by Greil Marcus
Real Life Rock
Also by Greil Marcus
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (1975, 2015)
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989, 2009)
Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991)
In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992 (1993, originally published as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers)
The Dustbin of History (1995)
The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (2000, 2011, originally published as Invisible Republic, 1997)
Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2000)
“The Manchurian Candidate” (2002)
Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005)
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (2006)
When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (2010)
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings, 1968–2010 (2010)
The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years (2011)
The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs (2014)
Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations (2015)
AS EDITOR
Stranded (1979, 2007)
Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs (1987)
The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad (2004, with Sean Wilentz)
Best Music Writing 2009 (2009)
A New Literary History of America (2009, with Werner Sollors)
Real Life Rock
The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986–2014
GREIL MARCUS
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Copyright © 2015 by Greil Marcus.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sleater-Kinney
and
the Mekons
two threads in this column
Contents
Introduction
The Village Voice, 1986–1990
Artforum, 1990–1998
Salon, 1999–2003
City Pages, 2003–2004
Interview, 2006–2007
The Believer, 2008–2014
Acknowledgments
Credits
Index of Names and Titles
Introduction
A BOOK THIS LONG CANNOT SUFFER a long introduction. The work collected here began with a phone call at the beginning of 1986 from Doug Simmons, then the music editor of the Village Voice. In 1978, for New West, a magazine the late Clay Felker had launched as an outpost of his successful New York, I’d started a column called Real Life Rock. I took the title from Magazine’s just-released album, Real Life. I loved the title, not the album. Calling a few songs slotted onto an LP real life seemed both ridiculous and like a challenge, or at least something to try to live up to: the notion that you could find real life anywhere, even on something shoved onto an LP or hidden away on it. It was an essay column, but each essay, through 1983, when it ended, closed with a top ten—songs, albums, commercials, ads, maybe a comment on a dress Bette Midler wore at an awards show. Anything.
Doug wanted to know if I’d turn that list idea into an actual column. He gave me the bottom third of a page once a month, about 700 words, which was room for anything: music, movies, fiction, critical theory, ads, television shows, remarks overheard waiting in line, news items, contributions from correspondents some of whom, under their column names or their real names, are still sending in items today, treating the column as a forum, or a good site for gossip, or the everyday conversation it has always wanted to be. I wrote the column every week until, in 1990, the Voice hired a new music editor who didn’t like it. I moved it to Artforum, where I worked with Ingrid Sischy, David Frankel, Ida Panicelli, Jack Bankowsky, and Sydney Pokorny, off and on, with breaks to finish books, for nearly nine years, with more space, a page or sometimes two, for the magazine’s ten issues a year. As in every following incarnation, the column changed according to the frame of reference of the publication and what I could presume the readership’s frame of reference might be. The column began to take in more formal art, more politics, more novels, more critical absurdities. When finally I had to take a break and couldn’t predict when it would end, the magazine offered a top ten to a different working artist every month. I kept writing for Artforum but in 1999 took the column to Salon, working with Gary Kamiya and Bill Wyman and publishing every other week—the online attention span, it was explained to me, was shorter than in the print world: “People forget what they’ve read more quickly”—and with no real word limit. At Salon the column was perhaps more ambitious than before—the work around it was thrilling, with the best coverage of the Clinton impeachment anywhere, wild humor, daring arguments—and more full of vitriol, because enemies were more plain. The column was killed in 2004 by David Talbot, the editor in chief, who said it was cut to save money. When I pointed out that given what I was being paid, doing away with it was not exactly going to make a measurable difference, he said that he didn’t like the column anyway, and that since I always did whatever it was I did, there was no point in discussing it, thus allowing me to join the company of my friends Sarah Vowell, Steve Erickson, and Charles Taylor, who had lost columns at Salon before me. I went to City Pages in Minneapolis, which under the editorship of Steve Perry had become the best alternative weekly newspaper in the country—with the best reporting, the best criticism, the cleanest design, and the best editors. With my thousand or so words a month, I was lucky to work with Melissa Maerz. In 2005, after little more than a year, I went back to Interview, where I’d been writing an intermittent essay column, Days Between Stations (the title stolen from a Steve Erickson novel), since 1992, working again with Ingrid Sischy and with Graham Fuller and Brad Goldfarb. Ingrid wanted a new name for the column; “Elephant Dancing” popped into my head as the dumbest possible thing we could call it. “Fine,” she said. She later asked me to switch the column to a top ten—but still under that terrible hoist-by-my-own-petard name, at about 750 words a month. This was the one time the column didn’t work, because everything had to be music related, and I’d long since found the column was about anything under the sun or it was nothing. I didn’t like writing it, Ingrid didn’t like reading it, and we went back to an essay format—until Ingrid left in the middle of the night and the new editors killed all the criticism columns (“We’re going more visual”). I tried for more than a year to find a home for Real Life Rock Top Ten, with no luck anywhere, until one good day Vendela Vida of the Believer called to say that Nick Hornby was taking a leave from his books column, and was there by any chance a column I’d like to write
? I wrote one ten times a year, at any length I chose, working with Vendela Vida, Sheila Heti, Andi Winnette, and Andrew Leland, from 2008 to 2014, and in the best possible home, even under the crazy stricture that, in the Believer, which had begun as a publication abjuring all snark, you couldn’t say anything mean about anybody, which made writing about Lucinda Williams a real challenge. I made it a game to sneak offending material into the column; sometimes I got away with it. When the Believer temporarily suspended publication in the fall of 2014, Bill Tipper of the Barnes & Noble Review took the column without hesitating, offering to publish it once a month at whatever length made sense.
