Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  APRIL 8, 2002

  1 Cassandra Wilson, Belly of the Sun (Blue Note) The great jazz singer recorded this album in a converted shack in her native Mississippi, not, as music business rumors have it, in a grave where a blues singer whose name no one can remember was buried before he was temporarily exhumed to allow for Wilson’s makeshift studio. The extraordinary range of material includes, along with Wilson’s own compositions, covers of songs made famous by the Band, Fred McDowell, Glen Campbell, James Taylor, Bob Dylan and Robert Johnson. Wilson’s way with these numbers recalls nothing so much as Narcissus, gazing into a pool of water and falling in love with his reflection, and the result is the same: falling in.

  2 Heather Nova, South (V2) Seven years on from the still unsettlingly frank “Walk This World,” there’s a breathy shiver in Nova’s voice, which otherwise is smooth enough for TV commercials, that shoots her into realms of uncertainty. The story she acts out is that of a woman who has constructed a life of propriety solely to allow her fantasies to take on flesh. As you pass her on the street, she knows you can’t tell. Electricity comes off of her in waves, but you can’t be sure she’s where it’s coming from. So you play the album again.

  3 Puta-pons, Return to Zero (Vinahyde) By way of Chicago in 2000, return to Liliput, anyway—which in punk terms (Zurich noise, 1978–83) may amount to the same thing. Except on the stunningly fast ride of Shelly Kurzynski Villaseñor’s guitar solo in “(You Need a) Shot in the Arm,” which delivers it.

  4–5 Eva Hesse, Untitled 1970, in “Eva Hesse” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through May 19; Weisbaden Museum, Germany, June 15–Oct. 13) and Eva Hesse, edited by Elisabeth Sussman (SFMOMA/Yale) Also known as Seven Poles, this work, coming at the very end of the exhibition, and of the German-American sculptor’s short life, speaks in many voices. Seeming to bulge and swell, the yellowed, L-shaped wire-polyethylene-fiberglass constructions vary in height from 6 to 9 feet; they might have been inspired, Robin Clark writes in the catalog, by Olmec figurines or Jackson Pollock’s 1952 Blue Poles. As Elisabeth Sussman arranged it for the exhibition, working from photos of the piece in Hesse’s studio, but not academically, allowing the poles their implicit freedom to move, the feet of most of the poles turn toward each other, and the thing looks like a version of Stonehenge, made out of Martians. Even as it played with eternity, it was laughing at itself.

  6 Dickel Brothers, The Recordings of the Dickel Brothers Volume Two (Empty) Fans of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and its Down From the Mountain live follow-up can test their affection for old-time Appalachian string band music played by new-time people against this quintet—who, unlike some of the Brother/ Mountain performers, honor tradition and laugh off piety with equal rigorousness. Performances of songs recorded in the 1920s and ’30s by such masters as Charlie Poole, Riley Puckett, Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers, Dick Justice and Earl Johnson’s Clodhoppers are reminiscent of the early versions, but not exactly remakes. They seem to come from somewhere else, a place of greater delight and less guilt: present-day Portland, Ore., or at least Portland a couple of years ago, when this record was made. The dead-cat-swinging invention of the sound is caught best in the group’s own liner notes, in their Story of the Band, which is certainly better than the Ramones’: “It’s been three and a half years since Matt and Clancy Dickel realized they were brothers. They wagered there were probably more knowing how Pa Dickel was such a, how shall we say it, free spirit. It wasn’t long before they unearthed three more just from looking up Dickel in the phone book . . .”

  7 Van Morrison, “He Ain’t Give You None,” “Linden Arlen Stole the Highlights” and “Snow in San Anselmo” (KALX-FM, Berkeley, Calif., March 11) The nearly hysterical blues monologue from Blowin’ Your Mind! (1967) yielded to the painfully hesitating piano opening of the tune from Veedon Fleece (1974), which faded into the inconclusive weather report from Hard Nose the Highway (1973), raising the question of whether or not Morrison had, in fact, just died—why else does anyone get three songs played in a row these days? I remembered the writer Jonathan Cott calling the beginning of “Linden Arden” a “prayer”; I realized that for all the times I’d played the cut in my own house, wanting nothing more than to get lost in its forest, I’d never listened to the words, which in a car came across directly. The story was about men sent to kill the man the song was named for, and how he killed them instead: at the foot of all the pre-Raphaelite sunbeams in the music, blood on the floor. I also realized how little distance separated “Linden Arden” from Elton John’s “Your Song.”

