Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  10 Frank Fairfield, Out on the Open West (Tompkins Square) With his first album, the young California traditionalist seemed as if he was on his way to becoming his generation’s Mike Seeger: an oldtimey musician who knew everything and could play anything, a librarian with such empathy for his archive of archaic styles that in moments he might stand alongside the old singers and players, as ghosts or in the flesh, singing with them like a brother. This album, made up mostly of songs that appear handed down but aren’t, is proof that Fairfield is someone else: a wicked messenger passing through town and leaving everything slightly frayed, damaged, unfixed, every gaze deflected toward an object just barely out of sight. This happens in “Haste to the Wedding/The Darling True Love,” with one foot in the twenty-first century and the other in the eighteenth, neither foot staying in one place for more than a few measures at a time, and in “The Winding Spring,” where a banjo is its own reward. But with the first notes of “Poor Old Lance,” you know you’re in different territory. The melody, really a fanfare, is bent, stretched, curved, seems familiar and teasingly out of reach—you could spend a day playing the song over and over, searching for the place you once heard that melody before giving up and admitting that probably you never did. The orchestration is glorious. Three fiddles, Fairfield, Justin Petrojvic, and Josh Petrojvic send the tune into the air and keep it there. Deep, slithering undertones from Brandon Armstrong’s bull fiddle, played with a bow, keep it rooted to the ground, and sometimes pull the song under it. There is tension from the first. The words are hard to make out, because Fairfield’s elisions, slides, slurs, and half-finished phrases are as much music as anything coming off the strings. But you catch enough: something about a man going down; a jailhouse, ten years. As this little play unfolds, chorus by chorus, the whole country comes into view, glimpsed as if over a ridge: a place of discovery, joy, despair, defeat, “a land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy,” all enacted in a single prison cell.

  OCTOBER 2011

  1–2 Amy Winehouse, Back to Black (Republic, 2007) and the Shangri-Las, Myrmidons of Melodrama (RPM, 1964–66) Again and again after Winehouse died, on July 23, you could read her talking about how she’d written the self-mocking, self-loathing, unflinchingly fuck-you songs for Back to Black: “I didn’t want to just wake up drinking, and crying, and listening to the Shangri-Las, and go to sleep, and wake up drinking, and listening to the Shangri-Las.” But she did. That’s why she would let their deathly “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” drift into “Back to Black”—there is a stunning montage of her gorgeous performances of the two-pieces-in-one on YouTube. That’s why, in “Rehab” and especially in her irresistible, unreadable 2008 Grammy performance of “You Know I’m No Good,” Winehouse was her own leader of the pack, but without a pack, without even girlfriends to ask her if she was really going out with him, if she was really going all the way, on her own, perhaps with nothing but the satisfaction of getting it right, saying what she had to say, adding something to the form that brought her to life as an artist, adding her name and face to the story it told. Yes, she wrote “You Know I’m No Good,” and like any work of art it was a fiction that bounced back on real life, maybe the author’s, maybe not; as she sang it on the Grammys, you could hear her listening to the song as well as singing it, hear the song talking to her, hear her asking herself, as she sang, “Is that true? Is that what I want? Is that all I’ve got?”

  “She could not stand fame any more than I could,” Mary Weiss, the lead singer of the Shangri-Las, said after Winehouse died. “I wish I could have helped her, even if she never sang publicly again. My hairdresser told me that is just ego, thinking that maybe you could possibly make a difference when others could not. I thought about it, long and hard. I do not think so. I would have only spoken about her pain, not drug usage, until (if ever) she was ready. I related to her so much it is a bit scary. . . . I will never understand why people get off kicking people when they are down and need help. How could that possibly make you feel better about yourself?”

  With anyone else but Mary Weiss as a lead singer, the doom in Shangri-Las songs might have turned into a joke, but it never happened: every time, whether in “Remember,” “Give Us Your Blessings,” “Out in the Streets,” “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” or “Past, Present, and Future,” the singer was a different person, starting from the beginning, telling her story as far as it would go, which was never very far. Their songs, like Winehouse’s, were all locked doors, doors that locked you out or that you locked yourself from the inside. But maybe because she is still here and speaking plainly, inside Weiss’s words you can imagine other lives for Amy Winehouse: a junkie on the street like Marianne Faithfull, who finally walked away, back into the career she never really had the first time around, first recording in the same year the Shangri-Las first recorded, this year covering their ghostly “Past, Present, and Future” on a new album; a grimy singer with a guitar case open at her feet, like anyone in your town; a social worker with years of shock treatment behind her, like June Miller; a music teacher for kindergarteners; an old woman with stories nobody believes.

