Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Trailer Bride, High Seas (Bloodshot) Melissa Swingle, singer and multi-instrumentalist leader (saw, guitar, banjo, harmonica, piano) of this country band, which sounds like an old motel on Route 66 looks, is going to have to change her “I Used to Be Disgusted, Now I Try to Be Amused, But Usually It’s Not Worth the Effort” T-shirt sooner or later. But not just yet.

  3 John McCready, “Room at the Top,” Mojo (May) The story of Joe Meek, the UK’s first real independent record producer. The Tornadoes’ 1962 “Telstar,” which alone among period pop songs playing in the “Les Années Pop” show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris this spring came across as a match for the best of the pop art on the walls, was his biggest hit; he killed himself in 1967 after shotgunning his landlady to death. McCready on Meek’s work with songwriter Geoff Goddard: “Like Joe, Goddard was an amateur spiritualist with a Buddy Holly obsession. Goddard’s interests pushed them to attempts at contacting dead stars—Al Jolson, Mario Lanza, and even Buddy. The sessions prompted Geoff to pen Mike Berry’s ‘Tribute to Buddy Holly.’ Joe and Geoff decided to call up Buddy and see if he thought the record would be a hit. His reply? ‘SEE YOU IN THE CHARTS.’ ”

  4 Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days (Doubleday) Anthropologist Harry Smith found the ballad “John Henry”—or the story of the ex-slave and spike driver who dies in a race with a steam drill—bottomless. No less than four versions are included on the four volumes of Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music—by the Williamson Brothers and Curry (“Gonna Die With My Hammer in My Hand,” 1927), Furry Lewis (“Spike Driver Blues,” 1928), J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers (“John Henry Was a Little Boy,” 1936) and the Monroe Brothers (“Nine Pound Hammer Is Too Heavy,” 1936). Scattered through this novel about a young journalist on a junket for the release of a John Henry stamp are Whitehead’s versions of the way the song generates versions of itself: tales of how singers find the song, or how the song finds its singers, be they a present-day crackhead or a Jewish song-plugger a hundred years ago. Whitehead’s hero stands in the way of a story trying to tell itself, but there is deeper writing here than in novels that have nothing wrong with them.

  5 Jonathan Franzen, “Freeloading Man,” review of Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days, New York Times Book Review (May 14) Novelist Franzen leads with the declaration that he was “irritated” by Whitehead’s having made the hero of his first novel, The Intuitionist, a woman: “Although it’s technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist’s fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened”—smallened?—“by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all?” Leave aside the assumption that women are by definition “smallened,” or, for that matter, the case of Henry James (who, some have argued, was, you know, not exactly male at all, at least as Franzen seems to define male). By the lights of Franzen’s argument, Whitehead, who is black, should also not attempt to inhabit white characters, which he does throughout John Henry Days, and Franzen, who is white, should certainly not be judging the work of a black novelist. But since he is, we can fairly ask: is he using Whitehead as his fantasy sex object? Is he trying to colonize territory that rightfully (at least as Franzen defines “rightfully”) belongs to black writers? Does he perhaps believe himself to be, at some shallow level, not white at all? Or is he simply a moron who should never write about anyone but himself?

  6 Lucinda Williams, “Angels Laid Him Away,” on Avalon Blues—A Tribute to the Music of Mississippi John Hurt (Vanguard) More proof that Williams has taken the fawning reviews of her Car Wheels on a Gravel Road to heart, and is now ready to bestow her genius on anyone dead enough to keep quiet about it. Too bad Joe Meek isn’t around to deal with this.

  7–9 “Vermeer and the Delft School,” Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, closed May 27) “The baddest painter since God’s Jan Vermeer,” Jonathan Richman proclaimed on “Vincent Van Gogh.” (“Bompabompadomp ramalangadangdang bompabompadomp oo-wah-oo,” went the chorus.) A banner with those words should have hung over Vermeer’s The Procuress (1656). On the right side of the large, florid painting is a man flipping a prostitute a gold coin while resting his other hand on her breast; on the left is a dandy, by consensus a Vermeer self-portrait, his eyes sparkling in a ravenously privileged male grin.

