by Greil Marcus
10 Roger McGuinn, Treasures From the Folk Den (Appleseed) Given McGuinn’s startlingly warm, open work on old American music with Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett of Wilco (see The Harry Smith Connection), this should have been, as Dikembe Mutombo recently put it, a walk in the cake. Thanks to contributions by worn-out Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Odetta, Jean Ritchie and Josh White Jr., the result is an earnest workshop, with the main lesson being How Not to Do It. This comes courtesy of excruciating performances in which Pete Seeger, who for six decades has accepted that he cannot sing blues, does. “I realize I’m used to slightly different chords,” he says in the most refined voice imaginable. “They’re not logical chords.”
JULY 16, 2001
1 Unitas, Porch Life (No Idea) They could have called it “Blood on Our Sleeves”—on this rough set of songs about being fans in a band, everything is familiar, nothing fits and anything is an occasion for passion. “What’s your favorite Uncle Tupelo song?” says the singer to you or the other three guys in the group; his is “Screen Door.” (From No Depression, 1990, Rockville Records—the lyric sheet is footnoted to discographical information on the music everyone on the porch is talking about, that everyone loves, that everyone feels oppressed by.) The sound is tear-away; you can almost feel the pieces pulling apart. The band ram through their songs as if they don’t want to give you time to talk about what’s wrong with them, or for that matter what’s right—say, the fierce, double-back riff in “Unitas (Picks A) Fight Song” (“The only thing more boring than you is your audience”—quick, think of a comeback for that). There’s even a manifesto. “I’m not about to advocate forming a committee to go out and confiscate copies of Start Today and the Minor Threat discography, but it almost sounds like a good idea.” The manifesto ends with a question: “ ‘How is this a punk rock record?’ If you don’t know, I’m not telling.” It’s a punk rock record because the people who made it have been around the block too often to care whether they look cool this time around. Which doesn’t answer the question of why this Gainesville band named itself after the quarterback for the Baltimore Colts.
2 Clarence Ashley, Greenback Dollar—The Music of Clarence “Tom” Ashley, 1928–1933 (County) Ashley (1895–1967) was one of the greatest of the “old-timey” singers—those who, in the first third of the 20th century, sang as if the new century was a trick that would disappear soon enough, as if only songs made long before you were born would hold your interest for more than a season. He was born Clarence and recorded under that name, but everyone knew him as Tom; when the bottom fell out of the oldtimey market in the ’30s, the recording artist Clarence Ashley disappeared and the performer Tom Ashley kept on. In 1960, at a fiddler’s convention in North Carolina, he and guitarist Clint Howard and fiddler Fred Price were approached by folklorist Ralph Rinzler, who asked if they had knowledge of a Clarence Ashley, whose bottomless recordings of “Coo Coo Bird” (1929) and “House Carpenter” (1930) had been collected on Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music. “Clint Howard recalls the moment,” one can read in the Greenback Dollar notes: “Fred and me had known Tom all our lives, but we just knew him as Tom. So I said, ‘No, I don’t. Do you know a Clarence Ashley, Tom?’ Tom started to say, ‘No,’ but he had a second thought: ‘Hell, I’m Clarence Ashley!’ ” As a public artist, he began a second life, but musically there was really no change from his first.
Even as a young man, Ashley had a squeaky, baffled old-codger’s tone. He reveled in the deadpan mysteries of “Haunted Road Blues” and “Dark Holler.” But those songs, like “Coo Coo Bird” and “House Carpenter,” are the high culture of oldtimey. On Greenback Dollar, drawn from Ashley’s various string bands as well as his solo recordings, low culture pulls harder: hokum rules. Ashley performed in black-face on the minstrel-show, medicine-show circuit; you can hear the blackface snigger in Ashley’s amazingly obscene “My Sweet Farm Girl,” which gets both cunnilingus and analingus into a single verse. You can hear the common, secret culture of the south in Ashley’s detailed versions of the true-crime ballads “Frankie Silvers,” “Old John Hardy” and “Naomi Wise.” And in an extremely vicious reading of “ Little Sadie” you can hear a man who might have reason to forget his own name.
3 Julien Temple, on The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle (1980) and The Filth and the Fury (2000), Fresh Air (NPR, July 3) The director on why Swindle was just that—his and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren’s attempt to force fans to confront their worship of idol-smashers—and on how Filth was his attempt to give the surviving band members the chance to tell their own stories, all of them “scarred for life” by a process in which Temple was not innocent: helping to drag them through “the chemo-therapy of fame.”
