Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  It’s a scene that recalls The Birth of a Nation, but it’s so culturally blasphemous there are really no precedents for it. In a clearing in the dead of night, hundreds of Klansmen in pure white robes whirl about like a college marching band at halftime, executing lightning moves as if they were born to them. They come to rest in formation, facing a red-robed Grand Master. Johnson is brought before him—and then, from a high platform, from inside the Master’s mask, issues the most horrifying, the most full-bodied, the most perfect rendition of the ancient plea “Oh Death” (“Won’t you spare me over for another year?”) imaginable. As the long, tangled song goes on, with no accompaniment but the audience, the victim and the night, a lynching becomes a philosophy lesson—and the slapstick escape that follows takes off none of the chill.

  2 O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (Mercury) Typically, the dynamism of the film doesn’t translate into disembodied recordings—if, as with the torrential “Man of Constant Sorrow” the cons-plus-Johnson cut in a radio station, it’s even the same recording. Pick to click, among the modern re-creations by the likes of Ralph Stanley, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, the Cox Family and the Whites: running under the titles, Harry McClintock’s 1928 version of the hobo jungle anthem “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

  3 Nov. 8, From the Ether: A friend writes: “I went to sleep when the networks called Florida for Bush, woke up 90 minutes or so later to see they were recalling it again, down to 500 votes at that point—and, shortly, someone cut to a shot of an Elvis impersonator (in black street clothes, but with the sideburns/hair/aviator glasses), presumably in Nashville, clasping his hands in silent prayer. It was that kind of night.”

  4 Al Gore, Huntington, W.Va., Nov. 4 Lest we forget, as we will, at the close of the campaign, with Gore taking up George W. Bush’s truthful but (simply because of, in Bush’s mouth, the accidental nature of its truthfulness) bizarre claim that “The people in Washington want to treat Social Security like it’s some federal program,” Gore finally hit the note that had eluded him for so long: “It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was an expression of ingrained hostility, a preference on the other side for a dog-eat-dog, every-person-for-himself mentality that—” And here the words vanish into the next four years.

  5 Bono, “Foreword” in “Q Dylan” (Q Magazine, U.K.) “The best way to serve the age is to betray it,” Bono says of Bob Dylan, quoting Brendan Keneally from The Book of Judas. He goes on: “The anachronism, really, is the ’60s. For the rest of his life he’s been howling from some sort of past that we seem to have forgotten but must not. That’s it for me. He keeps undermining our urge to look into the future.”

  6 Richard Carlin and Bob Carlin, Southern Exposure: The Story of Southern Music in Words and Pictures (Billboard Books) Mostly pictures, from the 1850s to the 1950s—pictures of musicians who made the music that in the 1920s was already the last word of another world. It’s the real world of O Brother, Where Art Thou?—especially on the cover, in a shot also reproduced inside. The photo is mottled, degenerating: it shows a dashingly handsome, dark-haired man with dark, hooded eyes looking you in the face under a broad-brimmed hat. Foulard tie, jacket, vest, watch chain: holding his five-string banjo, he is the dandy, the woman stealer. You wake up next to him and he’s already gone. In Warren Smith’s irresistibly slow, beckoning 1957 rockabilly tune he’s the man with a “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache,” but all through Lee Smith’s 1992 novel The Devil’s Dream, back from her to the Carter Family in 1940, forward again to Bob Dylan’s 1992 Good As I Been to You, he’s Black Jack Davey. Given what stories, regrets, laments, fond memories or erotic dreams he might have left behind in Hope, Ark., where he stands as his picture is taken, sometime in the 1890s, he is also Bill Clinton.

  7–8 Kasimir Malevich, Dynamic Suprematism, 1915/16 and Bill Woodrow, Twin-Tub with Guitar, 1981, at the Tate Modern (London, to January) In a huge, insistently conceptual long walk through 20th century art, these pieces jumped out. In the Manifesto Room of the “History/Memory/Society” sector, the old broadsides covering the walls shout and stamp their feet, announcing Futurism, the Bauhaus, Kandinsky’s New Theater, Suprematism itself, while off in a corner Wyndham Lewis is Blasting England to bits. Among a few other paintings is the Malevich, a tilted but upright triangle; it’s quiet, modest. From somewhere in Russia it pulls all the noisy declarations of the future into its own abstraction and silences them. In its abstraction, the piece at least seems to speak clearly—about the ease of remaking and rearranging the world, its constituent elements of life. If you keep looking, though, the triangle begins to look like a figure, an idea, a person, someone with a name. With the bars and squares that score the triangle now arms, eyes and hats, the figure gestures. It is now obese, absurd, threatening, its identity so obvious: Alfred Jarry’s loathed and loved Pere Ubu, in Jarry’s own woodcuts the same shape, the same fascist trod across whatever might be in his way—and now, with Ubu on the march into the New Day, somehow morally cleansed.

  Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953, “Formulary for a New Urbanism”: “Given the choice of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people all over the world have chosen the garbage disposal.” Not so fast, says Bill Woodrow, born 1948 in the U.K., in his own room in the “Still Life/Object/Real Life” sector. For his piece he’d cut the outline of an electric guitar out of the grimy metal casing of a post-war Hotpoint washing machine but not removed it, so the two remain attached like a parasitic twin still part of its host. The curators comment: “The sculpture wittily combines two potent symbols of Western consumerism.” Not so fast: why not art out of functionalism, or the art hiding in objects of utility, the desire hiding in need? Woodrow himself: “The guitar was a pop icon and the washing machine was an everyday, domestic item. So it was bringing the two things together like a slice of life.” Not so fast: why not the urge to create sneaking out of the wish for comfort, and superseding it? There’s no trouble imagining this as Pete Townshend’s diddley bow, his first guitar.

  9 Middle-aged man shaking a cardboard coffee cup full of change like maracas (6th Avenue and 13th Street, New York, Nov. 5) He was hammering out a tremendously effective R&B number that sounded halfway between anyone’s “C. C. Rider” and almost anything by Bo Diddley, and it wasn’t until I’d added my change to his and was halfway down the block that the song revealed itself out of its own beat: Elvis Presley’s first record, “That’s All Right.”

  10 Pere Ubu 25th Anniversary Tour (Knitting Factory, New York, Oct. 14) “The long slide into weirdness and decay,” leader David Thomas announced. When synth player Robert Wheeler moved his hands over his two homemade theremins—to play the theremin you can’t look like anything but someone casting spells—the small pieces of metal seemed less like musical instruments than UFOs, and the highpitched sounds coming from them, drifting through the rest of the music like swamp gas, nothing but the cries of the creatures trapped inside. Like any number of people other than myself must feel as I write, the day after the election.

  NOVEMBER 28, 2000

  SPECIAL BIZARRE ALL-QUOTATION EDITION!

  1–2 Alan Berg and Howard Hampton on Election Eve and after Berg, Nov. 6: “I am trying to cope with my jitters by listening to the five CDs of Dylan’s Basement Tapes bootlegs and nothing else till it’s over.” Nov. 9: “I didn’t think I’d have time to listen to all five CDs. When things got rough, right before Pennsylvania came in, ‘Clothes Line Saga’ came on and that took care of Pennsylvania. Right now it just went to ‘We carried you / In our arms / On Independence Day.’ No question about what this will be resolved on: ‘I’m Not There.’ ” Hampton, Nov. 18: “ Today I played the only appropriate song I could find: ‘I Was in the House When the House Burned Down.’ ”

  I called Warren Zevon to find out where he was on Election Night, but he wasn’t home.

  3 Fran Farrell, “I Want to Be Teenybopped: Teen Star Sex Fantasies” (Nassau Weekly, Princeton, N.J., Oct. 19) “Jordan Knight, of the New Kids on the Block
, was the first person I ever masturbated about. . . . While my friends were playing with Barbie, I was imagining having sex with Jordan, and sometimes a threesome with Joey, on their big tour bus. See, I met Jordan when I was 10; it was downhill from there. Fast forward 10 years, to London, England. I’m walking down the street when I see a sign, the most beautiful sign I’ve ever seen—Jordan Knight, performing at 4 o’clock today. I couldn’t believe my luck. Then I thought, this isn’t luck, it’s fate. We met 10 years ago, but now it’s legal for him to have sex with me!!!! So I wait in line for FOUR HOURS. Yes, four hours for that has-been. The line was full of 15-year-old girls with thick British accents, acne and very bad teeth. I was squished in the middle of a crowd of sweaty, ugly girls screaming for a washed-up ’80s pop star. But when he came onstage . . .”

