Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  The five-song Electro 2000 is even sunnier, a dream-pop manifesto, but has anyone ever woken up from a dream as gorgeous as “You Name It”? This is Gibson again, walking through fields of flowers while the Northern Lights spread salacious rumors about her and she plays the Go-Go’s “Our Lips Are Sealed” in her head. In 1983 it might not have seemed so striking, but today you won’t hear anything this band is doing anywhere else.

  5 Nick Talevski, The Encyclopedia of Rock Obituaries (Omnibus) Four hundred ninety pages of dead people, even including writers, and not just Lester Bangs. Too much about the lives, not enough about the deaths, but it’s a start.

  6 Drive-by Truckers, Alabama Ass Whuppin’ (Second Heaven) The name of this country-rock band and the title of its live album sum up the attitude the Drive-by Truckers mean to substitute for whatever else they might need. But halfway through, even they seem tired of it.

  7 Neil Young, Friends & Relatives, Road Rock (Reprise) As an apparent stopgap in lieu of the long-awaited many-CD first installment of his multi-many-CD career retrospective, Young offers a recent tour document: note-for-note cover versions. Of his own songs.

  8–9 “Amazons of the Avant-Garde” at the Guggenheim (New York, through Jan. 7) Context revealed the second-spookiest work in this show of mostly promiscuously colored pre- and immediately post-revolution paintings by female Russian artists, which runs in galleries alongside the big, superpopular Armani retrospective. (Sponsored by InStyle: “My favorite magazine!” my companion said. “When people ask me if I’m looking forward to anything, I always say, InStyle!”) Nadezhda Udaltsova (1885–1961) might not have spoken so clearly anywhere else, but here, with her 1915 Red Figure, she was a mediator between commerce and the eternal, which is one of the things an artist is supposed to be. In the frame an orange-red cubist woman, slight and slim like the Armani mannequins, sat in a mostly cubist room of infinite style—a room that, with a halfcircle of a back window letting in the light, took in the styles to follow, from de Stijl to art deco to ’50s moderne. In its predictiveness, the picture had a harsh, dismissive authority; I mean, you can feel stupid looking at it. Yet the woman is casual in her all-encompassing modernity, on top of the century as if it had already happened and she’s thinking it over.

  The No. 1 spookiest piece was Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) in Grimaces in Art, a futurist poster from a 1913 number of the journal Teatr v Karrikaturakh. She posed in a peasant’s headdress, with her face painted so violently that the woman then in her early 30s looked 80—a comment, perhaps, on how old Russian peasant women in their 30s actually looked. But the picture was less historical than primeval: Goncharova’s cheeks, chin and forehead were scored with heavy black lines, cuneiforms, signs, unreadable Paleolithic cave symbols or protowriting. What you see, along with the heroic shout of modernism, are wrinkles so deep you could stick your fingers in them, unless you see the marks of badly healed scars cutting down and across the face so brutally you can almost feel the knife that would have put them there.

  10 Bijou Market hot sauces (1015 Decatur St., New Orleans) Along with the vast array of submissive Bill and dominatrix Hillary postcards, and the usual do-you-dare hot sauce brands—Open Grave, Capital Punishment, Last Rites, Sudden Death—there was, this year, Bubba’s Best (“As Usual Comes Up a Little Short”), Hillary’s Diet Sauce (“Made From Pure Whitewater—for Use in Place of Health Insurance”) and, among various Lewinsky products, the Monica’s Down on Your Knees hot sauce, with the label picturing what seemed to be permanently attached versions of what Lewinsky herself once hopefully called her “presidential kneepads.” Compared with last year, when Decatur Street shops displayed T-shirts printed with photos of a joyously smiling Monica with semen dripping down her chin, this was a big step toward national reconciliation. Or something.

