Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  10 Ruby Ray, From the Edge of the World: California Punk, 1977–81 (Superior Viaduct) Some of Ray’s photographs are typical musicians’ poses that anyone could have caught. But slowly the apocalyptic tinge in the title begins to pay off. Faces darken. Suspicion rises off of them like steam from the ground. There’s a sense of calm, and you can begin to feel as if you were watching a movie with the sound turned off, which in turn gives the impression that everything is happening in slow motion. A picture of Mick Jones of the Clash, leaping across a San Francisco stage in a posture of pure rock cliché, momentarily breaks the mood, because he’s acting like a star, his movement choreographed by people he’s never met, and in the best pictures here that’s not even a possibility: as in Greg In-graham (The Avengers), you see people doing what they can to be insolent and free in a low-ceilinged room made of grime, heat, glare, and a queer sort of anonymous urgency most of all.

  NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2013

  1–2 Radio Silence: Literature and Rock and Roll, issues 1 and 2, edited by Dan Stone Published in the form of a literary quarterly, but with a design that promises both seriousness and surprise, this Bay Area journal is something people have been waiting for for fifty years: writing in, through, beside, around, and about music, where the first criterion is writing. There is Fitzgerald sharing pages with Geoff Dyer. There’s Ted Gioia trying to bury the myth of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil and finding that it can’t be done; there is Jim White trying to explain to an old man that a character in a Cormac McCarthy novel isn’t real, only to find Suttree’s ghost tapping him on the back. There is Rick Moody, who apparently never met a question he didn’t already know the answer to. But favorites or their opposites are not the point. What it is is a radical overturning of the whole notion of what music is, what it’s for, where you find it, where it goes, and one issue contains not a hint of what another one might have to offer.

  3 A mother takes her five-year-old daughter to see “PUNK: Chaos to Couture” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as related by Deborah Freedman (New York, August 14) Daphna Mor: “This fashion breaks the rules. They did things that other people thought were ugly, provocative—” Alona Mor Freedman: “I like acupuncture fashion!” Daphna: “It is not acupuncture, it is punk.” Alona [excited that she is wearing tights and a pink shirt herself, and pointing to a contemporary dress inspired by punk]: “Ima, this is not acupuncture—it is too pretty.” Daphna: “I know! This one is not real punk, and anyway—it is not acupuncture, it is punk. Acupuncture is what your uncle does with the needles.” Alona: “Ah, they didn’t use needles in punk?” Daphna: “They did, but a different kind . . .”

  4 Typhoon, White Lighter (Roll Call Records) This massed and layered music from Portland, Oregon—eleven band members are named—isn’t going to reveal itself quickly. Moodily considering the fate of the universe, Kyle Morton sings with unlimited self-importance—“Every star is a possible death,” he announces at the start of one number, and then, singing sometimes from behind where the song seems to be, from one state over, from years before it was written, he turns a tone that at first felt pompous into pure urgency. The music might be taking place in the sky—and then, near the end of a song, female voices come in and pull the rug out from under the whole edifice. The big voice is replaced by a little one—high voices, sometimes unnaturally high, Betty Boop after she’s seen it all and is ready to tell at least some of what she knows. And then the record begins to speak in its own tongues. There’s a banjo passage in “Possible Deaths” that can stop you cold with its embodiment of regret; doo-wop chords at the beginning of “Prosthetic Love” that promise a sweetness the song turns away from as soon as you feel its pull. Again and again, there’s a sense of something missing, something withheld. You’re almost there, you can practically touch it, and then you’re not sure that what you heard was there at all. “The Lake” might be the most compelling number; certainly it’s the loveliest. But it only suggests how bottomless the pools at the heart of these songs are.

  5 Aimee Bender, “Americca,” from The Color Master (Doubleday) A story about a household where gifts arrive out of nowhere—“We’ve been backwards robbed,” says one daughter. With an ending set precisely to the rhythm of “Ode to Billie Joe.”

