Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  5 Richard Shindell, Somewhere Near Patterson (Signature) I bought this glossy folk recording because of a fulsome New York Times review (“What does it mean to say a singer-songwriter is the best?”) trumpeting “the vocal equivalent of Shaker furniture.” Bet you didn’t know “Shaker” was a synonym for “florid.”

  6 Ben Shahn, Farm Security Administration photo, Oct. 1935 From the FSA home page, go from Subject Index to United States-West Virginia-Welch, from there to United States-West Virginia-Scotts Run, from there to No. 30, and you’ll find Shahn’s picture of a businessman or government man—dressed in fedora and three-piece suit—sitting in a clearing next to a very handsome guitarist: “Love oh, love, oh keerless love,” someone wrote down, attempting to capture the player’s mountain dialect. His expression is at once wistful and impassioned, and his face is delicate, almost effete—there’s nothing of the weathering of Appalachia in his features—which only makes the caption more odd: “Doped singer relief investigator reported a number of dope cases at Scotts Run.” No audio, but listen to Lead Belly’s 1935 recording of “Careless Love” (on Midnight Special, Rounder) if you want to hear the morphine—in the song, if not the singer.

  7 North Mississippi Allstars, Shake Hands With Shorty (Tone-Cool) In this juke joint, the old—sometimes very old—blues are part of the atmosphere. With the guitars, even a mandolin and a washboard, buzzing off the walls, you don’t have to notice that the vocals are stuck in neutral, or if you do you can tune them out.

  8 U. S. Postal Service, “1990s Celebrate the Century” Sure, if you really want your letters celebrating cellphones and SUVs, virtual reality, computer art, Titanic (“A James Cameron Film”—did they, which is to say we, have to pay extra to say that?) and a visual and conceptual vagueness that beggars the imagination: take “New Baseball Records,” which neither on the front of the stamp nor the explanatory back bothers to say what the records are or who set them. As for the Seinfeld number: no Elaine crawling out of somebody’s bed, just—a doorway.

  9 Belle and Sebastian, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (Matador) Myself, I’d prefer they walked like an Egyptian—at least they couldn’t maintain their coy folk melodies, their arch pre-Raphaelite narratives, if they had to do it at right angles.

  10 Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Interscape, with music by John Cage (One 8) and décor and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg (Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, Calif., May 3) After his molecules-in-motion pointillist backdrop for a dance set to Morton Feldman’s 1958 Summerscape, for the new Interscape Rauschenberg offered a typically bullshit collage—disassociated images that connected to nothing, generated no tension, merely sat on their screen mute and still. In place of his Summerscape leotards, which in their lightness left the illusion of nakedness, he came up with outfits decorated with more meaningless images. It didn’t matter. The music was rendered on what one might call a distressed cello (all scratching and dying chords, like John Cale’s viola at the end of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”) and broken—or, somehow, extended—by long periods of silence, in which the dancers continued to move without hesitation, in the same stutter-step they used with the cello. The effect was no sense of mime, but an unnatural suspension of one element of life, which made life itself feel like a construct, invention or accident. At the end, Cunningham came out for a bow, appearing as the complete happy bohemian: Carl Sandburg mop of white hair, dark coat, dark shirt and striped baggy pants he might have bought off a village fool somewhere in central Europe in 1547.

  MAY 30, 2000

  1 Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP (Interscope) Why is he so much more believable, funnier, scarier and for that matter whiter—a realistic voice—on Dr. Dre’s 2001 than on his own record?

  2 John Gutmann, The Photography of John Gutmann: Culture Shock (Merrell Publishers) Gutmann (1905–98) left Germany for San Francisco in 1933, and thereafter let the California light bleach the irony out of his avant-garde eye even as what the nativeborn took for granted remained thrilling and odd to him. He moved around his new city like Robert Frank with a sense of humor. He loved signs, especially crowded, overwritten signs—the 1938 Yes, Columbus Did Discover America (a sedan screaming from “AND HOW THESE COYOTES HOWL” on the hood to “THE TRUTH MARCHES ON” on a back fender) or the 1988 Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Rosa Luxemburg, et al. at the ‘Militant Forum’ Bookshop—that communicate like citizens driven mad by their times. There are fabulous shots of Count Basie Band dancers, women on the street, repeated intimations of leftist culture as a Theosophical cult: the past in the pictures dares you to imagine the world has changed. “Exposi of NAZI AGENTS in San Francisco” reads a poster advertising a Jan. 30, 1938, meeting at Eagles Hall—who was there, who was exposed, where are they now?

