Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  4–5 Robert Nighthawk et al., And This Is Maxwell Street (Rooster) and Levon Helm and the Barn Burners at Biscuits & Blues (San Francisco, Feb. 6) Maxwell Street is a triple CD—two discs of “dime in a cigar box” performances recorded in 1964 at Chicago’s open-air market by Mike Shea for his film And This Is Free, one disc of guitarist Mike Bloomfield interviewing guitarist Robert Nighthawk—and some of the most incendiary blues jams ever caught on tape. There is Big John Wrencher, leading Nighthawk and guitarist Little Arthur through “Lucille,” the heat from his harmonica wilting every weed in earshot; there’s Nighthawk himself, a dull singer, lifting whoever’s gathered around off their feet with “Peter Gunn Jam,” “Take It Easy, Baby” and “Back Off Jam,” hitting notes the citizens don’t suspect are there. But there is also an archaic, less obviously crowd-pleasing music, as if sneaking out of Chicago shacks like repressed memories: Arvella Gray’s long “John Henry,” merely a snippet of a song he could sing for hours; the James Brewer Gospel Group’s “When the Saints Go Marching In,” lifted up as if the hoary chestnut has been forgotten for 100 years and the sheet music has just been discovered under floorboards; and Fannie Brewer’s “I Shall Overcome,” the source of the civil rights anthem, here as real as a single body. “I’ll see his face, today,” Brewer promises the congregation she’s made of the people gathered on the street to listen. “I do believe, I’ll see his face someday.” As music it’s a smaller promise than the one she makes to herself as she ends her song: “I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright / I’ll be alright someday.”

  The Barn Burners could be one of the white blues bands that were forming across town as Shea ran his tapes—the material is not very different. It might be the same stuff Levon Helm of the Band was playing with his teenage Jungle Bush Beaters in Marvel, Ark., in 1958. More than 40 years later, Helm, his voice burned to a rasp by radiation treatments for throat cancer, sounds 100 years old but looks like Porter Wagoner; sitting behind his drums, he is the center of gravity in this six-piece combo, just as saxophonist Bobby Keys of Lubbock, Texas, said to have played with Buddy Holly, best known for his solo on the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” is its face of nothing-to-prove. The two of them about 60, everyone else, including singer Amy Helm, about 30—it felt right. Every note was in place, but too often every note stayed in place. The musicians were drawing a blues picture; they weren’t quite in it.

  Frontman Chris O’Leary carries the group: with a huge shout to open “Hey Porter,” a force-of-nature harmonica sound on “Wang Dang Doodle,” his blocklike smiling face and linebacker’s body, he generates what authority the group has, but they need more. Like O’Leary at his best, they have to trust the music to generate their authority. They are steps away.

  6 43rd Annual Grammy Awards (CBS, Feb. 21) During the Barcelona Olympics, when synchronized swimming first became an official event, a sportswriter caught what was wrong: “astonishing,” he said, and “faintly repugnant.” That was Destiny’s Child, maybe because they might as well have been wearing swimsuits, because they move so well and because they seem so corporate. As the night went on, the parade of dyed blond hair, plastic surgery, bare midriffs and flattened stomachs that do not occur in nature turned sickening. No, neither Ricky Martin nor Britney Spears, who don’t look even slightly human, took the stage, but they weren’t needed. Disassociation ruled. Listening to Best New Artist Shelby Lynne’s album, the coldy formal re-creation of ’60s soul music I Am Shelby Lynne, you might have responded, “No, you’re not—from the evidence of this record, nobody is Shelby Lynne”; here, either duetting with Sheryl Crow or accepting her award, her attitude of bemused disdain didn’t really square with the big “Please Buy My Breasts” sign she wore on her chest. Highlights: Discover Card’s fabulous Danger Kitty commercial, a Los Angeles ’80s hair band Behind the Music segment in under a minute, with nothing left out; the Jesus and Mary Chain smeared into the background of a Chevy commercial; the McDonald’s commercial with Kobe Bryant and the “We Love to See You Smile” tag line, more money for Randy Newman, a regular on the Oscars, excluded from the Grammys; Macy Gray performing her overaired “I Try,” sounding like an actual person in a sea of purple wigs, ending her spot sitting in a chair; Eminem’s shockingly hard, heaving “Stan,” which reached new territory as he took the voice of the crazed fan on a suicide run with his pregnant girlfriend screaming from the trunk of his car, the stakes raised high above any played for on record. It was shattering, and likely the strongest performance the show ever let itself in for.

