Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  9 New Orleans, March 9 All sorts of music comes out of the doors in New Orleans: Bob Seger and disco in souvenir shops, the Drifters and the Young Rascals in the big, high-ceiling Rue de la Course coffeehouse at 3128 Magazine Street, Billie Holiday’s greatest hits one day and Sisters of Mercy the next in CC’s Community Coffee on Royal. It’s rare to find music so quiet you have to be still to notice it—and when you do, it sticks. In what was previously the morning madhouse of Mothers at 401 Poydras, Robert Johnson’s 1936 “Ramblin’ on My Mind” now got lost in the dim light of the new, half-empty backroom—and in Luigi’s muffaletta joint at 915 Decatur, in the middle of the sleaziest block on the sleaziest tourist street in town, you could barely make out a plinking banjo and a hesitating vocal in a crude version of “Spoonful.” At first I was sure I’d heard it before—the feel and the style of the piece were somehow implied by the song. But there was too much space between the notes, too much air in the sound. “Do you know who’s singing?” I asked the counterman. “It’s WWOZ! 90.7!” he said. “It’s Will Slayden, recorded in 1952,” said the WWOZ DJ a few minutes later. “It’s new: African-American Banjo Songs from Western Tennessee. Do you want the address? It was put out by the Tennessee Folklore Society, MTSU Box 201, Murfreesboro, TN 37132. Isn’t it great?”

  10 Associated Press, March 14: “Dixie Chicks singer criticized for anti-Bush comments” For the record, Natalie Maines, on stage, London, March 10: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” Maines was born in Texas—in Lubbock, Buddy Holly’s hometown. George W. Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and to run for office adopted a tough-guy version of what he took to be a Texas accent. On September 21, 2001, in New York City, for the America: A Tribute to Heroes broadcast, Maines introduced the Dixie Chicks’ “I Believe in Love” in a deep performance; Bush posed at Ground Zero with his arm around a New York City worker, promising aid he later withheld.

  APRIL 23, 2003

  1 Nineteen Forty-Five, I Saw a Bright Light (Daemon) The first time you hear this, it might sound ordinary; the third or fourth time it can be shattering. There is the heart-on-our-sleeves heedlessness of the Mendoza Line’s “We’re All in This Alone”—but with Nineteen Forty-Five guitarist Hunter Manasco’s scared leads and bassist Katharine McElroy’s handholding backing vocals, none of the Mendoza Line’s irony. In the kind of apartment that’s too small to get clean, Eleventh Dream Day’s “It’s Not My World” has been played so many times that the glory you can only get by opening the window and the self-affirmation you can only get by closing it are in the walls—and so is the lift of the Feelies’ “Raised Eyebrows,” the feeling of going flat-out in a car that has a day left to live. Manasco, McElroy, and drummer Will Lochamy are from Birmingham, Alabama; they look familiar, but you haven’t seen them before.

  2 Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (Scribner) This compact day-in-the-life novel has been savaged by critics from People to the New York Times as obvious, cheap, empty, and backward. The line is that the hero is a soulless 28-year-old billionaire financial manipulator, and that’s just so three years ago, isn’t it? But he isn’t soulless. Like the detective in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, he’s holding himself together with string and gum, and then he isn’t. The 2000 setting isn’t in the past. It’s the country blowing up in its own face, as it does whenever the individual’s realization of the American dream erases America—a nation that, here, comes together only in the last pages, in the middle of the night, with 300 naked movie extras sprawled in the street.

  3 Madonna, “American Life” (Warner Bros.) Question, 1956: “Will I be pretty, will I be rich?” Answer: “Que sera, sera.” Response, 2003: “ ‘Whatever will be, will be?’ You call that American? Can’t somebody fix this shit?”

  4 Reese Witherspoon in Freeway (1996, Republic Pictures Home Video) Why you can never remember who won the Oscar a year later: because compared to an unnominatable performance like this, America’s presweetheart as all-time juvenile delinquent, the performances that are nominated (for Freeway’s year, Brenda Blethlyn, Secrets and Lies; Diane Keaton, Marvin’s Room; Frances McDormand, Fargo; Kristin Scott-Thomas, The English Patient; Emily Watson, Breaking the Waves) barely exist. Southern Tip (Cecily Marcus): “Not even Reese Witherspoon is allowed to be as good as Reese Witherspoon was in Freeway.”