  3 Amen Dunes, Through Donkey Jaw (Sacred Bones) The music here—less abstract than vague—may be trying to live up to its cover photo by Deborah Turbeville, which could have appeared in Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip: a dark-haired woman with glasses, a hand held to her open mouth in alarm, and frightened eyes—eyes frightened by something behind them, not in front of them.

  4–5 McCabe and Mrs. Miller, “Nebraska,” from First Person Singular Presents Debts No Honest Man Can Pay (Pegasus Books, Berkeley, July 20) and Debts No Honest Man Can Pay (Veritas, mccabeandmrsmillerband.com) Taking part in a performance series that means to redefine not only the literary event but the literary as such, the duo—guitarist and singer Victor Krummenacher, late of Camper Van Beethoven, and pianist and singer Alison Faith Levy, once of the Sippy Cups—stepped up to perform, or rewrite, Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, and they hit a vein right from the start, with the title song. As a murder ballad, Springsteen’s account of Charley Starkweather and Caril Fugate’s 1958 teenage murder rampage is as stark as a Robert Frank highway photo—a song so severe in its conception and performance it could have been made to deny anyone else the chance to sing it. Krummenacher and Levy, who later recorded all the songs from the show, with “Highway Patrolman” as the clear, soul-deep standout, seized Springsteen’s song by doubling down, with Krummenacher as Starkweather and Levy as Fugate trading verses and sharing lines that in Springsteen’s original had been Starkweather’s alone. He was executed in 1959; Fugate, who claimed to be a hostage, was paroled in 1976. Since then she has never spoken of the eleven bodies she and Starkweather left across Nebraska and Wyoming, but she was speaking this night. She was there as Levy sang, “Me and him, we had us some fun”—and she came in without flinching to sing Starkweather’s real-life line about what he wanted when he went to the electric chair, “Make sure my pretty baby / is sitting right there on my lap.”

  6 Woods, Sun and Shade (Woodsist) There’s a little of Velvet Underground’s “New Age,” more of the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” a lot of the Beatles and more of the Beach Boys, but the feel of the bedroom is stronger: from the high, high voices of “Pushing Onlys,” the primitive, fully realized pop song “Who Do I Think I Am,” the tunneling playing in “Out of the Eye,” this is the band the fifteen-year-old music obsessive Jason in Dana Spiotta’s novel Eat the Document would have formed, if only in his head.

  7–8 Diann Blakely, “Dead Shrimp Blues,” with comment by Lisa Russ Spaar, The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 15) For years, Blakely has written what she calls “duets” with Robert Johnson: her poems visiting his songs, his songs breathing in her poems. Here she has Tennessee Williams and Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof cross paths with the blues singer in Clarks-dale, Mississippi, so she can address him directly, circling around the imagery in one of at least two Johnson songs built around a metaphor for impot
ence. She writes like a window-peeper: “I’ll undress / Down to my humid white-girl slip.” Spaar follows the way Blakely’s words curl around Johnson’s until it can seem as if Johnson’s are curling around hers; she rescues the phrase “posted out” from the murk of Johnson’s song so you can hear it crack in Blakely’s.

  9 Eleanor Friedberger, Last Summer (Merge) Jittery—someone talking too much, for a moment gritting her teeth if that’s what she has to do to squeeze out the five or six words that matter. That’s the story, until near the end the tension begins to break—with Friedberger’s own piano running the music in “I Won’t Fall Apart on You Tonight,” her harmonica breaking “Early Earthquake” open with a huge laugh, her distantly doo-wop guitar chording letting the last song end the album miles away, and lives away, from where it began.

