Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  5 Pipilotti Rist, “I’m a Victim of This Song,” in Himalaya (Oktagon) Rist is a Swiss video artist; leading off We Can’t, the CD included in the catalog for a recent exhibition, is her version of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” An insinuating guitar and a careful, Germanic male chorus take the performance away from karaoke; Rist lets the song draw her little-girl voice back to hopscotch days, lets it skin her knees, and then steps forward to sing with poise and balance—just as her alter ego, trapped in the locked room of any overplayed hit, begins screaming for her life.

  6 Atmosphere, Overcast! (Rhyme Sayers) With voices Slug, Spawn, Beyond, Ant and Stress, this determinedly right-here-right-now Twin Cities hip-hop collective looks for the sound of thought. “In 200 years people will be studying Atmosphere,” you hear, and there’s such modest desperation in the way the line is spoken you can sense the singer reaching that far into the future, grabbing the first person he sees, shouting: “Why aren’t you listening?”

  7 Nat Finkelstein, Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, 1964–1967 (Cannongate) One day in 1965 Bob Dylan and entourage arrive at the Factory for a screen test—or, really, in photographer Finkelstein’s account, for a showdown in which hip is pitted against cool, and loses: “A Jewish potlatch commenced. Andy gave Bobby a great double image of Elvis. Bobby gave Andy short shrift.” The real winner was Finkelstein, who came away with a perfectly framed back-shot of Warhol and Dylan facing each other as Warhol’s Flaming Star Elvises, their guns drawn, aim blank-eyed at both—a concatenation of American iconography unmatched in this century. Dylan knew a curse when he saw one: he traded the picture to his manager Albert Grossman for a couch. The couch is probably long gone, the picture is worth millions, but guess who’s still alive?

  8 Absinthe (74–75, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paris 1e) On the way to the Picasso Museum, stop here and find yourself plunged into the turn-of-that-century haute bohemia of Barcelona, Picasso’s first city. All the staff are in costume (you sort of hope): hair plastered to their skulls, black spit curls on their foreheads that a typhoon wouldn’t dislodge, suits and dresses of outrageous and seductive design, the floor man and woman moving from customer to customer like tango dancers, the madame of the place sitting behind the counter like a madam, a dead ringer for an older, dissolute version of the woman in the Picasso Museum’s 1918 Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, a magical painting of Olga Khokhlova, Picasso’s first wife. The store is magical. But in the window, seen from the street, is something more magical still. On a brilliantly attired male mannequin is a peacock feather scarf, gleaming with gold and beads, but somehow subtle in its splendor. It was the essence of dandyism: if in the 1830s Paris poet Girard de Nerval took his pet lobster for walks on a leash, this was as close as you could come to wearing one around your neck.

  9 Sweetwater, Cycles: The Reprise Collection (Warner Archives/Rhino) A recent VH1 film chronicled the Tragic Story of this band: adventurous hippies open at Woodstock, car crash sidelines lead singer and kills the group, the world turns, and 30 years later they reform for heroic comeback—reincarnated as, among others, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and Frederic Forrest of The Rose. This lovingly compiled set lets you hear the band as it really was: as Nansi Nevins makes a breakthrough to diffidence, her most passionate mode; as her sub–Grace Slick affectations give way to a shared aesthetic rooted somewhere in the final choruses of Marcia Strassman’s “The Flower Children (Are Blooming Everywhere)”; as on the Woodstock stage one of the guys announces the band as “Sweetwawa” and is not immediately struck by lightning. These people were so bad it’s embarrassing to be in the same room with them, and they’re still resentful that they missed their “chance.”

  10 Marianne Faithfull, Vagabond Ways (It/Virgin) And when she gets it right, it can still be scary to be in the same room with her. Thanked, among others: Anita Pallenberg, Herman Melville, Kate Moss, and Elizabeth I.

