Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  7 44 Long, Collect Them All (Schizophrenic) Brian Berg is at home in Richard Manuel territory—think of “Whispering Pines” on The Band—but more often he and his Portland bandmates are cowboys seeking a Western. They get it in “Undertaker” (“I lost my faith,” Berg testifies, as if all good stories start right here), which could have inspired Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man if it isn’t the other way around.

  8 Carl Hiassen, Lucky You (Knopf) Centering on two poisonous Florida losers who form their own Aryan militia, the White Rebel Brotherhood—which they soon discover is also the name of a mostly black hip-hop band beloved by half the people they meet, most notably their kidnap victim, Amber Bernstein, a Hooters waitress who keeps asking them what they think of WRB’s “Nut Cutting Bitch,” her favorite song.

  9 Alaine M. Labauve, “Louisiana Highway 1: Images” (Louisiana State Museum, Presbytere, New Orleans, through May 24, 1998) From composition to printing LaBauve is a stunningly dull photographer, but in this gallery of roadside shots one stood out, oddness poking through the obviousness: a ruined bar, half-reclaimed by the wild growth around it and dominated by a huge ad, almost a mural, for Old Milwaukee Beer. It was testament to how quickly time can pass, with a beer that didn’t even come on the market until the ’70s appearing as far gone as a brand name in a WPA photo by Walker Evans.

  10 Patti Smith, Peace and Noise (Arista) With an album dedicated to personal losses behind her, here Smith steps out as a universal mother of death, mourning among others Ginsberg, Burroughs, massacred Tibetans, the Heaven’s Gate crew, and with such self-importance you get the feeling a death doesn’t really count until Smith has blessed it. And yet “Last Call,” the Heaven’s Gate number, has murmurs of danger; the 10:34 “Memento Mori” touches the Rolling Stones’ “Goin’ Home” and catches the momentum of a Jim Morrison rant. What remains is Smith’s ability to get lost in a piece of music without losing it, to momentarily change into a strange woman before once again taking her shape as a saint.

  Salon 19992003

  AUGUST 7, 1999

  1 Slapp Happy, “Scarred for Life,” on Ça Va (V2) Inside an empty Middle European cabaret Dagmar Krause is singing. She’s seen the whole of the century. She’s not opening the door.

  2 She Mob, Cancel the Wedding (Spinster Playtime Records) As with such modest, cutting 1980s U.K. punk combos as Delta 5, women singing like people having real conversations. Increasingly funny, vehement, distracted conversations. For example, “Why did I become a teacher? Why did I become a teacher?” For all the right reasons, but—

  3 James Marsh, director, Wisconsin Death Trip (BBC Arena/Cinemax) In 1973 historian Michael Lesy, working from an 1890s archive left by the town photographer of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, published a book of this name. It was a study of morbidity replacing vitality in the conduct of everyday life, a chronicle of seven plagues—childhood epidemics, murder, suicide, insanity, drought, tramp armies and economic ruin—and the story of how the Depression of the 1890s all but dissolved the assumption that is the bedrock of ordinary affairs: that tomorrow will be like today. Using unbearably intense frame-enlargements of family pictures, Lesy focused on disassociation in eyes, on horror around mouths. The time seemed very far away.

  In James Marsh’s poetically cruel film—rumored to be set for its world premiere over Labor Day weekend at the Telluride Film Festival, which never announces its program in advance—the distance of then from now seems our conceit, and Marsh collapses it. Using a steely, low-contrast black and white for the 1890s, color for underplayed footage of Black River Falls in the 1990s, and working almost without faces, re-enacting incidents Lesy unearthed—the if-I-can’t-have-you-nobody-can killings that in our newspapers seem like weather reports and here appear as parables scripted by Jim Thompson, or a 125-year-old Wisconsinite Susan Smith, peacefully waiting by the water after drowning her children—Marsh leaves only the quiet as an anomaly; salvation through vengeance seems not part of a time but part of the land.

  Marsh uses very little music, and what he does use is extraordinary: at one point bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” from 1928, and, throughout, a variation of DJ Shadow’s “Stem/Long Stem,” the highlight of his epochal 1996 Endtroducing . . . Jefferson’s profound song is an argument with death; the singer surrenders, but as a guitarist the same man backs away, circles around, almost dances, the arcs of sound young, supple, a dare. Shadow’s piece—a purloined note layered until the theme constructed from it seems not made but found, always present, a reminder of something you just can’t catch—is calming, comforting. But in the reassurance of the repetition there is a suggestion of no way out, and before long the music is sinister before it is anything else. It’s always struck me as film noir—not film noir music, but a whole, generic film in the music itself—and now it is, with film noir backdated 50 years from the ’40s, and set in a small town in the Midwest.

