Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  8 Marianne Faithfull, A Secret Life (Island) Her much anticipated collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti, and the perfect accompaniment to her recent autobiography: the tone of exasperated, imperious noblesse oblige is the same.

  9 Janet Lyon and Michael Bérubé “Living on Disability—The Upward Climb of Down Syndrome,” Voice Literary Supplement (December 1994) English professors Lyon and Bérubé’s breathtaking comment on their Down’s syndrome son: “In the end, he’s both like and unlike everyone else—part body, part discourse, part counterdis-course.” It’s a stunning example of why so many find this sort of critical writing—flipping buzzwords like card tricks—an occasion for mirth, if not disgust.

  10 Albert Zugsmith, producer, Girls Town (or The Innocent and the Damned), 1959, on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (16 December 1994, Comedy Central) The setting: a prison farm run by nuns. The star: Mamie Van Doren. The human and the two robots who trade wisecracks about the movies they watch in the MST 3000 screening room might as well be lobbing spitballs for all the mileage they’re getting out of this one—until escapee Cathy Crosby is caught, and boyfriend Paul Anka has to convince her to go back to the nuns without scratching her, or their, eyes out. “I’ll visit you,” says Paul. Cathy manages a weak smile. “You tell me what your favorite song is,” Paul says, “and I’ll come up and sing it to you.” From the peanut gallery: “You know ‘White Light/White Heat’?”

  MARCH 1995

  1 Alison Krauss, Now That I’ve Found You—A Collection (Rounder, 1987–94) Going pop, bluegrass thrush opens up far more roads than she found on her most luminous recording, which isn’t even here. Some performances are from her own records, some are more inaccessible: covers of the Beatles’ “I Will,” and of Autry Inman’s room-spinning “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby.” Krauss makes you hope you never will.

  2 Mark Merlis, American Studies (Houghton Mifflin) In this unmannered novel, a 62-year-old man, Reeve, lies in a hospital bed, having been beaten nearly to death by a boy he’d picked up. He thinks about his old professor, one Tom Slater—a figure Merlis has based on F. O. Matthiessen, Harvard teacher, communist, homosexual, suicide, and author in 1941 of the classic American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, though here the book is called The Invincible City. All that Slater wanted from life—from love and politics made inseparable—is summed up in his affection for Whitman’s magic word “camerado.” As Reeve thinks through the past, he nails its every vanity—of the left, the university, the famous book, of the closeted professor and his salon of golden youths. But no matter how distant, or evanescent, or false, the image of utopia the long-dead professor raised before his eyes cannot be erased: “The seminar above all, that famous seminar of his, that he first had the audacity to call ‘American Studies.’ Nowadays that means dissertations on ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ But that wasn’t what Tom meant at all. . . . For him there were, perhaps, three hundred Americans in as many years. They dwelt together in a tiny village, Cambridge/Concord/Mannahatta, Puritans and Transcendentalists exchanging good mornings, and Walt Whitman peeping in the windows. . . . He had made a little country of his own. . . . As Jefferson thought it would take a millennium to settle the continent, so we thought it would take forever just to cut a few paths through the forest primeval of nineteenth-century letters. . . . Even I felt, with Tom and his real students, like a conquistador, staking my claim on the imagined America that lived in that little room.”

  For Reeve, this memory, as metaphor, can give meaning to any incident of sex or history, or can take away whatever meaning he might have found in such incidents: can find them wanting. And this is the meaning of his life. It’s a terrible paradox, the essential paradox of art and criticism, and I have never seen it rendered with such flesh and spirit, in such a good story.

  3 PJ Harvey, To Bring You My Love (Island) On her best album she rides a broomstick she hasn’t used before: a thick, heavy, pansexual voice. On “I Think I’m a Mother” it can feel like a man’s. The music is forbidding—dare you enter these portals?—but while the sound is never transparent, sometimes Harvey seems to sing through herself, and then the sound is opaque, almost open, ivory.

  4 Martin Scorsese, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1968, Warner Home Video) First feature for both Scorsese and Harvey Keitel, and the most violent sequences are typically shot silent but scored with a song—the Channels’ slow doo-wop “The Closer You Are,” say. At first this seems to make no sense: what’s on the screen is a rape, physically vicious but emotionally even more so. It’s as if the woman is against all reason holding onto the perfect promises the Channels made, that she thought the guy with her made—until, finally, long before the rape is over, she lets those promises go. Then, on the soundtrack, the song begins to break up, to shred.

