Mystery Train, 50th Anniversary Edition: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music

by Greil Marcus

A 50th anniversary edition of the music classic, with fully updated discographies and new introductions from Greil Marcus and Dwight Garner

In this special 50th anniversary edition of the beloved Plume backlist staple first released in 1975, Mystery Train's complex analysis of the relationship between rock 'n' roll music and America is given new life with updated discographies and new introductions by Greil Marcus and Dwight Garner.

Rather than providing a general overview of influential bands and artists, Marcus's definitive book focuses on just virtually unknown early rock 'n' roller Harmonica Frank; the country blues singer Robert Johnson; and some of the better-known musicians who followed—The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley.

This is the original book to take these rock legends and place them in the American culture of their time. And now, in 2025, Mystery Train continues its groundbreaking work for a new generation of readers and music lovers.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Essays, Art, Criticism, Cultural

524 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics. In recent years he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Minnesota, NYU, and the New School in New York. He lives in Oakland, California.

Reviews

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a masterpiece from Greil Marcus about what makes American rock-n-roll such a special beast. It focuses on the origins of rock music in the blues and then profiles four completely different artists: Elvis, The Band, Sly and the Family Stone and Randy Newman. It also includes a kickass discography to go back and listen to the music he discusses. I was blown away by the original Sun sessions of Elvis and grew an entirely new appreciation of Bob Dylan's work with The Band, Sly Stone's music as well as that of Mr. I Love LA. It is a must read for fans of rock music and a magnificent testimony to the art behind the legends as well as the ethos behind the music.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty much the big bang for those who like to plug their music collection into their book collection and let the two comingle, cohabit, collude and co-depend.

I've always believed that somewhere Geoffrey Chaucer and Slim Harpo, Christina Rosetti and Iris DeMent, Jelly Roll Morton and Sheherezade, Geeshy Wiley and The Book of Kells, Zoot Horn Rollo and Thomas Traherne share the same chords even as they spin distinct threnodies.

Yes, I agree, Greil Marcus is a waffling, grating self-parody of a tall-foreheaded fierce rock crit whose favourite obsessions are painfully predictable (Robert Johnson, Randy Newman, Elvis for starters).

His later books you would have to pay me in unmarked bills to read, but this one was very cool for its time and the time I read it, so hey Greil, you may be male and oh so pale but this wasn't a fail.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

wonderful book. I hope one day to follow in Marcus' footsteps. He combines (or better to say assimiliates) varying traditions and social forces within American history and popular culture, beginning with an artist, a moment, a tone, a mood, an instance and expanding it outward into larger and more elegant circles of reference and obscure historical connection until we get a sort of folk gestalt, an x-ray if you will, of another seemingly endless angle on the American consciousness, which is experiemntal to the bone.

If you're going to talk about rock and roll, you've got to confront the obscure. A whole chapter on Harmonica Frank? I'm pretty well-versed in rock n roll and I've never so much as heard of him. But Marcus makes him come alive. The chapter on Staggerlee- the man, the myth, the legend is absolutely essential, I think, to getting at the heart of a certain kind of American poetry (in this case, a folk ballad) and American violence (bad man, cruel Stagolee...don't mess with his Stetson hat)...

It has been fairly said of Marcus that "everything reminds him of everything else"...if this sounds like goop for cultural criticism this ain't your book. If this sounds sort of like what one of his blurbs says of him: 'Marcus writes criticism like Dylan writes songs' then this just well be the book for you. (I think you can take quite a bit from the nature of the blurbs on a book jacket, their number and tone and the who and the where, but that's another issue altogether)...

The drawback as such to a book like this is that it does contain an extensive (almost larger than the main course itself! 'notes and discography' section which EXAUSTIVELY documents the textual background for the musicians he covers (I learned more about bootlegs for 'The Band' than I ever wanted to thought possible). This can be enthralling if you're a fan or scholar of the artist in question- I was actually pretty riveted to his discussion of Robert Johnson. I do think it's somewhat annoying to read discriptions of songs and records which you know you'll never actually get around to hearing....this is a very strong drawback for any literary person, since after all how much culture can one take in in a lifetime? It got a little jarring at points (see parenthesis above) but- here's the kicker- Marcus writes so damn well about obscure novels and bootlegs and concerts that even if one did actually hear them or attend them Marcus' phrases are so distinct and so tastefully sketched that they envelop the music in a poetic aura of interpretation which becomes a thing of its own. He makes the music (or, if one wants to be uncharitable) his impression of the music vivid, incisive, tough-minded, and profound.

