FORWARD by Greil Marcus

 Years ago I read an interview with Joel Selvin where he said, in essence, it’s a privilege for me to interview James Brown, but it’s also a privilege for James Brown to be interviewed by me.  That wasn’t merely the most arrogant statement I’d ever heard from a critic—it struck me as unbelievably arrogant.  Even though I’d been reading Selvin for years, I couldn’t imagine what sort of person could say such a thing—for that matter, I couldn’t imagine how such a person could get through an interview with James Brown without Brown  having his bodyguards throw the guy out.  Smart ass didn’t come close to covering it.

            Years later, when along with Roy Blount, Jr., Dave Marsh, and Matt Groening, we were fellow members of the benighted Critics Chorus in the all-author band the Rock Bottom Remainders—“This is the nadir of western civilization,” our band director Al Kooper, himself a published author, said after one rehearsal for our big number, an execution of the Swingin’ Medallions’ “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love).”  “Right here, in our show”—I discovered that with Joel, what seemed like arrogance was a big sense of life.  It wasn’t simply that, alone among we five (one of the few San Francisco bands not covered in this book), Joel could sing: loudly, with delight, bravado, and, the one quality we all shared, shamelessness.  It was that in Joel’s company, anything seemed possible.  There was no door that couldn’t be talked open, no obstacle that didn’t reveal a short cut, no refusal that wasn’t topped by a story of a better one. 

            What Smart Ass captures completely is the expansive and generous spirit of a writer who cannot take no for an answer.  If the subject of a given piece isn’t talking—Sly Stone, for example, in “Lucifer Rising,” a shattering account of the making of There’s a Riot Goin’ On, or Phil Spector in the deadline-yesterday “Over the Wall”—Selvin will tease out the story from other people, from the ambiance of place and time, a feel for dead ends and locked rooms, an ear for truth and lie, and his own vast knowledge of who was where, when, and why, until rather than sensing the absence of a subject, the reader can sense that figure standing on the outside of the piece, looking in, wishing he’d had the nerve to talk while there was still time.

            There is perhaps less of Joel’s humor, his sarcasm, his ability to unmask a fraud with a sentence of that person’s own words, perfectly placed, than there might have been here—but this is the record of a man covering a beat, knocking on the same doors again and again, until they seem to open without a touch.  The story here is not only the story of music in California over the last forty years or so.  It’s also the story of one man earning the trust of other people, to the point where, at the end of a tribute to a colleague, the late Ralph J. Gleason, his widow, the late Jean Gleason, will tell Selvin, “He was not a good writer.  He wrote about interesting things,” and it can seem like the finest epitaph a writer could ask for, and most of the people in these pages speak that plain language, because Joel knows how to hear it.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION

CHAPTERS

FORWARD BY GREIL MARCUS

AN INTERVIEW WITH BARBARA FLASKA

PRESS RELEASE

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