  6 Hugh Laurie on The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, August 5) It began with Stephen Colbert taunting Laurie about his professed love for the blues as opposed to the more-appropriate, for an Englishman, Gilbert and Sullivan: “Do you have to live the blues to play the blues—’cause I always heard [in a growly whisper] You gotta live the blues—to play the blues!” Laurie: “Well, obviously I’m going to say, nooooo, because that’s the sort of position I’m in.” Colbert: “You’re an international star, who was until last year the highest paid man in a drama. OK? That’s not exactly sharecropping.” Laurie: “No, you’re absolutely right. I was handsomely compensated.” Colbert: “And a handsome man as well.” Laurie: “Well, thank you for that. But here’s what I would say. My point is that to me this music—I would hate for this music to be just put in a box of a sort of sociological category of American folk music that is only—it only has meaning because of the experience and the period from which it grew. I think of this music as high art, as high as some bloke singing Don Giovanni down the road.”

  7 Walter Mosley, Little Green (Doubleday) It’s 1967 in Los Angeles and Easy Rawlins is looking for a young black man who has gotten mixed up with hippies and acid. In a commune he meets a runaway who sleeps outside a window and calls herself Coco. She doesn’t seem to notice or care that he’s black. She doesn’t seem to notice or care that she’s naked. The detective listens to her talk, watches as she smiles, and for the first time in the ten novels that have tracked Rawlins’s secretive life from just after the Second World War to now, he is face-to-face with something he wasn’t prepared for, and doesn’t understand. It’s a queasily thrilling tale as it unfolds: he believes, at least for a moment, that he is glimpsing the fresh green breast of a new world, and, for a moment, so do you.

  8 Girls Names, The New Life (Slumber-land Records) A Belfast dream-pop four-piece, with, as it happens, only one girl’s name in its lineup, and that’s appropriate. There are words in guitarist and singer Cathal Cully’s songs, but sometimes there don’t have to be, and at their most effective—“Projektion,” elegant, unpretentious Old World surf music—the occasional human-voice sounds are just another instrument. You can hear Barbara Gogan’s Passions, from London, and the Young Marble Giants, from Cardiff, in the late 1970s; the Chantays’ “Pipeline” from 1963; but most of all Alphaville, that lovely, bitter German synth combo from the mid-1980s, whose “Forever Young” has so far lived forever at high-school graduations. Girls Names lives in a more-abstract forever.

  9 Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, Volume One: 1942–1943, edited by Philip Nel and Eric Reynolds (Fantagraphics Books) Johnson is best known for the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon, in which a round-faced, apparently bald little boy creates the world with a single crayon—just like God. But that little boy first appeared, in the early 1940s, in a daily grown-ups’ comic strip in the pages of the left-wing New York tabloid PM, as Barnaby. He lives in a nice house with his nice parents in a nice suburb. His world is also inhabited by a beer-drinking, cigar-smoking, permanently hungry, profoundly irritating fairy godfather in a pork-pie hat and gossamer wings named Mr. O’Malley, who manages to fuck up every conceivable patriotic, virtuous, charitable, unselfish, necessary wartime endeavor—a neighborhood blackout, a scrap-metal drive—while somehow maintaining an uncanny ability to help Barnaby expose Nazi spy rings. Until, at the end of this big, smiling collection, the House Un-American Activities Committee comes along, and O’Malley, who previously sabotaged a mayor’s radio speech with a Duke Ellington record, takes over with an investigation of a man in a red suit. It’s wonderful the way Barnaby ignores his parents’ attempts to humor him about his delusion, to talk him out of it, to prove that fairies don’t exist, and lucky it
’s the ’40s, not the ’50s, when they would have packed him off to a child psychiatrist. There’s no way Jack Kerouac, along with every other selfconsciously cool person in New York, wasn’t reading this. O’Malley turns into Neal Cassady, the guy who’s not quite human, who never shuts up, who drives you crazy, and who can make anything happen, just like that. There will be a Volume Two; in the meantime, there’s also Nel’s lively, inspiring Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI; and Transformed Children’s Literature (University Press of Mississippi).