  5 Luc Sante, “The Birth of the Blues” (Yeti #2) Inside this words ’n’ graphics journal (plus 30-track soundtrack CD) is a displacing argument from underworld historian Sante: that just as geneticists now claim that all living people are descended from a single woman who lived perhaps 140,000 years ago, the blues—“a particular song form made up of 12 measures of three-line verse, with a line length of five stressed syllables and an AAB rhyme scheme” (Charley Patton, 1929: “Hitch up my pony, saddle up my black mare/Hitch up my pony, saddle up my black mare/I’m gonna find a rider, baby, in the world somewhere”)—did not emerge, evolve, develop, or come to be in any folk sense. Sometime in the 1890s, in East Texas or the Mississippi Delta, the blues, which surprised everyone, black and white, “could only have been invented,” by a “particular person or persons,” just as “the x-ray and the zipper and the diesel engine were invented in the same decade” by particular persons. We know their names, though; if the blues was invented, why by 1910 at the latest did nobody know by whom, when, where? Illiteracy, poverty, racism—but also because the blues was so portable that once the first blues singer sang the first blues song to the first blues listener, “it is easy to imagine that within 24 hours a dozen people had taken up the style, a hundred inside of a week, a thousand in the first month. By then only ten people would have remembered who came up with it, and nine of them weren’t talking.”

  6 Cursive, “Staying Alive” from The Ugly Organ (Saddle Creek) A one-foot-in-front-of-the-other beginning, then a slow, ten-minute slide into sleep. The band slips into a military march rhythm near the end, and then falls into Angelo Badalamenti’s arrangements for Julee Cruise in Twin Peaks, where the deaths that occur in the music are never final, even if the bodies are buried.

  7 KBSG-FM, Seattle (February 25) Barry Franklin writes: “Yesterday I was standing in the checkout line at a small retail shop on Mercer Island. On a clear day, one can see the Cascades from its window, just 20 miles to the east. Due to the rain clouds, though, the mountains weren’t visible. Talk, among the clerk and those waiting in line, centered on the dark gray clouds and the imminent rain. The radio was tuned to an oldies station, airing the song ‘Rhythm of the Rain’ by the Cascades. I pointed out the exquisite beauty of this moment of synchronicity to my fellow humans who, I think, didn’t quite get it.”

  8 Rosanne Cash, Rules of Travel (Capitol) Great Harlequin Romance cover.

  9 Porch Ghouls, Bluff City Ruckus (Roman/Columbia) Great God’s Little Acre trash-paperback-jacket-style cover. A song called “Nine Dollars Worth of Mumble” that’s worth four minutes of your time. And “Girl on the Road (Ford Fairlane),” which goes right over a cliff. Or rather the bluff, which is to say out of Memphis and into the drink.

  10 “Eating It” comedy showcase, Luna Lounge (New York City, January 20) Sarah Vowell writes: “As part of MLK day, they asked the audience to sing along with ‘Ebony and Ivory,’ the white people doing McCartney’s part and the black people Stevie Wonder’s. This meant a whole room drowning out Paul, followed by maybe one sheepish black guy, the only one in the audience, singing along with Stevie. The point being, even us smart, good-hearted New York wiseacres who cringe at the thought of segregation find ourselves socially segregated by default. I had started out the day reading King’s speech to the Memphis sanitation workers, marveling at the way he could call for togetherness without a hint of icky, sappy fakery, and there I was hours later, singing sap. Yet when I was singing my part, singing along with Paul, even though there’s hardly a lamer song, I found myself singing embarrassingly loud.”

  MAY 14, 2003

  1 The New Pornographers, “The Laws
Have Changed,” from Electric Version (Matador) Neko Case pipes in the background like an organ. Then, as a multiple exposure, she’s high above the music, singing down to a single image of herself. Male voices take over the blips in the background as Case goes back to the sky. “So all hail—What will be revealed today,” she trills, but, as on the New Pornographers’ Mass Romantic, she’s the revelation, and coming out of this band there’s no sound richer than hers abroad in the land today.

  2 The White Stripes, Warfield Theatre (San Francisco, April 28) The unbelievable brazenness of the Betty Boop cartoons that preceded the band fit right in with the drama that followed: every tune seemed to have its familiar, and not in the restagings of Lead Belly’s “Boll Weevil” or Son House’s 1965 “Death Letter.” How can they seem to get Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” and Pussy Galore’s “Cunt Tease” into—or maybe out of—the same song? Where did Vicki Lawrence’s “Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” come from? Or more to the point, where did it go?

