seemed to rise to the occasion. I don't know if
that would be true in any other city, because old Florence is pretty compact you can walk around in it very easily,
it's not big, it's not Paris, it's not London, it's not Chicago."
So it sounds like there was this idea of people imposing a psychogeography on the sites.
"Yeah, and it did force you to wander through the city. It's like somebody going to Los Angeles, and saying,
'I'm gonna go to every single McDonald's here.' So you walk around or take a bus or drive and every time you see
those golden arches you pull in. This is kind of like that except it was a big red banner that said, 'Art and Fashion,
Time and History.' And you'd walk in. Some of the events were free and some had an admission fee. We didn't do
anything else we spent four or five days ga-ga (laughs) over these amazing dresses."
Could this happen in America?
"I think it could happen anywhere, and it would be wonderful if it did. I suppose what you need to make it
work is you need a sense of contrast, and what that means on the crudest level, is that you need very old buildings,
that have a sense of must around them, of time or history passing. Then you have these designs which are radically
different, radically new, which are almost certainly not going to last they're fashion, not history. You have a
clash there. I could really see this working in New Orleans or San Francisco. I think if you tried to do it in
New York, New York is itself so dominated by fashion, whether it's couture on Madison Avenue or just trendiness
downtown, then I think the sense of contradiction and clash would never emerge."
Was there much in the way of music in the installations?
"Well, no. The only thing is that there was a number of formal museum installations, as opposed to a single
designer coming in and putting various dresses in a church nave. The museum installations were quite elaborate,
and one was about the history of fashion in the 20th century, and it was in Fort Belvedere, a big old fort that
overlooks the city. And I walked and in the front room, there was a shirt designed by Vito Conci. And it's a shirt
completely made of music boxes, really, pretty amazing, and very tiny music boxes it looks like something you actually
could heavy. There were maybe 30 music boxes. So there was nobody else around, and I just did what I assumed you
were supposed to. I know Vito, he's a very engaging artist who always wants to provoke a response in the viewer,
so I start pulling the strings to the music boxes to find out what they were playing seemed to be a logical thing.
And I'd gotten through about eight of them and been really disappointed to find out they were all playing the same
song, which was 'Hey Jude,' when this woman comes running down the stairs, screaming at me in Italian, 'What are
you doing?! You have to stop that right now! Don't you understand this is a museum?!' She could've been screaming
in Urdu but I think anyone would've understood what she was getting at. That was it as far as music went."
You're also talking about Bob Dylan in Toronto -- is there any possible connection between Florence and Bob? Maybe
Bob at the Vatican?
"Maybe so. I don't know. I thought Dylan at the Vatican was absolutely wonderful. People say, 'What was that
all about? What was he trying to say by doing that?' I figured that he was curious. You get invited to play for
the Pope what the hell, let's see what that's like. And it was really quite amazing to be seeing that on television
the Pope nodding off to sleep and Dylan performing. Then the Pope stands up and becomes a rock critic he says,
'You have asked me, how many roads must a man walk down before he's really a man. And I answer you, one road! The
road of Christ!' And I'm thinking, everybody wants to be a critic, even the Pope. But only the Pope would say at
a concert, you have asked me, as opposed to you have asked us. So that was pretty interesting. I think when you've
reached the point that Bob Dylan you simply cannot be criticized for dipping your foot into the river of history,
whatever the opportunity may be."
You're coming here as a Dylan authority and you've written so much about him, yet your intent has always seemed
to be to point out the mysteries in his work.
"That's absolutely correct. I don't think I'm much of an explainer, period. I don't think I'm very good at
it, I don't think I have much interest in doing it. What I like to do is dramatize and that's another way of saying,
bring the reader into the mystery, into the detective story, really, which is what any interesting cultural event
or work of art is. So it's not about pinning down a meaning. There's a character in the work of David Lodge, an
English professor in Changing Places and Small World and a couple of other books. And he is based on a very, very
famous American English professor named Stanley Fish, who's currently at Duke. And in these books he's always portrayed
as the man who is going to finish off Jane Austen forever, or going to end discussion of T.S. Eliot in our time.
And that's his goal. That's very funny how it's presented, but I think it's true for a lot of people, and really
a putrid kind of ambition.
"I don't feel that I'm any kind of expert on Bob Dylan. I'm a fan, I'm a listener, I'm fascinated by his work.