  NOVEMBER 29, 1999

  1 Macy Gray, On How Life Is (Epic) An almost old-fashioned soul record, with tunes that draw from surprising sources (“Do Something” from the Wailers’ “Kinky Reggae,” “Caligula” from the Beatles’ “Come Together,” “Still” from the Rolling Stones’ “Shine a Light”) and a voice that recalls Eartha Kitt, Shirley Bassey and Tasmin Archer—for that matter, Gayl Jones—more than anyone on Atlantic or Motown. There’s a thinness, a lack of glamour or costuming, in Gray’s tone; you can imagine these songs as ordinary if acrid talk as easily as you can see them as performances. Soul music was about appearing to reveal all, and Gray is plainly holding back, but that’s part of what draws a listener in. It’s as if something has been beaten out of the singer, and the real goal of the music is to get it back without giving up anything else. But that’s just a notion; there are mysteries here. Momentum builds in “I’ve Committed Murder” until you can feel the sound won’t escape the song; the last cut ends with a banjo, which is to say in the 19th century.

  2 Nik Cohn & Guy Peellaert, 20th-Century Dreams (Knopf) Like their 1973 Rock Dreams, cool fantasies of juxtaposition from writer Cohn, lurid realization from photo-collagist and painter Peellaert—as in Federal Agent at Large Elvis Presley smashing into a Yale dorm room to bust doper law student Bill Clinton.

  3 Cellos, “Rang Tang Ding Dong (I Am the Japanese Sandman),” on Bringing out the Dead: Music from the Motion Picture (Columbia) Doo-wop, and one of the most ridiculous records ever made. Plus, a backup singer revolts, stopping right in the middle of the song: “All you guys say the big things! All I ever get to say is, ‘Ah he goes . . .’ ” A hit in 1957, and hard to find ever since.

  4 ZZ Top, “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” on XXX (BMG) Speaking of 1957, not to mention songs with parentheses, this cute Presley No. 1 was once described as Elvis “selling out to girls.” Done here as a stripper blues, with new lyrics about cheetahs and rhinos, it’s more like cash on the bed.

  5 Laurie Anderson, “Songs & Stories from Moby-Dick” (Zellerbach Auditorium, Berkeley, Calif., Oct. 29) My friend Andrew Baumer reports on a show I couldn’t make: “If I were as self-consciously clever and downright arch as Laurie Anderson, I’d probably say something like ‘How can a supposedly respectful and intelligent revision of Moby-Dick manage to be completely devoid of any reference to Freemasonry, castration or buggery?’ The Edith Ann chair was silly and the much-vaunted Talking Stick was just a digital rehash of her magnetic-tape violin bow, but she’s really hooked up with a killer bass player this time: Skuli Svernisson, who, despite his birth in Iceland, not Kokovoko, played like he should be coated in full body tattoos and eat nothing but beefsteaks. The high point came 20 minutes in, when the astounding Thom Nelis, over a diabolical funk bass line, did a whirling peg-leg tarantella with and on crutches, all the time screaming, ‘Have you seen the White Whale? He looks like NOTHING!’

  “The oddest, and in retrospect most interesting, aspect of the whole performance was Anderson’s unapologetically female take on this whale of a book. Maybe her ignoring the savage phallocentrism of it all in favor of celebrating the yearning, nurturing, healing elements I confess I’d ignored during my 20-plus rereadings throughout my adolescent and adult life might have been just a trifle disingenuous, and perhaps a teeny bit forced, in keeping with her elfin, ain’t-I-clever persona, but so what. It never occurred to me that Melville’s intention was to compose a meditation on the search for the secret love and beauty hidden within the human heart, but if Anderson sees it, it’s obviously there.”

  6 Ann Hamilton, Myein (1999), at the Venice Bienalle (June 13–Nov. 7) As you approached the American Pavilion, crossing a flagstone courtyard, you noticed the stones were stained red, as if someone had spilled paint. The neo-classical building was small and low, with two rectangular wings coming off a dome. The place, a sign in the entryway said, reminded Hamilton of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, so she decided to orchestrate the place as an American metaphor. The sign explained further: the bumps you would see on the walls of the wings would be Braille renderi
ngs of poems from Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, which were drawn from court records, while the whispering voice you would hear emanating from the ceilings would be Hamilton reciting Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in “International Phonetic Code.”

