Re: The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years:
“This is now the third book I’ve written in a month — literally, to the day… I do all the listening, all the interviews, all the reading and all the writing in a month. I don’t know that it is a way to write any given book, but this one on the Doors was easy to write, enormous fun. I just barreled through it.” (John Fleming, TampaBay.com)
“Well, I guess the difference is that I made a more emotional connection with Rod Stewart’s songs, or they made a connection with me. It’s just different from the connections I’ve made with the Doors’ music. I love their music in different ways. With ‘Maggie May’ and particularly ‘Every Picture Tells a Story,’ ‘Reason to Believe,’ so many other songs, my chest is open, my heart is beating. Everything is exposed. That’s the way I want to live. It just seems like this incredible vision of a good life, a life of complete fulfillment. That’s what I hear in Rod Stewart, in the stuff that I love the best. There’s no question that what’s going on in the Doors is chillier. It’s more thought-out, more formally experimental — it’s different. I love them both, but in a real different way.” (Michaelangelo Matos, eMusic)
“Here I am writing about a band that only existed for a very few years in the late ’60s, and I wanted to make this book about the music — not about the late ’60s… I wanted to take that music out of its context and put it in a new context, which is the present moment.” (Sam Whiting, SF Gate)
‘Look at the iPhone,’ he says, picking it up from next to him on the couch in his crisply decorated, sun-soaked West Village apartment. ‘You know, it’s good looking…’ He pushes the button at the bottom, and his home screen pops up. ‘I mean, isn’t that cool?’ He points at the app logos. ‘What does that mean? Look at all those talismanic symbols — I wonder what they are?’ He contemplates the object. ‘It was derided by all sorts of people, and I was probably one of them, as some sort of expensive status symbol, or just the latest electronic fetish object — But then people discover not only is it beautiful, not only is it cool — in the best sense of the word — but it’s also useful. And it really does make life easier. And not only does it make life easier, but it makes life more interesting and fun.’
“Greil, Dave [Marsh] and I were at one time very good friends, but Dave and I are no longer friends at all,” recalls Christgau. “We shared political assumptions and were all a part of the counter-culture, even though we all were extremely sceptical about drugs and the religious strain of hippiedom, which in fact was the dominant strain.
“But even back then we had serious political differences. And, as you know, it’s the curse of the minority-left to be sectarian. Our musical tastes were completely different, too. These days I would call Dave a cultural conservative, and Greil has become a person with, ah, extremely intense and narrow interests: he loves what he loves and ignores almost everything else.”
(Update: I thought this was a new interview… it’s not, I’ve just never seen it before.)
Nicky Wire “explains why [Lipstick Traces] was a pivotal text for him and his Manic Street Preachers bandmates.” (Foreword to a new reprint of the Marcus classic.)
Sample:
Q: “What songs transport you back to your student days at Berkeley?”
Marcus: “None. I don’t really listen, or hear, music that way, as a nostalgic trigger.”
A fan from the moment the Doors’ first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock & roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, one could drive from here to there, changing from one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour—every hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult of both Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify, and focus solely on the music. It is a story untold; all these years later, it is a new story.
“Roxy Music’s ‘More Than This’ is a drift, a float. The sounds coming out of Ferry’s mouth, except for the chorus, when the whirlpool is stopped, when it’s centered, when he steps out as if to make a speech, are a golden smear.
“Four minutes and fifteen seconds long, the song begins to fade after two minutes and thirty-two seconds. You hear ‘More than this — nothing’ — and then Phil Manzanera, who has simply been counting off the rhythm behind Ferry, play his solo. It’s maybe eleven bent blues notes — there and gone in under three seconds. It is the most elegant and ephemeral distillation of the guitar solo, any guitar solo, imaginable, and it brings up a question. What is a guitar solo? What happens when the singer steps back and gives the song — its themes, its argument, its imagery, its story — to a musician?”
