Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Down and Out—The Sad Soul of the Black South (Trikont) This extraordinarily sophisticated anthology focuses on obscure singers and strange records. It begins with George Perkins and the Silver Stars’ 1971 “Crying in the Streets,” a purposeful negation of Martha and the Vandellas’ 1964 “Dancing in the Street” and a eulogy for the Civil Rights Movement. “I see somebody marching,” Perkins cries, but he doesn’t; he’s crying in the street because all he sees are ghosts. Then there is Bill Brandon’s “Rainbow Road,” a generic voice telling a generic tale, but with such pathos it seems that without the existence of a genre, which allows men and women to disappear into anonymity, some would never have the nerve to speak at all. And there is Dicky Williams’ “In The Same Motel,” an adult version of the Rays’ 1957 “Silhouettes,” where a guy comes home from work and behind the shade of his big picture window sees his wife kissing another man—except it isn’t her, because he lives in one of the new subdivisions where all the streets and houses look the same and he’s “on the wrong block.” This time the guy’s out of town in a motel with thin walls; he’s just settling down for a lonely night on the road when he picks up the sounds the man and woman in the next room are making. “Oh,” he says in a way you wish he wouldn’t, “I got so tired of hearing my woman scream.” “I am a forgotten lover/That is, if you have time to hear,” Virgil Griffin and the Rhythm Kings sing so modestly from Greensville, Miss., speaking not only for everyone here but for the genre itself.

  3 Sinners and Saints (1926–1931) (Document) Early commercial recordings of pre-blues song survivals, from the T.C.I. Section Crew’s very smooth railroad-gang number “Track Linin’ ”—a cappella gospel in form, a day’s first cup of coffee and train whistles inside of it—to the Nugrape Twins’ odes to a drink that will make you a better person and bring you closer to God.

  4 Sarah Dougher, The Walls Ablaze (Mr. Lady) Organist for the cheapo-punk trio Cadallaca, Dougher sings and plays out of doubt here, dropping hints all over the place that happy endings are elsewhere. The women in her songs might be kin to the character Samantha Morton plays in Jesus’ Son, all brains and fatalism, contemptuous of the obligation to explain herself even as she does exactly that.

  5 Down to the Promised Land—5 Years of Bloodshot Records (Bloodshot) There are more gems among these 40 previously unheard tracks by bands on or about the Chicago country label than the Handsome Family’s cover of Bill Monroe’s “I Hear a Sweet Voice Calling,” Rico Bell and the Snakehandlers’ bitter “Money to Burn” or Hazeldine’s dark, damned “Unforgiven.” That’s merely all I’ve found so far. But if there’s anything better than Amy Nelson and Eddie Spaghetti of the Seersuckers mooning about what they did on the floor I’ll be surprised.

  6–7 J. Bottum, “The Soundtracking of America” (Atlantic Monthly, March) & Philip Roth, The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin) There are many reactionary propositions in critic J. Bottum’s manifesto—notably the idea that there was once a common “belief in the intellectual coherence of human beings and the world,” that “ Music used to have a purpose: to express and, indeed, to perpetuate this shared sense of coherence.” Now, that coherence is lost and music has no purpose. It is empty, nothing more than a soundtrack, interference, static, aural caffeine.

  What this actually means is that once upon a time only certain people needed to be taken into account as “ human beings and the world”—that’s what’s gone. Any future shared sense of coherence will have to be based on something more than the hegemony of a single, and singly gendered, ethnic group. But Bottum doesn’t hear it this way. He hears only the emptiness of music as such, the muteness, and with the great goal of social coherence—or, in reality, social domination—missing, he hears the danger of music. Bottum hears it as an irrational art form; it cannot contain ideas. It grants false but overwhelming credence to sentiments of utter vapidity and banality: “Even in, say, Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’—in, that is, a deliberate effort to make music express something rational—the ideas it takes 45 minutes to convey amount to little more than winter is cold and summer is hot.” Music convinces us we know what we don’t, understand what we’ve never thought about. Worst of all—my characterization of Bottum’s thesis, not his—music makes ordinary people feel heroic, as if they can do anything and be anyone. But it’s all a lie: “What can a genuinely tragic folk song tell us, except that we no longer know what to make of tragedy?”

