Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  It’s too bad Van Morrison doesn’t know how to get out of the way. He hooked up with Linda Gail at a Jerry Lee convention (she was performing, he was there as a fan)—but mainly, it seems, to walk all over her. For the blues and rockabilly standards on You Win Again, he’s like the husband at a party telling everyone how great his wife is and then finishing every sentence she tries to start. Maybe someone—Elvis Costello? Laurie Anderson? Peter Guralnick?—will hear how good this woman is, as quick and economical as a singer as she is on the page, and find her the time and place to make her own record.

  3 Shaver, The Earth Rolls On (New West) From 1993, with the undeniable Tramp on Your Street, Shaver was country singer and writer Billy Joe Shaver and his guitarist son Eddy; the younger Shaver died of a drug overdose on New Year’s Eve. He was a serious guitar player, and on “Evergreen Fields” he ran loose. He counts off the “We Will Now Tell the Terrible Tale” beat, then opens up a solo that gets out of the terrible tale alive, and makes you want to hear it again.

  4 Hellhound on My Trail—Songs of Robert Johnson (Telarc) Despite notes from Lawrence Cohn, who knows whereof he speaks, this tribute album, a set of tunes written by the ’30s bluesman and performed by David Honeyboy Edwards, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Pinetop Perkins, Keith Brown, Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert “Victim of Love” Palmer and more, more, more, starts dull and gets worse until, with Eric Gales’ “Me and the Devil Blues,” it gets to horrible—plummy, empty, incompetent, glib. Like “Louie Louie,” “Dust My Broom” is hard to ruin; Joe Louis Walker pulls it off. Chris Thomas King, who played the older Mississippi singer Tommy Johnson in O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a high-light, and he’s just OK. The only real exception is Susan Tedeschi, who offers a spare, distracted, Trailer Bride–style version of “Walking Blues”—you can see right through her shift, just because it has been washed so many times. You realize what the difference is: she’s singing the song as if what happens in it happened to her.

  5 The Early Blues Roots of Bob Dylan (Catfish) The tribute album backward—assembling the originals, the set makes the present-day man pay homage to his fore-bears, whether he wants to or not. But Bob Dylan is not at issue—right off, with the Mississippi Sheiks’ 1931 “I’ve Got Blood in My Eyes for You,” you hear how completely 62 years later he entered the song and changed it from the inside out. The structure remains the same; only the soul is different. Rather, it’s the wide range of the compiler’s ear—picking up Booker T. Sapps’ obscure “Po’ Lazarus,” Will Bennett following the melody of “Railroad Bill” in 1929 like a man going downstream in a canoe, the Rev. J. C. Burnett chanting “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” in a black church in 1928—that makes you realize what an undiscovered country remains to be found. When, just before the end, in the Parchman Farm Penitentiary in Mississippi in 1939, Bukka White begins to hammer the high, ringing chords of “Po’ Boy,” his voice an eternal whine, as if he knows this is the only way to get God’s ear, you reach that country, and you can’t believe you have to leave. You can; he couldn’t.

  6 Maria Muldaur, Richland Woman Blues (Stony Plain) Yet another sort of tribute album—the quilting-bee version, when friends and neighbors gather to help stitch up the music. Some of the same people from the Robert Johnson session, as if in another life (Taj Mahal, huge and ancient on “Soul of a Man”; Alvin Youngblood Hart, terrific adding scratches and scrapes to “I’m Going Back Home”), some of the same songs as the Dylan collection (Lead Belly’s “Grasshoppers in My Pillow”) and, as Muldaur’s voice gets bigger and bigger for Memphis Minnie’s “In My Girlish Days,” as big, it seems for a few minutes, as Bessie Smith’s, a sound that could not be less girlish.

  7 16 Horsepower, Hoarse (Checkered Past) A live recording of original-sin rock from a Denver quartet that can separate the wheat from the chaff, especially when leader David Eugene Edwards straps on his banjo. Unfriendly, unforgiving—their version of “Bad Moon Rising” makes the Creedence Clearwater original seem like an open question.

  8 Julie Lasky, Some People Can’t Surf—The Graphic Design of Art Chantry (Chronicle Books) The most striking pictures in this handsome, well-written appreciation of the work of the former Seattle punk poster artist (whose own Instant Litter collection appeared in 1985) might be those of Chantry and Sir Francis Chantry—real separated-at-birth stuff, except that one was born in 1954 and the other in 1781.

