Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  As his free-swinging liner notes make clear, Lowe is a radical pluralist; as a synthesizer he’s completely idiosyncratic. He may love disjunction far more than unity—but what others hear as disjunctions may be unities to him. Thus along with late-nineteenth-century black quartette singing, Bert Williams, W. C. Handy, early gospel, vaudeville blues, minstrelsy survivals, New York City productions featuring the likes of Mamie Smith, Sarah Martin, and then Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and the lone-traveler-with-guitar of the country blues, there is also Paul Whiteman, Jimmie Rodgers, white mountain singers, Billie Holiday, bluegrass, Sacred Harp chanting, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, and a Charles Ives piano piece from his Symphony no. 1. In Lowe’s hands, the blues is not a feeling (“A good man/woman feeling bad,” in the classical phrase, or, in Buzzy Jackson’s recent revision, “A bad woman feeling good”). It’s a language: something one can draw from the times and the landscape, or out of oneself; it’s a language one can learn. As a language, it gives whoever can speak it a certain purchase on the world, allowing one to present it or oneself in a light different from the light that falls on you without your will or desire coming into play. That is why it takes so many, even infinite, forms.

  In the world of the blues as Lowe affirms it, any attempt at summary, let alone a critical assessment of what his crafted world is worth, of whether it’s a spinning globe or a pile of feathers, would demand far more time than it takes to listen—and given the shape of his production, constantly calling you back to play a given piece a second or a tenth time, to make it fit, to hear how it doesn’t, summary may be beside the point. For that matter, while Lowe covers every conceivable genre, style, form, and fashion, the recordings he chooses are almost never generic, an example of something as opposed to a thing in itself. Within any genre he is drawn to its anomalies, not the master chord but the broken cord. I hope to take up each of his four boxes as they arrive; here are ten echoes from the first.

  1 Bert Williams, “Nobody” (1906) “Not a blues, but—” it’s always said: it’s a spoken piece about being treated as if you don’t exist, or as if you never should have been born. (“Coon Song. Baritone Solo” was the notation on the original release.) As philosophy it’s a straight line from this to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, two world wars, a Great Depression, and forty-six years later. But in its cadence and in the melody of its speech it’s a leap to Muddy Waters’s “Rollin’ Stone” two years before that, and to Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” four years later.

  2 Fisk University Jubilee Quartet, “Poor Mourner” (1911) Formal gospel by trained singers—but in the highs and lows, the irreducibly spooky tones of a different voice, eyes without a face, a face without a name: what John Fahey meant when he said that inside certain gospel records you could hear “a cloven hoof beating time.”

  3 Prince’s Band, “St. Louis Blues” (1915) The big, bouncy, so-called first blues: “A terrible song, melodically bland and formally vulgar, a middle-class state of the blues,” Lowe says. “But the blues was a form Handy could not tame.” You can catch it here, in the half-lights in the verses, the spectre of a haunt already reaching to take the form back.

  4 Roosevelt Graves and His Brother, “I’ll Be Rested” (1926) So modern sounding, with air between every word and every note.

  5 Hendersonville Double Quartet, “I Want My Life to Testify” (1926) Lowe writes of the dignity of this recording. It’s the dignity of the scorned, the illiterate, the worthless, eight people speaking as a group to affirm that none of them is like anybody else, that if they’re worthy God will see each for who he or she really is, which means that if you don’t, you sin.

  6 Blind Willie Johnson, “Motherless Child” (1927) Compared to Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night—Cold Was the Ground,” one of the great works of American art, a pop song: “Blind man’s bluff,” Lowe says. That’s the echo. What does that mean?

  7 Moses Mason, “Molly Man” (1928) In the 1890s in St. Louis, the street singer Bill Dooley may have written both “Stagolee” and “Frankie and Albert,” on the spot. You can imagine that this is what he sounded like.

  8 Frank Stokes, “Take Me Back” (1928) From Memphis, all but turning cartwheels, Stokes always had his tongue in his cheek, and his tongue was like a whip.

  9 William Moore, “One Way Gal” (1928) When Moore looked out at the world, he never saw it end. The sun dropped down to the horizon, but it never set.

