Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Nomi Kane, Jingle Bell Rock, SXSW 2010 and Namaste, Home Is Where the Boss Is in Wings for Wheels and Sugar Baby (brewforbreakfast.com) Kane is an autobiographical Berkeley comix artist. Her thin, plain lines and utter refusal of caricature or exaggeration produce a pathos and sweetness that capture the pain of children that parents can’t touch. That’s true even when the child and the adult who can’t save her turn out to be the same person—as with Home Is Where the Boss Is, the chronicle of an entire life, from five or six (“For a time I was convinced Bruce and the Big Man lived behind the speaker grate in my Dad’s Honda hatchback”) to adulthood. And there is Sugar Baby, the diary of a little girl diagnosed as diabetic. Her doctor gives her “an old friend to help [her] practice injections”; it looks like a Raggedy Ann inflatable sex doll. In “ Family Restaurants,” the girl goes into the restroom to inject herself in the stomach; two older girls come in, see the needle, and walk right back out. “This place has really gone downhill,” one of them says.

  3 Hollis Brown, Ride on the Train (Alive) Presumably named for the Bob Dylan song about a South Dakota farmer who kills his five children, his wife, and himself, this four-piece guitar band from Brooklyn is keeping forgotten Lynyrd Skynyrd promises. The title song, the first track, goes far enough, but with “Walk on Water,” near the end, the stops come out, the rivers are crossed, and you can see all the way to the Pacific.

  4 Phil Spector, written and directed by David Mamet (HBO) This isn’t about Phil Spector. It’s about Al Pacino, and the way actors carry their roles with them all across their careers. At the end of The Godfather: Part III, Michael Corleone’s daughter is shot, and then, years later, we see him as an old man, sitting in the Italian sunlight, toppling off his chair dead. This is what happened in between: in a mansion that feels like a haunted house, caution has turned to paranoia, pride to megalomania, resentment to rage, intelligence to suspicion. All of Pacino’s awful tics and jerks and shouting find their vessel, and you can’t bear to miss a word he says.

  5 Mark Fisher, “Eerie Thanatos: Nigel Kneale and Dark Enlightenment,” in The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, edited by S. S. Sandhu (Texte und Töne/Colloquium for Unpopular Culture) In this collection dedicated to the British screenwriter Kneale’s Quatermass TV and film project, which through the 1950s and 1960s pushed the theme of alien invasion ever more steadily as a threat not from outer space but from within human beings themselves, Fisher takes on the final, 1979 installment. Here the scientist Bernard Quatermass, now an old man after his battles to save the world in The Creeping Unknown (1955) and Five Million Years to Earth (1967), is bent on rescuing his daughter from a millenarian youth suicide cult: “In place of the hippie dream of a renewed Earth, his trance-intoxicated postpunk proto-crusties—the Planet People—long for an escape into another world, another solar system.” The analogue in 1979, Fisher goes on, wasn’t Star Wars or Close Encounters of the Third Kind but Joy Division, in Manchester, acting out the collapse of the Industrial Revolution in the city where it was born: “The breathtaking audacity of Unknown Pleasures, after all, lay in its presumption that youth culture was essentially thanatoid. Maybe only the Stones had made that equation so starkly, but even they had only hinted at it, returning to more familiar hedonic territory. Joy Division were unremitting: a black-hole effect, an inversion and terrible turning back against itself of rock’s exhilaration and energy.”

  6 Kacey Musgraves, Same Trailer, Different Park (Mercury) When a young performer receives ecstatic coverage all at once in toney outlets—in this case, “Kacey Musgraves’s Rebel Twang” by Carlo Rotella in the New York Times Magazine, a rave in the daily Times by Jon Caramanica, a celebration on NPR by Will Hermes indistinguishable from a press release, with the adjective beautiful applied to conventional song structures and accompaniment—chances are there’s less there than listening is likely to turn up. When Melissa Swingle called her country band Trailer Bride, you could hear that story in her voice; all you hear in Musgraves’s is confidence, as a stance or a marketing strategy. Musgraves has staked out a position as a fearless opponent of country-music piety (“Ms. Musgraves’s assault is full-frontal,” Caramanica writes), but something else is going on. “If you save yourself for marriage you’re a bore,” Musgraves sings in “Follow Your Arrow,” sounding sick of the hypocrisy she’s lived with all her life. “If you don’t save yourself for marriage you’re a whore”—“-ibble person,” she dribbles off. Cool way to say what you mean while playing by the rules of country music and mocking them at the same time, or flattery of the listener cool enough to get the joke, which is everyone? It’s not the rebellion that sells the song, it’s the coyness.