  8 Neil Young, Are You Passionate? (Reprise) Clink, clink, clink—it might happen between Young and Booker T. Jones and Duck Dunn of Booker T. & the MGs onstage, but not in the studio. No wonder Crazy Horse had to come in and juice this long afternoon nap with nine minutes of “Goin’ Home,” by-the-numbers but still bottomless grunge. The Flight 93 song, “Let’s Roll,” starts off with chills down your spine, but they come from what you carry within yourself, not what the singer’s giving out. This is no “Ohio”; by the second verse your mind is already wandering.

  9 Rocket From the Tombs, The Day the Earth Met Rocket From the Tombs: Live From Punk Ground Zero, Cleveland 1975 (Smog Veil/ Hearthan) Not to be confused with Rocket From the Crypt—not in this life, not in the next—the band that became Pere Ubu puts down demos, gets up on stage, throws what they have at the crowd to see if any of it will come back. This is part of the history of guitarist Peter Laughner, who died in 1977 at 24, used up by himself, a shocking legacy behind him: sounds no one else would ever make, from the jittery lead to “What Love Is” to the deliberate, suicidal cadence of “Ain’t It Fun.” Here you can’t tell if Laughner’s sardonic attitude is covering up the pain or if the pain is just there to root the attitude—until he underlines breaks between verses with what can seem like four versions of himself, too many guitars speaking different languages and no translator needed, and you don’t care. He hammers away at a fuzztone, again and again, convincing you he’s said what he has to say, that he’s used up the song. Then he steps into a stately, Clapton-like solo, and you can see him holding his instrument the way Errol Flynn held a sword.

  10 Bruce Conner, 2002 B.C. (Available through the Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles) This DVD collects eight 16mm films made by the San Francisco experimental artist, including the 1966 Breakaway with Toni Basil and the 1981 Mea Culpa for David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. But the time-stoppers are in the 1967 White Rose, a seven-minute mystical documentary, scored to Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, about the removal of Jay DeFeo’s huge painting The Rose from her San Francisco apartment, and two found-footage pieces on Conner’s Kansas 1940s childhood, the 1976 Take the 5:10 to Dreamland and the 1977 Valse Triste. From inside a high school science film, or a training film for animal husbandry majors, or a Chamber of Commerce promotional film, you see another movie beginning: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. At the least, this is surely where Lynch saw it beginning. And that, for the few minutes these films last, is just the beginning.

  APRIL 22, 2002

  1 Elvis Costello, When I Was Cruel (Island) This always surprising work reaches into the netherworlds of such long-ago Costello compositions as “I Want You,” “Pills and Soap” and “Green Shirt.” More than that, it conjures up the displacement—the weird sense of privileged resentment—of the overlooked “My Dark Life,” made in 1996 for the X Files tribute Songs in the Key of X (now included on the Rhino reissue of Costello’s All This Useless Beauty, from the same year). And with Steve Nieve, keyboards, and Pete Thomas, drums, When I Was Cruel is a redrawn breath of Costello’s 1978 voice, the thuggishness thickened in the throat like a certain thickening of the body. The tunes are rough, hard, inventive, moving too fast: “Like a Jewish figure revolving on a music box.” Really? Did I just hear that coming out of the song, or did I write it in myself?

  The heart of the album—across years of experiments, Costello’s best since All This Useless Bea
uty, if not far better—may be “When I Was Cruel No. 2” (“When you were cruel?” cry the fans. “When weren’t you?”). The slow performance has the languid feel of post–La Dolce Vita movies, everybody passed out in their Pucci outfits and only the singer walking through the gilded room, deciding what to take. The music is built around a tiny sample “from a ’60s italian pop record by the great singer, mina,” repeated every six seconds: “Oh, no,” she seems to be saying. It’s an indelible bit of rhythmic punctuation, and like Eminem’s use of Dido’s “Thank You” in his “Stan” but infinitely more subtle, a commentary on the story the singer is telling, insisting on doubt, melodrama and bad news.

