Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  3 Brokeback, Brokeback and the Black Rock (Thrill Jockey) Douglas McCombs is focusing the textures of Tortoise, his better-known band, into something close to pure concept, but a concept so formally open there’s never a feeling of aesthetic claustrophobia. In other words, after the opening track, the harsh “Will Be Arriving,” this slips away into desert surf music, all guitars and reverb, a fantasy soundtrack to Kill Bill: Vol. 3—or, if Quentin Tarantino ever finishes it, who knows, the real thing. It’s slow, relentless, unforgiving, all landscape and bad weather—music so quietly grand it hardly needs the puny figures acting out the plot.

  4 Andrew Loog Oldham Presents the Rolling Stones ‘Charlie Is My Darling—Ireland 1965,’ directed by Peter Whitehead (ABKCO Films) An expanded version of a film that played briefly as a short and then went on the shelf—and though the concert footage can be hot (especially an ugly, onstage fans’ riot for “I’m Alright”) and the interviews with smiling girls and dour boys sometimes odd (“Did you enjoy it?” then-manager Oldham asks one. “No,” he says, as if he was determined not to, “the screaming was a bit much.” “In the next house we’ll turn the screaming off,” Oldham promises), the real action is backstage. After talking throughout about his discovery of the fallacy of the supposed ephemerality of pop music, Mick Jagger takes the long view: “In the last two or three years, young people have been—this especially applies to America—instead of just carrying on the way their parents told them to, they’ve started a big thing, where they’re anti-war, and they love everybody, and their sexual lives have become freer. The kids are looking for something else, or some different moral value, because they know they’re going to get all the things that were thought impossible fifty years ago. The whole sort of basis of society and values which were accepted could be changed, but it’s up to them to carry on those ideals that they have, instead of just falling into the same old routine their parents have fallen into. So it’s not until the people of twenty-one now reach the age of seventy-five—those kids actually have to be grandfathers before the whole thing is changed.” In a way, he and Keith Richards take an even longer view when in a hotel room they start working their way back through “Tell Me,” a song from their first album that I once read was “doo-wop trash.” It is doo-wop—elsewhere, they fool around with deep-voiced pseudo-Elvis versions of “Santa Bring My Baby Back to Me” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” (“This number has been for me,” Jagger says for the narration in the middle, “maybe what your father and mother were to you.”) But here, with Oldham keeping time by patting his hands on a nightstand, the echoes Richards is fingering out of his acoustic guitar are dark-hollow folk chords, taking the progression of the song—a step-by-step build toward a declaration of love declaimed from a balcony—into a stumble through the sublime, as if the song were not made but found.

  5–6 Corin Tucker Band, Mercury Lounge (New York, September 27, 2012) and Public Image Ltd. at the Hammerstein Ballroom (New York, October 13, 2012) Tucker came onstage featuring Veronica Lake’s peekaboo hairstyle, her blond hair draped over one eye. It’s an easy look to copy; given how strong Lake was on screen from 1942, in Sullivan’s Travels, to 1946, in The Blue Dahlia, it’s a lot harder to live up to. With bassist Dave Depper, guitarist Seth Lorinczi (he and Tucker traded leads, he with feedback and shredding, she with the more lyrical lines), and drummer Sara Lund, a marvel on oo-oo-oos, behind her, Tucker pulled no punches, and one eye was all she ever showed.

  John Lydon, too, called up an icon from another era. Early on came “Albatross” (from 1979, about “the spirit of ’68”) and “One Drop” (from 2012, a fifty-six-year-old man declaring, “We are teenagers . . . We are the last chance, we are the last dance”), both staggeringly fierce, one the tale of someone fighting his way through a miasma as thick as quicksand, the next a triumphant refusal ever to give up, both two sides of the same theme: how do you get out from under the shadow of the past and make your own history? Lydon’s singing style is close to speechifying: chanting, exhorting, warning. I was thrown by a familiarity in his manner I couldn’t immediately fix—but halfway into “One Drop,” it fell into place. The intentionally pompous expressions, in a face tilted up, the facial muscles seemingly locked into place, until for a crescendo they were twisting into an expression of anguish and challenge; the harsh, bleating tone; the flat palms held inches apart, just below the neck—those were all elements of Adolf Hitler’s speaking style. With all of it put together, as it was this night, it was more than a style. It was a way of drawing on the collective unconscious of the west to get songs about history across.

