Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Philip Kerr, Prague Fatale (Penguin) There are probably a number of reasons Kerr wrote this book, the eighth Bernie Gunther thriller, this one set in Berlin and Prague in 1941: to keep the series running, to fool around with an Agatha Christie parody that turns out to be too self-parodying for its own good, and—with a few pages on a dank room, a woman’s head, and a Nazi’s foot on a basin that are so harrowing you wish you could stop reading—to finish the argument over whether or not waterboarding is torture.

  3 Keith Richards on Robert Johnson, from “Love and War Inside the Rolling Stones,” Rolling Stone (May 23) “Robert Johnson, there’s fear there, yeah. A fear of what? If you’ve faced fear yourself, you want to tell other people that it’s faceable. There’s no point in ignoring it. That’s an element of the expression in what we’ve done, in, say, ‘Gimme Shelter.’ Fear is just a viable element, an emotion to use in a song as any other emotion.”

  4–5 Tom Jones, Spirit in the Room (Rounder) In Jones’s gnarled hands, Leonard Cohen’s 1988 “Tower of Song” is so pure in tone it can make you think of the Tower of Babel before God scattered the single human language into thousands: it’s that gorgeous. His version of Blind Willie Johnson’s 1930 “Soul of a Man” has its feet in the earth. But too much of the album misfires: “Just Dropped In” isn’t half as threatening as First Edition’s 1967 original, where the parenthetical that Jones’s titling omits brought the song home even before it started: “(To See What Condition My Condition Was In).” The world doesn’t need another pious journey to the grave of the “Lone Pilgrim.” As Charles Taylor reports, the real story may be playing out onstage: “On May 18, at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, Jones opened the show with Cohen’s song and here it was a declaration of principles, Jones’s astounding confidence a statement of a craftsman’s undiminished pride in the face of time. In the 100 minutes of the show he did only one hit, ‘The Green Green Grass of Home,’ and that tucked into the encore. Jones covered the jubilant spiritual ‘Didn’t It Rain’ but sounded as if he were powerful enough to take sustenance from the desert, which is why it made sense when he sang about trees springing from rock. No longer needing to prove himself as a showman, Jones now seems to care only about proving himself to the music, which is why the peak of the show—an unexpected version of George Jones’s ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’—hit with the quiet devastation of Sinatra’s ‘Cottage for Sale’ or Dolly Parton’s ‘Down from Dover,’ songs that, a few lines in, you don’t know whether you’ll have the strength to get through. A story of devotion unto death, Jones made it a memorial for Jones’s great, ragged career, and made the devotion of the man in the song for the woman he has lost the story of his own dedication to the music before him.”

  6 Barack Obama, speech at National Defense University, Fort McNair (Washington, D.C., May 23) At one point in Barack Obama’s lucid defense of his administration’s terror war policies—when he got to the congressional refusal to permit the closing of Guantánamo—Medea Benjamin of Code Pink broke in from the audience: “Excuse me, Mr. President—” “Let me finish, ma’am,” he said. They went back and forth, his “To the greatest extent possible, we will transfer detainees who have been cleared to go to other countries” answered by her “—prisoners already. Release them today.” His statements, her numbers. The crowd clapped for the president to show which side it was on—but there was nobody dragged from the room, held in protective custody, arrested for disorderly conduct, all of the presidential thuggery so familiar from the Reagan and Bush presidencies that when it doesn’t happen you think you must have missed something. “I’m willing to cut the young lady who interrupted me some slack,” Obama said, “because it’s worth being passionate about.” If that was meant to mollify her, it didn’t work. She would not quit—and finally the president backed off and, for nearly a minute, waited as Benjamin replaced his speech with hers. He ended with a Norman Rockwell painting—one that had, no doubt, been painted in advance, with one square erased at the last minute and filled in on the spot: “Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony at a battleship, or a statue being pulled to the ground. Victory will be measured in parents taking their kids to school; immigrants coming to our shores; fans taking in a ballgame; a veteran starting a business; a bustling city street; a citizen shouting her concerns at a president.”

