Bay Area music critic and culture historian, Greil Marcus, discusses The Slits and former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine's new memoir as well as his fascination with The Manchurian Candidate.
Transcript:
Lisa Kiefer:Method to the Madness is next. You're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Keifer, and today I'll be speaking with Bay Area native and resident Greil Marcus. Greil's has been writing about music and culture for the last 40 plus years, and today we're going to be talking about an event coming up as part of the Bay Area Book Festival. He'll be speaking with Viv Albertine, formerly of the seminal girl punk band, the Slits, on Sunday, April 29th at 3:15 PM at the David Brower Center, Goldman Theater, right here in Berkeley at 2150 Allston Way. Viv Albertine wrote a debut memoir in 2014 that was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Her new book is called To Throw Away Unopened. We'll be talking about that and much, much more.
Did you ever see The Slits live?
Greil Marcus:Nope.
Lisa Kiefer:When did you first hear the Slits?
Greil Marcus:You know, I heard the Slits, I was in England in 1980, and I went over there to do a story about the Raincoats and the Gang of Four and Essential Logic early in 1980, and met everybody, and in some cases had formed lifelong friendships out of that trip. And somebody handed me a record there. Yeah, it was called Once Upon a Time in a Living Room. It was the Slits official bootleg, or maybe, I don't know how official it was. It was on Y Records, and it was just the rawest stuff I'd ever heard in my life. I knew who the Slits were, I was aware of them. I heard their first album and it didn't knock me out, but this destroyed me.
The first song, Once Upon a Time in a Living Room, starts off with one of them saying, "You're ready?" And someone else is, "Ready?" And then they just burst into laughter, and then there's this tremendous guitar chord coming down and that's it. There is just this storm of guitar noise with the most joyous back and forth, up and down yelping all through. It really is a song, even though at any given moment you, depending on how you're hearing it, it absolutely is noise. But there is a song, there is a musical theme. There are words, not that you could ever make them out. And I just thought it was the purest expression of punk I'd ever heard and I still do.
Speaker 3:You're ready? Ready! Oh, no. (singing)
Greil Marcus:I just fall over. How could anybody have the nerve to do this?
Lisa Kiefer:They had no role models. It was so fresh. And I wonder, has there been anything so fresh as that period of time where the Sex Pistols emerged? They came on the scene, it was a short time, then they're gone. Do you think there's been anything quite like that?
Greil Marcus:Yeah, there are analogies. There are parallels, maybe. Elvis at Sun Records in 1954 and '55. It was a similar explosion of creativity, and it brought people from all over the south to knocking on that same door saying, "Let me in. I want to make records too." And a lot of those people became legends, and there's creativity going on in hip hop, just unlimited. There are no borders. There's no bottom, there's no top. It's not just Kendrick Lamar, it's not just Kanye West. There is a group in Edinburgh called the Young Fathers, which is just tremendously playful and experimental, and at the same time, dead serious.
Speaker 4:(singing)
Greil Marcus:And I'm just talking about the few things I know, but in terms of coherence, with punk in England you have a time, you have a place, you have a scene, you have all different kinds of people who know each other, who are topping each other, who are learning from each other. Viv Albertine of the Slits, I want to be a guitarist. Well, she finds people who can show her how to be a guitarist, and there isn't envy and there isn't fear. I don't want to teach her, you know, she may end up outshining me. There isn't that spirit and it doesn't last very long. None of them. And yet that kind of camaraderie and a desire to speak and a desire to be heard, that was really what punk was all about, at least as I hear it. That was replicated all over the world and still is.
One of the best stories about punk I ever heard was from a friend of mine who was spending time in Andalusia in Spain, and she's fluent in Spanish, and she was sitting in a cafe, and these kids came up to her and they said, "You're American, right?" And she said, "Yes." "But you speak Spanish." And she said, "Yes." And they said, "Well, we're punkies, and we have the Sex Pistols album, but we don't understand any of the words. Could you translate these songs for us?" So she did. And that led them, this little group of people who were trying, they didn't know if they wanted to form a band, if they wanted to put out a magazine, if they just wanted to do disruptive things in public, put on hit and run plays.
