Greil Marcus’ 1975 Mystery Train is the book of criticism most important to me as an American (and one of the most important to me as a writer). It was Marcus’ inspiration to write of rock ‘n’ roll not as rebel music but as art deep in the American tradition. And so the book said to those of us whose lives were bound up with rock ‘n’ roll that we too were part of America. I’ve taught the book on and off over the last fifteen years and never came close to feeling I’ve gotten anywhere near the heart of it. It’s a book that has become more difficult to teach—because college students can no longer be counted on to grapple with a difficult text or to engage in research that puts in context events that happened before they were born. And in teaching the chapter on Elvis, the book’s finest and still the deepest critical writing done on Elvis, we are now, as I was reminded a few weeks back, dealing with the fantasy notion of cultural appropriation, which dresses itself in the beleaguered rags of imperialist absorption but which is really an essentially fascist ideology, positing that culture is a pure thing not to be sullied by, and incapable of being understood by, whoever self-appointed cultural gatekeepers brand the outsider.
What follows is nothing close to a finished essay but lecture notes in which I attempted to lay out for my students the major lines of thought in this dense and brilliant book. The ideas explicated here belong to Greil Marcus. What I hope these notes convey is a fan’s ardor for a volume and a man that has imparted coast-to-coast breadth, and valley-deep emotion.
“NEVER IN THE HISTORY OF ART!!!”
The cry of Little Richard, angling to take over the Dick Cavett show from a pissing content between John Simon and Erich Segal and, as Greil Marcus points out, the words of the only person on the panel qualified to talk about art. Let’s take a minute to consider Richard’s words. Speaking about himself—and really, when is Little Richard not speaking about himself?—he’s quite right. Who had ever heard of the likes of Little Richard? “The Georgia Peach,” as he was called, which was a polite way of saying here was a great flaming queen of a performer who combined coyness, flamboyance, and the urgency of the gospel for which he would later abandon rock ‘n’ roll. (And never quite give it up. Interviewed in the ‘70s by Rolling Stone and asked the simple question, “Richard, how did you come to write ‘Long Tall Sally’?” he began his response with, “Mah Lord! Mah Lord! Mah Lord! Come hear the GOOD News!!!”) Had popular music ever contained a family story like the one told in “Good Golly, Miss Molly”? “Mama, Papa told me son, you gotta watch your step/If they knew about Miss Molly I’d have to watch Pa myself”: “If my daddy saw the high-stepping whore I’m keeping company with, the old man would take a crack at her himself.” That’s what those lines mean.
And they are wonderful. They are also just the sort of thing that, ever since rock ‘n’ roll appeared, has never stopped being used to declare it the province of degenerates, morons, deviants, troublemakers, thugs. You know the old saw: rock and roll is rebel music, yadda, yadda, yadda. “What’re you rebelling against, Johnny” a girl asks the biker played by Marlon Brando in The Wild One and Brando replies, “whaddya got?”
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