  10 Mekons, Ancient and Modern 1911–2011 (Sin/Bloodshot) This is a treasure chest, and what it contains is the whole of the band’s thirty-four-year stumble-and-fall career: Tom Greenhalgh’s no-hope chronicles, Sally Timms’s icy X-ray gaze, Jon Langford’s rousing odes against all odds—odes to defeat, because the game is fixed. But across eleven songs, none of that touches the delicacy, the detail, the tiny gestures that make the music new: the quiet, measured, rock-hard spoken interludes by Susie Honeyman and Sarah Corina in the title song; the intimations of plague, carried by fleas or ideas, in “Warm Summer Sun,” mapping the same blasted terrain PJ Harvey is crossing in Let England Shake. And then there is “Geeshie”: a dive into Geeshie Wiley’s uncanny 1930 “Last Kinds Words Blues.” “Lu and I,” Jon Langford says of Mekon Lu Edmonds, “became obsessed with the unpredictable insanity of the chord progressions, the length of the bars. Then we tried to play an instrumental version, cut it up into pieces”—and then let Sally Timms walk the tune from a Mississippi juke joint to a Weimar cabaret, turning Geeshie Wiley into Kurt Weill, though the tune in its new form moves so lightly on its feet it could be, to Weill’s endless delight, the other way around.

  Thanks to Andrew Hamlin

  NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2011

  1 David Lynch, Crazy Clown Time (Sunday Best) Lynch has written songs before, most memorably for Julee Cruise. He’s recorded, notably with John Neff for the 2003 Blue Bob. But he has never tried anything like this: singing and playing lead guitar on a full-out set of songs. By its end, he has mapped a version of America—an America bordered on one side by teenagers getting drunk and on the other by perverts insisting they’re just like anybody else, fuckhead—a picture of ordinary life as funny and unsettling as you can find in Mulholland Dr. or Lost Highway. There is terrific psychedelic Duane Eddy guitar—a slow, seductive rhythm, reverb as big as a house. Again and again, there is a talking voice playing with syllables, stretching them out, bending them, curling them, until you become altogether attuned to the musicality of every inflection. But most of all, there are scenes you can visualize as you listen. For “Football Game” there is dramatic, gonging guitar, and the feel of the Top 40 death ballad brought up to date. “I went down . . . to the football game,” says a beaten-down character missing half his teeth (he’s not that far from David Thomas in “Nowheresville,” telling a story about the guy who thought his wife was going to leave him, how he had this great idea to build a motel on the new interstate, but then they put the interstate on the other side of the valley . . .), and you don’t take him seriously until “I saw you / with another man,” and the stakes go up.

  “Good Day Today” plays with ’60s yé-yé, Hooverphonics’ synthesizer lounge ambience, cheesy French movie music, with tiny background synthesizer uh-uh-uh-uh-uhs, all so someone you do not want to meet can tell you, “I want to have a good day today,” which is to say he’ll do whatever he has to do to get it—don’t pedophile serial killers deserve one too? There is “Speed Roadster,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Stolen Car” as a stalker’s reverie, and “These Are My Friends,” where the singer tells you, “I got a truck,” that he’s “got two good ears, and my eye on you”—it’s a high-school love song, Marty Robbins’s 1957 “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation)” crossed with Larry Clark’s Tulsa, a creepy, moving version of Rosie and the Originals’ 1960 “Angel Baby” slowed down to a crawl: “These are my friends, the ones I see each day / I got a perscription fer a product, keep the hounds at bay.”

  These are rich, sometimes tricky studio assemblages; after a few listenings you’re only scratching the surface, but with “Crazy Clown Time” you might get everything the first time. It’s Lynch in his high, thin voice, the old man suddenly reinhabiting his teenage self, Frank from Blue Velvet stopping you on the street to tell you just how it was when “Susie, she ripped her shirt off, completely”—and it’s that completely that still has him shaking his head in wonder after all these years. “Calling Little Richard,” the song begins, and he’s right there, the parents are gone, and while the party gets increasingly out of control (“Then he poured beer all over Sally . . . Danny spit on Susie”), nothing really terrible happens. But the tempo slows, the atmosphere goes heavy and dark, as if the party has moved from Fred’s house to the roadhouse in Twin Peaks. “Susie had hers off completely,” the man keeps saying, as if he’s trying with everything he has to remember exactly what that looked like, and just can’t. It would have been interesting to hear this on the radio in 1965, a dank, gothic, blues version of “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love).” “It was really fun,” the old man says finally.