  7 The Trajectory of Cinema, #746. 1942: Les visiteurs du soir, directed by Marcel Carné: “Two strangers dressed as minstrels . . . arrive at a castle in advance of court festivities—and are revealed to be emissaries of the devil, dispatched to spread heartbreak and suffering. Their plans, however, are thwarted by an unexpected intrusion: human love” (Criterion . com). 2013: The History of Future Folk, directed by John Mitchell and Jeremy Kipp Walter: “Sent to earth to plan for a future invasion, a space alien (Nils d’Aulaire) lands in Brooklyn and instead decides to become a bluegrass musician” (New York Times, May 3).

  8 Felice Brothers, “Dream On,” from God Bless You, Amigo (thefelicebrothers.com) The Felice brothers are from the Catskills, not another planet, but they did form their bluegrass band in Brooklyn—and over five albums they have never come up with anything more affecting than this rewrite of the now almost 120-year-old Stagger Lee ballad. Most often it’s been a celebration of the African American badman, sometimes it’s been a cautionary tale, but rarely if ever has it been a dream of regret. The music moves like a quietly turning stream, carrying the killer farther and farther away from the life he could have lived if, just that once, he hadn’t pulled his gun. At the same time, the dream pulls back, so that you see Stagger Lee in the moment before his act, seeing all the way into the half-life he will live: the half-life of exile and prison, the half-life of a real person, one Lee “Stag” Shelton, who disappeared into legend years before he actually died; you can imagine him forgetting his own name.

  9 Moreland & Arbuckle, 7 Cities (Telarc) A song cycle about Coronado’s search for the Seven Cities of Gold on the band’s own Kansas home ground—but you don’t need any backstory to respond to the muscle and heft on this album, especially the broken-shackles guitar on “Bite Your Tongue,” the bursting harmonica on “Time Ain’t Long,” or to realize that the group’s whole reason for being might be to set a scene where covering “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” would make perfect, glorious sense.

  10 “Izzy Young Reads Bob Dylan’s Unpublished Poem ‘Go Away You Bomb’ ” (soundcloud.com) In 1963, Izzy Young, proprietor of the Folklore Center in New York, asked various people for contributions to a book of anti-war poems that was never published; this year, he traveled from his home in Sweden to auction off what Bob Dylan came up with: “Go Away You Bomb.” To a small crowd, Young read it out, sounding more like Allen Ginsberg than anyone else. At first it was laughably phony, or so phony you were supposed to be in on the joke: “My good gal don’t like you none. . . . I don’t like it none too good.” Then there were a few lines about how the bomb was bad. Then it got clever: “ ’orrible. You’re so ’orrible the word drops its first letter and runs.” And then it went elsewhere, as the writer turned himself into his own enemy—be that the villains of “Masters of War” or John Wayne or Lyndon Johnson or even Cowboy Slim Pickens, yahooing his way to oblivion at the end of Dr. Strangelove, which wouldn’t happen until a year later. “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes, and just for that one moment I could be you,” Dylan sang two years later, when he had gone from Greenwich Village phenom to world face; empathy has always been the key to his songwriting, but the turn this doggerel takes is still a surprise. “I want that bomb,” Dylan wrote, and Young read evenly, enjoying it as much as he might have flinched from it fifty years ago. “I want it hanging out of my pocket and dangling from my keychain. I want it strapped to my belt buckle . . . I want that bomb. I want it sticking out of my mouth like a cigar . . . I want to get up in the morning and scare the day right out of its dawn. Then I walk into the White House and say, Dig yourselves!”
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  NOTE: In my previous column, regarding the new film Twenty Feet from Stardom, I mistakenly attributed the performance of “Southern Man” to Lisa Fischer. It was by Merry Clayton. My apologies.—G. M.

