Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  9 Northern State, Dying in Stereo (Northern State) I wouldn’t say a word against a Long Island hip-hop trio with an MC who calls herself Hesta Prynne—except that with that name she’s going to have to deliver stronger stuff than the charming “The country’s getting ugly, and there’s more in store / But don’t blame me, ’cause I voted for Gore.” Something like—

  10 Election flyer, www.moveonpac.org (Princeton University, Nov. 5) “REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME—VOTE”

  DECEMBER 9, 2002

  1 Announcement (Madison Square Garden, Nov. 11) For years, the same voice has opened every show with the same phrase, squashing the name at the end into one word: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Columbia recording artist, BOB DYLAN!” Last Aug. 9, though, a piece appeared in the Buffalo News in anticipation of a Dylan date in Hamburg, N.Y. It led with a paragraph recapitulating Dylan’s career. As print it was boilerplate—but to hear that paragraph now, appropriated as Dylan’s official new introduction, was pure media shock. It’s the displacement that takes place when the conventions of one form are shoved into the conventions of another form: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock ’n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the ’60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the ’70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to find Jesus, and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’90s. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan!”

  2 “Masters of War” (MSG, Nov. 11) In 1991, with the Gulf War underway, Dylan stepped onto the stage at the Grammys telecast with his band. They were to play before Jack Nicholson presented Dylan with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The combo dove into a blithering, all-stops-out piece of rhythm, Dylan smearing every word into a single sound. It was “Masters of War,” from 1963, Dylan’s best, and most unforgiving, antiwar song—but you couldn’t necessarily tell. The song was buried in its performance, as if history were its true audience.

  With a second Gulf War looming, there was no disguise when, seven songs into the first of two New York shows, Dylan gathered his small band into a half-circle for an acoustic, almost chamber-music version. Played very slowly, very deliberately, the performance made you understand just how good the song is. It wasn’t a matter of relevance. You could imagine that if the last war on earth had occurred 39 years ago—if the song had, by its very appearance, ended war—the song would still speak, just as a 7,000-year-old god excavated in Jordan and recently installed in the Louvre is still speaking, reminding you of what you came from, of who you once were.

  3 Cover: Elvis Costello’s “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” 1977 (MSG, Nov. 11) He didn’t sing about the shoes; having apparently invested more wisely than the angels, he wore them.

  4 CD: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5: Live 1975—The Rolling Thunder Revue (Columbia) Confusion in almost every vocal, a pound of sugar in almost every arrangement. Right, the famous “donned makeup in the ’70s” period.

  5 Paul Muldoon, “Bob Dylan at Princeton, November 2000,” from “Do You, Mr. Jones?”—Bob Dylan With the Poets and Professors, ed. Neil Corcoran (Chatto & Windus, U.K.) Muldoon is a poet (author most recently of Moy Sand and Gravel), co-author of Warren Zevon’s recent “My Ride’s Here” and a professor at Princeton. Leading off this new essay collection with a new poem, Muldoon goes back to the show Dylan played at Princeton in 2000—which took place in Princeton’s Dillon Gym. “ ‘You know what, honey? We call that a homonym,’ ” the narrator of the poem says to the woman he’s with as the concert starts. Then Dylan’s only previous appearance at Princeton enters the poem—in 1970, when Dylan was present not to play but to accept an honorary degree. “ ‘He wouldn’t wear a hood,’ ” the narrator of the poem remembers. “ ‘You know what, honey? We call that disquietude.’ ”

  6 Cover: George Harrison’s “Something,” 1969 (MSG, Nov. 13) A final encore, done very straight. Musicians love this song; they admire the ability to craft anything that’s at once generic, anonymous and likely to generate income for a hundred years.

  7 “Summer Days” (MSG, Nov. 11) In a perfect world, this would be the turnaround cut on a live album called “Having a Rave-Up With Bob Dylan!”