  4 Mark Pellington, director, Arlington Road (Sony Pictures) For the scene where Jeff Bridges’ Professor of Urban Terrorism stumbles into his terrorist neighbors’ backyard cookout—bizarre not just because he doesn’t even notice the Ruby Ridge Body Snatcher who murdered his FBI agent wife, or because the gathering is set up to match the closing ghoul-fest in Rosemary’s Baby, but for the music that’s playing. “Yes, after a hard day of smashing the state, we like to get down with the cool ’70s sound of KC and the Sunshine Band—don’t you?”

  5 Bonnie “Prince” Billy, i see a darkness (Palace) Lots of people go back to the hills and say they’ve seen a darkness; Will Oldham of Louisville, who usually records as Palace, just asks you to trust him. He sings a lullaby that takes you to the edge of sleep, where you realize the music is saying you might not wake up. “Nomadic Reverie” is just that—until terrible voices begin to echo from the hills Oldham keeps in his back pocket. “Woo-woo, woo-woo”—it’s the sound Jeff Bridges can’t get out of his throat.

  6 Jonathan Van Meter, “The Tyranny of the Hit Single: What’s a Record Exec to Do with Aimee Mann?” New York Times Magazine, July 11 Still whining after all these years, the former ’Til Tuesday voice continues her Harold Stassen act: she had a hit in 1985. Given that her principal talent is for converting self-deprecation into self-celebration, with luck and a lot of critical support she could become the next Lucinda Williams.

  7 Kristin Hersh, Sky Motel (4 AD) The former Throwing Muses singer presses on as well. Wan ballads in a thin voice, Appalachian standards, her own tunes, it all comes out the same: air conditioning.

  8 Tentacles, “Louie Louie Got Married” (K 7’ single) He’d be 43, but the people at the wedding don’t sound a day over 17.

  9 ELVIS at UCSF Medical Center (Nuclear Medicine, basement, 505 Parnassus, San Francisco) A dirty white contraption in the middle of a corridor, 4 feet high, 3 feet wide—with a gorgeous black-and-white glossy of Elvis from Loving You laminated on the front. On the back is an Elvis tableau that, it turns out, changes with the holidays: On March 15 he’s a leprechaun—why not Julius Caesar?—for St. Patrick’s Day, an Easter bunny the next week. Signs on machine: “DO NOT BRING ELVIS INSIDE (CUDA) EVEN IF NOT WORKING” and “NO LAB SPECIMENS IN ELVIS.” Two yellow headlights on the front look like eyes.

  A technician comes up and starts to press buttons. “What’s this?” he’s asked. “It’s a robot,” he starts to explain, when a doctor passing by indignantly corrects him: “It’s Elvis!” It turns out to be an autonomous refrigerated drug-delivery apparatus: i.e., it’s full of drugs. You program it, it navigates the hallways to its destination. The eyes register obstacles; bumpers around the bottom protect the walls when the eyes don’t work. You don’t have to pay it and it doesn’t get benefits.

  ELVIS (“Some kind of acronym,” a pharmacist says. “Evasion/Sensory . . . I don’t know where the ‘L’ is”) took off down the corridor, eyes blinking. “Be careful he doesn’t hit you,” the pharmacist said to a woman in the hall. “He’s supposed to know better,” she said. “Elvis woul
dn’t hit a woman.” It just missed a wall, then smoothly turned a corner and disappeared.

  10 Department of Yeah, Right, Death Trip Division, Midwestern Subsection, San Francisco Chronicle, July 27 “Heat advisories were posted yesterday from Kansas eastward through the Ohio Valley and over parts of the Southeast. Temperatures throughout the region hit the 90s and reached triple digits with the heat index.

  “The weather was blamed on eight deaths in Cincinnati over the weekend, 11 deaths in Illinois in the past week and five in Missouri.”

