Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  MARCH 11, 2002

  1 “Paula Jones Replaces Fisher in Celebrity Boxing” (CNN.com, March 4) Yes, it was all about her reputation: “Amy Fisher is out and Paula Jones is in as Tonya Harding’s Celebrity Boxing opponent, Fox announced Saturday. . . . Jones, who lives in Cabot, Arkansas, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette she’s not concerned about the notorious skater. Her only fear: the safety of her new nose job.”

  2 Manic Street Preachers, Know Your Enemy (Virgin) This fiercely unpretentious record features Christopher Wool–style lettering, an epigraph from Susan Sontag (“The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions”), abstract art by Neale Howells and a host of expertly produced songs that allow you to imagine what the Beatles might be doing if they were still together and hadn’t lost their edge. (If the singer on “Miss Europa Disco Dancer” isn’t Paul McCartney—McCartney today, in his ragged rockabilly clothes—he could be.) But the music reaches its height with “Epicentre,” an unbreakably stirring piece of 1970s-style guitar rock that calls back such dead heroes as Paul Kossoff of Free and Rory Gallagher of Taste. One chord after another, the song climbs its own steps, a leap from the top of the tower preordained. “Feels like / There’s / No escape,” James Dean Bradfield says in a harsh cadence, breaking up his line like Wool breaks up words. “Except through / Our hate.”

  3 Elvis Costello, This Year’s Model (Rhino reissue, 1978) No album ever has to sound better, but God help us if any album ever sounds more under pressure. With “This Year’s Girl,” “The Beat,” “Hand in Hand” and “Lipstick Vogue,” both the singer and the band are so swept up in the cruelty of the music it’s hard to credit the multitude of choices shuddering out of every note, word or riff—what can come across as pure emotion can also communicate as craft. What feels like spew one day will feel like someone biting his tongue the next. No wonder that “Radio, Radio” and “Night Rally,” both burning on their own terms, feel contrived by comparison; next to numbers that can scare you because they cut the ground out from under your feet, they’re just protest songs. In sum, a world-historical statement—plus, as with all the new double-CD Costello reissues on Rhino, an extra disc of junk.

  4 Caitlin Cary, While You Weren’t Looking (Yep Roc) Big, chiming guitars are one of the corniest devices in rock ’n’ roll, but sometimes there’s no better way to say that no matter how bad the story you’re telling, you’re coming out of it like Timi Yuro with “What’s a Matter Baby (Is It Hurting You)”—as pure vengeance. That’s the feeling the fiddler from Whiskeytown gets on “Thick Wall Down,” despite the fact that her words tell a story about how bad turns into good. It’s one more proof that the refugees from the never-so-hot band are better off on their own—Ryan Adams with glory-rock success, Cary, unafraid to sound too much like Sarah McLachlan, with tunes that might stick.

  5 44th Annual Grammy Awards (CBS, Feb. 27) The only highlight, from a very diminished Jon Stewart: “In Afghanistan, they were ruled by a totalitarian regime for five years, and when Afghanistan was liberated, the first thing that happened was that music was played on the streets there. (Applause from the hall, but somberly; this is a tribute.) And three days later even they were sick of Creed.” (Rumbles of protest from at least a few in the seats: that wasn’t very nice, especially after Stewart had set them up to act patriotic.)

  6 Dennis Miller Live (HBO, Feb. 22) Since Bush assumed the presidency, the one-time gadfly has become an administration cheerleader and his audience a gang of chanting dittoheads (this night people laughed mockingly over attorney Gloria Allred’s assertion that the Supreme Court decision that made Bush president was “wrong,” as if to say, “That’s just so 2000, you cunt”). There’s still room for good writing, though Miller has trimmed his famous blind references with I.D.s, perhaps because he thinks his new crowd might be a bit slow on the uptake. “We’re not living in a police state,” he said during his rant. “The only people longing for 1984 are the original members of the band Whitesnake”—and it’s that “the band” that bleeds the line dry.

  7 24 (Fox, Feb. 26) As it begins to emerge that presidential candidate Sen. David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) is being run by forces unknown to him, his wife, Sherry Palmer (Penny Johnson Jerald), tries to keep him focused—by insisting that Palmer’s asking who he’s actually working for can wait until after the California primary. “We’re almost there,” she says reassuringly—and more like Angela Lans-bury in The Manchurian Candidate every week. The premise of this show from its first episode was that you can’t trust anyone; you, the viewer, really can’t. It’s stunning that the level of tension hasn’t simply been sustained over three months, but deepened.

