Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  9 Louis Menand, “Holden at Fifty” (New Yorker, Oct. 1) “Once, you did ride a carousel. It seemed as though it would last forever,” Menand concludes, trying to add a graceful, elegiac note to yet another of his screeds against youth culture and its diseased adult residue, nostalgia. But he can’t get past received ideas: “You go to a dance where a new pop song is playing, and for the rest of your life hearing that song triggers the same emotion.” Thoughtless and reductionist, assuming that pop songs are by definition so vapid they are incapable of acquiring new meaning, or revealing new tones in the face of new events, new times, changed listeners—and assuming that any listener stupid enough to be caught by a song is incapable of thinking, or of responding to a changed world in a different way—Menand only digs his hole deeper.

  “It comes on the radio and you think, That’s when things were truly fine. [Gentle Reader: Have you ever thought this?] You want to hear it again. You have become addicted. [This happens the first time you hear a song? That is, nostalgia, a.k.a. thats when things were truly fineism, is present as soon as a song appears? Or do you become addicted only after the song first appears on the radio? Discuss.] Youth culture acquires its poignancy through time, and so thoroughly you can barely see what it is in itself. [As opposed to real culture, which is transparent?] It’s just, permanently, ‘your song,’ your story. When people who grew up in the nineteen-fifties give The Catcher in the Rye to their kids [Gentle Readers of a Certain Age: Have you ever done this?], it’s like showing them an old photo album: That’s me.

  “It isn’t, of course,” Menand finishes. “Maybe the nostalgia of youth culture is completely spurious. Maybe it invites you to indulge in bittersweet memories of a childhood you never had, an idyll of Beach Boys songs and cheeseburgers and convertibles and teenage crushes which has been constructed by pop songs and television shows and movies, and bears little or no relation to any experience of your own.” But it’s not the fault of, say, the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around”—which for California teenagers in 1964 did not construct but reported—that Menand, an Easterner (“I transferred to Berkeley, didn’t like it, went back,” he says of his university days), apparently did not experience what the song describes, or that for more than a quarter of a century he has made a career out of writing as if he, unlike most people who have been young, has never been embarrassed.

  10 Henry Flynt, “Picket Stockhausen Concert!” in In The Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins (Walker Art Center) Regarding composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Sept. 16 pronouncement in Hamburg that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City constituted “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos”: Sarah Vowell recalls that in 1964 Henry Flynt—the musician/theorist who for two weeks replaced John Cale in the early Velvet Underground, and who in the 1968 Realists handbill “OVERTHROW THE HUMAN RACE!!” would call for, among other things, “Starting a thermonuclear ‘spasm’ war that will decisively transform human consciousness (and possibly biology)”—issued a flier announcing a demonstration against an upcoming Stockhausen performance in New York. “Jazz [Black Music] is primitive . . . barbaric . . . beat and a few simple chords . . . garbage [or words to that effect],” Flynt quoted a 1958 Stockhausen lecture at Harvard. Flynt attacked intellectuals who promoted “The Laws of Music” (“Common Practice Harmony, 12-Tone, and all the rest, not to mention Concert etiquette”—“ ‘Music Which Will Enoble You to Listen to It’ ”) and condemned Stockhausen precisely for his talent: “He is a fountainhead of ‘ideas’ to shore up the doctrine of white plutocratic European art’s supremacy.” “BUT THERE IS ANOTHER KIND OF INTELLECTUAL,” Flynt insisted: “Maybe they happen to like Bo Diddley or the Everly Brothers.” He concluded: “STOCKHAUSEN—PATRICIAN ‘THEORIST’ OF WHITE SUPREMACY: GO TO HELL.”

  Henry Flynt, 2001: finally released 1970s recordings Graduation and Other New Country & Blues Music (Ampersand). The theory was alive; the music wasn’t. Stockhausen, Sept. 19: “The journalist in Hamburg completely ripped my statements out of a context.”

  OCTOBER 29, 2001

  1 Kaleidoscope, “Please,” from Infinite Colours, Infinite Patterns—The Best of Kaleidoscope (Edsel) It’s no fun, the specter of—the specter of SPECTRE stepping out of James Bond movies and into everyday life, leaving postal workers dead in Washington, the vaporized thousands brought back to life for a few paragraphs and then returned to nowhere each day in the New York Times, and whoever is next by whatever means are next. Songs that cut all the way down are too painful to put on when you know that’s what’s coming, and too real to take off when they’re spinning. “Please,” sing this 1960s Los Angeles psychedelic country-blues band, digging so far down into the mine of the word you can feel as if you’ll never have the will to escape it. But the New Pornographers’ “Letter to an Occupant” is still No. 1 on my chart.

