Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  7 Folkes Brothers, Laurel Aitken, Owen Gray, Theophilus Beckford, et al., Tougher Than Tough—The Story of Jamaican Music (Mango 4-CD reissue, 1958–93) Sure, it’s all great. But the first disc, covering 1958 through 1967, has the aura of people waking from a four-century sleep to take back their island from Columbus and all who came after him; only their skin color has changed.

  8 ZZ Top, Antenna (RCA) REPAIRS COMPLETED. ROAD OPEN1. SPEED LIMITS STRICTLY ENFORCED.

  9 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, induction ceremonies, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel Grand Ballroom (New York City, 19 January) Just think: in four years, Aerosmith will be eligible.

  10 Ian Softley, director, Backbeat (Gramercy Films) As a movie about the Beatles in Hamburg in the very early ’60s, this is perfectly adequate. As a movie about the love affair between then-Beatle bass player Stuart Sutcliffe and Hamburg photographer Astrid Kirchherr, which is what Back-beat wants to be, it’s a blank. Sheryl Lee is wasted as Kirchherr; like her soulmates in Heavens to Betsy she goes to extremes or she goes nowhere, and her underwritten part gives her nowhere to go and nothing to do, save to sit around looking knowing and occasionally pull off her sweater.

  What’s most intriguing in Backbeat is its presentation of Kirchherr’s world, the world of the Hamburg Exis, or existentialists: a flamboyant, costumed, forbidding, sexually ambiguous haute bohemia. The question the film begs is where this supremely self-confident outsider milieu came from, given the suppression of bohemian cultures under the Nazis and the privations of the post-war period. Did Kirchherr and her friends hark back to the Weimar Dadaists, or did they come together in the same spirit as their peers in Paris, London, San Francisco, and New York? What were their resources—and how different, really, was Liverpool’s working-class beat-group scene, where Un Chien Andalou was as familiar as Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, from Hamburg’s bourgeois Beat scene, where Sartre was a hero and Chuck Berry arrived via Armed Forces Radio? Did worlds collide, or were they the same?

  At least in the Beatle literature, this is a question no one has asked, let alone answered. Stuart Sutcliffe died in 1961, but Astrid Kirchherr, now in her mid 50s, is still living in Hamburg; it’s unlikely she’s forgotten a thing.

  APRIL 1994

  1 Rickie Lee Jones, “Rebel Rebel,” on Traffic from Paradise (Geffen) One of the really great David Bowie songs, brought to life with the intimacy of two people off in the bathroom halfway through a concert, fixing their makeup and taking their heads off.

  2 Jimmy Reed, the Spaniels, etc., The Vee-Jay Story (Vee-Jay 3-CD reissue, 1953–65) An imaginatively programmed assemblage of gritty, close-to-the-ground smashes and obscurities from the black-owned Chicago label that in 1963 brought America the Beatles (“Please Please Me” fell short of the charts; “From Me to You” struggled to #116) and went belly up three years later. For the paranoid inside story of the emergence and ruin of this pioneering company, see Joseph C. Smith’s novel The Day the Music Died, from 1981; for the prosaic version, in which genius and genre coexisted in a state of exquisite tension, listen to the alcoholic prophecies of Jimmy Reed’s primitive “High & Lonesome,” the doo-wop swoon of the El Dorados’ “At My Front Door,” the doom-struck pop rhythms of Dee Clark’s “Your Friends,” and the overwhelming emotional striptease of Little Richard’s greatest blues, “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got But It’s Got Me.” The year is 1965; Richard, wailing, testifying, madly gesticulating, is the genius; an unknown Jimi Hendrix, on guitar, is the genre. And two years later they’d changed places.

  3 Mike Leigh, writer & director, Naked This portrait of rape in present-day London may be a parable of the ruins of Thatcherism, but there are older echoes. Charming scum Johnny (David Thewlis) might be a time-traveler from the plague years; he seems almost to rot as the movie goes on. His exgirlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp) has the sort of deep, heavy face that pretty much left the screen when talkies arrived. She can recall Gloria Swanson, or even Albert Dieudonné in Abel Gance’s Napoléon. Still, no-future is what the film is always about: erasing the future as it comes into being, registering what’s being left behind and letting it go. Desperate for company, a guard in an empty deluxe office building takes a homeless Johnny inside and guides him through the place; he clears locks with some sort of post-Modern security wand, a black baton with a white tip. “What’s that,” says Johnny, “a Dadaist nun?”

