Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Finney Mo and His West Dallas Boys live at the River Club in Dallas, 1976 (“Finney Mo / River Club 2,” YouTube) He had the noticeable “Shake That Thing” in Texas in 1963, but this underwater performance from 1976 is worlds away from any sort of conventional rock ’n’ roll or R&B—it sounds like a secret tape Van Morrison kept as a magic lantern to rub when the spirit left him. The musicians slither along the riverbed; Finney rises every minute or so to call out what sounds like “blind robber blind” over and over. You realize there’s going to be no story, except that the story—someone going nowhere, forever—is completely present in the slow scratching on the guitar, the thin, unspectacular sound of the saxophone. Does he really shout “Stackerlee!” at the end? The ordinariness of the life that’s been described would be the real hell for the old legend.

  3 Neil Genzlinger, “Kids These Days: They’re All Older Than 50” (New York Times, November 20, 2013) On a wave of unfunny sitcoms based on putative adults acting like sniggering thirteen-year-olds (The Millers; Brooklyn Nine-Nine; The Crazy Ones; Mom; Dads; Back in the Game; 2 Broke Girls; The New Normal): “Could it be payback for years of baby boomer boasting and self-glorification?

  “Boomers have been boring every generation younger than they are for decades with their constant babble about Woodstock, Vietnam, flower power. They have, subtly or overtly, let every subsequent generation know that its music, books, movies and life experiences are inferior,” Genzlinger writes. “The younger generations have choked this down quietly, biding their time. As these generations take over the making of television and become the desirable demographic for advertisers, boomerage characters are paying the price, and older-than-boomer ones are also being swept up in the retaliation frenzy, a sort of collateral damage. It’s open season on anyone 55 and above.

  “This is the ultimate revenge. Because while someday everything this older cohort holds dear will have been forgotten or undone by revisionist historians, television portrayals will live forever on DVDs and in cyberspace. A century from now, youngsters in history class will sum up the lives of everyone who had gray or graying hair in the second decade of the 21st century with: ‘Oh, yeah; those were the people who were obsessed with their bowels and couldn’t work a smartphone.’ Then, after a pause, they’ll add, ‘Kind of sad, really.’ ”

  Or, as Howard Hampton reported a week after Genzlinger’s piece appeared, “I came upon a listing for Jon Anderson, formerly of Yes, playing a solo gig in Miami Beach—the early show, being 6 p.m. Immediately the Seinfeld episode came to mind: Jerry goes to dinner with his parents in Boca at 4:30 so they can get the ‘Early Bird Special.’ That’s apparently where all the old Yes fans have retired . . . Pre-concert dinner with the Seinfelds and Costanzas: Frank Costanza: ‘I’m tellin’ ya, damn it, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” was the BEST THING THEY EVER DID!!’ Morty Seinfeld: ‘Get outta here, you’re crazy, Tales of Topographic Oceans still rules!’ ”

  4 Angels in America, “The Corpse,” from Split Cassette with Weyes Blood (Northern Spy) Scary, beautiful, with the mood pushed by the tinny sound of a woman laughing only seconds in, then electronically lowered male and female voices: the dreams of the undead. It goes on for nearly seven minutes, words taking shape only occasionally. Odd, decaying sounds trace melodies in washes of echo and distortion. Until a trackable rhythm—which in this context might as well be from a Disney cartoon—takes over after five minutes, you float on this music. At least one person has heard it as a perfect soundtrack to Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip; for me it’s playing behind Charlotte Gains-bourg stamping naked through the blasted landscapes of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

  5 Lady Gaga, “Do What U Want” with R. Kelly, from Artpop (Streamline/Inter-scope Records) Not as fierce on record as on Saturday Night Live last November—less abandoned, with less of a sense of drowning in pleasure, the pleasure you could see in her face of having made it to the top and knowing she belongs there, plus there’s no aural equivalent of watching Gaga and Kelly acknowledging each other as equal sex gods—but this may echo on the radio, in the ether, for a long time.

