Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  10 Anheuser-Busch, Cross Roads Beer (“Where Substantial Flavor and Easy Drinking Meet”) Or, where Robert Johnson meets yet another incarnation of the Devil: in the TV commercial, as white folk frolic over this insipid beer, a Cream-style version of the Mississippi bluesman’s 1936 signature tune pounds the message straight out of the frame. Who gets the money?

  JANUARY 1997

  1 Michael Ventura, The Death of Frank Sinatra (Henry Holt) Ventura’s third novel: a Las Vegas family detective story that’s nervous and delicate even in its most brutal scenes. The tale moves from the Bugsy Siegel days to the present, catching the emergence of a culture made out of mob murder, sex clubs, atom-bomb tests, the specter of JFK, and Dean Martin’s last drink. America’s highest ideals rest on the same moral plane as the grimiest sleaze, Showgirls’ Elizabeth Berkley mouthing phrases from Lincoln as she goes through the motions. Near the end of the book, Sinatra comes onstage, an old man, and makes a miracle: “Then on a high note the voice cracked, and for an instant the music soured, and the audience flinched as one person, but instead of retreating from that bad sound Sinatra leaned into it . . .” There’s the feeling that in the American desert two utopias were founded, two great, queer cities that in some irreducible way remain as they began, outside the law—the other place being Salt Lake City.

  2 Sheryl Crow, “On the Outside,” from Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X Files (Warner Bros.) Her voice is slow, heavy, and subtle—conscious, not self-conscious, which is appropriate for this sliver of a really bad dream, the sort of dream that, when you wake, is about only one thing: your inability to remember anything but dread.

  3 Sarge, Charcoal (Mud Records) Women speak the harsh, desperate language of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son in the songs of this Illinois punk trio (“I walked into the bar where you hung out/24 and I still hadn’t figured it out/Eight months pregnant and sick with all these lies”) but there’s a will to speak a more commonplace language in Elizabeth Elmore’s singing and guitar playing. There’s as much old Van Halen in her sound as Gang of Four.

  4 Mystery Science Theater 3000, “The Sinister Urge” (Comedy Central) The film that the human and two robots are watching has something to do with ’50s smut peddlers and a mad killer on the loose. Everything is hesitant and stumbling and clumsy, to the point where a zero-IQ cop surveys a crime scene and says, “There is . . .” And with his pause seemingly a wait for someone, anyone, to throw him his next line, robot number one pipes up, perfectly matching Eric Burdon’s pause at the beginning of the Animals’ first big hit: “. . . a house, in New Orleans . . .” “That’s why Ed Wood gets final cut,” says the other robot.

  5 Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watch-tower,” from The Concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Columbia) For the moment, the only licensed recorded proof that what Dylan and his shocker of a combo (Winston Watson, Tony Garnier, Bucky Baxter, John Jackson) were doing onstage in 1995 was more than an illusion; and, until they release Having a Rave Up with Bob Dylan, the only proof that reinventing yourself in your fifties as a lead guitarist embracing syncopation as the source of all values is a brilliant idea.

  6 Collins Kids, Rockin’ on T.V. (Krazy Kat, UK) Like most rockabilly outfits without hits in their time, Larry and Lorrie don’t come near their pseudolegend. For that matter, Larry was a clod. These thirty-one 1957–61 transcriptions are just OK—until the Kids get to Buddy Holly’s “Oh Boy!” and the world blows up. Larry sings—and Lorrie hiccups into an orgasmic frenzy so absolute and unstoppable it can suck you into your speakers.

  7 Ellen Lupton and Elaine Lustig Cohen, Letters from the Avant Garde: Modern Graphic Design (Princeton Architectural Press) Stationery, most of it from between the wars. The best of it is De Stijl with a Dada touch, as in the ’20s work of Piet Zwart, whose motto was, “The more uninteresting a letter, the more useful it is to the typographer.” It certainly sums up the letterhead he designed for the Netherlands Cable Works.

  8 R. L. Burnside, A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey (Matador) Mississippi bluesman who makes John Lee Hooker sound like Kenneth Tynan gets together with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, who make Canned Heat sound like the Kronos Quartet. The results make Jon Spencer Blues Explosion records sound like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion records.