I'm not interested in his private life. And a lot goes right by me. If a new Bob Dylan album comes out and I don't
like it, I don't then devote two weeks of time to studying it so that I will understand it and commit all of its
songs to memory. If I don't like it, I don't listen to it. I was on a panel the other day in New York about the
screening of Dylan's film about his 1966 tour Eat the Document, which hadn't been seen for a long time and the
Museum of Television and Radio is showing it for the next five or six weeks in New York and Los Angeles. So they
had a panel to kick off these screening and they included me, Don Pennebaker, who shot the footage and earlier
made Don't Look Back, and Ron Rosenbaum who's a New York writer who's written a lot about Dylan and lots of other
things, and Betsy Bowden, who's a Chaucer scholar from Rutger's and a big Dylan fan. And at one point, Ron Rosenbaum
proposed a sort of acid test of Dylan fandom and that was the movie Renaldo and Clara, and he talked about a woman
this is Dylan's film of '77, four and a half hours long he talked about a woman who'd seen this movie 27 times
in a room. He said, That's the gold standard of Dylan fandom. And he said that he had some claim as a Dylan fan
because he'd seen the movie four times. Well, that left me totally out, because I haven't seen the movie at all.
That seems to be a good thing. When I talk to Clinton Heylin, who's written a number of books about Dylan, and
Clinton's a very generous and witty guy, I can't remotely keep up with him, he knows infinitely more about Bob
Dylan in terms of dates and places, who what when, than I ever will. But I think as a critic I'm good at being
seduced by music, being drawn into its labyrinth and then maybe finding a way out."
On the subject of musical authorities and such, does it bother you as much as it bothers me when music is reissued
with extra takes following each other consecutively it's the way that a musicologist would prefer but I find it
very alienating.
"You mean when here's this song, 'I Love You Baby,' and then there'll be six outtakes of 'I Love You Baby'
following? That's horrible. If there really are six interesting outtakes of 'I Love You Baby,' then stick them
on another disc that people can go to if they really want to. The first time I noticed that was with the Robert
Johnson reissue, where the alternate takes were placed immediately following the master takes. And it just ruins
it as something that someone could put on and be enveloped by. It's scholastic, and it implies that we are all
connoisseurs. We are not all connoisseurs. We have busy lives and we don't devote our lives to studying what exists
elsewhere. We sometimes hope we can bring that into our lives, but we don't need always to be instructed."
It's undervaluing the need for editors. I love Bitches Brew as much as the next guy, but can I listen to it for
five hours?
"I think for all people who love records or love books or love movies, there's a certain fetishistic quality
to all of those things, and there's part of the pleasure in them, like how the record cover is, or maybe the label
has an aura to it, not just the music. So when an album is reissued on CD with eight extra tracks, the wholeness
of the original thing is compromised. I read that three Dylan albums are being reissued next year Freewheelin'
and two others with extra tracks. Well, it's kind of like when I first began to hear CD reissues on the radio,
and you'd hear a song that you'd hear for 10, 20, even 30 years, and suddenly it was utterly different because
people didn't know how to mix CDs in the early days, and so you'd have the drums always as the lead instrument.
It was as alienating as anything could possibly be. It's like saying, 'Well, we've lost the master to "Like
a Rolling Stone," but we've got this really good karaoke singer who we can put on, and she can handle just
fine, so don't worry.' I see no reason to mess with these things. If there's a need for us to know more than what
we already know, then give it to us in a form where we can yes or no to it.
"But I'm as much of a sucker as the next guy. There's a new edition of Robert Johnson's original album, King
of the Delta Blues Singers, that was put out with a newly discovered alternate take of 'Travellin' Riverside Blues.'
Well, I bought it, I bought it for that take. They got me, and they'll get some other people with that thing."
One thing I was thinking when I was reading Invisible History...
"Invisible Republic. That's an awful title, no one can remember it."
So where did that title come from?
"I wanted to call it "Cuckoo Hollows," which was a very elaborate pun, from the song `The cuckoo,
it never hollers,' then I'd play around with that notion in the course of the book, and it also refers to hollows
and dark places and where the cuckoo lives. It was not a good title at all because all it did was confuse people
and it didn't really sound like anything although in German, it sounds fabulous and I almost got the book called
that in German. I came up with different titles and editors in England and the United States didn't like them and
finally I wrote about 20 titles on a sheet of paper and sent it to both of them and said, 'Here, you decide.' Well,
they both liked Invisible Republic. Invisible Republic is a lousy title because I think the notion of invisibility
is overworked and it's got too many syllables, no one can remember it. It was a version of the title for a book
about movies by Geoffrey O'Brien called Phantom Empire, which is a much better title and is in fact the name of
an old Western serial. It just has tremendous resonance. And so Invisible Republic was my version of that, a kind
of club-footed version."
How about "The Old, Weird America?"
"Almost every review that talked about the book alongside the Harry Smith anthology, which was fortuitously
rereleased only a few months after was itself published, had the headline 'The Old, Weird America.' The phrase
clicked with people it stuck in their minds, it was appealing, there was something alluring and funny about it,
I guess. So that's what the book should've been called, you're absolutely right. We missed the boat on that one.