I would love to see this kind of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, artistic style of criticism more often. Especially in academia.

It's sort of an accepted truism that the critic is really just a frustrated artist- 'those who can, do, etc'...always a bridesmaid never a bride'- but I think a case can very easly and poignantly made (there is some truth to this slander after all) that criticism is its own form of poetics, aesthetics, its own artform. If you read the best it has to offer the reason for its very being is more than present, its obvious, and makes such distinctions irrelevant to say the least.

Criticism is, or should be, about making the thing discussed more vivid, more alive, more complex and writhingly real. Juxtaposition is not eclipse.

Marcus is one of the critics who make criticism MATTER. Rave on

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

We all know what talking about music is like (and for those who don't, great googly moogly, don't get me started). Greil Marcus does a lot of dancing about architecture in this book, first published in 1975 and updated for this fifth edition in 2008. Thank goodness (or thanks to rock and roll, which is not quite the same thing) it's an interesting dance. From the calculated shock tactics of Lyndon Baines Johnson to the ornate phrases of William Faulkner, Marcus moves effortlessly from "high" culture to "low" (scare quotes intentional) and back again. He draws connections—that's what he's best at—unlikely connections between American rock music and literature, politics, and other arts (for don't you think politics is an art?), and like all critics who are worth the time it takes to read their work, Marcus sounds certain of whatever opinion he's asserting, continually making pronouncements that are, if not as incontrovertible as he's phrased them, at least plausible. And, after all, that's what we're here for.

Mystery Train is surprisingly short, though. The essays collected here cover a mere half-dozen bands and artists in depth:

As "Ancestors,"
Harmonica Frank (who? Well, Marcus explains the inclusion of his pet obscurity)
and Robert Johnson, "King of the Delta Blues Singers."

As "Inheritors,"
The Band,
Sly Stone,
Randy Newman,
and Elvis Presley, in his pre-obese corpse/tabloid fugitive incarnation.

But in these short chapters Marcus delves fearlessly into grand subjects. He knows why widely popular works—even if they're terrible by critical standards—force us to engage with them, precisely because they're popular. "Only works that can't be ignored—liking them is hardly the point—raise such questions and bring them to life" (p.110). I frequently use Dan Brown as a whipping boy for bad prose—but even I have to admit that despite Brown's flaws, millions of people have read and enjoyed his books. And that's an achievement I cannot entirely discount.

After the essays, frozen as they are in time (it was deeply weird for me to read the unbroken present tense of "Presliad"), come 195 pages—literally more than half the book—given over to Marcus' "Notes and Discographies." These are no mere appendices but arguably the real payload of the book—where Marcus switches from high-minded, abstract and didactic polemics to biography and bibliography, flatter and drier in tone perhaps but much richer in detail, and much more current. (I especially appreciated his shout-out to Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, in his afterword on Robert Johnson.)

*

Some of Marcus' analysis is deeply uncomfortable. His rock'n' roll spectrum is made up of just two colors—black, and white, a dichromatic rainbow. Not just in the band names—though he does mention The White Stripes in one of his Notes, and the whole tone of the book brought to my mind Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, with their driving anthem "Whatever Happened (To My Rock and Roll)?" The faces of rock and roll are black, and white—rock music's roots are African-American, and a lot of its branches, too, though there have been plenty of clinging vines who have denied the source of their sustenance. Marcus faces this divide unflinchingly on almost every page.

In contrast to the looming presence of race, however, another great dichotomy is simply invisible—in Marcus' rock'n'roll, women do not exist except as audiences and backup singers. Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, for two who spring immediately to mind, are each mentioned only once; Joplin, for example, is only noteworthy for an appearance onstage with Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, "Marmaduke" (John Dawson) from New Riders of the Purple Sage and The Band. It is an odd, if all too common, blind spot for someone otherwise so observant.

*

If you listen, you get sharper, and you begin to hear what the band is hearing{...}
—p.74

Marcus is a good listener. His analysis of the end of the 1960s still resonates:

Too much war and too much public crime has poisoned the country to be easily put to rest by any kind of reform or vengeance. There is simply too much to forget. Our politics have robbed the good words of ethics of their meaning; an impenetrable official venality has robbed the good ideas of the last few years of theirs. What, in the sixties, looked like a chance to find new forms of political life, has been replaced by a flight to privacy and cynicism; the shared culture that grew out of a love affair with the Beatles has collapsed (not without their help) into nostalgia and crackpot religion. The revisionists have already gone to work on the last decade—which was, no matter how smug, self-righteous or naïve, a time of greater cultural and political freedom than most of us will likely know again.
—pp.88-89

And he had, even while presumably writing these essays while much younger and in the heat of the moment, a clear-headed perspective on aging unusual in rock journalism.

