Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  3 Dennis Miller, rant on UFOs (Dennis Miller Live, HBO, January 31) “In 1947, something crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Some believe four aliens were discovered at the site, and that their remains, as well as their flying saucer, are being held in an Air Force installation a hundred miles north of Las Vegas known as Area 51. Ufologists insist that the four aliens and their manager Brian Epstein . . .”

  4 Cliff Carlisle, Blues Yodeler and Steel Guitar Wizard (Arhoolie Folklyric) 1930–37 recordings from a man who walked in the footsteps of Jimmie Rodgers (gone by 1933) and whose singing and lap slide guitar playing relaxed into a luxuriousness Rodgers himself could never afford.

  5 Scottie Priesmeyer, The Cheaters—The Walter Scott Murder (Tula Publishing) In 1966 in St. Louis, Walter Scott sang the lead on the weirdly named Bob Kuban and the In-Men’s “The Cheater.” It reached #12 on the national charts, and though it was catchy, even bouncy, there was something insinuating about it too—something disturbing. “Watch out for the cheater,” Scott sang, and while the song played, cheaters seemed to be everywhere, sizing you up. The follow-up album died at #129. The In-Men broke up and went straight, Scott went solo, and nobody ever had another hit—until 1983, when Scott disappeared. Three years later, his body was pulled from a cistern on property owned by Scott’s wife’s new husband, a bullet in his back. What makes Priesmeyer’s ill-written account of this story compelling is not its irony (after years of the case against Scott’s accused killers going nowhere, Bob Kuban formed a band to play a benefit for Tim Braun’s campaign for County prosecutor; Braun won, and then won the case), but its griminess, its low-rent drift away from even small-time glitz and back to the world where ordinary people commit murder for ordinary reasons, to get what they want, right now.

  6 Chris Isaak, Baja Sessions (Reprise) Never mind smalltime—playing the worst donkey-fuck emporium in Tijuana, Isaak would still give off the aura of lost millions.

  7 TBWA/Chiat/Day, Jack’s Jack in the Box commercials (all networks) Dressed in floppy clothes like a ’90s Ozzie Nelson, the big white roundhead was everywhere as the year began, high-fiving with other dads at his kid’s football game, etc., but he only came clean at the gate of Colonel Sanders’ mansion, eager to get the Colonel (didn’t he die?) to taste-test his new Spicy Chicken Sandwich. “The Colonel says go away,” says a voice on the intercom, so Jack turns to go: “He says leave the sandwich.” So Jack leaves the bag and palms the food. “Psyche!” he says, just like a twelve-year-old who’s got it totally down, the smart-aleck comeback turning Jack’s huge, bland grin smug and even slightly sinister. This is real subliminal advertising; in the same way that Joe Camel is a penis, Jack is Bill Gates.

  8 Ray Charles, “I Don’t Need No Doctor” (ABC Records, 1966/KPIX-FM, San Francisco) Running the dial on the car radio, about once a week I can’t believe my luck: tuning into the middle of this relentless, unanswerable plea to the gods of rhythm and love (“He gave me a medicated lotion/But it didn’t sooooooothe my emotion!”), and then Dr. Nancy Snyderman comes on announcing her medical advice show, sounding as if she knows perfectly well one potential patient is out of her reach.

  9 The Rickets, et al., Yo Yo a Go Go (Yoyo) There’s good stuff on this double CD of live recordings from Yoyo’s 1994 Olympia punk fest—Heavens to Betsy’s primitive “Ax Men,” Mecca Normal’s scary “I Walk Alone”—but what moved me was a photo on the inside of the package. It shows Nikki McClure, dressed in a white shift and a funny hat, holding a big black guitar and squinting into the sun, Tae Won Yu of Kicking Giant, fingering his guitar and looking as at-home as anyone could, and Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening in shorts, staring off to one side. They’re in the middle of main street, part of a parade, thirty yards or so up from the Vernor’s float—and more than anything else I know, this picture of patient smiles captures punk: not as art or commerce but as appearance, as the pursuit of a public life on a human scale.

  10 Marianne Faithfull, 20th Century Blues (RCA Victor) In the immortal words of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda: “Bevare! Take care! Bevare!”

