Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  In the late ’50s Fred Waring wasn’t a corpse; he had his own TV show, peddling white-out jazz and standards, the safest music imaginable. But in Paris the narrator doesn’t know that. He or Cortázar himself is trying to figure out why “Every so often the dead fit the thought of the living.” Like no one else I’ve read, the great Argentine novelist (1914–84) gets to the oddity of the fraternity that comes together when one is listening to and feeling at one with the dead, who on records are more physically present than in any other medium: on the page, on the screen, even in a personal memory of a night when you were there to see the singer, alive.

  JULY 23, 2002

  1 Tommy Lasorda on Ted Williams (San Francisco Chronicle, July 6) “He had a great pair of eyes. They say he could watch a 78 record go around and tell you what’s on the label.” Normal people can’t do it with a 45.

  2 Jill Olson, My Best Yesterday (Inner-state) The jingle-jangle of the Searchers in the guitars, their “Needles and Pins” bite in this young woman’s voice, a warmth and a feel for loss that the Searchers never got around to—and a sense of place that makes Olson, who sings far less convincingly in the San Francisco country band Red Meat, at once familiar and someone you haven’t yet met. “I hope these pop tunes remind you of the sounds that might have blasted from the radio of a brand-new 1966 Ford Ranchero,” Olson says, “way back before you were born.” Or perhaps before she was.

  3 Subway commercial for Dijon Horseradish Melt (Fox Sports Net, July 13) One “Jim” (“a Dennis Miller–type of guy who tells it like it is,” says Subway publicist Les Winograd) pulls up to a burger joint in a car full of buddies. He’s about 40, tall, well-exercised: “Turkey breast, ham, bacon, melted cheese, Dijon horseradish sauce,” he says in the drive-through, exuding an aura of Supermanship all out of proportion to the situation. “That’s, like, not on our menu,” says the young, pudgy, confused person taking orders. “It’s not only not on your menu,” Jim says, “it’s not on your radar screen!” “Do we have a radar screen?” the clerk asks a supervisor as Jim peels out. “Think I made that burger kid cry?” Jim says to his pals, all of them now ensconced in a Subway with the new Select specials in front of them.

  It seems plain that, finally, George W. Bush is making himself felt in culture. The commercial takes Bush’s sense of entitlement—which derives from his lifelong insulation from anything most people eat, talk about, want or fear, and which is acted out by treating whatever does not conform to his insulation as an irritant—and makes it into a story that tries to be ordinary. But the story as the commercial tells it is too cruel, its dramatization of the class divisions Bush has made into law too apparent. The man smugly laughing over embarrassing a kid is precisely Bush in Paris attempting to embarrass a French-speaking American reporter for having the temerity to demonstrate that he knew something Bush didn’t. (Real Americans don’t speak French.) Even someone responsible for putting this talisman on the air may have flinched at the thing once it was out there in the world at large, functioning as public discourse, as politics—the last time I saw the spot, the final punchline had been dropped.

  4 Counting Crows, Hard Candy (Geffen) After the tied-in-knots This Desert Life, a return to form: songs about endless free time, a fortune under the couch cushions not to mention in the bank, nothing to do and nowhere to go. Played with all hearts on sleeves. With angst. ANGST. ANGST. And it works: It describes a real terrain where people without endless free time or too much money to count actually live. Even if Adam Duritz’s hair has reached the point where it looks ready to fly away with him.

  5–6 Phil Collins, Shirley Bassey, Bryan Adams, Queen, Annie Lennox, Cliff Richard, Elton John, Brian Wilson, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Tom Jones, Rod Stewart, Joe Cocker, Ozzy Osbourne, et al., Party at the Palace: The Queen’s Jubilee Concert, Buckingham Palace (Virgin) and Furry Lewis, Bukka White and Friends, Party! At Home—Recorded in Memphis in 1968 (Arcola) Aside from Tom Jones’ “You Can Leave Your Hat On”—a Randy Newman ode to fetishism for which I somehow doubt the queen was present, done in full Mars Attacks! mode—the package is as worthy of all the performers joining hands onstage at the end of the concert to commit mass suicide as you might expect. I was looking forward to the conceptually irresistible set-up of comparing Party to the similarly titled release by blues singers who had the advantage of being already dead. But then I did the honest thing and listened to it.