  9 Jon Carroll, “The Faith-Based Presidency” (San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 22) The moderate way to dissent from Bush’s presidency is to complain that he acts as if he had been elected in a landslide, rather than not elected at all. Like Thomas Friedman’s March 13 New York Times column on faith-based air-traffic control, Carroll’s picture of the unreality of present-day governance is a ghost story: “We now have a faith-based presidency. We need to have faith that we have a president. We have a person in the White House who is called the president, but it is hard to imagine him doing the job. Faith is the evidence of things not seen. We do not see him working, and yet we believe he is. We do not see him thinking, and yet we believe he is. We believe he is in charge. Our rational minds may waver. Always there is doubt. It is the challenge of the faith-based path to move beyond doubt. We cannot reason ourselves closer to the reality of the Bush presidency . . . we have the faith and he has the presidency.”

  10 Heike Baranowsky, Auto Scope, in “010101: Art in Technological Times” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through July 8) In a not-overburdened show of ambiences, recombinations, scans and a photo maze was this video, shot from a vehicle traversing the periphery of Paris and projected in four identical feeds. Speeding along, the assembled double-double images collapse into each other, so that each image is a mirror of itself—when trees come into the field of vision, the city becomes a series of Rorschach blots. There are moments of color, of ads and the bodies they feature, but mostly it’s road, walls, apartment buildings, factories, overcast. “This is Paris?” someone in the room said. “It looks like Poland.”

  APRIL 17, 2001

  1 Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals, Live From Mars (Virgin) This is the worst album I’ve ever heard. Not because it’s more than 137 minutes long—it was the worst album I’d ever heard after 10 minutes. It begins with thick waves of insensate cheering (track by track, you can hear the engineer pushing the volume up at the end of every number)—and then, out of the maelstrom, comes this pathetic, strangled, self-pitying, self-righteous, melisma-crazy bleat, the voice of a sensitive man alone in a world where, as he puts it, “I’m not as afraid of dying / As I am of getting old.” It’s an unsingable couplet, with that first “as” dissolving the first syllable of “afraid,” but who needs rhythm when your heart’s in the right place, when you’re against pollution and stuff like that? How low can you go when what you really want is to be the new Richie Havens? This record proves that no one knows, but I’ll bet Ben Harper wouldn’t have dared do “Sexual Healing” if Marvin Gaye were still alive.

  2 Daft Punk, Discovery (Virgin) The masked French techno duo makes oceanic dance music—music to dance to in your dreams. The 1997 Homework seemed to have no bottom to it; this has endless warmth, an openness of spirit that asks only that you melt. Try to resist: the opening “One More Time” begins with a tinny sample, as if from an old, old radio. The radio begins to play a naive melody, and soon enough you remember Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” never felt anything but good. With a bigger, deeper drum sound, the ’80s are all over this record, in the thrilling “Superheroes,” a pounding Pet Shop Boys march with a big, uplifting finale, the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of the Village People’s “Go West” without the sadness, without the trick AIDS played on the song; in the endless wildness of “Veridis Quo.” This is the one. It’s loud but never rushes; it reimagines George McCrae’s already abstract Miami soul classic “Rock Your Baby” alongside the Italian disco group Cetu Java’s gorgeous, somehow sinister “Adonde.” The pace is cool, but a sense of mission is never muffled, never hedged. The theme running
over the drum sound seems to double back on itself, to generate its own accompaniment, to step back and listen to itself, to approve, to rejoin the gathering of tones and declare itself: Give me a riff and I’ll save the world!

  3 Duets, directed by Bruce Paltrow (United Airlines in-flight entertainment) Maria Bello is very good at saying, “I’d be pleased and honored to fuck your brains out”; this PG edit of the horrible Karaoke World picture dubs in a car revving its engine so you can’t hear her. There is, though, a moment of instruction, when hustler Huey Lewis and recently met daughter Gwyneth Paltrow team up on Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’.” Dion, speaking of Hank Williams in a Fresh Air interview last fall: “His commitment was so total. He’d bite off the end of words: ‘I got it now!’ ” This is the opposite: the definition of plumminess, where a song exists only as a vehicle for the singer’s vanity, where if the word “forever” appears it can only mean “So long, sucker.” So here “forever” is not bitten off but stretched out, into “Fou-ahhh-evvvvahhhh,” the singers forcing the melody to carry more than it can bear, until it can produce only lies. Time stands still: the commonplace effect becomes an absolute, raising insincerity to a transcendental value. The crowd goes as wild as a Ben Harper applause track, as it does for everything in the movie—except for Andre Braugher’s weird, heart-rending reversal of the guy in the crowd screaming for “ Free Bird.”

