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“... Lo and Behold!’ opens on the rails, the first notes on the piano setting the wheels in motion, the singer with one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train as it pulls out within the room. It’s the summer of 1967, in the basement of Big Pink, a couple of months into fooling with old tunes, moving across a common landscape, new songs now coming in a rush; almost three decades later, you can still hear Garth Hudson snap the switch ...”

“... On 22 February 1991, a small ad appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. Running in French, just below the much larger announcement of a ‘Search for the Director of the Bancroft Library’ at the University of California at Berkeley, the ad read: GUY DEBORD Judging it necessary to disavow the new Editions Lebovici, SEEKS LITERARY AGENT or highly-placed independent editor for books that will expose the modernisation of the society of the ‘integrated spectacle ...”

“... another unfortunate chorus-sweller in the vaudeville farce we might, even without the prompting of Greil Marcus, call Dead Elvis. In any case, it all seems far longer than a decade and a half since he was around – generations earlier than other rock’n’roll deaths like Brian Jones or Janis Joplin. ...”

“... and United Artists). As with everything to do with the Cold War, it mutated in the imagination. As Greil Marcus suggests in his short study, the film ‘prefigured the sense that the events that shape our lives take place in a world we cannot see, to which we have no access, that we will never be able to explain. If a dream is a memory of the future, this ...”

“... he decided early on not to let the fat lady out of her dressing room. Different Every Time, Marcus O’Dair’s fascinating authorised biography (Serpent’s Tail, £20), explains how much Wyatt had going for him at the outset and why the music is good. For a start there were his parents: his mother, Honor Wyatt, was a BBC producer (she worked on the ...”

“... the true history of the Massagetae has escaped us. It remains a closed book, a secret history. Greil Marcus’s ‘secret history of the 20th century’ does not mention the Massagetae. His principal subjects – the Sex Pistols, Dada, the Situationist International – send him plunging back into earlier epochs for proleptic and analogous movements ...”

“... Voltaire in Zurich; Ernst, Miró and Dora Maar made images based on Ubu: Jarry has left what Greil Marcus calls ‘lipstick traces’ to this day. Since 1978, Dave Thomas has kept his spirit alive with the band Père Ubu – punks owe a lot to Jarry – and William Kentridge used his creature to comment on the barbarisms of apartheid. A small but ...”

“... sought to emulate the mood onstage: furious, wide-eyed and speed-driven. Bangs, once described by Greil Marcus as ‘a one man orgy of abandon, excess, wisdom, satire, parody’, died in 1982 of a heart attack triggered by stimulants, but his prose – Kerouac’s narrator in On the Road, three steps nearer the abyss – makes Bangs, unarguably, the dead ...”

“... as good as it used to be, that commercialism has taken over. But some, like Simon Reynolds and Greil Marcus, emerge with their enthusiasms undiluted and are able to explore the links between the memorable moments and the groundbreaking acts, serving as a corrective to the inclination to see pop music as a series of unconnected ...”

“... American stabbed and kicked to death by Hell’s Angels while the Rolling Stones were playing. As Greil Marcus summed it up later, a young black man in a predominantly white crowd was murdered ‘by white thugs as white men played their version of black music’. Altamont, the columnists pronounced, had brought the curtain down on two exemplary years of ...”

“... The Sex Pistols have recently been commemorated at stupefying length by the American rock critic Greil Marcus as the natural culmination of every Anarchist/Dadaist/Situationist movement of the century. I think they sounded rather like the Stones at their fiercest. Matlock half-agrees: drummer Paul Cook, he admits, ‘was always “Mister In My Own Good ...”

“... excellent, warm-hearted excursions to the centre of our listening and imagining worlds – see Greil Marcus, Nik Cohn – and yet it has also given rise to some of the laziest and most puerile garbage currently available in print. The worlds of pop music are accessible and real – to do with bought product – and they are also dreams and places in ...”

“... of the late 1950s and early 1960s formed an ‘image of community’, to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus. Coleman never counted off his pieces, and yet – as George Russell marvels in Made in America – ‘everybody would instinctively or intuitively come in at the same time and you didn’t nod your head. How did that work?’ The answer was ...”

“... his ‘secret history of the 20th century’ in which the Situationists figure centrally, Greil Marcus limns a phantom community in the shadows: Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured – new institutions, new maps, new rulers, new winners and losers – or is it also the result of ...”

“... blues singer gazing up at the lights of Times Square is not only banal, it is bizarre,’ Greil Marcus wrote in 1975. Gradually, the image morphed into something more modern: ‘Robert Johnson may be the first ever rock star,’ the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said when it inducted him in 1986, the year it opened. Wald was especially good at ...”