Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Music in Balthazar (New York, Sept. 5) For a still-hot restaurant with a reputation for cool to uphold, either a new concept of cool or real problems with the concept. Playing indistinctly in the background as we come in after 11—can it be, no, it can’t be, why is it? It’s Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” from 1967, one of the sappiest songs of all time. Then a lot of terrible Saturday Night Live–style fake jazz. Then finally, loud, every note standing out: “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, probably the greatest pop recording of the last 50 years, and not dinner music. Not even walking-out music. Not even cool. Far beyond cool, in a realm where the concept is an embarrassment.

  3–4 Slobberbone, Slippage (New West) and Plastic Mastery, In the Fall of Unearthly Angels (Magic Marker) On “Springfield, IL.,” the first track of Slobberbone’s Slippage, the hard, loose, fast band from Denton, Texas, combines a desperate country vocal that’s all over the room with a guitar playing off its own promises, never quite paying off, replacing each moment where the music falls just short with a greater promise. You get the feel of a terrible place the musicians want only to escape—why is it so full of life? In a much more punk manner, with floating chords and vocals lifting away from their songs, Plastic Mastery of Tallahassee catches the same fear, the same hurry. It’s a queer sound: the sound of people almost but not sure there is no place for them.

  5 Sinéad O’Connor, “Lord Franklin,” from Sean-Nós Nua (Vanguard) The traditional ballad Bob Dylan recast in 1963 to look back at his youth as if he were already dead—and, in O’Connor’s hands, never more gorgeous, never more accursed. O’Connor’s disdain for sustaining a career makes it possible to forget her; this is a reminder of why it is impossible to write her off. She will be around, harrying everyone into their graves.

  6 Bernie Woodall, “Book Says Grateful Dead Has Grand Place in History” (Reuters, Sept. 4) An interview with Dennis McNally, on his bestselling A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead and his plans for a follow-up, on the Mississippi: “I want to write a book about the river and Highway 61 and Bob Dylan, Mark Twain, Robert Johnson and a jazz player to be named later.” To be titled “Whatever.”

  7 Vito Acconci at the Aspen Institute (Aspen, Colo., July 19) Speaking in conjunction with the recently closed Aspen Art Museum exhibition “Vito Acconci/Acconci Studio,” Acconci, now in his 60s, combined a brief run-through of his career from the 1960s to about 1980 (his life as a gestural/ performance artist and sculptor) with a thrilling account of his work with his own architectural studio: a nearly two-hour talk that was at once galvanizingly visionary and completely down to earth.

  He said many things, even most things, twice. Returning to a phrase or an idea almost as soon as its first version left his mouth, it seemed less that he was unsure you understood than that, nearing the end of a thought, he had already reconsidered it, and so put it into words again to see if they still worked. There was a great physical presence in his speech, especially when he moved away from his lectern and turned his back on the slides he was working with, leaning forward, rocking back on his heels.

  He was mapping the work of his New York–based Acconci Studio—a crew of architects and others who since 1988 have been working on the redesign of extant buildings and the part-closed, part-open spaces that adjoin them, from an entryway in the Philadelphia International Airport to corporate complexes all over Europe, from a roundabout in London to small household objects. Most of the projects have never been built—and despite Acconci’s accounts of commissions or competitions for commissions, it was hard to believe, looking at drawings and models as they appeared on the screen behind him as he speaks, that they were ever meant to be built. They are so blatant in their refusal to accept the claim of form on content—and thus when Acconci showed slides of actually completed projects, some in the audience gasped. They had already grasped the careful, patient but anarchic utopianism inherent in whatever the studio does, its absolute reach for another city in another life—for elsewhere, wherever that might be.

  While the fundamental premise of almost every project had to do with bringing the outside of a building in or the inside of a building out, to break boundaries between space and people, to unregiment work and confuse the borders between work, respite and leisure, that doesn’t speak to the driving force of play in the projects: the desire to bring the outside in or the inside out just to see what happens when you do. The realization of the simplest project—the roundabout that expands into a ziggurat and folds up like a flower according to the flow of traffic around it—carried the ambitions of the most grandiose. No space, no building, was for anything; as the Acconci Studio ethic became clear, you began to see as the studio does, to see that no building is fated, none is fixed, none, no matter how old or insured, was ever more than a whim, a bribe, an idea, good or bad, whose time had come.

