by Greil Marcus
9 Bob Neuwirth in “Hal Wilner’s Harry Smith Project,” Royal Festival Hall (London, July 2) For a mass tribute to the compiler of The Anthology of American Folk Music, the old Dylan sidekick made a subtle shift in the lyrics of the impenetrable North Carolina ballad “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” from “I wish I was a lizard in the spring” to “I wish I was a lizard in your spring.” Sort of changed the meaning—or revealed it.
10 Mango boutique, Plaga de Carles Pi I Sunyer, Barcelona (Nov. 24) Found archaeology: A smooth-faced model was featured on a poster on the outside wall of the shop. The poster was so big it completely covered a still-functioning doorway, secured by a heavy lock and chain—which, appearing right in the middle of the model’s cheek, made the whole tableau into a precise match for the most extreme examples of London punk style, as it was almost a quarter century ago. The signifiers of domination and escape, control and refusal, of hiding in plain sight, swirled in the twilight; no tagger could have produced anything half so suggestive.
JANUARY 10, 2000
1 Snakefarm, Songs From My Funeral (RCA) For singer/guitarist Anna Domino and guitarist/programmer Michel Delory, the idea was irresistible: take the most commonplace folk ballads in the American tradition—all those deep, profound, deathsoaked cornpone campfire singalongs from “John Henry” to “Tom Dooley” to “St. James Infirmary” to “Frankie and Johnny” to “The Streets of Laredo” to “House of the Rising Sun”—and take them away. Not make them their own, but make them perfect, distant, beckoning, resistant, irresistible in and of themselves. Other versions, by the ’20s and ’30s singers brought together on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, by Bobby “Blue” Bland, the Kingston Trio, Bob Dylan, the Animals, or 100, 200 years’ worth of street singers, might be convincing, down-home, inventive, scholarly, passionate, personal; for this project, every performance would be Garbo.
Domino’s singing is cool, chilly, cold, funny and most of all unsurprised. She inhabits these songs—with the words of most of them radically extended, rewritten or recombined from the countless variants of each (have you ever heard “Seventeen coalblack horses/Are hitched to a rubber-tired hack” in “St. James Infirmary”?)—so completely you never question the techno aesthetic Delory has grafted onto them: electronic blips and beeps, a lot of wahwah, the disembodiment of a drum machine and a synthesized chamber orchestra. Such effects are never effects at all, but merely the bleached, alkaline, Georgia O’Keeffe landscape in which the songs are now set. There’s never a sense any song could have turned out any other way: Domino’s beyond-the-grave tones are matter-of-fact.
According to one account, Frankie Baker shot Allen Britt in St. Louis on Oct. 15, 1899, and ever since, as was said of Abraham Lincoln after John Wilkes Booth shot him, they’ve belonged to the ages, or whoever wanted them. No one cared about the facts; the story had room in it, and so singers, composers, playwrights, painters all took their places in the tale, changing names, faces, races, time and place. On Songs From My Funeral, the piece begins as if in some ’50s nightclub in L.A., after hours, James Dean on the bongos, Chet Baker looking on, wondering whether to join in, wondering if he’s Frankie or Johnny, wondering if he’d rather cheat and die or be wronged and kill. As Domino tells the story in this club—like someone pulling petals off a daisy: he loves me, he loves me not—it’s a story everyone knows, something that happened back in the ’20s, in New York, wasn’t that it, Greenwich Village, didn’t Edmund Wilson write something about this, something about him and Edna St. Vincent Millay? Or was it up in Harlem?
Domino is now coming out of Anna Christie, and as she fills in the details, the very perfection of her face—and, beneath the skin, the inhumanity perfection suggests—sexualizes the legend in a wholly new way. Suddenly, as Domino recites the necessary opening lines, “Frankie and Johnny were lovers/Oh lordy how they could love,” you see Frankie’s hands all over Johnny, unbuttoning his new suit, Johnny’s hands under Frankie’s dress, right on the street. When Frankie sees Johnny with Alice Fry, your heart goes into your throat, just as Frankie’s goes into hers: No, no, you say, it can’t end this way! But she has to shoot him—“Rooty toot toot,” as Domino makes it happen, Frankie’s last words before she gives up her life to myth.
