Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  8 Michelle Polzine, Chosen Best Pastry Chef by San Francisco magazine The former guitarist in Special Agents of Her Majesty’s Secret Cervix, now at Range, a gem in the Mission District: “If people like what you’re doing when you’re playing punk, you’re doing something wrong. As a pastry chef, I can please people and still retain my integrity.”

  9 “Marin Center Presents: Ian Anderson Plays Jethro Tull,” Advertisement, San Francisco Chronicle “Ian Anderson, founding member of the legendary rock band Jethro Tull, has long been considered to be the foremost and to many, the only exponent of rock-style flute”—and God knows being the only is a sure way to being the foremost. Not to mention appearing as your own tribute band.

  10 Hem, Funnel Cloud (Waveland) Chamber folk music from Brooklyn, but where the 2002 Rabbit Songs could get under your skin like a disease, here Sally Ellyson’s singing is all but willfully pallid, and the music goes nowhere. Except in the instrumental “The Burnt-Over District”—named for the section of western New York that in the 1820s was so inflamed by revivalism that by the time Joseph Smith led his flock west there was hardly anyone left to save—which weaves the theme to The Manchurian Candidate into “Shenandoah” and goes all over the country, from then to now.

  NOVEMBER 2006

  1 The Drones, Gala Mill (ATP/R) I was attracted to this solely because the title of the band’s last album, Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By, echoes two of my favorite band names: When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water and And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. How could Gala Mill be anything but great? Sure, dull title, but according to the press release, this Australian four-piece, led by singer-guitarist Gareth Liddiard, recorded on “an isolated 10,000-acre farm” in Tasmania. Eat your heart out, Nick Cave.

  None of that—and none of the band’s earlier music—is any preparation for what happens here, from the first moment. “Jezebel” is a long, delirious song that seems to suck all the chaos and horror of the present moment into a single human being, who struggles to contain that world inside himself. Especially on the choruses, when a drone comes up, hovers, waits—and it’s unnerving, waiting for the sound to break—you can’t tell if the singer succeeds or not, or if it would be better if he succeeded or failed. Better for who? You are dragged into this song as if you were a prisoner. The performance is a shocker—and the album, casting off its echoes of Neil Young and Eleventh Dream Day, staking out its own territory in song after song, can hardly recover from it. Not until the final number, a nine-minute reenvisioning of a traditional Australian convicts’ ballad—and after that, you really will know this band by their trail of dead.

  2 Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Broom (Polyvinyl) Okay, but they don’t do “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—Boris’s favorite song.

  3 Clerks II, written and directed by Kevin Smith (The Weinstein Company) Last line of the film: “ Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.” Immediately jettisoned by Soul Asylum’s suicidal “Misery.”

  4 The Grates, Gravity Won’t Get You High (Dew Process) For “Inside Outside”—fast, desperate, cool, absolutely unafraid of how smart it is. “I might live to tell the tale,” says singer Patience, “of how young girls once rode a whale.”

  5 Ellen Barkin, “It’s nighttime in the big city . . .” Theme Time Radio Hour With Bob Dylan (XM Radio) Every week, before Dylan as disc jockey begins spinning his discs and telling his tales, Barkin, the woman who so long ago in Diner couldn’t put her husband’s records back in the right order, now stands back and lowers the boom. After her opening line, what by now amounts to a poem in progress unfolds: “A woman walks barefoot, her high heels in a handbag . . . A man gets drunk, he shaves off his moustache . . . A cat knocks over a lamp . . . An off-duty cop parks in front of his ex-wife’s house.” Is he stalking her, or do they still sleep together?

  6 Cat Power, Live on KEXP (eMusic exclusives) Four numbers recorded on the air with only guitar and piano, and likely a more complete summation of who this woman is and what she does than can be found anywhere else. It’s all so quiet you don’t know whether to hold your breath or scream.

  7 Robert Plant, Nine Lives (Rhino) In 1982 the ex-Led Zeppelin dervish drifted in a sea all his own, a surfer on a wave that never reached shore. That was “Far Post,” then a B-side, nearly impossible to find since. It’s here. You can play it all day long.

  8 Bob Dylan, Modern Times (Columbia) Inside the sometimes slack rhythms and the deceptively easy lines, a deep longing. For a trail of dead.

