Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  8 American Magus: Harry Smith—A Modern Alchemist, directed by Paola Igliori (Inanout Digital Productions), at the IV Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (April 18–28) Southern Tip writes: “If Argentina is a country that loses everything (the peso loses more than half its value, the National Library loses a big part of its collection in the course of a move, films are barely preserved and personal collections have to be thrown out when it’s politically dangerous to hold on to them), then seeing a movie about Harry Smith, the weirdest collector who ever lived, may make no sense at all. But the wildness of Smith’s curiosities, from ancient phonograph records to paper airplanes to string sculptures to painted eggs, might be a shot in the heart to someone living out their own no-future—because suddenly everything is possible and anything might matter. It’s hard to assimilate a man whose endless, diverse collections teetered in piles above his bed but who could also distill hundreds of years of dread into a headline for someone’s worst nightmare, as he did in the handbook for his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume One: Ballads (though most Argentines would have no problem getting the everyday devastation of ‘Young Agriculturist Neglects Seed—Loses Both Crop and Fiancée’). Igliori, editor of a book that carries the same title as her film, doesn’t fit Smith into the mold of a genius or an eccentric, an anthropologist or a student or a savior, though the people she interviews call Smith all of these things. Her movie is less a balanced portrait of a peculiar person who did exceptional things than something you can imagine seeing at Coney Island’s freak show, right after the Snake Lady and before the Unbelievably Strong Tattoed Twins swallow their swords.”

  9 Michael Rutschky, on “Americanization? Popular Culture Abroad,” at the conference Democracy and Popular Culture (John M. Olin Center for Inquiry Into the Theory and Practice of Democracy, University of Chicago, April 20) “I remember him saying we should never listen to noise,” Rutschky, author of Berlin: Die Stadt als Roman (The City as Novel), said of studying with Theodor Adorno in the 1960s. “The noise of Heidegger or the noise of the Beatles, it was the same.”

  10 Pizzeria Uno, Wabash and Ohio, Chicago (April 20) On a cold, blustery night, a little speaker on the outside of the building was playing “Hound Dog.” The original, sung by Willie Mae Thornton, from Los Angeles in 1953. It sounded about as old as the weather, and also like an accident of place and time—then and there, here and now.

  MAY 28, 2002

  1 Laurie Anderson, Live at Town Hall New York City September 19–20, 2001 (Nonesuch) An exquisite piece of work in a situation that had to be close to impossible to navigate: straight off, Anderson offers a brief, inhumanly effete little homily on the eight-day-old ruins of New York and the blood fear of what comes next. It’s unbear-ably precious—until, somewhere into the first or second of these CDs, you realize Anderson’s whole performance is an exercise in breath control, and that introduction comes back as a stifled scream, a swallowed curse, whatever you think you might have said in the same circumstance, which Anderson pointedly didn’t say in your place.

  Song after song becomes perhaps more of a song than it ever was before—“Let X = X,” “Strange Angels,” “Coolsville.” But how Anderson managed to get through “O Superman” without losing the strict, science-fiction beat is beyond me. Dating from 1979, the composition, it’s now clear, is Anderson’s “Gimmie Shelter,” her “Anarchy in the U.K.,” her Book of Amos, her “Sugar, Sugar”; it’s the end of the world, and it’s catchy. It was always terrifying; it was always cute. But now, instead of predicting the future, the song is looking back at a future that has already taken place. Who, what wrote such lines as “Here come the planes / They’re American planes / Made in America / Smoking, or Non-Smoking?”—and how did Anderson sing those lines after it had been revealed that “Smoking” was the answer the song had always contained? These nights were a great patriotic speech, with, scattered through the audience, the dead: Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Abraham Lincoln.

