Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  6 Gin Blossoms, “Found Out About You,” from New Miserable Experience (A&M, 1992) “Yes, the Blossoms are still broken up,” reads the Unofficial Gin Blossoms Home Page, “but you can follow the former members in their new efforts . . .” Do they hold up so well because singer Robin Wilson still sounds not only miserable, but as if nothing could possibly have changed, including the world? Or because song-writer Doug Hopkins included his 1993 suicide in his 1992 songs?

  7 Clash, Take It or Leave It (Wise/P.F.P. vinyl bootleg) Recorded May 8, 1977, in Manchester. Awful sound. And when they go into “J.A.”—the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop”—you can hear the world stand up and change.

  8–9 Maggie Greenwald, director, Songcatcher & Music From and Inspired by the Motion Picture “Songcatcher” (Vanguard) The movie never gets out of its clothes, thanks to Janet McTeer, whose imperious Lily (When can I take a bath? McTeer seems to be asking every five minutes) is loosely based on Maud Karpeles, who with Cecil Sharp in 1916 to 1918 collected more than 1,600 variants of 500 songs from 281 singers in the Appalachian highlands. One remarkable scene: country singer Iris DeMent as a mountain woman offering the collector “When First Unto This Country”—the words are prosaic, the feeling loaded into them otherworldly—just after her husband has sold their farm for 50 cents an acre to oily Earl Giddens (David Patrick Kelley), local representative of McFarland Coal. Another: after a brawl at a dance, Giddens, beaten to a pulp by hero Tom Bledsoe (a comfortably beefy Aidan Quinn), pulls himself to his feet, closes his coat over his pistol and launches into “Oh Death.” He walks off into the night, leaving the song to whoever wants to finish it—not, luckily, the red-robed Klan leader who declaims it like a speech in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? What are the chances of this ancient, bottomless song turning up in two general-release movies in one year?

  DeMent’s performance, as thin and brittle as anything she’s ever recorded, is listed as “Pretty Saro” on the soundtrack album; “Oh Death” is sung by Kelley, Hazel Dickens and Bobby McMillon as “Conversation With Death.” There are other fine moments, among them Rosanne Cash’s “Fair and Tender Ladies” and, from Emmylou Harris’ florid “Barbara Allen” to Allison Moorer’s horrid “Moonshiner,” too many songs sung to the mirror. For a better song-catching film, seek out David Hoffman’s early-60s Music Makers of the Blue Ridge (Varied Directions) if you can find it; for the songs behind the story from people who never left where the songs came from, walk into any good record store and look for Doug and Jack Wallin, Family Songs and Stories from the North Carolina Mountains (Smithsonian Folkways), which has no flies on it.

  10 David Thomas, David Johansen, Steve Earle and Philip Glass, “Kassie Jones,” from Hal Wilner’s Harry Smith Project (Royce Hall, UCLA, April 26) The big all-star jam to close the all-star concert, and thanks to Glass, who sounds as if he’s playing underwater, and as if he grew up doing it—“Mr. Boogie,” Thomas says disdainfully, after announcing the supergroup as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and trying and failing to figure out who’s who (“Love the one you’re with, baby!” someone shouts)—the singers disappear right into the song. You can sense them attempting to hold back, to maintain some shred of individuality while exploring how a railroad man who actually lived turned into a figment of the common imagination, but the only way to tell the story is to let it tell itself.

  SEPTEMBER 4, 2001

  1 Great Pop Moments (That Should Have Happened Even if They Didn’t Division): Valerie Mass, “ People” column (Denver Post, Aug. 6) “Elton John spilled the beans about his former liquor-soaked, drugged-out life in an interview with The London Mirror. . . . John said he met Bob Dylan and George Harrison at a party he was hosting in Los Angeles but was unable to talk any sense to them. ‘I’d had quite a few martinis and [God] knows how much cocaine. So I started babbling on about how [Dylan] had to come up to my room and try on my clothes . . .’ ”

