Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  5–7 Leslie Bennetts, “Not Across My Daughter’s Big Brass Bed You Don’t, Bob” (Los Angeles Times, April 16); Mel Gibson, producer, The Passion of the Christ—Songs Inspired by (Universal South); Mirah with the Black Cat Orchestra, “Dear Landlord,” from To All We Stretch the Open Arm (YoYo) Bob Dylan Sellout Alert! Bennetts, who made her name attacking Hillary Clinton in the pages of Vanity Fair, again raises the flag of moral outrage. This time it’s because of the way “an artist who once had a profound effect on American culture” can now be found in a Victoria’s Secret commercial. There he is in the city of gondolas and Titian; as his suicidal “Love Sick” plays, he squints across the Grand Canal at a montage of underwear models, thus giving a whole new meaning to “See Venice and die.” But what about “Not Dark Yet”—like “Love Sick” from the wasteland of Dylan’s 1997 Time Out of Mind—appearing on a collection of mostly old recordings that Mel Gibson has put to work celebrating his very own movie to the point of claiming that he himself is somehow responsible for their creation? Bennetts thinks an underwear commercial is pedophilia, Gibson thinks a song following a man down a dead road is about Jesus, and they may be right—but not as right as the one-time riot grrrl chanteuse Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, who, like so many before her, understands that a profound Bob Dylan song can, in other hands, sound like anybody’s common sense.

  8–9 Penelope Houston with Pat Johnson, “The Pale Green Girl,” from The Pale Green Girl (DBK Works) and Nancy Sinatra, “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” (Reprise) A slow, hesitating song with a quick, poppy chorus, right up to that point where guitarist Pat Johnson makes you lean forward and wonder what his few broken, abstract notes are saying, and Houston, in her most powerful moments since she broke up the Avengers in 1979, cracks the punk whip that’s been hiding in the tune all along. I heard it on the radio immediately after Nancy Sinatra’s shockingly avant-garde 1966 version of a Sonny and Cher hit, from the Kill Bill, Vol. 1 soundtrack. The Vol. 2 set would be better off with “The Pale Green Girl” than anything that’s actually on it.

  10 Jan Berry, 1941–2004 He treated everyone around him like something to kick out of the way, including the truck he crashed into 38 years ago and never really walked away from. He never apologized, except perhaps in that perfect moment in “Dead Man’s Curve,” after the Jag he’s been racing has been totaled; a hand runs across the strings of a harp, and Jan finds himself not in his Stingray in heaven, playing a lute, but in the hospital, putting on a convincing show of humility—“Well, the last thing I remember, Doc, I started to swerve . . .”—but you can bet he’s secretly grinning over every word.

  JUNE 30, 2004

  1 Leah Garchik, June 14 (San Francisco Chronicle) Regarding George W. Bush declaring the day of Ronald Reagan’s funeral a national holiday, bold-faced names columnist Garchik cited a report of signs on the D Street post office in San Rafael, just over the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, on Friday, June 11: “Post Office Will Be Closed Today in Memory of Ray Charles.”

  2 Ratatat, “Seventeen Years,” from Ratatat (XL) Two guys in a bedroom studio in Brooklyn make what sounds like the instrumental B-side of “Hey Ya”—the music is about half that inventive, which is to say very inventive, and never calls attention to itself. But then the glee of trading one piece of sound for another fades, and you’re floating on a lullaby. The movement draws you in, quiets your mind, and then, whatever this is, you’re swimming through it.

  3 Lucinda Williams, “Love That Mystic Hammering” (New York Times Book Review, June 13) “I sure don’t pretend to be no intellectual,” says the adored tribute-album contributor in her piece on Bob Dylan lyrics. Her father was a college professor, but she spent her childhood out by the barn eating dirt, which is why her own songs ring so true today.