  AUGUST 23, 1999

  1 Atmosphere, “The Abusing of the Rib,” on Stuck on AM—Live Performances on 770 Radio K (No Alternative) Drifting out of a studio at the University of Minnesota is a modest, unsettling, finally disturbing question: “What do you love?” The questioner is the earnest, smooth-voiced Slug, of the Minneapolis hip-hop collective Rhyme Sayers; off to the side is the gravelly, much older-sounding voice of Eyedea, a high school student. A piano runs a repeating, regretful line in the background, regretting that all questions were settled before the questioner arrived, but he doesn’t buy it. Life has put him on the spot; he means to put you there, too. Still, he makes a beautiful reverie, and you can fall into it and forget yourself, until the very end. Somehow gathering up all the menace of Bo Diddley’s “Who do you love” (God help you if it isn’t him) and none of the flash, Slug’s “What do you love?” becomes the hardest question he can ask. Now so much is at stake you can imagine that you or anyone might mumble, stammer, and then admit it: “Nothing.”

  2 lunapark 0, 10 (Sub Rosa) Beginning with a ghostly, unbearably romantic minute from Apollinaire in 1912, then thunderbolts from Mayakovsky in 1914 and 1920, avant-garde poets read the century, which seems to have finished prematurely; by about 1960 they’re mostly talking about themselves.

  3 Ad for Notting Hill (your daily newspaper) Snuggled next to Julia Roberts’, Hugh Grant’s face takes you right back to the silent era, when leading men like Wallace Reid (king of the racing picture—The Roaring Road, Double Speed—before he became addicted to morphine) burst from their posters in unthreateningly fruity grins, mugs dripping with lipstick, rouge and the eyeliner that with Grant makes his eyes look like they were cut out of a magazine and pasted on. That’s right, he’s not human. He’s not supposed to be.

  4 Dusty Springfield, “I Only Want to Be with You” (HBO, 9:30 p.m. Sundays) I have no idea why Springfield’s 35-year-old fluffy first hit is so thrilling as the kickoff to Arli$$, spreading warmth and delight over the montage of Robert Wuhl’s sports agent suffering Bill Bradley’s no-look hoop, Jesse Ventura’s choke hold, Katerina Witt’s kiss. Maybe it was just a perfect record; maybe the release is all in the editing.

  5–6 Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, “Kandy Korn,” on Grow Fins–rarities [1965–1982] (Revenant) and The Mirror Man Sessions (Buddah) An L.A. band’s guitar piece, live from 1968, from the studio the year before, in both cases arriving from a future still ahead of us, a future momentarily circling back to look for a spot in Mississippi in 1930, but missing.

  7 Nik Cohn, Yes We Have No—Adventures in the Other England (Knopf) In this map of secret cultures hidden in plain sight—anarchistic and seeking cultures made by solitaries (a man requesting official recognition as the antichrist; Johnny Edge, now an old West Indian London hipster, in 1962 the Christine Keeler boyfriend who “detonated the whole Profumo affair, blew Harold MacMillan out of office, and so gave the Anglo club a whack from which it never quite recovered”) and groups (ravers, Odin worshippers, Elvis worshippers, travelers, Rastas, squatters, every form of contemporary heretic)—the novelist and pop chronicler has rewritten The Pursuit of the Millennium—Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Norman Cohn’s soul-shaking 1957 study of medieval heretics. “The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one,” Norman Cohn wrote, “and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious”: what we call the present is a bridge over an ancient pit, a bridge built out of wishful thinking. Nik Cohn is more sanguine, but he is more than four decades farther from Hitler than his father was.

  8 Old Time Relijun, Uterus and Fire (K) A punk trio that believes in the past—and that running headlong down a path naked will get you somewhere you want to be. “Jail” echoes both the thrash Descendents of Redondo Beach and Chicago bluesman Magic Sam: desperate, a confession, weird moments of reflection in the noise. “I have a lot of time on my hands,” the singer tells you. “I got a lot of good books to read.”

  9 Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs, Vols. 1–3 (Merge) Stephin Merritt of this and other bands is running this show—writing all the songs, singing most of them in his cloying, sub-Morrissey voice, listing 90 instruments he plays, including not merely “jug” but “Paul Revere jug,” which is to say that the preciousness of the project is all too apparent. (The voice is cloying on purpose, you fool.) But there’s something intriguingly tentative and random about the words and the music, in the stupid puns and often slow, counted cadences. Just when you’re ready to give up, a different singer will come in like someone on the street waving at the floats in a passing parade. You might find the radiant Shirley Simms hammering an old country vocal to a Bo Diddley beat on “I’m Sorry I Love You” (“It’s a phase I’m going through”—you ought to hear that on Sex and the City before the season is out) or Claudia Gonson on “Yeah! Oh Yeah!”—though the exclamation points are strictly postmodernist. A rough version of the guitar line from the Feelies’ “Raised Eyebrows”—itself the inheritor of every great guitar melody from “Wild Weekend” to “Layla”—kicks off a very up-to-date version of Paul and Paula’s horrid 1963 “First Quarrel.” Gonson is flagellating herself over the possibility that her marriage has always been a joke no one bothered to tell her: “Did you dread every phone call, could you not stand me from the start?” “Yeah, oh yeaaaaaaah,” Merritt moans in languid ecstasy. It’s clear this is how the husband gets off; for the wife you can’t tell, but I doubt it.

