Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  FEBRUARY 5, 2001

  1 Vladimir Mayakovsky/El Lissitzky, For the Voice (MIT Press) In 1923, in Berlin, the futurist poet and the suprematist designer made a thrillingly Soviet book: poems that flew off the page as signs broke out of pictures and letters severed themselves from words, then regrouped in lines and paragraphs, so that each poem was forever in contest with itself, the ante upped every time you came back to the same black-andred page. In this stunning edition, there are 5 1/4-inch-by-7 3/8-inch facsimiles of the original edition, in Russian and, translated by Peter France, English, plus Voices of Revolution, a volume of critical essays edited by Patricia Railing.

  You start with the noise the pictures make, and in that language nothing that follows really matches the second poem, with “beat out our march” pounding across two pages, the last two words standing up to a suprematist red square only by refusing to stay in formation. Then you start to read, and after the fourth poem, “Scum,” the other voices in the book can feel silenced. “Give me a rich man,” you can almost hear Mayakovsky chanting in his rumbling voice (as you can hear him for real in the 1914 and 1920 recordings collected on the anthology lunapark 0,10 [Sub Rosa], “the fattest / the baldest. / By the scruff of his neck I’ll haul him / in front of the Famine Committee. / Look.” What you’re now looking at is the cannibalism that swept through parts of the countryside during the civil war that followed the revolution. People posed for pictures of themselves with the remains of people they’d killed to eat; Mayakovsky doesn’t flinch. Like a true early-20th century avant-gardist, he goes for the jugular: “Son? / Father? / Mother? / Daughter? / Whose turn.” In London, he sees a banquet: “May / savages, / eaters of human flesh, / from the colonies come scavenging.” He travels to Paris, Berlin, revolution following him across the map, and the curse on the bourgeois world begins to seem automatic, until he returns to Soviet Moscow: “May your fat steak be turned into scissors / and cut your stomach apart.” In 1930, face to face with the murder of the revolution as since the first decade of the century he had written it out, he shot himself. He was 35.

  In 1918 Mayakovsky and others had called for poets to take up brushes and paint whole towns. “This seemed to be utopian,” El Lissitzky said in 1922, “and yet subsequently it came to pass.” “You know, this is a most interesting piece of work,” Lenin said of Mayakovsky’s 1921 “150 Million.” “A peculiar brand of Communism. It is hooligan Communism.” But by the end of the decade Mayakovsky stood accused of bohemianism and social parasitism. In her essay “A Revolutionary Spirit,” Railing quotes Russian critical theorist Ramon Jakobson’s 1931 “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets”: “We strained toward the future too impetuously and avidly to leave any past behind us . . . as for the future, it doesn’t belong to us either. In a few decades we shall be cruelly labeled as products of the past millennium. All we had were compelling songs of the future; and suddenly these songs are no longer part of the dynamic of history.”

  Tall, robust, with a threatening shaven skull and even more threatening eyes, Mayakovsky entered legend as part of the first crop of glamorous, inscrutable 20th century performers to be harvested young, joining in his own time Rudolph Valentino and Bix Beiderbecke, then as the years went on James Dean, Charlie Parker, Patsy Cline, Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. But he was from another country, one that he partly invented and that in any case no longer exists. You look at For the Voice and struggle to believe its 1923 ever happened: that the book was ever published, made, thought up, even a notion abandoned as soon as it came into view. Even that stretches credulity. All that power, packed into a few small pages, a rebuke to the future we live in.

  2 Butchies, Butchies 3 (Mr. Lady) A trio from Durham, N.C., that manages to combine vocal ache and prettiness, majestic chords and tiny drum sounds, “woo-hoohoos” and ugly stories, speed and what seems like a dead stop, until you realize they never stop moving.

  3 Paul McCartney, Liverpool Sound Collage (Capitol) In the footsteps of Walter Ruttmann’s 1930 Berlin Weekend (covered here Aug. 21, 2000), for the Peter Blake show “About Collage,” at the Liverpool Tate through March 4, the Cute One excavated his old town according to noise-music experiments the mop-tops first pursued in 1968 with “Revolution 9.” The difference for these pieces, made to play in the exhibition space, is that the 1965–69 voices of the Beatles McCartney mixes into his own ambient street recordings sound only vaguely familiar. John, Paul, George and Ringo sound not only as if they came from these streets but as if they went back to them, to live.

