Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  3 Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac (Capitol) One after the other she lost a stepmother, a father, and a mother. She sings as if she never got a chance to settle anything with any of them, so instead of crying at the funerals on this album, she says inappropriate things. On “The World Unseen,” she moves slowly, as if from room to room in an empty house, all the action in her hesitation. “I will look for you between the grooves of songs we sing,” she says, and finally the other mourners begin to relax. Then, with a deepening of her voice so unmistakable the people around her can see her shut the door, she walks away, rewriting Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” in her head. She’ll look for them, all right: “in morphine and in dreams.”

  4 Honda, “This Is What a Honda Feels Like” commercial In a parking garage, a conductor assembles a chorus to outdo the Human Beatbox and the Human Orchestra. With nothing but their mouths they start the car, drive through a tunnel, around turns, over cobblestones. They close the sunroof with the newest new-car sound you’ve ever heard. But the sexiest moment comes when they turn on the windshield wipers.

  5–8 The 48th Annual Grammy Awards (CBS, February 8) Best Smarm: John Legend, who will be a Grammy hero for decades. Best Legend: Sly Stone, who in a gold lamé topcoat and a blond Mohawk looked like a cross between Wesley Snipes in Blade and a sea monster. Best Monstrosity: as a concrete sign of emotion, post-Mariah Carey melisma is a sign of insincerity; what is meant to appear as a loss of control is its imposition; a woman projecting autonomy is practicing a pimp aesthetic. There was Kelly Clarkson, Mary J. Blige, Christina Aguilera—but what the hell, let’s give the prize to Joss Stone. Best Dressed: Keith Urban, head-to-toe in Nicole Kidman.

  9 The Raveonettes, “Twilight” and “Somewhere in Texas” from Pretty in Black (Columbia) Western ballads that would have been perfect for the soundtrack to Kill Bill: Vol. 2—a queer combination of serenity and menace.

  10 The Fiery Furnaces, Bitter Tea (Fat Possum) For their fourth album, the most interesting and perplexing of all the two-person male-female bands offers a funny-noises record. There are squeaks and scratches, Beach Boys effects, and between-the-wars cabaret. When Eleanor Fried-berger’s vocals are run backward, she sounds Russian, when brother Matthew’s are, he sounds Hungarian. And nothing is lost: when the singing goes back in the right direction, the feeling of not caring how you got where you are is so musical, you may not even notice the change. But most of the time the feeling is that of a smart kid with a chemistry set—or a three-CD Smile bootleg—experimenting on his sister, who knows more than he does. Best song: “Benton Harbor Blues,” a rewrite of “96 Tears.”

  JUNE 2006

  1 Sarah Bernhardt, L’Aiglon, from In Performance (no label) At the Jewish Museum in New York, near the end of the exhibition “Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama,” which closed April 2, there was, after rooms of posters, costumes, books, photographs, and silent film clips, a listening station. What you heard was four minutes from Rostand’s L’Aiglon, starring Bernhardt (1844–1923) as the son of Napoleon, recorded for Edison in 1910—or rather what you heard was a wire being drawn through a body as its voice refused death: Not yet, not yet, Bernhardt seems to say, not until I have said what I have to say, and what I have to say is, Why? Why? I played it over and over; I couldn’t believe I would have to walk out of the building and never hear it again. In the museum gift shop, they were sold out of almost everything, including “Who Do You Think You Are, Sarah Bernhardt?” T-shirts. But they still had copies of this CD.

  2 Frank Black, Honeycomb (Back Porch) The Pixies’ singer; he recorded in Nashville, but he made a Memphis album—with, among many more Bluff City musicians, Reggie Young, guitarist on Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man.” A highlight is “Song of the Shrimp,” one of the most reviled Elvis movie songs, which with a laconically inebriated voice Black turns into a surreal folk ballad on the order of “Froggy Went A-Courtin’.” Before that comes “Go Find Your Saint,” with a rough voice riding a melody so sweet the singer’s dirty coat seems to shine, and before that, with Black’s voice high and slipping, is the most defenseless version of “Dark End of the Street” ever made.

  3 The Wallflowers, “God Says Nothing Back” from Rebel, Sweetheart (Interscope) Occasionally this single resurfaces on the radio out of the murk of last year, and everything around it feels cheap. With a stoic backbeat and Jakob Dylan’s fatalistic way of biting off his words, this is the sound of someone thinking—about insignificance, in the pop world, in the real world.

