Portrait of Greil Marcus
Reading List
Greil Marcus
Music Critic and Author
Greil Marcus is an American critic who writes about popular music as a way into American history, and was Rolling Stone‘s first records editor.
Mystery Train (1975) read Elvis, Robert Johnson and The Band as figures in a national story rather than as entertainers. Lipstick Traces (1989) drew a line from the Sex Pistols back through Dada and the Situationists, and Invisible Republic (later The Old, Weird America) took up Dylan’s basement tapes. Later books include The Shape of Things to Come and Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010.
He has taught at Berkeley, Princeton and the New School.
Pulphead
Essays
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
“You desperately want to find out how these magical sounds were created, and what kind of lives lay behind them. So often this kind of knowledge is absolutely inaccessible – you’ll never find the answers to these questions but the questions never go away. Nobody has dramatised that as well as he has in this book, so I’m really recommending it for one marvellous essay about old country blues.” — via Interview, December 2011
You Don’t Love Me Yet
by Jonathan Lethem
“This is a short novel that Jonathan Lethem published a few years ago about a bunch of young people who form a band in Los Angeles. They’re writing songs and trying to rehearse. In the course of the book, before the band breaks up, they play maybe three times – once at a radio show, once at a party and one other time. That’s their whole performing career.” — via Interview, December 2011
Bye Bye Baby
My Tragic Love Affair with the Bay City Rollers
by Caroline Sullivan
“Caroline Sullivan is an American woman who became a completely obsessive fan of the Bay City Rollers, a Scottish group that dressed in all tartan costumes in the early to mid-seventies and were momentarily huge. Like a lot of teenage girls, Caroline Sullivan fell in love with them, but unlike most of their fans she proceeded to devote her life to them.” — via Interview, December 2011
Riders on the Storm
My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors
by John Densmore
“John Densmore was writing about his few years in the band from ’65 until ’71 when Jim Morrison died. What I love about this book is that it’s so confused. It is somebody struggling to make sense of what he was doing, of what was going on around him, of the people he was working with. It’s that sense of struggle that I find captivating.” — via Interview, December 2011
Chronicles
Volume One
by Bob Dylan
“Yet here he is writing a memoir that completely ignores everything which made him a world figure. It ignores all of his most famous songs, it ignores all the periods in which he was a great star. It’s all about times when he was trying to learn, when he was confused and lost but absolutely alive with the thrill of discovering new ideas, new singers, new information.” — via Interview, December 2011