The Man Who Built The Old Weird America

It's an amazing phrase mythic, poetic, mythopoeic. Four words that contain buried towns, crooked highways, tombstones with no names, strange maps that bear no relation to the physical land. It offers volumes of lost plots, miles of endless yarn.
Since the publication of Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic, his epic 1997 exegesis on Bob Dylan and The Band's Basement Tapes and much more besides, 'The Old Weird America' (a corruption of the term 'the old free America' coined by the poet Kenneth Rexroth about Carl Sandburg's song collections) has quickly gained in currency, becoming shorthand for anyone from Mark Twain, Robert Johnson and Edgar Allan Poe right up to the No Depression/New Country cabal, Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs and the Alan Lomax field recordings Moby sampled for his Play album.
"First of all, that's the best phrase I've ever coined, even if I sort of stole it from Kenneth Rexroth," Marcus admits, "because it really has travelled all over the place and has become, like you say, just shorthand for a way of describing a whole complex of things, here as well as in Europe or in England or Ireland. That's what I wanted to call Invisible Republic but neither of my editors liked it. I may put out a new paperback edition of the book in the United States and if I do, that's what I'm gonna call it."
The 'Old Weird America' chapter of Invisible Republic is primarily an exploration of historian, song collector, polymath, poet, dope fiend, filmmaker, shaman and visionary Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music, first released by Folkways Records in 1952. Collating the 84 selections of folk songs, ballads, blues, gospel and 'race' recordings from the early part of the century, Smith acted as a kind of sonic cartographer, reconstructing a vanishing musical landscape; a language of discarded colloquialisms and etymological fragments already becoming extinct in the '50s consumerist boom.
Smith painstakingly sequenced his Anthology so that each performance complemented, commented on, argued with and sometimes insulted its neighbours. Chronological order was bypassed in favour of this internal dialogue: murder victims testifying against their killers, accounts of industrial revolution, farm disasters, train crashes, bank heists, drownings, assassinations, the sinking of the Titanic, strange songs about the weather, sorry stories of duped drunks, odd little ditties like 'Froggy Went A Courtin'' that at first sound like nursery rhymes but on closer observation yield nursery crimes. These, Marcus wrote, were "spookier versions of the often supernatural English and Scottish love tales that since the eighteenth century had functioned in mountain hollows as what in blues language would be called a second mind: tales of murder and suicide in which love is a disease and death the cure".
The re-release of the Harry Smith Anthology in 1997 overturned accumulated notions of folk as a music about God and Nature - here, it was re-established as pure American gothic, with a direct line to the Devil, Unnature.
But Smithville - the name Marcus gave to America of the Anthology - is not the only town in the big country. Or perhaps it is, it just gets renamed every few years, as Peyton Place or Twin Peaks or Pleasantville. Or Black River Falls, Wisconsin, circa 1890, the community behind Michael Lesy's cult classic Wisconsin Death Trip.
This book came about when historian Lesy, fascinated by photographer Charles Van Schaik's images of Black River Falls at the turn of the last century, began tracking down data sources: farm diaries, state statistics, madhouse records, newspapers on microfilm. In an article published in The Guardian last September to coincide with the television premiere of BBC film maker James Marsh's adaptation of his book, Lesy described what he found:
"In between the church supper announcements and the birth and betrothal notices, the murders and suicides and ghosts began to appear. 'Jesus!' I whispered. 'No-one ever told me about this stuff.' The 'stuff' kept coming, issue after issue. Arsons, epidemics, infanticides, suicides, bankruptcies. 'Ah, my God,' I thought, 'I've stumbled into a madhouse.' Not so, though. The state statistics showed the place had normal rates for everything - mental and physical health; infant mortality, commercial activity and crop production. Worse yet, the craziness was being reported from all across the region."
