Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  SEPTEMBER 4, 2000

  1 Eleventh Dream Day, Stalled Parade (Thrill Jockey) This Chicago trio got it right a long time ago: the sound of fate (taking its time) on the guitar, vocals that seem like whispers no matter what their volume, an overwhelming sense of displacement combined with a refusal to leave. They first found their voice under George Bush; here guitarist Rick Rizzo, drummer Janet Beveridge Bean and bassist Doug McCombs act surprised that after eight years under Clinton their old language of dramatic fuzztone and bitter jokes no one thinks are funny still speaks so clearly.

  2 Domenic Stansberry, The Last Days of Il Duce (St. Martin’s Minotaur) A murder mystery that’s creepily convincing in its plot, which concerns lingering traces of fascism in San Francisco’s North Beach; completely convincing about the energy of sexual obsession that drives the plot; and, around the edges of the plot, utterly suggestive about the way immigrants lose their freedom as Americans when the hyphen drops away. A man who once might have been called an Italian-American and who is now merely an American looks into the face of his dead brother’s Hispanic wife: “ ‘How are you and the kids set?’ I asked. ‘Maybe I could help out.’ It was a lie of course. I didn’t have any money in the world and she knew this. Besides, she had her friends and the community around her, and after the funeral she and her two kids named Julia and Juarez Jones would disappear into that great other population of California the newspapers and television always mentioned but seemed to know nothing about. . . . I wished I could disappear into that other world too, but the magic hour for people like me had long since passed.”

  3–4 Aug. 22: The Radio Speaks out of Both Sides of Its Mouth KALX, the Berkeley college station, is playing “Anna-Letmeinletmeout,” from the minimalistrepetitive German band Trio’s 1982 Trio and Error. As a dumb love song it seems so fresh, paradoxical, intelligent, the few syllables it bothers to use reaching the level of, say, the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”—but that high plateau reached not in spite of sophistication and art theory but because of them. Then click click click across the stations into the middle of Wet Wet Wet’s version of the Troggs’ “Love Is All Around.” It’s the opposite of Trio: mindless, a big, stupidly overblown arrangement, phony nightclub singing, and still it’s moving: you can’t hurt this song. Axl Rose or Lucinda Williams or Fred Durst or Lauryn Hill could do this song and sound sincere.

  5 Great Moments of the 20th Century (Rhino Word Beat) The century as sound bite, and over three CDs it’s a game to see who will return to the ether and who will get under your skin. Winners: Andrew West of KRKD, on the air reporting the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as it happens (“Oh my God . . .”), pure panic, diving into the event itself (“The gun is pointed at me right this moment . . . Hold him, Rafer!”); California Gov. Ronald Reagan on Arthur Bremer’s assassination attempt on presidential candidate George Wallace. Handed a dispatch as he was speaking at a fundraiser, then breaking the news to the audience, Reagan is absolutely calm, like the radio pro he’d been; he speaks in an unsurprised, reflective tone, wondering what, really, could be happening to the country, as if for once he didn’t know.

  6 The Band, “Don’t Do It,” from Cahoots (Capitol) Remastered versions of the original albums by the Band are coming out, each with extra tracks. This is the best of them, from the early ’70s: a rather laconic Marvin Gaye number pulled inside out until all that’s left is speed and heat.

  7 Nell Dunn, Up the Junction (Counterpoint) In 1963 Dunn, then in her mid-20s, published this book of stories about women in London’s Battersea slums. The dialogue and the action are blunt, cruel, pointless, life as one big non sequitur. What’s most striking, now, is the way Dunn describes a world so class-bound it is absolutely impervious to change: either the events Dunn, a reporter, drew on took place before the Beatles arrived to change the world (“Sonny fiddled with the jukebox, which suddenly burst forth ‘Rambling Rose, Rambling Rose/Why she rambles no one knows . . .’ ”), or else nobody noticed.

