Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
“Critical essays are really where it’s at.” You start your most recent book with that quote from The Doors’ Jim Morrison. You’ve been writing about rock almost since he said those words in 1967.
That was from the first interview I ever read with The Doors. It was in a little fanzine. I wasn't even writing about music then, but for some reason I always remembered that line.
What do we get by reading critical essays?
You get one person's developed response to something, whether it's a novel, a movie, a public event or a piece of music. Whatever it might be, the critic spends his or her time thinking about his or her own response, trying to understand what brought forth that response and what's different about the subject of their scrutiny. That's not what most people do. Most people don’t examine their own reactions. Ideally, someone can read critical essays and value their own responses in a way that they haven't before – in other words, trust their own instincts and their own tastes. That's a good thing.
Do we strengthen our relationship to a work of art by looking at it through someone else's eyes?
That's certainly true for some people – it's true for me. God knows, if it wasn't for Pauline Kael’s movie criticism I wouldn’t have realised how much more there was in a film. Her work helped me make sense of my own confused responses. Without it I would not have had the same relationship to certain movies that I have now.
In much of your writing, you use the music as an overture to a wider ranging exploration of American culture. Why is rock the foundation of your work?
It’s a spur for my thoughts. Most of my thoughts begin with a song, or maybe something a song reminds me of, makes me think about or makes me want to know more about. That's just how it works for me.
We’re starting with Bob Dylan’s autobiography. Why did you select Chronicles?
Dylan has had a career of extraordinary richness and variety. Yet here he is writing a memoir that completely ignores everything which made him a world figure. It ignores all of his most famous songs, it ignores all the periods in which he was a great star. It's all about times when he was trying to learn, when he was confused and lost but absolutely alive with the thrill of discovering new ideas, new singers, new information.
It's a marvellous, eyes-wide-open partial-autobiography. It's also wonderfully written – the words are alive on the page. It clearly wasn't co-written or talked into a tape recorder. It's a great piece of writing.
You’ve written so sweepingly about Dylan that a collection of your thoughts on his work came out last year. Why is he a focus of such enduring interest for you?
His is probably the most complexly expressive voice that I’ve heard. There's just no end to the shades of meaning that come out of the way he shapes a word. The way he shapes a phrase can leave you hanging – he can take you so far with just a turn of a syllable. That's really it. It comes down to his singing.
You wrote that becoming a Bob Dylan fan made you a writer. How so?
He gave me something I wanted to write about.
Riders on the Storm is an autobiography by Doors drummer John Densmore in which the author is upstaged by his bandmate. Please tell us about it.
John Densmore was a drummer for The Doors, a band from Los Angeles of enormous depth and popularity in the late sixties. Their music has never been off the radio in 40 years. You may hear more Doors on the radio today than 20 or even 40 years ago. The staying power of their music is quite remarkable.
John Densmore was writing about his few years in the band from ’65 until ’71 when Jim Morrison died. What I love about this book is that it's so confused. It is somebody struggling to make sense of what he was doing, of what was going on around him, of the people he was working with. It’s that sense of struggle that I find captivating.
Densmore starts his book by talking about a visit to Morrison’s grave. What does the death cult that has sprung up around musicians who died too young tell us about the power of rock music?
I don't know. I don't think people visit Janis Joplin’s or Jimi Hendrix's grave the way they visit Jim Morrison’s. I did – I went to Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. But what's really fascinating about that place is Balzac and Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt’s graves, and the Holocaust memorials. It’s a really fascinating place. Jim Morrison's grave has just been turned into a graffiti site. It's kind of embarrassing.
In your new book The Doors you focus on the group’s music, which you heard live in concert during the five years when they topped the charts. Tell us about it.
It's a listening book, it's not a biography. It's about listening to the Doors – getting lost in the songs and coming out with a story about how the song plays, how it communicates. The Doors’ music is unlike anybody else's. Song to song, their music is not even like itself. There is a constant attempt to tell truth in their music and in the way Morrison’s words are shaped. My book is not a survey of a career, it's about taking the songs and trying to put into words what makes them so special.
Greil Marcus is a music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism. His newest book is The Doors
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