  2 Bob Dylan, “Summer Days,” from Love and Theft (Columbia) Speaking of trying on new clothes—four years ago, Dylan’s celebrated Time Out of Mind mapped a country of abandoned roads and emptied cities, and nothing like what’s happening here could have happened there. “Waaaal”—in this song, “Well” is always “Waaaal,” “Yes” is always “Yaaaaaaassss,” pure minstrel diction, as befits an album seemingly named for Eric Lott’s 1993 study Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class—“Waaaaal, I’m standing on a table, I’m proposing a toast to the King,” the singer shouts from inside a roadhouse where a Western Swing band is running a jitterbug beat as if it’s twirling a rope. On the dance floor women are flipping in the air and couples snap back at each other like towels in a locker room. The singer high-steps his way across the room, Stetson topping his Nudie suit. How much proof do you want that the night can’t go wrong? “Why don’t you break my heart one more time,” he says happily to the woman at his side, “just for good luck?” He stretches out the last word as if he can’t bear to give it up.

  3 Erase Errata, Other Animals (Troubleman Unlimited) This four-woman San Francisco combo sings and plays in the clipped, impatient manner of the 1980s Leeds punk outfit Delta 5—until at the end of this first album, with “Dexterity Is #2,” they’re breaking up their sound in the manner of Gang of Four, which sparked Delta 5. The difference is that Delta 5 and Gang of Four premised their music in their leftist-feminist milieu while Erase Errata’s sound comes free of any political context—anything a listener could assume as a premise of what they’re impatient about, or what the break-up of their sound might signify. With borrowed voices they’re beginning their own story from the beginning, and it’s a bright, scratchy experiment—with one eyebrow raised in sardonic doubt.

  4 Gillian Welch, Time (The Revelator) (Acony) New old-timey singer Welch had the Walker Evans FSA look down from the start. Now, with sententious, self-absorbed singing, in a tone that sounds weirdly like David Baerwald—though God knows without his passion—she comes forth as barefoot seer, offering oddly abstract songs about Elvis’ death and Lincoln’s assassination. The idea is that both events are best understood, or felt, as folklore: the Elvis song is put to the tune of “Casey Jones,” while Welch’s second Lincoln song, “Ruination Day Part 2,” explicitly compares Lincoln to both Casey Jones and the Titanic and for good measure rewrites “500 Miles” to shoehorn Lincoln’s funeral train into the number as well. This might be interesting if Welch didn’t sing as if she figured all this out a long time ago and can’t be bothered to get excited about it now.

  5 Thalia Zedek, Been Here and Gone (Matador) Or, for her band Come, “Came and Went.” There’s a dead spot for a Leonard Cohen song, Zedek’s own tunes in Marianne Faithfull/Weimar cabaret mode when she seems bored, but mostly you might hear a singer-guitarist wondering what would happen if she followed the Rolling Stones’ “Moonlight Mile” to the very end.

  6 Madonna, “La Isla Bonita,” from Madonna: Drowned World Tour (HBO, Aug. 26) In her Eva Peron getup, but looking more like the love child of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, finally she came up with an oasis in a desert of strutted shtick: a good beat everyone could actually dance to.

  7 Heavenly, Heavenly Versus Satan (K reissue) This column shamelessly worships the Oxford ground Amelia Fletcher floats above, be it with Talulah Gosh from 1986 or Heavenly since 1990, when this album, never before released in the U.S., was made. “Shallow” is the perfect moment: a modest guitar pulse, no high notes, a sweetness that can’t last and wouldn’t be worth the time if it could.

  8–9 “The Presidential Pen” (New York Times, Aug. 8) & “Satan Gets 2- Year, $6.8 Million Deal” (New York Times, Aug. 9) And speaking of Satan, why is it that the latter headline led a mere two-inch item, while Bill Clinton’s book deal was covered like a new pardons scandal, with padded news reports followed by arch Op-Ed page lampoons and an editorial that for all of its schoolmarmish distaste (“The one thing that would be most helpful now, to all of us, is candor”) had already collapsed into gibberish? �
��It’s hard to tell just what Mr. Clinton will sound like in print,” the editorialist wrote. “The man is most himself when winging it in front of a crowd, which means that this may be one of the few presidential memoirs ever written before a live audience.” Monty Python had Thomas Hardy doing that years ago with The Return of the Native, but somehow I don’t think that’s the reference here.

