Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 P J Harvey and John Parish, A Woman A Man Walked By (Island) From “Sheela-Na-Gig” on her first album, in 1992, Harvey has never made any secret that her music is meant to make a home for an avenging pagan goddess. Any song called “Pig Will Not” all but promises that figure will appear in a great snout mask, making inhuman sounds, and that is what happens: “WILL NOT!” she shouts in acrid fury, making a sound Fucked Up would pay for if they could get Harvey to sell it. “I WANT YOUR FUCKING ASS!” she yells in “A Woman a Man Walked By/The Crow Knows Where All the Little Children Go,” the latter part of the title turning Harvey into a witch. You step back before these moments, and go back to them when you think you’re equal to them, not just because nothing else here is.

  3 “American Letterpress: The Art of the Hatch Show Print” (Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington, through July 19; Durham Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, October 31, 2009, through January 10, 2010; Austin Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, February 13 through May 9, 2010) The Nashville company’s blunt, colorful block designs haven’t changed much from movie posters in the ’30s (“She’s the WOMAN behind the KILLER behind the GUN! J. EDGAR HOOVER tells her amazing story in ‘PERSONS IN HIDING’ ”) to concert promotions for the likes of Beck or the Strokes today. A walk through the show brings a sense of repetition most of all. But there are ghosts on the walls, and suspense even in the captions. As with the very first Hatch bill, for a lecture in Nashville in 1879 by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, as both a social reformer and an adulterer at the time likely the most famous preacher in the United States, now speaking on “The Reign of the Common People”: “Parquet and Dress Circle, 1-, Family Circle, 1-”—and, for the onetime fire-breathing New England abolitionist, no doubt a concession to local custom: “Colored Box, 50¢.” As with these lines, below a wall of ’50s prints: “Imagine the scene at Hatch. Two men are setting type for posters on tables side by side. One is a poster for the Rabbit Foot Minstrel Show . . . the other is a poster for someone named Presley.”

  4 Levon Helm, Electric Dirt (Vanguard) Born in 1940, growing up in Arkansas, Helm saw the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and he saw Elvis, both before he was fifteen. You can hear those events in this music, especially on the call-and-response in Larry Campbell’s “When I Go Away,” with Helm pounding his voice as if it were his drums as others shout back at him as if he were a mountain and they’re in it for the echo. Helm’s 2007 Dirt Farmer, which won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album, is pale compared to Allen Toussaint and Steven Bernstein’s sliding New Orleans horn arrangements, especially for “Kingfish,” Randy Newman’s ode to Huey P. Long. With throat cancer behind him, and most recently on-screen as a very convincingly dead Confederate general in Bertrand Tavernier’s In the Electric Mist, Helm now sounds most of all robust, perhaps with his best music since the Band’s Last Waltz ahead of him.

  5 Liechtenstein, Survival Strategies in a Modern World (Slumberland) Three young women from Sweden take less than twenty-three minutes to skip from Liliput grinning through their punk songs in Zurich in the 1980s, to the Teddy Bears mouthing doo-wop in Los Angeles in 1958, for that matter picking up next-door neighbor Jorgen Ingmann in Copenhagen in 1961 before they’re in the air. You never miss when you kick it off with “Apache” guitar.

  6 Andrew Britton, Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, edited by Barry Keith Grant (Wayne State University Press) Britton (1952–94) was a critic who took nothing at face value and nothing for granted. Writing in the British and Canadian journals Movie and CineAction, he interrogated pictures under a third-degree light, but as if he were Philip Marlowe and the movies were cops, and sometimes it seemed like a put-up job. But not in the 1986 “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment,” nearly sixty pages that will leave you feeling as if you’ve just read a movie version of the Justice Department’s report on torture under George W. Bush—and as if the era the essay describes has not even begun to end.

  7–8 The Kills, Keep on Your Mean Side (Domino) and Dead Weather, Horehound (Third Man) Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince had so much fun trying to live up to their name on the Kills’ 2003 debut album—and, on this reissue, with numbers from the EP Fried My Little Brains and elsewhere, including their graveyard version of Dock Boggs’s “Sugar Baby”—it didn’t always sound like an act. But they never caught up with themselves, and now Mosshart’s singing with the White Stripes’ Jack White in Dead Weather, where it sounds as if nobody ever leaves the house.

