Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  Rythm Oil was published in London in 1991 by Cape, complete with a quiet portfolio of color photos by William Eggleston that opens the book cold. All are missing from the 1992 Pantheon edition—even the gorgeous red-black-and-yellow label from the bottle of LUCKY MON-GOL RYTHM OIL, which you can still buy at Schwab’s on Beale Street. Too bad that like so many of his blues heroes, Booth had to go abroad to find a decent welcome.

  2 Love Battery, Day Glo (SubPop/Caroline) This Seattle four-piece has a knack for song titles: “Foot” is good, “Side (With You)” is inspired. They also have a sound that chases noise, folk-rock lyricism, and everyday dread into a sensation of expansion, a lifting-off. The music gets bigger, the room gets smaller, and whatever’s happening it isn’t on the ground.

  3 Tom Waits, “Back in the Good Old World (gypsy),” from Night on Earth—Original Soundtrack Recording (Island) As Jim Jarmusch’s new movie shifts from L.A. to New York to Paris to Rome to Helsinki, the atmospheres are so strong, precisely establishing the clichés of a given city before letting the action in a taxi moving through it dissolve those clichés, that Waits’ occasional vocals barely register. They may not even be needed. But I heard the sound track before seeing the film, and on its own the clanking, generous opening tune, so happy with its sprung Kurt Weill rhythms, seems to reveal a childhood secret behind Waits’ twenty years of low-life dramaturgy: Wallace Beery as Long John Silver, “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.”

  4 Béatrice Dalle, as the Blind Passenger (Paris segment) in Night on Earth (Fine Line Features) Probably the main reason the picture doesn’t need Tom Waits; he couldn’t keep up with her any more than her cabdriver can.

  5 Melvins, Bullhead (Tupelo) The Melvins formed about ten years ago in Aberdeen, Washington, where leader Buzz Osborne was mentor to Kurt Cobain and Chris Novoselic of Nirvana. Now they play really underground music: slow, disconnected, almost always seeking the longest distance between two points. They play like moles, occasionally poking their heads into the air, usually avoiding it.

  6 Christopher Münch, writer and director, The Hours and Times (Antarctic Pictures) Maybe this is the way to shoot rock ’n’ roll history: by reimagining small, almost forgotten turning points. Here Münch, in black and white, with the simplest sets (mostly hotel rooms) and cast (a few people practicing naturalism), takes John Lennon and Brian Epstein back to Barcelona in the spring of 1963, where they spent a few days among the Gaudís and did or did not make love. John (Ian Hart) has the upper hand but he’s not sure he wants it; Epstein wants John so badly, and with such self-loathing, he’s not sure he could survive getting him; and a stewardess John picks up on the flight over (Stephanie Pack—presumably hers is an invented character, but just because Münch made her up doesn’t mean she wasn’t there) may stay with you longer than either John or Brian. Hell, she might still be alive.

  7 Body Count, Cop Killer (Sire) To Rapper Ice-T and the other thrash ’n’ metal fans in Body Count the kind of racism that makes black rock an oxymoron is a fraud on their taste. Thus guitarist Ernie C. proves he doesn’t care if Pink Floyd is less hip than Funkadelic, drummer Beatmaster “V” offers a pulse so tough and quick he can make the musicians around him seem irrelevant, and Ice-T will need at least another album to catch up with his band.

  8–9 Bruce Springsteen, Human Touch and Lucky Town (Columbia) Springsteen’s last record, the 1987 Tunnel of Love, may have come out of his first marriage, but you didn’t have to hear it that way; you do have to hear most of his new songs as celebrations of his second marriage. There are exceptions, escapes from this prison of literal meaning and transparent metaphor—the musical reach in “Human Touch,” the gritted-teeth abandon in “Lucky Town,” the measured pace of “If I Should Fall Behind”—but in sum these numbers have little room for other people in them. Which raises a political question I imagine Springsteen will find ways to address after these two most commercially successful transitional albums of all time are more or less forgotten: people may care whether or not you’re happy, Bruce, but why should they?

  10 Patricia Kennealy, Strange Days—My Life With and Without Jim Morrison (Dutton) Kennealy married Morrison in a Celtic handfasting ceremony in 1970; she writes as if she took a deep breath the day she heard he’d died and is only now letting it out.