  4 Milarde (Mediaset TV, March 18) On the Italian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (a milarde is a billion lire, about $500,000), a woman faced the final question: Albert King—Writer? Formula 1 driver? TV journalist? Musician? She chewed her lips, her fingers, twisted in her seat, and an aura of the fix came off of her in waves. “Well, I know B. B. King is a musician,” she said—as if, confronted with somebody named King, one would automatically think B. B. and not, say, Martin Luther. “Ah, yes,” said the host, “B. B.—‘Blues Boy.’ ” One would have thought this promised an early resolution, but no. Angst, despair—finally the woman was led away, as if to perdition. Ten minutes of commercials followed. The woman returned. Over 15 minutes, she struggled with inner demons. Writer? Musician? It could have been Sophie’s Choice for all you could tell from her face. It was fake—if it wasn’t it was pornographic—and then, the answer. Yes, she will plunge into the abyss: “Musician.”

  The result was a truly religious deliverance. The woman seemed ready to kiss the host’s feet, to pledge to him her unborn children. By the logic of her performance, had she lost they would have had to put her down, like Jane Fonda at the end of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

  5 Persona Grata (17, rue du Temple, Paris 4e) Just across the Pont Neuf on the Right Bank is Conforama, a household furnishings department store. What’s inside—items guaranteed to put you to sleep on your feet—seems to translate the name of the place: a play on confort (comfort), to an English speaker it reads Conform-o-rama. But small stores offering typical French design—simplicity combined with uniqueness, a lack of ostentation with flair—are all over the city, and this one stood out. Persona Grata is divided into sections, each with its own manifesto—“Good Taste? Bad Taste?” “Design? Child’s Play!” “Objects: Stories without Words”—and a Princess toaster, all gleaming silver except for a black base and handles, paid off on the last one. Without a single anthropomorphic feature it was nonetheless a face. It grinned, saying, “Good morning. Click me.” It was welcoming, but it also suggested it had a mind of its own—that as much as it was there to serve you, it would wait for you to go to sleep, and then get up and wander all over the house, moving things.

  6–7 Cat-Iron, Cat-Iron Sings Blues and Hymns (Smithsonian Folkways) & 15.60.75, aka the Numbers, Jimmy Bell’s Still in Town (Hearthan) Cat-Iron was a blues singer from Natchez, Miss. In 1958 Frederic Ramsey Jr. recorded him and wrote him up in the prestigious Saturday Review. All through Ramsey’s interesting piece—the liner notes to the original Folkways release, included on the custom cassettes or CDs you can now order through Smithsonian Folkways—run the lyrics of “Jimmy Bell,” Cat-Iron’s signature number. Otherwise second-or thirdhand, here Cat-Iron’s guitar takes on its own voice, stating no theme, only dropping hints, pulling you closer; as he sings, he seems less to be telling a story than promising he’ll tell you later. No wonder: Jimmy Bell, with “greenbacks enough to make a man a suit,” has come to drive the women from the church. “All you need,” he tells his sister, “is not to shout.” The sense of some enormous transformation is in the air. What it is you can’t tell.

  In 1975, opening for Bob Marley, singer-guitarist Robert Kidney took his seven-piece, three-sax band from Kent, Ohio, onto the stage of the Agora in Cleveland. “Jimmy Bell” was the Numbers’ wipeout piece, as much Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” as Cat-Iron’s cryptic crusader. Picking up on the bare syncopation in the Cat-Iron version, the Numbers press the rhythm right away, the bass slithering over the beat like a snake, then rhythm guitar, then Kidney’s thin voice, insisting on that greenback suit until you can see it walking down the street as his lead guitar picks up the bass’s theme and flails it like a whip. Across nearly 11 minutes, the performance is all play and menace, all here and now, all origins erased, a reach beyond the story to the willfulness in which it begins, a willfulness only a long, mean solo will turn up. By the time Kidney returns to words Jimmy Bell has come and gone and come back again, and you’re on the next train out. “Up the road I’m going,” Jimmy Bell tells his wife. “She said,” Kidney shouts for her in terror, “She said, ‘What road?’ ”

  8 Reuters, “British Sequel to ‘The Omen’ ” (International Herald Tribune, March 20) “London—The Labour Party will use a spoof video based on the cult 1970s horror movie ‘The Omen’ to assail its rivals in approaching elections. . . . The video [uses] imagery and music from ‘The Omen’ to liken Conservative leader William Hague to the character Damien, the son of the devil, and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to the anti-Christ.”