  MAY 1997

  1 Eleventh Dream Day, Eighth (Thrill Jockey) Chicago’s most passionate rock ’n’ roll trio on the city’s most avant-garde label—it makes sense, because in its fourteenth year Eleventh Dream Day has moved off the stage and into the realm of a certain abstraction. Muscle and drums are still present, but as gestures and whispers; the pace is slowed. Timeless folk talismans—“salty dog,” “She’ll be comin’ down the mountain, when she comes”—appear in the music like nearly meaningless fragments of an idea that lurks seductively behind them. The doubled voices of guitarist Rick Rizzo and drummer Janet Bean can be as bitter as an all-night argument in its last hour and as ordinary as a conversation overheard on the street, pursuing a realism beyond the reach or perhaps even the desire of anyone else currently making pop records; with bassist Douglas McCombs the whole of their music seems to revolve around a core of receding visions of honor and right, and to take its spirit from getting up in the morning and going to work.

  2 Susan Subtle Dintenfass, curator, Hello Again! A New Wave of Recycled Art and Design (Oakland Museum of California, through July 27) There’s anonymous tramp art from cigar boxes and generic third world unart from automobile tire sandals on up. There’s Jan Yager’s American Breastplate, 1995–97, fashioned from found crack vials and syringes, and Salvatore and Marie’s Alice, 1996, a hilarious little walking clock made out of bent spoons and a pretty cat food can. And outstripping everything else is Nule Giulini’s untitled wedding dress: classically lowcut, with a twenty-foot train, composed entirely of used underwear, which is to say the bride wore gray.

  3 Lush, “Last Night (Darkest Hour Mix),” on City of Industry soundtrack (Quango) From a gangster movie starring the fearsome Timothy Hutton, praying mantis music: a complete ’50s French film noir, as remade last year in Hong Kong. Second feature, same genre: Tricky’s “Overcome.”

  4 Charlatans, “Jack of Diamonds,” on The Amazing Charlatans (Big Beat reissue, 1965–68) They were a quintet of Edwardian gunslingers who came down from Virginia City to kick off San Francisco’s psychedelic years, but their truest music was old-timey, from their epic revision of “Alabama Bound” to this crude, nervous, indelible 1965 rehearsal, a version of “The Cuckoo” that has all the art of a cowboy standing up at a campfire and giving a speech.

  5–6 Dan Bern, Dog Boy Van and Dan Bern (Work/Sony) Bern doesn’t want you to call him “The New Bob Dylan,” and for good reason. “Talkin’ Alien Abduction Blues” (which really ought to have been called “I Shall Be Free 10%”) is “Talkin’ World War III Blues” without wit or bite, while “Estelle,” Bern’s liveliest, most physical performance, is also a shameless rip-off of Dylan’s “Brownsvile Girl”/“New Danville Girl.” Otherwise “New Irritatingly Plain-Folks But Obnoxiously Self-Regarding Post-Generational Voice of His Generation” is more like it: Bern isn’t afraid of big subjects like Kurt Cobain’s suicide or the Oklahoma City bombing, and he isn’t afraid of triteness or sententiousness.

  7 Shirelles, on Homicide (NBC, February 21) Having their 1961 “Dedicated to the One I Love” playing in the background while Detective John Munch investigated the murder of his high-school crush Helen Rosenthal was an almost obvious touch, but the cleanness of Shirley Alston’s voice cutting into the slack, middle-aged bodies that moved through the story was as cruel as life. It’s unlikely anybody anticipated the girls popping up in the last fifteen minutes to apply “Mama Said” to a Pepto-Bismol commercial, though.

  8 Alison Krauss & Union Station, So Long So Wrong (Rounder) Fine, with “It Doesn’t Matter,” a will o’ the wisp in pitch dark—and not far enough removed from the most frightening moment of this year’s Grammy Awards show, beyond the android undulations of Celine Dion. That came when Krauss and her band joined Vince Gill and Patty Loveless for the gospel classic “Working on a Building.” That is, Krauss was announced, but where was she? In place of the most soulful bluegrass singer
of our day stood a pallid, rail-thin blonde, her voice a ghost. It was as if, after Krauss nailed the country charts last year with Now That I’ve Found You, somebody read her the riot act: Honey, you can go all the way, but only if you lose thirty pounds first.

  9 David Lynch, Lost Highway (October Films) This movie has its flaws. Hank Williams’ shadow title song is not acknowledged, the appearance of the “Lost Highway Hotel” is cheesy, as if the film is running its own ad, and the product placement is sloppy (Full Sail ale makes sense at the fancy party, not for Gary Busey’s biker). But the self-loathing that never really leaves Bill Pullman’s face—the look he perfected playing chump husbands in Malice and The Last Seduction—never leaves the picture, either. It’s a grimace that somehow sums up American nihilism at the end of the American century, a sneer that contains knowledge of all the secrets that aren’t worth telling.

