"There's a Field of Action There"

"I was listening to Dave Mason's one great solo album [Alone Together, 1970], and there's a track, 'Look at You Look at Me,' which has a very long guitar solo at the end: an unspeakably marvelous and elegant piece of music. Everyone at the time thought it was Eric Clapton playing it... supposedly it's Mason, but if it's really Mason it's the greatest Clapton solo that Clapton never played. Listening to something like that and wondering what must it have felt like, in that moment, to be making that music... I always imagined that the person felt free and fulfilled and utterly taken out of himself. For some people, reacting that way, they would then decide, 'I want to feel like that person so therefore I'm going to learn guitar and ultimately get to that point.' For me, the way of inhabiting that moment was to write. And it wasn't until I read Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies that I had the same feeling about writing: 'I want to feel as free as she must have felt when she wrote that.'"

Simon Reynolds interviews Greil Marcus in the Los Angeles Review of Books.