  In the wings the information dissolved into mere suggestion, like the title of a song standing in for words you can’t make out. The suggestion changed the dots on the walls from poems you couldn’t read anyway into an abstract version of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural as it’s chiseled on a wall of the Lincoln Memorial—because it was now that building, not Monticello, that the Pavilion matched. Hamilton’s voice-over was precisely a song where you can’t make out the words, weirdly done in the style of one of these female heavy-breathing discs—Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourgh’s 1970 “Je T’aime . . . Moi Non Plus” was probably the first—that’s good for a hit every 10 years or so. The few identifiable words (“Oscar,” “November,” “Sierra,” “uniform,” “triumph”) seemed not to belong to the Second Inaugural, even if one of them does. So there you were in this surrealist memorial, noticing the difference between Lincoln’s and Hamilton’s: her walls were alive.

  Down every wall, streams of dark pink powder fell to the floor, sometimes in slivers, sometimes in gushes, like the bleeding walls in The Shining. The powder piled up on the floor, inches deep; as people walked through the rooms, causing drafts, the powder spread across the floor, and people picked it up on their shoes. When they left the U.S. Pavilion for those of other nations, they carried a trail of blood—not, you could think, the blood of conquest, but of crime and punishment: “ Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash,” as Lincoln said of slavery in his Second Inaugural, “shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” The sign explaining the piece was neat, balanced, and formal; the thing itself was almost vibrating.

  7 Bryan Ferry, As Time Goes By (Virgin) Bryan Ferry is a god. This is the most boring album of the year.

  8 Rage Against the Machine, The Battle of Los Angeles (Epic) They have a victory strategy: beat it to death.

  9 Alanis Morissette in Dogma (Lion’s Gate) Typecast as God, she opens her mouth for a scream only dogs can hear and blows off Ben Affleck’s head. As I recall, that’s pretty much what happened every time “You Oughta Know” came on the air.

  10 Levon Helm’s Classic American Cafe (300 Decatur St., New Orleans) Is this where the road ends? Here at this defunct restaurant-cafe, even the word “American” communicates like a lapsed trademark. A “Live at Levon’s” poster has an insert of a Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks poster and a design spelling out “BAND” to remind you; a spring 1999 calendar lists Levon and daughter Amy Helm with the Barn Burners, Levon Helm’s Classic Blues Band, Levon Helm with Allen Toussaint, Levon Helm with James Cotton, Levon Helm with Cork, Levon Helm with the Dirty Dozen Blues Band. The creepy stuff is on the menu: “I’m a Lonely Boy . . . I Ain’t Got No Home” Po’ Boys; The Last Waltz Desserts; “Up on Cripple Creek” seafood—and, too perfectly, “King Harvest Has Surely Come” salads. After the big “FOR RENT” sign, a red and white sticker under the menu pages in the window seemed like the last word:

  www.allmenaredogs.com

  A Revenge Site for Women

  DECEMBER 13, 1999

  1 Beck, Midnite Vultures (Interscope) This is embarrassing.

  2 Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Beacon Press reprint) Jones’ first novel from 1975 about a blues singer singing a song no one’s exactly heard before. “ ‘Songs are devils. It’s your own destruction you’re singing. The voice is a devil.’ ‘Naw, Mama. You don’t understand. Where did you get that?’ ‘Unless your voice is raised up to the glory of God . . . Where did you get those songs?’ ‘I got them from you.’ ‘I didn’t hear the words.’ Then let me give witness the only way I can. I’ll make a fetus out of grounds of coffee to rub inside my eyes.” On the other hand, Henry Louis Gates recently claimed the real significance of the book was that it introduced oral sex into fiction by black women.

  3 Metallica, S&M (Elektra) Recorded in April at the Berkeley Community Theater with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Kamen, and glorious. On “Bleeding Me,” Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” comes into view, but it’s a mirage: the real vision in the music is far more desperate, Ronald Colman clawing his way back to Shangri-La in the last shots of Lost Horizon. Across two discs, the band isn’t lost for a second; they sound like they’re on top of the mountain.

  4 Dolly Parton, The Grass Is Blue (Sugar Hill) This is the best album Parton has made since My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy in 1969, and the killer is “Silver Dagger”—the pristine Appalachian ballad that in 1960 led off Joan Baez’s first LP. Baez rarely again opened herself to a song so fully; Parton follows Baez like a girl following her mother through a field, wandering off the path, circling back, then disappearing into the woods. But now it’s nightfall, everyone in town is searching and some people are already talking about haunts and ghosts. How it ends: the fiddler, Stuart Duncan, finds her.