  JANUARY 8, 2001

  1 Arliss Howard, “The Human Stain by Philip Roth” (Houghton Mifflin audio books) Album of the year? This is it: unabridged, eight cassettes, 14 1/2 hours and a tour de force by an actor less known for his roles in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar! and Tales of Erotica than for his marriage to Debra Winger. Winger has a small role in The Human Stain; all it does is throw Howard’s performance into relief. He contrives different voices for different characters, and many different voices for different incarnations of the same character, without ever seeming to do so, without ever losing an overall narrative authority. It’s as if, somewhere behind all the acting, Howard himself were the real author of Roth’s novel. With not a word missing, this means a lot of ruminating, a lot of philosophy, repetitions that on the page can seem like a whisper and that spoken out loud can sound stupid. With Howard speaking, the same phrases, the same ideas coming up again and again, work in the listener’s mind not as irritations, but as reminders, as part of the listener’s own memory. This is the perfect companion for a long, long driving trip—but be sure to time the end of the trip to the end of the story. Otherwise you’ll be left stranded, wondering what you’re doing so many miles from home, no place to be when, as at the end of Howard’s reading, all of life comes crashing down.

  2–3 PJ Harvey at Bowery Ballroom, New York (Dec. 11) and at Daddy-O’s, 44 Bedford St., New York (Nov. 19) Harvey was very glamorous at the Bowery Ballroom; she ran the band with her guitar. Still, she’s so selfcomposed that when she offered a few conventional words to the crowd it seemed unnatural, out of place—or as if the audience weren’t needed at all. There were moments when doors you didn’t know were there opened, moments when you might see yourself across town at the Museum of Modern Art, gazing into Jackson Pollock’s 1950 One and realizing you could be looking at a 30,000-year-old cave painting or wall engraving, looking into an image redrawn or scored by hundreds of hands over hundreds or thousands of years. But mostly her performance was a series of songs—and it was surprising to find the new “Big Exit” already a standard crowd pleaser. The audience’s cheers made the song seem like a finished thing, already known.

  A few weeks before, at a Village bar, a guy was shouting into his cellphone. The bartender cranked his Rolling Stones Let It Bleed CD higher and higher; the guy just upped his own volume. But when “Midnight Rambler” and “Monkey Man” and “You Got the Silver” yielded to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” you realized it wasn’t simply some self-important jerk with his Nokia that was killing conversation, or even the ever-rising loudness of the music, but the music itself. This was, after all, merely the best rock ’n’ roll album ever made, and when it’s playing it’s kind of hard not to listen to it. The bartender proved his touch was perfect by following with Harvey’s just-released Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. “Big Exit” is the first cut, and it immediately raised the question, Why isn’t she in the Rolling Stones? It’s not as if they don’t need her help, or as if she’s not already standing in their shoes.

  4 Gossip, That’s Not What I Heard (Kill Rock Stars) From Arkansas: very tough, very grimy, very Southern—all dirt and spit, with a feeling Pussy Galore once found, probably on an old copy of The Rolling Stones, Now!

  5 Val Kilmer on Saturday Night Live, Dec. 9 (NBC) Before applying himself to a startling impression of Jeb Bush being spurned by former lover Katherine Harris (and you haven’t lived until you’ve seen her in the “Fashion Police” pages of the Dec. 25 issue of Us), at the end of his monologue Kilmer said, “U2 is actually on the show tonight.” As a violation of SNL’s most hardened cliché—the hideously tiresome “[Name of musical performer] is here!”—it was right up there with Kilmer’s “Shoot him in the face” advice to Christian Slater in True Romance.

  6 “Dearly Departed: Remembering those in the arts who died in 2000,” San Francisco Chronicle Datebook (Dec. 31) Average age for the 20 entries under “Pop Music,” including Roebuck Staples, 84; Lord Kitchener, 77; Edward “Tex” Beneke, 77; and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 70: 54. Average age for the 47 entries under “Classical Music,” including Neil Wilson, 44; David Shallon, 49; David Golub, 50; a
nd Michael J. Baker, 51: 77.

