Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  That is the title song. As “The Rising” begins you can hear the speaker stand with his feet planted on the platform, which may be no more than a tree stump; the music his voice summons tips him off the stage and out of the forest, off to search for his audience, to see his face in others’ faces. The song is at once enormous and simple, an act of will and a ready-made. It has room in it—room for the dead and for those who mourn them, for those who care and those who don’t, for those who believe they can’t be touched and those who already have been.

  It may be that the song actually has room for the enormity of the event it means to enclose. It may be that the song speaks the language of the event: not the language of those who perpetrated it, but the language of people trying to make sense of it, to translate it, to at once accept and resist its reality. The song seems much too short, so when it’s over you play it again.

  3–4 Elvis Presley, “Elvis Talks About His Career,” on Live in Las Vegas (RCA) and “Hound Dog” on Roots Revolution (Tomato) or Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Evolution of Elvis Presley—The Complete Louisiana Hayride Archives (Music Mill) If you want to know who he was and where he came from (“From my side of the story. There’s a lot that’s come out about what happened, but never from my side”), listen to the astonishing onstage monologue that ends the first disc of this four-CD set. It’s August 24, 1969, three weeks into the engagement at the International Hotel in Las Vegas that brought Presley back to life as a performer, and he feels happily naked, sly, sardonic, coolly nailing his enemies, one by one: “So they arranged to put me on television. At that particular time there was a lot of controversy—you didn’t see people moving—out in public. They were gettin’ it on in the back rooms, but you didn’t see it out in public too much. So there was a lot of controversy . . . and I went to the Ed Sullivan Show. They photographed me from the waist up. And Sullivan’s standing over there saying, ‘Sumbitch.’ I said, ‘Thank you, Ed, thank you.’ I didn’t know what he was calling me, at the time.”

  To hear the controversy as a thing in itself—the event from which half the country was fleeing while the other half was running right for it—listen to the version of “Hound Dog” Presley offers on the December 15, 1956, broadcast from the No. 2 country radio show (“They’ve been looking for something new in the folk music field for a long time, and I think you’ve got it,” the host says hopefully to Elvis at his first Hayride appearance, in 1954). On Roots Revolution, new musicians have done note-for-note re-recordings of the original, very distant backing parts from guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black and drummer D. J. Fontana (not Jimmy Day’s steel guitar), but the difference is marginal—the sound is still bad, the performance is still shockingly fast, hard and mean, and the screams from the crowd comprise the most excited sound you’ll ever hear in your life.

  5 Emry Arthur, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” on Man of Constant Sorrow and Other Timeless Mountain Ballads (Yazoo) Arthur backed the Virginia mountain singer Dock Boggs on guitar in 1929; “he couldn’t reach the chords,” Boggs remembered. “He’d been shot through the hands. Bullets went through his hands.” From the year before, you can hear those shots on the first recording of a song that during the folk revival of the 1960s would be sung by Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and countless others, and that in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Dan Tyminski (vocals) and Soggy Bottom Boy George Clooney (lead lip-synch) turned into a rave-up you had no trouble believing could sweep the South. Arthur maps the same territory, but as an exile. Singing haltingly, in a high voice, testifying shamefully that he has no lover, no friends, no home and deserves no better than an unmarked grave (“You’re dreaming while you’re slumbering / While I am sleeping in the clay”), he might as well be hitting the strings with blunt instruments.

  6 Sean Wilentz reports on Bob Dylan’s return to the Newport Folk Festival after 35 years (Aug. 5) “The thing that was most apparent to me was how ghostly it was—because they’re all dead. All the people the young folk artists were drawn to in 1965 or before; they’re all dead. Mississippi John Hurt is dead. Son House is dead. Geoff Muldaur was funny: He asked who had been to Newport before; he asked who had been born in 1965. Maybe half had. He told a story about Mississippi John Hurt: ‘He’d just do a little finger-picking—and we’d all collapse.’ There were a lot of ghosts around. At the same time it was a very conscious passing on of that tradition to something new—on the part of the older folks. Dylan did that very intentionally. Songs that he was singing in 1965, and songs that recalled that tradition.