  8 “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” (MSG, Nov. 11) Dylan’s first performance of the song since he recorded it with the Hawks in a basement of a big pink house in upstate New York 35 years ago. Two of the five who were there then are dead. The house was recently on the market as a prime Dylan collectible. The tune still blew the air of pure American fedupness: “Pack up the meat, sweet, we’re headin’ out.”

  9 “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (MSG, Nov. 11) From 1965. The audience always waits to cheer for “Sometimes even the president of the United States must have to stand naked.” By now the song has outlasted almost as many presidents as Fidel Castro: Lyndon Johnson (no problem, for a man who liked to receive guests while sitting on the toilet), Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton (who as president was stripped naked, and who you can imagine singing the line to himself) and now George W. Bush. The line took nothing away from the last man on the list; he lives in the armor of his own entitlement.

  10 “All Along the Watchtower” (MSG, Nov. 11) The second of two encores, it began very strangely, with guitarist Charlie Sexton rolling a few spare notes that seemed to call up a distant western—Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, maybe, with Neil Young’s improvised and timeless guitar soundtrack. It was in fact the opening of Ferrante & Teicher’s 1961 twin-piano hit “Theme From Exodus,” from the movie based on Leon Uris’ 1958 novel about the creation of the state of Israel. Whether you caught the reference or not, it took the song about to emerge from its own history—one of Dylan’s most world-ending, from 1968, a year that over and over again felt like the end of the world—out of itself. Now the song was going to speak with a new voice: that was the promise that little introduction made.

  It was impossible to imagine that Dylan ever played the song with more vehemence, or that, this night, six days after the midterm congressional elections, the performance was not utterly political, as much a protest song as “Masters of War.” Not when, after Dylan, Sexton and guitarist Larry Campbell led an overwhelming instrumental climb through the tune’s themes following the closing verse, Dylan came back to the mike to sing the opening verse again in a wild voice, throwing the last lines across the seats and out of the hall like a curse: “Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth / None of them, along the line, know what—any—any of it—any of it is—worth.”

  JANUARY 2, 2003

  1 Mendoza Line, “Sleep of the Just,” from Almost You: The Songs of Elvis Costello (Glurp) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? This one is really terrible—and the Atlanta band’s view all the way into one of Costello’s greatest recordings ranks with Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and DJ Shadow’s The Private Press as the most undeniable sound of the year.

  Maybe it was always obvious that the song is about the gang-rape of a local girl at an army base, with the woman looking back: “The soldier asked my name and did I come here very often / Well, I thought that he was asking me to dance.” Maybe the song was always about the woman cherishing his death when his company’s transport vehicle is blown up: he’s getting the sleep of the just, all right, the big sleep. In Costello’s performance, though, the beauty of the composition makes the story into a fable, and the people in it float like ghosts.

  Shannon McArdle is all flesh, still trying to wash off the stains after all these years. She makes her voice small and flat for the difficult shifts in timbre, removing any hint of professionalism. She’s as off-the-street as the woman in the middle of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” and the naturalism of the performance—carried from the beginning by a solemn church organ that is even more damning when it plays pop changes—is almost unbearable. The woman has her satisfaction over the so
ldier’s death, but that’s all she has. He and the rest took everything else.

  That a woman is singing makes all the difference. Costello himself could go all the way into the song, but McArdle goes out the other side.

  2 Boomtown Rats, “I Don’t Like Mondays” (Columbia, 1980) Southern Tip reports from Tierra del Fuego, Argentina: “ ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ was playing in a cab in Ushuaia. It sounded better than ever. I asked the driver to turn it up and told the person I was with he couldn’t talk. It made me think that radio is the farthest reaching, most democratic medium for art there is. How bad can it be to live in the southernmost city in the world, which is on an island—a city that to reach by car you have to cross the Straits of Magellan and twice cross the Chilean border—how bad can it be when the DJ plays ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’?”

