Greil Marcus / Letter in the Ether

1 Sleater-Kinney, Greek Theatre, Berkeley (September 9). In December 2012 I went to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse and the Patti Smith Group. Smith and her band opened and they never flagged. When they left you thought, that was fine, that was strong, I was lucky to be here. Then Crazy Horse came on—for me, when they’d start to play, it was always as if Young was just part of the band—and it felt like you’d just watched some people scribbling on scratch paper.

The never-ending question of putatively decent people writing about people who are apparently not, antisemitism in Michigan, and a surprise appearance by P. G. Wodehouse I’ve been thinking about a musical language that seems to have almost disappeared from contemporary popular music: the fully formed, immediately singable instrumental melody—a melody capable of carrying an entire piece and remaining in the memory almost like a song.

1 Beths, “Expert in a Dying Field” (Carpark/YouTube, 2022). It’s wonderful when a band you’ve never heard of becomes your favorite as soon as you do. That happened to me with the Beatles, it happened with the Fastbacks, it happened with Sleater-Kinney, and now it’s happened with the Beths.

Not a question, just a condolence for the loss of your friend Dave Marsh. I was in high school when he wrote infamous reviews about Queen and cover stories about Springsteen, and I followed him through his Rock & Rap Confidential days through to E Street Radio. And I still page through that list of 1001 singles with the mix of exasperation and exhilaration Marsh probably intended.

In the early 1990s I was in college in Athens, Ohio, and I had really thirsty ears, but information moved differently back then, so I was doing whatever I felt I had to do to survive as a listener, and sometimes survival looked like having to save up my buttons for selections from the half-rack of budget cassette tapes at Revco Drug (hey, we’ve all been there).

1 The Odyssey, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Universal). It’s too bad that back in 1954 Tony Curtis, the former Bernie Schwartz of the Bronx, never really said “Yonder lies da castle of my fodder” in The Black Shield of Falworth. But Christopher Nolan is here now with this ludicrous travesty to pick up the slack.

Hello! I have at age 63 finally partially succeeded in one life’s ambition: to bring forth the history of the short-lived New Music America festival (1979–90) via my Substack and little community radio shows since 2018. The section in my Substack is called “The Secret History of Music of the Eighties” (inspired by Lipstick Traces, a seminal work for me) and a complete index of every single day of all 12 festivals starts here (the NMA articles have no paywalls).

1 Your Friends and Neighbors, showrunner Jonathan Tropper (Apple TV). In a show that over two seasons with a third to come that makes The White Lotus play like The Sopranos, or maybe the Army-McCarthy hearings, house porn in an enclave commuting distance to New York. And also TV porn, as if the whole engine of the show is everyone—writers, directors, actors, characters, and whoever is watching—consciously reveling in the complete vapidity of it all. And everyone is subsumed into Jon Hamm.

Hi Greil, I recently finished reading Brand New Beat [by Peter Richardson]. Following the death of Ralph Gleason, Mr. Wenner decided to move the magazine to New York because San Francisco had become a “cultural backwater.” Personally, I enjoyed the music scene of the latter half of the ’70s and would value your take on what prompted the move. Best regards. —PAUL HALLAMAN San Francisco was a backwater as far as the music and media industries were concerned.

1 Lara Trump, “I Won’t Back Down” (First Class). In his Substack newsletter A Legend in His Own Minefield, John Mendelssohn suggests that with the implosion of the Freedom 250 shows the White House could simply bring in—or, you could presume, transfer the funds to—Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump.