Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  “Surely all the trouble it did cause must have been the result of a simple mistake: an editing mix-up in interviews. Obviously, someone mistakenly put McChrystal’s lines in Lady Gaga’s mouth and vice versa.

  “What McChrystal really said about the commander-in-chief: ‘I’ve really never loved anyone like I loved him. Or like I love him. That relationship really shaped me. It made me into a fighter.’ About his relationship to the soldiers: ‘I’m really good to the people around me. . . . I’m not a diva, in any sense of the word.’ About the war in Afghanistan: ‘I committed myself to my heartbreak wholeheartedly. It’s something that I will never let go. . . . As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.’

  “What Lady Gaga really said about the obligations of being a star: ‘How’d I get screwed into going to this dinner? . . . I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner.’ About her social life: ‘All these men, I’d die for them. And they’d die for me.’ On dressing for the stage: ‘It’s shirts and skins, and we’ll kill all the shirts.’ And on current events: ‘Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan.’ ”

  8 Philip Kerr, If the Dead Rise Not (Putnam) In Kerr’s now six-book Bernie Gunther series—following the onetime Berlin cop and private detective through the Nazi era, to postwar Vienna and Perónist Argentina, now book-ending Berlin in 1934 and Havana twenty years later—the whodunnit, or even the why-dunnit, has never been the point. The battle Gunther fights is against his own sense of oppression, miasma, nihilism. Here Kerr has his hard-boiled wisecrack machine revved up to high—“Don’t get me wrong,” Gunther says, in lines that bounce off the screaming faces at Tea Party rallies, “I just love Nazis. I’ve a sneaking suspicion that ninety-nine point nine percent of Nazis are giving the other point one percent an undeservedly bad reputation”—but as 1934 fades out in a horror of murder and blackmail, and 1954 takes shape as a game of love and blackmail Gunther can’t win, the wisecracks dry up. You want Gunther to end up with the woman he’s been in love with for twenty years as much as he does, but you don’t have to pay the price—until the last pages, which make the most depressing ending to any novel I’ve read in years.

  9 Cabaret—The Adult Entertainment Magazine (August 1956) A friend passed on this nightclub trade publication, devoted mainly to strippers; the headlines were, with unbelievably garish cover photo, I TAUGHT JAYNE MANSFIELD ABOUT SEX (inside comedown: “I taught her about sex as it is manufactured in Hollywood”) and WHO THE HELL IS ELVIS PRESLEY? (inside surprise: aside from a few obviously made-up quotes—“I’d like to study dramatical acting. I don’t care nothing whatsoever about singing in no movie”—a smart and accurate profile). But the most displacing tidbit came on the last page, in the “Backstage” column by one Arch Ayers, where you could find the real Jayne Mansfield: “PUBLICITY MAD Jayne Mansfield will do anything to make the papers. Shortly after telling Winchell and three other columnists that she had broken off with her current flame, Robbie Robertson, she was heard on the phone telling her boyfriend: ‘But Robbie, you don’t believe all that stuff you read in the columns.’ ” Reached in New York, Robertson had this to say: “Don’t you just hate it when one of those bombshell chicks blows your cover. I was only twelve at the time, but I knew how to make a woman feel special.”

  10 Elvis Presley, “Stranger in My Own Home Town” In truth, “Who the hell is Elvis Presley?” is a question that has never been answered—or, as Nick Tosches once put it, “Elvis Presley will never be solved.” Here he is in 1970, spinning out songs in the studio, grabbing on to an old Percy Mayfield number, taking it slowly, languidly, until the pressure just barely increases, and suddenly you know you’re hearing the sort of plain truth Elvis almost never permitted himself: he knows the envy, the resentment, the hate behind every smiling face. The performance appeared only in 1995, on Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential 70’s Masters, but with lines missing the Internet now gives back.

  “I’m going back down to Memphis,” Elvis sings, though plainly that’s exactly where he already is. “I’m going to start driving that motherfucking truck again.” You hear a defiance inseparable from self-loathing, a man who sees the envy, the resentment, the hatred in every smiling face: “All those cocksuckers stopped being friendly / But you can’t keep a hard prick down.” There’s no sense of obscenity or provocation as he sings. It’s plain speech, but with that last line he’s gone, off into a country only he can enter, into the utopia of his own gifts, where not even a song as good as this one can tell a fraction of what he knows. As he turns his back and walks away, he’s “just standin’ here wonderin,’ ” as he himself had to have sung out loud more than once, “if a matchbox would hold my clothes.”

