Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  • The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen: “The important thing to know about Jonathan Franzen’s novel is that you can ignore all the literary fireworks and thoroughly enjoy its people.” Translation: “You have to ignore what a prick Franzen is in order to read the book.”

  • Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Love-ship, Marriage by Alice Munro: “As Alice Munro gets older, the challenges faced by her characters get darker.” Translation: “This is even gloomier than most Canadian fiction.”

  • John Adams by David McCullough: “There will always be some readers who feel that the historian’s subduing of Adams’s noisy feistiness in this account—his rashness, stubbornness and sometimes bizarre behavior—makes him a little less himself.” Translation: “McCullough knew that if he was too honest he could kiss the miniseries deal goodbye.”

  • John Henry Days by Colson White-head: “The ambition of Colson White-head’s second novel is to define the interior crisis of manhood in terms of the entire pop-mad consumer society.” Translation: “Somebody on the Book Review staff is thinking about buying a red Jag to alleviate his midlife crisis.”

  • The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand: “The approach also gives his thesis a kind of theatrical excitement that no severe intellectual history could engender.” Translation: “Reading this stuff bores us as much as it does you.”

  • True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey: “That alone would make this novel the most compelling reading on the list.” Translation: “We’re above just reading for pleasure.”

  • Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks: “As charming as his prose always is, Oliver Sacks cannot write for long without finding a subject outside himself.” Translation: “He’s a rambling old geezer.”

  9 Velvet Underground, Bootleg Series Vol. 1: The Quine Tapes (Polydor) A modest three-disc box of recordings guitarist Robert Quine made at shows in St. Louis and San Francisco in 1969, featuring a furious “Foggy Notion,” a 17-minute “Follow the Leader” and 24-, 29- and 39-minute performances of “Sister Ray.” The sound is perfect: you can hear through the smoke, the grime, the enthusiasm or indifference of the crowd, the 32 years.

  10 Cameron Crowe, director, Vanilla Sky (Dreamworks/Paramount) Charles Taylor writes: “In Vanilla Sky, the Cruisesuzs, Tom and Penelope, re-create the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. May God have mercy on us all.”

  JANUARY 7, 2002

  1–2 The Concert for New York City (Columbia) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? From the Oct. 20 event where Sen. Hillary Clinton was booed and Melissa Etheridge wasn’t, there are surprises. “Providing aid to New Yorkers victimized by the attack on September 11, 2001,” Destiny’s Child offers a “Gospel Medley” that kicks off with Beyoncé Knowles’ revelatory proof that with melisma there is no beginning and no end. “Glopglopglopglopglopglopglopglopglop” is the closest I can get to the momentum she generates—it sounds like she’s gargling with olive oil. For God.

  With Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ “Salt of the Earth,” the feeling is desperate in a contrived way, but still desperate; the rhythm is much richer than in the distracted version of the song the Stones left behind when they closed their 1968 “Rock and Roll Circus.” Who can say that Jagger didn’t mean it then, that “the faceless crowd / A swirling mass of gray and black and white” didn’t look real to him, or that he doesn’t mean it when he says that now the crowd does look real? To hear Richards change a line from “Let’s drink to the good and the evil” to “the good not the evil” is stirring. Is it like Jagger changing “Let’s spend the night together” to “Let’s spend some time together” (or, as he has always insisted, “Let’s spend some mmmugh together”) for the Ed Sullivan Show? It’s not completely different. Does that mean Jagger and Richards are practicing self-censorship? Or that as songs move through time and time works on songs, there is no reason for songs to stay the same?

  3 Selby Tigers, Charm City (Hopeless) You can learn a lot about a town by listening to what it doesn’t show. You don’t see what you hear on this disc while walking the streets in St. Paul, for example. You see the trees, the Mississippi, the houses—you can even see the seasons change, but not a face that, like guitarist Arzu D2’s voice, sends out Howard Devoto’s 1977 Buzzcocks fuck you (from Manchester, the “Boredom” phrasing and snarl), Kathleen Hanna’s 1991 Bikini Kill fuck you (from Olympia, the “Suck My Left One” disdain) and Penelope Houston’s 1977 Avengers fuck you (from San Francisco, the “American in Me” glee). Here all that sounds as if it’s in the St. Paul air. Plus you get Dave Gardner as Sammy G’s bass, running rings around the songs as if he showed up from somewhere else and will be somewhere else tomorrow.

