Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  6 Robert McNamara at Elgar’s “Violin Concerto in B Minor” “The Architect of the Vietnam War”—or, if we give that honor to McGeorge Bundy, “The Contractor.” “Do you remember Mr. McNamara?” said the woman next to me, who’d come in with McNamara, who was sitting next to her. “He’s had such a hard time lately, what with all the criticism,” she said, referring to the reception given the Kennedy/Johnson Secretary of Defense’s recent I-Knew-It-Was-Folly-and-I-Wish-I’d-Mentioned-It-at-the-Time books. (“McNamara made a ‘bad guess’/‘Bad Guess’ chorused the Reporters?/Yes, no more than a Bad Guess, in 1962/‘8000 American Troops handle the/Situation,’ ” Allen Ginsberg wrote in his great Vietnam poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra”: “Your magic errandboy’s/Just made a bad guess again/that’s lasted a whole decade.”) Now he looked old, fastidious, resolute: like an executioner-monk.

  7 Howard Hampton, e-mail report (Aug. 13) “Wisecrack from the finale of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a few minutes into Danger: Diabolik, swinging ’60s Italian-cum-Modesty Blaise send-up/ripoff, as a bunch of leather-boy motorcycle cops swarm by: ‘If Hitler had won the war and hired Stu Sutcliffe as a fashion designer.’ Besides summing up the dream life of Scorpio Rising, that line seems to have bottomless pop resonance, even if there are only six people in the world who got it, and I’m not even sure I’m one of them.”

  8 Bob Dylan, “Highlands,” Madison Square Garden, July 27 An audience tape of just the second performance of the song since it appeared at nearly 17 minutes on the 1997 Time Out of Mind. In this 10-minute version the tone shifts from the original bitter weariness to something much sharper: sly, sinister, the sound of a scary old man whispering from a doorway. He could be a prophet; he could be trying to sell you dope. Only one way to find out.

  9 David Lynch, director, The Straight Story (Disney) In a bar where they’re the only patrons, two old men who have just met have told their awful stories of fighting Nazis in the Second World War—stories of what they saw, what they did, stories about their own guilt. Jo Stafford’s “Happy Times” plays in the air; the young bartender stands in the half-light, trying to fade into the woodwork, trying not to hear, not to invade the privacy of the men speaking in this public place, shamed by his own youth.

  10 David Bohrer/Los Angeles Times news photo (Aug. 10) The picture was carried in countless papers across the country: “Children from a Jewish Center in Los Angeles were escorted to safe ground yesterday by police officers after a gunman opened fire at the center,” in the New York Times’ caption. The shot was from above, with an officer in the middle of a line of 10 children, all holding hands; the curve in the line made it seem as if the police and the children were dancing. It was a rare instance of true déja vu. Framed by the photographer and then chosen by editors, by intent or by a common, silent memory, the shot was a match for the famous image from the end of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 The Seventh Seal: men and women, holding hands, dancing off a hill, all led by Death.

  SEPTEMBER 20, 1999

  1 The Pale Orchestra conducted by David Thomas, Mirror Man Act 1: Jack & the General (Thirsty Ear) The centerpiece of the 1998 Diastodrome! Festival in London, with impresario/composer/performer Thomas moonlighting from his band Pere Ubu: a live recording of what could have been called “Route 66,” because the journey the singers and musicians take across an America they’re afraid of forgetting is that expansive. What’s missing is that old Bobby Troup–Rolling Stones glee as the miles burn up and L.A. gleams in the distance. This is all backroads and, with Bob Holman’s increasingly frantic monologues about how, no, no, no, don’t you understand, that’s not it—he’s talking about gas prices and small towns and theme parks—panic. Then the tone shifts. A character something like Steve Martin’s corrupt, dreaming traveling song-salesman in Pennies from Heaven emerges: Thomas, ready to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, or whatever bridge takes you from here to there. He convinces you that he has the right to do it, because he doesn’t take the bridge for granted and you do. Suddenly you want to leave the house and get in the car and see if you can find the same country this company is finding—leaving the disc on while you’re gone.