  10 Lester Chambers, “ People Get Ready,” Hayward Russell City Blues Festival, Hayward, CA (July 13): For the record: on the day George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder, Chambers, seventy-three, of the Chambers Brothers, dedicated the Impressions song to Trayvon Martin, saying that if its composer, Curtis Mayfield, had been alive he might have changed the line “There’s a train a-comin’ ” to “There’s a change a-comin.’ ” Dinalynn Andrews-Potter, forty-three, then leaped onto the stage and knocked him to the ground. One week later, on August 19, Chambers, who had to cancel shows because of injuries caused by the attack, announced that he would file a five-million-dollar suit against the city of Hayward, Andrews-Potter, the concert promoter, and those responsible for concert security, saying he was left unable to perform for at least the rest of the year—but his main complaint was that Andrews-Potter, who was charged with felony counts of assault and elder abuse, was not charged with a hate crime. Her attorney said she was a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder—and, NBC Bay Area reported, claimed that “the beat of the song triggered the attack.” Presumably, if the case goes to trial, Andrews-Potter will have to name the song that caused her original trauma. And then, if there is any justice, at least in the realm of people coming up with really great excuses for horrible acts—and Andrew-Potter’s is much better than the one Zimmerman’s lawyer provided for him, charging that the unarmed Martin was indeed armed, “with a sidewalk”—whoever owns the copyright will be able to sue her. For libel. Or slander. Defamation. Loss of earnings due to fear that the song might cause harm to others. Or just for the pleasure of watching Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and others defend her defense. I mean, you can already hear them saying: Have you ever heard “A Change Is Gonna Come”? I mean, really heard it?

  Thanks to Linda Mevorach,

  Deborah Freedman, and Charles Taylor

  JANUARY 2014

  1 Pearl Jam and Sleater-Kinney, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Tampa, Florida, 2003 (YouTube) This is no all-star jam. This is rock ’n’ roll celebrating the human spirit, a good song, and itself. It’s two bands touring together, but now one band, six men, three women, Janet Weiss hammering stand-up percussion next to Jack Irons’s drums, Carrie Brownstein facing off with Stone Gossard, Mike McCready soloing joyously while Corin Tucker and Eddie Vedder throw verses back and forth as if each is the other’s all-time teen dream and they’re going to make this senior prom last forever, even if the Neil Young number they’re dancing to is really Carrie’s bucket of blood.

  2 Stanley Crouch, Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (HarperCollins) There’s a moment in this stirring book when Crouch, homing in on the first Joe Louis–Max Schmeling fight, in 1936, links the three minutes of a prizefight round to the three minutes of one side of “a 78-rpm record, all a jazz band needed to make a complete musical statement.” It’s part of a plain and poetic argument about the effect of recording technology on both fighting and jazz. It’s part of a rewriting of the legacy of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, and of how he “almost instigated an interior ethnic riot” when “he chose to go through Harlem bragging about how much money he’d won by betting on the German.” Page by page, the book is unpredictable before it’s anything else. It ends in 1940, with Parker taking his first steps in New York, still a teenager, but the sense of an odyssey completed, the wind of history at one man’s back as he begins to blow it out ahead of himself, is overwhelming.

  3 Rosanne Cash, The River and the Thread (Blue Note) A soul-music travelogue, taking in Memphis, Faulkner, Dockery Farms, the Civil War, Robert Johnson’s gravesite, Bobbie Gentry’s Tallahatchie Bridge, and Money, Mississippi, the town where Emmett Till was lynched and thrown into the river that runs under the bridge. You don’t have to hear any of that; the words don’t point to places on a map. What you hear is time passing.

  4 Rachel Harrison, Fake Titel (D.A.P.) An elegant catalog for an exhibition (beginning in Hannover, Germany, in 2013, and ending at the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium, on January 4, 2014) most notable for a series of unflinchingly rough 2011–12 colored-pencil portraits of Amy Winehouse—Winehouse as a Picasso model, or maybe a muse. Wine-house is juxtaposed with Picasso’s harlequins, his Gertrude Stein, or his cubist nudes; as she seems to be using her handheld mike as a spray can to conjure Guernica out of the air, her own features crack and bend, one eye sliding below the other, her skin bruising in greens and purples. With her beehive seemingly bigger with each picture, her mouth bigger, she begins to resemble a rotting inflatable sex doll—or a junkie decomposing before she’s even dead. Yet you are never free of Winehouse’s presence, power, desperation, defiance, or need. The tension between her self-presentation as a cartoon and the tragedies enacted in her music is patent here—and finally, with Winehouse sharing an image with Marie-Thérèse Walter, you can see her not as some sort of doppelgänger for Picasso’s women, models from life or specters from history, but as their voice.

