Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  You may have listened to Johnson through each successive improvement, each set of new sonic clothes; you haven’t heard these notes, these words, these leaves trembling on the trees.

  2 Elvis Costello and the Imposters, “Jimmie Standing in the Rain” (Fox Theater, Oakland, California, May 8) Near the end of the show, when he’d dropped the Spectacular Spinning Songbook format, he stepped into this tune from his 2010 National Ransom. It’s about a man in a British coal town, getting nowhere in his attempts to get by with cowboy music—because this is also a song about the Great Depression, and there’s no work, anywhere. The man in the song seemed to sink lower, down to his knees, the more expansive and delicate Costello’s voice became. The sound in the hall had been one impenetrable echo from the start—at one point Costello stepped away from the mike stand and sang without any amplification at all, and for a moment you could hear a real person on the stage—but finally the clouds cleared. And then, without any change you could catch, he was singing the last, desperately smiling verse of Bing Crosby’s 1932 “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” For a moment, many things just out of reach for the rest of the night were present: beauty, terror, a curl in the words, a naked soul, shame. The sounds in Costello’s throat grew bigger even as they seemed to scurry away from him, back into history, out into the street. “Mr. Harburg’s song,” Costello said the next day, speaking of Yip Harburg, who wrote the words Crosby sang, “is sadly back in vogue.”

  3 Alison Krauss and Union Station, Paper Airplane (Rounder) You could say there’s nothing new here in New Bluegrassland. Krauss and guitarist Dan Tyminski still trade tunes. Their approaches are so different—he’s funny regardless what story he’s telling, she’s a fatalist (the way she says “Save your breath” in “Sinking Stone”) no matter how happy an ending—they seem more like people who say hello when they pass each other on the street every day than members of the same band. If you want something new you might as well bulldoze the town.

  4 Rainy Day, “I’ll Keep It With Mine” (YouTube) Someone took Susanna Hoffs’s 1984 version of this 1966 Bob Dylan demo—a song that, as far as I know, has never been done badly, by anyone—Nico, Fairport Convention, Bettie Serveert (behind the crawl in I Shot Andy Warhol, maybe the best)—and used it as a sound track for excerpts from the rigorously formalist avant-garde filmmaker Guy Debord’s 1961 movie Critique de la séparation. In a Paris travelogue, the camera is madly in love with a young girl: a round, trusting face, very short hair, a gamin from central casting. As it follows her down the street, pauses over her outside a café, stops her in still photos, Hoffs, recording almost a quarter century later—former L.A. punk in the Bangs, in 1984 a glamour girl in the Bangles—seems to have been there and gone. She could be that same person, all those years later, facing the fact that all the wrong turns in her life started here.

  5 Steven Brower, “Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants”: The Art of the Paperback (Universe) There are many collections of lurid paperback covers. This book makes gestures toward bibliographic seriousness, but it’s really about the necklines, when there are any: I mean, where would modern painting be without Erskine Caldwell? Still, it’s the nighttown cover for The Catcher in the Rye that might be the most unsettling: this thickset guy with what looks like a backward baseball cap on his head holding a heavy suitcase and walking with determination straight into a New York grotto of bad news, a look of utter suicide on what little you can see of his face.

  6–7 Perry Lederman, “Impressions of John Henry” and Debbie Green, “Who’s Going to Be My Man?” on Hear Me Howling! Blues, Ballads, and Beyond as Recorded by the San Francisco Bay by Chris Strachwitz in the 1960s (Arhoolie Records) An illustrated, 136-page book with a fine text by Adam Mach-ado, four CDs of mostly unreleased work cut between 1954 and 1971 by the German-born folklorist and notoriously honest record man Strachwitz on the blues singers Skip James, Big Joe Williams, Lonnie Johnson, Bukka White, and Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Berkeley folkies and rock ’n’ roll singers Country Joe and the Fish and Joy of Cooking, the R&B shouter Big Mama Thornton, the Zydeco King Clifton Chenier, and many, many more—it’s unquestionably historic stuff. It can tingle. But it’s not their best stuff, and while I listened, fascinated, I was more moved by the unknown early ’60s performances by the guitarist Perry Lederman, dramatizing the John Henry story by trading off between taking the parts of both the steel-driver and the steam drill, and Debbie Green, the Cambridge folk-singer who—so pretty people found it easy not to take her seriously—spent a good part of a lifetime accusing Joan Baez of stealing her music and borrowing her soul. On a version of “In the Pines,” her playing is as ragged, self-conscious, and convincing as her testament is elegant and enraged: “By the time I got to Berkeley toward the end of 1960, she had recorded all the songs that I taught her. All my arrangements, and learned all the inflections and facial expressions. She’s a mime. So anyway, then I couldn’t do any of that material because I was a Baez imitator.”