As the members of an audience grow older, they lead less public lives. Their deepest affections shift from a multiplicity of friends—from the idea of friendship itself—to husbands, wives, children; they exchange the noisy heterogeneity of school for the quiet homogeneity of a job. They travel less frequently, act less impulsively. If politics once meant the fellowship of the street or the political community of a campus for those who were lucky enough to have known such things, more and more politics comes to mean voting—the most solitary political act there is—or, at best, talk with a few friends. A life that was fluid with possibility can solidify into loneliness. One looks harder for the comforts of similarity, and shies from the risks of diversity. It becomes easier to think that nothing is new under the sun, or that if there is, that one can no longer be a part of what is new. Too much is settled.
—pp.105-106

Too much of that paragraph is all too true.

But this is, perhaps, Mystery Train's best epigraph:

Within such a culture there are many choices: cynicism, which is a smug, fraudulent kind of pessimism; the sort of camp sensibility that puts all feeling at a distance; or culture that reassures, counterfeits excitement and adventure, and is safe. A music as broad as rock'n'roll will always come up with some of each, and probably that's just as it should be.
Sometimes, though, you want something more: work so intense and compelling you will risk chaos to get close to it, music that smashes through a world that for all its desolation may be taking on too many of the comforts of familiarity.
—p.89.

At its best, this is what rock music does—and, at worst, this is what real rock music at least aspires to.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geoff Rice correctly assesses Invisible Republic as where the Marcus voodoo choo-choo goes off the rails and re-reading this vividly recalled the many strange feelings one can get receive via the Holy Greil – from 'this is obviously the best thinking ever about music' to 'if I read one more evocation of the paradoxical nature of the South, I'm gonna choke myself on a chitlin.' I read this in high school and a couple things jumped out as I reread back home on vacation. One: apparently I wasn't a very bright teenager. I have all these passages highlighted in yellow but they're all completely random and usually not very interesting, sometimes just factual. I'll underline a totally nugatory line right next to a brilliant observation. I guess at seventeen years old I didn't know what the main idea in a paragraph was yet. Scary. On a more positive front, I was reminded of the way he makes criticism part of artistic process, especially in the chapter on the Band. His imagination helps make Big Pink a better record. I was also reminded how much this guy demanded of the art he cared about. After reading this I used to listen to even the most average post-REM college rock records dozens of times because Greil told me that if you couldn't play it five hundred times and keep finding something new it was either your fault or the record's (In the case of Guadalcanal Diary's Walking In the Shadow of the Big Man it was probably the record.) Anyway, now I never ask or expect anything from anyone ever. Thanks context.

In other news, everyone loves the Elvis chapter but, except for the end where he explains his theory of American popular culture, it's my least favorite. The Sly chapter, especially the section about conservatism in '70s soul (which I kinda forgot) has plenty of balls for a white cat from Berkeley. I'd totally forgot about the great LBJ-Huck-Ahab digression, the '60s vs. 'the 70s section (winner" the '60s!), the Westerns/Orsen Welles comparison, lines like "the Band don't refer to their sources anymore than we refer to George Washington when we vote." Of course, there's also lines like "all the beauty of the world and the terror of losing it is in Eric Clapton's rock and roll." Yep, that's ALL the beauty. ALL OF IT. So, if you like ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD, get down to the record barn and pick up a copy Slowhand by Eric Clapton on Columbia Records and Tapes. That is, if you can stand the THE TERROR!!!!

