Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  6 Chumbawamba, “Tony Blair” (ActiVator) The chest-thumpingly anarchist English amalgamation recently put out “The Passenger List for Doomed Flight #1721,” in which it gleefully fantasizes the deaths of, among others, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder—apparently not considering Joerg Haider sufficiently evil to be worth mentioning. Infinitely more interesting is Chumbawamba’s fan-club single “Tony Blair,” which the band should make generally available before it chokes on its own righteousness. Following the Clash’s 1979 London Calling, the sleeve mimics the left-to-bottom pink and green lettering on Elvis’ first album, the 1956 Elvis Presley: in place of the delirious Presley of the original jacket, though still placed right next to Elvis’ bassist Bill Black, is Blair. His face split by a smile, he’s lightly picking on an acoustic guitar—as if backing up the sweet-voiced young thing on the record, who steps lightly over sock-hop piano triplets while pining away for the dreamboat who promised her “something new” but dumped her as soon as he got what he wanted. “Now you date/All the girls you used to hate,” she sighs; “oo-wah-oo-wah-oo,” says the chorus. Even though she says, “I’m not that kind of girl,” you just know she’d fall for him all over again. That’s not the message Chumbawamba means to send, but it’s what happens with good records: they say what they say, not what they’re told.

  7 Clambake revisited, in William Plummer, “Sensing His Moment” (People magazine, Jan. 31) In a recent column, Molly Ivins argued that no one can be elected president without an Elvis component, and confessed she could find no such thing in Bill Bradley, whom she nevertheless spent the rest of her space adoring. Bradley apparently got there ahead of her: “A notoriously dozy speaker,” Plummer reported, “he once studied Elvis movies at the Library of Congress to get a clue to the King’s charisma.” And still couldn’t win New Hampshire: I admit I haven’t tried it, but watching Elvis movies at the Library of Congress sounds like eating ribs with a fork.

  8 Eternal return on The Sopranos (HBO, Jan. 30) The episode kicked off with a jumping piece of old, East Coast, for all I know New Jersey-specific doo-wop pulsing through a pizza joint run by a man in his 50s; it ended with teenage Meadow Soprano and her friend Hunter cooking at home and singing along to New Jerseyan Lauryn Hill. As events, the songs were more than 40 years apart; in the way the words of both were more interested in themselves than in addressing any listener, in the way they slid off of each other’s sounds, the songs were almost the same.

  9 Bob Dylan, “Things Have Changed,” from Wonder Boys—Music from the Motion Picture (Columbia) Taking phrases out of the air (from the Carter Family’s “Worried Man Blues,” Duane Eddy’s “Forty Miles of Bad Road”) to completely inhabit “I been all around the world, boys,” a line from scores of old mountain songs and white blues, Bob Dylan the person thus begs leave to inhabit a fictional construct in which he imagines what it would mean to outlive oneself: to retain all of one’s faculties and decline to use them. Melville created his clerk Bartleby to define rebellion as withdrawal, his manifesto “I would prefer not to”; using all of his faculties, Dylan guides the receding narrator from the 1997 Time Out of Mind into a long step back, letting him look over the whole landscape of that work with an expression composed of a querulous grin.

  10 Bill Clinton, State of the Union address (Jan. 27) “We remain a new nation,” Clinton said. “As long as our dreams outweigh our memories, America will remain forever young.” “Could Reagan have said it better?” asked a friend, and the answer is, No, he couldn’t have said it better, or half as well. Reagan couldn’t have brought off the Dylan reference as if it were his own. And I doubt if Reagan would have done what Clinton did just a paragraph earlier—when, caught in the coded metaphors of American speech, he had a Founding Father (“When the framers finished crafting our Constitution, Benjamin Franklin stood in Independence Hall and reflected on a painting of the sun, low on the horizon. He said, ‘I have often wondered whether that sun was rising or setting. Today,’ Franklin said, ‘I have the happiness to know it is a rising sun’ ”) naming a brothel in New Orleans. Or, as another friend put it, “Cue the Animals.”

  FEBRUARY 22, 2000

  SPECIAL ALL-BEATLES EDITION!