  “There was a roots stage—[but] given the explosion of interest in [old-time] music, there was too little. Most of the music was personal song-stories. In a funny way, what with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Alison Krauss, the festival seemed to be out of step with where folk music now is. It was largely virtuoso self-indulgent adolescent angst. It was Shawn Colvin.

  “Dylan walked out on stage with [Orthodox Jewish] earlocks—and a ponytail, and a fake beard. He looked like a guy who was on the bus to Crown Heights and got lost. From another angle, not really seeing the beard, he could have been in a girl group—he could have been in the Shangri-Las. Then he looked like Jesus Christ. He was putting on a show, and he was donning a mask—because he’s a minstrel. A Jewish minstrel. And an American minstrel.

  “There came a point when he could have said something—when he was introducing the band. I looked at him very closely then—but he just sort of smiled. He twitched. And then he went into the last song, ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.’ Then he goes away, and comes back, and does a sizzling Buddy Holly, ‘Not Fade Away,’ the Grateful Dead arrangement. Again it was ghosts. That was Bob Dylan. He was the whole fucking tradition. He was a one-man festival.”

  7 Kelly Willis, Easy (Ryko) The devastatingly clear-voiced country singer can walk on melodies as if they’re water. The first number, Willis’ “If I Left You,” has that kind of melody, but the words are inescapable, and they make no sense: if the singer left the guy who left her, she’d worry about him all the time and love him forever. The best number here is Paul Kelly’s “You Can’t Take It With You,” a brilliantly slick put-down (“You might own a great big factory, oil wells on sacred land”—“sacred land” is a priceless touch) Willis sings with barely a hint of malice.

  8 Me Without You, directed by Sandra Goldbacher (Fireworks/Goldwyn) As we follow best friends Marina (Anna Friel) and Holly (Michelle Williams) from 1973 (jumping rope) to 2001 (watching their children play), pop eras come and go. In 1978, when the girls can’t be more than 15, they crash at a punk non-party where Holly lets Marina’s brother make love to her and Marina lets a guy shoot her up with heroin; a few years later their apartment wall features dead Ian Curtis of Joy Division, clutching his mike stand like a cross. You hear all the right period music, from the Clash to the Stranglers to Echo and the Bunnymen—and nothing sounds half so right as, in a scene shot in a club where half the men seem to be wearing Adam Ant pirate hats and skirts, a DJ pumps out Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough.”

  9 John Paxson, Elvis Live at Five (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s) On a Dallas TV station looking for a new angle on the 25th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, a producer and a computer genius create a virtual Elvis and, making no pretense that it is anything but the image of a dead man, turn him into a talk show host. Then the station owner takes over and turns Elvis into a demagogue, taking on homosexuals, immigrants, Hare Krishnas, his denunciations backed by footage created by means of the same technology that keeps Elvis talking. Soon homicidal mobs roam the land, their victims driven before them: “Thousands of men, women and children in a long snaking line of misery and fear stumbling through the winter snows of Nebraska.”

  Very convincing. No happy ending.

  10 Bruce Springsteen, “The Rising,” on Late Night With David Letterman (CBS, Aug. 2) With Steve Van Zandt singing into Springsteen’s mike along with Patti Scialfa as the song hit its last choruses, it was impossible not to see his dimwitted Sopranos thug S
ilvio Dante there too. And that made it feel as if the song meant, among other things, to kill somebody.

  SEPTEMBER 9, 2002

  1 Scott Ostler, “Insincerity Taken to New Levels” (San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 31) On baseball’s new labor-management agreement: “At the news conference, ever-hip Commissioner Bud Selig quoted the Beatles, saying of the negotiations, ‘It’s been a Long and Winding Road.’ And as the Beatles noted in that song, ‘We’ve seen this road before.’

  “Unfortunately, Selig did not quote from the Beatles’ tune ‘Money (That’s What I Want).’ ”

  2 Holiday Inn School of Hospitality and Resort Management, University of Memphis (Aug. 16) A blond woman approached the desk at this training hotel: “I’m checking out: Linda Evans.” “Linda Evans?” said a man standing next to her. “From Dynasty?” “A long time ago,” she said. “But I killed all my husbands.”