  5 Body/Head, Coming Apart (Matador) From singer Kim Gordon, late of Sonic Youth, and guitarist Bill Nace, this is a fierce, sustained fun-house ride with the lights off. Over long stretches, sheets of noise fuse like concrete and then, as a rhythm builds or a melody opens before it disappears, they begin to crack. The music is all undertow. With the folk song “Black Is the Color (Of My True Love’s Hair)” emerging at the end of more than thirteen minutes of “Black,” you’re somewhere in one of the Doors’ half-improvised onstage versions of “The End” and Gordon’s own harrowing “Shaking Hell,” from Sonic Youth’s first album, Confusion Is Sex. And you’re not ready to leave.

  6 The Clash, Sound System (Sony Legacy) A box set packaged as a facsimile of the boom boxes people used to carry on their shoulders in the ’80s, the monster contains the first five Clash albums, obscurities and rarities and B-sides, fanzines and posters and buttons, film clips and outtakes, early sessions and DVD footage of interviews and performances and videos. But not “This Is England,” from Cut the Crap, the last Clash album, in 1985, because that album, made after Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon kicked Mick Jones and Topper Headon out of the band, isn’t supposed to exist, even if “This Is England” is the band’s ethos, its mission, its triumph, and a confession of its failure: its “Streets of Laredo,” its “I’m shot in the breast and I know I must die.”

  7 The Libertines, “Don’t Look Back Into the Sun” (2006), as crawl music for Kill Your Darlings, directed by John Krokidas (Killer Films) Running under the credits—and finally, a feeling of release. Release from the claustrophobia of the tiny little world created by Daniel Radcliffe’s Allen Ginsberg, Dane DeHaan’s Lucien Carr, Michael C. Hall’s David Kammerer (a weird cross between his Dexter and David Fisher, his Six Feet Under character), Jack Huston’s Jack Kerouac, and, most quietly and most deeply, as if playing out his own, almost-silent film within a film, Ben Foster’s William Burroughs.

  8 Neko Case, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You (Anti-) With Case’s cool, clear tone—never a burr, a break, a hesitation—fucking as an adjective at first seems out of place. Until it comes up again, and you hear it as Case, on her solo albums so often swaddled in overwriting and decorative arrangements, singing in her own voice: her own tired, fed-up voice, the voice of someone who refuses to quit.

  9 Jay Z, Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film, direc
ted by Mark Romanek (HBO/YouTube) Not counting exit footage and credits, this six-minute movie, made from a six-hour performance at the Pace Gallery in New York, and most notable for Jay Z’s dances with groupie-for-a-day Marina Abramović—not to mention an eclectic crowd of painters, gallery owners, impresarios, actors, schoolchildren, and film directors, all clearly having a great time—answered the question of what hip-hop, celebrity, and contemporary art have in common: they’re forms of money. You get the feeling all of the people here could walk out of the gallery and into any other place and buy whatever they want with the currency of their mere existence.

  10 Lou Reed, “Street Hassle” (1978), processional at a wedding in Beacon, New York (October 12) The cellos and violas never sounded more glamorous, never sounded like more of a portent, but the setting didn’t immediately match the music: could this actually be what it sounded like? Were they really going to walk down the aisle to that? A DJ faded down the song before the second verse, where a woman OD’s and the rest of the people at the party throw her body out the door, after which Reed delivers a soliloquy for which he ought to be remembered as much as for anything else: “You know, some people got no choice / and they can never find a voice / to talk with that they can even call their own. / So the first thing that they see / that allows them the right to be, / why, they follow it. You know, it’s called—bad luck.” RIP, 1942–2013.

  FEBRUARY 2014

  1 Lana Del Rey, “Young and Beautiful,” in The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann (Warner Bros.) I’ve seen this deeply empathetic translation of the novel—where you absolutely believe that people in the ’20s were going wild for hip-hop: what else would they be dancing to?—every chance I’ve had (Paris, Berkeley, airplane), and I expect to be going back to it for years. I always see and hear something new, as with this song—gorgeous, but also acrid, like a rotting flower—or less the song itself, maybe, than the way it’s threaded through the film, fading deeper into the background each time it surfaces, but never less than indelible, recasting whatever scene it inhabits, moving the characters closer to death each time.