Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  5 David Lang, original music in (Untitled), directed by Jonathan Parker (Goldwyn) Lang won the 2008 Pulitzer music prize; I can’t imagine it would work on the soundtrack album, but on screen his avant-garde conceptual noise music parodies, which include a musician popping bubble wrap but usually focus on a bucket, have a glamour that deepens scene by scene—especially when, to pay the rent, Adam Goldberg’s fearless composer takes jobs playing piano at a supper club or a wedding and still can’t help dumping the likes of “Night and Day” or “Wonderful World” for atonal minor chords that shout “Death, death, death!” at the fleeing crowds. It makes sense that Marley Shelton’s ice-queen New York gallery owner falls for Goldberg the first time she hears him, and that he’s so self-consumed he doesn’t notice that her own clothes, apparently all made out of metal-based fabrics, generate sounds as alluring as his (cellophane packages being opened in movie theaters, wood being sanded, wrenches unscrewing bolts)—whenever she walks, turns, or tries to take them off.

  6–7 Raincoats and Viv Albertine, Knitting Factory (Brooklyn, October 16, 2009) I hadn’t seen the Raincoats, one of the UK’s original all-female punk bands, for just short of thirty years. Original members Gina Birch (bass, guitar) and Ana da Silva (guitar, bass) looked precisely as they did when they started out, merely older. Anne Wood (violin, kalimba, bass), who joined the band in 1994, replacing original violinist Vicky Aspinall, looked like Molly Shannon and carried herself like the lead in Abel Gance’s Napoleon. The young drummer, Vice Cooler, from San Francisco, who records as Hawnay Troof, added a drum sound so big, and so light on its feet, that each song seemed to start a few inches off the ground and stay there. Viv Albertine, guitarist of the Slits, the original all-female UK punk band, opened the show solo; she joined the Raincoats for their version of the Kinks’ “Lola,” a signature crowd-pleaser, but the second-to-last song, “In Love,” from the band’s first single, from 1979, was, in the words of th Faith Healers, “ everything, all at once, forever.” I was waiting for that one song, and when it began I realized I’d altogether forgotten it, remembering only the impact it had when I first heard it: remembering the shock. It blew up the jammed little room, half filled with people half as old as the other half: shouts and cries and curses and pleas, all coming as if from a single throat, a wild, unsatisfied, unsatisfiable celebration of the discovery that, in someone else’s eyes, you exist, you cannot be erased, even if in the next moment you’re hit by a car and all you leave is a stain on the street.

  Albertine played only new songs; they’re better with a band, as on her Myspace page, but they still seem contrived. Her stage talk, which took up at least half of her time, was if anything more practiced, and moved with all of the passion, humor, and daring her music lacked. Her ruminations took her through the breakup of her fifteen-year marriage over her wish to go back to music after not touching a guitar for a quarter of a century; her terrible sex life then and now; the beginnings of punk and the Stalinist tinge among the small, insular group that made up the first wave, a few friends who really did mean to change the world by embodying a new way of life. She told tales of being shouted down on the street for holding hands with her punk boyfriend, Mick Jones of the Clash, and of being forced to get rid of all her T-shirts (“from Biba, the best store in the world”), because they had scoop necks. Then, as if relating a fairy tale, putting down Mother Goose and picking up the Brothers Grimm, she told the story of the arrival in London, just as the scene had found itself, of the Heartbreakers, from New York: “They brought Nancy Spungen, but what they really brought was heroin.” Within weeks, she said, the same Stalinism that made her get rid of her favorite clothes meant that if you weren’t using heroin you weren’t cool enough to speak to: “ Really rigorous people, questioning everything, and now all they cared about was finding the next fix.” “I succumbed,” she said. “I let Johnny Thunders shoot me up. My arm turned black for three weeks. I was living with my Mum and had to hide it. Luckily I didn’t go down that road. I never did it again. I wouldn’t want my daughter to know about it.” A smile never left her face; at fifty-four she looked thirty at most. “The curse of the Slits,” she said, leaving everyone to wonder what she meant.

  8 Coen Brothers, A Serious Man (Focus Features) The scene where the ancient rabbi quotes from the Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” as if the lyrics came straight from the Talmud is its own double take. But why does the song sound so terrible on the soundtrack?

