Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  4 The Great Crusades, Never Go Home (Glitterhouse/Germany) When this Chicago foursome set off on their third album, with “Hand Grenade Head” and “Out of Our Little Town” (“They don’t sell sleeping pills over the counter,” Brian Krumm sings, and you know that’s as hopeful as the song will get), they carry themselves like Midwestern gangsters: with the determined, bitter nihilism of Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition, but also the gleeful nihilism of Billy Zane in This World, Then the Fireworks. But as the road out of town gets longer, you hear a guitar player putting a south-of-the-border melody on The Wild Bunch, surf combos tuning up in Southern California in 1962, a steel-guitarist clocking in in Nashville, a banjo player picking for himself somewhere in Virginia in the 1920s, and the band never hurries a step.

  5 San Francisco Giants vs. St. Louis Cardinals, National League Championship Series, Game 3 (Fox, Oct. 12) At Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, as a man in the bleachers had a home run bounce off his hands for the second time, a camera picked up a shirtless man sitting behind him, his mouth hanging open. One announcer speculated that the shirtless guy was dumbfounded that rubber-hands had blown two chances in a row. A second announcer noted that shirtless was wearing headphones, and the camera pulled in: the guy wasn’t surprised, he was completely zonked. “He must be listening to the Grateful Dead,” said the announcer. Someone back at Fox World Domination put on an impossibly vague Dead track (Deadheads would call it abstract), with Jerry Garcia whispering “odelay” over and over as guitar notes struggled to take shape and then died like minnows and the tune went on and on and the face of the man in the headphones never changed.

  6 Jim Jocoy, We’re Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy, SF/LA 1978–1980 (powerHouse Books) At first Jacoby’s full-length posed color portraits of people on the scene seem to owe everything to the black-and-white pictures in Isabelle Anscombe’s 1978 Punk—for that matter, the SF/LA punks seem to owe everything to the Londoners in the Anscombe book. But the longer you look—and not, particularly, at the shots of Joan Jett, Exene Cervenka of X, Johnny Thunders or other stars—the more you begin to see what it took to remake yourself as a freak, as a social idiot, as someone you weren’t meant to be. A woman with short black hair in a short black vinyl skirt who looks like a follower of the early San Francisco punk band Crime; a blond woman wearing red, black, blue, yellow, white and green stripes and squiggles, smoke drifting over her face like a small cloud; a small woman dressed demurely in black and blue and something in her eyes that seems to be daring the world to fuck with her, and not because she knows what will happen if it does—soon enough, you’re seeing real people everywhere.

  7 David Gates, “Everybody Must Get Sloshed” (New York Times Book Review, Oct. 13) On Tim O’Brien’s novel July, July, about a class of ’69 30th-anniversary college reunion and how dreams of a better world turned to dust, gold dust that still shines with the pain of hopes abandoned and hearts that even under a carapace of corruption beat on to the music the man can’t bust even though he did. Choosing among requisite “uptight Republican housewife,” “draft-dodger who split for Canada” and “still-traumatized Vietnam veteran” with “a voice in his head,” Gates homes in on the latter, or rather his “imaginary friend,” one “Johnny Ever.” “Talk about cynics!” says Gates. “ ‘Seen it once, seen it a zillion times,’ this hard-boiled internal parasite tells his host. ‘We’re talkin’ grand illusion here. Fairy tales . . . “Hair.” Your whole wacked-out generation, man, it got turned around by all that tooby ooby walla starshine crud.’ ” “Edgy stuff,” Gates says. “If you can’t believe in ‘Hair’ anymore, what can you believe in?”

  8–9 Ed Ward on Domino Records, Fresh Air (NPR, Sept. 3) and The Domino Records Story (Ace) Resident pop historian Ward told the story of an odd little label launched in 1957 in Austin, Texas, by a team of solidly middle-class white entrepreneurs who met at a business seminar called “How to Market a Song.” They experimented. Their strangest record was Joyce Harris’ New-Orleans–style chant “No Way Out”: no way out from your love, was the concept; it wasn’t the feeling, which was life and death. A male voice begins the song with “I gotcha! I gotcha! And there’s no way out—” twisting the last word into a drawl so menacing you can’t believe anyone can answer him; Harris does, if only by sounding as if she’s tearing snakes out of her hair.

