Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  9 “The Fog of War: Robert S. McNamara and Errol Morris in Discussion,” University of California at Berkeley (Feb. 4) Throughout a long talk arising from Morris’s 2003 documentary The Fog of War, moderator Mark Danner pressed the former Secretary of Defense—under Kennedy and Johnson the tribune of the Vietnam War—to apply his conclusions from that time to the present day. Again and again, McNamara—at 88 in frightening command of his faculties, vehement, direct, lucid, at times even monomaniacally focused—ignored the question, dodged it, refused it, denied it. Finally Danner announced that he would read the “Eleven Lessons” from McNamara’s 1995 In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam: “I’ll ask you while I do so,” he said, “to keep the present situation in mind.”

  One by one, the items went off like small bombs: “ ‘We failed to . . . We failed to . . . We failed to . . . We failed to draw Congress and the American people into the pros and cons of a large-scale military action before it got underway. . . . We did not realize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. . . . We do not have the God-given right to shape other nations as we choose . . .’ ”

  “When I read these lessons again I felt a chill go through me,” Danner said. “I was in Iraq. In October, reporting . . . they seemed to reflect with uncanny accuracy—it’s for that that I’ve tried to push you, not only about—” McNamara cut him off.

  “What he has done,” he said to the audience, “is extract those lessons from this book. The lessons are in there. . . . I put them forward not because of Vietnam, but because of the future!” He turned to Danner: “You want me to apply them to Bush. I’m not going to do it.” He turned back to the audience, full of people who decades ago fought him with everything they had. “YOU APPLY THEM TO BUSH.”

  10 New York Times, “ Music Albums Chart, Billboard/Soundscan, February 9 through 15” (Feb. 23) #1 Norah Jones, #2 Kenny Chesney, #5 Josh Groban, #6 Harry Connick Jr., #7 Evanescence, #10 2004 Grammy Nominees compilation—it’s probably pointless to read anything into this sudden domination of comfort, balm, reassurance, and acceptance at the start of an election year. At least I hope it is.

  MARCH 24, 2004

  1 Mendoza Line, “It’s a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly),” on Fortune (Cooking Vinyl) From people hiding in present-day America—just as the Mekons of Fear and Whiskey and The Edge of the World were all but moles in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain—a swift, irresistible put-down song (“She called you a cab and they brought you a hearse”). Debbie Harry had her finger on this trigger in Blondie’s “Rip Her to Shreds,” but Shannon McArdle makes you think she didn’t pull it.

  2 The Bear, 95.7 FM, San Francisco, music criticism (Feb. 24) I.e., following Toby Keith and Willie Nelson’s 2003 lynch-mob ode “Beer for My Horses,” where everybody who’s not swinging from a tree meets “up back at the local saloon,” with Reba McEntire’s 1992 version of “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” where the judge rushes off to dinner and “they hung an innocent man.”

  3 “In other news,” official Sleater-Kinney website (Sleater-Kinney.com, March 3) “Urban Outfitters, the store dedicated to reselling your childhood back to you via nostalgia and irony-based fashion, is selling a T-shirt that says: ‘Voting Is For Old People.’ Unless you are under the age of 18, this shirt will be banned from all Sleater-Kinney shows.”

  4 Sons and Daughters, Love the Cup (Ba Da Bing!) Except for an edge of restraint, the edge of not telling all they knew, there wasn’t anything on this Glasgow quartet’s folky 2002 EP The Lovers to suggest the snaking tension—or the pounding fury—of the tunes here. “Fight” begins slowly, then blows up in the singers’ faces; “Johnny Cash” opens as the murder ballad “Pretty Polly” taken at a fierce pace, the curses of the words chasing David Gow’s drums until Adele Bethel, Ailidh Lennon, and Scott Paterson are screaming for the tune’s last minutes as if they’ve already killed who–ever it is the song wants dead.

  5 “Lee Greenwood puts heart into his pre-race performance to kick off this year’s Daytona 500” (Pollstar, Feb. 15) Heart may not be the word: as passed on by Steve Weinstein, who provided his own caption (“Lee Greenwood and choir giving quasi-Nazi salute at NASCAR rally—while presumably singing ‘God Bless the USA’ in Aramaic”), the photo, shot just before George W. Bush proclaimed, “Gentlemen, start your engines!” showed Greenwood raising his right arm, high, stiff, and forward, while four women dressed in blazing red clerical gowns and two men draped in yellow lifted theirs with at least a slightly ambiguous bend in the elbow. Or, as one could have read a month later in the program for the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Colorado Springs, which Bush addressed on closed-circuit TV (“You are doing God’s work with conviction and kindness, and on behalf of our country I thank you”), “What Can 30 Million Evangelicals Do for America? Anything We Want.”