Accompanying Van Schaick's photographs, Lesy's telegrammatic synopses of the bizarre events in Wisconsin ("Black diphtheria Incest Unemployment Business fairy tales Farm depression") suggest a correspondence with William Burroughs' synchronicitous experiments with recombinant text, plus Harry Smith's unnerving knack of distilling the gist of centuries-old ballads into a topical headline format on the booklet accompanying his Anthology ("GAUDY WOMAN LURES CHILD FROM PLAYFELLOWS; STABS HIM AS VICTIM DICTATES MESSAGE TO PARENTS").
"The book was made to move rhythmically and incrementally, like a Gamelan concert," Lesy wrote. "It relied on the viewer/reader to decipher - and participate in - its coded progressions as if they were elements of a collage built like a raga. John Cage and William Burroughs were as much its godfathers as Max Ernst and John Heartfield. Minor White and Ralph Gibson's photo sequences had as much an influence as Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding."
"Wisconsin Death Trip has been a real touchstone for me ever since it was published in '73," says Greil Marcus. "Michael has gone on and written many, many books over the years that are all of a piece, he's a morbid guy (laughs) and this book is very personal in a lot of ways. But the correspondence between what's going on in this little Wisconsin town and by implication the country at large and what's happening in the Harry Smith Anthology is not something that you or I would be the first to notice."
In fact, as Marcus points out, James Marsh used selections from the Smith Anthology on the soundtrack of his film. Michael Lesy declined to be interviewed for this piece, citing time constraints, although he was curious as to what I was writing about.
"Myth and murder in American music," I told him.
He chuckled. "What else is there?"

II. The Southern Gothic Musical Companion

Mystery Train is the title of Greil Marcus' first book, a film by Jim Jarmusch, a radio programme by John Kelly and the last track Elvis Presley ever recorded at Sun Studios. It's also a ghost story.
The song's authors Junior Parker and Sam Phillips based the refrain of a long black train carrying the singer's baby away on a Carter Family tune entitled 'Worried Man Blues', described by Marcus as "the story of a man who lays down to sleep by a river and wakes up in chains." No further explanation, just that chilling image, like something from a noir-horror film. Parker and Phillips added a happy ending to their song, but the Elvis version is charged with anger, as if he means to derail that cursed train with his bare hands. Maybe the girl left of her own accord, maybe she was forced, by poverty, pregnancy or any number of circumstances beyond the singer's control. Or perhaps the train is death on wheels.
If so, what are we to make of Elvis' yowl of defiance, "Well you took my baby/But you never will again!"? That you can't die twice? Or, like the grief-maddened protagonist in Stephen King's Pet Semetary, maybe he's gonna take her body to some sacred Indian burial ground, commune with pagan spirits and do the resurrection shuffle.
Presley's ghost-locomotive was neither the first nor the last of its kind, but through the supernatural echo of the Sun Sessions, the spook in Sam Phillips' machines, we can share the nameless, timeless dread felt by the boys Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade in Ray Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.
"The wails of a lifetime were gathered in (that train whistle) from other nights in other slumbering years; the howls of moon-dreamed dogs, the sleep of river-cold winds through January porch screens which stopped the blood, a thousand fire-sirens weeping, or worse! The outgone shreds of breath, the protests of a billion people dead or dying, not wanting to be dead, their groans, their sighing, burst over the earth!"
As the aforementioned Mr. King indicated in his book about the horror genre Danse Macabre, that's a hell of a train. Literally. Foreshadowed by strange harbingers - a ghostly calliope sound, a wayward lightning rod salesman - it heralds a carnival of souls: Cooger And Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show. This mystery train is not the same one Woody hijacked from Sister Rosetta Tharpe: it carries no end of gamblers, hypocrites, self abusers and midnight flyers.
"What makes that song so astonishing is the transformation of the American gothic into the American pastoral," Marcus observes, "from a bad ending to a happy ending without cheating, without cutting anything out, without narrowing the story at all. It is much more explicitly weird in the Elvis Presley version in terms of the lyric, what's actually going on in the song, than it is anywhere else, and yet this is the only time when the singer doesn't give in, when the song is not a piece of fatalism, it's a call to action.