  7 A history walk in Little Rock, Arkansas (September 25, 2012) In the Clinton Library, from a hallway away from the gallery noting Hillary Clinton’s mother’s crush on Keith Richards, there was a waft from another gallery of the 1992 victory speech on the steps of the state capitol: that line about “the mystery of our democracy.” Far down the street, after President Clinton Avenue turned back into Markham Street, just across from the capitol, there was a plaque on a stand, FREEDOM RIDERS IN LITTLE ROCK: “On 10 July 1961 five Freedom Riders from the St. Louis Branch of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—Benjamin Elton Cox, Annie Lumpkin, Bliss Ann Malone, John Curtis Raines and Janet Reinitz—arrived at the Mid-West Trailways bus station at Markham and Louisiana Streets. A crowd of between 300 and 400 people watched as they were arrested. The Riders were later released from jail and continued their journey to New Orleans. The Freedom Rides led to the desegregation of bus terminals in Little Rock and other cities by order of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) on 1 November 1961.”

  Heading toward the Clinton Library again, one would have passed the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, with a banner announcing a new exhibition: “The Civil War in Arkansas—Invasion or Liberation?” On the next block there was another plaque, this one commemorating the 1880s site of the Concordia Association, a social club for Jews, part of Little Rock since 1830, but barred from all other city clubs and citizens’ groups. And then at 511 Clinton Avenue there was the Flying Fish Restaurant, where, had it existed in 1961, black people would not have been allowed. Painted on a window was a quote from “Fishing Blues,” a signature song for Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas (1874–1950?). When in 1952 Harry Smith compiled his epochal Anthology of American Folk Music, he made it the last number, the last word. As Thomas recorded it in 1928, it featured the most joyous panpipe playing since the devil put it down, and the most salacious line in American blues: “Any fish bite if you got good bait.” Presented as the wisdom of the ages, an absolute truth.

  8 Ralf Paulsen, “Tom Dooley,” in La Paloma (YouTube) In 1958, the Kingston Trio made the post-Civil War murder ballad “Tom Dooley” an international hit and the Army stationed Pvt. Elvis Presley in West Germany; a year later future West German cowboy actor Ralf Paulsen appeared in this strange movie. Dressed as a GI, with a high Elvis pompadour, seated in a nightclub with two Army buddies, he begins to sing in English, somewhat haltingly, in a dank, somber tone: “Hang down your head Tom / Dooley, hang down your head . . .” The old waiters stare at them. They rise from their table, still singing, staring back at the waiters and the other patrons, staring at the musicians in the nightclub band who are trying to pick up the tune, all of them—it’s plain—old Nazis, now confronted with their American liberators—or avengers. The three GIs go through the door, closing it behind them, singing, “Poor boy, you’re bound to . . .” and then Paulsen opens the door, sticks his head through, straight at the old man on the other side, pushing the last word of the song right into his face: “. . . die.” Shot when Elvis, in uniform, was hanging out in West German nightclubs, resisting the constant calls from other patrons that he get up and sing, Paulsen’s scene plays as the most outrageous fantasy of what might have happened if Elvis had done just that—the killer Tom Dooley, in the person of another Southern boy, back from the dead to lay his curse.

  9 Iris Dement, Sing the Delta (Flariella) Country, old-time, quiet, unass
uming, all home truths. With one sting after another.

  10 Second favorite election film (once removed): Jeremy W. Peters, “Strident Anti-Obama Messages Flood Key States” (New York Times, October 23) On Dreams from My Real Father, a DVD purporting to prove that Barack Obama’s actual father was an American Communist Party activist and that his mother posed nude for a bondage magazine: “The film is the work of Joel Gilbert, whose previous claims include having tracked down Elvis Presley in the Witness Protection Program and discovering that Paul McCartney is in fact dead.”

  Thanks to Virginia Dellenbaugh

  FEBRUARY 2013

  1 Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (Graywolf Press) “Two black men walk into a bar and the rosy-faced white barkeep says we don’t serve niggers in here and one of the men points to the other and says but he’s the president and the barkeep says that’s his problem. So the president walks over and gives the barkeep a box and says these are Chilmark chocolates and the barkeep says thank you and reaches over to shake the president’s hand. The president jumps back, says what’s that? And the barkeep says it’s a hand buzzer, a gag, get used to it, asshole.” And in this novel, that’s just the first chapter.