  OCTOBER 2013

  1–2 Stephen Burt, Belmont: Poems (Graywolf Press) and Breaking Circus, “Driving the Dynamite Truck” (Homestead, 1986) “Yes, another / poem about flowers and kids,” Burt says early on in this collection, but the ruling themes are age and how to stave off cowardice—how to keep rage alive. “We have task force reports, // but no tasks, and no force” could be a sentimental definition of poetry as such, but that’s not how it works here. Rather, it’s a question: of course we have tasks, of course we have force, but what are they, and where is it? “You realize that you have become the person you are—/ not who you were, not who you want to be, / but something close to them, in exactly the way / the new low-intensity streetlights come close to the moon.” It may all come to a head in two poems that could not be more different: the searing, all-but-evaporating “There,” which can leave you stranded in abstraction and disconnection, and “In Memory of the Rock Band Breaking Circus.” “We barely remember you in Minnesota we love // our affable Replacements,” Burt, late of Macalester College, in St.Paul, writes of a mid’80s Chicago and Minneapolis group—but Breaking Circus played “as if you knew you had to get across / your warnings against all our lives as fast / as practicable before roommate or friend / could get up from a couch to turn them off.” It’s that “them” that sticks: it’s the warnings that had to be turned off, not merely a record. And while it’s impossible to hear the band’s “(Knife in the) Marathon” today on its own terms, “Driving the Dynamite Truck” remains a weirdly balanced paean to destruction: a clipped, spoken vocal over a melody that comments on itself, a harsh, seemingly one-dimensional pulse that as it moves across the minutes picks up the back-and-forth dynamics of a Gang of Four record from five years before. There’s no warmth, no flattery of the players or whoever might be listening.

  3 David Lynch, The Big Dream (Sacred Bones) On Lynch’s first album, Crazy Clown Time, you were listening to an old man who never got over high school—who could never get his pornographic fantasies of Sue and Darlene and Diane out of his head. Here the voice is more that of an old codger unwilling to bring anything into too tight a focus, and the record rides on its music. “The most significant event of the twentieth century?” Kristine McKenna asked Lynch back in the twentieth century. “The birth of rock ’n’ roll,” he said, and now, in a different language than he spoke in Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart or Twin Peaks, he’s taking his place in that story. Like Nina Simone and the Stooges before him, he goes up against Bob Dylan’s deadly “Ballad of Hollis Brown” as if it were a test, and from the first two words you know you’re hearing about a real person, even if Dylan made him up.

  4 “The Genoa Tip,” The Newsroom (HBO, July 21) Jeff Daniels meets Emily Mortimer in a bar and she throws his drink into his lap. She’s trying to argue with him when Willie Nelson’s version of “Always on My Mind” comes on and Daniels turns his back, lost in the self-pity of the performance: “A hundred covers of this song,” he says like a penitent contemplating the philosopher’s stone, “and nobody sings it like him. Not even Elvis.” And something tells you that, deep inside the scene, he knows he’s lying, because Nelson gives himself and the listener a way out, and Elvis doesn’t, because he’s so gorgeously lying: he never thought of her once.

  5 Bob Dylan, “Suzie Baby,” Midway Stadium, St. Paul, Minnesota (July 10, minnpost.com) In a setting one attendee described as “totally Midwestern—when ‘All Along the Watchtower’ began, the train running past the stadium blew three perfect whistles”—Dylan went back to 1959. It was then that Buddy Holly’s plane went down, on February 3, just days after Dylan (then Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota) had seen Holly play in Duluth; that, the next morning, Bobby Vee, then Bob Velline, the singer for a just-past-fantasy Fargo Central High School band called the Shadows, answered a promoter’s call for someone to fill in for Holly that night in Moorhead, Minnesota; that, in the summer, Zimmerman, calling himself Elston Gunn, briefly joined the Shadows on piano in North Dakota; that, in the fall, the renamed Bobby Vee and the Shadows went into the Soma Records studio in Minneapolis to record their first single, Vee’s own “Suzie Baby.” A subtle weave of doo-wop and rockabilly, it was a regional hit; picked up by Liberty Records, it made number seventy-seven on the national charts. Vee went on to become a teen idol, with six top-ten hits between 1960 and 1967, including the number one “Take Good Care of My Baby” and the gothic “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”; by 1970 he was off the charts for good. Bob Dylan went on to become Bob Dylan; in his Chronicles, Volume One, he writes affectionately of taking the D train from Greenwich Village to the Brooklyn Paramount in 1961 to see Vee “appearing with the Shirelles, Danny and the Juniors, Jackie Wilson, Ben E. King, Maxine Brown,” and more. He went backstage: “I told him I was playing in the folk clubs, but it was impossible to give him any indication of what it was all about.” Last year, Velline, now seventy, having reclaimed his given name in 1972 with a singer-songwriter album called Nothin’ Like a Sunny Day, announced he had Alzheimer’s; this night in St. Paul he was in the audience to hear Dylan, seventy-two, dedicate his song to him. “I’ve played all over the world, with all kinds of people, everybody from Mick Jagger to Madonna. I’ve been on the stage with most of those people,” Dylan said musically. “But the most beautiful”—or did he say “meaningful”?—“person I’ve been on the stage with is a man who’s here tonight, who used to sing a song called ‘Suzie Baby.’ I want to say, Bobby Vee is actually here tonight.” With border-town guitar underlying every phrase, the tune came forth so delicately, suspended in time, as if Dylan, walking on eggshells and not cracking a single one, were glancing back to the past not from the present moment but from well into the future, where the song was, against all odds, with Velline dead, Dylan dead, still sung.

