Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  1 Stan Ridgway, Anatomy (Ultra Modern/New West) Coming out of the old L.A. punk scene with Wall of Voodoo, Ridgway has always peeked around corners as a kind of detective (“of the heart,” I think you’re supposed to add). Here the liner art plays off the ’50s moderne credits of the 1959 movie Anatomy of a Murder. But unlike other detectives, Ridgway has all the time in the world. He’s not going anywhere; he doesn’t solve anything; he just takes notes. The slowness in his singing is like the slowness in the way Dwight Yoakam’s trucker moves in Red Rock West. He misses nothing and he keeps his mouth shut. That’s a hard trick for a singer, but that’s the feeling you get: in Ridgway’s songs, not a word is spoken out loud. They all take place in his thoughts as he tries to figure out what he’s seen. The music is muscular, but all restraint: you don’t raise your voice if you’re not really using it. “Wrong, so wrong, we’re wrong,” Ridgway says in “Mission Bell”; he winds the words around each other until the song they cast back to, a 20-year-old Elvis Presley’s “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone,” has risen up without ever announcing it’s there at all.

  2 Heather Duby, Post to Wire (Sub Pop) Seattle 25-year-old with a deeper voice than you’d put to her Juliette Binoche haircut pursues interesting project: take outsider cool and early-’80s synth bumps and echoes into Sarah McLachlan territory. It’s a seductive journey, even though she may never get back.

  3 Chicago, “If You Leave Me Now,” in Three Kings On the day after the end of the Gulf War, the creamy 1976 No. 1 adult-contemporary hit is playing in the purloined Mercedes as Sgt. Ice Cube and an Iraqi rebel hairdresser pull up to the bunker where they’re going to try to rescue Sgt. Mark Wahlberg from torture, the hairdresser silently mouthing the words as if they’re a prayer.

  4 Robert Crais, L.A. Requiem (Doubleday) P.I. Elvis Cole is riding with angry cop Samantha Dolan when her choice of L7’s angry “Shove” on the radio inspires a critical meditation on the strategic use of pop music in everyday life. “ ‘Too on the nose, Dolan,’ ” Cole says. “ ‘The music should be counter to your character, and then the statement would be more dramatic. Try Shawn Colvin.’

  “Dolan jerked the sedan around a produce delivery truck and blasted through an intersection that had already gone red. Horns blew. She flipped them off.”

  5 Blank culture sighting (Oct. 1, 63rd St. & College Ave., Oakland, Calif.) Street flyer glued to newspaper rack, black and white with vertical lines. Scrawled motto: “I eat fascist.” Graphic: squared, elongated Hitler figure. On his sleeve: “Pez.”

  6 Jacket of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister as published in the U.K. by Hamish Hamilton, 1949 (Otto Penzler Books facsimile edition) “I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk,” L.A. dick Philip Marlowe says of his encounter with Orfamay Quest of Manhattan, Kan., a young woman with a “prim little narrow-minded smile.” Here you see her entering his office for the first time, looking like the grammar-school teacher everyone’s had and no one forgets. I mean, you’re lucky if you’ve already read the book, because you may not want to open it.

  7 David Lynch, director, The Straight Story (Disney) In Lynch’s version of the adventure of the late Alvin Straight, who at 73 drove a lawn mower and a trailer across Iowa and into Wisconsin to visit a brother he hadn’t seen in 10 years, people sometimes assume stiff, theatrical or uncomfortable postures; they occupy themselves with unique, seemingly obsessive, unexplained gestures. These incidents—Straight’s next-door-neighbor fitting a pink SnoBall into her mouth; the fright in his daughter’s eyes when she tries to push words through whatever it is that blocks them; a man at the end of a bar moving his hand (or a knife?) in a circular motion, making a distant, discomforting scratching sound—are no different from the way the Log Lady in Twin Peaks tries to get people to listen to her, or the way Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey says almost anything he says in Blue Velvet. As they are composed in Lynch’s films, such events carry a displacing sense of the unnatural, yet once you’ve watched them, it’s impossible to imagine the actors acting in any other way.

  “I want to make films that occur in America, but that take people into worlds where they may never go,” Lynch has said, and this America emerges not as a place, a history of deeds or a set of ideas. Instead it’s a story people tell each other: a fable about how people can be expected to act, about how events can be expected to unfold. With The Straight Story this is a story about determination sliding into obsession—craziness, one could call it—and the persistence of the pioneer spirit, the faith that in America anything is possible, with the whole enveloped by decency on the part of every character present, a decency that seems brought forth by one man’s expectation that he will find it. In Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Lost Highway, the story is about determination sliding into obsession—sociopathology, you could call it—and the persistence of the pioneer spirit, the dead certainty that in America anything can happen and probably will, with the whole wrapped in a storm of derangement, which some survive and some don’t.