  3 Christopher Logue, All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer’s ‘Iliad’: Rewritten (Farrar Straus Giroux) Logue’s Iliad project is not to retranslate it, but to rewrite other translations. The innovation is the rampant use of modernisms (“The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip”) or neologisms (“Greekoid scum!”). It can seem gimmicky. And then you are right there, in the action, less reading than listening: “Think of raked sky-wide Venetian blind./Add the receding traction of its slats/Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up./Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.”

  4 The Folksmen, “Never Did No Wanderin’,” from A Mighty Wind: The Album (DMZ/Columbia) Christopher Guest’s movie lives up to its title; comparisons of this set of overmilked gags with Guest’s loving neurot-o-rama of Best in Show are as self-congratulatory as its worst songs. Are reviewers really that pleased they get the joke? But on the radio, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer’s frighteningly accurate parody of a Kingston Trio “whalin’ song” comes off as very nearly the real thing: catchy, faintly embarrassing, stirring.

  5 The Be Good Tanyas, Chinatown (Nettwerk America) Speaking of faintly embarrassing, there is that name—but by the second track on their second album, this Vancouver trio is long gone, setting up house in the late Townes Van Zandt’s “Waiting Around to Die.” With the foreboding melody, they call up “Streets of Laredo” (hear it on Johnny Cash’s American IV) or “Hills of Mexico” (hear Roscoe Holcomb on Mountain Music of Kentucky). Frazey Ford and Samantha Parton sing as if they’re already dead; Trish Klein’s high, slow harmonica solo, drifting across the years from Country Joe and the Fish’s “Bass Strings,” seals the coffin. And then there is a version of Kid Bailey’s 1929 “Rowdy Blues,” as light, sweet, and unhurried as Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again”—which, suicidal as it is, takes you right back to “Waiting Around to Die.” And then it’s hard to listen to anything else for the rest of the day.

  6 Scott Amendola and Carla Bozulich, “Masters of War” (www.protest-records.com) Bob Dylan’s hardest antiwar song: over nine minutes, it gets bigger, and noisier. There are moments when the storm in the music makes it difficult to remember what you’re listening to. Bozulich’s voice, never so convincing with the Geraldine Fibbers—never convincing you so much is at stake—is thick, considered, like Anna Domino’s in Snakefarm. In moments it can be arty in its strangled effects—and then Amendola’s drumstick comes down in a manner so artless it’s scary. But it’s Eric Crystal’s shredding saxophone solo that nails the song to the ground, that takes it somewhere it hasn’t been before, not on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963, not when Dylan smeared it into the 1991 Grammy show, during the first Iraq war. The hectoring self-satisfaction of speakers at antiwar rallies begins to creep into Bozulich’s voice after that (the tone that lets you know the last thing such people want is for the powerful to do good; if that happened, how could they feel superior?)—but then, for the final verse (“And I’ll stand over your grave till I’m sure that you’re dead”), the instrumentation drops to almost nothing, bare taps and silences, and you hear someone speaking for herself.

  7 Patricia Tallman in Night of the Living Dead, directed by Tom Savini (STZ, May 2) The lone woman to escape the plague of cannibal zombies—mute with shock in the beginning, by the end she’s ready to shoot anything that moves—wakes up to find the sun shining and the spell broken. She watches as a crowd of yahoos torment a zombie in a corral while others use lynched corpses for target practice; she flinches as the bodies jerk in the air. “They are us and we are them,” she says. “Say what?” says a hunter. “Nothin’,” she says, afraid again. I suppose this shot-for-shot 1990 remake isn’t as good as George Romero’s 1968 original, but it was still too much to take: too close to home, which is to say to the picture the country has been offering itself on the nightly news.

  8 James Mathus Knockdown Society, “Stop and Let the Devil Ride” (Fast Horse) If the appropriation of old country blues by the White Stripes or the Be Good Tanyas bothers you, here’s what it sounds like when it’s done without wit, imagination, or a decent beat. The devil wouldn’t be caught dead riding with these guys.

  9 Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell (Inter-scope) The feeling of people pushing through a crowd, when there’s no crowd.

