Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Mariee Sioux, Gift for the End (Almost Musique) Not as immediately arresting as Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games,” but mapping the same nowhere, and without the metallic smell of early death. That isn’t to say death is missing. Sioux, from the California Gold Rush country, sings softly, strums and picks, and you can’t get a fix on her in any way. Even as she seems to come right up to you, you sense a distance that can never be bridged. That may be because the eight songs here carry the feeling of Grimms’ fairy tales. “We’ve learned our lessons,” plead young girls, and you don’t want to know what schooled them. In her most uncanny moments, Sioux is less playing her songs than swimming through them: “No rest, no rest, no rest, no rest.”

  3 Jay Leeming, “Desolation Row,” from Miracle Atlas (Big Pencil Press) The whole place has been torn down and “replaced / by the new civic center, a gigantic white building / funded by a Norwegian greeting card company.” No one remembers all those strange characters who used to roam the place, “though now and then their names / turn up on the newspaper’s last pages: Doctor Filth / found strangled to death in the Brazilian jungle.”

  4 Werner Herzog, Hearsay of the Soul, video installation, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (through June 10) A highlight of the 2012 Biennial: in a separate room, in a five-channel, five-panel projection, landscapes of stone valleys and terraced stone mountains—manipulated seventeenth-century etchings by Hercules Seghers—frame the cellist Ernst Reijseger. Moonfaced, his head shaved, he plays hard, his mouth open like an electric guitarist writhing in the agonies of being moved by his own sounds, his eyes closed—when at the end he opens them, it’s a shock. The landscapes, at first all panorama, are slowly explored so that nearly infinite detail begins to emerge. Where once there was only landscape, now there are rocks; where there were only rocks, there are solitary human figures, who look as accidental as the rocks. To Herzog, the Biennial curator Elisabeth Sussman said, Seghers’s etchings are “the beginning of modernity”; with Reijseger, at the end of his piece sliding his fingers down the strings as if he’s playing slide cello, time slides off.

  5 ?uestlove, “Put the Needle on the Record,” EMP Pop Conference, New York University, New York (March 25) On his record collection, now reaching seventy-five thousand LPs, and the fetishism that goes with it: “I hated the orange Capitol label. I wouldn’t listen to anything with it. So I missed Pet Sounds and post–Rubber Soul Beatles.” He started as a child: “ Album covers I was scared of, logos I was scared of, they’d go to the bottom of the collection.” “What was the first record you bought with your own money?” asked moderator Harry Weinger. “I had an adult’s knowledge of music at the age of five,” ?uestlove said, “but I didn’t have a job.” Then in 1979 “Rapper’s Delight” came out and he had to have it. “I had three hours in school to borrow a dime,” ?uestlove said, “—from thirty-seven people.” That, he said, was the first record he bought with his own money, “borrowed money.” “Did you pay everybody back?” Weinger asked. “No,” ?uestlove said, as if it still bothered him, a little bit.

  6 Bruce Springsteen, “Wrecking Ball,” from Wrecking Ball (Columbia) “I don’t know how you write something so affecting from the point of view of a concrete bowl,” a friend said of this song about Meadowlands Stadium, “but there you go.”

  7 Penelope Houston, On Market Street (Devoted Ruins) When not touring with the Avengers, her reformed and still-fierce late-’70s San Francisco punk band, Houston makes quiet records; here, a smoothly keening organ leads her through tired San Francisco bars and ugly San Francisco streets. The small voice is all knowledge, with the fatigue of not believing tomorrow is going to be any different from today. The bill comes due with “On Market Street,” where three violins and a cello stop all the other stories cold. Houston sings like someone watching, not a singer at all, warbling about the human wreckage she passes on her way to work, composing a song in her head as she shows her ID to the guard, sits down at her desk, picks up a stack of papers, and hums.

