Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  9 Kevin Bradley, Robert Johnson (Chelsea Market, New York City, December 16, 2009) One of a series of letterpress posters on the walls of the meandering hallways, this stood out: for the backlit eyes, the filed teeth, and the caption: “They say he sold his soul, but he tricked Saten by putting his soul in his music.”

  10 Pirate Radio, directed by Richard Curtis (Universal Pictures) Set in the mid’60s, this movie about illicit rock ’n’ roll broadcasting from a ship in the North Sea into bedrooms and offices all across the UK lines up Don’t Knock the Rock (1956), Animal House (1978), American Hot Wax (1978), Pump Up the Volume (1990), Titanic (1997), and finally Dunkirk (1958), and plays them like a xylophone. It sounds wonderful, it’s hilarious, and it features Rhys Ifans as the coolest DJ in screen history. But when the ship begins to sink and the thousands of LPs and 45s in the station library are swept away (never mind what Walter Benjamin said about the artistic products of mechanical reproduction lacking the aura of art—as they’re carried off by thousands of pounds of water, these records are aura), a deeper analogue appears. That’s Tom Stoppard’s 2006 play Rock ’n’ Roll, for the horrible scene when the Czech hero discovers that the secret police have smashed his albums, every one.

  MAY 2010

  1 Ellyn Maybe, Rodeo for the Sheepish (Hen House Studios) I heard half of the long, quietly mesmerizing “City Streets” on the radio—what was this? A woman with a poem, with music and a sung chorus not behind her but circling her, and the poem neither exactly recited nor sung, but spoken with such a lilt, in a voice so full of miserabilist pride—at forty, a woman is still getting high-school insults tossed at her (“Hey Mars girl,” a man shouts on the street, “get off the Earth”)—that it’s music in and of itself. There is no bottom to Maybe’s inventiveness, to her adoption of Nirvana’s Oh well whatever never mind as an artistic tool, to a confidence that allows her to toss off a bedrock statement on the American character (“There are people / who know the cuckoo is the state bird / of most states of mind”) in a throwaway voice so that its humor hits you not as a joke but as an echo. There is nothing like this album except for the real life it maps.

  2 Train, “Hey, Soul Sister” (Sony) A perfect fan’s letter, with the high, light sound of someone madly in love with the idea of being in love. You can see the singer dancing in circles in his bedroom, waving his arms in the air. Could the soul sister who inspired this record make one half as good?

  3 Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance” (Inter-scope) When she turns Love into Lahv, lahv, lahv, as if she could care less, the inhuman edge of this semiological construct—the performer, not the song—can open up a hole in your soul. When it feels as if Kiki and Herb are smiling down at her from the heights of their “Total Eclipse of the Heart” she’s Robert Plant, lost in communion with the ancestors, like Medusa or Gene Vincent.

  4 Keri Hilson, “Knock You Down,” featuring Kanye West and Ne-Yo (Interscope) The swirl.

  5 Carolina Chocolate Drops, Genuine Negro Jig (Nonesuch) “Fragments of humble and cryptic work songs appeared,” Constance Rourke wrote of how the voice of the slave made its way into blackface minstrelsy before the Civil War. “Defeat could be heard in the occasional minor key.” In the hands of this string-band trio, taking up “Genuine Negro Jig,” popularized by Dan Emmett in the 1840s, you can hear that sense of defeat stretched so far from the ordinary facts of life that it begins to turn into what was hiding in Rourke’s choice of the word cryptic: into resistance, or, if not that, escape. And when Justin Robinson’s auto-harp surfaces a few songs later, in “Kissin’ and Cussin’,” which takes off from Rabbit Brown’s 1927 “James Alley Blues,” the aura of the uncanny—of time travel as a version of walking out your front door—is almost as strong.

  6 Handsome Family, “Jenny Jenkins,” on Face a Frowning World: An E. C. Ball Memorial Album (Tompkins Square) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? This one, celebrating a traditional Virginia singer who died in 1978, features mostly bland vocals and the happy-go-lucky accompaniment by the Health & Happiness Family Gospel Band, which might as well be Hippie Heaven circa 1971. In that house, it feels as if the Handsome Family, picking a children’s nonsense song off the floor—Will you, I won’t, Will you, I won’t—came in through a window. Asking the questions, Brett Sparks sounds like a preacher trying to save a child from perdition; throwing them back in his face, or rather over his shoulder, at a horizon only she can see, Rennie Sparks sounds like a talking goth doll.