  3 Berkeley Liberation Radio, 104.1 FM (May 11, 8:30 a.m.) Sometimes you can pick up this pirate station, sometimes you can’t. This day the radio seemed to stick on a faraway soul production, though it was more like an emanation: the style was 30 years ago, but the feeling was as old as the world. As if from the top of a mountain, a man chanted: “Why does my heart/Feel so bad?/Why does my soul/Feel so bad?” A highly pitched orchestration bridged the distance between him and the woman who shared the song. A specter of exile and banishment overwhelmed any sense of genre. The woman departed for the desert, the man floated off his mountain top and disappeared.

  The record ended—or rather fell into a long, staticky silence. Transfixed, I drove around in circles for the next half hour, trying to stay within range, hoping for someone to I.D. the tune, through a couple of minutes of a Noam Chomsky lecture on the U.S. as the Great Satan, more silence, Metallica from S&M, more silence, more Chomsky, the civil-rights movement jailhouse anthem “Ain’ Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” more silence, then Chomsky dithering over the introduction of another lecture only to be cut off cold by the 9 a.m. DJ, one “Sunny Day.” That strange soul record, it turned out, was Moby, who dies on my stereo and gets me on the radio every time.

  4 Forever Dusty: Homage to an Icon—A Tribute to Dusty Springfield (R&D) A set that soars when people you may not have heard of sing songs you may not have heard. It begins with the Laura Love Band’s stultifying note-for-note version of “Son of a Preacher Man”—and then dives into streetlevel pop heaven with “What’s It Gonna Be” by the Butchies, catches SONiA’s cool and dreamy “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” lets you imagine yourself on the disc with Lord Douglas Phillips and Gretchen Phillips’ utterly straight, guileless, nearly karaoke “Yesterday When I Was Young,” and former Gang of Four bassist Sara Lee’s absolutely karaoke “I Only Want to Be with You.” Best of all might be Jennifer Kimball’s “Chained to a Memory,” where every note seems pressed down like a dead flower in a book of bad poems.

  5 Mary Gaitskill, “Folk Song 1999” (www.nerve.com) Gaitskill starts this short story with news items, as if the daily paper is where you can now find the everyday perversity, the gothic portents, of the old ballads: here a murderer on a talk show with relatives of his victims, turtles stolen from a zoo, a woman aiming for the record books with a thousand-man gang bang. By the end, she turns into “John Henry,” the folk hero who died in a race with a machine. She’s no Tralala; she’s going to win, but while she won’t fuck herself to death, she may erase herself. Or she may simply be acting out a drama that was already in some versions of “John Henry,” say J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers’ “John Henry Was a Little Boy,” collected on the new Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four: “John Henry had a lovely little woman/Her name was Polly Ann/John Henry got sick and he had to go home/But his Polly drove steel like a man/Polly drove steel like a man (Some woman, boys!)”

  6 Don Henley, Inside Job (Warner Bros.) While it’s well known that as one gets older, one tends to find changes in the world at large unsettling, confusing, fucking irritating, a rebuke to one’s very existence, it’s generally not a good idea to make a career out of saying so.

  7 The Filth and
the Fury—A Sex Pistols Film soundtrack (Virgin) Everything of the pit (and I don’t mean the mosh pit) you can hear in the theater—the unknowable, the unspeakable—is translated into clean speech by the magic of digital house keeping. The sound isn’t bad, it’s evil.

  8–9 Rian Malan, “In the Jungle” (Rolling Stone, May 25) and Solomon Linda’s Original Evening Birds, “Mbube,” on Mbube Roots—Zulu Classical Music from South Africa, 1930s–1960s (Rounder) From Malan, the capitalist odyssey of a 1939 song its creator sold for “about one pound cash” and which to this day has made tens of millions for others: the song generations of campers know as “Wimoweh.” In the annals of theft and fraud that make up at least half the story of popular music, what’s astonishing is not that Linda (1909–62) reaped so little, but that, today, his family receives anything at all; what’s uncanny is that the Evening Birds’ dignified, stately original is instantly recognizable as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” the cheesy 1961 No. 1 by the Tokens. I heard it three times in one day recently; the voices on the verses are still embarrassing, but after Malan’s piece, the chorus sounded glorious.