[Paul Secor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perhaps the most overrated writer on popular music - no, wait - that would be Dave Marsh. Both of those guys are more pimps than writers.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Some once said that I had claimed a belief that rock and roll could save the world. What I actually said was that I was the last person to believe that rock and roll could destroy the world."---Greil Marcus. Back in the 2000s General Motors advertised their cars on television with the slogan "We're the nation that invented rock and roll and the cars that go with it". (To their eternal damnation Robert Plant and Jimmy Page allowed Led Zeppelin's song "Rock and Roll" to be played over the advertisement.) That was GM's way of associating rock and cars with American hegemony. Greil Marcus, in this stunning collection of essays, shows that rock was born and can still be revolutionary. Take, for example, the teaming of Elvis and the Black songwriter Arthur Crudup, who wrote the King's first two hits, "That's Alright Mama" and "My Baby Left Me." Marcus, in baroque and polymathic fashion, links this to another trend---the Blaxploitation films of the Seventies., particularly the brilliant ACROSS 110th STREET. Whites watched them as cartoons while Blacks, and white and Hispanic radicals, viewed them as subverting white power---from the police to the Mafia. An intellectual and informative joyride this volume.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

The latest edition is two books in one: the first half is a spotty analysis of Marcus' favorite groups that barely holds together; the other half is a discography section that succeeds mostly because it's not weighed down by Marcus' own sense of self-importance. Then again, if your opinion supported every baby boomer's claim that modern music ceased to be relevant once they hit 30, you'd think every notion that came to you was important too.

There's no clear thesis (despite the subtitle of the book), leading his analysis into strange digressions that he lazily attempts to connect to the artists: the biggest disappointment is the Sly Stone section, which could have lost the entire Stagger Lee component and still been a decent portrayal of black American's trying to find an identity in the early 1970s. The section on The Band nearly dispenses with any analysis after a few pages and instead traces how disappointed Marcus became with them after their 2nd album. The prose is tepid, refusing to delve into a deep critical analysis of the artists while neglecting any autobiographical elements that could shed light on the author's opinions. Marcus wants it both ways: His only support for the importance of these artists is their popularity (though Elvis was the only one to achieve a long-lasting version of it) and his own opinion of them; Billboard chart positions and record sales can support the former, but we aren't left with much to support the latter.

The discography section (which is about the same length as all of the preceding essays) does a better job of tracing the lineage of American music, though entire pages are simply a list of every version of "Stagger Lee" that Marcus could find. While the album & book suggestions are helpful, they are also extremely subjective, and his dismissive tone is off-putting.

If you are interested in the musicians listed on the cover (Elvis, Sly Stone, The Band, Randy Newman), consider a separate biography about them. This isn't about rock 'n' roll as much as it as about how Greil Marcus sees rock 'n' roll.

[rumbledethumps · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greil Marcus simultaneously invented and ruined rock criticism. He suffuses his work with literary references (Moby Dick, John Bunyan, et al), humor, and a depth of emotion that makes it both beautiful and gritty. His style is inimitable, and yet he has countless imitators who wish they could write like him, who possess neither his insight nor his instinct, and just end up writing boring pieces that sound like they are trying too hard.

But he cannot and should not be blamed for his imitators. Mystery Train is an American classic. I will be poring over the appendix and the discographies (twice as long as the actual book) for weeks to come.

[Hilary · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book may have been filled with interesting and relevant information, but the writing style was this terrible stream-of-consciousness nonsense, and the author kept comparing rock songs to classic lit books, like Moby Dick. Ouch. Also, the author (pronounced Gry-el Marcus)expected his reader to already have a ton of background information about the times and the music, which was annoying. This book was mainly useful to me (born in 84) as a primary document of what it was like to live in the 70s.

[Alberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un buen libro de música que tiene el handicap de centrarse en pocos artistas: Armonica Frank, Robert Johnson, The band, Sly & The Family Stone, Randy Newman y Elvis Presley. Aunque ciertamente usando a esos grupos habla de muchos más temas: del blues primitivo, Stager Lee, Música negra en general, The Sun Records... La parte final: Notas y Discografías (que ocupa casi la mitad del volumen) es un compendio de discos e historias que es de lo mejor del libro. El autor demuestra una erudición notable.

Está escrito en 1975 estando Elvis Presley en vida. Mi edición del Círculo de Lectores es una maravilla. A ver si consigo subir la foto
" "

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heralded as the first academic examination of pop music and it's relationship to American life/culture, I had high expectations. Not all of these were met. The front is the examination, done in a socio-politico-economic-philosophic style that tends to sink under the weight of its own self importance and lofty language at times. The original edition, with a definitely shorter section of notes and discography, must have been a let down to many people when they finished reading it. Tracing pop music to someone named Harmonica Frank seems like a reach, and raising Randy Newman to some high place as mirror on America reads like the work of a devoted fan rather than anything else. And while as a fan I enjoyed seeing that Sly Stone was included as one of the principals in the book, his section drifted from its named subject more so than any other, which was disappointing.