  7 Bill Moody, Looking for Chet Baker: An Evan Horne Mystery (Walker) Moody’s idea of adding a brooding intensity to his jazz detective is having him say “Don’t go there” over and over—or having him tell us that to catch a very special moment he “punched the air and said Yes!”

  8 Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Family & Their Legacy in American Music (Simon & Schuster) It’s shocking, but aside from John Atkins’ obscurely published 1973 The Carter Family, this is the first book about a trio that from the 1920s through the ’30s made what remains as profound and influential a body of American song as can be found anywhere. It’s also shocking that even though it is more than 400 pages long, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? is not a serious book. Zwonitzer, who makes documentaries for NPR (Joe DiMaggio, Mount Rushmore), acknowledges his dependence on interviews by Hirshberg (author of undistinguished books on Elvis Presley and the Beatles), on 1960s interviews by folklorists Ed Kahn and Mike Seeger, on research by the scholar Charles Wolfe, and more. But not a quotation or a fact in the book is sourced, which makes it worthless for anyone who might want to pursue routes Zwonitzer might be opening up. Even the many photos are undated. There is no bibliography or discography.

  As writing, the book is cute when it isn’t tone-deaf. Hardly a page goes by without Zwonitzer attempting to convince a reader that, as a Northerner, he’s down-home with the Carter Family’s Virginia mountains, juicing the narrative with countless versions of “mighty fine,” “pretty fair” or “flat out.” “When the crop was good—and, tell the truth, even when it wasn’t so good—there was always corn to spare for liquor,” he says in his rangy voice. Oh, those hillbillies!—always going around saying things like “tell the truth.” As for the music, Zwonitzer has no sense of how to get a song into prose. Other people will have to tell whoever might want to know why the Carter Family needs a book, not that the Carter Family has ever ceased to do it.

  9–10 “Reimagining July 4,” New York Times (July 4) and “Dissent: The American Way,” San Francisco Chronicle (July 4) The contrast between these two unsigned editorials could not have been more complete. The Times writer spoke of the “breathtaking” renewal of “the principles behind” the country, adding that, “As principles go, they are generous to a fault”—whatever that means. The writer went on to speak of the difficulty of “feeling one’s freedom” (“a little like trying to feel the rotation of the earth”), while finding the notoriously resistant idea of freedom itself not at all difficult to define: “Freedom is the ability to choose whom and what you will become according to your own lights.” How very New Age or, rather, Republican: it’s up to you, you’re on your own, and there is no such thing as society, let alone politics. Freedom certainly has nothing to do with citizens attempting to determine the nature and purpose of their community, their common predicament, their more perfect union.

  The great historical struggle to create that union was the subject of the Chronicle’s broadside, which one can hardly imagine running in any other major daily in the country. It pulled no punches. “Ever since Sept. 11,” the writer began, “President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft have tried to quash dissent by questioning the patriotism of people who seek to protect our civil rights and liberties.” The writer went on to trace the history of our best-known patriotic traditions, rituals, sayings and songs, from the Pledge of Allegiance to the motto on the Statue of Liberty to “America the Beautiful,” noting that the latter was written in 1883 by Katherine Lee Bates, a feminist professor of English at Wellesley who l
ived “for decades” with “her life partner Katherine Coman, an economist and social historian. It’s unlikely that those who sing the stirring words ‘and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea’ know that a progressive lesbian who agitated for a more democratic America authored these words.” In other words, the writer was saying, the story of the country is a continuing story, and it starts again when you lift your eyes from the paper.

