Dem Voters Triumph— Plus, That Springsteen Movie

Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show, rock critic Greil Marcus will comment on the new film about Bruce Springsteen writing the songs for his 1984 album “Nebraska.”  The film misses the context: Springsteen’s theme is working class decline in Reagan’s America.  But first: Americans voted in several key elections on Tuesday – John Nichols has our analysis – in a minute.
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The Democratic victories were big on Tuesday, big everywhere.  For comment and analysis, we turn, of course, to John Nichols. He’s executive editor of The Nation. John, welcome back.

JN: It’s great to be with you, Jon.

JW: Briefly, some of the highlights: in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill won the governor’s race with 56%. That’s a 13 point margin.
In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger won the governor’s race with 58%. That’s a 16 point margin.
In California, the redistricting initiative won with 64%. That’s a 28 point margin.
In Pennsylvania, the three Democratic Supreme Court justices all won retention by 61%. That’s a 22% divide.
And in New York, of course, Zohan Ani broke 50% in a three-way race. Let’s start with New York City. They have elected a mayor who’s a Muslim, a democratic socialist, and an immigrant — as he made very clear in his victory speech on Tuesday night. The pundits have all been saying New York City is unique. It’s a great place, it’s an important place, but what works in New York won’t work in most other places. But you and Katrina vanden Heuvel have a editorial posted at thenation.com where you say Mamdani ‘has the potential to transform not just a city, but the politics of a nation.’ Please explain.

JN: Well, there’s simply no question that the New York mayoral race was nationalized.  Mamdani did that to some extent on his own, simply because he was an incredibly dynamic and interesting candidate. Are there ideas? Are there tactics? Are there stances that can go beyond New York? The answer is absolutely yes. He won because he communicated aggressively. He reached out to people. He used social media in very creative and dynamic ways. He was open and blunt and human. That’s a lesson right there. You don’t have to adopt all his stance on every issue, but the approach, the boldness, the clarity, that’s useful.
But then let’s get into the issues. What did he say? The most important thing is affordability. That people can afford to live where they reside, right? I mean, that’s nothing radical about that.

JW: I don’t know. It sounds like communism to me.

JN: [LAUGHTER]  I know.  To ask people, ‘what do you need to get by?’ And then to come up with practical proposals that can help ’em do it — That’s not radical. That’s what we used to call ‘politics.’  And it’s only because the billionaire consultant class has come in and tried to define politics so narrowly that anyone questions that. So of course, Mamdani is transferable, not in exact details, but again, in the boldness, in the clarity, in the focus on accountability.
And if I can offer one more thing, Zorhan Mamdani spoke bluntly about Gaza. He did so from the start. Now, Gaza is not necessarily an issue that New York is going to have a profound impact on any given day.  But it offered a clarity about where he was coming from, and when he was attacked on that, he didn’t back off his position. Mamdani has shown Democrats across the country that, on controversial issues, on challenging issues, if you hold firm to where you’re at, if you talk about it and if you willingly engage with people who disagree with you, you often can get the support of people who may be convinced to adopt your position. But even if they’re not, who say, look, this is a person to principle who believes in what they’re saying, and I can agree with them on a whole bunch of other things. I’m going to vote for this person. Even though we might have this disagreement. Democrats desperately need to learn that lesson.

JW: Mamdani had, in the end, a hundred thousand volunteers doing canvassing, knocking on doors to get out the vote.  Not since Obama has there been such a massive outpouring of volunteers who want to work for a candidate. Bernie, of course, also had a massive outpouring of volunteers.  But Obama never did anything with his volunteer army, and Bernie hasn’t done much with his. What do you think Mamdani could do? What should he do? What do you think he’s likely to do with his a hundred thousand volunteers?

JN: Well, that’s a very important question. Probably the most important — because we know that, now that he’s won, Zorhan Mamdani is going to face a pushback and assault from Washington and from the billionaire class that spent tens of millions trying to beat him. They’re not going to stop. So what Momani needs is to have that base highly mobilized, to push back — and to push forward. And what I’ve heard in talking to the Mamdani folks is that that has already been a part of the planning. When we interviewed Zorhan Mamdani for The Nation, we asked him about this months ago, and he said very clearly that he intends to keep using his social media in the way that he does, to keep moving around the city in the way that he does, essentially to keep campaigning. Of course, he has focus on governing. That’s a given. But in this case, to govern, he needs to have the people on his side in a big way.
For many of the things that Mamdani wants to do, he needs the state of New York, particularly Governor Kathy Hochel, who did endorse him toward the end, to remove barriers, to get funding, et cetera. And so having a highly mobilized base in New York City that is clearly supportive of what Mamdani is doing, where you can see the numbers, where you can see the communications that has a real potential to move Hochel and New York State government. If that happens, then Mamdani can start posting successes.
And this is the critical thing. Mamdani promised a lot.  Now that he is going to be mayor, he does have to deliver. The more quickly he delivers on some of those core promises, the more space he will have on the really difficult ones. So I think having that organized base is critical. I think you’re going to see the launch of a project to keep the base organized. I will tell you, I think in the coming days.