  4–5 PJ Harvey, Uh Huh Her (Island) and Nick Catucci, “Carnal Fission” (Village Voice, June 9) Harvey rubs, scrapes, drags chairs around the room; sometimes it feels as if her music comes from her guitar applying pressure to her skin rather than her fingers applying pressure to her guitar strings. Each album seems to gravitate toward the point where a certain state of mind and body will flare up into a single image—which will then burn out and disappear, leaving you incapable of remembering what the image was, only that you glimpsed it. Here, you’re on the way with the pulse of “Shame,” only the second song; you can feel the destination has been reached with the next, “Who the Fuck?” which combines a Lenny Kravitz beat with an extremist, primitivist Sheryl Crow vocal—an affinity that lets you hear Harvey listening to Crow, lets you hear Harvey hearing something in Crow’s voice nobody else hears, maybe including Crow herself.

  That’s the problem with artists: They know things other people don’t. They feel compelled to say what those things are, and to conceal the strangeness and alienation of the act. If there is an “I” in their work, it ceases to refer back to the person writing, painting, singing; the person whose name is on the work has momentarily replaced herself with a made-up person who can say or do anything. This is what makes such a person an artist, and it’s why critics who try to reduce an artist’s work to her life are cretins. Thus we have Nick Catucci in the Village Voice, assuring his readers that Uh Huh Her is “a break-up album”—“as all save her last have been,” he adds, in case you think there might be something out there that doesn’t fit into a thimble. Forget that situations everyone goes through might go through Harvey differently than they do through you or me; don’t worry that there might be anything here that isn’t immediately obvious; after all, Catucci says, she’s “an easy read” and “she’s got a one-track mind.” “We know she’s been fucking and fighting, probably in equal measures, and maybe in the same moments.” You can almost smell him, can’t you?

  6–7 Patti Smith, “Radio Baghdad,” from Trampin’ (Columbia) and Michael Kamber, photo accompanying Edward Wong’s “Deputy Foreign Minister Is Fatally Shot in Baghdad” (New York Times, June 13) Smith has been selling death for years—but now mere husband, brother, friends, and poet comrades take a backseat to a whole city, a whole civilization: civilization itself! That’s what was destroyed when the U.S. took Iraq. For Smith it’s a chance to gas up the piety boilers, and remind us that we (or, rather, “they,” which is us, but not her, unless we accept her vision, in which case we can be her, gazing with sadness and disgust at those who remain “they”) destroyed a perfect city, the center of the world, where once walked “the great Caliph.” How does it sound? Silly. The Aloha-Elvis wall hanging you could see in the background of Kamber’s photo—captioned “American soldiers searched a suspected stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr”—was infinitely more interesting. Why doesn’t Smith write a song about what Elvis was doing there: about a “we” that even she might not be able to make into a “they,” unless the “they” included Iraqis, too?

  8 Blue Sky Boys, The Sunny Side of Life (Bear Family) A five-CD box set of songs recorded between 1936 and 1950 by Bill and Earl Bollick of West Hickory, North Carolina, who look like the nicest insurance salesmen you’ll ever meet. Their music creates a simple, innocent, white small town, all calm and pastoralism, and the calmest, most pastoral tunes are the murder ballads.

  9 Evan Eisenberg, “Bushido: The Way of the Armchair Warrior” (New Yorker, June 7) A single page, and, with a quietly implacable rhythm, one word to the next, the most frigid, frightening, and complete portrait of the current occupant of the White House I have read. Machiavelli could have written the following lines, and in slightly different form he did: “The Chinese word for ‘crisis’ combines the characters for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity.’ For the armchair warrior, the significance of this is clear. Every crisis is an opportunity, and the lack of crisis poses a grave danger.” But even Machiavelli’s ghost might flinch at the smile of evil to which Eisenberg appends his last period.