  2 New York’s a Lonely Town When You’re the Only Surfer Boy Around, Vermont Dep’t. The Magic Rat (aka Steve Weinstein) writes from Norwich: “This is the kind of thing we have for entertainment up here, if we’re LUCKY:

  “ ‘GANDY DANCER CAFE Presents: hub-cats, Saturday, May 25 @ 9.00, $5 cover, 39 Main Street, Historic Downtown White River Junction, VT

  “ ‘The HUBCATS are an acoustic duo from the Burlington, VT area. The duo is comprised of Stewart Foster and Fred Bauer. A mix of acoustic guitar, mandolin, bass, vocal harmonies and a diverse song list that tends to stray from the mainstream gives this duo a unique appeal. Stewart’s . . . early influences have been James Taylor, Jim Croce, Jonathan Edwards and others. While those influences are still noticeable in his style, influences that have played a bigger role in more recent years are such artists as Lyle Lovett and David Wilcox. Brauer has been reviewed by some as a combination of John Paul Jones & Peter Townshend. . . . The HUBCATS has just released a CD titled FIRST SNOW.”

  “Feel my pain.”

  3 Gossip, Arkansas Heat (Kill Rock Stars EP) Not as sharp a title as That’s Not What I Heard, the trio’s debut, but absolutely accurate. You can hear the whiplash of outsiders’ hate as readily as you can imagine you’re listening to a punk Rolling Stones—which is to say, Stones rehearsals, and so roughly that 20-something singer Beth Ditto can stick “1965” in the title song as if nothing that’s happened since has fooled her for a minute.

  4 Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher, directed by Michael Haneke (Kino International) Marketing consultants vetoed the original title: Let It Bleed. As well as promoting it as a version of Pandora’s Box. My God, where does Huppert go after the last shot?

  5 About a Boy, directed by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz (Universal) There’s a dull soundtrack of new songs by Badly Drawn Boy; the musical high point of this fine picture comes near the end, when the hopelessly nowhere 12-year-old stands alone for a school “Kidz Rock” talent show and attempts to croak “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” his mother’s favorite. He’s dying a thousand deaths—until his friend and protector Hugh Grant strolls onstage strumming an electric guitar. Missing his floppy hair, looking at once slightly embarrassed and as if he’s realizing a lifelong dream, Grant gets just enough melody under the tune to make the boy’s effort seem passable, if only barely, and that’s what makes the scene—the refusal of the triumphant finish coded into the moment by countless movie moments like it. It’s a combination of Michael J. Fox’s pseudo-invention of Chuck Berry’s duckwalk in Back to the Future and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s excruciating but undeniable nine-minute performance of Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back” in Georgia—brought way, way down to earth.

  6 Permanent city history exhibition, McCord Museum (Montreal, May 11) While the delights of the Montreal city museum are many—especially an extensive, multimedia presentation of all the different ways the place gets really cold—the stopper was the surrealism-in-action display on wealth and poverty circa 1900. A photomural of an all-but-collapsing hovel and five siblings looking about three years apart handled the latter part of the story. The former was, properly, in a glass case. It contained a Japanese lacquered screen, a set of china, a gilt chair, an oil painting of the Honourable Mrs. Hugh Graham and Her Daughter Alice, and two life-size mannequins of same, clad in lovely purple dresses, a silver teapot where Mrs. G’s head should have been, a serving dish for her little girl’s.

  7 Bratmobile, Girls Get Busy (Lookout!) The now venerable riot grrrl originals have more fun—more experience they don’t need. Allison Wolfe may be the flattest singer this side of Fred Schneider, but it’s a far side. What she does with her limits makes her part of her audience; what Schneider does with his makes his audience an object of contempt. Hot shot: “What’s Wrong With You?” where the plaintive “Baby, I don’t hate men / Maybe I just hate you” is followed by cheerleader chants.

  8 Pet Shop Boys, Release (Sanctuary) The comeback, or anyway the return—but despit
e “London,” which may stand with their best, they could have called it “Vaguely.”