  4 Intimacy, directed by Patrice Chereau (Pathé) In a ratty two-story apartment, you hear the Clash’s “London Calling” in dank background; it feels old and undiminished. This is where a divorced man and a married woman meet once a week for anonymous sex. It’s less graphic than real: grimy, clumsy, then achieving a drive it seems nothing could stop—fucking that seems to exist outside of any movie. But as remarkable as the sex—with an almost unbearably intense good-sex scene followed by an almost unbearably intense bad-sex scene—is what happens when the man and the woman try to follow each other into the world at large: what happens when they come between each other. The lucidity of flesh turns into the incoherence of speech. They can’t hear; you can’t hear.

  5 Sarah Dougher, “Keep Me,” from The Bluff (Mr. Lady) Dougher’s music on her own is different from the music she makes in the Portland trio Cadallaca because there’s no back door in her own songs, no moment when they even suggest someone might be pulling your leg. (With Cadallaca, it’s all back door—the front door is when you figure they mean what they say.) Here the contrast between the measured pace of Dougher’s singing and the get-it-over-with beat makes you want to get out of the way, but both doors are locked.

  6 David Menconi, Off the Record (Writers Club Press) As a rise-and-fall-of-a-rock-band novel—here about a Nirvana-like trio from Raleigh, N.C.—Off the Record is distinguished by thrilling accounts of songs coming together and songs coming apart: Menconi, who writes for the News & Observer in Raleigh, can get music on the page. He can get his words off the page: a producer compares recording a note or a phrase at a time “to filming car wrecks by leaving cameras running on street corners.” On signing with Gus DeGrande, the Don King of the music business: “Ken could only assume that, with Joseph Stalin and Colonel Tom Parker unavailable, Tommy had settled for the next worst thing.” But then comes the first show of the band’s tour behind their smash album, which the Kurt Cobain figure opens and closes with his version of the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays in the Sun.” Played once.

  7 “Lesley Gore: It’s Her Party,” on Biography (A&E, Dec. 7) When I tried to tell people how good this program was the day after it ran, everyone I spoke with had already seen it, sometime during the night. “I could have gone back to school,” says the pre-Beatles hitmaker (four straight in the top five in 1963), “and become a lawyer or a doctor”—that’s not how the rock ’n’ roll story goes, and this is a rock ’n’ roll story. Quincy Jones is part of it, from “It’s My Party,” the No. 1 first record, to today, speaking as if this nice Jewish girl from Tenafly, N.J., is his god-daughter. The nice Jewish girl who could have become a lawyer gets cheated out of all her royalties. The girl who couldn’t be stopped becomes a woman no one wants to hear. The edge in her voice—no metaphor, but a physical grate, something that scratches at the listener—and the real misery she put into high-school lyrics turn a teenage girl into Miss Lonelyhearts, as people with problems that cannot be solved write her for help. You can see it all in her face, now, and you break when she tells her sweetest, most hurtful story: that when her “You Don’t Own Me” was used in the 1996 First Wives Club, Gore would time her daily walks so she could pass by a theater where the movie was playing, so she could hear people singing the song as they came out.

  8 Vanilla Sky, directed by Cameron Crowe (Dreamworks/Pa
ramount) What’s most creepy about the scene where a hologram of John Coltrane plays at Tom Cruise’s birthday party—before the morally vacuous hero is sent on his journey of discovery—is that you suspect whoever came up with the idea was wondering if he could afford something like that for his own birthday party. And now he can.

  9 There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs—Recordings of Musicians Photographed by John Cohen (Smithsonian Folkways) I shouldn’t write about this, because I wrote the introduction to Cohen’s photo collection, which carries the same title. But nobody else is. There is a lot here that shouldn’t get lost—but what, before now, was barely found is the great folklorist Alan Lomax’s 1967 recording of “Love My Darling-O.” Lomax’s earlier field recording of the tune, as sung by a prisoner named James “Ironhead” Baker, is described as a “Negro version of a Scots ballad”; in Lomax’s hands it’s a dangerous song about adultery sung to the tune of “Which Side Are You On?” Lomax is partly Burl Ives here, part Jean Ritchie; his tone is plummy. But he lets the song take him, until he is as much the sort of coal miner or holiness church member he himself would record as he is a member of a collegiate folk trio with matching madras shirts. The mystery of his performance, its timelessness and its depth, is precisely its inauthenticity.

  10 Overheard in a hospital waiting room (Palo Alto, Calif., Dec. 4) “As a former Deadhead—” “Is there really such a thing as a former Deadhead? Shouldn’t it be recovering Deadhead?”