  10 Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still—The Warner Collection, Volume I (Appleseed) There is old and there is old. On this 58-cut anthology of field recordings made between 1935 and 1966 by folklorists Frank and Ann Warner, you sometimes hear the sound of people living in an old-fashioned manner—living according to a frame of reference that is at once familiar and defunct, like an old brand of soda pop, or for that matter the term “soda pop.” When “Yankee” John Galusha of New York sings “Days of 49,” though, you are in another world, just a few years after the Gold Rush; when Lee Monroe Presnell of North Carolina sings “Farewell to Old Bedford” and the plain but undeniably mystical “Sometimes in This Country,” you hear the society that was here before the Founding Fathers met to turn it into a nation.

  JUNE 12, 2000

  1–2 Aislers Set, the last march (Slumberland) & Young Marble Giants, Salad Days (Vinyl Japan) Those who know the Young Marble Giants of Cardiff, Wales—including Courtney Love, who covered their “Credit in the Straight World” on Hole’s Live Through This—treasure the minimalist three-piece’s 1980 Colossal Youth as proof that punk meant cutting back to essentials, including, one would think from the sound of the thing, stuff like furniture, heat, more than one change of clothes. The 1979 demos collected on Salad Days—“recorded in the rundown heart of student bedsit land”—prove something else: that to pull off a concept that strict you need perfect execution.

  Alison Stratton’s ultracool YMG vocals might have been picked up from the screen—from Anna Karina in ’60s Godard movies. The Bay Area combo Aislers Set catch the same casual vehemence, the sense that while you can read your fate in dust motes you can also sweep them up. Recorded “ either in Amy’s garage or Wyatt and Alicia’s living room,” they make dream pop feel as easy to make as a can of soup, and as dangerous: watch that jagged edge. A woman singing, “I cut my teeth on dirty looks” isn’t what you’re supposed to find in dream pop, but here the line goes by like a smile: watch those smiles.

  3 Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll (A&E, June 18, available on home video in July) Directed by Morgan Neville, written by Peter Guralnick, narrated by Billy Bob Thornton, this 90-minute documentary again and again trumpets the magical ear of the great Memphis producer and Sun Records founder—but the words that explain how Phillips captured varieties of American speech at their fullest, through such mediums as Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Junior Parker, Pat Hare and countless more, don’t make it into the film. Instead there are the results, and wonder.

  Visiting the ruins of the penitentiary where, at the age of 17, in 1943, he was sent to serve 99 years for rape, Johnny Bragg of the Prisonaires—the group he formed in prison—describes the genesis of his lovely R&B hit “Just Walking in the Rain.” Now he’s very old, nattily dressed, and, talking about what it meant to glimpse the rain from the inside, he begins to sing. He’s absolutely glorious. The song expands, taking in anyone’s aspirations for what they can never have. “I always had hope,” Bragg says. “Of getting out. You know why? I was innocent.” Phillips got him down on tape in 1953, 10 years into the 24 Bragg would eventually serve.

  Shaking their heads in awe are, most notably, R&B singer Roscoe Gordon (Phillips “could reach the soul of man through that board”), Sun producer Jack Clement (“He scares the heck out of some people. He’s telling you something, and you know he’s full of . . . prunes, but it’s profound, whatever it is. He can have you believe in something and you know it’s not true. For a while”) and Memphis musician Jim Dickinson. With typical eloquence he sums up Phillips’ achievement by describing a 1954 show at Memphis’ Overton Park Shell, where with one “Ellis Presley,” billed below country ham Slim Whitman, the crowd found itself faced with the future. “It forced the listener to make a choice, simply to accept it or reject it, if nothing else. What followed that choice was freedom, because of course that’s what follows a choice.”

  4 Sonya Hunter, Finders Keepers (Innerstate) Good title for an album of mostly other people’s songs, but Hunter doesn’t get to keep them: she’s a terrible singer. Except on Jeb Nichols’ “GTO,” where the hot ’60s Pontiac is celebrated as if it were a horse in the Virginia mountains in 1885.

  5 Tarbox Ramblers, “Third Jinx Blues,” on Tarbox Ramblers (Rounder Select) Ordinarily the folkies at Rounder can’t tell a rock ’n’ roll band from a tree, but this Boston four-piece can play from the shadows. A wrong-side-of-the-bed blues catches the mood of a man who wants only to tell the world the bad news, but who refuses to be rushed. It’s like Canned Heat or the Beat Farmers at their best; it’s so good you wonder why the group fills up the rest of its album with old-timey warhorses (to the point of piling “Jack of Diamonds” on “The Cuckoo”—they’re the same song) that at best are B-plus college papers and at worst copied off the Internet, if not old Kaleidoscope albums.

