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Title: Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'N' Roll Music by Greil Marcus, Penguin Usapaper Plume ISBN: 0-452-27836-8 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.65 (17 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Great Rock Critic At His Best
Comment: Mystery Train Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus is indisputably rock n'roll's premier cultural historian. The reissue of his powerfully influential Mystery Train, a book that traces rock music to its origins, is a reminder of how this popular expression grew from the social protest of a number of committed American bluesmen.
Finding in the likes of Harmonica Frank and the murdered Robert Johnson, a formative aesthetic that Elvis Presley completed, Marcus looks to blues as the spiritual journeyer interpreting the American Dream. His metaphor for the quester is that of the worried man, the individual disinherited from his roots, and attempting to reshape America through a music created from its myths.
Marcus's study, while it concentrates on specific artists like The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley, is nonetheless a critique aimed at evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of rock as the natural evolution of the blues. Praising the originality that informs Robert Johnson's songwriting imagery, Marcus is not afraid by way of contrast to point up the solipsism at the heart of so many pedestrian lyrics. 'Rock'n'roll', he tells us, 'is suffering from that old progressive school fallacy that says if what you write is about your own feelings, no one can criticize it.'
One could argue, according to Marcus's criteria, that Elvis Presley represents the supreme embodiment of the American Dream. Born to poverty and failure, Elvis who exploded out of the South in 1955, was the white personification of black music. Bringing dynamism, complexity and contagious stage presence to a blues he reinvented as rock, Presley by escaping limits succeeded in going mainstream. That he opposed oppression with revolt, and yet subscribed to popular appeal, was a formula that won him unprecedented success. Marcus is Presley's best critic, and as such his writings on Elvis are unforgettable.
Jeremy Reed
Rating: 5
Summary: Still one of the truly great Rock 'n' Roll books
Comment: The first edition of MYSTERY TRAIN appeared in 1975, and now appears in its 4th Edition. That a study of rock 'n' roll should appear in a 4th edition shows the ongoing appeal of this book, which easily makes any short list of the great books or rock criticism ever written.
Throughout all his work, Greil Marcus has been concerned not merely with rock 'n' roll on its own, divorced from the greater culture, but with the role it plays in the cultural life of America as a whole. For many cultural critics, Elvis was a disruption with what came before. For Marcus, Elvis is a natural outgrowth of primary trends in American life. No section of the book illustrates this as well as the one on Robert Johnson, in which he emerges as the natural heir to the Puritans, because, like them, Johnson takes the Devil seriously. No just in writing about Johnson or Elvis, Marcus seems to believe that there is something uniquely American about rock 'n' roll, as if it were an outgrowth of the American spirit and soul. It is a part of American history in a way that it is not a part of English history, even if many British bands could take up rock 'n' roll and play it as well or better than its American creators.
Marcus never fails to write with great intelligence and insight, and if he sometimes seems to make a point go further than it wants to go, it should be viewed as evidence of his trying to make as much sense out of the subject as he can. Marcus isn't content to write superficial, glib criticism. He wants to go below surfaces to what lies beneath. If he tries to make connections that one might not quite agree are there, I find that preferable to a kind of criticisms that isn't capable of seeing larger connections at all.
This is also in advertently sad book. Most of the figures he wrote about in 1975 were all still alive and were most were still active. Indeed, many of them seemed capable of continuing to produce great music. But none of the major figures discussed in the book are today alive and active in producing rock 'n' roll. Elvis would be dead two years after the publication of the first edition. The Band would disband and key figures in the band would die. Sly Stone would become embroiled in drugs and then disappear from the public eye entirely. Randy Newman would produce a few more albums, but would eventually leave rock to write movie soundtracks like his uncles Alfred, Emil, and Lionel. Marcus wasn't aware that he was writing about the past when he completed the first draft in 1974, but he was.
Still, if one wants highly intelligent, literate, sophisticated rock criticism, a kind of incisive writing that cannot today be found in ROLLING STONE or SPIN or anywhere else, this is the place to go. I actually prefer some of Marcus's other books to this one (in particular, LIPSTICK TRACES), but this remains his best overall book on rock.
Rating: 1
Summary: Astonishingly bad, by any standards
Comment: Back in the 70s, we hadn't yet learned to "just say no." Perhaps that's why some people liked _Mystery Train._ Rampant drug use is the only possible reason anyone might find this gibberish interesting or enlightening. It's so absurdly overwritten, so pompous, and so empty of actual meaning as to be beneath contempt. This is, to books about music, what "Plan Nine From Outer Space" is to sci-fi movies.
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Title: The Old, Weird America : The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus ISBN: 0312420439 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: 22 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus ISBN: 0674535812 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1990 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll by Charlie Gillett ISBN: 0306806835 Publisher: Da Capo Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
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Title: On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word by Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin ISBN: 0415053064 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $30.95 |
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Title: This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band by Levon Helm, Stephen Davis ISBN: 1556524056 Publisher: Chicago Review Press Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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