My interview with Marcus and Chuck is right near the top of my favourite Nerve pieces. If I didn't mention as much in my contribution to Scott's Nerve retrospective, that's only because it was an interview rather than something I really wrote.
I have a vivid memory of how different it was to talk to each of them. I wrote to Greil beforehand, to get his phone number and to see if he was receptive to an interview. I sent along a piece on junky '70s music that Scott and I had written (a precursor to the book we later wrote on the same subject) for Graffiti. Greil wrote back to say he enjoyed the piece and to give him a call. When I did call soon after--this is the part I remember so clearly--there was a long pause, followed by an intimidatingly impatient "Just a minute." I think he later explained that I'd caught him at a bad moment, but at the time, I wanted to crawl under a rock. ("I was just being polite, doofus--I didn't mean for you to actually call.") I remember also that when we finished, I asked Greil if he'd put together some kind of index or bibliography of his writings that we could publish alongside the interview. More withering exasperation: "I can't do that..." It was, indeed, a pretty strange request. You always remember the bad stuff first, and I'm laughing at these two specific lowlights now. Greil was in fact great once the interview got going, and after publication he sent a nice follow-up postcard that is visible on the bulletin board pictured in the Nerve piece.
I'm guessing Marcus had been interviewed many times by 1986; I don't know if this was Chuck's first interview (I seem to remember him mentioning another one he'd recently done), but it was close enough that he couldn't have been more accommodating or enthusiastic. That it was someone from Canada must have made the experience even more novel and unexpected, comparable, I suppose, to me getting an interview request from Iceland tomorrow. It was actually Chuck's wife, Martina, who fielded my first call (I must have gotten the number through directory assistance), so as soon as he got on the line when I called back, he was ready to go. And, as I wrote in my preface to the interview, that's exactly what Chuck did--probably not as breathlessly as I indicated at the time, but even today I remember the conversation as a blur. A friendship developed from there, one that's had its ups and downs over the years. The downs are adumbrated in a line from the intro: "even though I rarely agree with him about anything," a gap that I have personalized at times. Hüsker Dü = Big Country--all we needed was Bette Davis in the wings telling us to fasten our seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Whenever I take a look at an old Nerve, I especially love anything that's hopelessly dated. I think my favourite part in the whole Greil/Chuck interview is either the burning question of whether or not the Cro-Mags deserved space in Spin--the Cro-Mags??--or the part where, given the chance to ask Marcus his opinion of anybody, I stepped back, took a good hard look at history and posterity and all of that, and got a few words from him on...Anita Baker! It's invaluable that I was able to get that clarified for future pop-music scholars.
-------------------
Greil Marcus and Chuck Eddy are critics that anyone interested in rock writing--anyone interested in rock'n'roll for that matter--should be reading. Some brief introductions.
Marcus, although he insists he's just a guy who writes a couple of columns, is almost certainly one of the most revered and influential critics around today. (As my conversation with Eddy was winding down, he suddenly asked out of the blue, "So what was it like talking to Greil?") Marcus has been writing for some 20 years, so there's a wealth of material I would refer you to: Mystery Train, the kind of book that could conceivably outlast rock'n'roll itself; Stranded, a collection of indispensable 'desert island' essays that Marcus edited and contributed a critical discography to; his essays on the Beatles, Girl Groups, Rock Films, and Punk included in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock 'n' Roll; his monthly Voice column, which covers Eddie Money, toy Godzillas, and other less bizarre subjects; his monthly Artforum column (soon to terminate) which will make you feel painfully stupid; and countless other odds and ends strewn across the pages of old Creems and Rolling Stones.
Eddy, who has emerged in the past three years as the Voice's most prolific contributor, is a critic I never miss even though I rarely agree with him about anything. Besides his monthly singles column in Creem Metal, Eddy's sharpest writing can be found in the following Voice pieces: "Howls From the Heartland," a tour through Midwestern grunge (Aug. 5, '86); "Dead Air," a vehement blast at the current state of radio (Jan. 6, '87); "Umlauts From Hell," which traces the evolution of surf music from the Beach Boys through Celtic Frost (Feb. 3, '87); and "Slime Is Money (Bastard)," a critique of Forced Exposure (March 31, '87). To explain why I love these Eddy pieces, I'd echo Marcus's words on Elvis Costello and the Mekons found below.