- Greil Marcus, EMP Karaoke (2004)
Haven’t done a roundup-y sort of thing in… well, forever far as I know. A random bunch of things (via Twitter, mainly) to kick off your weekend house parties:
New York Timespodcast featuring Nik Cohn and Ben Ratliff discussing (the newly remastered) The White Album.
Info from Robert Hilburn about his just-released compendium of reviews, etc.
800 + pages of Manny Farber, also now available in good stores everywhere (except, apparently, Toronto). Early review here by Ken Tucker.
Page flip through this Amazon link to get to the Table of Contents for the newest in the Da Capo Best Music Writing series. Guest Edited by Greil Marcus (w/Series Editor, Daphne Carr).
The second installment of the Eddy podcast focuses on the discographies in Stranded (Greil Marcus) and Marooned (Phil Freeman). Most (though not all) of the music bits are samples of songs culled from Marcus’s text. I may have more to say about this later (a whole bunch of things I wish I’d responded to at the time — i.e., Hackamore Brick), but for now… Check it out below (it’s a little over 15-min. long). More Chuck on the way later in the week.
36.Songs They Never Play on the Radio: Nico, the Last Bohemian (James Young) – Another one in the haven’t-read-it-but-would-like-to pile. From what I gather it’s a tour diary (written by the guy who played keyboards with Nico throughout the ’80s) with many episodes of wanton drug use. Truthfully, not really my idea of a good time. And yet… every review I’ve read suggests that it’s much more intelligent than my no doubt reductive encapsulation suggests.
25. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Simon Frith) – Aka The Sociology of Rock. One of the first books of rock criticism I tried to read, ”tried” being the operative word in this case. Frith’s prose just never grabbed me here, never led me into thinking (or caring) about his ideas . That said, I’m uncomfortable with the assumption in Christgau’s headline for his review of this book: ”It’s Barely Rock and Roll, But I Like It.” Uncomfortable, that is, with the idea that a book about rock and roll has to read like rock and roll, uncomfortable with the underlying assumptions about what such a formulation even means (it must be loud? forceful? in-your-face?). Weird thought coming from Christgau, given that he probably has a wider definition of “rock and roll” than just about anyone. (He nails my disinterest with the book much better when he says it “isn’t romantic enough.” Maybe that’s what his headline means??) As I mentioned in a previous entry, I do like Performing Rites quite a bit, and I’m guessing that stylistically the books aren’t really that different. Maybe the slyness –the Drifters, if not the Stooges — in Frith’s voice just comes through a little better in the later book?
11. The Dark Stuff (Nick Kent) – Read a few chapters of this (Brian Wilson, Stones, G N’ R, I think), perused the others, have never felt a pressing need to pull it off the shelf again. I know how highly regarded Kent is (especially in the UK), and based on the little I’ve read I can neither confirm or dispute the many claims made for him, but the terrain he covers in this book is, at least for me, one of the least interesting stories in pop music — that of the wasted, self-destructing rock star (I say this as someone who has pretty much revered Keith Richards forever, even while simultaneously considering him one of rock’s ultimate self-parodies). There’s no doubt more to the writing here than that, but it’s just not a subject that greatly compels me, in the same way that I almost never actually enjoy watching junkie movies (even skillfully directed junkie movies). Another barrier: the whole journalist-as-rock-star thing. Witness Morrisey’s blurb: “I could tell you stories about Nick Kent that would uncurl the hair in your Afro.” Thing is, I don’t have an Afro.
A conversation with… “It’s wrong to force these questions. It’s a completely false choice. I have probably 20 different records I can argue are the greatest. At any given time I feel that the sum total of what human beings can create is contained in the Chiffons’ ‘One Fine Day’ or the Clash’s ‘Complete Control.’” [Toledo Blade]
Desert Island Dick: (By Kevin John) … “It’s as though Marcus can’t recognize the many vital communities created and reinforced by modern music because they aren’t the globe-spanning movements of his imagination. Or in other words, he doesn’t get it, so it must be ungettable. Ugh.” [Chicago Reader]
All links directly from the Marooned blog, which has more info about the book, plus more links and stuff.