  8 “Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise” (Boo-Hooray Gallery, New York, May 10–29) Robert Polito reports: “Memorialized often only as the first drummer (polyrhythmic bongos and tablas) of the Velvet Underground, Angus MacLise was the speeding Wagner of New York’s ’60s downtown: a guy from the suburbs, by way of Paris and India, who intended to scramble poetry, music, dance, theater, art, religion, and film into a total spectacle. Drolly curated by Johan Kugelberg and Will Cameron, the broadsides, posters, handwritten notes, and calligraphy of Dreamweapon suggest the post-cataclysmic totems of a vast, irretrievable civilization—Petra, Pompeii, or Z—if the residue of that civilization consisted of nothing besides ink and a hundred radiant pieces of paper. Collectors tag such stuff ephemera. The wonder is that most of this survived at all, never mind that decades later we still wander the ruins. A 1966 flier for the Film-Makers Cinema-theque proposes that you see ‘in the person, or just in the film’ Harry Smith, the Gato Barbieri Quintet, Andy Warhol, Larry Coryell, Jack Smith, D. A. Pennebaker, Bob Neuwirth, Gerard Malanga, Jonas Menkas, Don Snyder, Marie Menken, Barbara Rubin, Weegee, ‘& ANGUS MACLISE & THE VELVET UNDERGROUND in THE DENTAL DESTRUCTION OF THE CHAIRS a MASS MENTAL CONCENTRATION AGAINST FURNITURE BY MOVIES MOVIE MOVIES SLIDES & LOOPS & BURNING PROJECTORS MUSIC WOVEN FOR 12 DAYS ONLY IN THE MASS LOVE CONTEST “SMOTHER ME” FREE FORM WALKING BOO LOVE HISS n’ COME COSTUMED.’ If that’s an advertisement for Paradise Lost, a 1979 pencil draft of a poem (MacLise would die that year in Nepal) is a postcard to the next world—‘Enjoying life I look forward to death with the eagerness, of a lover. The stars will be mine!—and the final depths of poetry.’ ”

  9 Dolores Fuller, 1923–2011 In the 1953 Glen or Glenda, she gave Ed Wood—“the cross-dressing writer and director of films so awful they have a stupefying, apocalyptic beauty,” Margalit Fox wrote in her New York Times obituary for Fuller—the angora sweater he craved beyond all flesh. Then she became a songwriter, cowriting the Elvis numbers “Rock-a-Hula Baby” and “Do the Clam”—compositions so awful it’s embarrassing to type their names. Whatever Ed Wood got from her, she got back.

  10 Robert Johnson’s Hellhound on My Ale (Columbia Legacy/Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, dogfish.com) As a promotional tie-in, I figured this had to be terrible: all concept (“Brewed with Lemons,” the front label reads, with the second label explaining the flavoring “as a shout out to Robert Johnson’s mentor Blind Lemon Jefferson”), no beer. It comes only in a twenty-five-ounce bottle, there was no one to taste-test it with, but I opened it anyway.

  It was rich without noise, with a huge head. Flavors swam through the glass. It was so smooth it was like drinking a sunset. I reached for the bottle and it was empty.

  SEPTEMBER 2011

  1 Fucked Up, David Comes to Life (Matador) “If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever. And remember that it is forever.” Fucked Up is a little like that. There must be few forces in the universe as unrelenting as the singe
r Pink Eyes’ hardcore slam of words, slogans, chants; at first listen he’s one single giant battering ram. At more than seventy-five minutes, the lifelong love story of David Comes to Life might as well go on forever. That’s all there as the album opens, but by the end it’s gone. I can’t speak for the subtleties of the story: it’s hard to catch a reading of The Sorrows of Young Werther in the middle of a riot, and a short novel’s worth of lyric sheets is not music. But as a work where words less tell a story than signify that, somewhere, a story is present, this is a gorgeous, invisibly layered, extraordinarily ambitious, and fully realized testament to how far, in the present moment, pop music can go. Throughout, female voices sweep in to undercut Pink Eyes’ male stomp, and every time you hear those voices, they seem to be coming from different people, from different times. There’s never a lessening of speed, frenzy, of action-movie action, but as the songs go on, all eighteen of them, an emotional if not narrative clarity begins to take over. Near the end, with “A Little Death,” “The Recursive Girl,” and “One More Night,” the numbers feel increasingly fresh, new, invigorating; the musicians sound as if they, too, are about to seize a new life.