  2 Pere Ubu, Apocalypse Now (Thirsty Ear) A show from 1991, with David Thomas doing a stand-up comedy routine between songs (“I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that one of our members onstage said to me right then, ‘That was actually good’ ”) and whispering the secrets of the universe into the ears of the audience as the songs themselves are played. With melodies rising out of the clattering sound like the modal themes of old folk songs, the effect is stirring, Cleveland punks more than 15 years down the road with no lessening of their conviction that they have been chosen to change the world, laughing at how little they’ve been changed by it.

  3 Anonymous: altered billboard (Gilman Street at San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, Calif., Sept. 8) A pair of red dice, one with a skull, and this message, in clean Times letters: “Just because you survived ______ doesn’t mean your children will.” The original word, still barely showing, was “drugs”; in the exact same typeface, it has been replaced by “Bush.”

  4 Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday) A detective story where the hero’s Tourette’s Syndrome (unending waterfalls of tics, from the man’s scrambled verbal outbursts to his fascinating need to straighten people’s clothing) shapes the tale—allowing a rhythm in which the frenetic almost hides the islands of quiet where thinking gets done. Tourette’s is a thing in itself here, a kind of invisible twin; thus Lethem (Gun, With Occasional Music, Girl in Landscape, As She Climbed Across the Table) writes in a double language, which opens up the mystery genre to the point that it’s almost erased. As the hero tries to keep himself awake for an all-night stakeout, he recognizes “insomnia [as] a variant of Tourette’s—the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance—as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.” His favorite song: Prince, “Kiss.”

  5 Quickspace, Precious Falling (Hidden Agenda/Parasol) U.K. drone band derived from th faith healers. (Thee Headcoats won their “e” in a poker game, I think they said.) Not as demented as that great combo (their 1993 Imaginary Friend remains the most blithelessly extreme music of the decade), but with a neat trick: fast drone. Squealing and clicking in “Hadid,” they appear as naked people in a field regressing as you listen: regressing not to a pre-verbal childhood but to a previous species.

  6 James Lee Burke, Sunset Limited (Island/Dell paperback) “St. Peters Cemetery in ten minutes,” says a witness to cop Dave Robicheaux. “How will I recognize you?” “I’m the one that’s not dead.” Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash, Robicheaux should say—but he doesn’t use profanity. He won’t even tolerate it unless it comes out of the mouth of his partner, Helen Soileau. (“I met Miss Pisspot of 1962 at the jail this morning,” she says of an FBI agent.) It’s not that he gives her a break because she’s a lesbian; somewhere in the literary archetype Leslie Fiedler set out in 1948 in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” she’s playing Jim to Robicheaux’s Huck.

  7 Glad bags commercial (A&E, Sept. 9) A happy female gospel version of Mississippi bluesman Skip James’ brittle, miserabilist 1931 “I’m So Glad” (famously redone in 1967 by Cream), and a travesty: not because it’s being used to sell plastic bags, but because of the suggestion that it was originally used to sell God.

  8 Vanity Fair/Neutrogena party at the Telluride Film Festival (Sept. 3) The Neutrogena banner at the Skyline Guest Ranch was fairly modest, but against a backdrop of the Colorado Rockies, which were throwing up Matterhorns everywhere you looked, a big poster of the September Vanity Fair was like litter. It was the Bruce Weber shot of wistful, windblown, ridiculously blond Carolyn Bessette Kennedy—a face t
hat, the setting revealed, was unmistakably slipping into camp, into that realm of the undead where “The Private Princess,” as the magazine named its cover girl, had already joined not Princess Di but “America’s people’s princess”—as Patsy Ramsey calls her late daughter, JonBénet.

  9 Associated Press, “ Music, the Universal Language,” Sept. 13 “ After a week of chaos and terror in East Timor, Indonesia’s powerful military boss sang ‘Feelings’ yesterday to show why he can’t walk away from the independence-minded province.

  “To cheers from retired military officers at a party, Defense Minister Gen. Wiranto dedicated the song to foreign journalists: ‘I hope you have the same feelings, like me, for East Timor.’

