Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  9 The Exiles, directed by Kent McKenzie (Milestone) and Revels, Intoxica! (Sundazed) Last year saw the first-time commercial release of this 1961 film about American Indians wandering through life in the Chavez Ravine sector of Los Angeles—a Los Angeles that was wiped away for Dodger Stadium. As people gather in apartments, go out to bars, pile into cars, there’s a constant, real-time sound track by the Revels of San Luis Obispo (“Six Pak” and “Church Key” were California hits in 1960): wherever there’s a jukebox or a radio in the movie, the Revels are on it, a pseudo–surf band distinguished by the unrelieved crumminess of its sound, which turns every echo of something distinct, unique, contingent, unlikely—moments in the music that might remind you of the Everly Brothers, Jack Scott, Don and Dewey, the Champs, Santo and Johnny—into the same cheap, grimy insult the film itself follows in every frame, as if to say, as the film won’t quite allow itself to do, I don’t care, I don’t care if you care, so why should you? Give up!

  10 Paul Beatty, Slumberland (Bloomsbury) A novel in the voice of DJ Darky, a.k.a. Ferguson Sowell, an African American from Los Angeles who hangs out at the Slumberland bar in Berlin in the years before and after the wall came down. Searching-for-the-perfect-beat plot aside, what makes this book sing on every page is the fact that you’re in the presence of someone who’s so smart you don’t want to miss a word he says. I don’t mean Beatty. Our DJ with his phonographic memory—he never forgets a sound—has opinions on everything, and every one of them, tossed out as punch lines and wisecracks and put-downs and tears in his beer, seems the result of hours of thinking it over: the rebuke, the pose, the atrocity, the psychopathology of everyday life in the form of what’s on the jukebox. We meet Lars Papenfuss, a “master spy who used his cover as a pop-culture critic to prop up dictatorial movements like ‘trip-hop,’ ‘jungle,’ ‘Dogme 95,’ and ‘graffiti art’ instead of puppet third-world governments.” “I hate Wynton Marsalis in the same manner Rommel hated Hitler,” DJ Darky says, pushing his German-historical hangover for lack of anything better to do. “Whenever I hear Marsalis’s trumpet playing I feel like the Desert Fox forced to come to grips with the consequences of totalitarianism after the war has been all but lost.”

  FEBRUARY 2009

  1 Frank Fairfield, “Darling Corey” / “I’ve Always Been a Rambler” (Tompkins Square 7″ /myspace.com/frankfairfield) A young Californian who sings and plays as someone who’s crawled out of the Virginia mountains carrying familiar songs that in his hands sound forgotten: broken lines, a dissonant drone, the fiddle or the banjo all percussion, every rising moment louder than the one before it.

  2 There’ll Always Be an England: Sex Pistols Live from Brixton Academy with The Knowledge of London: A Sex Pistols Psychogeography, directed by Julien Temple (Rhino/ Freemantle DVD) At the show, from 2007, there seems to be almost as much footage of the audience as of the band, and what’s odd, if you’ve been anywhere recently where fame is on the stage, is that you see almost no one holding up a cell-phone camera, taking a picture of an event instead of living it out, even if a thirtieth-anniversary show is a picture of another show before it is anything else. Instead, people are shouting, jumping up and down, shoving, and most of all singing their heads off. Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock (“You’re a lucky cunt,” Rotten says near the end, “because this is the best band in the world”) find moments they might not have found before. The old British tourist song “Beside the Seaside” is sung in full as a lead-in to “Holidays in the Sun”; in the fiercest passages of “God Save the Queen” and “Bodies” a true dada vortex opens up as words lose their meanings and seem capable of generating entirely new ones. But the real fun is in the “psychogeography” (“The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”—Internationale Situationniste #1, June 1958), which is the band minus Rotten taking us on a tour of its old haunts. Cook and Matlock look the same as they did in 1976, merely older, but Jones is unrecognizable. Onstage he looks like one of his own bodyguards; here, wrapped in a heavy coat, with dark glasses and a cap pulled down, he could be a mob boss or merely a thug with money in his pocket. The three are touring Soho, checking the hooker ads in doorways. (Jones goes up, comes down: “That was great! But she made me wear a johnny.”) “It’s like a fuckin’ Dickens novel,” Jones says, surveying the sex shops, the dubious hotels, the strip clubs they once played (the El Paradiso, they remember, was so filthy they cleaned the place themselves). “I feel like a bucket of piss is going to come flying out the window.” They visit pubs, search for old performance spaces (“Do you know where Notre Dame Hall is? The Sex Pistols did a show there—ever heard of the Sex Pistols?”), and like spelunkers they navigate dank hallways until they reach their old rehearsal space and crash pad off Denmark Street. Rotten’s caricatures of the band members are still on the walls, plus “Nanny Spunger” (Sid Vicious’s Nancy Spungeon) and “Muggerade” (manager Malcolm McLaren by way of Malcolm Muggeridge). And there is the outline of a manifesto, words running down a wall:

  AWFUL

  HEARTACHE

  STUPID

  MISERY

  ILL BOOZE

  END DEPT ILL

  SICK

  DISMAL

  “This is where we began to take it seriously,” Glen Matlock says. “If there was half an idea floating around, we was in a position to do something about it.”

  3 Tom Perrotta, Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies (Berkley, 1994) Perrotta’s ongoing chronicle of men and women moving through the last decades (Election, Joe College, Little Children, The Abstinence Teacher) is no secret. But until a few months ago I’d completely missed this first book, a collection of stories following one Buddy, of Darwin, New Jersey, from Cub Scouts to the summer after his first year in college. There doesn’t seem to be a moment Perrotta doesn’t get right, or more than right: “On Friday, Mike was holding hands with Jane. On Monday he had his arm around a hot sophomore named Sally Untermeyer, while Jane drifted through the halls, looking like she’d just donated several pints of blood.”

  4 Ty Segall (Castle Face) Away from the San Francisco punk combo the Traditional Fools, Segall dives into one-man-band bedroom classicism. Very mid-’60s—with the Seeds, the Standells, and Bo Diddley smiling down from the walls—until “Oh Mary,” a leap into the crazed undergrowth of the ’50s, where you never knew what you’d find when you turned over a rock: most likely some guy screaming about “Oh Mary” while chasing a beat as if it’s a snake and he’s on a horse.

  5 Eugene Carrière, Two Women (Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis) Though the painting is from the late nineteenth century, the mood is shockingly modern—a picture where the present is already the past. In a portrait that calls up Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane, about two sisters, a ghostlike face hovers over the shoulder of a woman in a red dress holding her chin in her hand, her eyes looking off to the right, into the future, toward death. This is a picture of a woman thinking—and the feeling is that by some chance the painter has caught something that has never happened before.

  6 Serena Ryder, “Sweeping the Ashes,” from is it o.k. (Atlantic) A twenty-five-year-old from Peterborough, Ontario, Ryder presses hard, and over a whole album the feeling can go soft. But this is the first track; it hasn’t yet worked as a warning a listener might take to the rest of her songs, and so a simple angry love song rises up like an epic. The tie to ordinary life is never cut—not with a banjo running the rhythm—but all Ryder has to do is take a deep breath to open up the song, to blow the clothes off the floor of her bedroom and reveal how much territory the performance actually claims. If you heard this on the radio you might come away feeling bigger, stronger, defiant.

  7–8 TV Smith, In the Arms of My Enemy (Boss Tuneage) and Jamie Palmer, video for “Clone Town” (vimeo.com/1945972) In 1978, Smith led his band through the perfect London punk album, Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts: the sleeve sh
owed the title on a billboard and the ugliest public housing in the city behind it. Now he looks like someone you’d cross the street to avoid, old, beaten down, muttering to himself, consumed by his own fury. “Clone Town” isn’t even Smith’s best new song, but it presents the character he’s made fully: a crank, unwilling to keep his mouth shut, the man with the bad news, even if that makes him someone you’d cross the street to avoid. “You don’t really want to know how they get those prices so low!” he sings in a battering closing refrain, the phrase taking on another exclamation point with every repetition—but you do, you do.