  Thanks to Doug Kroll, Nick Tosches, and Jim Marshall

  NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2010

  1 Bryan Ferry, Olympia (Astralwerks) Want to hear a whole album of “Slave to Love”—or a whole album about hanging around in bars, pretending you’re younger than you are, an undercurrent of lounge-lizard ooze bringing everything to . . . life? Thanks in part to Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera and saxophonist Andy Mackay, there’s not a false note—especially when a deliriously romantic, regretful, deep-soul embrace of Traffic’s it’s-too-late ballad “No Face, No Name, No Number” takes the singer out of Olympia’s incandescently sleazy paradise, stranding him within sight of a real-world home he’ll never reach.

  2 Biutiful, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, at the Telluride Film Festival, September 5 Javier Bardem as a father dying of cancer, trying to raise two children while keeping his head above the sewage of the criminal underground economy in Barcelona—and as misery accumulates, in his body, in his family, on the streets, in the basement where illegal Chinese workers sleep, his panic increases, and he begins to slow down, because he can’t keep up. The movie captures the look and feel of Barcelona as a place where people live, not just as a theme park—imagine Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona in this cauldron, and it vaporizes in a second. At nearly two and a half hours, the picture, the story, is not a minute too long; like the lives it describes, it’s too short. It’s draining; when I walked out I felt as if I’d just given blood.

  3 Frazey Ford, Obadiah (Nettwerk) For Ford, the most distinctive voice in the Be Good Tanyas, “Bird of Paradise” is not an image, it’s a lilt. The words as she sings them are wings. It’s that “San Diego alley,” sneaking out the darkness of the song and returning to it almost before you can register it, that’s the image, and you can’t see to its end.

  4 Carlos, directed by Olivier Assayas, at the Telluride Film Festival, September 4 In a conversation about his film on the terrorist Carlos, who from his murder of French police in Paris in 1975 to his capture in the Sudan nearly twenty years later was a oneman spectre haunting Europe, Assayas at first said that he had thought of scoring it to classic orchestral movie music throughout. “But the film did not want it. The film laughed in my face.” So from scene to scene—Carlos preening naked in a mirror, the takeover of the OPEC oil ministers’ conference in Vienna in late 1976, after that the shooting of a military policeman at a Swiss checkpoint, a weapons delivery, a breakdown in communications—the movie is less scored to than invaded by post-punk songs so romantic and tough they create empathy for situations even as the film withholds it from its characters. New Order, the Feelies, the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer,” most viscerally Wire’s “Dot Dash,” a song that seems to terrorize itself—not in any way keyed to the scenes in chronological, soundtrack-of-our-lives banality, they raise the question of whether the best and most adventurous music of the late 1970s and early 1980s was as animated by international terrorism, by the spectre of a world where at times it could seem that only a few armed gnostics were in control of anything, as by anything else.

  5 David Thomson, Humphrey Bogart (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) There are passages in each of Thomson’s recent short biographies—Bogart, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman—that frame a classic film in term
s no one else would choose. Here, on Bogart’s Roy Earle, in the 1941 High Sierra: “Earle was a killer, a thief, a loser—sure, he had a kinder side to him, and he got along in a strange tough way with Marie. But he never stopped the film and said, look, folks, I’m a reformed character. I’m a nice guy. Honest, I am. He never asked for anything. Maybe that’s what Huston saw and maybe he guessed how it could fit in a new moment in American history when all of a sudden the real heroes didn’t have to wear labels but could act as mean, as hard-bitten and as unsentimental as . . . Sam Spade or Rick Blaine or Philip Marlowe (or Tom Joad)”—the difference is Thomson’s claiming a movie not for film history, which is what anyone else would have done, but for American history.

  6 Cyndi Lauper, video for “Money Changes Everything,” from The Body Acoustic (Sony, 2005) Who knew Tom Gray’s 1978 “Money Changes Everything” (which five years later Lauper ripped up as a lament and stitched back together as vengeance) was all along looking for life as a fatalistic Appalachian stomp, something the grownups who are now singing it—playing it on fiddle and harmonium, swirling to it—absorbed as children like a lullaby or a slap?

