Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  Featuring . . . IN PERSON

  “Sensational!!”

  BOB

  DYLAN

  “Blowing in the Wind”

  Not to mention that it’s “Blowin’,” not “Blowing.”

  10 Anonymous, altered Travel Guard International travel insurance vending machine (Oakland Airport, April 7) AS TRA ELVIS-URANCE, naturally. Or unnaturally.

  OCTOBER 1997

  1–2 Daft Punk, Homework (Virgin) and Various Artists, KAOS Theory: 89.3 Olympia Community Radio (K) Ages ago there was a record called something like “Radio KAOS!”—a satire of hysterical Top 40 DJs so on the mark it jumped like the best radio station on earth. Started in 1973, broadcasting out of Evergreen State College in Washington state, KAOS-FM, here represented in a compilation of on-air performances, is at least 89.3 percent for real. (“I was going out with Henry Ford/And you, you were seeing Henry Thoreau,” Matthew Hattie Hein and Christine Denk recall on “I’ll Never Learn.” “I said, ‘We’ve got a lot in common.’ ”) But it’s Daft Punk who truly act out the broadcast of dreams. The best pop group in the history of Paris—not that there’s been much competition since the days of Royer Collard and the Doctrinaires—this techno duo works with unparalleled muscle and depth. Their textures are thick, their sound all but bottomless, and unlike the currently more celebrated Prodigy and Chemical Brothers, musically they never preen. Listening, you feel as if you’re tuning in to a broadcast that began long ago and will circle around long after you’ve forgotten how to find your way back to its unmarked spot on the dial.

  3 Linda Scott, “Don’t Bet Money Honey” (Canadian American, 1961, on various collections) For “You Don’t Own Me,” Lesley Gore is credited with the first breath of feminism in rock ’n’ roll—the first female “fuck off.” Coming off the pleasingly gooey “I’ve Told Every Little Star,” this favorite of Arthur Godfrey, later a music teacher at the New York Christian Academy, had it down two years earlier, and with a cooler tone. With her small voice shaping the title phrase—“Don’t bet money, honey/Our love will last”—it’s as if she’s just in it for the sex.

  4 Bharati Mukherjee, Leave it to Me (Knopf) Mukherjee’s last book, The Holder of the World, is a great visionary novel. Complete with a courtroom “That was no lady, that was my wife!” joke, this is more like a comic book—starring adopted Debby DiMartino as self-named Devi Dee, fearless wisecracking avenger bent on the unmasking and destruction of her birth parents. There’s lots of cheap sex and violence, but what really inflames twenty-three-year-old Devi, prospecting in a Bay Area milieu dominated by her parents’ generation, is sanctimony: that old ’60s canard that anyone who wasn’t there was born too late. Her parents abandoned her in India, on the old pot trail—how could they? “Think Vietnam,” says Ham, a Berkeley film producer Devi has seduced because Jess, a woman who was Ham’s lover before Devi was conceived and might be his lover still, might also be Devi’s mother. “Rent the Apocalypse Now video if you can’t think. You made your life one continuous flying fuck or you didn’t survive the times.” “And how do you protest the war by doing dope on an alien continent?” Devi asks herself. “That didn’t make sense.” But “It had to Jess in her twenties; it still did. It made all the sense in the world to anyone her age, Ham’s age . . . those who had survived and owned up to what war’d really done for them, how it’d freed them to be themselves, to curse and fuck and burn and loot, to kill or die, to feel superior while having fun.”

  5 Beezus, Lives of the Saints (Mud) This Champaign-Urbana female trio are fabulous complainers (“Buttercup”) and world-class leapers. Witness their doubled version of “Rebel Girl,” a strummed 1:14 on Joe Hill’s Wobbly-era original and 2:34 worth of grunge on Bikini Kill’s 1992 rewrite. Who else has realized both songs hinge on the question of the right clothes?

  6 10,000 Maniacs, “More Than This” (Geffen) Tiresias had been both man and woman; when asked which was capable of greater pleasure, he said woman. Less covering than joining Bryan Ferry’s stilled and drifting erotic reverie—with Roxy Music in 1982, his highest moment—Mary Ramsey makes the case for perfect equality.

  7 Starlet, From the One You Left Behind (Parasol) Very catchy Swedish boy pop that has no trouble rising to its titles: “Girlfriend,” “Wendy,” “Pin-up.” Two steps away from the Friends soundtrack, but only one step away from the irresistible Norwegian boy pop of a-ha’s “Take on Me.”

