by Greil Marcus
7 Warren Zevon, The Wind (Artemis) Last fall it was announced that Zevon had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Nothing on the old rounder’s putative farewell album can erase his version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which is not a joke.
8–9 Jeff Bridges in Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles (Sony Classics) and Masked and Anonymous—Music from the Motion Picture (Columbia) Bridges’s rock critic Tom Friend is trying to get an interview with Bob Dylan’s half-forgotten troubadour Jack Fate. Looming over Dylan like a rain cloud, Bridges has a list of questions but instead of asking them spins his own theories of what it all means without letting Dylan get a word in—except that the words coming out of Bridges’s mouth are words Dylan wrote: Woodstock, man. You weren’t there, were you? I was there. Hendrix, man, what he did. The mechanics. What he did to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Was that treason? I don’t think so. You could hear the tears in every note: “Love me, love me, I am a native son.” He was reaching back to his Founding Fathers. To the Pilgrims . . . Dylan stares at him and turns away, but what happens to Dylan’s own music in the film—with, say, Articolo 31’s “Come una pietra scalciata,” an Italian cut-up that’s no less violent or loving a treatment of “Like a Rolling Stone” than Hendrix’s version of the national anthem—is what happens here, what nearly all of the characters in the film are trying to do: in an America that has collapsed into dictatorship and racketeering, to connect with a way of life that has gone into the past, that no longer makes any sense.
10 Summer travel tips (e-mail, July 22) Michele Anna Jordan writes from Dallas: “The back of the ticket to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealy Plaza offers $2 off your purchase of $15 or more at the Spaghetti Warehouse on North Market St.”
AUGUST 27, 2003
1–4 Lady J on KALX-FM (Berkeley, August 18) Mondays 9 to noon is Lady J’s shift at the same college station that figures in Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, The Fortress of Solitude; this morning, she outdid herself. There was the Delmonas’ blitheringly happy version of the Premiers’ 1964 “Farmer John”—covered by Neil Young on Ragged Glory in 1990, but not before this all-female mid-’80s U.K. outfit got their hands on it. You can imagine the Slits at the mic and the crowd on Johnny Rivers’s “Secret Agent Man” as the audience, the singer telling Farmer John she’s in love with his daughter, the women in front of the stage holding their breath for the chance to scream “wheee!” for every “the way she walks,” not to mention every “the way she talks.” Then the Larks’ “Honey from the Bee,” gussiedup doo-wop from 1955, and the Aaron Sisters’ weird 1932 “She Came Rollin’ Down the Mountain,” from Flowers in the Wild-wood: Women in Early Country Music, 1923–1939. Singing unaccompanied, in a farm-girl accent so sharp you could hitch it up behind a mule and plow with it, the Aaron Sisters offer the tale of Nancy Brown, who throws over one suitor after another until she finds the man she’s been waiting for: “A city slicker with hundred dollar bills.” They live happily ever after, but Anny Celsi doesn’t, not on Lady J’s choice “ ’Twas Her Hunger Brought Me Down,” a song inspired by Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and released this year on Little Black Dress & Other Stories. Celsi is Hurstwood, narrating his own downfall; the singing is just past ordinary. The backing, except for a few archaic passages from a banjo, is perfunctory. The music is all in Celsi’s writing, which is direct, killing—“I took twenty thousand dollars/Where it went I can’t explain/I’d be richer if I’d thrown it from the train”—needing no ornamentation and getting none. What the DJ offered was her taste, a reach for oddity, a faith that each song would somehow sing every other.
5 Sinéad O’Connor, “Big Bunch of Junkie Lies,” from She Who Dwells in the Secret Place of the Most High Shall Abide Under the Shadow of the Almighty (Vanguard) This surfaces from a two-disc set (“rare and unreleased” plus a 2002 concert) like a corpse in a mountain lake. The clear-voiced sainted victim ruling the music is replaced by an avenger, the snarling rocker O’Connor has almost always tried to hide, and the performance is devastating, a curse in the form of a prayer. She breathes out the words slowly in front of an acoustic guitar; the blows land when a single word is sung full-throated, followed immediately by a dead drop to a bone-dry whisper. “You sucked the life out of my true friend,” O’Connor says, but the truth of the song is that she knows the man she’s singing to couldn’t care less.
