Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  9 Mary Weiss, “I Just Missed You,” from Dangerous Game (Norton Records) A staircase, climbed to the top, and you can feel every step.

  10 Howard Fishman, “I’m Not There (1956),” on Howard Fishman Performs Bob Dylan & The Band’s “Basement Tapes” Live at Joe’s Pub (Monkey Farm) Not an interpretation but, for as long as it plays, an irrefutable translation of a legendary song that seems beyond human ken, and not only because half of its words are missing and you can’t quite be sure if the other half are there or not. Soon to be a major motion picture.

  JUNE 2007

  1 Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down (Black Cat) In this stupendously jittery novel, the narrator, with no idea how to make it to the end of the week when the bills come due, walks into a Brooklyn club on amateur night. Al Green is on the sound system, singing “Tired of Being Alone”—cut off to make room for Ed and Peter, a folk group, who before they can do their song about the day “we started bombing Afghanistan,” have to explain it—and the scene as Thomas lets it play is so perfect you can hardly bear to stay in the room. Even as your skin crawls over “It’s a song about war, I guess. . . . But it’s about the sadness of it all, which is something people don’t really see,” you can’t wait to find out how much worse it will get.

  2 The Avett Brothers, Emotionalism (Ramseur) Employing mainly guitar, banjo, and inferior recording equipment, two brothers from Greenville, North Carolina, listen for the Beatles. That opens the door to the house their songs make—a place where the doors stick and the floors aren’t level. There’s an odd, shifting light and folk-art knickknacks in the bedrooms, not to mention Buddy Holly 45s and a warped copy of the Band’s second album in the attic.

  3 The Polyphonic Spree, “Lithium,” from Wait (Good) If you thought Kurt Cobain sounded psychotic on this, wait till you hear it sung over a tinkling piano by the president of your high school science club.

  4 R. Crumb, R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country (Abrams) Why are the faces of the blues and country performers weathered, while every jazz man’s is smooth?

  5 Samuel L. Jackson, “Stack-O-Lee,” Music From the Motion Picture Black Snake Moan (New West) This is the prison version. Jackson stamps out the words as if he learned them there.

  6 The Death of a Party, The Rise and Fall of Scarlet City (Double Negative) Four people from Oakland, California, gulping, shouting, delirious, only occasionally pulling back to gain an inch of perspective, running right over a cliff (“She’s too young to be sleeping with a married man, but you’re too old to care”), and then scrambling back up to try it again. The songs are all mysteries, hard to penetrate, full of allure, demanding you solve them.

  7 Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) “The French critic and provocateur Jean Baudrillard, whose theories about consumer culture and the manufactured nature of reality were intensely discussed both in rarefied philosophical circles and in blockbuster movies like The Matrix, died yesterday in Paris,” Patricia Cohen wrote on March 7 in The New York Times. That same day a photo of an elderly Baudrillard reading on stage while accompanied by a very tall blonde got up as a queen from outer space popped up in my e-mail box. He was dressed in what appeared to be a gold lamé jacket. The Elvis costume came across as, yes, a critique of consumer culture, and also as an inadvertent admission that Baudrillard’s intellectual glamour was that of a media player—one whose philosophy always fit snugly into the sound bites he deplored.

  8 Rufus Thomas, “Stop Kicking My Dog Around,” from Can’t Get Away from This Dog (Stax) Thomas (1917–2001) claimed that Sam Cooke wrote this song for him, “backstage at a theater off Broadway that I was working with Sam, Jackie Wilson, and Lesley Gore,” and as Thomas recorded it sometime in the mid-’60s, it did have that Sam Cooke glide. But the song goes back to the minstrel shows—and so did Rufus Thomas. Could it have been that Cooke, even if he was only 2 when he left Clarks-dale, Mississippi, where he was born in 1931, remembered hearing Thomas sing the old piece as he passed through with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, and that Thomas forgot?

  9 Larry Kegan, Howard Rutman, Robert Zimmerman, “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Boppin’ the Blues,” “I Want You to be My Girl,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “Confidential,” and “Ready Teddy.”