  6–7 Lou Reed, Animal Serenade (Reprise) & Live: Take No Prisoners (Arista) If you don’t like Lou Reed, double live albums won’t convince you. Whether onstage in New York in 1978 for the biting Take No Prisoners or in Los Angeles last year for the reflective Animal Serenade (what, an animal serenade without “Possum Time”?), he’s not selling anything, and he takes whatever time he needs: 17 minutes for the relentless stand-up comedy routine that’s the Prisoners’ “Walk on the Wild Side,” nine minutes for “Set the Twilight Reeling” on Serenade. The highlight of the latter might be “Tell It to Your Heart,” which would fit David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. even better than Reed’s version of “This Magic Moment” did Lost Highway; the benchmark for Prisoners, if not for Reed’s entire presence over the decades, is “Street Hassle”—also included on Animal Serenade, and in a performance that seems complete until what Reed did with the song 26 years ago makes you realize the drama in the number can never be complete. Reed lets the scene where the singer is telling another man to get his dead wife out of the singer’s apartment dictate the rhythm; with the bouncy Waltzing Matilda beat suddenly stripped back, it’s a long, jittery moment of absolute naturalism. You forget that the lines Reed is speaking rhyme, that these are lyrics in any kind of song. It’s a play, not a song, and the Brando in Reed is all the way out, walking back and forth across the stage. There is no stylization you can hear.

  8 Walter Hopps at “Jay DeFeo and The Rose: Myth and Reality” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Feb. 28) It was a symposium on the San Francisco artist’s painting The Rose. DeFeo (1929–89) began working on it in 1957; in 1965, the work having long since taken over her life, she and her husband were evicted from their apartment, and the unfinished painting, which by then had grown to more than 10 feet by eight feet and weighed nearly 2,000 pounds, was removed to the Pasadena Art Museum where Hopps, then its director, planned to show it—though it wasn’t until 1969, when Hopps was gone, that it finally appeared. Before long it disappeared, walled up like a corpse in the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1995 it was broken out and restored; the next year it was at the Walker as part of the touring exhibition “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965.”

  This day in San Francisco, Hopps, now curator of the Menil Collection in Houston, remembered a night at the Fillmore Auditorium in the late 1950s, when he and DeFeo had gone to see Count Basie: DeFeo loved his “Hello Central, Give Me Doctor Jazz.” DeFeo was dancing alone in front of the stage; when the band took a break, Basie motioned her over. She came back to Hopps: “He wants me to go backstage!” She went. When the band returned, DeFeo reappeared, blushing. “Well, what on earth went on?” Hopps asked. “He asked me to go away with him,” DeFeo said. “What did you say?” “I told him there’s this big painting I have to finish.”

  9 Joe Rathbone, I Can Hear the Windows of Your Heart Breaking (Zakz) First winner of the Rod McKuen Prize for Gross Metaphorical Elaborationism. And the music sounds just like the title.

  10 Oliver Hall writes in: “L.A. is having one of its occult fits of meaning again. Driving back from the polling place this afternoon in the lower-middle
-class neighborhood where I’ve lived for the last 14 years, I found a street I’d never seen before: Barbara Ann Street. It only seems to go about a block, and there was nothing on it but an abandoned couch, a torn-up Camaro, and something covered in a blue tarp.”

  APRIL 14, 2004

  1 Salon, “Letters,” regarding the pending removal of Bob Edwards as host of NPR’s Morning Edition (March 30) The bemusement Edwards has for 25 years offered ordinary important events is of a piece with the What seems to be the problem? tone he adopts for absolute catastrophes. Neither is more than a genteel version of standard D.C. cynicism. But familiarity with anything on the air breeds resistance to change—that is, it breeds “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds”—far more readily than it does contempt. “For me,” one Edwards follower wrote Salon, “Bob Edwards has become the Mister Rogers of my adult life. His ability to report and explain all facets of news stories in an even-keeled, compassionate manner has allowed me to accept and understand even the most difficult and horrific events of the world with a sense of optimism.”

  2 TV on the Radio, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (Touch and Go) This New York experimental pop band—credited as Tunde Adebimpe, vocals and loops; Kyp Malone, vocals, guitars, and loops; David Andrew Sitek, music—is never obvious. Some songs are too vague to notice, and they hide the ones that aren’t—until a slowly building storm (“Dreams”) or a dragging but determined walk home in the middle of the night (“Wear You Out”) makes it clear this music comes out of a real city: an invisible city. Getting there is easier than reporting back, but these people are inventing a new language to pull it off.

