When Greil Marcus published Mystery Train in 1975, it was hailed as the greatest book ever written about rock & roll. Fifty years after it came out, there’s a lot more competition — but no other book has come close. It’s a radically original portrait of America and its music, starting with a few crucial figures: Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, The Band. But Marcus uses them as a map to the country, connecting to history, politics, movies, literature, folklore. His goal, as he explained it: “To deal with rock & roll not as youth culture, or counterculture, but simply as American culture.”
Marcus was still in his late 20s when he wrote Mystery Train. He just turned 80 this summer — yet he’s still telling these stories, because they just don’t end. In the essential new 50th Anniversary Edition, it’s a living, breathing book, as he expands and updates the “Notes and Discographies” section, following these tales through the years. In the first edition, it was 25 pages — by now, it’s nearly twice as long as the original book.
But that’s because the stories in Mystery Train just keep getting longer and stranger all the time. In 1975, Elvis was a faded star in Vegas and Robert Johnson was just another obscure dead bluesman. But these days, people argue over Elvis and Johnson more than ever — they remain stubbornly alive, showing up all over our culture. Mystery Train shows why we never stop talking about Sly Stone and the Delta blues, The Band and Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys and Manson and Southern California, “Hound Dog” and The Godfather and “Louie Louie” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” All the territory this book mapped is still so full of life.
Part of the weird legacy of Mystery Train is all the music it’s inspired. The Clash used it as the basis for their classic London Calling. When Bruce Springsteen read it, he said the book “gets as close to the heart and soul of America and American music as the best of rock & roll” — then turned around and made Nebraska. (Let’s just mention Nick Cave.) For me, discovering it as a teenager, no book has had a deeper impact on my life as a reader, writer, or listener — Mystery Train remains a revelation of how many secrets a great song can tell.
Courtesy of Penguin Random House
Marcus was one of the original Rolling Stone founders — he wrote the famous 1970 review of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait with the opening line, “What is this shit?” He’s carried that spirit into books like Dead Elvis, Lipstick Traces, What Nails It, and The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. He writes his Real Life Rock Top Ten column, now on Substack. And his “Treasure Island” discography in the 1979 anthology Stranded is the best and funniest 47-page cheat sheet to pop history you’ll ever read. Marcus spoke to Rolling Stone about the strange evolution of Mystery Train, and why the new edition feels “elegiac” to him.
Congratulations on the new Mystery Train. It’s amazing how this book keeps expanding.
I’m just very lucky that I’ve had a publisher willing to say, “Let’s keep these stories going,” and give me unlimited space to do it. Nobody said, “Well, it can’t be more than 400 pages or whatever.” No one’s ever said anything like that.
But the tales in this book never end. Elvis, Sly, Robert Johnson, the Band — they’re always mutating.
That’s true — every time I finish an edition of the book, I start a file for the next edition. The last was in 2020, when the Folio Society in England put out an illustrated edition. But this time, the publisher could get revisions into the book three weeks before it actually existed. The last change I made was in mid-July when Robert Johnson’s stepsister Annye Anderson died. I was able to get that in. People just keep dying, with a book that’s been around for 50 years. They just keep piling up, and luckily I’m not yet one of them.
But the stories never end. They build on each other. And I think the reason is that the music is so rich that it continues to generate new stories, new versions of itself, whether it’s other people covering the songs, or people writing about them, making movies about them, addressing their own past, trying to grasp a future. This story goes on, and I hope when I’m gone, the stories in the book, they’ll keep traveling.
Robert Johnson and Elvis — they’ve been especially busy the past decade. Why are they still cultural obsessions?
I’ve been on this beat for more than 50 years, so it’s not surprising the way that Elvis came back. The Elvis story continues to mutate, especially as more and more filmmakers come in to write the story in their own way. Not just with the Baz Luhrmann film, which I think is a great film — maybe not as great as his version of The Great Gatsby. But also the whole slew of documentaries in the last ten years, particularly the Eugene Jarecki film, The King. Then near the very end of my deadline comes Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir, completed by her daughter Riley Keough. You’ve got this tremendously vital and galvanic and often shocking book, with great dark humor. Nobody could have expected that.
But with Robert Johnson, there’s new stuff that nobody could have imagined. First of all, you’ve got his stepsister Annye Anderson, who was 12 years old when he died, with her book Brother Robert. She played with him; he sang nursery rhymes to her. There’s a picture of Robert Johnson on her book cover that no one had ever seen before. That’s the story as I’m telling it — trying to make it all work together and most of all, letting all the people speak.
This will probably be the last edition of this book, and it’s very frustrating. There’s so much more I want to put in it.
I hope it’s far from the last edition. But when you told me about it, you said this edition felt “elegiac” to you. Why?
Look, some of it is personal. Three years ago, I spent three and a half months in the hospital. I had two open-heart surgeries, had to learn how to walk and talk again. I didn’t expect to live out the year, and I had actually very low chances of doing that.