  As Sgt. Joe Friday used to say to his partner in the Mad magazine Dragged Net parodies, “How’s your mom, Ed?” Coleman Silk, in Philip Roth’s new novel, a 71-year-old classics professor, can explain. Banished from the college he once transformed, he’s caught up in a transforming affair with a 34-year-old janitor. Now every Saturday night he tunes in the local Big Band show and, he says, “ Everything stoical within me unclenches and the wish not to die, never to die, is almost too great to bear. And all this from listening to Vaughn Monroe.” He goes on: “Let anyone born in 1926 try to stay alone at home on a Saturday night in 1998 and listen to Dick Haymes singing ‘Those Little White Lies.’ Just have them do that, and then tell me afterwards if they have not understood at last the celebrated doctrine of the catharsis effected by tragedy.” Who do you trust, a real-life critic or an imaginary professor? One whose true demand on art is that it offer not ideas but arguments, or one who believes that music less contains ideas than finds them in those who hear it, and then says what those ideas are worth?

  8 Melvins, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Ramblin’ Man,” from The Crybaby (Ipecac) Buzz Osborne of the Melvins was Kurt Cobain’s first mentor in punk, so he has as much right as Tori Amos to cover Cobain’s best song. Hey, it’s a free country, so he even has a right to ask ’70s flesh-crawlingly rockbottom teen idol Leif Garrett to sing it on the Melvins’ guest stars album. Fruit of perhaps the most perverse singer-to-song match since Bert Parks sang Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” in The Freshman (and he was great), the track begins so pristinely, with such punch, it suggests a terrible possibility. What if Garrett, currently heading a band called Godspeed and looking like the sort of person who’d paper his walls with pictures of the sort of person he used to look like, rises to the occasion? What if he’s good? The world remains on its axis; Garrett is completely effete. You can hear all the words, and without Cobain’s mumbles, his swallowed lyrics, the fear of being understood, there is no music. Then Hank Williams III takes his grandfather’s spookiest tune. The hesitation in the way the melody opens up—the curling finger, then the fading smoke, of the first notes on the steel guitar—make it Williams’ most clovenhoofed. The band never pushes the song, and never loses it, but after two verses the young singer falls behind, which only makes the drama more believable.

  9 Common, Like Water for Chocolate (MCA) If the cover art—a 1956 Gordon Parks photo of a young black woman in Alabama, dressed for church, drinking from a “Colored Only” water fountain—is the music, and the record’s title the words, nothing on the record itself comes close. I don’t know what would, though.

  10 Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Land of Hope and Dreams (Crystal Cat bootleg, Barcelona, April 11, 1999) It’s stirring to hear the old sanctified train that don’t carry no gamblers turn into a train that carries whoever most needs a ride: “Losers and winners, whores and gamblers, brokenhearted, souls departed.” And it’s stirring to hear them all lift their glasses together and sing their own song. Caveat emptor: the fans in Barcelona couldn’t clap on the beat to save their city from Franco.

  MAY 1, 2000

  1 American Psycho, directed by Mary Harron (Lions Gate) This really is Katrina Leskanich’s moment. In 1985 with Katrina and the Waves she scrubbed the airwaves clean with the horrifyingly bright “Walking on Sunshine.” (“Soon to be a major floorwax commercial,” one reviewer wrote at the time.) Now the gruesome thing is leaking out of Patrick Bateman’s headphones as he heads into his office, serves as a hideous wake-up call in High Fidelity, and chirps from your TV in incessant ad
s for Claritin allergy pills while fresh-faced folk frolic on the grass and little kids pick up the chorus. No wonder everybody has to die.

  2 Sleater-Kinney, “Is It a Lie,” from All Hands on the Bad One (Kill Rock Stars) With guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker now joined by drummer Janet Weiss as singers, the music of the band no other group is even chasing is easier to hear and harder to keep up with, especially on this trickily constructed death song—which despite its description of a traffic accident might one day fold into the tradition of 19th-century murder ballads like “Omie Wise” or “Banks of the Ohio.” The piece is all questions, and when “Was it a lie?” is asked for the last time, a plain tone exchanged for a who-cares fade, it’s not a single person but a whole way of life that seems to have been run down. It’s a mystery, but perhaps nothing compared to the one in the cover photo, which looks like documentation of a performance-art piece staged in a union-hall-cum-nightclub circa 1943—or the one in the leading guitar figure on the last cut, “The Swimmer,” which is much closer to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks than John Cheever’s river of pools. The meaning of the glamorous photos in the booklet or Brett Vapnek’s sparking video for “You’re No Rock ’n’ Roll Fun” is not mysterious: good clothes can make you happy.