  1–3 The Beatles, “A Day in the Life” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol, 1967); The Handsome Family, In the Air (Carrot Top) and Down in the Valley: A Treasury of Their Most Willowy and Haunted Songs (Carrot Top, 1994–2000) Thirty-three years ago, the Beatles marshaled every studio trick to form a collage meant to enclose all modern existence in the arms of absurdity and alienation; the result was stupendous. It made those already passé ’50s shibboleths seem so new you couldn’t tell the threat from the thrill. The Beatles excavated the habitual in a car crash and the routine in art. They revealed the visionary possibilities of a commute. They threw in what sounded like complete symphony orchestras, echo chambers, electronic distortion and, to end it all, the return of the lost chord. Two-thirds of a century’s worth of avant-garde experiments from cubism to futurist noise to Eduardo Paolozzi’s post-war “Pop!” assemblages were boiled down into a pop song meant to last forever. The world reeled, then; today, when the seams and stitches of the piece may be more immediately apparent than the whole, it still sounds like a miracle, or an accident.

  The Handsome Family, aka Brett (music, vocals) and Rennie (words) Sparks of Chicago, work the deep mines of fundamentalist American music, from the preblues and proto-country shouts and ballads where it is presumed that there are no experiments or accidents. In this valley, all thoughts and sounds (here made with guitar, bass, banjo, melodica, piano, drum machine and autoharp) are somehow preordained. There are no seams or stitches, but only a reach toward a secret that enclosed existence before human beings learned to write and will enclose it when they have forgotten how.

  The Handsome Family’s music is meant to seem discovered, not made; fated, not willed, but when fate is altogether out of your hands absurdity translates as guilt. Across the three albums mostly drawn on for Down in the Valley—Odessa, Milk and Scissors and Through the Trees—the songs that begin as murder ballads in the recognizable line of “Omie Wise” or “Tom Dooley”—the 1994 “Arlene,” the 1996 “Winnebago Skeletons”—reach the verge of the 1998 “My Sister’s Tiny Hands,” which is the “A Day in the Life” of folk music.

  Like the Beatles, the Handsome Family use everything they have, everything they can find; the difference is, the effects seem less to have been imposed on a composition than to be circling around a story like vultures. Shadowy clouds pass over the drama of twins so close in the womb and then in life you know neither will ever find another mate; when they are separated by a snake that leaves one dead and the other mad, winds blow through the tale so fiercely you can’t tell them from baying hounds, chasing the singer through the swamp as he seeks to kill every snake on earth with a stick. But you don’t have to hear the shadows, the wind, the howling. It’s all subsumed into Brett Sparks’ already-dead narrative tone, his refusal to give up the ghost just yet (over there, over there, one more snake!). The oldest truly common American folk song is the snakebite epic “Springfield Mountain,” which is sardonic, mocking and social, a joke for the whole town to share. The aloneness that is the final subject of “My Sister’s Tiny Hands” is about a much older, more notorious snake, and in this case Adam is cast out of Eden without Eve; he buried her in the garden. And it’s all his fault. If he had never been born, she wouldn’t have had to die.

  In the Air, the Handsome Family’s new album, takes many steps back from this high Gothic—from haunts Edgar Allen Poe might have envied, never mind Bob Dylan. This is like Dylan’s soft-footed Nashville Skyline—with the portents and warnings of John Wesley Harding, of “All Along the Watchtower” and “The Wicked Messenger” hiding inside it. You can miss the murders, the torments of an isolation that is far beyond the help of a mere idea like alienation, because, as the record promises, you are in the air: floating on the airs of flattened melodies
, calmed orchestrations, lowered voices. The music might be all about weather, no rain in sight. Outside of the quiet spell the music casts, though, the weather may have to change many times before the songs give up what they hold.

  4–9 Astrid Kirchherr & Klaus Voormann, Hamburg Days (Genesis Publications / Govinda Gallery) In concert with a “Hamburg Days” exhibition—a show running through March 18 of paintings by original Beatle Stu Sutcliffe, who died in Hamburg in 1962; the early-’60s photographs of the Beatles made by his lover Kirchherr; and new Hamburg-days paintings by Hamburg Beatles discoverer Voormann—the Govinda Gallery of Washington, D.C., is distributing Hamburg Days, a two-volume, boxed, Genesis art book, available in a limited edition of 2,500 copies for $480, shipping included. It might be recalled that in 1980 Genesis issued a similarly limited $356 edition of George Harrison’s I Me Mine—which showed up not long after in a $12.95 version published by Simon & Schuster.