  8 Johnny Green and Garry Barker, with illustrations by Ray Lowry, A Riot of Our Own—Night and Day with the Clash (Indigo, London) The tour diary is not the richest music-book genre. This touching, angry, uproarious tale sustains 238 pages because it never lets go of the notion that as one day follows another something more than a pop group’s career might be at stake.

  9 Ani DiFranco, Dilate and Living in Clip (Righteous Babe) Alanis Morissette may have glommed her act from DiFranco. It’d be to DiFranco’s credit if she made Morissette sound like an unwitting self-parody, but for that you have to go to the Morissette-sound-alike Sprite commercial.

  10 Bob Dylan, Time Out of Mind (Columbia) A Western. It starts with Clint Eastwood’s face at the end of Unforgiven, then turns around and heads back east like bad weather.

  NOVEMBER 1997

  1–2 Kelly Hogan, “The Great Titanic,” on Rudy’s Rockin’ Kiddie Caravan (TNT) and William and Versey Smith: “When that Great Ship Went Down,” 1927, on Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Harry Smith (Smithsonian Folkways six-CD reissue) The Smiths’ street-singer chant is one of the most primitive—or primeval—morality plays in a set that works as a map of Gothic America. But seventy years later lead vocalist Kelly Hogan, also credited with “barstool legs and folding chair,” and “storytelling” vocalist and guitarist Andy Hopkins give no ground in their contribution to a Rudy and Gogo World Famous Cartoon Show collection of twenty-two old folk ditties (“This Old Man,” “Home on the Range,” etc.) rendered by a crew suspiciously loaded with Mekons types. “Le’s do it,” snarls a scratchy male voice to introduce Hogan’s clear alto; with notes breaking up around her, she sets the stage for a staticky news report by Hopkins as Shine, according to legend the only black person aboard the officially whites-only Titanic, and the first off. “It was sad when the great ship went down,” Hogan glows at the end, all roaring glee. With the rich passengers sinking to the bottom of the sea, it’s as if she’s discovered the one time trickle-down economics actually worked.

  3 Christian Schad, Marietta, 1916, in “Christian Schad: 1894–1982,” curated by Tobia Bezzola (Kunsthaus Zürich through November 9; Städtische Galerie, Munich, from November 26) The Zurich Dadaist and inventor of the photogram found his true calling as a portraitist, and he found it early, in this devastatingly unstable picture of an archetypal Central European bohemian cabaret singer. Marietta was a real person, but here, with the painting’s cubist fragments at once drawn to the center of the canvas by the force of Marietta’s eyes and driven away from it by the threat her eyes carry, she is also her own twentieth century: born out of the brow of Hedda Gabler, crossing the bridge of the world war hand in hand with her contemporary Emmy Hennings, soon to fix the world in her gaze in the person of Louise Brooks.

  4 Patsy Cline, Live at the Cimarron Ballroom (MCA) Cut July 21, 1961, at Cline’s first show after a near-fatal auto accident. As her studio recordings couldn’t do, the rough, brassy set catches the spirit of a woman who never got around to apologizing for anything.

  5 Miranda July, 10 Million Hours a Mile (Kill Rock Stars) This serious-looking woman comes up to you on the street and starts telling you about her philosophy of life and half an hour later you’re still listening.

  6 Waco Brothers, “Revolution Blues,” on Do You Think About Me? (Bloodshot) In 1974 on Neil Young’s On the Beach this Manson Family manifesto was lumbering, sardonic, even smug. Now, with the sound of time running out matching Jon Lang-ford’s race through scattered images of dune-buggy attack squadrons and dead dogs on million-dollar lawns, the reach for the end of th
e world in the music suggests a Waco Brother not credited here: David Koresh.

  7 J. Walter Thompson agency, Alan Jackson’s commercial for Ford Trucks (all networks) You’ve got the smarmiest country singer—and one of the richest—smiling down from under his Stetson with “If I had money/I’ll tell you what I’d do” as the inescapable rhythm of K.C. Douglas’ holy “Mercury Blues” pours out of the rewrite and Jackson promises he’d buy two Fords. The wrong singer for a song is one thing, but you can’t use a car song for the wrong car.