  6 David Johansen, David Johansen and the Harry Smiths (Chesky) Johansen, aka the dread Buster Poindexter, equates shtick with being, and on this dive into prewar blues the shtick is that to sing very old songs you must sound as if you are very old. There are Amos ’n’ Andy vocals, and despite his many protestations, I don’t believe Johansen has ever been to Memphis. But on Rabbit Brown’s ineffable 1927 “James Alley Blues” he gets lost in the song. Covering Bob Dylan’s “World Gone Wrong” rewrite of “Delia,” Johansen seems sorrier about what happens there than anyone before him.

  7 Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind (live),” on The Best of Bob Dylan, Volume 2 (Sony UK) A friend in 1963, when we first heard this song: “Kinda ersatz.” He meant it was written by the times, not by anyone in particular. But in this seven-minute, undated 1990s “field recording”—right out of the crowd, like a bootleg—the song is less a message than an occasion for music, with a lot of guitar. The song itself is now blowing in the wind, and has long ago blown away from its author; on this night people have momentarily attached themselves to it, the author with little more claim to the composition than the audience. The confidence and condescension of a younger man—Don’t you get it?—have turned into the regret of an older one. The song is no oldie, though. Singing alongside Dylan, Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell take the tune to a new, higher register, and suddenly “Blowin’ in the Wind” is not only an occasion for music, not when it’s daring the future to shut it up.

  8 Stanley Booth, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (A Cappella Books) The 1984 epic on the epic year 1969, back in print. From the new afterword: “The last time I heard the Stones, I went in like a civilian, with a ticket. Inside the entrance just past the ticket-taker a girl was passing out applications for Rolling Stones Visa and MasterCards with the tongue logo. I had a vision of NATO leasing the tongue to put on helicopters, tanks, bombs. In the sixties we believed in a myth—that music had the power to change people’s lives. Today people believe in a myth—that music is just entertainme
nt.”

  9 The Haggard, A Bike City Called Greasy (Mr. Lady) Two women from Portland, Ore.—guitarist Emily Kingan and drummer sts—playing what is by now very formal hardcore, but with monsters-from-the-deep mythical undertones: in the sound of the voices, not the words they use.

  10 Dusty (Sarah Dougher), “Cadallaca Meet the Backstreet Boys” (Puncture #46) Bumped from their date at a Portland studio by the BBs, the women in the punk trio “started conjecturing about their sexuality in song form, penning the bluesy number ‘One Night with a Backstreet Boy,’ ” available soon or never as a hidden track on the next Sleater-Kinney single (“pending outcome of slander suit”).

  JUNE 26, 2000

  1 Oval/Markus Popp, ovalprocess (Thrill Jockey) Techno as surf music: blips, buzzes and hums, with a dream in the background and moving like water.

  2 Don Asmussen, “The San Francisco Comic Strip: On Microsoft, Monopolies and Breaking Up” (San Francisco Examiner, June 11) “What Judge Jackson did took guts,” Asmussen began in a panel featuring the Examiner headline “JUDGE JACKSON SPLITS UP MICROSOFT.” “But then the power got to him . . .” Second panel: “JUDGE JACKSON ALSO SPLITS UP ‘JOURNEY’ Annoying ’70s Band Has Gone on Long Enough, Says Jackson. Judge vows to ‘never hear that lovin’ touchin’ squeezin’ song ever again.’ ”

  3 Chris Isaak and Kelly Willis on Sessions at West 54th (PBS, June 3) Isaak was his usual diffident self until he cut out with rockabilly guitar on “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing.” Willis, in a simple, gorgeous red dress, melted the walls from the first notes of “What I Deserve.” The words of the song wound into each other; nothing stood in the way of Willis’ expanding voice, which seemed to seek out all the corners in the room that other voices might not reach. She got more out of a word than some people get out of a career. With Willis digging into “that” or “happy” with no sign of pushing you could hear, just the grimace on her face, it was real soul singing—not the mindless melisma, the vocal equivalent of an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, that rules female singing on the radio today. “I Have Not Forgotten You” is a hurting song that in the almost thrown away “So many got it tougher than I do” makes room for the whole world without identifying the singer’s suffering with the world’s. This is Willis’ most striking number, but it wasn’t allowed to speak for itself, as it does on her 1999 album What I Deserve. It had to get bigger: BIGGER, as if you might mistake the showcase for a mere tune. It was an insult to the listener: no one needs cues to understand how much is at stake in this melody, but three lines in the drums fell on the song and nearly toppled it. There was a guitar solo the song didn’t want and didn’t need. And then Willis sang a verse almost a cappella, time stood still, and the world could have ended for all you’d have noticed.