Is there too much distance between us and the Old, Weird America now?
"I think if you look at Invisible Republic, there are throughout the book news items about almost incomprehensible
crimes that often involve the murder of children by their parents, but may also involve religious mania and insanity.
And the old, weird America may seem like some kind of curio, but in fact it's all around. I think people are beginning
to realize this. As the inquisition over Bill Clinton proceeds, more and more people are beginning to dig back
into the history of the country and ask, where have we seen this before? Where have we lived this out before? And
they're realizing that we have and that the Puritans are very much alive in all of us, the best of the Puritans
and the worst of the Puritans. That the notion of the lynching is not something that we've escaped or outgrown,
that the idea that there is something about it that is unclean, that has to expunged from the body politic, is
very much alive. I don't think there's anything distant about it at all. It's just the notion that I suppose that
it comes in an older language, that gives you the sense that it's something that can be safely confined in a museum.
But I don't think that's really true.
"I tend to find the most evidence whenever I'm travelling, and when I'm travelling I tend to read USA Today,
a much more of a tabloid newspaper than the New York Times, say. But it has a lot of news in it that the Times
never covers, not just the East Coast and the West Coast. The other day, I opened it up and there were five or
six different items, whether they were advertisements or news stories, about the whole notion of Biblical prophecy.
They were either advertisements for people saying, here's why the world's gonna end and here's what you can do
to be sure you'll be raptured up into heaven when it happens, or people being arrested because they believe their
baby was Jesus Christ and they were only feeding him water so that he would remain pure in his mission to save
the world.
"I think the fact that you have one man, Kenneth Starr, who grew up in a Biblical community in Texas where
all forms of indulgence were banned popular music, dancing, movies determined to destroy another man who represents
licentiousness, self-indulgence, profligacy and sin, shows the Bible is not distant at all. We have a country,
the United States, where something close to 90 per cent of the population profess to believe in God, in a very
direct and concrete manner 'There is a god, he governs what happens in our world' where a majority of the people
believe that evolution is not true, that it's some kind of anti-religious conspiracy to deprive us of spirituality.
This is still in many ways a primitive country, and by that I mean a country that is afraid, that is unsure of
itself, that is not convinced of its own legitimacy, the kind of state of mind that you'd expect to find in the
beginnings of the history of a society. We think this is an old country but it's 200 years old not very old. America
is a very strange place where there's a before and an after the country was invented, thought up, established on
a certain date. Before that there was social history. After that there is political history. There is no evolution.
That's not how it's perceived, that's not how it's understood and there are many ways in which that's exactly how
it's true there is a before and an after. And the after is not very long. Whereas every other society is able to
pull its social history, which goes back sort of into the mists of time, into its political history, and the two
are not totally separable. The question of legitimacy that I'm mentioning, that's a political question. And if
your political history, if your political society is, No. 1, invented and, No.2, not old, and, No. 3, not blessed
by God, not ordained, then you will not be sure that you really have a right to exist at all."
There is this aspect to the American ideal, that there is no chance for learning because the real quest is for
total reinvention.
"This hideously specious notion of American innocence is part of that. God knows how many times since I've
learned to read have I read when that's supposed to have happened. It's like the perpetual virgin. Doesn't matter
how many times you have sex, you're still a virgin. There are people like that."
Are there artists in music today who use masks in the same way as Bob Dylan or some of the people on the Anthology
did?
"There are very obvious cases like Marilyn Manson, but using a mask in a way that is playful and also a matter
of self-protection, I think you have to look at PJ Harvey. It's one thing for Marilyn Manson to get up there and
he is a mask as such, right his whole body is a mask but I don't think it's very convincing that there's anything
behind it. Whereas with PJ Harvey, I've always thought that there was something unfathomable about her, certainly
for an outside listener, and maybe to herself as well. And that it is only the continual asumption of different
masks that allows any perception of a real self you're never gonna see it all at once. It's not that she looks
that different physically at any given time: the mask is her voice. So that's who I would look at it."
"I've always loved her work, and the record I like the best is Four Song Demos, because there the mask maybe
isn't on as tightly. But the last time I saw her was '95 or '96, maybe the third or fourth time I'd seen her, and
it was the only show I've ever seen in my whole life where the word `profound' was the only proper word for it.
I had no idea what was going on it just seemed that everything was big, it was very scary, and I had the feeling
that there were no limits to what she could have done that night. She knew, but I didn't know. It was pretty amazing.
And I think she's the most interesting single performer to come along who has given any sense that she could sustain
a life in the arts. Sinead O'Connor is on the same level, but she is a really troubled person, and is not gonna
be able to stay in the light. PJ Harvey is able to bring a shroud with her."
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