  8 Brown-Eyed Soul, The Sound of East L.A., Vols. 1–3 (Rhino) This smooth, warming, endlessly surprising project documents not a genre but a sensibility: less the records young people made in the barrio in the mid ’60s, when the southern California Chicano community passed through the shock of self-recognition, than the records people liked—the music people used to tell each other who they were. So there’s hot rock from the Olympics, cool soul from Peaches and Herb, jam-it-up stompers from local heroes Thee Midnighters and the Premiers, funk from War, searing blues from Johnny “Guitar” Watson, the still heartbreaking, still weird “Image of a Girl” by the Safaris (a surf group)—and what links almost everything here is a certain restraint, the sense that a whispered code word will travel further than a shout.

  9–10 Lynne Dawson/Rolling Stones, September 6 (all networks/KFOG-FM, San Francisco) You chose your own moments at Diana’s funeral, or they chose you, but on my day soprano Dawson’s impassioned reading of Verdi’s Requiem—as alarming for the way she turned the pages of the sheet music as for the faraway notes she hit as if they were speeches from Wuthering Heights—took on a new cast a few hours later, when the first, high, solo, female chorus of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” stepped off the radio. Whoever the song’s first voice is, instantly it was inescapably Dawson; when Mick Jagger came in for the first verse, the song had already said what it had to say.

  JANUARY 1998

  1 Roger McGuinn, Jeff Tweedy, Jay Bennett, at “Revelations of Tradition: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and Its Legacy” (Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA, October 25, 1997) To close a rather stereotypical folk revue, the former leader of the Byrds and two members of Wilco found the heart of Dock Boggs’ implacable “Sugar Baby” in an instant; with Tweedy singing and McGuinn getting a pulse on his acoustic twelve-string, it was as if the song had caught them, not the other way around. After a warm McGuinn vocal on “Springfield Mountain” (“1761,” McGuinn said; “the first indigenous folk ballad to gain national currency,” Alan Lomax writes), Tweedy took up Richard “Rabbit” Brown’s “James Alley Blues.” The Boggs and Brown originals, both dating to 1927, are among the most determined and idiosyncratic recordings ever made in this country; they ought to be uncoverable, and as far as I know up to this night they were. Tweedy’s simple audaciousness in taking them on was admirable enough; to hear him make them his own, without apparent reach or guile, casually shifting lyrics to his liking, ignoring the hellfire of Boggs’ cadence or Brown’s flatly untouchable orchestration in favor of his own rhythms, his own pace, was like a dream, and it came off as a feat about as remarkable as collecting the mail.

  2 Uncle Tupelo, “I Wish My Baby Was Born,” from March 16–20, 1992 (Rockville) On record, the only Jeff Tweedy performance that comes close to the haunts at Wolf Trap he grasped like brothers.

  3 The Doors, Box Set (Elektra 4-CD) Hard, cruel, ridiculous, mostly unreleased, with a cold, thrilling “Crystal Ship” from a crummy 1967 nightclub tape and 1965 demo of “Hello, I Love You” that proves the awful no. 1 hit actually began life as a decent song.

  4 Adam Green, Adam Green’s Book of Hollow Days (Kensington Books) New Year’s Day to New Year’s Eve with Chicago’s sourest cartoonist. Stops dead on Father’s Day—Joseph: “Now Jesus, you be home by nine.” “Shut up! You’re not my real dad!”

  5 Bardo Pond, Lapsed (Matador) The Cowboy Junkies pull a Heaven’s Gate and then realize the only way to communicate from the other side is with forty-seven minutes of unrelieved feedback, fuzztone, and moaning; for the first time, they sound alive.

  6 George Garrett, The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You (Harcourt Brace) Early in the first Clinton administration, a reporter goes home to Paradise Springs, Florida, to write a book about an inexplicable local sex-and-gospel double killing. It took place as Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and must somehow be the other side of the ’68 coin. That the premise makes sense neither at the beginning nor the end of Garrett’s novel doesn’t stop him from letting a zoo of characters rant and cogitate their way through the mysteries of history and time. The Paradise Springs librarian was three in 1968, but what interests her is the way in her life “1968” might as well have been 1776: “Even though most of the cultural icons and artifacts of 1968, trash as well as treasure, persistently, indeed relentlessly continue to exist, and not in an antiquarian sense either, even so, it is surprising to contemplate a time when these things began and were new,” she says. “I find it difficult to unlearn and imagine a world in which pop culture was not always at the very center of things.” Along with many others she proves that the true curse of pop-cultural time is not transience, but permanence.