  3 Green Velvet, Green Velvet (F-111) Techno, very playful, very accessible, very funny when dubbed with dank, deadpan monologues and the multivoiced “Answering Machine,” where any number of people, all of whom I like to think are DJ Curtis Jones (otherwise known as Cajamere or Green Velvet), helpfully call up to inform the guy screaming “I! Don’t! Need! This! Shit!” that, for example, “I hate to do this over the phone, but I sort of can’t do it in person, I want to thank you for the engagement ring, I know you probably gave it to me after I told you I’m pregnant and stuff . . . but the baby’s not yours, so you don’t have to worry about it, I’ll always love you.”

  4 White Town, “Duplicate,” from Peek & Poke (Parasol) A man surrounded by two women floats through what could be Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me Baby” with all the fear, fury and self-hatred removed. At under four minutes it’s over far too soon, as if music-maker Jyoti Mishra didn’t trust himself. “Inspired by,” among others, Monkee Michael Nesmith, late physicist Richard Feynman, preening role model bell hooks and onetime silent movie actor Lev Davidovich Bronstein.

  5 Hanson, This Time Around (Island) Fine: nothing as catchy as “MMMBop,” but eager, jumping, edging up to the territory marked out by the Indigo Girls’ “Shame On You.”

  6 Bruce Conner, “Dead Punks and Ashes,” Curt Marcus Gallery (578 Broadway, New York, through Saturday) In 1978 at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, filmmaker-collagist-sculptor Conner—who more than a decade before orchestrated light shows at the Avalon Ballroom across town—stood at the lip of the stage photographing punk bands for Search and Destroy. What he liked most was to catch a group’s first gig; after that, he’s said, something, some measure of fear and a refusal to give into it, is lost. New York Eye, aka Emily Marcus (related to me, not the gallery), reports: “The few dozen black-and-white photos of actual punk people look like pictures of punks—costumed, rowdy and drunk, including a stoned and skinny Toni Basil (who 12 years before performed in Conner’s film Breakaway). Weirder are the memorial collages for three local musicians who died, carefully but sparely decorated and surprisingly moving. Ricky Williams: Dead Punk (of the Sleepers) stands out (among Will Shatter of Negative Trend and Flipper and Frankie Fix of Crime) for its draped hospital tubing, catheters still attached, but the pieces work best as a group; it’s nice thinking of the three of them hanging out together, and I get the feeling Conner sees himself in their eventual company.

  “In the second part of the show Conner brings the doom home. Black-and-white photos of motel TV screens, caught in the middle of the late-night creepshow, welcome and deceive, but the real point of the room is a collection of immodest and unattractive photocopy collages of the artist’s decline into illness, pain, old age and cynicism—autobiographical records that are not so much morbid as mundane. It’s a dismal room, half full of distracting, barking TVs, with one wonderful exception, and the only piece in the show with a sense of humor: a brick neatly wrapped in an Ace bandage. Brings a smile to my lips.”

  7 Sarah McLachlan, “I Will Remember You,” in Columbine High School Massacre video (Jefferson County, Colo., Sheriff’s Department) With her tune running under April 20, 1999, footage of pools of blood in emptied, shattered rooms, McLachlan sounds unspeakably facile and insincere. “I hope that just didn’t destroy that song for me for the rest of my life,” a cop viewing the video said to a reporter for KRONTV in San Francisco. But what song wouldn’t collapse under this weight? The Rolling Stones’ “Gimmie Shelter”? Ice Cube’s “Dead Homies”? Of course they would. Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” probably would not—but maybe only because Kurt Cobain, too, is dead.

  8 Neil Young, Silver and Gold (Reprise) Given that Young works on a pendulum, this hilariously vapid collection of acoustic musings (might want to get Buffalo Spring-field back together, “give it a shot,” why not, why not row row row your boat down the L.A. River) presages great things in the future. For the time being, as an old National Lampoon Radio Dinner spot had it, “The last half-hour of No Neil Young Music was brought to you by . . .”

