Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  5 The Doors, The Doors (Elektra, 1967) It didn’t cost much to listen to “Take It As It Comes” (“Time to laugh/Time to live/Time to die,” etc.), “The Crystal Ship,” or the last, quiet minute of “The End” when they were new, but now you can hear an ugly momentum in the music, the music’s urge to catch up with the people who made it. Forget the soundtrack album, forget best-of’s and greatest hits; this is all you need, and, maybe, all there ever was.

  6 Fastbacks, Very, Very Powerful Motor (Popllama) Unreconstructed punk with a lot of melody, no apologies (though there is a tune called “Apologies,” along with “Trouble Sleeping,” “What To Expect,” “I Won’t Regret,” and “I Guess”), and Kim Warnick, for whom singing flat is just a form of realism.

  7 Gang of Four, Mall (PolyGram) Where you don’t pick up pennies because you don’t want anyone to think you have to.

  8 H. L. Goodall, Jr., Living in the Rock N Roll Mystery—Reading Context, Self, and Others as Clues (Southern Illinois University Press) An argument that “interpretive ethnography is to cultural studies what rock n roll is to social life,” though the real questions here have to do with what “rock n roll” is, and the balance between social life and one’s own life, finally unshareable no matter how loudly one shouts the awful facts. “In addition to the lives we lead we also live lives we don’t lead,” Goodall says; now on stage with his band, now following realtors around as they inspect properties, he makes himself his own test case, switching sides as self and other, musician and fan, detective and dupe, social scientist and impostor.

  9 Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, editors, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture vols. 1–4 (Anchor) Speaking of impostors . . .

  10 Pink Floyd, Julie Christie, the Small Faces, David Hockney, the Marquess of Kensington, etc., Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London (See for Miles reissue, 1968) To end our mini-’60s survey, this weird artifact: the augmented soundtrack to a forgotten Swinging London movie by Peter White-head. Pink Floyd offers nearly half an hour of intriguingly vague psychedelic music; one Vashti sings bits of the charmingly innocent “Winter Is Blue”; and various people talk about various aspects of the New World, from Edna O’Brien on sex to Mick Jagger on his plans to go into politics to Michael Caine and Lee Marvin (what’s he doing here?) on miniskirts: Marvin is pro, Caine is con. It’s a lot of fun, and pathetically trivial: people trying to describe the enormous energies of change and having a hard time thinking of anything to say. But then you run into Whitehead’s 1990 liner notes: “Never forget that what that time meant to the people who were responsible for creating that whole period and mood . . . was the love of freedom, in the profound sense, the hatred of fascism, in every sense . . .” He goes on: “It was a time of anarchy, yes, but also a time of sowing . . . seeds of hope and the future. Those seeds are continuously sprouting in the most unexpected places, and there are a lot of them still under the soil. . . . Keep an eye on those verges at the side of the concrete road . . . those margins at the side of that colossal text, that thrust of rationality and falsification. . . . Be ready when it comes—the flood—Salome dancing again—the demise of history.”

  I found it hard to gainsay a word; I put the disc back on and tried to make it give up even a hint of what Whitehead was talking about. It didn’t. Someone was crazy, but I don’t know who.

  SUMMER 1991

  Bob Dylan’s the bootleg series, volumes 1–3 (rare & unreleased) 1961–1991 (Columbia) contains a shadow version of his entire career, embedded within 58 performances. They range from a tune taped in a Minnesota hotel room in 1961 to an outtake from the 1989 album Oh Mercy; along the way, three CDs collect concert recordings, alternate takes, rehearsals, and publishing demos, programmed roughly year by year. A lot of it is dross, a history of unfinished ideas or un-transcended clichés, a book of footnotes. Other parts work as a series of interruptions—of the whole, of whatever you happen to be doing—moments that leap out of the chronology and stop it cold, turn it back on itself. Some seem to need no context, and to make none; some seem to fall together and make a story.

