Read Online When That Rough God Goes Riding by Greil Marcus - Free Book Online
Authors: Greil Marcus
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musicians and you said it to people who weren’t musicians: there’s more to life than you thought. Life can be lived more deeply—with a greater sense of fear and horror and desire than you ever imagined.
That’s what I heard at the time, and that’s what I hear now. There is a difference. I no longer altogether trust the sort of explanations that along with other people I used to pursue so passionately—not, of course, philistine, literal explanations, of course not, but imaginative, contextualizing explanations that made both a work and its setting richer for the introduction of the one to the other. I’ve played Astral Weeks more than I’ve played any other record I own; I wouldn’t tell you why even if I knew. In the face of work that became part of my life a long time ago and remains inseparable from it, whether it’s The Great Gatsby or Astral Weeks , what I value most is how inexplicable any great work really is.
Dick Schaap, The Perfect Jump (New York: New American Library, 1976).
Hank Shteamer, “In Full: Lewis Merenstein, Producer of Astral Weeks ,” 3 March 2009, Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches , http://darkforcesswing.blogspot.com .
Barry Franklin, “Crawdaddy?” 1968, unpublished. Courtesy Barry Franklin.
Brooks Arthur, to Josh Gleason, “Van Morrison: Astral Weeks Revisited,” Weekend Edition , NPR, 28 February 2009.
Jon Landau, “John Wesley Harding,” Crawdaddy! May 1968, collected in It’s Too Late to Stop Now (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Press, 1972), 52.
R. J. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1937), quoted in Wilfred Mellers, A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (New York: Oxford, 1985), 33.
Lester Bangs, “Astral Weeks” (from Stranded , ed. GM, 1979), in Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung , ed. GM (New York: Knopf, 1987), 21, 20.
Martin Scorsese, to GM; see “Save the Last Waltz for Me,” GM, New West , 22 May 1978, 95.
PiL (Public Image Ltd.), “Albatross,” Metal Box (Virgin, 1979). Originally three twelve-inch 45s in a film can; the 1990 reissue was one CD in a four-and-three-quarter-inch tin: a PiL box.
Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower,” John Wesley Harding (Columbia, 1967).
Neil Young, “All Along the Watchtower,” on Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (Columbia, 1993). A tribute show from Madison Square Garden, with, most notably, Johnny Winter on “Highway 61 Revisited,” Roger McGuinn with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Lou Reed on “Foot of Pride,” and Sinéad O’Connor on Bob Marley’s “War” (leave it to her to break the rules), not to mention quite a few real stinkers.
Jimi Hendrix, “Star-Spangled Banner,” on Jimi Hendrix—Live at Woodstock (MCA, 1999). The best account of what happened when Hendrix played the anthem is Jeff Bridges’s Bob Dylan–written rant in the film Masked and Anonymous , dir. Larry Charles (Sony Pictures Classics, 2003). “I don’t know, man. All I did was play it,” Hendrix said on the Dick Cavett Show not long after Woodstock. “I’m American, so I played it. I used to sing it in school. They made me sing it in school, so it was a flashback.” Cavett, as Michael Ventre reported in 2009 for MSNBC, “interrupted the interview to point out to the audience, ‘This man was in the 101st Airborne, so when you send your nasty letters in ... ’ Cavett then explained to Hendrix that
whenever someone plays an ‘unorthodox’ version of the anthem, ‘You immediately get a guaranteed percentage of hate mail.’ Hendrix then respectfully disagreed with Cavett’s description. ‘I didn’t think it was unorthodox,’ he said. ‘I thought it was beautiful.’”
John Lee Hooker, with Van Morrison, “I Cover the Waterfront,” from Mr. Lucky (Virgin, 1991), included on the posthumous Hooker collection The Best of Friends (Shout! Factory, 2007), along with another Hooker-Morrison number, “Don’t Look Back.” The two also recorded
That’s what I heard at the time, and that’s what I hear now. There is a difference. I no longer altogether trust the sort of explanations that along with other people I used to pursue so passionately—not, of course, philistine, literal explanations, of course not, but imaginative, contextualizing explanations that made both a work and its setting richer for the introduction of the one to the other. I’ve played Astral Weeks more than I’ve played any other record I own; I wouldn’t tell you why even if I knew. In the face of work that became part of my life a long time ago and remains inseparable from it, whether it’s The Great Gatsby or Astral Weeks , what I value most is how inexplicable any great work really is.
Dick Schaap, The Perfect Jump (New York: New American Library, 1976).
Hank Shteamer, “In Full: Lewis Merenstein, Producer of Astral Weeks ,” 3 March 2009, Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches , http://darkforcesswing.blogspot.com .
Barry Franklin, “Crawdaddy?” 1968, unpublished. Courtesy Barry Franklin.
Brooks Arthur, to Josh Gleason, “Van Morrison: Astral Weeks Revisited,” Weekend Edition , NPR, 28 February 2009.
Jon Landau, “John Wesley Harding,” Crawdaddy! May 1968, collected in It’s Too Late to Stop Now (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Press, 1972), 52.
R. J. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1937), quoted in Wilfred Mellers, A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (New York: Oxford, 1985), 33.
Lester Bangs, “Astral Weeks” (from Stranded , ed. GM, 1979), in Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung , ed. GM (New York: Knopf, 1987), 21, 20.
Martin Scorsese, to GM; see “Save the Last Waltz for Me,” GM, New West , 22 May 1978, 95.
PiL (Public Image Ltd.), “Albatross,” Metal Box (Virgin, 1979). Originally three twelve-inch 45s in a film can; the 1990 reissue was one CD in a four-and-three-quarter-inch tin: a PiL box.
Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower,” John Wesley Harding (Columbia, 1967).
Neil Young, “All Along the Watchtower,” on Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (Columbia, 1993). A tribute show from Madison Square Garden, with, most notably, Johnny Winter on “Highway 61 Revisited,” Roger McGuinn with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Lou Reed on “Foot of Pride,” and Sinéad O’Connor on Bob Marley’s “War” (leave it to her to break the rules), not to mention quite a few real stinkers.
Jimi Hendrix, “Star-Spangled Banner,” on Jimi Hendrix—Live at Woodstock (MCA, 1999). The best account of what happened when Hendrix played the anthem is Jeff Bridges’s Bob Dylan–written rant in the film Masked and Anonymous , dir. Larry Charles (Sony Pictures Classics, 2003). “I don’t know, man. All I did was play it,” Hendrix said on the Dick Cavett Show not long after Woodstock. “I’m American, so I played it. I used to sing it in school. They made me sing it in school, so it was a flashback.” Cavett, as Michael Ventre reported in 2009 for MSNBC, “interrupted the interview to point out to the audience, ‘This man was in the 101st Airborne, so when you send your nasty letters in ... ’ Cavett then explained to Hendrix that
whenever someone plays an ‘unorthodox’ version of the anthem, ‘You immediately get a guaranteed percentage of hate mail.’ Hendrix then respectfully disagreed with Cavett’s description. ‘I didn’t think it was unorthodox,’ he said. ‘I thought it was beautiful.’”
John Lee Hooker, with Van Morrison, “I Cover the Waterfront,” from Mr. Lucky (Virgin, 1991), included on the posthumous Hooker collection The Best of Friends (Shout! Factory, 2007), along with another Hooker-Morrison number, “Don’t Look Back.” The two also recorded
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