“I thought, ‘Oh I’ll be a professor.’ I had an independent major in American Studies, but my main milieu was the political science department and this political theory groupuscle inside of it — a group of professors and students. When I went to graduate school I had the same professors and the same students, and it was just like crossing an invisible, meaningless line. Except that it was enormously meaningful, because the professors who thought when they were teaching undergraduates that their role was to inspire people, now they thought, ‘We’re here to train people as academics.’ It was the most deadly experience imaginable. I started writing then because I was bored to death. I had to do something to keep my mind alive. I fell into writing as a hobby. But I had known Jann Wenner since we were freshmen, and we had fallen out of touch since then, but we knew each other well enough. When Rolling Stone started, I started writing for them. And then I got a call from Jann saying, ‘I hear you’re complaining about the record review section.’ And I said, ‘Yes, everybody’s just writing about lyrics and reviewing it as if it was just folk music, and it’s totally wrong.’ And he said, ‘If you think it’s so terrible, why don’t you edit it?’ So I’m at graduate school but I’m also an editor at Rolling Stone. And that’s taking up more and more time. It becomes more compelling and interesting. I realized, ‘There’s a field of action there.’”
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Simon Reynolds interviews Greil Marcus for the LA Review of Books.