Everything through The Believer is here. Whether that makes sense is for others to judge. I have corrected some errors, though some probably remain, and some, as when I misheard a song lyric, or cited what seemed to be a fact that later proved not to be, although that couldn’t have been known at the time, remain on purpose. I haven’t changed or softened any judgments. I had fun. I still do. I know I use variants of “black hole” and “heart on his sleeve” far too often.
The Village Voice 19861990
FEBRUARY 18, 1986
1 Reducers, “Let’s Go,” from the sampler Epic Presents the Unsigned (Epic) Most of the stuff here is novelty-record cute; this pained, nervous stomp is part ’56 rockabilly, part ’64 British Invasion, part ’77 punk—timeless. Chasing themselves out of their hometown of New London, Connecticut, to Paris to Texas to Munich, the Reducers just want to get out of here, and then get out of there. They only have to name a place to leave it.
2 Billy Ocean, “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going” (Jive/Arista) This piece of airwave fodder isn’t “Billie Jean,” but it’s a beautifully layered conversation—after a hundred shots on the radio, the female chorus seems to be made up of real people. As for the line about “Your love is like a slow train coming”—is that what Bob Dylan meant?
3 Godzilla (Takara, Japan) It was established long ago that all Japanese rock ’n’ roll derives from Godzilla movies; at one and one-half inches high, this rubber monster spits fire when you rev its wheels, then runs flat out for 50 feet when you let it go, which is more than you can say for most Japanese rock ’n’ roll. About $4 in better weird-toy, comix, or sci-fi stores.
4 W. T. Lhamon Jr, “Little Richard as a Folk Performer,” in Studies in Popular Culture, VIII:2, 1985 “One of the more obscuring claims critics make about the origins of rock music,” Lhamon begins, “is that individual genius conceived it.” Little Richard Penniman was not sui generis, Lhamon goes on: he was a product of the late ’40s/early ’50s “milieu of afternoon bars, minstrel shows, gay clubs, carny midways, folk patois, blues lyrics, road bonding, and the postwar leisure of Northern soldiers bored in Southern towns.” Lhamon proves his case in frightening detail—at least, the way he traces Richard’s “Miss Ann” to a 16th century British nursery rhyme frightens me—and he’s just as strong making sense of the explosively new appeal of Richard’s presumptively old story. On the originally obscene “Tutti Frutti” in 1955: “. . . the puns on ‘Sue’ and ‘Daisy’ titilated uninitiated audiences simply as references to good opposite-sex partners. At another level in these days of desegregation, Daisy and Sue were racially moot names. . . . Was Little Richard probing the delights of miscegenated sex? At a third level, and to other audiences, Daisy and Sue were knowing referents to drag queens in the clubs where Little Richard had presented himself as Princess Lavonne. In seeming to sanitize ‘Tutti Frutti,’ [producer Bumps] Blackwell, [co-writer Dorothy] La Bostrie, and Penniman had instead sublimated it with small nodes of latent excitement. Most audiences probably did not suspect any of this . . . but the singer knew, Blackwell knew, and so did the musicians. . . . Their performance took on a licentious exuberance commensurate to their release from restraint.” In other words, rock ’n’ roll began as a code its new fans didn’t know they were deciphering—a code that deciphered them.
5 Lime, “Say You Love Me,” from Unexpected Lovers (TSR) Shirley and Lee go disco—except this isn’t Shirley and Lee. But Denyse Le Page has Shirley’s impossibly high, quavering voice, and 30 years after “Let the Good Times Roll” or 11 after “Shame, Shame, Shame,” it will do.
6 Sam Cooke, “Just for You,” from The Man and His Music (RCA reissue, 1956–1964) According to Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop 1955–1982, this exquisitely syncopated 1961 ballad, Cooke’s only release on his own S.A.R. label, never made the charts—which is either Whitburn’s first documented mistake, or God’s latest.
7 The Costello Show (featuring Elvis Costello), “Brand New Hairdo” (CBS) Not on the new King of America, and nothing like it, either: fast, noisy, and nasty.