  4 Cindy Bullens, Dream #29 (Let’s Play/ Blue Lobster) In 1978, at 23, she made “High School History”: If you pull out all the stops you can do stuff in high school they’ll be talking about for years, but they stopped talking years ago. Now she’s in her early fifties—and on an album about self-delusion, divorce, and pulling out all the stops, she concedes nothing.

  5 IBM Commercial, “What Makes You Special?” You see armies of determined men and women in suits like armor, in crowded elevators, marching down corridors, every one of them mouthing the Kinks’ absolutely ferocious 1966 “I’m Not Like Everybody Else”—and, my God, for an instant nobody is.

  6 Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones (Interscope) All you read about them is how soon they’ll be huge. The music is judged according to whether or not it will make that happen, and despite the fact that Karen O has a voice as human as it is urgent, she seems to judge herself on the same terms. Better than all that here: “Cheated Hearts”; the “Telstar” guitar solos in “Turn Into.”

  7 Amazon.com, editorial reviews “Who writes this stuff?” asks my friend Steve Weinstein, passing this on, typos and all: “Jewel is about to deliver her most personal and autobiographical record so far—Goodbye Alice in Wonderland. Not content to relegate herself to a traditional music areana, or to be typecase, Jewel has established herself as a culturally significant and relevant brand.”

  8 Prince, 3121 (Universal) His version of “The Playboy Philosophy,” circa 1962.

  9 Derek McCulloch & Shepherd Hendrix, Stagger Lee (Image Comics) On Christmas night 1895, in Bill Curtis’s saloon in St. Louis, “Stag” Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons; by the time Shelton died in prison in 1912, he was more legend than flesh. In this blazing graphic novel—part folklore, part love story, part thrilling Law & Order episode with a deadpan denouement—Shelton hears a guitarist in the next cell playing the “Stackalee” song: “That song about me.” No, says the singer: “I think Stackalee from Memphis.” There are endless subtleties here—taken from the historical record when it’s there, invented with the lightest touch when it’s not—and, somehow, no resolution at all. Not after more than a hundred years, thousands of singers, and likely thousands more to come.

  10 Devin McKinney a.k.a. Declan MacManus, Popwithashotgun.blogspot.com, March 21 Too perfect: “I had a vision after watching The Sopranos the other night that the last show would end with Tony dying in Carmela’s arms, and that the last song of all would be ‘Poor Side of Town,’ by Johnny Rivers.”

  JULY 2006

  1 Kanye West, Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival (April 29) Solidifying his position as One of the Best People on the Planet, he switched from singer to DJ and announced he was going to play “one of my favorite songs”: a-ha’s “Take on Me,” the most deliriously irresistible hit of 1985. Doing either the “Carlton dance” or the “Molly Fucking Ringwald,” as uploads on youtube described his moves, West high-stepped across the stage while the crowd sang the song en masse, going up all the way—and it’s a long way—for the impossible high notes that dissolve the chorus into air.

  2 KT Tunstall, “Other Side of the World,” from Eye to the Telescope (Relentless/Virgin) It’s all about Tunstall’s seemingly endless drift through the second word in “You’re on the other side of the world to me.” In that moment this woman from Scotland could be the great Bermudan-Canadian singer Heather Nova, and not in the world at all.

  3 Mandy Moore, American Dreamz (Universal) Almost too good on her numbers
in the hard-nosed American Idol parody where she’ll do anything to win, but she’ll live in film history for the way she delivers a single line: “I’m not physically attracted to other people, but . . .”

  4 Chris Walters From a friend, a haiku for Gene Pitney, 1941–2006, who in the early ’60s, with “Town Without Pity” and “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance,” caught the voice of the outsider too bitter to shake anyone’s lying hand: “Can’t cut my own throat / Before I tell this whole town / To go fuck itself.”

  5 The Handsome Family, “All the Time in Airports,” from Last Days of Wonder (Carrot Top) From the surrealist Albuquerque folk duo, slow power chords behind the details that can make an airport the black hole of everyday life: late at night, “the cages pulled across the stores,” and in the morning, “when they drive the waxer across the floor.” It’s dead air you don’t want to breathe, but you can’t help it.

  6 B. Molcooli and Band, “He Don’t Love You,” Berkeley Farmers Market (March 4) A toddler walked up to the soul singer and an accompanist and held one hand to each of their guitars, letting the sound go right into his skin.