  7 James F. Smith, “Rebels on Rugged Road to Peace” (Los Angeles Times, carried in the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 25) On the beginning of the 2,000-mile Zapatista caravan from Chiapas to Mexico City to seek constitutional amendments expanding the rights of indigenous Mexicans: “Last night, surprised tourists mingled with hundreds of Zapatista supporters in front of San Cristobal’s cathedral, waiting for the rebels. Roaming vendors sold small dolls of the Zapatistas, even T-shirts with a photo of [Subcommander] Marcos on the front and the words ‘Zapatour 2001’ on the back. ‘This could be a Rolling Stones tour,’ said Jack Jones, a 58-year-old visitor from Austin, Texas, who bought two of the shirts. ‘Somebody needs to support these people. What a great story for the 21st century.’ ”

  8 Michael Janofsky, “For Ex-Student Protestor, a Pardon Without the Spotlight” (New York Times, Feb. 24) Disgraceful as the pardons of Marc Rich, Pincus Green and the Hasidic swindlers may be, that the story has been trumpeted in mainstream media with far greater force than and sustained many times over that of the Supreme Court’s nullification of the presidential election is an infinitely greater disgrace. Conspicuous by its absence, the purloined election is like the purloined letter: the fact and means of its erasure must be hidden in plain sight. Janofsky’s piece on Bill Clinton’s pardon of Howard Mechanic is a signal example of how it’s done—how one story is used to hide the other.

  In 1970 Mechanic was given a five-year federal sentence for throwing a cherry bomb during an antiwar demonstration at Washington University in St. Louis—an act he did not commit. He fled. After 28 years of hiding in plain sight in Phoenix as one Gary Robert Tredway, Mechanic was exposed and sent to prison. To little notice, as Clinton left office he granted Mechanic a pardon; nearly a month later, it becomes a story. “A path to freedom on the backs of ordinary citizens,” announces the teaser box in the piece, the line matched in the second paragraph: “Mr. Mechanic walked a path to freedom on the backs of ordinary citizens, thousands of them.” To “walk on the backs” of others is to exploit, traduce or oppress them—who, one might wonder, are these thousands of ordinary Americans exploited, traduced or oppressed by Howard Mechanic? G.I.s in Vietnam in 1970, placed in even greater jeopardy by protesters undermining America’s will to fight? Not exactly, as it turns out, seven paragraphs later: “Old friends in St. Louis and new ones in Arizona . . . created a Web site to collect petition signatures—nearly 3,000 at last count, said Bruce M. Rogers, a college classmate of Mr. Mechanic’s—and to urge supporters to contact elected officials.” One would think such a fact would call for a characterization along the lines of “a path to freedom with the helping hands of ordinary citizens, thousands of them”—but that would be to assume that the Times’ treatment of the Mechanic story was about something other than keeping a very different story alive, until, presumably, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton take the place of Marc Rich, or Howard Mechanic, as fugitives from justice.

  9–10 John Fahey, 1939–2001 (Feb. 22) and Jon Langford at Johnny Foley’s (San Francisco, Feb. 22) An acerbic man who suffered no fools, the experimental guitarist was his own equal as a writer. “It’s great,” he said of J. P. Nestor’s 1927 recording of “Train on the Island.” “But what is it?” Recalling Hank Williams’ last concert in 1953—or, rather, making it up—he caught what should have happened in How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, a book of fabulist autobiographical pieces he published last year: “First thing Williams did was curse a
nd swear at us. ‘Why dontcha all go home?’ he yelled into the mike. ‘I hate every damned one of ya.’ ” In Fahey’s story it was just a setup for capturing a song: “At some point in the show he sang ‘Alone and Forsaken’ and while he did that many of us almost died of grief and fright.”

  Fahey calls it “the greatest song of despair ever written” and quotes the first line: “We met in the springtime.” He makes you pause. “By the fifth word,” he says, “you know it’s all over.”

  It was by chance that Jon Langford of the Mekons, accompanied on Hawaiian guitar by Jon Rauhouse, closed a vibrant solo show with a harsh, syncopated version of “Alone and Forsaken.” (The posthu-mously released 1949 original can be found on the recent Williams album Alone With His Guitar, with cover art by Langford). Langford hadn’t read Fahey’s book. Sometimes the right time creates the right place.

  MARCH 19, 2001

  1–2 The Sopranos, Alan Coulter, director; David Chase, writer; Kathryn Dayak, music editor (HBO, March 2) and Peter Gunn: “Death House Testament” and “Skin Deep” (Rhino Video) As orchestration for the FBI bugging scheme that dominated this season’s first episode, the combination of the Peter Gunn theme—from the 1958–61 private-eye TV series; Henry Mancini won the 1958 album of the year Grammy for his soundtrack—and the Police’s 1983 “Every Breath You Take” was quite brilliant. Too brilliant—the stalker-quiet second song creeping out of the car-chase noise of the first, so that both seemed to have precisely the same beat, was uncanny, but once, not three times. It got me wondering how Peter Gunn itself might play today. It was the opposite of The Sopranos—the least nervous crime show imaginable, despite the fact that when Gunn got beat up, which happened at least once every half-hour, he got completely stomped.

  Craig Stevens, who died last year at 81, played the hipster detective as a slightly more Jewish version of Cary Grant in North by Northwest; Herschel Bernardi played Lt. Jacoby as a very Jewish version of Tonto. Ethnically, only the villains were straight—and, at best, or worst, straight out of film noir slime. In “Death House Testament,” directed by series creator Blake Edwards, the alcoholic mob croaker Dr. Alford could be moonlighting from Kiss Me Deadly; the camera is so tight on his face as he puts Gunn out you can feel his sweat dripping through the screen. When Gunn tries to escape from Alford’s clinic, Stevens gets as close to Raymond Chandler forcing Philip Marlowe to stand up (“ ‘Okey, Marlowe,’ I said between my teeth. ‘. . . You’ve been shot full of hop and kept under it until you’re as crazy as two waltzing mice. And what does it amount to? Routine. Now let’s see you do something really tough, like putting your pants on’ ”) as any movie actor—and once Stevens’ version of Marlowe gets his pants back on and can act cool again, he doesn’t even need the best lines. “Please, give me an excuse,” he says, holding a gun on Alford and his boss. “No, thanks,” the doctor says, “I’m drinking.” Gunn doesn’t even offer a comeback. He just smiles. He’s a watcher, a listener, wary but amused, not a talker. The ’50s were psychoanalysis central; you can’t imagine Stevens taking Tony Soprano’s place in Dr. Melfi’s office, but you can see him taking hers.

  3 Book of Love, “Boy,” from I Touch Roses—The Best of the Book of Love (Reprise) “Uh-huh.” “Uh-huh.” “Uh-huh.” In 1986 it sounded like Trio’s “Da Da Da,” but without apology; today it sounds like a conversation. It was not much more than an opening bid from a three-woman, one-man modern-world synth ’n’ harmony outfit that never made a bad record.

  4–5 Low, Things We Lost in the Fire (Kranky) and Peter S. Scholtes, “Hey, We’re in Duluth,” Minneapolis City Pages (Feb. 7) “When they found your body / Giant Xs on your eyes / And your half of the ransom,” Alan Sparhawk sings in “Sunflower,” “The weather hadn’t changed”—I made the last line up, but it wouldn’t be out of place. From Duluth, where 42 years ago Bob Dylan stood in the audience at the National Guard Armory as Buddy Holly played his third-to-last show, this notoriously unhurried trio captures the insignificance of human desire as opposed to the fact of a Minnesota winter even as they suggest they might prefer that the weather never change at all. Or, as Scholtes puts it in his Minneapolis visitor’s piece on “the emerging sense among Duluthians of an emerging sensibility among Duluthians”—that is, signs of a termite culture going public—“if there is one certainty at the heart of Duluth’s mystique it is Lake Superior. The lake is always there and it is always cold. It will always be there and it will always be cold. Nothing about the physical landscape of the lake’s corner should make a visit this spring more pressing than one the next.”

  6 Johnny Dowd, Temporary Shelter (Koch) Featuring mover Dowd and hairsalon proprietor Kim Sherwood-Caso of Ithaca, N.Y., this is the bad conscience of country music as surely as the sheriff in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me is John Wayne’s—though the people in Dowd’s songs are more like Thompson’s most humiliated characters, and in their most profound moments of embarrassment. With Sherwood-Caso’s voice going far past the song in “Hell or High Water” and Dowd’s guitar scraping the paint off its darkest corners, or in the bad hotel room called up by the unclean ’50s white jazz in “Cradle to the Grave,” it’s the sound of “the joke’s on me”—the somehow pristine sound of even that kind of joke failing to get a laugh out of the crowd.

