by Greil Marcus
8 “Viggo Mortensen: Hollywood’s Grungy Antihero,” New York Times Style Magazine (December 4, 2011) Inside, accompanying a profile by Zoë Heller, Mortensen has a fifty-three-year-old’s lines cracking his face when he grins. In the retouched cover photo, all pensive and fey under a watch cap, he looks exactly like Justin Bieber.
9 Carolyn Hester, “Lonesome Tears,” Teatro Bibiena, Festivalettertatura, Mantua, Italy (September 9, 2011) and on Hester’s From These Hills (Road Goes on Forever, Outpost, 1996) Hester, a Greenwich Village folkie from the late ’50s and early ’60s, recorded her first album in 1957 at Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico, with Buddy Holly chipping in on guitar during rehearsals; one of the songs she cut was “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” When Holly and the Crickets played London the following year, the show began with a ghostly organ sound, but no organ, no musician; then a platform rose from beneath the stage, revealing Holly alone at the keyboard, playing “Black Is the Color” as if it was the only song anyone needed to hear. In Mantua, in a severe, steep eighteenth-century theater where Mozart once performed, Hester took the stage with her two daughters and, before running through a set of wasn’t-that-a-time chestnuts, stilled the room with Holly’s “Lonesome Tears,” the song as she played it at once earthy and delicate, sounding both like a handed-down ballad and a perfectly crafted pop song. “The day before yesterday was his birthday,” she said, with a tone that made you think not a week had gone by since his death in 1959 that she hadn’t thought about him.
10 “Regifting: Songs My Mother (or Some Other) Gave Me,” hosted by Joe Christiano and Theresa Kelly, St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Albany, California (December 4, 2011) “Cover songs only!” was the first of a list of rules for a hootenanny of “passed on” tunes (“This Land Is Your Land,” went a list of suggestions, “Up on the Roof, My Yiddishe Momme”)—along with the disclaimer that original songs would be permitted only if they were “credited in performance to Paul Anka.”
Thanks to Diann Blakely
MARCH-APRIL 2012
1 Roots, Undun Even if you catch only a phrase here and there, the story this shape-shifting album tells is plain. Just through the feel of the music, you know you are following the story of a single person, as he slowly pulls himself out of simple questions and simple answers and into a sense of self that throws off anyone else’s idea of who he’s supposed to be, even if he’s drowning in confusion, conflict, voices hammering in his head, all answers to any questions far behind him. The voices telling his tale continually change—on “Lighthouse,” the sound couldn’t be more toothpaste, but it’s also a relief from the street life swirling around it. There’s a reason the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” is quoted early on: the same humility, the same sense of struggling to know what you don’t know, runs through the songs like a river to cross. The rapping is close to ordinary speech—the bravado, the sneer, that makes so much rapping one-dimensional and tiresome isn’t in this music. But the more you listen the more you hear—stray echoes of Dion & the Belmonts, Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” the ambition and the willingness to slow down, not to rush, of Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. You don’t want this to end, and not only because of dread at what the ending will be.
2 A Place to Bury Strangers, Onwards to the Wall (Deep Oceans) From New York, the spirit of Joy Division—until the riptide of the title song, when the band all but changes places with New Order. But New Order never had a singer like Alanna Nuala—a.k.a. Moon—who as she rides through the middle of the number could be a horsewoman riding a ghost.
3 Pina, directed by Wim Wenders (HanWay Films) An unforgettable moment in this gorgeously vivid tribute to the late choreographer Pina Bausch, as performed by members of her Tanztheater Wuppertal, from her 1978 piece “Kontakthof,” with Peter Dennis’s delirious 1975 version of Jimmy Dorsey’s 1946 “T. D.’s Boogie Woogie” pushing them on. A line of men seated in chairs, dressed in suits, hammer their way across the floor toward a line of women in slinky dresses rubbing themselves against the wall behind them—a routine that in its aura of trance and violence seems to capture the ambitions of every avant-garde nightclub from the Cabaret Voltaire on down. As a 3-D movie Pina ought to be on a double bill with Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
4 Comet Gain, Howl of the Lonely Crowd (What’s Your Rupture?) Formed in 1992, this British group appears here stuck in the Beat past of the ’40s and ’50s, with the references to Allen Ginsberg and David Riesman followed by “Herbert Huncke, Pt. 2,” a tune about the Times Square junkie celebrated by Jack Kerouac in On the Road that the Velvet Underground forgot to record; “The Ballad of Frankie Machine,” pushed wonderfully by singer Rachel Evans; and the last track, “In a Lonely Place,” which lets Humphrey Bogart’s damned face look back over all the wasted years. It doesn’t seem like a concept, merely people in the band wrapping themselves around things they like, and nothing gets in the way of a vocal diversity, of the surprise eruptions of feeling (the guitar break in the lovely, soulful “ After Midnight, After It’s All Gone Wrong,” the thrill of “Thee Ecstatic Library”) that make you want to see the band opening for the New Pornographers.
