The first illustrated history of rockabilly music from the 1950s to the twenty-first century.It was the twang heard 'round the world: Rockabilly was born out of country, bluegrass, jazz, and the blues in the 1950s, becoming rock 'n' roll and ruling the world. Here's the story of Elvis Presley's first Sun records that inspired all. And here's Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and many more rockabillies from the gol...

"It may be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood," film critic Pauline Kael wrote of John Frankenheimer's terrifying 1962 political thriller about an American serviceman brainwashed in Korea and made into an assassin. Sophisticated to be sure, it's also a headlong fall through the looking-glass of American politics and the most deeply prophetic film of the second half of the American century. As Greil Marcus reconstructs the drama, The Manchurian Candidate

Greil Marcus saw Bob Dylan for the first time in a New Jersey field in 1963. He didn't know the name of the scruffy singer who had a bit part in a Joan Baez concert, but he knew his performance was unique. So began a dedicated and enduring relationship between America's finest critic of popular music -- "simply peerless," in Nick Hornby's words, "not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian" -- and Bob Dylan. In Like A Rolling Stone Marcus locates Dylan's six-minute mast...

From the author of Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces, an exhilarating and provocative investigation of the tangle of American identity"America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, crime and liberation, lynch mobs and escapes; its greatest testaments are made of portents and warnings, biblical allusions that lose all certainty in the American air." It is this story of self-invention and nationhood that Greil Marcus rediscovers, begin...

Acclaimed cultural critic Greil Marcus tells the story of Bob Dylan through the lens of seven penetrating songs“Marcus delivers yet another essential work of music journalism.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Further elevates Marcus to what he has always been: a supreme artist-critic.”—Hilton AlsAcross seven decades, Bob Dylan has been the first singer of American song. As a writer and performer, he has rew...

Bryan Ferry, Greil Marcus, hands across the water—one singer, one critic, a music comes to new life.What is a song? Is it a fact, or is it a question? Over more than fifty years in a story that is still going on, for Bryan Ferry, either with Roxy Music or as a solo artist, any song is an open question, something he interrogates as surely as it interrogates him. Who are you? Ferry asks Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” or Roxy Music’s own “More Than This.” Wh...

"Van Morrison," says Greil Marcus, "remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music." When Astral Weeks was released in 1968, it was largely ignored. When it was rereleased as a live album in 2009 it reached the top of the Billboard charts, a first for any Van Morrison recording. The wild swings in the music, mirroring the swings in Morrison's success and in people's appreciation (or lack of it) of his music, make Van Morrison one o...

For nearly thirty years, Greil Marcus has written a remarkable column called “Real Life Rock Top Ten.” It has been a laboratory where he has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements. Taken together, his musings, reflections, and sallies amount to a subtle and implicit theory of how cultural objects fall through time and circumstance and often deliver unintended consequences, both in the present and ...

The legendary critic and author of Mystery Train "ingeniously retells the tale of rock and roll" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).Unlike previous versions of rock 'n' roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs and dramatizes how each embodies rock 'n' roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, in...

Best Music Writing has faithfully collected the year's most compelling writing on music for a decade now, so it's appropriate this special edition be guest-edited by one of the best-known writers on music and popular culture, Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces, Mystery Train, Like a Rolling Stone, and other groundbreaking excursions into the very fabric of music, America, and beyond.As always, Series Editor Daphne Carr has culled an impressi...

Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's life in music is revisited by his foremost interpreter -- weaving individual moods and moments into a brilliant history of their changing times.The book begins in Berkeley in 1968, and ends with a piece on Dylan's show at the University of Minnesota -- his very first appearance at his alma mater -- on election night 2008. In between are moments of euphoric discovery: From Marcus's liner notes for the 1967 Basement Tapes (pop music's m...

**From a celebrated critic, a heartfelt and adventurous reflection on the art of writing about art“Essential for fans of Marcus and fruitful reading for anyone reflecting on the mysteries of art.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)**“Writers write. They can’t help it. They can’t not.” In this spirited book, the revered cultural critic Greil Marcus explains his compulsion as a yearning for fun, for play, and, most of all, to discover—to feel the moment when a creation ...