Greil Marcus / Letter in the Ether

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.

The June edition of Real Life Rock Top 10 will beposted later in the month. Dear Greil: I have two 17-year-old students working on a podcast, trying to understand what “Classic Rock” is. Is it “white-guy music?” Is it just marketing? Is it just rock and roll? Who decides what is and isn’t? Do you think it’s a style of music? Something else? As GenZers, they don’t really listen to the radio, so these names don’t have much to do with radio stations for them . . .

1–3 Stanford Hospital, 500 Pasteur Drive, Palo Alto (April 21). A few days after a third open-heart surgery—the last two in 2022—I needed to feel more than I could manage on my own hooked up in a bed: to feel more alive and more in touch with morbidity. I needed to hear Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” but not his and the Wailers’ original—I wasn’t up to that. Not Joe Strummer’s; for all my affection for him, whenever I tried to play it, I could only feel him falling short of the song.

Hi Greil, As I’ve seen for signs at several No Kings rallies, So many questions, so little space. But one thing I’ve thought about recently is, What does Greil make of “I Pity the Poor Immigrant”? I saw that you touched on it in a talk, saying the drumming was trudging, lending a feeling of pointlessness. I revisited the song recently, in light of the current immigrant situation, and came away with little idea of who Dylan’s immigrant is.

1 Mary Lucia, What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To (Minnesota). From a longtime Twin Cities DJ (many years at the Minnesota Public Radio station The Current, now at the University of Minnesota Radio K), a harrowing memoir of a three-year stalking terror.