  4 Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Fiftieth birthday greeting for Bob Dylan (U.S. Senate, May 24, 1991) “Twenty-five or 30 years ago, I would have had a very difficult time imagining Bob Dylan, whose music was so much a part of my life at the time, being 50 years old, an age he attains today, his birthday. I would have had even greater difficulty imagining me taking note of his achievements in remarks in the Senate of the United States.

  “Back in 1963, it is hardly likely any member of Congress would have been talking about Bob Dylan, at least not on the floor of either chamber; at least not in favorable terms. After all, it was he who said of them, ‘Come senators, Congressmen, please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.’ So times have changed, though Dylan’s sentiment still holds true when we consider how many problems we still have to heed. I am sure he sings those words with the same spirit and intensity today as he did 28 years ago.

  “There is a mystery to Bob Dylan, which is surprising, in a way, given how freely he has expressed himself through his music. But the mystery results, I think, from Dylan’s refusal to play roles society might seek to assign him—roles like superstar, rock idol, prophet. ‘I tried my best to be just like I am / But everybody wants you to be just like them.’ ”

  5 David Thomson, The Big Sleep (BFI Publishing) On Lauren Bacall, director Howard Hawks and To Have and Have Not (1944): “Betty was born in 1924, and grew up looking like nothing else on earth. I mean, how does one describe that young woman who could look like a Jewish teenager, a Eurasian doll, a Slav earth mother and the smoke that gets in your eyes—and all that before Hawks got hold of her? Add to that the allegation that she was only 17, and you can see what a wide-open country America was then.”

  6 Ishmael Reed on the dance mania “Jes Grew,” sweeping the nation after the election of Warren G. Harding, “the first race president,” in 1920, and the conspiracy of the “Antonist Wallflower Order” to stop it (Mumbo Jumbo, Scribner, 1972) “It has been a busy day for reporters following Jes Grew. The morning began with Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the three-element vacuum tube, which helped make big-time radio possible, collapsing before a crowded press room after he pleaded concerning his invention, now in the grips of Jes Grew: ‘What have you done to my child? You have sent him out on the street in rags of ragtime to collect money from all and sundry. You have made him a laughingstock of intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere.’ ”

  Tycoon Walter Mellon: “Jes Grew tied up the tubes causing Dr. Lee De Forest to cop a plea at the press conference. . . . At the rate of radio sales, $600 million worth will be sold by 1929, correct?”

  Hierophant of the Wallflower Order: “That is true, Mr. Walter Mellon.”

  “Suppose people don’t have the money to buy radios. It will be an interesting precaution against this Jes Grew thing, isn’t that so?”

  “I don’t get what you’re driving at, Mr. Mellon.”

  “The liquidity of Jes Grew has resulted in a hyperinflated situation, all you hear is more, more, increase growth. . . . Suppose we shut down a few temples. . . . I mean banks, take money out of circulation, how would people be able to support the appendages of Jes Grew, the cabarets juke joints and the speaks. Suppose we put a tax on the dance floors and get out of circulation J[es]. G[rew]. C[arriers].s like musicians, dancers, its doers, its irrepressible fancy. Suppose we take musicians out of circulation, arrest them on trumped-up drug charges and give them unusually long and severe prison sentences. Suppose we subsidize the hundreds of symphony orchestras across the country, have government-sponsored waltzboosting campaigns . . .”

  “But wouldn’t these steps result in a depression?”

  “Maybe, but it will put an end of Jes Grew’s resiliency, and if a panic occurs it will be a controlled panic. It will be our Panic.”

  7 Hal Foster, Election “Diary,” on a word soon to disappear from our lexicon (London Review of Books, Nov. 30) “ ‘Chad’ . . . For some reason I think of Troy Donahue, and imagine him dimpled, pregnant, hanging or punched.”

  8 Colin B. Morton on Metallica and Napster in “Welsh Psycho: Extracts From the Teenage Diary of Colin B. Morton” (Clicks and Klangs #3, Oct./Nov.) “William Hague, leader of the U.K. Tory Party, has recently come out in defence of a man who shot dead a youth who was trespassing on his private property. Even more recently, the Tory Party has used, without permission, the music of Massive Attack to help promote the idea that we shouldn’t have to pay tax or care about the sick. Hague’s own logic dictates, therefore, that Massive Attack’s Daddy G and 3D should have the right to shoot all members of the Tory Party for trespassing on their Intellectual Property. Either Intellectual Property doesn’t exist, or they can have that right. Hague can’t have it both ways. (Well, he can, but that’s another story entirely.)”