That led them to rediscovering the history of their own town. The anarchist history of their own town, which had been completely erased and buried. And they started talking to older people, and they started digging into the libraries, and they realized that they were the heirs of a tradition that was being reenacted on this Sex Pistols record. And it gave them this tremendous sense of pride and identity. Now they didn't form a band, they didn't make any records, and yet that is a punk story. That is a story about a punk band, band of people as true and as inspiring as any other.
Lisa Kiefer:It's a way of being, like as you've pointed out in many examples in Lipstick Traces, one of my favorite of your books.
Greil Marcus:Oh, thank you.
Lisa Kiefer:And I find myself going back to that. I mean I bought it when it came out, and the Lester Bangs collection that you edited.
Greil Marcus:Sure.
Lisa Kiefer:That I continue to go to, and that really opened my eyes. I was listening to this kind of music and I saw the cover and I thought, oh, this is a book about the Sex Pistols. So I start reading it and really it wasn't, but it educated me on the history, all the movements that I considered to be punk. From the Priests going up on Easter Sunday in 1950 and saying, "God is dead."
Greil Marcus:In Notre Dame.
Lisa Kiefer:Somewhere in France.
Greil Marcus:Easter Mass in Notre Dame.
Lisa Kiefer:And then, 10 years later, and John Lennon saying, "We're more popular than Jesus." I mean, this has been happening along the way.
Greil Marcus:Yeah. And what was so fascinating to me, and the stories I end up trying to tell in Lipstick Traces was that it involved all sorts of people who were not unaware of each other, but are doing the same work, speaking the same language in different formal languages, whether it's English or French or German or whatever it might be.
These are people who never met, who, if you told them, if you told the Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck in the 1970s just before he died, that his real inheritors, his real soulmates were these people across town, he was living on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, people across town called the Velvet Underground, he might say, "I have all their albums." Or he might say, "Leave me alone. I'm a serious psychoanalyst." Who knows? But these people weren't aware of each other, and yet they are following in each other's footsteps and taking inspiration from other, whether they know it or not.
Lisa Kiefer:Let's talk a little bit about what's going on Sunday and your conversation with Viv, her first memoir, and now I want to talk a little bit about musician memoirs. I love literature deeply and it's kind of my guilty pleasure to read all of these rock memoirs or whatever, whether it's Keith Richards, Kim Gordon. Have you read Kim Gordon's?
Greil Marcus:Sure.
Lisa Kiefer:Viv's first one, which is called Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, it was so entertaining. I was so engaged and I didn't expect to be.
Greil Marcus:You know, it's a marvelous book.
Lisa Kiefer:You called it the best punk book ever.
Greil Marcus:I think it is. I think if you want to get a sense of what impelled people, what drove people to step out of their shells, their shyness, their manners, their politeness and reinvent themselves and the joy they felt in doing so for a very brief period of time, this book will show you that, not just tell you, but show that to you, like no other book or film that I'm aware of. But you know, the title really sums up Viv Albertine, I think. Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Boys, Boys, Boys, Music, Music, Music, which is what her mother once said. "That's all you care about. Clothes, clothes, clothes and boys, boys, boys and music, music, music." And she's, "Yeah, that's right." And there's a wonderful scene at the end of the book. She's in her fifties, she's been married and divorced, she has a daughter, she has this boyfriend and their relationship is not working.
And at one point he just explodes, and he grabs her by the neck, and he's shoving her face into the carpet on the floor and she really feels he's trying to kill her, and she's struggling and she's thinking, but she takes you right into her head at that moment. And she says, "Here's a man who I've introduced to my mother and my daughter, who I've cooked for, who I've dressed. I've done everything for this person. And here I am wearing an applique blouse." And she goes and tells you exactly what clothes she's wearing at this moment. And he's pounding my face into the carpet. And she says, "You know, there's just no pleasing some people," and she has that sardonic attitude. But what have you got here? While there's no music in that scene, but you got the boys and you got the clothes, and there's an appendix that tells you what she was wearing and what she was listening to and who she was involved with in any given point of time in the many years covered by this book.
