What Nails It: A conversation with Greil Marcus

David talks to the critic about his latest book, list making, movies and more

Greil Marcus needs no introduction, but I’m going give him a brief one anyway. Marcus was one of rock criticism’s founding figures and remains among its most distinctive stylists. He was an early reviews editor at Rolling Stone, is the creator of the decades-long and frequently migrated column “Real Life Rock Top Ten,” and is the author of such germinal texts as Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music; Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century; and Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (each of which has been updated and republished in multiple editions); just to name his best known works. Greil has written monographs on The Doors (in 2011) and Van Morrison (2010), The Manchurian Candidate (2002) and The Great Gatsby (2020) and “Like a Rolling Stone” (2005). He’s also edited several volumes, including the influential early anthology of rock criticism Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (1979); The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad (co-edited with Sean Wilentz, 2005); and one of my go-to reference works, A New Literary History of America (with Werner Sollors, 2009).

If you want to learn more about Marcus’ bibliography and its impact, I wrote an appreciation of his work in 2015 for The New Yorker. Much of his work has been archived at GreilMarcus.net. In 2022, he launched Letters in the Ether, here on Substack. His latest book, part of Yale University Press’ “Why I Write” series, is What Nails It, and he generously agreed to answer a few questions about the book and his career.

David Cantwell: You are one of rock criticism’s great list makers. You don’t do listicles, and you tend not to rank items you’re listing, but you regularly organize your writing in list form. Sometimes your lists are short but expansive, as in your 2014 book The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs or 2022’s Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs. Other times they’re short and sweet, such as “Seven Songs,” an essay that ends the 2007 coffee-table tome Rock ’n’ Roll, ’39–’59. And you’ve been publishing your great “Real Life Rock Top Ten” column for coming on 40 years now. What would you say has been most attractive or useful to you over the years about the list format? What qualities can make a list good or helpful or interesting, in your view?

Greil Marcus: I think—I really don’t know—that what I like about developing—seeing?—books or pieces in terms of a number of somethings is the arbitrary nature of the whole business. In many ways it’s meaningless and absurd—and yet, somehow, meaning and sense emerge from the fun of being arbitrary, unfair, thoughtless, irresponsible, and dumb.

With my “Real Life Rock Top 10” columns, which I’ve been doing since 1986 and will keep doing as long as I have a place where it makes sense to publish it, I used to try very hard to arrange the items so that there would be a shape and a flow or maybe an interruption in each column. I’d write the items and then try to find the best way to arrange them. But over the last years—maybe since I restarted the column on Substack in December 2022 after not writing anything but phone e-mails for ten months while spending over 100 days in three hospitals—I’d sit down and write ten items and they usually run in the order I’ve written them. It’s not altogether an accident: I have the whole column in mind when I start. But it’s also that I tend to trust accident and chance more than intention. Or maybe not trust: just like.

The first of these productions came with the seven items in the Rock ‘n’ Roll 1939-59 book published by the Cartier Foundation in Paris in 2007, a great catalogue for the even finer exhibition there, which was curated by Gregg Geller, a person about whom I’ve never heard a bad word, let alone had a bad thought about myself. I was involved with the show in different peripheral ways and was asked to contribute to the catalogue, and that’s where the strain of perversity that underlies The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs (which could have been called A History, which would have robbed the book of any reason for being right from the start), Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations (which is a terrible title in about a dozen ways but is descriptive, overweening, and I couldn’t think of anything better), and Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs began. I decided to try over that span of 20 years to really TELL THE STORY, in a way nobody else would: Fats Domino’s  first record, which still fills me with awe and delight whenever I hear it or even think about it; Little Richard’s ‘Reddy Teddy,’ which invents, defines, and realizes the form in a way that can never be topped; and then four perfect records that sit in their own self-created but also generic worlds, the Fleetwoods’ “Come Softly to Me,” Dion and the Belmonts’ “I Wonder Why,” the Jewels’ “Hearts of Stone,” and the ‘Five’ Royales’ “The Slummer the Slum” (Lowman Pauling’s Nobel Prize in Physics-worthy guitar playing: When Eric Clapton heard it, he said, “Oh well, I guess I’ll try to play like Robert Johnson, that’ll be easier”), all topped by a record that DID tell the story, as a dada cut-up, in both senses of the term, Buchanan and Goodman’s ‘Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll.’ That opened the door to the true absurdity of “the history” in ten songs—how could you leave out. . . ?—which when I finished it did seem like the right songs and who cares about the rest.

Look—it’s fun to write like that. When the marshalling of whatever abilities you have and all you know and care about out are just a game you or anyone can play.