  10 Richard Linklater, SubUrbia (Gramercy Pictures) Based on Eric Bogosian’s devastating portrait of lost youth trapped in the decaying wreckage of the modernity of our nation, or, as a patron put it as the credits rolled, “How many times have we seen this movie?”

  SUMMER 1997

  1 Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, “Johnny Cash” on A World Without Dave (Cooking Vinyl America) In the midst of a typically sour travelogue through the post-Thatcher, presumptively pre-Blair (or for that matter post-Blair) ruins of British social life, a pause in a bar. No matter how bitter the singer feels (“The people here should be in a zoo,” he mutters), nothing can rush him, nothing can shade the love he still feels for what life should be. The names this duo use—CUSM, “Jim Bob,” “Fruitbat”—have always been there to disguise the fact that most of all they want to break your heart.

  2 Spice Girls, On Saturday Night Live, April 12 (NBC) Yeah, sure. But this bad?

  3 John Sheinbaum, “Think About What You’re Tryin’ to Do to Me: Rock Historiography and Race-Based Dialectics,” at “Re-pre-sent-ing Rock: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Rock Music and Culture” (Duke University, April 6) In the midst of a passionate, carefully prepared presentation on the critical construction of Aretha Franklin’s “Think” as craft and the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” as art, Sheinbaum, a graduate student at Cornell, noted that while Paul McCartney had asked producer George Martin for a string arrangement in the mode of Vivaldi, what he got “was a lot closer to a Bernard Herrmann film score.” Sheinbaum played a few seconds of the Beatles record; the lights were on, but suddenly everyone in the room was watching Psycho.

  4 Tarnation, Mirador (Reprise) There’s something of Deborah Kara Unger’s face as she appears in Crash in Paula Frazer’s voice: a faraway coldness that’s both alluring and repellent. Neither the singer nor the actress seems absolutely human. The difference is that the deaths Frazer has in her heart are versions of the Carter Family or Roy Orbison, while the deaths Unger’s Catherine has in hers are just versions of herself.

  5 Big Red Ball, “Drown,” on Stuck on AM: Off the Record in Minneapolis (TRG) On a compilation of on-air recordings for the best college radio station imaginable—Radio K, 770 AM in the Twin Cities, daylight hours only—a harsh, accelerating chant from the 1994 “three-Lisa-lineup” of a defunct band who here fall somewhere between Grace Slick’s Great Society in 1966 and the Gang of Four in 1978. I heard it on the radio, along with a solid hour’s worth of other knockouts I’d never heard on the radio, among them a Frank Zappa rant, an eerily distant Heavens to Betsy track, and a ’50s pep talk on clean living.

  6 Fleetwood Mac, “London Live ’68” (Thunderbolt/Magnum) An audience recording, maybe even a bootleg, and a zero, until halfway in guitarist Peter Green locks into Willie Dixon’s “I Don’t Know Which Way to Go” and you realize he never will.

  7–8 Bettie Serveert, Dust Bunnies (Matador) Cool. But their “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” from the I Shot Andy Warhol soundtrack (Atlantic), is not cool. It’s sweet, but inside that sweetness Carol van Dijk is so defeated she’s singing less to any lover than to all the now-dead souls in Mary Harron’s movie, swaying back and forth so relentlessly that a song Bob Dylan wrote thirty-two years ago for Nico sounds like a song Liz Phair wrote for herself.

  9 Paradisette (Stockholm), Diesel for Successful Living postcard (free postcard racks everywhere) In his day, Stalin had the heads of purged generals cut out of photos and new faces pasted in; now Diesel, for reasons of its own, offers the famous Yalta photo of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Uncle Joe, all smiling, and, through the magic of digital technology, with superleggy babes draped all over them. I think it’s a subliminal ad for the Spice Girls—proof that along with the present, they rule the past.

  10 Dana Bryant, et al., Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro (Astor Place) The ’60s singer-songwriter received respectful notices when she died earlier this year, but don’t let that fool you: as this tribute album insists, saint was always her shtick. “Her concerts were religious experiences,” writes producer Peter Gallway. “Laura gowned, surrounded by roses, alone in purple light at the grand piano. Her style, her holiness, her reclusivity, her high standards became the stuff of legend. Her records were even more intimate, more natural”—and the world recoils almost as one: “ ‘More natural?’ ” Many of those who wouldn’t recoil are included on this pre-posthumous production: admirers from Jane Siberry to Sweet Honey in the Rock, Rosanne Cash to Suzanne Vega. They all sound mannered and self-conscious (gosh, wonder why), all offering little encomiums of their own. Only Lisa Germano avoids embarrassment: “I thought it’d be refreshing to do a song about somebody else’s boyfriend for a change.”

