Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  6 Dixie Chicks, Top of the World Tour—Live (Open Wide/Columbia) One big grin. Not included: “My mother always said, when you can’t say something nice, go to London and say it in front of 20,000 people”; “I Believe in Love.”

  7 Rock Hall Highlights, #2 (Cleveland, Dec. 7) Poster: along the top, “E. J. Recreation Center, Johnson, N.Y.” Then: “Direct from Nashville, Tenn.” Then, in enormous type: “HANK WILLIAMS.” Details of lesser acts follow, culminating at the bottom, in the biggest letters save for the headliner’s, with “CARL PERKINS ‘Mr. Blue Suede Shoes.’ ” But Hank Williams died on New Year’s Day, 1953, three years before Carl Perkins released “Blue Suede Shoes”—how could they be on the same bill? Because, just above “HANK WILLIAMS,” in type so small it almost isn’t there, you can just make out “Audrey (Mrs.).”

  8 24 (Fox, Dec. 9) When temporary Counter Terrorism Unit command Michelle Dessler (Reiko Aylesworth)—previously notable this year for an embarrassingly low-cut top and push-up bra—confronts apparent mole Gael (Jesse Borrego), it’s in a head-on, full-face closeup, and suddenly you’re seeing someone you haven’t seen before. There was a toughness in the stillness of the moment; you could sense a real character beginning to emerge. Given the rhythm of the show, that means you have no idea where she’ll go, or be taken.

  9 Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, “Redemption Song,” video directed by Josh Cheuse (Epitaph) On a downtown New York street, a man spray-paints a memorial portrait of the onetime Clash frontman; the portrait of Strummer covers an entire wall. People of different ages gather to watch it go up, or gaze seriously as they pass by. Others pose in front of it, proudly, giggling, some as if they’re humbly (Steve Buscemi) or defiantly (Jim Jarmusch, Cara Seymour) putting their handprints into the picture, joining it. At the end there’s performance footage, just strong enough to make you say, Ah, shit.

  10 Rock Hall Highlights, #3 (Cleveland, Dec. 7) “Steven Tyler Bust. 1997. Fabricated by Kevin Yagher Productions”—in a Lucite cube, a replica of the Aerosmith singer with hair flying, eyes bulging, mouth all but swallowing the microphone clutched in disembodied hands. A visitor: “This is the best. I think this is what we all want for Steven Tyler: to have his head cut off and put in a box.”

  JANUARY 14, 2004

  1 Mr. Airplane Man, C’mon DJ (Sympathy for the Record Industry) A Boston duo—Margaret Garrett, guitar, Tara McManus, drums and organ—recording in Memphis, then calling out from the Memphis murk. They go back, past Mazzy Star, Robin Lane, the Spikedrivers, to young white men playing blues in the Sun studio in the mid-fifties, then back from there, to a bar where the customers are so drunk they can’t even tell what color they’re supposed to be. The result sounds as contemporary as anything by such like-minded outfits as the White Stripes, the Kills, the Fiery Furnaces: an insistence that the present is a con, the past a myth, music a mask. You don’t think about that in the stomp of “Red Light” or the haze of “Don’t Know Why,” but in “Wait for Your Love” the vocals are buried, and so are the guitar and the drums. Everything takes place behind a curtain, until with a final whamwhamwham the band hits and runs.

  2 Kill Bill Vol. 1—Original Soundtrack (Maverick) Not that there’s anything less than fabulous here, but the eleven minutes plus of Santa Esmeralda’s mariachi version of the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” is almost beyond human intent.

  3–4 Cold Mountain—Music from the Miramax Motion Picture (DMZ/Columbia) and Goodbye, Babylon (Dust-to-Digital 6-CD reissue, 1902–60) The sensibility that producer T Bone Burnett brought to the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack doesn’t work for Cold Mountain; Jack White and Alison Krauss seem to be looking over the horizon at something else, something that actually interests them. The new recordings of Sacred Harp singers—people following a primitive notation system as the means to bring a whole community into a complex song—have spirit, but there’s no ground in the sound. To hear what the form, or philosophy of life, can be, seek out the country-religious music collection Goodbye, Babylon. Pressed into the tinny confines of commercial 78s from the 1920s or ’30s, people stand and deliver themselves to God, as if by pure will they can make him listen. If he can turn away from the Huggins & Phillips Sacred Harp Singers’ 1928 “Lover of the Lord,” with the lead voice of a nerdy teenage girl deep inside the sound, he’s not worthy of them—not worthy of the dead. As an all-night DJ shouts in Geoffrey O’Brien’s forthcoming book Sonata for Jukebox, “Alabama gospel records from before recording was invented”—that’s the feeling.