  2 Christian Marclay, Guitar Drag, in “Rock My World: Recent Art and the Memory of Rock ’n’ Roll” (California College of Arts & Crafts Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, through May 11) It’s not clear from the works on display here—grounded in their existence as visual or mixed-media works, rather than as visual referents to musical events, and thus combining into a much more successful show than any of its many forgotten rock ’n’ art precursors—whether “The Memory of Rock ’n’ Roll” means the present-day memory of a finished thing or the memory the music carries within itself. That’s especially true of turntablist and collage artist Marclay’s video, made in Texas in 2000: 14 minutes of an electric guitar dragged behind a pickup truck. The guitar is attached to an amp in the truck bed, so that as it’s scratched and battered over rocks, brush, road and dirt it howls with noise. Shot from a comfortable distance, then very closely, then too closely, as if you’re only an inch from the action, the guitar is self-evidently a solid-body version of James Byrd Jr., as he was dragged to death by Texas racists in 1998. Part of what is horrible, and fascinating, about Guitar Drag, though, is that most viewers will know that Byrd came to pieces, and the guitar doesn’t. Long before the video is over, the guitar stops emitting sound; it loses its guitarness, and even its metaphor. It turns into stuff, junk, something someone tied to a truck for lack of anything better to do with it. Still, at the end, you wonder if it might be fixed—and, if it could be, what it would sound like. People can be killed, Marclay’s piece says; rock ’n’ roll may be dead, which means you can’t kill it.

  3 Dirty Vegas, Days Go By (Capitol) A sampler for a forthcoming album makes it plain that the way this modest piece of London dance music daft punks its way out of the Mitsubishi commercial where most Americans first heard it—with a sense that, in the right car, on the right road, with this song on the radio, you really could disappear into an eternal pop memory, shared by all—is in the electronically distorted vocal, reaching for what’s already behind it. That is, an acoustic version of the song is a complete zero.

  4 Paul Butterfield Band, An Anthology: The Elektra Years (Elektra) 1964–71, in no hurry. With heartbreakingly beautiful photos of handsome young men.

  5 Paul Butterfield with the Band, “Mystery Train,” from The Last Waltz (Rhino reissue) From 1976, and inside the perfect count, faster than sound.

  6 John Ashcroft & the Paul Shaffer Band, “Can’t Buy Me Love” (Late Night with David Letterman, CBS, April 9) Ken Tucker writes: “Pressed by the host to sing his biggest hit, ‘Let the Eagle Soar,’ the Attorney General declined. Instead, Ashcroft—who is, says one of his aides quoted in the April 15 New Yorker, ‘in a great mood all the time these days’—used his time to chat about why he’d just arrested lawyer Lynne Stewart (Letterman maintained a patriotic silence; the audience applauded), and then got behind the keyboard to assay a stiffly-pounded instrumental version of the Beatles hit. If he’d wanted to make extra-sure he’d never achieve a rhythm that might have tempted him to dance, which he believes is against his religion, he should have covered McCartney’s more recent, Super Bowl stupor-inducing ‘Freedom.’ Or, to be on the safe side, simply arrested Paul.”

  7 “Secrets of Investing 2433” (unsolicited e-mail from trading@micron.net, April 10) It’s in the quick setup, the whiplash turnaround:

  “Are you angered by the mess in the Middle East? Feel helpless?

  “Since you can’t change the situation, at least find out how it can change the quality of your life for the better.

  “Click in the link below to quickly take a look on how turmoil in the Middle East could affect US oil prices and how you can counteract it.”

  But wait—if “you can’t change the situation,” how can you counteract it? Or does the “it” refer to your quality of life? And what about the grammatical impossibility of “take a look on how”? Who wrote this? And from where?

  8 “Didn’t Ask to Be Born” on This American Life (WBEZ/NPR, March 29) After a divorce, Debra Gwartney moves to Oregon. Her two oldest daughters, Amanda and Stephanie, 14 and 13, pull away, hard, and take a long, hard fall. “When I first started getting into the punk rock scene in Portland,” Amanda says, “I got into it purely for the angry, drunk violence aspect of it. That’s what really spoke to me at first.” About 50 minutes later, at the close of the program, host Ira Glass read the credits, ending up with thanks for funding from various sources, and especially “from the listeners of WBEZ Chicago, WBEZ management over-seen by Tobey Malatia, who explains what attracted him to National Public Radio this way,” and there was a cut right back to Amanda Gwartney: “I got into it purely for the angry, drunk violence aspect of it. That’s what really spoke to me at first.”