  10 “Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–1966” (Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota) On Christmas Eve 1956, three boys, two 14 and one 15, pooled their quarters for the record machine at Terline Music in St. Paul, Minnesota. You put in a coin and got about 30 seconds, so with the 15-year-old pounding a piano they rushed to harmonize on whatever they could until the machine cut off, and then started up again with another tune. It sounds like a slumber party, and what’s surprising is not that one of these kids turned into Bob Dylan, but that less than a year later he was—as pictured in a recently discovered photo featured in the Weisman show—singing the same songs in a band called the Golden Chords, commanding a stage with fervor and confidence, dressing pretty much as he dresses now: flash coat, dark pants, dark shirt, white tie.

  The Believer 20082014

  SEPTEMBER 2008

  1 Prime Suspect 7—The Final Act, directed by Philip Martin, written by Frank Deasy (Acorn Media, 2006) You suspect the father of a missing schoolgirl until he puts his head inside her backpack as if he knows this is as close to her as he’ll ever get again. “Did you ever hear that song, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?”

  2 Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Lie Down in the Light (Drag City) For years Will Oldham—traveling under variations of the name Palace, as himself, as a figment of his own imagination, no doubt under names I’ve missed—has written and sung from an Appalachian highlands that may as well be his own imagined country. But in his music Oldham gets to live there, and there he does what he wants; even as you might swoon at their delicacy, the songs give off the smell of perversity. Here he sings as the sole member of his own religion—and you can’t tell if the faith has all but died out or if the prophet has yet to find his first follower. He can call up a company of selves at will, to watch, to witness, then make them disappear before the revelation comes: “Kneel down to please me,” he says, as caught between sex and adoration as Madonna in “Like a Prayer,” but his voice tells you he’s the supplicant. From song to song the feeling is more abstract, harder to hold on to, beauty flashing like an animal in the forest you can’t be sure you saw at all, just as in the moment you’re convinced this person will never make a record this good again.

  3 Howard Hampton writes (June 11, 2008) “I stumbled on Dylan’s endorsement of Obama (London Times, June 5: ‘Right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralizing. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we’ve got this guy out there right now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up—Barack Obama. . . . Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to’). Makes sense that there would be that spark of recognition—the thing that amazes me is that the Clintons never seemed to get that they were dealing with someone more formidable than a Howard Dean in blackface. So they wound up looking like Baez and Seeger, the Old Regime, undone by the sound of a greater sense of possibility than they were willing to entertain—hence the whole ‘Electability’ issue would frame the election as ‘No We Can’t’ (elect a black man) vs. ‘Yes We Can’ (dream a better country, as MLK or poor tortured RFK did once upon a time).”

  4 Shannon McArdle, Summer of the Whore (Bar/None) Late of the Mendoza Line, for the title song McArdle summons a slow shame ballad, full of portent and dread, a pop form that goes back to the early ’60s (“Suspicion,” “Endless Sleep”) and has never worn out, maybe because so few have had the nerve to try it. It’s a self-lacerating heartbreaker (“A little filth for my record,” the singer snaps over a dead marriage)—with the reverb on the guitar making each note a warning, the voice seems to grow thinner and stronger at the same time.

  5 Counting Crows, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings (DGC) Why is it so
uncool to like Counting Crows? Because Adam Duritz has made so much money that he can wear his heart like a coat instead of merely sticking it on his sleeve? “1492,” the first thing you hear, is Jon Langford’s “Lost in America” with Columbus standing in for John Henry, relentless, ridiculous, embarrassed, defiant, and despite hilariously pretentious song titles as the album winds on (“When I Dream of Michelangelo,” “On a Tuesday in Amsterdam Long Ago”), its echo never really dies out.

  6 Hoagie’s Restaurant, Hopkins, Minnesota A family place filled with placards and metal ads, some original (Uncle Remus Syrup: “Dis sho’ am good,” says an old black man), some reproductions, and one bizarre anachronism: a go-getter dressed in ’50s suit and tie and a sly grin holding up an LP under a banner: EDUCATION: THE NEXT BEST THING TO A RECORD DEAL.