"It's very hard to do that. It's not easy to sing 'I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground' or 'James Alley Blues' or 'Country Blues' or something like that and make you feel that the world is full of possibility and nothing significant has been done yet, it's all up to you - that's not the message of those songs. But y'know, I would've loved to have heard Elvis Presley sing 'I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground', I bet it would've been different from any version anybody else would've come up with."
As Marcus says, Elvis possessed an instinctive grasp of the old, the weird and the American - hardly surprising when one considers his own origins take on the flavour of some secret southern gothic fable. The story of Elvis' stillborn twin Jesse has long since entered rock 'n' roll mythology, but in his new book Double Trouble - Bill Clinton And Elvis Presley In A Land Of No Alternatives, Marcus isolates a simple yet startling image raised at the 1993 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival by writer David Adler, who told of a neighbour bringing the gift of blankets to the Presley house at the time of Elvis' birth. "Entering, the woman saw Gladys on her bed, having just given birth to a live child," Marcus relates. "On a table she saw a shoebox. She opened the box, and inside it saw a dead baby: Elvis' stillborn twin, Jesse Garon, who would be buried in an unmarked grave."
This image obviously also had an impact on Nick Cave, who transposed it into biblical blues language for the prologue of his novel And The Ass Saw The Angel. In it, the newborn mute Euchrid Eucrow observes his Pa disposing of his dead brother's body: "In his hands he held a shoebox bound with string. On its lid was written '#I'."
In the 1980s, Cave was perhaps the most obvious practitioner of the southern gothic storytelling tradition in rock 'n' roll, although The Bad Seeds' sound owed as much to '60s pop and European avant garde forms. The term 'Southern Gothic' is believed to have been coined by Ellen Glasgow who, speaking to a group of librarians at the University of Virginia in 1936, used it in reference to a "new and disturbing" trend in Southern fiction, one which she associated with writers such as Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner, and would also become synonymous with Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor. Throughout the rest of the century, aspects of the southern gothic would travel to South Africa (the location for Richard Stanley's 1993 film Dust Devil), Australia (The Triffids' agoraphobic torch songs), Britain (PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love) and of course, Ireland. In a classic case of bringing it all back home, Pat McCabe's novel The Butcher Boy took its name from a Scots-English-Irish ballad that got exported to Appalachia sometime in the 18th century. When an early version of his manuscript was rejected, McCabe took Faulkner's the-hell-with-them attitude as his oracle and redrafted the whole yarn in the scatological "shite-talk" for which it became renowned.
A recent version of the song itself can be found on Lambchop's Nixon album.
"I found it in an old Harry Smith folk song book, both the sheet music and the words," explains Kurt Wagner. "I'd never heard the song or anything, I just liked the words, forgot about the sheet music and made up the chords, and that's the way it went."
This method of wilful transmogrification was also employed by Nick Cave on his versions of the Smith staples 'Stagger Lee', 'Froggy Went A Courting' and 'Henry Lee' recorded during the Murder Ballads sessions. (Cave hosted the Hal Willner directed Harry Smith night in his capacity as curator of the 1999 Meltdown festival.)
"I came about those songs in other ways rather than listening to (Smith's) collection of songs," Cave acknowledges. "I'd always heard 'Stagger Lee' and stuff like that, but some of the other ones I'd never heard, I'd just seen them written down on sheet music."
Wagner: "I think that's kinda cool and it sort of goes along with the whole way folk music is passed around anyway, from ear to ear to ear, and in the translation it gets changed along the way. I guess in Nick's case and mine we didn't even bother listening to the music, we were just fascinated by these sort of scary, tragic, sad lyrics."
The southern gothic literary tradition still thrives, with Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy and Gail Anderson Dargatz among the more notable practitioners, spinning fevered tales of homicide, suicide, fratricide, patricide, infanticide, incest, alcoholism, intemperance, adultery, bestiality, feeble mindedness, cabin fever, child pregnancy, xenophobia, madness, religious fundamentalism and familial dysfunction. It's a world of grotesques, burlesques, penny dreadfuls, bottomless wells, bloody slash-hooks, idjit savants, abattoirs, whorehouses, demented preachers, the malevolence of place as much as people: the forbidding woods of Deliverance, Twin Peaks and the Blair Witch Project. In rock 'n' roll, these themes continue to trickle down through the twists and knots of the ballad tradition.