JW: Mamdani in his victory speech explicitly addressed four words to Trump. He said, quote, ‘turn the volume up.’ That’s a challenge. That’s a provocation. That’s kind of daring Trump to attack New York City. And it’s true that Trump can do a lot to hurt ordinary New Yorkers — first by sending his armies of deportation thugs; and then by cutting funds for vital public services.
That will make Mamdani more important nationally as the leading target of Trump. But can he actually succeed at defending New York — or is this challenge, this provocation, reckless?

JN: I don’t think it’s reckless. I think it relates to your previous question, and that is how do you organize a city to Trump-proof it, to have a base of people that are ready to respond in nonviolent ways if you’re in the streets, but also input very political ways by petitioning, by communicating, by letting Republicans in New York state, outside of the city know that New Yorkers want their city to succeed. They want to work with people. There’s so much about turning the volume up on the positive messages of Mamdani’s campaign that I see as smart politics. It’s not a provocation, right?
Look, Trump has provoked again and again and again. I think what Mamdani is saying is that, in the face of Trump’s provocations, Mamdani wants the people in New York to say what they believe, to be confident, to be strong in the face of threats from other places.
What we know about Donald Trump is that when he faces a city, a state, that is strong, there are instances where he has backed off. LA has seen a horrible assault, but then some backing down on the part of the feds. And I think that’s rooted in the fact that people in LA really organized strongly and really pushed back. Remember, one of the things that happened in LA was that you had people on the street, but you also had very mainstream politicians, all the way up the ladder, aligning with these movements that are saying that we don’t want our city invaded and we don’t want Donald Trump doing all the stuff that he does. And I think that what Mamdani is saying is that New York will similarly seek to resist where necessary, but also seek to build the political base to push back.
And can I offer one final notion on that?  The results from yesterday, not just in New York, but nationally, suggest that there is a much broader political base to be built, a much broader political movement to be built around some of the concepts we heard with the No Kings protests, around many of the concepts we saw expressed in this election. And so with that in mind, the possibility that we are entering into a new political space, one where it is possible to say ‘no’ to Donald Trump and to amplify that ‘no’. And then cause, if not Trump himself, at least some Republicans, to rethink — that’s certainly worth exploring.

JW: We have to talk about California redistricting.  The initiative Prop 50 got 64%. Yes. And a surprisingly big turnout. This was an election with no candidates and only one thing on the ballot, this proposition, it’ll create five more Democratic seats in the House to match Texas gerrymandering.
It wasn’t clear at the beginning that this was going to do so well.  At the outset, the ‘no’ side had a lot behind it. It had a lot of money: $10 million from a right wing billionaire was what funded the initial mailers. We got a couple of them right away in the first week. Former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was kind of the face of the vote.
But Gavin Newsom succeeded. He raised, they say, $114 million. We saw ads on this World Series out here, ‘Vote Yes’ ads, that featured Obama, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Senator Alex Padilla, and others. And they say there was $38 million raised in small donations from supporters, responding to those, let’s call them, ‘irritating’ text messages, emails, Instagram posts.
The New York Times said that the success of Prop 50 redistricting in California has made Gavin Newsom ‘the Democrats’ chief antagonist to Trump.’ Do you think that’s right?

JN: Probably. Look, I think even before Prop 50’s results were in, it had become clear that Newsom has worked very, very hard to kind of counter Trump on Trump’s own ground, if you will. And that is to create social media that is combative, that is funny, that is challenging, that is mocking of Trump. You have to be careful to differentiate between someone who is a face of opposition to Trump and someone who would necessarily replace Trump as president.
I’ll say one other thing, Jon, and this is separate, apart from the personalities. The California intervention at this point shows, A., that you can push back against Trump, but also even in red states where they are redrawing lines — in Ohio, in Indiana, in Missouri — there’s an effort to grab some seats from Democrats for the Republicans. Now that you’ve seen the success of the California pushback, I think you will see pushbacks, for instance, Ohio, where you can petition a referendum onto the ballot that puts changes on hold. 

