Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  7 Placebo, Sleeping with Ghosts (Astralwerks) Music: Bush-league Bush. Cover: spectral woman’s naked body merging with corporeal half-naked male figure—an image that still carries some of the charge of the version left behind by Cro-Magnons 15,000 years ago, traced in stone in what is now La Marche, France.

  8 Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, Streetcore (Hellcat) If Strummer hadn’t died at 50 last year, the rough versions of the Wailers’ “Redemption Song”—a melody that seems capable of redeeming anyone who comes near it—and “Silver and Gold,” earlier recorded by co-composer (with Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew) Bobby Charles in 1972 on his Small Town Talk as “Before I Grow Too Old”—would still bleed, and still make you smile. It would have been so easy to find some studio goof on an old Clash number to stick on at the end.

  9 Charles Peterson, Touch Me I’m Sick (Powerhouse) One difference between this big book of black-and-white photographs of Seattle punk in action and Peterson’s 1995 Screaming Life, which collects a few of the same shots, is that here the sense of movement is much stronger. It’s a vortex. Sometimes you can hardly believe anyone got out of it, and you know some didn’t. Another difference is that the bands in the photos are not identified with captions. All that information is on a chart in the back—which means that as you look, you don’t necessarily know what you’re looking at. The two guitarists with John Brown beards—one of them looking mean enough to be John Brown—who are they? Do you really want to know? On page after page, flying hair heavy with sweat fills the image, and for once there is no difference between people on the stage and people in the crowd.

  10 Blues Poems, edited by Kevin Young (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets) Dozens of poems, from the Harlem Renaissance to the present, not too many songs. Rhythms are sometimes forced, but when they’re not—as with Gayl Jones’s “Deep Song,” or Langston Hughes’s “Song for a Dark Girl,” a rewrite of “ Dixie” as a lynching lyric—it’s like a whole literature exhaling. And there are continual surprises, like half-cast spells or whispers of forgotten curses, as with Melvin B. Tolson’s late ’30s “Sootie Joe,” where a minstrel speaks through a chimney sweep: “Somebody has to black hisself up/For somebody else to stay white.”

  NOVEMBER 12, 2003

  1–2 Brooks & Dunn, “Red Dirt Road” (Arista) and Martina McBride, “Independence Day” (RCA, 1994), on The Bear, 95.7 FM (San Francisco, Oct. 20) As melody, orchestration, the way the arrangement shows its hand, these two country hits are almost the same song. They’re both about small towns and independence, making your own way, becoming yourself—etc. upon etc.

  The Brooks & Dunn version is strictly personal, but set in terms of experiences all real guys have: “That red dirt road” is where the singer “had my first beer,” “wrecked my first car.” The McBride version is about a woman who takes a stand—and raises the flag for others. A woman who, by her solitary action in a community where everybody knows what’s going on and nobody does anything about it, raises the promise of a more perfect union, or any kind of union. A woman performs an act—burns down her house and kills her husband—that forces everyone to pay attention, which requires that everyone have an opinion, even if one’s real opinion is not what one says in public. The act creates a real community by dividing a false one. And through the metaphors used to portray it, this act draws on national ethics, on the history of the country for motive and justification and explication—and in the process extends or changes those national ethics, that patriotic history. None of the Revolutionary generation equated Independence Day with “the day of reckoning”—Judgment Day, the day when “the guilty pay”—as McBride does, but when you hear this song (written by Gretchen Peters), the connection seems to have always been there, hiding somewhere in the Declaration.

  “Independence Day” is sung full-throated, but with odd, harsh snaps at the ends of lines, cutting them off, throwing you off, personalizing the song: no one else would think to sing it this way. “Red Dirt Road” is cuddly-growly, with words curling back on each other, creating an impression of modest regular-guyness. “Independence Day” is plain: the father is “a dangerous man.” In a “small, small town” “word gets around.” Everyone knows this guy is beating his wife. In “Red Dirt Road” the song turns, or falls, on its euphemism-by-omission: while the fact that this is where the “had my first beer” guy had his first girl is implicit, you’re made aware that the singer won’t say this, and it feels like a cheat.