  3 Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs, conceived and organized by Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan & Charles Traub (Scalo Books) A compendium of more than 1,000 pictures drawn from the evolving downtown exhibition that, beginning about a week after last year’s terrorist attacks, opened itself to photographs from professionals and amateurs, until it seemed everyone in New York was taking part. Some 5,000 photos were scanned, filed and printed, and, within the limits of the makeshift space at 116 Prince Street, hung like laundry.

  There is no telling what image will break down all defenses, erase the year’s time, open the hole in the ground and in your memory. For one person I know it was the man in a T-shirt that read “I’VE GONE TO PIECES,” the splayed fingers of his right hand over his face. For me it was a young woman holding an American flag during a vigil or memorial gathering in Washington Square Park: the flag as if billowed by no more than the expression on her face, some combination of stoicism, sadness and an absolute inability to read the future.

  4 Sleater-Kinney, One Beat (Kill Rock Stars) “Turn on the TV,” the second cut, “Far Away,” begins, and the singer does: from Portland, Oregon, she sees the World Trade Center, and then what’s left of it—nothing. But this opening moment doesn’t carry over into the rest of the song, and guitarist Corin Tucker’s high, hard shouts miss the moment even as she calls it up. Across the rest of the album, Tucker, guitarist Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss seem to miss their targets, even if their targets are each other. What’s missing is a certain spark, that dimension of expectation and desire that previously made so many songs outrun themselves. Except perhaps in the rolling and rumbling choruses of “Light-Rail Coyote,” here the band is in front of its songs, looking back at finished things. Years after they appeared, “Dig Me Out,” “ Little Mouth,” “Jenny” and “Was It a Lie?” are not finished things.

  5 Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Compaq Center (San Jose, Aug. 27) One of Springsteen’s talents is in bringing his biggest numbers down to earth. He opened with “The Rising,” which immediately set the show on a high plateau, looking down on the ruins of the World Trade Center, from the perspective of what writer Homi Bhabha named “the Unbuilt.” Much later, Springsteen introduced the band. “The Goddess of Love,” he said of his wife, singer and guitarist Patti Scialfa. “I like to call her mental Viagra. Come on up for the risin’,” he said.

  6 Peter Wolf, “Growin’ Pain,” from Sleepless (Artemis) Peter Wolf has been around long enough to show up in Robert Greenfield’s 1982 novel Temple, drunkenly fronting the J. Geils Band in a Cambridge club in the late ’60s and explaining the meaning of “L7” to the hero. With J. Geils he went from blues and soul to the ’80s hits “Love Stinks” and “Centerfold”; on his own he married Faye Dunaway and made albums. None came close to the shuddering blasts of cold air that stormed all over the J. Geils Band’s 1970 cover of John Lee Hooker’s “Serve You Right to Suffer”—or the smile in “Love Stinks.”

  “Growin’ Pain” has every year of that story in it—that story as ordinary life unmarked by stardom. It moves on a sharp, bouncing beat, but lost bets and blown chances pull against it, filling the tune with the likelihood that the dead ends of the lives chronicled in the song will never open onto any better road. Wolf gets stronger as the number goes on, but even as the sound rises he seems to sing more quietly, as if to offer old friends a respect the world they live indenies them.

  Sleepless will get momentary attention for Mick Jagger’s “You’re So Vain”–style vocal on the banal “Nothing But the Wheel” or Steve Earle’s cowboy shtick on “Some Things You Don’t Want to Know.” But this song may keep coming back.

  7 Robert Greenfield, S.T.P.—A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones (Da Capo) A reissue of the 1974 account of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 return to the U.S.A.—with tickets, at least in San Francisco, to make amends for the 1969 horror at Altamont, a flat $5. This is the same tour followed in Robert Frank’s film Cock-sucker Blues—named for the song Mick Jagger sings as the picture begins—and Greenfield’s book exposed how much of the movie was staged, and how much of the tour, crowded with celebrities from Truman Capote to Marisa Berenson to Dick Cavett and other rock gods, was not. Again and again the book took its readers into dark rooms, then woke them up in time to make the bus—or would have, had the book had readers. In 1974 it was, as Greenfield notes in a new foreword, “the very first full-length book ever published about the rock ’n’ roll tour. Those times being what they were, though, no one expected those who loved the Stones to rush out and buy this volume. They were too busy getting high and listening to Exile on Main Street. Which is why only fifteen hundred hardback copies and thirty-five hundred trade paperback copies were ever printed.” It entered oblivion as a classic.