  10 Shangri-Las, City Hall Park, New York City, June 19 In the May 17, 2001, edition of this column, then running in Salon, I included an item,
written more than a week earlier, on an A&E documentary that featured an interview with Mary L. Stokes—formerly Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las, the lead singer with long, straight blond hair. She was talking about why the 1964–65 tragedies of “Remember,” “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” or “Leader of the Pack” were not difficult for her: because, she said, she had enough pain in her own life to stand up to the songs. A few days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, I heard that Stokes, now a manager for a furniture company, was present when the towers were hit and when they came down; I contacted her and asked her to write about that day for this column, and she did. When I read that the Shangri-Las would be performing in New York City, I asked my friend Robert Christgau to cover the show; as this will be my last column in City Pages for at least a year, the idea of tracing that circle, if not closing it, seemed right.

  Christgau reports: “This may be the oldest crowd I’ve been in anywhere short of the Metropolitan Opera (and a beatnik poetry reading I attended a few years back). Intros by Randy Davis of WCBS-FM, ‘New York’s oldies station,’ promising to ‘walk you right down memory lane’ in the ‘real heart of New York City.’ ‘They were known as the bad girls of rock and roll . . .’ Backing band all in black, three ladies in black slacks with V-cut red satin tops. Stage left a brunette in her twenties, stage right a well-preserved forty/fiftysomething, also brunette. But there’s no Mary Weiss in sight—unless she now has brownish hair in a curly frizz, which would be bad for business. Four or five dozen onlookers come up in front of the stage in the sun, those on benches stay there, most of the crowd of perhaps 200 hangs back in the shade, including senior latecomers who really need to sit. The band vamps, sounding way too perky, and they are: the opening number is ‘You Can’t Hurry Love,’ followed by ‘Give Him a Great Big Kiss,’ the nicest hit in the Shangri-Las’ repertoire, which is also too perky. It’s a generic oldies set (‘Johnny B. Goode,’ ‘The Loco-Motion,’ ‘Be My Baby,’ etc.) with three Shangri-Las tunes.”

  It turns out the Shangri-Las are the Shangri-La: Marge Ganser, “the twin who didn’t die of a barbiturate overdose,” accompanied by her daughter Mary and a friend. Christgau: “Five blocks from Ground Zero, we’re told (well, not ‘we,’ but the younger fans Marge was looking down at; we ‘survivors’—yes, the term was adduced, by young Mary—know enough to stay out of the midday sun) we’re going to have ‘a hell of a history lesson.’ And the lesson is that although the Shangri-Las live (except for the dead Ganser) their individual-collaborative achievement does not; the lesson is that the past is already smooshed together into one perky playlist.”

  Bye-bye.

  Note: We were all fooled, and none of us had done our homework: the show was a fake. Marge Ganser died of breast cancer in 1996.

  Interview 20062007

  APRIL 2006

  1–2 Neko Case, Canadian Amp (Lady Pilot) and Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Anti) With the New Pornographers, Case shoots cries of passion and glee into the air until she towers over the band like a waterspout. On her own albums, pitched toward country, she has always sung too carefully—except on the EP Canadian Amp, released as an Internet-only item in 2001 and now available in stores. There, she took Neil Young’s “Dreaming Man” so soulfully Young evaporated from the music; with Hank Williams’s “Alone and Forsaken,” Case herself almost disappeared into the song, which is as far as anyone should go into that most blasted of American suicide notes. But with Case now in her mid-thirties, something like aging is taking place. On Fox Confessor she sings as if she knows more—or doubts more. There’s a warmth here, as if drawn from a deep well, that she didn’t have to give before. Song by song, stories swirl. With “Hold On, Hold On,” Case leaves a party at 3 A.M. (“Alone, thank God”); she turns her car west, with Duane Eddy as a guide, ghost riders in her sky.

  3 Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, Dec. 1) He interrupted himself to muse over Rick Springfield’s great 1981 hit “Jessie’s Girl.” “I have not been able to get the song out of my head,” he said. “I wish that I had Jessie’s girl. I wish that I had—what’s that next line?” he asks the stage manager, who probably wasn’t born when the song topped the charts. Colbert swivels his head. “Rick, what’s the next line?” And then Springfield, holding a guitar, happily responds. “Where can I find a woman like that,” he bangs out and immediately stops. “That’s it. Thanks, babe,” Colbert says, moving right along, as if Springfield were a prop man.

