Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  9 Al Kooper, Rekooperation (MusicMasters/BMG) Blues and soul instrumentals—a jam on Richard Thompson’s “When the Spell Is Broken” keeping company with “Soul Twist-ed” and “Honky Tonk”—but after hours, with the doors locked, somebody stealing the tape that wasn’t supposed to be running anyway.

  10 CBS-TV, Philadelphia Phillies/Toronto Blue Jays, game two, World Series (Toronto, October 17) Lest we forget: with the Phillies’ John Kruk, the coolest guy what is what am this night, at bat, a camera panning the stands for celebrities zoomed in on the only man in the place whose hair could make Kruk’s look good. In a just world this is what Michael Bolton would be remembered for.

  JANUARY 1994

  1 Dramarama, Hi-FiSci-Fi (Chameleon) So smart and funny they could pass for American Kinks, this New Jersey guitar band wears its heart on its collective sleeve with a shamelessness beyond any upstanding Englishperson. In “Work for Food” lead singer John Easdale, singing as himself, is pushing a shopping cart with everything he owns down the street (“The records never sold and that was that”); he tells you exactly what’s in it. He’s pathetic, a joke, not quite heartrending, and completely believable. It’s a great idea. But “Shadowless Heart” is a great song: slow, cool, disturbing, knowing, near death, like Social Distortion without the blood and guts—without the distortion. I play it over and over, and I still can’t tell: “You got a shadowless heart,” Easdale sings, but is that good or bad?

  2 John Irvin, director, Sam Resnick and John Mcgrath, writers: Robin Hood (Fox Video) With Patrick Bergin underplaying the Errol Flynn in Robin and Uma Thurman playing Maid Marian as a swan—and featuring Jeff Nuttal, author of Bomb Culture and longtime mainstay of British bohemia, as Friar Tuck—this 1991 ambush of the Kevin Costner vehicle of the same year is sexy, wisecracking, deliriously hip, and a shock. Throughout the film, Saxon anti-clericalism builds as a counter to Norman power (Tuck peddles holy relics—he’s got St. Peter’s finger—made out of chicken bones), eventually turning into outright paganism: the Merry Men invade the baron’s castle on All Fool’s Day, with Tuck as Lord of Misrule and everyone else costumed as animals, spirits, shamans, trees. Druidic ceremonies blast the Church like a hurricane blowing away a tract home. The Cross is toppled by the Golden Bough—and at the end, when Robin and Marian marry, it’s as king and queen of nothing so transitory as a manmade kingdom, but of the May.

  3 Bratmobile, Pottymouth (Kill Rock Stars) Three young American women have fun and experience, as the Slits once put it, and get more mileage out of the word “fuck” than the Mamas & the Papas did out of the word “yeah.” They’re so fast they burn up their own tracks, barely leaving a trace; it’s not individual tunes that stick in the mind but the thrill of making they all carry, sort of “Hey, Hey We’re the Monkees” armed with humor and obscenity.

  4 Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (HarperPerennial) In these linked tales of losers circling around a bar so far below the normal economy that people try to pay with money they’ve copied on Xerox machines, the narrator sometimes notices too much: “seeds were moaning in the gardens” is supposed to be dope talking, but it’s Literature. Far more often, though, the holes that drugs and booze put in the narrator’s memory fill up with gestures that grow into acts that are recreated as compulsions, small pictures of fate. “The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce”: using the cliché of the first description to disguise the unusualness of the second is real writing.

  5 Bikini Kill, Pussy Whipped (Kill Rock Stars) The original pointwomen (well, three women, one man) for riot grrrl, a movement now happily dismissed by the likes of Newsweek as last year’s fad (“Young feminists,” Jeff Giles wrote recently, “with RAPE and SLUT scrawled on their bellies”—sure sounds like a fad), prove they’ve only just begun to talk. They play the way good graffiti looks.

  6 Counting Crows, “Mr. Jones,” on August and Everything After (DGC) “I want to be Bob Dylan!” Adam Duritz of Berkeley admits two-thirds of the way through this irresistibly desperate, demented song about stardom, a song that could be about almost anything else—the emotion is that loose, that confused. As for Mr. Jones, presumably the same one Dylan was after in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” he doesn’t seem like anyone to be trusted, though the singer does trust him, which means the trouble the music constantly suggests on this track ought to pay off elsewhere on the album, which it doesn’t.

