Cultural critic Greil Marcus’ classic text, Mystery Train, has been republished to mark its 50th anniversary; its title taken from Elvis Presley’s last single for Sun Records. The train—mysterious and elusive, a metaphor for fate and desire, though equally literal as symbolic—has been rolling along since the Carter Family in the 1930s to Bob Dylan in 2020 with “Murder Most Foul”; it snakes through the subconscious of the United States, where the nation’s imagination lies frighteningly and frightfully naked—alive. From John Winthrop to Little Richard, returning to Herman Melville, Mystery Train is a ride—that is for sure.
Little introduction is needed for Greil Marcus, who was the first reviews editor for Rolling Stone and, subsequently, wrote for Detroit magazine Creem, when rock criticism was in ascendancy. Apart from Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, Marcus has written other seminal books, including Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989); Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997); and, more recently, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (2022).
Once on the mystery train, it is difficult to get off. Along the way, it picks up speed, ploughing harder and faster, deeper and broader than most non-fiction and fiction books. Indeed, it could be classified as fiction (isn’t the best non-fiction writing fiction, anyway?). Mystery Train crackles like an ole’ Vocalion 78 with secrets floating in the ether, waiting to be caught. Certain books make you dream; Mystery Train wakes you up to the blunt fact that you are alive.
Greil Marcus Keeps Rollin’
The prologue of Mystery Train recounts The Dick Cavett Show, in which the New York critic John Simon and Erich Segal, author of Love Story [1970], and Yale Professor of Classics, are having a heated debate about Euripides—as if the Greek tragedian will come back to life and let them know which one is correct before telling them both to put a cork in it. Little Richard, having had enough of this pretentious conversation, brings it to a crashing and dramatic halt.
The point: Greil Marcus uses this scene as a metaphor for how little importance critics have when compared to an artist. Especially an artist such as Little Richard, who inspired a 15-year-old Robert Zimmerman to pound his keys like a pugilist when performing Richard’s “Jenny, Jenny” in the auditorium of Hibbing High School, backed by his group the Shadow Blasters, in April 1957.
Greil Marcus was in his late 20s when he wrote Mystery Train, and, in one sense, it is a young man’s book: filled with incandescent rage and reckless ambition. *Speaking about the records of Robert Johnson, Chicago blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield (whose meaty guitar playing on Highway 61 Revisited hits better than most that it could make even the heavyweight champion of the world sweat), says, “ … I do know that in them you can hear a young man, a young man with an amazing amount of young man’s energy, the kind of thing that you would find in the early Pete Townshend, or early Elvis.”
Bloomfield forgot to mention Marcus. Passion for music is a young “man’s” game, and this is what you take away from Mystery Train: a writer who has everything to say and nothing to lose, a beauty with terrifying depth.
The classic book, Mystery Train, is so much more than a text on rock ‘n’ roll; it lays the foundation of the themes Greil Marcus will explore throughout his oeuvre, including his much-beloved and elusive United States. Specifically, how the United States being an “invented nation” impacts what it means to be an American today.
Thus, Mystery Train is a sweeping reaction to the imagination of the United States. Its purpose is to shed light on the collective unconscious of America, where Marcus likes to hang out, much like a Jungian analyst (I hope his rates are reasonable). However, instead of understanding the archetypal, shapeshifting hero Coyote (where is Bob Dylan when you need him? He told you: “I’m Not There”), Marcus delves into the symbolism of the devil in blues music, and Stagger Lee with his brand new Stetson hat. (What would have Lloyd Price made of Mystery Train? Or was he too busy watching the leaves tumbling down?)
As Greil Marcus explained in 1974, these American archetypes in the nation’s imagination—unconscious, psyche, call them what you want—are united yet elusive. Yes, Mystery Train is subterranean; you will not see daylight again.
For those who are not conversant with the history of the United States, there is one name you will learn to know by heart when reading Greil Marcus: John Winthrop. While aboard the ship Arbella during the trans-Atlantic journey from Britain to New England in 1630, Winthrop delivered a sermon to his fellow Puritans to prepare them for a new life in the Americas under the banner of Christ, their Redeemer. This sermon included the phrase “city on a hill,” which meant that if the Puritans failed to uphold their covenant with God, their sins would be for the world to see; simultaneously, they would also be a shining example. Arguably, the origin of American exceptionalism.
For Greil Marcus (granted, he has a wild imagination), this intense drama is played out to this day, both in real life and art. Therefore, questions arise: how has the United States betrayed the idealism of its Puritan foundation? Conversely, what is the reaction of the present-day United States to the Puritans’ failings? These are some of the questions posed in Mystery Train and again in Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, reaching an apex in The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice (2006).
In the prologue to Mystery Train, Marcus quotes from Leslie Fiedler’s 1968 essay “Cross the Border—Close the Gap“: “To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.” He deploys this as a springboard for Mystery Train: how American artists straddle between what is inherited and what is imagined, between history and myths, between fact and fiction.