5 Rocket from the Tombs, Barfly (Fire) The group formed in Cleveland in 1974; now, almost buried behind singer David Thomas’s self-questioning, crooning croak, is the most subtle and quietly passionate guitar band in the land. A land perhaps defined by the faces on the back of the CD sleeve that the musicians key their names to: Vachel Lindsay (drummer and organist Steve Mehlman), Edgar Allen Poe (guitarist Cheetah Chrome), Mark Twain (bassist Craig Bell), Herman Melville (guitarist Richard Lloyd), and Stonewall Jackson (Thomas).
6 Robert W. Harwood, “ ‘Stack O’Lee Blues’—the first sheet music (and more)” (iwentdowntostjamesinfirmary.blogspot.com, December 20, 2011) From 1924, the first publication of the true-crime bad-man ballad that came out of St. Louis in 1895, reduced to a lame tune and lyrics about a new dance craze keyed to a racist playground chant. The sheet-music art is what’s uncanny: in red, blue, pink, white, and black, a swirling abstraction, in circles and rectangles, that calls up the dada experimental films being made at exactly the same time.
7–8 “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk—An Introspective” (Brooklyn Museum, through January 8) and Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” (1959, YouTube) A big room, centered by Blossom (2007), an installation with a huge tree growing through a piano with its bench knocked over and lying in dirt: a prepared piano that plays a slow version of “Strange Fruit.” Nearby is Cheshire (2007), a video showing a large tree with black men climbing it, a lynching tree reclaimed with the smile of the Cheshire cat when one man reaches the top, where when black screen-breaks appear you hear “Strange Fruit” by Imani Uzuri. Here “Strange Fruit” is fixed, a reference point, unlike the 1959 footage of Holiday, old and ravaged, singing the song in a nightclub with unparalleled vividness, so that every word makes a separate scene you are forced to visualize, that she is forced to visualize—you can see and hear her resisting the song, as if she can barely stand to sing it. The piece by Biggers that lives up to this performance is Bittersweet the Fruit (2002), where a tree branch with leaves, installed horizontally, has a two-by-three-inch video screen cut in. It’s described as an allegory of the pickup-truck lynching of James Byrd Jr., in Jasper, Texas, in 1998—one of the killers, Lawrence Brewer, was executed on September 21, 2011, two days before Biggers’s show went up—you see, in a wooded area like the scrub forests Byrd was dragged through, a naked black man with gray dreads seated playing a piano. The sound plays backward, slow, fuzzed, then frantically speeding up and clattering—and the sense is that of the man trying to go back in time, to when he wasn’t dead.
9 Randy Newman, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” from Live in London (Nonesuch) It can be hard to hear the world catch up with Newman’s misanthropy.
10 “Gaga Constellation” Christmas windows, creative direction by Nicola Formichetti,
directed by Tim Richardson (Barney’s Workshop, New York, December 14, 2011) Various Gaga fantasies—and the one that works is Gaga Machine, with LG’s body painted gold and transformed into a Futurist motorcycle. Passing by, Marinetti would have broken the glass and climbed on.
MAY 2012
1 Alison Faith Levy, “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” from World of Wonder (Mystery Lawn Music) On an album of children’s songs, this glorious recording—with startling new verses pitting a mouse against a cat, a monkey against a tiger, a hippo against a snake, and the spider against a bumblebee—comes forth huge, pounding, with a passionate vocal from Levy and, from producer Allen Clapp, the most convincing re-creation of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound anywhere. Precisely, it’s “Itsy Bitsy Spider” as the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the feeling bigger with each chorus, and each chorus more ambitious, more deliriously affirming Levy’s animal-kingdom moral fables.
But Spector, now serving nineteen-to-life for second-degree murder in the 2003 shooting death of the failed actress and House of Blues hostess Lana Clarkson, remains as much an author as Levy. Released in 2009, Vikram Jayanti’s trial documentary, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, can leave you almost certain that Spector did not kill Clarkson (after watching his attorneys present forensic evidence at his first trial, which hung the jury, you can imagine Spector bringing out a gun, showing it off, listening to Clarkson talk about how worthless her life had turned out to be, and then handing it to her: “Go ahead and kill yourself, I don’t care”). On February 21 the Supreme Court refused to review the case; as Spector waits out his time, I hope this puts a smile on his face.