Marcus talks like he writes: orderly and concise. For him, I've used the interview format. Eddy also talks like he writes, something like his beloved Die Kreuzen: "all over the fucking place before you know it." So I've arranged Chuck's words into some semblance of categorization.
-------------------
Phil Dellio: In the last (1985) Pazz & Jop poll, Tim Somner suggested the time has come for the '70s critics to bow out. How do you feel about the long-term domination of yourself, Bob Christgau, and Dave Marsh?
Greil Marcus: I don't see myself in any sort of dominant position in any way--I just write a column and say what I think. Until I started the Voice column a year or so ago, I did it in a small-circulation art magazine, and before that in a magazine that wasn't circulated outside of California. All I'm doing is writing about stuff that continues to interest me in a very intense way. I'm still struggling to make sense of it and feeling vitalized by writing about it. But I don't consider myself a player in a game of taste-making, or any sort of a critical powerbroker or anything like that. When Tim says the '70s critics should bow out, my response is, "I guess I don't have to worry--I'm a '60s critic." I don't know who he's talking about when he said that--I really don't. There's another thing, too, to get obnoxious about it for a moment. People will stop reading me and Bob and Dave and people of that ilk--if that is an ilk--when other people come along with better ideas, a more intriguing writing style, more stamina, and more commitment to the subject matter. There's nothing surprising about that.
Dellio: A few months back you commended Steve Albini's highly personal diary in Forced Exposure. Do you think the people at Forced Exposure are writing out of genuine conviction, or just looking for a forum to make a name for themselves?
Marcus: I don't know the people on Forced Exposure, so I don't know what their motives are. As someone who reads the magazine, I often get the feeling they're just writing for fun. And that could mean dozens of things. To try to piss people off--easier said than done. I don't know why Byron Coley keeps dropping the g's off his words. It's so affected. I talked to him on the phone recently--I've never met the guy--and told him he's just gotta stop that. It's like a quadruple irony, and I got lost somewhere on the double irony.
One of the reasons I like Steve Albini's writing is because he isn't working within someone else's form. He's working within his own. I was very moved by that diary. I really thought the guy was talking about real things. Making a fool of himself, shooting himself in the foot, and not giving a damn--he was gonna say it and leave himself completely naked. I don't think he was trying to be provocative, and I don't think he was copping a pose; I think he was really trying to figure out what the fuck he wanted to say, and to say it to its limit. And I think he did a real good job.
Dellio: What do you think about Chuck Eddy's writing?
Marcus: I liked Chuck's writing a whole lot when I was first seeing it in the Voice, but I guess I've gotten the impression over the past year or so that he's trying to convince himself that what he's saying on the page is true. Like, "I'm supposed to like this album, so I like it, and I'm gonna write about how great it is." You see the letters H-E-L-P tearing through the lines. So I'm not convinced by what he's been writing lately. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he believes it with all his heart and soul. But if he doesn't, I don't have any idea what's going on with him.
Dellio: Since interviewing Peter Townshend and Elvis Costello earlier this decade, you seem to have completely given up on interviews.
Marcus: I've never done interviews. I did the Townshend because the person who was supposed to had cancelled at the last minute, and my editor called me up desperate. I did the Costello simply because I'd always wanted to meet the guy. I'm real glad I did because we've become friends, and we talk, and he's really quite a guy.
But I'm not an interviewer--I'm not good with it and I'm not comfortable. What's wrong with me is I want the other person to like me. And that's fatal for an interviewer. The best interviews come when you ask stupid questions. You say, "Is it true your mother's really a dolphin?" And the guy says, "No! Where did you hear that? She's not a dolphin, she's a burrow. And let me tell you how she got to become a burrow..." And he'll tell you everything. Obviously, if you want the guy to like you, you're not going to ask if his mother's a dolphin. So I'm not cut out to be an interviewer.
