Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  8–10 Anton Corbijn’s film about Joy Division really should have been titled after the band’s “Atmosphere”; in Control (Genius DVD), from the emergence of the post–Sex Pistols band to the suicide of singer Ian Curtis in 1980, the dark skies and darker streets of Manchester overshadow any story. Even rooms have clouds in them. The second half of the film is predictable, tiresome, like real life, or the biopic version of a real life, but the first hour is like a storm, like a perfect punk show: when the band takes the stage for the first time, when they finished “Transmission”—the actors playing and singing—I realized that half a minute had gone by and I hadn’t taken a breath. What Sam Riley as Curtis does with the song (“No language, just sound”)—what he does with his face even more than his voice—and what Corbijn does with his camera are as shocking as anything I’ve seen on a screen. On The Factory, Manchester, Live 13 July 1979, included as a second disc with the recent reissue of Joy Division’s first album, the 1979 Unknown Pleasures (Factory), Curtis sounds as if he were twenty feet tall; Bela Lugosi, passed on by Bryan Ferry, is coming out of his mouth. The performance of “Transmission,” the last number, is what was channeled for Control, and it’s a frenzy, itself seemingly channeling Sarah Bernhardt in one of her tear-my-heart-from-my-own-breast speeches—until, near the end, Curtis lets loose. It’s impossible to say what he lets loose with: nothing so commonplace as a scream or a shout, nothing so earthly as a cry of rage or anguish or frustration. It was nothing the band could summon at will. With University of London Live 8 February 1980, on the reissue of the 1980 Closer (Factory), the music is already freezing, trapped in contrived arrangements meant to frame Curtis’s increasingly jittery song structures; the band has become its own prison. People don’t kill themselves for reasons; they kill themselves to end the story.

  With thanks to Chris Walters

  NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2008

  1 The Gits, directed by Kerri O’Kane (Liberation Entertainment) They were Mia Zapata, vocals; Matt Dresdner, bass; Andrew Kessler, a.k.a. Joe Spleen, guitar; and Steve Moriarty, drums. They formed at Antioch in 1986 and moved to Seattle in 1989, in time to catch the second wave of Northwest punk. The first half of this long-after-the-fact documentary is the band coming together, finding its music, and the pace is frustrating. You get only tiny snatches of songs, onstage, on the sound track, and what little is there is so alluring, so full of the spirit of someone driving herself through a storm of her own making, so delicious (“Another Shot of Whiskey,” “Here’s to Your Fuck”—they took Dennis Hopper’s rants in Blue Velvet and made a language out of them) that you can barely stand it when the film moves back to exposition, interviews, scene-setting. Inside the band’s velocity, the sound has grandeur; as Moriarty pounds shirtless and Dresdner and Kessler leave the action to Zapata, she is shockingly alive onstage, breathing the band’s tremendous, unpredictable rhythms like air. But as the band members tell you how they began to come into their own, you are there, and, bit by bit, whole songs begin to assemble themselves, in complete performances, in cutups of many performances, in costumes (street clothes, Medieval court jesters), in haircuts: “While You’re Twisting, I’m Still Breathing,” “Bob (Cousin O.),” “Second Skin.” It’s a great thrill to watch a whole creation take place in full before you, a song as a life lived. I’ve never seen the special quality of liberation punk offered people brave enough to take the stage and hold it put across so powerfully onscreen—and as the band members talk years later, they don’t hide the sense of privilege they still retain, the privilege of, once, making their own drama.

  Zapata was raped and strangled to death sometime after 2 a.m. on July 7, 1993, on a deserted Seattle street. The second half of the movie is a funeral and a cold-case police procedural, the long story of a small community shattered, paranoia replacing comradeship and rivalry: It could have been any of us, a fear that cuts both ways. Selene Vigil of 7 Year Bitch is a quiet, bitter, dignified presence: “She was missing in action.” The case gets nowhere; Joan Jett fronts the three men to sing Gits songs and raise money to hire a detective: they “found out a lot of dirty about a lot of people”—about people they knew, that is—but no leads. You see the tombstone:

  MIA KATHERINE ZAPATA AUG. 25, 1965–JULY 7, 1993 CHERISHED DAUGHTER-SISTER-ARTIST-FRIEND-GIT

  Ten years later, a DNA match pulls up a felon in Florida. He’s returned to Seattle to stand trial: a huge thug with death all over his face. Vigil: “This is the last person that she saw. She was looking into this guy’s eyes.” O’Kane trusts her story; she never embellishes, never tells you something you’ve already heard. She’s not afraid of her story, either; there’s not an unearned look on any face she found.

