Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  6 David Thomas and Foreigners, Bay City (Thirsty Ear) Bay City—a.k.a. Santa Monica—was the nice little mob town where Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe went to get beat up in the ’40s. In Denmark, the brooding leader of Pere Ubu tries to walk its streets, but they might as well be water under his feet. Read Farewell, My Lovely instead.

  7–8 Beachwood Sparks, Beachwood Sparks (Sub Pop) and Broken by Whispers, Trembling Blue Stars (Sub Pop) Sub Pop was once the arm the Seattle scene reached out to the rest of the world. By way of London and Los Angeles it’s now offering two of the wimpiest records you’ll ever hear—or, if the times are better than this music is betting they are, won’t. As the critic Mark Shipper imagined the perfect James Taylor lyric back in the early ’70s: “The wind blows/I fall down.”

  9 Steely Dan, Two Against Nature (Giant) You might think it’s against nature for Donald Fagen and Walter Becker to return with music precisely as airless as that offered on their last studio album, Gaucho, which came out in 1980. But maybe inside the not-very-clever tunes is an argument: I’m Rip van Winkle! I slept for 20 years and missed nothing! As the more interesting Steely Dan “Timeline/Bio” wheel included in the press packet says of 1947, the year before Fagen’s birth: “Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker records ‘Klacktoveedsedsteen’ for an obscure jazz label. This is the last significant work of the classic period. Nothing very important happens from this moment on.”

  10 On Feb. 21 at 63rd Street and College Avenue, Oakland, Calif. “Heard anything important to you on the radio today?” asked a radio commercial. No: just Morning Edition’s false concern, filmmakers bragging about how smart they are on Fresh Air, no music worth the time it takes to change the station. Then at Royal Coffee, where neighbors’ complaints have put severe limits on what employees can play, a shock: Etta James’ fabulously girly 1963 “Two Sides to Every Story” (“There’s always his side, and yours too!”), with the women in the shop singing under their breath to the frantic scratchy chorus. “They’re always two sides to every story!” James shouts as her two backing singers, little devil and little angel perched on her shoulders, go “TWO SIDES!” and then swoon together into a sighing “Yeahhhhh”—it just fades, slides, there’s nothing like it—when James meets a new guy. In the sister shop next door: Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light,” the morning suddenly so unfixed you could imagine everyone in the place converting on the spot.

  MARCH 20, 2000

  1 Ernest C. Withers, Pictures Tell the Story (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va.) In this companion volume to the exhibition running through May 7—the first collection of work by a Memphis, Tenn., photographer best known for his 1950s shots of Memphis musicians looking as if they own the world—the most notable pictures are from the civil rights movement. There is “Tent City” Family, from Tennessee in 1960, evicted from their home for voting; the smile in the father’s eyes is devastating in its pride. There is the well-dressed young protester carrying a sign reading, “Communist Can Eat Here Why Can’t We?” There is First Day of Memphis Integration, 1961, three young children looking out a car window, one of them a girl of perhaps 7 with eyes so bright you can’t believe the future she sees isn’t real, and a scared woman in the front seat covering her face. There is a filthy toilet, a sink and a rotting wall, an image so stark, ugly and composed you can read it as an art photograph aestheticizing squalor until you read the caption: “Boarding House Bathroom from Which James Earl Ray Shot Dr. King, 422 South Main Street.” And there is King’s funeral procession, moving down Main Street in Memphis, past the State Theater advertising “ELVIS PRESLEY AT HIS BEST: ‘STAY AWAY JOE.’ ”

  Despite the fact that Withers’ 1956 and ’57 photos of the Hillbilly Cat smiling backstage with B. B. King and Brook Benton are pictures of brotherhood, this is the most complete image there is of the irrelevance, and the silence, of Elvis. After that, the shot of the Bobby Bland band onstage in about 1950—in essayist Daniel Wolff’s description, traveling “in a one two three beat from Bland to his hot guitarist to the blissful young sax player, with a final rim shot provided by the portrait of W. C. Handy on the wall behind”—is a relief you may think you have no right to feel.