  The label’s stars were the Slades, especially with their original version of “You Cheated”—a reworking of the Penguins’ 1954 doo-wop classic “Earth Angel”—which became a national hit when in 1958 it was covered by the Shields, who as they were black and the Slades, whose passionate, close-harmony rehearsal tapes are the hidden treasure of The Domino Records Story, were white, turned the vitally important American tradition of whites strolling to riches on the backs of blacks on its head. Or anyway sideways: Jesse Belvin, who wrote “Earth Angel,” was the lead singer of the Shields, and as with white covers of black records, compared to the Slades the Shields were slick.

  Ward played the Slades’ “You Cheated”—rough but reaching, for just what you couldn’t quite tell. The soul music that was just around the bend? A transparency in the tune the singers couldn’t quite find? Hollywood? The humid last notes hung in the air, as if they were ready to burst into rain. “It was a magnificent record,” Ward pronounced, as if stunned at his own story, at the glory a marketing seminar could turn up, just like that.

  10 Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (NBC, Oct. 4) “That’s another 25 years,” Detective Ice-T says to a murder suspect, setting up a line that for a moment left film noir heroes from Humphrey Bogart to Guy Pearce in its dust. “Your parole officer isn’t born yet.”

  NOVEMBER 4, 2002

  1 Sam McGee, “Railroad Blues,” from the anthology Classic Mountain Songs (Smithsonian Folkways) McGee (1894–1975) played guitar with Uncle Dave Macon in the 1920s, with Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith in the ’30s and ’60s; in this 1964 recording he blows holes through the idea of “country music,” the “breakdown,” the “guitar solo.” Long, thin notes stretch into the air until you think you can’t hear them anymore, but you can; bass strings swoop down to rescue the melody from the silences that are almost left behind. It’s a workout, a cutting contest—but more than anything an acting out of the pioneer spirit, of America as experiment, as, “Hey, there’s always something better over the next hill,” but deep down not really caring if there is or not, not if to get from one place to another you can move like this.

  2 Don DeLillo, Belknap Lecture, Princeton University (Oct. 16) DeLillo read from his forthcoming novel, Cosmopolis, due next spring, about a day in the life of one Eric Packer, a 28-year-old billionaire currency trader. As the book opens he’s in his white limousine, on his way to get a haircut. Refusing to dramatize, letting the words carry the story, DeLillo read quietly, and the result was a dreamlike rhythm. As Dave Hickey says of Chet Baker Sings, there were “no range dynamics, no tempo dynamics, no expressive timbre shifts, no suppression of extant melodics, no harmonic meandering, no virtuoso high-speed scales.” Later there were questions from the audience. “What do you know about being fabulously wealthy?” a woman asked. “I can spell both words,” DeLillo said.

  3 “Piss off Ryan Adams, win a prize!” (Oct. 17) The tale of Ryan Adams’ response to a fan who shouted out for Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69”—Adams screaming, demanding the house lights be turned on, identifying the offender, paying him $30 as a refund for his ticket and refusing to play until the guy left the hall—even made it into Time. But not the response of songwriter Robbie Fulks, on his Web site: “Any reader on this site who attends a Ryan Adams show and disrupts the show with a Bryan Adams song request will receive in return merchandise”—T-shirts and autographed CDs—“of his or her choice equal to the cost of the ticket, from my online store . . . please provide the date and location of the show, what you yelled, and what Ryan’s reaction was.”

  4–5 16 Horsepower, Folklore (Jetset) and Woven Hand, Woven Hand (Glitterhouse/G
ermany) In its best work, as with the 2000 Secret South, the Denver combo 16 Horsepower calls up the specter of itinerant preachers you can’t tell from thieves. It’s scary to believe David Eugene Edwards’ voice—it can be scarier not to. But Folklore lacks all conviction—and no one can get away with sounding bored with a song as good as the Carter Family’s “Single Girl,” let alone with Hank Williams’ “Alone and Forsaken.” Edwards could have been saving it all for his solo project Woven Hand—here, from the first notes, a banjo clattering as if the distant past is rushing forward so fast the future will be defenseless against it, nothing is certain. You understand what it means to wander in the desert, abandoned by God and hating every human face, and you wonder why such a life sounds so rich.