  2 Lucinda Williams, Little Honey (Lost Highway) The very first track ends with a flourish so drawn-out and self-congratulatory she might as well have dubbed in applause over the last note.

  3 Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You (Scribner) In London, a middle-aged psychoanalyst tied in knots tries to untie himself. “I guess I’d been something of a snob before, wondering whether it was healthy to be so moved by Roy Orbison and Dusty Springfield.”

  4 All Girl Summer Fun Band, Looking into It (AGSFB Music) Not as funny as the Portland combo’s 2002 debut, with “Car Trouble” and “Cell Phone,” but on top of a beat that snaps like a pencil there are gorgeous harmonies floating over no-nonsense lead vocals relating how nothing works out the way you thought it would. The day Jen Sbragia, Kim Baxter, and Kathy Foster describe is all-American: getting in the car, driving all over town running errands, looking at the signs, wondering if the person who just passed you on the left is someone you went out with two years after high school, the radio on, imagining it’s you.

  5 Fucked Up, The Chemistry of Common Life (Matador) It’s glorious, the lyricism buried beneath the crumbling mountains of sound the Toronto hardcore band makes here: a wall of noise that’s not so hard the complexity of the singing—its doubt—can’t break through. Mostly that’s Pink Eyes, a.k.a. Father Damian, real name Damian Abraham, who growls, roars, rends his garments. But it’s the backing vocals of lighter voices that give the vision of social collapse and moral panic a kind of serenity. Repeating one phrase over and over in breaks between Abraham’s rages in “Black Albino Bones,” Dallas Green appears as a second mind, saying what Abraham won’t, what he can’t, what might make him seem weak, afraid, though Green never sounds remotely weak or afraid. One song later, in “Royal Swan,” instead of trading pieces of time, Katie Stelmanis-Cali floats like a queen in a costume epic behind Abraham’s increasingly harsh chorus, until finally they’re walking through the ruins shoulder to shoulder. It may not match the eighteen-minute single “Year of the Pig,” where Caitlin Starowicz, Katherine Pill, Visnja Jovanovic, Lauren Moses-Brettler, and Alison Griggs stroll through the forest of the music like a whole tribe of Little Red Riding Hoods to Abraham’s Big Bad Wolf—by the end, with the band fighting off its own feedback, you realize they’ve been in cahoots all along—but it’s not certain anything this group can do would, or should.

  6 U.S. Army, “Army Celebrates 60 Years of Integration” (television commercial) The spot was all over the airwaves in July, marking the day in 1948 when, as a front-page featured in the spot showed, PRESIDENT TRUMAN WIPES OUT SEGREGATION IN ARMED FORCES. “Celebrating sixty years of a unified armed forces,” says a voice that might be Dennis Haysbert’s, over a montage of soldiers then and now: “A diverse army is a strong army.” We know the word integration has disappeared from the language, but this makes it seem as if (first clause) we used to have two armies (which of course we did, during and after the Civil War) and that (second clause) it’s good to have people from different backgrounds in the army. What’s interesting is that the very fact of the message implies that this is still an open question.

  7 Pipettes, “Pull Shapes,” from We Are the Pipettes (Cherrytree, 2007) Whenever this comes on—I heard it on The L Word—it’ll be a surprise. Smiles as good as the one that breaks all
over the chorus always are.

  8 Ruth Gerson, Deceived (ruthgerson.com) Death ballads, those first sung by people who’ve been dead for more than a century (“Butcher’s Boy,” “Banks of the Ohio,” “Delia’s Gone”) and some first sung by those still living (Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” Dolly Parton’s “Down from Dover”), getting under the skin every time.

  9 Vladimir Feltsman, conductor and piano, Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor, op. 35, 1933 (Aspen Music Festival, August 7) In-your-face, thumb-up-your-nose drive, crazy-quilt rhythms, cool breezes blowing through spare piano notes followed by clashing and banging and a runaway train to nowhere. It was futurism both as ethos and musical practice—a movement that had a huge impact on the Russian avant-garde in the 1910s and ’20s, and that in the early ’30s was still traveling under the Stalinist radar. As a conductor, Feltsman was unpretentious, very physical, but in the sense of someone at home in his own skin, never drawing attention to himself, no violent maestro’s head shakes or arm wrestling with invisible demons. He gestured like a man having a conversation with the musicians—the Sinfonia, the student orchestra—just someone trying to make a point.

