Audiobooks by Greil Marcus

Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs

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 Als Across seven decades, Bob Dylan has been the first singer of American song. As a writer and performer, he has rewritten the national songbook in a way that comes from his own vision and yet can feel as if it belongs to anyone who might listen. In Folk Music, Greil Marcus tells Dylan’s story through seven of his most transformative songs. Marcus’s point of departure is Dylan’s ability to “see myself in others.” Like Dylan’s songs, this book is a work of implicit patriotism and creative skepticism. It illuminates Dylan’s continuing presence and relevance through his empathy—his imaginative identification with other people. This is not only a deeply felt telling of the life and times of Bob Dylan, but a rich history of American folk songs and the new life they were given as Dylan sat down to write his own.

Greil Marcus (Author), Ian Porter (Narrator)

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Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby

A deep dive into how F. Scott Fitzgerald's vision of the American Dream has been understood, portrayed, distorted, misused, and kept alive Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald's story has become a key to American culture and American life itself. Marcus follows the arc of The Great Gatsby from 1925 into the ways it has insinuated itself into works by writers such as Philip Roth and Raymond Chandler; found echoes in the work of performers from Jelly Roll Morton to Lana Del Rey; and continued to rewrite both its own story and that of the country at large in the hands of dramatists and filmmakers from the 1920s to John Collins's 2006 Gatz and Baz Luhrmann's critically reviled (here celebrated) 2013 movie version-the fourth, so far.

Greil Marcus (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator)

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The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years

The best critic of popular culture in America considers the attraction of the Doors, which has endured despite the band's short life, sampling the lasting songs and legendary performances that made Jim Morrison and his band rock 'n' roll legends. A fan from the moment the Doors' first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock 'n' roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, one could drive from here to there, changing from one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four of the Doors' songs in an hour-every hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult of both Jim Morrison-and the era he was made to personify-and focus solely on the music. All these years later, it is a new story. "Nobody reads a song like Greil Marcus, whose prose is as passionate and omnivorous as the music he loves. Here he travels by way of Thomas Pynchon, pop art, and Charles Manson to bring the chaotic, majestic, death-haunted Doors back to doomed and haunting life."-Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-winning author

Greil Marcus (Author), Ray Porter (Narrator)

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