  10 Furry Lewis, “Judge Harsh Blues” (1928) Black man, white justice. I was going to say Judge Harsh is forgotten, and Furry Lewis’s name is spoken in a hundred languages, but that is glib. Judge Harsh will never die, and not because Lewis made him immortal. In this modest performance, made up of commonplace lines from a score of other songs (“My woman come a-running, with a hundred dollars in her hand / Crying Judge, Judge, please spare my man / One hundred won’t do, better get your three”), you can, as always when Lewis tells his stories, feel that he has thought them over for a long time, and that he’s still thinking as he sings.

  SEPTEMBER 2010

  1 Laurie Anderson, Homeland (Nonesuch) “Only an Expert” is not anything anyone could have expected from Laurie Anderson: a pop song. It moves quickly on a stuttering and unpredictable beat. The verses are like a stand-up comedy act where the comic is constantly winking at the audience, but not exactly to indicate everyone in the privileged room is in on the joke. You can’t tell what the wink is saying, and it exerts its own pull of fascination. The chorus is pure pop, the singer taking pleasure in the momentum of a few words that quickly cease to mean anything—they could be doo-wops. The music is that cool, that unafraid of itself. The bits of Lou Reed’s feedback running in the deep background of the piece as it moves on, each fragment curling in on itself like paper in fire, suggest that there’s a lot to this song that isn’t being said, even though it has over nine hundred words.

  Like a lot of this album, with its Department of Security title—the Nazi word Homeland saying that everywhere else is Empire—“Only an Expert” moves quickly into the traducing of the Constitution and the morals of American history by George W. Bush and his administration. But as such it’s a novelty song, which I once heard defined as a song that was funny and not about love. This song is very funny for more than seven and a half minutes, and it gets funnier the more you listen to it. Its currency is disbelief: everything it describes is presented with an expression of well-what-did-you-expect acceptance, which in every other moment turns into you-must-be-kidding, which, as you listen, over and over, can change into nightmare, hate, fear, self-loathing, and fantasies of murderous revenge.

  Except perhaps on The Ugly One with the Jewels and Other Stories, from 1995, Anderson’s best album until this one, her voice has been a raised eyebrow: arch, knowing, sometimes sneering, even smug. It’s no different here. What is radically different is that here Anderson has built a context—on an expanding, old-fashioned Zeitgeist album that means to translate everything into its own language, to replace a diffuse and fugitive frame of reference with one the singer has built herself—in which everything she says, her every tone of voice, is suffused with such regret and pain over what has happened to the country the singer has to describe that the arch, the knowing, the sneering, and the smug are revealed as hopeless, worthless masks. Song by song, through play, surprise, tunes that drift like dreams in and out of the words and textures of “O Superman,” that soft-spoken jeremiad that across nearly three decades has lost none of its prophetic gravity, Anderson heads toward the center of her story, a more than eleven-minute spoken piece—with movie-like music behind it, maybe calling up Lost Horizon, a better title than Anderson’s “Another Day in America,” music suggesting that you’ve been here before, even if here has never been more than a figment of someone else’s imagination—performed, by means of a filter, in a male voice.

  Out of his slow, heavy, I-used-to-be-disgusted-now-I-try-to-be-amused growl, it’s impossible not to picture the man speaking. I see him as
tall, heavy set, a one time prep-school Ivy Leaguer who’s worked in the State Department for forty years. He’s seen it all. He’s seen presidents, senators, secretaries of state come and go, and now he’s seen too much. He tells jokes as if they’re parables; he offers parables as if he can tell them as jokes, but they fall flat, a whole country falling flat on its face. As he goes on, with Antony Hegarty coming in behind him, floating around his head like the ghost of his dead, younger self, he gives up even trying to be amused; every word he says turns sour in his mouth. We’ve come too far, he’s saying; nothing is going to change back to what it was, or what we thought it was, or what we hoped it could be. When the song ends—and it doesn’t fade out; it stops with a last, self-silencing note—it’s horrible. You feel the story, the country, has outlived itself.

