Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music

Arts & Photography

Greil, Marcus

Music

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

History

World

A collection of interviews profiles the legends of rock and roll, including Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, and James Taylor

The Rolling Stone Interviews: Talking With the Legends of Rock & Roll, 1967-1980

David Dalton

John Carpenter

JONATHAN COTT

Happy Traum

Ralph J. Gleason

Jann Wenner

Jon Landau

st.martins press

While focusing on a select group of musicians performing privately in a brief window of time, noted music and culture writer Greil Marcus cuts to the core of the American musical legacy to study it as a slightly blurred snapshot, full of shadow and mystery. Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes centers around the now legendary recordings made by Bob Dylan and The Band in 1967, and how this music signaled a change in American music by capturing the essence of the moment within the context of a rich folk tradition. During these casual sessions they recorded more than 100 songs, some originals, but most borrowed from barely remembered folk, blues, and country musicians. This music they derived from had been part of the American fabric in an anonymous way that can only be explained as folklore and myth, and they breathed new life into it while adhering to its legacy. Though never intended for release, these recordings molded into the tradition of music as oral history, and appropriately, a few tapes were passed hand to hand, then some were pressed as bootleg records, which then spread like rumors. This folk revival conjured up a collection of timeless stories that many had heard in a slightly different form without ever knowing who started them. Just as Dylan did with the Basement Tapes, Marcus's exhilarating book extends beyond music and into the psyche of America, making the present more clear by putting the past into focus.

Invisible republic: Bob Dylan's Basement tapes

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

An Owl Book, Henry Holt, 1998

Originally published in 1990, an investigation into underground, alternative and revolutionary movements in art, music and other cultural forms which takes as its starting point the nihilism and anger of punk and focuses especially on the Sex Pistols.

Lipstick Traces

Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.

Mystery Train

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Faber and Faber

Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010

Faber&Faber

Listening to Van Morrison represents Greil Marcus's quest to trace Morrison's particular genius through seminal moments in his long career, beginning in 1965, breaking open in 1968 with the incomparable Astral Weeks, and continuing in full force to this day. This is a portrait of a perplexing, mysterious and terrifyingly gifted artist and vocalist at the height of his powers, written by one of our most thoughtful cultural critics.

Listening to Van Morrison

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

This book is about a single, serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called "Anarchy in the UK" was issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. The song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris intellectuals. In "Lipstick Traces", Greil Marcus' classic book on punk, Dadaism, the situationists, medieval heretics and the Knights of the Round Table (amongst others), the greatest cultural critic of our times unravels the secret history of the twentieth century.

Humor & Entertainment

A fan from the moment the Doors' first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock & roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, one could drive from here to there, changing from one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour—every hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult of both Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify, and focus solely on the music. It is a story untold; all these years later, it is a new story.

Doors

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Books by Greil, Marcus