  No matter how augmented, dressed up or padded with sketches, scene-setting documentation and everything else anyone can think of, as a painter Voormann remains an ordinary commercial artist and Kirchherr’s photos remain unforgettable, more severe than they are playful. In line with the way her pictures were restaged and she was interpreted in the fine 1993 Ian Softley movie Backbeat—interpreted as a postwar Mona Lisa by Sheryl Lee, who put her Laura Palmer prettiness into her eyes—her posed portraits of the Beatles as a group or as individuals, or her own selfportraits, communicate more than anything a moment that is about to vanish. As the Beatles played all night in the worst strip club in town, Kirchherr and Voormann glimpsed them as the true avatars of the postwar world they had been trying to make for themselves in bohemian, art-school Hamburg. Her pictures say that in an instant these determined-looking young men are going to leave not only Kirchherr but themselves behind as they are transformed into figments of the common imagination of the entire world.

  Beyond the photos—which can be seen elsewhere, though not so gorgeously—what makes Hamburg Days uncanny is the way it functions as a collective KirchherrVoormann memoir. As they remember growing up under the Nazis, you’re reminded how close to the Nazis they and the Beatles all were in 1960, and how close the Nazis remained to them. “We had to say ‘Heil Hitler’ when we got to school in the morning, and it was the standard greeting when you met someone in the street,” Kirchherr says. “When the war was finished and the English came, my mother took me aside and warned me, ‘Now you must never say that again,’ and I didn’t know why. I’d thought it was like saying, ‘How do you do?’ ” She is explicit that her and her friends’ attempt to create their own culture, really a kind of secret society, out of Cocteau, the Marquis de Sade, Oscar Wilde, Sartre, and Villon—all combining into something much closer to present-day Goth than ’60s existentialism—was an attempt to negate their identity as people who would have grown up as Nazis if Hitler had won: “So even before we met the Beatles, we were creating our own little innocent revolution.” It was the success she saw coming for the Beatles, not the guilt of the past, that would take away whatever innocence that revolution had; once you help change the world, innocence is the last thing you can claim.

  On his recent Hamburg-days album, Run Devil Run (Capitol), Paul McCartney acts as if he never did change the world. The lack of anguish and authority in his bash-and-split renditions of such old Beatles favorites as Carl Perkins’ “Movie Magg” or Larry Williams’ “She Said Yeah” is as weird as the 1999 picture inside the box, where he looks more like his own child than himself. The music is alive—but nothing close to the anarchy of the music the Beatles actually made in Hamburg. You can find it on various official and legally-contested Live-from-the-Star-Club albums; it was never more raw than on a tape bootlegged as The International Battle of the Century: The Beatles vs. The Third Reich. This was a takeoff on a real album, in which Vee-Jay Records of Chicago recycled the early EMI Beatles recordings to which they briefly held rights: The International Battle of the Century: The Beatles vs. the Four Seasons. On the back was a checklist, where you could award between 10 and zero points to, say, “Baby It’s You” vs. “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” The Third Reich version was far more inspired: the likes of “Matchbox” and “ Little Queenie” vs. audience noise titled “Arbeit Mach Frei,” “Schweinehund,” “Your Papers, Please” and “Vhere Ist Pete Best?” Starting tepidly with “A Taste of Honey” and “Till There Was You,” the band, with Paul doing most of the singing and John taunting the crowd, soon goes absolutely elsewhere, into sounds so rough the songs barely retain a shred of recognizability. On “Talkin’ ‘Bout You” 1977 London punk is discovered, not as style but strictly as form, with a disorientingly atonal one-note guitar solo—here, as on “Where Have You Been All My Life” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” impossible to credit as the work of sober, worried George. A tame Carl Perkins ditty like “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby” goes over the edge into a kind of war—or right into the secret society into which Kirchherr and Voormann had already initiated the Beatles, and vice versa.

  10 Ringo Starr, TV commercial for Charles Schwab As drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Ringo often sat in with the Beatles in Hamburg; now he sits up straight in an office delivering investmentcounsel gobbledygook to up-and-comers as the menacing piano line of “Money (That’s What I Want)” bangs in the background. Of all the Beatles’ official recordings, their 1963 cover of Barrett Strong’s 1959 original (the first Motown record; there’s a blood-and-guts account of the making of the Detroit template in Raynoma Gordy Singleton’s Berry, Me and Motown, often translated as “Bury Me in Motown”) was perhaps the only one to capture the spirit of the Hamburg cauldron—capture it, and heave it at the world. Whenever I hear the Beatles’ version, aiming, it seems for its whole length, at John’s scream “I WANT TO BE FREE!” I know that nothing could ever be better. I hope Ringo made a good deal: the commercial is a reminder, or, for those who haven’t heard the record, a clue.