6 Graham Roumieu, In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot (Manic D Press) This unassuming rant would be hilarious even without the primitive Ralph Steadman–like drawings, and the guts of the story aren’t found in Bigfoot’s tale of how he abandoned his career as a junk bond trader to form a Seattle grunge band, or what he thinks of Sam Donaldson (“Me like man’s hair. Me take him hair and eat man”). They’re in the prosaic: “What happen world me ask? Me once believe in good. Now, no. World go shit.”
7 The Kills, Fried My Little Brains (Rough Trade EP) Their own “Jewel Thief” ought to work as an answer to the last cut, a cover of Dock Boggs’s deathly 1927 “Sugar Baby.” But “Jewel Thief” is all attitude, and “Sugar Baby” is a drone. The singers keep their bodies away from the words coming out of their mouths, a fatal abstraction.
8 The Cutters, “(Back in the) 20th Century,” from In the Valley of Enchantment (Blackjack) From Humboldt County, California, best known for marijuana plantations in national forests, guitarist Mike Wilson, drummer Ray Johnson, and bassist Tad Sutera use London punk inflections on Angela Brown’s American voice for a message no different from that of their neighbor Bigfoot. It’s pissed off, it’s funny, it’s sharp (Brown drops comments on her own lines like Johnny Rotten muttering to Clio), it’s alive to its own momentum (the last “No!” following “Nancy Reagan just said” nearly pulls Nancy’s size two over her head). As a song about exile in your own hometown, not to mention your own country, or your own century, it can be a stone in your shoe.
9 Sarah Vowell writes in from the blackout (New York, August 15) “I went for a walk in the dark last night for a little, marveling at the stars. Walked past people on a stoop blaring ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on a boombox and everyone was giddy, singing along: ‘With the lights off, it’s less dangerous, here we are now, entertain us.’ ”
10 Christian Marclay, catalogue organized by Russell Ferguson (UCLA Hammer Museum/Steidl, for an exhibition closing at the Hammer August 30, at Bard College September 28 through December 19, at the Seattle Art Museum February 5 through May 2, 2004) Marclay is an American with European avant-garde credits, a pioneering turntablist (his 1983 Phonoguitar allowed him to scratch a vinyl LP while performing guitar-hero gestures), an irrepressible investigator of the record as talisman (with countless cut up and reconfigured discs, album covers, sculptures made of melted or chopped vinyl albums and singles), a social critic (his 2000 video Guitar Drag is a complex and visceral version of the 1998 dragging murder of James Byrd in Jasper County, Texas), and a prankster with a bottomless appetite for trash: as for so many art punks, “Batman Theme” was his ground zero. His work doesn’t come off the pages of a catalogue: you have to go where it is and look at it, listen to it, laugh at it, let it laugh at you. Still, there is one stunner here, in sound historian Douglas Kahn’s essay “Surround Sound,” regarding the 1930s experiments of neurologist Wilder Penfield, “the first bio-turntablist”: “When Penfield lowered [a] wire instead of a stylus onto the grooves of . . . one patient’s exposed brain, the patient, still conscious and alert, was convinced that there was a gramophone playing in the operating room.” “Everybody grew up listening to all this stuff,” Marclay responds, “and all this music is, in a way, already sampled in our heads.”
OCTOBER 1, 2003
1 Neva Chonin, “Sex Pistols’ Lydon tries, but can’t revive rage on reunion tour at Warfield” (San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 5) “What can you say about a 25-year-old legend that died? That it changed your life, changed music history, hated the Beatles?”