  Beginning with the fourth track:

  1 “No More Auction Block,” from a show at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, late 1962 The song was composed in antebellum times by escaped slaves who had reached the end of the Underground Railroad, in Nova Scotia. As “Many Thousands Gone,” it was probably first taken down from black Union soldiers in the middle of the Civil War, in 1862, precisely a century before Bob Dylan mixed it into an otherwise undistinguished set comprising mostly New York folk-scene commonplaces: “Barbara Allen,” “Motherless Children,” “The Cuckoo,” and so on.

  The number opens here with a few hurried but isolated guitar notes, which instantly promise a weight no other song sung this night will achieve. Throughout, the guitar sound suppresses melody (though the melody Dylan sings is the one he took for “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a piece as ersatz and clumsy as this is real and shaped); instead it produces a strange hum, maybe the sound history makes when for a few minutes it dissolves. Not the acting a singer might do, or impersonation, but a transforming empathy breaks down all distance, not of persona, or race, but of time. When Dylan sings, “No more/ Auction block/ For me”—and then, much more slowly, “No more/ No more”—there’s no reference to any symbol. The auction block is a thing, you can touch it, people are standing on it: “Many thousands gone.” The hesitations in the singing are so eloquent, so suggestive, that they generate images far beyond these of the “driver’s lash” or “pint of salt” in the lyric. I thought of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, black members of the 1968 U.S. Olympic team, standing on the victory blocks in Mexico City after taking gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash, each with bowed head and a raised fist in a black glove. A small protest against racism, a silent no to the assassination of Martin Luther King, and it caused a firestorm: the men were all but arrested, then sent back. The picture of the two of them that was flashed around the world seemed to terrify the nation; listening now to a 21-year-old Jewish folkie as he sang “No More Auction Block” six years before, you can feel the reason why. In the symbolic matrix their gestures made, Smith and Carlos suddenly knew, and everyone just as suddenly understood, what they were standing on.

  Skipping 12 tracks:

  2 “Who Killed Davey Moore?,” from a concert at Carnegie Hall, 26 October 1963 Fashionable bleeding-heart pieties about a boxer who died after a fight with Sugar Ramos—in 1971 Dylan himself would be present for the first Ali-Frazier match—but also songwriting as intricate and satisfying as Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield’s “Calendar Girl.” With referee, fans, manager, gambler, sportswriter, and opponent each stepping forward in ritual denial, the lyric is almost all dialogue; the filler between rhymes (“ ‘It’s hard to say, it’s hard to tell’ ”) can seem like genius. You can sense a new energy here: the thrill of getting it right.

  Skipping one track:

  3 “Moonshiner,” outtake from The Times They Are A-Changin’, 12 August 1963 “I hit all those notes,” Dylan said in 1965, in reply to an interviewer’s mention of Caruso, “and I can hold my breath three times as long if I want to.” This ancient Appalachian ballad—five minutes of suspension, single notes from the singer’s throat and harmonica held in the air as if to come down would be to bring death with them—must have been what he meant.

  Skipping one track:

  4 “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” piano demo, 1963 Dylan presses hard, right through the song’s instant clichés. Times are changing; events are physically present; the force of history is driving this performance, and you might feel like getting out of the way.

  Skipping one track:

  5 “Seven Curses,” outtake from The Times They Are A-Changin’, 6 August 1963 A horse thief is caught, his daughter tries to buy his life, the judge demands a night with her instead, she pays, her father hangs anyway—seemingly set in feudal Britain (that’s where the melody comes from), this is a simpler, more elemental version
of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” perhaps Dylan’s greatest protest song, but with the position of the narrator impossible to place. The resentments and hopes in the preceding tunes of oppression and rebellion, “No More Auction Block,” “Who Killed Davey Moore?,” “Moonshiner,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” or others someone else might choose from the bootleg series, all are present here, but with an ending: there is no such thing as change. That old melody turns out not to be the skeleton of the song, but its flesh; it carries its own, unspoken words, which are “there is nothing new under the sun.”

  Skipping six tracks:

  6 “Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence,” outtake from Highway 61 Revisited, 15 June 1965 Chicago blues with a Howlin’ Wolf laugh. All rhythmic hipness, especially the first time Dylan says “All right,” investing the words with more meaning—more stealth, more motionless Dean-Brando menace—than any of the number’s real lyrics.