  3 Tom Perrotta, Little Children (St. Martin’s) The New York Times is pumping this diverting, evaporating novel about young couples with children in suburbia—probably because some Times writers who still think John Cheever and John Updike had something to say are thrilled to have their own suburbs reauthenticated in fiction. But this book doesn’t touch Perrotta’s high school novel, Election, which is nothing like the every-punch-telegraphed movie version, or for that matter Joe College, Perrotta’s college novel. The new book is just like a movie, and you can hardly read a page without seeing Eric Stoltz and Maura Tierney as the leads.

  4 Beyoncé, Baaba Maal, et al., 46664: Part 1—African Prayer (46664) The first of three albums collecting performances from the November 29, 2003 Cape Town concert that inaugurated Nelson Mandela’s “46664” campaign against AIDS. “46664 was my prison number,” Mandela said in his speech that day. “For the 18 years that I was imprisoned on Robben Island I was known as just a number.” Highlight: Bob Geldof, “Redemption Song.” Perhaps done as badly as Bob Marley’s greatest composition can be, but that melody can keep any singer alive.

  5 Queen, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, et al., 46664: Part 2—Long Walk to Freedom (46664) Highlight: Corrs, “Breathless.” Even if they act as if what makes the song wonderful is that it’s supposed to be taken seriously.

  6 Eurythmics, Ms. Dynamite, et al., 46664: Part 3—Amandla (46664) Highlight: Bono and The Edge, “One”/“Unchained Melody.” The great thing about U2’s “One” is that if they hadn’t recorded it, Johnny Cash would not have sung it. The good thing about Bono’s version of “Unchained Melody” is that it can remind you of Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers, who last November dropped dead just before he was to go onstage and sing the song one more time. Still, when you hear Mandela say, “46664 was my prison number,” you might wonder why the Maytals weren’t there to perform Toots Hibberts’s song about his own time in prison: two years for marijuana possession. As he first sang more than 30 years ago, on the indelible Jamaican chant “54-46 Was My Number”: “Right now someone has that number.” The song was recently redone with Jeff Beck on the stars-galore Toots and the Maytals self-tribute album True Love—yet another example of this terrible new craze for repetition as a first principle of modern life.

  7 The Sopranos (HBO, March 28) Tony and Carmella are at a conference about their fuck-up son with his school counselor, played by David Strathairn. “So, he called the English teacher Daddy-O?” Tony says, quoting the Coasters’ 1959 “Charlie Brown.” The counselor doesn’t get it, which is a mistake—Strathairn’s characters always get it.

  Later, at a high-stakes poker game, David Lee Roth is playing himself, looking a few hundred years past his Van Halen days, and also looking human. The mobster played by Robert Loggia tells a joke about the first Jewish CPA in heaven; “I used to be able to write off condoms,” Roth says wistfully. But anyone who knows Roth’s autobiography will have trouble believing he didn’t ask the director to give him a chance to throw the joke back in Loggia’s face. “Every step I took on that stage was smashing some Jew-hating, lousy punk ever deeper into the deck,” Roth wrote in Crazy from the Heat. “Every step. I jumped higher ’cause I knew there was going to be more impact when I hit those boards. And if you were even vaguely anti-Semitic, you were under my wheels, motherfucker. That’s where the lyrics came from, that’s where the body language came from, that’s where the humor came from, and that’s where the fuck you came from.”

  8 Iron and Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days (Sub Pop) Sam Beam’s version of folk music has received enormous praise. Is that because he combines Gothic lyrics with a voice that insists he long ago saw through all their mysteries? Or because his beard looks like it weighs 10 pounds?

  9 Spam e-mail from jaysonblair_th@stgl.gr.ch (March 20) “The only solution to Penis Enlargement.” No, his book isn’t selling, but who knew he’d fallen this far?

  10 The Doors, Boot Yer Butt!—The Doors Bootlegs (Rhino Handmade) This four-CD box of 1967–70 live performances is not drawn from soundboards or well-made audience tapes, but from absolutely horrible recordings made with damaged equipment and originally pressed onto illegal vinyl that warped and splintered as soon as you tried to play it. Here, Jim Morrison can sound miles and miles away from the little handheld microphone that’s picking up his messages—messages that feel like they’re coming from a void, because you may not be able to make out a single instrument behind Morrison’s voice. The band can emerge and disappear, as if it’s playing a séance, not a show. But if you’re willing to crawl through the black caves of this set, the result is a treasure chest.