2 Paul McCartney in Red Square (a documentary on A&E, Sept.
18) It was last May 24, with an audience of 100,000, the camera picking up one honey shot after another, and often Paul can’t hit the notes: “We Can Work It Out” and “The Two of Us” are as painful as “I Saw Her Standing There” is true. Musicians, critics, government officials talk about how the collapse of the Soviet system was unthinkable without the Beatles—without their embodiment of a secret or inaccessible culture people desperately wanted to join. You hear the memory of imprisonment: “We lived on a separate planet and they could never come here,” says the leader of the Soviet-era band Aquarium. But if the story makes you think of Lou Reed inducting Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, describing how the Belmonts sent him “the sound of another life,” soon enough the film will give you Mikhail Gorbachev, looking diminished and blank, and you can’t gainsay his dutiful testimony that the Beatles told “the young people of the Soviet Union there was another life”—what else could they have heard? On stage, “Live and Let Die” is big and gets bigger in front of a video-screen montage of Russian peasants, Leonid Brezhnev and Vladimir Putin, folk musicians in traditional dress, and more honey shots. “I could fulfill one of my wishes only in 1984 when I bought all of the Beatles LP records,” says Sergei Ivanov, the Russian minister of defense. A commercial comes on: Davy Jones or a lookalike promoting A&E’s Meet the Royals (Camilla and Charles appear in two-shot) while he or someone else chirps “Hey, hey, they’re the royals!” Back to the stage: “Maybe I’m Amazed,” and then “Back in the U.S.S.R.” The instant leap in the crowd tells you this is what they came for, what they wouldn’t leave without. You see a cool-looking guy in the audience, looking right at the camera, with a deep, knowing smile. The song was supposed to be a joke, as in Who’d want to go back to the U.S.S.R.?, and today the U.S.S.R. doesn’t even exist. But the people in Red Square do, and the song does, and now the people present to hear it played change the unspoken negative of the song into an affirmation of their own existence. Yes, it was a script, and everyone was playing a part, but you’d have to be a truly great cynic not to smile over this tale.
3 Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil Remix (Abkco) By Full Phatt: zero. By Fatboy Slim: less than zero, dragging the band behind its own beat, plus stupid sound effects. By the Neptunes: with the ending, they open a door in the song not even the song knew was there. From “Lay your soul to waste” on, they layer Western-movie strings and a thin, chopping guitar sound to create a sense of isolation and abandonment, until the last “Woo-woo”s fade away into a desert of loss and despair.
4 Team Doyobi, “Team Doyobi’s Remix,” from O , compiled by Radboud Mens (staalplaat.com) Out of nine otherwise dullard versions of “O Superman” (“O Hyperman,” “O Super Mom,” etc.) comes utter displacement from the U.K.—those “ah-ah-ah”s running all through Laurie Anderson’s little play about terrorism as an orgasm.
5 Seth Borenstein, “EPA: CO2 No Pollutant–Ruling Made on Clear Act” (Denver Post/Knight-Ridder, Aug. 29) “ ‘Refusing to call greenhouse-gas emissions a pollutant is like refusing to say that smoking causes lung cancer,’ responded Melissa Carey, a climate policy specialist for Environmental Defense, a moderate New York-based environmental group. ‘The earth is round. Elvis is dead. Climate change is happening.’ ”
6 Anonymous blurb on Bubba Ho-Tep, New York Times fall movie preview (Sept. 7) “Two residents of an East Texas nursing home—one believes himself to be Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell), the other John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis)—team up to defeat a soul-sucking mummy who has risen from the local swamp.” Howard Hampton writes: “In other words, the Clinton-with-Two-Heads beats back Bush—draining his swamp.”
7 “Classic Blues Artwork from the 1920s” 2004 calendar (Blues Images) On the cover: the single extant photograph of Mississippi blues progenitor Charley Patton, previously known only from the neck up. Yes, he was straight off the plantation. Though it turns out he was wearing spats.
8 Michael Corcoran, “Exhuming the Legend of Washington Phillips,” in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2003, edited by Matt Groening (Da Capo) The story of how a man who left behind some of the most unusual gospel recordings of the 1920s (and, with “I Had a Good Father and Mother,” perhaps the most heartbreaking) was not who music historians thought he was, but someone else with the same name. Which is fitting, given that in Best Music Writing Michael Corcoran’s piece ended up credited to someone named Michael Cochran.
9–10 Soundtracks: Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Red, White and Blues—A Film by Mike Figgis and Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: The Soul of a Man—A Film by Wim Wenders (HIP-O Records) I haven’t seen the blues documentaries running on PBS—Scorsese served as executive producer for the series, and directed one episode—but I have heard the accompanying CDs, and I can tell you that Tom Jones’s “Goin’ Down Slow” (in the Figgis film) shows a deeper recognition of Howlin’ Wolf than Lucinda Williams’s embarrassing “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” (in the Wenders) does of Skip James—and that Jones has infinitely more of himself to bring to the song. These two albums in particular are a study in weird contrasts, with Soul of a Man filled with ridiculous performances by Shemeika Copeland, Cassandra Wilson, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, and Nick Cave, and Red, White and Blues mixing small masterpieces from Louis Armstrong (1947), Miles Davis (1957), and Big Bill Broonzy (1956) with famous and obscure recordings from the British 1960s (Cream’s runaway-train version of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads,” the Spencer Davis Group’s impossibly sure, bone-chilling “Hey Darling”) and grounded, present-day pieces by Jones, Lulu, and Jeff Beck. The shocker is the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group’s more cited than heard 1954 cover of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line.” Donegan is so excited he runs right out of the studio and into the street, shouting, dancing, and you can almost hear thousands of British teenagers—among them four named John, Paul, George, and Ringo—saying to themselves, “I could do that! I have to! Now! This is the sound of another life!”
