Mystery Train (book)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"In 1957, Phillips, engineer Jack Clement, Billy Lee Riley, and Jerry Lee Lewis were setting up to make “Great Balls of Fire," [...] Suddenly [...] Jerry Lee objected. In 1949, as a kid in Ferriday, he had talked his way onto a bandstand for a chance to bang out “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” but the road to Sun took him through an outbreak of glossolalia in Ferriday to the Southwest Bible College in Waxahachie, Texas; like all Sun rockabilly ravers, he was raised on the gospel, and unlike most he knew it by heart. Sitting in Phillips’s studio, reading over the lead sheet for “Great Balls of Fire,” the meaning of the image must have hit him. “Great balls of fire”: that was a Pentecostal image, that meant Judgment Day—and now Sam Phillips wanted Jerry Lee to turn that image into a smutty joke, to defile it. Jerry Lee said no."--Mystery Train (1975) by Greil Marcus |
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Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'N' Roll Music (1975) is a book by Greil Marcus.
Said to re-define the parameters of rock music criticism, the book places rock 'n'roll within the context of American cultural archetypes from Moby Dick to Jay Gatsby to Stagger Lee.
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Authorship
Greil Marcus, rock critic and columnist for Rolling Stone, and contributor to other publications, such as Creem, the Village Voice, and Artforum, wrote Mystery Train in 1975. In the prologue, he relates that the book "is no attempt at synthesis, but a recognition of unities in the American imagination that already exist." The writing, according to the author, took about "two years of doing nothing else."
Mystery Train, according to one reviewer, reflects on what could be called "the historical turn" that rock took at the close of the 60s, initiated by Bob Dylan and the Band, and followed through by everyone from Creedence Clearwater Revival to Randy Newman, the music moving "beyond rock'n'roll's teenage immersion in the present to an adult sophistication steeped in deep knowledge of rock's roots in blues and country and lyrics that likewise looked to the past for inspiration."
According to another reviewer, Marcus proceeds in his examination of American popular culture with the "democratic assumption" that Presley and Herman Melville are already cultural and political equals, and are, therefore, "in conversation with one another - having a dialogue about freedom and limits, innovation and tradition, American dreams and American obsessions." When the 2nd edition came out, Elvis had recently died, and Marcus was asked to amend the chapter relating to Elvis by putting everything in the past tense but he refused, because, he said, "Elvis' presence was so powerful, I felt he's always in the present tense."
Mystery Train opens with an episode on the Dick Cavett show, where Little Richard interrupts a disagreement between a writer and a critic, and closes with a transcript of Jerry Lee Lewis arguing with producer Sam Phillips as they are setting up to record "Great Balls of Fire" in 1957.
Critical reception
Frank Rich reviewed the book for The Village Voice and wrote that Marcus' "frame of reference is so vast that he never runs out of connections worth making between the music he loves and just about anything else that matters in American art and life.”
List of contents
- Author's note
- PROLOGUE
- ANCESTORS
- INHERITORS
- THE BAND: Pilgrims' Progress
- Crossing the Border / Stranger Blues / The Righteous Land / Even Stranger Blues / The Weight
- SLY STONE: The Myth of Staggerlee
- Staggerlee / Sly Stone / Riot / Sly Versus Superfly / A Quiet Rebellion
- RANDY NEWMAN: Every Man Is Free
- Pop / Newman's America, 1 / Newman's America, 2 / Newman's Failure
- ELVIS: Presliad
- Fanfare / Hillbilly Music / Raised Up / The Rockabilly Moment / Elvis Moves Out / The Boy Who Stole The Blues / The Pink Cadillac / Elvis At Home / Mystery Train / Finale
- EPILOGUE
- NOTES AND DISCOGRAPHIES
Similar works by the author
- Dead Elvis (1991), on the influence of Elvis Presley on American culture in the latter half of the 1970s.
- Invisible Republic (1997), on the creation and cultural importance of The Basement Tapes, a series of recordings made by Bob Dylan in 1967 in collaboration with the Hawks, who would subsequently become known as the Band.
See also