  7 Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand (Rounder, 2007) The old rocker and the bluegrass queen: very nice people. Very polite. To each other, to the songs, and to you. But all the singing is whispering and it was the dullest album of the year.

  Onstage, though, fervor comes out—especially for Led Zeppelin songs that go back to the woods. On YouTube videos from this year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Druids in “Battle of Evermore” take to the skies: two final minutes of furious mandolin slashing and Plant’s snaggletoothed hair bucking (“Bring it back! Bring it back!” My God, are you sure? Bring what dragon back?) as if the notes have him on a trip wire. For “When the Levee Breaks,” with Plant quieting Krauss’s keening fiddle to let lines from Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” float through to be lost in the flood, the song sweeps up Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, who recorded it in 1929, and walks their ghosts across the stage.

  8 Carolyn Jessop with Laura Palmer, Escape (Broadway Books, 2007) “I was born into a radical polygamist cult. At eighteen, I became the fourth wife of a fifty-year-old man. I had eight children in fifteen years. When our leader began to preach the apocalypse, I knew I had to get them out.” In case you were wondering what she’s been doing since Twin Peaks.

  9 Randy Newman, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” from Harps and Angels (Nonesuch) It’s been clear for some time that the theft of the 2000 election laid the foundation for the Bush administration as such: if they could get away with that—with the Supreme Court having discredited itself to get Bush into the White House, the last check was gone—they could get away with anything. And, says Newman’s unmade bed of a song, the bed of someone who hasn’t gotten out of it for days, they did.

  The number was first floated on iTunes in 2006, then adapted as an op-ed piece for the New York Times; now, to shards of the tune to “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” Newman runs through the worst leaders in history, from Stalin and Hitler back to King Leopold of Belgium and Torquemada, trying to convince himself they were worse than our own, but who cares if they weren’t? In a verse the Times left out, he thinks about the curse of history: “You know it pisses me off a little / That this Supreme Court is gonna outlive me.” “Get over it,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in April of Bush v. Gore. “It’s so old by now.” He’ll get the last word, but to sing even a clumsy song in the face of that knowledge is not nothing.

  10 What I really want to do is be Edmund Wilson, or “Interview with the Doors,” Mojo Navigator #14, August 1967, collected in Bomp! Saving the World One Record at a Time, edited by Suzy Shaw and Mick Farren (Ammo)

  JIM MORRISON: “Interviews are good, but . . .”

  MOJO: “Oh, they’re a drag.”

  JM: “Critical essays are really where it’s at.”

  OCTOBER 2008

  1 I’m Not Jim, You Are All My People (Bloodshot) A songwriting collaboration between the novelist Jonathan Lethem and Walter Salas-Humara, singer-guitarist for the Gainesville, Florida, band the Silos—and from the first track you’re somewhere utterly familiar where nothing quite fits. “Mr. October” is the title, but you might have to listen a long time before you catch Reggie Jackson flashing across the TV screen in the bar, just as the singer (Salas-Humara, as on every number) is having trouble putting the bits of memory the tune assembles together. Hangover music—Did that really happen?—but the first reason you might miss Mr. October is that the melody, running down descending lines on the guitar, breaking up as the lyrics aim for the last line of a verse, is almost too sweet to bear. It carries regret for the fact that neither you nor the singer can come away from this song with any certainty. Did the singer ever see any of the people he’s singing about again?

  The half-light of “Mr. October” is filtered through everything that follows: the noir one-liners in “Missing Persons” (“a bum tries to sell you his hat”), catchy bubble gum (“Amanda Morning”), a depressed ballad that would have fit in Lethem’s Men and Cartoons if baseball cards count as cartoons (“The Pitchers Gave Up”), and, maybe with more sticking power than anything else, three shaggy dog stories, spoken-word pieces that could have come off of a 1950s Beat comedy LP by Ken Nordine, one of which actually features a dog. A man with a talking dog walks into a bar, where the old routine immediately shatters. The guy telling the story keeps a level head, but he can’t keep the story straight. The bartender’s comebacks don’t fit the lines he’s handed. It’s a Twilight Zone episode that can’t find its way out of the first act. “I’ve been in every bar in every joke in this country,” the guy says, as if he deserves to know how all this comes out as much as you do.

