Ask Greil: June 26, 2026

Hi Greil, I recently finished reading Brand New Beat [by Peter Richardson]. Following the death of Ralph Gleason, Mr. Wenner decided to move the magazine to New York because San Francisco had become a “cultural backwater.” Personally, I enjoyed the music scene of the latter half of the ’70s and would value your take on what prompted the move. Best regards. —PAUL HALLAMAN

San Francisco was a backwater as far as the music and media industries were concerned. That gave Rolling Stone its independence from those very forces. The Bay Area’s inbred disdain for Los Angeles and its chip-on-its-shoulder attitude to the East in general and New York in particular (it used to drive me nuts when people assumed I was from New York because they couldn’t imagine that anyone Jewish and not stupid could come from anywhere else) was crucial to the publication’s authority and unpredictability. In the Bay Area we simply were not part of the New York–LA nexus of publicity and schmoozing. Though really, it was grooming: I can’t tell you how many writers in New York and LA believed the record industry’s house hippie Danny Fields really was their friend. I found the same was true when in 1975 I became the Rolling Stone book critic. But Jann did want to be part of a world where Jackie Kennedy and Warren Beatty knew his name: knew that just as they had something to offer him, he had something to offer them. It was when the magazine became the house organ for Saturday Night Live that it sank into a trough of back-slapping it took maybe 20 years to get out of. I can’t believe that now the same rich man’s son owns Variety, Rolling Stone, and Artforum. Still, it seems like an ugly but appropriate conclusion to a time when Ingrid Sischy and Jann did things that no one, even themselves, ever expected, sometimes with every new issue, every time you turned your head.

Of the handful of rock music icons who continue to tour and perform live, I find only Bob Dylan listenable in that he has adjusted his sound and setlists to his age and abilities as they are now instead of the nostalgia trip the one encounters watching Paul McCartney or the Rolling Stones. Dylan seems relevant to me today in ways the others do not. In part, it’s due to his musicianship and tinkering and changing familiar songs into very different versions from what they sounded like even 10 years ago, but he seems to belong to a heritage he encountered as a young man, the old blues musicians who were rediscovered in the early-to-mid 1960s by college audiences and who performed at those Newport Folk festivals where a young Dylan got to see them and meet them personally. Did you see any of those pre-WWII blues artists back then like Skip James or Son House and what do you think of Bob Dylan today as a musician and performer? —JAMES R STACHO

Berkeley was a center of country blues performances when I arrived there in 1963, and before that. Lovers of—you could even say believers in—Mississippi and Texas blues from the 1920s and ’30s formed a kind of free and open cult. Rolf Cahn and Debbie Green brought that culture from Cambridge after 1959 and opened such country blues clubs as the Cabale and the Blind Lemon and later the Jabberwocky. Those spots along with the Berkeley Folk Festival hosted everyone: Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Dock Boggs, so many people who became central to my sense of American music and American democracy as such. And I missed it all. I had friends who I later learned had been part of that scene, but somehow the word never got passed or I wasn’t listening. I was reveling in and starting to write about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Lovin’ Spoonful. It wasn’t until early 1970, after Altamont, when rock ’n’ roll as an idea, a world, made me sick, that in the little Berkeley store Record City I discovered the treasure chest of country blues put out over the previous years by the Berkeley label Origin Jazz Library. It was on their sampler Really! The Country Blues that I first heard Skip James, Garfield Akers, Son House, Charlie Patton, Tommy Johnson. My life took a turn for the better. I still have that LP and play it with undimmed disbelief.

As for Bob Dylan, I wasn’t in town for his recent Berkeley shows at the Greek Theatre. I heard about it from any number of people, and the sense I got was that if you were in the mood, if you were receptive to the idea of this golem draped in cloth playing songs you would have known if you could decipher his intentions, you likely would have come away thrilled with a sense of possibilities, of recognizing how much you didn’t know but had just found out. But see below for more.