Dellio: Would you agree, as Chuck Eddy wrote earlier this year, that radio is in its worst shape ever?
Marcus: Look--except for a few years, and they were mostly in the mid-50s and mid-60s for AM, and in the late '70s for college FM, the state of radio has always been the worst in history. There was a time in around 1959 when I stopped listening to the radio because it almost made me physically ill every time I turned it on. All I'd hear was Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy." There was another time like that in the late '60s, the early '70s were beyond belief, and the early '80s were astonishing. Top 40 or hip FM--whatever the standardized form of pop music might be--has an infinite capacity for dullness and stupidity. We'll never know when we hit bottom. So sure, I completely agree with what Chuck wrote--except it's not the worst in history if you want to take a longer view than six months.
Dellio: How about the mid-70s, the radio that Chuck Eddy and a lot of other newer writers grew up with?
Marcus: Well, I thought "The Night Chicago Died" was really funny, and "Beach Baby" was a truly wonderful record. But it was one of those fallow periods. And since it wasn't my period, in the sense that it wasn't when I was first starting to write or argue with my friends about music, it was just a time I had to get through. One of the great things about major changes in pop music, like Elvis or the Beatles or the Sex Pistols, is that unless you're a lot smarter than I am, it's a shock. Moving along in the mid-70s it was, "Jesus, seems like it's gonna be like this forever." The ultimate nadir was reached with that song "How Long" by Ace. Remember when that record came out? There's a mid-70s record for you. Well, rock critics all over the country said, "Hey, this is good! This is kinda interesting! Maybe this is gonna be a good new band!" I mean, that bland piece of shit? It couldn't get any worse than that, Chuck Eddy to the contrary.
Dellio: I take it that it still means something for you to hear a song over your car radio, as opposed to sitting at home.
Marcus: Yeah, because it's a surprise, it's more tactile, you're closer to the speaker, your hand's on the dial. I find it a lot of fun to be moving along and have something come on that will take me out of the day, take me back 20 years, confuse me in terms of a context, or just hear some song that I'm thinking, "What the fuck is that?"--something I've never heard before that just sounds great or weird. I think that's a lot of what living a good life is all about, to be able to be surprised like that.
Dellio: The collection of Lester Bangs's writing that you're editing was undertaken soon after his death five years ago. Has there been a delay in getting it out?
Marcus: It took a good while to collect everything we could collect. That meant gathering all the material from his apartment, which was thousands and thousands of pages, some of it in order and some of it not, then shipping it out to me; it meant gathering hundreds and hundreds of published articles from obscure sources, as well as from the Voice, Creem, etc., and getting all the stuff in one place and me going through it, dividing it into piles of 'yes,' 'no,' and 'maybe,' and then starting to read it and think about it.
But I finished the book last June, and it will be coming out in September. I think it was worth the wait. I hope it will have a big effect on how not just rock'n'roll, but culture or politics or anything is written about. I think people are going to see new possibilities for talking straight and for talking twisted when they see this book.
Dellio: Do you think people who write about rock'n'roll still tend to write in the shadow of Lester Bangs, or with Lester Bangs in the back of their mind?
Marcus: Well, I don't know. He's certainly on my mind, and I know he's on Dave's mind in the sense that he's a literary conscience. Often you'll write something and you'll say, "God, that's pretentious--Lester would kill me." Of course, people felt that when he was alive, too. That's not just a function of his being dead.
Dellio: Between your columns in Artforum and the Voice, you usually manage to say a few words about most performers. I wanted to get your thoughts on a few I've yet to see you comment on. The Jesus and Mary Chain?
Marcus: I thought (Psychocandy) was a good record, but in a real cold way. I always tried to get my British friends to explain to me why they're so big and important and controversial over there. I've got some smart British friends, but they never could explain it to me.
Dellio: Anita Baker?
Marcus: I think Anita Baker is ridiculous. Any time you hear somebody bringing back this kind of genteel, effete black music--the same number the Pointer Sisters pulled in the early '70s when they gave concerts with "Black Tie Recommended" printed on the tickets--it's an incident in class politics that has nothing to do with music.