  SEPTEMBER 1992

  1 The Earliest Negro Vocal Quartets, 1894–1928, (Document, Austria) One day in 1894, in Washington, D.C., the Standard Quartette—H. C. Williams, Ed De Moss, R. L. Scott, and William Cottrell—cut a number of cylinders for Columbia. Only one survives—“Keep Movin’,” the earliest recording of African-American music yet discovered. It’s just as spooky as its distant provenance suggests. Emerging now out of a wash of distortion and surface noise is a single, strong tenor, then a full, closely shaped chorale; what you hear, first, is the nearly ten decades that separate you from them. But there is nothing foreign here. If formally the unaccompanied singing seems primarily genteel, the passion is at odds with its bounds, and soon you’re hearing church sermons, street preachers, gospel choruses, marching bands, Walt Disney’s Song of the South, Paul Robeson’s “Old Man River,” the national anthem, funeral lamentations, folk tales told in the rounded, plummy tones of the Carolinas . . .

  The other 22 recordings collected here can’t match the power of this stray artifact, though there is not a completely obvious moment among them. The a cappella Dinwiddie Colored Quartet (1902) was clearly in the crowd-pleasing business, mixing animal tales and black-to-white-to-black Stephen Fosterish arrangements into a flat, effective formula. The Male Quartette’s “The Camp Meeting Jubilee” (1910) is exactly that: a little play. As up-to-date as Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch (not to mention David Byrne, Paul Simon, Sting, and dozens more), Polk Miller and His Old South Quartette (1909–10) featured a white singer and his black backing group. They played Carnegie Hall, flogging a sort of antebellum nostalgia act about the good old days before the Yankees came: “The Watermelon Party” plus “The ‘Old Time’ Religion.” Mark Twain called two of their numbers “musical earthquakes”—though perhaps not these.

  In sum, more sociology than music, leading off with a fact of history that also transcends it: “the mystic chords of memory.”

  2 X-Tal, Everything Crash (Alias) Fronted by J Neo, who has a lot of heart and no attitude in his thin punk voice, and sparked by bassist Allison Moseley and violinist Carrie Bradley, this small-time San Francisco combo wears their defeated leftist politics on their sleeves and can open for the Mekons without letting you forget them when the headliners come on. They write good songs, but much better than good are Moseley’s cover of Fairport Convention’s “Genesis Hall” and Neo’s despair-hate-grief-and-rage cocktail “Black Russian,” which ends with the meanest Elvis tribute I’ve ever heard: “So pour me another Black Russian,” Neo says to the bartender, “and let’s get real, real gone for a change.”

  3 Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, 1992—The Love Album (Chrysalis) More exciting, overwrought, high-pop songs about power, corruption, and lies, not to mention AIDS, child abuse, alcoholism, poverty, rape, and heretic-burning, keyed by “The Only Living Boy in New Cross”—which is sort of based on the Trade Winds’ 1965 “New York’s a Lonely Town” (“When you’re the only surfer boy around”)—and topped off by a straight version of “The Impossible Dream.” Heard in the right mood, this can be very depressing.

  4 Anonymous performance, downtown Manhattan subway (May 12) Two young black men, one short, the other tall, moved fast through the car and stopped in front of two women, one white, one black, both in their 20s. “CAN WE ASK YOU A QUESTION?” they shouted at the black woman. When she didn’t answer they jacked up the pace: “CANWEASKYOUAQUESTION-CANWEASKYOUAQUES—” As she sat stone-faced they fell silent, struck a pose, and then, slowly, asked anyway: “What’s your name / Is it Mary, or Sue?”—and then went on through almost the whole of Don & Juan’s 1962 doo-wop hit. As the black woman broke into embarrassed smiles and the white woman got out a dollar,
I wondered why the guys, already heading for the next car, had left off the song’s kicker, “Shooby doo-waht do wha.” The tall one looked over his shoulder: “Shooby doo-waht do-WHAHHHHHH,” he and his pal sang, giving the last syllable a fabulous lift, and they were through the doors.

  5 EMF, “Search and Destroy,” on unexplained EP (EMI) A superhot cover of Iggy Pop’s hottest song, all keening melody, guitar like bad weather, drooling glee. Maybe payback for last year’s horrible, inescapable “Unbelievable”—you may not believe in censoring music for content, but what about for form?