  10 John Moore, “Lucinda Williams Gives Stellar, if Subdued, Concert” (Denver Post, Aug. 9) “Williams was genial but somber, and not as talkative as usual. Ironically, it was when she began dedicating songs to her favorite dead musicians that the pace picked up . . .”

  SEPTEMBER 17, 2001

  1 Handsome Family, Twilight (Carrot Top) As he sings the words Rennie Sparks has written, the fatalism in Bret Sparks’ voice now comes in a deeper drone than ever before. He sits in a diner watching the crowds gather across the highway. He tells you why. It’s a terrible story, but for the moment the way he’s telling it is worse: is he even alive? That one song later he turns up living in a park is no shock. But “I Know You Are There” is a shock. Enveloping the stalker in the lyrics, walking right over the suicide who’s singing, is the voice of another singer, crawling out of the others and leaving their bodies by the road like old clothes: a man speaking in waltz time the way you might imagine a president late in the 19th century would deliver a patriotic address. It all feels right, clear, heroic, simple, everyday.

  2–3 Terry Zwigoff, director, Ghost World (United Artists) & Ghost World: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Shanachie) Clomping in her Doc Martens, Thora Birch as self-consciously outsider high school graduate Enid finds out what’s on the other side of outside when she lets Steve Buscemi’s old-timey culture fetishist Seymour sell her an LP at a garage sale. As the warped vinyl spins on her little box—and you can pick up the whispery sound of the warp on the soundtrack album—she hears Skip James’ 1931 “Devil Got My Woman,” hears the high, otherworldly voice from Mississippi promising “Nothing but the devil, change my baby’s mind,” believes it, and, lying back, staring at the ceiling, moves only to put the tone arm back on the same track, all night long.

  Missing Britney Spears’ “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” and the Backstreet Boys as examples of the “horribly contrived commercial slop” Zwigoff couldn’t afford (“I wanted this music to heighten the alienation and fit into the general feeling of paranoia and cynicism I was attempting to create”), the soundtrack offers surprises: Mohammed Rafi’s “Jann Pehechaan Ho,” the fabulous rock ’n’ roll dance number from the 1965 Indian film Gumnaam that’s running on Enid’s TV as the movie opens, or “Pickin’ Cotton Blues.” In a sports bar, after a legendary ancient black bluesman has been ignored by the crowd, a young white trio comes on, announcing it’s going to jam on the real authentic true-life Delta sound, then leaps into a ridiculous number written by Zwigoff, which doesn’t come off as remotely so awful as it’s supposed to.

  What does: the end of the film, when, with both Enid’s life and his in shreds, Seymour speaks earnestly to his therapist, hoping he’s turned the corner, that he won’t have to see her anymore. “Let’s start with that next week,” she says. He leaves, and as the therapist closes the door her face falls in disgust.

  4 Bobbie Ann Mason, “Three-Wheeler,” from Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (Random House) A woman has let two vaguely threatening young boys talk her into letting them clean up her yard; Mason slides her down the situation until it opens into what’s really on her mind.

  “ ‘How much dirt have you boys moved? I’m not paying you for Sunday-school lessons.’

  “ ‘We need your riding mower to pull our wagon, so it’ll be faster.’

  “ ‘That’s silly.’

  “ ‘We can make twice as many loads.’

  “The idea tempted her. She could get the mower out. She had filled it with gas before the yard-man’s two-hour visit. A two-hour yard man ought to be twice as good as a sixty-minute man, she thought, remembering the raunchy old song. She always thought it should be the theme song for Sixty Minutes. Her mind was flying around loose.”