  9–10 Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel, Live Fast, Die Young—The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause (Touchstone, 2005) and Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray (Warner Bros., 1955) Even without a single distinctive sentence—note the tripping-over-its-own-feet syntax of the subtitle—this book is irresistible. With all of the principals other than writer Stewart Stern dead—James Dean (1955), Sal Mineo (1976), Ray (1979), Natalie Wood (1981), a wipeout, as if Dean came back in that Porsche Spyder to get them—Frascella and Weisel rely mostly on actors who in the film played gang members (Corey Allen, Frank Mazzola, Steffi-Sidney, Beverly Long, Dennis Hopper) to reconstruct it. But because the movie changed the way the world looked, how it felt, they only have to apply a bit of pressure to a tiny matter—the sixteen-year-old Woods’s simultaneous affairs with Ray (on his urging) and Hopper (on hers), the fate of Dean’s red jacket—to find their own drama. Today the gravity in the picture belongs wholly to Dean, and the gravity is a matter of an intellectual energy so bright the man carrying it seems constantly on the verge of bursting into flames.

  MARCH-APRIL 2009

  1 Cat Power, Dark End of the Street (Matador) Six numbers left over from Jukebox, her deadly covers collection from 2008, but with every song here—most deeply with her version of Brendan Behan’s “The Auld Triangle”—the slow ache of Chan Marshall’s voice comes through like a promise that might take her a lifetime to keep.

  2–3 KT Tunstall, “Little Favours,” from Drastic Fantastic (Virgin, 2007) and “Mr. Fritter,” “The Tunstallator” (YouTube) So fierce on its own terms, as Tunstall’s voice wraps itself around her own body; in another life it opens up into a bizarre video, credited to an “ex-teacher,” a slightly balding man of about thirty-five who’ll turn out to be a cross between Terence Stamp in The Collector, whoever killed the Black Dahlia, and your everyday bondage fetishist. “I just want to show you something I’ve been building for the last few months,” he says before he beckons you into his house to show you a life-size puppet topped by a rotating box of Tunstall faces with an ugly slashed mouth. After jerking the strings on the mouth, on the metal hook that serves as the hand on the plastic guitar, and the body, all in sync to the music—precisely, which only makes it worse—the man, silently singing along with the drumbeat that opens the record, ties the strings around his own face as he kneels before his idol, just like Ed Gein draping the faces of the women he killed over his own. And the song still sounds glorious.

  4 Irma Thomas, “Wish Someone Would Care,” from Soul Queen of New Orleans (Mardi Gras) or Swamp Dogg Presents Two Phases of Irma Thomas (S.D.E.G.) Not the quiet original, from 1964, the saddest song that ever hit the Top 40, but a shouting version cut in 1973 with the eccentric soul singer Swamp Dogg at the controls, reproduced by him twenty years after that—turning up now late in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for a few moments in a diner late at night, as if from somewhere in the back, maybe a dishwasher singing to herself and keeping time off the beat by banging on the counter with a fork.

  5 Orioles, “Crying in the Chapel” in Revolutionary Road, dir. Sam Mendes (sound track album on Nonesuch) Hidden in this adaptation of a 1961 novel about spiritual death in the suburbs of New York in 1955—a book that would never be mentioned today if it had been set in Michigan or California—is one strange scene. Leonardo DiCaprio’s self-loathing business-machine promotion man Frank Wheeler sits in his cubicle late at night, speaking into a Dictaphone. “Knowing what you’ve got,” Wheeler says deliberately. “Knowing what you need,” he says. “Knowing what you can do without”—all with the Orioles’ ethereal harmonies about peace and redemption drifting somewhere behind him, as if from another building. “I live from day to day,” they sing, their words aimed right at the office drudge Wheeler has become. But the group sets an inescapably poetic mood, and for a moment you can believe that the artist that Wheeler and his wife know sleeps somewhere inside of him is about to break through. “That’s inventory control,” Wheeler says.