  7 Who Do You Love, directed by Jerry Zaks (Alexander/Mitchell Productions) In the 1930s, two Jewish Chicago boys, Leonard and Phil Chess, hear a black street singer going off about motherfucker this and motherfucker that, and they walk off playing with the word, almost chanting it, trying to catch the man’s inflection, because somehow it just sounds so good, feels so good: “What does this mean?” one kid says to the other.

  The second movie in two years about Chess Records, this one tells the story from 1946, when the Chess brothers decided to open a blues club, to 1955, when Bo Diddley arrived to change the tune. Partly because of the short time span, it’s a chamber piece compared to Cadillac Records, a shapeless movie that never got off the ground. This has so much movement it’s like one long gasp, and yet its dynamics are always controlled, its scenes intense, its humor snapping, its pain ugly and ineradicable, its flair for the startling moment unending. The performances are never showy; each actor seems to be searching for his or her center of gravity, and when they find it, the movie comes out of itself: when at the beginning and the end Robert Randolph as Bo Diddley serves up the title song, his white socks flashing like stars and his feet moving too fast to credit, it’s like a dream of the birth of rock ’n’ roll come true. David Oyelowo as Muddy Waters is a well of dignity: “You know that ain’t no good to me,” he says without embarrassment when Chi McBride as the songwriter Willie Dixon hands him a lyric sheet. Megalyn Ann Echikunwoke’s Ivy Mills, a fictionalized version of Etta James, is nothing as a singer; as a woman looking Leonard Chess in the face, seeing right through him but wanting what she sees, she is as much will as fear. Alessandro Nivola’s Leonard Chess is a businessman first and last, but he’s also still trying to figure out what motherfucker means. “Dix is my mentor,” Leonard Chess says at one point to Muddy Waters, who wonders why Willie Dixon is always looking over the boss’s shoulder, but who has no idea what mentor means. “I am his guide to the exotic Negro world,” Dixon says, honey dripping from his mouth.

  8 Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick, Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James and the Shondells (Scribner) Nice kid from Ohio walks into the big time in New York in 1966 and then the door slams behind him. He doesn’t mind, because “Hanky Panky” goes to number one on Roulette, his music gets better, and he’s almost never out of the top ten. In 1968 he campaigns for Hubert Humphrey (who tells James his secret plan to end the Vietnam War), and then the vice president of the United States writes the liner notes to Crimson and Clover—and if the Jewish gangster running his career is owned by the Genovese family, isn’t that what America’s all about? “He saw the world as a crime family,” James says of Morris Levy, whom he clearly loved. “And most of the time he was right.” Maybe it all goes back to the folk process, to the way Tommy James and the Shondells, teenagers in Dayton, found “Hanky Panky” in the first place—the song traveling from the “B-side of a record nobody ever heard” to James’s friends the Spinners’ Sunday-afternoon show to a rehearsal where all any of the Shondells could remember was “My baby does the hanky panky” and they had to make up their own words. “We were actually doing an imitation of the Spinners’ imitation, and who knew how far the chain stretched?” Was that really any different from Morris Levy putting his name on your songs?

  9 Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (Knopf) Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking, or why this novelist’s best days may be ahead of him: “As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thi
ns out into nothing. . . . Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.”

  10 James Wolcott, “A Certain Acoustic Quality in the Air” (VF.com, March 3) On the street, with the temperature in New York not yet reaching into the low 40s, Wolcott was struck by a sense less of déjà vu than of rightness, “reminding me of something, but what?—what? Then the picture liquidly surfaced in my brain like a print in a developing tray. It’s like the album cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan out there today! . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if I turned the corner and saw Bob and Suze Rotolo, arm in arm, stepping out of folk history and heading my way.” Summed up as a weather report, and they should all be so suggestive: “Early Bob Dylan Album Cover, with a chance of precipitation.”

  JUNE 2010

  1 Club 8, The People’s Record (Labrador) You know that Dire Straits song “Twisting by the Pool”? If a whole album of twisting-by-the-pool music by a demi-ABBA—Karolina Komstedt and Johan Angergård, Swedes with a bossa-nova collection—sounds appealing, this is for you. Especially on “We’re All Going to Die.”