Something this complex, unhurried and seemingly uncontrived—unfolded—happens with almost every tune. You can’t get close to the bottom of any of them, even though you may have heard these songs all your life; Domino has, after all, and she hasn’t gotten to the bottom of any of them, just dropped the false bottom of overfamiliarity out of each. As a result the old music comes back to a listener not like a ghost from the past, begging to be remembered, but as if from the future, certain nothing we do can change anything.
2–8 “America Takes Command—1950s into the 1960s,” in “The American Century Part II, 1950–2000,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Lisa Phillips, chief curator (New York, through Feb. 13) On the top floor, a moan from several galleries away took me to the section’s “Culture Site,” a collection of representative books, magazine covers, film stills and, in this moment, Hank Williams’ 1950 “Ramblin’ Man.” Surrounded by ads for Cold War hysteria and the post-war boom, it sounded so old—older than any other object present on any of the floors, except, in the “Monochromatic Abstraction” mezzanine, from 1966, Brice Marden’s peasoup, prairie-flat Nebraska, which could have had a little radio playing the Bruce Springsteen song hidden behind it. Then Williams was followed by Muddy Waters’ 1950 “Rollin’ Stone,” and then Elvis Presley’s 1955 “Mystery Train.” (Billboard for the whole “American Century Part II” show: Warhol’s Double Elvis doubled, under the headline “GET HERE BEFORE ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING”—shouldn’t it be “leaves”?) Contextualized like this, “Mystery Train” sounded exactly like “Rollin’ Stone”—it was all in the rhythm, speeded up but also opened up—until Elvis hit his high notes, and Williams was back in the saddle. Then Elvis laughed, and he was on his own.
The picture Williams had taken me away from was Wallace Berman’s 1964 Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, a fierce collage with a lot of story-untold empty space: Muhammad Ali in a cap, shouting, looking just like Elijah Muhammad; three Rolling Stones, in dark cutouts; a figure I couldn’t recognize except generically, a type-case of the American drifter-killer, flanked by two detectives; people with swastikas on their foreheads; naked white women, from a sex magazine, probably, though in this unstable setting they looked as if they were on their way to the gas chambers. It all fit with a poster for the 1954 radioactive-ants movie THEM! On the far left, a fleeing man looked exactly like Ronald Reagan; in the center, a speech balloon coming out of a woman’s mouth read, “Kill one and two take its place!” Well, isn’t that the American way? Buy one, get one free?
9 Handsome Family, Odessa (Carrot Top) From 1994, this turned up in a bin: first, fully realized attempts by Chicagoans Brett and Rennie Sparks to transfer the fatalism of the old murder ballads into modern life. As in “Moving Furniture Around,” a celebration of clinical depression.
10 Bobby Fuller Four, “A New Shade of Blue,” on Boys Don’t Cry soundtrack (Koch) The first sign the filmmakers are going to get Charles Starkweather country right comes right at the beginning, when Brandon and Candace, neither of whom will survive the film, pick each other up at a bar, and this gorgeous rockabilly crying song—altogether forgotten until now, it seems to have been made to be forgotten—is floating in the background. It was 1966, the Texas band had scored with “I Fought the Law,” they filled up an album, this was on it, and then Fuller was found dead in an L.A. parking lot. Of “asphyxiation,” the coroner ruled. Because someone had poured gasoline down Fuller’s throat.
JANUARY 24, 2000
1 Warren Zevon, Life’ll Kill Ya (Artemis) The old rounder borrows his old melodies, his old ideas and kicks over his own rocking chair: “I Was in the House When the House Burned Down” is “Excitable Boy” with humor intact, but no longer a joke, because when the house burn
ed down the singer found he had nowhere else to go; he still lives in the ashes. So he blows his horn, gets syncopation out of his guitar, passes it off to the drummer and steps up to the mike. As Zevon imagines himself back to the Crusades, back to Graceland (“He was an accident waiting to happen,” he begins, speaking like a witness in court, a storm-warning guitar line hanging over his head. “Most accidents happen at home”), into the ground, the album takes on such a sweep that the house that burned down comes to seem less a place than Zevon’s whole era, that time Billy Joel sings about in “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Of course we did, Zevon says. Want a light?