  9 Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton) Marked by a gigantic, repeating error—the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where dada was discovered, opened in 1916, not 1915—this is a book of endless riches and complexity. Cutting wit is everywhere: “In Germany, antiwar demonstrations by tens of thousands of people gave way to tens of thousands of corpses who had obviously changed their minds.” No good writer can resist the language of the dada manifesto—though maybe it’s more a gesture, a certain James Dean slouch, than a language—and Codrescu doesn’t try. In an age when bad writers are afraid most of all of their own voices, then putting every word that might mean anything at all in self-protecting scare quotes, “No art in its right! Mind (i.e., for sale) can possibly mean what it says. Therefore, Dada is not art,” is a first step toward a cure. But “Dada is a tool for removing parentheses and removing the world from between quotes with the forceps of inspiration” slams the door so hard it opens onto a country where people are not afraid. The whole affair is rooted in an apocryphal chess game between founder of dada Tristan Tzara and founder of communism V. I. Lenin, and two more-than-open questions: Who won? And is the game over?

  10 Bob Dylan, video for “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” (YouTube) A montage of photos from Bruce Davidson’s 1959 series “Brooklyn Gang”—Larry Clark’s Tulsa as made suitable for Vogue—with the Jokers getting tattoos, hanging around, taking their shirts off, going to Coney Island, trying to look as if they don’t care. Near the end a woman with lank black hair and black eye-makeup comes into the story. She carries experience the boys don’t, desires they couldn’t fathom, but she has nowhere else to go and so she’s here. She’s a dead ringer for Amy Winehouse, and you miss her more than ever.

  SEPTEMBER 2009

  1 Fiery Furnaces, I’m Going Away (Thrill Jockey) Musicality in speech is a common theme; the peculiar delight in the Fiery Furnaces’ eighth album in their six years is the realism of speech in their songs. The music is a given, so if you catch, say, the way Eleanor Friedberger turns her words, “Well, I thought I was thinking, but apparently not,” whatever context the words might inhabit in their narrative drops away, and you might be transported to a city street and enveloped by the feeling not of listening to a performance but of hearing a woman on her cell phone as she strides past you, with precisely the intensity and surprise of a smell taking you back to a face or a voice you haven’t thought of for years.

  2 Robert Cantwell, “A Harvest of Illth,” in If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture (University of Illinois Press) Cantwell is a subtle writer, and his collection of essays on the transformation of everyday life by art that resists disappearing back into the ordinary and the predictable is full of paradox (“The disc renders the performance silent, as the photo renders its subject invisible, each not merely representing, but replacing the other”). But in “A Harvest of Illith”—John Ruskin’s word for a form of wealth that “as it leads away from life, it is unvaluable or malignant,” here naming Mississippi blues 78s made in the ’20s and ’30s as accumulated by a few young men in the ’40s and ’50s—Cantwell finds his way into a kind of frenzy. If Beale Street could talk it might say this: “Like a bus driver caught in a skid”—imagine a tourist bus, with the driver on his intercom, “That’s where they had the Palace Amateur Nights, they say Elvis sang there before anyone knew his name, Oh shit, hold on!”—“the Delta blues thrusts the musician into a swiftly proliferating emergency that test
s not only his competence as a musician but his grasp of the whole nature of his body and his instrument in the midst of the wider context of natural laws of which he and it are parts.”

