Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 R.E.M., “Wall of Death,” on Beat the Retreat—Songs by Richard Thompson, a tribute album (Capitol) On Richard and Linda Thompson’s 1982 Shoot Out the Lights and ever since, I’d heard “Wall of Death” (collected on Watching the Dark—The History of Richard Thompson, Rykodisc) as an affirmation by then-Sufi Thompson of some sort of Islamic trial by endurance: you know, they hang you on the wall of death in the morning when it’s 120 degrees and if you’re still alive by sundown your heart is true. Thompson’s guitar and the wispy vocals were suggestive before they were anything else; the only lines I ever caught were “I’ll take my chances on the wall of death” and “Beware of the bearded lady,” which meant who knew what. But on R.E.M.’s magic carpet of a cover version, with steel guitar making the strange familiar and Michael Stipe wanting everything and as close to being scared of nothing as he’ll ever be, I found myself looking down from the ride and discovered that the song is about a carnival attraction. O.K., so you knew it all the time—but I still believe that if musicians cover songs by recutting them, listeners cover songs by mishearing them.

  3 Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock (MCA) Astonishing. Everyone’s heard of it, but for 25 years only the 30,000 or so who were left to sit out the festival’s finest hour—63 minutes—actually heard it. Fifteen minutes into the performance, it seems impossible he could go farther than “Hear My Train A Comin’,” but about halfway through, with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” the fervor and drive of Hendrix’s playing goes over some edge, and it’s as if he caught a glimpse of where his train was going. Whether he did or not, you do.

  4 Spice 1, “Strap on the Side” (Jive) This is a mean, ugly Oakland rap about a big gun and using it; running in the background, sometimes alongside, is a meandering, intensely melodic, conversation-with-the-mirror reverie that, while reinforcing the threat of the dominant speech with its words, in its tone falls just short of calling the song’s own bluff.

  5 The Cranberries, No Need to Argue (Island) The confidence that can come from even a rather bland top ten hit like “Linger” has changed Dolores O’Riordan’s voice. Now it’s more ordinary, idiosyncratic, Irish, bitter, and most of all unpredictable.

  6 Quentin Tarantino, Lawrence Bender, and Karyn Rachtman, executive album producers, Pulp Fiction—Music from the Motion Picture (MCA) The music here comes off much weirder than it does in the movie, mainly because concept albums based in second-rate California surf instrumentals are uncommon these days. Dick Dale & His Del-Tones’ 1963 “Misirlou” is relatively well-known, but the likes of the Revels’ 1964 “Comanche” or the Tornadoes’ 1962 “Bustin’ Surfboards” are completely obscure. This stuff appeared right about the time Pulp Fiction director Tarantino was born, and disappeared soon afterward. On disc it’s close to a foreign language, and also completely bracing; as a frame its very nearly heroic reach for a decent riff makes Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” feel like deep soul (it is) and Urge Overkill’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” their two-year-old cover of a 27-year-old Neil Diamond hit, sound like Elvis fighting over the song with the grittiest white street singer, Joe Grushecky in his Iron City Houserocker days, maybe—like heaven on the run from hell.

  7 Kurt Schwitters, Ursonate (WERGO Schallplatten GmbH, Mainz, Germany) The sound of a very old radio playing a very old record (on this CD, you can hear the original shellac discs spinning): the legendary sound-poetry epic, here 41 minutes 29 seconds, by the legendary German Dada Merz-man, only recently discovered, and recorded in . . . nobody knows. The piece sounds overwhelmingly influenced by the far shorter letter-sound poems of Schwitters’ 1920s Dada comrade Raoul Hausmann, except that the only Hausmann recordings one has to go on were made in the ’50s and the sonically more ambitious Schwitters, also Hausmann’s postwar partner, died in 1948. For the moment, let the puzzle rest with this: if you could stick your head all the way into the big end of one of the giant ear horns that served as amplifiers on the earliest phonographs, it’s the blips and rushes of its ocean you might hear in Ursonate.