  6–7 Vania Heymann/Interlude, “Like a Rolling Stone” video (bobdylan.com) and Øyvind Mund of Gylne Tider, “Let It Be” video (sabotagetimes.com) Jay Lustig of New Jersey’s Star-Ledger got it right on the Dylan production: “A concept right out of ‘The Twilight Zone.’ You’re watching TV, but no matter what channel you turn to—a news show, a cooking show—whenever someone speaks, all you hear is Dylan singing ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ ” There’s something faintly repulsive about it, something inhuman, something that would never occur in real life, like synchronized swimming. But the “Let It Be” video, a Norwegian tribute to ’80s and ’90s TV stars mouthing various renditions of the Beatles song as they’re gathered on some computerized beach—what seems like scores of them, starting off, in some semblance of rationality, with the likes of Roger Moore, Jason Alexander, Josie Bissett, Corbin Bernsen, and George Wendt, then edging into the less-likely with a hideously mugging Katarina Witt, then going straight over the cliff with a demure Tonya Harding, identified as “Skater in Trouble” and wearing a T-shirt reading CAN YOU SEE ME NOW—is a horror of a very different order. At nearly six minutes it’s an invitation to suicide: what other rational response is there to watching Philip Michael Thomas as the most embarrassing air-guitarist in creation? Or Judd Nelson doing nothing at all? Or Peter Falk brought back from the dead to stand on the beach with Kathleen Turner, Sheryl Lee, and Daryl Hannah, none of whom should ever have had to sink so low?

  8 Cat Power, Masonic Temple, Brooklyn (November 14, 2013) Eric Dean Wilson writes from New York: “It was a raw-nerve performance. Everything suggested a ritual undoing of the 2012 Sun album and its tour, which left Cat Power—aka Chan Marshall—awash in an electronic, beat-driven sound. Here she bounced between what she called a Craigslist-buy guitar and a candlelit piano, and the shuffle caught the atmosphere of the night: halfway between a basement and a chapel. She flowed from song to song without any intentional break, except to adjust the monitor levels, which never satisfy her, or to ask the audience whether they worked in education. The audience clapped wildly at that, but Marshall insisted: ‘I’m not talking about parents who have children—is anyone in education?’ A few people laughed. When she didn’t get an answer she picked up without any further comment, playing the neck of her guitar with one hand so it appeared to hover in midair while she crooned. She rambled broken anecdotes with no beginning or end, and suddenly spun herself and the audience into a trance. Without announcing her final song, she muttered a few unintelligible words, bowed, and was walking offstage before anyone realized it was over.”

  9 David Cantwell, Merle Haggard: The Running Kind (University of Texas Press) A clear, unflinchingly critical hearing of the songs—that is, in Cantwell’s pages they are creative acts, not real, disguised, or fake autobiography—and that lets the songs go anywhere: a subtle yet flesh-and-blood class analysis, an argument against the authenticity argument, and when the focus is precisely on how a song felt its way into its own skin, its own body, you always want more. “The recording Merle and his Strangers made of ‘Hungry Eyes,’ ” Cantwell writes, “is a musical adjunct to, and the artistic equal of, ‘Migrant Mother,’ the photograph that Dorothea Lange took of Florence Thompson in 1936. The women in both works, Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ and Haggard’s ‘Mama,’ document an internal war between pride and inferiority, dignity and shame.” If Cantwell often can’t get music onto the page, he can make you need to hear every song he writes about.

  10 Sundown Songs, Like a Jazz Band in Nashville (Sundown Songs, 2008) This is a New Orleans street band that may or may not still exist: the flood song “Here It Comes,” from their 2009 album Far from Home, might be their truest testament. But the earlier album cuts more deeply. With irresistibly pretty acoustic guitar playing throughout, and sometimes a clumsy, strummed guitar that’s just as evocative, it calls up an Old West people carry with them af
ter the Old West is gone: “Let Em Talk” has the feeling of Butch Cassidy in a Wyoming bar sometime in the 1920s, or Neal Cassady in a bar in San Pedro in the 1990s, trying to get people to believe he’s who he says he is. “I’ve stained the world, in ten thousand ways. / I’ve stained up your sofa, for ten thousand days,” the guy testifies, holding himself up with both hands, as if that’s enough work for anyone.

