Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  4 Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle (Algonquin) A novel based on the 1955 Mississippi lynching of Emmett Till—but here, amateur bluesmen getting drunk in the morning and lining out old Robert Johnson songs recede in the face of Moby Dick rising out of dry land. Dead, Emmett Till turns into Pip the cabin boy, comes back to life “dressed in a heavy garment of fish and turtles,” then dies for good; entering a courtroom to testify before an all-white jury, a black witness sees the whiteness of the whale—as Thomas Hobbes put it in 1651, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil.

  5 Iris Dement, My Life (Warner Bros.) In DeMent’s voice you can hear bluegrass, old-time country music, and the physical and moral tiredness of some of the people Bobbie Ann Mason writes about. In her own songs you can’t always tell if DeMent is parodying clichés, exploiting them, or caught by them, but then she takes something extra from a too-familiar image, or dances over a line anyone could have produced, and she’s gone.

  6 Hole, “Credit in the Straight World,” from Live Through This (DGC) Good luck.

  7 Red Alert, DJ Red Alert’s Propmaster Dancehall Show (Epic Street) A compilation of delirious, irresistible tracks—the collection all but drowns in its own fluids with Patra’s “Love All the Men”—pretending it’s the best radio show in the world, heading your way from KISS-FM, New York. Too bad it’s not.

  8 Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up! (Viking, UK) In this black comedy about the evil of Thatcherism, so extreme even Elvis Costello might be caught up short, cutbacks in funding for the Underground lead to hideously overcrowded cars and disastrous service failures. A train stops dead in a tunnel; then the lights go out. The air turns unbreathable. “I could sense fear, now, fear all around me whereas before there had only been boredom and discomfort,” the narrator says. “There was desperation in the air, and before it proved contagious I decided to beat a retreat, as far as possible, into the privacy of my own mind. To start with, I tried telling myself that the situation could be worse: but there were surprisingly few scenarios which bore this out—a rat on the loose in the carriage, perhaps, or a busker spontaneously . . . treating us all to a few rousing choruses of ‘Imagine.’ No, I would have to try harder than that . . .”

  9 NKOTB, Face the Music (Columbia) The presentation is all shame and guilt—for more than ten years, NKOTB were New Kids on the Block. They aren’t giving the money back, but Danny Wood now looks exactly like Erik Menendez.

  10 Pearl Jam, on Saturday Night Live (NBC, 16 April) On April 8, the day Kurt Cobain’s suicide was announced, there seemed to be as much Pearl Jam on the radio as Nirvana; given the solemnity always present in Eddie Vedder’s singing, every song sounded like a eulogy. Still, that was no preparation for the wake the band staged little more than a week later. On a program that takes Nirvana’s audience as a given, but which over the course of two shows had found no way even to mention Cobain’s death, Pearl Jam began with the unreleased “Not for You.” It was an extraordinary number—led by the most rudimentary up-and-down guitar riff by Vedder, and only for a moment raised into the realm of myth by a modal passage from guitarist Stone Gossard—a song at once ordinary and mysterious, elemental and twisted, quiet and full of alarms, elegiac and damning. Later the group moved on to “Rearview-mirror,” then closed, after another break for moronic skits, with “Daughter.” Pointedly pulling back his jacket to display a K on his T-shirt, Vedder ended the tune with a few lines from Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps—the album Cobain quoted in the suicide note his widow, Courtney Love, had publically denounced as “like a letter to the fuckin editor.”

  She was right. One of the horrors of the event, a small horror, maybe, but a horror nonetheless, was that a man who could speak so freely in his own songs could not in the end find his own words, or make someone else’s words (“It’s better to burn out than to fade away”) sound like his own. Yet when Vedder sang, as if the thought or the quote had just occurred to him, “Hey, hey, my, my, rock and roll can never die” (the line has carried unpleasant ironies since Young first offered it; once again, as always, it had to fight off an audience’s idiot whoops), Vedder could not have appeared more completely himself: a fan surprised to find himself on a stage but ready to push his chance to the limit.