  8 “Bibliophilia: Collecting Black Books—The Archie Givens, Sr. Collection of African American Literature,” Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (February 6–April 20) It’s displacing to come face to face with the tiny first editions of Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the 1850 Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s privately published 1892 Oak and Ivy, or countless other treasures you might never have imagined you would ever actually see. Along with LeRoi Jones tapes, Kirby Puckett memorabilia, toys, children’s books, LPs, Black Panther newspapers, there are surprises everywhere you look: the blazing dust jacket of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1934 novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine, which seems to take its power not from the fervor of the gesticulating preacher but from the very few worshippers around him, as if they’re the first or the last of a cult about to vanish. And all this can fade against the September 7, 1937, letter from Clara E. Stokes, a Federal Writers’ Project administrator in Jackson, Mississippi, to Carrie Campbell, a field-worker about to conduct her first interviews with former slaves, and then three fragments of interview transcriptions on yellowed paper that look as if they’d crumble at the touch—the Dead Sea Scrolls of the New Deal. Two are in pencil, one in typescript, and while the edges of lines are folded or broken, the voice and the history it stands for come through: “She sure was good to us. And even so much as gave us a cow. If it hadn’t been for that KuKlux. Lord how they did scare us. They had a song [unreadable]”—and it breaks off. Everyone I’ve spoken to who’s seen this show has said the same thing: This has to travel.

  9 Tom Jones, “Evil” (Third Man) Howlin’ Wolf recorded this song in 1954. Jones sings it as if he’s calling 911.

  10 Dion, “Ride’s Blues (For Robert Johnson),” from Tank Full of Blues (Blue Horizon) Why wasn’t he at the Apollo? As he moves ever more surely into blues, the man who gave up his seat on Buddy Holly’s death plane has lost nothing of his voice, but his guitar speaks even more eloquently. This piece, coming after the three cool, expert, casual love-and-trouble numbers that open this superb album, is immediately elsewhere, a place where all is menace, and a queer, complete sense of fatalism settles over the trees. “He told me on the way there / He was born in sin,” the man telling the story mutters. “Huh. What else is new?”

  Taj Mahal, born 1942; Sam Moore, 1935; Elvis Costello, 1954; ?uestlove, 1971; Kirk Douglas, 1972; James Blood Ulmer, 1942; Mariee Sioux, 1985; Jay Leeming, 1969; Werner Herzog, 1942; Hercules Seghers, circa 1589; Ernst Reijseger, 1954; Bruce Springsteen, 1949; Penelope Houston, 1958; Tom Jones, 1940; Dion, 1939.

  Thanks to Steve Perry

  JULY-AUGUST 2012

  1 Laura Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah (Verso) From 2006 through 2009, Ford produced the issues of the fanzine collected here: hundreds of pages of text, maps, bland drawings of vague faces, and cumulatively riveting photos of architectural detritus—roads, graffiti, housing blocks, filthy courtyards, storefronts, overgrown building sites, almost all of them utterly depopulated—chronicling a long walk through the back alleys and abandoned patches of a London remade through Thatcherist and New Labour gentrification and the evictions and new constructions of the looming 2012 Olympics. Read straight through, Ford’s work is the most convincing follow-through there is on the project of poetic urban-renewal inaugurated by the situationists Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov, and Michèle Bernstein. In the early ’50s, they and a few other young layabouts began an exploration of Paris as a city that ran according to its own backward-forward-spinning clock, where a drift down the streets might so scramble time that 1848 would exert a stronger spiritual gravity than 1954. In places Ford echoes Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her slideshow of sex and death in bohemian New York in the 1980s, and the cityscape in Andrea Arnold’s 2006 film Red Road, where in a decaying Glasgow foxes dart around the base of apartment buildings that are corroding
from the inside, almost as strongly. On any given page, Thomas De Quincey, from his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, might be holding Ford’s hand: “I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.”

  Number by number, Savage Messiah is a delirious, doomstruck celebration of squats, riots, vandalism, isolation, alcohol, and sex with strangers, all on the terrain of a half-historical, half-i maginary city that the people who Ford follows, herself at the center, can in moments believe they built themselves, and can tear down as they choose. The past is a shadow, an angel, a demon: most of what Ford recounts seems to be taking place in the ’70s or the ’80s or the ’90s, with the first decade of the twenty-first century a kind of slag-heap of time—of boredom, enervation, despair, and hate—that people are trying to burrow out from under. “1973, 1974, 1981, 1990, 2013,” she chants on one page. “Always a return. A Mirror touch. A different way out.” “Queen’s Crescent is the nexus of knife crime, a flashing matrix of Sheffield steel,” Ford writes in Savage Messiah #6, “. . . suspended somewhere between 1968 and 1981, and I sense my darling there, on the corner of Bassett St. and Allcroft Road. I’m searching the brickwork with dusty fingertips for the first Sex Pistols graffiti of 1976. He was here then, and possibly now, we drift in circles around each other”—and answering herself on the facing page: “In the fabric of the architecture you can always uncover traces and palimpsests, the poly-temporality of the city. As I lay my palm flat against the wall I grasp past texts never fully erasing the traces of earlier inscriptions.”