  9 Kay West, People.com (September 21, 2009) “Before a packed house of 1,500 fans and a balcony filled with invited guests, Grammy-winning rock-folk singer Lucinda Williams said, ‘I do,’ to her boyfriend and manager Tom Overby on Friday. The couple, who have been together for three years, tied the knot onstage at First Avenue, a music club in Minneapolis. The audience was in the dark about the pending nuptials until Williams, at the end of her performance, told the crowd that like country legend Hank Williams, she was going to share her happiness and her wedding with fans. Hank Williams married his second wife onstage in New Orleans.” Ken Tucker comments: “Williams also announced that she’d recently decided she wants to be referred to hereafter as ‘the daughter Hank never knew he had,’ rather than as ‘the daughter of poet Miller Williams,’ because ‘the whole poetry angle really isn’t working out for me anymore now that folks have actually examined my lyrics.’ ”

  10 Josh Lieb, I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President (Razorbill) This first novel, featuring twelve-year-old Oliver Watson, a fat Captain Beef-heart fan who rules the world but not his Omaha middle school, seems powered by the same malignant spirits that fester in Fletcher Hanks’s completely unhinged comic strips of the late ’30s and early ’40s, lately collected by Fantagraphics as You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation! and I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! This is funnier, because you can usually forget that the story would actually be worse if it you took it as Oliver’s fantasy instead of his real life.

  FEBRUARY 2010

  1 Kelly Clarkson, “Already Gone” (from All I Ever Wanted, Sony BMG) Sometimes you want singers to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Especially when they sound like Sarah McLachlan.

  2 The Missing Person, written and directed by Noah Buschel (The 7th Floor) Matching its center of gravity—the way that with every scowl directed outward at the world Michael Shannon’s private eye pulls more deeply into himself, as if he can make himself his own black hole—the movie itself is dark and muffled. It’s hard to see and hard to hear. The plot is full of dead ends. But there is one moment of clarity, so full of unguarded warmth it seems to be from another film altogether, or another life: the detective and a woman who’s picked him up in a bar dancing in a crummy Los Angeles hotel room as the radio plays the Jive Five’s 1961 “My True Story.” “But we must cry, cry, cry,” Eugene Pitt sings, going up high, turning the swamp of the past into at least a hint of a future, and you think, yes, tell this story—while at the same time you’re wondering, OK, a thirty-five-year old Jive Five fan, he’s from New York, I can believe that, but how did he find a doo-wop station in California?

  3 Punk shoes from Giovanna Zanella (Castello 5641, Calle Carminati, Venice) Six-inch heels on black pumps with a Doc Martens sole and a red Mohawk that looks more like a weapon than a haircut coming out of the back.

  4 Herbert Bayer, Design for a Multimedia Building, in “Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity” (Museum of Modern Art, New York, through January 25) It’s all Regina all the time: on one face of the rectangular box, a film projected from inside showing Ms. R. pulling her lips apart in a happy if brainless smile; on another, a huge gramophone horn protruding, broadcasting the new hit “Regina.” On the roof, a smoke hole emitting small black clouds that spell out . . . you guessed it. To the side of the horn, under an overhang, a man exiting, while the diagram helpfully indicates the In and Out. The whole looks like a valentine from Bayer to his girlfriend Regina, a modernist treehouse, or a De Stijl–influenced moc
k-up of an ad for a freestanding one-woman brothel. The playfulness and glee of the design perfectly catches the thrust of the exhibition as a whole: the story of adventurous, questing, ambitious people with their lives and a world to change before them, about to be crushed.

  5 Jenny Diski, The Sixties (Picador) If you liked An Education and were wondering what happened next . . .

  6–7 Bob Dylan and Dion, United Palace Theater (New York, November 17, 2009) The stage was pure House of Blue lights before Dylan came on: deep velvet background, upside-down electric candles ringing the top of the stage. In that setting “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,’ ” from Together Through Life last spring, was a sultry vamp from a ’40s supper club. Clearly the song was still opening itself up to Dylan; he sang with heart, as if looking to find how much it might tell him. “Dedicated to our troops,” Dion had said earlier, for “Abraham, Martin and John,” and the mood Dylan was creating was already too fine for “Masters of War”; instead he sang the mom-sends-son-off-to-glory-and-then-he-comes-back folk song “John Brown” in a hard-boiled voice, the Continental Op running down the murders in Red Harvest. Most striking of all was “Ballad of a Thin Man.” In Todd Haynes’s film I’m Not There, Cate Blanchett, as Dylan in London in 1966, acts out the song standing alone behind a mic stand like a nightclub singer, no protection of a guitar between performer and audience. It was something Bob Dylan had never done, but that was precisely the posture he assumed now, as if the movie had taught him something new about his own song: how to make it more intimate, more direct, so that it was the audience, not the singer, that was left more naked, more defenseless.