  5 Spam e-mail (Jan. 3) Why is it that the words “Young Goodman Brown”—referring to the 1835 Nathaniel Hawthorne story where a devout Puritan is drawn into the devil’s forest (“On he flew, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy”), toward a coven of Satanists and, at its center, his wife, Faith—keep popping up in the upper-left corner of Paris Hilton video ads?

  6 Hootie & the Blowfish, video for “The Goodbye Girl,” from the TNT original movie Neil Simon’s “The Goodbye Girl” (Jan. 16, 18, 20) It runs on Law & Order central as an endless commercial: the musicians playing in the rain plus Patricia Heaton of Everybody Loves Raymond as a wan middle-aged woman acting mainly with her nose job and Jeff Daniels offering come-hither eyes in a sad-puppy face—compared to this, his Dumb and Dumber character was Sean Connery in Robin and Marian. Cutting in and out of the movie, the band seems inspired, risking anything, even electrocution, to pay homage to David Gates, who first recorded this terrible song, back in 1978, right about the time Bread stopped fooling anybody.

  7 American Blues Festival 1962–1966, 2-DVD set (HIP-O Records) Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Rush, Victoria Spivey, Memphis Slim, even Howlin’ Wolf, and more, in Germany, in hokey but appealing stage sets or before polite audiences, and all giving at best 10 percent of the minimum they could have gotten away with back in Chicago. Except for T-Bone Walker on “Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong,” plainly too much of an artist to think he’s more the owner of the music than it is of him.

  8 The Cooler, directed by Wayne Kramer (Gryphon Films) There’s nothing happening here but Alec Baldwin’s performance, pushing far beyond his 1992 role as the sales-force executioner in Glengarry Glen Ross. The scene where Baldwin’s Old Vegas casino boss explains his values to Ron Livingston’s New Vegas business-school mobster is supposed to dramatize passion and experience against callowness and training, and it does—as a display of what it means to disappear into a character, to let him walk without the puppet strings the director is so obviously using on Livingston. Also featuring an unsurprisingly convincing turn by ’N Sync’s Joey Fatone as craven lounge singer Johnny Capella.

  9 Arthur Moore, Security Service Individually Watermarked (Maverick) A letter accompanying this pre-release CD stated that for security reasons the object in question could not itself carry the information that (1) Arthur Moore was in fact Alanis Morissette, (2) Security Service was really an album titled So Called Chaos, (3) “By accepting this CD” one was agreeing not to copy it, play it in a computer, put it on the internet, lend it to anyone, or play it for anyone, and (4) that any such use of the object in question could somehow be traced. So I can’t tell you anything about it. Or wouldn’t be able to even if I had listened to it, which I was much too scared to do.

  10 Sarah Vowell reports from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (Dec. 21) “Went to visit the Arizona this morning. What really got me was the little marker to the lower left of the wall of names: the vets who survived but wanted their ashes sprinkled in with those of their comrades. Two of them died just this year. Then I took the bus up to the North Shore to watch the surfers. My sister and I always had a thing for surfer movies. There was one called North Shore that came out when we were teenagers in Montana about a kid from Arizona who learned to surf in a wave pool and moved to Oahu where the real surfers looked down on him but then he won them over and got the cute Hawaiian girl.

  “Off to watch the sunset and listen to
Warren Zevon. Last night I was doing that and the sun dropped below the horizon line just as his version of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ was ending, thereby proving that if there is a God, he directs really hack videos.”

  FEBRUARY 11, 2004

  1 Electrelane, The Power Out (Too Pure) In 2001 these British women released the almost all-instrumental Rock It to the Moon, and you couldn’t begin to say what it was. This time, working with professional reprobate Steve Albini, the result is almost a narrative: a series of embarrassing misfires and experiments (a poem by Siegfried Sassoon done with a choir) followed by a long, long chase. With “Take the Bit Between Your Teeth,” the band does: it’s an all-stops-out grunge jam, about nothing but getting through the forest to the clearing—or the feeling of not caring if you ever get anywhere else. “This Deed” is very European film music, very sexy, very where’s-the-gun; “Love Builds Up” is syncopated in a way that’s all suspense. Cheap organ and drifting voices have made their own place, as unlikely as the Pre-Raphaelite party of Donovan’s “Bert’s Blues” or the locked room of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and no less irresistible. This is as rich a record as you’ll hear this year, and almost certainly the least obvious.