  2 Alfred, “Like a Rolling Stone,” in Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan’s Songs (Norton) Almost everything here is destructively literal, to the point that most of the pictures meant to illustrate the songs are accompanied by matching lyrics that instead illustrate the pictures—or reveal the complete lack of imagination behind them. By stunning contrast—and in stunning use of shifting color schemes, where each chapter in the story of a woman attempting to escape into a life of her own and continually finding herself imprisoned by the life she was born to is governed by shadings of blue, taupe, yellow, olive green, brown, gray, and finally a bright, light-filled page that is scarier than anything darker—Alfred trusts abstraction. Until the very last of his sixty-seven panels there isn’t a word to be seen. The story he tells isn’t obvious, isn’t clear. It doesn’t match Dylan’s soaring, heat-seeking-missile crescendos and choruses—it brings them down to earth. It isn’t a social allegory. It’s one person’s odyssey, a lifetime that returns her to precisely the place she first flees. And the Siamese cat isn’t a symbol of evil, or anything else. It’s the woman’s conscience, or what, all along, has been singing the song that has been playing deep in the farthest back corners of her mind. Following the tale as Alfred sees it, it’s as if you’ve never heard the song at all, and now you must.

  3 Scott Ostler, “Bay Area Sports Scene Is Giants and Disasters” (San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 2010) On the so-far futile attempt of the Oakland A’s to move to San Jose, with disaster rating by tornado: “The A’s (three tornadoes) are Running Bear, the American Indian in a 1960s novelty song of the same name by Johnny Preston. Running Bear is in love with Little White Dove. In our local drama, Little White Dove is played by the city of San Jose.

  “Bear and Dove can’t get together because their respective tribes are at war. All they can do is gaze longingly at one another across a big river.

  “That’s the A’s. Their very existence depends on finding a way to overcome politics and hook up with San Jose. Frankly, most of us wish the two would get a room.

  “The song, by the way, ends with Running Bear and Little White Dove jumping into the river from opposite sides, and ‘the raging river pulled them down.’ ”

  4 Hanoi Janes, Year of Panic (Captured Tracks) Almost-one-man band Oliver Scharf, from Saschen, Germany, near Dresden. Caspian Sea Surf Music, suggests the press release, which is close enough—song titles include “Beachkids,” “Surfin’ KMC,” and (note the surfin’ variation on the album title) “Summer of Panic”—but Scharf is closer to Jan and Dean than Brian Wilson, and a lot closer to Jonathan Richman than either of them. Except on “Good Bone,” when he’s closer to Buddy Holly. Gloriously.

  5–6 Hugh Brown, Allegedly: The Hugh Brown Chainsaw Collection (Grand Central Press) and Caitlin Williams Freeman, “Confections” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) What if Matisse, Duchamp, Man Ray, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Cornell, and more, more, had incorporated chainsaw motifs into their work—not to mention Arbus (she didn’t?), Warhol, Ruscha, Kruger, Holzer, Prince, Hockney, and Mapplethorpe? It’s not likely many of them would have come up with anything as coolly subtle as Brown’s constructions, fruit of a project decades in the making. Least convincing: a phallic remake of Meret Oppenheim’s Object. Blink and you’ll miss it: a perfectly rendered version of Walker Evans’s 1936 Farm Security Administration photograph of a New Orleans movie theater, which instead of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey’s The Nitwits is now featuring The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2. Brown’s work is also a gallery show (at the Robert Berman Gallery, Los Angeles, July 24–August 21), which were it to be installed at SFMOMA you could walk through and then go up to the rooftop coffee bar and try to chose between Caitlin Williams Freeman’s Jeff Koons White Hot Chocolate with cup and saucer slathered with gold leaf; Frida Kahlo Mexican Wedding Cookies; a blue, red, yellow, and white Mondrian Cake; and, most perversely, Build Your Own Richard Serra—where standing in for the iron walls are a Swedish gingersnap, a chocolate sable cookie, a graham cracker, and, as the bar to hold the mini-Stonehenge in place, a citrus tuille cookie. Plus a napkin complete with instructions to keep the thing from falling down while you set it up.