Dellio: Robert Cray?
Marcus: I don't like Robert Cray, and I particularly dislike his new album (Strong Persuader). What really puts me off about him is that you just can't do blues in the self-conscious way you can do a lot of other things. You can't get up and say, "Ladies and Gentlemen, now I'm gonna do a blues song," without immediately sounding ridiculous. There's something very demagogic about that. The Bonzo Dog Band could do it, but they were supposed to be ridiculous.
Dellio: R.E.M.?
Marcus: The most boring of the boring--forget it.
Dellio: Both "Real Life Top 10" in the Voice and "Speaker to Speaker" in Artforum are fairly free-form in what they draw upon for subject matter. How does each take shape?
Marcus: For "Real Life," I keep a running file. Whenever anything crosses my path that might conceivably go into the column--something I hear on the radio, a book I see in a store, a strange news story I see in the paper, something I might see at an art exhibit--I write it down. You need a balance: I don't think it would be much fun to read a column about ten records, or ten books, or ten movies.
I suppose the subject of "Speaker to Speaker" is, "What does it mean to be a listener?" What are we doing when we listen? What happens? What doesn't happen? What could happen? I really am a critic in the sense that I don't give a shit what the artist intended, or what he meant. I couldn't care less. What I'm interested in is what happens when you listen. If the artist made a record intending to convince all right-thinking people to send money to the I.R.A., but the record is in Swedish and nobody can know that, it's sort of pointless to discuss the guy's intentions. What you really have to discuss is what is it like to hear a record in Swedish, and does it have a good beat?
Dellio: The last couple of years you've written a disproportionate amount about Elvis Costello and the Mekons. What do you see in them?
Marcus: They provoke me more, they give me more to think about, they give me more visceral pleasure, they upset me more, than any other people. But I don't like the new Mekons album (Honky Tonkin'); I didn't like Blood and Chocolate. I don't like everything those people do. But for the last few years, it's true, they've been the people who have gotten under my skin.
It just so happens with the Mekons that when I started to write about them, they weren't much being written about. So I had both a cause to trumpet and a subject to explore. And with Elvis Costello, to be perfectly frank, I don't think anybody else writes anything halfway intelligent about him. And I don't know why; don't ask me why no one else wrote a whole column on "Pills and Soap," because it sure as hell deserved it. You could write a whole column on his version of "Withered and Died," an old Richard Thompson song.
-------------------
Breaking Down Barriers
Damn right I try to subvert a readership's assumptions, no matter who I write for. I grew up not knowing what heavy metal was. I do know what loud guitars are. Sonic Youth, the Janitors, Squirrel Bait, they all have loud guitars. So the people who read Creem Metal should like that kind of music. The problem is, heavy metal is not a kind of music anymore--it's a marketing term. The paradox is that heavy metal listeners are probably about the most open-minded people out there, for a couple of reasons. Number one, speed metal had just opened the door between metal and punk--the stuff just goes back and forth. So if I tell the kids who read Creem Metal about Sonic Youth, I would assume that for a lot of them it makes just as much sense as somebody else telling them about Suicidal Tendencies. The other reason is, even the pop-metal stuff, which I don't really like--bands like Poison and Motley Crue--where they take off from is T. Rex and Slade and Sweet. One of the most ridiculous things I've heard in the last couple of months is that Red Kross, who have their album being distributed by a major label, are touring with the Butthole Surfers. They ought to be touring with Poison--they'd be huge. They draw on the exact same kind of music as Poison and Motley Crue and those bands do. Somebody's messing up somewhere. But to answer your question, yeah, I want to expose people who read Creem Metal to everything from Run-D.M.C. to the Janitors.
In the Voice, I want to piss people off. Especially in the Voice. Since I started writing for that paper, I've always assumed that there's something complacent about those readers. So yeah, I want to shock them. Besides, it's interesting to talk about Venom in terms that somebody who reads the Voice might appreciate. I mean, hell, Christgau ended up giving Slayer a B-plus in his Consumer Guide; he put Motorhead in his top 10! I have to think I played a part in that--I know I did. I can't believe he ever really played that Slayer record--I can't imagine Bob doing that--but I think it's neat breaking down some of the barriers he has toward this kind of stuff.