The only analogy to that is a Jan and Dean album, the wonderful surf doo-wop group from the 50s and 60s, and it's a collection, and on the back of the album there's a concordance matching the car and girlfriend that Jan or Dean had at the time any given record was released. And what's really fascinating as you read through this is that both the cars and the girlfriends are constantly shifting back and forth between the two of them. They both have Corvettes. One gets a Porsche, the other gets a Maserati. One is going out with Jill, the other's going out with Debbie, and then Debbie is going out with the other one. It's just so funny to read. And so is Viv Albertine's book.
Lisa Kiefer:Yeah, she starts her book saying, "I don't masturbate and I never had a desire to masturbate." That's how she starts the book. Later she's talking about Ari Up, who is their vocalist, that she takes a wee right on the stage. I mean, that had to be the first time ever for a girl band to, she had to go and that's where she did it. She was stabbed a couple of times. Really vivid, and you just get this idea that she was so courageous and brave and honest. She's talking about when she first started listening to T. Rex. And why? Because he was a little less aggressively masculine. And I can remember the same thing happened to me in my little town in the Midwest. No one was listening to T. Rex. They did not understand what I liked about Marc Bolan and I loved him, so I've really connected with this book on many levels.
Greil Marcus:Yeah, and one of the things that I find so moving in her new book, it's called To Throw Away Unopened, which is another book. I hate to think of them as memoirs because both of these books are so imaginatively constructed, and they really are about things outside the writer's life. The writer is living in a world. The world is present in these books. I think of them as much more ambitious intellectually than memoirs. What happened to me, this all really happened. You should care about it. Why should I care about this? I don't care about this. You have to make me care.
This is a book revolving around the death of her mother in 2014, which was at the time that she published her first book, and her conflicts with her sister, and the mystery of her parents' marriage and why it broke up, and who her parents really were. Things that she began to find out after her mother died. Putting all this stuff together, and yet you are always aware of a particular individual fighting to maintain her sense of self, which is constructed, which is self-conscious, which is real, but which could disappear and shatter at any time.
There's one incident early on in the book, where she's talking about going to pubs, playing her songs. You know, she's got her guitar, she goes to places, she plays songs because she wants to be heard. She's not making money doing this. She's not supporting herself doing this. It's something she absolutely has to do. And she's in one pub, and there's a bunch of guys right up front who are really drunk and loud-mouthing and shouting and paying no attention to her at all, making it impossible for anybody else to pay attention to her. And there are people there who want to, and impossible for her to pay attention to what she's supposedly doing. So she asked him, "Could you maybe go to the back, maybe go to the bar. I'm trying to get these songs across." And they ignore her. They didn't even say (beep) you. Sorry, we're on the radio.
Lisa Kiefer:I'll bleep.
Greil Marcus:They don't say a word to her, they just ignore her. And so she gets up, she puts her guitar down, she gets up, she walks over to their table, she picks up a mug of ale, which is the closest thing to her, and she simply sweeps it across the faces of these four guys sitting at the table, and they look at her, absolutely stunned. And then she picks up another mug and she says it was a Guinness, which, this is Viv Albertine as a writer. Every detail is important. It's a Guinness. That's interesting. It's going to be thicker. It's going to stay in clothes more. It's actually going to be more unpleasant to have that thrown in your face.
And she throws that in their face and she says, "Your punk attitude, it comes back to you when you need it." And there's a way in which that is sort of the key as I read it anyway, to this new book, as it comes back to you in terms of the the responsibility you have to not back down, to stand up for yourself, but also to stand up for things you believe are right and in jeopardy, to fight when you have to. And to be relentlessly honest, and not pretend you don't care when you do or that you do care when you don't.
Lisa Kiefer:I've read her first book. The second isn't out yet. So are they going to be selling it on Sunday?
Greil Marcus:Well, she's on a book tour.
Lisa Kiefer:So I assume it'll be there.
Greil Marcus:So presumably, you don't go on a book tour unless you've got a book that people can go out and get.
Lisa Kiefer:And it is the Bay Area Book Festival.
Greil Marcus:Yeah.
Lisa Kiefer:So, it sounds like you think it's as strong as the first book, which was nominated for a National Book Award.
Greil Marcus:It's very different. It's very different, and as writing, it certainly is strong. Whether the story is smaller in terms of the room that makes for the reader, maybe it is, I'm not sure. Viv Albertine is a remarkable person who's done exceptional things in her life, who has a tremendous sense of humor, who has a sense of jeopardy and danger.