  2 Robert Altman, Santana, Altamont Speedway, Livermore, CA, December 1969, in The Sixties (Santa Monica Press) Everyone knows Carlos Santana’s the-pain-of-the-universe-is-in-my-fingers grimace, and this is one of the best shots ever made of the guitar god hitting that note. Except that he’s playing maracas, which kind of takes the edge off.

  3 Miranda Lambert, “Famous in a Small Town,” from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Sony) From last year, not the hit, still floating around the country stations, an expert number about truth, lies, and gossip: “Everybody dies famous in a small town,” and, even in your grave, you’ll never hear the end of it. “We heard he was caught red-handed with her mama,” Lambert sings querulously. “So that’s just what they let us all believe.” You mean that with-her-mother story was a cover-up? For what?

  4 Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter,” in “The Dark Defender,” on Dexter, season two (Showtime) Dexter walks into a bar . . . to find the bartender who killed his mother with a chain saw thirty-four years before, in front of him, when he was three. Slow motion, tilted image, with a red filter, and as Michael C. Hall opens the door, the song comes up on the jukebox; at the end of the long lead-in, when the last guitar note breaks over the rest of the music, he sits down at the bar. The music moves on. The suspense that is generated is the suspense the piece has gathered to itself over all these years, never sounding like the past, still sounding like the future.

  5 James Lee Burke, The Tin Roof Blow-down (Simon & Schuster) The ten-minute egg: Detective Dave Robicheaux and his boss, Sheriff Helen Soileau, approach Detective Lamar Fuselier at a crime scene, a hut holding the rotting bodies of two men shot to pieces. (“Their viscera was exposed, their facial features hardly recognizable. Their brain matter was splattered all over one wall. Both men wore sports coats, silk shirts, and expensive Italian shoes with tassels on them.”) Fuselier throws tough-guy repartee at Robicheaux, who once saw him cheating on a police exam. “ ‘Mind if we take a look?’ Helen said. ‘Be my guest,’ he said, finally taking notice of her. His eyes traveled up and down her person. ‘We got barf bags in the cruiser if you need one.’ ‘Give it to your wife,’ she said.”

  6 Bob Dylan, “32–20 Blues” from Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series No. 8 (Sony) Robert Johnson recorded it in 1936, Bob Dylan in 1993 for his World Gone Wrong, lines from it traveled the South through the first decades of the twentieth century before turning up in 1956 in the Crickets’ “Midnight Shift”—and here, on a three-CD set made up mostly of footnotes to official releases from the last twenty years, it breaks the pace. The
dominant tone of the thirty-nine performances is reflective; this is a search for a groove. The syncopation Dylan finds on acoustic guitar at first lags behind his singing; before he’s a third through, the fluttery beat has made room for the voice to slide right off the lines, until you can follow the last words of verses (“none”—“nuhhhhnnnn”—“come,” “right,” and a “hell” so faint it might not be that at all) as if they’re rabbits running through the brush.

  7 Dario Robleto, Military issued blanket infested with hand-ground vinyl record dust from Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” and Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” in “Neo-Hoodoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith” (Menil Collection, Houston, June–September; P.S.1, New York, October 19–January 26, 2009) Beige-cream, with light red stripes, thin on the sides, thicker in the middle: a true army blanket from the mid-1880s. Yes, it calls up soldiers passing out blankets infested with smallpox during the Indian wars after the Civil War—if it’s not the thing itself—but it’s also a swirl of confusion. “I understand ‘Cortez the Killer,’ ” I said to Robleto in Houston, “but why ‘Tainted Love’? Because the blankets were tainted?” From his response it didn’t seem as if that notion had even occurred to him. “Soft Cell, soft sell,” he said—hey, says the Army, we just want to warm up our Indian brothers and sisters on those chilly Plains nights. “But also because of all that ’80s synth-pop,” Robleto said. “It was like another British invasion”—more like the one in the seventeenth century than the one in the twentieth. Or, as Memphis bandleader Jim Dickinson once put it, turning the story inside out, “Giving synthesizers to the British was like giving whiskey to the Indians. Their culture never recovered.”