  The aura of a mystical quest hovers over even the most sordid incidents, the ugliest photos of belongings piled up at the foot of an apartment block. John Legend’s “Ordinary People” is on the jukebox: “And all the guilt I harboured, all the shame, the walk around Highbury with so much hanging in the balance, tyranny of choice and the crashing cruelty of desire, it was all locked into that one anodyne song.”

  2 Evans the Death, Evans the Death (Slumberland) Dream pop, casting back to Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls in London in 1980, coming into perfect focus on “Letter of Complaint,” where Katherine Whitaker dances so delicately, with such a sense of pleasure, she leaves a light behind with each step.

  3 Levon Helm, 1940–2012 Watch him at what might as well have been the end, as the blind, cursing desert rat in his friend Tommy Lee Jones’s 2005 movie The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada; listen to him at the beginning, in 1961, roaring through Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Further On Up the Road” (collected on The Band—A Musical History, or on Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks: The Roulette Years) as if he’s not the driver but the car. And then, in the Band’s “Chest Fever,” as he marshals what Tom Kipp, once of the Montana punk band Deranged Diction, calls “THE BACKBEAT OF GOD” to summon a sound that feels far more like a civil war than “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” let Helm describe an American epic of love and madness, home and flight—a sound so rich you can listen and watch at the same time. That was 1968. The music had no temporal frame of reference clinging to it then, and it doesn’t now.

  4 Peter Stampfel in conversation with RJ Smith, “ ‘We’re Gonna Rise When the Sun’s Going Down,’ ” at the EMP Pop Conference, NYU, New York (March 23) He loved rock ’n’ roll and he loved old-time music—but they were “incompatible,” the cofounder of the Holy Modal Rounders said of his dilemma in the Greenwich Village folk scene in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Then in 1961 he heard Bob Dylan singing “Sally Gal.” “His phrasing was so clearly rock ’n’ roll-influenced. He was already combining folk and rock ’n’ roll. I thought—what if we could bring Uncle Dave Macon, Charlie Poole, back, now, set them right here in the middle of rock ’n’ roll—what would they do?”

  5 Jack White, Blunderbuss (Third Man Records) Regardless of the passion in the music White made with the White Stripes—a harsh, at times almost frightened passion—there was always something cold about it. Whatever was happening, it was happening not here but over there—and to someone else. The best performances on White’s first solo album are those where this isn’t true, and in each case it may be because White’s ownership of the sound, his ability to look down on his own creation, is weakened, because other people are making themselves felt, and with such heart: Brooke Waggoner’s parlor piano on “Hypocritical Kiss,” Ruby Amanfu’s comradely backing vocals on “Love Interruption,” most of all Ryan Koenig and the mandolin player Pokey LaFarge singing not behind White but around him on “I Guess I Should Go to Sleep,” a reverie so entrancing that by the end the sense is that the singers slipped away well before they started singing, and what you’re hearing is the dream.

  6 Bo Diddley, Road Runner: The Chess Masters, 1959–1960 (Hip-O Select) I recently saw the first volume of this archival project, I’m a Man: The Chess Masters, 1955–1958, priced at $200 at Amoeba Records in Berkeley; Amazon had it at $255.99. I have no idea why. A few years ago it was just another reissue, if, as with anything the late strange character produced, full of twists and turns no one else would ever think of. Here, on an at least for the moment normally priced set, you can find the most formally primitive and the most formally avant-garde music refusing to acknowledge any difference. “Bucket” strings folk-lyric fragments over the Bo Diddley beat, but there’s nothing generic, nothing automatic in the improvization—the thing is like a hand made of swamp gas, reaching out of the past, crooking its finger. “Mumblin’ Guitar” (“Whatchyu say, man? Quit mumblin’, and talk out loud,” Diddley opens it) is a swarm of insects dancing on his fretboard; you can see him throw the guitar away to get them off his face, and then stand back grinning as the guitar plays itself.