  7 Peter Loge, “Comment,” on Morning Edition, NPR (Dec. 20) Big question for the nation, according to Loge, director of Washington’s Justice Project, an anti–death penalty group: figuring out a future for Al Gore, especially with the possibility that he might have to subsist on “Tipper getting the Wildcats back together for one last VH1 special.” Noting that Gore seemingly had “no marketable skills,” and that traditional opportunities for ex-vice presidents—motivational speaking or writing a book—raised specters of boredom beyond hope (the Spiro Agnew–Gerald Ford tradition of lobbying, fixing and introducing corrupt foreign businessmen to influential members of Congress and the executive branch went unmentioned), Loge proposed that Gore, drawing on his years of experience showing up at state funerals and secondrank fundraisers, offer himself as an “event stand-in.” Gore could rent himself out to family reunions, charity events, Little League games or whatever function someone else wanted to avoid, Loge announced somberly—and he could be just as stiff and wooden as he wished. After all, what could be more polite at such gatherings than a robot that says “Yes,” “Thank you” and “More punch would be delightful” better than any human? In other words, calls for national unity, “putting hard feelings behind us” and acknowledging George W. Bush’s legitimacy as president (as, according to a December New York Times poll, 40 percent of the public, as opposed to 99.5 percent of the media, do not) are all very well, but what’s really necessary to establish Bush as the landslide winner he has pretended to be since Nov. 7 is the transformation of Gore into the automatic punch line of every loser joke—no matter that he plainly won the election, in Florida as in the nation at large.

  8 Leni Riefenstahl 2001 desk calendar (Taschen) Speaking of legitimacy (“Riefenstahl’s current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1974, when Riefenstahl, who will turn 99 this year, could still pose as a nymph, “do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst”), this is going too far—or coming too close.

  9 Johnny Cash, American III: Solitary Man (American) “I” and “II” in the Cash revival—put old man together with new songs—did nothing for me; here an inner depth combines with the deep voice to take some of the songs to places neither they nor Cash have reached before. Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” was always a great record, but also a kind of whine; here it’s a testament. Will Oldham’s “I See a Darkness” is creepy as Oldham himself does it as Bonnie “Prince” Billie; now it’s a premonition of death that lets you see through death’s eyes. The thriller is U2’s “One”: with Bono’s bellowing gone it’s revealed as a perfect tune. As the singer waltzes with himself in the studio apartment no one else has entered for months, only the pop lightness of the melody convinces you the song is something other than an old mountain air.

  10 The Suburbans, directed by Donal Lardner Ward, written by Tony Guma and Donal Lardner Ward (Tristar 1999, HBO, Dec. 7) Ultra-adorable record company rep Jennifer Love Hewitt facing terrified one-hitwonder ’80s band now on tour for the first time in over 15 years: “So! We beat on, boats against the current, ceaselessly into the past!” Her telling the Suburbans she’s quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald doesn’t make them feel any better.

  JANUARY 22, 2001

  1 Don Asmussen, “San Francisco Comic Strip”: “This Week: President-Elect George W. Bush’s Cabinet Nominees” (San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 14) For the first panel, a Chronicle front page: “ASHCROFT: ‘I’LL ALLOW BLACK ABORTIONS.’ Bush’s Attorney General Nominee Meets Halfway: Nominee’s openness to compromise shows that Bush’s promise of a new era of bipartisanship is heartfelt.”

  2–3 Snoop Dogg, “County Blues,” from Dead Man Walking (Death Row) and Honeyboy Edwards, Mississippi Delta Bluesman (Smithsonian Folkways) “The county gives plenty blues”—in a piece on police harassment with vocal and harmonica samples that put it right back in the South of 70 years ago, the man with the smooth, trickster drawl walks the rhythm slowly down the street, looking back and forth to see which direction his ancestors are coming from. “They got me wearing county blues,” sings an old man again and again, as women’s voices swirl around his like caressing hands, like snakes. “They got me wearing / Penitentiary shoes.” As for Edwards, who as a young man hung around with Robert Johnson, this handsome reissue of a 1979 session is proof the country blues can be as dull as anything else.

  4 Pere Ubu, The Shape of Things (Hearthen, available through Ubutique) Recorded from the crowd at the Mistake in Cleveland on April 7, 1976—when guitarist Peter Laughner, who would soon leave both the band and his life behind, steps out of the first number, “Heart of Darkness,” you understand why people who knew him still testify he heard things they never would. Just as memorable, though, are the two poseurs in the audience trying on British accents: “Band seems to be lacking a bit of energy this evening.” “Bit of something.” They’re so callow, and it’s easy to laugh—but then, you wouldn’t have known it was a historic night, either. Where are they now?