  7 Mary Lou Lord, “Some Jingle Jangle Morning” (Kill Rock Stars) Airy, folky, but hard, too: a character out of one of Denis Johnson’s stories escapes from Johnson’s book, just like almost all the women in the book do, and then gives up on dope, as they probably don’t.

  8 Modern Lovers, Live at the Long-branch Saloon (Fan Club/New Rose, France) Mostly from a 1971 Berkeley show, back when Jonathan Richman wasn’t just odd but unbelievable: a pudgy world-class guitarist trumpeting naïveté as the fount of all values. The most perfect moment here, though, comes from a 1971 or ’72 show at Harvard. “I think this song is one of the worst songs that I’ve ever heard in my whole life,” guitarist John Felice says, introducing “Wake Up Sleepyheads.” “Thank you, John,” says Richman. “It’s really disgusting,” Felice continues, “and I really don’t want to play on it, but they’re making me.” “You like the chord changes,” Richman says. “I like the chord changes,” Felice admits, “but the words are horrible.” “That’s OK,” Richman finishes. “I sing the words, so it’s alright.” “But I hate the song—”

  9 Frank Hutchison, et al., White Country Blues (1926–1938): A Lighter Shade of Blue (Columbia/Legacy) Kicking off with “K.C. Blues” and “Cannon Ball Blues” (both 1929) by the uncanny West Virginia slide guitarist Hutchison, moving on to Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers’ “Leaving Home” (1926) and “If the River Was Whiskey” (1930), the first disc of this two-CD set is an almost perfect backdrop to Bob Dylan’s recent World Gone Wrong. The second disc is dead, but you won’t care.

  10 Robert Altman, director, Altman and Frank Barhydt, writers, Short Cuts Altman’s characters have sometimes taken his sneer away from him (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean), but the sneer does all the work in this film, though perhaps more economically than in the past. With Nashville Altman’s contempt for his material was so vast he had actors playing country singers write and perform their own songs; here he merely posits a nightclub with an all-black clientele (save for Tom Waits and a party that wanders in by accident) and an all-white jazz band, led by a white singer. Yes, it’s Annie Ross, who’s supposed to have seen better days, but the only thing phonier than her singing is her patter.

  FEBRUARY 1994

  1 Andreas Ammer & FM Einheit, Radio Inferno (EGO/Rough Trade, Germany) This astonishing radio play was written by Ammer, produced by Herbert Kapfer, and aired last year in Munich on Bayerischer Rundfunk. Here it’s a single 34-track CD: Dante’s Inferno, cantos I through XXXIV, recast in German, English, and Latin, with all time scrambled. Apt musical composition combines with inspired sampling (a bit of the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” gongs and bells in a background so deep the sounds don’t seem to be coming from your speakers) and an even more inspired cast: Blixa Bargeld as Dante; Phil Minton as Virgil, his guide; Yvonne Ducksworth as Beatrice (“and characters from hell”); and John Peel, the great BBC dj, as your guide, the voice of authority, the man with the microphone, sardonic, entertaining, professional, surprised by nothing, so cool ice wouldn’t melt in his mouth no matter what circle of hell he’s covering.

  It’s an insane conceit, a shadow play with the 20th century plunged into the 14th and then locked up. Peel: “The surrender to sin leads, by degradation, to solitary self-indulgence. Here, beatnik Burroughs has to read his own book, for all eternity.” John Cage and Marcel Duchamp call out in their own voices; soon enough all are possessed by the spirit of Bosch, laughing at the tenth circle, which is filled with the Falsifiers,
the Modern artists “stricken by hideous diseases,” the Dadaists “covered in ulcers.” “Welcome to the Terrordome,” Peel announces with utter contempt. “We’re coming to the countdown to Hell, our Eternal Hit Parade of Sin and Punishment—” It’s funny at first. At the end, too. Strange things happen on the way.

