Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  9 Telluride Film Festival Diary: Wilkinson Library Dedication Stone, 2000 (Telluride, Colo.) “Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.”—Toni Morrison

  OK—but it’s a library. How about access to syntax?

  10 Minimalist poet found hiding in New York Times daily TV log listing of Law and Order repeats (Sept. 21)

  A&E, 6 P.M. “The Troubles.” Violence.

  A&E, 11 P.M. “Silence.” Murdered.

  OCTOBER 17, 2000

  1 P. J. Harvey, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (Island) There are dead spots: the helpless Patti Smith impersonation in “A Place Called Home,” the deadfish handshake Thom Yorke of Radiohead gives Harvey in their duet on “This Mess We’re In.” But with “Kamikaze” and “This Is Love,” one number pounds on top of the other, thin sounds building until a wall you can’t climb is staring you in the face. The plain fact that Harvey never uses all she has, never tells the secret, makes what she is willing to say a tease, a dare, a threat. But all of that seems far away on the first number, “Big Exit,” which could have come off the Band’s second album if she’d been around to play on it. Along with the hammering beat she gets on her guitar, the verses scratch at the memory, until finally the Band’s basement-tapes tall-tale “Yazoo Street Scandal” comes out of hiding. But the chorus is all Harvey, and Harvey in the air, circling the globe like Superman. “Baby, baby, ain’t it true / I’m immortal / When I’m with you,” she wails, not a crack or a tear in her tone, and, yes, she sounds like she has been here for a thousand years.

  2 Invasion of the Body Snatchers returns to San Francisco 22 years after Kevin McCarthy is run down in the street screaming, “They’re here! They’re here!”: Natalie Jeremijenko, One Tree, at “Picturing the Genetic Revolution—Paradise Now” (Exit Art, 548 Broadway, New York, through Oct. 28) The installation (“Mixed Mediums Courtesy Postmasters”): eight putatively identical shrublike saplings in green containers. From explanatory material: “Cloning has made it possible to Xerox copy organic life and fundamentally confound traditional understanding of individualism and authenticity . . . ‘One Tree’ is actually one hundred tree clones of a single tree micropropagated in culture. These clones were originally exhibited together as plantlets at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, in 1999. This was the only time they were seen together. In the Spring of 2001, the clones will be planted in public sites throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including Golden Gate Park, 220 private properties, San Francisco school district sites, Bay Area Rapid Transit stations, Yerba Buena Performing Arts Center, and Union Square. A selection of international sites are also being negotiated.”

  3 Croupier/Sing-a-Long Sound of Music (Waverly Theater, New York, Sept. 30) Where the warning label on the marquee reads “PG,” not “R.”

  4 David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Running Press) With lyrics by Lewis Allen (aka Abel Meerpol, adoptive father of the sons of convicted atomic bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after the latters’ execution), the anti-lynching song was both a hit and a scandal in 1939, when Holiday recorded it: “Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” Margolick somehow fails to mention this early version, regarding a lynch frenzy in Vicksburg, Miss.: “From gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers: till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees on every roadside; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.”

  —Abraham Lincoln, “On the Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” 1838.

  5 Almost Famous, written and directed by Cameron Crowe (DreamWorks) The scene in the movie where lightning hits the band’s plane and guitarist Billy Crudup happily starts singing “Peggy Sue” is fine; so is the whole crew picking up “Tiny Dancer” on their bus. But the acting by heroes Patrick Fugit and Kate Hudson is excruciatingly self-conscious—and so, in a way, is the script. That a midteen Cameron Crowe was able to chronicle the adventures of musicians so vividly that many of them refused to allow coverage by Rolling Stone unless Crowe was the writer is remarkable; the notion that Crowe did it by means of warts and all is absurd. Crowe’s ability to convincingly portray rock stars as thoughtful, honest, fun-loving, caring, decent—and nothing else—had a great deal to do with changing the magazine he worked for from a journal that could throw the realities of Altamont in the faces of both its readers and its namesake to a magazine that would let cover boy Axl Rose pick his own writer and photographer. I don’t doubt that Crowe wrote what he saw—or, rather, that he wrote about what he found most real—but there’s more to reality than the belief that, as Anne Frank didn’t put it, people are basically nice.