  SEPTEMBER 1994

  1 Walter Hill, director, Streets of Fire (1984; A&E cable, MCA video) I caught the last 20 minutes of this urban never-never-land rock fable on A&E one afternoon (cast: Diane Lane, Michael Paré, Willem Dafoe, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, Lee Ving, Bill Paxton, Ed Begley, Jr., the Blasters, Robert Townsend), waited out the plot for the final musical number, and had my memories of the film dissolved by the wonder of what goes on. There’s tremendous unreality to the sound and staging of “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young”—it’s thrilling, but in a prickly, disturbing way. Music videos have never come within centuries of what Hill (and Jeffrey Hornaday, the choreographer) does here with every gesture. Contradictions are the medium: singer Lane’s dress is at once tight and hanging on her like a piece of paper, slit all the way down in back—she’s not thin. The perfection of every move, every cut, is scary, and the sense that this isn’t happening is overpowering: it’s as if this is no performance but a transmission to the stage, by unknown technology, of your deepest performance fantasies. The audience waves its arms, and you peer through them: at the way the drummer, shot from below, makes the beat, the way the guitarist frames Lane with his back to her, his zoot suit touching her skin, the way the black vocal quartet enters the ensemble, strolling and strutting as if they’ve been called forth to walk it like she talks it.

  On-screen the music—by some faceless aggregation called Fire, Inc.—sounds a thousand times better than it would on a record. This is exactly right for what you know cannot be real: the many female and for all I know male voices coming out of Lane’s mouth. There’s no way in the world what you’re seeing is making the sound you hear, but you can believe the performers, in character, know this as well as you do. As you, in the audience, watch, the performers are projecting their own fantasies onto themselves, desperately, happily, casually, as a matter of life and death. Isn’t this what happens in a real show?

  2 Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, “As I Am,” from Pure and Simple (Warner Bros.) Jett is wildly overrated as a survivor (aren’t they all?), but as she runs her hoarse plea through a small, delicate knockoff of a circa ’65 Phil Spector arrangement, she could be making her first record.

  3 Anonymous, I, Spastic A deliriously tasteless and appallingly hilarious one-person fanzine about, among other things, Jesus (“probably the most influential figure in history before Aaron Spelling”) and the Apostles as a teenage gang (“all wearing dark coats made from the skin of a cow. . . . ‘My man!’ ” says Jesus to a leper, “ ‘Give me three and a half!’ ”), the transmogrification of confessed Bosnian Serb war-criminal Borislav Herak into an Azerbaijani pop star (illustrated), an L.A. porn actress home in Waukesha, Wisconsin, for Thanksgiving and recruiting her teenage sister (though their little brother gets all the best lines), and the Kurt Cobain–like death of Barney the dinosaur (illustrated): “In potting soil near his body, a pen thrust into the dirt held his one-page suicide note, written in appropriately purple ink. It read, in part, ‘I love you, and you love me, but I hate myself and want to die.’ ”

  4 Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Sleeps with Angels (Reprise) Tonight’s the Night disguised as Harvest—some trick.

  5 Erasure, I Say I Say I Say (Mute/Elektra) A lift.

  6 Wallace Berman, Support the Revolution (Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam/D.A.P.) Berman (1926–76) started out in the ’40s as a Watts white Negro. By 1967 his presence at the center of the Bay Area collage and assemblage circle led Peter Blake to include him in the gallery of culture heroes on the sleeve of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper (just to the right of Tony Curtis). This retrospective volume features dull text by a variety of writers, and a handsome, loose design. Scattered all through it, dating from at le
ast 1964 to nearly the end of Berman’s life, are scores of versions of his most iconic construct: they always begin with the same photograph, of a hand holding up a tiny transistor radio, completed with a picture where the speaker ought to be. Presented in sets of 56, like a sheet of stamps; of five, spread like a poker hand; or solitary, the doubled images work as omens, judgments—Verifax collages in color or black and white, positive or negative, showing two men hugging, a man and a woman having sex, a watch, a snake, a basketball game, a pistol, Kenneth Anger in a teenager movie role, an Iron Cross, George and Ringo, nothing, a galaxy, Bob Dylan, ancient coins, a spider. Each image communicates a kind of blankness, the radio silenced by the picture that has, it seems, developed out of it. All together the pieces make a whole metaphysics, derived from the simplest notion: changing the station.

  7 Junior Kimbrough and the Soul Blues Boys, Sad Days, Lonely Nights (Fat Possum) Taped in Kimbrough’s juke joint in Chulahoma, Mississippi, with the nightspot used as a cold room—no audience. The result is rough, fraying, introspective, so much so it’s almost abstract.

  8 Marshall Crenshaw, Hollywood Rock (HarperPerennial) Former Beatlemania John Lennon and continuing dubious rockabilly impersonator, Crenshaw may have found his true calling with this rock-movie guide—though there are 26 reviewers besides Crenshaw, and one Ted Mico is credited as editor. Films are graded for “music,” “attitude,” and “fun”; Streets of Fire gets three, one, and two stars, Hated: G. G. Allin and the Murder Junkies gets five across the board. The book is a treasure, or anyway a treasure chest: unpredictable, full of bizarre (or made-up) facts, obsessive to the point of dementia, and if you’ve heard of every movie here—Amor a Ritmo de Go-Go? Teenage Millionaire? The Wizard of Waukesha (say, weren’t we just talking about . . . )? Blonde on a Bum Trip? The Amorous Sex (I actually rented this once, under another title)?—you probably don’t remember your own name.

