Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  6 “Give Me Your Hump!”—The Unspeakable Terry Southern Record (Koch/ Paris) It was a great idea, readings from the works of the late black humorist—author of Candy, The Magic Christian, Blue Movie and “You’re Too Hip, Baby,” the perfect short story about a white man on the Paris jazz scene in the 1950s—and the result is a dead fish. What comes off the page as unlikely, unstoppable—No, he isn’t going to go farther, is he?—seems smugly obvious coming out of anyone’s mouth. Marianne Faithfull, Michael O’Donoghue, Allen Ginsberg, Southern himself: they’re too hip.

  7 A friend who works in theater writes: “I just finished teaching a class as a ‘guest artist’ at the local hoity-toity private school, which is trying to fashion itself into an arts magnet. I asked the students to pick a question they wanted to explore, and they picked (drumroll) ‘What is love?’ and I thought Oh God no. They are so completely surrounded by money and the ‘correct’ answers and the giant stick that their whole world has up its ass. It’s hard to feel sorry for them, but still there’s a lot of pressure to be perfect or they will not be ‘invited back’—and the school has had a rash of suicides. Two of my students were on suicide watch and had to leave rehearsal early every day to go to counseling. The students spent three-quarters of the class trying to do things ‘right’ and giving very safe answers and doing safe things and they’re all incredibly bright—maniacally so.

  “They each came up with 10 things they always wanted to do on stage. As soon as the lists were made they asked ‘We’re not really going to do this, are we?’ but you could immediately see them thinking ‘Oh my God, we actually could do this stuff.’ They ended up smashing guitars and screaming the lyrics to ‘Wish You Were Here’ and banging the gazillion dollar baby grand for all they were worth. Dogs were coming on stage running all over, one kid tried unsuccessfully to vomit, and at the end they had a giant food fight with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and just generally acted their age as hard as they could. The audience was all dressed in fancy black dresses and suits and after the curtain call the students spontaneously charged into the audience and started sliming them with peanut butter and jelly. It was god-awful, but they made a little Cabaret Voltaire for themselves and I got to watch them let themselves be 15 for half an hour.

  “It’s sad to know that’s probably the extent of it. They wouldn’t wash the peanut butter off—they were still running around all slimy when I left half an hour later. I’m pretty sure I’m ‘not invited back.’ ”

  8 David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti, Mulholland Dr. (BMG/Milan) This is not like the movie. There is no imperative to keep you interested, entertained or following the story. Rather there is so much silence on this soundtrack album, or waiting, that you can forget you are listening to anything, so that when the sound comes back—creeps back, usually—you don’t know where you are. In the movie you always know right where you are—Hollywood, which, as one viewer put it, signifies the real message of the movie: Stay away.

  9 Bertha Lee, “Mind Reader Blues” (1934), from Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton (Revenant, 1929–34) This amazing set—a tribute both to records as repositories of national memory and to records as fetish objects—is just what it says it is. Patton, the central progenitor of Mississippi Delta blues, recorded in Wisconsin and New York in six different sessions, under different names, in different styles, traveling and performing with different compatriots; the seven CDs here, presented in the form of an album of 78s, with the equivalent of two full-length books, collections of original advertisements and record labels and much, much more, present the full results of each recording session, whether by Patton or others, so that in fact not only the will of a single performer but the air he breathed is captured whole.

  Part of that air is the very last performance from Patton’s last session, from his wife Bertha Lee. You stick the word “blues” onto the right phrase and it’s as if you’ve never heard the phrase before, and that’s what happens here (Mike Watt of the Minutemen: “A good title is worth a thousand lyrics”). A woman with an undistinguished voice and an ordinary sense of timing starts out with the claim that she can read her man’s mind; she proceeds to do it with no more emotion than you’d expect her to use on the dishes—maybe less. “Baby, I can see / Just what’s on your mind”—what spouse can’t do that? But you don’t live every minute of the day with that kind of knowledge—or do you? “Well, I’m worried now / But I won’t be worried long,” Lee ends her song; usually the words mean the singer’s life is about to end. It’s only death that takes care away. But in this moment it isn’t her trouble that’s on her mind.