  2 A friend writes: “ People magazine, 10/22: Cuttin’ Heads, John Mellencamp (Columbia), reviewed by Chuck Arnold: ‘Now that American flags are adorning every front porch, it’s time to dust off the old John Mellencamp discs—mostly the ones where Cougar was still a part of his recording name. In the ’80s he carried the banner for Americana, with a string of hit albums including . . .’

  “Sorry—I just can’t transcribe more. Flags on ‘every front porch’? Even Mellencamp’s ‘little PINK houses’? Shouldn’t John Ashcroft be looking into musicians by now? Mellencamp carried the ‘banner’ for the meretriciously titled radio format ‘Americana’? This will probably come as a shock to—well, come to think of it, Gillian Welch and Wilco could use a shock. By the way, this is the same ‘Johnny Cougar’ whom I interviewed one night in L.A. at the Star-wood Club in the ’70s and who told me, ‘This country has a big ol’ heart, but it’s also got politicians who’ll break it every time.’ ”

  3 Evelyn Nieves, “Bastion of Dissent Offers Tribute to One of Its Heroes” (New York Times, Oct. 22) Regarding a testimonial at the Oakland City Hall for Rep. Barbara Lee, “for being the only lawmaker in the House or the Senate to vote against granting” George Bush “the authority to use military force against terrorism”: “Few here would argue that Ms. Lee would have received this hearty a celebration anywhere in the country.” Not that to the New York Times anywhere in California has ever really been part of the country.

  4 William A. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story Between the Great Wars (California) It’s at the very end of this short book, in “Le Jazz Cold: The Silent Forties,” that the late Berkeley anthropology professor gets to the Zazous: “By December 1941 these young people began appearing in cafes off the Champs-Elysées and the Latin Quarter. . . . In the metro you might see a young man or woman board a car, raise a finger in the air and say or cry ‘Swing’ and take a hop, before shouting ‘Zazou, hé hé hé, za za zou.’ Then three slaps on the hip, two shrugs of the shoulder, one turn of the head. Finished!”

  They weren’t serious jazz fans—with their flamboyant hairstyles and zoot-suit clothes, they were jitterbuggers. Soon the collaborationist press was calling for their heads—wasn’t getting rid of scum what the Nazis were for?—and weren’t a lot of these degenerate cosmopolitans obviously Jews? When in 1942 all Jews in Occupied France were forced to wear Yellow Stars, Shack writes, “Many non-Jews abhorred the decree and themselves wore a star on which they wrote BOUDDHISTE, GOÏ, or VICTOIRE”—Zazous wrote “SWING.” Thugs cut their hair off. They had songs, like the 1943 “Ils Sont Zazous,” written by Johnny Hess and M. Martelier, where a country notary arrives in Paris dressed in the formal business attire of about 1900, which in the provinces has never gone out of style—and in Nazi Paris finds himself the epitome of cool: “Hair in wild curls, eighteen-foot-high collar . . . a jacket that drags on the ground.” “There resides the spirit of all Zazous,” the tune ended: how many perished? How many went on, in the streets or watching from the cafés, to cross the line of the mid-century, to ride the next wave?

  5 Jean-Michel Mension, The Tribe: Conversations with Gérard Berréby and France
sco Milo, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (City Lights) A man swims back through rivers of alcohol to the Paris of the early 1950s, when he was a teenage delinquent with borrowed ideas in his head and cryptic slogans painted on his pants. As an intense and subjective account of the creation of a subculture, this is also a true work of bookmaking, with illustrations and marginalia so completely contextualizing the story it doesn’t matter if you have no idea who any of the characters are or why anyone is talking about them now. With a passage like this—just a man in his mid-’60s sitting in the same café that today is just across the street from the Mabillion Métro station—you don’t stop: “The real neighborhood was here, at the Café de Mabillion, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Not the Dupont-Latin. The Dupont-Latin was the port, or the beach, before the great departure; and you had to cross the Boul’ Mich’—leave the Latin Quarter, was the way we put it—and make the voyage from the Dupont-Latin to the Mabillion: that was the initiation. Most people got lost, got drowned, on the way over. There were some even who went back home right away, but the vast majority of the people from the Dupont drowned crossing that ocean.”