  9 Sleater-Kinney, Call the Doctor (Chainsaw) Then put this on; you’ll never hear the doctor call back, but by the time she does you won’t need her, or you’ll be beyond help. A punk breakout of unparalleled ferocity, body, and balance, and the best album of 1996.

  10 M. Dolors Genovès, Europa de postguerra, 1945–1965 Art després del diluvi (Postwar Europe, 1945–1965 Art after the deluge), a documentary video included in “Europa de postguerra, 1945–1965. Art després del diluvi” (Fundació “la Caixa” and Televisió de Catalunya, Barcelona, 1995) All Genovès does is orchestrate stock footage from the postwar period—or rather she orchestrates the social war that followed the shooting war, using pop culture to undercut the authority and pomposity of official culture. Top of the pops: On The Ed Sullivan Show, Elvis Presley is performing “Hound Dog,” smiling through the tinny kinescope sound. Genovès cuts simultaneously into the hard fullness of the studio recording of “Hound Dog” and to footage of Soviet commissars filling a steep auditorium, wildly pounding their fists as if in a mad attempt to keep time. The line “You said that you was high class, well, that was just a lie” comes up; Genovès cuts to shots of Eisenhower, the Pope, de Gaulle. And then back to Elvis, who, mission accomplished, takes a bow.

  FEBRUARY 1997

  1 DJ Shadow, Endtroducing . . . . (Mowax/ffrr) This all-sampled reflection of a “lifetime of vinyl culture” is best heard as a double LP; it’s more of a thing than the CD version, takes up more space, gets in the way, makes you interrogate it more physically. Musically, it’s a throwback, straight to the beginnings of recorded hip-hop—to Grandmaster Flash’s 1980 “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.” It’s also absolutely modern—which is to say ambient-dreamy and techno-abstract. Quite brilliant throughout, it resurrects the body only on the 9:21 “Stem/Long Stem,” which combines a gorgeous, unspeakably beckoning riff from the ether with what sounds like dialogue from the opening pages of an old James Ellroy mystery, just before everything gets really bad. Not to be confused with DJ Spooky, one of the great bores of our time.

  2 John Parish & Polly Jean Harvey, “Who Will Love Me Now” (Island) A fourth track sliding off the single “That Was My Veil”—a slow ballad, as if from the end of a war, a woman bidding farewell to everything she ever cared about. Very European, very cinematic, and unlike anything else Harvey has done.

  3–4 The Rolling Stones, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” & “Sympathy for the Devil,” from The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (Abkco CD and video) Mick Jagger may have gone farther into his music than on this night in 1968, but if he did the proof has not survived.

  5 Wendy Brenner, “My Ex-Fiancé” (essay in The Oxford American, August/September, 1996) Her ex-fiancé ran a comedy club/avant-garde theater in Chicago; he was odd, scary, beautiful, sexually ambiguous, needy, and alluring. When he decided to move to Arizona, “to get his act together,” Brenner recalls, “for a while I made plans to follow him, but in the end I stayed in Chicago, and shortly thereafter I met a young prosecutor who offered all my exfiancé could not: idealism, clear skin and eyes, strict heterosexuality, and a graduate degree from an Ivy League school. . . . He worshipped Bruce Springsteen and often quoted from his songs. He fought for the little guy. The world tries to beat you down, he said. You’ve gotta fight to keep the wolves at bay. C’mon Wendy, champs like us, etc.”

  “So I moved in with him and everything went fine until an argument we had one evening that started with me saying I thought ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ was a joke, and ended with him holding me by the throat with one hand and cracking the back of my head against the hardwood floor, over and over, alternately spitting in my face and shouting at me that I would never unders
tand Bruce because I’d never suffered, never had to live in the real world,” as Bob Dole so famously put it last summer, unless it was respectable fascist novelist Mark Helprin speaking through him. “I’d grabbed for order, for safety,” Brenner says. “I’d somehow managed to invite the wolf right inside my door, without even knowing it.”

  6 Iris Dement, The Way I Should (Warner Bros.) DeMent’s third album revolves around “Wasteland of the Free,” a protest song that if not for its drive and sincerity would drown in its own disgust, and the title song, a ditty about self-affirmation that after two or three plays feels as big as a house. “I’ll tell you why we won’t play this,” a DJ said to DeMent’s husband about a new DeMent single, speaking of his station’s format. “It’s too country. We only play Real Country.” (From Nicholas Dawidoff’s In the Country of Country, Pantheon.)