  2 Butchies, Make Yr Life (Yep Rock) These three punk musicians will probably call their next album The L Word, which will be to the TV show as the homemade PRADA T-shirt one of them is wearing here is to the trademarked version. For the moment what they’re after is pop craft—from echoes of Elizabeth Elmore’s Reputation to a doo-wop guitar figure running through a love song.

  3 David Denby, “Living in America,” New Yorker (Jan. 12) Last fall, Denby, a film critic for the New Yorker, published “My Life as a Paulette,” as in an acolyte of the late New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael. It was his exorcism of the spell the witch cast on him even in death: an account of how Kael befriended him, encouraged him, praised him, and one day called to tell him he wasn’t really a writer and that he ought to do something else with his life. Well, he showed her—he got her job!—but as a critic Denby remains dead weight. His style is the equivalent of someone clearing his throat. On those rare occasions when he assays an argument, it’s indisputable that nothing will ever rescue him from mediocrity.

  In “Living in America,” pumped by his liberation from Kael and at the same time helplessly but perversely imitating Kael’s sense of herself as an American writer, Denby takes on Vadim Perelman, the Russian/Canadian director of House of Sand and Fog, Jane Campion, the New Zealander director of In the Cut, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director of 21 Grams. These people should not be making movies for American audiences, Denby says: “They don’t really get America right . . . they miss the colloquial ease and humor, the ruffled surfaces of American life.” They insist on the ugliness, horror, obsessiveness, and vengeance in American life (like Denby’s hero, the Clint Eastwood of Mystic River, which apparently also pulses with the ruffled potato chips of American life, though I must have slept through those parts), but they “may be complacent in their own ways. Perhaps they accept tragedy too easily . . . Dolorousness”—yes, Denby is free; that’s not a word Kael would have used at gunpoint—“is becoming a curse in the more ambitious movies made in America by foreign-born directors.” “We don’t need other people’s despair,” Denby concludes; plainly, foreigners can get down with it like John Woo or they can shut up. Kael didn’t know the half of it.

  4 Townes van Zandt, “Coo Coo,” on Acoustic Blue (Tomato) A 1994 concert version from the late country songwriter: never has “Coo Coo”—or “The Cuckoo,” or “The Coo Coo Bird,” or “Jack o’ Diamonds”—taken on such detail, such melodrama. Two minutes in and it’s not a song at all, it’s a western.

  5 Barry Gifford, Brando Rides Alone (North Atlantic Books) A very short account of the 1961 One-Eyed Jacks, the only movie Marlon Brando ever directed. You can squint trying to find more than attitude in Gifford’s critical method and confuse yourself trying to figure out why that’s all he needs.

  6 Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer, “Hillbillies,” from Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (Verse Press) “Hillbillies” is only the most notable of the 19 often improvised poems included here, all of them recorded on the spot in clubs, on roadsides, in front of signs, etc. It instantly elevates Beckman and Rohrer—a Huey-Dewey-and-Louie duo of New York tourists—to the top of whatever chart it is that ranks artists who should be shot.

  7 Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, “I Don’t Wanna” (Locust Music) 1966 Fluxus protest music from Flynt, an experimental troublemaker (he subbed with the Velvet Underground and denounced Karlheinz Stockhausen as a racist who didn’t understand the Everly Brothers) with a reedy, old-timey voice and a hot, hard-to-follow guitar style. On the cover, he looks like he’s submitting a high school science project; song by song he chants cut-up denunciations of the Vietnam War and Wall Street and hits atonal Carl Perkins notes while drummer Walter de Maria, who would go on to erect the celebrated land-art work Lightning Field in New Mexico in 1977, runs around the room hitting things at random, and in time.

  8 Tarbox Ramblers, “Country Blues,” on A Fix Back East (Rounder) Producer Jim Dickinson gets a big, echoey Time Out of Mind sound, which makes it feel as if everything here is taking place inside the not altogether sane head of the singer. But Michael Tarbox is so growly he might as well be a bear, and when he applies himself to Dock Boggs’s 1927 testament to a wasted life, the startling boogie arrangement makes his voice feel like a put-up job. But his slide guitar makes another voice—and when Tarbox comes back singing in an almost delirious mode, he takes the song out of his head and into some ugly bar, where new people keep turning up even if no one’s left for years.