  6 Hoarding, rue de Seine, Paris (Oct. 7) Posters and leaflets, announcements and ads, glued to the board, ripped, decaying, pasted over, new, photocopied, expensively printed, mostly in multiples: for an Andy Warhol gallery show, job listings, a chamber music concert, city and country tours, more gallery shows, museum exhibitions, real estate agencies and, always only partly visible from under something else, readable whole only by putting the pieces from three different places together, a big black-and-white square with block letters in English: “I WAS HONEST.”

  7 Steve Erickson, “L.A.’s Top 100” (Los Angeles Magazine, November) Records made in Los Angeles from 1930 (Jimmie Rodgers) to 2000 (Eminem), and perhaps only a novelist could write a list that so fully tells a tale you don’t even think about what’s been left out. Certainly only a native Angeleno would include such hidden touchstones as the Premiers’ 1964 “Farmer John,” Charlie Parker’s 1946 “Lover Man,” the Mamas and the Papas’ 1967 “Twelve-Thirty,” the Jewels’ 1954 “Hearts of Stone” or Ray Charles’ 1963 “That Lucky Old Sun.” No one but the author of Amnesiascope, though, could have written “snapping the beat to set the tempo, [he] was upstaged by his own fingers” (Tennessee Ernie Ford, “Sixteen Tons,” 1955), “Phillips probably didn’t notice that the young girls coming to the canyon were named Kasabian and Krenwinkle” (“Twelve-Thirty”), “Robert Johnson by way of Marilyn Monroe” (Julie London, “Cry Me a River,” 1955), “holding his own soul hostage” (Percy Mayfield, “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” 1950), “Their record company decided it would bring this Ann Arbor band out to L.A. to keep it under control, which was like bringing the Black Death to 14th-century Europe to control the world’s rodent population” (the Stooges, “Loose,” 1970) or turn Los Lobos’ 1984 “A Matter of Time” into an account of how Ritchie Valens actually got up and walked away from that plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper.

  8 James Mathus & His Knockdown Society, National Antiseptic (Mammoth) The Squirrel Nut Zippers have their old-music cabaret act down, but they’re too cute. So the North Mississippi Allstars, who are not cute but don’t sing as well as Mathus, shove the Zippers’ leader face down into the dirt and he comes up spitting it out, but not all of it. Charley Patton’s “Shake It and Break It” turns into rubber band music, but there’s a rhythmic undertow to all the best tunes here, pulling back against the dominant rhythm, the players questioning the voice and vice versa. “Spare Change” (“Ain’t worth a dime today”) is dark, deadly, the blues as Chuck Berry once defined them: “When you ain’t got no money.” It’s a modest version of Otis Rush’s deep-blues “Double Trouble,” all on the surface, as deep as it has to be.

  9 Fastbacks, “Waterloo Sunset,” and Heather Duby, “The Way Love Used to Be,” from Give the People What They Want: The Songs of the Kinks (Sub Pop) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? There isn’t a performance on Hank Williams: Timeless (with Bob Dylan, Sheryl Crow, Mark Knopfler with Emmylou Harris, Emmylou Harris with Mark Knopfler, Keith Richards, Beck and Johnny Cash on hand) worth playing twice. Give the People What They Want features mostly performers who wouldn’t know how. But here—with the two most uncoverable songs Ray Davies ever wrote—two singers, faced with exquisite melodies they cannot in fact sing, humble the songs before the flatness of their own voices. Duby doesn’t even try to make “The Way Love Used to Be”—a reach into a past that never existed that is so passionate you can imagine it was composed by Jack the Ripper—her own; she merely lets it carry her. Can she keep the song’s promise? Yes, because while Davies was singing to himself, Duby is singing to another person, a person she has herself made real. “Terry and Julie” in “Waterloo Sunset” might have been Davies’ wave to Terrence Stamp and Julie Christie, but as Kim Warnick looks out the window of the song’s old man, she is both of the people she gazes at; she owns the world.