  7 The King, directed by James Marsh, written by Milo Addica and Marsh (Think-Film) One Elvis Valderez (Gael García Bernal, Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries) gets out of the Navy and sets forth to remake the family of the father who left him a bastard, the father he’s never met, now a middle-class fundamentalist preacher (William Hurt, so good you may not recognize him). The movie is a version of the demonic Elvis who emerged in the popular imagination after the real Elvis’s death—demonic because, as a king, he holds absolute power over others’ hearts—but pushed farther than ever before. With Pell James as Elvis’s half sister, indelible when she realizes she’s going to hell.

  8 The Doors, “Doors Ride Again—box set, movie, and Vegas show in the works for the band’s 40th anniversary” (Rolling Stone, May 4) That’s not all. When Jim Morrison died, Evan Serpick reports, organist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger wanted to go for commercials, but drummer John Densmore said no: “Onstage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That’s not for rent.” Now he’s saying yes: “We might consider something technology-oriented, or some hybrid car or something, but it’s gotta be right.” And for the movie, they’ll only do nudity if it’s absolutely necessary to the script.

  9 The Sopranos, “Live Free or Die,” April 16 (HBO) Vito, the only loyal man Tony has left, is exposed as a homosexual. He flees, planning to kill himself before anyone in the mob can do it for him. In a New Hampshire diner, the cook, seeing him for who he is, makes him feel at home as he never has in New Jersey; other gay men come in. In an antique store run by a gay man, Vito stares at a license plate: “Live Free or Die.” Can he? Doesn’t that promise apply to him, too? Coming up behind him, playing in full under the credits: X’s desperate, depressed version of Dave Alvin’s “4th of July,” and the promise and heartbreak of American democracy goes right to your chest.

  10 Sleater-Kinney, “Jumpers,” Great American Music Hall, San Francisco (May 3) Guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker pulled a thread that unraveled the music and tied it in a knot, but it was Janet Weiss who caught the drama. “She’s got the best drummer’s hair ever,” said a friend.

  AUGUST 2006

  1 Jon Langford, “Lost in America,” from Gold Brick (ROIR) This summer Bruce Springsteen will be getting thousands on their feet with “John Henry,” cheering the tale of a man who in the years after the Civil War died proving he could hammer through rock faster than a steam drill. In October, Oxford will publish Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Steel Drivin’ Man, where John Henry is real-life prisoner number 497 in Virginia’s Richmond Penitentiary. But in Jon Langford’s leaping “Lost in America,” John Henry is the country itself. He’s there when the last spike is driven into the Transcontinental Railroad, walks away from the fight with the drill, dies in the “Wreck of Old 97,” turns up as a soldier at Abu Ghraib—and, just possibly, takes the September 11 planes back from their hijackers and breaks Columbus out of Guantánamo. It’s as rousing as Springsteen’s version, and absolutely heartbreaking, which for some reason the actual “John Henry” folk song never is.

  2 The Lovekill, These Moments Are Momentum (Astro Magnetics) Cleveland by way of Omaha, and more exciting than driving the 800 miles at 100 mph.

  3 Gang of Four, “Natural’s Not in It,” from Entertainment! (EMI) “The problem-uh, of-uh leisure,” Jon King chanted uncertainly on the band’s first album, in 1979; he made the notion sound like a black hole. Now the song will kick off Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. “Andy and I thought it was a fantastic idea to use this song for the film, when we heard it was a new take on the costume drama,” King says of himself and Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill. “It seems to have shook up the audience in Cannes. It could easily be French parochialism about a Yank taking on this iconic figure without due deference. It’s the only developed country where there’d be a prosecution of a rapper for criticizing Napoleon and de Gaulle.”

  4 Peter Carey, Theft (Knopf) “We had been born walled out from art, had never guessed it might exist,” says an Australian painter in Carey’s new novel, “and then we saw what had been kept from us.” The resentment is patent, but still it’s a shock when fragments of pop songs—art the man wasn’t born walled off from—explode in his mouth as he rails against a 16th-century art critic: “You went to the finest schools all right but you are nothing more than a gossip and a suck-up to Cosimo de’ Medici. I was a butcher and I came in through the bathroom window.”

  5 Ronnie Dawson et al., Rockin’ Bones: 1950s Punk & Rockabilly (Rhino) Across 101 tracks from 1954 through 1964, the trash (Dwight Pullen’s “Sunglasses After Dark”) is so giddy it makes the masterpieces (Elvis’s “Baby Let’s Play House”) feel like folk music.