  7 When Brendan Met Trudy, directed by Kieron J. Walsh, written by Roddy Doyle (Collins Avenue/Deadly Films 2) As culture—as the picture it draws of what it means to live happily, almost fully, in a funhouse of representations—the writing in this movie is as sexy as the smile in Flora Montgomery’s eyes. “He makes movies,” Montgomery’s young thief says to her warden, describing her young schoolteacher boyfriend, and he does: home movies, as scripted by Godard, Iggy Pop, Kevin Spacey, Jean-Claude Van Damme starring in Remedial Action. As when he runs into one of his teenage students, whose names he can never remember, in a supermarket. “Dylan,” the boy reminds him, as his parents beam at the one remaining sign of a hipness long since erased by the class system. “Mr.—Tambourine Man,” the teacher says, having already forgotten the student’s name again but translating the reference into a bigger story. The kid has no idea what he’s talking about.

  8 Saks Fifth Avenue, Caribbean Lifestyles—Live a Little Volume 2 (Sony Special Products) An in-store giveaway CD: 12 Caribbean lifestyles, but only one of them offered by an actual Caribbean, Ini Kamoze of Jamaica, which I guess makes him the poster and the likes of Men at Work (“Down Under”), Blondie (“The Tide Is High”) and Mungo Jerry (“In the Summertime”) travel agents. There are the unavoidable tourist-trap disasters (Bobby Bloom’s “Montego Bay,” Buster Poindexter’s “Hot, Hot, Hot”) but also that moment when the tropical storm breaks into a sky unlike any you’ve seen before. I mean, nothing with Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” on it is a waste of money, and this one’s free, at least if you buy something else.

  9 Corrs, “Breathless” (Atlantic) Surveys show most Americans aren’t getting enough fluff in their diet. This radio hit, up there with Maxine Nightingale’s “Right Back Where We Started From,” so good on the team bus in the 1977 hockey movie Slap Shot, is the perfect cure. Already in heavy rotation on Patrick Bateman’s Walkman.

  10 Pola X, directed by Léos Carax (Arena Films) Based on Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities, about a young man and a young woman, Isabelle, who appears out of nowhere and claims to be his sister, set in contemporary France, and, as the lives of the two become ever more entwined, starring Guillaume Depardieu as Kurt Cobain. Pierre leaves comfort, mother and fiancée behind and with Isabelle finds a hiding place in an abandoned Paris factory that’s been taken over by a terrorist cell-cum-noise music orchestra (music provided by Scott Walker, one-time member of Righteous Brothers imitation the Walker Brothers, in later years a Jacques Brel disciple). Already famous as someone he isn’t—as “Aladin,” pseudonymous author of a cult novel—Pierre hunches over his desk in his bare room, scribbling endless pages in red ink. Desperate for a publisher and an advanc
e, he appears as himself on a literary talk show; when he freezes up in terror at the interviewer’s asking him who he really is, he becomes the person hiding in so many Nirvana songs, able to speak only through the screams of the choruses, retreating into the near silence of the verses almost instantly. “Impostor!” someone shouts from the studio audience. It’s the shout Cobain always heard, just as the publisher’s response Pierre’s new manuscript finally receives—“A raving morass . . . reeks of plagiarism”—is the judgment Cobain always pronounced on his own work. It can’t be an accident that Depardieu, who begins the film cleanshaven, with neatly trimmed blond hair, looks just like Cobain by the end (a wig and a fake beard, Depardieu says)—or that he exits the plot in the back of a police van, a shot that all too closely echoes the famous photo of Cobain in an ambulance in Rome, Courtney Love looking at the camera with her face a smear of determination and fear. I have the feeling that even if Cobain were still alive, he would have entered the vocabulary of other people’s work just as fiercely as he has as a dead man.

  APRIL 2, 2001

  1–2 Linda Gail Lewis, The Devil, Me, and Jerry Lee (Longstreet) & Van Morrison/Linda Gail Lewis, You Win Again (Mercury) If you’re sick of the broken-arm school of memoir writing, in which self-criticism is magically transformed into self-congratulation—Adair Lara’s Hold Me Close, Let Me Go: A Mother, a Daughter, and an Adolescence Survived is a recent example—this frank (“It’s a miracle we’re not all more fucked up than we are”), funny (“Jerry Lee would probably not do a double take if he were seated at the Last Supper”), fatalistic (“In Ferriday I could have married a cousin and not even known it”) and short (166 pages with big print) look back by Jerry Lee Lewis’ little sister is like a good drink at the end of a long day. She can tell a story; she can get out of the way and let a story tell itself. “When I was very young, my mother was always commenting about what pretty little hands I had,” she says. “I think it finally got to the point where [older sister] Frankie Jean really had heard enough about my beautiful hands, so naturally, she took me over to the oven and helped me to place them directly on the hot grates inside”—it’s that “to” in “helped me to place them,” slowing the description, making it more formal, that makes the moment perfect.