  10 The Bad Seed, with Patty McCormack (Castro Theater, San Francisco, July 16) In 1956 a 10-year-old McCormack played an 8-year-old serial killer in blond pigtails named Rhoda; the role was so perverse and her performance so fierce she burned up a whole career in advance. This night, with McCormack appearing after a screening of the film, the theater was packed with raucous gay men, but once the movie started the hooting part of the crowd was often shushed by those who didn’t want to miss a word.

  McCormack came out to be interviewed by Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto. Instead of the female female-impersonator you often get with half-forgotten mini-legends, she sat down as a fast, cool, completely alive woman in her 50s. She looked like a cross between Carol Lynley and Debbie Harry; Musto couldn’t keep up with her. On her Catholic mother refusing to let her do the 1959 shocker Blue Denim: “[At 14] I thought about that and understood: I was allowed to kill people as long as I didn’t sleep with them.” (Lynley ended up getting pregnant and almost having an abortion instead.) Patty’s little Rhoda dispatched whoever got in her way with whatever was handy—fire, blunt instruments, a staircase; the story’s conceit was that it was all in the genes, because her grandmother was a homicidal maniac. “Did you play Rhoda as pure evil, or as cursed?” Musto asked. “I played her as right,” McCormack said without a smile, and nobody made a sound.

  SEPTEMBER 7, 1999

  1 The Best News of the Week, Denver Post, Aug. 22 “Universal Records has confirmed that Spin Doctors lead singer Chris Barron [‘Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong’ etc.] has been diagnosed with a rare paralysis of his vocal cords. Barron is meeting with doctors who have indicated that he may never regain the full use of his voice. He now cannot speak above a whisper. All promotional activities for the band’s new CD, ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ are on hold.”

  2 Trailer Bride, Whine de Lune (Bloodshot) A small cowboy combo that plays as if it’s not expecting more than the 10 people in the audience to show up, fronted by a woman who sings like she’
s wondering who she has to fuck to get out of going through everything twice. As if anybody knows.

  3 Alison Krauss, Forget About It (Rounder) For the title song, built around the way they say it and mean it not in mob-movie New York but in the rest of the country—not far from the way Bob Dylan said “Don’t think twice,” a whole lost world in three words. As always with Krauss, whose voice has the unsatisfiable yearning of her own bluegrass fiddle—unsatisfiable because the sound remembers a land of milk and honey—she needs hills and valleys in the melody to come to life, to pull away from the music and the listener, to get lost, then to come back just far enough to pull your string: to pull it right out of you. Songs on an even plane defeat her every time.

  4 Marine Research, Sounds from the Gulf Stream (K) and “Parallel Horizontal”/“Angel in the Snow”/“I Confess” (K single) Moving from Talulah Gosh to Heavenly to her new five-piece, Amelia Fletcher of Oxford, England, has lost a step each time. The fatigue now drawing her voice back still doesn’t hide what makes that voice, all sweetness and worry, one of a kind.

  5 Aspen Festival Orchestra, Kyoko Takezawa, soloist, Elgar’s “Violin Concerto in B Minor” (Aspen Music Festival, Aug. 15) In “Allegro”—deliriously romantic and ominous—the whole first movement seemed to resolve itself into chase, run. The piece was the apparent source of all the high-class, high-gloss film noir music of the ’40s (Gilda, The Lady from Shanghai, Double Indemnity, any production that could afford a real score)—so much so that the music, played now, isn’t merely familiar, it’s fabulously generic. You cannot attach, say, a certain gesture by Rita Hayworth or Orson Welles or Barbara Stanwyck to a given lift in the music, a particular door opening into a darkened room to a threatening slide on Takezawa’s special “Hammer” Strat—I mean, Strad, her 1707 “Hammer” Stradivarius. But moment to moment the piece, read back on the films that plundered it, gives up near-images that stop the soundtracks as they play in your head. The plot rushes forward, breaking over the hesitations of the actors, smearing all of them into one.