  8 Daniel Wolff, co-author of You Send Me: The Life & Times of Sam Cooke and editor of Ernest C. Withers’ The Memphis Blues Again, considers a White House photograph officially titled The President and Presley Examine Documents, and initiates a caption contest. The results so far:

  Wolff: “So, if I read this correctly, you’re saying that if I can dream of a better land, where all good people stand hand in hand, then why can’t that dream come true?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dave Marsh: Kissinger (listening through keyhole) “Damn! Adorno swore this was impossible!”

  Anonymous staffer at the Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, Ark.: “I’m sorry, Mr. Presley, but what you’re asking is just not feasible.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President. I’ll be back.”

  9 Low and Dirty Three, In the Fishtank (Konkurrent) Premise: the Dutch label “invites bands to whom they are strongly related”—in this case the Duluth crawlers and the Australian instrumental trio led by Warren Ellis’ violin—“to record while touring Holland.” So every number, including what might be the first version of Neil Young’s “Down by the River” cut by a woman, Low’s Mimi Parker, seems 10 minutes long, and not too long. Drifting in and out of “When I Called Upon Your Seed,” Parker turns the music into a church; it’s as unnerving, and as lacking in doubt, as the scratch of Ellis’ fiddle in “Cody.” You can almost hear the water freeze—the canals in Amsterdam, Lake Superior, the Bass Strait.

  10 Law and Order (NBC, Feb. 27) Trying to nail a company that sells personal information taken off anyone’s computer, Elisabeth Röhm’s young assistant D.A. Serena Southerlyn does a little research on her boss, Sam Waterston’s crusty Jack McCoy, just to see how hard it might be. “You listen to a lot of Beatles and fusion jazz,” she says, confirming the clichés of the character. “And you have what I can only describe as a very weird obsession with the Clash.”

  MARCH 25, 2002

  1 Pink, “Don’t Let Me Get Me” (Arista) This is a heartbreaker, and it makes every one of the male loser hits of the last decade—Radiohead’s “Creep,” Offspring’s “Self Esteem,” Beck’s “Loser”—come off like pickup lines. The snap of Pink’s rhythm sense makes you almost certain the woman whose story this is will get out of it—out of her own skin—but around every sharp turn is the voice of self-hate, the only thing her parents ever taught her, and then you just don’t know.

  2 Reputation, 924 Gilman, Berkeley (March 15) Elizabeth Elmore led the tough, self-lacerating punk combo Sarge in the second half of the ’90s; her new group, playing ahead of the April release of The Reputation (Initial Records), Elmore’s strongest recording, was fourth on a five-act bill. You don’t expect an opening band to have it all, to make the territory of a small, foreign club their own, to blow off the setting and make you see only them, but Elmore burns the stage—she singes it, she doesn’t burn it down. There’s fright behind the determination in her warbling voice, and she plays lead guitar like Elvis Costello: rhythm, then a lift that suggests rather than describes, then back to rhythm, as if the theme that suddenly shifted the song was an illusion. Watching this woman in her mid-20s, on a year’s leave from law school at Northwestern, fronting three men who seemed either distinctly older or younger than she is, I wondered what sort of lawyer she’d make. Her performance carried an atmo
sphere of ordinary life; it was as easy to imagine her as a 40-year-old bandleader as to see her as a 30-year-old attorney. What the two would have in common might be someone who knows how to focus, to bear down, someone as hard on her client as on the other side, someone you wouldn’t hire lightly.