  7 Social Distortion, White Light White Heat White Trash (550 Music/Epic) The kind of punk Mike Ness and his band play is now so traditional it might be folk music. They’re living up to their name, both as effect and cause, as fate and goal.

  8 Nirvana, “The End,” from Complete Cover Versions (bootleg) A 2:17 onstage compression of the 11:35 1967 Doors classic, here featuring Krist Novoselic and set mostly in a Waffle House. Surrounded by tunes originally cut by Kiss, the Wipers, Led Zeppelin, the Who, and the Meat Puppets, it’s a reminder that the trio’s disdain was as funny turned outward as it was awful turned inward.

  9 Pauline Kael, Conversations with Pauline Kael, ed. Will Brantley (Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi) Criticism—not how, but why.

  10 Lars Von Trier, Breaking the Waves (October Films) This is the worst sort of art-house swill—sub-Ingmar Bergman infused with the spirit of Joan Osborne’s “One of Us”—but the intertitles introducing each “chapter” are weird. Glowing, romantic landscapes worked up with painter Per Kirkeby unfold almost like blooming flowers in time-lapse photography; each one is accompanied by a pop song, so glossy and bright on the soundtrack it might be a commercial. The songs have something to do with the heroine’s holy madness: when asked by her church elders if outsiders have ever brought anything good to her isolated, blasted Scottish village, she shyly replies, “Their music.” Just as Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way from Memphis” almost upends the movie as it begins, David Bowie’s exquisite “Life on Mars?” almost seals it at the end. But with Chapter 5 comes Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” in its dreadful, preening vanity really the perfect song for this film, and the fact that it was chosen at all should have given the game away. Nobody seems to be getting the joke.

  MARCH 1997

  1 Warren Zevon, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (An Anthology) (Rhino) The songs on this dauntingly solid two-CD retrospective—roughly crafted, built-to-last artifacts of a rounder’s wasted life—come across as an unacknowledged pop anchor, a bad conscience, a refusal to go away. Across the years the bravado of muscled rhythm may yield to melody, to the hidden surges in “Looking for the Next Best Thing” or “Suzie Lightning,” but the change is just lines on a face; the singer doesn’t change. In 1976 with “Desperados Under the Eaves,” Zevon asks you to listen to the air conditioner humming in his room in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel—humming “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the same time; in 1995 “Mutineer” is as defiant and as lost. Along the way there is a magnificent “Mohammed’s Radio,” a 1980 live recording that becomes the ruined bohemians’ drinking song the Rolling Stones’ “Salt of the Earth” was meant to be; on this all-night show you can hear the future calling even as the past pulls you down. “Even Jimmy Carter’s got the highway blues,” Zevon cries, half laughing, half shocked, and you can see the president looking at the Ayatollah Khomeini over one shoulder and Ronald Reagan over the other, standing somewhere in the middle of Nevada, the radiator of his empty limousine boiling over, his thumb in the air.

  2 Oval, 94Diskont (Thrill Jockey) The claims this German techno trio make in their manifestos/PR copy read like parodies of Mike Meyers’ Saturday Night Live Prussian hipster Dieter hosting his poststructuralist dance party “Sprockets.” Their fave aesthetic categories seem to be “offensive” and “disobident” (read that as “disobedient” at your peril; it’s probably a new concept), and the calming, vaguely threatening ambient fields they depict are steps ahead of contemporaneous anti-dance music. Still, rather than the intended proofs of the obsolescence of music as we know it, what Oval make are proofs of the existence of a realm where music has always done its work, the subconscious.

  3 Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village—Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester University Press/St. Martin’s) Unsentimental throughout, and startling when Boyes turns over the ideological stone of folk authenticity circa 1936 and forces the insects beneath it into the light. The genteel folk-dance summer camps of a movement born with John Ruskin and Morris dancing made common cause with Nazism; the search for the eternal Folk at the heart of a true England turned into an openly fascist precursor of the present day Men’s Movement, with bands of brothers possessed of “The Secret of Memory” and dancing the Sword Dance, deep in the woods around their leaping fires. All “are consumed,” Rolf Gardiner wrote in The English Folk Dance Tradition, “by one fluid, electric, purging, flame of ecstasy, an exaltation, a cathartic frenzy, impossible to convey in words to one who has not experienced it.” And then it gets worse.