  8 North Mississippi All-Stars, “KC Jones (On the Road Again),” from Shake Hands with Shorty (Tone-Cool) A standard collage made out of a few of the countless versions of the 100-year-old song, not well-sung, not particularly well-played—but on the radio, in the Colorado Rockies, it sounds so in time, as if it has all the time in the world to get to the mysterious lines you can imagine are what the song is really about, no matter how many other songs they turn up in. Never mind heroic engineer Casey Jones and his train wreck—what’s that against “I told her my name was on the tail of my shirt / Natur’l born Eastman don’t have to work”? The first phrase is easy enough to translate: Kiss my ass. But the natural born Eastman is still on the loose. And speaking of which—

  9 Bill Clinton on “The Second Year of a Process of Trying to Totally Rebuild My Life from a Terrible Mistake I Made,” Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Ill. (Aug. 10) Howard Hampton: “Bill’s happy, discursive visit to the evangelical lion’s den was remarkable, not least for the format and the seated body language, which could not help recalling Elvis ’68 sitting and addressing the audience during the taping [of his comeback TV special] with the Rev. Scotty Moore as interlocutor. (I’m referring to the full session that ran on C-Span, not just the confessional stuff that made “Nightline” and the headlines.) God only knows what he’ll say or do [at the convention] but after this performance, if he strode out in leather jacket with Rosa Parks on one arm and the Playmate of the Year on the other, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised.”

  10 Lynn Harrell and Caitlin Tully, Aspen Music Festival (Aug. 12) Acting as master of ceremonies for a special benefit day, the renowned cellist Harrell, in his 50s, played in busker’s street clothes with 12-year-old violinist Tully during an intermission. After introducing Tully as someone the audience would be listening to for decades to come, Harrell turned to her and said, “I have to ask you—do you listen to the Backstreet Boys?” “No,” said Tully hesitantly, as if suddenly and definitively embarrassed by her own age. Too bad she didn’t say, “No, but have you heard Eminem’s ‘Stan’?”

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2000

  1–2 Telluride Film Festival Diary: Shadow of the Vampire, written and directed by E. Elias Merhige (Sept. 1) and Boomtown Rats, “I Don’t Like Mondays” (Columbia, 1979) Everybody loves vampire movies; let’s just say that with this, on the making of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, you get more than you bargain for. It’s a comedy with a terrible payoff. I walked out of the theater thrilled, queasy, wondering what art is worth and how much an artist—in this case, not Merhige but John Malkovich’s appallingly convincing Murnau—can charge for it. I went down a stairway into a basement sandwich joint where “I Don’t Like Mondays” was playing, and though there was nothing in the place for sale I wanted, I couldn’t leave. That record all about a girl shooting up her high school just made me smile. Those big, dripping piano notes, that effete Bob Geldof delivery, punk as “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”—both the movie and the song were asking the same questions, but, just as the movie was made to ensure you couldn’t answer them, the song did.

  3 Wallflowers, Breach (Interscope) The tunes on this follow-up to the huge Bringing Down the Horse flow along without stumbling, Jakob Dylan’s voice at once hoarse and smooth. But there are lines that don’t fit—don’t fit here and wouldn’t fit in anyone else’s music: “Look at you with your worn out shoes / Living proof that evolution is through” is intriguing, not that I have a clue what it means, but “Sam Cooke didn’t know what I know”—Dylan’s teeth clench on the line, as if he’d rather he didn’t know but, given that his sound is all fatalism, he has no choice. Moral: this record is far more hoarse than smooth.

  4 Bratmobile, Ladies, Women and Girls (Lookout!) “I’m old, and Croatian,” Allison Wolfe, singer for this Olympia, Wash., trio, said from the stage of the Fillmore in San Francisco in June. Since they started out in 1991 the Bratmobile women have learned nothing (or cast off all superfluous knowledge); they still come off as if they just no
w realized that systemic oppression and bad manners deserve the same nyah-nyah-nyah.

  5 Jackie Leven, “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” on Defending Ancient Springs (Valley Entertainment) Leven is a bland, poetic singer—singing at the words, not through them—but with Pere Ubu’s David Thomas playing Little Bobby Hatfield to Leven’s Big Bill Medley, the old Righteous Brothers classic is twisted from plea to complaint. Won’t mean a thing to anyone not already seduced by Thomas’ Gyro Gearloose-as-Nobel Peace Prize winner act (where, as on his Meadville, a cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” fits right in with a lecture on Charles Fort), but he’s so—monkey time.