  9–10 Peter Stampfel: Karen Dalton, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best (Koch, 1997) and Holy Modal Rounders, Alleged in Their Own Time (Rounder, 1975) On Gala Mill, the Drones cover “Are You Leaving for the Country,” a song learned from a recording by the ’60s Greenwich Village folk-scene jazz singer Karen Dalton. She had an acrid voice, and she lived an acrid life: caught like a pursesnatcher in Stampfel’s song “Sally in the Alley.” He uses the lyrics to “Sally” to end his notes to the reissue of Dalton’s 1969 album; he recorded it on the Holy Modal Rounders’ Alleged in Their Own Time, nearly 20 years before Dalton died. You’ll forget the Drones’ “Are You Leaving for the Country”; you may forget Dalton’s (on her just-reissued 1971 album In My Own Time). You won’t forget “Sally”—a nursery rhyme about a junkie.

  FEBRUARY 2007

  SPECIAL FOUR ITEM EDITION (IT WAS A LOUSY MONTH)

  1 Brian Morton, Breakable You (Har-court) Sometimes, as in his first novel, The Dylanist, Morton has perfect pitch—and especially writing about parties, where people have to think of something to say, a kind of discomfort that takes away one’s sense of the novelist having to think of things for them to say. This time it’s a literary party in New York: “E. L. Doctorow, remote behind his air of suave imperturbability, was talking to Laurie Anderson, who was, as always, carefully disheveled, and Lou Reed, who had the pruny monkeyish face of somebody’s grandfather, but who was imperishably hip—the hippest man in the room, in any room, by definition.” What’s so effective about the passage is how casually it distinguishes hip—or cool, the better word—from Doctorow’s act. Cool is beneath the action, looking up; the air of smugness that surrounds every picture of Doctorow like smoke speaks for someone working much too hard to look as if he hasn’t worked for years.

  Reed demonstrated how it works not long ago, in an “in-conversation” night with the critic Anthony DeCurtis at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. On Berlin: “One of those career-ending moments” (though Reed later announced he’d be performing Berlin at St. Anna’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, with a set by Julian Schnabel). On work: “When I can’t write it’s so impossible it’s a joke, and I can’t even imagine how it’s done.” He broke character only when asked about “the stature of rock ’n’ roll in the culture today”: “I just love a good rock band. Always have. . . . The first time I heard OutKast do ‘Hey Ya’ for the first 15 seconds I was saying ‘Oh man, I could listen to this forever’—and then you kind of had to.” And when a woman in the audience asked him a question in a mall-rat accent so heavy he had to ask her to repeat it twice.

  2 TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope) Before the election last November, the sense of dread loaded into this dark cloud—the way the group sounds as if it’s been hiding out with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man at least since the start of the second Bush presidency—was inescapable. Now the feeling—echoing Frankie Lymon’s doo-wop cry, the punk gloom of Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division, the clatter on the streets of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude—is just slightly less immediate. People are still running down one street, hiding in the corners of another, but you no longer have to feel as if that’s the only possible way to live.

  3 Chris Smither, “Diplomacy,” from Leave the Light On (Signature Sounds/Mighty Albert) The same shift of real time onto music takes place with the old blues guitarist’s song about the Iraq war—which it doesn’t have to mention by name.
The song is so what-the-fuck, so stuff-happens (“Slip-slidin’ away,” Smither sings, apropos of nothing, or everything) that if it sounded brazen last fall, when Smither was knocking it out for Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition or at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan, today it sounds as if a good part of the country is singing along: “Take it or leave it, it’s the deal of the day,” go the lines, the American sticking out his hand for the whole world to shake. “And if you leave it, you get it anyway.” It’s as if millions of people actually heard this song—and as if this verse has, now, an extra line: Hey—what kind of deal is that?