  MARCH 6, 2000

  1 Mary Lou Lord, “Aim Low,” on Mary Lou Lord/Sean Na Na (Kill Rock Stars) After the who-cares kick of Janis “The Female Elvis” Martin’s old rockabilly twirl “Bang Bang” and the shtick mournfulness of Lucinda Williams’ “Hard Road” (could there be any other sort of road in a Williams song?), Lord ends her half of this EP with real indie soul music: a version of the Bevis Frond’s pretty, painful account of someone afraid of the sound of her own voice, somehow combined with the momentum of Trisha Yearwood’s “She’s in Love With the Boy.” That one song says “You got no target, it’s impossible to miss it” and the other says “reach for the stars” turns out to have nothing to do with why both are good.

  2 Julien Temple, director, The Filth and the Fury (Fine Line) Temple, who made the much-fictionalized Sex Pistols film The Great Rock ‘n Roll Swindle for impresario Malcolm McLaren in 1980, returns with a documentary for the surviving band members—all of whom, for present-day interviews, are presented in silhouette, either because they don’t want to look old or, as Temple has said, because it makes them look like criminals. How cool. Like the opening Collapse of England montage, which is supposed to set the Pistols’ eruption in a causative social context, the device is a distraction. As Johnny Rotten makes clear, he wasn’t fighting unemployment or corruption or racism or Pink Floyd—he was fighting resignation, in all its forms. He thinks he lost: “Yes, I can take on England,” he says of himself and Sid Vicious. “But I couldn’t take on one heroin addict.”

  “They are the antithesis of human existence,” says a London council member. What comes across in the still-shocking, irreducible performance footage, often fitted to studio recordings, is Rotten’s absolute seriousness—the sense that he’s on some suicidal mission, that he has no choice—and the unprecedented, unfollowed power of the songs he used. Perhaps most riveting is a segment (shot in a small venue, from below the stage, in blue tint) of “God Save the Queen.” Rotten is in a conventional, unripped suit jacket and bow tie. The clothes accentuate him not as a j
uvenile delinquent but as a speaker in the public square, dressed respectfully to address his fellow citizens—with the rain of frogs that 16th century artists showed spewing from the mouth of the Antichrist now issuing from his. “At least when I die,” guitarist Steve Jones says today, “they can say, I did something.”

  3–4 Will Oldham, Guarapero—Lost Blues 2 (Drag City), and Byrds, “Lover of the Bayou,” on (Unissued) from (Untitled)/(Unissued) (Columbia Legacy) Oldham, in Louisville in the 1990s, and Roger McGuinn, in Hollywood in 1970, heard something glamorous and unkillable in old American music. To Oldham, it might have been music that was altogether forgotten, so that to remember it would require a voice that could leave its body. To McGuinn, it was a Technicolor movie starring none other. “I’m the lover of the bayou!” he crows, making a complete fool of himself, except that the crossing rhythmic lines of a band exploding into a song—the guitars, the voice and the leading harmonica pulling away from each other—open the story to the point where you can see the singer turning into a Louisiana Paul Bunyan, striding from Lafayette to Baton Rouge in a single step.

  Oldham sings like the kid McGuinn’s hero took into the swamp to raise and then forgot. His voice cracks opens fissures of doubt in everything he says. At his most vehement he sounds the most frightened. “Johnny Ace was drunk, was fucked, was NOT ON STAGE” he insists of the spectral R&B singer who shot himself playing Russian roulette on Christmas Eve 1954—as if the fact that Ace did it in his dressing room is what’s really important, though Oldham will never be able to explain why. Unless it’s because he believes the old story that it was really Ace’s label boss Don Robey who pulled the trigger.

  5 Milla Jovovich, “Satellite of Love,” on The Million Dollar Hotel—Music From the Motion Picture (Interscope) Intense, clumsy, convincing—who’d have guessed that if you put the actress who wore the adhesivetape dress in The Fifth Element behind an old Lou Reed song she’d sound just like Macy Gray?