  9 Bad Livers, Blood and Mood (Sugar Hill) The quirky backroads duo digs deep into the country that opens up out of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music in order to . . . get really cute.

  10 Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes (Miramax, 1998) I rented this paean to the Ziggy Stardust era to see what Christian Bale was doing before he turned into Norman Bates, and came away touched: by Toni Collette’s impersonation of broken down Susan Alexander in the Citizen Kane interview scenes, by Ewan McGregor’s heedless merging of Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain, by the dream their characters shared of a world redeemed by style. “We set out to change the world, ended up just changing ourselves,” McGregor’s washed-up star tells Bale’s reporter long years after the glam utopia has vanished. “What’s wrong with that?” Bale asks reasonably, but as if he knows exactly what’s wrong with it. “Nothing,” says McGregor without bitterness, “ unless you look at the world”—and the camera pulls back to show the bar they’re sitting in, a place devoid of color, flair or self-invention, of Corin Tucker shouting, “Culture is what we make it” on the new Sleater-Kinney album, so roughly it sounds like she’s saying “cut your ears.”

  MAY 15, 2000

  1 The Holy Childhood, Up With What I’m Down With (Gern Blandsten) There’s a cracked vision in this sprawling music—some drunk in his 20s conducting the Band with a few female friends to loosen the choruses, maybe—that reaches a pitch of experience and desire so expansive the whole thing seems to have been recorded outdoors.

  2 Richard Belzer as Detective John Munch, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (May 5) For once, no joke, no conspiracy mongering, just a case that sucks him in and breaks over his head, leaving his nihilism boiled down to the coldest professionalism, rewriting his ruined skin, wire glasses and dark beady eyes into the most complete deadpan imaginable, so that the suspect has two choices: fall into the black hole of this man’s face, or confess, fast.

  3 Wire at Great American Music Hall, San Francisco (May 2) Formed in 1976, they were from the start the most severely arty of all British punk bands, and it was their severity that saved them: their pursuit, it always seemed—as over the decades Colin Newman, Robert Gotobed, B. C. Gilbert and Graham Lewis went their own ways and reformed, dumping an all-but-unsolvable confusion of LPs and CDs off the charts—of form before and after anything else. Despite Newman’s cutting accent (“London suburban art-school sarcastic,” according to critic Jon Savage), or the fact that in 1991, lacking Gotobed, the group recorded as Wir, their humor was all in their melodies, playing against the sense of espionage in their lyrics, against the harsh, absolutely selfcontained bass drums guitars rhythms of their ridiculously br
ief songs. In a word, they were perfect.

  For the sold-out first show of an eightdate American tour they were instantly up to speed: terrifically loud but precise, with Newman’s staccato delivery for “Pink Flag” letting every word stand out clearly. They were pure punk in shape and attack—punk as wish, as what it could be, as an ideal—but without any baggage as to clothes, attitude, history. Never big stars, they carried nothing more than their old or younglooking selves and their sound onto the stage. Nothing was mythicized; nothing happening in the music referred to anything that wasn’t present, except to the degree that the music referred to, or in its way reformed, the world at large. Expressions were dour. Movement was minimal. The four played as if they had invented punk—or had stumbled upon it the day before, as if their project was so conceptual it was completed before it was begun. Doubt and nervousness underlay every tune. The cryptic invitations of the words suggested code. That made the momentary release of the melodies in the likes of “Dot Dash” or “French Film (Blurred)” unbearably pleasurable, because even as you felt the pleasure, you felt it being taken away.

  Remaining tour dates: May 15, Irving Plaza, New York; May 26–28, the Garage, London.

  4 Wire, Third Day Five indistinct rehearsal cuts recorded last fall. Forget the “first edition: 1 of 1,000” printed, not stamped, on the sleeve (as I read it, that means there can be 1,000 first editions of limitless pressings each) and look for On Returning (1977–1979) (Retro/EMI, 1989), Behind the Curtain: Early Versions 1977 & 1978 (EMI, 1995), Chairs Missing (Harvest/EMI, 1978, their best) and Document & Eyewitness (Rough Trade, 1981), in whatever configurations you might find, plus Ian Penman’s fine “Flies in the Ointment” in the March issue of The Wire.