4–7 David Gray, Flesh (EMI reissue, 1994), Sell, Sell, Sell (EMI reissue, 1996), White Ladder (ATO) and Lost Songs (ATO) For those who think memoirs written by white people in their 50s or younger are true.
8 White Stripes, White Blood Cells (Sympathy for the Record Industry) As the disc unwinds, the smart, bashing punk offered by a Detroit ex-husband (guitar, vocals) and ex-wife (drums) opens into the near nursery rhyme of “We’re Going to Be Friends” or the INXS slickness of “I Think I Smell a Rat.” Maybe Jack and Meg White really do have sympathy for the record industry. But for the moment the heart of their music seems to be in “Offend in Every Way,” a harsh, expert storm of old guitar riffs, old curses and the steady, disinterested beat of someone who sounds as if she learned the story in the womb. The sound starts in Memphis, where the music was recorded, and then heads for the hills.
9 Amir Bar-Lev, Fighter, Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival (April 4) After escaping the Nazis in his native Czechoslovakia, a man returns after the war to help remake his country. The Stalinist government sends him to prison, where every day loudspeakers blast “that optimistic socialist music” (period footage shows a robust, bright-faced young couple in traditional Czech dress dancing a traditional Czech dance; they look just like Ricky Martin and Britney Spears)—“the kind of music my father always called organized farts.”
10 Nick Hornby, How to Be Good (Riverhead) The narrator tells her husband of 20 years she’s “been seeing someone.”
“I’m presuming that you’ll be moving out in the next couple of days,” he says.
“The affair’s over,” she says. “As of this minute.”
“I don’t know about that,” he says. “But I do know that no one asks Elvis Presley to play for nothing.”
JULY 30, 2001
1 Club 8, Club 8 (Secret Agenda) From a Swedish duo (Karolina Komstedt, vocals; Johan Angergard, instruments and writing), dream pop with the undertow dream pop needs. “Love in December” plays off the phrase “I’ll be there for you,” but where the Rembrandts’ Friends theme song promises that the singer will make jokes when you can’t decide what to wear, here the singer might be promising she’ll sit by your deathbed, and the promise is sweet; in the rolling tones of “Say a Prayer” light shades and dark swirl like ye-ye singers entertaining Bateau-Mouche passengers on the Styx, not the Seine. It’s a love-and-espionage sound that’s been missing since the Belgian band Hooverphonic’s 1996 A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular—apparently a sound only Europeans can make, or hear.
2 Allan Ball, producer, Six Feet Under (HBO, July 8) Thirty-ish Nate, on the trail of his late father’s hidden life, discovers his secret hideaway: a grimy four walls behind a restaurant, fitted out with ratty couch, dirty coffee table, big TV, a phonograph and a rack of LPs. It looks just like Beavis and Butt-head’s video room. Nate pulls out an album and cues it up: the Amboy Dukes’ 1968 psychedelic horror Journey to the Center of the Mind, Ted Nugent’s first big moment. Nate imagines his father in the place: doing the frug in his three-piece undertaker’s suit, smoking dope with bikers, bringing in a prostitute for a blow job, picking off people on the street with a sniper’s rifle. Nate falls asleep on the couch; in a dream, he turns to his dad as the queasy ’67 sound of “Spooky” fills
the dead air: “What the hell is this place, this music? Since when do you listen to the Classics IV? Who the hell are you?”
3 Mary Gauthier, Drag Queens in Limousines (In the Black) A self-consciously dark, would-be Gothic set of songs—so self-conscious, as with the miserabilist autobiography of the title song (“I hated high school, I prayed that it would end / The jocks and their girls, it was their world / I didn’t fit in”; Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” was more than anyone needed to hear about this, and that was a quarter-century ago), that there’s no room for Gauthier to move to her own rhythms. But on “Our Lady of the Shooting Stars” she doesn’t press, doesn’t worry that you might miss the point. Her voice makes shadows; the music unwinds slowly, and you have no idea where she’s taking you. To the miserabilist “Karla Faye,” as it happens, about Karla Faye Tucker, executed in Texas. (“ ‘Please don’t kill me!’ ” laughed then Gov. George W. Bush over her letter asking for clemency.) It doesn’t matter. The voice in “Our Lady” is singular, beyond anything classy country singers like Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch would ever reach for.