  3–4 David Thomson, “After Citizen Kane—A New Socratic dialogue” (McSweeney’s 31) and Adam Lambert, “A Change Is Gonna Come” (American Idol final, Fox, May 19) Thomson has Susan Sontag trying to get Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Charlie Chaplin, and Ernest Hemingway to vote against Citizen Kane in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll on the greatest movies ever made. “I always vote on American Idol,” says Woolf. Would she have voted for Adam Lambert, who for the season’s final face-off placed his bet on Sam Cooke’s civil rights anthem, the greatest soul record ever made? Ken Tucker of Fresh Air has compared what Lambert does to other people’s songs to the outrageous and inspired operations David Bowie performed on the likes of British Invasion hits on Pin Ups; he played Lambert’s version of “Burning Love” to prove his point, and it did. But this night Lambert began as if soul music were a picture in a magazine; every note and gesture was a referent to a referent that the picture had rendered invisible. So much alienation was built into the performance, where according to Idol precepts all emotions are absorbed into I want, that Lambert became his own impersonator. After thirty seconds of hitting notes (“Not singing, or vocalizing,” said a friend. “Vocaling”), he screamed, to show that he could really hit a note, and the performance went to a rank hysteria, which was meant to stand for actually hearing one’s own words, for being moved by what one was singing about. And then the coup de grâce, as Lambert turned a song about a change that had to come because it would affect a whole people, a whole country, perhaps even the whole world, into a pitch for votes, magically replacing a common history with solipsism. “I know my change is gonna come!” he sang, leaving Cooke’s inescapably shared “a change is gonna come” in the dust—making the song his own, the ultimate Idol praise phrase, in the most absolute way, erasing everyone, dead or alive, that the song truly contained. The judges were beside themselves. Lambert lost to Kris Allen, in the word of the day Pat Boone to Lambert’s Elvis, but he will be closing his act with “My change is gonna come” until Sam Cooke returns in the common imagination to claim it, and for Lambert the song will fall away from him and he will be the last to know. Up in heaven, trying to negate eternity, probably Virginia Woolf would have voted for him: “That show can cheer me up sometimes better than a Cornish cream tea.”

  5 Tom Meyer, “Back Page” cartoon (San Francisco Chronicle, May 17) There’s an older man shouting at his unhappy daughter: “Hey—we had to pay for our parents’ Social Security, you have to pay for ours!” “Your parents were part of the Greatest Generation that delivered us from the Depression and the Nazis. . . .” she says, shoving her finger into his potbelly: “Your generation gave us Iraq, the Great Recession, trillion-dollar deficits, and Duran Duran!”

  6 Ed Zuckerman, writer, “Rock Star” episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent (USA, May 3) The first show with Jeff Goldblum as Detective Zach Nichols. “I have a Grammy!” says Daniel Gerroll as old washed-up British rock star Philip, now landlord, sexual blackmailer, band manager, and killer, when Goldblum sneers at him. “Milli Vanilli had a Grammy,” Goldblum says mordantly, turning himself back into the crotchety rock critic he played in Between the Lines in 1977.

  7–8 Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with David Ritz, Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography (Simon & Schuster) and Josh Alan Friedman, “Jerry Leiber: Kiss My Big Black Tokhis!” in Tell the Truth Until They Bleed: Coming Clean in the Dirty World of Blues and Rock ’n’ Roll (Backbeat) With Ritz, who’s been ear and pen for autobiographies by Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, and more, the songwriters who from the beginning of their partnership in 1950 defined rhythm and blues and rock and roll talk their tales one after the other, back and forth: tales told before, in many cases, but not with such a sense of satisfaction and reflection, with such a lack of guile or resentment. Leiber speaks of deriving the words for “Is That All There Is?,” eventually an indelible hit for Peggy Lee in 1969, from Thomas Mann’s “Disillusionment,” while Stoller says he went for the spirit of Kurt Weill for the music; together they recount trying to sell the song to Marlene Dietrich (“The song you just sang is who I am,” she tells Leiber, “not what I do”), then Barbra Streisand. What about Lotte Lenya? Ultimately they take Lee into the studio, she sings the song again and again, and they settle on take thirty-seven, because, for take thirty-six, when the three got it all—“Peggy had done it. We had done it. The enormous potential in this strange little song had been realized”—the engineer forgot to press the RECORD button. Leiber relates a lot of the same stories in Friedman’s profile; with the gentlemanliness of Ritz’s presentation replaced by Friedman’s insistent street-grit milieu and tough-guy narration, they aren’t half so convincing.

  9 Eliot Ross, Passover at Jake’s: The Rosenbloom Seder Plate, 2008, in the “Dorothy Saxe Invitational: New Works/Old Story—80 Artists at the Passover Table” (Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, February 27–June 2, catalog available through the museum) “An assemblage of objects memorializing my father and his brothers who never took time off to celebrate a Jewish holiday,” Ross says: on a blue and white Pabst serving tray, with WHAT’LL YOU HAVE? emblazoned on the edge, there’s a snapshot of the four Rosenbloom brothers posing in front of a bar, and before them an ashtray with a few butts, a cigar stub for a lamb shank, a shot glass, the whole thing held up with a Budweiser bottle.