  It’s not characteristic. All through the Delft work, especially that of Vermeer (1632–75) and Pieter de Hooch (1629–84), there are quiet rooms, courtyards, streets. There is the emergence of bourgeois life as “a new idea in Europe” (as Saint-Just, at the height of the French Revolution, named happiness)—as a new idea of harmony, simplicity, domestic art, leisure, neoteny (children are dressed as miniature adults, but their faces are their own, and the faces of adults retain childlike features). There is a stillness, a peace of mind that rules even as tales of colonial adventure bring drama into the home. There is a complete absence of decadence or pretentiousness—or, most of the time, even anxiety. (Vermeer’s 1662–63 Woman With a Lute is a glaring anomaly: a girl with hollow eyes in a bird’s face, her blonde hair receding as if she’s suffering from malnutrition, could be a London punk in 1976.) A whole way of being can be summoned in the luminous possibilities of a single flower or a commonplace bowl.

  If you’d left the exhibit and walked across the museum to the William Blake show, you’d have passed van Gogh’s 1888 Madame Roulin and Her Baby, which measures the real distance between the Netherlands in the 17th century and France in the 19th: between a new idea and an old one. The mother is on the right, her head downcast, her yellow face fading into the yellow background as she holds up her baby with its ugly adult’s face, with its grimace of one who has already apprehended and understood the ugliness of the world into which it has so recently been born. The mother’s age can’t be told from her face, but her hands are old and arthritic; she looks down in shame from her monster.

  10 Soundbreak.com, advertisement (Prince & Mulberry streets, New York, May 9) Down the side of a building, the head of a pleasant-looking middle-aged man; your accountant, pharmacist, hardware store clerk. “Their music drowns out the evil voices in my head,” he’s saying.

  JUNE 11, 2001

  SPECIAL OUT OF TOWN OUT OF MIND SUMMER EDITION!

  1 Monkees, Summer 1967—The Complete U.S. Concert Recordings (Rhino) Proof that the economy is still humming: market calculations indicate there remains enough disposable income to ensure a positive return on the release of a double live CD collecting, in their entirety, four shows consisting of the same 17 songs. Played in the same order. By the same people.

  2 Advertisement for U.S. Trust (Los Angeles magazine, June) & David Leonhardt, “If Richer Isn’t Happier, What Is?” (New York Times, May 19) This column does not credit the existence of political conspiracy or coordinated propaganda. Therefore the simultaneous appearance of a news story about how “money really cannot buy happiness” and how “even though income [has] risen dramatically since World War II, Americans say they are no happier” and an ad headed “Money Is Not the End of Worry. It Is the Beginning” can have nothing to do with deflecting resentment over the unprecedentedly regressive character of the recently passed tax bill. “You have more dependents, more possessions, more investments,” says copy under a stark painting of a 40-ish woman who looks like Daria without a sense of humor. “Yet you’re still expected to fight your way through a zillion e-mails and voice mails each day, just trying to hang on to your sanity, your ideal weight, and your quality time with your family. How can you explain to other people the fear that your children might never need to work?” “Who would believe all that money could ever feel like a burden rather than a blessing?” the ad asks. It answers not just for U.S. Trust, but for the person idly reading along: “We would.” Wouldn�
��t you?

  3 Quasi, The Sword of God (Touch and Go) Earnest playing, uninteresting singing—of a certain strain, indie music of absolute purity.

  4 Nick Lowe, The Convincer (Yep Roc) From the last of the rock ’n’ roll pranksters, songs too dull even for parody.

  5 Scott Miller & the Commonwealth, Thus Always to Tyrants (Sugar Hill) Nothing here—not the cravenly self-conscious rewrite of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, especially not the even more cravenly self-conscious rewrite of the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”—suggests this isn’t an homage to John Wilkes Booth. Except that Scott Miller’s declamatory style isn’t going to scare anyone.

  6 Love, Janis: The Songs, the Letters, the Soul of Janis Joplin (Columbia Legacy) She didn’t mean it. Whatever it was.

  7 Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Ease on Down the Road (Palace) Going nowhere, particularly on the swooning chorus of “Just to See My Holly Home,” where it doesn’t matter.

  8 Yayhoos, Fear Not the Obvious (Bloodshot) A foursome with bad teeth in a fearless stumble into the Faces’ A Nod Is as Good as a Wink . . . to a Blind Horse, which pays off on “For Crying Out Loud.” And on “Dancing Queen,” where the three-sheets-to-the-wind band turns its roadhouse into a karaoke bar.