In the plus column was his essay on Elvis. Long before many others cashed in on Elvis books after he died, Marcus carefully and respectfully illustrated Presley's influence on American culture and music. It also gets into Sam Phillip's influence on these things, which cannot be overlooked. Furtheri, Appreciated the scholarship (yes, scholarship) on Robert Johnson. I remembered how blown away I was when I first heard Johnson after buying the double cassette "King of the Delta Blues Singers" from a discount bin when I was in high school. I wore them out and no longer have cassettes, so this book put me on a path back to buying that collection or another simple collection of 29 songs.

The greatest plus here, though, are the Notes and Discographies that form the second half (or more) of "Mystery Train." The notes are the greater of the two add-ons, as the historical and anecdotal information contained within are of greater value to me than the social commentary. Still, I think Marcus exhausted all of his Newman knowledge in the main, as the second section is an unreadable list of Newman's records, writing credits and guest appearances.
Ultimately, "Mystery Train" has its place in the pantheon of rock books as a first-of-its-kind, and as a decent history in places. Just not as a best-of-its-kind.

[Gabriel Conroy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I might as well just write a book about the exact same bands Marcus talks about and claim whatever it is I want to claim about them. For god's sake....he devotes an entire chapter to Randy Newman. (Randy Newman!) Unfortunately, that is Marcus's most cogent chapter because he actually provides evidence for his "analysis" of Newman, which is more than I might say for his other chapters.

In the chapter on Robert Johnson, for instance, Marcus claims that when Eric Clapton, in "Layla," hopes that his love will not be in vain, the listener can hear the torment of the damned (which somehow relates to something Robert Johnson might have said 40 years before Clapton sung that song). Now, I've listened to at least two versions of "Layla," looking for this anguish, and I just can't see it. Of course, Marcus must be right. After all, he wrote for the rolling stones magazine.

[Harriett Milnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1975, Greil Marcus wrote Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music. He discusses enthusiastically the music of Harmonica Frank and Robert Johnson (the Ancestors), and The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis (The Inheritors). This is half the book. The other half is Notes and Discographies, which was updated in 2015.

Lots of great, interesting stuff. Value judgments abound. In his list of the Top Ten of Rock 'n' Roll versions of Robert Johnson's tunes. #4 is Barack Obama, "Sweet Home Chicago," closing "Red White and Blues," the White House, February 21, 2012 (whitehouse.gov). In what would have been his 101st year, Johnson's song was sung by the President of the United States. As if he'd heard it all his life.

And that is just one of the reasons I LOVE President Obama.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

I rarely give a book two stars but I found the 100 plus pages of the discography in the second part of the book fractured and disjointed. Although the artists he elected to write about did have impact on American culture I thought the fawning over Elvis was a bit too much. Not enough credit was given to the black influence in "The Kings" music nor was the people that actually wrote the songs given their due with royalties and recognition. Mr. Marcus is a little full of himself and his opinions for my liking.

[Jason Bergman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marcus is a great writer, and this is generally a very good book of rock criticism. My only issue is really his choice of subjects. His insights into Elvis (especially the Sun years) are excellent, as is his full history of Sly and the Family Stone. But the rest are just okay. And then there's...Randy Newman. I don't care how many times Marcus says he's a genius. I just don't see it. As-is, this book is fine, I'd have enjoyed Marcus' writing more if he tackled different subjects.

[Carol Storm · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretentious, badly-written, and way over-rated -- and it shouldn't read "Images of America" in Rock and Roll. It should read "images of brutal violence in old redneck songs that send weak little Berkeley boys into spasms of vicarious blood-lust!" I mean, let's *not* all get Dixie Fried. Really!!

[Todd Fife · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hated it.

[Swjohnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greil Marcus' 1975 "Mystery Train" comes from a critical milieu that will seem as distant as Mars to today's readers of Pitchfork.com. Its Age of Aquarius preoccupations and urgent obsession with pop cultural redemption will be familiar to anyone who's paged through the notorious first (red) 1979 edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide, or flirted with the writings of Robert Christgau, Nick Tosches, Dave Marsh or Lester Bangs. Marcus and those simpatico writers occupy various points on a similar philosophical spectrum: Rock and roll is redemptive art, authenticity is paramount, critical winners (then including Jackson Browne, Van Morrison, Graham Parker, and Warren Zevon!) wear bent halos while losers and poseurs are damned to burn in Pablo Cruise hell.

