Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  4 ’N Sync at Network Associates Coliseum (Oakland, Calif., June 11) Kayla D’Alonzo: “I had been waiting two months for June 11th. My dad got press passes for my friends and me. Since we are only 11 years old my dad went with us. We got to the concert at 7:30, it was really crowded. Pink was on stage when we arrived, it was really loud. After she was done a huge poster came down of ’N Sync, that’s when the screaming began. Finally at 9 ’N Sync came out, on strings like puppets, it was cool. Smoke and fireworks were coming out from the stage, it was so loud, all the girls around me were screaming and jumping up and down. They were screaming ‘We love you Justin, Joey, Chris, Lance and J. C.’ J. C. looked the best because he had the best clothes and he rocked the concert. My favorite song they sang was ‘It Makes Me Ill.’ They were dressed like patients in a hospital. They sang 12 songs; I wish they had done more songs. They are pretty good dancers. They ran all over the stage. My eyes never left the stage.”

  Pete D’Alonzo (48): “The most important experience was scrutinizing my youngest daughter and her peers chanting/gazing wild-eyed at the icons of rock music of their time. The time wasn’t right before, during or after the concert to relate to them what the experience was like for me during my rock extravaganza of years past. It was their moment to cherish, and I’m not one to remove that time they will remember for a lifetime . . . My overall view? The band was giving the audience the most their money could put out, with all the rigid guidelines they must conform to. It was definitely a memory that will be etched in my mind for a lifetime.”

  5 Les Primitifs du Futur, World Musette (Sketch Studio) Featuring Dominique Cravic (writing, vocals, guitars) and two dozen others, among them proud moldy fig R. Crumb, this is old-timey music, with Paris in the ’20s and ’30s standing in for Memphis or Mississippi at the same time. The feeling is impossibly romantic—and as pretentious as a postcard. “Robert Johnson on the radio,” mutters an American voice in “Portrait d’un 78 tard” (“Belated Portrait of a 78”). There’s a tribute to Louise Brooks with lyrics so corny (“I saw your face/And heard your voice/Which sang only for me”) you can imagine someone crooning them while strolling along the Seine. There’s “Kid Chocolate,” a sentimental cartoon of Jack Johnson. There’s even music that, while all about Paris, doesn’t seem to depend on America, though it probably does.

  6 No Rest in Peace for Chester Burnett (1910–76) or, Can White Men Sing the Blues, Part #4789 “ Today is the birthday of blues great Howlin’ Wolf,” read the chirpy DJ. “He’s celebrating his 90th today. And today the House of Blues is . . .” Putting him on display, stuffed?

  7 Favorite Albums of Senatorial Candidates in Minnesota, from “So You Want to Be a Senator” questionnaire (City Pages, Minneapolis, May 31) Mike Ciresi (Democratic-Farmer-Labor, 54): “Ann’s Favorites” (wife’s compilation of his favorites); David Daniels (Grassroots—party, not group—45): Bob Marley & the Wailers, Natty Dread; Leslie Davis (Independence, born 1937): Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits; Mark Dayton (DFL, 53): Jefferson Airplane, Volunteers; Dick Franson (DFL, 71): “All of Frank Sinatra’s albums”; James Gibson (Independence, 47): “my wedding album”; Jerry Janezich (DFL, 50): Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell; Steve Kelly (DFL, 47): Mary Black, Collected; David Lillehaug (DFL, 46): Kansas, Greatest Hits; Steven Miles (DFL, 50): Bob Dylan, Time Out of Mind; Erik D. Pakieser (Libertarian, born 1969): Beastie Boys, Paul’s Boutique, Ice Cube, Death Certificate, Beatles’ “white album”; Ole Savior (DFL, 50): Rolling Stones, no album named; Rebecca Yanisch (DFL, 47): Van Morrison, Moondance; Rod Grams (Republican, incumbent): did not respond.

  8 Posters for More Than Food restaurant (Jung von Matt an der Isar Agency, Munich) “Guttes Essen statt bvser Krieg” (“Good eating instead of evil war”) is the slogan: airbrushed archival graphics show soldiers on the battlefield. While one waves a huge wooden soup stirrer instead of a rifle, two others, with Nazi insignia transformed into neutral striped epaulets, carefully study a menu in a bunker. Maybe Germany is taking Gerhard Schroeder’s “New Start” business too far.

