Peter Guralnick – People Want To Tell Their Stories
IV. IT’S SORT OF LIKE SAYING, ‘I LIKE THE ROLLING STONES, SO THE BEATLES SUCK.’
ND: You seem bent on letting your subjects speak for themselves. But some might say it’s the job of a critic to expand the context he or she is writing about — maybe to do what Greil Marcus does, which often involves unearthing things that no one else can see. What do you see as the pros and cons of these two approaches?
PG: Greil Marcus and I are friends. We’ve known each other for 30 years. But we’re at opposite ends of the earth as far as our aesthetic goes. What he does has nothing to do with what I do, even though it might appear to, because we write about similar subjects. And people can prefer one or the other. It’s sort of like saying, “I like the Rolling Stones, so the Beatles suck.” There’s no corollary there. It’s just one response to different things.
ND: So in a fundamental way, you don’t see yourself as a critic.
PG: No. I never did. I wrote what could be called criticism, but it was written as advocacy of something. I may have made occasional errors of judgment. I know I did. Recently, a woman showed me a review that I’d written and she said, “You really wrote a bad review of this person,” whom I like very much, whom I’m friendly with now and whose music I always liked. I said, “No, I don’t remember writing that.” And she brought in this review in Rolling Stone, and it’s something that I would never write today. I thought, at the time, I was writing it as a cautionary tale because it was someone whose work I admired and I felt that this singer had gone astray. But my fundamental commitment — 98 percent of the time — was to call attention to something that I thought was important.
ND: Some of your writing has been around for 15-20-25-30 years. Would you approach some of the things you’ve done differently if you were doing them now?
PG: Totally. Yeah, yeah. I look, for instance, at the piece I wrote about Charlie Rich originally. It was based on one long afternoon and evening spent with Charlie and Margaret-Ann at the Vapors, that club outside of the airport in Memphis. I would never have the temerity, and never have the courage today, to write what I wrote on such short acquaintance. So on one level, I’m glad I wrote what I wrote. On another level, I would certainly approach it differently.
I think actually things become more difficult the older you get. I think they become more difficult the more you know. Knowledge is a very inhibiting thing and I think ultimately it’s the most likely source of paralysis, and that’s why I believe, to some extent, in Jack Kerouac’s theory of spontaneous bop prosody. I think in fact that no matter how much you know, at some point you just have to let go. I’ve said this before, it’s the Chet Baker thing, you know, “Let’s get lost.” You just have to let go. And this is what I do when I write.
My aspiration is toward an expression of literature. And again, whether I achieve it or not, that’s what my aim is: to write a book that’s as good as Taylor Branch’s Parting The Waters. That’s my ambition.