  5 Atmosphere, Ford One & Ford Two (Fat Beats, vinyl only) A set of raps and dubs from Slug, a Midwesterner who shares Eminem’s accent but moves as slowly as the Detroiter moves fast. The hard, cold, northern Minnesota autobiography “Nothing But Sunshine” isn’t that far in mood from the Barbarians’ 1966 “Moulty,” which you can find on the original Nuggets collection—until, with a sucker of a fan stuck in the throat of a sardonic, bitter man who’s been fooled too many times, Slug starts warbling the Temptations’ “My Girl” (“I’ve got sunshine / On a cloudy day . . .”), and no better than you might. The intrusion of the sound of ordinary life into the performance is as startling as it is when the woman starts telling her story in the middle of Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.”

  6 Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (Museum of Modern Art) As I write, one-time Frankfurt revolutionary Joschka Fischer, now Germany’s foreign minister, is testifying in the trial of onetime Red Army Faction member Hans-Joachim Klein, who is accused of complicity in the murder of three people in a terrorist raid on an OPEC meeting in 1975. Not long after, three of Klein’s comrades—Ulrike Meinhof in 1976, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin on Oct. 18, 1977—were found dead in their cells in the maximum-security prison that had been built to house them. Richter’s 1988 paintings of images of the Baader-Meinhof Gang alive and dead—crepuscular, black-white-gray underwater paintings derived from news photos—seem exploitative in the MOMA exhibit (which closes Jan. 30) this book explores; as big as 6 feet by 7 feet, they seem like absolute appropriations of another’s being, like graverobbing. This doesn’t belong to you, you want to say to the artist—it doesn’t belong to me. The display is indecent. But what about the indecency of how these people were treated in life, deprived of sleep, subjected to constant white noise, all the forms of torture that leave no marks? Well, what about it? That’s not the question; that’s just to use word magic on the walls. But in the book, you can look into the pictures. Just as the paintings themselves took their subjects over, in book-size reproductions they seem to capture real people, people retreating from the artist’s eye as from yours.

  The most modest, unsensational painting in the exhibit—Baader’s phonograph, with an LP on it, though in the painting there’s no hope of identifying the record—is the most arty of the pictures on the page. But if you dismiss it you’ll miss the book’s most interesting footnote: “An inspection [of the original prints] involving careful scrutiny with a high-powered microscope as well as computer-enhanced re-imaging” revealed “that the record on the turntable in Baader’s cell was Eric Clapton’s 1974 release There’s One in Every Crowd.” Storr goes on to relate the music and lyrics to the event, but the event doesn’t bring the born-dead music to life.

  7 Caroline Sullivan, Bye Bye Baby: My Tragic Love Affair With the Bay City Rollers (Bloomsbury USA) There were many 1977s, of course; this unapologetic fan’s memoir by a nice Je
wish girl from New Jersey is powered by one question: will the author, pushing 20 in those days, ever lose her virginity? To one of them? Halfway through the book it seems she does. Seventy pages later it seems she didn’t. I think she did, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

  8 Dean Santomieri, “crude rotation” (Archipelago) Musique concrète, beginning with echoes of marching music so faded they might be from the First World War.

  9 Kelly Harrell, “The Cuckoo She’s a Fine Bird,” from Kelly Harrell: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Volume 2, 1926–1929 (Document) For perhaps the most commonplace of all Appalachian ballads, a normally canny Virginia singer offers a primitive, self-effacing vocal orchestrated between verses not by mountain fiddle but Central European nightclub violin. Plus a real cuckoo clock. You want weird, this is weird.

  10 The First Family’s Holiday Gift to America: A Personal Tour of the White House (Fox, Dec. 15) Bill Clinton walks you into his Music Room, set up both for playing and remembering. On a wall there’s a picture of him jamming with Kenny G, a poker hand’s worth of gold “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” discs from Fleetwood Mac, and Herman Leonard jazz photos, lovingly described, including the famous one of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon wreathed in smoke. There’s Elvis onstage, pensive off it, and on a shelf a ceramic version waving from a pink Cadillac. Last shot before the tour moves on: a litter of saxophones, real and jewelry size, brass, gold and silver, scattered randomly, like junk for the country to throw out.