  2 Jay-Z & Mr Hudson, “Young Forever” (Roc Nation) In a small drama where the land of eternal youth sounds a lot like the Islamist martyr’s paradise, what makes the performance so gripping is the way Jay-Z plays against the British R&B singer Mr Hudson’s gorgeous re-creation of Alphaville’s 1984 “Forever Young.” He’s testifying off to the side, then going silent for Mr Hudson as if listening to what he’s saying, waiting in the alley of his own song for that moment when he’ll dash out and jump the train of the old one, then running his own train of words straight through the melody, jumping off with perfect timing when Mr Hudson takes the music back.

  3 Hockey, “Song Away” (Capitol) The Portland band is dynamite on the air, when you’re not expecting it, when you tune right in to the middle. Despite the fast pace, the speechifying vocals, there’s a hint of the languor of Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do.” The muscle in the guitar-bass-drums rhythms is so arresting that on the radio it can erase the video from your mind, and the video, by Skinny—kin to Samuel Bayer for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” with the ordinary horror of being a nerd at a gym dance replacing the Prom Night menace of Nirvana’s pep rally—is one of the funniest, warmest, and most socially accurate (the way the geeky kid looks at a row of the coolest girls in school as if they’re from another planet) high-school movies ever made.

  4 Flotilla Choir, “We Con the World (Turkish ‘Aid to Gaza’ Song with Captain Stabbing & Friends)” (YouTube) Contrived almost overnight after the May 31 attempt of the Mavi Marmara to break the blockade of Gaza, this Israelis-in-Arab-drag video is the most outrageous parody of “We Are the World” ever devised. And, except for “We Are the World 25 for Haiti,” recorded in February by Justin Bieber et al.—in the very same studio where Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and so many more once checked their egos at the door!—the most effective.

  5–6 Matt Diehl interviews Joni Mitchell (Los Angeles Times, April 22) “Bob is not authentic at all,” Mitchell said. “He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.” Charles Taylor comments: “In protest, Chelsea Clinton changes her name to Hibbing.”

  7 KFOG-FM (San Francisco, May 14) A deep, sonorous radio voice: “Back in the Stone Age, this song was used to repel dinosaurs.” Then the DJ played Dramarama’s “Anything, Anything,” which sounded as if it would have worked.

  8 Tom Jones, Praise and Blame (Lost Highway) The seventy-year-old-onetime Welsh R&B stomper goes back to his blues and gospel roots, digs them up, tosses them in the fireplace, and with John Lee Hooker’s 1959 “Burning Hell,” burns down the house.

  9 Crooked Still, “Henry Lee” from Some Strange Country (Signature Sounds) A carefulness, a flinching hesitation, has boxed in Aoife O’Donovan and everyone else in this sensual old-timey band since their Shaken by a Low Sound four years ago. But on this ancient, mystical murder ballad, they make a labyrinth, and don’t even try to get out.

  10 Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms (Knopf) His second book named after an Elvis Costello song: a sequel to Less Than Zero. “Our reunion tour,” says E. C.

  OCTOBER 2010

  1 Corin Tucker Band, 1,000 Years (Kill Rock Stars) There are strings on the first music to be heard from Tucker since Sleater-Kinney left itself behind in 2006; on “Riley,” which seems to dig down farther with every deep, slowly exhaling breath, all the strings do is emphasize. In moments you might hear Christine McVie in Fleet-wood Mac—the clear voice of “Spare Me a Little of Your Love” and “Over My Head”—but the toughness you could miss with McVie remains the motor of Tucker’s music. The trouble can come at any time, and it does, over and over.

  2 Elizabeth Cook, Welder (31 Tiger) Country is not supposed to be this frankly salacious, whether about quaaludes or sex, or the difficulty of telling one from the other—but Cook was probably not raised to become the woman she is, writing and singing about “making love in the disco era,” which somehow summons up the specter of a single act of intercourse lasting at least five years and a joke the singer will be telling for the rest of her life. “My hands were in his mullet,” she laughs, at the time, the guy, and herself, but why not? She bends around the corners of her stories until her voice cracks, and her nostalgia is inseparable from her pride. That’s what anyone might most carry away from this record: you couldn’t find regret with a Geiger counter.