  Too bad the Democratic Party won’t have the nerve to come up with its own version, even though it might put a crimp in GOP plans to rename the entire country after Ronald Reagan.

  9 Debbie Geller, producer of the Arena documentary The Brian Epstein Story and author of In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story, visits the 31st Annual Beatlefest (March 17) “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one of these things. I never have and assumed it would be full of obsessive Beatle collector types and there certainly were a lot of those. But what really struck me were the middle-class, middle-aged and younger clean-cut suburbanites there, virtually all of whom were having a great time. The vast floor of a chain motel in true Nowheresville, N.J., was broken up by ad hoc groups of guys with guitars and lots of people standing around them singing with unself-conscious enthusiasm and energy. Lots of them had their kids with them, who didn’t seem embarrassed by mom and dad and were even singing with them most of the time.

  “I’m only telling you this because I think you might understand, or maybe not, the sense of loss I felt in the face of this enthusiasm. Not that they’ve ever been anything less than the most popular group ever, but this current re-renaissance of interest in the Beatles has meant that my own original relationship to the group is becoming more and more distant. I can talk about the importance they had to me and all, but I can’t remember what it felt like anymore. It’s hard to remember a time when everyone didn’t know all the words to all the songs, when the Beatles were doing unexpected things, when you couldn’t predict what was going to happen, when a Beatle record being released was a major event and when they were so glamorous and their world was so glamorous, you could barely imagine what it was like.

  “Rather than feeling a sense of commonality with people as I watched them singing the songs I’ve known the words to as well for at least 30 years, I felt like they were singing songs sung by a different band.”

  10 The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, Directors Guild of America Theatre Complex (Los Angeles, March 9) After a screening of the 1978 TV f
ilm about the Bizarro World version of the Beatles, Rutles Neil Innes, Eric Idle and Rikki Fattar came out for a panel discussion and questions from the audience. Idle was asked if it was true that Jermaine Jackson had bought the rights to all the Rutles songs. He didn’t get it right away.

  MAY 1, 2001

  1 Ass Ponys, “Kung Fu Reference,” on Lohio (Checkered Past) The voice is pained and passionate, the voice of a fan of the TV series who, the melody convinces you, wants more than anything in this world for the show to mean as much to you as it does to him. Why? Because, you find out in a verse you’d rather not have understood, this man has nothing in his life but a choice between RoboCop and The Bride of Frankenstein—whatever’s on tonight. The chorus seals the song: “If you ever gave a damn for Sonny Jim / I know you will—remember him.” It’s in the rise and fall, the shining light that, for some reason, 26 years after the show went off the air, isn’t out, even if like me you never watched it, or heard of Sonny Jim. A heroic guitar solo seems to carry its own double inside itself; it’s uncanny, and like all great guitar solos not an interlude, but the story translated, elevated, pushed out in front of itself like a life the singer will never live.

  2 “No Depression in Heaven—An Exploration of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music,” produced by Hal Willner (Getty Center, Los Angeles) The ’60s Cambridge folkie Geoff Muldaur led the assemblage. He looked like the kindly town pharmacist; when he opened his mouth a dynamic version of Noah Lewis’ 1928 “Minglewood Blues” came out like a tiger. “You’re going to be killing a lot of people tonight, aren’t you?” fiddler Richard Greene asked Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family, who was one of only four or five people under 40, or maybe 50, on the stage. “That’s what I do best,” she said sweetly. Sparks writes lyrics about murder and clinical depression for her husband, Brett, to sing; she introduced the Blue Sky Boys’ 1936 “Down on the Banks of the Ohio” as a song in which “a woman is slaughtered to ensure the river remains full.” “This record sounds like it came from Mars,” Greene said, kicking off Floyd Ming and His Pep Steppers’ 1928 “Indian War Whoop” (a new version orchestrates Baby Face Nelson’s arrest in O Brother, Where Art Thou?). It sounded just like Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call,” which in Mars Attacks! makes all the Martians’ heads explode.