  9 Steve Earle, Transcendental Blues (E Squared/Artemis) Anyone singing with this much growly insularity wants not to tell you how much he doesn’t know but how many times he’s seen it all before. For the King of Dirt Road PC, every breath goes back to the breather. Atrocity: “The Boy Who Never Cried.”

  10 John Garst, “Delia” (e-mail postings, June 10 & 14, courtesy John Dougan) Two weeks ago I was praising David Johansen and the Harry Smiths’ cover of Bob Dylan’s rewrite of the traditional “Delia,” from Dylan’s 1993 World Gone Wrong—a song so seemingly generic it sounds more written by its genre than rooted in any facts. The number appeared in print as “One More Rounder Gone” in 1911; early research was done in 1928 by Robert W. Gordon of the Library of Congress (who “supposedly traced the song’s origins to Savannah,” Michael Gray writes in his inexhaustible Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan). Blind Willie McTell recorded it, as have Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare and Ronnie Wood, not to mention Mr. Acker Bilk; Dylan first taped a livingroom version in St. Paul in 1960. “Seems to be about counterfeit loyalty,” he wrote in 1993. “the guy in the courthouse sounds like a pimp in primary colors . . . does this song have rectitude? you bet. toleration of the unacceptable leads to the last roundup.”

  Garst, of Georgia, recently went looking for the story behind the song—someone is passing for white, a woman is murdered (“You loved all those rounders, never did love me”) and the killer is calm and humble—“and within two hours I had it.” With interpolations: “Delia Green, age 14, was shot and killed by Moses ‘Coony’ Houston, age 15”—Dylan uses “Cutty”—“in the Yamacraw section of Savannah (characterized for me by a local historian as ‘poor, black and violent’) at about 11.30 PM on Christmas Eve, 1900. She died Christmas day in her bed at home.” (“Wouldn’t have been so bad/If the poor girl died at home,” Dylan has Delia’s mother lament). “Delia and Coony had been ‘more or less intimate’ (newspaper) for several months and Coony said something to the effect that he would or wouldn’t let her do this or that. Delia reacted with strong words to the effect that he had no control over her whatever. He then shot her. All accounts, from the very beginning, emphasize how calm, cool, deliberate and polite Coony was. . . . He appeared in court wearing short pants (on the advice of his lawyer, I suspect). The jury asked the judge for a clarification at one point, ‘What would be the sentence for a murder conviction with a recommendation of mercy?’ The judge replied that the law specified life imprisonment. Shortly thereafter the jury returned with that verdict and the judge sentenced Coony to ‘life.’ He replied, ‘Thank you, sir.’ ” In other words, a Savannah murder that was no mystery when it happened, as a song turned into one, and which has already lasted longer than Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has any chance to.

  JULY 10, 2000

  1 Ace Atkins, Leavin’ Trunk Blues: A Nick Travers Mystery (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s) Following last year’s Crossroads Blues, in which Travers, a white Tulane musicologist, uncovered both a cache of unreleased Robert Johnson recordings and the murders behind them, this tale of an aging Chicago gangster who uses the street name “Stagger Lee,” a long-dead South Side record producer named Billy Lyons and a forgotten singer rotting in jail takes time to escape the corniness of its premises. When it does it’s because Atkins gets inside his detective’s skin as a trespasser: “Why,” Travers hears Johnson asking him in a dream, “do you believe in a world that doesn’t believe in you?” “I don’t want to be in no paper,” Ruby Walker tells the professor—also a former New Orleans Saint and sometime blues harmonica player—when he interviews her in prison, and she doesn’t mean the newspapers. As the book grinds to its end and the bodies pile up, you realize that all the investigator can do is hope someone else will pull the trigger, not because he can’t but because it’s not his story to end.

  2 Amanda Ghost, Ghost Stories (Warner Bros.) “Welcome to my filthy mind,” Ghost says to introduce herself,
and she sounds like she’s singing from the basement of a nightclub long after whoever locked up thought it was empty—but then she changes her clothes and gets all wistful instead. The result is a really great Spice Girls album.