  AUGUST 5, 2002

  1–3 David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, “Death Letter,” on Shaker (Chesky Records); White Stripes, “Death Letter,” on De Stijl (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 1998); and Son House, “Death Letter,” on Son House: Father of the Delta Blues—The Complete 1965 Sessions (Columbia Legacy, 1992) Son House (1902–88) was the most melodramatic of the great Mississippi Delta blues artists, and when he sat in New York City in 1965 to record “Death Letter,” he pulled out all the stops—just as he’d done with the sardonic “Preachin’ Blues” in 1930, when he first recorded. In 1965 he wasn’t the musician he’d been as a young man, but the drive to thread a song through six minutes or more was still there. The guitar playing is splayed, but it cuts to the bone; the man recalling the death of the love of his life takes satisfaction from the fact that he will never get over it.

  White Stripes Jack and Meg White attack “Death Letter” as Steve Miller might have, a couple of years after House cut it: Miller on stage at the Fillmore in San Francisco, determined to prove that disrespect—a tone more mordant than wounded, an orchestration less elegant than simply loud—is the surest route to the truth. With their band still coming together in 1998, the Detroit punk combo is as stumbling as House was, and they care as much as he did: that is, not at all. Again and again they climb the spine of the song, leaping off like little kids diving from a rock into a pond. They climb out, shake the water out of their hair and the song is theirs.

  Punk progenitor Johansen—New York Dolls frontman in the 1970s, lounge lizard Buster Poindexter in the decades that followed—takes a different tack in his current incarnation as tramp folklorist. He shambles into the tune as if it’s obvious, as if its tale wouldn’t even be worth telling if he weren’t already drunk. Against House’s more than seven minutes, or the White Stripes’ branding-iron sound, Johansen needs only four laconic minutes to make the dead woman in the song perhaps more dead than she’s been before. There’s something about Johansen’s sense of humor—his weird way of communicating that even as he’s getting his story across he’s forgetting something more important—that allows him to relax into songs a contemporary white man should be ashamed to even consider singing.

  4 Comet Gain, Réalistes (Kill Rock Stars) Three in the morning in someone’s London apartment, unattached men and women not giving up on the night: at first you hear blithering, then the smartest blithering you’ve ever heard. Then shots in the dark: “There’s no security in purity.” Then anguish and hope, forgiveness and curses, and a heartbreaker from its title to the last note: “Why I Try to Look So Bad.” By this point you’re hearing people you’d like to meet.

  5 Bernard Weinraub, “Six Feet Under Leads Emmys with 23 Nominees” (New York Times, July 19) “Six Feet Under was not shown to a test audience, as it would be at a network,” series creator Alan Ball tells Weinraub. “Nobody ever suggested bringing people from a mall to get their opinion of the show”—and can you imagine? Mall people judging the work of the man who wrote American Beauty? The man who unmasked American suburbia as a land of moral hypocrisy and spiritual decay as not more than three or four hundred other movies had ever done before?

  6 Anything for Art, or You Will Know Those Who Turn Self-Deprecation into Self-Congratulation by Their Trail of Dead (Shoreline Media press release, July 25) “Two days ago, while in Philadelphia to tape Fresh Air, Linda Thompson found out that Lucinda Williams was playing that night, and then scored tickets to the show. Williams, who was tipped off that Thompson was in the crowd, stopped midway through her set and explained that ‘I feel really self-conscious Linda Thompson’s in the audience.’ She was, however, able to finish the show.”

  7 X-Ray Spex, The Anthology (Sanctuary) With Poly Styrene’s screech prophesying the London Hanif Kureishi would begin to write out in the mid-1980s, an affirmation of life no less fierce than Son House’s affirmation of death, and a setting that burned with the same intensity. The songs tumble down one after the other, each whole, each bursting its skin: “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo,” “Let’s Submerge,” “Identity.” On the first disc, collecting the 1978 Germfree Adolescents album, Rudi Thompson’s sax rolls over the music like a storm, but he holds the shape of each number; with the eight tunes cut in the Roxy nightclub in 1977, the sound splitting in half a dozen directions at once, original saxophonist Lora Logic (who in 1995 combined with by-then Hari Krishna sister Styrene for a few new tunes) is utterly elsewhere. She seems to be playing from a nightclub in Saigon, as if punk was as likely to first raise its head there as anywhere—and as Poly runs her songs to ground, it’s Lora who gives every performance its smell of the uncanny, the unreal, the sense that the performance this recording documents could never have happened.

