Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  Moment to moment, incident to incident, song by song, others stepped into Kidney’s, or Lynch’s, shoes: Syd Straw, sitting at the diner table alone, her head in her hands, the weight of her fatigue capsizing the theatrics of the men on the stage like Peggy Lipton’s Twin Peaks waitress at the end of her shift; Thomas sitting at a desk with a manual typewriter, crumpled paper, and what looked like a week-old sandwich as if he were Jack Nance in Eraserhead, clenching his teeth as if that would force thoughts out of his clotted brain; and, everywhere, a sense of time as something used up somewhere in the past, by someone else.

  The difference between Lynch’s American towns and the decaying towns on and off Thomas’s Lost Highway—the phrase repeated so often it finally fell somewhere between a prayer and a brand name—was that in the darkest, most dead-end actions Thomas orchestrated in Los Angeles, there was always the sense that they were a setup, that all together they made a story which, when you heard the punch line, you would understand as a joke. When on the last night the 49-year-old Thomas gave his all to Rocket from the Tombs’ adolescent lament “Final Solution,” it didn’t end up so far from Dion and the Belmonts’ “Teenager in Love.” But the punch line never came, unless it was the last line of “Nightdriving,” somewhere in Mirror Man, I think, as if Thomas was floating across all the chanting voices, incantations, and reverb guitar of the night before and the night to come: “See ya around, sucker!”—the second syllable of the third word cracking like a whip, like a grin as big as the room.

  JUNE 25, 2003

  1 John Mellencamp, Trouble No More (Columbia) Old songs, old singer, fresh sound: Mellencamp turns Dicky Do and the Don’ts’ obscure 1959 doo-wop “Teardrops Will Fall” into stupendous backwoods rockabilly, with fiddle playing by Miriam Sturm that shoots up from inside the music like the wind Toni Marcus blew through Van Morrison’s “Full Force Gale.” Taken up in the last few years by David Johansen as well as the White Stripes, Son House’s “Death Letter” is now some kind of subterranean pop hit; in Mellencamp’s version there’s a shift halfway through its six minutes—Michael Ramos’s organ coming in to let you know that the reality of death is setting in, that the singer too is now sliding toward death—that is so sure, so unafraid of itself musically and so terrified of itself morally, that the song leaves the pop world and goes right back to the dead man who wrote it. And yet, with good covers of compositions by Robert Johnson, Hoagy Carmichael, or Willie Dixon flashing by, it’s “To Washington”—a modest rewrite of “White House Blues,” a 1926 Charley Poole number about the McKinley assassination—that may cut the deepest. The first verses, setting the scene of the last presidential election, seem timeless, as if they’re taking place far in the past; the final verses, about the Iraq war, are the sort of protest lyrics that don’t outlast the time it takes to sing them. But it’s the melody, picked out on mandolin by Mike Wanchic—the traditional power of the melody, the way it anchors the theft of Florida in 2000 in a murder that took place in 1901—that makes the tune hurt, filling it with sadness, loss, betrayal, defeat.

  2 Wisegirls, directed by David Anspaugh (Lions Gate) Made in 2001, starring Mira Sorvino, Melora Waters, and Mariah Carey as waitresses in a Staten Island mob joint, this film went straight to video. Is that because Carey is faster, more obscene, and tougher than any woman in The Sopranos?

  3 William Burroughs, Junky: The 50th Anniversary Definitive Edition (Penguin) Modern pre-history from Burroughs in Mexico in about 1950, learning “the new hipster vocabulary” from “refugee” junkies: “ ‘Cool’ [is] an all-purpose word indicating anything you like or any situation that is not hot with the law. Conversely, anything you don’t like is ‘uncool.’ From listening to these characters I got a picture of the situation in the U.S. A state of complete chaos where you never know who is who or where you stand.”

  4 Alan Garthright, “No-Fly List Ensnares Innocent Travelers” (San Francisco Chronicle, June 8) “In their efforts to prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11 tragedy, the U.S. government and the airline industry are relying on software so outdated it can’t distinguish between the last name of Osama bin Laden and punk rocker Johnny Rotten Lydon. . . . Many airlines rely on name-searching software derived from ‘Soundex,’ a 120-year-old indexing system first used in the 1880 census. It was designed to help census clerks quickly index and retrieve sound-alike surnames with different spellings—like ‘Rogers’ and ‘Rodgers’ or ‘Somers’ and ‘Summers’—that would be scattered in an alphabetical list. Soundex gives each name a key using its first letter and dropping the vowels and giving number codes to similar sounding [consonants] (like ‘S’ and ‘C’). The system gives the same code, L350, for ‘Laden’ and all similar-sounding names: Lydon, Lawton, and Leedham.”