  As Acconci spoke, every slide he projected dovetailed with fragments of a personal manifesto, flying through descriptions and anecdotes like a memory interrupting a sales talk: “I see art as an exchange, a meeting, where the person in the role of the artist comes face to face with a person in the role of the viewer.” “Actually building projects is a problem, because it screws up the theory.” “My work began in an art context as a kind of resentment toward the do-not-touch of museums and galleries: ‘The art is more expensive than you are.’ ” The equation doesn’t hold with the Acconci Studio projects: even when built, you can’t believe anyone ever funded them. But there are more of them, out there in the world, all the time.

  8 Steve Earle, Jerusalem (Artemis) The supposedly heretical “John Walker’s Blues”—on the page, a puerile self-justification from inside the heart or mind of “the American Taliban”—has brought Earle the biggest boost of his career, press coverage everywhere, right up to a respectful interview in the New York Times Magazine. The album carries not just a lyric sheet, but a statement: “Lately I feel like the loneliest man in America,” Earle begins, trumpeting his courage. He goes on to discuss hysterical patriotism, the Vietnam War, domestic repression, race riots: “Well, we survived all that—and I believe that we’ll survive this, as well.” By “this” he means the Bush administration’s drive toward autocracy and secret government—not the actual physical jeopardy of the USA. There is no acknowledgment that the country faces a real enemy, that the country itself, not a few buildings, has already been attacked, that it has been shown to be more vulnerable than its enemies ever imagined it was. “God bless America, indeed,” he says finally, in that sarcastic, self-congratulatory trope of bad critics everywhere.

  The music is not bad. It’s missing Earle’s usual smarm; his singing is less mannered than it is on all the records by other people he’s been popping up on lately. “John Walker’s Blues” is a real song.

  9 Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot (Simon & Schuster) On why Al Gore should have had the producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer running his show instead of the people who blew it: “High school is the most appropriate metaphor for the 2000 presidential campaign, since high school is the most appropriate metaphor for life in a democratic republic. Because democracy is an idealistic attempt to make life fair. And while high school is the place where you read about the democratic ideal of fairness, it is also the place where most of us learn how unfair life really is.” The best book I’ve read about patriotism since Charles L. Mee Jr.’s A Visit to Haldeman and Other States of Mind—and that came out in 1975, just after Watergate.

  10 Wire, “The Afgers of Kodack,” from Read & Burn (Pink Flag) They were on stage at the Roxy in London in 1977 when punk gave birth to itself; they were always ridiculously smart, always interested in espionage, and no less so here—with a furious negation ending an EP of otherwise indistinct and pointless tunes. “Read and burn?” The band burns up its own footprints.

  Thanks to Chris Walters

  OCTOBER 7, 2002

  1–2 Igby Goes Down, written and directed by Burr
Steers (United Artists) and trailer for The Man From Elysian Fields, directed by George Hickenlooper (Goldwyn) Movie logic: at the end of Igby Goes Down, Jason Slocumb Jr., played by Kieran Culkin, visits a catatonic man in a mental institution: his father Jason Slocumb. It’s Bill Pullman, who we’ve seen in flashbacks willfully driving himself out of his family, out of society, out of his mind. The Western-hero face was still there, some years back, the features sharp, but even then this once-strong, silent man was silent because he had nothing to say. It’s one bad step past the familiar: the father’s sardonic smile, when he still recognized his son, is from the chump Pullman played in The Last Seduction, the deadness in his eyes now from the terrified man he played in Lost Highway—it’s as if he’s stepped out of those roles only to complete them.

  The same confusion between art and life—are Bill Pullman’s previous roles part of his filmography or his biography?—is at work in The Man From Elysian Fields, where Mick Jagger looks at once like the gangster he played in 1970 in the “Memo From Turner” sequence of Performance and a desiccated version of a 60-year-old Jennifer Love Hewitt. Here he appears as the pimp Luther Fox, which is to say that he is also playing a version of James Fox, who in Performance played the real gangster, and for whom Jagger’s Elysian character is half-named. Far more deeply, though, Jagger is appearing as a fantasy version of himself, 35 years after the Rolling Stones, last hitting with the 1965 “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” were definitively erased from public consciousness by the San Francisco sound of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and It’s a Beautiful Day. After decades as the highest paid gigolo in Europe, what else would he be doing but running an escort service?