OCTOBER 22, 2003
1 The Fiery Furnaces, Gallowsbird’s Bark (Rough Trade) Brooklynites Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger offer hilarious sibling-loathing liner notes and songs that seem to come from an alternate universe: “Up in the North” and “Don’t Dance Her Down” make instant sense and also make you feel as if you’ve never heard anything like them before. There’s a cover of Virginia mountain banjoist Dock Boggs’s 1929 “Old Rub Alcohol Blues” that is both utterly contemporary and not a cover at all: Eleanor Friedberger sings as if she’s worked out every idea in the words for herself, fingering her own scars, and at first the instrumentation is simply big, gonging piano notes. Boggs’s version is dead-man-walking; the Friedbergers are walking very carefully, but they fall anyway. “My mind, my mind,” Eleanor says as the song seems to get away from her, or perhaps it’s that she doesn’t want it anymore.
It all comes together in the chorus of “Two Flat Feet”: passion, anger, contempt, melody, sardonicism, fear—like Blondie’s “Rip Her to Shreds” without the comic-strip wink. Like the best and least obvious album I’ve heard this year.
2 Metric, “Combat Baby,” from Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (Everloving) Emily Haines sounds very well-educated, and very tired of being so pissed off. The result is a severe, fast little pop song about not getting what you want—not even seeing what you want on the street, no matter what reflection you see in the shop windows, no matter what’s on sale on the other side, even though you never wear anything but black.
3 Randy Newman interview with Bob Edwards, Morning Edition (NPR, Oct. 8) The day after California voted to smash its government, Newman was discussing The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 1, solo piano recordings of 18 of his tunes. Edwards brought up the new version of the 1972 “Sail Away,” noting that its premise of a con man sweet-talking Africans onto his slave ship with promises of ease and abundance back in the U.S.A. wasn’t exactly in the historical record. “What am I supposed to say,” Newman said, “ ‘Slavery is bad?’ It’s like falling out of an airplane and hitt
ing the ground, it’s just too easy. And it has no effect.”
“But the contrast is so strong,” Edwards said. “That beautiful melody . . .”
“It worked out well,” Newman said. “It ended racism in this country. Kids today don’t remember, now that it’s gone away.”
4 Goldfrapp, “Lovely Head,” from Bande originale du film ‘Demonlover’ de Olivier Assayas (SND) New Crime Jazz: wet Paris streets whistling, harpsichord, a Shirley Bassey–style vocal—plus a high trick voice that could have come from the Skyliners’ “Since I Don’t Have You.” And then into “Dirge” by Death in Vegas, featuring the same mood and what feels like the same voice. Weird.
5 Paula Frazer, A Place Where I Know: 4-Track Songs 1992–2002 (Birdman) Frazer did her best work in San Francisco in the mid-’90s, but it’s all of a piece: Roy Orbison is god, but Frazer can’t hit his notes, so she makes a world in a much smaller, more confined space. After a time you wonder how she keeps singing, since it feels as if there’s no more air to breathe. She keeps singing by letting the quietly harsh sound she gets from her guitar slow down old folk melodies—secrets she knows but Roy Orbison didn’t. Or didn’t tell, as she does.
6 Culturcide, “They Aren’t the World,” from Stay Free’s Illegal Art Compilation CD, free at “Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age,” Nexus Gallery, Philadelphia (Oct. 3–Nov. 2) Keeping company with the likes of the first rock ’n’ roll sample hit, Buchanan and Goodman’s 1956 “Flying Saucer,” as well as Negativland’s legendary 1991 “U2” and Invisible Skratch Piklz’s 1996 “white label edit,” this 1987 revision of USA for Africa’s self-congratulatory 1985 mandatory number-one hit “We Are the World” by a troupe of Houston dadaists is still ridiculously funny—Culturcide records itself right on top of the original—not to mention brutally cruel. Bruce Springsteen sounded like Joe Cocker the first time around; here he sounds like he’s undergoing throat surgery without anesthetic. And he’s nothing compared to Culturcide’s Cyndi Lauper: one woman as three Chipmunks.