  The language spoken to tell either story, though, is the same. People move and speak as if they are performing, for others and for themselves. They make gestures that are in some profound and casual way absolutely self-legitimating: gestures that say that those who wave their hands, stutter or proffer strange talismans have as much a right to speak, to tell the story, as anyone else. Sort of like the people on an old Randy Newman album.

  8 Fleetwood Mac, Shrine ’69 (Rykodisc) Live records by the original Fleetwood Mac, the all-English blues combo led by Peter Green, are all over the place. Legit, illegit—the cheesy cover art won’t tell you which, or that, to bend a phrase Mississippi’s Skip James once applied to himself, the band came and went from places its contemporaries never got to. The great guitarist Lonnie Mack used to tell a story about a ratty gig where a mouse crossed the stage “just as I hit my highest, most soulful note—and the mouse dropped dead.” As Danny Kirwan finds his way into his Elmore James tribute “Something Inside of Me,” you can kind of imagine that happening here.

  9 Iggy Pop, Avenue B (Virgin) The first, spoken track is Mr. “Search and Destroy” talking about growing older and facing death: “It was in the winter of my 50th year when it hit me . . .” (It would be the winter.) Funny thing is, the tone is exactly the same as in the Barbarians’ 1965 “Moulty”—you can find it on Lenny Kaye’s compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era—where Moulty the drummer talks about how he lost his hand and now has to drum with a hook.

  10 Stan Ridgway, Songs That Made This Country Great: The Best of Stan Ridgway (IRS, 1980–91) Well, you never know. But “Lost Weekend” is one of those songs that describes the country as it is—a broken promise, with the whole of the nation present in a promise a couple make to each other.

  NOVEMBER 1, 1999

  1 Sally Timms, Cowboy Sally’s Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos (Bloodshot) Ever since she strolled coolly, coldly through “Millionaire” on I ♥ Mekons, Timms has been the last country singer you’d want to go up against in a staring contest. Her touch is light, and deceptive; her reserves of depth seem bottomless. But nothing she’s done before suggests the exquisite balance of this disc, the way she makes both Robbie Fulks’ “In Bristol Town One Bright Day” (which could be an ancient English ballad learned from a 1928 recording by Buell Kazee of Kentucky) and Johnny Cash’s ditty “Cry Cry Cry” (the flip side of his first single, cut for Sun Records of Memphis in 1956) seem like old family stories: tales Timms might not have quite believed when she first heard them as a girl, but which, to her surprise, as a grown woman, she found she had lived out herself.

  2 Pet Shop Boys, Nightlife (Sire) Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s Very and their remake of the Village People’s “Go West” were the best album and single of 1993. In the years since it’s been as if those records took all the two had to give. Here the group could be starting over from the beginning, in an ’80s nightclub, dancing to the drum machine, all possibilities
of love and fear present in the way your partner looks you in the eye or over your shoulder.

  3 Bruce Bernard, editor, Century (Phaidon) Of all the summing-up volumes currently clogging the bookstores, this 1,119-page, 25-pound, $50 photo collection is infinitely the most powerful. The brief captions (printed faintly, so you can ignore them and confront the pictures directly) sum up Bernard’s response to the times: a sardonic face, held until it falls apart in horror and disgust. That happens even though Bernard’s atrocity shots—even “Perhaps the worst photograph of all” (Page 421)—are, formally, mild. A little girl abandoned on the street in Berlin in 1920 is not bleeding; she is merely the void into which she has fallen, and she pulls you in. So for the single image from Bernard’s century I would use to blot out all the others, I choose “Lily Brik, girlfriend of the poet Vladimir Maya-kovsky,” photographed by the great Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko in 1924, an image later made into a still-famous Soviet propaganda poster. With the photo here a thing in itself, though, you can hear what the happy woman with her hand cupped to her shouting mouth is saying: “Calling out around the world/Are you ready for a brand new beat?” And the world answered: Yes, but not yours. Stalin walks across the facing page; turn it and Hitler is waiting.

  4 Peter Lely, Portrait of Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, 1671/74 (Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

  Spy for Louis XIV, mistress of Charles II and a dead ringer for Rose McGowan—the unsurprisable face McGowan assumes in Going All the Way, stripping as the Orioles float through “It’s Too Soon to Know.”