That made me a little more aware of mortality. I made a point in this edition of noting the birth and death dates of every figure in the “Notes” who died. Sly Stone died only this year. The Band, every single one is dead. Garth Hudson was the last leaf to fall from that tree. And boy, that’s sobering. I knew all the members of The Band, Robbie [Robertson] in particular, over many, many years. It’s really painful. I don’t like it. Also, our oldest daughter died in 2023, and she’s a part of this book. So I’m just aware that I’m living on borrowed time, and so is everybody else who’s still around in the book. Well — who’s around?
Randy Newman. And Mike Love.
Mike Love will live forever. Randy Newman is 81 at this point, and we’ll see what he has to say. He’s never going to shut up. He’s a thinking person; he’s a tortured person. He looks out at the country today in the same way I imagine you and I do — with horror and displacement, wondering, “Is there a place for me in this country anymore?” Which is another way of saying, if you’re a creative artist, “Does anybody want to hear what I have to say anymore? Should I just go away? Should I just shut up?”
I don’t know what the answer is for him or anybody else, but I’m sure that he’s wrestling with that question. I’m not so sure that Dick Cavett is still wrestling with it. Maybe Rita Moreno, who’s there on the first page of the book, who lives just a few miles from me — maybe she is, but I don’t believe Dick is.
Last year you put out this really brief and personal book, What Nails It, about why you write. It feels deeply connected to the new Mystery Train.
Yeah, I feel that too. I wrote that book and did the revisions to this edition of Mystery Train at the same time. And they share the same mood. They share the same sense of people asking, “Why am I so obsessed with mystery and the unknown and unsolvable questions?” Well, for me, I KNOW why. So I wrote a book about that.
I don’t like to write about myself. I’m not that interested in myself, and one person I am not is a narcissist. But I was in the hospital. I got a call from my editor, asking, would I give this lecture at Yale? And I said, no, I’m in the hospital. I have no idea if or when I’m getting out. And he said, well, next year. My attitude was, sure, I’ll probably be dead by then, so who cares? I can say yes, then they can find somebody else. But it turned out I made it through. So now I had to write this lecture, and I had to write this book to go with it.
So it was really liberating to write about myself as a writer, not in a personal sense, not telling any secrets, but just to try and be honest about that side of my life. I like what Bob Dylan said: “I just don’t advertise my life. I write songs, I play onstage, and I make records. That’s it. The rest is not anybody’s business.”
The way you elegize these major figures in your life, whether it’s your father or your friend Pauline Kael, it’s a different voice than you’ve used before. Where did that come from?
I had a father who died before I was born, in World War 2. He wasn’t even a specter because people didn’t talk about him, and I just had nothing to go on. I never heard any stories. My mother, who married him, didn’t talk. To find out about his death, then to have our older daughter join the story — she started to go to reunions of the survivors of the naval disaster in which he died in 1944 in the Philippine Sea. That was something I would’ve not had the nerve to do. But she said, “This is my story too, I’m going to meet these people,” and they became alive to her, real people to her. As soon as she walked into their reunion in Las Vegas, they knew who she was. They recognized their old comrade in her — I mean, physically. It’s hard, because she didn’t live much longer.
She’s one of the voices you bring into the book. Do you feel like your book is part of keeping these voices alive and communicating?
Yeah, I’m dedicated to that. And keeping voices alive just means leading someone to listen to a song and say, “Wow, I’ve never heard anything like that before. Who could these people be? What are they really saying? Why does this move me so much?” And begin to ask the same questions I ask, and answer in their own ways. And not just about the things I wrote about, but anything they care about, anything they love. Sure — it’s just a way of passing it along.
The poet James Merrill, he defined the elegy as “a new machine which makes the dead available to life.”
Yeah, that’s not bad if you can really do it.
You came up with a book title in 1997 that became part of the language — The Old, Weird America. It really sums up the America you’ve been chronicling your whole life. Is it ever bizarre to you how often people quote this phrase?
I fantasize that my obituary will read, “Reputed to have coined the phrase…” It’s a real burden, but it’s a burden I can’t complain about — to say something offhand and have it follow you the rest of your life.
My favorite result of that — can you see this? [Holds up menu] This is a beer menu for a brew pub in Washington, where they carry the New Weird America Pale Ale.
I hope you at least got a free beer out of that.
No — I tried. I wrote the company, but it didn’t happen.
Randy Newman’s saga has taken so many strange twists, since these days, everybody grows up knowing his voice from kids’ movies.
That’s wonderful, and that’s a perspective that I don’t have in the “Notes” — the perspective of someone who knows and loves Randy Newman through his movie work. He once told about a concert where some people have brought their little kid. He’s up there playing “Davy the Fat Boy” or “Sail Away” or whatever it might be, and the kid is screaming, “Play ‘You’ve Got a Friend In Me!’” I don’t have the perspective of that kid in my book, but it should be there.