  7 Robert Plant, Band of Joy (Rounder) Much is made of Plant’s working with Nashville musicians under the name of the band he played in before he joined Led Zeppelin, back in the blimp age. But against the free, unencumbered stroll through “Cindy, I’ll Marry You Someday,” a commonplace song Plant learned from a recording by the great North Carolina folklorist Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882–1973), everything else—new songs, covers of numbers by Townes Van Zandt, the Minnesota duo Low, Los Lobos, Richard Thompson, Barbara Lynn, even the gothic spiritual “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down”—feels contrived. “When I found Bascom Lamar Lunsford,” Plant said recently, “I was born again”; the true roots he’s getting back to are those he’s yet to find.

  8–9 Washington Square Park, New York City, 10 p.m., August 30 It was a hot night and the park was jammed; there were a lot of people with guitars out, under the arch, around the fountain, wherever there was an open space under the lights. But sitting on the ground in the dark, yards away from any other person, was someone singing and playing Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.” He sang it very slowly, as if he was still working it out—as on The Rod Stewart Sessions 1971–1998, a box set released last year on Rhino, you can hear Stewart working it out in the studio, plugging in nonsense lines, trying to get a hold on the melody, as if the song were coming out of the air, as if it wasn’t simply his world-historic 1971 rewrite of the old Liverpool folk song about a prostitute and a sailor.

  It was odd, and, if you were in the mood, heart-stopping. The man in the dark was in public, as if he had a need to make himself heard, to an audience as spectral as he had made himself. As a public performer, he had withdrawn into himself, where only his sound drew any listener to the dim outline of his body. So the strain of loss and regret that’s one part of Stewart’s original was now the whole song, but staged as if it were a play. The man was singing Stewart’s words, following his tune, all the way back to the docks, and, as the song played out, Rod Stewart might never have been born.

  10 Justin Sullivan and Friends, Tales of the Road (Attack Attack, 2004) Looking around the Internet for odd Tom Jones songs, I stumbled on a video from this album and was stunned by as unforgiving a performance of “Masters of War” as I’d ever seen. Here the front man for New Model Army, along with the drummer and guitarist from the London punk band—who with Jones rammed their way through “Gimme Shelter” as if it were a collapsing building—begin a set recorded around Europe, mostly, it seems, in Germany, with the title song, apparently about the most tiresome subject in the annals of rock ’n’ roll. But that’s not it.

  As with the music throughout the album, a dankness pervades everything, and with echoes of elements in rock ’n’ roll most resistant to borrowing, even homage—Bruce Springsteen’s harmonica in “Nebraska,” the reach of the Doors’ “The End,” the primitivism of the Mekons’ “The Building”—the very first minutes are the spookiest of all. In the place called up with “Sitting in the all-night café in a curl of smoke, telling tales of the road,” you might glimpse not a few aging musicians in a Greek restaurant in Soho but anarchists from the late nineteenth century meeting up in a Whitechapel tavern to pass secrets, then disappearing in the night. This isn’t sorry-babe-the-road-is-calling-me. If it’s a rock ’n’ roll road then it’s a different rock ’n’ roll.

  JANUARY 2011

  1 Scott Shepherd in Gatz, directed by John Collins, produced by Elevator Repair Service (Public Theater, New York, October 29, 2010) At the very end of this partly dramatized reading of The Great Gatsby—with various people working in and around a somewhat ratty 1980s office, here and there turning into Gatsby, Daisy, Tom Buchanan, and anyone else who appeared in Fitzgerald’s pages eighty-five years ago—Shepherd puts down the book he’s been reading from since he came across it in a desk compartment nearly eight hours before, and begins a drift all the way into the Nick Carraway he’s only intermittently portrayed, a drift into the canonized reverie of the final pages.

  From “I see now that this has been a story of the West” to “ceaselessly into the past,” they comprise some of the most gorgeous American writing, words suspended in their own air—sentences that have been so relentlessly quoted, memorialized, worshiped, and declaimed that they are now clichés preserved in their own amber. It’s not easy to read these last paragraphs, but it’s far more difficult to say them out loud: to make it feel as if you haven’t heard them before, to bring the words down out of the clouds and into the mouth of someone who can convince you he’s talking to you when he’s saying them.

