Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  There was powerful if circumstantial evidence against Hill: on January 10, 1914, the same night John G. Morrison and his son were shot to death in their grocery, Hill, an organizer and songwriter for the IWW, the “one big union” which before 1920 was spreading like fire among the miners and loggers in the west, was himself shot in the chest. Prosecutors argued Hill had been hit by a shot Morrison’s son had gotten off before dying, and though Hill had supposedly mentioned a woman and a jealous suitor to the doctor who treated him, at his trial he refused to say anything at all. But for his book The Man Who Never Died, Greenhouse went on, Adler found a “long-forgotten letter from Hill’s sweetheart that said he had been shot by a rival for his affections”—and, Greenhouse reported, Adler had been inspired to dig up the bones of the case “ after reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, which argued that the Hill case was a miscarriage of justice.”

  In 1968, Dylan based “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” on the old labor song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” (“Alive as you or me,” it went; “ ‘I never died,’ said he”). “The more I thought about it,” Dylan says in the three pages in Chronicles he devotes to Hill and the question of the protest song, “ ‘Long Black Veil’ seemed like it could have been a song written by Joe Hill himself, his last very last one”—but who knew that wasn’t poetry but detective work?

  10 Brighton Rock, written and directed by Rowan Joffe (IFC) On the Brighton pier in 1964, at a “Make a Record of Your Own Voice” booth, Pinkie Brown—played by a terrifying Sam Riley, who four years ago in Control gave a shattered performance as Ian Curtis of Joy Division—cuts the first punk 45. Luckily, the stuff they use for the discs is really cheap.

  JANUARY 2012

  1 Yael Bartana, Entartete Kunst lebt! (Degenerate Art Lives!), as part of “Germany Is Your America,” curated by Michael Brace-well and Anke Kempkes (Broadway 1602, September 13–December 15, 2011) An animated five-minute 16 mm film—which ought to be playing now not solely in galleries but as an art-house short, a film-festival gem, an online sensation—derived from Otto Dix’s still-shocking 1920 painting War Cripples, which was seized and shown by the Nazis at the 1937 Munich Degenerate Art exhibition. Bartana begins with silhouettes in a hobbled march across a dim screen, which is soon filled by an ever-increasing parade of four hideously maimed war veterans from Dix’s picture, figures that in Bartana’s hands turn into countless different people. In a parade of wooden legs and prostheses, all are in uniform, each one is seemingly more cut-up than the last, with the sound hammering and clattering from the tap dance of the artificial limbs to the screech and cranks of mechanical jaws and other body parts, until the centerpiece seems to become the jaunty man with dark glasses and a cigarette and no arms or legs, being pushed in a cart. More and more and more of them, sometimes shot from above, so you see only massed lines of hats—by the end spelling out the title of the piece like a college marching band as led by Leni Riefen-stahl. What’s most striking is the image of happiness on the faces of the men—not pride, really, but smugness: “Look at what I gave for the Fatherland.”

  2–3 Mekons at Bell House (Brooklyn, October 7, 2011) and City Winery (Manhattan, October 8, 2011) At Bell House, before a surging, stand-up throng, they opened with “Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem”—the trip the heretic takes, so that at the end any place can be the New Jerusalem. In the frenzy of the performance, everyone was a crusader, a Templar knight, a Ranter, a Familist, a Shaker, a Muggletonian. It was Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium boiled down to a chant and blown up into “Hey Bo Diddley.” Later, with the Zuccotti Park occupation in its first month, guitarist Jon Langford announced he was “ going to Wall Street.” There were cheers. “To see my investment banker,” he went on. “Play golf with Hank Williams Jr. and Hitler.” Sally Timms stepped forward to sing “I love a millionaire,” and you could see her crooning it at the head of a march, the song now a manifesto of ambivalence, self-hatred, whoredom, money, surrender, and rage. The next night at City Winery, with the band seated in a minstrel-show half circle for an audience of chattering texters, except for Rico Bell sacrificing his firstborn son for “Hard to Be Human Again,” the band did not quite come across—but in a place that a few nights before had hosted a “ Music of Sting Wine Pairing” (twenty-five songs, seven wines, with “tasting notes placed at your table” to “reveal why we think each wine flight goes with the particular songs it’s paired with”), who could?