  For all that, Dion stole the show. He opened with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On”—and that had to be to remind both Dylan and the crowd of the night in early 1959, just days before Holly died, when a seventeen-year-old Robert Zimmerman sat in the Duluth National Guard Armory, Holly himself sang “Rave On,” and Dion was an opening act at that show, too. Now he was seventy, and his voice grew, opened, gained in suppleness and reach with every song. One by one, he put the oldies behind him, so that it all came to a head with “King of the New York Streets,” from 1989.

  It’s a gorgeous, panoramic song: a strutting brag that in the end turns back on itself, a Bronx match for the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” It opens with huge, doomy chords, wide silences between the notes, creating a sense of wonder and suspension, and you don’t want the moment to break, for the music to take a single step forward—just as, after the song has gone on and on, you can’t bear the idea that it’s going to end. From that almost-frozen beginning, the pace seemed to speed up with every verse, but it wasn’t the beat that was doubling, it was the intensity and the drama. Dion’s wails were as fierce as ever, but never so full of wide-open spaces, the voice itself an undiscovered country, and it was impossible to imagine that he had ever sung better.

  8 Gov’t Mule, “Railroad Boy,” from By a Thread (Evil Teen) Upsetting a trainload of expert grind-it-out, the centuries-old melody and story of “Railroad Boy” (a.k.a. “The Butcher’s Boy”), which sounds like the precursor of the Teen Death Song: “Tell Laura I Love Her,” “Last Kiss,” “Teen Angel,” but perhaps more to the point, “I Don’t Like Mondays,” “Endless Sleep,” and most of all “Ode to Billie Joe.” Ruth Gerson made the connection explicit in 2008 with her Deceived; in Gov’t Mule’s hands, or hooves, it sneaks up on you like a villain in a Scream movie. Which makes the name of their label all too perfect.

  9 Malcolm McLaren, “Shallow” (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, October 24, 2009–January 3, 2010) Twenty-one “musical paintings”—which is to say, loops of found footage depicting people gearing up to have sex with soundtracks made up of smeared pop songs, snatches of interviews or spoken-word performances, and swirls of movie tunes. “No matter how shallow people say pop music is,” McLaren writes in his exhibition note, “it continues to confound, astound, and seduce something deep in all of us—the desire to change the culture and possibly, if it be only for a moment, change life itself. No matter how shallow people say sex is, it continues to occupy and post-occupy everyone’s thoughts, forcing us to be irresponsible, childish and everything this society hates, and why not?” A topless blonde woman descending a staircase and dragging a fur coat behind her as Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” answers Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” is a joke that never comes to life. There’s a shaggy, fleshy guy with his arm draped around a grinning beanpole; they don’t seem to be listening to the bits of the Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself” floating in and out of a disco version of an old country blues, and when the camera pulls back to show a handgun jammed into the front of the second man’s pants, you don’t hear the music either, because now the man’s faraway resemblance to Timothy McVeigh is undeniable. Best of all is a dressed-up seventies couple, seated on a couch, apparently watching a movie on TV, both smoking, with fragments of the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” circling their heads. It’s super-slow motion; the slightest change in expression becomes an event that you follow in a state of suspense. As the man steals glances at the woman with a self-satisfied smile crawling over his mouth, her eyes widen in an expression of surprise or fright that imperceptibly but definitively changes into arousal, and then the sequence begins from the beginning. You watch them again and again—and then finally McLaren allows the film to go a step further. The man is still contemplating his conquest, the woman is still lost in her own world, until she turns her head and sees him, her eyes as clear as if she were speaking out loud: Who is this guy? Where did he come from?

  10 Ed Sullivan’s Rock and Roll Classics: The 60s (PBS, November 29) Fund-raising break commentary by host TJ Lubinsky: “Public television has always been there as an alternative to”—the Ed Sullivan Show?