Harmonica Frank: Dramatis Personae
Like the Puritans establishing settlements in New England, Mystery Train‘s two chapters—which are about hillbilly Harmonica Frank and the blues musician Robert Johnson—are entitled “Ancestors”; the other four—The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley—are entitled “Inheritors”.All the artists in Mystery Train embody the paradoxical nature of the United States: between rebellion and conformity, freedom and obligation, ambition and restraint, real and unreal, offensiveness and inoffensiveness. Put differently, each artist is an insignia, a symbol, a countenance of the Janus-faced nature of American society.
Yes, Greil Marcus’ work is deep, like a black hole. He makes a profound point every other line, which takes minutes to assimilate; by then, you’re out of breath, wondering if he doesn’t know that there are readers—like myself—out there, trying damn hard to keep up with him. Oh, and who the hell is—and what is so great about—Harmonica Frank? I have heard of Guitar Slim—but Harmonica Frank? Is he kidding?
I swear he exists purely as a function for Mystery Train—or is part of Marcus’ fantasy for old-timey characters who are not so much real as fabulous. Have you heard of Harmonica Frank before or since?
Harmonica Frank was real! (music producer Steve Lavere rediscovered him.) The blues scholar Don Kent wrote the following about the otherworldly blues musician Geeshie Wiley: “If she did not exist, it would not be possible to invent her.” With a wry insouciance, Greil Marcus responds, “So did she invent herself?” However, Harmonica Frank takes it one step further: he could not have existed and still have influenced rock ‘n’ roll.
Enough of these ridiculous metaphysical asides, take a listen to Harmonica Frank’s talking blues number, “The Great Medical Menagerist”, his only single for Sun Records, in which he is more feline than human with those fiendish falsettos and caterwauls, blithely and gleefully making a fool of himself at his own expense. He was a larger-than-life vagrant who personified rock ‘n’ roll before rock ‘n’ roll; dirty, wild, and absurd. Unlike Bob Dylan, Harmonica Frank blew his lungs not even for a dollar a day. In fact, he smiled at obscurity. Born for the lonesome road.
In the Harmonica Frank chapter, Greil Marcus demands that you understand that this artist cannot be cast aside to the ash heap of history or, to purloin from the author, the “dustbin of history”. There is no question that this wailing clown is part of rock ‘n’ roll’s story, or, more accurately, essential to the rock ‘n’ roll topography that Marcus carves out in Mystery Train.
Travelling around the country, playing medicine shows, weirdo Harmonica Frank captured the strangeness rooted in the American experience, which Greil Marcus would later coin as “The Old, Weird America” (the inescapable epitaph for Marcus!). For Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records, Harmonica Frank was his first shot at success, before Elvis Presley. Always before Presley.
The Elvis Presley chapter in Mystery Train is, by far, the strongest: Elvis Presley comes alive and, before long, not only are you walking alongside him but seeing through his eyes. You see this especially when Marcus delves into the ‘68 Comeback Special; a performance in which Presley reclaims his throne of “King of Rock and Roll” and searches for a future while confronting his past, atoning for his sins, seeking redemption, all in the name of the Lord.
America’s Mythical Transfiguration
At the beginning of the Robert Johnson chapter, Greil Marcus writes, “It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.” Each artist in Mystery Train, some more than others, has grappled with limitations that they were born to.
In Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997), Marcus writes at length about the reinvention that occurs in “Lo & Behold!”; effectively, the narrator pulls out of a town on a train to start anew but, when a conductor asks for his name, his mask falls off; the nation’s past and his own has caught up with him. William Faulkner wrote about the past not being past, while F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that you can repeat the past; the past haunts the United States.
What these American writers understood, or tried to grapple with, is, as Greil Marcus hammers down at with a John Henry sledgehammer, that the nation’s history, due to being a nation built upon an idea, the past is always present. No more so than in the music of these six artists.
The six artists in Mystery Train follow a story bigger than themselves: that old United States’ narrative of self-invention. “In the work of each performer there is an attempt to create oneself, to make a new man out of what is inherited and what is imagined.” Robert Leroy Dodds to sold-his-soul-to-the-devil Robert Johnson, whose spindly fingers knocked out unorthodox chords like a barroom brawler.
All six acts have held contradictory feelings about the past, selves, place, success, and meaning. This is perhaps best summed up by Walt Whitman’s quip, “I Contain Multitudes”, which is an American characteristic and makes up for the American experience (despite the members of the Band being Canadian, minus Levon Helm).
Fitzgerald’s Every-Luring Green Light
American artists, sometimes unwittingly, expose the illusion of the American dream, the emptiness that lurks beneath the surface. They eviscerate the dream and themselves in the process. Nobody did so more than the parvenu Presley, who personified the rags-to-riches story that never leads to happiness; in his case, it ended in early death.
If not death, then, “Lonely at the Top”, as the quasi-vaudevillian Randy Newman sang, as if he was too wise to play the game. Greil Marcus highlights his ironic aside of wanting to perform at Shea Stadium to theater concertgoers, while his 1974 album, Good Old Boys, was rising in the charts. This is nothing but the goddam truth. Thus, the United States is partly founded upon a lie: success as succor.
