The Sunday Mail
IT turns 40 this year. I have been hoarding confetti, waiting to celebrate its still-youthful countenance.
But if the parade has come by, I have missed it. My vuvuzela is unvuvused.
Anecdotally, I’m aware that “Mystery Train” has meant a lot to many people. Less anecdotally, I’m aware that most critics and serious listeners think it’s almost certainly the best book yet written about American music in general, and about rock in particular. This may seem like only moderate praise until you consider that for some, myself included, that’s not so far from remarking that “Mystery Train” is the best book ever written about being alive. Mr Marcus’s book got to me at a good time, which is to say a bad time. I was 18 or 19 and had delayed my enrolment at college (Middlebury) for a year and a half to save money and to wend around Europe with friends. The trip went well until it didn’t. There were scheduling mishaps; serious fights about stupid things; bounced checks. By the end, I was working as a bartender in a dismal pub outside London to save money to fly home. I returned to the United States depressed and broke. But I knew I didn’t want to go back to Naples, Fla, where I had gone to high school. So I began to hitch-hike. I won’t snap on a harmonica neck rack and go all Woody Guthrie on you. But I hitched for weeks, staying with friends who were already at college, winding slowly from Florida to Virginia and as far west as Indianapolis and back home again. This was bliss. This was also 1984, probably the last time you could hitch-hike in America without feeling you had a “kick me” (or worse) sign taped to your back.
The book I carried in my backpack was a bruised paperback copy of “Mystery Train”, one I had picked up in a used book store. I read it straight through twice, so intently that I often didn’t bother to stick out my thumb. I would just sit there with it, beneath an overpass, like Ferdinand the bull under his cork tree. I still have this copy, by the way. One thing I notice now about it is that, on the inside back cover, there’s a quote from Frank Rich, who reviewed “Mystery Train” for “The Village Voice” before he became chief theatre critic for ‘The New York Times”.
This snippet of Mr Rich’s words catches my sense of Mr Marcus’s gift pretty well: “His 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.”
If you are not familiar with “Mystery Train”, the simplest way to describe it is to say that it’s a “think piece” (the phrase that Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Lester Bangs, mischievously tells the kid journalist in “Almost Famous” to dangle in front of his credulous Rolling Stone editors) about six seminal American musical acts. Two of them, the blues-man Robert Johnson and the medicine-show circuit musician Harmonica Frank, are accorded the title “Ancestors”. Under the rubric “Inheritors” come four more, rolling your way like emotional tanks: “Sly Stone”, the “Band”, “Randy Newman” and “Elvis Presley”.
Into these chapters Mr Marcus, then in his late 20’s, poured everything he had. “Mystery Train” is as much about American art, literature, politics, manners and morals as it is about rock music. It’s about how these performers “delivered a new version of America with their music”, and about how “more people than anyone can count are still trying to figure out how to live in it”.
Mr Marcus’s writing had the soul to match his erudition. “Mystery Train” is among the few works of criticism (Alfred Kazin’s “On Native Grounds” oddly, is another) that can move me to something close to tears. It reverberated in my young mind like the E major chord that ends the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”
Part of Elvis’s achievement, Mr Marcus saw, was to plant new questions, over a thousand radio transmitters, into the American mind. “Why not trade pain and boredom for kicks and style? Why not make an escape from a way of life — the question trails off the last page of “Huckleberry Finn” — into a way of life?”
After hearing the music of Jimmie Rodgers, whom Mr Marcus likened to “every boy who ever ran away from home,” he asks, “How could an honest man be satisfied to live within the frontiers he was born to?”
“Mystery Train” changed a lot of things for me. Most basically, it plugged me into a lifetime’s worth of listening. Because of it, I erased “English lit” as my college major and inked in “American lit”. It remains the book I can’t help measuring critical writing against. I picked up the new, sixth edition of “Mystery Train” the other day. The book has grown plumper; it’s got some middle-aged spread. Tacked onto the original text are two new introductions and new footnotes, among other things. It’s a rock Torah swamped by mid-rash.
The book has especially grown at the back, as if it had a mullet haircut. The rear section, “Notes and Discographies”, has swelled to become larger than the original text. This is good news, not bad.
This part of “Mystery Train” is updated for each new edition, and I’m not alone among this book’s admirers in bolting to purchase each new edition when it comes out, to rummage through the author’s latest enthusiasms and loathings.
The “Notes and Discographies” section is where Mr Marcus kibitzer’s about new records, reissues and bootlegs, and riffs on videos and concerts and cover versions. “Mystery Train” is among those rare books that is still alive and brewing, like yeast. I plan to give a copy of Mr Marcus’s book to each of my children when they leave for college. It speaks intimately to a part of the cultural heritage that, in my haphazard way, I have tried to give them.
I recently reread Norman Mailer’s powerhouse essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”, which was originally published in Esquire in 1960. One snaking sentence stood out for me, and put me in mind of Mr Marcus’s achievement in “Mystery Train”.
It’s worth reading quite carefully: “Since the First World War, Americans have been leading a double life. And our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull, if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.”
“Mystery Train”, which arrived 15 years later, got at those untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires as well as any non-fiction book I know, and I’m lucky to have found it when I did.
— The New York Times