  7 Surveillance, directed and cowritten by Jennifer Chambers Lynch (2008, Magnolia DVD) For nightmare performances by Pell James and Ryan Simpkins—with Simpkins, in her fearlessness and lack of affect after seeing her entire family massacred, presented, by way of her blond braid, as Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed, which means a sequel in which she will either kill Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond or join their gang. With David Lynch’s crawl song “Speed Roadster” in his high, come-into-this-alley-with-me psycho rap over fuzzed blues.

  8 Kiss Meets the Führer of the Reich (YouTube) In 1966 Woody Allen bought rights to a Japanese James Bond imitation called Kagi no Kagi, dubbed in his own dialogue, and released the thing as What’s Up, Tiger Lily? As Allen’s first and funniest movie, it made an increasingly unhinged kind of sense—and so do the slew of un-credited videos that with English subtitles play the same trick on a four-minute section of the 2004 German film Der Untergang. It’s April 20, 1945, Hitler is in his bunker, surrounded by his staff, raging, despairing, then reflective, almost wistful—and then it’s June 25, 2009, for Hitler Finds Out Michael Jackson Has Died, or three months later, for Hitler Finds Out Kanye West Disses Taylor Swift. But the killer is June 8, 2008. Poring over charts, plotting strategy to the end, as head of the German division of the Kiss Army, Hitler is preparing for the band’s big concert. He will stop at nothing to get Peter Criss and Ace Frehley to add their signatures to his buttocks—he’s already got Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. Then an officer steps forward, trembling, to deliver the bad news: Frehley and Criss are not touring with the band. There is a silence no one dares break. Another officer, grasping at straws, suggests that all may not be lost: the substitutes are said to be “competent musicians.” “What do Kiss fans care about competent musicians!” Hitler explodes. Again, silence. Again, the remaining officers looking desperately at each other, knowing the wrong word could mean their deaths. Hitler backs himself into a corner, shrinking into himself, cursing wildly, but then fury turns to acceptance. It’s over: “I can’t even rest my hopes on Mr. Ace Frehley’s new solo album.” And it’s all in the timing—the camp timing of the original transformed by the bizarrely human timing of the subtitles, catching nuances the real movie never dreamed of.

  9 Assassination of a High School President, directed by Brett Simon (2008, Sony DVD) Scream was a parody of the high-school slasher movie, and for most of its length this increasingly creepy exercise—with Reece Thompson as the school paper reporter Bobby Funke (“Funk!” he keeps correcting everyone) and Mischa Barton as the femme fatale—is a parody of Scream. But step by step,
in emotion if not plot, it moves toward the believable. At the end, with the hero distraught and refusing to accept the whole truth, when his editor turns to him and says, “Forget it, Funke, it’s high school,” the moment sticks harder, seems less of a screenwriter’s gloss, than it did in Chinatown. Plus Cat Power’s “Speak for Me” running over the credits, and capturing the chaos of high-school life as well as anything on the screen.

  10 Penelope Houston at Library Laureates presents Urban Legends (San Francisco Public Library, April 16) The great Avengers singer, a longtime SFPL staff member, came up: “I’m dressed as a literary urban legend,” she said. Perhaps 5′ 2″, moles pasted on each cheek, streaked blond hair over one eye, goggle-dark glasses—she was JT Leroy. Or as much as anyone impersonating someone who existed only as an impersonation could be.

  Thanks to Jeff Gold

  JULY-AUGUST 2010

  As a compiler, Allen Lowe is the music historian’s equivalent of David Thomson with his ongoing editions of A Biographical Dictionary of Film (the latest will be out this fall). In 1998 Lowe produced the nine-CD American Pop: An Audio History—From Minstrel to Mojo: On Record, 1893–1946; in 2006 the thirty-six-CD That Devilin’ Tune: A Jazz History [1895–1950]. Now he is unrolling a thirty-six-CD Really the Blues? A Blues History 1893–1959 in four installments; the first nine-CD box, covering 1893 to 1929, appeared this spring from West Hill Radio Archives. With at least twenty-four numbers to a disc, Really the Blues? is a cornucopia; it’s a swamp. It’s a forest to get lost in, tree by tree or even leaf by leaf. It’s a grand and overarching story—though that ? at the end of his title marks Lowe’s doubt as to whether with the blues such a story is possible, or even a good idea. It’s a flurry of fragments, leaving you grasping for a way to follow the trail.