  8 Colin Escott with George Merritt and William MacEwen, Hank Wilsons: The Biography (Little, Brown) In earlier books on Sun Records, Escott wrote with a dogged academicism; now he’s found both his style and his heart. Avoiding the Hunter Thompson–like sensationalism of Chet Flippo’s harrowing 1981 Your Cheatin’ Heart, Escott—facing down a figure who on the terms of conventional biography is a specter behind scandal and who yet remains “almost desperately real through his music”—ends up in a graveyard far more awful. “There’s the notion that the writer or poet calms his troublous soul by reducing it to rhyme,” Escott finishes, ready to seal the case he’s made. “For Hank Williams, though, as he pulled off his boots and eased himself gingerly onto his bed, the little verses scratched out in his untutored spidery handwriting almost certainly offered no relief at all.”

  9 Tom Jones, The Lead and How to Swing It (Interscope) He’s 54; his last hit came in 1988, with “Kiss,” and he still hasn’t gotten over Prince. He has gotten better—on Yaz’s “Situation,” madly so.

  10 Sheryl Crow, Tuesday Night Music Club (A&M) It’s fine for her to rip off Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” for “All I Wanna Do”—Stealers Wheel is thankfully long gone. But since Ricki Lee Jones is very much around, it seems premature for someone to make the top ten by absconding with her entire act.

  JANUARY 1995

  1 Allen Ginsberg, Holy Soul Jelly Roll—Poems and Songs, 1949–1993 (Rhino Word Beat 4-CD box) I put this on out of curiosity; except for performances I had to repeat, I played it straight through to the end. It is, somehow, a monument without pretensions, a testament of ambition without hubris, a year’s worth of lectures on the origins of language without pedantry. Like a long singing from the Haftorah, the 63-minute-plus “Kaddish” only explodes at the end, shuddering toward a dissolution that, here, is the only way to wholeness. The previously unreleased version of “America,” live in Berkeley in 1956, changes the solemn heart-breaker of Ginsberg’s 1959 studio recording into a stand-up comedy routine not far from Richard Pryor—Live in Concert. The best album of 1994—no contest.

  2 Hole, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco (11 November) Fronting bass, drums, and lead guitar with her own guitar in her hands and one leg hoisted onto a monitor speaker, Courtney Love has a number she runs on the crowd between songs: a lot of casual-sounding talk about what she dislikes about the site of a given show, former sex partners (especially whoever might be present), a fair amount of undifferentiated loathing, and a few well-placed invocations of Kurt Cobain (“I wrote this with my husband”; “Will you just come back, dick-head!”). It’s a punk version, or her version, of “HELLO, SAN FRANCISCO!”—which you usually hear bellowed out at the Oakland Coliseum. But as a standard routine her words come off as detritus she happened to find onstage, and the fact that her music has the same offhand, let’s-get-it-over-with quality produces a strange effect. There are no divisions between patter and song, and rather than everything communicating like performance, nothing does. The shifts between talk and music, shifts that given the band’s precision timing you don’t have to notice, merely take a conversation to another level; the burr in Love’s voice is the same whether she’s insulting someone, negotiating the careful steps of her time-stopping “Asking for It,” or tossing off half of “Hungry like the Wolf.” The result reminded me more than anything of a recent all-acoustic, sit-down, no-smoking, mother-in-the-audience concert by Iris DeMent, baring her soul and everyone else’s with her “No Time to Cry,” reinventing country music by treating it like ordinary speech—except that Love was more believable.

  3 Libby Gelman-Waxner, If You Ask Me (St. Martin’s) Collected columns from Premiere on what really matters in the movies—the way clothes determine attitude, and vice versa. Too bad no music critics have figured out an equivalent approach, which allows for, or for that matter demands, the ability to comment on anything at any time—as when Gelman-Waxner blithely mentions, in the course of
reviewing Ghost (or rather explaining the subtext of same to her seven-year-old), that “the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, is spoken of as the entrance to the underworld in the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

  4 Unnamed Dixieland Band, unnamed New Orleans Sanitation Department driver, encounter (19 November) In the French quarter, a small combo was churning out a tepid version of very old style for the Grand Opening of a nondescript bar. The musicians spilled out into the street, so when the garbage truck came up Dumaine and tried to turn onto Chartres the driver found the way blocked. He blasted his horn—and then, as if he’d just noticed the awfulness of the noise he’d failed to silence, picked up the band’s half-dead riff and punched it out on the horn, once, twice, three times. He completed his turn and growled on down the street, still playing, leaving the band to its miseries.