JW: Same in Missouri.  Same in Missouri.

JN: That’s right. It’s a lot of work. Right. But what inspires you to go out and work to do something like that, to push back, prevent the gerrymandering than a massive victory in California? I think it’s very influential.

JW: We have to talk about Virginia. Virginia had been until this Tuesday, a purple state, it had a Republican governor, and a Republican State Attorney General. The state legislature was very closely divided. Tuesday night, I think we can say. we turned Virginia blue. Abigail Spanberger won by a massive 15% margin. She got 57.5% of the vote. Kamala Harris just a year ago got 52%. And the Republican vote in Virginia fell from 46% a year ago to 42% this week. The hard one, which Democrats won was electing the Democratic candidate for Attorney General Jay Jones, who won by a comfortable margin.
In the end, the most amazing one was the House of Delegates, where we need a clear majority in order to do the redistricting that will create a couple of more Democratic House seats. In Virginia, Democrats won every single targeted district for the House of Delegates, flipped 13 seats, expanded the Democrat’s majority in the House of Delegates from a one-seat majority to 64 to 36. This is really a historic blue wave that is probably going to change the whole future of Virginia. And Abigail Spanberger just won more votes than any gubernatorial candidate in Virginia history. Do you think it’s right that we turned Virginia blue this week?

JN: What goes beyond blue? I mean, that’s the question. I mean, what you saw in these results are it’s like deep blue right now. Now Virginia, it’s a state where I think you still have to work. And I think I would caution against over confidence. However, if you look at Virginia, there’s no place that they didn’t do better. Every county in Virginia, every single county, the most rural Republican areas, all shifted significantly toward the Democrats. And so it was a stunning victory. And I think, I’m not trying to avoid the Virginia question, but let’s put it in context. Virginia is a state that was historically a southern state. I think now because of the DC suburbs, we look at it differently.
But another state that’s sort of in that kind of transition is Georgia. And in Georgia, which is very much a battleground state, they were winning statewide, public or state public service commission seats. Democrats winning in counties where they have never won or at least never won in the modern age, they were winning. Their numbers were up all over Georgia. To the extent that there are people who follow Georgia closely who say, if you had this pattern last year, a couple or four years ago in some recent elections, Democrats would’ve been in a very, very good position.
And so I think what we need to take away from this is that everywhere across the country you saw movement. And what that movement was that purple states became blue. In some cases, red states became purple. And even in the Reds to red places, you saw breakthrough winds.
What this tells us is that there’s a combination of things going on. First, there’s a pushback against Donald Trump. It’s real. It’s national. It runs deep.
Secondly, there is a pushback against, frankly, and I’m trying to find the scientific word for it — Oh yeah, ‘stupid’ approach of Republicans to this negative advertising, right? They got this theory that you could go wildly over the top on immigrant rights, on trans rights, on a host of other issues. And that somehow attack ads that said wild, crazy, irresponsible things were going to work. I think this election showed that people have developed some real perspective about that, and they don’t work as well. And I think one final thing is it is possible, not certain, but it is possible that Democrats may finally be figuring out that mobilization of their base is the way to win. Right? And Mamdani did that surely in New York, but the Virginia mobilizations were very effective as well.

JW: Yeah. So where does this leave Trump in the Republicans? Trump didn’t even try to campaign, wouldn’t spend any of his own money on his own candidates. Obviously, he didn’t want to be associated with the worst people in the world – Losers.  Those turned out to be his candidates.
And as you say, what are their issues? Trans athletes. That doesn’t seem to be something that worked. How about the menace of illegal aliens? The poll show people like immigrants, they think immigrants are good for America.  Tariffs. Is that a winner? That’s a huge loser. I don’t think so.
So how can Republicans maintain control of the House a year from now? Really, there’s only one way. Voter repression.  Using the power of the federal government to prevent people from voting.  Send federal troops to intimidate people outside polling places in blue cities.  Try to disqualify the Democratic winners. And of course, the Supreme Court allowing unlimited gerrymandering.
They can really only win by attacking the whole system of voting itself. And that won’t be easy, because voting in America is not controlled by the federal government. It’s controlled by the states, which then empower the counties. The county Registrar of Voters is the one who runs the voting system. So we’re going to see a big battle over voting suppression in the next year. And it could get pretty ugly.