  In other words, it’s right on target for Antichrists.

  5 The New Pornographers, Bimbo’s (San Francisco, June 9) The songs—“It’s Only Divine Right,” “Letter from an Occupant”—were rockets. On “The Laws Have Changed,” as Carl Newman boosted Neko Case’s somersaulting lead singing with falsetto chirps, flags flew. The band—with keyboard player Blaine Thurier twirling his left arm when he just couldn’t stop himself and Kurt Dahle smiling over the hardest bass drum sound you’ll ever hear—was its own air raid siren, and the message was All Clear.

  6 The Riverboat Gamblers, Something to Crow About (Gearhead) From Denton, Texas: Beatle-era punk—the Knickerbockers with “Lies,” say—with a thrash follow-through, like the Descendants’ “Weinerschnitzel.” On “Ice Water” or “Catch Your Eye” they can make you believe the style was invented yesterday. That they take it all back on the last cut, with what starts off as a rewrite of Santo and Johnny’s 1958 “Sleep Walk,” only means they’ll do slow dancing if you ask politely.

  7 The Squids, Tracy Hall (Norwich, Vermont, May 30) The Magic Rat (Steve Weinstein) reports: “Prominently noted on poster advertising a benefit show: ‘Alcohol and Smoke Free. Please bring a clean pair of shoes to protect the dance floor.’ ”

  8 Ben Harper, “With My Own Two Hands” from Diamonds on the Inside (Virgin) People used to attack Sting for his fake Jamaican accent; how does Harper get away with it? First by coming on like the god Denis Johnson said Bob Marley would turn into, then playing the Joan Osborne slob-like-the-rest-of-us Jesus.

  9 Larry Clark, Punk Picasso (Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York; through June 28) New York Eye (Emily Marcus) writes: “Clark made his name with the speed-freak photos in Tulsa in 1971 and the film Kids in 1995; his first gallery show in five years is a collection of mementos that illustrate his life with embarrassing intimacy. There’s no wall text or labels for correspondence and talismans (for Roger Maris, Sonny Liston, Bruce Lee), for old records (Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues, Bob Dylan’s “George Jackson”) both mounted and playing through the gallery speakers. A torn piece of paper with a quote from Blake shares space with a clipping about the execution of three Arkansas serial killers and shots of a young Clark and his Tulsa friends giving each other blow jobs and shooting up. What makes Clark’s photos and films powerful is the clarity of his voyeurism: his palpable lust. On the walls, the uncoordinated elements of Clark as kid, family man, and shock-artist go a long way toward depicting the whole man—and still do little to lessen the primary affront of his work.”

  10 A wedding at Gale Mansion, Minneapolis (May 25) DJ Joel Stitzel’s repertoire went back and forth between classic soul (Betty Banks’s 1964 original of “Go Now,” Aretha Franklin’s 1967 “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)”) and older group sounds: the Chantels’ 1958 “Maybe” never sounded richer. And as the music for the bride and groom’s first dance “Love Theme from The Godfather” never sounded stranger. “Just this one time, I’ll let you ask me about my affairs,” said one guest after another.

  JULY 16, 2003

  1 Patti Smith at Martin Luther King Jr. Park, Berkeley (June 15) Smith and Boots Riley of the Coup were performing in support of International A.N.S.W.E.R., a group affiliated with the Workers
World Party, the left-fascist sect that uses Ramsey Clark as its dummy and the Palestinian Intifada as its true cause. It being Father’s Day, Smith dedicated “ People Have the Power” to her father. He was gone, she said—but there was still Ralph Nader, “ father to us all.” Or, as Paul Berman, author of the recent Terror and Liberalism, wrote two days earlier in Salon of the Nader cult, “I interpret the Green Party as a movement of the middle and upper-middle class, as actually having a certain satisfaction with the way things are—which is to say, the reason you should vote for the Greens is because you want to feel the excitement of political engagement, the adventure of it, but you don’t really care what it’s going to mean for other people if the Republicans get elected.” You’re voting not as a member of a polity, where each citizen is presumed tied to every other; you’re voting to place yourself above not only your fellow citizens, but above the democratic ritual that presumes to make a republic. You’re voting to affirm your own purity—like voting Republican, as Krist Novoselic put it when Nirvana was first accused of selling out, “so you can get tax breaks. Now that’s sold out.”