  2 Cadallaca, Out West (Kill Rock Stars) In this side project, organist “Dusty” (Sarah Dougher of the Lookers), guitarist “Kissy” (Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney) and drummer “STS” (Junior of the Lookers) nail what Lesley “You Don’t Own Me” (But) “That’s the Way Boys Are” Gore would have done in 1980 if she’d blown off her age and formed a punk band with ? and the Mysterians. That is, as Kissy she’d get all Frankie and Johnny on her cheating lover (“Out West”), but dropping Frankie’s regrets for Mili Avital’s “I never loved you anyway” in Dead Man; as Dusty she’d sing about sex in a car to the one she did it with so that the bad memory will last longer for the other person than for her.

  3 Cat Power, The Covers Record (Matador) Chan Marshall is precious and arty. She can also make “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” sound like a version of “Boys Don’t Cry” and Moby Grape’s 1967 walk down Haight Street, “Naked If I Want To,” feel as if it’s chiseled on a tombstone. Which it probably is, somewhere.

  4 Sarge, Distant (Mud) Last words from the defunct Illinois punk quartet, with both new tunes (“Detroit Star-lite”) and live old ones (“Fast Girls”) jumping with singer/writer/guitarist Elizabeth Elmore’s singular leaps from desperation to amusement to confusion to gritting her teeth. Plus a “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” that should have been recorded as karaoke, not in a studio with horns.

  5 Robert Frank, US 285 (1956) outside “Walker Evans” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through May 14) The comprehensive retrospective of the Evans photographs—the first, it said there—was in truth pretty skimpy and suffered from overfamiliarity. The countless outtakes from the 1936 Alabama work known from Evans’ and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were completely ignored in favor of the official images. Making a stronger claim, in a lead-in gallery devoted to photographs that influenced Evans and were inspired by him, was a single picture from Robert Frank’s 1958 collection The Americans, the most ordinary and mythic shot imaginable, just a flat road in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, white line down the middle, one black car approaching. Evans’ comments on the piece, from 1958 US Camera Annual, more or less a Theory of the Springsteen Road Song, appeared next to it: “In this picture, you instantly find the continent. The whole page is haunted with American scale and space, which the mind fills in quite automatically—though possibly with memories of negation or violence or of exhaustion with thoughts of bad cooking, extremes of heat and cold, law enforcement, and the chance to work hard in a filling station.”

  A few lines from Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo should have been there, too: “ ‘Deluxe Ice Cream, Coffee, 1 cent Pies, Cakes, Tobacco, Hot Dogs and Highways,’ ” says a Haitian to 1920s Harlem hoodoo detectives PaPa LaBas and Black Herman. “ ‘Highways leading to nowhere. Highways leading to somewhere. Highways the [U.S. Marines’] Occupation used to speed along in their automobiles, killing dogs, pigs and cattle belonging to the poor people. What IS the American fetish about highways?’ ‘They want to get somewhere,’ LaBas offers. ‘Because something is after them,’ Black Herman adds. ‘But what is after them?’ ‘They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress. We call it Haints.’ ”

  6 “Rock Style” (Metropolitan Museum of Art) A Tommy Hilfiger production, with co-sponsorship from Condé Nast and Estée Lauder, it made you feel like you’d dreamed your way into a Vanity Fair ad supplement and would never wake up.

  7 Randy Weeks, “Madeline,” on Madeline (Hightone) The composer of Lucinda Williams’ “Can’t Let Go” digs himself into a very dark, very convincing seduction song in a town where there’s nothing else to do. Weeks’ voice isn’t strong enough to make the recording stand up for long, but while it lasts there’s a cruel, alluring shadow of Larry Clark’s Tulsa in the background.

>   8 Hillary Clinton at Riverside Church, New York (March 5) What’s disarming about Hillary Clinton is the way she stands up in front of a crowd and speaks at length in paragraphs, without notes, without seeming to have memorized anything, simply as if she knows her own mind. She’s that organized and that fierce. But this day, addressing the not-guilty verdict in the trial of the police who shot Amadou Diallo without mentioning it, she was, one by one, reading the sort of words (“To hunker down instead of reaching out. To shut doors instead of opening them”) nobody speaks without counting the cost of each.

  9 Chloë Sevigny gets lucky in love in If These Walls Could Talk 2 (HBO, March 5) After getting HIV in Kids the first time she has sex, V.D. in The Last Days of Disco the first time she has sex, falling in love with a man who turns out to be a woman and then gets shot in front of her in Boys Don’t Cry, it’s about time. Interesting music, too—faraway, smoky soul—as opposed to the horrifying washing-machine melodies of the Ellen De-Generes/Sharon Stone episode.