  6–9 Irma Thomas, Dr. John, Elvis Costello, Allen Toussaint, Bruce Springsteen In the work Thomas and Dr. John did last fall for the collection Our New Orleans (Nonesuch), you could almost hear Katrina blow away decades of complacency. Now they walk blankly through their paces on the formally similar package Sing Me Back Home (Burgundy), credited to the no-doubt already disbanded New Orleans Social Club. On Thomas’s own After the Rain (Rounder), the songs are classy, the arrangements contrived, and once past a tense, every-breath-I-take remake of the Drifters’ 1960 “I Count the Tears,” the singing is confused. Costello and Toussaint’s The River in Reverse (Verve Forecast)—recorded last November and December in Los Angeles and New Orleans—is tedious. But in Concord, California, on June 6, Springsteen’s update of Blind Alfred Reed’s 1929 complaint “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” rang true even through the self-congratulatory stomp of his huge “Seeger Sessions” band. It was his verse about George W. Bush’s first visit to New Orleans after the flood; “He took a look around, gave a little pep talk, said ‘I’m with you,’ then took a little walk,” Springsteen sang.

  10 Jon Langford, Nashville Radio (Verse Chorus Press) Almost any one of these photo-based paintings of old country singers would serve as a grimy, plastic-covered image on a tombstone. But there’s so much hidden-in-plain-sight detail in the pictures—mottos, slight facial distortions, quotations—that by page 120 Hank Williams as St. Sebastian (in a cowboy hat but otherwise naked from the waist up, from a photo taken after an arrest) seems obvious. All the graves are open.

  OCTOBER 2006

  1 Weegee, “Heartbreak Pillow” c. 1945, in Unknown Weegee, International Center of Photography, New York City The street photographer, here shooting a small bed in a small room: a headboard, what looks like a gilt bedspread, and a heart-shaped pillow that might be covered in heavy fabric, big enough for only one head. A decade before the fact, it’s the clearest glimpse ever of the inside of Heartbreak Hotel.

  2 Peter Spiegelman, Death’s Little Helpers (Vintage Crime) A private eye is trying to get information out of his client, who just wants to bite his head off. The Ramones on her stereo aren’t helping.
Then she puts on Roxy Music, which stops the action the way a sap on the back of the detective’s head would in a normal crime novel. “She sat at the drafting table, stubbed out her cigarette, and rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers. . . . I watched her and listened to the music and we sat that way for what seemed a long time.” Four minutes, thirty seconds: The song is “More Than This,” never sounding more true than it does in the silence of a page.

  3 The Blow, Paper Television (K) You get the feeling Khaela Maricich’s voice can go anywhere without her leaving her room in Olympia—even, as in “True Affection,” 20,000 leagues under the sea. “You were out of my league,” Maricich sings, bringing the old story back to dry land, maybe making you care more about how her story turns out than you ever did about Jules Verne’s.

  4 Pere Ubu, Why I Hate Women (Smog Veil) On the inside sleeve: “This is an irony-free recording.” Which refers to . . . the album title? The songs (including “My Boyfriend’s Back,” which is not a cover of the 1963 hit by the Angels)? Or how to live?

  5 Bill Fitzhugh, Highway 61 Resurfaced (William Morrow) A lost-tapes mystery—all blues mysteries are lost-tapes mysteries—but unlike the rest, this pays off with a climax so rich you want to hear the tapes as much as the people hunting them down.

  6 The Pine Box Boys, Arkansas Killing Time (Trash Fish) Murder ballads one after the other, and, not halfway through, enough to make you queasy. Especially the indelible little number “The Beauty in Her Face,” which goes as far into the mind of a killer as anyone needs to. You know how it’s going to end before the first verse does, and you spend the rest of the song trying to make it come out differently.

  7 Paul Muldoon, “Sillyhow Stride,” The Times Literary Supplement, May 31 From the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, guitarist for the Princeton band Rackett, and sometime song-writing partner with Warren Zevon (“My Ride’s Here,” from 2002, one year before Zevon’s death at 56), a long elegy for the old California rounder. It starts off straitjacketed with song titles and lyric quotes; then the ground of the poem begins to slip, the room grows close, and more than anything you want a breath of fresh air. Which you get: “Every frame a freeze-frame/Of two alcoholics barreling down to Ensenada/In a little black Corvette, vroom vroom.”