  3 Sinéad O’Connor, Faith and Courage (Atlantic) Ever since “Mandinka,” O’Connor has worked hard to disguise the fact that she can sing rock ’n’ roll like she’s cracking a whip. There are moments of that here on “ Daddy I’m Fine,” a fast pop autobiography in which O’Connor celebrates her teenage hairstyles, boot styles and what it felt like to “wanna fuck every man in sight.” Otherwise this highly praised comeback is all sanctimony, albeit cosmic sanctimony.

  4 Sarah Vowell, “On Patriotism and ‘The Patriot,’ ” open letters, July 4 “I think about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution all the time. Mainly because I watch a lot of TV. I keep a small, 95-cent copy of the two documents handy so that I can fact-check the constitutional interpretations in the shows of David E. Kelley and Aaron Sorkin. In my little booklet, the Declaration and the Constitution are separated by only a blank half-page. I forget that there are eleven years between them, eleven years of war and the whole Articles of Confederation debacle. In my head, the two documents are like the A-side and B-side of the greatest single ever released, recorded in one great drunken night.”

  5–6 Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (Anchor) and Bob Dylan, “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” from the bootleg series, volumes 1–3 [rare & unreleased] 1961–1991 (Columbia) Dylan’s weary 1966 piano demo is about whether or not to get on a train; Whitehead’s novel is a metaphysical mystery about elevator inspection; and these lines, from Whitehead’s gnostic textbook “Theoretical Elevators, Volume Two, by James Fulton,” could have been written to translate the song: “You are standing on a train platform. A fear of missing the train, a slavery to time, has provided ten minutes before the train leaves. There is so much you have never said to your companion and so little time to articulate it. The years have accreted around the simple words and there would have been ample time to speak them had not the years intervened and secreted them. The conductor paces up and down the platform and wonders why you do not speak. You are a blight on his platform and timetable. Speak, find the words, the train is warming towards departure.”

  7 “Germaine Krull—Photographer of Modernity,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (through July 30) In Munich and Berlin, Krull (1897–1985) staged incandescent nude lesbian tableaux and angled new buildings as godheads. But her most striking pictures are of friends and associates, notably S. M. Eisenstein (1930), cropped so that only below the chin is there any air, the rest of the face overwhelming the frame, allowing the filmmaker’s big, beady eyes to leave the present-day viewer an impression of the sexually repressed madman, the Ed Gein, the Jason whose hockey mask is his own face; Etude (1931—portrait of Wanda Hubbell), stunning both because Hubbell is so beautiful and because, tears on her face, eyes down, she has lent herself to a generic portrait of the film actress, not remotely mistakable for anything else, that is, a real person; and Walter Benjamin (1926), where, despite a reddish-brown tint added to the critic’s mustache, light seems to glow behind this black-and-white image, in the long and tousled hair, until you see a Jewish Elvis, if not a 1920s Lou Reed.

  8 America, Highway: 30 Years of America (Rhino) “Spanning three decades and nearly all of America’s 23 albums,” says the press release, “Highway contains 64 tracks in a three-CD boxed set that features the classic rock staples ‘A Horse With No Name,’ ‘Sister Golden Hair,’ and ‘Ventura Highway,’ ” and, if one is writing on Independence Day as Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell are performing at Wellesby Park in Sunrise, Fla., one must ask two questions: what does it say about this country that this group has gotten away with recording 23 albums? And, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, could even the dead listen to 64 straight America songs?

  9–10 Dave Alvin, Public Domain (Hightone) and John Lee Hooker, The Unknown John Lee Hooker: 1949 Recordings (Flyright) Rockabilly rootsman Alvin bids for the ultimate Americana album, with fabulous colored old photos (a black cowboy in what looks to be a sheep herd’s worth of chaps) and a matching set of p.d. hits: “Shenandoah,” a variant of Mississippi bluesman Tommy Johnson’s “Maggie Campbell,” “Railroad Bill,” “Delia,” “East Virginia.” Just over half a century ago, in Detroit, Hooker—a variant of whom appears in Leavin’ Trunk Blues as Elmore King—did something similar, responding to a Czech cartoonist and record collector’s wish for the old country stuff no one wanted to hear anymore with solo versions of “Two White Horses,” “Rabbit on the Log,” “Six Little Puppies and Twelve Shaggy Hounds,” “John Henry,” “Jack O’Diamonds,” the ancient ring shout “Old Blind Barnabus” and a variant of what would become “Mystery Train.” The difference is absolute. Alvin sings every commonplace tune in a plummy, unquestioning manner that suspends whatever is uncertain, unfinished or threatening about any of the unkillable songs; Hooker addresses artifacts of the local culture of his Mississippi childhood, which were in fact emblems of a vernacular national culture, as if they threaten him directly, and as if he has the ability to stare them down and wait them out. The whole point of commonplace music is to take up a song everyone knows, that everyone is sick of, that everyone was born sick of, and then to sing it and make it be heard as if the singer is creating the song on the spot, drawing on familiarity and dissolving it in the same motion. Alvin does the opposite. He sings like the musical director of a summer camp; he’s going to teach you these songs, and exactly how to sing them. Hooker’s the guy telling ghost stories after lightsout, stories so laconically offhand you can never get them just right when you try to tell them to somebody else.

  JULY 24, 2000

  1 Dido, “Thank You,” from No Angel (Arista) What’s most interesting about the way this piece now emerges from Dido Armstrong’s 1999 debut album is how completely its first minute and a half—the material sampled by Eminem on his recent “Stan”—now seems definitively appropriated. On No Angel, an otherwise dulled record that begins in dance clubs in London and might as well be on the beach at Ipanema by its end, you’re listening to a number about a woman with a hangover. The drifting, fatalistic quality of the melody seems all out of proportion to its insistently ordinary payoff—with an insistently ordinary melody stretched over the remaining two minutes—which is that the singer is grateful to her boyfriend, whose love redeems bad days. This does not quite match what Eminem does with Dido; using her music to place beauty in between the pages of an awful story, he makes her into the angel of death.

  2 Dick Slessig Combo, presented by Jessica Bronson, “Rock Your Baby,” at the Portland, Ore., Art Museum (July 7) Carl Bronson, bass, Steve Goodfriend, drums, and Mark Lightcap, guitar—the Dick Slessig Combo, as in dyslexic—were playing on L.A. conceptual artist Jessica Bronson’s internally lit bandstand for the Portland opening of “Let’s Entertain,” a motley assemblage of glamorous art statements first staged at the Walker in Minneapolis. They were at least a half-hour into a performance that would eventually cover 90 minutes before I realized the nearly abstract, circular pattern the trio was offering as the meaning of life—it was all they were playing, anyway—was from George McCrae’s effortlessly seductive 1974 Miami disco hit. Or rather the pattern wasn’t from the tune, it was the tune, the thing itself. Variation was never McCrae’s point (the big moment in his “Rock Your Baby,” the equivalent of the guitar solo, is when he barely whispers “Come on”); finding the perfect, self-renewing riff was. “I could listen to that forever,” I said to Bronson when he and the others finally stepped down for a break. “We’d play it forever if we were physically capable,” he said. The bandstand is empty now, but a 50-minute edit of the number will be running in the air above it, over and over, through Sept. 17.

  3–4 Billy Bragg and Wilco, Mermaid Avenue Vol. II (Elektra) & ’Til We Outnumber ’Em (Righteous Babe) Mermaid Avenue Vol. II is Bragg and Wilco’s proof that the light touch of last
year’s astonishing completions of lyrics Woody Guthrie never got around to making into songs was a fluke. Compared to the blanket of piety enveloping a Guthrie tribute from a 1996 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame conference—featuring Bruce Springsteen, Ani DiFranco, the Indigo Girls and more, every speaker droppin’ his g’s (never has plain-folks talk sounded more affected)—it’s Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy.”

  5 Shalini, We Want Jelly Donuts (Parasol) The singer lives in North Carolina, and you can imagine her small songs, pushed forward in a flat, conversational voice, as a fantasy of knocking the acronym made by her title off the top of her local charts, where it means “What Would Jesus Do?”