  SEPTEMBER 1997

  1 John Cale, Eat/Kiss: Music for the Films by Andy Warhol (Hannibal) Chamber music that in the eleven-movement sequence for Kiss (1963) runs from the austere to the severely trashy. The four-part piece for Eat (1964) is deadly dull, but so much so you hardly notice it’s there, or that the movies aren’t.

  2 Amy Sedaris, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, by the Talent Family (Lincoln Center Festival, New York City, July 8–11) Sedaris plays both a witch (Theresa from Flathurst) and an animal (Donkey) as hillbillies, and she plays hillbillies as creatures who have discovered that the quickest route to true communication is obscenity: as weary irony, as a wallow in the mud, it doesn’t matter. Not only does the donkey prove Sedaris’ case, unlike almost every other character in this little play, it lives.

  3 Kenny Bill Stinson & the Ark-La Mystics, Festival of American Folklife (Washington DC, July 4) Performing as part of the “Mississippi Delta” subsection—along with Memphis legend Rufus Thomas and some pretty bad blues players—this loose and rangy rockabilly outfit had the right song for Independence Day: Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.,” so full of longing you could almost feel you weren’t home. With leader Stinson all ease and guitarist Kevin Gordon all effort, the band got where it meant to go every time. My favorite moment came not with Stinson’s from-the-ground-up Jerry Lee Lewis covers or Gordon’s own “Blue Collar Dollar,” but when Stinson claimed drummer Paul Griffith’s hometown as Waterproof, Louisiana—probably the last thing you could call any town in Louisiana, let alone one in the delta. It’s not on any map I’ve got, but maybe that’s where the second part of the band’s name comes in.

  4 Jonathan Lethem, As She Climbed Across the Table (Doubleday) A third novel that starts slowly but turns out to be as good as its title—if not quite as sexy.

  5 Saints, “Messin’ with the Kid,” from The Most Primitive Band in the World (Hot/Restless) The Saints were Australia’s original punk band; their 1977 I’m Stranded seemed definitive on release. This 1974 recording has more in common with what Peter Laughner was doing with Pere Ubu in Cleveland about the same time: striking matches in a self-created dankness, the dankness courtesy of the Rolling Stones’ “Sway.”

  6 Don Bolles, Don Bolles Presents “I’m Just the Other Woman,” MSR Madness Vol. #4). “Song-poem music,” states producer Don Bolles of the results of the small-ad scam where frustrated small-ad readers are seduced into
sending off their heartfelt scribblings to a concern that will “set them to music,” for a very reasonable fee, “is one of the richest motherlodes of pure unfiltered glorious wrongness to be found in any field of human endeavor. I believe in that statement so firmly that I am willing to die for it.” Now that, you might say to the former drummer of LA’s by-now nearly mythical Germs, is punk—but only before you’ve played Bolles’ compilation of what the MSR company did for its would-be George Gershwins and Neil Sedakas. Some of the numbers—mildly insane rambles sung as if they were Tony Bennett album filler—are charmingly odd. Then you come up against “The Will of God,” written by Dan Ash-wander, sung pleasantly enough by Keith Bradford. This, you accept some time after you’ve realized it, is God Himself’s attempt to get Himself a hit record, while also stopping “the evil German race” and its plan for “a secret Nazi dictatorship,” a pairing that as Bradford renders it could almost be “moon” and “spoon.”

  7 Alan Lomax, producer, Southern Journey (Rounder) A thirteen-volume reissue of Lomax’s historic recordings of gospel, blues, breakdowns, etc., and the Heisenberg Principle was never more in effect: the sound is as sterile as the performances are formal.

  8 Guided by Voices, “I am a Tree,” from Mag Earwhig! (Matador) It’d be a step up.

  9 Midway Stadium/Ticketmaster, advertisement for upcoming concert (City Pages, June 18) You know how in the ads for once-mighty rock heroes now reduced to playing local bars you’ve never heard of, the promoter always sticks the title of the one big hit under the marquee name, since you might remember the song even if you’ve forgotten who did it: Every Mother’s Son (“Come on Down to My Boat”)—Gino’s No Cover One Nite Only? But this was a shock, and for a show at the Minnesota State Fair, no less: