Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2–3 James Agee, Cotton Tenants: Three Families, with photographs by Walker Evans (Melville House Books) and Alana Nash, “Elvis as a Teen? See a Never-Before-Published Photo from His Hometown in Tupelo, Mississippi,” Vanity Fair.com (January 8) Cotton Tenants collects the recently discovered thirty-thousand-word essay that turned into Agee and Evans’s 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In contrast to the sweep and scope of that book, which rides the same American wind as Moby-Dick once the Pequod ships off, the piece—a never-printed 1936 assignment by Fortune magazine—pitches between fastidiousness and rage, coldly matter-of-fact summaries of infant mortality and flatly reported accounts of family economies, snide dismissals of individuals turned into types, and, for individuals who for a moment escape all typology, an awestruck respect that Agee seems almost desperate to suppress. Agee never finds an even keel, because he doesn’t want one. But Evans did want a stable perspective, a certain distanced, confident stance that allowed his subjects—men, women, children, their houses, their beds, their walls decorated with advertisements—to appear as both iconic and ordinary, as individuals and as objects, as poor people smashed by the cotton economy, and as art. It was this—as Agee, in the more than four hundred pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, dove so far down into the lives he chronicled it’s not clear he ever came up—that has allowed Evans’s pictures to enter the common American imagination as images that were not made but found, and that allows you to see them everywhere, as if Evans’s eye were not his at all but that of the country itself, dreaming its fractured, free-associating dream. For example: the 1936 picture made of the farmer and three children in Hale County, Alabama, that appears on the cover of Cotton Tenants, the man leaning with casual dignity against a support beam of his shack, the kids with their wet hair slicked back to look nice for the camera, and a recently surfaced photo, by an unnamed photographer, of a thirteen-year-old Elvis Presley, alone with his bike on a Tupelo street in 1948, his blond hair also slicked back, his face proud, and what might as well be exactly the same man in the first picture just to the boy’s right, the same hat, maybe slightly better clothes. You don’t have to know that Evans took photos of soil erosion in Tupelo in 1936—or to imagine that he came back years later to follow up and had his eye caught by a boy on the street who reminded him of children he’d shot before—to know that in the deepest sense he made both pictures.

  4 Pete Seeger, 1919–2014 He sang for union rallies and children, at civil rights meetings in fields and in concert halls. He defied the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was blacklisted and never backed down. He saved the Hudson River. He lived in a log cabin he built himself and his seventy-year marriage was ended only by death. He was also Arthur Dimmesdale, with all of the moral rectitude and none of the guilt.

  5 Anna Ostoya, Adad Good Spirits (2010), in “New Photography 2013,” MoMA, New York (September 14, 2013–January 6) Ostoya is a Polish artist working in New York; this supremely modest piece is a small, rolled-up scroll of the photograph of Hugo Ball in what he called his “magical bishop” outfit from the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, and, next to it, in a placement that mirrors Man Ray’s 1926 Black and White, is an even smaller conical scroll reading “OSTOYA íst politicisch” (“Ostoya Is Political”), which is to argue that Ball was, or is, too. It’s a lovely dada three-way, quietly punk, blank and yet full of shifting meaning, and, with the white in the piece and its spare setting dominating the grays of the photo and the black of the words, above all coolly delivering its uncool message, which is now cool, too.

  6 Kevin Young, reading and talk, NOMMO African American Author Series, University of Minnesota (February 12) Young, author of The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (2012) and eight collections of poetry, reads with delight: not with drama but with deadpan humor, a musician’s sense of timing that brings out the seductive economy of his writing. Not a word is wasted, and every word seems to perform at least two jobs at once. He talked about thinking he’d finished with the blues form after his 2003 book, Jelly Roll, and how, for the poems in the 2008 Dear Darkness, “blues came back and got me.” He writes from deep in the tradition and escapes it, as with “Last Ditch Blues”: “Tired of digging / my own grave.” The killer is “Flash Flood Blues.” “I’m the African American / sheep of the family,” he says, then, wending his way through six subtly whiplashing couplets to find lines Robert Johnson would have been more than happy to use: “Even my wages of sin / been garnished.”

  7 Joel Selvin, Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm & Blues (Counterpoint Press) Berns was a songwriter and a record producer; he died in 1967, at thirty-eight, leaving behind such epochal hits as the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” the Drifters’ “ Under the Boardwalk,” Them’s “Here Comes the Night.” He was also a man of the street, putting people together, avoiding others, looking over his shoulder, making deals that returned howling at his back. Selvin walks through his story with a Broadway swagger that at first feels contrived, third-hand, and after a hundred pages or so feels not only earned but musical, and a rhythm begins to count its way through the story. The songwriter Ellie Greenwich haunts the last part of the book like the ghost of a woman who doesn’t know her life is already over; Berns courts death like a man singing Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” under his breath. Again and again, Selvin brings forgotten recording sessions that any other chronicler would have ignored to such stirring life that they validate not only the story he has to tell but the worth of Berns’s own life. In 1963 he went into the studio with a neophyte named Betty Harris, who recorded two of his songs: “Cry to Me,” already a huge hit for Solomon Burke, and “I’ll Be a Liar.” Selvin lets you feel the contingency of the moment, how everything that happened—this inflection, that hesitation—could have turned out completely differently, and led to nothing. You probably don’t know the performances, but the suspense that Selvin is building is too strong for you to turn to YouTube—and you know that what’s there won’t match the picture Selvin is drawing: “She didn’t know Berns wrote ‘Cry to Me’ when she auditioned for him by singing the song. She didn’t know that he originally envisioned the song the way she sang it, slowed down to a crawl . . . from the first sob that bursts almost involuntarily from her throat, Betty Harris slowly, deliberately picks her way through the pathos,” Selvin writes. It’s the word picks that throws the scene into relief, producing images both of a woman walking with care and fright and of her picking at her own skin, her own heart.

  8 Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (Riverhead Books) An incisive and powerful account of the desires, instincts, decisions, strategies, actions, and punishments of a few people who committed themselves to living as if they were free in a society built to ensure that they were not. The Russian American Gessen, author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (who will not say “Pussy Riot” aloud), is first of all a reporter, and she traces the story of a performance-art collective that turned into a “fictional group” that turned into a real group, recording the playground shouts of “Kill the Sexist” at a playground, and then everything that happened, and didn’t, when they took their next step, bringing their act into a cathedral. The tone can be sardonic, from the inside, not the outside: “They were ready. Sort of. Maybe. Almost.” Gessen also writes like a novelist, preternaturally attuned to the way the perpetrators of an action can lose control of it—“Something felt off among them, and each of them sensed it, the way each partner in a romantic relationship senses when it has started to crack, even though neither can say what went wrong and when”—and to the feelings of loss, missed chances, and abandonment that sometimes accompany even events that, in their small or enormous way, can leave a nation, or the world, or only a single person changed. “There is that moment in every action,” Gessen says of a woman who did not go into the cathedral, but might have, “when you have handed over your personal belongings to whoever is helpi
ng and you know exactly why you are there and you know what you are about to do and you feel that you can do anything at all and at the same time it is as though you could see yourself, so lithe, so young, so bright in every way, climbing up onto that platform—it was this moment she remembered.”

  9 I Break Horses, Chiaroscuro (Bella Union) Maria Lindén is from Stockholm; through the haze of this shimmering album you can see her playing both the middle-aged La Dolce Vita parties in The Great Beauty and the funeral scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, if he’d shot it. You can see her spinning Alphaville’s “Big in Japan” over and over in her teenage bedroom, and a few years later watching Julee Cruise swim her way through “Questions in a World of Blue” in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and realizing that was what she wanted to do with her life. This is synthpop draped in Gothic mystery so thick it would be corny if there were a single element in the music—vocals, melody, rhythm, texture most of all—that seemed fixed, settled, seen as a fact by the woman who made it. You could play this record all day long, and I’ve never played it less than twice in a row.

  10 Sly and the Family Stone, “Stand,” from Higher! (Epic Legacy) On this career retrospective, a moment from a show at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970: it’s 7 a.m. The band is following Miles Davis, the Doors, the Who, and Melanie. The crowd is dead but the group somehow brings it to life; then someone hits Freddie Stone on the head with a soft-drink can and they leave. Before that there is Sly Stone, with a few sentences and a few notes that capture the best of what he left behind: “ People believe in a lot of different things—though our universal thoughts, in general. . . . I mean, the people who believe that what’s up is up and down is down, simple things, you know. It’s very easy to be fair, and don’t kill nobody, and those things—hurts if you step on my toe: ‘Ouch.’ A lot of things happened in the sixties”—and it’s so displacing, to hear someone barely halfway through 1970 referring to “the sixties” as an already completely historicized past—“a lot of people stood in the sixties. A lot of people went down in the sixties—for standing. That’s unfair.” He begins a clear, calm, floating a cappella “Stand,” as voices come in behind him, then instruments creep in as nothing but the most distant, quiet vamp, and you can see a small band of people, dressed in white, as they were that morning, gathered in a circle, and then you hear a single drumbeat.

  Thanks to Cecily Marcus and

  Andrew Hamlin

  JUNE 2014

  1–4 Gina Arnold, Exile in Guyville (Bloomsbury/33 1/3); Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville (Matador, 1993); Pussy Galore, Exile on Main Street (Shove, 1986); Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street (Rolling Stones, 1972) Arnold is a wonderful writer: fearless, precise, full of doubt, never taking anything for granted. She’s one of the few people left on the planet who uses presently correctly, which can create its own thrill. Going back to Liz Phair’s once notorious, now often forgotten, absurdly in-your-face ambitious first album—“a story about a girl and a time and a place,” the indie-rock world of Wicker Park, in Chicago, in the early 1990s, but in Phair’s hands a story told with such heart that you need no such details to catch every shade of meaning and emotion—Arnold has written a book about the past (“when dinosaurs, as personified by Dinosaur Jr., ruled the earth”), its follies and crimes (“Every past is worth condemning,” Arnold quotes Nietzsche, and then puts the words to work), and the idea of an imagined community that the past leaves behind (“Often I think I am a better informed citizen of Middlemarch, Bartsetshire,” Arnold says, “than I am of San Francisco”). And it’s about what it means for a young woman to simultaneously take on both everyone in her town and take down the album that sums up everything that everyone in her town would like to sound like, look like, act like, be—to take down a whole way of being in the world. “At one point we had felt like misfits or we had felt like ‘others,’ ” Carrie Brownstein recently said of the time she shared with Phair—in her case, in her own indie-rock community, in Olympia, Washington. “It was supposed to be come one, come all, you know? Freaks gather round and we’ll provide you with shelter. And you get in these scenes and you realize, no, I’ve gone from one set of rules and regulations and codifications of how you should dress and what you should know to another. . . . What should have been inclusive felt very exclusive . . . there were times when I felt very flummoxed by the rules, very alienated, and I was trying way too hard to figure out not just what band to like, but am I liking the right album from that band. And then, am I liking the right band member in that band? Am I liking the right song on the right record? Have I picked the right year to stop liking the band?”

  Phair wasn’t the first person in the post-punk community to take on the Rolling Stones’ Moby-Dick. Fourteen years after the release of Exile on Main Street, the hilariously obscene Pussy Galore covered the whole double album, all eighteen songs, in what sounded like a single all-nighter, hammering out the tunes until they lost all definition, people shouting back and forth at each other in impatience, frustration, and pure fed-upness, putting the thing out in the most obscure format possible, a five-hundred-copy grimy cassette (though today you can find it all online). It works; you’re drawn in by a band’s epic refusal to quit. But Phair did something much harder. Writing her own eighteen songs—Arnold, in her own way of playing, or singing, Exile in Guyville, makes a case for the pairing of each track of each album—Phair came up with just under an hour of music that today sounds as personal, unique, and yet socially necessary as it did more than twenty years ago. It was a dare: someone no one’s ever heard of can say as much, can say more, than someone everyone’s heard of, whom everyone listens to, and in her own voice. Such a story is always new, and it’s new now.

  Because it never received enough airplay to be overexposed, because it carried no obvious influences and did not, musically, obviously influence anyone—the spiritual influence of the album, the way it inspired others to take the kind of dare Phair took, was enormous—the music on Exile in Guyville has not become dated in any way. “Fuck and Run” is if anything more painful, more defenseless, than it was when it was first heard, because the pain is not only a matter of, in Arnold’s words about everything on the album, “what it was like to feel voiceless and powerless in a nightclub, on a road trip, or during sexual intercourse,” but it is in the melody, in the way the melody pulls back on itself, and in the rhythmic drive Phair’s guitar puts into the story, the sense of inevitability, so that you don’t even need the singer to tell you “I can feel it in my bones, / I’m gonna spend my whole life alone.”

  Arnold is betting on the right horse. Liz Phair’s album today sounds completely fresh. It feels completely fresh in the way that it feels completely worn-out, because, when the album ends, you feel as if the person you’ve been listening to has been through a hard day. That fatigue, that sense of being too tired to care but too blasted not to, gives what Phair did an odd realism that, in her place and time, no one else seemed to know was there, or to want to know.

  The obvious thing to say now is that the realism of Liz Phair’s version of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street—her translation—makes the real thing sound phony, fake, contrived, every gesture postured, not lived, makes it sound not real at all. But if anything, Phair lets you hear how unlikely, how desperate, what a long, long night the Rolling Stones’ album really was. Pussy Galore bash their heads off, but the Rolling Stones sound more primitive. The songs are dribs, drabs, fragments, pasted together with spit (the words to “Ventilator Blues,” Arnold says, “sound like the Moldavian entry in the Eurovision Song Contest”), and yet, as if they’re betting against themselves, they take shape, burrow under the ground, change shape, and come into the light as if they were just getting out of bed. You don’t hear production, money, skill, or even intent. You feel as if you’ve stumbled onto the scene of an accident where, for some reason, people pitched a tent.

  It became a legend, and other people made the tent into a temple and insisted that everyone
live in it. Liz Phair was one of those who lived in it. In Gina Arnold’s telling, she didn’t cast out the money changers; they’re still there. Again, she did something more difficult. She walked out, pitched her own tent down the road, and then left that behind, too.

  5 La Sera, Hour of the Dawn (Hardly Art) The spirit here is of people rushing through city streets so fast you can feel the wind they make, but their minds are just as quick: from song to song there’s a hint of Eleanor Friedberger’s relentless questioning of every moment as it passes. “You go on and on about the things you believe,” Katy Goodman says in “ Running Wild”—the person she’s talking to might be chasing the singer, but she’s already turned the corner. With endless invention and flair, the guitarist Todd Wisenbaker gives the former member of the always overrated Vivian Girls space, purpose, and most of all pace.