Cliques of a Different Colour
Let me put it this way: I would be allowed to give Hüsker Dü a negative review in the Voice, but you can't give the Swans a bad review in Forced Exposure. Byron Coley called me two weeks after "Slime Is Money" ran, and he told me flat out that a lot of those people he writes about are his friends. He told me that he will not write something negative about Chris D. or the Misfits. So the way Forced Exposure is cliquish has to do with the music they cover; Spin, the Voice--or before that, New York Rocker--are maybe cliquish internally, but they don't only cover one kind of music.
I have a lot of problems with Spin. I've told this to John Leland, but since I write for them it's not something I really want to...I was gonna say I kind of hate Spin. There's like a trendy schtick there. The Cro-Mags, for instance, don't deserve any space anywhere--they're a generic hardcore band. That Spin would devote that space to somebody like the Cro-Mags only indicates to me that whoever's writing that article, whoever's serving as the editor for that article, doesn't know about the kind of music they're covering.
Favourites
The albums I play more than any other albums in my collection are Paranoid, Funhouse, and ZoSo. Paranoid's amazing--it's a jazz album. Big influence on early Pere Ubu and electric Miles Davis. Anybody who takes time with Paranoid or Master of Reality, I'm convinced they'll come away thinking those are amazing records. Thing is, they're not that far from what the Stooges were doing. But what divided the critics then was audiences: a different audience listened to the Stooges and MC5 than listened to Sabbath, and it was assumed that the audience who listened to Sabbath were dumb. And that's reprehensible.
I listen to Zeppelin records right now, and there's never been a more avant-garde rock group. Never. Those guys..."When the Levee Breaks" is just so hard. "Communication Breakdown" is like hardcore ought to sound. It confuses me: I can't figure out why punk revolted against that stuff. The Pistols are nothing compared to Zeppelin. The difference is, people are dancing to Zeppelin right now. They were making dance music all along: "When the Levee Breaks," "Wanton Song," and "The Crunge" are great dance songs. I can't imagine anybody's ever gonna match that music. ZoSo's my desert island record if Greil ever asks me to write a chapter for Stranded.
If I was asked to name the most important rock artists of the '80s, I'd be really hard pressed. I think Motorhead have been really consistent, and I think AC/DC have too. But they're nothing like geniuses. [laughs] They've only made a couple of albums I really liked, but they've made a lot of good ones. Maybe the Fall, who are completely ignored by most critics. I don't know what I'm missing, but I think the Fall make brilliant records.
Critics
I've never met Greil Marcus, and I really want to. He's one of the people in the world I would really like to meet. Sometimes, I think he's way out in left field somewhere; I don't even understand what he's writing about. I mean, I've got to be honest--I'll read his "Real Life Top 10" and...you can't say it's over-intellectualizing, because that's not it. I have a radio in my car, and being in Detroit without mass transit, I drive around a lot too. So I really sympathize with what he does there. He was the only person besides me who realized that "Calling America" by ELO was one of the most brilliant records of last year. I thought it was really neat that it ended up on both our top 10s.
I've got nothing against Greil. Yeah, I probably do. I think both him and Christgau miss a lot. With Marcus it's probably not that important, because he never set out to hear everything there is. With Christgau it is important, although I know he realizes that he misses a lot.
The thing that bugs me about rock criticism more than anything else, and this applies to both Marcus and Christgau, and Marsh even more, is what I would call a hero-worship syndrome. Both Marcus's and Christgau's aesthetics are at least partially based on the idea that anybody can make great music. But I don't think they carry that out in practice. To me, it's not that likely that Elvis Costello will make four great albums; most people will make one great album or one great single. Making one great album doesn't really increase the chances of making another great album. I guess I'm not as convinced by the concept of genius as most critics are.