  “His eyebrows arched in restrained emotion, Wiranto held the microphone in both hands and stood stiffly in a yellow batik shirt and crooned as a band played the 1975 hit popularized by Paul Williams:

  “ ‘Feelings, nothing more than feelings . . .’ ”

  I can’t go on. This is just too sick. You always knew the song was rotten, but evil?

  10 Fastbacks, The Day That Didn’t Exist (Spinart) It’s scary that Seattle’s Fastbacks formed 20 years ago, that except for the drum spot the lineup has never changed, that they’ve never made it, that their music has never gotten better, only utterly failed to exhaust itself. Guitarist Kurt Bloch writes songs about the everyday that somehow contain the state of the union; bassist Kim Warnick sings them in a punk voice that’s flat until you hear it as a form of address, as real talk; guitarist Lulu Gargulio keeps the other two honest. Here, one of the days that didn’t exist can be found on “I Was Stolen”: “We tried to save the world last fall,” War-nick says in her high, girlish warble, as if nothing could be more obvious; when she follows with “You remember that we didn’t save anything at all,” the story seems to end before it’s had a chance to begin. But the story goes on, it gets interesting, full of fury and good works, and by the time the story is over you’re no longer convinced these people left the world as they found it—not 20 years ago, not last fall.

  OCTOBER 4, 1999

  1 Fred Eaglesmith, 50-Odd Dollars (Razor & Tie) Opening with a backwoods ballad drunk on Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” a stolid-looking man says he knows his country when he sees it, especially in old cars. Listen to “Georgia Overdrive” and try to convince yourself that for two minutes you don’t want to be in the driver’s seat more than you want to be anywhere else.

  2 Jay Mohr as Peter Dragon in Action (Fox, Sept. 16) Desperate, the producer runs to the house of his whore/script consultant, where he finds her with a client, who is down on his knees and cleaning her floor. Despite the bustier and black mask the guy is wearing, Dragon recognizes him as a Disney executive; “My name is Andri,” the man insists. Dragon looks him in the eye: “My name is Luka,” he says. “I live on the second floor . . .” You can’t tell if the vicious glee in his face comes from having a rival where he wants him, or finally finding a use for the stupid lines that have been bouncing around in his head for more than 10 years.

  3 Michael Ochs, 1000 Record Covers (Taschen) At 7 inches by 5 inches and 768 pages, this dense object is not a typical album-cover-art book, where designs supposedly fashioned according to vision or genre are presented for your admiration. Opening with Hen Gates and His Gaters’ 1957 Let’s Go Dancing to Rock and Roll (happy white kids in red convertible, balding dad-like person at the wheel) and closing with Oasis’ 1994 Definitely Maybe, this is stuff—the sort of stuff you’d find flipping LPs in a vinyl emporium, sleeves warped, images scratched or faded or gleaming with an eagerness hiding the truth that the people you’re looking at are probably dead. Not looking at all dead, however, is the dead girlfriend on the cover of J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers’ 1964 Last Kiss. There’s been a car crash, but while her eyes are closed, her hair isn’t even mussed. “Rumor has it that first printings of this cover actually had blood dripping from the girl’s face but it was airbrushed out,” Ochs says—but that would have only made the fact that the girl’s arm resting on her skirt is plainly held there by still-functioning muscles even more weird. The boyfriend, in perfectly pomaded ducktail and gray business suit, looks at the girl’s face as if he can’t figure out why she’s playing dead. But he’s supposed to be about to bestow “our last kiss”—to act out the most convincing moment in the song. In 1964 and this year, with Pearl Jam’s stoic, anguished, unteenage version, the words are rushed—“I kissed her our last kiss.” It’s as if the singer can barely stand to remember what happened, and it catches you up. The burr in Eddie Vedder’s voice, the labor you can feel from gestures you can’t see, makes the quickness of the moment even more dramatic, almost secretly dramatic, than it was 35 years ago: You feel the moment, but you don’t necessarily register it. The sour guitar note that closes the record says both you and the band know this dumb old song is a joke, but nobody told the singer, and that’s why it’s a hit. As for the cover of the album Pearl Jam’s “Last Kiss” is on—No Boundaries: A Benefit for the Kosovar Refugees (Epic)—it shows a young man bent over, his hands gripping his neck, his whole body in a posture of despair. He’s already learned about last kisses—the kind there’s no time to give.