4–7 Go-Go’s, God Bless the Go-Go’s (Beyond); Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s (IRS, 1994); “Belinda Carlisle Rocks Naked” (Playboy, August); Jane Weidlin, Dear Weirdos (Experience Music Project, Seattle) The reformed band is more alive on the new God Bless the Go-Go’s than it was on a few dull 1994 cuts tacked onto Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s, its “half dive into the unknown, half heard it all before” retrospective. Lead singer Belinda Carlisle sounds more alive than she looks in Playboy, smoothed and inflated beyond nature. But of the new songs (which include “Daisy Chain,” a three-minute, 45-second Behind the Music mea culpa), only “Insincere” even hints at the fierceness and ambition that took the group out of the new world of late-’70s Los Angeles punk and into the hearts of young girls all over America when Beauty and the Beat, their 1981 debut album, hit No. 1. All of that is present on the first CD of Return: dirty, late-night performances and rehearsals from 1979 and 1980, with Ventures-style guitar snaking through the noise so distantly it’s as if Charlotte Caffey were playing from the back of the room; the bitterness in “This Town,” which after 20 years is still unsatisfied; the defiance and delight in “Our Lips Are Sealed,” which after 20 years is still undeniable. All that’s missing, really, is an enhanced track with a clip of Carlisle’s nervous, hard-nosed interviews in Penelope Spheeris’ 1980 film The Decline . . . of Western Civilization, and guitarist Jane Weidlin’s 1978 fan letter to Los Angeles punk heroes the Weirdos: a fantastic collage that, beginning on a roll of toilet paper with an ad for the Fruit-of-the-Month Club pasted onto the first sheet, proceeds from manifesto (“Who needs fruit when you can be a weirdo?”) to P.S. (“John I think you’re really keen”) while taking in Alka-Seltzer tablets, a vinyl belt, photographs of the author, a rubber glove and instructions on how to brush your teeth.
8 Cyndi Lauper, “Money Changes Everything,” at Boston Pops (Independence Day) Boston Blackie, aka Lindsay Waters, reports on a live performance of Lauper’s greatest recording: “In 1984 I rushed to the TV when called to see Cyndi Lauper sing on national television. This was in Minneapolis and we were just about to move to Boston. We listened to ‘She’s So Unusual’ all the way across the country as we cried because we were leaving the Twin Cities: she with her downtown manners from New York and some songs from Uptown Minneapolis from Prince. Now on the Fourth of July I found myself called to the TV again.
“Seeing her now, packed into her skimpy silver dress with the super-short skirt, was strange. There she was, doing the bump with Mr. Conventional Keith Lockhart, in the most conventional city in the U.S. The Boston Pops threatened to give us Cyndi Pops. She sounded good and fresh and peppy, but the scene put me in mind of how time and place change things as absolutely as money. In the 18 years since she first sang the song, the city of Boston, and especially the area around the Hatch Shell on the Charles River, has changed because money has poured into the city. Downtown Boston has gone and is going through a major re-shaping. Boston is a city of old money, of people who would rather sit on their money than spend it. Luckily the taxpayers of the U.S. can be called on to make up the difference when the locals are frugal, so all the new bridges, roads and high-rises can be paid for by new money. The place Lauper was playing encouraged one to see her performance in the most cynical light, but she bopped so hard you could almost imagine that Boston was on the verge of the change it has resisted for at least a hundred years.”
9 Michael Mann, producer, Crime Story reruns on A&E (Mondays) On July 16 it was Chicago, 1963: a 1986, first-season episode about a psycho killer who’s a dead ringer for Stiv Bators. It was graphic beyond anything on network television before or since, and from beginning to end there were great cars, shot from street level, great clothes and great hair, especially the bizarre flattop pompadour on mob comer Ray Luca (Anthony Denison). But the truest moment came in the opening scene: a party for Lt. Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) and his Major Crime Unit, the whole hipster crew and their wives and girlfriends dancing slow and cool to the hometown Impressions’ 1963 hit “It’s All Right.”
10 Flier for Gossip show at 7th St. Entry (Minneapolis, July 8) For the unkempt Arkansas threesome, Sharon Stone crossed her legs in Basic Instinct. The near white-out glow the artist had imposed over the too-familiar image erased the role Stone played in the picture as the object of gossip, replacing it with something sexier: the suggestion that she’s about to whisper it in your ear.
AUGUST 20, 2001
1 New Pornographers, Mass Romantic (Mint) Put five guys from Vancouver in a band that would rather be Oasis or even the Small Faces in their arty period—or the Beach Boys topping “Good Vibrations” or, why not, the Beatles—together with someone doing a good imitation of Phil Spector crinkling up tinfoil, bring in Bloodshot country singer Neko Case and watch a smile spread through the room, and then watch it soar into the sky like a balloon, and Case fly through the air like Supergirl, or anyway Helen Slater, who will do. “The song, the song, the song that’s shaking me,” Case warbles off her feet in “Letter From an Occupant”; I couldn’t make out the next line, but the boys’ “woo-woo-woo-woo, weeooo’s” were clear as day. Then came the opening shots of “To Wild Homes,” and I found myself applauding. In the car, in the fast lane. From last year, and for good.