  2–3 Eleventh Dream Day, Riot Now! (Thrill Jockey) and the Coathangers, Larceny & Old Lace (Suicide Squeeze) The Coathangers are a casual female punk band that’s been hanging around Atlanta for five years; Eleventh Dream Day is a Chicago group led by Rick Rizzo and Janet Bean for almost a quarter of a century—and just as a ninety-year-old is more likely than a fifty-year-old to live to a hundred, chances are Rizzo and Bean will still be pounding—Rizzo’s guitar playing can be more percussive than Bean’s drumming—when guitarist the Crook Kid Coathanger, drummer Rusty Coathanger, bassist Minnie Coathanger, and keyboard player Bebe Coathanger have gone on to other names. The Coathangers start off their third album with “Hurricane,” and they live up to the title in an instant. Just as you can see Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed in their “Hurricane” video (on You-Tube), you can hear Sleater-Kinney in the blunt insistence of the singing, Delta 5 in the displacing bass breaks, and, most of all, Kleenex in the playground shouts of the chorus. And you can feel a glee, a sense of both escape and arrival in the right place at the right time, that makes where the band learned its tricks irrelevant. And after that it’s like a show where the costume changes are more compelling than the music. The group tries on one style after another, until, well before the record ends, each song sounds more contrived than felt. Riot Now! is Eleventh Dream Day’s tenth album, but there’s no pose struck anywhere on it; almost every track is infused with discovery, doubt, unease. The songs feel less like songs than jagged, almost random pieces of the same bad day. “Tall Man” is a moment of panic boiled down into a few words and a riff from Dramarama’s “Anything Anything”: you can imagine Rizzo and Bean seeing a guy on the street, saying, “He sure is tall,” then, half-jokingly, “He’s too tall,” then, not joking at all, “He’s too fucking tall to fucking live,” then the two of them imagining a building falling on him. With Bean shouting behind Rizzo’s everyman leads, there’s a core of ferocity in every number, and, with the way Bean’s voice sometimes seems to be suspended above Rizzo’s, a question mark to his exclamation point, a core of fatalism. There’s no hint in their music that life is ever going to get any easier, or any less interesting.

  4 Lydia Loveless, Indestructible Machine (Bloodshot) On her second album, this twenty-one-year-old country singer from Ohio shows herself drinking white lightning or gasoline (cartoon on the front cover) and smoking a cigarette (photo on the back). She and her band are weirdly disconnected, as if the band was playing on one side of the street and she was recorded walking by on the other side and making up songs as she went. Moments of truth leap out of sarcasm and disdain (“They get away with shit / That I never will,” Loveless says in “More Like Them,” a grown-up version of Claudine Clark’s teenager’s “Party Lights”). In “Can’t Change Me,” which is a blast of pain, not bravado, there’s a weight, a grounding, that allows Loveless to ignore meter and come across as if she’s seen everything twice. What you’re left with is a big, warm, open, sometimes desperate voice.

  5–6 Rave on Buddy Holly (Fantasy) and Buddy Holly, Not Fade Away: Complete Studio Recordings and More (Hip-O) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Yes, and from Paul McCartney’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins imitation on “It’s So Easy” to Karen Elson’s flattening of Holly’s swirling melody in “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” to Patti Smith’s benediction on “Words of Love,” this celebration of Holly’s would-have-been-seventy-fifth birthday lives up to the genre—save for the Black Keys’ modest, spooky “Dearest,” Modest Mouse’s offering “That’ll Be the Day” as if they’re remembering some other song the title just happens to remind them of, and Lou Reed, with Laurie Anderson on electric violin, turning Peggy Sue into a grunge queen. Holly has to be smiling; he’s heard this all before. As you can hear on Not Fade Away, people were revising his music before he was barely cold in the ground. You listen to the six CDs, collecting performances from 1949 to the first days of 1959, as if to a novel unfolding—until the end, when it all goes to hell. You hear the quiet, soulful, fiercely ambitious demos Holly made in his last months in his Greenwich Village apartment; no sooner did his plane go down in that Iowa cornfield in 1959 than his producer Norman Petty got the tapes, fixed them up, and, again and again, put them on the market. The contrast between the music as Holly made it and Petty’s successive dubbing sessions—featuring strings, the clueless New Mexico band the Fireballs, and nameless hacks—is so stark it suggests not greed but resentment: a producer’s desire to dissolve an artist’s singular intelligence into a product cheesy enough to prove that his music could have been done by anyone, and wasn’t worth doing. So go back and listen again to Holly alone: “Love Is Strange,” “Dearest,” “Peggy Sue Got Married.”