  10 Elvis Presley, “That’s All Right” (Cole Coffee, Oakland, May 23, 8:30 a.m.) For a minute, the little coffee spot had no customers. As I walked in I caught the first strum of Elvis Presley’s first record. “That’s nice,” said one of the three twentyish women behind the counter. Another took my money and began dancing as the first one starting singing. A feeling of freshness and confidence rang through the music and into the air of the room.

  OCTOBER 2009

  1 Worst News of the Month: CRIME LEADERS KRAY TWINS SCHEMED TO TAKE OVER AS THE BEATLES’ MANAGERS (Entertainment Daily, June 21) The scheme the Krays supposedly hatched was simple: instead of cutting up Brian Epstein with swords, threaten to expose him as homosexual—never mind that Ronnie Kray was gay himself. You can imagine that John Lennon might have found the prospect of being managed by the scariest people in London cool beyond cool—for about five minutes.

  2 Ettes, Do You Want Power (Take Root) With guitarist Coco Hames in front, drummer Poni Silver in back, and bassist Jem Cohen in the middle, this is a punk band—and depending as much on your mood as on their intentions, you might pick up the swooping grandeur of the Adverts’ “Great British Mistake,” the speed of the Clash, the distance and space the Rolling Stones found in rhythm and blues. Songs can take off so fast they all but leave you behind. But the oddest notes might be the most compelling, a few months or years down the line: the way the I-Can-Wait-Forever Appalachian voice of “O Love Is Teasin’ ” or “The Cuckoo” winks out of the verses of “While Your Girl’s Away,” the Cheshire-cat smile in “Keep Me in Flowers.”

  3 Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, directed by Werner Herzog (Saturn Films) Nicolas Cage’s lieutenant walks into a surveillance room across the street from a house detectives are checking out, hallucinating his head off from crack and coke. “What are these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?” he says, as one of the lizards only he can see begins to rotate an eye while Johnny Adams’s New Orleans version of “Release Me” comes out of its mouth—or its nose, or whatever it is that iguanas sing out of.

  4 Nicholas Rombes, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1974–1982 (Continuum) You can’t use this for reference, and not because there’s no table of contents. Jumping all over the place is too much fun. A typical entry is the faux-referential “Ongoing force of me, the,” which cites a 1987 Johnny Rotten response to an “interviewer’s statement that there had not been anything as revolutionary as the Sex Pistols”: “There has been something a
s revolutionary as the Sex Pistols. The ongoing force of me.” You might laugh as you skip backward or forward to Dhalgren (1975 novel by Samuel R. Delany, news to me) or “Punk, influence on something other than music or fashion”; you might also be stopped in your tracks by phrase-making I doubt could have been produced by anyone else on earth.

  5 Charles Taylor writes in on seeing Sonic Youth for the first time (United Palace Theater, New York City, July 3) “How do you explain the difference between volume that is pulverizing and volume that’s liberating? At one point during the first encore, Kim Gordon, who was wearing a silver sheath dress, was doing her go-go-dancer moves and looked as if she was actually surfing the waves of sound. Visually and in attitude, she’s the steady center of that band. At times, she and Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo and Mark Ibold would form a loose circle, facing each other, and they had the deadly precision of a group of hired killers in a Leone western. And the music seemed to me perfectly pitched between songs and guitar freak-outs, the latter of which never—never—lost discipline or structure. Maybe only Neil Young has that sense of physical expansiveness at his most slashing.

  “Part of what moved me, and this may sound trivial, was that for the first time in memory I was at a rock show watching people older than myself, and people not playing at anything, not posing, but doing what they love without feeling they have to resort to rock-star clichés of bad behavior to do it. Did you see Gordon in Last Days? I hated that movie. I thought it treated Kurt Cobain the way generations of college girls have treated Sylvia Plath (though there it fits): as the fetish object at the center of a death trip. When Gordon walks in, she shows the entire movie for the lie it is. Here’s someone who is as rock and roll as rock and roll can be, and she’s not self-destructive or frantic or foolish. She’s an adult. That’s why I loved her as the gangster snapping off orders in Cantonese in Boarding Gate. She is such a cool, self-possessed professional. Jean-Pierre Melville would have adored her.”