2 John Carman, “Mob Rule” (San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 14) Saturday Night Live ran a hysterical parody of Sopranos reviews on Jan. 15, but unlike most of the cream-in-their-jeans crowd—TV critics who sounded like nothing so much as the swells who take Tony to their golf club and treat him like an exotic pet—Carman has something to say. “There’s a reason Tony can’t find his bliss at home; at his strip-joint hangout; or in his psychoanalyst’s office. He’s a criminal; his life has rotted from the inside out.” But that’s just a warm-up. The code of the show is in its language, Carman writes, in all the variations of “fuck” except the one that takes a “Let’s” in front of it: “The f-word as an adjective serves to demean the noun it modifies. As a nonsexual verb, it demeans the direct object. The language itself is lifenegating, and the negation of life is the rampant disease corrupting Tony’s two families, biological and criminal.”
3 Etta James, “A Sunday Kind of Love,” on Her Best (Chess) In 1960, “Miss Peaches” drifts around the old song as if it’s “Since I Fell for You,” as if she has all the time in the world.
4 Bonnie Raitt voted into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in first year of eligibility I was complaining about this to another music writer. “I think her body of work is superior to Ruth Brown’s,” he said of the R&B pioneer inducted in 1993. But neither Brown nor Raitt has a body of work. Brown had a string of singles, Raitt has a bunch of albums; you flip through them, looking for a moment when you say, yes, this made a difference. If you place Brown’s 1949 “Teardrops from My Eyes” against, say, Raitt’s 1989 Nick of Time, you’ll see that mannerism can never speak the language of style—and that Raitt, in her honest, dedicated way as false a singer as Michael Bolton (who really does love “When a Man Loves a Woman,” you know), is being honored for her class. In the Marxist sense.
5 Ed van der Elsken, Love on the Left Bank (Dewi Lewis) This legendary photonovel, originally published in 1956, is set mostly in a small bar off St. Germaindes-Prés. It’s the early ’50s, and all the bohemian clichés are present—sex, drugs, violence, poverty, and bad art—but also movement, tension, the unknown. Looking at the way people stand, shout or pass out, you can feel the blank sense of freedom that followed the war all over the West now compressed into this one shabby cafe and nobody there having the slightest idea what to do with it. Or almost nobody. At one table, a few youthful megalomaniacs—among them Serge Berna, Michèle Bernstein, and Jean-Michel Mension, who are visible here, and Guy Debord, who isn’t—were working on the problem. And you can feel that, too.
6 Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1976–92), in “The American Century Part II, 1950–2000,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Lisa Phillips, chief curator (New York, through Feb. 13) “Generation to generation, nothing changes in bohemia,” Nik Cohn wrote in 1968; that may be its allure. In 690 slides, Goldin takes the baton from van der Elsken, and while there’s more sex, drugs and violence here—and, since the story goes on, death—the weightlessness of the boys and girls in Love on the Left Bank is missing. That’s because the revolution those people counted on had, by Goldin’s time, come and gone. The people in van der Elsken’s book went on to make history; Goldin and her friends are stranded outside of it. In such a setting, it’s fascinating, and heartbreaking, to discover which songs on Goldin’s soundtrack emerge to take new power from photos of deadened lovers and defiant casualties, and which are just wallpaper. The winners, somehow made pristine: Dionne Warwick’s “Don’t Make Me Over,” Petula Clark’s “Downtown” (equally alive as the liberation theme song in Girl, Interrupted) and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” by Nico with the Velvet Underground. The first is a warning, the second a celebration. The third is a funeral: its strength is in its time shift, its elegy for what has not happened, its certainty that all tomorrow’s parties have already taken place. And the last song is Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This”—which, following slides of cemeteries, coffins and a crude painting on a door of skeletons fucking standing up, can never have sounded so rich.
7 Michael Lindsay-Hogg, director, Two of Us (VH1, premiering Feb. 1) A fantasy: in 1976, after years of estrangement, Paul McCartney and John Lennon meet at the Dakota in New York. They walk, they talk, finally they get out their guitars and then—Yoko calls. From L.A. Where she’s gone to sell a cow for half a million dollars.
8 Degrees of believability in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (New Line Films) 1. Fulfillment of Exodus 8:2. 2. Julianne Moore trying to kill herself because she feels so awful about being unfaithful to dying fossil Jason Robards. 3. The whole cast—sentient, OD’d, in a coma, it doesn’t matter—reverently mouthing the words to Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up.”