  Skipping one track:

  7 “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” Highway 61 Revisited alternate, 15 June 1965 As if he’d waited one year too many to shake it up and put the Beatles in their place, a headlong rush. And after a minute or so, a heedless extremism, as with the last minute of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”—which, when it was released in 1967, sounded too much like Bob Dylan was singing it.

  Skipping one track:

  8 “She’s Your Lover Now,” outtake from Blonde on Blonde, 21 January 1966 An unforgiving, barely coherent rant, but less about the unnamed she than the rumble that repeatedly builds up to an explosive convergence of guitar, piano, bass, drums, organ, lyric, and vocal—a convergence that never arrives in the same place twice. As for the piano, liner notes credit both Paul Griffin (who played on “Like a Rolling Stone” and Don McLean’s “American Pie”) and Richard Manuel (of the Hawks, Dylan’s touring group in 1965 and ’66, later of the Band), but it must be Dylan. No other pianist could follow his singing; no singer could follow this piano without playing it.

  Skipping 21 tracks:

  9 “Blind Willie McTell,” outtake from Infidels, 5 May 1983 Between “No More Auction Block” and “She’s Your Lover Now” there are barely 3 years; between “She’s Your Lover Now” and this song, more than 17. Seventeen years of great work, bad work, endless comebacks, divorce, musical confusion, a terrible search for a subject producing hopeless songs about Legionnaires’ disease and Catfish Hunter, a retreat into simple careerism, and, most shockingly, conversion to a particularly self-interested, middle-class, Southern California suburban version of fundamentalist Christianity, and then reemergence as a Full Gospel preacher with God on his side. “You came in like the wind,” he sang to Jesus in 1981, on “You Changed My Life,” a bootleg series number: “Like Errol Flynn.” And went out like him too, maybe; with three explicitly born-again albums behind him and sales plummeting, Dylan seemed to come back to the world with Infidels, and critics climbed on for another comeback, a return to form: “License to Kill,” “Neighborhood Bully,” and “Union Sundown” sounded like . . . protest songs!

  Perhaps they were, but “Blind Willie McTell”—left off the album, one can imagine, because it would have upended it—is much more. It turns all the old, sainted rebels and victims parading across Infidels as across Dylan’s whole songbook to dust, then blows them away. Led by Dylan on piano, with Mark Knopfler in his steps on guitar, this piece claims the story: the singer finds not evil in the world but that the world is evil. The whole world is an auction block; all are bidders, all are for sale: “Smell that sweet magnolia bloomin’/See the ghost of slavery still.”

  The song is detailed, the language is secular, the mood is final. It’s the last day before the Last Days, except for one thing, one weird, indelible non sequitur closing every verse, every scene of corruption and failure, like a gong: “Nobody can sing the blues/Like Blind Willie McTell.” So the prophet answers his own prophecy with a mystery not even he can explain; the singer sums up and transcends his entire career; and the listener, still in the world, turns off the stereo, walks out of the house, and goes looking for an answer.

  10 Blind Willie McTell, Last Session (Prestige Bluesville) Willie McTell was born in Georgia in 1901; he died there in 1959. He first recorded in 1927, and ended his life frequenting a lot behind the Blue Lantern Club in Atlanta, where couples parked to drink and make love; McTell would walk from car to car, trying to find someone to pay him for a tune. In 1956 a record store owner convinced him to sit down before a tape recorder, and he talked and sang his life and times.