  4 Murray-Dodge Hall, Princeton University I’m sitting in the courtyard of this small Gothic pile, reading Lester Bangs’s 1971 rant “James Taylor Marked for Death” for a class I’m teaching, coming on his mini-generational history about the way counter-cultural messianism “sent us in grouchy packs to ugly festivals just to be together and dig ourselves and each other, as if all of this meant something greater than that we were kids who liked rock ’n’ roll and came out to have a good time, as if our very styles and trappings and drugs and jargon could be in themselves political statements for any longer than about 15 stoned seconds, even a threat to the Mother Country!”—and there in front of me, courtesy of the class of 1969, commemorating its 25th reunion in 1994, is a large granite cylinder with a yin-yang symbol and, engraved in block letters, lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s insufferable “Woodstock”: “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” All I could think was how remarkable it was that they both ended up here, still arguing.

  APRIL 2007

  1 Pink Nasty, Mold the Gold (pinknasty.net) A singer and guitarist from Wichita, Kansas, she doesn’t even try to live up to her name. “We could go to Starbucks/And talk a lot of shit about people/We don’t know, now/Who probably live in New York”—you get the feeling that the borders of the life described are Starbucks over here and Seinfeld reruns over there. Whether the songs are full of rhythmic stop signs (the gorgeous, almost doo-wop ballad “Hot Pink House”) or move so fast you can’t imagine them stopping for anything (“Dirty Soap”), there’s a pugnacious, resentful depression all over the music, but it’s a depression alive to itself: it might be one person’s way of taking revenge on the world.

  2 The Moaners, Blackwing Yalobusha (Yep Roc Records) Speaking of depression—Melissa Swingle, who can play anything, and Laura King, who plays drums, sound as if they long ago disappeared into the black hole and came out completely unimpressed.

  3 Shut Up & Sing (The Weinstein Company) Barbara Kopple, co-director here with Cecilia Peck, is still best known for Harlan County, U.S.A., her 1977 documentary about a miners’ strike; this film, about the Dixie Chicks trying to come up with the nerve to spit in the hurricane of abuse that followed lead singer Natalie Maines’s 2003 denunciation of George W. Bush, isn’t altogether different. The women are millionaires, but a memory of destitution, or a sight of it somewhere in the future, is present in the bones of their faces. The passion and fear that drive a strike are present in “Not Ready to Make Nice,” which, as it takes shape and then emerges as a finished thing—calm, resolute, and hard—is like a woman watching her own autopsy: whatever it said to you on the radio, the song here, with real-life death threats behind it, holds as much terror as defiance. “Now that we’ve fucked ourselves anyway,” Maines says at one point, “I think we have a responsibility to . . . continue to fuck ourselves.”

  4 Law & Order: Criminal Intent (USA) You’re the devil!” a man says to Kathryn Erbe’s Detective Alexandra Eames, in the episode called “Cuba Libre,” after she’s tricked him into giving himself away. “You should see me in a blue dress,” she says flatly—and given the resolute plainness of Erbe’s character, the line would work almost as well if she said, “You should see me in a dress.” But then it wouldn’t have that Detroit snap, right back to Shorty Long’s 1964 “Devil With the Blue Dress,” and Detective Eames wouldn’t get to walk off with the barest curve of a smile on her face.

  5 Paula Frazer and Tarnation, Now It’s Time (Birdman Records) After years of silence the female Roy Orbison returns, shrouded in swamp gas as always—with the sense that what you’re hearing isn’t quite there; with her syncopated yet faraway melodies or a spectral wail deep in the sound, every hesitation in Frazer’s voice says she isn’t telling you a fraction of what she could.

  6 Michael Tolkin, The Return of the Player (Grove Press) The Hollywood insider panicking, keeping his head down, his mouth forming nothing but yes; he’s learned “to give up his own taste . . . and to surrender to the audience. He consoled himself with the example of Eric Clapton, a brilliant musician who might have been as difficult for the masses as Bob Dylan, or Hendrix if he had lived, but Clapton pursued the middle way.”

  7 Pet Shop Boys, Pop Art: The Hits (Capitol Records/EMI) A great career for Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, and all of it might fit in Dusty Springfield’s mouth as she breathes “Ah-ha-ha” in her guest spot on the 1987 “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” lifting the last syllable just slightly, perhaps the sexiest wave goodbye in all of pop music.