  Thanks to Ashawnta Jackson,

  Anna Witiuk, Ari Spool, and Luke Wiget

  MARCH-APRIL 2014

  1–2 The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Vol. 1 (1917–1932) (Third Man Records and Revenant Records) and the Bladensburg High School Video Jukebox (1959bhsmustangs.com/VideoJukebox.htm) The Paramount set calls itself a “cabinet of wonder,” and it is. You pay your money, a large, elegant wooden box arrives in the mail, and you open it. You stick a thumb drive into your computer, and one of eight hundred songs, the most recent dating to 1927—volume two will appear later this year—begins to play. You finger a set of LPs, marveling at the labels. You glance through a big paperback discographical history. You pry open a heavy, clothbound volume and begin to follow the story of how a Wisconsin chair company figured out it could make money producing cheap records for people to play on its expensive phonograph cabinets, and how, after clueless executives set about recording anything with a pulse, a visionary African American producer and opera follower named Mayo Williams began to move the label into what was called race music—and then you begin to page through dozens and dozens of advertisements so daring, and at times so odd, you can’t believe the music will live up to them. Such as one for Ethel Waters’s 1922 “That Da Da Strain” (“It will shake you, it will make you, really go insane,” wrote a couple of Tin Pan Alley tune-smiths, eager to get a dance-craze tune on the market even if they had to name it after a European art movement): “The Only Genuine Colored Record. Others Are Only Passing for Colored.” The price is $400, which, compared to the recent Clash Sound System ($249.99 list) or Bob Dylan’s Complete Album Collection, Vol. 1 ($279.98), is not so much a bargain as a gift.

  But there are all kinds of wonder cabinets, and the Bladensburg High School Video Jukebox—from the class of ’59, culled from YouTube, also featuring just about eight hundred songs, not counting full-length oldies shows and countless more embedded videos—is free. You click the button that lets each selection “drop the coin right into the slot,” as Chuck Berry put it, and then you have no idea where to begin, so you hit, say, Dion and the Belmonts’ “I Wonder Why—THEN”—a 1958 TV clip with dance moves so complex they might have taken months to work out—and then the same song “NOW,” from an oldies show, Dion and, let’s say, two of the Belmonts, with hats or scarves hiding their bald heads, and singing with a soul, a yearning, an accumulation of decades of disappointments that the kids three decades before never would have believed, and with vocal dynamics you won’t. And then you’re off, lost in a labyrinth where, say, Senator Everett Dirksen’s sonorous recitation “Gallant Men” rubs up against Johnny and Joe’s “Over the Mountain.” It’s 1957 on Milt Grant’s Record Hop, with two black teenagers lip-synching for an all-white dance floor and subtitles running on the screen, as if Johnny and Joe were singing in a foreign language, and then it’s “FIFTY YEARS LATER” and piano notes open the doo-wop song, a song that was tragic even in its day, because you could hear, you could feel, that the boy and the girl singing would never get over that mountain, would never cross that sea, are so weighted with experience that when you see Johnny’s white hair and white mustache he looks as if he’s grown into the song, that he’s finally ready to say what it says.

  3 “Christopher Wool,” Guggenheim, New York (October 25, 2013–January 22, 2014) A rich, deeply tactile retrospective from the 1980s to the present. As you wind your way up the circular galleries, near the top you find what Wool calls his gray paintings, a pursuit he took up in the middle of the last decade. Most are untitled. Made partly with a spray-painter, they look like any city’s urban scrawls, all loose lines reaching for the edges of rectangles and squares. You begin to notice what seems like over-painting, though it’s the mark of a rag scrubbing away part of the image that has yet to come together, whiting out, or graying out, whatever cryptic message someone else has left before. Sometimes there are lighter, less-clear revisions, as if someone caught a hint of an idea, a message, and tried to bring it out, to make it talk. The graffiti language at the root of the work breaks down the apparent abstraction of the pieces: they refer to something specific, even if you can’t locate it on a map. The pictures are big, unstable, unfixable, lucid, steely, and gorgeous, and the longer you look, the more you see. From 2005, the scrubbing of a piece is not so much an erasure as the creation of a cleared space, a new field of action to be occupied and then abandoned in turn, or even forgotten.

  4 John Chamberlain, Pigmeat’s E flat Bluesong (1981), Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York (on long-term view) Chamberlain made his first auto-parts sculpture in 1957; here there are twelve, from 1979 through 1988. It’s David Cronenberg’s Crash played out in single objects, but especially in this 72″ x 75″ x 61″ lump. With fenders wrapped around chrome side strips and remnants of grilles, with yellow dominating red, orange, and cream over splattered surfaces, more than any other piece spread out through a long, open gallery it was a believable auto-auto-assemblage: something that put itself together, either what you might have seen after two or three cars merged into one in a single crash, or after Chamberlain rescued the thing from a compactor halfway through the job. What’s so immediate about it, so real, is that still and fixed as the object is, speed is still present all through it. You can feel the rush that made this.