  3 Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer, 24 (Fox, Tuesdays) If Bill Clinton was not, as Toni Morrison famously claimed, the first black president, then Dennis Haysbert—who has, for reasons not unrelated to the racism that is the deep sub-text of the Palmer character, received far more praise for his Sidney Poitier turn in the lifeless Far From Heaven than for his work here—is playing the first black Bill Clinton. It’s in his apparent naiveté, the way he carries his size, and most of all in the angry self-control in his face as he realizes once again that he’s been betrayed by one of his own, whatever “his own” means. As his estranged wife Sherry has been arguing since halfway through the show’s first season, there’s no such thing.

  4 New Order, Retro (Warner Bros., 1980–2002) Across four CDs of hits, remixes and live recordings, it doesn’t matter that the Manchester dance band’s 1983 “Blue Monday” remains the biggest selling 12-inch single ever. Compared to the Shep Pettibone mix of the 1986 “Bizarre Love Triangle” (where again and again, in moments memory can’t hold, the sound shifts faster than a fast cut in a film), “Blue Monday” remains a soap jingle. And compared to the full, 8 minute 41 second version of the 1982 “Temptation,” probably the best 12-inch single ever made (a journey comparable to the Boz Scaggs/Duane Allman version of “Loan Me a Dime,” moving from delirium to contemplation and, so violently, back again), the Shep Pettibone remix of “Bizarre Love Triangle” is very nice.

  5 Touré, The Portable Promised Land (Little, Brown) The author bio promises the Brooklyn writer’s first novel, Soul City, “soon enough,” but the best of the stories in this first collection are pieces of a novel reaching for each other, then backing away. There’s a lot of padding—credibility lists of negritude on the order of “The African-American Aesthetics Hall of Fame,” or “101 Elements of Blackness (Things That’ll Make You Say: ‘Yes! That There’s Some Really Black Shit!’)” that were done better in Darius James’ That’s Blaxploitation! There are stories that don’t take off. But the book drops all pose for the mystery of what happens when the borders between black and white begin to dissolve. In “Attack of the Love Dogma,” “The Playground of the Ecstatically Blasé,” the three-part “Black Widow Story,” “The Commercial Channel” and “They’re Playing My Song” Touré stops moving characters like toy soldiers and lets them move him. “The Black Widow Story” is a superhero comic book, a trash race novel, Chester Himes influenced by Lester Bangs—you have no idea what will come next. Is Charisma Donovan, high-school queen turned femme fatale turned porn star, a version of the Black Widow, a white woman who becomes the female Tupac “on a dare after drama class,” or are they the same person—and could either tell if either were? “You remember,” Touré says as he sets the scene, “how things were last summer when Jamais was brand-new and like, the only thing the city was talking about. The French Bistro décor. The barefoot girl in the glass case behind the bar sitting on a pillow reading Paradise Lost, all night every night . . .”—and somehow you do remember. You’re right there. And you don’t like it when the author lets you go, too soon.

  6 Joshua Clover, “Modest $100 Million Proposals, for Better or Verse” (Village Voice, Nov. 27–Dec. 3) On the $100 million-plus gift by rejected amateur poet Ruth Lily to Poetry Magazine: after three sensible notions on what to do with the money (“lobby for pro-education candidates,” “buy a million poetry books every year and give them away,” “free medical coverage to every poet accepted for publication”), Clover pulls out the stops. Such ideas, he says, “would burn a tiny fraction of the bequest: Instead of investing the remainder, Poetry could secede from the Union, purchase the Republic of the Marshall Islands (GDP: $99 million), and appoint their very own poet laureate, who would then meet the U.S. laureate in a battle to the death, wreaking unfathomable destruction across the landscape.”

  7 The Jimmy Show, written and directed by Frank Whaley (First Look Pictures) Whaley as a New Jersey man with a dead-end job who lives for open-mike nights at local comedy clubs, where the heartfelt cry “YOU SUCK!” is the most response he ever gets. Or, Bruce Springsteen, the Bizarro Years.