It's Tom Waits' testifying, "There's always some killin' you got to do around the farm".
It's Warren Zevon growling, "There ain't much to country livin'/Sweat, piss, jizz and blood" in 'Play It All Night Long'.
It's The Pixies' Black Francis beseeching his love, "Bloody your hands on a cactus tree/Wipe it on your dress/Send it to me".
It's the ghost jazz of Jimmy Scott's 'Sycamore Trees' or Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit'.
It's Green On Red's 'Come Gather Round' ("They say she bore her father's child") or the Violent Femmes' 'Country Death Song'.
It's The Dubliners' Grimm fairytale 'Weela Weela Walya', in which the old woman who lives in the woods sticks a pen-knife in her three month old babby's heart.
It's the serial killer lurking in Hank Williams' 'Ramblin' Man'.
It's Jerry Lee Lewis wearing Robert Duvall's face in The Apostle.
It's an episode of the X-Files in which a family of grotesquely inbred brothers keep their limbless mother in a drawer for breeding purposes.
It's the "Squeal like a pig!" scene from Deliverance recycled by Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction (screenplay note: "sounds of sodomy and The Judds singing harmony").
And maybe most of all, it's Bobby Gentry's 'Ode To Billie Joe', where a pair of lovers toss a mysterious bundle off Tallahatchie Bridge, shortly before Billie Joe himself goes the same way.
Siniad O'Connor (who appeared as the Virgin Mary in Neil Jordan's screen adaptation of The Butcher Boy) recorded this tune as an out-take of her 1994 album Universal Mother. The way her voice gravitates towards native cadences in phrases like "balin' hay" and "McAllister", plus the arrangement's low whistle, carries resonances of Ireland's own heartlands nightmares such as the Kerry Babies tribunal and the Kilkenny X Case, but most of all the lonesome death of Ann Lovett, who perished during childbirth in a Wexford grotto in 1984, a tragedy straight out of a Harry Smith Child Ballad. (Lovett's death was addressed more directly by Wexford band Cry Before Dawn in their song 'Girl In The Grotto' later changed to 'Ghetto' on the insistence of the band's label CBS.)
Siniad O'Connor also covered Nirvana's 'All Apologies' during the Universal Mother sessions, presumably moved not just by Kurt Cobain's death, but the intensity of his version of, his possession by, Leadbelly's 'Where Did You Sleep Last Night' from Unplugged In New York.
In Double Trouble, Marcus describes this as "one of those performances where you can't imagine the singer escaping from the song". There can be little doubt that Kurt also felt the cold draught of Hank's 'I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive' at his back here, although the Seattle acts path into the old south remains largely overlooked, even by the musicians themselves. Nevertheless, the trail is there for all to see: Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan's version of that Leadbelly song on his first solo album; Pearl Jam's affinity with the primitivist alchemy of Neil Young's live shows; The Walkabouts' Setting The Woods On Fire.
Aside from the fact that the stage set looked like some weird backwoods shrine, Nirvana Unplugged In New York telegraphed what the trio might've achieved outside the strict confines of a fundamentalist punk rock mandate. In their versions of The Meat Puppets' 'Lake Of Fire' and the fetishistic rituals of 'Plateau', Greil Marcus recognises echoes of Clarence Ashley's cryptic riddle 'The Coo-Coo Bird'. Nirvana had hinted at this music before on Nevermind: 'Polly' sounded like it was written in the voice of Twin Peaks' Killer Bob's younger brother, but the writer traces it even further back.