  6 Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” (Sub Pop sampler) The complete set isn’t due till November, but there’s no need to wait on this shocking discovery by bighearted and/or leftist singers: the 1982 Springsteen album had social content! So it’s cool to sing the songs! But the performances are square. Chrissie Hynde might be up to the dead-mantalking inhabitation of teen mass murderer Charles Starkweather on the title song—but not by treating it as a prayer. Billy Bragg wants you to know that Woody Guthrie could have written “Mansion on the Hill.” Ani DiFranco comes up with an interesting entree into “Used Cars,” singing as if through a string and a tin can, but she’s all smugness for the last, kiss-my-ass-goodbye line. Aimee Mann and Michael Penn (who proves definitively that Mann did not marry him for his voice) are predictably pleased with themselves for “Reason to Believe”; the results are unspeakable. But look, Bruce is a bighearted, leftist kind of guy, usually ready to pay tribute to people who deserve it: why isn’t he here, taking on “State Trooper” or “Open All Night” as if he didn’t get them right the first time around? That’s what he does on his own stage.

  7 James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road (Doubleday) Perhaps the most interesting aspect of current fiction is the way President Clinton is beginning to make his way into it. It may be some time before anyone goes beneath Philip Roth’s dazzling surface skating in The Human Stain, but Burke has nothing to apologize for. Here the Bayou crime novelist comes up with one Belmont Pugh, governor of Louisiana. As he runs for a second term, word gets out that he’s both a drunk and the father of twins—by his mulatto mistress. He appears on TV to beg forgiveness; the Jimmy Swaggart move doesn’t work. So he steps up at a Fourth of July rally: “His face was solemn, his voice unctuous. ‘I know y’all heered a lot of stories about your governor,’ he said. ‘I won’t try to fool you. They grieve me deeply. I’m talking heartfelt pain.’ ” Pugh pauses: “ ‘But I’m here to tell you right now . . . that anytime, anywhere, any-body . . .’ He shook his head from side to side for emphasis, his voice wadding in his throat as if he were about to strangle on his own emotions. ‘I mean anybody sets a trap for Belmont Pugh with whiskey and women . . .’ His body was squatted now, his face breaking into a grin as wide as an ax blade. ‘Then by God they’ll catch him every time!’ ” He’s “reelected in a landslide,” of course; more to the point, it’s Burke’s version of Clinton not as Swaggart but as Earl Long, Huey’s damned, heroic brother.

  8 Rick Shea, Sawbones (Wagon Wheels/AIM) As dirt-eating country troubadours go, Shea is notably plummy, but here and there the beat slows and the sky clouds over. Best number: Don Wayne and Bill Anderson’s casually vengeful “Saginaw, Michigan,” which would die if the singer showed his hand a note too soon.

  9 Regarding a Sept. 4 item on Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction, about working-class women in London in the early ’60s, Mark Sinker writes from the U.K. “I still own my mum’s 1966 Pan paperback edition, complete with pulp cover painting of a blonde girl in jeans and leather. The blurb says that, yes, ‘In 1959, Nell Dunn, then 23 and newly married, crossed the bridge from fashionable Chelsea and bought a tiny house in Battersea . . .’—and the stories were first published in the New Statesman, so must have been written pre-Beatles. But what always fascinated me (since the early ’80s, newly arrived in London) was the sense the book captured of London (and thus the U.K. as a whole) as a series of landlocked villages, mutually invisible to one another. Colin McInnes’s Soho is a galaxy away from Dunn’s Clapham. I think that a great deal of this U.K. somnolence survived the Beatles upsurge, which really operated globally rather than locally—like bombsites, some bits of the city remained quite undisturbed into the mid-’70s. (Jon Savage is good on this in England’s Dreaming: Steve Jones and John Lydon, from West and North London respectively, are all but foreigners to each other.) South of the Thames really only woke up with punk and after: Squeeze actually wrote a song called ‘Up the Junction’ (and mined similarly landlocked/timelocked lives, in some ways). There was a TV drama and a 1967 or 1968 film, directed by Ken Loach (soundtrack by Manfred Mann), by which time the datedness was showing badly: they tried to update it, and it comes across as Boulting Brothers meets Day of the Triffids. The scene that lingers is set high in a ruined building with the wall blown out, looking out over a luridly painted cityscape.”

  10 Telluride Diary: Paul Schrader (Sept. 2) The director as ontologist: “Once you go back to 1974, nothing else matters.” Even if he was talking about his movie Forever Mine.

  OCTOBER 2, 2000

  1–4 Campaign events (September) With Al Gore recently citing “He not busy being born is busy dying” as his favorite Bob Dylan quotation, David Hinkley of the New York Daily News suggested a contest on what Gore’s favorite Dylan line should be.