  Today the book is confusing. What Greenfield describes is happening so fast no sense of in-the-past holds; the action seems to be taking place in the present moment. And then, on the last page, with the tour running into the next year: “Michael Jagger had his whole life in front of him, with several already left behind. The Stones would go on as long as he needed them to. . . . For Jagger was a young man, just thirty.” At this point the book falls on the reader like a building, carrying all the weight of what the Rolling Stones so purposefully accomplished in the few years before Greenfield drew what he seems to have suspected might not have been an arbitrary line, along with the weight of what they didn’t bother to do in the many years that, now, bring us to the band’s latest swing through the economy.

  8 Dixie Chicks, Home (Open Wide/Columbia) With all the publicity about rebel girls with big smiles taking on the Nashville machine and taking country music back where it belongs, you expect more than . . . dobros.

  9 Hall Robinson Choir, “St. Louis Blues,” from Walk Right In—When the Sun Goes Down: The Secret History of Rock ’n’ Roll, Vol. 1 (Bluebird/RCA) There are endless riches in archivist Colin Escott’s new excavations in the Bluebird and RCA vaults, and imaginative, non-canonical programming: here the classically trained baritone Paul Robe-son’s 1926 “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the Carter Family’s 1930 “Worried Man Blues” and Mississippi blues singer Robert Petway’s unnervingly simple 1941 “Catfish Blues” seem to come from the same radio station. But there is an odd displacement in “St. Louis Blues,” the last cut: 20 professional male and female voices with a repertoire of spirituals recording in Hollywood in 1939 and here led by an exuberant woman singing as if from the soundtrack of Vincente Minnelli’s 1943 all-black musical Cabin in the Sky. It might take only a moment to realize that Ike and Tina Turner’s 1966 “River Deep, Mountain High” is a rewrite, and that its producer and co-writer Phil Spector had to have heard the Hall Robinson Choir’s version—and that when he took Ike and Tina into Gold Star Studios in Hollywood his goal was to top it. Which he did.

  10 24 Hour Party People, directed by Michael Winterbottom (United Artists) Manchester, England, late ’70s: There are passages in this droll dramatization of a long episode in pop history that show Joy Division finding their sound, then what seem
like huge crowds in tiny nightclubs finding and losing themselves in the now stark, now all but dreamed songs, and they are the most powerful and mysterious musical sequences I’ve ever seen on film. Actor Sean Harris looks little like Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, but the nervousness of his dancing—a trance you wouldn’t want to enter and may barely stand to watch—makes David Byrne in Stop Making Sense look like Daffy Duck. Harris’ Curtis is on to something, he hasn’t decided whether he can say what it is, when he hangs himself the movie goes from Olympus to a parking lot, and you no more than the people in the movie will believe that neither you nor they will ever make it back.

  SEPTEMBER 23, 2002

  1 Press release, D. Baron media relations (Sept. 12) “Los Angeles, CA—Celebrated recording artist composer Warren Zevon, one of rock music’s wittiest and most original songwriters, has been diagnosed with lung cancer which has advanced to an untreatable stage.” Playing: “Mohammed’s Radio,” the churchy live version from the 1982 Stand in the Fire (“Even Jimmy Carter’s got the highway blues”); the delirious rising in the 1978 “Johnny Strikes Up the Band”; the regret in the melody of “Looking for the Next Best Thing” in 1982; the shared dread of “Run Straight Down” in 1989; the delicacy of “Suzie Lightning” in 1991 and “Mutineer” in 1995. From 1976, when he went public with “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” on the album Warren Zevon, it has been more than a quarter century of gunplay and bravado, not for a moment concealing Zevon’s loathing for his own betrayals and those of the world around him. “I was in the house when the house burned down,” he sang in 2000. From afar he has been a good friend.