2 Bobby “Blue” Bland, Two Steps From the Blues (MCA) From 1961: the first full album by the strangest-looking and most original postwar blues stylist—a man whose sense of tragedy was as carefully cut as his sharkskin suits. Never too much drape, never a fold showing, with so many different threads running through the material the result is a glow, the glow of despair and loss at twilight, be it the gentle “Lead Me On” or the horrifying “St. James Infirmary.” On the front: Mr. Bland himself, jacket slung over his shoulder like Frank Sinatra, mounting the two steps that will take him inside the blue-paneled building where, you can bet, he will inquire about his royalties. “What royalties?” Duke Records president Don Robey will ask him. “I don’t see your name on any of those songs.”
3 David Rakoff, Fraud (Doubleday) Rakoff’s embarrassed stories are mostly funnier and creepier on This American Life than on the page, where you can begin to think he went begging for his Wrong Guy for the Wrong Job assignments. Thus the center of gravity here is not Rakoff at all, not as our guide to the absurdities of contemporary speech and mores or weird cool person. “The Best Medicine” is a report on the Sixth Annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., where the self-congratulation of the event—Eric Idle: “They are the finest people in the world, aren’t they, comedians?”—leads Rakoff to question the legitimacy of his own birth: “Yes, not like those pushy, conceited Doctors Without Borders, and don’t get me started about that bitch Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.” “There’s really no arguing with Preston Sturges,” he says, referring to Sullivan’s Travels and its insistence that all people want out of art is something to take their mind off life, “but
it bears repeating that even though laughter may well be ‘the best medicine,’ it is not, in point of fact, actual medicine.” This won’t win Rakoff cheers from the positive-attitude crowd, but he’s already had cancer.
4 Katastrophywife, Amusia (EFA/Almafame) In 1990 Babes in Toyland of Minneapolis—singer and guitarist Kat Bjelland, drummer Lori Barbero, bassist Michelle Leon—released Spanking Machine on the local Twin/Tone label. It was as free and fierce a sound as anyone found in the post–Sex Pistols era—and there was nothing like Bjelland screaming, as an effect, as an event, an event taking place in one of her songs or off the record, in the street outside wherever the group was playing that night. Neal Karlen’s Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock and Roll Band chronicled what happened next: a lifeless, overworried album on a major label, a “triumphant spot on the 1993 Lollapalooza, the most prestigious tour in rock and roll,” and that was that. Now Bjelland has a new trio with at least three puns in its name, and how her head stays on her body I have no idea.
5 Oxford American No. 40 The bad news is that the passionately edited bimonthly literary magazine from Oxford, Miss., is going quarterly. It’s not a shock. To take nothing away from Roy Blount Jr. and his “Gone Off up North,” when the hardest bite in your pages comes from your humor columnist, too many other people are biting their tongues. The good news is that the Fifth Annual Music Issue is probably the best so far. Witness after witness steps forth to testify in favor of an ignored, forgotten, misjudged or misunderstood pioneer, obscure genius or contemporary prophet without honor. From James Hughes on the Gants (“Mississippi’s Beatles”) to Robert Bowman on Linda Lyndell (“The Woman Who Saved Stax”) to Bill Friskics-Warren on Bill Nettles (“protorockabilly” from the late ’30s) to Billy Bob Thornton on his new album to David Eason on country singer-songwriter Steve Young and more, more, more, the reader can’t wait to hear what the writers are talking about, and the 22-track CD included with the magazine gives you instant access to crushing disappointment. Mississippi’s Beatles are really Mississippi’s Beau Brummels (but odd enough to send me to the record store in search of Road Runner! The Best of the Gants on Sun-dazed). Billy Bob Thornton’s “Ring of Fire” is absolutely terrible. Steve Young is still a bore. In other words, the CD will save you the money the writers had almost convinced you to spend. Not that they would take a single word back: these are fans ripping off their shirts to show you who’s really tattooed on their chests. They don’t care if you agree with them, they just want you to look, and why not? Why shouldn’t the writing be more convincing than the music? But then you come across something as emotionally tricky, as musicologically intense, as Tom Piazza’s “A Light Went on and He Sang,” on country blues founder Charley Patton, and even if you’ve been listening to Patton for years, you know that when you close the magazine you’ll cue up a disc and hear the man for the first time.