Hüsker Dü are a perfect example. If they emerged now, playing the kind of music they do, they'd be deservedly ignored. They sound like Big Country! There's no punch to that music. The other thing that makes me real different from Marcus and Christgau--probably makes me different from most critics--is that I want music to have immediate impact. That's one of the reasons I really like heavy metal. There are very few albums that grow on me over time. The Mekons's Edge of the World is probably the only album I've loved in the last couple of years that didn't hit me right off and kill me, and just continue to kill me.
Another thing is--I say these guys are great, and then I come up with all these things I hate about them--these guys judge music on lyrics. Marcus does it less than most critics, Christgau does it less that most critics, both do it way more than they ought to. Music is not lyrics. To me, lyrics are almost irrelevant. The only time lyrics will affect me one way or the other is if they outwardly annoy me, like with the Wiseblood record. I don't look for meaning; I don't think most people who listen to music do.
Words matter to me when they're funny, like on the new Cult album. I think it's by far one of the best records this year--it's just so stupid! Or like the Shonen Knife record, this power-pop group from Japan. They're three Japanese girls who are playing '79 style power-pop, influenced by the Buzzcocks or early XTC, with all the songs about animals, ice cream, and stuff like that. To me, those are good lyrics.
Steve Perry vs. Bob Mould
Bryan Adams, Boston, and Lou Gramm--or Steve Perry, who I think is a great singer--I acknowledge that it's crap. I like it as crap--it's great crap. They set their sights low, so they don't have to be that good. Whereas Hüsker Dü, to do what they set out to do, they have to be real good. And they're not.
Doug Simmons (Voice Music Editor) thought my Third Stage review was one of the better things I'd written. He pictured a whole city of people with their morning coffee and that review in front of them just spitting their coffee all over the table. And that's kind of what my intention was. I'm not gonna write about Boston and tear that album apart. I mean, why?--billions of people could do that. There's no use writing about Boston or REO unless I'm going to sit down and figure out what it is people like about Boston and REO. On the other hand, a big part of that Boston review was tongue-in-cheek. It was definitely aimed to piss people off. Rock criticism should.
Bono vs. Bonzo
I loathe U2. I hate their guts. But--just like Pee Wee said in his movie, there's always a big but--if "Bullet the Blue Sky" comes out as a single, that'll be my single of the year. Oh, man--the drums are pure Bonham! I heard it on the radio last week, and they played it back-to-back with "Love Removal Machine," and then went into "Kashmir." I was in heaven--I was in heaven.
Teenagers vs. the World
To me, rock'n'roll is a teenage music. One of the things that excited me so much about Metallica is that this was no frills, teenage music--and there's kids out there buying it. The thing that bugs me more than anything else is that there's no radio for kids anymore. There's nothing on the radio. Although the Beastie Boys, man...I hate their guts, I hate their guts--as people or whatever. But they proved something that Run-D.M.C. and Metallica started to prove last year: there's a teenage audience out there that's thirsting for their own music. And they're not being given it. Every generation of teenagers since rock'n'roll started had their own music. Until this one.
Chuck Eddy vs. Chuck Eddy
I don't know if my tastes will change; that's one of my big questions. One of the things I've taken Marsh to task for is that in old Creem, in the early '70s, he wrote all these amazing high-energy reviews of Raw Power, Sir Lord Baltimore, and Dust. Then he started taking bands like Pere Ubu--who to me are a natural extension of that kind of music--to task as being too arty, or too noisy: "Stop listening to noisy music." I guess a lot of that has to do with getting older.
But as I get older, I find my tastes lean more and more towards noisier music. I hate to refer to it in those terms, because it's almost as if someone like Albini likes noise just for the sake of noise. I don't--I want music to express emotion. I guess that's a Lester Bangs thing, but that's what I want. And right now, most of the music I see expressing emotion is loud, noisy music. So what will probably be the deciding factor is not whether my tastes change, but whether the music changes.
I'm convinced that I'm
listening to the best music there is right now. I've got no doubt in my mind.
(Originally published in Nerve; revised introduction written for rockcritics.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment