ABSTRACT
Mystery Train is not simply a book about music. Many of its tenets, in fact, derive directly from certain specific views of the academic discipline of American Studies, which Greil Marcus studied during his years at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-to-late 1960s. Mystery Train embodies strategies implicit in rock history writing that derive from larger trends in American intellectual history. The written history of rock 'n' roll is directly related to the history of those social groups whose concerns and ideals this music has come to represent—most characteristically, the American counterculture. Greil Marcus located the different periods of rock 'n' roll's history at various points in a repeating cycle: it emerges, rebels, slips back into conformity, and waits in an almost hibernatory state until it amasses enough discursive power to speak eloquently again of its cultural milieu.