  Strange things happen on these discs, and especially strange things seem to have happened at the April 18, 1970 show at the Honolulu Convention Center. “Mystery Train” starts out as “This Train” (you know: “You don’t need no ticket, just get on board”). After a buildup, the vocal sound overwhelms everything around it, and Morrison seems lost in the possibilities of the song, inventing words, ignoring the band’s rhythm, erasing it with a huge scream. “Light My Fire” unfolds over 20 minutes. Guitarist Robbie Krieger starts it off as “My Favorite Things”; Morrison finds “Fever” hiding inside the big hit. “Love comes when you least expect it,” he says as the music slows almost to a stop—but after that everything is harsh, wild, rough, unforgiving.

  Throughout there is the sense that anything can happen, that the songs are less pieces to perform than opportunities for vision—usually banal visions of other songs, occasionally visions of music made with intent and found only by chance.

  MAY 5, 2004

  1–2 Eagles of Death Metal, Peace Love Death Metal (AntAcidAudio) and Dock Boggs, Country Blues: Complete Early Recordings (1927–29) (Revenant) Featuring a member of Queens of the Stone Age but starring the singer and guitarist Jesse “The Devil” Hughes (credited throughout as J Devil Huge), Peace Love Death Metal is an uncompromisingly inflamed but deep-down wimpy stomp through an American high school: a high school defined on one hand by Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant—his version of the Columbine mass murders—and on the other hand by Daniel M. Pinkwater’s novel Young Adults, where the endemic jocks-versus-brains conflict takes the form of a struggle between two conflicting theories of art (and, of course, life), with the two-man Dada Ducks gang going up against the conformist goons of Heroic Realism.<
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  Some of the Eagles’ song titles are better than the songs—the George Clinton tribute “Whorehoppin (Shit, Goddam),” “San Berdoo Sunburn”—but “Bad Dream Mama” pays off from first note to last, and still falls short of “Kiss the Devil.” “Who’ll love the devil? Who’ll kiss his tongue? Who will kiss the devil on his tongue?” Huge growls, and answers himself: “I’ll love the devil! I’ll kiss his tongue! I will kiss the devil on his tongue!” “Kiss the Devil,” it turns out, is a very light rewrite of Virginia banjoist Dock Boggs’s “Sugar Baby”: a mountain-symbolist masterpiece that, hinting at a man’s wish to murder both his wife and his child (“Who’ll rock the cradle, who’ll sing the song? Who’ll rock the cradle when you gone?”), is more demonic than these Eagles—not to mention the other Eagles—would ever dare to be. And that’s why the rewrite works. Jesse Hughes heard Boggs, understood him, and also understood that the only way he could ever sing Boggs’s song was to turn it into a joke. It’s a good joke, but that’s not all it is.

  3 Loudon Wainwright III, “Presidents’ Day” (www.lwiii.com) By November 3 this anti-Bush song may seem as pathetic as a Wesley Clark campaign button. For the moment it’s as sharp as an Oliphant editorial cartoon, with that little bird talking at the bottom.

  4 Mendoza Line, Fortune (Cooking Vinyl) The CD booklet here is full of words, but like ballplayers who fall below the line the band named itself for (.198: Mario Mendoza’s 1979 full-season batting average with the Seattle Mariners), some of the band’s best words are doomed to be forgotten because they’re wasted in press material. For Fortune, they’re in a couple of anonymous, first-person pages titled “About the Songs,” with the back story of “Fellow Travelers” (which in the 1950s meant traitors) described directly: “As recollections of the 2000 presidential election dissolve into a hazy, melancholic fugue, they stopped to wonder if it had all really happened that way: was our country really given away to a small coterie of unprincipled Fortune 500 acolytes. . . . Were these men really assisted in their ascendancy by a group of so called ‘liberal activists’ whose self-aggrandizing exercise in ‘protest’ helped set the real cause of progressive politics back forty years . . . and who will ever have enough money to buy our country back now? Additionally: Wasn’t that the year my every aspect of the social and emotional fabric of my life unraveled utterly? Could it be that this is more than a coincidence? I have a bad feeling this might all be my fault . . .” Out of that mix of rage and fear, self-ridicule and guilt, come country songs with vowels dragged into the next county and rave-ups about the national debt compounded daily by private failures. In a number where the sweet trill of a steel guitar coming off the last word gives almost nothing back to what a fiddle has already taken away, the simple heartbreak of singers whose loss of faith in their country has made it impossible to trust the people they love can break your heart as well. “Make every day count,” the press release says, “even if it can only count to three.”