  3 Thalia Zedek, You’re a Big Girl Now (Kimchee EP) “I got tired,” are the first words the relentlessly thanatopic singer and guitarist offers—but except on Bob Dylan’s title song, not tired enough.

  4 Justin Timberlake, “Like I Love You” (Jive) ’N Sync update: while Joey Fatone takes Broadway in Rent, Lance Bass “remains hopeful” that his backers will come through with the $20 million for his Russian space flight (His backers? He didn’t have the dough himself? And what do they get? Product placement?), Chris Kirkpatrick weighs a bid for the Republican nomination to take on Sen. Bob Graham in ’04, and J. C. Chasez considers trying to save the Devil Rays, Justin Timberlake has gone for the solo career. He’s got the Neptunes at the board, the Thriller-period Michael Jackson hat, the Bad-period Michael Jackson yelps, the George Michael “Faith” arrangement, and a paint-thinner voice.

  5 Dave Morey, “Ten at Ten” on KFOG-FM (San Francisco, Sept. 11) The matchless daily show that usually interpolates “10 great songs” and sound bites from “one great year” made a one-day switch, airing listeners’ request messages and then the songs they wanted played to commemorate the attacks of the year before. Many of the messages were singular. A man noted that “Sept. 11 was always a happy day for me,” because it was his father’s birthday, then told how his father, a crisis manager in Iowa, immediately flew to New York to do what he could. Another man spoke of playing Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” on a jukebox in a bar, upsetting the other patrons—“but that was a time when you felt you could go up to anybody and start talking,” and so he did. But of all the songs chosen—from Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence” to U2’s “Walk On” to the Corrs’ “When the Stars Go Blue”—only Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms” reached the event, and then only in Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing, a hurtful funeral oration for a funeral that, you might have sensed, could take place only in the arc of the oration’s own music.

  6–7 Bert Berns, The Heart & Soul of Bert Berns (Universal) and Solomon Burke, Don’t Give Up On Me (Fat Possum) Berns, a legendary New York record man, was 38 when he died in 1967. Collections honoring such a figure usually come in boxes; ignoring Berns’ pop hits with Van Morrison and the McCoys, this is a single disc of nine deep-soul numbers that Berns wrote and produced, plus one misguided homage. Some of the tracks here were big—Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” and “Cry to Me,” Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters’ “Cry Baby,” Irma Franklin’s “Piece of My Heart,” the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout.” Some—the obscure Hoagy Lands’ heart-stopping “Baby, Come On Home,” Freddie Scott’s “Are You Lonely for Me, Baby” and the Drifters’ “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You”—might never have existed at all. But together these records make a picture so delicate you can almost hear the performers’ fear that anything they do will break it. You hear strange, astonishingly delicate bits of instrumentation—guitar triplets, a hesitating piano, room to breathe all through the arrangements—that produce the feeling that the great voices Berns recorded were not quite of this earth.

  “If everybody sang this song, I believe it would save the whole world,” Solomon Burke announced in 1964 as he moved into “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” Today, singing new songs by Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Dan Penn, Tom Waits, Nick Lowe and Brian Wilson, he sounds most of all unsure of himself. He can dominate the material, but just from the outside. Only on producer Joe Henry’s “Flesh and Blood”—deathly slow, every moment felt through and then left behind with regret, the next step taken without an intimation of hope—does he sound like he’s wearing his own clothes.

  8–9 “Absolut Pistols” (Absolut Vodka ads, available in postcard form at Tower Records) and the Sex Pistols at Inland Invasion, Devore, Calif. (Sept. 14) Absolut used the Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols art, with the pink “Sex Pistols” in a lumpy version of the bottle. Not quite as nervy as the online Dos Equis “Viva la Revolucion” ad from a few years ago that featured lifelong alcoholic Guy Debord of the Situationist International (“Made his own dead time,” Dos Equis said, rewriting situationist-inspired graffiti from the May ’68 revolt in France, “Live without dead time”), but Dos Equis didn’t have to ask permission to use Debord’s name, because he’d already killed himself. The Sex Pistols—Johnny Rotten, Paul Cook, Steve Jones and Glen Matlock, which as a functioning commercial enterprise last month played for 52,000 people at a punk festival in Southern California—charge and approve, and more power to them.