You can hear it in her music and you can feel it coming off the pages that she writes. I don't know what we're going to talk about. I don't know what this will be like. I just know that as someone listening to the record she made, seeing her play live, reading her books, that she is just a person who can go in any direction at any time. I saw her in 2009 at the Kitchen in Brooklyn, at a show with the Raincoats. She was opening for them, just herself and her electric guitar. Most of what she did was tell stories on stage, was talk. She played songs, but she was mainly telling stories, and it was the most entertaining and diverting and compelling stuff I'd seen in a long time. I was just hanging on every word, and she was both funny and sardonic and cruel to herself and anybody she might be talking about.
And at one point she made some reference to how she looks. She was, I think, 54 then. She looked about 30. There was just no question. You say, "Is this real? Is this happening?" And she said, "Yeah, yeah, I know, it's the curse of the Slits." Well, one thing I'm going to ask her is, "What do you mean by that?" You know, the Fountain of Youth? What's going on here? You know, I met her once in, I think, 1991 in England.
Lisa Kiefer:When she was doing films. She's a director.
Greil Marcus:Yeah, she was a TV director. We were introduced and I said, "My God, you're Viv Albertine?" I'm like, wow. And she was saying, "No, I just, you know, I'm just doing this little TV crew." And I said, "No, this is a big deal for me to meet you." Well, it will be a big deal for me to meet her again.
Lisa Kiefer:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today I'm speaking with Greil Marcus, music critic and culture historian.
You've written a monogram on The Manchurian Candidate sometime ago, and you introduced it as part of a film series at the Pacific Film Archive this week. What is your fascination with this Frankenheimer film?
Greil Marcus:Well, I saw it when it came out in 1961, saw it at the Varsity Theater in Palo Alto with my best friend. I was 16 and came out of that movie shellshocked. I had never seen anything like it. The only analogy was, I guess the year before seeing Psycho in a theater across the street in Palo Alto. And when that chair turns around at the end of the movie, and you see this mummy, I think you could have peeled me off the ceiling of the theater. But that movie, ultimately it was a puzzle. It was a game. It was a tease for the audience. It wasn't about anything real. You didn't carry it with you. It wasn't like a waking bad dream. It wasn't like a bad conscience that this movie was passing onto, and that's what The Manchurian Candidate was. It was shocking in every way I could possibly account for, and at 16 couldn't begin to account for.
I realize now that I had never seen a movie that so completely went to the edges of possibility of the medium itself. What I mean by that is I understood what movies could be after seeing The Manchurian Candidate, and I had never even thought the movies could or couldn't be anything before. The question wasn't even there. The only comparable experience was seeing Murnau's Sunrise quite a few years later and say, "Ah, now I understand this is what movies were meant to be, but almost never are."
Lisa Kiefer:With Trump as our president, it's almost like he could be the Manchurian Candidate.
Greil Marcus:Well, you know, since John McCain was first running for president and he was, you know, remember he was a prisoner of war and he was beaten and he was tortured. He was filmed, essentially confessing. And there were many people who began to spread rumors about him that he was, and this phrase was used, the Manchurian Candidate, that he had been brainwashed in Vietnam.
And he had come back here as a kind of sleeper agent. And somebody once said to him, "How do you make decisions?" And he said, "Well, I just turn over the Red Queen," which is one of the clues in The Manchurian Candidate.
Lisa Kiefer:Yeah, I brought one with me. I was going to try and brainwash you.
Greil Marcus:Yes, exactly. The Queen of Hearts. That is a crucial marker in the film. But it wasn't that it was showing us a conspiracy to destroy our country, which is part of what the movie is about. And that we would then say, "Oh my God, this could happen. This is so scary. This is so terrible." Over the years, this is 1961 or '62, Kennedy, John F. Kennedy was involved in the making of the movie. He and Sinatra discussed it. Kennedy wanted Lucille Ball to play the role of the mother that Angela Lansbury ended up playing. Kennedy was weighing in on the casting.