  6–7 Alfred Hayes, In Love (1953) and My Face for the World to See (1958) (New York Review Books) These two short novels, the first set in Manhattan, the second in Los Angeles, might remind a reader of a John O’Hara story, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Ross Macdonald’s The Chill, but soon comparisons burn off, the settings float away, and you are in a swamp of sexual obsession where all places and all values melt down to worthless egotism: clenched fists or suicide. “There was nobody anywhere I could miss enough for it to matter and the terrible thing for me was that even when I missed them I knew it was not important and that nothing had been really lost for me,” says the man in In Love. “That was why she wanted it to be over. That was why she had gone back to him”—cue Elvis Presley, “Always on My Mind.” The books feel much longer than they are, because they are so dense, and their density comes from a relentless self-questioning, the first-person narrators locking themselves into their own torture chambers, making themselves talk, and never giving up everything, because then the torturer would turn away in disgust.

  8 Michèle Bernstein, The Night (Book Works) Clodagh Kinsella’s translation of a novel first published in Paris in 1961 as La nuit gives full purchase to the unflinching coldness inside this superficially cool parody of the nouveau roman hiding inside a parody of Les liaisons dangereuses inside a parody of the author’s life with her then husband, Guy Debord. In a new preface, Bernstein writes that, as a situationist and a member of “the lumpensecretariat,” she wrote strictly for money. “Lots of fashionable novels came my way,” she says. “I saw how I could write one that would immediately satisfy editors whilst deploying all the rules of the game. The protagonists would be young, beautiful and tanned. They’d have a car, holiday on the Riviera (everything we weren’t, everything we didn’t have). On top of that, they’d be nonchalant, insolent, free (everything we were). A piece of cake.” The cynicism shapes the characters, who revel in it, until it turns into nihilism, and then Bernstein
lets them walk away, if they can. “For three weeks, Léda will sing in a cabaret near the Opéra: just long enough so that she isn’t forgotten, and can maintain her artistic reputation. Afterwards she’ll want to take a role in a film in Japan, and she’ll plan on taking Hélène, so they can eat raw fish together and assimilate a trimillennial culture. Hélène will write a letter to Bertrand, who will never reply. Waiting for Léda, she’ll head off alone on a health retreat in an isolated farmhouse in Provence. And then later she’ll die, on the way home, not far from Hauterives, where Postman Cheval’s Palais Idéal is an essential detour, at the wheel of a Porsche that will coil around a plane tree, as generally happens with this type of car in such encounters.” Bernstein and Alfred Hayes would have had fun killing a bar together.

  9 Lady Gaga, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Gay Pride Rally (New York, July 28, YouTube) Two days after the Supreme Court struck down the central section of the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor, Lady Gaga appeared as an American version of Marianne, cool as an iceberg in a flaring black dress, holding a small rainbow flag. “My LGBT fans and friends always said to me, I knew Lady Gaga when. Well,” she said, gesturing at the crowd, “look who the star is now! Now I get to say that I knew you when. Now I get to say I knew you when you suffered. When you felt unequal. When you felt there was nothing to look forward to. I knew you then—and I knew you when, but I really know you now.” Then she sang ten Super Bowls’ and four Inaugurations’ worth of the national anthem a cappella, with all of the blessings of the song in the full, clear tone of her voice and all of the war the song now celebrates in the ferocity in her face.