  10 Sleater-Kinney, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco (Sept. 22) Jane Dark reports: “Having seen Sleater-Kinney four or five times, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them do a cover. And never wanted to—they’re too good at sounding like themselves. They sounded like themselves last night, except more so: Where I was standing, Carrie Brownstein’s vocals and Corin Tucker’s guitar both seemed low, so the band resolved to axioms: Corin’s voice ripping open the complicated, angular spaces of Carrie’s shifting figures. Janet Weiss has grown into a tremendous drummer, beyond tremendous—undeniable.

  “The Fillmore seemed a little large, and swallowed up the songs from when they were small: ‘I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,’ which I still believe is their greatest (if not in fact the greatest) song, seemed attenuated, a perfect little bomb that couldn’t blow up the whole room. But the new songs were better than on record, and ‘You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun’ and ‘Words and Guitar’ were better than ever, particularly for what they didn’t do—for all the ways, no matter how massively compelling, they would never be rawk anthems.

  “They did do a cover. They did an anthem. It was Bruce Springsteen’s birthday and they hauled off and played ‘Promised Land’ to start the encores. They played it tight and fast with no fooling around, with close harmonies in the chorus, and at the beginning of the third verse where there’s that part about ‘desert floor’ it sounded to me like they were saying ‘Desert Storm’ and suddenly you understood that these women singing a guy’s coming-of-age song weren’t just taking liberties, they were talking liberties: that ‘Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man’ wasn’t an illusion of independence, of the dream of getting out of your hometown, like so many Bruce songs. It was about the inseparability of that particular swagger and being draft age. Bruce’s ‘desert floor’ was a di
fferent desert altogether, so far outside your hometown that the people had names you couldn’t pronounce. A couple of minutes later Corin was howling ‘Dig me out’ over and over, and it seemed like the hole was the whole world.”

  Thanks to Howard Hampton and Jason

  Gross of Perfect Sound Forever

  OCTOBER 21, 2002

  1–3 Mekons, Mercury Lounge (Sept. 21, New York City) Swinging east on their 25th anniversary tour, the old punks added a special show by popular demand—“a concept,” singer and guitarist Jon Langford said from the stage, “with which we are not that familiar”—at 6 p.m. Noting that one fan praised the idea as “a Mekons dream come true—home by 9!” Langford announced the door policy to the crowd already crammed into the small room: “Nobody under 40.” Nobody left. The band, from accordion on one side to fiddle on the other, ranged from the primitive rant “The Building” to singer Sally Timms’ dreamy bomb-scapes of a ruined London, but it was when various members began to read from the group’s just-published Hello Cruel World: Selected Lyrics (Verse Chorus Press) that the performance transcended the night. Elegantly printed, illustrated with photos and Blakean cartoons, the book doesn’t read like a conceit—that is, you actually can read it—but that was no preparation for what happened when the words were read out on stage. The idea seemed an utter contradiction: why have someone step out of a band and read song lyrics when the band was present and ready to play them? In truth, the first reading, Langford with “Funeral,” came off as a clichéd political speech. But then the lyrics truly began to change shape, to lift off on such flights of rhetoric they became unrecognizable as songs. When non-singing drummer Steve Goulding stepped to the front of the stage and raised the book, the words rang like Shakespeare.

  “Failure in the short run guarantees success in the long run,” Neil Young once said. The Mekons’ run, not exactly toward success, a quarter-century of small clubs, small labels, day jobs and a calling that has not worn out, has been a long one in itself. So long that later that night, as Langford, Timms and accordionist Rico Bell broke for dinner at a Chinese place called Kam Chueh, the fortune that turned up in one cookie did not quite communicate as a portent: “The seeds of success lie in your last failure.” On the terms of success, every Mekons show is a failure.