  JANUARY 28, 2002

  1 Mendoza Line, Lost in Revelry (Misra) From Georgia, the sound of people who expect nothing, don’t even necessarily think they deserve more and nevertheless want everything: a lifetime guarantee and an airtight alibi, as the Tubes once put it; “A damn good disguise to live this one down,” as they put it. With Shannon McArdle rising bar by bar out of the perfect picking of “Whatever Happened to You?” there is the sweetness of Brinsley Schwarz; there is the doubting undertow of Richard and Linda Thompson. The sound of people in love with each other and not trusting each other: on “We’re All in This Alone” you could be listening to the Mekons, if the Mekons had come out of the U.S.A. At its unpolished best, as on “Red Metal Doors,” the music moves by like traffic. Male and female voices throw the songs back at each other—“Mistakes were made tonight,” as they warble over fuzztone—but there’s no end to the game. And there is, on the back of the press release, in the form of a look back over the last few years, a manifesto:

  “The seller,” the band writes, “could not sell without guilt, the buyer could not buy without shame. . . . And after a certain period of buying, day after day, at the most exorbitant prices, all that we would never have wished to be given as a gift, the relationship between our shopkeepers and us began to seem surprisingly antagonistic. Were our merchants, it crossed our minds more than once, actually trying to kill us?” Then the band turns into the sellers, selling its music: “From the sad sacks who made it, to the sad sacks who bought it . . . or has anyone doubted that the consumer has been viciously and systematically tricked all these years? Really? And did you really believe that the consumer himself didn’t know?” The band finishes: “We must accurately reflect the real burden and real struggle of America, the essential question which only an American asks and only an American can answer: namely, what have you done with the relatively limitless freedom and prosperity which you’ve been given as a gift?” For people who named themselves for the batting average beneath which one sinks into oblivion to become one with, as Dostoevski put it in “The Grand Inquisitor,” “those God forgets” (i.e., .200), they are beginning again from the beginning; the heartland may be wherever they happen to be playing tonight.

  2 Christopher Hitchens, “For Patriot Dreams” (Vanity Fair, December) After describing his attachment to New York and his return, following the destruction of the World Trade Center, to lecture “newly enrolled New School students, some of whose parents wanted them back in the heartland, that they’d be sorry forever if they abandoned the city at such a time,” the British journalist, for whom “heartland” is only English for “unserious place where rubes live,” turned his readers into just those rubes, asking himself, or rather asking his readers to ask him, “Shall I now take out the papers of citizenship? Wrong question. In every essential way, I already have.” Or, as the guy with an American flag flying from his SUV and an FDNY cap on his head said when a kid asked him, “Gosh, mister, are you really a New York fireman?”: “Son, in every essential way . . .”

  3 Loudon Wainwright III, Last Man on Earth (Red House) Over these many years, a little of Wainwright has gone a long way. Inside his funny upper-middle-class folk music he’s so naked about his embarrassments his forced rhymes can embarrass the listener—maybe that’s what goes a long way. But here gruesomely autobiographical tunes dig in, until you want more than anything for the singer to find his way out of his misery. You root for him to escape his loneliness, the shadow of his mother’s death, his failures, his dodgy cult audiences, to get out of bed.

  4 Neal Pollack & the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature (Bloodshot) The idea is good: in a package designed as a parody of the hallowed Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, Kelly Hogan, Sally Timms and Jon Langford spin old-timey fiddle spells as McSweeney’s-designated parody of the great American writer reads his parodies of great American writer blather—from the sound of his voice, because he had nothing better to do after being turned down for a part in Swingers. Unbearable.

  5 Robert Salladay, “Media Pack Keeps Condit on Tightrope” (San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 12) On Rep. Gary Condit’s appearance at a candidates’ forum at the Branding Iron Restaurant in Merced, Calif.: “Condit offered only his now-famous Chiclet smile and silence to reporters’ questions about the Levy controversy. . . . It had been another strange hour for Condit, who sat quietly during most of the luncheon, occasionally suppressing a smile at the assembled competition. That included Paul Yonker, a very intense-looking Vietnam veteran carrying a folded American flag. ‘I believe it’s time to go back to the moon,’ said Yonker, a Republican rancher from Mariposa, which is outside Condit’s 18th congressional district. ‘They had a biosphere. It worked in the Southwest. Let’s go to the moon. I believe in the flag amendment.’ Others included Elvis Pringle, a Los Angeles record producer who said he wanted to build a space center in the Central Valley but offered absolutely no details; a college professor who talked so fast that he was almost unintelligible; a San Jose gas station manager who read . . . his . . . speech . . . very . . . slowly; and a former state assemblyman whose remarks consisted of quoting the Constitution and singing Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA’ in its entirety.”