  10 Street scene, Canal & Bourbon streets, New Orleans (Nov. 3) Next to a mailbox, a young woman with a baby on her hip was wearing a black T-shirt with a homemade “EVIL” spelled out in silver sequins; a middle-aged woman with three young children was shaking a white bucket and chanting “Help our church, please help our church”; a huge man walked by in a black-and-silver T-shirt with “Good/Evil” running over a picture of a man in a cowl; on the back of the mailbox, under the headline “RESISTANCE IS FERTILE,” was a poster picturing a young Hispanic/Indian woman with a baby at her breast and a rifle on her back, the logo “Crimethinc.” and a text: “The greatest illusionist spectacle in the world no longer enchants us. We are certain that communities of joy will emerge from our struggle. Here and now. And for the first time, life will triumph over death.” Looming over it all, a billboard: “LARRY FLYNT’S HUSTLER CLUB. TWO GIRLS FOR EVERY GUY.”

  NOVEMBER 26, 2001

  1 Strokes, Is This It (RCA) Fast, expert, hanging-out sounds from a young New York five-piece with a guru—not the so-named older guy with the comb-over pictured with the band on the insert, but, wow, Lou Reed. Julian Casablanca’s vocals may be filtered so that their tinny sound matches the group’s skinny-tie beat, but that doesn’t save the Strokes’ “Modern Age” from dissolving back into the Velvet Underground’s “Beginning to See the Light”—and “Modern Age” is the best thing here. The cover of the import version offers a white woman’s naked ass cupped by a black gloved hand: “So 1983,” said one disappointed fan.

  2 Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Shifty) As slick as the Strokes are, this ill-named New York trio (can you imagine yourself saying, “Hey, let’s go see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs”? It’s like saying “Let’s go see Who’s on First”) are abrasive. They’re so heedlessly tough that the arty touches at the end of “Miles Away” can seem like a relief, a promise that the music is an effect, not reality. But the first four songs on this EP are as good as they have to be; they might be a way of your getting used to Karen O’s small, pressured voice, until with “Our Time” you’re ready to actually listen to her. Announcing “I—may be dead, honey,” over a stop-time orchestration of the band’s single-guitar and drums wall of sound, O could be Melissa Swingle of Trailer Bride as easily as she calls up Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las: you don’t question for a second that she knows what she means. Her voice curls, like a finger beckoning you into the music. “It’s the year to be hated,” she says, then leading a chant: “OUR TIME! It’s our time! OUR TIME! To—be—hated—” The music rises like a flag blowing. “C’mon, kids,” O says—and there is nothing so modest, so defiant, so hopeless, so much of a smile, short of the Who’s “The Kids Are Alright.” But this song has its own place and time, even if it didn’t make its time, but fell into it—even if 19 men came from elsewhere and destroyed thousands to make the song’s time. Three musicians standing up to attest with the crowd they gather around themselves that they’re ready to be hated, that they’ve waited all their lives for the chance—I can’t believe people in New York aren’t singing this on the street.

  3 www.findagrave.com It was Connie Nisinger, a high school librarian in the Midwest, who decided that this interesting site needed a picture of the final resting place of Billy Lyons, shot dead in St. Louis on Christmas Day, 1895, his corpse kicked through time ever after in the countless versions of “St
ag-o-lee,” “Stacker Lee” and “Stagger Lee.” Click “Search by name,” type in “William Lyons,” and there is Lyons’ plot in St. Peter’s Cemetery in St. Louis, sec. 5, lot 289. The site allows you to “Leave flowers and a note for this person”: keep clicking and you can leave a cigar or a beer instead. Advertising bars include “Contact Your High School Class-mates”—to find their graves?

  4 Hanif Kureishi, Gabriel’s Gift (Scribner) Screenwriter for the socially commonplace and artistically unique London romances My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, writer and director of the stupidly dismissed London Kills Me, author of The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album and Intimacy, Kureishi is a born storyteller, but he is not a natural novelist. On the page, his dialogue can seem perfunctory, looking for another medium, a way from one place to another, not what a person would say: “ ‘Talent might be a gift but it has to be cultivated. The imagination is like a fire or a furnace; it has to be stoked, fed and attended to.’ ” The man talking, speaking to a teenage boy, is a great rock star from the 1970s, still worshipped; far more alive on the page than the star or the boy—or dead on the page, which here amounts to the same thing—is Rex, the boy’s father, who once played with the star. Save for his moments in that man’s sun, he has been a nobody, and he has stoked, fed and attended to his failure until, after nearly 30 years, he can almost live off of it.