That same hand-wringing intensity is visible in "Mystery Train's" debt its late 60s through mid-70s origins, where pop music was central to social change, both a medium of protest and a cultural preoccupation. If only for that reason, it can be excused its occasional eccentricities of tone and argument, and behind a plumage-and-truffles surface lies an initially compelling study of rock and roll and its relationship to American life and imagery. But “Mystery Train” succeeds more at pure effect and broad strokes that gradually lose their power (and coherence) as Marcus repeatedly batters away at the same ideas.

Marcus' thesis is straightforward: Rock n roll and its influences effortlessly connect with and illuminate American archetypes and images. As he states in his introduction, the book "is no attempt at synthesis, but a recognition of unities in the American imagination that already exist." Those unities shift over time; naturally ingrained in early outsiders like Harmonica Frank and Robert Johnson, rock music continued to amplify American themes as it matured from raucous party tunes to more literary and self-conscious expression, in the examples of the Band, Sly and the Family Stone and Randy Newman (not the genial composer of "You've Got a Friend" but the cynical satirist of "Rednecks" and “Louisiana 1927”).

It’s an auspicious premise, but only if the reader is prepared to weather Marcus' fanboy intensity and an oracular, rhapsodic style which is often content to merely evangelize on a topic, often in digressive fire-and-brimstone prose poetry. Some may sensibly be tempted to re-read any number of near-mystifying passages. Other seasoned connoisseurs of music writing will likely weary of another fawning survey of the Band's work and the sublimity of their rough-but-right harmonies and atmospheric Canadian-Americana. But Marcus occasionally hits on authentic, poetic truth in his essays, which strangely refute counterargument by never actually attempting true argumentation in the academic sense. For example, he is content to evoke the broad idea of the Puritan archetype rather than connect the lyrics of Harmonica Frank to, say, the theology of Jonathan Edwards. The enormity of his topic forces Marcus to make wide-ranging thematic points of contact, and he does so credibly in the book’s early chapters: Ahab is a doomed outsider, just like Robert Johnson's lyrical protagonist; blues evoke a note of disappointment that can only exist in relationship to the extremes of the American promise; Sly Stone invokes a historical current of sex and violence. "Mystery Train" often thrives on mythic generalities that ring true. But once the most hardened reader reaches the final “Elvis: Presliad,” they will have wearied of the endless tautological party with Moby Dick, Huck Finn and Stagger Lee.

[Il Pech · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐⭐½

Se questo, come scritto da Rolling Stones e riportato nella prefazione, è considerato "il più importante libro che sia mai stato scritto sulla musica rock", siamo messi male.

Marcus racconta l'evoluzione della musica americana prendendo Harmónica Frank e Robert Johnson come antenati, per poi descrivere gli eredi The Band, Sly Stones, Randy Newman ed Elvis.
A parte l'assoluta arbitrarietà dei nomi scelti, infatti Harmonica Frank non lo conosce nessuno e Randy Newman non è certo un pilastro della musica americana dei '70es -ma che vuoi dirgli, a Marcus? Il libro è il suo, parli di ciò che vuole- quel che colpisce è che anche se le analisi sono ben costruite e inserite nel tessuto sociale dell'epoca, la maggior parte dei paragrafi risultano noiosi a causa della totale mancanza d'ironia* e di brillantezza nella penna dell'autore. Insomma, diverse considerazioni intelligenti ma non una sola immagine che ti resti in mente.

E -Cristo- non si può utilizzare come unici termini di paragone per tutto il libro Huckleberry Finn e Achab. So che negli US tutto deriva o si ispira a quelli che sono i loro unici due classici della letteratura (Walt Whitman sbuffa contrariato) ma lasciatelo dire, Marcus, se ogni autore e ogni opera di cui parli ti fanno pensare ad Achab sembri stupido.

Alla fine dell'edizione che ho letto ci sono 150 pagine di note e discografia dei sei artisti citati. Mi aspettavo un elenco puntato invece sono paragrafi lunghi e discorsivi. Quello su Robert Johnson l'ho trovato più interessante del capitolo vero e proprio. Gli altri non li ho letti.

*In realtà una volta ho riso. Nel pezzo su Elvis ci sono degli interventi chiamati Echi di Elvis, che spezzano l'articolo con aneddoti, considerazioni e voli pindarici. Gli Echi sono molto Bangsiani. Da qui il pensiero con cui chiuderò questo pezzo. Se vuoi leggere critica musicale non leggere mai Lester Bangs altrimenti tutto il resto ti sembrerà noioso freddo e stantio.

