uTopianTurtleTop

INSIDE / OUTSIDE

Someone I’ve known all my life was recently sworn in as a freshman Congressman from Battle Creek, Michigan, my dad’s home town, 30 miles away from where I grew up in Kalamazoo. Joe Schwarz was a lifelong friend of my late uncle’s and is still close with my widowed aunt and my cousins. My dad has known him since childhood. Joe had been a moderate Republican state legislator for many years. He ran for governor in 2002 as a fiscally conservative socially liberal moderate Republican who said “we need to raise taxes to balance Michigan’s budget.” The extremist irresponsible Republican establishment creamed him in the primary, and their extremist nominee got creamed in the general by the Democrat Jennifer Granholm. I saw Joe shortly after his primary defeat, at a Michigan football game when I was back home visiting. I offered my sympathies and he shook it off. “I said what I wanted to say and I have nothing to be ashamed of; I can go out with my head held high” -- he was cheerful. Readers of this blog will have known that I’m a lefty, but I would have been hard pressed to vote against Joe, because he’s a friend of the family, a decent guy, smart as they come, a social liberal -- pro-choice on abortion and wouldn’t stand in the way of gay marriage -- and he has courage and integrity.

I bring all this up because in today’s Seattle Sunday paper is pontifical David Broder profiling Joe and a freshman congressional conservative Democrat from Oklahoma. And Broder closes his column by saying that Joe, as a maverick moderate in a highly disciplined conservative party, is just about to learn how complicated his life is going to be. And I thought, how condescending, Broder, Joe Schwarz has so much more experience, integrity, courage, gravitas, and general smarts than you, it’s embarrassing. I’ve known him all my life, but I’ve never known him well; still I’m confident that he is fully aware of what he’s getting into.

And the next thought was -- bingo. It’s not just music critics who can be condescending to their subjects. The problem is an inherent potential pitfall to all journalism. I had been aware of this but had forgotten it, as I’d been brooding on my critical “turn-offs” in recent days -- Chuck Klosterman’s habitual condescension to musicians, Greil Marcus’s opposite assumption that music is an esoteric mystery religion of which only a select few mysteriously annointed musicians are worthy. Marcus can be very condescending to musicians whom he seeks to cast to outer darkness, which appears to be most of them. As the self-appointed doorkeeper of his religious mysteries, he remains outside the mystery himself, and he can be positively hostile in his insistence that ordinary listeners and readers aren’t anywhere close to getting in the door. We’re somewhere out in the forsaken, graceless fields. Marcus portrays himself as at least within watching distance of the ceremonies -- close enough to lip read, but not enough to hear.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the move he makes near the end of his coy write-up of Bob Dylan’s new book “Chronicles” (which I wrote about the other night). A couple paragraphs from the end, Marcus quotes a whole paragraph of Dylan’s book:

“Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect. I could believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real, so more true to life than life itself.”

It’s a good quote -- an eloquent (and Dylan’s book is lushly ripe with eloquence) description of his view of the relationship between everyday life, the archetypal world, and the medium of folk songs -- “medium” in the “arts-media” sense and maybe in the “seance” sense as well.

With overheated excitement that spills over into outright hostility, Marcus follows that paragraph-long quote with a one-sentence paragraph of his own device:

“Songs that say, I am true, but there is no truth: Figure that out, buddy.”

Well, Greil, I just did. Do you need more help? Does your hyper-romantic hyper-rationalist worldview make you uncomfortable with the underlying uncertainty and metaphysical contradictions that riddle our existence, in spite of which we can feel and sense and know and believe provisional, partial, pragmatic (or quasi-pragmatic) truths? Dylan isn’t, and his prose doesn’t seek to beat us down or bully us. I can understand your excitement at finding that your idol articulates your obsessions and concerns so well, but why so hostile, Greil? What’s up with that? What’s up with imputing a hostility to Dylan’s prose that just isn’t there?

Hyper-rationalist, you say? Yes, I say. That little one-sentence paragraph is the piece’s penultimate one; I quoted the closing paragraph in my post the other night, where Marcus says of folk songs, that they can express “-- ‘the truth about life,’ as Dylan writes of folk songs, even if ‘life is more or less a lie.’ No, it probably wasn't going to set anybody free, except, for an instant, maybe the singer." And after posting it occurred to me -- Marcus is hooked on the words. He’s not hearing the music. He’s worrying about whether verbal rational truth resides in songwords and ignoring how heartfelt musical truth interacts with the words in ways that can, momentarily, resolve contradictions and liberate the spirit.

Why do I care so much that Greil Marcus has gone around the bend into some bitter, anti-musical place, you ask? Because I loved his music writing. Just tonight I was listening to Charlie Rich sing “Feel Like Going Home.” Beautiful song, as Marcus knows. The first verse lays it down (scroll down for the whole lyric):

Lord, I feel like going home
I've tried and I failed and I'm tired and weary
Everything I've done is wrong
And I feel like going home

In Marcus’s book “Mystery Train,” he gives an incredible account of hearing Rich perform the song in 1973 or 1974, which I’ll paraphrase from memory. Rich was at the height of his popularity, having recently scored his biggest hits, “Behind Closed Doors” and “The Most Beautiful Girl,” and his new audience gave his performance a laser-like focus and intensity -- it was his shot, and he knew it, and he knew what it was worth -- to coin a phrase, he knew what was at stake. And then he played “Feel Like Going Home” and dedicated it to the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, whose presidency was just then turning into a national embarrassment. And Marcus found himself feeling a sympathy for the president that he never, never wanted to feel.

The power of music. And I can’t hear the song without thinking of Marcus.

“Mystery Train” is full of such moments. One that affected my listening life deeply -- his account of Elvis’s version of “Tryin’ to Get You” on the RCA “Great Performer” collection. It was Elvis live at his 1968 comeback concert, doing a song he had first recorded in 1955 while at Sun Records, and much more powerful, according to Marcus, than the original. Marcus is right, and, paraphrasing again, he says that it’s full of a glamour, fury, and drama that is quite beyond what any other rocker is capable of. And Marcus is right -- he nails it. Elvis’s performance is one of the greatest virtuoso displays of vocal tone color in the history of recorded music; I can’t think of a greater one. In one phrase Elvis goes from a wailing, howling, gravelly roar of love (or luuuuv) to a sweet crooning prayer of gratitude, all in the same breath, and it’s so idiomatic, so natural, so wedded to the contours of the words and the music that you might not even notice the feat if you’re not listening closely. The last line of the second bridge,

Well, there's nothing that could hold me
Or that could keep me away from you
When your loving letter told me
That you really loved me true --


going into the the first line of the last verse,


Lord above me knows I love you
It was He who brought me through,
When my way was dark as night,
He would shine His brightest light,
When I was trying to get to you. . .

that’s when it happens -- the long cascade of notes where the word “true” turns into “Lord.” The awesome astonishment of learning “that you really loved me true,” and the awe-struck humble gratitude that the Lord “brought me through.” I wouldn’t have bought the record without Marcus’s recommendation, and, wow, it’s amazing.

Marcus’s exuberance for the music he loves went overboard into an exclusionary crypto-mystery-religion with his book about Dylan, “Invisible Republic,” a book I read and hated for Marcus’s hostility to the ordinary reader and listener, a tone that I couldn’t put my finger on until I read Marcus’s current “Rolling Stone” piece on Dylan. Dylan loved “Invisible Republic,” finding many of his own closest concerns articulated there. I’m glad he was able to articulate his own, more inviting, version of those concerns in his compelling bildungsroman (Marcus’s right-on word) “Chronicles.”