  9 Seminar on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (Princeton University, Nov. 17) One person at the table, on the notion of the panoply of farmer-minerlaborer-domestics or itinerant professional entertainers such as Dock Boggs, Sister Mary Nelson, Frank Hutchison, Uncle Dave Macon, Blind Lemon Jefferson or Bessie Johnson, as their 1927–32 78s were assembled by Smith in 1952, as a “town” or “community” (following, among other comments, “Hattie Stoneman ought to be drowned” and “ Uncle Dave seems much too satisfied about the prospect of apocalypse”): “If it is a community, it’s not one I’d want to be part of.” “Of course no one wants to be part of it,” another participant said later. “All these people are poor!”

  10 Special “Forward Into the Past” Election Update—Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: The Centennial of Warren G. Harding (McGraw-Hill, 1968), quoting Progressive newspaper editor Brand Whitlock on the Republican Party’s nomination of Warren G. Harding as its candidate to replace Woodrow Wilson “I am more and more under the opinion that for President we need not so much a brilliant man as solid, mediocre men, providing they have good sense, good and careful judgment, and good manners.”

  DECEMBER 18, 2000

  1–2 Eleventh Dream Day and Come at Mercury Lounge (New York, Nov. 25) Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw of Come sat with electric guitars for a short set of down tunes built around high notes—tunes that came most to life in the instrumental passages, with words less messages than structures. Zedek carries the world-weariness of a Slavic Anna Magnani (having flown into New York that day, she apologized for the rawness of her voice, blaming it on the fact that she couldn’t smoke on the plane); for her last number, she picked the first couple of notes of “California Dreamin’.” I took it for a joke, a false beginning to a song that would turn out to be the opposite, but she continued on with an absolutely lethal version of the Mamas and the Papas’ first hit, taking it into Puritan graveyards, the death’s head angels on the tombstones staring back at the singer as she left the song on the ground.

  Eleventh Dream Day—guitarist and main singer Rick Rizzo, drummer and sometime singer Janet Bean, bassist and sometime guitarist Doug McCombs, joined by friend Mark Greenberg on organ, bass and drums, and by powerful guitarist Tara Key on two numbers—play infrequently these days, especially outside of Chicago. You’d never know it. With their fi
rst song Rizzo drove the music to levels of intensity it takes the best bands five or six numbers to approach. It seemed impossible that the band would ever get back there, but again and again it did. Rizzo has an insistently ordinary, mild-mannered, reasonable, amiable demeanor; what comes out of his mouth as he sings, his voice on an even keel, avoiding almost all dramatics, is a creature of decency and desperation. But as a guitarist Rizzo is without limits, and if the lines he plays have definition, the creature pumping them out has none. He’s a well without a bottom, a creation of fury, resentment, revenge, someone who gives his songs no reason to stop. Bent over to the breaking point, leaning back on his heels, he still looked ordinary, like Bill Paxton—not the good, sort of dumb Paxton of Twister and Titanic but the friendly, class-clown killer vampire Paxton of Near Dark. From beginning to end the band found the song within the song, some core of rhythmic momentum, building on itself, that the song didn’t have to give up, and Eleventh Dream Day seemed to take it not as theirs but as something to be used and then put back in the song. One jarring note: among the many talismans on Key’s guitar was an old reflector campaign button, showing a profile of John F. Kennedy from one angle, “The Man for the 60’s” from another. I don’t recall “the ’60s” being referred to as “the ’60s”—that is, conceptually—in 1960, which means some adman, or maybe Arthur Schlesinger Jr., if not Andy Warhol, was way ahead of his time.

  3–4 Cannanes and Steward, Communicating at an Unknown Rate (YoYo) and Cannanes, Electro 2000 (Insound Tour Support) This Australian combo is playful before it is anything else. The long “Savage” certainly is, with its bright little synth notes, and Frances Gibson’s sunny, thoughtful voice asking herself questions and a guitar chiming in like a particularly considerate friend. But it keeps on, until the repetitions in the small riffs that build the tune unsettle the notion that it’s headed for a happy ending, like the way that Charlize Theron, in most of her movies, sparkles like a spring and then ends up dead. I don’t know where “Savage” ends up, except that it’s nowhere near where it started, even if, on paper, the notes would say the two places are exactly the same.