  6 John Mellencamp, “Gambling Bar Room Blues,” from The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers—A Tribute (Egypt) Top performances come from Dicky Betts, Iris DeMent and liner-notes essayist Bob Dylan (it’s his label), but John Mellencamp is in another country, where the song is sung as if for the first time. To the inexhaustible melody of “St. James Infirmary,” a road bum in a good mood revels in cynicism, in a belief life doesn’t get any better than this even if anybody else would call this shit. With an amazingly loose, ’20s street-blues arrangement and cracked fiddle from Miriam Sturm.

  7 Tom Perrotta, Joe College (St. Martin’s) After the perfect-pitch Election (forget the bludgeoning movie version), this coming-of-age novel, set in 1982, is a trifle—and no novelist, no matter what age he’s coming of, can be allowed to present “If Ted and Nancy were a plausible couple, why not Polly and I?” as if it were English. Still, there are moments when the reflections of the working-class Jersey-Yalie narrator turn him into someone you’d like to meet: “I remember watching the debate between Reagan and Carter and feeling a huge abyss open up at my feet when the commentators began declaring Reagan the winner, even though he’d seemed to me to have performed a fairly plausible imitation of a twinkly-eyed village idiot. I wondered if it was Yale that had made me such a stranger to my own country or having smoked too much pot as a teenager. In any case, it was unnerving to find myself dwelling in a separate reality from the majority of my fellow citizens, my parents included. I was enough of a believer in democracy—or maybe just safety in numbers—to not be able to derive much comfort from the stubborn conviction that they were wrong and I was right.”

  8 Hooverphonic, The Magnificent Tree (Epic) The insinuating, vaguely diseased moods that singer Lieske Sadonius brought this Belgian techno-exotica combo caught the nervousness that lay beneath the earliest Paris new wave movies. With Geike Arnaert in front, they’ve moved on to catch the very essence of the cheesiest La Dolce Vita knockoffs, which is to say Italian vacation films.

  9 ®™ARK, Biotaylorism, at “Picturing the Genetic Revolution” (as above) A hilariously detailed, deadpan video heralding the application of Frederick Taylor’s principles of modern industrial organization to bioengineering—but ending with a brief prescription for sabotage, notably sneaking into toy stores and attaching warning labels to Barbie dolls regarding the cosmetic and genetic surgery those adopting a Barbie selfimage might face somewhere down the line.

  10 Speaking of “Yazoo Street Scandal,” a correspondent writes: “I was playing some music for my 9-year-old daughter the other day: ‘Lo and Behold,’ ‘Yazoo Street Scandal,’ a few other lo-fifavorites. ‘These sound like they were recorded in somebody’s house,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘A pink house. On a tape recorder. In the basement.’ She pondered this and said, ‘This music sounds so good. Why does Britney Spears spend so much money getting everything perfect-sounding in the studio?’ ”

  OCTOBER 30, 2000

  FORWARD INTO THE PAST: SPECIAL ELECTION EDITION!

  1 Pere Ubu 25th Anniversary Tour (Knitting Factory, New Yo
rk, Oct. 14) Too cool: not the homemade theremins, or the feedback apron singer David Thomas wore, or the dedications (“A song written for men going through their midlife crises, who have punk roots. If there’s ever a time for punk, it’s when men have their midlife crises”—a dedication followed, a few minutes into the song, with “the pogo section,” with the enormous Thomas moving to the beat less like Sid Vicious than Sidney Greenstreet), but the fanfare music the band used to set itself up for a night of confusion: Max Frost and the Troopers’ “Shape of Things to Come.” From the 1968 AIP trash classic Wild in the Streets—produced by Mike Curb, with a neverknown Billy Elder impersonating youth Führer Max Frost (in the movie, would-be James Dean Christopher Jones)—it was a song that 32 years ago somehow sounded as stirring as it did embarrassing, just as it did three weeks before the nation was to go into its booth to decide the shape of things to come. Which, the song reminded everyone, “nothing can stop.” More next column.