  5 Team Dresch, Personal Best (Chainsaw/Candy Ass) Fast, prickly, with screams ambushing lilts and an ineradicable feel for the beat in tunes that seem made to disguise it. A press release brags that this female four-piece “only play all ages shows and queer bars,” but they could play anywhere they want.

  6 Little Axe, The Wolf That House Built (Okeh/Epic) Little Axe is a group led by singer/guitarist Skip McDonald, Wolf is Chester Burnett, house is the music, and too often in this collage all is indistinct. There are small moments of sampled vision: the surging rhythm that begins with a brakeman announcing “All aboard, all aboard,” which itself kicks up the riff Robert Johnson used to open “Preaching Blues,” which never sounded so cool as it does here.

  7 Pocket Fisherman, Future Gods of Rock (Sector 2) The bassist quit for a group called Jesus Christ Superfly. He was smart.

  8 Clinton Bottling Works, “ClinTonic” (ca. 1870–1935, on display at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, N.Y.C.) Raspberry soda bottle discovered at the site in 1993. Shouldn’t this be in the White House? Maybe there’s a drop left.

  9 Birney Imes, Whispering Pines (Mississippi) Color photographs of a Mississippi bar—often, shots of mementos stored in cigar boxes, with one item sneaking out, a yellowed news clipping, likely from the late ’50s, possibly from the early ’60s: “Singer Charged in Mississippi—Negro Rock and Roll Star Denies He Asked For Date From Girl.” “Charles ‘Chuck’ Berry” has been “jailed without bond” and transferred from the police station to the county jail “for his own safety”; a “20-year-old girl” is “near hysteria” after the incident; the dateline is Meridian, from where, in June 1964, came the news of the disappearance of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and later the news of the discovery of their bodies.

  10 Alison Krauss & Union Station, “Two Highways,” from Two Highways (Rounder, 1989) Her most luminous recording. I think.

  APRIL 1995

  1 Nicole Eisenman, Alive with Pleasure, 1992–94, installation, “In a Different Light” (University Art Museum, Berkeley, through April 9) In this big wall assemblage of ads, doll parts, and Eisenman’s own cartoons, the famous 16th-century image of a naked Diana Poitiers pinching her sister’s nipple stands out, mainly because Eisenman has printed “slut” on D. P.’s chest, thus introducing I’École de Fontainebleu to riot grrrl. “Early on,” Simon Reynolds and Joy Press write in their new The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Harvard), “some daubed slogans and words with lipstick on their bodies,” and they quote Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill: “When you take off your shirt [onstage] the guys think, ‘Oh, what a slut’ and it’s really funny because they think that and then they look at you and it says it.” All of which is probably subsumed by the Beavis and Butt-head episode where the boys are watching Sheena Easton’s video for “Sugar Walls.” “She did Prince,” Butthead says. “And she dresses like a slut.” “Prince makes all his women dress like sluts,” Beavis says. “That’s why I like him,” Butt-head says. “He has a vision.”

  2 Mike Seeger, Third Annual Farewell Reunion (Rounder) A long day’s Appalachian picnic, with Seeger gathering 23 performances by fiddlers,
banjoists, mouth-bow players, and singers he’s worked with from the ’50s to now—siblings Pete and Peggy Seeger, Bob Dylan, Jimmie Driftwood, Jean Ritchie, many more. The best music is mountain air, the weather shifting in an instant but never really changing, and in its cleanest moments—“Oldtime Sally Ann,” with the late Tommy Jarrell on fiddle, Paul Brown on banjo, and Seeger on guitar—pointing toward paradise on earth. “I strive for really traditional-feeling sounds,” Seeger writes, “some of which may have never previously existed.”

  3 Mazzy Star, “Halah” (Capitol) Escaping from the 1990 She Hangs Brightly album, an unlikely FM hit, and also weird—cool trash on the order of Joanie Sommers’ 1962 “Johnny Get Angry,” and it may hold up as well. Languorously negotiating the sand dunes of the verses, Hope Sandoval sounds like Elizabeth Wurtzel looks on the jacket of Prozac Nation (“a Playboy bunny as St. Sebastian,” a friend put it), but on the tag-lines (“Baby won’t you change your mind,” which finally turns into “Baby I wish I was dead”) she sounds like Julie Delpy looks anywhere.

  4 Jerry Lee Lewis, interviewed on The History of Rock ’n’ Roll (Time-Life Video & Television, 11 March) For his fabulous impression of William Burroughs.