  6 Ramsay Midwood, Shoot Out at the OK Chinese Restaurant (Vanguard) Whether Midwood has a degree in creative writing from Harvard or was born in a graveyard in Alabama, he’s selling weirdo country shtick. But he’s also got Skip Edwards playing organ. “Monster Truck” is going nowhere until a descending wash of sound takes you out of the performance, and suddenly you’re floating down a river on a raft; nothing is happening in “Fisherman’s Friend” until there’s this odd little squeak, and then a new, wordless voice is singing the song, with humor and depth, and a momentum that seems to have come out of a need or a desire nothing in the music has even hinted at is burning off the pose. Strange.

  7 Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Irving Plaza, New York (Oct. 15) On their 2001 EP this New York trio was rough, sardonic, pulling an anthem, “Our Time,” out of the ground: “Our time / To be hated!” singer Karen O chanted. This night, opening for Sleater-Kinney, all they had were gestures, and by the time they got to “Our Time,” the last song, it felt like not even the band believed a word it said.

  8 “Ferus,” at Gagosian Gallery, New York (Sept. 12–Oct. 19) In a celebration of the revolutionary Los Angeles Ferus Gallery, which from 1957 to 1967 showed many of the most surprising works by Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn and Ed Keinholz, the most powerful piece was an unusual Andy Warhol Triple Elvis from 1963. Back then, Ferus mounted a whole show of Warhol Elvises, using the giant panels to make a labyrinth the visitor had to find a way through. Unlike most Triple Elvis works, the one in the Gagosian showed not three separate versions of Elvis from the movie Flaming Star—Elvis in cowboy gear, pointing a gun out at the world, his body hunched, his black-rimmed eyes falling into his face—but only two. On the right side of the piece there was a single, stable image. On the left there was a single image with a shadow breaking out of it, as if the Elvises were shaking, about to come apart. As Elvis’ body separated from itself, the terrified blankness in his eyes was more alive than ever.

  9 Chieftains, Down the Old Plank Road: The Nashville Sessions (RCA) Backing such outsider-country names as Alison Krauss, Lyle Lovett, Martina McBride, Vince Gill, Buddy and Julie Miller, Gillian Welch and Patty Griffin, plus Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck and John Hiatt, the hallowed Irish quintet leads them through the thickets of such great numbers as Dock Boggs’ “Country Blues” and Uncle Dave Macon’s “Way Down the Old Plank Road,” into a land of such blandness you can barely tell you’re listening, let alone to who or what. It’s an acting out of America as, “Well, whether or not there’s always something better over the next hill, you’re probably better off not knowing.” I blame the Chieftains; no one else here has ever been so dull.

  10 Bob Dylan, “Train of Love,” from Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Songs of Johnny Cash (Lucky Dog) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Dylan almost never does good work on them, but here, surrounded by Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle (it’s against the law to make a tribute album without him), Travis Tritt, Keb’ Mo’, the unspeakable Hank Williams Jr., Bruce Springsteen, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris and Rosanne Cash, he gets real, real gone, though not before pausing to wave goodbye: “I used to sing this song before I ever wrote a song,” Dylan says before “Train of Love.” “I also want to thank you for standing up for me, way back when.” Way back in 1965, onstage at the Newport Folk Festival, where, as the current revisionist line has it, nothing actually happened.

  NOVEMBER 18, 2002

  1–2 8 Mile, directed by Curtis Hanson (Universal) and Eminem, “Lose Yourself,” on Music From and Inspired by the Motion Picture “8 Mile” (Sony/Interscope)

  The picture is alive to Eminem’s presence, and he is alive to the picture, seeming to withdraw from the camera even as he pulls its eye toward him. Taking the viewer through a few days in the life of a white Detroit rapper in a black milieu—the adventures of a young man whose attempts to step out of oblivion are at best wary and at worst, and most believable, terrified—Eminem gives a performance that is all gravity. When the movie ends, there is a sense that it has, in fact, ended—that the movie has caught its own story.

  Then “Lose Yourself” begins to play under the closing credits, and in an instant it blows the film away. The music dissolves the movie, reveals it as a lie, a cheat, as if it were made not to reveal but to cover up the seemingly bottomless pit of resentment and desire that is the story’s true source. Again and again the piece all but blows up in the face of the man who’s chanting it, Eminem lost in his rhymes until suddenly people are shouting at him from every direction and the music jerks him into the chorus, which he escapes in turn. The piece builds into crescendos of power, climbing ladders of refusal and willfulness step by step, rushing nothing, never reaching the top because it is the music itself that has put the top so high.