  “Bury the rag deep in your face/Now’s the time for your tears,” sneered Nader supporter Dave Marsh. But Marsh also volunteered that perhaps more to the point would be a question recently raised by Berkeley, Calif., photographer Liz Bordow: “Everyone remembers where they were when they heard that Kennedy was shot; I wonder how many people remember where they were when they first heard Bob Dylan’s voice. It’s so unexpected.”

  Marsh: “Gore’s answer? Bush’s?” Yes, that would settle it—assuming Bush has heard it. On the other hand, the recent Radio City Music Hall benefit for the Gore–Lieberman ticket, where, at the end, Bette Midler, Sheryl Crow, Don Henley, Timothy B. Schmidt, Glenn Frey, Lenny Kravitz, Matt Damon, Paul Simon, Julia Roberts and Salma Hayek came out to sing “Teach Your Children,” would have raised an even more awesome question, had Dylan been there too: When was the final time you heard Bob Dylan’s voice?

  5 Nurse Betty, directed by Neil LaBute, written by John C. Richards & James Flamberg (Gramercy Pictures) This hilarious and affecting movie is remarkable in that after two unrelentingly cynical films (In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors) LaBute has exchanged realistic stories and utterly contrived emotions for an unbelievable story that turns up real emotions. One result: in a dark bar in Williams, Ariz., empty except for the middle-aged bartender and the regular drunk, Ricky Nelson’s beautifully underplayed 1958 No. 1 “Poor Little Fool” is on the jukebox. The song doesn’t fill up the room, it simply lives in it. The message is that nothing ever changes here, nothing ever happens, and for a moment the tune takes the scene outside of the violence of the plot, which has just pulled into the parking lot.

  6 Telluride Film Festival Diary: to name the movie would be to give away the ending, so . . . It’s an almost generic scene: after an increasingly edgy buildup following a beginning that promised little more than a comedy of skits, there’s a terrific payoff in the form of a double killing by a hitman. As the bodies tumble in a basement, rising up on the soundtrack are the Dells, from 1956: “Oh What a Night,” still a lot of people’s favorite doo-wop song. Playing over a scene of really convincing carnage, the music is sweet, confirming, and most of all complete. Which made me wonder: why does it work? The same association is all over Martin Scorsese’s movies, starting with Mean Streets and Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love.”

  The director stood up for a question-and-answer session; “Why does doo-wop seem so appropriate for killings in movies?” I asked him.

  “Well, doo-wop is Joe. And it’s his night, so—‘Oh What a Night.’ ”

 
That couldn’t have been the whole story. There is something about the simplicity and directness of the emotionality in doo-wop that speaks to the lack of complexity in the desire to see bad people who are troubling your life dead—and which, on screen, confirms that desire: confirms it, makes it beautiful, for the moment.

  The director: “But he committed a crime. He’ll get caught.” But not that night, and not on his screen.

  7 Anthony Frewin, Sixty-Three Closure (Four Walls Eight Windows) A cool, then panicky book about a man and a woman in a small town in England stumbling on an anomaly in the who-killed-Kennedy story: photos collected by a dead friend seem to say Lee Harvey Oswald was in the U.K. when he should have been in the Soviet Union. What makes the story work is the confidence it gives you that the couple will get out of the story sadder but wiser, not with the discovery of who-killed-Kennedy but that, after a lifetime palship, they were meant for each other, that the past really is another country, and a valid passport will get you home.

  8 Waco Brothers, Electric Waco Chair (Bloodshot) It seems certain now that on record the self-proclaimed Last Dead Cowboys will never get close to their live sound, where a vehemence that seems to come out of the ground is summoned to overwhelm any mere songs, and so burns the songs into your heart. On record they’re closer to the ’70s English country band Brinsley Schwarz, which is nothing to be sorry about, unless you want to judge all those you find wanting, which dead cowboys tend to do. Here the vocals alternating between Jon Langford and Dean Schlabowske produce the sense of a conversation between friends who see the world in the same way and feel everything differently. Defeat is the primary condition of their lives, but while for Langford defeat is the only condition of life he trusts, and so in a way he loves it, can trust himself only when he’s looking up from the bottom, Schlabowske will never be at home in his misery, even if he’s never lived anywhere else. He’s Hank Williams, still singing about hope long after he should have learned it’ll never knock; Langford is Williams’ biographer, saying all those things Williams could never say out loud.