  2 Bikini Kill, Bikini Kill (Kill Rock Stars, 1992) The hurricane riot grrrl band will be reissuing all of their 1990s records. After their demo cassette, Revolution Girl Style Now! this five-song EP was their first formal release. With “Liar,” a snakepit redo of “Give Peace a Chance,” and “Suck My Left One,” which is both a declaration of independence and a girl’s account of how her big sister protects her by giving herself up to their father every night, it’s funny and harrowing, sometimes with no line, and no time, between the two. But it’s also only a hint of how radical the group was onstage. A YouTube clip—“Bikini Kill wdc 1992”—shows lead singer Kathleen Hanna, bassist Kathi Wilcox, guitarist Bill Karren, and drummer Tobi Vail as Hanna stamps out “Girl Soldier,” the word fuck used for percussion as much as anything else. And then Vail—from her haircut to her T-shirt to her skirt looking exactly as Thora Birch’s miserable punk Enid would in Ghost World almost ten years later—gets up from behind her drums as Karren sits down at them. She strides up to the mike, grabs it as if it’s the only thing left to hold on to in the midst of a storm, and then she makes the storm. She releases a flood of glossolalia, or dada sound poetry, or a rage beyond language so fierce you can barely believe what you’re seeing. Then she goes back to her drums as if what she just did was merely a passing moment of everyday life—which was the Bikini Kill argument about what life is.

  3 Rihanna, “Stay,” on Saturday Night Live (November 10, 2012) Torch song: small to start with, even on the big notes her voice thins as the song goes on, but the moral force behind it seems infinite.

  4 Tracy K. Smith, “Alternate Take (for Levon Helm),” from Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011) A slowly building poem in which the writer (“I’ve been beating my head all day long on the same six lines”) wants nothing more than to feel like the singer must have felt as he sang—what would it have been? “Chest Fever”? “The Weight”? “You know how, shoulders hiked nice and high, chin tipped back / So the song has to climb its way out like a man from a mine.”

  5 Jess, “Tricky Cad” in O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica, ed. Michael Duncan (Siglio Press, 2012) Jess (1923–2004) was a San Francisco painter and collage artist. From 1952 to 1954 he clipped Dick Tracy comic strips out of the Sunday papers and cut them up and scrambled them, until people changed heads and dialogue fractured. This marvelous book—full of more conventional collages made of advertisements and nudie magazines so detailed it would take weeks to decipher them—collects all five extant Tricky Cad casebooks (three are lost). Dick Tracy itself, Jess said, was “dramatic serious nonsense of the highest order, like Krazy Kat”; Tricky Cad was “a demonstration of a hermetic critique self-contained in popular art.” As in Case 1, the page titled TRICKD, with Tracy running a lie-detector test on a middle-aged woman with a white ponytail. She’s furious and hysterical by turns; “TELL THE LION AND THE SHIP TO COME IN,” Tracy says. Two panels later her face is doubled by a younger version of herself, with another older version in the background, as she shouts, “WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?” at Tracy—over a severed hand, still in its shirt cuff, lying on a steel table. “A CROSS DIDN’T DO IT!” she screams from a jail cell. “LET’S HEAR IT ALL, PUNY,” says a cop. “I’M SCARED TO QUESTION YOU ABOUT ANOTHER SUBJECT, EVER!” says Tracy. Followed by a series (“KIT CARY,” “CRACKY I,” “IKICK ART”) involving a woman smothering a man with a pillowcase, broken teeth, a missing baby, and a woman, the murderer, sentenced to a year in prison not for the killing but for “living at home.” And then it gets complicated.

  6 Cleve Duncan, July 23, 1935–November 7, 2012 Soaring over the skipping piano triplets as if he didn’t hear them, Duncan was the lead voice in the Penguins’ “Earth Angel,” in 1954 one of the first Los Angeles doo-wop singles—a record that has proved as enduring as anything else America has turned up over the last sixty years, including Martin Luther King’s address to the March on Washington, which was its own kind of music, the legend of Sylvia Plath, or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. The song came down to earth—and lived as true a life as in any other place or time—in Philip Roth’s 1962 Letting Go, when it played behind what might be the saddest line he ever wrote, and this time you could imagine that Duncan did hear Roth’s young woman, just the sort of person who would have loved the song: “She could not believe that her good times were all gone.”

  7 Michael Robbins, Alien Vs. Predator (Penguin, 2012) Robbins’s poetry is quick as thought, as Constance Rourke might have put it, if he’d been around in 1931 for Rourke to include him in her American Humor: A Study of the National Character. With Davy Crockett–Mike Fink brags brought up to date (“I clear the jungle with the edge of my hand. / I make love to an ATM. I enrich uranium,” followed by the perfect capper: “I’m uninsured”) and pop songs bouncing off a nineteenth-century novel (in “Self-Titled,” I can’t tell if I like “This is Uncle Tom to Ground Control” more than “I just died in my arms tonight”), it might be more true to say Robbins’s poetry is thought, or rather a mind alive but not thinking at all, a jumble of memory and stimuli and distractions and it’s-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue, never mind, a roaring in the head of someone talking to someone else while what he’s really doing is talking to himself, but barely listening, and having the time of his life.