  I can’t tell you exactly how Shepherd did it. He sat at a desk and moved, as if he were thinking with his arms and shoulders as well as his mind, his memory, as the thoughts he was relating came to him. It wasn’t a reverie. He did seem to be looking at the big houses as he spoke of them, to see the trees that weren’t there. He seemed almost on the verge of tears, and to change his demeanor, his manner of speaking, in order to protect the words from his own emotions—his, Nick Carraway’s, or his, Scott Shepherd’s? But as I listened in a small theater suddenly so still the quiet was its own kind of loudness, I noticed that I was tapping my foot.

  If there’s a rhythm in that ending as Fitzgerald wrote it, it’s spectral and complex—something it might take an Ives or a Satie to find. In Shepherd’s hands it was a beat. Slow, measured, a ragtime ghost.

  2 John Legend and the Roots, Wake Up! (Columbia) When Legend first appeared, he seemed spontaneously generated by the Grammy Awards: as bland, contrived, and smarmy as his name. He’s never been so convincing, so flesh-and-blood, as on this recasting of 1970s political soul music as a manifesto for the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and the Roots, who wear musical history like clothes they picked up that morning off the floor, have a lot to do with that. Guitarist Kirk Douglas cuts the bottom out of Bill Withers’s 1973 “I Can’t Write Left-Handed”—about Vietnam on Withers’s record, about Afghanistan on this one—leaving Legend to make his way through the moral wilderness of the song on his own, and he sounds as if he’s been waiting years for the chance.

  3 . . . Next Stop Is Vietnam—The War on Record: 1961–2008 (Bear Family) A daunting package—thirteen CDs of music and documentary inserts, one of song lyrics, and a more-than-three-hundred-page illustrated hardbound book—organized thematically: disc 2, “Proud to Serve,” is mostly dead-soldier-serves-the-cause-of-freedom songs, mostly performed with a really bottomless insincerity. The set reaches its apotheosis with Bob Braun’s appalling 1966 “Brave Men Not Afraid”: “Someone may die for me tonight,” he says happily, smugly, as if he’s on his third drink. The most bizarre note is struck with Lee Hazlewood’s 1968 production of “The Warrior” by Honey Ltd.—a female quartet from Detroit, previously known, one learns, as the Mama Cats, whose first single, “My Boy,” about a soldier on his way to Vietnam, was produced by Bob
Seger. “The Warrior” is presented here as “a terrifying anti-war song,” but we’ve just heard them introduced by Bob Hope, “on tour in Vietnam,” performing for our troops, presumably offering our boys this weird Playboy fantasy, this complete eroticization of war and death: “It’s good, it’s so good . . . We must kill more people . . . This body is precious, as it’s lowered to the grave . . . Oh God! It’s so good!” And the ending: “Da da da da da,” just hopping down the street.

  4 “Prints: Now in 3- D!” at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (Minneapolis, July 9–October 31, 2010) A show of objects and print works, including a ravishing red/pink prom dress and pumps, a set of clothes to be presented at an ER for a rape kit, and Jonathan Stewart’s Let-Go series—a set of boxes with boxy, LEGO-like cartoon characters acting out Stewart’s theme: “I am primarily concerned with how history, experiences, and emotions are packaged for consumption. My boxes point toward a marketplace where these characteristics are bought and sold.” So there are five bright boxes that look like they ought to contain animal crackers, red and blue, pink and yellow: Leaving with the Kids (walking out on the husband, 4 × 6 in.), Nowhere Else to Go (homelessness, 7 × 5 in.), Panhandling for Change (6 × 4 in.), the hard-to-read Pregnancy Test (3 × 4 in.), and, most striking, the tiny (1½ × 2½ in.) Rejection Letter, just about big enough for one small cookie inside, or a small piece of rolled-up paper. On the front: a man holding a letter by his thigh. On the back, you read it over his shoulder as he reads it, as any rejection letter reads to whomever gets it: “To whom it may concern—We regret to inform you that you are not the best at what you do. We have decided to go with somebody else. They are much better than you in every way.”