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A PLUME BOOK

MYSTERY TRAIN

GREIL MARCUS was born in San Francisco in 1945. Among his books are Lipstick Traces (1989), Dead Elvis (1991), The Old Weird America (1997), The Shape of Things to Come (2006), Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus (2010), The Doors (2011), and The History of Rock n Roll in Ten Songs (2014). He is the editor of Stranded (1979), Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs, with Sean Wilentz The Rose & the Briar, and with Werner Sollors A New Literary History of America (2009). Since 2000 he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Minnesota, NYU, and the New School in New York. In 1989 he was a curator of the exhibition On the Passage of a Few People Through a Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 19571972 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the ICA in London, and the ICA in Boston; in 1998 he curated the exhibition 1948 at the Whitney Museum in New York, and in 2014 Festival Albertine at the French Embassy in New York. He is the author of one rock n roll song, I Cant Get No Nookie, which, as recorded in 1970 by the Masked Marauders, fraudulently reached #123 in the Bubbling Under section of the Billboard charts, after which it was attacked by Dean Burch, then head of the FCC, as an example of obscenity on the air. He was a member of the Critics Chorus of the Rock Bottom Remainders until the ignominious dissolution of the all-author rock n roll band in 1996.

Greil Marcus writes a monthly column for the Barnes & Noble Review. He lives in Oakland with his wife, Jenny Marcus.

Outstanding Praise for Mystery Train

Im rereading this, Greil Marcuss history of rock n roll. Its an incredible, beautiful book that puts the work of great artists in the context of other arts, particularly literature. It was written in 1975 and is hugely optimistic in the sense that you get the idea that he believes music can change not just people but the world. And music has done that. It did that for me, and I still really believe it has the power to change the world.

Dave Stewart, The Guardian (London)

When I was eighteen and leaving home for college, my brother put one thing in my hand: a copy of Greil Marcuss Mystery Train. It changed my life.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

When Greil Marcus writes about Elvis you feel the relationship between the star and the scribe is elemental; you feel the writer somehow lives inside the performers style and catches his breath at a very personal-seeming eruption of meaning in the life and the work.

Andrew OHagan, The New York Review of Books

Marcus writes criticism like Dylan writes songs.

Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch

Ill never forget the seismic shock I experienced reading [Marcuss] first book, Mystery Train.... The book profiles six artists who he believes articulate the inherent contradictions of American culture: between freedom and servitude, tolerance and prejudice, opportunity and repressionin short, the disconnect between reality and certain enduring American myths. Marcus was audacious enough to claim that rock artists can be on equal footing with other great creators, and persuasive enough to make the argument stick.

Marc Weingarten

Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces remain two of the most compelling investigations of music ever published.

J. Gabriel Boylan, Salon

Marcuss M.O. has always been to begin with a workfilm, novel, song, careerand draw circles of reference outward to see where that work touches other works, other careers, other arts; and then how it implicates and is in turn implicated by the politics, crimes, and blunt fact of American life. As the breadth of that referential radius widens, connections snap and abstractions are jolted awake. Pretty soon the work (Bob Dylans The Basement Tapes) or career (Elvis Presley) becomes an active nerve center, its far-flung tendrilsfactual, poetic, metaphoricalcasting up sparks.

Devin McKinney, American Prospect

Through the arts, Marcus writes, you begin to discover what it is you truly love. And what you truly love should inspire you to change the world and yourself. Thats what an American cultural critic should do: inspire you to change the world and yourself. Nobody does it better than Greil Marcus.

Michael S. Roth, San Francisco Chronicle

Greil Marcus is one of Americas great listeners.... His enormous force as a critic has never been in merely divvying good from bad. It is in telling you why something mattersbe it the Declaration of Independence or a Sly and the Family Stone record.

Hua Hsu, The Village Voice

ALSO BY GREIL MARCUS

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989, 2009)

Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991)

In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 19771992 (1993, originally published as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers)

The Dustbin of History (1995)

The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylans Basement Tapes (2011, originally published as Invisible Republic, 1997)

Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2000)

The Manchurian Candidate (2002)

Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005)

The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (2006)

When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (2010)

Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, Writings 19682010 (2010)

The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years (2011)

The History of Rock n Roll in Ten Songs (2014)

AS EDITOR

Stranded (1979, 2007)

Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dungby Lester Bangs (1987)

The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad (2004, with Sean Wilentz)

Best Music Writing 2009 (2009)

A New Literary History of America (2009, with Werner Sollors)

PLUME

Published by the Penguin Group

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Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. Previously published in a Dutton Edition.

First Plume printing (Sixth Revised Edition), 2015

Copyright 1975, 1982, 1990, 1997, 2008, 2015 by Greil Marcus

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Marcus, Greil, author.

Mystery train : images of America in rock n roll music / Greil Marcus.6th revised edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.