  8 Uncle Tupelo, 89/93: An Anthology (Columbia Legacy) Dull, but as Jeff Tweedy proves in a previously unreleased number that begins as a plaintive love ballad, there is no such thing as a bad version of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”

  9–10 On Louis Armstrong: Julio Cortá-zar, from Hopscotch (1963, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, Pantheon, 1966) and Percival Everett, from Glyph (Graywolf Press, 1999) In Paris in the late 1950s, in an apartment where every jazz 78 seems deeper than the last, an Argentine in his 40s lets his mind drift back to “Storyville nights, where the old only really universal music of the century had come from, something that brought people closer together and in a better way than Esperanto, UNESCO, or airlines, a music which was primitive enough to have gained such universality and good enough to make its own history, with schisms, abdications, and heresies” and most of all “Satchmo, everywhere, with that gift of omnipresence given him by the Lord, in Birmingham, in Warsaw, in Milan, in Buenos Aires, in Geneva, in the whole world, is inevitable, is rain and bread and salt, something that is beyond national ritual, sacred traditions, language and folklore: a cloud without frontiers, a spy of air and water, an archetypal form, something from before, from below, that brings Mexicans together with Norwegians and Russians and Spaniards, brings them back into that obscure and finally forgotten flame, clumsily and badly and precariously he delivers them back to a betrayed origin.”

  In Glyph, his hilarious novel about the games language plays with people, Percival Everett brings Aristophanes together with Ralph Ellison, and has them put it somewhat differently. Aristophanes: “All war is unnecessary and finally ruinous for all parties, but yet I find that the notion of sincere reconciliation doesn’t appear as an option for humans, or for politicians either.” Ellison: “Perhaps. But the condition you call war is often the condition of life for many. We have in our time a musician who clowns before kings and queens, wipes down his sweating brow with a rag between creating the sweetest music with the same lips and breath that make a graveled growl of a voice. He is at war. Necessarily and perhaps forever. And his weapon is irony. The enemy loves what he does, but when they imitate him, try to make it themselves, they hate him because, not only do they fail to recreate his music, they are terrified of becoming the one they mimic.”

  Or, as Melissa Maerz of City Pages in Minneapolis described Holly Golightly’s show at South by Southwest in Austin last March 27, “Little white singer-songwriter snarls the blues like a one-woman White Stripes. Somewhere, indie rockers torn between folk and garage are discovering the next big thing. Somewhere else, Son House is laughing his ass off.”

  AUGUST 26, 2002

  1 Jaime O’Neill, “It’s only rock ’n’ roll, but it’s enough, already” (San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 4) After dismissing the notion of the teenager as “a marketing construct” and se
emingly regretting that, at 58, he ever was one, rejecting all forms of youth culture as manipulations, frauds and posing, O’Neill hits the clincher: “The anthems of the ’60s anti-war movement have killed more of us than the war itself.” Inarguable, of course, but we need details: how many people did Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” kill as opposed to Freda Payne’s “Bring the Boys Home”? Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” vs. Edwin Starr’s “War”? Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” vs. Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets”? Oh, right, wrong question, that was a pro-war song—how many lives did it save?

  2 Bruce Springsteen, The Rising (Columbia) It’s too long—at 72 minutes, longer than the Rolling Stones’ storied Exile on Main Street. The poorer songs—“Into the Fire,” “Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin)”—seem to go on forever. The set may well be what the film critic Manny Farber defined as “white elephant art”: as an indirect but inescapable picture of the world in which Americans have lived since a New York headline proclaimed “U.S. ATTACKED,” it is certainly “an expensive hunk of well-regulated area.”

  It is also less like any sort of pop music album than a speech—maybe a speech given without an audience, like Lincoln out in the woods declaiming to the trees. The speaker tries on many voices, rhetorical devices, exercises in repetition or metaphor. As with Martin Luther King’s 1963 address to the March on Washington, neither the classical passages (“Further On [Up the Road]”) or gratuitous grace notes (“Empty Sky”) make it obvious that what the speaker is doing is building a platform to support the weight of what, in fact, he has to say—and for the grandeur with which he means to say it.