  3 Carlene Carter, “Me and the Wild-wood Rose” (YouTube) Her grandmother Maybelle sang it with the Carter Family; her mother, June Carter, sang it. After wonderful records long in the past, a lost career, arrests for heroin, a marriage to Nick Lowe that must seem like someone else’s Hollywood movie, the death of her mother and her stepfather, Johnny Cash, Carlene Carter plays the song as if it’s the home where when you come back knocking it has to let you in.

  4 John Mellencamp, No Better Than This (Rounder) Mellencamp had a ridiculously precious idea: record a set of new songs in the Sun studio in Memphis, where Howlin’ Wolf and Elvis once walked the few square feet as if it were the earth; in the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, a stop on the Underground Railroad; and in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where in 1936 Robert Johnson faced a wall and sang “Cross Road Blues”—and not just put the thing out on CD and vinyl, but do it all in mono.

  Slowly, tune by tune, and so imperceptibly that each time you play the album it might seem to shift at a different time, the muffled sound of the music begins to work on the ear as something not old, but looking back at the singer from a future he may not reach. Nothing is rushed; in “Save Some Time to Dream” (Memphis), “Thinking About You” (Savannah), and “The West End” (Memphis), Mellencamp’s voice sounds like something he had to scrape off the back of his throat. And then comes “Love at First Sight” (Savannah). The singer passes someone on the street, and glimpses their whole life together. It takes him four and a half minutes to tell you everything that happened, the music bouncing lightly up and down, back and forth, like hopscotch, but with every detail—a smile, a kiss, her getting pregnant, them getting married, her leaving him for another man—you never don’t know that the singer saw it all in an instant, and you know that on any given day, you could, too.

  5 15-60-75, a.k.a. the Numbers, “Matchbox Defined,” from The Inward City (Hear-than) Formed as a blues band in Kent, Ohio, at the end of the ’60s, the Numbers have ground on ever since, as if searching for the end of time, or a solution to the mysteries of the songs they still can’t get out of their heads. Here the guitarist, Robert Kidney, who now uses a cane, takes up a song that made its way from Blind Lemon Jefferson in the ’20s to Carl Perkins in the ’50s to the Beatles in Hamburg in the early ’60s to, you can be certain, the Numbers not long after, and which, regardless of how many times Kidney has sung it, still makes no sense. So with a harmonica solo that could have come off of the first Cream album and a train-whistle guitar solo that summons up the Yardbirds at the Fillmore in 1968, Kidney takes up the tune as a philosophical investigation. It was a lifetime ago, he says, when an old blind man asked him if a matchbox could hold his clothes—“And I shook my fist and I said, old man, how could a matchbox hold my clothes?” But almost every word is its own line as Kidney relates the
tale, Jefferson stepping out of the grave to taunt him—“The old / blind / man / asked me”—and the almost violent hesitations churn up drama. “And I / thought / about it / for / ten years”—you know he’s never going to get out of this. But then comes a hangover, when everything is slowed down, every thought the lifting of a house, and everything is clear. The singer sees his wife watching TV; he could walk out the door right now, “with nothing”—the nothing of her not even noticing he’s gone. Kidney tells the story as if he’s opened that door a thousand times and closed it and walked back into the kitchen for another beer just as many. But it doesn’t matter; he’s seen through his life, and now he can sing the song as if he owns it, instead of the other way around. If he ever could close that door behind himself, “And where you’re going nobody knows / Then a matchbox will hold your clothes.”

  6 Eminem, Recovery (Aftermath) What makes Eminem different is a sense of jeopardy: a bedrock conviction that whatever there is in life worth having, and whatever of that you might have, you don’t deserve it. Maybe in anyone else’s hands that would translate into self-pity, fake panic, hair-pulling desperation—but not here. In these songs, it translates into a kind of ethics, where the person speaking tries more than anything to see every possible point of view, every conceivable response, every missed chance, all at once.

  7 Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle (June 29) Dep’t. of Lest We Forget: “I got my hands on that issue of Rolling Stone with the interview that caused the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the cover of which was particularly interesting because its main focus was on Lady Gaga with a pair of guns (borrowed, I assume) and a pair of buttocks (her own, but probably air-brushed). The story about ‘Obama’s General’ was mentioned in the smallest cover line of anything else, indicating the editors didn’t think it would cause much fuss.