  9 Diann Blakely, “Duets With Robert Johnson,” BOMB (Summer issue) Blakely is an Alabama-born poet and author of Farewell, My Lovelies (Story Line Press, 2000—start with “Reunion Banquet, Class of ’79”). Here she weaves a very few lines from songs written in the 1930s into her own reveries, and the result is that Johnson joins a greater history than that to which he is usually consigned, which is to say that of Mississippi country blues. In Blakely’s “Crossroads Blues” the only person named is Ashley Wilkes; in her “ Little Boy Blue” Johnson’s teacher Ike Zinnerman “sings, but history shakes with louder sounds,” and the modern sound of the country blues is suddenly the sound of the Battle of Vicksburg, and the little blue boys are dead Union soldiers. In her “Ramblin’ on My Mind” it truly is Blakely who lets her mind wander: one of her ancestors appears like a haunt, her wounds still open, “the first woman killed by Nat Turner’s gang,” then fades past a slave owner into the evils Blakely hears Johnson “claimed for songs / Which foretold more bad news: factory stockyard closings / King shot in Memphis, schoolkids selling crack / By fallen tractor sheds. All great migrations done.” Like a songwriter—like Bob Dylan—Blakely trusts a line that cannot be pinned down by time or place, by history (“All great migrations done”), to suck those that can (“schoolkids selling crack”) into its instability, where all things are possible.

  10 Stephen M. H. Braitman, “Letter to the Editor” (San Francisco Chronicle, May 18) “I love the idea of Lucas John Helder’s alleged art project of creating a smiley face out of pipe-bombing patterns in the Midwest. It seems that Stockhausen’s comments about the World Trade Center attack [have] borne fruit. No more limits on creativity! ‘Terrorist Art’ is a new genre, and has just begun to inspire the work of artists throughout the world.”

  JUNE 10, 2002

  1 Elvis Costello & the Imposters, Berkeley Community Theatre (May 23) He played for well over two hours, and he needed the time. With original London Attractions Steve Nieve on keyboards and Pete Thomas on drums, plus Davey Faragher, a bassist from California, Costello looked sleek and ready, his voice was seamless, and for more than half of the show little came across whole. “When I Was Cruel No. 2” and “Dust,” terrific songs from last month’s album, When I Was Cruel, lost shape to visual fussiness, missed connections between musicians, lazy rhythms. New tunes “15 Petals” and “Spooky Girlfriend,” along with “Man Out of Time,” “Clowntime Is Over,” “High Fidelity” and others of the older songs Costello chose lack shape as compositions, and the quartet had none to give them. Endings were often pointlessly extended with parodic extravaganzas; Costello played to the crowd, asking for singalongs or eliciting the slow, barely-on-the-beat clapping that has as much to do with music or performance as the Wave does with baseball. (“I liked it better when he was an angry young man and acted as if the audience wasn’t there,” said a friend.) As if searching for the spines of the songs, Costello’s tone turned into a bleat.

  With three sets of encores, everything changed. There was no “Alison,” no “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes.” There was, first, the new “Alibi.” It went on and on, rebuilt from the ground up with radical shifts in pacing, silences yielding to shattered guitar notes, pantomime as words dropped out of the song or reached their limits. “Stop me if you’ve heard this but,” Costello added to the recorded version, like a sadist who is also a flagellant: “Papa’s got a brand new / Alibi.” That last word began to work as the clincher of any argument, a one-word summation of the human condition. As the song stretched, so did the idea.

  “Lipstick Vogue” has been a heart attack on stage since 1978, but the lines “Sometimes I almost feel / Just like a human being” always stop the song dead even as it rushes on. Regardless of his demeanor, weight, hair, Costello has always been able to put that version of the human condition—feeling almost human—across, and its sulfurous residue carried over into the new “Episode of Blonde,” made into a stand-up comedy act, the sung parts breaking off for something close to a Lord Buckley routine with vaudeville moves and Nieve, his hair flying in full Professor mode, playing his theremin like a wah-wah pedal. Again, the performance seemed impossibly long. Not too long, but as if the recorded version was merely a template of what the song could be onstage, where there was room to move, to disappear, to come back as somebody else.

  The finale was “I Want You,” first heard on the 1986 album Blood & Chocolate. It’s Costello’s epic, a template for so much more, including the best songs on When I Was Cruel, but more than anything an irreducible thing in itself. The piece is all darkness, threat, death and punishment—suddenly, that was the human condition, and no breath of any other air could make it into the music, or out of it. Now the silences in the performance were black holes, sucking in any intimations of only-kidding, of take-it-back. The jagged guitar notes that figured in “Alibi” were bigger, more unstable—huge discords calling up Neil Young’s improvised soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. I cannot get to the bottom of this, Costello seemed to say with every two lines, but will not stop trying.