  2–3 Tara Key, Bourbon County (Home-stead) & Funkadelic: “Maggot Brain,” on Maggot Brain (Westbound reissue, 1971) Key has been an effective lead guitarist for well over a decade, first with Louisville’s Babylon Dance Band (not a name to leave behind), then with Antietam. Six or seven cuts into her first solo disc she lets loose with a twisting, uncertain exploration of heretofore hidden passages in her music, as if the likes of “V.O.B.” were her Mammoth Cave and her guitar both torchlight and pickaxe, as if her terrain didn’t exist until she opened it up. It’s a thrilling, mysterious kind of tension she creates—the tension of self-discovery, so many years on. Twenty-three years ago the late Eddie Hazel, guitarist of Funkadelic, went farther without, so to speak, leaving his room, almost without moving. “Maggot Brain” begins where Peter Green’s 1967 “Supernatural” left off, meandering slowly, always more slowly, over ten perfect minutes, toward a peace beyond words. Guess that’s why the original Maggot Brain liner notes, crypto-Nazi cultspeak from the Process Church of the Final Judgment, are included with the new CD—just in case you get too confident, you know?

  4 Janis Joplin, “Coo Coo,” from Janis (Columbia/Legacy 3-CD reissue, 1966) “We Americans are all cuckoos,—we make our homes in the nests of other birds,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1872, and no one who has recorded this scary Appalachian ballad ever got more homelessness out of it than Joplin did. The leap she takes coming off the second line of each verse—a wail that’s part abandonment to desire, half abandonment to death—was the promise her music, and her myth, almost always made, a promise she could almost never keep when tape was running.

  5 Mudboy & the Neutrons, “Land of 1000 Shotguns,” from Negro Streets at Dawn (New Rose, France) When this tune started life, as “Land of 1000 Dances,” the Apache Dance was probably not one of those writer Chris Kenner had in mind. These days, on certain Negro streets, it may be the only one left.

  6 Kristin Hersh, “Cuckoo,” from Hips and Makers (4 AD) Wordsworth, 1804: “shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice?” Why not a spell?

  7 Coup, Kill My Landlord (Wild Pitch/EMI) This non-gangsta Oakland rap trio—Boots, E Roc, Pam the Funkstress—is determinedly local. They don’t care if when they mention “Moby D.” you don’t know they’re referring to the Alameda County courthouse. They’re conversationalists, not braggarts; moody, not melodramatic. But they play with irony both as a weapon and for fun. It’s unnerving to realize the old Vietnam War chant “Hey, hey, how many kids did you kill today?” now refers not to LBJ but to a neighborhood shooter. And it’s hilarious when a white reporter calls Boots for a comment on L.A.’s “tragic riots”: “Not a riot, a rebellion,” Boots snaps. “Well,” says the reporter, “the, uh, tragic rebellion . . .”

  8 Lisa Rebecca Gubernick, Get Hot or Go Home—Trisha Yearwood: The Making of a Nashville Star (Morrow) A solid account of a newcomer’s attempt to turn a successful debut album into a career. Gubernick, a Forbes editor, plays fly on the wall with barely a hint of condescension or cynicism, but her story could have used a bit more of the latter. The people in her pages are theme-park nice, and not unbelievably so; the goals they struggle for so efficiently with such a clear sense of what the rules are, seem benign, pinched, and wholly self-referential. Gubernick’s description of Nash-ville’s Fan Fair, where stars sit in booths for five days signing autographs, as a “country-music petting zoo” stands out—for once, Lisa the fly turns back into a human being. The line strikes a discord, and it makes you wonder: did the presence of a New York reporter throughout the conception and recording of Yearwood’s second album have no effect at all on the way the principals thought, spoke, acted?

  9 Jim Pollack, Nairobi Sailcat, Carrie Weiland, Slide to the Rhythm (Fitness Innovations/Dynamix Music Services) An aerobics tape, 126 B.P.M., with every other of the 12 tracks building off a riff so suggestive, so determined, you can’t think about anything but the rhythmic truth it’s about to reveal before the following track sweeps it away.

  10 Betsy Bowden, English 393, fall 1993 (Rutgers at Camden) Bowden, a Chaucer scholar who describes herself as “world famous among a very tiny group of people who truly care about obscene puns in 12th-century Latin,” invented a Literature of Travel course to assuage her guilt over making full professor. Starting in 400 B.C. with Xenophon’s Anabasis, she covered, among other highlights, The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, Twain’s Innocents Abroad, and Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath, all arranged “such that the whole of Western literary culture culminates in Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.” “On the last day of class, thus,” Bowden wrote to friends last Christmas, “I was teaching the Nun’s Priest Tale and ‘Desolation Row,’ and watching the Medieval Lit class put on the Second Shepherd’s Play in Middle English. I more or less feel as if this is what I ought to be doing when I grow up.”