Randy Newman’s got so many connections with Steely Dan, as you frame him in the book. They’re both describing the dark side of that Southern California mythos. Alex Pappademas’ book Quantum Criminals is about Steely Dan’s fictional world, but it could also be about Newman’s.
That is an extraordinary book. Quantum Criminals is an absolute breakthrough in terms of how to write about music, how to write about a band, how to write about songs. He simply takes all these characters in the songs and gives them their own lives to lead, so to speak. And Walter Becker and Donald Fagen — they’re there too, but off to the side. Their creations have gone on to live their own lives. This guy had real courage in writing this book. I have always felt that when criticism really hits its stride, when it’s at its highest pitch, it’s fiction. It really is. It does what fiction does. And he just said, “Okay, why not?” I was crazy about that book. I felt so gratified — “boy, someone’s finally doing something really different.”
Neil Young is another artist who’s barely mentioned in Mystery Train, but he could have his own chapter.
If I had written about Neil Young in Mystery Train, I would’ve been so frustrated because he’s done all of his best work SINCE then. Even his folk-song album, Americana, even his “Oh Susannah,” which is right in the core of the heart of what Mystery Train wants to be. It’s like he said, “The hell with that book — I can SING it.”
He is a conundrum, Neil. He is a force of nature. Nobody’s ever gotten close to what makes his music what it is. No one’s cracked that nut.
The Grateful Dead are not in the book, and you’ve almost never written about them, but do you hear them as part of this story, on albums like Workingman’s Dead?
Well, they were part of it in a way. They started out as a folkie group. My favorite Grateful Dead recording is an old folk song that recorded at the Avalon Ballroom in ‘65 or ‘66, “Cold Rain and Snow.” Their first album is old blues and basically Harry Smith songs done their way, “New Minglewood Blues” and all those old-timey songs. Same thing with the Charlatans — they were old folkies.
I would like to write about that tiny little window of Grateful Dead World. They came out of the same town I came out of. I went to school with Bill Kreutzman and Bob Weir. I knew Kreutzman — we were at a tiny Quaker elementary school. Jerry Garcia was my daughter’s guitar teacher before anybody had heard his name. This is Menlo Park; this is Palo Alto. John Dawson, who became “Marmaduke,” was in my class at Peninsula School, and I always valued John. He meant a lot to me. He was the only person in our class who was shorter than me, and a worse athlete.
What about a group like Moby Grape? Do they fit into this tale at all?
Oh, sure. I could have written about Moby Grape, a wonderful band, really fantastic band. I was lucky to see them, and they were deep, and they were powerful, and they were fun, and they were trivial. They were just everything. They didn’t have any of the pretentiousness of the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead or even Quicksilver Messenger Service. They were always just “that other band.”
There was one terrible night at the Fillmore where the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service were all on the bill together, the Big Three, and each band encored with “In The Midnight Hour.” Then around 2 o’clock, all three bands were on stage together, and they played “In the Midnight Hour” AGAIN. That was when my wife said, “Never again. Never coming back here.”
You’ve mentioned doing a book on Bryan Ferry. Is that coming next?
Yes, I’m writing a “listening to Bryan Ferry” book now. I’m in touch with him — he’s very forthcoming and helpful. Ever since that third Roxy Music album, Stranded, with “Street Life” — boy, that got me, and I’ve been listening to him ever since, being surprised and stunned, wondering, “What is this about? Where did this come from? Why is he so different?”
In all the previous editions of Mystery Train, you predicted Jerry Lee Lewis would be the last to go. This time you say, “He won.” But you’ve spent your entire life with these characters in this book, keeping them alive.
For the second edition, after Elvis died, the publisher said, “We should put the Elvis chapter in the past tense now.” I said absolutely not. It’s going to stay in the present tense. I want it to read as this unlikely, astounding story that CAN’T end, that can’t have a simple ending, and I want the vitality of it to come through. I don’t want it to read as, “Oh, once upon a time.” I placed a bet that the writing would have enough life in it to sustain a sense of presentness.
Are you ever surprised that all of these stories just keep on moving forward?
It’s been 50 years and I know these stories keep traveling. I know they’re not going to stop. I know people are not going to lose interest. If they do lose interest, they’ll rediscover this record, that performance, and be shocked and mystified and say, “I’ve got to solve this problem. Why does this music affect me so much? Why is it so difficult? Why are people so wrong about it?”
That was the motive of the book. This was all music I loved, and by some grace have never lost interest in. It’s music that has never bored me—I’ve never said, “Well, enough of this. I don’t need to hear this song again.” And because I only wrote about stuff that I really cared about, I was able to put that sense of high stakes into the book. To be a little obnoxious, I think the book itself entered into all of these stories. In some small way, the book played a role in the way these stories would continue to be told. I think that’s true. But I am a little piece of that story. It’s a big story.