  2 Bob Dylan in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (Sony Pictures) Widmerpool (a.k.a. Ken Tucker) writes in: “Not on the KICK-ASS soundtrack album to this KICK-ASS movie—who needs him there, when you’ve got Nickelback and Kid Rock collaborating on a KICK-ASS version of Elton’s ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’? No, Dylan sneaks in during the scene in which a KICK-ASS Drew Barrymore gathers her belongings to leave Angel headquarters, and we clearly see that one of her few cherished possessions is a vinyl copy of Bringing It All Back Home. So the real mystery of the movie is, who wanted that product placement in a film filled with shots plugging Cingular Wireless and Body By Demi? My guess? Crispin Glover had been using the album on the set to get himself in the mood to play a bitter, religion-warped mute, and director McG did what he does best, which is stealing cultural totems and reducing them to throwaway junk-jokes that make the viewer feel as though the ASS of anything in life that matters has been KICKED.”

  3 Trailer Bride, Hope Is a Thing With Feathers (Bloodshot) When Melissa Swingle, leader of this country band, plays her saw, it sounds like a theremin. Brief snatches of psychedelic guitar by Tim Barnes are like an opening into another world. As on the modest, painful 1999 Whine de Lune and the 2001 High Seas, Swingle is laconically miserable. But she no longer sounds convinced she’s saying anything anyone needs to hear.

  4 Liz Phair, “H.W.C.” on Liz Phair (Capitol) When in the only tune here that raises itself above water Phair puts what might as well be spam porn (you know: “OUR SLUTS CAN’T WAIT TO DRINK YOUR HOT WHITE CUM”) on top of candy-cane sound, it’s like watching Barbies fucking. You can call that radical displacement, or you can call it spam.

  5 DJ Shadow, Diminishing Returns Party Pak (bootleg) For the second of two discs drawn from BBC jockey John Peel’s March 29 show: a 40-minute collage of apparent examples of 1965–73 California pop, Fairport Convention–style folk rock, and British post-Beatle-isms. It’s all so stylistically third-hand and discographically obscure that you imagine only Shadow can still name the tunes—even if anyone can hear the desire and idealism that seem coded in their forms.

  6 David Carr, “Major Stars Not So Crucial as Concept Trumps Celebrity” (New York Times, June 23) “Musical stardom has always been a very calculated affair,” Carr writes. “Elvis might have been just another hillbilly if it were not for Col. Tom Parker.” It’s been true for decades that white male Southerners are the last class one can denigrate in polite company, but would this sneer have appeared in the New York Times if Alabamian Howell Raines were still the editor?

  7 Jeff Tamarkin, Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane (Atria) “Moby Grape chugged along only for a couple of years before circumstances did the band in.” From the Whatever school of rock history.

  8–9 Sly and the Family Stone, “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa” (1971) on The Essential Sly and the Family Stone (Epic Legacy) and Skip James, “Cypress Grove Blues” on She Lyin’ (Genes, 1964) or Complete 1931 Recordings in Chronological Order (Document) The Mississippi bluesman and the San Francisco dandy, speaking the same language: the high, faraway moan of one man calling out from the dead, telling the other not to join him.

  10 Penelope Houston, “The American in Me” and “Scum” at “Stand Up and Be Counted: Howard Dean Declaration Celebration Party” (Hyatt Regency Hotel, San Francisco, June 23) In 1977 “The American in Me” was the torn flag flown by the Avengers, the best punk band in San Francisco and probably the nation. With a teenage Houston at the mic, you can hear the song on Died for Your Sins (Lookout!). It’s scabrous, self-loathing, crude, undeniable, a thing in itself, with “Kennedy was murdered by the FBI!” slamming into “It’s the American in me that makes me watch TV!” as if one was the other. Twenty-six years later, Houston, now a folk singer, was asked to sing “The American in Me” by a Dean worker she met at a protest against the new FCC regulations on media consolidation. Performing with guitarist Pat Johnson, she dropped the Kennedy line: “Here I am at a presidential rally singing about the assassination of a president—what if something happened to Dean later? How would that feel? It’s all red, white, and blue—mostly white and blue—and I’ve got this inverted soundbite about Kennedy.” She also left out a verse about live television coverage of the Symbionese Liberation Army hideout burning to the ground in Los Angeles in 1974: “It seemed dated—but it’s happening now more than ever. People numbed by an image. An image seen over and over until it becomes meaningless.” But this night “The American in Me” was a statement of pride—with “Scum,” from Houston’s 1999 Tongue (Reprise—included on Houston’s Eighteen Stories Down retrospective), dedicated to the man Howard Dean hopes to oppose.