JN:  It’ll get very ugly. Look, somebody asked me in another program or something recently, will Trump change because of this? Will he adjust who he is? Well, we’ve been asking that question for a decade. The guy doesn’t change. The fact of the matter is that Trump is likely to continue to be bombastic, to make threats, to try and use the federal government in ways that might benefit his allies, particularly political allies, but also economic allies. And so you’re going to see a lot of stuff, right? I mean, that’s all true. But I want to emphasize, Jon, we saw quite a bit of it already in New Jersey. New Jersey was a state where there seemed to be a lot of dirty tricks being played out by the Republicans release of military records that was far more extensive than was appropriate release of financial records against the Democratic candidate. A lot of threats, intimidation, especially in cities with large minority populations. The arrest of a sitting member of Congress when she tried to inspect a detention center, the threatened arrest or brief arrests of the Mayor of Newark. These things are not all related to the election, but they have a tension around them, a pressure, a highlighting of issues. And in New Jersey, I think there are many people who thought that that race for governor was going to be close, that it was going to narrow down. And what Sherrill, the Democratic candidate, did at the end was just run clips of ads showing her opponent saying he didn’t disagree with Trump on anything. And I think it devastated the opponent who had previously been a relatively mainstream New Jersey Republican.
End result here is that I think we’ve had test cases. I think we’ve seen that you can push back.  It doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to be difficult. I think it’s going to be very difficult, challenging time. But this election gives lot of hope for how you can challenge us.
And if there’s one final thing I would suggest it is that I think that Trump is not the only Republican, right? The party is a cult of personality. He is central to it. He does threaten fellow Republicans. But after this election, if I’m a Republican from a congressional district that voted for Joe Biden and for Kamala Harris, as there are a number, if I’m a Republican who’s facing a tough reelection, am I going to do everything Trump tells me to do? Or am I going to try to scramble toward a somewhat more sane position? Most won’t, most will stay with Trump. But I think there is the possibility that you start to see some real, some fissures, some divides within the Republican party. And of course, if Trump and his allies get all freaked out about that and are focusing on discipline within their own party, that creates a much more open lane for Democrats to just head toward November of 2026 with renewed energy — and with perhaps an opening up of hope, not just to flip the House, but even perhaps with a mobilized turnout, the right candidates to flip the Senate.

JW: ‘An opening of hope.’ John Nichols, read him at thenation.com. John, thanks for talking with us today.

JN: Great pleasure to be with you, sir.
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JW: Now it’s time to talk about the new movie ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.’ It’s about Bruce Springsteen in 1982 writing the songs for his ‘Nebraska’ album. For that we turn to Greil Marcus. He’s written many books, mostly about American music, including ‘Lipstick Traces,’ and most recently ‘What Nails It.’ His column ‘Real Life Rock’ has been running since 1986. Now it’s at Substack. And his first book, the classic ‘Mystery Train,’ has just been reissued in a special 50th anniversary edition, with a new introduction by the author.  We reached him today in Minneapolis. Greil, welcome back — and congratulations on the 50th anniversary of ‘Mystery Train.’

Greil Marcus: Well, thank you. I’m glad to be talking with you again.

JW:  ‘Nebraska’ was the Springsteen album that followed ‘The River,’ which had been his first number one album. ‘The River’ had a gigantic tour, 140 shows, performances that lasted up to four hours. At Madison Square Garden, he did four sold out shows, a total of 80,000 people, all of them singing along on ‘Everybody’s got a hungry heart.’  And then he did ‘Nebraska.’ Please explain why that album was such a shock.

GM: Well, It’s essentially a folk album that’s also a punk album. Dave Marsh said at the time that it had more in common with punk records like the Adverts’ ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes,’ which was a song about what if Gary Gilmore donated his eyes to science. to an eye bank, and you got them, and you’re living your life seeing through Gary Gilmore’s eyes.  And the Sex Pistols’ ‘Bodies. That’s what Dave Mars said, that there is something absolutely raw, unfiltered, dangerous, and damaging in this record.
It’s also a folk record. It also goes back to Dylan’s early albums, goes back to Woody Guthrie, goes back to murder ballads by Clarence Ashley and Doc Boggs in the 1920s and 1930s. And that’s what ‘Nebraska’ is made up of. That’s the cosmos he’s inhabiting.