  9 John Carman on Bad News, Mr. Swanson (San Francisco Chronicle, June 1) On a comedy about a man diagnosed with terminal cancer, which will or won’t appear this fall on FX cable: “The medical death sentence emboldens Whaley to seize control of his life and become more assertive with his estranged wife, his overbearing father and his bosses. He also finds himself in a fantastical relationship with Death, a spike-haired, beer-swilling reaper played by John Lydon, the erstwhile Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.” Wow, death! What’s next, the Antichrist?

  10 Joe Queenan, Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation (Henry Holt) The BBG defined not by the conventional 1946–62 but by 1943–60 (“Randy Newman, one of the few famous Baby Boomers who is not a thoroughly revolting human being, was born in 1943. I need him in this book”), and including an “Are You a Full-Fledged Baby Boomer” quiz with good questions and bad answers. For example: “On August 3, 1962, Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan are paddling a canoe down the Potomac at 12 miles an hour. Meanwhile, Charles Manson, James Earl Ray and Mark David Chapman are hurtling toward them in a motorboat cruising at 75 miles an hour. If the two boats collide just south of the Jefferson Memorial, which Baby Boomer hero will still be assassinated in the next few years: (A) Martin Luther King, (B) Bobby Kennedy, (C) John Lennon, (D) John F. Kennedy.”

  Real Life Rock Top 10 answer: A, B, D.

  JUNE 25, 2001

  SPECIAL DEAD PEOPLE EDITION!

  1 Baz Luhrmann, director, Luhrmann and Craig Pierce, writers, Moulin Rouge (20th Century Fox) Part Showgirls, part Dennis Potter’s Lipstick on Your Collar, this delirious musical has the courage of its own ridiculousness. It never goes soft, never backs away from its commitment to the constantly trumpeted “bohemian revolution,” presented as a new religion of art, love and to thine own self be true, in practice a proof that you can get away with anything so long as you never admit there’s anything the least bit odd about what you’re doing. After half an hour, the appearance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in a 1900 Paris chorus line or “The hills are alive with the sound of music” as avant-garde poetry is so liberating, so obliterative of a century’s worth of cultural piety, that you start rewriting the movie to fit your own heart. I couldn’t understand why doomed lovers Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman were duetting on David Bowie’s “Heroes” when they could have been singing “That’s My Desire”—a scandal in 1947, when it was first recorded (“To spend one night with you” is the opening line), then turned into a dream by countless East Coast vocal groups in the 1950s, most indelibly by Dion and the Belmonts.

  2 Bobbettes, The Best of the Bobbettes (Crash) In 1957 five young girls from P.S. 109 in New York wrote a song about their cool principal: “Mr. Lee” was a top 10 hit. Still, the edge in the swift, gleeful piece of street doo-wop—jailbait lusting after a grown-up authority figure—made sense of the 1960 follow-up: “I Shot Mr. Lee.” The girls didn’t say why; they didn’t have to. By this time the Bobbettes were barely into their midteens.

  Heard today, “I Shot Mr. Lee” (“Ah, shot him in the head, boom boom”) is totally wild. It’s funny; it’s almost believable. The surprise is that a group as one-hit marginal as the Bobbettes can so easily sustain a collection of more than 30 tracks: the slow, gorgeous “The Dream,” which bridges the gap between the Chantels’ “Maybe” and Rosie and the Originals’ “Angel Baby”; the witty “Rock & Ree-Ah-Zole (The Teenage Talk)”; the “Party Lights”-like tragedy of “Mama Papa,” where the singer turns on the TV only to see her boyfriend dancing on American Bandstand—with someone else.

  3 Rennie Sparks, Evil (Black Hole Press) Despite the accurate jacket description of Sparks as “lyricist for the gothic country duo the Handsome Family,” her short stories are unspectacularly prosaic accounts of angry, isolated, confused young women and the trouble they get into. They live on the rotting edges of a big city; everyone seems to know someone who’s been murdered. The notion of any of Sparks’ characters growing up is where the tension comes from: that is, you can’t imagine it. One who’s on her way is the narrator of “4-Piece Dinette Set $799.99”: “I’m a good worker at least no worse than the rest, except for Post-its. I like to steal them. Everyday I grab a pad or two off someone’s desk as I head out to my car. Driving back to the city, I toss Post-its out my car window and watch them through the rearview mirror, skidding and rolling in the dirt. I don’t know why I do it. I guess I don’t really want to know why.”