  There was no bottom; there simply came a point where, for the moment, there was nothing more to say. Filing out music: Roy Orbison, “It’s Over.”

  2–4 DJ Shadow, Live From Austin (Mothers Milk, 1999), DJ Shadow with Cut Chemist, Brainfreeze aka Dance the Slurp (Pirateria Fonografica, 1999) and The Private Press (MCA) Live From Austin: scratching. Brainfreeze: humor. The Private Press: vision, by means of a ready-made remake of “Dead Man’s Curve.”

  5 Bryan Ferry, Frantic (Virgin) At first the latest solo album by the great fan-as-artist feels tired. By comparison to Ferry’s outrageous version of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” on These Foolish Things in 1973 (an album that also featured a hysterical take on Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party”), new covers of Dylan’s too-familiar “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Don’t Think Twice” seem pro forma. It can take a while to catch how noisy, how vulgar the strings and harmonica make “Baby Blue,” or how cutting the instrumentation on “Don’t Think Twice” to piano reaffirms what the song really is: a melody. Then a few seconds of “Ja Nun Hons Pris,” credited to Richard the Lion-Hearted and sung by soprano Mary Nelson, opens onto the gorgeous “A Fool for Love,” where Ferry takes the king’s cloak and nobody cares. After which “One Way Love”—a melancholy, utterly obscure single by the Drifters in 1964, slightly more prominent that same year in a bouncy version by the Paris ye-ye singer Ria Bartok—is the sun coming out.

  6 Kills, Black Rooster (Dim Mak EP) Press release: “A smoking 23 yr old American girl, a ‘don’t look at me’ London boy with a thousand yard stare”—and both of them with a thousand pounds of attitude worn like a slip. You might hear the Kinks or the Rolling Stones from 1964, Blondie’s “Rip Her to Shreds” from 1976, X’s “Los Angeles” from 1980, but that doesn’t mean the Kills duo have heard them; they sound as if they’re starting from scratch. There’s a fierce guitar undertow on “Cat Claw” and a crunch in the male-female singing on “Dropout Boogie.” Not to mention “Gum,” a monologue.

  7–8 CQ, written and directed by Roman Coppola (MGM and Outrider), plus coming attraction The best thing about this preening vanity project was a trailer for Jonathan Parker’s Bartleby, starring Crispin Glover. From Back to the Future to River’s Edge to Dead Man, Glover developed a persona of passive loathing at once so weird and recognizable it verged on obscenity—but here he seems to have put everything he has into the barely different ways his precise, bland office worker can quietly deliver a five-word anarchist manifesto, “I would prefer not to.” Too bad Herman Melville isn’t around to hear him.

  9 American Hi-Fi, Berkeley Community Theatre (May 23) “Robert Johnson sang primitive blues about women,” the producer Frank Driggs wrote in 1961 in the notes to Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, and the manner in which the words fell together made them toll like a bell.
Opening for Elvis Costello, this self-proclaimed “rock ’n’ roll band from Boston!” sang whiny songs about girlfriends.

  10 Joel Selvin, “A Life With Rock Royalty,” obituary for Sharon Sheeley (San Francisco Chronicle, June 2) Sheeley wrote Ricky Nelson’s 1958 “Poor Little Fool,” his first No. 1 hit; with Jackie DeShannon she wrote the Fleetwoods’ delicate 1961 “(He’s) The Great Impostor.” She died May 18 at 62. In 1959 she wrote “Somethin’ Else” with Eddie Cochran, the most handsome of early white rock ’n’ roll singers and, according to Nik Cohn’s founding pop history Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, the most perfect. Sheeley was also Cochran’s fiancée, injured in England along with Gene Vincent in the 1959 car crash that took Cochran’s life. “Although Sheeley lived 42 more years, she never got over Eddie,” writes Selvin, author of Ricky Nelson: Idol for a Generation and the unforgiving Summer of Love. “She was never able to stay with another man for long. Cochran loomed over her life. She will be buried in a plot next to him.”