  4 E-Trade Super Bowl Halftime Show (CBS, Jan. 28) As Aerosmith and ’N Sync ran onto the field for their all-star revue, soon to be completed by neo-soul queen Mary J. Blige, rapper Nelly and Britney Spears as Miss American Fuck, the sound system pumped out the first chord each of “Start Me Up” and “Hard Day’s Night.” Never mind the parade of the Lines ’Round My Eyes Are Protected by a Copyright Law gestures of Aerosmith or the animatronic Michael Jackson moves and constipated singing of ’N Sync: according to the script viewers were supposed to follow, Aerosmith are the Rolling Stones and ’N Sync are the Beatles. Don’t like it? Hey, as they say in D.C., get over it. Justin Timberlake says the Beatles were once dismissed as a “boy band,” too. Paul McCartney doesn’t remember that, but he’s 58 years old, and probably doesn’t remember what he’s doing in his own living room.

  5 Tim Easton, The Truth About Us (New West) The insert to this singer-songwriter’s much-praised step away from alt-country shows a guy lolling on a couch, his eyes cast and an arm raised toward what must be light streaming in through a window. He never gets up, though.

  6 Aislers Set, “Attraction Action Reaction”/“Clouds Will Clear” (Suicide Squeeze) It’s the B-side of this 7-inch single from the cool, calm and collected Bay Area quintet that’s the charmer: a woman warbling about getting someone’s attention, and so simply you all but tune out. And then an even simpler but much deeper guitar part lets you feel how her heart beats when she gets what she wants. Plus the best label name of the season.

  7 Jon Langford, “PainTings,” at Other Music (New York, Dec. 6, 2000) The paintings hung on the walls of this avant-garde record store were part of Langford’s long-running “Death of Country Music” series, many of them renderings of Hank Williams, but the one that stood out bore no musician’s name. With talismans of doom scattered inside the frame—a skull, a Masonic eye—for Forgotten Cowboy Singer Langford recast an old publicity still, adding to the would-be star’s 10-gallon hat, western shirt, huge guitar and bigger smile a blindfold over his eyes. The plumminess of the pose made the picture as Langford finished it very creepy: this cowboy didn’t know that he couldn’t see, let alone that now, likely half a century after his photo was taken, he was dead.

  8 Richard Pryor, . . . And It’s Deep, Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings, 1968–1992 (Warner Archive/Rhino) What’s most shocking about listening to the nine CDs in this set straight through, which is easy to do, is that by the time Pryor gets to the incident where he set himself on fire free-basing, on the 1982 Live on the Sunset Strip, he’s turned into the same character he pinned so mercilessly on That Nigger’s Crazy 12 years before: the one who, in “Wino & Junkie,” can barely talk.

  9 Object in cluttered NPR studio (New York, Dec. 15, 2000) In an apartment rigged up for remotes but with so much stuff piled so randomly you half-expected someone to come in, announce a pledge drive and start selling every cracked book and discarded piece of clothing, stood an Elvis figure I’d never seen before: lithe, gold lamé, holding a mike stand, frozen in mid-jump-step, sly grin on its face, mounted on a silver base. I pushed a button marked “Demo”; the Elvis began to dance, fast, and a loud, powerful “Hound Dog” came roaring out of a hidden speaker. “It’s a telephone,” said an engineer passing by—“Elvis Presley Telephone,” to be precise, courtesy Telemania, division of Tilbor-Hetman Enterprises. “That’s what it does instead of ringing.”

  10 George
W. Bush’s inaugural cowboy boots (Jan. 20, all networks) Black, with “GWB” engraved on the sides and the presidential seal imprinted on the front—which is to say that in his personal appropriation of the symbols of the presidency, Bush made it clear he is not president merely in the constitutional sense but also in a corporate sense. The presidency is a logo, and he owns it.

  FEBRUARY 20, 2001

  1 Ja Rule, “Put It on Me” (Murder Inc./ Def Jam) Something like Barry White without the subtlety, this inescapable radio hit reaches depths of degradation most gangsta music never hints at. More tuneless than Fred Schneider of the B-52’s but in his way just as fey, Ja Rule slobbers as females swirl around him like a harem, melismatizing their brains out, their sound so far removed from actual human sexual response it becomes the vocal equivalent of breast implants.