  5 Beyoncé, “All I Could Do Was Cry,” in Cadillac Records (Sony Pictures) The Chess Records story, with Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, Chuck Berry: one thing after another and no sense of having gone from one place to another, with a finale listing the date of each of the principals’ inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as if they needed that validation. The reason to see it is Beyoncé, singing James’s songs with such drama, conviction, and simultaneous mimicry and invention you can hardly credit her own musical career as anything but a marketing strategy. Yes, she’s a businesswoman: after getting under the skin of this music, why else would she still be out there twirling in her own melismatics, over-souled and overdressed? What happens here happens most completely with James’s early “All I Could Do Was Cry.” It’s the first song we see her cut in the studio—off to the side, you see Jeffrey Wright’s Muddy Waters shut his eyes and lift his eyebrows in admiration as Beyoncé comes down hard on a line, and you know just how he feels. Omitted from the soundtrack album in favor of one of Beyoncé’s own songs—but you can find the whole scene on YouTube, where you can also hear James herself.

  6 Teddy Thompson, “Down Low,” from Upfront & Down Low (Verve Forecast, 2007) Hidden in his collection of dull versions of country standards is a single original: the cruelest, most self-pitying, least overstylized, and best Chris Isaak ballad in years. Minus only Chris Isaak.

  7 Alvin & the Chipmunks, “Don’t Stop Believin,’ ” from Undeniable (Razor & Tie) Finally, the supposedly most downloaded song of the twentieth century gets the singer it always needed.

  8–9 Stanley Booth, “Triumph of the Quotidian,” in William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008, ed. Elisabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski (Whitney Museum/Yale) and Eden, dir. Declan Recks (Samson Films) On the white gallery walls of the Whitney, in a show that closed in January and is now at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Eggleston’s deadpan color photos didn’t hold their places; they got lost in the crowds looking at them. In the catalog, though, each image on its own page, you can hear what Eggleston is after: silence. As in his 1972 picture of shoes under a bed, creating the atmosphere of a room no one has entered for years, nearly everything he processes through his camera and his darkroom looks abandoned. That makes room for Stanley Booth to tell stories, and one started me thinking about how songs travel. In Eden, a film about a miserable Irish couple’s tenth anniversary, Aidan Kelly’s Billy Farrell leaves his wife in a disco for a party, chasing a girl he thinks has eyes for him, though all she sees is an old man. He passes out drunk; in a room behind him, people start singing “House of the Rising Sun.” Farrell wakes up, automatically singing along, sees the girl, stumbles to his feet, and as he grabs her, forcing himself on her as she tries to push him away, the song continues, but now the voice you hear belongs to Sinéad O’Connor, an avenging angel who seems to be singing from inside Farrell’s heart, which she’s turned against him. The song has gone from its commonplace beginnings somewhere in the American South, somewhere in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, to Bob Dylan’s first album, in 1962, to the Animals’ epochal 1964 worldwide hit, to countless versions by street singers and karaoke belters, to a party in an Irish town in the early twenty-first century, where if nothing else it’s a song everybody knows, and from there into the spectral hands of a woman who could stare down anyone on the planet—and who’s
to say where its true home is, who owns it, whose singing most rings true? “A number of years back,” Booth says of Eggleston, “he was honored by the Photographic Society of Japan at a Tokyo ceremony on the occasion of photography’s sesquicentennial anniversary. When he accepted his award, Eggleston, who speaks little Japanese, sang, in English, ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ Still singing—‘I been so lonely, baby’—he went out to the sidewalk, where a Japanese woman he remembers as ‘very beautiful’ looked into his eyes and said, ‘Oh so lonely.’ ”