  7 Julyan Davis, “Dark Corners: The Appalachian Ballad—Paintings of the South” (Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina, through July 1; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia, opening September 1) Davis’s talents are those of an illustrator—his faces have no life and his bodies have no movement. But he can see places—and in two paintings in this series of images he’s attempted to draw out of the likes of “ Little Maggie” and “Barbara Allen,” he sees places no one has seen before. For “Pretty Polly,” instead of the hills and valleys of the murder ballad it’s a huge, ruined barn, covered with the wreckage of abandoned artwork, as if vandals broke in and destroyed the place with buckets of paint, canvases, stretchers, and unfinished images; the place looks dangerous, and you don’t need to see the woman inside or the man approaching from outside to feel that. With “Darling Corey,” the tale of a faithless lover, there’s a pastoral scene, a Currier and Ives print: winding dirt road, bare trees, melting snow, spring about to burst, and, in the distance, set in a meadow at the foot of a mountain, a family home, with smoke that at first comes into the landscape like fog billowing out of the windows, the hint of red so faint that at first, as you come up the lane singing, “Wake up, wake up, Darlin’ Corey, what makes you sleep so sound?” you might think everything’s all right.

  8 DJ Shadow, The Less You Know, the Better (Island) What made the sampling artist’s 1996 Endtroducing . . . and The Private Press, from 2002, so spooky—what let the person born Josh Davis live up to his chosen name—was a mood of clandestinity, of subterranean communication, the way he could make you feel as if you were listening in on a conversation you were never meant to hear. On The Less You Know, the Better, that happens only once, with “Give Me Back the Nights.” Shadow wraps film-noir tones around “The Night,” a frantic, all-but-suicidal lost-love rant by one C. E. Rabinowitz that Davis found in a thrift store—a 45? From an LP? In the least readable credits sheet I’ve ever seen, he doesn’t say—until the singer loses his performer’s body and becomes a figment of anyone’s nightmare. And that’s better than thinking that the singer’s nightmare is still going on. You can wake up; with Shadow pressing down on him, you know he can’t.

  9 Black Clock no. 15 (CalArts) A
special issue of this adventurous literary quarterly on imaginary cinema, filled with clumsily executed posters for, say, Casablanca starring Ronald Reagan and Hedy Lamarr, who were up for Rick and Ilsa; Intolerance remade by Baz Luhrmann and starring Sasha Grey; Kill Bill directed by Russ Meyer and featuring Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Dorothy Daindridge, Natalie Wood, Takashi Shimura, and Machiko Kyô, and each one all the more frustrating because the pictures were never made. The highlights might be Michael Ventura’s “Lou ’n’ Charlie,” the story of an eighteen-year-old Louise Brooks’s affair with Charlie Chaplin in the form of a memoir by Brooks’s lesbian roommate, and Howard Hampton’s “Breakaway: Summer of ’69,” a scholarly piece about how the San Francisco avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner took over Easy Rider when Dennis Hopper abandoned the project, complete with footnotes to nonexistent passages in real books, and so convincing that even the last paragraph, referencing “the McGovern interregnum and the Reagan backlash” and a final, post-credits mini-sequence where “a television announcer is heard introducing a car dealer (‘and now here’s Cal Worthington and his dog Spot’) as Conner injects Un chien andalou’s famous scene of a straight razor slicing a human eye,” rolls by without a blink. And both seem modest next to Anthony Miller’s “A History of the Cinema 1920–2014,” first in a ten-page chronology ranging from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari to an all-female remake of The Maltese Falcon starring Lindsay Lohan as “Sam(antha) Spade” and Patricia Clarkson as Kasper Gutman, and then ranging in pop-ups through the journal’s more than 190 pages, in which all of film history revolves around successive biopics on the late-Victorian adventurer Richard Burton (Lon Chaney plays him in The Mecca Masquerade, Harry Reemes in Dick Burton’s Kama Sutra) and the infinitesimally slow emergence, over nearly one hundred years, of an underground pseudo-masterpiece called, at least at first, The Zoo, “a work of undetermined length and origin by a filmmaker known only as ‘Darc’ (sometimes misidentified in studies of early film as ‘D’ arc’).”