  5 Frontline, “Hillary’s Class” (PBS, 15 November) In this examination of the women of Wellesley ’69 and their devil’s choice between career and family, the ground opened up straight off, at commencement ceremonies 25 years ago. Republican Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the main speaker, had just concluded his remarks on student protest (“a perversion of democratic privilege”) when Hillary Rodham, the first Wellesley student ever chosen to address her own class, stepped up in turn. She put aside her speech and talked back: “As the French student wrote on the wall of the Sorbonne,” she said, “ ‘Demand the Impossible.’ We will settle for nothing less.” After the Republican victories of last November, Speaker-presumptive Newt Gingrich famously derided Hillary and Bill Clinton as “counterculture McGoverniks,” and the unusual suffix was meant for automatic, subconscious decoding: first back to beatnik, and from there to the source of that word in Sputnik, the first space satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, and thus the root translation—commie. But what Hillary Rodham quoted that day was Situationist graffiti, from the uprising of May ’68. That event has been written out of history, and so, many times, has Hillary Clinton, but I doubt we’ve heard the last from her.

  6 Nirvana, “Lake of Fire,” from MTV: Unplugged in New York (DGC) Almost every tune the band did this night sounded ancient, but none more so than this Meat Puppets number. With its lyric constructed like an authorless folk ballad—each line at once a literal non sequitur and a poetic link to any other—the out-of-nowhere reference to “the Fourth of July” suggested that here, as in “The Coo Coo,” in America the type case of this kind of song, the Fourth of July is a predestined date, waiting, deep in unknown traditions, to be found and used. In other words, the feeling the music gives off is that as a talisman the Fourth of July not only preceded the Declaration of Independence but called it into being.

  7 Dave Marsh and James Bernard, editors, The New Book of Rock Lists (Fireside) The table of contents includes 27 chapters, 533 subsections, and no page numbers. This is very avant-garde.

  8 Laurie Anderson, Bright Red/Tight-rope (Warner Bros.) The archness in her voice that since the 1983 United States has left her disembodied is gone. Now she sounds at home in her own skin—given the current state of the United States, not a moment too soon. You take your prophets where you find them, if you can find them.

  9 KABL-FM, bus advertisement (Berkeley, 15 November) “BIG 98.1,” it read. “Biggest Hits of the ’70s. If Keith Richards Were Alive Today, He’d Be Listening to Us.” Could be; at the Voodoo Lounge show I saw, the best music of the night was Elmore James’ “Madison Blues”—the record, playing in the dead time between the opening act and the headliners.

  10 Guns N’ Roses, “Sympathy for the Devil,” in Interview with the Vampire (Geffen Pictures) At the film’s close, as a car speeds across the Golden Gate Bridge, this most menacing of all Rolling Stones songs comes on. It is the most menacing less because of its themes than because of the impossible certainty in Bill Wyman’s bass, taking your feet out from under you, hurling you toward a destination you can neither credit nor resist—I mean, it moves like nothing else. The performance is so rich Jean-Luc Godard could build an entire movie around the emergence of its arrangement (his 1968 Sympathy for the Devil has just been released on video by ABKCO). But here, at the end of a film that gets stronger—more menacing—as it goes on, instead of the thing itself there is, by Geffen Records’ own, a horrible imitation: generic, cloddish, ham-fisted and, in Axl Rose’s singing, hysterical, as if the end, the end of the vogue for his band, is all too plain. For the movie it’s a major false note: Lestat would have better taste.