  6 Valerie Buhagiar, in Highway 61, dir. Bruce McDonald (Skouras Pictures) As the can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her-bad-girl-on-the-run, Jackie Bangs—Lester’s sister?

  7 Walter Karp, Buried Alive—Essays on Our Endangered Republic (Franklin Square Press) Karp, who died in 1989, was a brave and finally ranting political critic best known for his work in Harper’s. He left behind a brutal, point-by-point account of what’s at stake in this year’s election: a choice between betrayal and tyranny. Seems easy enough to me.

  8 Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture—The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (Routledge) A clear, engaged explication of the least obscure Situationist texts (notably Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life), along with a long, cool look at how the likes of Baudrillard and Lyotard got famous enough not to need first names by reducing such texts to fashionable mush.

  9 Jim Dickinson, liner notes to Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Days—The Definitive Edition, vol. 2 (Bear Family, Germany) Releases and outtakes from 1951–52, ranging from the breathtaking to the merely heroic. Memphian Dickinson, who likes to talk about his town’s culture as a Dada subspecies, nails the legend of the man who, when born of woman, was just Chester Burnett: “He was a primitive-modernist . . . [whose] contribution to the blues goes beyond musical phrases. The ‘idea’ of Howlin’ Wolf makes blues history somehow deeper and richer.”

  10 New York Times, “A Scholar Finds Huck Finn’s Voice in Twain’s Writing about a Black Youth,” re Professor Shelley Fisher Fiskin’s Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 1993 (July 7) While it’s tempting to claim Twain as the founder of rock ’n’ roll, or the first good white blues singer (or anyway the inspiration for Polk Miller), I doubt that Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, or Henry Louis Gates, Jr., were surprised by Fiskin’s thesis that the voice of Huckleberry Finn was rooted in that of a black person (Twain: “the most artless, sociable, and exhaustless talker I ever came across”). Sorry, but given the setting Twain chose and his commitment to vernacular realism, how, at least to a good degree, could it not have been? (As George Carlin used to say, lock five kids from Harlem and five from Scarsdale in a room for a week and see who comes out talking like who.) But Reed, et al., would probably not be surprised that the Fiskin newsbreak has already produced the sort of happy talk to which no American racial paradox is immune: the argument that black people (or anyone else) need no longer be troubled by Huck’s use of the word “nigger” in reference to Jim, since now it’s really two brothers getting down.

  OCTOBER 1992

  1 Heavens to Betsy, “My Red Self,” on Kill Rock Stars (Kill Rock Stars) and “Baby’s Gone,” on Throw: The Yoyo Studio Compilation (Yoyo Recordings) The two stray tracks on various artists’ anthologies by this Olympia combo (Corin Tucker, guitar and vocals, Tracy Sawyer, bass and occasional drums) are as fierce—as unforgiving, and as unforgiven—as anything I’ve heard in ages. These songs sound anonymous, almost found; appearing alongside tracks by the likes of Nirvana, Bikini Kill, Unwound, Mecca Normal, Bratmobile, 7 Year Bitch, and Kreviss, the music simply seems part of an ordinary rock ’n’ roll conversation, at least in Olympia. (“The birthplace of rock,” it says on the back of the Kill Rock Stars CD, as if rock ’n’ roll could be born anywhere, again and again, as if for the first time, and of course it can.)

  “My Red Self,” about menstruation, is modest and strong; “Baby’s Gone” is riveting. A single, naked fuzztone makes a backdrop for what you might call testifying, if you can merge the old meaning of testifying in church with testifying in court. The same absolute need to be heard that drives the Mekon’s voice-and-stamping-foot “The Building” powers this performance, which doesn’t seem minimalist in any way; rather, it gets bigger as it goes on, until, near the end (“I did what you told me to/Now I’m dead”), it seems to try to explode but can’t. The pressure is enormous, and passed on straight.

  2 Heavenly, “She Says”/“Escort Crash on Marston Street” (K Records) A four-person band from Oxford, England, led by singer Amelia Fletcher, late of Talulah Gosh and still playing with the sweetest, most barbed warble in pop: her heaven is not for the innocent. An album, Le Jardin de Heavenly, is due, but for the moment this single spins on and on.