  4 Deep Dark Woods, The Place I Left Behind (Sugar Hill) The band is from Saskatoon; their music comes from the Appalachian highlands. Burrowing inside the ambience of Clarence Ashley’s “Dark Hollow Blues,” and summoning the menace of half-forgotten local legends, they live up to the cool suggestiveness of their album title. But what’s new is swooning lead guitar from Burke Barlow: an expansive, keening, thrillingly modern sound old-timey music almost never gets.

  5 Tony Bennett and Amy Winehouse, “Body and Soul,” from Tony Bennett, Duets II (RPM) Put this in your computer and iTunes will tell you it’s Easy Listening. Not anymore. You can hear Bennett forming the words, one by one; Winehouse was speaking her own language.

  6 Kim Criswell, “One,” in Happy Days in the Art World, written by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, directed by Toby Frow, NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (November 1, 2011) Two men, once a couple, now just collaborating artists, wake up in a bunk-bed limbo; after about a hour of Waiting for Godot–like freaking out, making sardonic jokes, and wondering if they still have a career, Criswell shows up as a blind hysterical postmodern Federal Express delivery person and steals the show like Jim Brown breaking into a Woody Allen drawing-room comedy. And then at the end, when she’s apparently dead, she lifts herself off the floor on one elbow and in a full, clear voice sings the U2 song.

  This is the great modern melody, a match for the Wailers’ “Redemption Song.” U2’s original is stiff, bellowing, but they left a treasure on the road for anyone to find. The song actually seems to ennoble whoever sings it: Johnny Cash, Warren Haynes, Kim Criswell, so many more to come.

  7–8 Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra, MTO Plays Sly (Royal Potato Family) and Sly Stone, I’m Back! Family and Friends (Cleopatra) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Yes, and Sly Stone dives into the quicksand with his first new music under his own name since the Treaty of Versailles: old songs featuring Ray Manzarek, Ann Wilson, Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter. Actually, it’s not terrible; there’s just no reason to listen to it. But Steven Bernstein’s downtown New York assemblage is another story. Very little is obvious: not Martha Wainwright diving into “Que Sera, Sera” as if it were a well, the disturbing moans all through “Sly Notions 2/Fun,” the Dean Bowman and Vernon Reid rediscovery of the blues in “Time.” The musicians and singers seem to be chasing the music down, not remotely sure they’ll catch it, or that they deserve to.

  9 Washington Phillips, “A Mother’s Last Word to Her Son” (1927), in We Need to Talk About Kevin, directed by Lynne Ramsay (BBC Films) In the ultimate bad-seed picture, a Texas gospel singer with a tragic voice emerges to say that from the day Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly’s son was born there was no hope.

  10 Bo Diddley, “Hey Bo Diddley,” on Shindig, 1965 (YouTube) Around the time this show aired, well-meaning people were making films in which one could see first-rank blues singers offering European audiences approximately 5 percent of what they’d need to get over in a South Side bar. In a sort of TV-studio-as-night-club setting, with well-dressed couples at his feet, the Great Reverberator smashes out of the box with the first note, handsome, powerful, flashing an outrageous rubber-legged strut, his band steaming, and a horn section that looks like it was recruited out of a Delta Sig house at the University of Myrtle Beach. “If this were any better,” John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in, “I think my head would burst into flames.”

  Thanks to Steve Weinstein

  FEBRUARY 2012

  1 Rid of Me, written and directed by James Westby (Phase 4 Films/Submari
ne Deluxe) In 2002—though it looks earlier: people can still smoke in bars—a woman is kicked out of her marriage and stranded in a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. All she wants is revenge: on her ex-husband, his old girlfriend/new wife, his worthless friends, on herself for buying into the scam in the first place. Katie O’Grady walks her character through her dead-end room, into a job in a candy store, down supermarket aisles, and then, as a formerly nice middle-class genteel housewife in her thirties, straight through punk, until she ends up lying down drunk on a sidewalk in the middle of the night. It all rings so true you don’t really believe she’s going to get up; the movie could end right there, but it doesn’t. Because there’s still this subplot about a Cambodian rock song the director wants to get in.