  3 Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove) Most of the stories in this first collection originally appeared in such prestigious quarterlies as Missouri Review, Ploughshares and New England Review; that the two best, the title piece and “How to Love a Republican,” were first published in Playboy is no accident. “This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth,” says the narrator in “Run Away, My Pale Love.” Almond’s first-person narrators are always saying embarrassingly arty things like that. Though they’re not the same people, they talk as if they are, one character after another indulging in the same effete verbal tics (“taking” lunch or “supper” rather than eating it, the implicit entitlement in the phrase not fitting the people talking). Almond can’t write dialogue by instinct, and he doesn’t think his language through. When the narrator of “The Body in Extremis” describes a woman with “ Behind this posed sangfroid, of course, was the inner panic nurtured by ambitious immigrant families,” Almond doesn’t seem to realize that his “of course” turns what’s supposed to be a character into a type, and that he’s just dismissed the person who’s going to have to carry the story. But “My Life in Heavy Metal,” the memoir of a cheating love affair carried on by a newspaper rock critic in El Paso, is always alive (“Jo looked like she’d been struck in the back of the head with an eel,” he says of his girlfriend at a Mötley Crüe concert), and “How to Love a Republican” starts off creepy and only gets worse. It’s 2000, and a bearded liberal working for Citizen Action meets a blond McCain volunteer who works for the Heritage Foundation. She takes him to hear George Will speak on “the deracination of moral authority” and to meet her mentor (“It occurred to me that Trent had served in the Armed Forces,” the narrator says of shaking hands with the guy, “possibly all four of them”). She ends up in the Bush camp; he votes for Nader. What happens next may stand as one of the truest nightmares of the post-election, when sex dissolves into events and lovers into the public choices they thought they could keep separate from their private lives. For the only time in the book, Almond pulls no punches. He comes to life as a writer, not as an orchestrator of attitudes and skits, and the reader goes down with his hero.

  4 Rosalie Howarth, back-announcing “Friday I’m in Love” (KFOG-FM, San Francisco, March 1) “The Cure! The Antidepressant Years!”

  5 “Young Elvis: The Man and the Movement,” with Michael Anderson, Peter Gural-nick, William P. Kelly and Camille Paglia (Graduate Center, City University of New York, March 18) Sarah Vowell reports: “What a pleasure to listen to those who know things. Peter Guralnick knows things about RCA engineer Steve Sholes or how the archival record makes clear that Vernon Presley always paid his bills, and Camille Paglia can answer a question about Elvis impersonators by bringing up ‘ancient mystery religions’ in which ‘the devotee becomes the god.’ Walking into this panel discussion on the early Elvis, I think I was afraid the notoriously chatty Paglia might bully the mild-mannered Guralnick, but it was more than a real conversation. They were the million-dollar duet. In blue shirts and black blazers, from the waist up, they were even dressed alike. She recalled being a teenager in the ’50s calling in to a radio station to vote for Elvis against Pat Boone; he reminded her that Elvis loved Pat Boone. She thanked him for researching the costume design of Elvis’ 1968 black leather suit; he grinned big as she riffed on the eroticism of Elvis’ Southern diction, ‘Dropping off the consonant at the end was so sensuous. Eating, drinking, talking, sex—it’s all the same thing.’

  “Guralnick, it turns out, was the shocking one, surprising Paglia twice. Since the panel is part of a [New York Times–sponsored] series on the 1950s, there was a lot of talk about James Dean and Marlon Brando and the parallels between the pared down recording methods of Sam Phillips and method acting. After Paglia had returned again and again to the subject of Elvis as a ‘method singer,’ Guralnick informed her, ‘Elvis read Stanislavski.’ To which Paglia girlishly replied, ‘For heaven’s sake!’ Guralnick added that, ‘Unfortunately, you don’t see anything that bears that out in his future [film] performances.’ Then Paglia practically fell out of her chair when Guralnick said that the so-called ’68 Comeback Special leather pants had to be dry-cleaned because Elvis, who ‘told June Juanico that being onstage was better than sex,’ climaxed at the show’s climax. I’m sure my mother would be so proud, that I actually stood in the book signing line afterward to ask Guralnick why he edited this juicy tidbit out of his book Careless Love, and he said that he didn’t, it’s just subtle. I looked it up, and he’s right: the book quotes a crony who says, ‘After he finished singing, he was literally spent.’ When I read that the first time around I must have thought Elvis was just real tired. I did, for purely journalistic purposes, pop in the tape of the special and carefully watch all the leather segments to see if I could find the exact moment when Elvis peters out, but that damn guitar is in the way the whole time.”

  6 Selby Tigers, The Curse of the Selby Tigers (Hopeless) Despite such all-American titles as “Cheerleading Is Big Business,” the St. Paul quartet, in moments the truest rock ’n’ roll band on the planet, reinhabits the music the Adverts and X-ray Spex left behind in London a quarter-century ago more fiercely than ever—until on the ’50s-style teen-dream “The Prom I Never Had,” they take off their black clothes to reveal the rented pastel tuxedos and gowns they’ve been trying to get out of since high school.