  2 Richard Pryor, . . . And It’s Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992) (Rhino) A big box of CDs of a black man onstage turning everyday life upside down. You listen and think, “How, why, was this voice silenced? What, how much, was lost?” Among other things, the voice of the white square, squared: our next president.

  3 Telluride Film Festival Diary, Turbulent, Shirin Neshat, director (Telluride, Colo., Labor Day Weekend) Should you have the chance, do not pass up even the most inconvenient fringe-festival, museum or cable opportunity to see this shocking short film. No sex, no violence, just, in present-day Iran, a man—co-producer Shoja Azari—singing to an all-male audience. He turns his back; his tone is full, rich, but infinitely supple. There are no affectations; sound is everything. And as he shows he can go anywhere he seems to be holding something back. And then the film cuts to Sussan Deyhim, a woman singing, but this time facing the seats—of an empty auditorium. She could be singing in five voices at once; the untrained ear hears overdubs, but in fact it’s what Yoko Ono always thought she sounded like, doubled, tripled, with a musicality you can’t translate not because Deyhim is singing in Farsi but because she is singing over your head, hitting some notes only certain human beings can hear, which is to say whoever might be excluded from her illegal concert: in Iran, everyone.

  4 Randy Newman, “A Fool in Love,” “Poor Me,” “Got My Mojo Working,” from the soundtrack to Meet the Parents (Dream-Works) The one-time “King of the Suburban Blues” offers a typically craven movie song, a dead cover of a Fats Domino tune and the sort of paint-by-numbers white-boy blues bash that in other hands was already a national skin crawler in 1967, the year before Newman issued his first album, . . . Creates Something New Under the Sun, which he did. The nadir of his career.

  5 Caitlin Macy, The Fundamentals of Play (Random House) A frighteningly expert first novel—set a decade back, a rewrite of The Great Gatsby as filtered through a Whit Stillman lens. Here irony is the essence of all human life, only the gross, vulgar Gatsby character doesn’t know it, which makes him less than human. But then how do you decipher the Daisy character, who except for this exchange is so insulated she barely lives on the page? “At some point,” says the male narrator, “I made another brilliant contribution to the conversation by asking what she had majored in. Still, I was curious to know.”

  “American studies.”

  “How’d you pick that?” I said.

  “Same as anyone.” But of the other couple hundred students who had graduated with that degree, I doubt a single one would have given the same reason Kate did. “I love this country,” she said. I thought at first she was being disingenuous, but she got a look in her eye then which I have never forgotten. It was a look of highly intensified complacency—if that’s possible—which I was sure no feast or threat of famine would ever shake.

  6 Larry Clark, Tulsa (Grove) From the director of Kids and Another Day in Paradise, his first work: a 1971 book of photos from the junk world of his long-extended youth. Deservedly legendary: if Robert Frank’s The Americans was a picture of the roads that ’50s teen mass murderer Charley Starkweather, the voice of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” might have taken if he’d gotten away, this is much worse—what if Starkweather had just stayed home?

  7 From liner notes to Nothing Seems Better to Me: The Music of Frank Proffitt and North Carolina—The Warner Collection, Vol. II (Appleseed) In 1940 folklorists Frank and Anne Warner taped hill singer Frank Proffitt’s offering of a local ballad called “Tom Dooley,” about a 19th century murder of a young woman by her former lover. The song traveled, and in 1958 a collegiate trio from Menlo Park, Calif., made it No. 1 in the nation. (For the whole, rich story, see Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good: The Folk Revival.) Proffitt, in a letter from 1959:

  I got a television set for the kids. One night I was a-setting looking at some foolishness when three fellers stepped out with guitar and banjer and went to singing Tom Dooly and they clowned and hipswinged. I began to feel sorty sick, like I’d lost a loved one. Tears came to my eyes, yes, I went out and balled on the Ridge, looking toward old Wilkes, land of Tom Dooly. . . . I looked up across the mountains and said Lord, couldn’t they leave me the good memories. . . .