  4 Eugène Atget, Atget Paris (Hazan, Paris, and Gingko Press, Santa Rosa, CA) At-get was a real street photographer—that is, he took pictures of streets, not of “street life”—and from the 1890s to about 1914 he mapped the Paris that had escaped the enormous hands of Baron Haussmann, from the Pont Neuf in the 1st arrondissement to the falling-down shacks at the farthest edges of the 20th. People who know—Louis Chevalier, for one, in his 1977 The Assassination of Paris—will tell you that Atget’s city was destroyed in our own time, and that to reach for the smoky auras captured in the 840 photos collected here is sheer romanticism, no matter how seemingly familiar a lot of Atget’s streets still look. Well, give it a test. Unlike so many other Atget volumes, this is no coffee table book. At 5½ by 7⅝ by 2½ inches, it’s like an elegant brick; you can hold it in your hand, using the pictures as a map of the city, following where they lead, and see if the city is still there.

  5–6 Iris Dement, Infamous Angel (Warner Bros.) & Bratmobile: The Real Janelle (Kill Rock Stars) The future of the past—the past being, respectively, the catch and curl of Dolly Parton’s voice in “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” and the unaccompanied mountain ballads she harks back to, and the glee and resentment of old Blondie records like “Rip Her to Shreds” and old Au Pairs records like “It’s Obvious.” Plus just a hint of “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow.”

  7 Joyce Carol Oates, “Waiting on Elvis, 1956,” in Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry, ed. Jim Elledge (Indiana University Press) Set in a café in Charlotte called Chuck’s (“I was 26 married but still/waiting tables”), written in 1987, and the most convincing Elvis-Clinton sighting yet: “I slapped at him a little saying, You/sure are the one aren’t you feeling my face burn but/he was the kind of boy even meanness turned sweet in/his mouth./Smiled at me and said, Yeah honey I guess I sure am.”

  8 Band, “Remedy,” on The Tonight Show (NBC, 22 February) With drummer Levon Helm, organist Garth Hudson, and bassist Rick Danko accompanied by new guitarist, pianist, second drummer, and a four-man Tonight Show horn section, they were better than on their recent Jericho—John Hiatt’s “Buffalo River Home,” from his Perfectly Good Guitar, is probably a better Band imitation than anything on Helm & Co.’s first album since guitarist Robbie Robertson left and pianist Richard Manuel killed himself. But this night there was a spark in the sound, muscle and play—and a definite, appropriate ordinariness. In 1968, when these men first announced themselves as The Band, the emphasis seemed to be on the “The,” as a statement of arrogance, which they proceeded to live up to. Now both capital letters might as well be gone. With a pretty good Diet Coke commercial based on “The Weight” running on TV, they played, sang, and carried themselves with a humility so complete it might not support any name at all.

  9 Juliana Hatfield Three, “My Sister” (Mammoth) Nancy Kerrigan’s soul sister, anyway.

  10 Tom Petty, “I Won’t Back Down” (MCA, 1989) How long before people here and there will be able to hear this without thinking of Dr. David Gunn, shot to death last year as he arrived for work at a Pensacola abortion clinic? Not long before, Gunn, armed with a cassette machine, faced a crowd of protesters and blared the song right at them—not only because its message was right, you might imagine, but because the song made him feel more alive. Listening to it today, joined to the history it helped make, you can hear Petty take what on paper is no more than an exercise in the obvious past itself, or vice versa.

  MAY 1994

  1–2 Mudboy & the Neutrons, Negro Streets at Dawn (New Rose, Paris) and “5” Royales: Monkey Hips and Rice (Rhino 2-CD reissue, 1952–62) A big, noisy rumble; a
testament to Memphis eccentricity; a revel that leaps from a growled, updated riff by the late bluesman Furry Lewis (“Our father who art in Washington/Slick Willie be his name/He taken me off Rabbit Track tobacco/Put me back on novocaine!”) to the deep soul of “Dark End of the Street.” Led by Rivertown favorite son Jim Dickinson, the set almost disappears into its own black hole with a deliriously cheesy white-boy trash version of the “5” Royales’ bizarre “The Slummer the Slum.” Released in 1958, the tune, Robert Ray of the Vulgar Boatmen recalls, “was always known in Memphis (where it was a huge hit, played by every high school garage band) as ‘The Stompity Stomp’ (which was the way it was always sung).”