  2 Bryan Ferry, “Where or When” and “Falling in Love Again,” from As Time Goes By (Virgin, 1999), also included on Ferry’s Slave to Love—The Best of the Ballads (Virgin, 2000) Of the standards that make up As Time Goes By, it’s “I’m in the Mood for Love” that’s in the air today, thanks to the film of almost the same name. But these are the heartbreakers. Despite the between-the-wars tuxedos ’n’ long dresses art on the CD insert, the material doesn’t signify the old glam rocker’s progression to a more mature, reflective—that is, decadent—state of mind. If anything, the demands Ferry is making on his music are more extreme than ever. Here the songs are tragic: it’s impossible to imagine they’ve ever been sung with such delicacy, with such an awareness that the slightest false move would break them. The sensibility might have first surfaced on Ferry’s cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” (included on Slave to Love), cut just after Lennon’s murder, but that recording now sounds merely personal compared with songs that, as Ferry sings them, seem to bleed all across the changing map of 20th century Europe. “Where or When” (1937) opens with a theme that suggests nothing so much as a Berlin cabaret where the bohemians who’ve been there every night for 15 years accept that the Nazis aren’t going away, and make their peace. The singer, though, won’t give up, so he imagines himself into the future, turning into Cary Grant in Notorious—meeting the same enemy around the next turn, but with the odds changed. “Falling in Love Again” (1930) is if anything more blasted; Ferry could have retitled the tune “Slitting My Wrists Again” and you wouldn’t even notice. He might be picturing Gabriel Byrne in Miller’s Crossing, as Byrne realizes that no matter what good he does for others, no matter whom he loves or who loves him, the story will shut him out.

  3 Twin Princess, The Complete Recordings (Hidden Agenda/Parasol) An arty duo from Seattle—arty right down to their not-weird version of Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s 1967 “Somethin’ Stupid”—but with enough charm to make you want to walk through the galleries where the stuff is playing. No. 1 this week: “Deep Sleep,” repetition as its own reward. Moving up: “Gimme a Kiss.”

  4 The Incredible Moses Leroy, Electric Pocket Radio (Artemis) Long ago, a big, sloppy-looking man called Larry “Wild-man” Fischer used to stand on street corners in Berkeley and Los Angeles and importune passersby: “Hey, you want to hear a new-type song for a dime?” If you said yes, something indescribable came out: flat and toneless, but weird enough (Fischer’s sidewalk hit was about his mother committing him to a mental hospital) and sweet enough to make you wonder—and, if not cough up another dime, hang around to listen if anyone else did. In 1968, during his freak-show period, Frank Zappa put out a Wildman Fischer double LP on his Bizarre label; it got great reviews. A follow-up did not; outsider artists are supposed to temporarily overcome their psychoses, not have careers.

  Ron Fountenberry of San Diego—who as a performer takes the name of his great-grandfather Moses Leroy (1900–90), a Houston civil rights activist who, from the ’30s to his death, spoke, sued, demonstrated and finally, in his last years, as a voter registrar, sat behind a desk to change his city and his country—stands somewhere between Larry Fischer and Brian Wilson. You can’t tell the studio genius from the kid fooling around in his bedroom. Leroy’s cutting and pasting, as unpretentious as a strip mall, results in songs that throw you off: sunny, disconcerting, glowing with the smiles of benign phantoms. Absolutely nothing seems to be at stake in this music other than amusement. Leroy works at it, and singer Camilla, taking a number every few tracks, gets to enjoy it. You take Leroy’s radio out of your pocket whenever you remember it’s there, to see what’s on; always, it’s something you’ve almost heard before.

  5 Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash, Walk Alone (Ultimatum) More from San Diego: for getting away with (or licensing) the name, the phrase “dead soldier” and the hearty male chorus on “Texas Sun”—which might remind you of the beginning of the cattle drive in Red River, when Howard Hawks cuts from one cowboy face to another, and you know that whatever’s coming next, it won’t be as good.