  One is a song that anyone could sing and almost everybody in country music has. One is a small story waiting in the greater American story for that greater story to give it meaning and ennoble it, or for the greater story to fall to pieces by failing to come through.

  3 Elephant, directed by Gus Van Sant (HBO Films) The Columbine shootings, or the feel of high school life, and what happens when what everyone has reasonably taken as reality becomes something else.

  4 The Strokes, Room on Fire (RCA) This bright set of tunes about nothing is a leap past the celebrated/backlashed Is This It? The band sounds like a band, not a set list of precursors. On those moments in “Reptilla” and “I Can’t Win” when guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. step out of the machine-stamped song structures, there’s a great lift. You can forget that, as with bassist Nikolai Fraiture’s “War Is Peace” T-shirt, for singer Julian Casablancas hot means cold.

  5 School of Rock, directed by Richard Linklater (Paramount) It’s interesting that the 1950s rock-movie plot—forces of authority try to stop music, end up tapping feet—is still serviceable. Why does the lead outraged parent look just like neo-con talking head William Kristol? The kids in the theater where I saw the picture went completely bananas for exposed fake teacher Jack Black’s inadvertently pedophilic mea culpa “Your kids have touched me—and I think I can honestly say that I touched them.” But all that pales next to Maryam Hassan as Tomika, telling Black she wants to sing, doing “Chain of Fools” with the camera tight on her face as it begins to slide into a trance, just slipping around the eyes.

  6 Handsome Family, Singing Bones (Carrot Top) Featuring what ought to be a double-sided smash by the folk duo: “If the World Should End in Fire” backed with “If the World Should End in Ice.”

  7 Richard Thompson, “A Love You Can’t Survive,” from The Old Kit Bag (Cooking Vinyl) A peace-corps-to-prison-to-drug-lord tale you could have expected from Warren Zevon. At the end, there are notes so huge they come out of Thompson’s mouth and wrap him up like a shroud.

  8 Randy Newman, “The Great Nations of Europe,” Bimbo’s 365 Club (San Francisco, Oct. 26) “A song that sums up better than anything else ever written the last 400 years of Western civilization,” Newman said to introduce his chronicle of expansion and extermination, starting with the Canary Islands—according to some anthropologists the last redoubt of the Cro-Magnons, at least until the Portuguese got there. “Didn’t he enunciate more clearly than with other songs?” said the man next to me. “He wanted people to hear the words.”

  9 Mad TV Kobe Bryant skit, “Consensual” video, with director’s credit to Michael Jordan (CBS, Sept. 27) Neo-soul vocal as Bryant (Aries Spears) seduces women in the jury box and high-fives the judge. You know he’ll walk.

  10 Press release on CMJ Music Marathon in New York City (Seattle, Oct. 25) “200 years ago Lewis and Clark, after learning of the Louisiana Purchase, left the East Coast to explore the rest of the New Land. Bringing a Newfoundland dog named ‘Seaman’ and Lewis’ slave ‘York,’ the two set out on a historic journey that is still marveled at today. Their now legendary voyage reveals the natural desire of man to explore the world around him.

  “This month Sub Pop Records will follow the same path of William Clark and Meriwether Lewis (except totally in reverse!) to CMJ in New York. Accompanying us will be our Chihuahua Vito and our intern ‘York.’ ”

  DECEMBER 3, 2003

  1 Johnny Cash with Joe Strummer, “Redemption Song,” from Johnny Cash, Unearthed (American/Lost Highway) The ti
tle of this five-CD set—four discs of outtakes from the 1996–2003 “American Recordings” sessions, plus a best-of—is weird at best: poor Johnny’s less than three months in the ground and already they’ve dug him up? But from versions of “Big Iron” to “Salty Dog,” from “The Banks of the Ohio” to “Chattanooga Sugar Babe,” songs find their ghost, and nowhere more than on Bob Marley’s testament. The weight Cash brings to the very first lines, “Oh pirates, yes they rob I/ Sold I to the merchant ship”—a physical weight, a moral weight, the weight of age and debilitation—is so strong it floats the song as if it were itself a ship, sailing no earthly ocean. The reversal of what would be Cash’s “me” for Marley’s “I” makes a crack in the earth, a man stepping into another time, another place, entering fully into another history. Then Joe Strummer comes in, plainly nervous, rushing the words precisely as he does not on the shivering version of “Redemption Song” on his own posthumous release, Streetcore: He’s tight, blank, and the performance never recovers. By the end it’s all but dead—and those first moments will bring you back again and again, trying to make the recording come out differently. Five CDs don’t come cheap, but the radio does, and a song like this is what the radio is for: to shock whoever’s listening.