He and Sinatra were close at that time. Sinatra's the lead in the movie. Kennedy is assassinated in 1963, Malcolm X was later. It was Malcolm X who said that with Kennedy's assassination, the chickens had come home to roost. And then we just go through the decades, it's just a panoply of disaster, whether it's Wallace, whether it's Reagan, whether it's Malcolm X, whether it's Martin Luther King, whether it's RFK, and going on and on to Gerald Ford, two assassination attempts on him, and into the present.
As each of these things happened, the movie comes back to people with more and more reverberation because the story, the sense that our politics don't make sense. This is that everything is happening in a world beyond our control, knowledge or even our abilities to comprehend.
Lisa Kiefer:And there are so many secrets that we aren't able to know about.
Greil Marcus:Yeah, this gets more and more present. So when you end up with a president, a candidate, and then a president who is at the very least beholden to, and at the very worst, under the control of another country, it's almost as if you can't make the Manchurian Candidate argument because it's too trivial. Well, this movie said, but that's what we carry around our heads.
But what's shocking about the movie? I want to get back to that because if people haven't seen it, it was unavailable for many years. It was essentially, it wasn't banned in any legal sense, of course, but you couldn't see it for many, many years. It just felt wrong after Kennedy's assassination and it played on TV after Kennedy was assassinated, but then Sinatra controlled the movie. He pulled it. It didn't come out in video. It didn't show on late night TV. It didn't show in revival screenings. It just wasn't there.
You could tell people about it as a kind of legend. Now it's available. People can watch it in any way they want, at any time they want. And one of the things that happens in this movie is violence. Violence that from the very first moment is wounding, is disturbing, is hard to take, and it's absolutely in your face. I mean that literally, the movie puts blood splatters in your face. It happens in a way that you're just desperate, as the movie is going on, for it not to go where you know it's going to go. This is not a movie with a happy ending. This has one of the most awful endings that I know. It is an ending of complete despair and self-loathing and hopelessness. The last words of the movie is Sinatra. "Hell, hell, hell!" That's how the movie ends. And there's a thunderclap. Bang. That's it. And you just walk out of there...
Lisa Kiefer:Stunned.
Greil Marcus:... and it's like your world has been taken away from you. None of this would matter if this movie wasn't made with tremendous glee and excitement on the part of the director and the writer and the editor and the cinematographer and Lawrence Harvey and Frank Sinatra...
Lisa Kiefer:Great cast.
Greil Marcus:... and Angela Lansbury and Janet Leigh and on and on and on. All these people are working over their heads. They've never been involved in anything that demanded so much of them, that is making them feel, this is what I was born to do. Can I pull this off? Can I make this work? Can I convince people this is who I really am, that I actually would do these terrible things, and going past themselves. None of the people in this movie, to my knowledge or the way I see it, ever did anything as good before or after.
They never did anything as innovative. They never did anything as radical. They never did anything as scary. And whether or not they felt that way about their own work in their own lives, don't have any idea, but I don't think so.
Lisa Kiefer:I do want you to mention your website, which I have found to be very interesting. What is that?
Greil Marcus:Well, there's a writer named Scott Woods who lives in Canada, and he approached me a number of years ago and asked if he could set up a website to collect my writing and just be a gathering place. And I said, "Sure." It's greilmarcus.net, and he just immediately began putting up articles, old things I'd written, recent things I'd written in no particular order, no attempt to be comprehensive, at least not right away. He did it with such incredible imagination and flair, but he started a feature a few years ago. It has the rather corny title of Ask Greil where people write in and ask me questions, and it could be about a song, or a band, or politics, or history or anything, or novels, movies. And I just answered them. I answered them all immediately because if I didn't, they'd pile up and I'd never get back to them. Is Donald Trump a Russian agent? Well, here's why he might be, and that's a complicated argument. So I take some time to talk about it.
Lisa Kiefer:Thank you for coming onto Method to the Madness and being our guest here at KALX.
Greil Marcus:Well, thank you. It's a thrill to be on your show.
Lisa Kiefer:That was musicologist Greil Marcus. He'll be in conversation this Sunday, April 29th at 3:15 with Viv Albertine, formerly of the Slits. This is part of the Bay Area Book Festival in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle. They'll be speaking at the Goldman Theater of the David Brower Center at 2150 Allston Way. Tickets are $10 ahead.
You've been listening to Method to the Madness. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll be back in two weeks.
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