  AUGUST 6, 2003

  1 Hem, Rabbit Songs (Dreamworks reissue) From Brooklyn, this set of nihilist love letters—originally released independently in 2001—keeps company with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Denis Johnson’s novel Jesus’ Son, Sarah McLachlan’s “Sweet Surrender,” and the old American ballads in which the singer narrates his or her own death. In a clear, sweet, altogether assured voice, Sally Ellyson sings Dan Messé’s songs of abasement and ruin less as if she’s looking back on folly than helplessly anticipating it. Violin, viola, cello, and piano carry her into the songs like a stream carrying a piece of wood—there’s no will here, no struggle, not even a wave as again and again the people in these tunes go down, somehow rising to the surface every time.

  2 Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux) “Maybe it could work after all, this act of total madness,” thinks a young black woman in her parents’ home in Philadelphia in 1939; to their horror, she is about to marry the German-Jewish refugee physicist she met in the crowd at Marian Anderson’s historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial that same year, arranged by Eleanor Roosevelt after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the black contralto from their Constitution Hall. “Maybe they could make an America more American than the one the country has for centuries lied to itself about being.” The Time of Our Singing is the story of these two people and their three children—the tale of the evanescent success and crushing defeat of the America the parents want by the America they mean to transcend—and the most ambitious and fully realized novel I’ve read since Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. After Powers’s last several novels—increasingly airless, didactic tracts about science and social wrongs—it’s a shock.

  3 Pearl Jam with Corin Tucker, “Hunger Strike,” Sports Palace (Mexico City, July 18) Eddie Vedder leads, and then Tucker subsumes him. As she pushes the words of the old Temple of the Dog number in front of her in a deep, thick voice, the performance finds its feet somewhere between Guns N’ Roses’ “Civil War” and Robert Plant and Sandy Denny’s duet on Led Zeppelin’s “ Battle of Evermore.”

  4 “John F. Kennedy Jr.’s Life Was Cut Short Four Years Ago in a Plane Crash. What If He Had Li
ved?” (headlines for a cover story by Edward Klein, Parade, July 13) The bad faith, the lies, the corruption—all of it would be gone, of course.

  5 Fleetwood Mac, Oakland Coliseum Arena (Oakland, July 23) They’ll never escape Rumours, but new songs didn’t sound new or old. “What’s the World Coming To” brought the night to life; “Say You Will” sealed it. The words are trite, it’ll make millions when it’s franchised, and the chorus is a whirlpool, pulling you in. “Someone once said, ‘When love is gone, there’s always justice, and when justice is gone, there’s always force,’ ” Lindsey Buckingham said, introducing “Peacekeeper,” which comes off as a middle-of-the-night meditation on the Iraq war. I don’t think Laurie Anderson is going to mind his turning “O Superman” into folk wisdom.

  6 “The Pinko Behind Little Richard”—or Your Freedom of Information Act at Work (e-mail from Dave Marsh, July 21) Bumps Blackwell (1918–85) was a founder of rock ‘n’ roll. He produced Sam Cooke’s early pop records, Guitar Slim, Lloyd Price, Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”; co-wrote “Reddy Teddy,” “Rip It Up,” and “Long Tall Sally”; in 1981 he co-produced Bob Dylan’s “Shot of Love.” Dave Marsh writes: “His FBI file identifies him as a member of the Young Communist League in Seattle c. 1943. He joined because he was fired from the Seattle Tacoma Shipyards on the grounds that he was a Negro; in essence, the Communist Party got him his job back: the campaign included a benefit dance called ‘Jive Bombers Swing into the Second Front Stomp.’ ‘On Blackwell’s return to his job,’ the file reads, ‘many white young workers personally approached him expressing their support and welcoming him back to his job.’ Blackwell was already a musician and is further alleged to have been attending CP ‘hootenannies . . .’ ”