  2 The Volebeats, Country Favorites (Turquoise Mountain) With tunes from famous country songwriters Roky Erickson, Abba, Serge Gainsbourg, and George Clinton, the York Brothers’ sexy-then-and-sexy-now 1949 “Hamtramck Mama” plus six of their own songs, not a false note.

  3 “Edith Piaf, la môme de Paris,” Hôtel de Ville, Paris (through January 31, 2004) In a room where the walls are covered with song lyrics, words highlighted in lavender: “bleu,” “mourir,” “destin,” “ciel,” “ rose,” “non,” “enfer,” “lumière,” “rue,” “rêve,” “pleurer,” “coeur,” “chagrin,” “homme,” “heureux,” “amour,” “ivresse.”

  4 Ida Lupino in Road House, directed by Jean Negulesco (1948) Playing a nightclub singer in a bar over a bowling alley, she talks her way through “One for My Baby” until it feels like a Shakespearean tragedy rendered by the Dead End Kids. “That’s the best singing without a voice I’ve ever heard,” says an astonished Celeste Holm.

  5 Oliver Hall writes in about subliminal censorship (Nov. 4) “Something I overheard tonight at a coffee house: ‘It’s a race dog owner’s worst dream, that the dog’ll catch the white rabbit. The dog’ll be destroyed, he’ll never race again. Kurt Cobain caught the white rabbit, and he realized it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. And he shot himself.’ I loved the odd lyrical way she put this—she’d just been gabbing about her anemia to an uninterested date—and hated what she said. It’s been so odd watching Kurt Cobain’s transformation over the past decade, from yelping sewer rat to cautionary tale; as I recall, for five years after he died, the only Nirvana songs you heard on the radio were ‘All Apologies’ and ‘Come as You Are.’ When I was sixteen some other teen broke into my house and stole all my Nirvana CDs. I replaced them when the insurance check came and was shocked to find the liner notes to Incesticide deleted, as I was shocked, watching the rerun of the band’s first Saturday Night Live appearance, that the French kiss between Cobain and Krist Novoselic had been edited out of the end credits, and shocked every time I have to remind my friends of the Michael Jackson impersonator Nirvana sent up to accept their MTV award. Sometimes I feel like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man, the last person on earth, who knows every line of dialogue in Woodstock.”

  6 Grandpaboy, Dead Man Shake (Fat Possum) Fat Possum has branched out from old southern black men self-consciously playing blues to younger northern white men self-consciously playing self-conscious blues, as if it’s, you know, all music, whatever that means. Jon Spencer is enough of a jerk to pull this off, but Paul Westerberg isn’t.

  7 Bobdylan.com store Featured items: “Self-Portrait Throw Blanket,” “Masked & Anonymous Tee,” “Jonny Rock ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ Corset.”

  8 John Humphrys, review of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (The Sunday Times, London, Nov. 9) “Truss writes: ‘The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the contractive “it’s” is an unequivocal sign of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian “kill” response in the average stickler.’ I think she probably understates the case when she argues that people who persist in writing ‘good food at it’s best’ deserve ‘to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.’ Lightning strikes are altogether too random. There should be a government task force with the single duty of rooting out such barbarians and burning them at the stake.”