  4 Ben Harper, blurb for Avalon Blues: A Tribute to the Music of Mississippi John Hurt (Vanguard) “If it wasn’t for Mississippi John Hurt, I would not be making music at all,” he says. It’s always a good idea to put the blame on someone who isn’t around to defend himself.

  5 Kelly Vance, review of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1968 She-Devils on Wheels (East Bay Express, June 15) “It has everything you look for in a drive-in movie: cheap production values, rotten acting, stupid writing, inept direction—the works. Think ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’ In fact, take practically any biker flick you have ever seen and turn it up a notch on the Dumb-O-Meter. This film defines the word ‘nadir.’ And yet, somehow, abstract concepts appear much more clearly when glimpsed from the rock-bottom of human experience.”

  6 Chris Walters, The Ghost of Jim Thompson Stalks L.A., collage of title and excerpt from letter from Bonnie Bakley to Robert Blake before the signing of a prenuptial agreement in October 2000 (letter from New York Daily News, May 9) “I think psychologically it helps me get even with mankind,” Bakley wrote to her soon-to-be husband and, after Bakley’s unsolved shooting May 5, widower (he went back to the restaurant where the two had had dinner to get his gun, Blake told police, then returned to his car and found her dead), of her life as a grifter. “My father tried to get fresh with me when I was seven, while my mother was in the hospital having Joey [her brother]. He died before I could grow up and kill him.”

  7 KFRC-FM (San Francisco, June 17) “ Father’s Day Superset,” featuring Marvin Gaye, who on April 1, 1984, gave his father the ultimate Father’s Day present. On the air, Bob Dylan immediately followed, though not with “Highway 61 Revisited,” which begins, “God said to Abraham, kill me a son—”

  8 Joy Division, Les Bains Douches 18 December 1979 (Factory) The severe, serious, nevertheless thrilling sound of young men walking all night in the Manchester rain—thrilling because, in the course of that long walk, anyone can find out what he really wants, anyone can fall behind, anything can happen—as captured mostly at what sounds like a very underattended show in Paris. As with other severe, serious post–Sex Pistols groups—Wire, the Cure—there’s the chilly feel of postwar espionage films, the voices of people who have no idea how they found themselves in jeopardy, let
alone how to get out. There’s no balance in the performance, no obvious match between Ian Curtis’ singing, Peter Hook’s bass, Bernard Albrecht’s guitar and Stephen Morris’ drums: As soon as you think of the Velvet Underground you think of the Doors, and then realize that, compared with this band, they were all about order.

  The most brutal and beautiful numbers here are taken from January 1980 live recordings in Holland. “Digital” is too strong, too hard, too much; on “Atmosphere,” the distant, silent-movie organ sound that would give the band that went on as New Order, after Curtis’ suicide on May 18, 1980, a claim to the deepest dives of the new decade and, along with Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is,” its best singles: “Temptation” and “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Joy Division’s second, 1980 album was called Closer; this could have been called “Close Enough.”

  9 Eddie Cochran, The Town Hall Party TV Shows 1959 (Rockstar Records video) The rocker remembered in his own country mostly for “Summertime Blues,” and beloved in the U.K. because he toured there and died there (in a car crash in 1960), appears on a Los Angeles country music show with his band Dick D’Agostin & the Swingers, who are much better than their name. Seemingly taking his visual cues from Edd “Kookie” Byrnes of the L.A. private eye hit 77 Sunset Strip, Cochran is short, compact, well-dressed and absurdly good-looking, his pompadour so big and glossy it just begs for Byrnes to show up and lend Eddie his comb. But he doesn’t need it until “Money Honey,” the second-to-last song of the night. Cochran is singing, playing guitar, chewing gum and rotating his shoulders all at the same time, and every element seems necessary for the spell he casts. “Whenever we put this on,” said the counterman at Down Home Music in El Cerrito, Calif., as he and everyone else in the place tried to keep doing what they’d been doing, “I never get any work done. I might as well take the rest of the day off.”