Classic Rock. I was born in 1961 and was introduced to Top 40 AM radio by my older sister when I was 5 or 6. Top 40 radio of that time was glorious and, do I dare say, diverse. In the late ’60s hit radio would play a song by the Doors and follow up with the 5th Dimension. In the ’70s (my teenage years) the rock ’n’ roll station (Indianapolis WNAP) we listened to played Top 40 hits and rock LP cuts (“Stairway to Heaven,” live “Free Bird,” etc.). So we’d get an Aerosmith cut then maybe Ted Nugent, then Gladys Knight and the Pips. As Disco came along mid-decade and produced a lot of hits (some of them were very good), the rock listeners started jumping ship to a new AOR station (WFBQ) that had started up in 1978. That summer WNAP went to “All Disco” on the weekends, and their fate was sealed. In less than a year WFBQ was THE rock ’n’ roll station in the market.

The AOR Playlist was all white (’cept for Jimi Hendrix) and the “classic rock” played rarely was from before 1967 (“Like a Rolling Stone” was the oldest song played that I remember). The “new” music they played pretty much avoided anything Punk, until Blondie and the Cars broke through (not punk).

Jump ahead to 1983, WFBQ is still THE rock and roll station in Indianapolis. One hot August Saturday that summer they were broadcasting from the Indiana State Fair and the DJ said that people kept coming by their booth and requesting a certain record that the station did not have, but would “see what we can do about it.” DJ mentions it a couple of more times without saying what record it was. No Spotify to instantly access a tune in 1983. Finally the DJ announced that they had the record and they were going to play it “only once.” The song was “Little Red Corvette.” This was the song of that summer. After the record was over the DJ apologized for playing Prince.

Over the years I have talked to too many white male rock fans my age who absolutely HATE Prince. Rock ’n’ roll came about with white teenagers and black teenagers listening to the same records in segregated America. Powers that be reacted as expected (including record companies) and next thing you know Pat Boone is unawaringly singing Little Richard’s ode to gay male sex (awopbopaloobop). There were periods when a diverse audience was listening to the same records (Motown, late ’60s/early ’70s soul, Sly Stone and then disco). But rock came to mean white music. That’s why I love hip-hop, even though I don’t listen to much, because it brought together a diverse audience (which is one of the reasons older rock ’n’ rollers despise it). —BOB RYNERSON

I can understand why some male people hate Prince. They think he acts like a girl and looks like rough trade. He does everything they were told not to do if they didn’t want to turn off every woman on earth and all the women on earth from Sinéad O’Connor to the ones in his songs seem to flock to him. As a semiologist he turns all signs of masculinity into jokes, to the point where the word itself sounds stupid. And he really could play the guitar better than anyone of his time (Peter Green went farther with “I’ve Got a Mind to Give Up Living” in 1970 and then he pretty much did). But a DJ actually playing “Little Red Corvette” and then apologizing? The guy had the wrong job. I’m sure there was a lot of trash around the station for him to pick up.

Hi, Greil. When and where you grew up, what was the prevailing multi-generational public social music, if there was one? Like, when there was some big free something in a nearby park—open to all, kids bring your parents, parents bring your kids, wheel granny out, etc.—what kind of music were they playing?

I grew up in upstate South Carolina in the eighties and nineties, and the big Everybody music there and then was Beach music: chiefly slow-drag shuffle-tempo R&B that was propulsive enough to let you know you weren’t in the parlor anymore, but nothing that would excite things to where you might need to have to set down your drink. It was cool enough to not alienate the kids, it was laid-back enough to not agitate the grown-ups, it was deep and familiar enough for black folks to get into, and—perhaps most crucially—it was deburred enough that it allowed white folks to enjoy black music without having to think too much about black people, and if you went to any event involving rented canvas and free hot dogs, this was probably the music you heard there.

Now, a few times a year, when I’m feeling strong enough, I’ll put a bunch of it on while I’m doing dishes or whatever and try not to go under. Or, depending on the day I’ve had, maybe not try.

Anyway, how did they do it where you were?