  8 Nick Cave and Warren Ellis Present Lawless Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Sony Classical) On covers of Link Wray’s 1971 “Fire and Brimstone” and the Velvet Underground’s 1968 “White Light/White Heat,” Mark Lanegan, leader of the 1990s Seattle band Screaming Trees, might be acting out the titles. He dives headlong over words, chords, rhythm changes as if speed is its own reward—and for a 2012 bootlegging movie set in the 1920s, music from forty years later couldn’t hit harder. On the other hand, the bluegrass icon Ralph Stanley was born in the Virginia mountains where the movie is set, in the ’20s, when the music that later made his name was already old—and his covers of the same songs sound like shtick, because he’s a shtick singer.

  9 On the Road, directed by Walter Salles, written by Jose Rivera (IFC) Jack Kerouac was casting the movie of his novel before it was published (he would star); finally, fifty-five years later, with the book still selling 100,000 copies a year and Kerouac dead since 1969, here it is. Except for Kirsten Dunst, who has nothing to do but act pissed off, the women—Amy Adams, Elisabeth Moss, Kristen Stewart—hold the screen, even if they have only walk-through parts. The men flop. Sam Riley, so fierce as Ian Curtis in Control and Pinkie in Brighton Rock, is vague and scattered as Sal Paradise (Kerouac); Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty tries hard, throwing himself at the story, but his features are too soft and rounded to give even a hint of why Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg couldn’t take their eyes off Neal Cassady. There is one killing scene, at the end. In New York, Moriarty comes out of the night, approaching
Paradise, who’s dressed in a coat and tie and surrounded by friends; they haven’t seen each other for a long time. Hedlund reaches out, but he seems addled, damaged; you can almost smell his desperation, his loneliness, and you can see Riley smell it too, and step back. “Duke Ellington won’t wait,” says a voice behind Riley, and he turns away. “I love you as always,” Hedlund says, and he’s left in the shadows, like Paul Muni at the end of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, slipping into the dark after seeing his onetime lover Helen for the last time. “How do you live?” she asks him. “I steal,” he says.

  10 Rick Perlstein, “The Long Con: Mail-Order Conservatism,” the Baffler #21 (Fall 2012) “It’s time, in other words, to consider whether Romney’s fluidity with the truth is, in fact, a feature and not a bug: a constituent part of his appeal to conservatives. The point here is not just that he lies when he says conservative things, even if he believes something different in his heart of hearts—but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on American Idol is supposed to sound.”

  Thanks to Allison Kirkland

  MARCH-APRIL 2013

  SPECIAL POST-ELECTION WHAT IS AMEICA EDITION

  1 Amy Winehouse, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” from At the BBC (Republic) A DVD traces her 2006 appearance at the Other Voices festival in the remote Irish town Dingle: a set of exquisite performances, Winehouse singing in a church, tiny under her bouffant, dressed in black jeans, trainers, a low-cut sleeveless top, two face studs, and her tattoos, accompanied only by bass and guitar. In interview footage intercut between songs she talks earnestly about the people from whom she learned to sing—Mahalia Jackson, the Shangri-Las, Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, Carleen Anderson, Sarah Vaughn, and Thelonious Monk, and the film lets you watch them as Winehouse might have. A CD collects fourteen BBC performances, most of them live, and as she moves through her own songs “Back to Black,” “In My Bed,” “You Know I’m No Good,” and “Tears Dry on Their Own,” and the torch singer Julie London’s 1955 “I Should Care,” you’re pulled into the impeccably edited and lit black and white film noir she acted out on the two albums she made while she was still alive. And then, on the last track, after you’ve admired her sense of style, her commitment to craft, the way her professionalism was inseparable from her fandom, comes the heartbreaker: a 2006 radio-station cover of the first record by the Teddy Bears, with Phil Spector on guitar and contributing the song, a vocal trio that came out of Fairfax High School in Los Angeles to score a number one hit in 1958. Then it was simpering, pious: Spector never failed to mention that he took the title phrase from his father’s grave (“From the words on my grave,” he once said before correcting himself). Now it’s full, rich, gorgeous, and slow, with a step from one word, one idea, to the next, the journey of a lifetime, which neither the singer nor the listener is willing to see end.