  10 Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls, edited by Marisa Anderson (Chronicle Books) It’s a week in Portland when girls from eight to eighteen form bands with strangers, write songs, learn to play, and make themselves heard—or, in other words, stand up in the public square, not alone, and speak to the crowd: “Bold,” Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney writes in a foreword, “is learning how to play the drums on Monday and performing in front of five hundred people on Saturday.” A lot of this wonderfully illustrated book (shadowy photos and bright cartoons) is friendly, point-by-point how-to, but there’s also Sarah Dougher’s history lesson “Real Girls Rock,” Jodi Darby’s “Self-Defense,” in which Mia Zapata is a presence in her absence (“No matter how spirited and strong we might be, we are all potential victims of violent crimes”), and, perhaps most indelibly, “How I Got Out of My Bedroom (in eleven lessons)” by Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, who records as Mirah. (Seek out Mirah with the Black Cat Orchestra, To All We Stretch the Open Arm [yoyo], recorded “in Larry Barrett’s basement in Seattle, WA, in January 2003, as the world braced itself for another war.”) “In 1993, I was a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington,” Zeitlyn writes. “I remember going to a Bikini Kill show downtown, standing outside the Capitol Theatre and looking through the open door at all the girls inside and then deciding to just walk home. It should have been a very inclusive situation. I was a girl, I believed in the power of like-minded people gathering together, I was starting to make music, too. But I went home instead of joining in. I didn’t feel cool enough to stay.” Or, as the late novelist Alexander Trocchi once put it, “We have to attack ‘the enemy’ at his base, within ourselves.”

  JANUARY 2009

  1 Fiery Furnaces, Remember (Thrill Jockey) Present-day New Yorkers by way of Oak Park, Illinois, Eleanor Friedberger, who does almost all of the singing, and brother Matthew Friedberger, the guitarist-organist-pianist who writes most of the songs and composes the train-wreck arrangements, plus whoever is playing bass and drums with them at any given time, are the most unpredictable band in the country. Or rather their songs are the most unpredictable. They start in one place and moments later they’re looking back at themselves from the other side of the street without giving you a hint of which side you’re on. This is a double live album, and their best—or, anyway, the album that takes their music further than any before it: Gallows-bird’s Bark, Blueberry Boat, Bitter Tea, the notorious Rehearsing My Choir, about the Friedbergers’ grandmother. The song structures might be jazz, in the same way that Steely Dan made rock and roll out of jazz, except that Steely Dan songs actually have structures, and Fiery Furnace songs often seem to have trapdoors and banana peels; the themes (“Single Again”) might come from the Carter Family.

  The package carries an unusual warning: “Please do not attempt to listen to all at once.” No kidding: after only the first disc—twenty-four cuts, with twenty-five on the second—I was exhilarated, spinning, and would have played it again immediately if I hadn’t been completely exhausted. I have no idea how the band keeps up with itself. There’s Hendrix all over the guitar, but calliope in the organ. Sometimes the vocals drop so far back they seem to be off-stage. Arrangements are too complicated to be made up on the spot, but you can hardly credit people patient enough to craft them before the fact. Eleanor Friedberger’s style is conversational but frantic, racing through domestic horror stories and Hong Kong crime films, the music pulling her like a marionette, an arm flailing here, a leg buckling there, her head whipping around in circles. She’s exasperated, she’s got to get it out, she has to tell you the story, but the phone is ringing and she has to take this call but there’s another call coming in OMG someone just cut her off and oh, right, where were we? “And then they drove me to an Albertsons outside of Boise,” she relates in the hubbub of “Oh Sweet Woods,” deliberately, to make sure you can follow this, “and took me into a back room. And they said they wanted to balance my checkbook,” a sexual reference you might not have heard before, but the innuendo is unmistakable, Hey, baby, how’d you like me to balance your checkbook? except that doesn’t seem to be it at all, “and they said they wanted to organize my receipts,” which doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it, “and itemize my expenses and that I had the key to a safety deposit box with treasury bonds and the key to another safety deposit box where I’d stashed away the only pewter pocket watch that ever belonged to Joseph Smith’s great-great uncle’s brother-in-law—and I said, You’ve got the wrong Eleanor Friedberger.”

  “Half the record is from actual shows and half is the hourlong set from our Bitter Tea tour recorded totally live in my apartment,” Eleanor wrote when I asked how the album was made. “As Matt says, it’s a live album about live albums.” “Did you have people over to make an audience?” I asked. “There wasn’t enough room to have people over!”

  2 Doors, Live at the Matrix (Rhino) It’s March 1967 and you’ve wandered into this supposed folk club on Fillmore in the Marina in San Francisco and there’s a four-piece band onstage with a tall lead singer who flops all over the place. They have an album out, The Doors, and maybe you’ve heard a few tracks on KMPX, the FM station that’s still alternating music you never imagined hearing on the radio with shows in Chinese and Tagalog. Now they’re six or seven minutes into, not exactly anything that fits the word song, but some Freudian psychodrama that somehow never loses its musical moorings, and—and, listening to this double CD, as opposed to the countless Doors live albums dumped on the market over the last few years (Philadelphia! Boston! Even Boot Yer Butt!, the cavernous, almost mystically fuzzy set of bootleg recordings compiled by Rhino in 2003), you can feel yourself as you might have been then, born or not, looking at the stage, at the few people at the tables in the room, trying to take in even a fraction of the sound, and wondering, What the hell is going on?