  7 Swamp Dogg, Total Destruction to Your Mind (Alive) In 1970, Jerry Williams was a very odd, very funny, very catholic soul singer who sang protest songs—his, Joe South’s, whatever moved him. He sang about racism, pollution, alienation, and he never held still; with his crying voice and a lot of wah-wah guitar, he could make the corniest conceit into a true heartbreaker. “Synthetic World” is convincing simply on the basis of its melody, but “The World Beyond,” a very slow ballad about nuclear holocaust, takes every cliché to the edge of tragedy. A man dreams about a little boy listening as his father tells him “of the world that used to be.” But the father never says a word. The song is all the boy’s questions, and each one is more painful than the one before it, sometimes less for the words (“Did concrete cover the land? / And what was a rock ’n’ roll band?”) than for Williams’s voice, so deep with a plea for understanding, comfort, physical contact, a random smile, that you want to reach through the speakers and tell him it will be OK. Except he’s already convinced you it won’t be, and that you can’t reach him: “What was a dog, and what was a shoe?”

  8 John Parish, Screenplay (Thrill Jockey) An album drawn from pieces composed for various contemporary movies (Sister, Little Black Spiders, Plein Sud), but that’s not how it plays. What you’re hearing is the soundtrack to an imaginary European film noir set in the mid-’60s—maybe the 1965 Symphony for a Massacre, which has disappeared so completely it might as well be imaginary. You watch your movie as you listen, wondering which of the characters you’ve cast will make it to the end.

  9 Nicolas Rapold, review of Love and Honor (New York Times, March 21) “The setting is that tragic time in our nation’s history” when “federal law apparently mandated the playing of ‘Magic Carpet Ride.’ Predictable consequences unfold when . . .”

  10 Daniel Wolff, “Postcards of the Hanging,” Oxford American (spring) The best art criticism I’ve read in ages: a short, plainly written walk-around in Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” teasing out why the end of the song is the beginning and the beginning the end—and why it is, like so many other tunes that seem like something else (“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “Highlands,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ”), a protest song. “A bluesy harmonica replaces the voice. It smears across the other instruments, almost knocking the lead guitar off-rhythm. Like a blackout after a string of scenes. Or like speech when speech doesn’t work anymore.”

  JULY-AUGUST 2013

  1 Eleanor Friedberger, “I Am the Past,” from Personal Record (Merge Records) The song doesn’t just get under your skin, it seems to emerge from under your skin, a memory lost a lifetime ago, but somehow now speaking in its own, full voice. On her second solo album, Friedberger is bright, light, taking pleasure from the softly bouncing melody, the muted trombone, the skipping flute, letting the darker shadows of her character—alluring, beckoning, irresistible, unnameable and unknowable—rise up and disappear. Is the sprite really singing only a nursery rhyme, as she says before she turns into something else? You could play this song all day long and not get to the bottom of “I am the past. . . . You have no idea what happened before me”—of the way Fried-berger floats through the words, turning them into a wave goodbye, Audrey Hepburn, her hair in a scarf, in a skiff, smiling as she slips over the horizon.

  2 Jo Jackson, lettering; Chris Johan
son, pictures; cover art for Last Kind Words 1926–1953 (Mississippi Records, 2006) This collection of blues and gospel, an out-of-print LP from a few years ago, is named for and leads off with Geeshie Wiley’s 1930 “Last Kind Words Blues,” a song that carries the singer from a man’s death to her own, and takes the uncanny as a walk down the street. The sleeve shows the walk down the street. It’s a colorful folk-art grid of a pleasant, sunny, orderly American place, and all the people going from here to there, looking out the window, sitting on the pavement, and what they’re saying, what they’re thinking. Back cover, in a neighborhood of apartment houses: “I am like some kind of a log rolling.” “That’s ok is it a fish I don’t know what the hells going on anymore.” “It is hard to leave you.” “Death is only a dream.” “Ding dong.” “It was so careless so very careless.” “I’m going.” “I see you.” Front cover, downtown: “That is no way to get along don’t now.” “Don’t let nobody turn you round.” “Money can’t buy your soul.” “Salvation.” “No kind words nowhere.” “Death is only a dream.” It’s a portrait of nearly complete isolation (a woman on the phone saying, “I called you this morning” might be talking to an actual person, or leaving a message), each phrase its own kind of last word, with no sense that anyone is listening, and most of the music—from Blind Willie and Kate McTell, the Mississippi Moaner, Robert Wilkins, Lulu Jackson, Cannon’s Jug Stompers—falls just short.