  4–5 Koerner, Ray & Glover, Blues, Rags & Hollers (Red House reissue, 1963) and One Foot in the Groove (Tim/Kerr) Thirty-four years ago, a Twin Cities folk blues trio—guitarists John Koerner and Dave Ray, har-monica player Tony Glover—put out an album that today feels like ice breaking. The follow-up, recorded live on home ground, sounds not late but patient, all practical humor (“France Blues,” “Pick Poor Robin Clean”) and, with “Shenandoah,” a nostalgia beyond dreams.

  6 Waco Brothers, Cowboy in Flames (Bloodshot) Deconstruct the signifiers in the group name, the record title, and the label and you’re halfway through the music, British country without apologies. The only stuff not coded is the thrill, the ride.

  7 Mick Lasalle, “No Love Lost for Worst of ’96” (San Francisco Chronicle, film wrap-up, 3 January) On The Evening Star, “with Juliette Lewis, looking as fresh-faced and wholesome as a dead blues singer . . .”

  8 John J. Strauss and Ed Decter, Creators/executive producers, Chicago Sons (NBC, Wednesdays, 8:30 PM) Speaking of dead blues singers, this sitcom about three bumbling brothers made me laugh a couple of times, but it hit home in one of the promos that aired earlier—where behind the it’s-a-guy-thing antics you could hear someone turning Robert Johnson’s 1936 “Sweet Home Chicago” into theme music indistinguishable from the Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You” on Friends.

  9 Wieden and Kennedy, Ad for Nike’s Air Penny Basketball Shoe (The Times Magazine, London, 23 November 1996) “This is Penny Hardaway,” it says next to a small picture of the Orlando Magic star. “He is not a marketing commodity and he is not a puppet”—i.e., shut up. Then the piece gets down to business: “listen: If you have a toothache, you don’t call an interior decorator. If you’re dirty, you don’t turn on the vacuum cleaner. If you make athletic shoes, you don’t ask referees or podgy sports writers how to make them better. If this is not perfectly clear we can come to your house and spray paint it on your walls in English, French, Italian or Esperanto.” In other words, if you don’t understand this ad, call Nike and they’ll send you an interior decorator?

  10 New York Times (national edition), Dada typesetting in article on Marcel Janco (“Bucharest Rediscovers Houses by a Modernist,” by Jane Perlez, 14 January) “Tristan Tzara and Janco were among the founders of the anti-bourgeois Dada movement in 1916 when they were young art students in Zurich. (In Romanian, Dada movement in 1916 when they were young art students in Zurich. (In Romanian, Dada is ‘yes’ said twice Dada is ‘yes’ said twice . . . ).”

  APRIL 1997

  1 Annie Lennox, “Walking on Broken Glass,” from Diva (Ar
ista, 1992) A decent hit the first time around, now resurfacing on the radio apparently in answer to some request from outer space, this is a perfect pop record, falling somewhere between Marc Cohn’s “Silver Thunderbird” and Connie Francis’ “Lipstick on Your Collar”: a simple, increasingly impassioned arrangement that by the final chorus has all of its parts battling for the right to save the singer from the hell of her lost love. I don’t think they do, though.

  2 Sleater-Kinney, Dig Me Out (Kill Rock Stars) Dense and crowded, even if new drummer Janet Weiss’ quickened beat lets the combo in on more conventional and more shapely rhythms than they’ve used before. Carrie Brownstein presses nagging guitar lines that match the nyah-nyahnyahs of the counter-vocals she pits against Corin Tucker’s leads; as a one-woman chorus Brownstein is half imperious Greek, half impatient Shangri-La, but on “The Drama You’ve Been Craving” she steps out of the background and she and Tucker leap into nameless wildness. The pressure the band has used to shock small clubs around the country is there in “One More Hour,” “Turn It Up,” and “Not What You Want,” this time building from the inside, but pressure is far too one-dimensional a word to describe the attack that takes place in the last cut, “Jenny.” By the end there seems to be nothing standing, not even the singer, not in the desert she’s made of the house in which she began.