  There are thousands upon thousands of middle-aged men like Rex, each one the butt of every musician joke, their delusions of glamour inseparable from their resentment of almost everyone they meet, men for whom aging means only helpless self-parody. Yet while Kureishi’s version contains them all, gives off the smell of fear they carry, Rex is not only a version, a type or a joke. Even though you may not want to, you can see him, imagine the way he talks, the way he moves, and even if you know too many people whose lives he is living out, he doesn’t look or move like they do. In that sense Kureishi, if not a natural novelist, is a real one.

  5–6 Ernest C. Withers, The Memphis Blues Again: Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs, selected and with text by Daniel Wolff (Viking Studio) & American Roots Music, edited by Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren and Jim Brown (Abrams) While not as rich as Withers’ Pictures Tell the Story, in which music was one element in the great social drama of the Civil Rights movement, there is a reminder of Withers’ true vision in a portrait of Aretha Franklin at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference event two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., her face swollen—from tears or a beating you can’t tell. Otherwise there’s merely fabulousness, everywhere you look: Louis Jordan and his father in matching 10-gallon fedoras, the Moonglows in action, a crowd waiting outside the Club Ebony in the rain, B. B. King accompanied on facing pianos by Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich, a Hollywood Elvis back in town and posing as if he’s already slept with everyone in it. It’s history as rumor, as a story you know can never be nailed down, proven, finished, only forgotten, until someday people will find these pictures and disbelieve everything they say.

  American Roots Music—the book of the PBS TV series—is very nearly a miracle: it makes the twisted tale of American music, its strands intertwined like lovers hiding from the light, seem bland. Worse, it makes the tale seem obvious. And, as it is obvious, it has nothing new to say, which means that as a tale it was over before it began.

  The Withers book is $14 cheaper, too.

  7–8 Britney Spears Live from Las Vegas (HBO, Nov. 18) & Jennifer Lopez Live (NBC, Nov. 20) Howard Hampton writes: “In case you missed it, I can tell you that I watched Britney Spears’ concert and I missed it too. It’s as if she’s made of flesh-colored Teflon. You can look, but your gaze just slides right off the surface. It’s not simply that she lacks imagination, personality, charisma, or stage presence” (hosting Saturday Night Live last year, she had it all) “but that this absence is the structuring principle of her act. There’s not even the pretense that those different voices are really coming out of her body, to the point where her piped-in vocals were like canned fetish objects, floating over the stage like props. It comes across like a Vegas Club Silencio converted into a vocational junior high school for strippers.” Two nights later, Gary Radnich of San Francisco NBC-TV affiliate KRON ended his nightly sports report with detailed comparison footage of the Spears and Jennifer Lopez specials, naming Lopez the clear winner because she had more costume changes—and because while “When Jennifer Lopez crawled on the floor she acted like she meant business. When Britney Spears crawled on the floor you wanted to say, ‘Get up.’ ”

  9 Mick Jagger, Goddess in the Doorway (Virgin) Reviews are saying this isn’t really terrible. It’s really terrible.

  10 Berkeley, Calif., Contra Costa Ave. (Nov. 17) On our woodsy street, the mail carrier walks with dignity, handling dogs, obstructions of foliage and hanging gardens of huge spider webs with determination, humor and a pith helmet. After watching her negotiate a particularly steep and slippery walkway, a neighbor offered encouragement: “All this, and then the anthrax terrorists. I’ll bet when you went to work for the post office you didn’t realize you’d be a, a—” The neighbor couldn’t find the right word. “A warrior!” the mail carrier said.

  Thanks to Andrew Hamlin

  DECEMBER 10, 2001

  1 Jim Borgman, editorial cartoon (Cincinnati Enquirer, Dec. 1) In 1963, for the sleeve of Meet the Beatles (With the Beatles in the U.K.), photographer Robert Freeman pictured John, George and Paul from left to right on top, with Ringo directly below Paul: the left sides of the faces white, the right sides in shadow, then-shockingly long black hair and black turtlenecks isolating the faces against the starkest black background imaginable. All Borgman did was black out the two faces on the left. On the occasion of George Harrison’s death, nothing I read, heard or saw came close.