  3–4 Walter Mosley, White Butterfly (Norton) and John Lee Hooker: “This Land Is Nobody’s Land,” from More Real Folk Blues—The Missing Album (Chess/MCA) In Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mysteries—White Butterfly, set in 1956 and the third in the series, is the most effective so far—what’s at stake is the unwritten history of postwar Los Angeles. Mosley, a man in his 30s writing in the voice of a retired black detective who would now be past 70, is writing this history from the inside out: from inside Watts. First appearing in the ’40s, Easy Rawlins is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as private eye; his skin and shuffle may be cover, but the wariness of his movements carries a greater charge than any scene of violence. Pages can curl with tension even when nothing is happening. Mosley isn’t much of a plotter, or even a storyteller; the books work in moods that shift like weather, on the glacial but certain apprehension of a society changing, though not in any direction anyone can control, or that anyone is necessarily going to like. Perhaps more than in the most extreme and Afrocentric rap, white people are foreigners in these books, and in Rawlins’ L.A., and black people are exiles. “This land is no one’s land,” John Lee Hooker sang in 1966, a year after the Watts riots—the tune was a slow, improvised blues, a blunt reply to Woody Guthrie, and it remained unreleased until 1991—“This land/Is your burying ground.” Easy Rawlins’ next appearance should place him in just about that year, if not that territory.

  5 Steely & Clevie, Play Studio One Vintage (Heartbeat) Classic late-’60s reggae, cut last year by the leading dance-hall producers and rhythm section, backing Theophilus Beckford, Alton Ellis, the Clarendonians, and more. The music is all definition, like a perfect black and white print of a ’40s film noir following the dead video color of the nightly news.

  6 Sonic Youth, Dirty (DGC) I like the way Thurston Moore snaps “I believe Anita Hill/That judge’ll rot in hell” on “Youth Against Fascism.” It’s so peremptory. It’s so convincing.

  7 Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes and Crucify (Atlantic) In a year or so, Amos’ attempt to find her own voice somewhere between those of Donovan and Kate Bush may sound impossibly arch and contrived; her version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” on the Crucify EP, already does. But that’s also what’s compelling about it. Breathy, precious, arty, and cool, Amos can get under your skin, and then rip.

  8 Ashtray, Ashtray (Shoe Records) Bare-bones lyricism, crude male and female vocal leads, and a guitarist who can play his string all the way out.

  9 Chris Hunt, director, The Search for Robert Johnson (Sony Music Video) Willie Mae Powell was Johnson’s lover in the ’30s; the look on her still-beautiful face when she listens to Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” which mentions her, is worth a lot, as is blues researcher Mack McCormick’s highly sophisticated analysis of Johnson’s psyche. They may even be worth sitting through a lot of stilted, overrehearsed interviews and endless takes of narrator John Hammond, Jr., strangling Johnson’s songs.

  10 Bono, “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” from Honeymoon in Vegas—Music from the Original Soundtrack (Epic Soundtrax) This set mixes by-the-numbers Elvis covers (Billy Joel’s “All Shook Up,�
�� Ricky Van Shelton’s “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”) with surprises: a thrilling ride through “Suspicious Minds” with Dwight Yoakam and an uncredited Beth Anderson, a torchy, Mary Lou Barton–styled “(You’re The) Devil in Disguise” by Trisha Yearwood, a hipster “Jailhouse Rock” from John Mellencamp. The stunner is Bono’s twisted reading of the ultimate Big E show-closer, here accompanied principally by an old Elvis interview running in the background. As Bono climbs the golden ladder of the song toward a falsetto so desperate it’s all too obvious who he can’t help falling in love with, the man himself—or the boy; Elvis sounds very young, and completely guileless—talks about a book called Poems That Touch the Heart. After two minutes, Bono fades into the ether, and from out of it comes that familiar voice: “Yessir, I’ll be looking forward to coming back. Yessir, I’m looking forward to it.”

  NOVEMBER 1992

  1 Lucious Curtis, “High Lonesome Hill,” on the various-artists anthology Mississippi Blues—Library of Congress Recordings 1940–1942 (Travelin’ Man) With the national music companies no longer digging up the South, folklorist John Lomax came to Natchez in 1940 to make field recordings. Among those whose songs he cut into his 12-inch acetates one Saturday was singer-guitarist Curtis, working with second guitarist Willie Ford. Curtis never recorded again, and if there is another country blues performance quite like “High Lonesome Hill” I haven’t heard it.