  Thanks to Liz Bordow, David Bordow,

  David Ross, and Peggy Ross

  MARCH-APRIL 2010

  1 Yellow Fever, Yellow Fever (Wild World) From Austin, Jennifer Moore and Isabel Martin play guitar, bass, and sing; Adam Jones plays drums and bass; and the early ’60s meet the early ’80s, neither of which anyone in the band is likely old enough to remember, which is simply to say that despite oldies formats there is no time on the radio. The band’s music is full of air, with brittle Young Marble Giants rhythms—and its humor (quotes from the Jaynetts’ 1963 “Sally, Go ’Round the Roses” and Ben E. King’s 1960 “Spanish Harlem,” plus sexy organ right out of Freddy Cannon’s 1962 “Palisades Park”) is sometimes muffled by Young Marble Giants archness, which has its own charms.

  2 Stephen Thompson, “ ‘American Idol’ and the Making of a Star” (Morning Edition, NPR, December 23, 2009) For Thompson’s own ideal American Idol song, “On the Wings of Dreaming Eagles,” which you’ll swear you’ve already heard, even if you can’t remember whether it was Clay Aiken or Adam Lambert on season four or season seven.

  3 Woods, “Born to Lose,” from Songs of Shame (Shrimper) There’s a broken, incomplete quality on every song here—something unknowable. But on this number—odd, incomplete, and, at 1:59, unsettlingly short—the name of the album comes into play. The tempo is slow, with bare guitar notes and distantly echoed backing vocals that come across less as voices than memories, or wind. From Brooklyn, Jeremy Earl’s croaked, pleading singing is as spectral as anything else: the testimony of someone whose time has already run out, and who doesn’t think he deserved a minute more than he got.

  4 Ken Maynard, Ken Maynard Sings The Lone Star Trail (Bear Family) With close to a hundred pictures between 1923 and 1945, Maynard (1895–1973) was the first singing Hollywood cowboy. Perhaps because of his high voice, he made only eight recordings, in 1930, with five—“Sweet Betsy from Pike,” “Fannie Moore,” “When the Roundup’s Done this Fall,” “Jesse James,” and “A Prisoner for Life”—released here for the first time, and not one is less than haunted. He could be listening now to Woods’s “Born to Lose,” smiling and saying, too bad they left
that off my album.

  5 Gigante, written and directed by Adrián Biniez (Ctrl Z Films) A very quiet movie about a surveillance worker at a huge Montevideo supermarket who falls in love with a floor cleaner while watching her on one of his video screens. He’s enormous and moonlights as a bouncer at a nightclub; she’s not pretty but endlessly appealing; he follows her all over town and beats up people who make catcalls at her. They finally meet, and you know it’s a match made in heaven, because they both love Metallica and Biohazard.

  6 DeSoto Rust, “Calgary,” from Highway Gothic (DeSotoRust.com) There’s nothing Gothic here, just the thirty-seven-thousandth ride down the American road, not a line escaping its cliché or even trying to. You can imagine Philadelphian Ray Hunter gargling dust to get the right sound in his throat. And somewhere inside the play between Dave Reeve’s drums and David Otwell and Steve Savage’s guitars, there’s the kind of satisfaction you can only get if you’re behind the wheel, alone, for a moment forgetting where you are, maybe because Marshall Tucker’s “Can’t You See” is on the radio.

  7 Absolut Vodka, The Rock Edition (Absolut Spirits Co.) More like the Black Metal Edition—except that with the zipper on the side, the thick studded black casing looks less like a guitarist’s wrist guard than a sex slave’s S&M mask.

  8 Georgia O’Keeffe, “Abstraction” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 17, 2009–January 17, 2010) Anyone can be forgiven for thinking, but I’ve seen Georgia O’Keeffe; the work in this great show has been hidden behind the flowers and skulls. This is bedrock, as much painted by the American landscape as it is about it. Wave, Night (1928: desert, a lake bed in the foreground, at the top, in the middle, a single white spotlight, which only barely illuminates the shadow of a road reaching diagonally from middle-right down to far-left) is as much an anticipation of Robert Frank’s highway pictures in The Americans as the 1919 Abstraction is of Batman’s Gotham City—or as the very early charcoal drawing Train at Night in the Desert (1916: clouds billowing up at either side, almost black on the left, gray at the right, the train in the center, but in a way that while a sense of movement is undeniable the train is itself a cloud) is of Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train.”