  3 Lightning Dust, Fantasy (Jagjaguwar) On a third album, Amber Webber and Josh Wells let their music float just off the ground, the sometimes-harsh consonants or quick shifts in tone from Lightning Dust (2007) and Infinite Light (2009) falling away like clothes. What’s left is a kind of séance. Webber’s voice—bigger than that of Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval, less self-regarding than Lana Del Rey’s, the closest analogue maybe Brit Marling’s demeanor as the quietly terrifying cult leader in Sound of My Voice—hovers somewhere between life and death. It’s not limbo, it’s a country to explore. What happens there? People think they recognize each other as they pass in the air, but names arrive only in the mind after the other person has disappeared. How do people talk there? In incomplete sentences, with a tone that’s unstable, that threatens to evaporate as you listen. With Cris Derksen’s cello giving the music muscle and bone, it all comes to a head with “Agatha.” It’s just over four minutes long; depending on your mood, it can feel like nine, it can feel like two. It won’t hold its shape, it won’t hold still.

  4 Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer, “Tam Lin,” from Child Ballads (Wilderland Records) Deep down, this is the tale biding its time inside Lightning Dust’s sound: a ghost lover makes a woman pregnant, then turns into a wolf, a bear, and a lion before he appears naked in her arms as himself. In the full text of the ancient ballad, it’s because he’s cursed by a fairy; in Mitchell and Hamer’s version, as they explained on the Scott Simon program on NPR, getting rid of the supernatural lets in the subconscious—the real home of fairies and ghosts. Mitchell steps through the song as if she’s walking on water lilies, alive to the thrill of telling the best bedtime story in the world.

  5 Rihanna, “Stay” (SRP) It was stunning on Saturday Night Live months ago. On the radio, played constantly, the daring of the performance, its challenge to everything around it—the refusal of melisma, the singer not owning the words but letting them capture her, almost no accompaniment but a simple, chording piano—stands out so plainly you can hear the more extreme record the singer, the writers, and the producers might have wanted to make: Rihanna, a melody, a lyric, and absolutely nothing else.

  6 Twenty Feet from Stardom, directed by Morgan Neville (Tremolo Productions) A documentary about black female backup singers that owes its life to producer Gil Friesen, who died last December. Darlene Love is the heroine, but every woman here reads from her own book. Most confounding is Lisa Fischer, so wrapped up in her own language as she hums and scats into a microphone today, so one-dimensional as she tried for a solo career in the 1970s with the likes of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Southern Man.” Most dignified, and the most fun, is Merry Clayton, talking about the third verse of “Gimme Shelter.” It’s the middle of the night in Los Angeles, and the phone rings—there’s some group, “The Rolling—the Rolling Somethings,” they need a singer. “They picked me up with silk pajamas on,” she says, “a mink coat, and a Chanel scarf.” “I didn’t know her from Adam,” Mick Jagger says; he still can’t believe she showed up in curlers. She can’t believe what she’s supposed to sing. “I said, what? ‘Rape—murder—it’s just a shot away’?” They run through it once. Jagger asks if she’ll do another take. “So I said to myself,” Clayton says—and you can see her setting her mouth, tensing her body—“I’m going to do another one—I’m going to blow them out of this room.” You hear the naked track, just her in dead air; you hear how she did it, her voice breaking, the near-stop just after the last “it’s” in “It’s just a shot away” that makes all the difference. And it’s not even her best story. “Many years ago, when I was singing with Ray,” she says of her time as one of Ray Charles’s Raelettes, “I saw this guy contorting in the front row of the concert. I’m saying to the rest of the girls through my teeth, ‘Who is that guy? What’s wrong with him?’ ” She ended up singing behind Joe Cocker, too.