2 Eleanor Friedberger at the Independent, San Francisco (February 4) Appearing with Friedberger were a drummer, a bass player, and guitarist John Eatherly, who’s likely in his mid-txwenties, looks sixteen (“That song was about fun times,” the thirty-five-year-old Friedberger said at one point, “back when I was his age”), and has the fastest hands I’ve ever seen. He reminded me of Tim Lincecum: he seems to invent melodies as he plays others, and he can shred. His face is always quiet; there’s a lyrical slide in his attack that takes the coolness off what might seem like technique for its own sake, and if his lyricism is still a step or two away from soul, it will come. Friedberger herself is impossible to fix, a singer who at her most distinctive comes across like someone arguing over the phone. A rambling, seemingly scattershot set turned on a dime with the unreleased “When I Knew.” It’s the kind of bouncing, emotionally blunt song the radio was invented to play, a song you hear once and then play over and over in the radio of your memory, hoping that when it is released it’ll sound half as right. For an encore, Fried-berger came out alone and sang “(Ummm, Oh Yeah) Dearest,” recorded by Buddy Holly on acoustic guitar in his Greenwich Village apartment the month before he died, when he was younger than Eatherly. The song is so perfectly written (by Ellas McDaniel—Bo Diddley—Prentice Polk, and Mickey Baker) that it doesn’t seem written at all, and Friedberger let it sing itself, as if she were following a step behind, in love with the way every barely sung “Ummm, yeah” opened into catacombs of affection and regret.
3 Jennifer Castle, Castlemusic (No Quarter) From Toronto, Castle was one of the Siren voices on Fucked Up’s David Comes to Life. Here she wanders like a pilgrim through the desert once crossed by Paula Frazer of Tarnation, Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, Julee Cruise, and, maybe most of all, Kelly Hogan’s “(You Don’t Know) The First Thing About Blue.” Two-thirds of the way through, with “Misguided,” Castle reaches a pitch of mystical transport so gorgeously ethereal she seems about to drift off into lands that don’t appear on any map. But then everything gets tougher, and the desert turns into Duane Eddy’s forty miles of bad road.
4 Dave Bickler on The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, February 2) As an answer record to Newt Gingrich’s unauthorized use of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” at campaign rallies, Survivor lead singer Bickler took the stage and made a heroic, without-a-breath dash through what could have been an entire page of Gingrich’s A Nation Like No Other—to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger.” “A nation explicitly Christian!” he declaimed: “Of the tiger!” When Bickler got to Gingrich quoting Patrick Henry, he made “Give me liberty or give me death” sound like a power ballad.
5 Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Light Is Faster Than Sound” (June 23), from Live at the Carousel Ballroom, 1968 (Columbia Legacy) Six minutes. Total riot. Punk shamed. Desperation, release, fear and driving right through it, hitting a wall, climbing over it, falling into a swamp. As Jim Thompson wrote in 1952 in The Killer Inside Me, “A man is hanged and poisoned and chopped up and shot, and he goes right on living.” There are screams that seem to come from other than ordinary bodies, wow-wow-wows that sound like hurricanes chafing at the starting block, a feedback solo that breaks up as it’s played, or as it arrives—can you go faster than sound, on your own two feet, with the wind of a nightmare at your back, a nightmare you can’t bear to wake from because you want to know how it turns out?
6 Deborah Sontag and Walt Bogdanich, “8 Guilty for Prison Massacre in Rare Trial of Haiti’s Police” (New York Times, January 19) Or Judge Dread lives. In 1967, the Jamaican ska songwriter and producer Prince Buster took on the mantle of an Ethiopian judge come to Kingston to rid the land of its scourge of thugs; across three historic singles—“Judge Dread,” “The Appeal,” and “Judge Dread Dance” (a.k.a. “The Pardon”)—he piled hundred-year sentences on teenage murderers, jailed their lawyers, left them weeping and pleading for mercy, then set everybody free and left his seat to lead a cakewalk through the court: “I am the judge, but I know how to dance.” Judge Dread reappeared on January 19, in Haiti, in the person of Judge Ezekiel Vaval, when, in an act that broke the culture of impunity that had always surrounded Haitian government officials of any sort, he sentenced eight police officers to prison for a jailhouse massacre they had perpetrated and covered up. “The decision of the judge is his expression of the truth,” said Judge Vaval, as in cadences that matched Prince Buster’s in both spirit and form he handed down sentences of two to thirteen years of prison and hard labor, giving police chiefs the longest terms. “There are other versions that exist but this is mine. And that is the law.”