"I don't know if Kurt Cobain had any inkling that his song 'Polly' was related to 'Pretty Polly' (an ancient murder ballad recorded by "Dock" Boggs among many others - PM), not that he needed to," he says, " but I think had he lived, that's something he certainly would've figured out for himself. He was getting a sense of himself at that point as very old and his understanding of what people generations before had done was instinctive and powerful. What he did with that Leadbelly song was extend it in a way that no-one else had ever been able to do - I mean that song's been sung by hundreds of people, but no-one ever sang it the way Cobain did. If he had gone on, he would've made the American Gothic or the American Death Trip a bigger story than it already is."
At this point in the tale, William Burroughs once again darkens the threshold. In 'Time Is Longer Than Rope' from Invisible Republic, Marcus had cast Burroughs not as the futurist drug addict of Beat-punk lore, but a droll old man of words, seated in front of the same spittoon as Melville and Twain. (Similarly, Bill Graham once described 'Thanksgiving Prayer 1986' as if "Uncle Bill was bleakly burlesquing Franklin Roosevelt's famous armchair radio homilies".)
In Guy Peellaert and Nic Cohn's 1999 book 20th Century Dreams, there's an impression of that infamous death shot of Kurt Cobain's sneaker-clad foot, with a distraught Courtney Love bending over the body, clawing at her face like one of Hitchcock's blonde victims. To the left of the picture, Burroughs looks on, dressed in top hat and tails, an ambiguous presence. We're not sure if he's been sent to steward the dead soul across the Styx, or if he is in some way being implicated in the act, a ghastly echo of the William Tell-like shooting accident that resulted in his wife Joan Vollmer's death.
Kurt Cobain was of course enamoured not just with Burroughs' drug of choice, but his cut-up technique, most explicitly in the text collages of In Utero, a record whose imagery expressed revulsion at the fleshy ugliness of copulation, menstruation, childbirth, love-as-disease. Also, in November of 1992, Cobain grafted sheets of white noise onto Burroughs' spoken word recording 'The Priest They Called Him'. I received the gift of a signed vinyl copy when it came out. Recently I fished it out and peered at the signatures again - both men were alive when I'd last looked at it.

III. The NEW SOUNDS
OF APOCALACIA

In the wake of the Seattle implosion in the mid-'90s came a sort of polyphonic folk explosion. Concurrent with the publication of Invisible Republic, the reissue of the Harry Smith Anthology, and Bob Dylan's Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong (whose sleeve notes contain some of the most strangely eloquent meditations on folk music of recent times), a new breed of traditionalists began putting outlandish clothes on a very old body of music. Uncut magazine editor Allan Jones called it "nouvelle-Americana, a re-drawing of the musical topography of America".
Landmarks on this new map included Grandaddy's strange agrarian spacefolk, Do Make Say Think and Jackie-O Motherfucker's return to found sounds and location recording techniques, Lambchop's country chamber music, Beck's One Foot In The Grave, The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin (with Wayne Coyne seemingly cut from the same crank cloth as the Harrys Partch and Smith), and Mercury Rev, whose 1998 breakthrough album Deserter's Songs took its title from a sceptic's description of Dylan's Basement Tapes. The Band comparisons were only strengthened by Catskills neighbours Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, who contributed to its symphony of singing saws, theremin, saloon bar pianos, battered stovepipe hats and flying unicycles.
Mind you, Greil Marcus, who wrote the book on the subject, doesn't buy it.
"Well, let's put it this way, I really tried to like it," he says, "and I thought it was witless, I thought it was heavy handed, I thought it was utterly without inspiration. I know a lot of people like it - I don't get it, it does absolutely nothing for me."
But there were many other voices from the new olde world, most notably the hunted, haunted emissaries of Apocalachia; a place where that high lonesome sound of Appalachia is shot through with Pentecostalist fear of an always impending apocalypse. "Whose that writing?" growled Blind Willie Johnson on Vol 2 of Harry Smith's collection. The answer: "John The Revelator." Certainly, in the last years of the century, the devil seemed to take on whatever form he pleased; serial killers, New Patriots, lone gunmen, government operatives, right wing hate groups, militia movements citing the second amendment as their first commandment.