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharing with us his vision of how the quintessential American art form (rock n roll) has responded to and shaped the reality that we live in as Americans (collective work, rock does), Marcus writes like a lazy sociologist. He's not lazy -- too well researched for that. But his winding narrative is imprecise at times, a fact which underscores two things: 1) Marcus is a rock critic, embodying the music in all of its irreverence (he doesn't need to expand every idea or vague phrase he writes down because it would cheapen his own art); 2) rock n roll is itself entirely open to interpretation. All the same, Marcus understands the best of late-20th century social history, leaving traces of Clifford Geertz all over the place.

Culture, as Robert Orsi (following Geertz) puts it, is the world that we make and sustain together, inheriting the work those before us have done while simultaneously taking it all for granted and working on that inheritance. Rock n roll has played a profound role in the process of the inheritance, acceptance, remodeling, and construction of future expectations within American culture, expressing the inherent contradictions of the promises we inherit and the failures we experience that we hold up against ever present ideals. Mystery Train is at the forefront of that conversation, illuminating to me despite my not having understood too many of Marcus' mid-20th century pop culture references.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

If music means a lot to you, and you’re open to reading someone else’s fairly idiosyncratic and creative readings of rock music, you’ll enjoy this book. I find Marcus feeds the imagination, makes you hear things beyond the music, makes you see historical and cultural connections that you’ve never thought about.

The chapter on The Band is my favorite; the Sly Stone chapter didn’t make much sense to me. I never understood what Randy Newman’s song “Sail Away” was really about until I read about it here...holy shit, right? The Elvis chapter is kind of cool: written before his death, it reads like an argument for why Elvis Still Matters. Did Elvis ever not matter? Still fun reading, though.

I got bored with The Band’s first two albums soon after the remasters came out back in 2000, but after Mystery Train and some re-listening, they haunt me day and night. I recommend playing the songs discussed on YouTube during and after reading—it’s sometimes difficult to understand what Marcus is on about without the drama of the music in your ears.

[Bill · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, my attempt to take a break from fiction came to a screeching halt about 25% of the way into this book. I really did try to like it but felt the author was way too pompous and self-righteous, and made himself the focus of the points he made. Seems he really did not care if anyone else agreed with his interpretations of different styles of music and musicians as though one was reading the Bible or Koran. Way too much for an analysis of the evolution and impact of rock 'n' roll. Just too much to continue after reading his chapters about Sly Stone.

Oh well...back to some fiction for now.

[Johanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

originally published in the seventies, updated in the nineties to include some things, like The Band's second incarnation, but not others, like Elvis's death. this left me always a little puzzled about when i was reading. which is not a problem for time-telescoped music like The Band's and Randy Newman's, but definitely changes how you view Sly and the Family Stone or Elvis. this is early Marcus and straighter criticism than he'll drift to later, less poetic swirling, more "get this reissue but not that one."
still, fascinating, insightful, entertaining.

[Christopher Dalla Riva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marcus is a special writer. He manages to put American rock music in a much larger context than any other writer possibly could by looking at the careers of Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, The Band, Randy Newman, Sly Stone, and Elvis Presley. Marcus doesn’t write for amateurs though. You need to have some knowledge about these artists, and the history of American culture generally, to be able to get the most out of this book.

[Madisen (plathgirly) · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was a fine book, I just never had a moment where I lost myself in it. The prose, no doubt, has a squeaky-clean dichotomy between professional and passionate, given this is Marcus' main line of study. I also had difficulty with the infinite musical references (bands, songs, artists, etc.) that I did not understand.
Read this for EN 408.

[Jason Diamond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had a new copy of this and decided to reread it. Glad I did.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll Music is a charter text in the New Left's valorization of participation in American civic life. Marcus made three claims here upon which the argument of this book will stand or fall. The first, and most provoking to me on my first reading of it, in the late Seventies, is that rock music merited a thematic analysis as a product of American cultural and political processes -- that these two were ultimately the same is certainly one of the book's warrants. Mystery Train heralded a literary-journalistic criticism every bit as sophisticated as the one offered by D.H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel (1962), and Pauline Kael in I Lost it At the Movies (1965) -- the three books paid homage in the introduction. In a sense, that is, rock criticism in Marcus's hands made good its claim to be regarded as a literary criticism. He could do this because, like in these inciting books, rock and roll music presented an "image" and a "myth" -- so, e.g., "how young this country is," Marcus writes, "how little distance separates us from the beginnings of the myths, like that of Lincoln, that still haunt the national imagination." His subjects -- Harmonica Frank and Robert Johnson, The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley -- are "symbolic Americans," who, if they are "not the whole story, . . . tell us how much the story matters." Marcus calls them "the best images" of American myths, because they have used the popular scale of American industrial life "to imagine, rather than to simply inherit a destiny." The Adamic community-building Marcus admires in them he admits to both participating in, and observing: "the audiences that gather around rock 'n' rollers are as close to that ideal community as anyone gets."