  MARCH 1994

  1 Heavens to Betsy, Calculated (Kill Rock Stars) This two-woman band (voice, guitar, bass, drums, or less) has been making extremist music about girlhood on stray singles and compilation-album cuts since 1991. For the first half of their own album they could be imitating themselves—looking for a subject, for a metaphor to burn the riot grrrl ideology out of singer Corin’s throat. But with the instrumental “Intermission,” everything hurts, and every note rings true, especially on “Donating My Body to Science,” which may be the coolest metaphor for sex in the history of riot grrrl, not to mention the history of Western civilization.

  2 Billy Ray Cyrus, “When I’m Gone,” from It Won’t Be the Last (Mercury) A completely convincing back-from-the-dead rewrite of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” apparently Boris Yeltsin’s favorite Elvis song. Will Boris cover this one? Has he already?

  3 John Zorn, “Never Again,” from Kristallnacht (Eva) For almost three minutes the sound of breaking glass is like a waterfall: that fast, that implacable. Then just the footsteps of someone running away; then Hebrew chanting; then a sort of Austro-Hungarian salon ensemble, discreetly summoning the dead soul of Central Europe. Despite the distant echoes, the true subject of this nearly 12-minute piece, recorded on 9 November 1992, seems as much the Germany of the present day as of 9 November 1938, when Nazis smashed the windows of Jewish shopkeepers all over the country. When the breaking glass comes back, and with it a mob unafraid of its own voice, you’re sure of it. “Contains high frequency extremes, at the limits of human hearing & beyond, which may cause nausea, headaches & ringing in the ears,” Zorn warns. “Prolonged or repeated listening is not advisable.” Tell it to the thugs.

  4 Alison Krauss & Union Station, “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You,” at the Grand Ole Opry (TNN, 27 November 1993) A friend sent me a barely audible tape—Krauss’ shimmering, preternaturally delicate warble of a 1967 hit by the Foundations, a not-forgotten British/Caribbean pop group. Their interracial arms now reach from the Sex Pistols (who began rehearsing with the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup”) to the quiet queen of bluegrass, singing like extra virgin olive oil pours in sunlight. Miss Krauss, meet Mr. Rotten. Oh, you’ve already met?

  5–6 Bob Dylan, notes to World Gone Wrong (Columbia) & Mike Kelley: Winter’s Stillness #1 Reading Dylan as he explicates his album’s old blues and Appalachian folk songs (on the ancient “Love Henry”: “Henry-modern corporate man off some foreign boat, unable to handle his ‘psychosis’ responsible for organizing the Intelligensia, disarming the people, an infantile sensualist”), two thoughts struck me. First, by abandoning liner notes after his 1965 Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan invented rock criticism, or anyway called it into being, simply by making a vacuum for it to fill. Second, even today no critic would dare make half as much of a son
g as Dylan always has when he’s taken to putting them into other words.

  Since a verbal commentary would inevitably fall short of the one Dylan had already provided, I thought World Gone Wrong needed a visual commentary, by someone who could let the music spark a picture. Given the opportunity, I asked Mike Kelley; he demurred, suggesting Raymond Pettibone. But then, paging through Mike Kelley—Catholic Tastes, the catalogue Elisabeth Sussman edited for Kelley’s recent retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, I realized the picture was already there. Winter’s Stillness #1 is from 1985: a top border illustrates the title in Currier & Ives clichés; below it there’s a rough drawing of the map of the U.S.A. The top two-thirds are blank; then Kelley’s version of the Mason-Dixon line stretches from coast to coast, with the lower third of the country dark and dank, the word “Hillbillies” dripping excreta into a lake of slime. On that lake is a cabalistic symbol, seemingly named in Kelley’s caption, a pun on hillbilly cliché and on the title of the piece itself: “A NEW KIND OF STILL—IT DISTILLS PURE INBRED EVIL. THE FOUL-SMELLING MASH SINKS TO THE BOTTOM—FIRE-BREWED. DOWN HERE IT IS. UH UH.” If that doesn’t outdistance Dylan it sure as hell keeps up with him.