  2 Sometymes Why, “Too Repressed” (YouTube) Aoife O’Donovan of the Boston traditionalist band Crooked Still in a side project with Kristin Andreassen and Ruth Merenda—though apart from background laughter this club performance is really all O’Donovan, with her angelic face, her soft, probing tone, and a new song which starts off like any other hand-me-down ballad she might take up. Until she gets to the chorus. “I want to fuck you,” she sings, “but I’m too repressed / I want to suck you / But I can’t take off my dress.” She’s as convincing on the first lines as she is unconvincing on the second.

  3 Martin Scorsese, George Harrison: Living in the Material World (HBO) A three-and-a-half-hour documentary on George Harrison, the Quiet Beatle, otherwise known as the Dull Beatle? Yes, and when it’s over you’ll want more. Never has Harrison’s music sounded so rich; never has his story been told with less pomposity and more grace. And, after Harrison’s years of seeking a higher truth, a purer life, a moment of shock, what he said after he and his wife, Olivia Harrison, fought off the man who broke into their house determined to exterminate the Beatle “witch”: “I never tried to kill anyone before.”

  4 James Gavin, Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker (Chicago Review Press) Across a lifetime of ruin, the persistence of “My Funny Valentine.”

  5 Veronica Falls, Veronica Falls (Slumberland) Maybe out of season, this is warm-weather driving music, airy and determined, with more than a hint of the Jamies’ “Summertime, Summertime,” as it plays in James Toback’s 1978 Fingers, with Harvey Keitel in a café with his boom box playing when a man at the next table complains. “Do you believe this?” Keitel says. “This is the Jamies, man! ‘Summertime, Summertime’—the most musically inventive song of 1958!”

  6 Percival Everett, Assumption (Gray-wolf Press) “I was tired of being a good guy,” says small-town New Mexico deputy sheriff Ogden Walker, not quite all there in the three detective stories that make up this book. Coming at the end of the last one, this simple line sends you back, mentally rewriting the ones that preceded it to try to make them work out differently, but they are not quite all there either. These are murder mysteries where the holes in the plot undermine all the apparent facts.

  7 Michael Pisaro, asleep, street, pipes, tones (Gravity Wave) Pisaro is a minimalist composer whose music—here, a more than hour-long piece—reaches for what can feel like nearly absolute abstraction. The abstraction, though, is so complete that you soon begin to feel at home with it. It begins to feel like a landscape, and you begin to inhabit it, to feel your way through it, to recogni
ze features, even to remember landmarks. What begins as a kind of industrial noise turns into industrial wind, and you have the feeling of being taken into a vast desert, which after a long traverse opens up onto a city, one of Anselm Kiefer’s abandoned, after-the-apocalypse ruins, and you can imagine yourself living there. Or, as the title implies, at least sleeping there.

  8 Alan Jackson, Norah Jones, Patty Loveless, Jack White, et al., The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams (Egyptian) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Yes, and for a collection of Hank Williams lyrics now set to music, Lucinda Williams goes so far around the bend of her own mannerisms she vaporizes like the Wicked Witch of the West. Everyone else is merely earnest and competent, except for Jakob Dylan, whose “Oh, Mama, Come Home” finds a quick beat, then slows the song behind it, then looks past it. Two-line verses, a four-line chorus: you feel someone walking a circle around his day, trying to find a way out, then not caring if he does, in love with the rhythm of his loneliness. It’s the most modest track on the album, the only one with nothing to prove, and you could play it all day long.

  9 Steven Green house, “Examining a Labor Hero’s Death: Letter Emerges in 1915 Case against Joe Hill (New York Times, August 26) “A new biography makes the strongest case yet that Hill . . . executed by a Utah firing squad in 1915 . . . was wrongfully convicted of murdering a local grocer, the charge that led to his execution at age 36. . . . The book’s author, William M. Adler, argues that Hill was a victim of authorities and a jury eager to deal a blow to his radical labor union, as well as his own desire to protect the identity of his sweetheart.”