  5 Martha Rosler, “Positions in the Life World” (retrospective at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) In the 1967–72 series Bringing the War Home, Rosler made John Heartfield–like photocollages of disfigured Vietnamese waiting patiently on suburban patios; the images were disconcerting, but immediately obvious. At the end of the string, though, was First Lady, and real art: Pat Nixon posing proudly in a full-length formal gold gown, while over her shoulder in a gilt-framed mirror, Faye Dunaway was being shot to pieces at the end of Bonnie and Clyde. Not many thought that was a Vietnam movie when they walked out of the theaters, but, like Rosler, a lot of people knew.

  6 Bono on Selections from the Book of Psalms (Los Angeles Times Book Review, Nov. 28) The way the U2 singer writes, King David might still rule and the psalms might still be in production. Or that’s his argument: David “was forced into exile and ended up in a cave in some no-name border town facing the collapse of his ego and abandonment by God. But this is where the soap opera gets interesting: this is where David is said to have composed the first psalm—a blues. That’s what a lot of the psalms sound like to me, a blues. Man shouting at God.” Of course, Bono later calls David “the Elvis of the Bible,” but that’s just to set up his closer, a brief dissertation on authorship and authenticity: “It is not clear how many, if any, of these psalms David or his son Solomon actually wrote. Some scholars suggest the royals never dampened their nibs and that there was a host of Holy Ghost writers . . . who cares? I didn’t buy Leiber and Stoller . . . they were just his songwriters . . . I bought Elvis.”

  7 U.S. Postal Service, “1970s Celebrate the Century” stamps Fifteen designs, every one ugly, and not one about anything worth remembering. “You mean,” she said, “there was?”

  8 Doo Wop 50 produced by T.J. Lubinsky/WQED/Rhino Entertainment (PBS, airing in December) Last year, a high school teacher asked me to talk to her class about doo-wop. Drawing a blank on the concept, the students reacted tepidly to the bit of ’50s-style harmonizing that opens Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing),” were tolerant of snatches of the Penguins’ “Earth Angel” and the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Nite,” and went absolutely crazy for the sequence in Floyd Mutrux’s 1978 film American Hot Wax where the Planotones, standing in for the Del-Vikings, cut “Come Go With Me” in a studio crowded with fans, girlfriends and pizza delivery boys. I shudder to think what their reaction would have been if I’d hauled in this wellmeant special, due soon enough on home video. Virtually every legend of the form living—and more than a few not, by the evidence of the singing—paraded out for the Greatest Hit: “Sincerely,” “A Sunday Kind of Love,” “There’s a Moon Out Tonight,” “The Great Pretender” and yes, “Earth Angel” and “Come Go With Me.” But again and again the wine died on the vine; it was too late. It’s not just love that, as so many of the old songs say, “makes the world go ’round”—it’s also age and death.

  There were exceptions: Tony Pasalaqua of the Fascinators with “Oh Rose Marie
,” a grandfather still living off the memory of a girl he never got to kiss, but getting another chance as he sang; the Cadillacs’ outrageous minstrel-show act for “Speedo”; the dignity of Arlene Smith of the Chantels, probably the greatest voice rock ’n’ roll has turned up, with “Maybe.” The tears on her face recalled producer George Goldner’s account of how he got Smith’s heart in the grooves: cursing the teenager for her incompetence and stupidity until she would do anything to get away from this terrible man—including, with all her defenses gone, singing the song one last time. Best of all was the bassman for the Marcels, kicking off “Blue Moon” with a perfectly controlled avalanche of syllables, none seeking a word, each a symbol of pleasure and escape. Among all the fat men crossing the stage, he was gaunt; his hair hung down in rings. Dark glasses covered his eyes; the curl of his mouth as he waited for his moments said he’d never tell half of what he knew. He could have been Richard Belzer, or Dennis Rodman, but he was Fred Johnson, on stage in Pittsburgh PA, his hometown.