The Aryan Nations first emerged in the early 1980s in Idaho, founded by neo-Nazi Richard Butler, preaching a gospel of hate for Jews, blacks, homosexuals, The Feds, ZOG (Zionist Organised Government), corporate totalitarianism, the United nations, the New World Order. Thousands who considered themselves "true descendants of Jahweh" set up covenant communities in remote mountain country, going off the grid in Idaho, Colorado, Montana and Seattle, home schooling their children, holding gun fairs, withholding taxes, terminating all contracts with the government including Social Security, gun and driving licenses. Media interlopers were regaled with prophesies of a cashless society where all will be asked to accept the mark of the beast by true believers stockpiling for an Armageddon literally interpreted as "the battle among the wheat fields", a biblical showdown in the plains of the mid and north west.
You can almost smell all this paranoid fatalism - the Klan robes, confederate flags, burning crosses and Nazi salutes at Christian constitutionalist church services - in the plagues of locusts in Tom Waits' Bone Machine, Grant Lee Buffalo's squint-eyed Fuzzy or Godspeed You Black Emperor's field recordings of ranting gun nuts. In New York, horrorcore acts like Wu Tang Clan, Gravediggaz and Genius/GZA dialled up their own urban visions of Armageddon time constructed from hardcore Rasta prophesy, martial arts movies, sci fi conspiracy theories and Nation Of Islam dogma. The tone of many films of the time - Natural Born Killers, Kalifornia, Strange Days, Se7en - reflected this feeling of something rotten in the heart of darklands.
The white militia had been scattered and disorganised until 1992, when FBI agents accidentally killed the wife and son of 44-year-old survivalist Randy Weaver in a bungled attempt to take him in on minor firearms violations. This episode soon became part of back-to-the-lander legend, giving these self styled new frontiersmen and women a common cause and the martyrs to support it. Listen to Neil Young's 'Powderfinger' or The Bands 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' and see how easily Weaver's image presents itself as a lone wolf fighting off Federal sharpshooters instead of Pinkerton men and railroad magnates. The Waco debacle a year later only reinforced the anti-government groups' position and won them more followers.
But then, on April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of Waco, came the Oklahoma City bombings, in which 168 people were killed, 19 of them children. It was the worst act of terrorism in American history, and resulted in many of the more moderate gun groups disbanding in horror.
In the last five years of the century however, there was more slaughter, with spates of teenage high school killings in Washington, Alaska, Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas and Oregon, culminating in the Columbine massacre in Denver, Colorado in 1999. It was as if someone was playing Harry Smith's child ballads backwards, and America's young had become the killers.
Against this backdrop, it was possible to hear an End Times Anthology Of American Folk Music taking shape; acts like The Handsome Family, Tarnation, Calexico, Johnny Dowd, Will Oldham, The Black Heart Procession, Gillian Welch, Old Time Relijun, Sparklehorse, Giant Sand, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Freakwater and Colorado's 16 Horsepower, the latter act led by David Eugene Edwards, the son of a Nazarene preacher who, according to his Gallic bandmate Jean-Yves Tola, "goes to the library of Congress and borrows tapes of unknown people who have been recorded mostly from remote places in the Appalachians".
The same spirits who haunted the backroads, backwoods and mountain hollows of The Old Weird America at the beginning of the century were still right at home 100 years later.
" I'd say somebody like Will Oldham or the Handsome Family are very consciously working in that tradition, and very well, very effectively," says Greil Marcus. "But the notion is broader than simply a certain genre of music, it really has to do with an uncanniness, it goes back to the Puritans. It has to do with raising certain goals for the founders of a new land, the colonists, the first European- Americans, whatever you want to call them, that they are to live up to a holy mission and if they fail that they will have to suffer a punishment commensurate with their sin. That's a weird premise on which to found a country and yet that is the premise on which this country continues to understand itself. So when you have that as the basis for society, for government, for religion, for politics, for economics, for violence, for all different kinds of interaction, then a phrase like The Old Weird America doesn't seem any more remarkable than a tuna sandwich."