P. S. I know you probably hear more of this than you’d like, but thank you so much for doing this. Your willingness to act as prison librarian for no fewer than two generations of musical obsessives really is an incredible generosity. —JAMES CAVICCHIA

It was suburbia in the ’50s in the Bay Area: I don’t recall music in parks or around swimming pools or at political rallies. (It was also the polio era and for a long time you stayed away from public places and stayed out of public swimming pools.) I don’t think we want to count marching bands at football games. My father would play songs from the ’20s and ’30s on the piano and we—five kids, eventually—would sing along, especially to novelty songs. At the Quaker school where I went there were a lot of folk songs, especially pacifist and Popular Front songs—and square dancing, which I hated to the point that when I heard “Swing your partner!” I felt ill. High school dances are a blur. The only really social music I knew was Top 40 radio and everyone at school arguing about the songs and who was better and listening to the radio at night and feeling part of some national conversation, our own republic where maybe Chuck Berry was president except for the way that we knew in some secret place in our hearts it was really Ray Charles or Little Richard. But all generations out here in public singing together? At ball games, because in those days you really were supposed to sing the national anthem and it felt good to try.

Prison librarian? I like that. I’ll try to live up to it.

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Bob Dylan’s 6/14 show in Berkeley was superb, even better than I expected. The band kept up a simmering nocturnal tension for almost the whole ninety minutes—so low-level that until the music stopped for just a second, you could forget how strong it had become. The sound was a fine mesh of taut wires, single strands snapping with the sound of a lone guitar or piano note. It feels like a missed opportunity that the Twin Peaks Roadhouse never booked him.

My friend Michael, who got a last-minute call to announce the openers on stage both nights, said that certain renditions reminded him of the Vulgar Boatmen and Dire Straits. I started thinking about D’Angelo’s Voodoo for its scientifically tight looseness; this show didn’t swing the same way, but I heard distant kinship. “Crossing the Rubicon,” done as a blues military march, gathered so much energy I wished the band had played it that way on Rough and Rowdy Ways, though on second thought it may have overpowered the rest of the album.

Of the Dylan shows you’ve seen in more recent years—say, since 2000—is there one you wish you could experience again for the first time, or one that surprised you the most? And is there a particular show you didn’t get to see but wish you had? —EMMERICH ANKLAM

There are a lot of shows based on what I’ve heard or read that I’m sorry I missed—even if I didn’t altogether trust what I’d read or heard. You just never know what anyone is going make of the conundrum Dylan can make of his performance. One person’s ceiling is another one’s floor, as one of his songs put it.

The show I’d like to see again would be either of two following the release of Tempest, either in New York or Oakland. The songs from that album come across directly but there’s no getting to the bottom of them. The more you hear the less certain you are of where you are. On stage at that time in the mid 2010s he was so expansive, acting them out with grand gestures like someone doing “Famous Scenes from Shakespeare” at the Virginia City Opera House in 1885.

I’m in Minnesota. I’ve seen fascinating shows here, but the one I most regret missing is one at a minor league ballpark where he went back to 1959 and sang Bobby Vee’s “Suzie Baby” and introduced Bobby Vee from the audience. I’d met Vee—by then back to Velline—at an oldies show in LA in the ’70s and at a Dylan conference at the University of Minnesota in 2007. Now he was deep into capture by Alzheimer’s. But he was there. My daughter was there. She described a train on a nearby track blowing its whistle as it went on by: “The perfect midwestern moment.”

I confess, Bob Dylan recently covering old Bob Dylan Basement Tapes songs, i.e., “Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby,” leaves me overjoyed and if ever Dylan were to do one of those shows/tours (how many does he have left?) featuring a “hit” album, let it be his entire Basement Tapes collection! Alas, he dropped the song after only a couple of shows, but doing 12 bar blues from his Summer of ’67 collection should be what it’s all about IMO. —JAMES R STACHO

With around 131 actual basement tapes recordings, that’d be some show. I think I’d settle for “This Wheel’s on Fire.” I was kind of shocked to hear he’d taken up “Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby”—I stumbled over it on the basement tapes bootleg set I found in the 1990s, and fell into its cauldron of laconic apocalyptic fury, this throwaway musically bland come-on that’s actually about the end of the world. Wow. That’s when I thought, there’s a book in here somewhere.