  5 Alison Krauss & Union Station, New Favorite (Rounder) Not only does she continue to get thinner and blonder with each new release, now the accompanying photos have her braless in a red lace top and hanging out in a diner with her all-male band—yes, we get the idea. When the songs are good she continues to drift away from whatever’s obvious in a tune, but the numbers that might stick hardest—Bob Lucas’ “Momma Cried,” the traditional “Bright Sunny South” and “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn”—are sung by guitarist Dan Tyminski, perhaps best known, or unknown, as the voice George Clooney lipsynchs for “Man of Constant Sorrow” in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Sounding weathered and beefy, he relaxes into the age of the songs, shakes hands with Dock Boggs, then disappears back into the band like a trick of the light.

  6 Morgan Neville, writer and director, The Hitmakers: The Teens Who Stole Pop Music, in “Pop Goes the Music Week” (Biography, A&E, Aug. 27) In a dream tour of the Brill Building, you saw a lot of stories about assembly-line songwriting and the invention of the girl group told as they’ve been told before, though they’ve never been told better. What you hadn’t seen before: Mary Weiss-Stokes, lead singer of the Shangri-Las, her hair still straight and blonde, her eyes fiery through wire-rimmed glasses, speaking with pride and dignity of how, 35 years ago, she put everything she had and more into “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” “Leader of the Pack,” and “I Can Never Go Home Anymore”—and then Shangri-Las’ producer and songwriter Shadow Morton, who as he looked back seemed to be looking around corners. He was Mohair Sam: as a smile played on his lips, behind tinted glasses his eyes were lying even when his tongue told the truth. Weirder: Biography host Harry Smith, looking too much like the high school principal and secret rock ’n’ roll demon Michael Ironside played in the great Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II.

  7 World Trade Organization/International Monetary Fund/World Bank/Group of Seven, Junichiro Koizumi Presents My Favorite Elvis Songs (BMG Funhouse) The super-cool, super-popular, super-nationalist prime minister of Japan wants it known that Elvis’ voice “eases my fatigue,” that “these days, I feel a sort of healing power from his gospels,” and that he and Elvis share the same birthday. For the cover of Presents, he’s digitally posed right next to the Big E circa 1956, looking for all the world like a Washington tourist posing next to a life-size cutout of an American president. The song selection—which does not include “King of the Whole Wide World,” but which does include “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” Boris Yeltsin’s favorite Elvis song—is true fan’s work. With “Wear My Ring Around My Neck” the closest thing to a rocker, which is not very close, the Big J goes for such glorious but ignored ballads as “I Was the One” (flip side of “Heartbreak Hotel”), “Don’t” and “You Gave Me a Mountain,” not to mention the Martin Luther King Jr. tribute “If I Can Dream,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Hawaiian Wedding Song.” So where’s the karaoke disc?

  8 Randy Newman, “The Beehive State,” from Randy Newman Creates Something New Under the Sun (Reprise, 1968) Given Salt Lake City’s purchase of the 2002 Winter Olympics, this song is sure to get more air-play than it’s ever had before, which is none: as the singer says, speaking to the nation and sure he will never be heard, “We gotta tell this country about Utah, because nobody seems to know.” Which may not change: as San Francisco Chronicle sports-writer John Crumpacker put it on Sept. 7 in his “Olympic Beat” column, “Utah is known as the Beehive State for the archaic hairdos worn by waitresses in time-warp coffee shops.”

  9 Old Time Texas String Bands, Volume One: Texas Farewell (County) Opening with Jim Tate’s high-stepping 1929 title tune, the set makes it to the back room of the worst bar in Dallas by the fourth cut, the 1928 “Blues in the Bottle” by Prince Albert Hunt—a sometime blackface fiddler who was shot to death at the age of 30 for stealing another man’s wife. He growls through dirty teeth, rolls on the floor, punches h
is fist through his stovepipe hat, passes out, gets up, falls down, and after every verse kicks up a dance-call with a single down-stroke so fat and sweet you’re ready to hire him to clean up your yard.

  10 George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation” (Sept. 11) “The American economy will be open for business,” he said. In his brief, poorly written speech there was no empathy, no outrage, only a nervous attempt to project competence, to assume his own legitimacy, but behind the big desk he grew smaller with every word. Compared to this Rudolph Giuliani seemed like Churchill.