9–10) Troxel vs. Granville before the Supreme Court, Jan. 12, and Come Softly to Me: The Very Best of the Fleetwoods (EMI) If you followed the coverage of this case, re the right of grandparents “to visit with a child over the objection of parents who have not been shown to be unfit,” as Linda Greenhouse put it in the New York Times, you might have noticed one of the plaintiffs: a bald, stocky, tight-lipped man in glasses, Gary Troxel, 60. It was in 1958 that he joined with Gretchen Christopher and Barbara Ellis at Olympia High School to form the Fleetwoods—before Sleater-Kinney, the best band ever to come out of Olympia, Wash. Over the next three years, chasing “Come Softly to Me” to “Mr. Blue” to “(He’s) The Great Impostor,” they would take the most obvious and commonplace sentiments and, floating them through doo-wop patterns, put them out of reach. “I saw him at an oldies concert about five years ago,” Charles Taylor says of Troxel. “The ‘Fleetwoods’ were on the bill. (I have no idea if the two women were the same.) I fully expected it to be another depressing act. And he was wonderful. The voice was the same, and suddenly I was looking at a middle-aged man for whom none of the uncertainty of those songs had ever been settled.” On the evening news shows, Troxel—whose son had killed himself in 1993, leaving two children with their mother, with whom Troxel and his wife were now in dispute—looked bitter, as if he had settled all questions in his heart and knew no one would ever feel as he did, as if he had nothing to say to anyone.
FEBRUARY 7, 2000
1 Mekons, Journey to the End of the Night (Quarterstick) An end-of-the—or anyway their—world album, maybe the best the intransigent Leeds-to-Chicago punk combo has made, with Morris dancing hiding inside reggae rhythms and inside of that “Neglect,” which could be the Crests, climbing “Step by Step” in 1960, Rod Stewart in 1972 telling a woman he hasn’t seen in years, “You Wear It Well,” but has a twist nice songs like those were made to deny.
2 The Need, The Need Is Dead (Chainsaw) Olympians (as in Washington) Rachel Carns and Radio Sloan on a thrilling ride, down switchbacks in reverse. Freedom of speech is fine, but this is something else—in moments, as when they recapture the long-gone late-’70s London warble of Lora Logic’s “Wake Up,” freedom of throat.
3 Christina Aguilera (Jan 30., ABC/MTV) The blonde sensation’s lip-sync job for the Super Bowl halftime show was creepy in a conventional, who-says-they-aren’t-real? manner. It was no preparation at all for the low point of the two-hour biopic Christina Aguilera: What a Girl Wants, which followed: in grainy footage of a little girl on a public stage, mike in her hand, singing an adult love song and making adult tease gestures, the 6-or 7-year-old Aguilera was the image of JonBenét Ramsey, and her mother, popping in to say, Oh, it w
asn’t ME, it was what SHE wanted, was the image of Patsy Ramsey. Running simultaneously on the USA network was The Mary Kay Letourneau Story: All-American Girl, but in this night’s depravity sweepstakes it didn’t have a chance.
4 Vue, Vue (Sub Pop) This young San Francisco band has rather bizarrely rediscovered the unrepentantly cheesy sound of the post-Beatles, pre-psychedelic San Francisco Bay Area—a sound perhaps summed up better by the name of one of its exemplars, Peter Wheat and the Breadmen, than any actual records, though “ Little Girl,” by San Jose’s Syndicate of Sound, is close. Thanks to Jessica Graves’ implacably pokerfaced, two-fingered organ riff, Vue’s “Girl” (principal lyric, ecstatically groaned by Rex Shelverton: “Oh, girl”) is closer.
5 Robert Mugge, director, Hellhounds on My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson (Winstar video) Talkers and players gathered at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for a celebration of the ’30s Mississippi bluesman, and this documentary includes too many fat white guys with nothing to say. But there are lucid, stirring passages from keynote speaker Peter Guralnick; there is Johnson’s childhood friend Willie Coffee, crying over his memory of “Sweet Home Chicago” (“I don’t like to talk about him too much”). Alongside any number of sclerotic or florid readings of hallowed Johnson tunes by singers black and white, there’s skinny white guy Chris Whitley’s queer, atonal revision of the previously uncoverable “Hellhound on My Trail,” ludicrous in its first notes and a dead man walking, a thing in itself, by its end. And in the power trio Gov’t Mule there are fat white guys slamming their way through a don’t-let-it-end-yet assault on “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day”—with the Rolling Stones’ “Stop Breaking Down” and Cream’s “Crossroads” the most exciting claim on a Johnson song I’ve ever heard. Don’t go looking to Gov’t Mule’s own records, or Chris Whitley’s, for anything similar; their performances here take place outside their careers.