7 Gaslight Anthem, “Changing of the Guards,” on Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan (Amnesty International/Fontana) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Yes, especially when they’re for a good cause, and four CDs long—but Gaslight Anthem, from New Jersey, puts so much humor and dread into this Street Legal number, unrealized in Dylan’s own hands, that you forget it’s a Dylan song. Elsewhere, even on the few tracks worth hearing more than once (Diana Krall’s “ Simple Twist of Fate,” Ziggy Marley’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Miley Cyrus’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” Bryan Ferry’s steely “Bob Dylan’s Dream”), words generally come out more clearly than on the originals, because so little is going on musically, either in terms of playing or singing—there’s nothing else to listen to, to be distracted by. “ People have a hard time believing that Shakespeare really wrote all of his work because there is so much of it. Do you have a hard time accepting that?” Dylan was asked in 1991. “ People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them,” he said.
8 Barack Obama, “Sweet Home Chicago,” White House Blues Night (February 21/PBS, February 27) In what would have been Robert Johnson’s hundred–and–first year, one of his songs was sung by the president of the United States. After a command from the guitarist Buddy Guy (“I heard you singing Al Green—you have started something, you gotta keep it up now”), he started out flat on “Come on, baby don’t you want to go / Come on, baby don’t you want to go,” and then with a rounded, lifting tone just barely swung “Chicago” into the night. He couldn’t have taken the tune from the band more casually; he must have heard this song all his life.
9 Venus in Fur, written by David Ives, directed by Walter Bobbie (Manhattan Theatre Club, New York, December 18;
now at the Lyceum) “Like the Lou Reed song?” says Nina Arianda’s Vanda as this storming, shape-shifting two-person comedy gets going. An actress shows up late to try out for a part, only the director is there, he says they might as well get it over with, and then the battle begins. It’s Naomi Watts’s audition scene in Mulholland Dr. with a subtext out of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae—translated by Betty Hutton in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and by Martha Raye in Monsieur Verdoux. Unless Vanda is the lost sister of the Marx Brothers crossed with Lady Gaga and Helen of Troy, who after more than three thousand years has a lot of scores to settle.
10 “King’s Court,” Super Bowl Pepsi commercial (NBC, February 5) After dispatching various miserable contestants for a single can of Pepsi, King Elton John is faced with X Factor queen Melanie Amaro, who, packaged as a stand-in for the Queen of Soul, steps up to perform a hideously over-souled and oversold version of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” After Elton sheepishly awards her the coveted red, white, and blue can, she zaps him into a dungeon and gives everyone in the court a free drink. In a better world, Elton would have sent her back to her TV show: “Lady, I served with Aretha. I know Aretha. Aretha is a friend of mine. Lady, you’re no Aretha.”
JUNE 2012
SPECIAL OVER-SEVENTY EDITION!
1 “Robert Johnson at 100,” Apollo Theater, New York (March 6) Charles Taylor reports from the scene: “The trick to feeling comfortable in Sunday clothes is to make sure that Sunday isn’t the only day you wear them. The famous 1930s picture of Robert Johnson looking sharp in his three-piece suit was projected over the stage for much of the centennial celebration, and the casual ease of everything about Johnson in that picture acted like a judgment on the parade of supplicants, posers, pretenders, and mediocrities who passed beneath. The ones who stood up to Johnson’s gaze were confident enough to sport their own style. Taj Mahal, walking out with the calm familiarity of a beefy working man approaching a job he long ago mastered, played and sang ‘Hell Hound on My Trail’ with a sound rooted to the earth while moving with the lightness of Jackie Gleason. Sam Moore’s high vocal was at first lost in ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ but the sweetness of his voice gradually drew you in like a beckoning finger. Elvis Costello, striking an unconscious echo of Johnson’s crossed-knee posture, performed a charming ‘From Four Until Late’ as if the evening’s honoree were George Formby, master of the English music hall. The Roots, who bend their knee to no one and do tradition the honor of never treating it as tradition, unleashed a staccato ‘Milkcow’s Calf Blues’ that was flabbergasting in its confidence. With ?uestlove’s drumming controlling singer-guitarist Kirk Douglas like a puppet master’s strings, the number grew into a duet recalling the unexpected and joyous rapport in Diner when Timothy Daly shakes up a lagging strip-club duo by taking over the empty piano, finding allies in the suddenly knife-sharp drummer and in the tired dancer out front, who responds as if she were once again the youngest girl on the bill. No one was more at home in his style than James Blood Ulmer, who followed Taj’s ‘Hell Hound’ with his own, never leaving his seat in the house band, using his voice and guitar to emit a series of yelps and moans and mutterings that could have been devil dogs at the crossroads, or the spirits of Stonehenge. The other ghost present, the faint smile on Ulmer’s face, suggested that the phantoms of the ages were all his familiars.”