  8 Jerry Lee Lewis, Last Man Standing (Artists First) Because he’s frozen solid.

  9 Chris Estey, writer, and David Lasky, artist, “Critical Mass: A Story of the Clash,” in Hotwire Comix and Capers (Fantagraphics Books) Beginning and ending with Joe Strummer at 50, at his kitchen table on December 22, 2002, about to drop dead. Best panel: future Clash bassist Paul Simonon on the tube one day, two people reading newspapers crowding him on either side, his eyes catching the headlines “Police and Thieves Clash at Notting Hill” on his right, “European Clash in—” on his left. Estey and Lasky leave out the lightbulb going on over his head.

  10 Randy Newman, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country” (Nonesuch at iTunes) Iraq as the end of America—and maybe a hidden track on the next Dixie Chicks album.

  MAY 2007

  1 Electrelane, No Shouts, No Calls (Too Pure) Singer Verity Susman could hardly sound more English than her name—loose, flighty, constantly surprised, with an innocence that can re-create itself after every shock—despite a darkening shade. Since their debut in 2001 with Rock It to the Moon, this quartet has made music that seems to take place in the air—not flying, just barely off the ground. That lends a sense of abstraction to guitarist Mia Clarke’s delirious search for the sublime through repetition, or the rhythms of bassist Ros Murray and drummer Emma Gaze. The lines they trace are straight, but all cut up, out of order, a hopscotch music where you never quite know where you are.

  2 Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet (Doubleday) His eighth novel, and his best since Gun, With Occasional Music, his first. The oddness there, with the lines between humans and animals a thing of the past, is still present in this apparently ordinary-life tale about a band (you get their whole story in one rehearsal, one gig, and one radio showcase)—present with a con artist who claims to be the guy who thinks up all those senseless-acts-of-beauty bumper-sticker/T-shirt/coffee-mug slogans. The premise is rich; what makes the book sing are Lethem’s accounts of what happens when a crowd on the street hears a band inside a building, the way the whole of a song is present in four words of a four-line chorus, or when for a moment four musicians understand each other better than any one of them understands him- or herself: “Denise met the call, ticked the beat double-time. The sound was sprung, uncanny, preverbal, the bass and drum the rudiment of life itself, argument and taunt, and each turn of the figure a kiss-off until the cluster of notes began again. Who needed words? Who even needed guitars, those preening whiners?”

  3 John C. Reilly, “My Son John,” from Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys (Anti) The highlight of a set featuring Nick Cave, Bryan Ferry, Gavin Friday, Lou Reed, Robin Holcomb, and dozens more, the Irish ballad (better known as “Mrs. McGrath,” as on Bruce Springsteen’s The Seeger Sessions) about a sailor who lost his legs to a cannonball takes on an unearthly cast when the not-the-st
ar of Boogie Nights and The Good Girl barrels into the mystic: when he chants the chorus, Timmy roo dun-dah, foddle riddle dah, whack for the riddle timmy roo dun-dah, it feels like a thousand-year-old curse.

  4 Paolo Nutini, “New Shoes” (Atlantic) The whole world may soon be sick of this—every shoe company on earth had to be bidding on it the day after it was released—but for the moment it’s as irresistible as irresistible gets.

  5 Marnie Stern, In Advance of the Broken Arm (Kill Rock Stars) Want to hear little girls screaming on a beach for 45 minutes? No? This might change your mind.

  6 Peter Hartlaub, “Lies, lies, lies, they’re going to get this geeky guy,” San Francisco Chronicle (March 2) Much of the best current film criticism is in the “advisory” daily papers run at the end of the supposedly real reviews, as in this one for the PG-13 teen comedy Full of It: “This film contains sexual situations, profanity, mild violence, and several references to the band Poison, which may lead to ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ getting stuck in your head during the ride home.”

  7 Joe Boyd, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (Serpent’s Tail) He was there, with the British avatars of today’s fey freak-folk movement: with the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Anne Briggs, Nick Drake, Vashti. What happened in those halcyon days? One thing after another.

  8 Warren Zevon, Stand in the Fire (Rhino/Asylum) Loud in the Roxy in Los Angeles in 1981—with “Mohammed’s Radio,” a night that turns its back on the dawn; plus four performances not included when the album was originally released. They aren’t as good as the ones that come before—but since there will be no more, they come across, one by one, from “Johnny Strikes Up the Band” to “Hasten Down the Wind,” as heartbreakers.