8 Bette Midler, “You Belong to Me,” in Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Buena Vista) Sweet.
9 Sandy Denny, Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (Hannibal reissue, 1967–77) Four LPs in a box, much unreleased material, not all of it terrific—merely those moments (“Tam Lin,” “Listen, Listen,” “Autopsy”) where all that “folk rock” was supposed to mean was put into play.
10 Loyal Jones, Minstrel of the Appalachians—The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford (Appalachian Consortium Press, Boone, North Carolina) In 1928 a North Carolina lawyer named Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882–1973) recorded a traditional mountain ballad called “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”; six decades later, the marriage of fatalism and desire in his performance defines American mysticism, as it likely would have done six decades before. According to this book, everything Lunsford did was interesting, and so is everything in this book.
MARCH 18, 1986
1 Richard Thompson, Doom & Gloom from the Tomb (Flypaper cassette) Eighteen unreleased performances, 1968–84, some demos, mostly live, better than the recent Sandy Denny box, and more playable than Thompson’s own retrospective, (guitar, vocal). The pairing of an ’82 duet with then-wife Linda Thompson on “I’ll Keep It with Mine” and an ’84 “Calvary Cross” (fingering his guitar, Thompson seems to be fingering the timber, wondering what it would be like to be up there) shows how far this modest piece of tape can take the gnostic story Thompson has been telling for almost 20 years; the immodest price includes a four-issue subscription to Flypaper, the newsletter of the Richard Thompson fan club.
2 Stan Ridgway, The Big Heat (I.R.S.) How to talk American—and not get caught. Whether or not Jim Thompson could have written these songs, his characters lived them out.
3 Coin-operated Photo Booth, circa 1933, the first published photograph of Robert Johnson (Rolling Stone, 13 February 1986) Born in 1911, this titanic singer and guitarist at once summed up and exploded the Delta blues tradition when he recorded in 1936 and ’37; he was killed in 1938. After that he became a legend, a ghost story, and was subsumed into the tradition; in the 1960s he exploded out of it. In the early 1970s, blues archivist Steve La Vere tracked down the facts of his life; and his leavings, amongst which were three photographs, prizes sought for decades, the Grail of the blues. The two that remain unpublished are formal studio portraits: here, prehensile fingers snake over the neck of Johnson’s guitar like hoodoo bone charms. You’ve got to see it.
4 PiL, “Single (Rise)” (Elektra) Inside the rant (“anger is an energy,” etc.) is a pause; John Lydon pulls back, thinks it over, almost croons to himself: “I may be wrong, I may be right.” The tune is supposedly about the struggle against apartheid, but it segues as perfectly into “Pretty Vacant” as it does out of black South African Sipho Mabuse’s “Burn Out.”
5 Luc Besson, director, Subway (Island Films) Punk flees blown blackmail plot into the Paris métro, and, having nothing better to do, decides to manage a really underground band.
6 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin) Not long into the future, when what was once the U.S.A. has become the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy that has replaced the Constitution with the Bible, a slave sings forbidden music to herself: “I feel so lonely, baby/I feel so lonely, baby/I feel so lonely, I could die.” She doesn’t kno
w where it came from.
7 Electric Light Orchestra, “Calling America” (CBS) Amazing how these portly gentlemen can still sound like addled teenagers, especially on an answer record to a 24-year-old hit. In 1962 the Tornadoes’ “Tel-star,” commemorating the first communications satellite, became the first U.K. rock ’n’ roll record to top the U.S. charts; now, the sci-fi “Telstar” sound still hanging in the background, Jeff Lynne finds his call suspended 20,000 miles up in space and he can’t get it down. NASA is working on the problem.
8 Firesign Theater, Eat or Be Eaten (Mercury) Probably written a few years ago—the premise is video games—but if the only true exemplars of multi-track dada comedy have to spend the next decade catching up with themselves, everyone else will still be behind.
9 Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, Saturday Night—A Backstage History of “Saturday Night Live” (Beech Tree/William Morrow) A fine story, cleanly told, though the authors have no idea how good Laraine Newman was, or that her nose job represents a greater tragedy than John Belushi’s death.
10 Sam Cooke, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” from A Man and His Music (RCA reissue, 1956–65) When this performance was released as a posthumous single in 1965, a verse about the racism the 1964 Civil Rights Act was meant to abolish was omitted; you could only find it on the LP version, which you couldn’t find. History has finally been corrected—though, given that a man who fought against that law is now responsible for enforcing it, history may be beside the point. Maybe RCA should have retitled the song “A Change Was Gonna Come.”
APRIL 15, 1986
1 T J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life—Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton) In the chapter “A Bar in the Folies-Bergère,” named for the weird Manet painting, Clark takes you into the “café-concerts” of Paris in the 1860s and ’70s, and captures nearly all that was up for grabs in the Roxy in London in 1977 with a clarity and drama that has escaped every writer who was there, if not the Clash, X-ray Spex, Wire, and the Adverts, who were there, too.