  5 Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg & Eminem on Saturday Night Live (Oct. 23) Despite the two CDs of Saturday Night Live: The Musical Performances now in the racks, musicians rarely explode on the SNL stage: in all these years I count only Squeeze with “Annie Get Your Gun,” Jackson Browne with “ Running on Empty” and Snoop Dogg’s first appearance (back when he had “Doggy” in the middle of his name). Rap summit meetings too often settle for self-celebration. But as Dre led the others through two segments, this was otherworldly from the start. With Snoop Dogg as gangly bodily as he was lithe verbally—he spoke the language as if he invented it—Dre provided drama, pathos, silence between the words, a preacher to Snoop Dogg’s trickster. Finally the whole, possessed by the reach for abstraction that drives Snoop Dogg’s best moments, seemed on the verge of swirling off into the sky. Half an hour later, when without a trace of black tongue Eminem began snapping off his syllables, piling each on the one before it, until his sound was a staircase he was too busy, too outraged to climb, Dre embodied experience and stoicism. He wasn’t countering the younger man’s impatience with the knowledge that this too shall pass away, but with the advice to save your strength: it’ll be back. If a black man and a white man could make the Rodney King videotape into art, this was it.

  6–7 Blind Alfred Reed, Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order: 1927–1929 (Document) and Del-Lords, Get Tough: The Best of the Del-Lords (Restless) From West Virginia, Reed (1880–1956) played a droning, sawing fiddle; along with Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family he first recorded at the fabled Bristol Sessions. He was a world-class complainer: he hated racism, feminism, alcohol, foolery and short hair on women (“Why Do You Bob Your Hair Girl”—it must have driven him nuts when a second version was mistakenly titled “Why Don’t You Bob Your Hair”). No socialist, he hated capitalism most of all—for the way it promised that everyone could have everything, right now, including what a minute ago no one even thought of wanting, and produced instead worthless novelty, social division, ungodliness, inequality and poverty. So Reed struck back with his own songs, among them the remarkable “There’ll Be No Distinction There” and “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live.”

  The first, which as a piece of music could fit on Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, is a vision of heaven where the scourge of race and class will be erased in favor of a beloved community, because everyone will play on golden instruments and there will be no more colored people: “We’ll all be white in the heavenly light.” No drinking, no women flirting or bossing men around . . . the sweep of the performance is lovely and the sentiment irksome. Heaven is so obviously going to be exactly the way he wants it—and stay out of Old Man Reed’s yard if you know what’s good for you. “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” is a carefully written attack on every public institution except the church, from the police to the courts to public schooling to the high price of dry goods and meat and—everything else. It wasn’t about the Depression—it hadn’t happened yet—but inflation and the false values created by a runaway stock market. The sound is from another world, but you can feel the writer pressing down on his pencil, pushing right through from his time to now, where his words feel absolutely modern.

  That hasn’t gone unnoticed. The tune was covered by Ry Cooder in 1974, and 10 years after that, in a roughhouse rock ’n’ roll version with new lyrics, by Scott Kempner (since then only coincidentally my son-in-law)—a number that leads off the recently released Get Tough. Alfred Reed would hardly have approved of Kempner’s solution to their common predicament—a beer run—but could his bitterness and belief in right and wrong have inspired the Del-Lords’ strongest number, “Judas Kiss”? “The radio kept playing the same rotten songs/Every one reminded me of you/All summer long,” a guy says to his dead junkie girlfriend—that’s Reed’s voice if anything is. “Those roses in the closet/Well, I took them from your grave”—backing singers Syd Straw and Pat Benatar are harder on her than lead singer Eric Ambel is, but that might be because they can sing harder than he can. Their vindictiveness is more effective than his frustration, but neither is as effective as the melody, which far more than any words convinces the singers that, unlike the song’s subject, they’re alive.

  8 Lindell Reeves, “Stagger Lee” (Berkeley Farmers Market, Oct. 19) Recognizable from 30 feet, the tune rolled over and over. Playing guitar and singing for tips, songster Reeves had a light tone, sad and amused. For the words he followed Lloyd Price, up to the final “Go, go Stagger Lee,” but without the glee Price gave the chant, a restraint that set up Reeves’ own close: “You have shot Billy/Now your time is come.” Aside from Reeves’ particular variations, it was a scene that could have taken place almost anywhere in the country any time in the last hundred years. “Stag” Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons in St. Louis in 1895; he died in 1912. When the last Americans then alive go out of the world, will the magic in the song go with them?