  9 Carole King for John Kerry (caroleking.com, Feb. 2) King was all over New Hampshire before the primary, singing “I Feel the Earth Move” at house parties and “You’ve Got a Friend” at benefit concerts—but has she played “The Locomotion”? “One Fine Day”? Or redone Bobby Vee’s “It Might as Well Rain Until September” as “It Might as Well Rain Until November”—whatever that would mean?

  10 Steve Weinstein passes on news of the “Hell Freezes Over Tour” (New England Ticketmaster Ticket Alert posting, Jan. 29) Events included Rufus Wainwright at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Carrot Top at the State Theater in Portland, Maine, Lynard Skynard (or imposters who can’t spell) and 38 Special (wonder if they can still pull off their great “If I’d Been the One”), Barenaked Ladies, and “An Evening with Christ . . .”—which a click on the link revealed to be cheap at the price, $25, even if “Christ” turned out to be Christine Lavin.

  MARCH 3, 2004

  1 Michael Pitt and the Twins of Evil, “Hey Joe,” from The Dreamers: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Nettwerk America) This movie about three young people making a whole world out of movies, sex, and parental allowances in a Paris apartment as the near-revolution of May ’68 takes place outside is not as good as it should be. It pulls its punches; it doesn’t go far enough. It may also be that when the trio finally run out into the street, the demonstration that sweeps them up feels fake not only because it’s poorly staged, but because the world that’s been left behind was so complete—and, at just that moment, so dangerous. Lead actor Michael Pitt’s thuggishly casual reading of the ’60s non-classic “Hey Joe”—not to mention the amazingly precise ’60s guitar playing by (presumably) half of his backing band, which cuts the tune down to its molecules—seems to have nothing to do with this or anything else in the film, but it sounds right.

  2 Pink Nasty, Mule School (Fanatic) From Wichita, a young woman who acts like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s characters and sings with the restraint of country artist Kelly Willis—with occasional slips into the floridness of Lucinda Williams. There’s a wonderfully thrown-away ditty called “What the Fuck”; there’s “Missing the Boat,” a disconcerting piece that takes two minutes to find its shape and when it does breaks into a realism that makes “I’ll drink beer for you,
I’d have sex with you, I’ll drink beer for you” feel like a letter to someone the singer will never write to again.

  3 Debbie Geller, “America’s Beatlemania Hangover” (BBC News, Feb. 7) The only 40th-anniversary-of-the-Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan tribute worth noting. As a girl in a “left-wing, atheist, divorced family” in Levittown, Long Island, “the archetype of American suburbia,” Geller has no answer when kids ask her what religion she is: “I had never even heard the word before.” She isn’t “so much bullied as barely tolerated.” But then suddenly everyone has to have a favorite Beatle, and everyone wants to know who everyone else’s is: “A girlish democracy was created.” Watching on February 7, 1964, she realizes it’s George: “During the postmortem at school the next morning, I announced my discovery with confidence. Although Paul was the undisputed favorite, my choice was accepted with respect. And no one ever made fun of me again.”

  4 Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Bonnie “Prince” Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music (Drag City) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? And this is a self-tribute album—smug versions of great Palace songs by Will Oldham, a.k.a. Palace—a whole new terrible genre.

  5 Old Crow Medicine Show, O.C.M.S. (Nettwerk America) Why people hate folk music.

  6 Negatones, Snacktronica (Melody Lane) Why people hate smart alecks.

  7 T. C. Boyle, Drop City (Penguin) Almost impossible: a novel about a 1970 hippie commune in which the author embarrasses neither his characters nor himself.

  8 Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” from Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall—October 31, 1964 (Columbia) Everyone who’s heard Dylan perform this number in the 39 years since it appeared on his Bringing It All Back Home knows what will happen when the line “Even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked” (as it’s sung here) comes up: the crowd will stomp and cheer to show what side they’re on, or rather what messy choices they’re superior to. But on this night Lyndon Johnson had yet to be demonized. Nixon had not been elected. Ford had not replaced Nixon, or Carter Ford, or Reagan Carter, or Bush Reagan, or Clinton Bush, or Bush Clinton. No one had heard the song before—and it’s so strange to hear the line produce only silence, as if it’s not obvious what the line says.