  9 Harvey Keitel & Madonna, in Dangerous Game, dir. Abel Ferrara (1993, MGM/UA Home Video) Lionized in 1992 for Bad Lieutenant, Ferrara could easily have called this one (or that one) Bad Director. But here both Keitel, as a lionized film director, and Madonna, as his leading actress and meal ticket, come off with dignity, and they’re fascinating to watch. Madonna’s character—off the screen of the movie-within-the-movie—is believable as an actual person, quietly evading Madonna’s own image factories. As a Ferrara stand-in, Keitel’s character isn’t there as such, but it’s gratifying to realize how completely and how well Keitel has aged on the screen over the last two decades. He seems to carry all of his roles with him, somewhere in the back of his mind, in the fatigue or vehemence of his gestures—and also, in his eyes, our memory of those roles, as he connives with himself, playing what we haven’t seen him do before against what we have.

  10 Pale Saints, Slow Buildings (4AD) Th faith healers meet Sonic Youth, spook the hell out of each other, and wake up from an arty swoon, satisfied.

  OCTOBER 1994

  1 Martina McBride, “Independence Day,” from The Way That I Am (RCA) Written by Gretchen Peters, this is one of those ultra-professional country songs where all craft is marshaled to burn a tune into your heart. McBride sings it rangy, loud, and hard, like Trisha Yearwood with more than a career on her mind. “Talk about your revolution,” says a young girl of her drunken father and her beaten mother; by the time the story finds its ending, the number has joined Van Morrison’s “Almost Independence Day” and X’s version of Dave Alvin’s “4th of July” in the thin folio of recordings that expose a legacy nearly too distant and demanding to think about. It’s a legacy that still carries an echo of Herman Melville’s version: “The Declaration of Independence makes a difference.”

  2 John McNaughton, director, Samuel Fuller & Christa Lang, writers, Girls in Prison (Showtime made-for-TV movie) By far the most intense entry in the “Rebel Highway” series of old-title/new-script remakes of ’50s AIP teen-exploitation films—the author of “Endless Sleep” gets framed for murder. The film goes giddy with glee over its freedom to push old ideas to the point of explosion: to get its first two heroines into the slam, they’re shown as driven literally berserk by McCarthyism. A famous liberal Hollywood actor and his playwright daughter rehearse a new script; then, as you see it tried out in a little theater, with the father as a witness fighting off his McCarthyist inquisitor, the members of the audience rise from their seats and, all barriers between art, life, and propaganda dissolving, beat the father to the edge of death. After that, in the hospital, he can only mumble “Are you a communist?” over and over; after shock therapy, he says nothing at all.

  3 Juliette Lewis, “These Boots are Made for Walkin’,” in Natural Born Killers, dir. Oliver Stone (Warner Bros.) Out on her feet from snakebite, finally captured, her stomach covered with blood from the crisscrossings of a cop’s knife, she’s got rhythm, just barely.

  4 Bill Clinton et al., Bill Clinton Jam Session—The Pres Blows (Pres/Daybreak M.O.) Too many strange clues here to handle—the sneer of the subtitle, itself a homage to Lester Young, the first tenor saxophonist to take the name “Prez”; the Mark of the Beast in the 800 number—but in fact this 17-minute CD is straight cool school, with more soul than Clinton fave Kenny G. Cut at the Reduta Jazz Club in Prague on January 11, with Clinton playing an instrument handed him by Vaclav Havel and leading a small troupe of Czechs through “Summertime” and a ten-minute “My Funny Valentine,” the music meanders at first, with more to hear as themes fade than as they try to take shape. At the end, Clinton gathers Jan Konopásek’s baritone sax to his tenor, and there’s a stirring moment of peace at the heart of a storm not long in the past. As for the concurrent release of brother Roger’s debut disc, Nothing Good Comes Easy, it’s lounge music, and where was it when the KGB could have used it? Lock Havel back up in his old cell, pump this in for . . . oh, about five tracks, and he’d renounce Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground too if that’s what it took to get out.

  5 Richard Huelsenbeck, editor, Dada Almanac, presented by Malcolm Green (Atlas Press, London) A long-overdue though not inspired translation, usefully if burdensomely annotated, of the still thrilling, still weird 1920 anthology. Almost three-quarters of a century of paranoid delusions of grandeur have not quite recovered the language (let alone the frame of reference) Walter Mehring found in Berlin for “Revelations”: “Since [the] Balkan division [of the first Dada dynasty] began the Albanian interregnum in collaboration with the Viennese Bankverein and the Italian Banca Commerciale, and launched its missionary activities among the Shiite Bektashiyahs, even simple jobbers at the stock exchange are beginning to realize . . .”