  4 Cat Power, The Greatest (Matador) For a decade, Chan Marshall has dedicated herself to tempos that stop and a voice that courts silence. Here, playing with Memphis soul musicians, she fools with strange new tools: coming down hard on a word, a rumble on guitar, hints of melodrama. But what’s at stake is the search for a darker hollowness, a more complete nowhere; with “Hate” she meets Neko Case somewhere in Arizona and in a battle of the bands, sucks her up like dust.

  5 Rubettes, “Sugar Baby Love,” from Breakfast on Pluto: Music from the Motion Picture (Milan) From 1974, and the most deliriously happy sound imaginable. No wonder Cillian Murphy’s character Kitten can smile in the face of horror; this never goes off the charts in her head.

  6 Ameriquest Commercial (Aug. 21) Weirder by far than the Rolling Stones’ performance at the Super Bowl was this spot, where, as an unbelievably desiccated and self-parodying (until the Super Bowl) Mick Jagger prances onstage, a young, properly dressed Ann Coulter look-alike emerges from the crowd to explain that Ameriquest is underwriting the band’s 2005 tour because they want to help you with your mortgage. “Mick! I love you!” she screams as the crowd lifts her into the air. Back on her feet, disheveled, replacing her glasses, she nevertheless has the self-control to explain that Ameriquest is not only sponsoring the tour but is the registered owner of the slogan “Proud Sponsor of the American Dream.” Or, as the Firesign Theatre once put it, speaking of a company they named U.S. Plus: “We own the idea of the idea of America.”

  7 Black Angels, Passover (Light in the Attic) A drone band looking for the sound of paranoia and dread: the vortex comes in the slow, rotting noise of “The First Vietnamese War.” And the second? And the third?

  8 Dion, Bronx in Blue (Dimensional Music Recordings) He sings Robert Johnson songs in his own voice, but he plays guitar as if he’s making the songs up on the spot.

  9 Ken Tucker, Fresh Air (WHYY/NPR, Dec. 20) On Bob Dylan at the Beacon Theater in New York: “He sang ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,’ and he just bit off the words—‘Shut the light/Shut the shade.’ It was as though he was about to direct a porn film, the way he said those words.”

  10 Cat Power, “Paths of Victory,” from North Country: Music from the Motion Picture (Columbia) Taken from her 2000 The Covers Record—and somehow the throaty intonations, the deliberate pacing, are a perfect match for Charlize Theron’s performance. Even though I knew the recording, when it played behind the credits I thought it was Theron singing.

  MAY 2006

  1 Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (Scribner) In 1972 a bombing meant as a protest against the Vietnam War goes wrong; a young woman and a young man go underground. Twenty-six years later they turn up under new names in the same town; inevitably they will meet. But in the meantime the most interesting character in this pitch-perfect novel—with references to Shulamith Firestone and Dock Boggs tossed off so lightly that even if the names mean nothing, they help create the frame of fictional reference and make their own sense—is the woman’s teenage son. It’s 1998; he’s obsessed with Smile bootlegs composed entirely of “10, 15, 20 takes that are nearly identical to each other.” This is a portrait of how smart a 15-year-old can be: “You are in the recording studio when they made this album. You are there with all the failures, the intense perfectionism, the frustration of trying to realize in the world the sounds you hear in your head.” The lines don’t come off the page as a metaphor for the story the novel tells; the boy’s voice is too intense for it not to claim his own story.

  2 The Fever, In th
e City of Sleep (Kemado) Geremy Jasper’s pretentiousness is his strength; he’ll try anything. What makes the music move is the strangeness filtered into familiar landscapes. In “Eyes on the Road,” it’s 4 A.M. somewhere in New Jersey. The police-radio voice-over is funny, and so present you feel yourself looking over your shoulder to see if you hit someone back there. Keep your eyes on this road and soon enough you’ll be seeing eyes on the road as well.