  10 Washington Phillips, “I Had a Good Father and Mother,” on Storefront and Streetcorner Gospel (1927–1929) (Document, Austria) A heavy-set, unsmiling man in his 30s, Phillips had a sense of humor (“Denomination Blues,” a deadpan account of the endless antipathies Christian orders find in a message of love). He played an instrument that sounded like an electric zither run through a Leslie speaker cabinet, showing you a heaven populated by ghosts. In 1929, at his last recording session, he sang the saddest song in the world, thanking his parents for putting him on the right path. You listen and you know the world is poorer because he is not in it.

  APRIL 3, 2000

  1 Lou Reed, “Possum Time,” from Ecstasy (Reprise) It’s 18 minutes long and you can play it all day long. A huge fuzztone that sounds more like a construction site than a guitar sets an implacable, unsatisfiable zigzag line in play. “It’s possum time!” a slightly demented, definitely pleased man announces. “I feel like a possum in every way!” In fact he sounds like a man who won’t back down, and you follow him, at a distance, on a nighttown walk. When it ends it’s as if the sun is coming up—so soon? Already? You’ve seen nothing that isn’t ugly, but the walk has its own rewards. “The only one left standing,” Reed says, sounding tired. He’s grown all the way into his role as bad conscience—his own and the nation’s. He may even grow out of it, but not yet. When, in the Velvet Underground, in another era, a young man who sounded old sang with fright and nausea of “all the dead bodies piled up in mounds,” who’d have thought that more than three decades later he’d still be prowling the streets looking for more of them, more bodies, more mounds, like a detective of the obvious?

  2 Phil Collins, “You’ll Be in My Heart,” best original song (Academy Awards, March 26) Given that as an original song “You’ll Be in My Heart” barely exists, Collins sang the hell out of it—while wearing the night’s best-looking suit.

  3 Nick Tosches, The Devil and Sonny Liston (Little, Brown) This short, clean book about the St. Louis Stagger Lee who in 1964, in one of the most shocking upsets in boxing history, lost the heavyweight championship to Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali, soon enough), is a keen reminder of the limits of biography—limits biographers almost never respect. That is: the biographer’s subject has no inner life. No matter how many letters, diaries or suicide notes the subject leaves behind, all you have are lies. You can’t know what goes on in someone else’s head—unless you are a novelist, and are willing to imagine another’s inner life, at which point biography ceases and fiction begins. So as you pass through this account of a man whose notoriety probably bought him only a few more years than he could have expected from a life on the street, don’t wonder what, in the depths of his soul, he really thought. As Tosches tries to decide why Liston was found dead in his house in Las Vegas in 1971—dead, probably, for a week—think about what Tosches calls “the unseen sediment, detritus, and sludge beneath the course of this book.” He means the world of manipulation and enforcement, murder and fraud, that the biographer’s illusion that we can know what makes a person tick allows us to ignore.

  4–5 Patti Smith, Gung Ho (Arista) & Angie Aparo, The American (Arista) Two albums from the same label with the American flag imprinted on the discs. Aparo is a shaved-head guy who poses in front of urban wreckage but sings like a sensitive ’70s troubadour; Smith bleeds for all humankind, but she’s noisier. On “Strange Messengers” she condemns slavery. Just as she once confidently declared herself a “Rock ’n’ Roll Nigger,” now she slumps to the ground as the whip cuts her flesh and her children are sold down the river. “History sends such strange messengers,” she announces: guess who? With her band just a megaphone and her singing merely a flag to wave, she pulls out all the stops, shouting: “My people!/I speak to you!/I burned, I swung, I toiled for you and your children!” But now all her people do is “burn out your lives on crack and sorrowful stories,” betraying their ancestors, betraying her. (By the way, what’s wrong with sorrowful stories?) She hasn’t even gotten to Vietnam yet, or the sneering twist she gives the words “Colonial-ism, imperial-ism,” as if the real purpose of history were to confirm the hipster’s superiority to it. “Donna, donna, donna/I’m the world’s Madonna,” National Lampoon’s Radio Dinner once had Joan Baez warble; Smith has taken over, but somehow lost Baez’s fab sense of humor along the way.