I recently read that you were quoted in a 2012 interview that during your early years at Rolling Stone magazine, publisher and founder Jann Wenner pressured you as editor and another writer to turn a favorable review of Paul McCartney’s debut solo album McCartney into an unfavorable review because Wenner wanted to cast John Lennon as the greater artist among the Beatles and Wenner was friendly with Lennon and Yoko. Later, Wenner would conduct the famous “Lennon Remembers” interview published in RS and in book form where John was highly critical of his former song writing partner. Did Wenner try to exert his influence on RS writers this way often and if so, did such behavior influence your decision to leave the magazine when you did? —JAMES R STACHO

I’ve told this story before, but I don’t mind telling it again, because it illustrates something important about Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone.

In April 1970 I was the records editor at Rolling Stone and Langdon Winner, my friend, neighbor, and fellow Political Theory grad student at Berkeley, was a frequent record reviewer and feature writer. As editor, my arrangement with Jann was that the Records section was an independent republic within the country of Rolling Stone. Jann could make suggestions or requests or objections, but final decisions were mine and the only way to overrule them was to fire me. There were never any exceptions while I had the job.

Langdon had reviewed McCartney, Paul’s first solo album, where he played all the instruments, and which, for reviewers but not the public, came with a self-interview where Paul, as his own band, denigrated the Beatles and promoted his new music as an escape from and transcendence of their triviality. When in the office Jann looked over Langdon’s review, which made no mention of the press material, he said it really needed to address that issue. I said that in terms of criticism it didn’t and that in any case it was Langdon’s legitimate choice to ignore that. We talked about this for about twenty minutes before Jann said he had other things to do, we weren’t getting anywhere, and why didn’t we go out for dinner and continue discussing it. So later Jann and I and his wife Jane and my wife Jenny went out to Tommaso’s, a favorite and legendary Italian joint in North Beach (that according to what I’ve heard recently reopened and is good again after years of decline), where to the amusement of Jenny and Jane Jann and I argued for three hours over Langdon’s review. Finally Jann convinced me. I said I’d take it up with Langdon. So we went home to Berkeley and I walked down the hill to Langdon’s place and spent three hours arguing with him until I finally convinced him too. He rewrote the review—the tone didn’t change, but the context was expanded and the whole piece came out richer for it. When Langdon later edited a book of Rolling Stone record reviews, he said to me that this whole business—spending an entire day fighting over a single record review—was an example of why “Rolling Stone is a great magazine and Jann is a great editor.”

This had nothing to do with why I left Rolling Stone. I didn’t quit; I was fired. But that’s another story.

Dear Greil, To what place does music criticism go?

Amidst the unravelling of hegemony, the foreclosure of so many avenues of transmission, are we finally leaving the 20th century? If so, where does criticism go? How does it live? —SEB B. GROSSMAN

Your question reminds me of, for rock critics old enough to have seen it at the time, a horribly embarrassing moment in the wonderful 1977 movie Between the Lines. It’s about a struggling Boston underground newspaper that has moved sideways to an alt-weekly (from counter culture anarchy to serious investigative reporting exposing the corruption of local government combined with what was called service journalism—“The Ten Best Croissants in Cambridge,” etc. and is about to be bought by a corporate outfit that’s going to turn it into shit. Jeff Goldblum plays the paper’s rock critic, who spends his time trading off what little celebrity he’s been able to cobble together cadging drinks off starry-eyed readers who think he must be cool and that if they tell him they read his review of the last Byrds album four times he might tell them how he wrote it, what he really meant, and how his editors butchered it. He starts talking about what he’s going to do next, the big piece he has to write, that’s calling to be done and maybe only he can do it: “Whither Rock?” It was so perfect; that was a time when deluded writers would actually use a word like whither.

Which is to say, nobody knows, and the question is both beside the point and answers itself. Write. Read. Argue. I once wrote a piece that brought forth a long letter from a reader that contained the most acute critical sensibility and dynamic and original literary style since Lester Bangs came into his own. I asked him why he was wasting his time writing to me when he ought to be publishing his own stuff and offered to knock on some doors. Soon he was writing for the Boston paper that spun off from the one that inspired Between the Lines and many other places besides. He had a screamingly funny and inflamed voice and our correspondence sustained me for years. Which is to say the question you’re asking is one you have to answer for yourself.