Double Trouble - Bill Clinton And Elvis Presley In A Land Of No Alternatives and the 25th anniversary edition of Mystery Train are published by Faber. Vol 4 of the Anthology Of American Folk Music is out now on Rounder Records. Wisconsin Death Trip is published by the University Of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

The Holy Greil

While his professorial approach to music writing has its critics Nick Kent and Richard Meltzer among them - there can be little dispute that Greil Marcus belongs with Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches on the pantheon of great American rock n roll scribes. As Bruce Springsteen said of Marcus first book Mystery Train, (It) gets as close to the heart and soul of America and American music as the best of rock n roll.
Marcus, born in San Francisco in 1945, cut his teeth as an editor at Rolling Stone in the late 1960s, before teaching American Studies in the University of California at Berkeley, 1971-2. Over the last 25 years he has written seven books about rock n roll and edited two, including Lester Bangs posthumous collection Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung. His one venture into the rock n roll fray was as author of I Can t Get No Nookie by the Masked Marauders, which reached no. 123 on the Billboard charts in 1970 before being attacked by Dean Burch, then head of the FCC, as an example of obscenity on the air . He was also a member of the all-author band the Rock Bottom Reminders until their demise in 1996.

Your favourite American President?
I suppose Franklin Roosevelt, but the greatest American president was Lincoln.
Best Elvis Album.
Elvis Golden Records Vol I.
Worst Elvis Movie:
I haven t seen enough to say. I haven t seen it, but Tickle Me doesn t sound very good!
Best Book About Rock n Roll:
Pop From The Beginning by Nic Cohn, now called Awobopaloobop Alopbamboo. That book was just a revelation. I loved it at the time, I still love it. I think he threw himself into that music so completely and wrote so well, he was writing about things I knew nothing about. The book just sings, it really does.

AMERICAN RECORDINGS 1-10
Strange Fruit Billie Holiday (1939)
Holiday s haunted interpretation of Abel Meeropol s poem about racist lynchings in the south still holds up as a work of politicised surrealism on a par with Picasso s Guernica.
Ornithology / A Night In Tunisia Charlie Parker (1946)
Featuring Bird and Miles Davis, this is the bottled spirit that would animate Kerouac s On The Road, Ginsberg s Howl and Jackson Pollock s free-jazz splatterings.
Music From Big Pink/The Band The Band (1968/9)
We carried you in our arms/On Independence Day, crooned Richard Manuel on Tears Of Rage , and it was as if The Band were rescuing a frail old Uncle Sam from the burning building of Vietnam.
John Wesley Harding Bob Dylan (1968)
Bob, never one to take the obvious route, responds to the shitstorms of 1966/7 with what sound like Biblical parables being interpreted by Groucho Marx.
There s A Riot Goin On Sly & The Family Stone (1971)
The soundtrack to the morning after the national coke orgy. Like The Stones Exile On Main Street, this is a rank document of a Nixon nation sick with excess.
Nebraska - Bruce Springsteen (1982)
Bruce, after late nights spent watching John Huston s Wise Blood and Terence Malick s Badlands, starts looking through Charlie Starkweather s eyes at a country decimated by Reaganomics.
Life s Rich Pageant REM (1986)
Let s put our heads together/Start a new country up, sang Michael Stipe on a paean to the polluted Cuyahoga river, sealing his group s reputation as the decade s only inheritors of The Band s legacy.
The Joshua Tree U2 (1987)
Having boned up on Mailer s Executioner s Song and reams of New Journalism, the Dublin quartet delivered an album that was part hymn to John Ford s wide open spaces, part scathing critique of trickle-down economics and foreign policy.
It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back Public Enemy (1988)
By the late eighties, Public Enemy, Ice T and NWA were prophesying new black power blocs, gangs of Stagger Lees and race riots. The revolution was not televised, it was broadcast through the rap medium, christened the black CNNn , by Chuck D. Nations was the loudest station.
F#a#oo Godspeed You Black Emperor (1998)
It s the end of the world as we know it, and Montreal s avant-hard specialists GSYBE feel far from fine.