  Then Frank Warner wrote, he tells me that some way our song got picked up. The shock was over. I went back to my work. I began to see the world was bigger than our mountains of Wilkes and Watauga. Folks was brothers, they all liked the plain ways. I begin to pity them that hadn’t dozed on the hearthstone. . . . Life was sharing different thinking, the different ways. I looked in the mirror of my heart—You haint a boy no longer. Give folks like Frank Warner all you got. Quit thinking Ridge to Ridge, think of oceans to oceans.

  Isn’t this a little too good to be true?

  8 Wallflowers on Saturday Night Live (NBC, Oct. 21) I wrote about it weeks ago, but I still don’t know how Jakob Dylan gets away with “Sam Cooke didn’t know what I know,” let alone four times in one song. He does, though, and it’s one of the weirdest accomplishments in pop-music history, and it’s not his looks. I don’t think.

  9 “Crossroads of American Values,” Toyota commercial (NBC, CBS, ABC, beginning October) Presumably thanks to Robert Johnson estate controller Steve LaVere, one can now enjoy the work of one of America’s greatest artists merely by turning on the TV. It’s the worst cover ever of a Johnson song, in this case the 1936 “Cross Road Blues,” featuring a horridly hyped-up white blues voice—compared with this, Randy “Mojo” Newman is Johnson. “Down to the crossroads / Tryin’ to flag a ride,” the piece begins; cars are streaming, people are engaging in transactions, it’s just full of busyness. “Goin’ down to the crossroads,” the voice finishes up: “I believe I’m goin’ down,” which means, down to the Toyota dealer’s. Never mind the line from the song itself, about a black man about to be caught alone on a public road after dark, where he’s as good as dead: “I believe I’m sinking down,” on his knees, in terror and surrender to his fate. The surrender part still works; only the fate has changed.

  10 Waco Brothers at Brownie’s (New York, Oct. 21) “This is a much more likable Waco Brothers than last year,” singer and guitarist Jon Langford announced from the stage at the end of an all-day Bloodshot Records showcase at the CMJ Music Marathon. “That’s what we’re all about,” added guitarist and singer Dean Schlabowske, “likability.” “We don’t play no alt country,” Langford continued. “That’s a Washington word! We play real music for normal people!” True to their adopted George W. Bush “all things to all people” posture, they started off with “Fox River,” a celebration of a river that flows where it wants to flow, and ended with guest Sally Timms swaying to the irresistible melody of “Seminole Wind,” an ode to flood control. Otherwise the politics were up to the music, and vice versa, with Langford proposing “W.” as an all-purpose obscenity for the next four years (“ ‘W. off,’ ‘W. you,’ ‘That last song was pure W.,’ ‘They really W.’d us over that time’ ”) and introducing mandolinist Tracey Dear—like the rest
of the Wacos, save token American Schlabowske, from the U.K.—as “a man who pays his taxes and can’t vote! That’s what your country was founded on: taxation without representation! Underpaid foreign workers like the Waco Brothers!” The sound fell apart heroically for Neil Young’s “Revolution Blues,” put itself back together for Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues,” came home for the anti-Clinton “Coo Coo” rewrite “See Willy Fly By” (“Clinton’s looking pretty good right now,” Langford said after the show) and rose as high as Waco Brothers music goes with Schlabowske’s indelible “If You Won’t Change Your Mind,” broken in half by a guitar solo that turned the word “bereft” into a physical sensation—a gorgeous sensation.

  NOVEMBER 13, 2000

  1 Ethan and Joel Coen, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Touchstone Films, due for release Dec. 21) Three white prisoners escape from a Mississippi chain gang in the middle of the Depression and run straight into a series of blackouts about old-time music—starting when they stop their jalopy to pick up a young black man in suit and tie, bluesman Tommy Johnson, fresh from selling his soul to the devil for guitar prowess and ready to rock. Unlike the younger Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson (“Cool Drink of Water Blues,” 1928, though here he’s given Skip James’ music to play) actually bragged of the transaction. (What could be cooler?) When in the Coen brothers’ version he’s seized by the Ku Klux Klan for ritual sacrifice, he figures it’s just payback coming sooner than he bargained for.