  FEBRUARY 1995

  1–2 Chieftains, The Long Black Veil (RCA) and Sharyn McCrumb: She Walks These Hills: A Novel of Suspense (Scribner’s) Both album and detective story take their title from “Long Black Veil,” a 1959 Lefty Frizzell hit revived by the Band for their first album—an “instant folk song,” as co-composer Danny Dill described it, because it had the feel of a 200-year-old Appalachian ballad. On the latest version of the tribute album (you recruit the stars and back them up yourself), the song is the best thing Mick Jagger has put his name to in years. It’s also the ghost in McCrumb’s third “ballad book,” the key less to her murders than to the mystery of the Tennessee mountains, where old crimes cling to the hills like smoke. Along the way, the Chieftains loosen up their revered Irish traditionalism, drawing luminous, self-realizing performances from Mark Knopfler (a wistful “Lily of the West”), Sinéad O’Connor (“The Foggy Dew” and “He Moved Through the Fair”), and Tom Jones (“Tennessee Waltz/Tennessee Mazurka”)—and McCrumb, writing long before the fact, throws the national orgy of pious incredulity over Susan Smith’s killing of her children into ordinary light. In McCrumb’s pages, both the song and her characters let a reader understand that what most distinguished Smith from the countless other Americans who each year kill their children was her use of her crime momentarily to become, before the whole country, what she must have felt herself to be: a star, her own abandoned child.

  3 Antietam, Rope-a-Dope (Home-stead) Tim Harris (bass) and Tara Key (guitar) can’t sing—not in the time-honored rock ’n’ roll tradition of can’t sing, but can’t sing the way normally proportioned human beings, which they are, can’t kiss their elbows. Yet every time you’re about to give up on this music, Key summons a passage on her instrument that does sing: a twist around a corner that a second before wasn’t there, a breakaway.

  4 David Evans, John Heartfield—AIZ: Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung/Volks Illustrierte 1930–38 (Kent) Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven antifascist photomontages—for all the good they did the first time around, a language worth relearning.

  5 James Marsh, director, Highway 61 Revisited (Arena Television/BBC, UK, 1993) Part of a “Tales of Rock ’n’ Roll” series so far unseen in the U.S., this documentary focuses on one of Bob Dylan’s most inspired recordings and the spine-of-the-nation highway it’s named for. There are surprises everywhere: Dylan’s great “Blind Willie McTell” orchestrates footage of the Civil Rights Movement, a specter dissolving the words of heroes; a rough, clanking piano demo of “Like a Rolling Stone” turns into the anthem everyone knows as New York City looms up; and on Dylan’s old buddy John Bucklen’s high school tapes, Bucklen and then–Bobby Zimmerman talk into the tape recorder self-consciously, as if they know someday we’ll be listening, judging whether Dylan’s claim that Johnny Cash is more boring than dirt, or that Elvis was a thief, sounds sincere (not completely). Dylan hammers out Little Richard’s “Jenny, Jenny” on the piano. He sings “Little Richard”—the song. His song. Good, too.

  6 Colin McGinn, “Out of Body, Out of Mind, Lingua Franca (November/December 1994) “From the fact that we cannot make sense of something it does not follow that it makes no sense. We know that consciousness exists and that it is robustly natural, though we cannot in principle produce the theory that would make its nature manifest. There is thus nothing mysterious about the existence of the mystery.” A philosophy professor at Rutgers, McGinn has been named a “New Mysterian”—a member of a minischool of mind-body theory named for ? and
the Mysterians, who in 1966 forever altered the consciousness of all too many people with their immortal “96 Tears.” “What difference has being a mysterian made to my life?” McGinn asks, and answers: “It has released me from the uncomfortable sensation that philosophical problems have always stimulated in me—the feeling that reality is inherently preposterous, ill-formed, bizarre.” Rudy Martinez, a.k.a. ?, who after an eight-year hiatus is again performing under his philosophical name, with the original Mysterians, should be proud.

  7 Juned, Juned (Up) Four women from Seattle stick an old picture of ugly transvestites on their CD sleeve, then combine folkish, borne-upon-the-winds vocals with an attack that veers from the relentless to the casually experimental. The sense that they could go anywhere pops up again and again, but for the time being they just go from one place to another.