  3 Frozen River, Shattuck Theatre, Berkeley (March 6, 2008) An oddly noisy audience for an art film about a destitute woman in upstate New York who turns to smuggling illegal immigrants over the border: a man boos the preview for A Girl Cut in Two, presumably to let everybody else know he disapproves of girls being cut in two. What’s shocking is the way people snigger at the heroine’s poverty when the cheap cord she tries to use to tow a car snaps, or when there’s nothing in the house—her trailer—for her kids to eat but popcorn and Tang.

  4 KT Tunstall, “Little Favours” (Virgin, 2007) Tunstall hits high notes by letting her voice break; as it does, you hear someone questioning herself, her motives, what she wants. The spectral presence that hovers somewhere in the sound—part Sarah McLachlan, part Dion, a presence made of will and doubt—has been generated by the radio itself. When it comes on, it seems to have drifted in from another country, another time, more likely the future than the past, as in the day after tomorrow.

  5
Brenda Lee, “Break It to Me Gently,” on Mad Men, “The Gold Violin” (Season 2, Episode 11, AMC) Closeout music after the episode ends with January Jones throwing up in the car on her way home from the party where she finds out her husband is sleeping with the comedian’s wife. It’s 1962, when the song would have been on the radio, but it never sounded so threatening when it was.

  6 Shawn Colvin, “Viva Las Vegas,” on Till the Night Is Gone: A Tribute to Doc Pomus (Forward, 1995) If you make a movie where nobody is anything but stupid, does that make you smart? Feeling unclean after the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, The Big Lebowski was like discovering an enclave of democratic spirit in, say, the Department of the Interior: Jeff Bridges thinks he deserves respect, so he treats everybody else with respect. But this slow, twilight version of the old Elvis song, running under the closing credits, picking up a motif carried in the film itself in predictable fashion by T-Bone Burnett and Carter Burwell, contains a landscape that the L.A. of the picture never touches: a whole city of dead ends.

  7 Classic Blues Artwork from the 1920s—2009 Calendar (Blues Images) Ads made for the Negro press by the old Paramount label—Kokomo Arnold’s 1934 “Milk Cow Blues” gets a light boost as “The Greatest Record Ever Made”—and taking off into the ether with a tableau for Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1928 “Worried Blues.” In a room with cracking plaster and a potbellied stove, a man in a suit, suspenders, and glasses is asleep on a bed; even passed out, he looks like a lawyer. A barefoot woman in a shift sits up straight and eager, smiling at the door, where a well-dressed man carrying a box labeled SHOES stands grinning—and you get the feeling what she really wants from her outside man is . . . shoes.

  8 Scott Simon, “Ole Miss: Presidential Debate Host, Cultural Treasure,” on Weekend Edition (NPR, September 27, 2008) The day after the first McCain–Obama debate, reflections on how Oxford, Mississippi, has changed from the time when James Meredith arrived on campus in 1962 as the first black student in the University of Mississippi’s history: the student body rioted, members of the mob killed two people, and every student stood up and walked out when Meredith entered his first class. “I’m glad that in these times it may be hard for us to imagine the courage of James Meredith,” Simon said, in his typically flat, soothing way, which is usually a setup for something blunt: “He walked across campus, went to class, and put his head down to sleep in a place where he knew that there were people nearby who wanted to kill him.” Forty-six years later, there’s a statue of Meredith on campus and Oxford is a sophisticated town with “visible integration”; it was only two years ago that the old-time music band Crooked Still, which can dive very deeply, felt a need to redo Bob Dylan’s 1963 “Oxford Town,” but they’re from Boston. “For years,” Simon said, “Mississippi was considered a state that was only barely a part of the country”; now it “played a role in electing the next president.” Simon paid tribute to the sacrifices of those who had lived and died to make it so, and then cued Robert Johnson’s 1936 “Cross Road Blues.” In Johnson’s Mississippi, to be caught on the road after dark could mean death for a black man; Simon’s implication was that Mississippi had crossed over. Johnson’s recordings have been remastered so the sound is full and complete, but this began tinnily, from a distance. Then Johnson hit a loud, quivering note on his guitar and you were in a barn, the note was a shot, and the story wasn’t about James Meredith at all, it was about Emmett Till.