  2 Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “Quail and Dumplings,” from Wolfroy Goes to Town (Drag City) Will Oldham brings you into the tune slowly, picking his mandolin in and out of an old mountain pattern, with Angel Olsen following his words in the background, then barely stepping past him with soft ooos. You relax into the song. Then someone claps hands, and Olsen grabs the song and, at first sounding as if she’s going to expire on the spot, stands up and demands that the song give up truths it hasn’t even hinted it might contain. Her voice breaks the pleasant folk spell Oldham has cast; there’s something stentorian and cruel in her cadence, in the way she hits back at the song as if it’s an enemy, a lie. And it’s this moment of drama that gives the song the power to tell whatever truth it knows. When Oldham comes back, after a rough, harsh electric-guitar break from Emmett Kelly, with “Weather ain’t judgment and money ain’t love,” he can stop you cold, the banality of the second phrase brought down by the uncertainty of the first.

  3 Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence—Nonfictions, Etc. (Doubleday) There’s a stiffness in many of the essays on fellow novelists, reputation, career, book tours, and literary theory; four pieces on the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001 doggedly say nothing. But when Lethem writes about music, there’s an unencumbered energy flowing through his sentences, a sense of discovery. The seemingly tossed-off, priceless notion that “pop was a trick, a perverse revenge against the banality of daily life dreamed up collectively by ten or fifteen Delta bluesmen and a million or a hundred million screaming twelve-year-old girls” conflates effortlessly with the idea that “ little-girl screams” were “the essential heart of the Beatles’ true sound, the human voice in a karaoke track consisting of the band itself.” “The Genius of James Brown,” from 2005, is the hit: three days in the studio and a night backstage in London a week later as a version of Moby-Dick, with a seventy-two-year-old Brown as Ahab and his band members as his grumbling, awestruck crew. As Lethem follows Brown through a remake of his 1971 “Soul Power,” he falls into a theory of James Brown as a time traveler, “like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five”; it sounds cute, even trivial. But it takes Lethem only a page to march from the claim that Brown somehow “saw, or, more exactly, heard the future of music”—a line that sounds like a cliché even if the idea is new—to something so rich Lethem becomes a juggler of ideas, keeping six of them in the air at once, and making the reader feel the thrill: “If the man was able to see 2005 from the distance of 1958, he’s also prone to reliving 1958—and 1967, and 1971, and 1985—now that 2005 has finally come around. We all dwell in the world James Brown saw so completely before we came along into it; James Brown, in turn, hasn’t totally joined us here in the future he made.” You can shake your head in wonder over that, and then turn a few pages and run smack into Lethem running a little word-association game—

  Analyst: James Brown. Please say the first thing that comes to mind.

  Patient: I feel good!

  Analyst: Stay with that thought.

  Patient: Uh, just like I knew that I would?

  —and realize that this would sound better on Brown’s tombstone than all of his heroic titles scrolling down.

  4 Shailene Woodley in The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne, written by Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash (Fox Searchlight) Playing Alexandra King, daughter of George Clooney’s Matt King, at the door of her mother’s lover, verbally driving nails into his forehead as his eyes pop out—a moment that catches just how quick and tough a seventeen-year-old can be.

  5 Loretha Z. Smith on “Ike Zimmerman,” Alabama State Council on the Arts/ Alabama Arts Radio Series (July 24, 2011) The story has long been told that, sometime in the 1930s, Robert Johnson of Mississippi spent a year or more with an unrecorded blues singer from Alabama, and under his tutelage changed from an incompetent guitar banger to someone you could imagine the guitar had been waiting for since someone first tuned its strings. Johnson’s mentor’s name is usually given as Isaiah “Ike” Zinnerman, or Zinneman; it was Zimmerman. That opens a spectral connection to a singer from Hibbing, Minnesota, who, when he first heard Robert Johnson, “immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.” But as Zimmerman’s daughter Loretha filled in her father’s life, one also learns that he later presided over his own Pentacostal church in Compton, California. That opens up the possibility that his parishoners included the parents of kids who went on to form N.W.A—the possibility that Ike Zimmerman could also have passed something on to Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E, or that we might see them as much Johnson’s progeny as Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Walter Mosley, Bob Dylan, or Cat Power. Loretha Smith described her father taking Johnson to a cemetery (owned by white people, she said gleefully) to play, sitting on gravestones—a Johnson-lore ghost story related here as plain family fact. “He learned Robert so good, how to play the guitar, that he was telling him he was ready to leave, and go back, to where he came from,” Smith said. “And my understanding, now, he came from Tennessee, where he was tryin’ to play the guitar, but when he went back he could play better, than any of those. And so they named my daddy the devil, because, they felt like no human being could teach a person how to play the guitar like that. But my dad, he wasn’t the devil. He was a good man. Very good man.”