  It’s Eminem’s greatest single recording, but it’s more than that. As with Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” the Miracles’ “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” the Rolling Stones’ “Gimmie Shelter” or Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it’s one of those moments in pop music that throws off everything around it, setting a new standard, offering a new challenge, proving that, now, you, whoever you are, can say anything, and with a beauty no one can gainsay. That’s what’s happening here. The cutting contest at the end of 8 Mile is a small thing compared to the cutting contest “Lose Yourself” throws down on pop music as such.

  3–5 Goyard, 233, rue St. Honoré, Paris (Oct. 27) You hear postwar jazz in any even vaguely expensive place in Paris. An otherwise painfully quiet restaurant features an entire Johnny Hodges live album; a hotel on the site of the fabled Tabou nightclub, once the haunt of Boris Vian, Juliet Gréco and Miles Davis, now offers a live trio, or disembodied voices determined to simultaneously mine the legacy and smooth it away. But in a posh luggage shop, empty except for a customer and a salesman, someone had programmed jazz chart toppers—though, really, it was only Peggy Lee’s 1958 “Fever” that allowed you to hear Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1956 version of the Merle Travis folk song “Sixteen Tons” as jazz.

  With both recordings the orchestration was so spare it was almost spectral, something you imagined rather than heard. You could picture each performer lit by a single spot, otherwise in complete darkness on his or her nightclub stage, moving so minimally that the slightest gesture would communicate as a promise or a threat. Except for Ford’s big final chorus, nothing was even dramatized. The recordings were about bringing out a single, unique taleteller, removing everything else from the world the song made, leaving nothing but the hipster smile in the first word and the orgasmic smear of the last of Lee’s “ Daddy-O don’t you dare,” nothing but the throwaway snap in Ford’s “A lotta men didn’t, a lotta men died.” The songs stayed in the air; after these one-of-a-kinds, Bobby Troup’s 1946 “Route 66” was just sweeping up.

  6 Bubblegum Babylon (VH-1, debuting Nov. 24) From west of Philadelphia, Widmerpool reports on a “ ‘history’ of pop pop-music, which the show seems to think began with David Cassidy and culminated in Britney”: “At one point, Danny Bonaduce says that at the
height of the Partridge Family’s popularity, on tour, ‘It was like Saddam Hussein—you had to keep moving from safe-house to safe-house.’ After this context was placed in my mind, I wondered what stopped the producers from spirit-gluing a beard onto the also-interviewed Monkee Peter Tork, so he could do his uncanny Osama bin Laden impersonation. The repulsively casual pop-group/Hussein comparison gave a new perspective to the Dick Van Dyke episode in which Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore provide a ‘safe-house’ for British invasion hitmakers Chad and Jeremy. Except C & J didn’t ask DVD or MTM to kiss their armpits in fealty; I bet Peter and Gordon would have.”

  7 Varin Frères (Amédée and Eugène), Reims, cathèdrale, gargouille et jeune homme en casquette, vers 1854, in “Chefs d’Ouevres de la Collection Photographique de la Musée d’Orsay” (Paris, through Feb. 23) In a passageway high in the cathedral, near a gargoyle, a man in a white shirt, dark pants, a scarf around his neck and a dark cap with a big bill slouches against a wall, right hand on his hip, left hand on his knee. It’s perhaps the earliest photograph ever made of ’50s cool—of Marlon Wild One Brando-James Rebel Without a Cause Dean-Elvis leaning-against-a-motorcycle Presley cool. Eighteen-fifties cool.

  8 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), directed by Don Siegel (Ojai Playhouse, Ojai, Calif., Oct. 19) Muzot (Genevieve Yue) writes: “Stars Dana Wynter and Kevin McCarthy were there for a brief Q&A session at the end. The screening itself was disappointing—a DVD instead of 35 mm, a false start in the Spanish language option and an uncomfortable shoebox theater preserved as a historical landmark—but I had the great experience of watching the movie with a group of junior high school students, a few rows in front of me, who were seeing it for the first time. No real fright, but plenty of giggling and cheering. When the actors stepped up, Dana Wynter looked blankly at the audience and declared herself a card-carrying pod. Kevin McCarthy scanned the theater suspiciously, everything about him gruff, and, speaking to no one in particular, said, ‘Are they all pods? No! We have to do it again.’ Not everyone knew how to react; it stung like an accusation, a familiar panic that wasn’t so easy to laugh at. I got the feeling this had become his line, worn not like the flat joke of an aged actor but a reminder of what made his warnings in the film so powerful to begin with, a sounding of the voice from the hills.”