  7 Scott Ellis, director, 1776 (Roundabout Theater, New York City, October 15) At the end of the musical all the singing members of the Continental Congress step up to sign the Declaration of Independence, and the Liberty Bell begins to toll. You expect an air of celebration, Ben Franklin pumping his fists and hissing “Yes!”—anything but the suspension and terror of a small band of men suddenly face to face with the history they’ve just made.

  8 Darcey Steinke, Jesus Saves (Atlantic Monthly Press) And Elvis rapes little girls.

  9 Barry Levinson, producer, “Blood Ties,” Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC, October 17, 24, 31) This odd three-part teleplay about the murder of a young Haitian woman employed by a rich Baltimore family was all wrapped in a parable—the parable of Bob Dylan’s 1963 “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” It was William Zantzinger, explains James Earl Jones, playing a millionaire businessman and community activist: Zantzinger, a rich man’s son who at a Baltimore society ball thirty-four years ago casually beat a black barmaid to death with a cane, a crime for which he received six months in jail and a $500 fine—and who was last heard from in 1991, extorting rents from the black tenants of hovels he did not even own. “ ‘In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel, to show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level,’ ” Jones as guilty father quoted Dylan’s song after his son confessed. “ ‘The ladder of law has no top and no bottom,’ ” Jones went on, as if to say—what? That finally we too can get away with murder? Time flipped, history shrunk, and the song, read out so eloquently, only got bigger.

  10 Portishead, Portishead (Go! Beat) Famous last words, again.

  FEBRUARY 1998

  1 Yardbirds, “You’re a Better Man Than I” on BBC Sessions (Warner Archives) In HBO’s recent Don King biopic, the Yard-birds’ British-blues version of Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” was used without a cut to orchestrate a restaging of the historic 1974 Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire. It was a reminder that nothing in rock ’n’ roll can outrun that particular recording, a hit in October 1965, just two months before the band cut a live radio session and, for one performance anyway, topped themselves with a rather clumsily written antiwar, antiracism protest song. “You’re a Better Man Than I” was always the Yardbirds’ most heartfelt and formally experimental number; here, with a wash of feedback threatening to upend the piece just as the band heads into the last chorus before the instrumental break, the music is plainly terrifying, and so exciting you might have to play it over and over just to make sure you heard what you heard.

  2 Sleater-Kinney, “Big Big Lights” on Free to Fight #1 (Candy-Ass) A 7-inch disc plus a 12-page booklet on “Girls Fighting Girls,” with instructions, reflections, and letters, including one on the Spice Girls’ “Girl Power”: “Girlism is the
step back to the sixties . . . As long as women think they are free to do whatever they want there’s no reason to start a revolt against our men-oriented systems.” Sleater-Kinney’s contribution features a vocal that’s extremist even by Corin Tucker’s standards—a vocal so consumed, so nearly a body in jeopardy, that you can sense it beginning to break up. B-side highlight: “Everyday,” a roundelay of overlaid voices that starts with “Every second a woman is called stupid, fat, crazy, a whore” and ends with “Every 15 seconds, a woman fights back . . .”

  3 Ivy, Apartment Life (Atlantic) A trio led by chanteuse Dominique Durand that with light echoes of Nico lives up to a terrific album title. The more you listen, the more bite you feel, as if you’re slowly realizing that the glossy shampoo commercial you’re watching on TV is made out of a cutup of Godard’s My Life to Live.

  4 Darren Starr, creator, Melrose Place (Fox, November 24, 1997) Dr. Brett Cooper, who has a real serial girlfriend-in-a-coma problem, attends comatose Megan. “Music can get through where nothing else can,” Coop says over Megan. “I’m betting you love Joni Mitchell as much as I do.” He slips a CD into a boom box, and as the camera comes in close on Megan’s face you can barely hear “Big Yellow Taxi.” “I’m awake! I’m awake!” screamed a sympathetic viewer. “Just turn off that horrible music!”

  5 Charles Brown, “Rising Sun” on The Cocktail Combos (Capitol 3-CD reissue) R&B pianist Brown is a swaggering presence at shows around Berkeley and Oakland these days. In Los Angeles in 1948 he sang like an opium eater sleeping in the grooves of his own 78s, his dreams too sensual to allow a hurried word, and there’s no sound quite like it anywhere.

  6 X, Beyond & Back—The X Anthology (Elektra 2-CD reissue) Punk looking for the heart of Raymond Chandler’s LA, and finding it—and also finding pure rock in the twelve-second guitar and bass intro to the 1982 “The Have Nots,” as perfect as the ten-second piano intro to the Falcons’ 1959 “You’re So Fine,” but with so much more jump.