  7 The Company You Keep, directed by Robert Redford, written by Lem Dobbs (Voltage Pictures, 2012) Thirty years after a Weatherman robbery that left a bank guard dead, the whole crew comes up from underground as Redford crisscrosses the country to get Julie Christie to clear his name. It’s a good movie. At seventy-one, Christie is Friedberger’s “I Am the Past” in the flesh; she has a pull the woman in Billy Liar, Darling, or even Don’t Look Now only hinted at. And what’s altogether remarkable, what keeps the story clean, what keeps it whole, is that there is no soundtrack-of-their-lives. No “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” No “Turn! Turn! Turn!” No “War.” No “Bad Moon Rising.” Not one song.

  8 The Canyons, directed by Paul Schrader, written by Bret Easton Ellis (IFC Films) A New Poverty Row Productions project, starring a glass house high in the L.A. hills and rotting cinemas in abandoned strip malls. “About kids who got in line for a movie and the theater closed, but they stayed in line anyway, because they had nowhere else to go,” Schrader says—and a Los Angeles where film culture consists of people in their twenties with money from their parents financing “run-of-the-mill slasher movies in Arizona.” Starring Lindsay Lohan, who goes all out, and porn star James Deen, who’s believable until he has to kill someone, which he didn’t really have to do.

  9 Levon Helm, “Kingfish” (Rollingstone.com) A clip from the documentary Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm. On Electric Dirt, the Randy Newman tribute to Huey Long seemed like a setpiece about two professional Southerners. Here it’s so relaxed, the singer as satisfied as the listener, and the song something Helm could have been singing since he was ten.

  10 Julie Bosman, “Judging ‘Gatsby’ by Its Cover(s),” the New York Times (April 25) Boycott independent bookstores? In a story about new editions of The Great Gatsby—that is, about which stores are stocking only the Baz Luhrmann movie tie-in with Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover (Walmart) and which only the one with the original spooky-eyes art—Kevin Cassem of McNally Jackson, a beloved independent in New York, told Bosman that the movie version was beyond the pale: “ ‘The Great Gatsby’ is a pillar of American literature, and people don’t want it messed with. We’re selling the classic cover and have no intention of selling the new one.” Bosman apparently caught the genteel fascism in Cassem’s attitude; she asked him “ whether the new, DiCaprio-ed edition of ‘Gatsby’ would be socially acceptable to carry around in public.” “I think it would bring shame to anyone who was trying to read that book on the subway,” Cassem said. So it’s better not to read the book at all than to read it with the wrong cover? Or is Cassem going to be the literary Bernie Goetz?

  SEPTEMBER 2013

  1 Counting Crows
, Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did on Our Summer Vacation) (Collective Sounds/Tyrannosaurus) After five top-ten albums on a tony major, the last in 2008, Counting Crows have put out a set of covers on their own label, some of them from little-known or never-heard bands they came up with in Berkeley in the late 1980s and early ’90s. “Every last bit of it,” singer Adam Duritz writes, “felt utterly unique and every last bit of it was being repeated somewhere else, lived by somebody else, experienced by a thousand ‘someone else’s’ in places all over like Minneapolis and Seattle and Boston and New York City and, of course, in a little town called Athens, Ga., not to mention London and Dublin and Glasgow.” As in those words, and as in all of Counting Crows’ best work, Duritz is sentimental, nostalgic, pleading, shameless; he wears his heart on his sleeve while the band, especially guitarists Dan Vickrey and David Immerglück, do their best to tear it off and throw it around the room. It becomes clear that with no period affectations, no genre inflections, Duritz is a soul singer; he sings to plumb the depths. Whether on Kasey Anderson’s 2010 “Like Teenage Gravity” or Fairport Convention’s 1969 “Meet on the Ledge,” he demands the songs explain themselves to him—why this word leads to that one, why the melody curves away from him when he thought he had it in his grasp, why the song cries out for something he can’t give but the musicians can, must—and the only way to make the songs do that is to sing them. It happens most acutely with Dawes’s 2010 “All My Failures.” In the original, the vocal is thin to the point of preciousness; you can hear the singer listening to himself. You can hear vanity, the way the song may not need you at all—and, for that matter, you don’t necessarily believe the singer believes he ever failed at anything. Counting Crows pushes hard from the start, and in the play that’s instantly under way, Duritz is a witness—to his own failures, sure, but also to yours. And then you are a witness to his, and to your own. And then you play it again, wondering why it sounds so good.