  9 Brian Morton, A Window Across the River (Harcourt) From the author of The Dylanist, a quiet third novel about the revival of a love affair that by the end of the book will likely strike the reader as more of a mistake than its protagonists can bear to admit—and also a revival of so-called K-mart fiction, where brand names and pop songs, now taken out of Bobbie Ann Mason’s mid-south and given a literary Manhattan twist, take over the imaginations of people who are trying to think. Here there’s NYPD Blue, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and, in the 35-year-old heroine’s panicked reaction to a doctor’s recommendation that her last living relative be moved to a hospice, Christopher Hitchens attacking Mother Teresa “because some of the people she cared for in her hospice could have been cured” but for her belief “that it was best for them to die and go to heaven” (“I’m not thinking right, Nora thought. I shouldn’t be thinking about Christopher Hitchens at a time like this”) and not knowing “what irony was anymore—not since Alanis Morrissette put out that song ‘Isn’t It Ironic?’ and all the reviewers pointed out that the things she was referring to as ironic, rain on your wedding day and so on, weren’t actually ironic at all.

  “Probably, she thought, I shouldn’t be thinking about Alanis Morrissette right now.

  “Alanis Morrissette and Christopher Hitchens.

  “Together at last.”

  10 Atmosphere, Seven’s Travels (Epitaph) Slug still wears his heart on his sleeve, and as smart noises and off-stage interjections come together as context, chorus, and audience, its beat is as true as it ever was. Especially on the gorgeous “Always Coming Back Home to You,” an ending so emotionally clear it’s no surprise Slug, Ant, and DJ Mr. Dibbs couldn’t rest with it, adding a hidden track as if to take the edge off a language they’re not altogether comfortable speaking.

  DECEMBER 24, 2003

  1 Natalie Merchant, The House Carpenter’s Daughter (Myth America) The songs are from Fairport Convention, The Anthology of American Folk Music, protest-song handbooks, an 18th-century hymnal, a one-time Ithaca, New York, folk band called the Horseflies. With her thick, heavy voice, Merchant hangs over the tunes as if, in the infinitely suggestive words of so many other songs, she’s letting her hair hang down, covering the songs in every meaning of the word. Fiddle from Judy Hyman (of the Horseflies) is the instrument that most often takes the lead, shaping the songs—“Down on Penny’s Farm,” a worker’s complaint that Bob Dylan turned into “Maggie’s Farm,” is taken as a country stomp—but what Merchant does is plainly uncanny. “House Carpenter’s Daughter”: that makes Merchant the child abandoned when her mother left her carpenter husband for a demon lover, so Merchant sings these songs from the inside, from a distance, sneaking up behind them, looking up at them like a child, looking back at them like an old woman. A dance unreels like a memory more than an event; a story becomes not a memory but an account of an event that is sure to take place tomorrow.

  You don’t know where you are. “Which Side Are You On?” written by Florence Reece during a miner’s strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1932, doesn’t come off like a protest song. Though the lyrics remain specific—“You’ll either be a union man/Or a thug for J. H. Blair”—the setting of the song, the time and place it makes, is not. With a ghostly chorus—you can see the dead saying, I see living people—Merchant leads the performance as if into a battle that
was lost before she was born, and that will be fought when she’s gone. When she sings the Carter Family’s “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” you’re at the funeral, and then you’re drunk at the wake. Each is less a memory or an event than a ceremony—as is almost every song here, high-stepping or barely moving at all.

  2 Highlights from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (a.k.a. Rock Hall), #1 (Cleveland, Dec. 7) Poster for the fourth-to-last appearance of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson:

  WINTER DANCE PARTY

  Laramar Ballroom

  Fort Dodge, Iowa

  January 30, 1959

  Dancing for Teenagers Only—Balcony Reserved for Adult Spectators

  3–5 Ryan Adams, Love Is Hell, pt. 1, Love Is Hell, pt. 2, LLOR N KCOR (Lost Highway) Adams seems to have stepped into the void left by the disappearance of the audience for Counting Crows, by far the best straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll band of the last decade. Unlike Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, whom San Francisco Chronicle critic Aidin Vaziri, reporting on a recent local show, described as “looking like a barefoot bus driver with an octopus strapped to his head,” Adams appears to be a regular guy—sensitive, all heart, gets angry because he feels so much, but no serious hang-ups or a need to act out. Adams looks more like the successful nonentity John Mayer, for whom Counting Crows had to open on their last tour, or for that matter Josh Groban. And underneath his clatter and angst, what he has to offer is different mostly in style from what Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard are selling.