  SEPTEMBER 1991

  1 Gordon Burn, Alma Cogan (Secker & Warburg, U.K.) This first novel by a London journalist has an odd premise and a strangely naturalistic follow-through. Alma Cogan was Britain’s most popular female singer of the pre-Beatle ’50s; she died of cancer in 1966 at 34. But here, with Burn taking Cogan’s voice and writing in her first person, she has simply lived on in oblivion, in the nowhere of forgottenness Beatlemania would have ensured her in any case. In 1986, having had enough of it, she looks back and tells her story—and it’s an enchantment, full of rise-and-fall, name-dropping (“When Cary Grant . . .”), and reflection. The “chuckle in her voice” Cogan was loved for sounds throughout the monologue, though less comfortable sorts of laughter often drown it out; from the first page, you don’t need to have ever heard of Cogan to need to know what comes next. Burn’s real concern, though—I almost said “Cogan’s”—is not my-life but fame-death. Often the narrative, moving smoothly through an incident, tilts, tears, as Cogan, with perfect reserve, tries to explain: “To be the owner of a famous face, even in the days when mine was famous, in an age when the advertising and publicity industries were in their infancy, was an enlivening thing. You felt invigorated, extra-alive, knowing that you were out there somewhere, circulating, multiplying, reproducing, like a spore in the world, even when you were sleeping. . . . What’s happening [now] is like a real-life enactment of those television title sequences where on atomised image shinily reassembles itself, like an explosion in reverse.” This is spooky. It’s spookier, maybe, than the formal, bloody mystery that Burn has brought Cogan back from the dead to solve—and that turns out to be the kind of detective story one might write if one took Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle rather than the usual mean streets as a setting.

  2 Type O Negative, Slow, Deep and Hard (RoadRacer) Self-conscious heavy metal that matches its song titles (“Glass Walls of Limbo [Dance Mix],” “Prelude to Agony,” “The Misinterpretation of Silence and Its Disastrous Consequences”) only with the 12 minutes plus of “Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infidelity.” The singer’s self-hatred builds to a fury, a woman’s languorous moans wipe it away, the melody of “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone” refuses to die, but finally a pounding male chorus rides in for the rescue. “I know you’re fucking someone else,” the singer cries, and his brothers answer: “He knows you’re fucking . . . ” “I know . . .” “He said he knows!” “I know!” “HE KNOWS!” She doesn’t care.

  3 Alexander “Skip” Spence, Oar (Sony Music Special Products reissue, 1969) Spence was the original drummer for the Jefferson Airplane, then leader and guitarist of Moby Grape, a band that dissolved when commercial hype destroyed its Haight-Ashbury cachet. After 22 years, Spence’s first and last solo album sounds like an autopsy performed on a bohemia that, if not quite dead, was ready to die—with the coroner in no better shape. Oar (with some numbers now extended and five cuts added) doesn’t equal the unholy horror of Dave Van Ronk’s 1966 MacDougal Street tribute, “Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again,” but Van Rank was playing from at least a few steps away (“Enough time on that street would disintegrate anyone”), and Spence wasn’t.

  4 Michael Madsen, as Jimmy (Louise’s boyfriend) in Thelma and Louise (MGM/Pathé) The best Elvis sighting of the season.

  5 Aaron Neville, Warm Your Heart (A&M) Lovely shlock, with a cover of Main Ingredient’s goopy “Everybody Plays the Fool” better than one of Randy Ne
wman’s exquisite “Louisiana 1927,” probably because it gave Neville more to work with.

  6 X-ray Spex, Live at the Roxy Club (Receiver, U.K.) In 1977 in this London basement, teenage saxophonist Lora Logic meanders through Poly Styrene’s songs as if she’s never played before and probably won’t again. She drifts, but pushes the edges of the music into its center; she sounds at once completely lost and completely confident.

  7 Michael Mann, producer, Crime Story, 1986–88 (now running on USA cable) Chicago, 1963: cops track mobsters. As soon as a tune appears on the soundtrack—Bobby Bland, buried deep beneath nightclub noise for “I Pity the Fool,” or a killer twisting the dial to bring up just a primitive taste of Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City”—you believe the characters you’re watching are listening, and understanding every note.

  8 G-Clefs, Cleftones, Schoolboys, Students, etc., Street Corner Serenade (Time-Life Music reissue, 1954–63) Doo-wop so self-referential (the Cellos’ “Rang Tang Ding Dong [I Am the Japanese Sandman]”), heedless (the Jewels’ “Hearts of Stone”), or confused (the Gladiolas’ “Little Darlin’ ”) that it never became classic, and now seems most of all unlikely.

  9 Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Overload,” from The Peel Sessions (Dutch East India reissue, 1978) and Mecca Normal, “Taking the Back Stairs,” from Water Cuts My Hands (K/Matador) With 12 years in the middle, the same shout at both ends.