  5 Sleater-Kinney, Kaia, Eileen Myles, Tattle Tale, Ruby Falls, Azalia Snail, Move Into the Villa Villakula (Villa Villakula) Stumbles and bruised knees (punctuated by singer-songwriter Kaia finding the right riff in “Off,” or the New York combo Ruby Falls investigating a small mystery in “Spanish Olive”) cover most of this compilation, but Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker, formerly of Heavens to Betsy, may have the most distinctive, demanding voice in pop music today, and once you’ve learned to hear it, every inflection, every silence, tells secrets and wrestles demons. As she muses over the words “When I hear that old song . . . ,” you realize the old song is the song she’s singing, but she’s already put more than a feeling into Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”—try theory, history, fortune-telling.

  6 Red Krayola, The Red Krayola (Drag City) Leader Mayo Thompson remains as dour as ever—this is a man who once called an album The Parable of Arable Land. But the beat is often so odd, and so impossible to shake, that you might find yourself trying to keep time well after a song is over, even into the next track, which really confuses things.

  7 Fakes, Real Fiction (Chainsaw) An artfully crude rock opera about child abuse, orchestrated by Kathleen Hanna but whip-cracked three times by the is-it-real-or-is-it-recovered-memory testimony of Billie Strain (“Held”), Sue Fox (“Burnt Girl”), and Angie (“Secret Weapon”), not to mention Phyllis, credited as the Voice of Reason. “Why do the indie boys like women who sing like angels or children?” asks a jacket note; these women sound like people you hear talking on the street, every day.

  8 Bush, “Everything Zen,” from Sixteen Stone (Trauma) Inflamed. Less ugly and less elegant than Nine Inch Nails, but more convincing.

  9 Shawn Colvin, “Viva Las Vegas,” on Till the Night Is Gone—A Tribute to Doc Pomus (Forward/Rhino) Sheryl Crow really is everywhere: as if she can’t help herself, Colvin turns “Viva Las Vegas” into “Leaving Las Vegas.” And comes out ahead of the song.

  10 Guy Debord, Mémoires (Les Belles Lettres, Paris) When Debord shot himself last November 30, he had completed the return to print of almost all his published work, including this legendary book: a collage of commonplace illustrations and text fragments, none containing a word Debord had written, all overpainted by Asger Jorn in bright colors, the result being an accurate and poetic account of Debord’s life in Paris in 1952 and 1953: a time and a place, as he wrote elsewhere, “where the negative held court.” The drifting streaks of paint, the looming fields of white space, the half-sentences chasing their missing endings and being forced to settle for yet another sentence’s beginning—the pleasure of nostalgia was already there in 1958, when the book first appeared, and it is present now, along with the cold wit that led Debord to disguise an altogether readable book as an unreadable antibook. “ ‘I wanted to speak the language of my century,’ ” Debord quoted the last line of Mémoires in his 1993 introduction to this 2,300-copy reissue, not quite quoting himself. “I wasn’t so concerned with being heard.”

  SUMMER 1995

  1 K. McCarty, “Walking the Cow,” on Dead Dog’s Eyeball: Songs of Daniel Johnston (Bar None) Late of Austin’s Glass Eye, Kathy McCarty here dedicates herself to a whole album’s worth of compositions by the Austin idiot sacré. Most often the oddity of the tunes falls short of their length, but McCarty’s breathless dive into “Walking the Cow” comes without warning, and for its 3 minutes 13 seconds no warning could catch her. The singer has escaped from the asylum. She has you by the throat, and the only thing more crazy than her eyes is her reasonableness. You can’t even croak back, but her voice is full, her madness audible only in the farthest curves of a bending phrase; a true rock ’n’ roll string section raises a wall of sound and puts your back up against it. You don’t know me, but right now we have to walk the cow. You do understand this, don’t you? If you don’t understand this, you do understand that the singer has only a second to get her words out before she forgets what they mean.

  2 Beatles, “Baby It’s You,” from Live at the BBC (Apple/Capitol, recorded 1963) “Cheat, cheat”—they get as much into those two words as the world got out of “A Day in the Life.”