DC: You’re best known as a rock critic, but you’ve carved out a career where you can pretty much write about whatever you like. And what you’ve liked to write about, second only to rock and roll, is film. In What Nails It, you cite several movies as key to helping you to understand what criticism could be and do: Blue Velvet, The Manchurian Candidate, F. W. Murnau’s 1927 film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and even a “B” flick called The Pirates of Blood River, among several others. You also stress in the new book that the film critic Pauline Kael, particularly her collection I Lost It at the Movies (“It felt like the most exciting writing I’d ever read.”), was a key inspiration for your wanting to be a writer. I wonder: Was there ever an early moment when you thought you might want to follow Kael’s model more directly and become a full-time film critic—particularly since, when you began writing, “rock criticism” was something you and others still needed to invent?

GM: I’d always written, even as a kid composing little odes to things I liked, like on Herb Caen’s Sunday non-gossip columns about San Francisco as a state of mind. That made sense to me as I’d been brought up to think of it in just those terms.

I started writing about rock ‘n’ roll in 1965 (in college papers, one of which, originally titled “New Horizons in Group Politics,” a joke on them commonplace political-science banality, and because the groups weren’t behavioral or demographic or religious but musical, was in my first book, the anthology “Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Stand,” in 1969, as “Who Put the Bomp”) because it was the most compelling and interesting thing in the world and. just as it impelled some people to play, it impelled me to write. It was my subject: Anything else would flow out of it.  What I learned from Pauline was about criticism as criticism—it didn’t matter about what.

I did have a film column once, in the mid-70s, in Tom Morgan’s short-lived and sometimes shining magazine Politicks.  But I started out writing about Howard Hawks and Steven Spielberg, Charlie Chaplin and The Battle of Chile, and soon enough I was writing about the TV movie Dead Man’s Curve: The Jan & Dean Story and Floyd Mutrux’s movie about Alan Freed, American Hot Wax.

DC: You begin What Nails It with a string of strong, short clauses: “I write for fun. I write for play. I write for the play of words. I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it—and the nerve to say it.” You stress “discover” is the key word there for you and then, on the next page, you share the thrill of looking over what you’ve written almost with shock, with “That feeling of no, I didn’t think that, I didn’t write that, where it did come from?” I love that you phrase it as “That feeling…,” as if we all know what you mean—because my guess is that anyone who does much writing knows exactly what you mean. As it happened, as I was beginning What Nails It, I still had in mind an Interview piece you’d written back in 2000, one of your old “Days Between Stations” columns, that I’d read on your Substack just a few days earlier. You were writing about Debbie Geller’s The Brian Epstein Story, and you wrote: “The sense you get from Geller's book… is that Epstein had to change the world to find a place in it.” Though in a far less consequential way than Epstein and the Beatles, that impulse resonated with me, too. I mean, that need to join or start conversations to make the world fit me and my point of view just a smidgen better. Is that perhaps one reason you write as well? To nudge the world, one reader or audience at a time, so that it better fits you? And if that’s not part of what makes you want to write, what do you hope your writing accomplishes for your readers?

GM: I was so startled by that thought about Debbie’s book—it wasn’t a flash of insight, it was thinking hard for a long time over what she’d written, whatever Epstein had said about himself, what others said about him—because it so fully wasn’t how I ever thought about myself and what I do. What do I hope my writing passes on to my readers? It’s the same as what I try, in non-obvious ways without ever stating goals, that I’ve hoped to pass on to students over 20 years of teaching that now seem to have ended: Think for yourself, which is not as easy as it sounds; take nothing for granted; the work is bigger than it seems.

DC: Finally, Greil, we always like to end these Q&As by asking: What’s one thing you’ve read recently – music-related or otherwise – that’s really exciting you or speaking to you in some way that maybe, without stepping on the toes of some future “Real Life Rock Top Ten” installment, you’d like to recommend?

GM: I’m in the middle of Charlie Haas’s novel The Current Fantasy, about a colony of Germans who in 1914, when currents of natural-living free love bohemianism were as common as incipient fascist movements, move to Southern California to escape the coming war and start a new life. It’s something Charlie, a screenwriter (Over the Edge) with one previous, wonderfully funny novel (The Enthusiast), has been working on for years, starting with studies of German Sun-worshipping cults, which eventually spilled out into two German countercultures: nativism and Nazism. I’ve read two previous drafts of the novel, and while the arc of the story is relatively constant, the accumulation of detail—emotional, practical, place, and time, as well as dress, tools, grooming, speech, food—is what draws you in, creating a sense of jeopardy because you come to care so viscerally about the characters and their mission, to the point that you can’t imagine how the story, which is too close to known history for a truly different ending, is going to turn out—is what lifts the book as it will appear later this fall, gives it its weight and its lightness: In the sense that, even if history will crush you in the end, there are times you can fly through it on wings of thought and desire.

Haas’s sentences are not that long.

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