  6–7 Taj Mahal, Taj Mahal (Columbia Legacy, recorded 1967) When you listen to Rising Sons Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder (Columbia Legacy), a collection of unreleased demos recorded in Los Angeles in 1964, you can’t believe Taj (né Henry Fredericks) ever made it to Taj Mahal—even if it took three years and a trip around the block. The country blues from the earlier sessions are as dead as the dog the man pokes with a stick in Bruce Springsteen’s “Reason to Believe” (“Like if he stood there long enough / That dog’d get up and run”). On Taj Mahal, the former member of the Pioneer Valley Folklore Society and the rest of, as the New York Times embarrassed its members into saying, Mr. Mahal’s band, with Cooder still in tow, took momentary title to songs that had been sung by hundreds before them. Hammering his har-monica, Taj pulls Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Checkin’ Up on My Baby” inside out—that’s where she is, right inside the song!—and on the long stroll he takes through “The Celebrated Walking Blues” he suspends the more than three decades between its first recording and his own, between the more than three decades since his recording was first heard and today. “Hehheh,” he says, in what might be the most lascivious half-second in blues, until a few minutes later, when he says it again: this, you’re sure, is the sound everyone who came before was looking for, and that everyone, Taj included, has been looking for since. The big, bulging notes on his slide guitar flap in the air like wash on a line, then billow up in the wind of Cooder’s mandolin; the rhythm makes all the time in the world, and when the recording ends, you know the song doesn’t.

  8 Levon Helm & the Barn Burners at Biscuits and Blues (San Francisco, Feb. 6) They went into Muddy Waters’ “I’m Ready.” “They’re using that in Viagra commercials now,” said Maria Muldaur, leaning across the table. You’ve seen it: guy prancing around his apartment, dressing sharp, because now the song doesn’t mean he’s ready ready ready to fuck. It means he’s ready ready ready to see the doctor to talk about why he can’t.

  9 Taj Mahal, “The Celebrated Walking Blues,” on Taj Mahal (Columbia Legacy) Not that Viagra wasn’t already in the song, or anyway its ancestors: “Got to go to Memphis, baby / To have my hambone boiled / You know I done laid around here in Clarksdale, baby, until my / Little old hambone was spoiled.” And if that doesn’t work, you go see the gypsy. That always works. And always costs.

  10 Nick Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows—Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press) A short, passionate study written from inside the story it tells, and less about drugs, perhaps, than the way adherents of a music and a culture came to recognize that the ground beneath their feet had turned into air. Bromell, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, sums up in a passage of surpassing cruelty: “Just four years earlier, yeah, yeah, yeah, they were taking to the dance floor because something was happening. Now they found that they could not, after all, escape from history. Nor could they make it. How, except with ‘Tombstone Blues’ or ‘Yer Blues,’ could they name this condition—one in which the earth’s most privileged cohort was also powerless, radicalized for nothing, fated to wait for decades on the
watchtower, listening to the wind rise and watching the approach of two riders who knew their destiny yet would never, it seems, arrive?”

  MARCH 5, 2001

  1–3 Oh Susanna, Sleepy Little Sailor (Catamount), Johnstown (Stella/Square Dog, 1999) and Oh Susanna (Stella, 1997) Oh Susanna is singer, guitarist and songwriter Suzie Ungerleider of Toronto. There’s the echo of the North Carolina mountains in her voice, but on Sleepy Little Sailor, the first record she hasn’t put out herself, you can also hear Sarah McLachlan. You can also hear someone with nothing to prove: no one else would have the nerve to take up Otis Redding’s “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” and then sing from inside the song as Redding did not; Ungerleider puts you on the street as she sees her lover with someone else, letting you feel his tongue in her mouth. And you can hear Tanita Tikaram’s unexplainable “Twist in My Sobriety,” from 12 years back, as Ungerleider moves into “All That Remains” and “Forever at Your Feet,” as elegant musically as they are unstable as stories—What happened? they leave you asking. Is he, is she, already dead?

  For all that, nothing on Sleepy Little Sailor or the EP Oh Susanna comes within miles of “The Bridge,” from Johnstown. Very little released in the past three years by anyone comes close to it. This is the sort of song the tradition of the Appalachian murder ballad should have written by itself: a ballad that tries to be about suicide and ends up being about murder anyway, “Barbara Allen” without love, with a graphic bluntness that’s absolutely modern and a dream logic that’s absolutely Brontëan. Perhaps the tradition did write it; maybe Ungerleider can so lose herself in other singers, other songs, that she has no need to sing as if she has written the songs she did in fact write. Piano, violin, guitar and especially the quiet shifts of a Hammond organ enclose the story Ungerleider is telling, finishing it, leaving it as frightening as it is gorgeous. I played the song all day, over and over, trying to make it turn out differently.