  6 Charles Taylor reports on Fucked Up at Le Poisson Rouge (New York, November 14, 2011) “Le Poisson Rouge is a strange place to see a rock ’n’ roll show: a medium-sized basement room in a piss-elegant club that looks like it thinks the basement is where that kind of show belongs. The performers stand on a low-rise stage near the front of the room, surrounded by the crowd on all sides, standing in a circle. Fucked Up had to fit all five members on that stage plus a string quartet. It didn’t matter much to Pink Eyes, who spent the whole show facing the crowd, holding the microphone out so we were hearing the audience’s vocals (most of them knew every word), roaming around to different parts of the room, at one point jumping up on the bar, and then, when the song ended, politely shaking hands with the bar staff before taking a candle and pouring hot wax on his chest while singing Madonna’s ‘Erotic.’ This is a guy who clearly believes the fans are part of the band. He thanked ones he’d recognized who had come distances to see the show, offered profuse and heartfelt thank yous after each number, gently shhhed the crowd so they listened when the string quartet played. It was lovely, and it was also the problem. You can’t tell moshers, ‘This is your show, too,’ because they just take that to mean that they’re cool for acting like assholes. It was no surprise when the most persistently obnoxious of the moshers, a little bastard with a ridiculous ’fro that made him look like Leo Sayer inducted into the MC5, climbed onstage and was handed the mike. I was about ten feet from the edge of the mosh area. I saw some girls in there, and the ones who were held aloft weren’t being manhandled. But it’s still male in the worst sense. (I loved the riot grrrls for getting rid of this shit at shows.) These adolescent boys—most of them well past adolescence—would never think of themselves as frathouse thugs. But I kept thinking that there was no difference between them and the cretins out supporting Joe Paterno. Essentially, they’re all fascists who believe their traditions are sacred and fuck anyone who’s hurt by it. M
aybe this is generational. But you can’t get swept up into FU’s sweaty, loving cameraderie if you’re worried about getting your glasses shattered, or that someone’s foot is going to smash an overhead light or set that hanging speaker swinging one too many times. Given the hardcore genre Fucked Up works in, I don’t know what the answer is. I do know that the majesty of David Comes to Life, which the band played in its entirety, was lost. It wasn’t a bad show. The band put their heads down and powered through the music. The sound had the steeliness and flexibility and hypnotic shimmer of vibrating sheets of metal. Eighty minutes of that kind of force can feel hypnotic. What was missing was the sense that the record gives of something being fought for and hard-won and of your having had some part in the outcome. I think Fucked Up’s hearts are in the right place. This is a band I could love and not just admire. But they’ve got to resolve how to stay true to a belief in community when your community sweeps up bullies along with everyone else who’s willing to listen.”

  7 Snakefarm, My Halo at Half-Light (Fledg’ling) A follow-up to the 1999 Songs from My Funeral, or the second chapter in Anna Domino and Michel Delory’s techno book of traditional ballads—“ Little Maggie,” “Staggerlee,” “Omie Wise”—music that turns into its own kind of dream pop, picking up echoes of Portishead, Bryan Ferry, the Cranberries, Kate Bush, and Pauline Murray along the way. “Darlin’ Corey”—the wellspring of a whole school of songs of faithless lovers that has tangled through the southern forests since the time of Daniel Boone like a rat king—is the most deadly. The melody is transposed from “The Streets of Laredo,” the mood is that of someone fingering memories like rosary beads, and by the end of “Darlin’ Corey” ’s few minutes—“Corey,” Domino calls her plainly, with an intimacy the song may have never permitted before—whole lives seem to have been lived and ruined.