  10 Wayne Robins writes: “20 Oct: I’m riding the subway this afternoon down from Times Square. Three black men with plenty of mileage on them get on unobtrusively at 34th St. One of them says to a woman in a loud voice: “Ma’am, do you know what time it is?” The elderly man sitting across from me looks at his watch and yells back, ‘One o’clock.’ ‘No!’ one of the trio shouts gleefully. ‘It’s doo-wop time!’ At which time the three men begin singing one of the most beautiful a cappella versions of ‘In the Still of the Night’ I’ve ever heard. As I reach into my wallet to put a dollar in the contribution bag, I realize my face feels turned inside out from smiling. It was the happiest I’ve been for 60 seconds in the last five weeks.”

  NOVEMBER 12, 2001

  1 Beth Orton, “Stolen Car,” from Central Reservation (Arista, 1999) A guitar plays like a cello, straight through to the end, through feedback, as if nothing can change. That sense of rootedness, of permanence, drives this broken-voiced ballad of no way out. The woman who steps forth—as opposed to the younger person who sings the smooth tunes that follow this opening cut—is a familiar face in certain parts of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Coventry, Leeds. She’s in her 40s, in her 50s, still beautiful, her face longer than it was, her eyes piercing, her jaw a warning. Like the heroine of Alison Fell’s 1984 novel Every Move You Make, she’s been through feminism when it was a closed, even Stalinist movement; unlike the heroine of Rod Stewart’s “You Wear It Well,” the radical blues have left marks all over her. Now she lives alone. She teaches or runs a gallery or works in publishing. Everything she left behind, everything that left her behind, is in her voice, which says there was no other choice, and that it was a choice.

  2 Bob Giraldi, director, Dinner Rush (Worldwide) Though it opens with a mob execution right in the street, within minutes the film is all laughs: in Tribeca, in a one-time trattoria that’s now the latest genius-chef hot spot (the real Gigino, a trattoria on Greenwich St. between Duane and Reade), everything goes wrong. Taking time out to place one last ruinous bet, and taking time out from that to fuck the receptionist who the chef thinks is his girlfriend, the sous-chef is throwing the kitchen out of whack. A famous food critic arrives and raises her eyebrow in doubt while the chef panics. A gallery owner blows in with a huge party and within minutes has bugs crawling over everyone’s flesh. The power goes out. Gangsters show up with no intention of leaving until the place is in their name. John Corbett (Sarah Jessica Parker’s boyfriend in Sex and the City) sits at the bar, amused at the human comedy—and at some invisible point everything that was funny is suddenly not.

  3 Good Rockin’ Tonight—The Legacy of Sun Records (London/Sire) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Here, for a TV documentary, everyone from Paul McCartney to Bob Dylan to Sheryl Crow to Bryan Ferry add nothing to Memphis explosions, from Charlie Rich’s deep “Who Will the Next Fool Be” to Warren Smith’s dark-hollow “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache” to Elvis’ slow-walking “Don’t Be Cruel” (yes, a Sun recording—by Jerry
Lee Lewis), while Johnny Hallyday and Elton John massacre Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” and Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Only one man escapes to tell the tale: Kid Rock, with the Howling Diablos of Detroit, leaping onto “Stick” McGhee and His Buddies’ “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” (a hit on Atlantic in 1949, and a Lewis touchstone from that day to this) as if it’s a horse he can ride all the way into the present, which he does, shouting “NO FLIES ON ME, SUCKERS!” all the way home.

  4 Michael Guinzburg, Top of the World, Ma! (Cannongate) Pure raunch—which turns into pain and suffering, which turns into a reader’s empathy for people you can hardly believe exist: Willem de Kooning cured of Alzheimer’s by a miracle drug and fucking his brains back, a teenager cheating on her mother, a man with a world-historical case of acne, a young hustler chasing a rumor that Jackson Pollock ended his life as a pedophile and, near the end, a new board game, “The American Dream,” where you win by parlaying immigrant identities and attendant handicaps into money—that is, the American Dream. “Mariah’s a Guatemalan midget with cooking skills but no English at Georgetown Law,” says one player of her opponent, “and I’m a Lithuanian prostitute with AIDS just off the boat working in a Dunkin Donuts.” No happy ending.

  5 Hissyfits, “Baby,” on Letters From Frank (Top Quality Rock and Roll) Standing out on a disappointing album from Brooklyn’s sunniest, trashiest, most worried guitar-based rave-up girl group, a floater: a small voice that takes on deeper textures with every phrase, a simple pulse that goes in circles even as it rushes toward the finish line.