Real Life Rock

Real Life Rock

Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music
(1975, 2015)

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
(1989, 2009)

Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession
(1991)

In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992
(1993, originally published as
Ranters & Crowd Pleasers
)

The Dustbin of History
(1995)

The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes
(2000, 2011, originally published as
Invisible Republic,
1997)

Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives
(2000)

“The Manchurian Candidate”
(2002)

Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads
(2005)

The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice
(2006)

When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison
(2010)

Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings, 1968–2010
(2010)

The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years
(2011)

The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs
(2014)

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations
(2015)

AS EDITOR

Stranded
(1979, 2007)

Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung
by Lester Bangs (1987)

The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad
(2004, with Sean Wilentz)

Best Music Writing 2009
(2009)

A New Literary History of America
(2009, with Werner Sollors)

The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986–2014

GREIL MARCUS

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.

Copyright © 2015 by Greil Marcus.
All rights reserved.
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10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

For Sleater-Kinney
and
the Mekons

two threads in this column

Introduction

The Village Voice,
1986–1990

Artforum,
1990–1998

Salon,
1999–2003

City Pages,
2003–2004

Interview,
2006–2007

The Believer,
2008–2014

Acknowledgments

Credits

Index of Names and Titles

A BOOK THIS LONG CANNOT SUFFER
a long introduction. The work collected here began with a phone call at the beginning of 1986 from Doug Simmons, then the music editor of the
Village Voice
. In 1978, for
New West
, a magazine the late Clay Felker had launched as an outpost of his successful
New York
, I'd started a column called Real Life Rock. I took the title from Magazine's just-released album,
Real Life
. I loved the title, not the album. Calling a few songs slotted onto an LP real life seemed both ridiculous and like a challenge, or at least something to try to live up to: the notion that you could find real life anywhere, even on something shoved onto an LP or hidden away on it. It was an essay column, but each essay, through 1983, when it ended, closed with a top ten—songs, albums, commercials, ads, maybe a comment on a dress Bette Midler wore at an awards show. Anything.

Doug wanted to know if I'd turn that list idea into an actual column. He gave me the bottom third of a page once a month, about 700 words, which was room for anything: music, movies, fiction, critical theory, ads, television shows, remarks overheard waiting in line, news items, contributions from correspondents some of whom, under their column names or their real names, are still sending in items today, treating the column as a forum, or a good site for gossip, or the everyday conversation it has always wanted to be. I wrote the column every week until, in 1990, the
Voice
hired a new music editor who didn't like it. I moved it to
Artforum
, where I worked with Ingrid Sischy, David Frankel, Ida Panicelli, Jack Bankowsky, and Sydney Pokorny, off and on, with breaks to finish books, for nearly nine years, with more space, a page or sometimes two, for the magazine's ten issues a year. As in every following incarnation, the column changed according to the frame of reference of the publication and what I could presume the readership's frame of reference might be. The column began to take in more formal art, more politics, more novels, more critical absurdities. When finally I had to take a break and couldn't predict
when it would end, the magazine offered a top ten to a different working artist every month. I kept writing for
Artforum
but in 1999 took the column to
Salon
, working with Gary Kamiya and Bill Wyman and publishing every other week—the online attention span, it was explained to me, was shorter than in the print world: “People forget what they've read more quickly”—and with no real word limit. At
Salon
the column was perhaps more ambitious than before—the work around it was thrilling, with the best coverage of the Clinton impeachment anywhere, wild humor, daring arguments—and more full of vitriol, because enemies were more plain. The column was killed in 2004 by David Talbot, the editor in chief, who said it was cut to save money. When I pointed out that given what I was being paid, doing away with it was not exactly going to make a measurable difference, he said that he didn't like the column anyway, and that since I always did whatever it was I did, there was no point in discussing it, thus allowing me to join the company of my friends Sarah Vowell, Steve Erickson, and Charles Taylor, who had lost columns at
Salon
before me. I went to
City Pages
in Minneapolis, which under the editorship of Steve Perry had become the best alternative weekly newspaper in the country—with the best reporting, the best criticism, the cleanest design, and the best editors. With my thousand or so words a month, I was lucky to work with Melissa Maerz. In 2005, after little more than a year, I went back to
Interview
, where I'd been writing an intermittent essay column, Days Between Stations (the title stolen from a Steve Erickson novel), since 1992, working again with Ingrid Sischy and with Graham Fuller and Brad Goldfarb. Ingrid wanted a new name for the column; “Elephant Dancing” popped into my head as the dumbest possible thing we could call it. “Fine,” she said. She later asked me to switch the column to a top ten—but still under that terrible hoist-by-my-own-petard name, at about 750 words a month. This was the one time the column didn't work, because everything had to be music related, and I'd long since found the column was about anything under the sun or it was nothing. I didn't like writing it, Ingrid didn't like reading it, and we went back to an essay format—until Ingrid left in the middle of the night and the new editors killed all the criticism columns (“We're going more visual”). I tried for more than a year to find a home for Real Life Rock Top Ten, with no luck anywhere, until one good day Vendela Vida of the
Believer
called to say that Nick Hornby was taking a leave from his books column, and was there by any chance a column I'd like to write? I wrote one ten times a year, at any length I chose, working with Vendela Vida, Sheila Heti, Andi Winnette, and Andrew Leland, from 2008 to 2014, and in the best possible home, even under the crazy stricture that, in the
Believer
, which had begun as a publication abjuring all snark, you couldn't say anything mean about anybody, which made writing about Lucinda Williams a real challenge. I made it a game to sneak offending
material into the column; sometimes I got away with it. When the
Believer
temporarily suspended publication in the fall of 2014, Bill Tipper of the
Barnes & Noble Review
took the column without hesitating, offering to publish it once a month at whatever length made sense.

Everything through
The Believer
is here. Whether that makes sense is for others to judge. I have corrected some errors, though some probably remain, and some, as when I misheard a song lyric, or cited what seemed to be a fact that later proved not to be, although that couldn't have been known at the time, remain on purpose. I haven't changed or softened any judgments. I had fun. I still do. I know I use variants of “black hole” and “heart on his sleeve” far too often.

The Village Voice 1986
1990