  7 Suzzy and Maggie Roche, Zero Church (Red House) Prayers set to music, and unspeakable, especially on the Shaker song “This Gospel How Precious.” The version recorded in the 1960s by Sister Mildred Barker of Sabbathday Lake, Maine (collected on Early Shaker Spirituals, Rounder), is all you need to know: it’s distinguished from the Roches’ version precisely by not being precious. Barker’s unaccompanied singing doesn’t call attention to its own perfection—which is what the Roche sisters have been about since the release of The Roches in 1979, for which New York critics unanimously creamed in their jeans. Barker’s performance is unpretty but anything but artless; it’s an event, and it’s hard to picture anyone singing the song the same way. The words “I know how to pray / I know how to be thankful,” are scary, because Barker makes you realize what a huge thing that is to know how to do. The Roche sisters sing as if they know how to sing prettily, and as if that will suffice to get God’s ear. After all, as they insist on their 9/11 special, “New York City,” “New York City is down on her knees,” and guess what it’s doing there? “Prayin’ / Together with you,” whether you are or not.

  8 Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Harvard) War-show (1917–1955) was the popular culture man in the milieu of the postwar New York intellectuals, and this book, now augmented with eight previously uncollected essays and worshipful new commentaries from film critic David Denby and cultural theorist Stanley Cavell, is a legendary manifesto. Today it’s also dull. Famous–by–reputation pieces such as the 1948 “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” which at seven pages smacks of get-it-over-with, may have had its influence on Pauline Kael’s 1955 “The Glamour of Delinquency,” but only the latter still has any blood running through it. Much is made of Warshow’s “immediate experience” credo—“A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man”—but there is no man in the seat in these pages. War-show pointedly rejects irony as a mode of both experience and criticism, but it is all too telling that his writing is littered with scare quotes—with countless crudely ironic references to the likes of “ ‘typical’ American experience,” “the operation of ‘simple’ and ‘American’ virtues,” “a ‘typical’ American town” where “all ‘real’ Americans live.�
�� I am not fooled, this man says, and critics have to be willing to be fooled. That is what being “that man” is all about.

  9 Shocker of the Week (from “Lucinda Williams: What I’ve Learned,” interview with Brendan Vaughn, Esquire, April) “Some of my best friends are music critics.”

  10 “Enronomania!” (American Folk Art Museum, New York, opening April 1, 2009) There’s the short con, which is no more than claiming the 10 you gave the clerk was a 20, and then there’s the long con, a true native art form. “Enron had its own myth-making machinery, recruiting employees as actors to fake out Wall Street analysts when they came to call,” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times on March 2. “The hoax even extended to the building of a Hollywood-style ‘trading room’ set in Enron’s Houston skyscraper.” But a reading of linguist David W. Maurer’s 1940 The Big Con (republished in 1999 with an introduction by Luc Sante) makes plain that the Enron scam was merely a billion-dollar revival of “the rag,” a con Maurer traced to Cheyenne, Wyo., in 1867, when a three-card monte dealer named Ben Marks opened the Dollar Store, with trinkets in front to draw the marks to the barrels in the back. Not long after the turn of the century the innovation had led to the Big Store: the phony fight club, the phony horse-race parlor and then the rag—the sham brokerage.

  “The victim first bets with money furnished by the con men, is then sent home for a large sum of money and is fleeced,” Maurer wrote. “For the rag the store depicts a broker’s office complete with tickers, phone service, brokers, clerks and customers. The same board which did duty for the races is often turned over to reveal a set-up for recording stock prices.” The Big Stores were “manned and furnished” with such realism “that the victim does not realize that everything about them—including the patronage—is fake. In short, the modern big store is a carefully set up and skillfully managed theater where the victims act out an unwitting role in the most exciting of all underworld dramas. It is a triumph of the ingenuity of the criminal mind.” Or, really, of the American mind: “For mere money, a thing useless and meaningless in itself,” Jim Thompson wrote in 1963 of Cole Langley, the tragic hero of The Grifters, “he traded great hopes and a new perspective on life. And nothing was ever managed so that the frammis would show through for what it was. Always the people were left with hope and relief.”