When an American fails, Greil Marcus suggests, it is more than a personal failure: it is a failure by the person on the community and the community’s failure on that person. However, the failure of the American Dream does not fit into the country’s narrative and, thus, is usually scorned, ignored, or pushed aside as if it were contaminated; anything but accepted as a rigged game.
Yet, suppressing failure creates a further isolation already embedded in the American character, which is why, in rock ‘n’ roll, you get the archetypal image of the drifter driving along a lonely highway, wondering why his dream has turned into a nightmare. He’s wishing for more gas in the tank to drive himself over the bridge, where, perhaps, the real promised land awaits.
As Marcus alludes to in Mystery Train, the destructive side of the American dream is played out in the vernacular of rock ‘n’ roll. This would continue post-publication of Mystery Train in a figure, such as Bruce Springsteen, who—post-The River, an album containing “Hungry Heart”, his first top-10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100—delivers his midnight prayer.
“It’s a hey ho rock and roll, deliver me from nowhere,” to an empty highway, as if echoing Robert Johnson, along with all his whirling Puritan devils (we will get to that later). Springsteen sings the line jocularly, as if to pick up the narrator’s forlorn spirits or, let’s be honest, himself from the waist-deep abyss of the American dream gone wrong, even when it supposedly went right.
America’s Collective Unconscious
As seen by its subtitle, “Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music”, Mystery Train asks, What are the myths, stories, and images that Americans inherit? Furthermore, what does Stagger Lee’s archetypal story portray about the United States’ fantasy of violence? Where does the image of the devil in blues music derive from?
Greil Marcus posits that the struggle between God and the devil is the legacy of the Puritan weirdness; they brought along a promise they could not keep, and their failures set the devil loose. In the 1920s and 1930s, blues singers, not gospel, were the real Puritans, Marcus explains in Mystery Train. They knew the devil better than most and, at the worst of times, they were the devil. For Marcus, Johnson was a failed Puritan.
Of course, Marcus is postulating a symbolic argument, as is the entirety of Mystery Train. This is why some readers fail to understand Marcus: they take him literally. Marcus has tapped into a way of understanding the United States on a symbolic level: to match myth with myth, song with song, art with art. Also, to understand the psychological effects of the country is to go beyond facts; it is to see it from the bottom up.
That being said, Greil Marcus is also literal. He has no qualms in taking the Faustian bargain Robert Johnson made at face value: “you could even take it literally,” Marcus writes, as if a matter-of-fact, an indifferent shrug of the shoulders, no bigger, right? Perhaps Marcus is correct: the selling of the soul in exchange for musical prowess returns to the Egyptians, as highlighted in a footnote in the “Notes and Discographies” section of Mystery Train, which is now, in the 50th anniversary edition, 269 pages long. (In the first edition, it was 25 pages.) Unsurprisingly, there is nothing new under the sun: what seems numinous today will be prosaic tomorrow, and vice versa.
“The image of the devil is a way of comprehending the distance between Fitzgerald’s shining image of American possibilities and his verdict on its result,” he pens. This is what makes Mystery Train engrossing: Greil Marcus neither goes down roads that you expect nor takes things as metaphors. For him, myths are real.
All these ideas will stay with him throughout his writing life, as he pens in his author’s note in 1974, “the resonance of the best American images is profoundly deep and impossibly broad. I wrote this book in an attempt to find some of those images, but I know now that to put oneself in touch with them is a life’s work.”
Imagined Democratic Vistas
Greil Marcus is obsessed with the reverberations of art: how one art form—such as song, film, or novel—connects with another. At his best, he binds seemingly disparate artifacts, rendering the idea of “being a stretch” obsolete, as that is its point: fiction emerges from fact. The creation of art is never coldly calculated—a thousand thoughts flow from and into artists in the process—so why not apply this to criticism?
The way in which Marcus oscillates between decades, centuries even, is closer to the workings of an artist—perhaps as he is a writer first, critic second—than the cold analytical eye of a professor. Like the Chantels, Marcus has rhythm, which is why he can get to the heart and soul of America quicker and better than most. An artist understands another artist.
Yes, of course, Marcus makes Whitmanesque transcendental leaps, but so did the artist that he is writing about. Whether consciously or not, there is an indebtedness to Marcus’ thinking to the German cultural critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin; they both express an understanding that any historical investigation is exclusively embedded in the present moment—in other words, we can only understand the past in the present and understand the present from the past.
In the epilogue, Greil Marcus explicates that these six artists—lost and found, unknown and known, revered and discarded, in the United States—were working within Walt Whitman’s framework. “Whitman thought limits were undemocratic,” Marcus writes. “As good democrats, we fight it out within the borders of his ambition.” With all their might, these artists pushed against their limits; in Mystery Train, Marcus does too.
*This is reported in the “Notes and Discographies” section of Mystery Train. The 50th anniversary edition of the book includes Greil Marcus referencing the birth and death dates of every figure referenced who has passed away, turning this edition into a eulogy. It leaves you with a somber question: What will go out of the world with Greil Marcus?