Mystery Train (1975)

It had actually been a good long time since I looked at this when I brought it along with me recently on a cross-country train trip (ha ha, get it?), where I was really struck—chagrined, even—by what a profound influence it has had on me (and dozens if not hundreds of other music journalists, professional and wannabe alike). That whole stream-of-consciousness game of associations around favored artists and American cultural landmarks, taking a freewheeling intuitive style into one's points, along with some tendency to overstate the personal impact for effect, has all been absorbed almost entirely by me, for better or worse, not to mention various highly specific points of pungent observation, such as the one about Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips and pentecostal religion and rock 'n' roll and heaven and hell and salvation. They are Greil Marcus's ideas, not mine. I have just chosen to live in that world. Over the years the artists he focuses on and lionizes here in his first outing have come to seem more eccentric than fundamentally central. Indeed, I think it would be easy enough to pick and choose one's own favorites and make the cases for their various places in the cultural mainstream at large. For myself alone, I can think of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, Iggy Pop, and Big Star off the top of my head. There's a place for Brits too, of course—the Beatles and Stones, David Bowie, Ray Davies, Mott the Hoople, the Pet Shop Boys. After all this time it looks like the only real naturals that Marcus picked were Robert Johnson and Elvis Presley. Harmonica Frank, the Band, Sly Stone, and Randy Newman are variously significant but second-tier or even more minor. It's a good thing that with the Elvis piece Marcus knocks the ball not just out of the park but out of the entire county in which the stadium sits, wrapping his arms as thoroughly around basically one album, The Sun Sessions, as perhaps anyone has done anywhere. All the warm-up exercises that precede it are rewarded, in the "Presliad"; this enables Marcus to roam even more freely and wantonly among his personal whims. One derives a particularly pleasurable sensation from the extensive "Notes and Discographies," an appendix but fully a third of my tome, of someone thriving and relishing the opportunity to read books and play music and turn ideas around in his head all day. That's when it's most fun. Marcus was the first and in many ways isolated yet certainly among the best at making his own choices and going for it. Perhaps most profoundly and thrilling, Marcus points to an electrifying way here to think about these things, tying together Moby-Dick and The Pilgrim's Progress and Ralph Waldo Emerson and the invention of a nation and all this rock 'n' roll racket, and he communicates his passion and the excitement of making the connections with almost irresistible infectiousness. Some of his most basic assumptions, made in his late 20s when he wrote the first edition of this book (I am writing from the edition I own, the 2nd, though Mystery Train, as of 2008, is now in its 5th), seem to me highly suspect, most notably perhaps that commonalities of taste create genuine community. It is actually my experience that paradoxically the opposite is true—we may all love Yo La Tengo at the show, say, but we do not necessarily love one another, even in the moment. Those I groove with side by side are not necessarily my friends—and conversely, many of the most important people in my life have always had questionable taste when it comes to things like music and movies and art. But this and other complaints are nits on the face of the accomplishment here. Greil Marcus has done some great work and in many ways the best of it starts right here.

In case it's not at the library.