  6–7 Buddy & Julie Miller, Buddy & Julie Miller (Hightone) Country singers and writers, currently the toast of New York, and striking—especially for Julie Miller’s shredded punk vocals, which can keep the slickness of the arrangements at bay for only so long.

  8 Mirah, “Cold Cold Water” (K single) and Advisory Committee (K) Mirah, a Pacific Northwest singer who used to go by the unwieldy but untoppable name Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlya, is as modest as Chan Marshall as Cat Power, and more insinuating—her high voice makes it unnecessary for her to spend the first moments of each number burning off her own pretentiousness. “Cold Cold Water” is haunting, but it could also be someone looking out the window and thinking of the Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain.” The song leads off Advisory Committee, which is full of experiments with tone, tempo and orchestrations that leave their songs behind—a record that feels as if it were recorded too soon.

  9 J. F. Bizot, Underground: L’Histoire (Editions Denoël, Paris) The strangest item in this oversize compendium of mostly ’60s–’70s lore—mostly drawn from the pages of the magazine Actuel—has to do with pictures the late Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken made in Paris in 1952 and collected in his classic 1957 photo-novel Love on the Left Bank. He frequented a bar called Moineau’s, where then assembled a group of
sometime artists and would-be revolutionaries who named themselves the Lettrist International: the “provisional microsociety” chronicled in Jean-Michel Mension’s recent memoir The Tribe. On the edges of their tiny milieu—their table—was an Australian siren named Vera.

  Like many other men, van der Elsken was obsessed with her, shooting her dancing with Africans in nightclubs, undressing, looking at her breasts in a mirror. As in the picture of her on Page 21 of Underground, her head thrown back theatrically, everyone looking at her as if she’s crazy, van der Elsken dramatized Vera as the ultimate bohemian, saint of her own self-destruction, doomed to forever wander the paths of desire and folly—until 1960, anyway, when as Bizot’s puckish research proves she turned up on the cover of an album by ultimate professional San Francisco bohemian Rod McKuen. His Beatsville featured not only “The Co-Existence Bagel Shop Blues,” “What Is a Fabian” and the fabled “The Beat Generation” (which in 1977 Richard Hell & the Voidoids turned into “The Blank Generation”), but also a painting of van der Elsken’s Vera beaming her kohlrimmed eyes at the would-be purchaser as an existentialist version of McKuen stared into his wineglass. She deserved better—an appearance sometime in the ’70s in the stunning van der Elsken photo of a naked couple fucking on their farm as, on a side road, a motor scooter rolls by obliviously, a picture that takes up all of Page 142 of Bizot’s book. Which, for all you can tell, she got.

  10 Cable TV in Hampton Inn & Suites, Columbus, Ohio (Jan. 8) On nearly 100 channels there’s no hint that it’s Elvis Presley’s 67th birthday (I missed the evening news, where Gov. Bob Taft, also born on Jan. 8, would have been mugging with Elvis impersonator Prentice Chaffin). But there is everything else. It’s a utopia of repetition and reversal, repeats and revision, a nirvana of self-referentiality where you’ve long since committed half of what is set before you to memory, word for word, and are ready for everything else: a never-seen Law and Order starring Harris Yulin as a thieving physicist click a Seinfeld I can’t tell if I’ve seen or not click click click one painful scene after another from Saturday Night Fever click the cliff-jump and click Cheers click N.Y.P.D. Blue click the final shootout from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (“For a moment I thought we were in trouble”) click a relentless Mad TV trailer for Leaving Metropolis, with Nicolas Cage playing Superman as a stinking drunk click Faith Hill searching for her birth mother click to the void: Shania Twain, surrounded by thousands of screaming fans and perhaps half a dozen cameramen, barking out “Rock This Country,” cantering from one circus-like ring to another. Like a horse, she can count her steps but she has no sense of rhythm; she can’t sing, but she can tease; she isn’t pretty, but she appears representing so much money the idea is hard to form. To call the production cynically organized is to beg the question; sealed in silver Spandex, Twain’s body is organized even more cynically—but not as cynically as her brace of fiddlers. Sawing away on bodiless, digitalized instruments, they appear in the midst of this extravaganza of trickle-down glamor merely as a sign of the traditional: to prove that the old ways are the best, if that’s all you can afford. By then it was past 2, I was ready for Videodrome, but it wasn’t on.