  9 Counting Crows, This Desert Life (DCG) The heart-on-sleeve combo’s Across a Wire—Live in New York City was a thrill; this has its moments. When Adam Duritz sings with, you know, naked emotion, the idea is a cliché, but the idea is real to him as an idea. He chases it and makes it give up a kind of self-exposure that nakedness only hints at. I couldn’t explain what Duritz means in “I Wish I Was a Girl,” and he doesn’t even try. He simply tries to convince himself he means what he says, and, like Prince with “If I Was Your Girlfriend” and Ian Hunter in Mott the Hoople’s shattering “I Wish I Was Your Mother,” he can leave a listener scared.

  10 Bruce Jenkins, “3-Dot Lounge” (San Francisco Chronicle Sporting Green, Oct. 23) “As baseball’s managerial crew grows increasingly whiter, the Rockies made a particularly weak choice with Buddy Bell. Next up: The Orioles hire Johnny Winter.”

  NOVEMBER 16, 1999

  1 Teddy Morgan and the Pistolas, Lost Love & Highways (Hightone) This trio starts in the country, and by the time they hit third gear they’re not just in the city, they’re so in love with their own momentum they grind right past the club where they’re supposed to go on in 10 minutes. Grunge seeps out of the woods like a dead animal, then pulls the singer down by his feet and steals his guitar. The sound Morgan, drummer Chris Hunter and bass Jon Penner make as they take it back would have Hank Williams and Kurt Cobain high-fiving if they weren’t so pissed they didn’t see this coming.

  2 Mark Sinker, “Concrete, So as to Self-Destruct: The Etiquette of Punk, Its Ha
bits, Rules, Values and Dilemmas,” in Punk Rock: So What?—The Cultural Legacy of Punk, edited by Roger Sabin (Routledge) In this complex and worried piece of criticism, Sinker wants to know how communities emerge out of nothing and then create a milieu in which individuals find each other and themselves, wants to know how such people then decide what to do in their shared space and time: “Imagine the ensuing centuries of Judeo-Christian moral debate had Moses returned from the mountain carrying not two stone tablets inscribed with five commandments each, but the first Siouxsie and the Banshees LP.” And that’s just the first sentence, on which Sinker builds a rickety heretics’ church where all questions get asked in the right way. And no questions are closed, except whether or not it’s OK to wear flares.

  3 Bob Marley: Chant Down Babylon (Tuff Gong) “Bob Marley duets featuring today’s hottest artists”: wake up, dead man. For this necrophiliac gangbang, remixers fool with old Marley vocal tracks as Lauryn Hill drops her Laconic Goddess of Disdain routine all over “Turn Your Lights Down Low,” MC Lyte makes a note to fire whoever got her into this, and a clueless Rakim croons like Crosby across a slowed-down “Concrete Jungle,” which as the Wailers’ greatest recording (once there were giants in the earth, and Marley was part of a band) was made out of equal parts despair, syncopation and menace. Out by the skin of their teeth: Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry on “Roots, Rock, Reggae,” proving that trashiness can so conquer all.

  4 Douglas Gordon, Through a Looking Glass (1999) at the Venice Bienalle (June 13–Nov. 7) Gordon ran a slightly fuzzy video of Robert De Niro’s “You talkin’ to me?” sequence from Martin Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver in a loop on two screens, with a stuttering echo on the soundtrack. Ten years old in Glasgow when Taxi Driver came out, Gordon removed the scene from its status as a cliché in cultural discourse, a punch line without a joke, and allowed it to communicate on its own, a drama of absolute presence. At the same time, by means of repetition, Gordon isolated each word and gesture to the point where from second to second one could read De Niro’s eyes flashing altogether different messages. You might have hit a mental pause button for the instant when the eyes were not taunting but mad, demanding revenge without regard to object—and you might have then seen the same eyes in De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin in Scorsese’s 1983 The King of Comedy. You might have seen the footage Gordon was playing with folding itself into the scene in which nowhere would-be stand-up comic Pupkin seats himself in his basement room in his mother’s house, the room all made up as a set for the Jerry Langford Show, and Pupkin happily acting out his big break, his routine, his confident banter with the legendary host, his ease in the light of fame. You might have seen the scenes from the two movies as one and the same, two dangerous men rehearsing what they plan to do next, and the one without the gun infinitely the more terrifying.