JW: So Springsteen’s new songs in 1982 came out of this old American tradition.  But they also came out in a specific context: Reagan had just been elected president.

GM: It seemed to me that this was the most powerful, the most detailed, the most felt rejection of Ronald Reagan’s America, which was meant to enrich the rich, impoverish the poor, marginalize everyone who wasn’t white, wasn’t male, didn’t deserve power. That seemed to me absolutely inescapable.

JW: You wrote in 1982 about Springsteen’s characters on ‘Nebraska” that they “speak with the bleakest acceptance, with a refusal that does not know itself.”  Close quote.  I thought that was terrific.
Now the movie has a different approach, let us say.  This is the movie starring Jeremy Allen White of ‘The Bear.’  Director Scott Cooper explained recently that in the movie his Springsteen is just trying to ‘understand himself, to reclaim a piece of his humanity.’ And of course, Springsteen himself has written about being depressed after The River tour. But you think this is not just about trying to understand himself.

GM:  No, not at all. Look, I don’t care. I never care about the performer, the artist. I don’t care what Bruce Springsteen was going through.  I don’t care what he thought he was writing about or what he thought his motives were, any more than I care about those questions when they apply to Lana Del Ray or Bob Dylan.  They’re meaningless to me.
What I’m interested in are the songs and what they say, what they say in the world. Once you put a song into the world, you lose control of it. Other people hear it and they hear it in ways that make sense to them and maybe make sense of their own lives or part of their lives. So I have no interest whatsoever in this being some sort of confessional album or, as it appeared to me in the movie, an album made by Bruce Springsteen’s inner child, working out his childhood traumas and somehow coming to grips with his place in the world, whatever it might be.  I could care less.
I know Bruce.  I like Bruce. I consider him a friend.  But I’m not interested in his work as autobiography or anybody’s, and I think it’s a reductive way to listen to watch. I got very, very tired in the movie of the black and white flashbacks to his childhood and his abusive father and his protective but Ineffectual mother. This album may not have had a social motive, but it draws a social picture and it creates social characters, characters who make political in a political movement.

JW: I’d like to talk briefly about the song that ends the Nebraska album, ‘Reason to Believe.’ A lot of people see it as a kind of anthem of hope.

GM: ‘Reason to Believe’: I know to Bruce meant this to be a deeply cynical song about how people will always fool themselves that things are going to get better, that everything is going to be okay, that there’s a way out — when there isn’t. And I remember talking to Bruce at the time about this song and his utter bafflement that people took this as some sort of redemptive or even uplifting song, and he said, ‘look, it starts out with a guy standing over a dead dog, thinking that if he stood there long enough, that dog would ‘get up and run.’ It’s dead. Don’t you get it?’
Well, Jeremy Allen talks about discussing this song with Bruce, and Bruce said essentially exactly that there’s no hope in this song, and Jeremy Allen White says, ‘well, I feel hope in this song’. And then he says, ‘I said to Bruce, don’t you think that when you record a song you lose control of it? It’s out there in the world for people to make of what they want.’ And I completely agree with that. Jeremy Allen White’s sense of that song may be completely different from mine, but it’s his. So if he performs that song in the movie with an element of redemption in it, that’s because that’s how he feels that song and that’s the way he can’t help but put it across.

JW: I find it hard to imagine anything more hopeless than this image of the dead dog in the ditch as our world that we live in now. So I am kind of with you on this.

GM: There are verses that follow that aren’t as rough.  ‘At the end of every hard working day, people find some reason to believe.’  And isn’t that great? Isn’t that what keeps us human? That’s how a lot of people heard that song.

JW: There is in the movie a very uplifting moment towards the end where Springsteen’s manager, John Landau, alone in a room with Bruce, plays him of the 1955 record ‘Last Mile of the Way’ by the Soul Stirrers; Sam Cook was the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers in those days. Tell us about that part of the movie

GM: That was fascinating to me and utterly moving. I didn’t know that song. I’d never heard it.  So this was completely new to me.  And its majesty, its depth, its range, the way it creates an entire world that you want to be part of was just kind of shocking. And to me, that scene of John Landau puts on this little cassette and he plays this song and he and Bruce just sit back and listen to it — What that said to me was this is showing both of them a picture of a place in music’s heaven that they will never reach, and yet it’s something to reach for, even though you’ll never make it. There’s no way that Bruce Springsteen or just about anybody else on Earth will ever be the singer that Sam Cook was, and yet you hear that, and you say, ‘I want to feel the way he must have felt when he sang that song. And so I’m going to sing a song that seems as true to me as that must have seemed to him at that moment and go as far as I can.’
So a picture of how far there is to go, even if you’ll never get to the end of the road, even if you’ll never get to the end of that last mile. That’s a great thing. That was my favorite scene in the whole movie.