  2 Paula Frazer, Indoor Universe (Birdman) The former singer for Tarnation—which always seemed to imagine itself as the lounge act at Heartbreak Hotel—still can’t crush a fly in her fist. It’s not that she won’t; she can’t close anything all the way. Her orchestrations might be made out of swamp gas; the closer she gets to the objects of her desire, the less substantial they are. Making her way into the vampirish “Stay as You Are” as if she’s pushing cobwebs out of her face with every step, she flats on her words as they end a phrase, hesitating, almost stopping. Patrick Main’s organ carries her forward like a stick on a stream. You can play the song again and again, waiting for the melody to exhaust itself, to reveal why something so familiar sounds less obvious each time you hear it—though you might also play it again and again because only three songs later Frazer is singing with a rose clenched in her teeth, which sort of ruins the effect.

  3 Flying Side Kick—Home Alive Compilation II (Broken Records) For this set in support of the self-defense group formed after Seattle musician Mia Zapata was raped and killed while walking home from a show, no quarter is asked and none is given. The Gossip’s “I Want It (To Write)” is pure heat, as primitive as an early Rolling Stones track. Amy Ray of Indigo Girls, here with the Butchies, is as always preaching to the converted—but my God, can she sing! Carrisa’s Wierd can’t spell “weird” but they can make it, playing male and female voices through a violin until something very distant, very dead, something vaguely pre-Raphaelite, rises out of the music. Every one of the 15 bands here comes up with something unexpected, pushing a little harder, maybe digging into its pile of tapes for something rejected just because, at the time, it didn’t seem like anything anyone would want to hear.

  4 Hadacol, It’s All in Your Head (Slew-foot) This is “Rio Bravo”/Ricky Nelson “So tough he doesn’t have to prove it” country from Missouri. The music is warm, unadorned, corny, naked, until a tune beginning “I was standing in the corner / Feeling just like Gerald Ford” opens up like a murder mystery. So of course they drop it right there. You don’t listen to Hadacol’s songs so much as pass them by, like road signs.

  5 Jennifer Saunders, producer,
Absolutely Fabulous (Comedy Central, Dec. 3) In a diet-induced delirium, God appears to Edina as Marianne Faithfull, wistfully mooning over what fools these mortals be. But then the Devil arrives—in the person of Anita Pallenberg in a black-red wig and upholstered horns. It’s the siren of Performance, the absolute ’60s ice queen, now looking lined, weathered and wonderful, and plainly having the time of her life—or eternity, as the case may be. “You gave them vanity,” God says of Edina’s weight-loss panic. “No,” says the Devil. “Self-loathing.” As they go for a drink you can tell they were always in it together.

  6 Sprint commercial on cellphone dyslexia (Fox, Nov. 26) “I said on a cellphone we need a ‘backup for O’Neill.’ What we got,” says a football coach, as amid linebackers and ends running their drills a middle-aged man in a yachting outfit plays a Farfisa organ and a matronly blond woman in a long black gown warbles “Do That to Me One More Time” into a hand mike, “was the Captain and Tennille.”

  7 Gov’t Mule, The Deep End Vol. 1 (ATO/ BMG) The Southern power trio comes back from the death of bassist Allen Woody with a double disc of grinding blues, aided by a virtual benefit concert of bassists—Jack Bruce of Cream, Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mike Watt of the Minutemen, Bootsy Collins, many more—plus another 13 utility players from Gregg Allman to Chuck Leavell. Everything’s going along fine until Little Milton, who made blues records for Sam Phillips in Memphis in 1953 before moving on to Chicago, takes over on “Soulshine.” The trick to making albums with guests is keeping people who’re too good for you off the guest list.

  8 New York Times Book Review, “Editor’s Choice: The 9 Best Books of 2001” (Dec. 2) As offered by a friend, “A Translation”:

  • Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald: “As so often in Sebald’s fiction, direct connections are never highlighted in the vast loops and sudden knottings of his rhetoric.” Translation: “You can’t tell what’s going on.”