  3 Richard Candida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California (University of California) This chronicle of the emergence of an avant-garde in California after World War II maintains a magical balance between empathy and skepticism; it is a very long book that never begins to suggest it is exhausting its subject. While not effacing the events or cultural movements of the world at large, the book, like its subjects (in greatest detail, Kenneth Rexroth, Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Wallace Berman, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Robert Duncan), escapes them. What comes forth is a sense of an attenuated but vibrant public life—even if the circle of friends you showed your work to was your public, even if your public life was a public secret, a secret you weren’t sure you wanted to make public and likely as not couldn’t make public even if the desire was there. “What was left then was to operate as a dream substratum within American society, influencing without being recognized. . . . The rejection of the world as it is flings one into an otherworldly limbo between heaven and hell. By choosing retreat the avant-garde transformed themselves into a reservoir of pure tendentiousness that would become increasingly attractive and relevant as the mechanisms for extracting consensus in American society collapsed. Like [DeFeo’s] The Rose, the avant-garde of the beat era was less a definable image than a response waiting to be activated.”

  4 Sally Timms, To the Land of Milk & Honey (Feel Good All Over) Except for a romantic, retitled cover of Jackie DeShannon’s 1964 “When You Walk in the Room,” the 35-year-old Mekons veteran less sings her songs than drifts through them, world-weary, expecting nothing from the future but time. When she calls up an afternoon in Central Park with “the Grateful Dead performing for the Czar,” she sounds far better acquainted with the latter than with the former.

  5 Laurie Anderson, The Ugly One with the Jewels and Other Stories—A Reading from “Stories from the Nerve Bible” (Warner Bros.) The Book of Revelation, retold in the voice of Goodnight Moon. To begin with. Her best album.

  6–7 Andreas Ammer, FM Einheit and Ulrike Haage, Apocalypse Live (Reine Ego/Rough Trade Records, Herne, Germany) and Yabby U, King Tubby’s Prophesy of Dub (Blood & Fire reissue, Ducie House, Manchester, UK, recorded 1976) More Revelation remakes, this time formally so, complete with ancient woodcuts and portraits of prophets and saints. Apocalypse is an English-German radio play, by turns hilarious and Wagnerian, with music from ’50s refrigerator commercials, Bible movies, and the sound of collapsing mountains alternating with the spiels of an American huckster and a continental theologian, both selling the end of the world. Prophesy is a Jamaican meditation, positing the end of the world because the composer, Vivian Jackson, seems alr
eady to have survived the great event. As such the music is the perfection of a form, or a perfect statement of redundancy: all dub is a version of Revelation.

  8 Violent Green, Eros (Up) Offering homages to Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith and sounding like neither, this rough three-piece is interested more in drama than in sound, more in sound than in songs; track by track they seem interested less in music than in ritual. Singer-guitarist Jennifer Olay might have a soulmate in Come’s Thalia Zedek, but while Come’s recent gestures toward conventional rhythms suggest an acknowledgment that a band is completed by an audience, Violent Green’s conventional rhythms seem like a setup: eliciting the conventional expectations of a listener, the band can then dissolve them. The rhythms don’t disappear, they simply cease to matter. As the disc moves on, what at first was vague begins to feel dangerous. Olay’s deep, burred voice erases whatever face you might have mentally attached to it. That is the rite—the removal of all ego, all personality, the merging of whoever’s playing and whoever’s listening into a single, pagan smear: “the long slow suck,” as Camille Paglia once called it.

  9 Elastica, Elastica (DGC) Like Veruca Salt, the Breeders, and Belly, they’re female-dominated and photogenic—here the guy plays drums and looks like David Byrne. The difference is that they’re English and the vocals are less cute, though even more colorless. The album could be an A+ senior thesis—on Wire, the Buzzcocks, and other avatars of arty punk—by a student who’s got her professor’s number; there’s not a moment that hasn’t been calculated, fussed over, and bled dry. One spin and the music is used up.

  Like their market-niche peers, Elastica know how to preen. Like Veruca et al. they might have been designed for cover stories, even if all they have to sell is attitude—which is short of posture, which is short of stance, which is short of position, which is short of action, which is short of blood on the floor, which is to say short of Heavens to Betsy. The attitude Elastica and the others are selling is that the last thing on their minds is a good pop song, like Veruca Salt’s “Seether”—cool, disdainful, hip, those high, high voices instantly catching your ear and then refusing to let go. Within days (if not hours) the performance has turned into an irritation that reveals its genius: this was a jingle before it was a song, and so effective a jingle that it’s as if the number had already been licensed to promote something else. “Seether” is its own commercial, and what it’s advertising is commercial space for the likes of Elastica, the Breeders, Belly, or Veruca Salt—in other words, the bands are their own commercials.