JW: Let’s talk a little about ‘Mystery Train,’ the 50th anniversary edition. The subtitle of the book is ‘Images of America in Rock and Roll Music.’ It changed the thinking of a lot of us and in some cases it changed the lives of a lot of us. It’s about six musicians: Robert Johnson, Harmonica Frank, Randy Newman, the Band, Sly Stone, and most of all Elvis, and about how each absorbed and transformed their moment in American culture.
Bruce Springsteen said about ‘Mystery Train’ that ‘it gets as close to the heart and soul of America and American music as the best of rock and roll.’  ‘Mystery Train’ I know as an Elvis song, his last song for Sun Records: “That long black train got my baby and gone.’ You say in the book, ‘it’s one of those songs that say, “this is the way the world is and there’s nothing you or anyone can do about it.”’ But actually Elvis does something with this song. What is it?

GM: Here is a song that goes back, it goes way back. It goes back most explicitly to 1930 when the Carter family recorded ‘Worried Man Blues’: ‘It takes a worried man to sing a worried song/I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long’– meaning ‘I’ll be dead.’

JW: They’ll be dead – and they’ll be in heaven.  That’s why they’re not worried.

GM: It’s a song that came out a year into the Depression, when the country was falling apart, when people were losing their jobs, when they were starving, two years before Franklin Roosevelt became president, and this is a song that touched a nerve all over the country. People heard this song as describing their lives.
In that moment, a man lays down by the river to sleep, he wakes up, he’s bound in chains. He has no idea what he’s supposed to have done. There is no court, there’s nothing to appeal to. It’s just a completely absurd situation that described the actual lives in an allegorical way of anyone who listened to it in 1930.
And this song travels through the decades until 1953 when Sam Phillips and Junior Parker write a new song, based on ‘Worried Man Blues,’ about a train. They take one verse out of ‘Worried Man Blues”: ‘Train I ride, 16 coaches long’: there’s a woman on this train and the singer can’t reach her. It takes her away from him.
When Elvis records this song two years later in 1955, like you say, it’s the last record that he would make at Sun Records before he goes off to New York and RCA and world stardom. He sings the song as Sam Phillips and Junior Parker rewrote it. He sings it as this incomprehensible tragedy.  But he turns it around. He chases the train down. ‘It took my baby, but it never will again. No, not again.’ And at the very end of the record, you can hear him laughing, just breaking out in laughter. I don’t know if that’s because he’s laughing that he did such a fantastic job singing the song, or if he’s laughing at the idea that the train thought it stole his baby and he got her back. I don’t know.
It is an ending of triumph, of self-belief, of victory in the shadows, in the middle of an allegory. You’re not supposed to go into an allegory and come back with a prize.  And it’s just marvelous. He is singing a blues and he turns the blues inside out and it rings absolutely true. It doesn’t sound like, ‘oh, let’s pretty this up. Let’s give this a happy ending. People like happy endings.’ It’s not like that at all. So it is just a marvelous moment.
I was going to call this book ‘Photograph Blues’ after a song by Robert Johnson, but after I was listening to Elvis for a couple of years and listening to songs hundreds of times: ‘Mystery Train’ — God, what a great title. I’m going to take that.

JW: Thank you for using it!

GM: If that book had been called ‘Phonograph Blues,’ it never would’ve lived a life. There would be no 50th anniversary of ‘Phonograph Blues.’

JW: The original text of ‘Mystery Train’ was 172 pages. The ‘Notes and Discographies’ at the end have been updated and expanded, and now are almost 275 pages. That’s because you’ve kept up with the literature. I have to say, there’s some fabulous things in the notes: Barack Obama singing Robert Johnson’s ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ at a White House gala in 2012. You have a link to the video. How did he do?

GM: He sang the song as if he’d heard it all his life. He sang the song is like, ‘I know this. You know this.’ And you’ve heard Barack Obama sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ He can sing.

JW: Greil Marcus wrote about the movie ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’ at the latest Real Life Rock at Substack.  Greil, thanks for talking with us today, and congrats again on the 50th anniversary of  ‘Mystery Train.’ 

GM: Thank you. It was a pleasure, as always.

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