So: his claim, both about the music, and to being its authentic witness [journalists report out], is his peculiar burden. The myth Marcus reads out in these artists is what makes them "best," "most American," "vital not only beneath the surface of American life, but on it," for which he adduces Johnson's lines from "Me and the Devil Blues": "you may bury my body, down by the highway side, | So my old evil spirit | can take a Greyhound Bus and ride." Johnson's lines steepen the chasm in American life between faith and piety, Marcus argues. Johnson presents himself, on this account, as another image of failure in our national community-building (Ahab to Huck to Gatsby), but his lines are also a promise, or covenant, to his audience (and generations hence) that rock 'n' roll will be about triumph, transcendence, vindication. That second line of reasoning (rock as transcendence) depends upon a third line of argument that is the most bothersome of the three, if I'm any judge. Marcus' historical narratives are offered as exemplification of a pop process that in modern industrial capitalism keeps accelerating in order to converge on an audience's participation in its narrative climax (rock criticism becomes a participatory journalism must have "a stake" in the conviviality of democratic forums, or we will not indulge the critic's expository role as the village explainer). Marcus writes about The Band's failure only five years after the work which had raised in the first place hopes that "there might still be open spaces out there." What are these open spaces our bad capitalists keep closing within their polylithic malls? On the one hand Marcus accepts from his friend, Robert Christgau, the Yeatsian invocation that "great artists need great audiences," though for some artists, Randy Newman is his example, "what matters is the depth and breadth of response an artist can evoke in an audience." How to square Marcus' "image" that "the pop process becomes its own idea, and a pretty deep one," with industrial scales within which even pretty deep artists like Randy Newman diverge ultimately from performance (thus that covenant) and toward guild musicianship and (L.A.) co-optation?

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

How did I not know of this book until 2021? Good Lord!

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a strange book. Nearly as much discographic information as storytelling and commentary, Mystery Train is a book by and for obsessive music listeners and record collectors. I was excited to read my first Greil Marcus book (I had enjoyed his column in The Believer magazine and had heard others praise him as a genius), but was disappointed for two principal reasons. First, part of my attraction to the book in the first place, was its subtitle, “Images of America in Rock ’n Roll.” I took the title literally, and expected to drawn into America as portrayed through its music. Ostensibly, this in fact occurs in the book, albeit opaquely, but I found Marcus’ prose too tiresome to work hard enough to find it. With the minor exception of his section on Sly Stone, Marcus’ writing did not give me new insight of America or how its experience is refracted through its music.

Second, I found it difficult to match his emotions and feelings for the music he described. The artists he covers in this book are beloved to him: Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, The Band, Randy Newman, Sly Stone. And Marcus is in LOVE with these artists. I love to read people’s writing about music the love (see my review of Simon Reynold’s celebration of post-punk). See, I am a fierce music lover and great musical explorer—I seek out new artists, read up on old artists, swap records with aficionados, even go crate-digging at thrift stores, picking up records based on their covers alone. However I’ve never been a fan of the music contained in this book. I never liked Johnson, Presley, The Band, Newman, or Sly (though I love many peer artists in their respective genres including Chicago bluesman, Carl Perkins, Neil Young, David Bowie, etc.), but came to this book open-minded and open-eared, ready to be swept-away by Marcus’ irresistible praise and unmatched enthusiasm. But it never happened. I feel like I understand the novelty and excitement of 50’s rock ‘n roll, and especially rockabilly, but I’ve never felt that magic moment with Elvis. And Marcus failed to bring me any closer. After enjoying his description of the evolution of The Band, I checked out some of their albums from the library. After just a few minutes of listening, I felt so let down by the vast distance between Marcus’ celebration of them and the way they sounded in my speakers. It actually caused me to dislike The Band even more! I’ve long been interested in reading Lipstick Traces, Marcus treatment of 70’s punk (and more). It will be interesting to see if I like his writing when he covers one of my favorite genres.