  7 The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit, edited by David Brittain (Four Corners Books) Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) was perhaps the first and certainly one of the best pop artists—a magpie who could pass a newsstand, come away with a movie of headlines and images playing in his head, then go home and burn it down to a single collaged frame—as he did in 1947 with I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything. Twenty years later he began working with the London arts magazine Ambit, and for seven years after that he let the Vietnam War invade his mind the way he’d once made room for sex magazines and soft-drink ads. He wrote absurdist essays and fractured plays, layered photographs, cut pictures out of magazines to make new magazines, and even produced his own newspaper: a one-page broadside called Bad News at the Breakfast Table. Aside from an obscene two-panel comic strip in the bottom right corner, a list of corporations on the left border, and sex ads bottom left, it consisted entirely of reports of mid-1960s American riots and murders. It had to have been devastating then, because it’s devastating now: a portrait of a country where anyone can be killed at any time. News item: MAD SNIPER KILLS 15, WOUNDS 31 FROM U OF TEXAS TOWER. News item: PERCY’S DAUGHTER IS SLAIN IN CHICAGO. The specter of Charles Whitman firing down into the campus plaza in Austin is part of the national consciousness, but who remembers that Valerie Jean Percy, daughter of soon-to-be U.S. senator Charles Percy, was killed in her own “palatial suburban home”?

  8 Department of Counterhistory In 2000, Al Gore was considering a running mate. He came close to picking John Edwards, then the number one rising-star fresh face of the Democratic party. Instead, most likely to distance himself as far as possible from Bill Clinton, he chose Joe Lieberman, a tribune of sanctimony so pious in his condemnation of Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal that Philip Roth gave him a cameo in The Human Stain. As a candidate, Lieberman—who in 2008 was John McCain’s first choice as a running mate, until McCain’s campaign managers told him no—is best remembered for his vice-presidential debate with Dick Cheney, whom he graciously allowed to run all over him as if Cheney were a pickup truck and Lieberman Lucinda Williams’s gravel road. Which didn’t stop him: In 2003, Lieberman announced that h
e himself would seek the Democratic nomination for president. But there was a road not taken. Eighteen years before, in 1975, Bob Dylan had gathered figures from all across his career—Joan Baez, Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Neuwirth, countless more—for a traveling minstrel show. WHO IS JOE LIEBERMAN? ran the headline of an ABC News story on January 2, 2003. “Lieberman has spent most of his professional life in politics,” the piece ran in part, “but there’s perhaps one aspiration he might have enjoyed pursuing. ‘I went through a Bob Dylan phase,’ he said. ‘One of his tours was called The Rolling Thunder Review—when Joan Baez was with him and people would come and go. It would have been fun to have spent a few months with Dylan on The Rolling Thunder Review.’ ” It might not have saved the country, but Joe Lieberman banging a tambourine for “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” is something I would have paid money to see.

  9 Jaan Uhelszki, “Off the Charts,” California magazine (Summer 2011) On KALX, Berkeley’s college radio station, and its tradition of recruiting guests to tape station IDs (number one on the charts, from the Reagan years: “This is Attorney General Ed Meese on KALX in Berkeley. It’s a crime if you don’t stay tuned”): “In February 1985, an emissary of Charles Manson called the station to arrange an interview. His one stipulation: He only wanted to talk about music. Reporters Arnold Woods ’84”—California is the Berkeley alumni magazine—“and Kevin Kennedy taped the convicted serial killer at the state medical facility in Vacaville, and for a brief time afterward you could tune into the station and hear, ‘Hi, I’m Charlie Manson and you’re listening to KALX in Berkeley.’ ”