  The “5” Royales themselves—a dynamic, still obscure R&B vocal combo featuring Lowman Pauling, a guitarist unparalleled in his ability to wring surprise from a song—get their due on Monkey Hips and Ricè, a model retrospective with sparkling liner notes by Ed Ward. Originally from North Carolina, the “5” Royales began in the 1940s, as a gospel group; by the early ’50s they had found a protean rock ’n’ roll style that combined tremendous excitement with open spaces in the sound, so that even in the midst of a rave-up their records always breathed. Their “Slummer the Slum” is no “Stompity Stomp,” but a dance-floor mystery: “Don’t try,” chants Johnny Tanner off an extreme stop-time beat, “to figure out/Where I/Come from,” instantly summoning thousands of years of heavenly interventions, divine portents, and unnatural catastrophes, along with a couple of the most unlikely guitar solos ever played.

  3 Elvis Costello, “Sulky Girl,” on Brutal Youth (Warner Bros.) A quiet, vaguely noirish lead-in on electric piano, and then these opening lines: “She wears a wedding ring her sister left to throw them off the scent/Just let them guess/It’s what they expect. . . .” Wouldn’t you keep listening?

  4 Tasmin Archer, Shipbuilding (ERG/SBK) Archer is a classy young British singer with a voice she can take lower than you’d expect. Here she makes a better case than Elvis Costello did on Spike that “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” is one of his best. She does real damage with her own “Lords of the New Church.” Archer seems to sing around a song; then suddenly you realize she’s singing straight from its heart. From her own heart: maybe not yet.

  5 Mekons, Retreat from Memphis (Quarterstick) Yes, fans, it’s that big fuzztone sound of the Mekons! Except that on the very first cut the guitar calls up Sergio Leone’s elegiac Once Upon a Time in the West, and by the last the band is back in the 1640s, laughing at the church: “Never wanna work, always wanna play, pleasure, pleasure, every day.”

  6 Charles Arnoldi, Hound Dog, in “The Architect’s Eye,” Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (November 1993–March 1994) In the opening exhibition in Frank Gehry’s fabulous new pile, a stunner: 120 inches by 104, acrylic on wood, black-gray-blue with slashes of red, though actually it bespoke less any sort of hound dog, or “Hound Dog,” than a Texas chainsaw massacre of Demoiselles d’Avignon. Maybe Jonathan Richman can figure this one out.

  7 John Lydon, Rotten—No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (St. Martin’s) Whipped into shape by Keith and Kent Zimmerman, two record-business tip-sheet editors, and fleshed out in long stretches by interviews with various there-when’s, from Chrissie Hynde to Lydon’s father, this “authorized autobiography of Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols” is a terrible disappointment. If he’d forced himself to write the book himself, you can think, Lydon would have had to confront both his success and his failure; instead, he more or less denies everything.

  And yet, near the end, there’s a weird reminder of a passage from Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, his great pseudodetective story about the mystery of the Knights Templar. One character is expounding upon the difference between the “four kinds of people in the world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.” The lunatic, he explains, “is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.” After nearly 350 pages of insisting that the Sex Pistols were all about him, 350 pages in which he tries doggedly to keep the world-historical stopped up in its bottle, Lydon offers this: “The Royal family has been brought up to believe it’s God’s will for them to be where they are. That’s what I find so disgraceful. . . . Think back. The only group of knights that did good were the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar. They were all exterminated because they gave up money, power and position. They were like early Franciscans and that could not be tolerated by the British establishment and they were slaughtered to a man. What would you call them? Early Communists? Their love of humanity above the love of selfishness attacked the establishment by their very existence. They fought all their wars and were a pre-SAS, the top assassins of their day, but they gave up all worldly goods, too frightening for the powers that be to tolerate for too long. Now I’m certainly no Knights Templar and I’m not out looking for the Holy Grail. . . . Which brings us back to the Royal family.”

  And which may leave us where we started: John Lydon may be a lunatic, but the punk syllogism remains intact—everyone else is a cretin, a fool, or a moron.