  6 Come, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (Matador) No matter what dustbin of history Clinton’s gays-in-the-military policy ends up in, the phrase will live on. It’s a work of genius, a perfect title for anything save what it stands for—including this moody, accessible album by a band that was previously a dirge factory for singer Thalia Zedek—the Avital Ronell of rock ’n’ roll—and is now letting a little speed and light into its sound. The music gets stronger and more whole song by song, until you can almost believe that inside the Gothic clichés some kind of secret is waiting.

  7 Prince 1958–93, Come (Warner Bros.) Currently on a supposedly permanent recording strike, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince has announced his intention to fulfill his huge Warner Bros. contract by dumping tapes out of his bottomless vaults for as long as it takes. The first fruit of this bizarre insult is his/its most elegant and idiosyncratic album since Dirty Mind, and that was 14 years ago. Come is superhigh concept: the careful, inventive, all but liquid dramatization of a single 48-minute-46-second fuck. Except for the hokey last track, “Orgasm”—if you believe Prince when he promises “I love you” to the accompanying female vocalist, credited as “partner,” he’s got an old Warner Bros. contract you might be interested in—the music basks in a kind of ease and luxury that brings back Howlin’ Wolf’s opening brag in “Going Down Slow,” lines you can imagine spinning off the end
of the last tape the Kid retrieves from the last vault: “Now, I did not say I was a millionaire/But I said, I have spent more money/Than a millionaire.”

  8 Heavens to Betsy, Direction EP (Chainsaw) Latest news from Tracy and Corin—who in pursuit of their next move (“Direction,” “Get Out of My Head,” “The Ones”) complain themselves all the way back to an X-ray Spex show in London in early ’77, at which point they climb out of the crowd, onto the stage, and call their own tune (“Driving Song”).

  9 Beck’s Beer Commercial, “Sail Away” spot (Wensauer • D.D.B. Needham, Düsseldorf) I once wondered what would happen if Randy Newman’s greatest song, conceived as a slaver’s recruiting pitch, were heard anytime, anywhere—part of the noise of any given day. Well, here’s the answer. Though only the title phrase and a hint of melody are used, the song is instantly recognizable behind footage of tall ships and waves surging. Why? To catch a vague echo of its evil, to give the commercial just the subliminal edge it needs?

  10 Fastbacks, “Answer the Phone, Dummy” (Sub Pop) After 14 years of evading anything resembling professionalism—seemingly abandoning all craft to glance a tune off your heart—bassist Kim Warnick and rhythm guitarist Lulu Gargiulo are singing lead guitarist Kurt Bloch’s songs with a new confidence, which doesn’t hurt lines like “I learned something today/People don’t think the way I do.” As always, the smallest incidents of memory or present-day this-’n’-that rush forward with a sense of fate and consequence, practical joke and tragedy, puzzlement and wonder—for example, the possibility of actually finding out “what it really was/An observatory does.” And speaking of great titles . . .

  DECEMBER 1994

  1 Stuart Davis, The Back Room, 1913, and Thomas Hart Benton, House in Cubist Landscape, ca. 1915–20, in “American Art, 1900–1940: A History Reconsidered” (San Jose Museum of Art, through October 1995) Drawn from the vaults of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, this survey show is full of surprises; these paintings leap out. In Davis’ dank barroom hide-away there’s a lone drummer standing in for a band, one couple dancing, others immobilized. Their roughed-out faces could be prototypes for the 1933 Charles Laugh-ton classic The Island of Lost Souls (“Are we not men?”). It looks like a place you’d likely never get into—an aura of pleasure earned, bled for, rises out of the frame. The piece is just around a turn from Benton’s water-color, which is as white as Davis’ sanctuary is black. Here is an Appalachian pastoral upended by shapes impossible in nature, trees and fields and rivers now a jumble of Cubist blocks; an arch into the sky could be two tree trunks fallen against each other or a direct route to a Primitive Baptist heaven. It’s as if the liquid bodies and landscapes of Benton’s later, celebratory Americana represented not only freedom but an attempt to escape the violence implicit in a once trendy, momentarily irresistible style. Soundtracks: for Davis, Memphis Jug Band, “Turpentine Blues” (1927), on Memphis Jug Band—Volume One (JSP/UK); for Benton, Carter Family, My Clinch Mountain Home—Their Complete Victor Recordings, 1928–1929 (Rounder).