  9 Bandits, directed by Barry Levinson (MGM Home Video) The songs Jim Steinman writes may sound phony on the radio, and worse at home; in the movies they march across the screen like rock gods. That was heroically true in Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire; it’s modestly true here. You believe Cate Blanchett’s housewife mouthing along to Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero” while whipping up an elaborate dinner for her husband to be too busy to eat. You believe her even more when she apologizes to thief-on-the-run Bruce Willis for loving Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” “It’s a sappy chick song,” she says. “It’s not sappy,” he says, and you don’t know whether to believe him. The line seems like a quick way into her pants, until he tops her with an all-time sappy guy song: his “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” he says, is Michael Murphey’s “Wildfire”—which, fortunately for the viewer, Blanchett is spared. You don’t see Willis getting lucky with that on the soundtrack.

  10 Patti Smith, Land (1975–2002) (Arista) With notes by Susan Sontag. “To the conquered!” she writes. Isn’t that Ralph Nader’s line? And where’s “Pumping (My Heart)”?

  Thanks to Howard Hampton and Cecily Marcus

  MAY 6, 2002

  1 Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch) The cover features photos of Chicago skyscrapers, and the first four words, “I am an American,” are the same as those of Saul Bellow’s 1953 The Adventures of Augie March: “Chicago born,” Bellow said after a comma; “aquarium drinker,” Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy says without one. But Augie March knew how to walk against the wind on the streets, to go right past you with such force you turned around and watched his back, wondering who he was—while Tweedy’s singing, never strong, here recedes into a dithering miasma apparently meant to signify thinking it all over, plus sound effects apparently meant to signify the modern world. In other words, it isn’t against the law to redo Revolver, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Especially if you’re an American.

  2 Sheryl Crow, “Soak Up the Sun” (A&M) Money, fame, cheesecake photos, and on this song she still sounds like someone making her first record without the slightest interest in whether it will go anywhere at all.

  3 Warren Zevon, My Ride’s Here (Artemis) And the black stretch takes off like a shot, with a determination that seems to want nothing more from life than proof it can only get worse. “Do everything I tell you,” says the singer in “Sacrificial Lambs,” gritting his teeth inside his hipster smile. “Then we’ll talk.” The driver rounds a corner and picks up Carl Hiaasen, Mitch Albom and Hunter Thompson. The bestsellers and the guy whose songs don’t sell scribble lyrics, grinning over
all the great lines. The writers are wondering how cool this is; the singer is wondering how big their names should be on the front of the CD. Sparks fly. It’s the back end of the limo, dragging the pavement.

  4 Grateful Dead, Postcards of the Hanging: Grateful Dead Perform the Songs of Bob Dylan (Grateful Dead/Arista, 1973–90) “Totally supplants ‘Peter Yarrow Sings Rage Against the Machine,’ ” writes Howard Hampton.

  5 Party of Helicopters, Space . . . And How Sweet It Was (Troubleman Unlimited) From Kent, Ohio, and for anyone who loved Bush—the band, not one or the other occupant of the White House. With more ferocity, more art, less time, the same thrill.

  6 Blasters, Testament: The Complete Slash Recordings (1981–1985) (Rhino) The Los Angeles rockabilly combo could nail it; with “No Other Girl” and “American Music,” the songs leaping with syllables drawn out over their own rhythms, words snapping back on themselves like rubber bands, they nailed it shut. But except for a cover of John Mellencamp’s “Colored Lights,” there’s nothing here anyone needs that wasn’t on The Blasters Collection, and at least an hour’s worth of stuff nobody needs.

  7 “Enronomania!” (American Folk Art Museum, New York, opening April 1, 2009) Back in 2002, James L. Swenson and Daniel R. Weinberg began their extensively illustrated Lincoln’s Assassins: Their Trial and Execution (Arena) with Lew Wallace’s striking Conspirators’ Tableau—what they called “a fanciful painting of John Wilkes Booth and his associates on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol as they watch Abraham Lincoln deliver his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865.” (Booth was definitely there; others of the eight convicted co-conspirators may have been.) Wallace got around—as a Union major general he served on the military tribunal that tried the surviving assassins, and after that, as territorial governor of New Mexico, befriended and then ordered the murder of Billy the Kid, and then wrote Ben Hurr. But what was it that led him to picture the conspirators leaning or standing on huge blocks of granite, one of them carved into an exact precursor of that tilted E true fans still remember as the Enron logo?