  8 Johnny Cash, American IV: The Man Comes Around (American/Lost Highway) The fourth time around for the Old Man Sings New Guy Songs concept is not too many, especially when so many old songs are part of the show: could anyone else let the line “Sometimes in the saddle, I used to go gay” from “Streets of Laredo” slip by without a hint of self-consciousness? There are stunning duds, most notably a version of Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever (I Saw Your Face)” that reveals how horrible the song actually is (though there’s no footnote about how it inspired “Killing Me Softly,” which is even worse). Cash does best with a strong melody and a light, insistent beat—and here, with Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” he goes deeper into the composition than Trent Reznor ever did. As with U2’s “One” on his III, Cash understands the piece as a weight; he assumes it, and then, as you listen, lets it crush him. When V, VI or VII comes out posthumously, it won’t sound any more posthumous than this.

  9 Duke Mitchell, “The Lion,” from “Gimme Dat Harp Boy!”—The Roots of the Captain (Ozit Records) On a label named for the leading lights of London’s 1960s underground press, a heroically diverse collection of strange records that prophesied Captain Beefheart—a word like “influenced” is just too paltry—a very hot late ’50s–early ’60s fuzztone stomp. With the fuzztone played by saxophones.

  10 Homer Quincy Smith, “I Want Jesus to Talk With Me” (“Tangled Roots,” Princeton University, Nov. 23) At a conference on old-time music, Dean Blackwood of the “raw musics” reissue label Revenant talked about the idea of “phantom artists”: people whose names can be found on the labels of old 78s, but about whom nothing is known, including whether the names on the labels are real. He played a 1930 recording by Elvie Thomas, and the 50 or so people in attendance (including Brett and Rennie Sparks of the contemporary country Gothic duo the Handsome Family, whose performance would close the conference, and Tony Glover and John Koerner of the 40-year veteran Twin Cities roots band Koerner Ray & Glover, who had opened the event with their last concert—guitarist Dave Ray would die six days later) shook their heads in wonder.

  Blackwood played a 1926 Paramount release by Homer Quincy Smith and mouths dropped open in shock. “I want Jesus to walk with me”—a man sings in a slow, measured cadence, making it plain he understands how much he’s asking for. The performance begins with the tinny sound of a calliope, which as Smith’s voice goes down to the bottom of a mine turns into a huge pipe organ. At the end, Smith lets his voice rise, until it seems a thing in itself, on its way to Jesus, leaving the singer behind. Another participant had prepared a response to Blackwood’s presentation, but as an instance of the great game of “Follow that, motherfucker!” I never saw anything like it.

  JANUARY 20, 2003

  1 The Best News of the Week: “Arrest in Punk Singer’s ’93 Slaying” (Associated Press/San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 12) “SEATTLE—A Florida man has been arrested and charged with murder after DNA linked him to the death of rising punk-rock star Mia Zapata in 1993, police said.

  “Police said Jesus C. Mezquia, 48, was arrested la
te Friday in the Miami area. His DNA profile matched a sample taken from the crime scene more than nine years ago, police said.

  “Zapata, the 27-year-old lead singer of The Gits, was last seen alive July 7, 1993, in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Her beaten body was left on a street curb more than a mile away. She had been strangled with the drawstring of her Gits sweatshirt.

  “Police had no leads in the slaying. The Seattle music community—including its biggest names, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden—raised $70,000 to hire a private investigator, but eventually the funds dried up.”

  2 Donnas, Spend the Night (Atlantic) “Faster than sound,” as Big Brother and the Holding Company put it 35 years ago in San Francisco, up the Peninsula from the Donnas’ Palo Alto. But Big Brother didn’t have Skyline Boulevard in their blood. Speed-shifting on the Skyline turns at midnight, way above the Stanford hills, is just what the Donnas’ new music feels like—except when it feels like X in 1980, the punk band burning their song “Los Angeles” into the pavement like rubber. Today “You Wanna Get Me High” jumps off the radio, as familiar as weather, as much of a shock as lightning hitting your house. “Take It Off” is right behind. This is what rock ’n’ roll never forgets—or rather it’s what rock ’n’ roll always forgets, until people like Brett Anderson, Maya Ford, Torry Castellano and Allison Robertson find it.