  5 The Jacksonian, written by Beth Henley, directed by Robert Falls, the New Group, Acorn Theatre, New York (November 5–December 22, 2013) A hotel drama set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, with Ed Harris as a disgraced dentist, Amy Madigan as his disgusted wife, and Juliet Brett as their miserable teenage daughter, and featuring Bill Pullman as what Elvis would have ended up as if “That’s All Right” had never gotten out of Memphis: an alcoholic bartender with a thing for jailbait who has no problem shooting a woman for a ring he doesn’t even want and letting a black man go to the electric chair for it. “I was a performer for a while,” he says under a huge pompadour, sideburns snaking down the sides of his face, but now his whole life is stage fright.

  6 “Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis,” Frick Collection, New York (October 22, 2013–January 19, 2014) A small show of rarely seen works, starring Girl with the Pearl Earring, which despite its celebrity—you can buy a GIRL ON TOUR T-shirt with, just like a band T-shirt, all the exhibition dates listed on the back (starting in Tokyo, in 2012, finishing up this year in Bolgona and the Hague)—you can still actually see. The painting is so luminous it burns off the haze of its publicity; there are countless unwritten books in the eyes. You sense that if you could touch the canvas, you’d feel flesh.

  7 The Past, directed by Asghar Farhadi (Memento Films) In a holiday season of movies whose nonstop fuck yous might as well be directed at the audience—The Wolf of Wall Street and August: Osage County are only the noisiest—this was displacing: a sophisticated picture about decent, intelligent people caught up in a dilemma they are incapable of resolving. Almost every scene brings a secret, or an untold story, but the movie is like a set of Chinese boxes: inside each secret there’s always another one, until the end. A man is about to tell a woman one last thing, you can feel that the film is a step away from turning into gimmickry, and she says stop—she doesn’t want to know. For its realism, and its relief, it was the most satisfying movie moment of the year.

  8 The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, directed by Robert Wilson, Park Avenue Armory, New York (December 12–21, 2013) The first true scene opens on a room bare except for a very freaked-out young girl, her even more freaked-out grandmother, and a 1950s washing machine; it’s explained that the Abramović household w
as one of the first in Belgrade to have one. As Paul Anka’s “Diana” plays, the girl throws herself onto the machine and begins to kick her legs as if she were trying to swim on it. The grandmother turns her face to the audience and sends electricity through her already Bride of Frankenstein hair by the force of her eyes, which seem to be rolling around in her head like cherries in a slot machine. It was the most vivid, in-the-flesh equivalent of the man-made chicken sequence in Eraserhead I ever want to see.

  9 Crooked Still, “New Railroad,” from Shaken by a Low Sound (Signature Sounds, 2006) Oscar Isaac has received universal praise for his performance of “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” in Inside Llewyn Davis. Listen to that, and listen to this.

  10 Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, on her early release from prison under a new amnesty law (December 23, 2013) “This is a lie.”

  Thanks to Doug Kroll, Reenee Gregg, Kathy

  and Larry Thompson, and John Rockwell

  MAY 2014

  1 Tacocat, NVM (Hardly Art) Like Seattle’s Fastbacks and Portland’s All-Girl Summer Fun Band, this group from Longview, Washington—singer Emily Nokes, bassist Bree McKenna, drummer Lelah Maupin, guitarist Eric Randall—are boiling over with the thrill of writing a song, making it into something that can be played, and discovering that as it happens you love the people you’re playing with. The voice is jaded, the sound anything but, and the world that comes into view is a trick, but you can slip its grasp and take off—through the bubbling warmth of “You Never Came Back,” the surge of “Bridge to Hawaii,” so sweet you can’t believe it still hasn’t been built, and “Snow Day,” which soars to the sun. “Crimson Wave” might be the door that flies open first. You don’t have to catch that it’s a protest against menstruation (“All the girls are surfin’ the wave / surfin’ the crimson wave today”): when Randall’s whomping guitar solo kicks in it’s just punk surf music, shooting the same curl as the Forgotten Rebels’ unforgotten “Surfin’ on Heroin.” The song explodes with its own conceit, with the way there’s absolutely no end to what you can find when you take an idea, a riff, a single pissed-off thought, and run with it—something like the tossed-off “Sew a scarlet letter on my bathing suit,” or the matter-of-fact “There are communists in the summer house,” a line that leaps out as such a perfect non sequitur that it doesn’t even have to be a metaphor that can drop right back into the song. I love this band.