  4 Tori Amos, To Venus and Back (Atlantic) Or rather the Twilight Zone. She walks through a deserted mansion, and there are mirrors everywhere: everywhere, she sees her own reflection. And then she sees it even when there aren’t any mirrors.

  5 Gino Washington, Out of This World (Norton) Detroit, early ’60s, a time when only grunge and ridiculousness (the Flares’ “Foot Stomping—Part 1,” Jimmy Soul’s “If You Wanna Be Happy”) made the radio bearable. Now a black teenager with a white band steps up to the mike for his song “Out of This World.” There’s a dull little “All right, now” business, and then the music leaps and it never comes down. Mediocrity is all over this collection: life is hidden in the female backing singers, who sound like they were recruited out of the audience; in the way Washington loves his girl so much he actually doesn’t care how he looks; in the twist of “Romeo”: “Juliet was my first love / She won’t be my last.” And I’m not even mentioning what makes the set priceless.

  6 David Johansen on soundtrack to Burnzy’s Last Call (Ripe & Ready/Celsium) Jo-hansen hasn’t simply put ironic scare quotes around his music since he gave up trying to be a real rock ’n’ roll hero with the New York Dolls 70 years ago—he’s put scare quotes around the scare quotes, to make it seem like he was, you know, playing a role right from the start. So now his songs might as well have titles like ““““Hi There, Sucker!”””” I don’t care, and you probably don’t either, but when you’re paying for something else it’s creepy.

  7 Nokia cell-phone ring menu Cell phones are personal car alarms, and there’s a problem when out of 35 rings—which include long, elliptical segments from “Ode to Joy,” “The William Tell Overture” and Mozart—the least annoying choices are “Fly” and “Mosquito.” I know it’s not in the public domain, but I’d pay an extra buck for a “Louie Louie” option.

  8 Goran Visnjic as Dr. Luka Kovac on ER (NBC, Sept. 30) Incredibly handsome new “sub-doctor” from somewhere in Eastern Europe spies pouty little girl sitting alone in ambulance. “My name is Luka,” he says endearingly—and that’s all. What a letdown. But I’d bet money he’ll get to the next line before the season is over—or someone will throw it in his face.

  9 Daniel Wolff, “Elvis in the Dark” (Threepenny Review, Fall 1999) As a review of Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, this is an almost physical summoning of the singer himself to make the critic’s argument against the biographer: that the singer was no innocent, but engaged throughout his career in a complex, cryptic argument with whoever might be listening to him. Wolff makes his case by taking the reader through a long, dizzyingly vivid walk through a song everybody who might care enough to read him will know: “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” The faithless woman in the song becomes the audience, bu
t the penitent who begins the performance is not the same person who finishes it: That man, Wolff says, is much closer to the singer in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” asking Mr. Jones if he knows what is happening, because he knows he doesn’t. “ ‘Fate,’ Presley told us in an earlier section of the song,” Wolff says, “had him ‘playing in love,’ just as fate made him an icon for millions of adoring fans. But it isn’t fate, now. We’ve struck a bargain with the singer: a whole, complicated tangle we’re not particularly willing to take apart.”

  10 Peter Boswell, Bruce Jenkins, Joan Rothfuss, “2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II” (Walker Art Center/D.A.P.) This landmark show of work by the San Francisco artist opens Oct. 9 at the Walker in Minneapolis—but the catalogue of the same name is no fun. Read what Boswell and Jenkins have to say about Conner’s pre- (and for that matter post-) MTV song film for Toni Basil’s 1966 “Breakaway” (by 1982 she was No. 1 on the charts with “Mickey”). Basil is dancing through uncountable thousands of Conner cuts, forward and backward, in costumes and naked, and the writers sound like they’re taking her blood pressure and measuring her lung capacity. But turn to the very back of the book, where an impish editor or designer has given Basil and Conner the last word: four double-page frame enlargements of a woman saying, in essence, “You know something’s happening, and I just might tell you what it is.”

  OCTOBER 18, 1999

  GUMSHOES AND OLD MEN EDITION.