  6 Dennis Miller, “Rant on Patriotism,” Dennis Miller Live (HBO, March 24) “You want to dwell on this country’s fuck-ups? Be my guest . . . But you might want to remember that when you stomped into CIA headquarters waving your Freedom of Information Act permission slip you were not summarily hustled into a damp sub-basement where a jackbooted sadist with one eyebrow and tinted aviators Elvis wouldn’t even fucking wear is smoking unfiltered cigarettes that smell like a skunk getting a perm as he clamps jumper cables on your nipples and starts humming the love theme from Midnight Express.” Too true. On the other hand, there’s that scene in Top Secret! where Val Kilmer is being tortured by East German secret police. Delirious, he sees himself wandering the empty halls of his all-American high school: he registered for a class, he forgot all about it, now he’s trying to get to the final, but school was over last week, and . . . and then he comes to. The East Germans crank the juice on the jumper cables, but a satisfied smile spreads over Kilmer’s face: it was only a dream.

  7 Surveillance Camera Players, 1984, on Surveillance Camera Players This small troupe stages plays in front of surveillance cameras, often in subways, then films the action off public monitor screens. Here, with four actors, eight minutes (out of a 45-minute video) and a pidgin comic-book script (signs held up by a man in a grinning death’s-head mask, I.D. placards around the necks of Winston and Julia), the story comes across: because it’s so familiar a few slogans and the right setting can call the whole thing back, especially when weird organ-like music is leaking in from another corridor, people pass by the show as if it’s invisible, and the primitivism of the drama-turgy reduces Orwell’s prophecy to the scale of litter. “WE ARE THE DEAD” reads the lovers’ sign; Death’s Head holds up the novus ordo seclorum Masonic pyramid from the dollar bill. “Can I ask you what you’re doing here?” says a man with a security guard’s menacing politeness. “Taping this,” says a woman. “Do you have a permit for this?” Death’s Head holds up “ROOM 101.” “You don’t need a permit to do this,” the woman says. “You don’t?” “Why are you guys doing this?” says a second man. “To show that surveillance cameras are everywhere,” says the woman. “Yeah,” the man laughs, “but who doesn’t know that?” Death’s Head shoots Winston in the head; from somewhere, there’s applause.

  8 “They Can’t Sing . . . But They Can Play” (Oakland Athletics TV commercial) The team’s youngest ballplayers take turns on a ratty high school auditorium stage where a bored, smiling, middle-aged music teacher is playing the organ. With cracking voices and expressions of absolute sincerity they apply themselves to a song that was a hit well before any of them were born: Simon and Garfunkel�
��s “Scarborough Fair,” here killed deader in under a minute than countless karaoke bars have managed in decades.

  9 Rosie and the Originals, The Best of Rosie and the Originals (Ace) For the 1960 “Angel Baby”; a lovely, previously unreleased cover of the Students’ 1958 “I’m So Young” (“Can’t marry no one”); and a study of how a group with one perfect moment in it tries to stave off the inevitable.

  10 Ass Ponys, “Swallow You Down,” from Some Stupid with Flare Gun (Checkered Past) This is what the Twin Cities Twin-Tone sound of the 1980s was for—the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Soul Asylum and Babes in Toyland using guitars to render ordinary stuff heroic, tragic, a thrill—but now it’s 20 years later in Ohio and the guys in the band are promising a suicidal friend they won’t walk away, not ever. They build the music until it’s too good to let loose, so they let it sweep them up, riding a sunny, rising melody for “I won’t let them swallow”—and then crashing hard for “you down,” paying off the loan the first five words took out on a pledge easier to make than to keep. This is what it’s all for.

  APRIL 17, 2000

  1 Marah, Kids from Philly (E Squared/Artemis) I haven’t heard a band sing so convincingly from the inside of a bad neighborhood since the Youngbloods’ “Four in the Morning,” and that was a long time ago. Marah works with a small, tight sound, as if they have nothing they can afford to waste, but they’re far-seeing. Their best pieces seem at once cramped—as cramped as the room the singer rents—and infinitely expansive: you have no idea how far the songs will go before they’ll let go of you. For a moment you might wonder why the Vietnam tune “Roundeye Blues” begins with castanets and a radio-familiar three-stroke drum pattern, but after that you’re too caught up in the story to care. The sudden density of the music and the cruelty of the ideas inside it shoot up on the chorus, burning off the romanticism of some young guy’s war fantasy. “Don’t smoke the Bible,” the singer warns. The last verse ends with a stinger; it’s so harsh, so unpolished, you can’t accept it as the last word. You want the story to go on. But by then the singer is trailing away, musing over the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” and you find out what those castanets and that drum pattern were for.