Mystery Train Quotes

“Every time Elvis sings, he makes a bargain with the devil -- just like Captain Ahab in MOBY DICK!”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“It is only too clear that man is not at home in this universe, and yet he is not good enough to deserve a better.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“Blues grew out of the need to live in the brutal world that stood ready in ambush the moment one walked out of the church.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“Wonder made the old chicka-chicka-boom beat so potent it sounded like a syncopated version of Judgment Day.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“Most have simply seen and done too much; as the Rolling Stones have been proving for ten years, you have to work for innocence. You have to win it, or you end up with nothing more than a strained naïveté.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“At a deeper level it is a fantasy of no-limits for a people who live within a labyrinth of limits every day of their lives, and who can transgress them only among themselves.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“To be an American is to feel the promise as a birthright, and to feel alone and haunted when the promise fails. No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“Country music lacked the confidence to break things open because it was not even sure it could find space to breathe. Hank Williams was eloquent, but his eloquence could not set him free from the life he sang about; he died proving it, overdosing in the back of a car, on his way to one more show.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“one of America’s secrets is that the dreams of Huck and Ahab are not always very far apart. Both of them embody an impulse to freedom, an escape from restraints and authority that sometimes seems like the only really American story there is. That one figure is passive and benign, the other aggressive and in the end malignant; the one full of humor and regret, and the other cold and determined never to look back; the one as unsure of his own authority as he is of anyone else’s, the other fleeing authority only to replace it with his own—all this hides the common bond between the two characters, and suggests how strong would be a figure who could put the two together. For all that is different about Ahab and Huck Finn, they are two American heroes who say, yes, they will go to hell if they have to.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“one of America’s secrets is that the dreams of Huck and Ahab are not always very far apart. Both of them embody an impulse to freedom, an escape from restraints and authority that sometimes seems like the only really American story there is.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“And this revolt is powerful stuff, after all. How long would Ahab have lasted if he’d been up against a howling weirdo like Harmonica Frank instead of a dumb Christian like Starbuck?”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“Of all the characters who populate this book, only Harmonica Frank did more than keep the legend of Huckleberry Finn alive—he lived it out. He showed up, made his records, and lit out for the territory, banging his guitar and blowing his harp, dodging Greyhounds and working the fields, setting himself free from an oppression he never bothered to define.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“The Great Medical Menagerist” is simply a triumph. Probably a miniature autobiography, it is a catalogue of all the prim and decent people Frank made asses of, and of the jobs his fun cost him.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“What matters about Frank is the sense of freedom he brought to his music: a good-natured contempt for conventional patterns of life combined with a genius for transforming all that was smug and polite into absurdity. The result was a music of staggering weirdness, dimly anchored by the fatalism of the blues and powered by the pure delight of what was soon to be called rock ’n’ roll. Frank wasn’t sexy, like the rockabilly singers who were to make Sam Phillips’s fortune; he was more like a dirty old man. He was ribald, and he had a flair. “I am,” he growled in one of his numbers, “a howling tomcat.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“In his own way Harmonica Frank was as much a maniac as Little Richard. He sounded like a drunken clown who’s seen it all, remembers about half of that, and makes the rest up. He put together a style of country rock that did not really find an audience until years later, when Bob Dylan caught the same spirit and much of the sound with “Mixed-Up Confusion,” his first single, a lot of the Freewbeelin’ album, and his “I Shall Be Free” songs.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“Old Sam Phillips only had one thing to tell me,” Harmonica Frank says today. “Said it over and over. ‘Gimme something different. Gimme something unique.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“With luck, we might even touch that spirit of place Americans have always sought, and in the seeking have created.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“The real drama of a performer’s career comes when the ideal that one can hear in the music and the audience that the artist really attracts begin to affect each other. No artist can predict, let alone control, what an audience will make of his images; yet no rock ’n’ roller can exist without a relationship with an audience, whether it is the imaginary audience one begins with, or the all-too-real confusion of the audience one wins.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“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;”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“trying to create a world where we feel alive, risky, ambitious, and free (or merely safe), dispensing with the rest of the American reality if we can.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“. . .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 . . . LESLIE FIEDLER, “Cross the Border, Close the Gap”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“What attracts me even more to the Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis, is that I think these men tend to see themselves as symbolic Americans; I think their music is an attempt to live up to that role.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“their ambitions have a good deal to do with Robbie Robertson’s statement of his ambitions for the Band: “Music should never be harmless.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“But they delivered a new version of America with their music, and more people than anyone can count are still trying to figure out how to live in it.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“A phrase that Little Richard snatched off Erich Segal stays in my mind: “Never in the history—in the whole history of art . . .” And that was it. Little Richard was the only artist on the set that night, the only one who disrupted an era, the only one with a claim to immortality. The one who broke rules, created a form; the one who gave shape to a vitality that wailed silently in each of us until he found a voice for it.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“The Elvis people last night were saying, ‘No it was fate.’ But I know it was an accident. Like driving down a backroad out in the country and going through a ghost town and you think, ‘This is the way it used to be,’ and you never forget the sight because it’s a perfectly shaped moment in time and space and like a vision of the distant future that will never be and you know it as you dream it, and you think, ‘We can renovate one of these old store fronts and move out here,’ and, of course, you know you never will but the vision has power because it answers a need. Some people find what they need in the darkness. Some people are transfixed by light. We checked in and we’ll check out.” •”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“When I took the title of Elvis Presley’s last single for Sun Records as the title for this book, I had no argument to make for it. The words had an echo in them, that was all I knew. More than thirty years later, I know one thing more: it’s been a good train to hitch a ride on. Over time, the idea or the image of the song has surfaced again and again, as a kind of talisman—of, I think, the need or the wish for mystery itself, as a dimension of life too often missing.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“Johnson remains the most emotionally committed of all blues singers;”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“You may bury my body, down by the highway side Babe, I don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone You may bury my body, ooooo, down by the highway side So my old evil spirit Can get a Greyhound bus, and ride.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music: Fifth Edition

“Elvis stopped threatening—not only girls, but the whole of the social order—and began pleading.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll