Rock Critic Greil Marcus on the Power of Songs and

Songwriters
The eminent rock critic’s book Mystery Train is as
incisive and relevant as ever, 40 years after it was first
published. Here he explains what makes songs so
powerful.
By Steven Rosenfeld
Greil Marcus
In 1975 Greil Marcus, the rock critic for Rolling Stone and
then Creem, published his first book, Mystery Train:
Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. He showed how
the music of six artists — Robert Johnson, Harmonica
Frank, Randy Newman, the Band, Sly Stone and Elvis
Presley — reflected the story of modern American culture.
To celebrate the book’s 40th anniversary we talked to
Marcus about Mystery Train, just released in its sixth
edition, and what makes songs so moving and timeless.
********
As a critic, you’ve written that you don’t quite care
about what songwriters are thinking as much as you
care about characters, the voices in their words, and the
connection all that creates in listeners. But in Mystery
Train, you pay great attention to the words and phrases
in songs. How do songs and songwriters fit into the
history you’re telling?
I’m not interested in what the songwriter thinks he or she is
doing, what their desires are, what their intent is. What I’m
interested in is what happens to this song when it’s out
there in the world and somebody’s singing it, somebody’s
playing it, other people are responding to it, whether that
means fans, listeners, other performers.
A song to me is an event. It’s an act. Performance is more
important than composition in the way that I write about it.
But I’ll never forget writing about a song called “Boogie
Woogie Country Girl” that was recorded by, God, was it
Southwind? This would have been about 1970. In any case,
I wrote about this record for Rolling Stone. A week or so
later, the phone rings. “Hi, this is Doc Pomus.” I didn’t
even know who Doc Pomus was, one of the great rhythm &
blues and rock ‘n’ roll songwriters ever. And he says, “So,
you wrote about ‘Boogie Woogie Country Girl,’ how come
you never mentioned who wrote the song?” We ended up
having this wonderful conversation for well over an hour.
That made me realize that if I’m not going to write about
the person who wrote the songs, which I often don’t in the
chapter on Elvis Presley in Mystery Train, then I have to
decide not to do that and why I’m not doing it. It has to be a
conscious choice.
Two ASCAP members play very specific and different
roles in the book: the Band and Randy Newman. What
was their importance as songwriters? Do you think they
were conscious of it?
It makes sense to talk about the Band and Randy Newman
together. They both come into the public eye right about
the same time, it was ‘68 with their first albums, Music
From Big Pink and Randy Newman Creates Something
New Under the Sun. Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel
wrote the songs on the first Band album. Randy Newman
writes his own songs. They’re all very conscious of what’s
going on in the world and what stance they want to take in
terms of it.
For Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel, Canadians, but
people who had been making their living, going to school
as working musicians in the United States for years upon
years – they looked at what’s going on in terms of protest,
in terms of denunciation of the government, in terms of the
Vietnam War, in terms of race riots going on. And they saw
the stance people were taking – “the government is evil,
I’m not part of this country” – and they thought this was a
mistake. The first and second Band albums were fashioned
as a way back into the idea of being an American. And if
you’re going to talk about that, then you have to say “What
does being an American mean? What are the images, what
are the phrases that capture America as something different
from other places, other societies, other histories?” And so
that became their project.
With Randy Newman, you’ve got a person from a more
professional and more educated background than the
people in the Band. His father’s a doctor, but he’s also a
songwriter. He’s got two uncles [Alfred and Lionel
Newman] who have been writing movie music all their
lives and winning Oscars. He becomes a professional
songwriter writing songs for Bobby Vee and Irma Thomas
and The Fleetwoods. He’s working for Metric Music in Los
Angeles. He writes the songs. They go out and sell them to
people.
When he steps out to record his own songs, he’s so aware
of what people are doing around him professionally and
what people are doing around him socially. He’s so aware
of what’s on the radio and what isn’t on the radio, that
when he steps out as a performer, it becomes a question of
“What do I want to say, how do I want to say it?”
One of the things I’ve noticed is that this tradition of
storytelling songs, character songs, seems to have ebbed.
We see many more songs now about people’s feelings or
their psychological dilemmas. Do you see a change in
what the landscape is today because there’s not as much
narrative storytelling?
I think this has been with us since the early ‘70s. And it’s
something I take up very directly in the Randy Newman
chapter in Mystery Train because he’s writing fictions.
He’s inventing characters. He’s not writing
autobiographically.
When you read a short story by James Joyce or Raymond
Carver or whoever, the writer creates an atmosphere,
creates characters, and if you have half a brain, you let
yourself be seduced by the writer and into the story that he
or she is telling. You don’t say, “What does this tell me
about Raymond Carver’s true character?” What is
Raymond Carver trying to tell me about himself?” Who
cares? Can he create a world that somebody else, a reader,
can live in? That’s the question. And yet, it’s not just
singer-songwriters wanting to dump their neuroses on the
poor, innocent audience. It’s also the audience wanting
people to dump their neuroses on them, because they don’t
believe in the imagination.
Everything has to be real for it to have any meaning. You
can see this in criticism over the last 20 years, where over
and over again critics are writing about anybody’s songs as
if they’re autobiographical, as if they’re not fictions, as if
they’re not even professional attempts to get hits. To write
songs that other people will want to hear and other people
will want to sing; the craven, contrived, market-driven
attempts at writing a song that will be popular. It’s all
‘What does this tell us about this real person?’ You know,
here’s Rihanna, and she gets beat up by her boyfriend, and
all of her songs are interpreted through that scrim. That
isn’t really how anybody writes a good song. Somebody
might start off writing a song because they broke up with
somebody, but if the song is any good at all, becomes
something else. It becomes a story. And the character in it
becomes fictional.
But audiences want to believe what they’re hearing. They
want to be convinced that it’s true. And so, for someone to
get up and say “This is just what comes out of my
imagination…” But you’re cheating me! I remember
having conversations with John Irving, the novelist, and
Graham Parker, the singer, both of whom are quite short.
And I remember both of them saying to me, “It must have
taken a lot of nerve for a short person like Randy Newman
to write [‘Short People’].” And I said “I hate to tell you
this, but Randy Newman is six feet tall.” And they were
both, “What!? A tall person wrote that song about me?”
Oh, they were upset. You know, Randy Newman always
said this was a joke. It was supposed to be a satire on
bigotry, how could anybody take this seriously?
Ultimately when a songwriter is telling you about himself
or herself – “this happened to me, this is my story” –
ultimately you, as a listener, are frozen out. But when a
songwriter’s creating a fictional situation that lets you in
because that allows you to become a fictional character in
your own mind. That to me is how art works, and that’s
what I was always looking for in Mystery Train. Whether
Elvis wrote his own songs or not, he created the situations
in which those songs became real.
That is what makes a great song. I guess you would just
encourage writers to keep doing that.
When I write, I’m not trying to convince anybody to do
anything. I’m just trying to wrestle with something and see
what it says, and try and make that interesting to other
people. That’s not up to me. But if I am trying to tell
anybody anything, it’s essentially two things: one, there’s
more here than there seems. Whether we’re talking about a
book, a movie, a song or a performance. And the corollary
to that is, trust your imagination, don’t limit yourself to
facts. Let your imagination run. What is this song telling
you? Go with that, trust that. And then your own response
is not just “Oh I’m so moved.” You really begin to think
about it. You begin to think about where that came from
and what you want, who you are. That’s the interchange
between art and audience, between performer and audience.