  8 Howlin’ Wolf, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” “I Ain’t Gonna Be Your Dog No More,” “Woke Up This Morning,” “Ain’t Going Down That Dirt Road,” on Ain’t Gonna Be Your Dog (MCA Chess 2-CD reissue, 1951–69) In 1968 Howlin’ Wolf was forced to record a psychedelic album eventually released as This Is Howlin’ Wolf’s New Album. He Doesn’t Like It. (“Dogshit” is what he called it.) Perhaps as compensation, at the same sessions the tape ran when he picked up an acoustic guitar and battered out pieces of old blues like a man knocking branches off a tree with an axe, just for the hell of it.

  9 Rob Wasserman, “Fantasy Is Reality/Bells of Madness,” from Trios (MCA/GRP) Bassist Wasserman’s bit is that he plays with two additional, famous people (pairing Neil Young and Bob Weir, say); the results are not staggering. But the cut featuring famous nutcase Brian Wilson and his famous (ex-Wilson Phillips) daughter Carnie on his own tune—unlike the rest of the album, produced by Don Was—is disturbing. The melody contains a preternatural lift, Carnie Wilson’s voice shimmers, and when she presses on the hear in “But when I hear the bells of madness” the effect is lovely and horrible precisely to the same degree.

  10 th Faith Healers UK, Imaginary friend (Elektra) Drone band with sense of humor makes what may turn out to be best album of year.

  SUMMER 1994

  1 Robert Cantwell, “When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Music Revival,” in Transforming Tradition, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg (University of Illinois Press) Starting with the Kingston Trio’s long-scorned 1958 #1 hit “Tom Dooley” and ending with the “national seance” of the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, this plainspoken essay rewrites history with music, and vice versa. Diffusing a perfectly sketched, generic, white, middle-class, suburban, postwar upbringing across the whole spectrum of American legend and experience, Cantwell pours old wine into a cruet that suddenly gleams with transparency: “the revival made the romantic claim of folk culture—oral, immediate, traditional, idiomatic, communal, a culture of characters, of rights, obligations, and beliefs, against a centrist, specialist, impersonal, technocratic culture . . . of types, functions, jobs, and goals.”

  As Cantwell begins to trace the roles played by his characters—those figures dancing on the surface of “Tom Dooley,” or hiding in its grooves—he makes the wine new. Surrounding the youthful folk acolytes of the late ’50s and early ’60s he finds the outlaw Tom Dula (who murdered his exlover, Laura Foster, in North Carolina in 1866) and Dr. Tom Dooley (an American doctor whose work in Laos inspired the Peace Corps), Wild Bill Hickok and Clint Eastwood (early on, as a TV cowboy), Appalachian ballad singers of the ’20s and Paris existentialists of the ’40s, Dr. Spock and John Lomax, Doc Watson and the Coasters, Ichabod Crane and Laura In-galls Wilder, Robin Hood and Theodore Roosevelt, Marlon Brando and of course Ja
mes Dean—who, rather miraculously, Cantwell makes new along with everybody else, precisely by introducing him to everybody else. Tom Joad and Leatherstocking, Nicholas Ray (director of Rebel without a Cause, but also “closely associated as a radio producer in the 1940s with the left-wing folksong movement in New York”) and Willa Cather, New Deal populists and blackface minstrels: all of them, in Dean’s hesitant speech and broken, then furious gestures, make a seance of their own. The only problem with this generous essay is that it is available only in the sort of over-priced volume most libraries can no longer afford, and no paperback is planned. Short of an essay collection by Cantwell—the author of Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (1984, Da Capo) and the recent Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture (University of North Carolina Press)—pray for remaindering.

  2 th Faith Healers UK, imaginary friend (elektra) “Psychedelic” is the only word for this obsessive band, led by the buried but mesmerizing vocals of one Roxanne. Using repetition, distance, and the sort of indecipherable echoes that still make Moby Grape’s “Indifference” feel unstable, the group works with negative space, creating it, filling it, then leaving it empty again. The sound can suggest George Grosz, Otto Dix—you sense an outraged innocence beneath a veneer of cynicism. The band bets the farm on the last cut, “everything, all at once, forever” (the complete lyric): for 19 minutes 58 seconds they try to turn bad news into transcendence, and the fact that the change never comes sustains the meandering, patient, fed-up performance to the end. It’s a false ending, though: after 12 minutes 25 seconds of silence, your CD player visibly counting backward to keep you from removing the disc, the song returns for another 7 minutes 35 seconds. This is a little boring.

  3 Richard Thompson, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” live on Fresh Air (National Public Radio, 13 April) “In England it’s a football song,” he said, after singing his heart out.