  10 Charles Taylor, “Chicks Against the Machine,” Salon (April 29) A steely, cant-destroying account of how and why, after their Primetime interview with designated patriot Diane Sawyer and their naked Entertainment Weekly cover, the Dixie Chicks can now open their shows with “I Won’t Back Down”—and close them with Natalie Maines announcing “Our final encore tonight is gonna be ‘Dixie.’ ” “ After all,” Emily Robison or Martie Maguire can say, “it was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite song.”

  JUNE 4, 2003

  1–10 David Thomas, “Disastodrome!” (Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Los Angeles, February 21, 22, 23) It was a version of a Raymond Chandler mystery, with tough, cool, and fooled detective Philip Marlowe written out in favor of the bit characters hanging around the corners of the plot, and it brought forth a large cast. There was (1) impresario-writer-director-actor-singer-musician Thomas himself, since 1975 leader of the avant-Cleveland band Pere Ubu, a huge man leaning on a cane, letting himself down into a chair and seeming to fall asleep as others moved around him, (2) poet Bob Holman, (3) Frank Black, late of the Pixies, (4) Robert and Jack Kidney of 1560-75, a combo from Kent, Ohio, that goes back before the last number in its name, (5) composer Van Dyke Parks, (6) the Two Pale Boys, trumpeter Andy Diagram and guitarist Keith Moliné, plus Yo La Tengo drummer Georgia Hubley, (7) singer Syd Straw, (8) actor George Wendt, and (9) the current incarnation of Pere Ubu itself, along with (10) a reunited Rocket from the Tombs, the spectral pre-Ubu band in which Thomas’s story began: a rocket on its way back to the tomb, featuring not only the living—Thomas, bassist Craig Bell, and guitarist Cheetah Chrome—but also, with Richard Lloyd of Television standing in for guitarist Peter Laughner (1953–77) and singer Stiv Bators (1949–90), the specter of the dead.

  It was a queer assemblage, and the noisy crowd that gathered for the three-night performance festival wouldn’t have been surprised that the show passed under the radar of the national music press, the art press, the theater press. The crowd knew it was lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

  The stories Thomas spread across the three nights—about bands forming and breaking apart, people meeting and separating, the interstate highway system, the towns the interstate left behind, the way elements of speech, commerce, and culture disappear, and how, after those things are gone, people like those on Thomas’s stage appear to reenact them—were most of all suggestive. As the tale unfolded, the cast grew even larger, drawing familiars and doppelgängers. On the second night, for the increasingly nervous, so-called improvisational opera Mirror Man—part sermon, part rant, part minstrel show, part lecture on spiritual uplift—the scene opened in a diner. Off to the side was a bus-stop bench with an ad for a wax mus
eum. With musicians spread across the back of the stage, Frank Black walked out of the crowd in an aloha shirt, looking less like himself than John McCain, communicating the same sense of solidity and frustration. George Wendt, Black, and Thomas sat down together on the bench, and as the audience waited for it to collapse under their seven or eight hundred pounds, Wendt was Babe Ruth and Thomas was Fatty Arbuckle. But when Thomas took the microphone—Panama hat on his head, his cane like chemotherapy, a sign of both debilitation and a will not to die—the character who came out of his body was, someone said, more like Orson Welles as Father Mapple in the movie version of Moby Dick—or Welles as Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil.

  Earlier, when the curtain came up, Syd Straw stood at the diner table, dressed in an aquamarine uniform, holding a pot of coffee, but she didn’t seem to move. Black and Georgia Hubley sat down and Straw took their orders. The stillness of the scene—as off to the left Bob Holman recited a broken narrative, sounds bounced off the walls, and songs were begun and sometimes finished—pushed the scene even farther into the background than it actually was; Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks drifted into your mind as easily as it drifted out of it.

  David Lynch was the missing actor, if he really was missing. When on the first night Robert Kidney held the stage like a bad dream, he could have been Dennis Hopper’s “well-dressed man” from Blue Velvet. “Look for me down at One-Eyed Jacks,” he said, gesturing toward the whorehouse in Twin Peaks. Kidney wore a dark suit, dark shirt, dark tie, a fedora pulled down over his face so that all you could see of his features was that they were creased and old; he sang in a mellifluous, weirdly unaged voice, his guitar stopping the rhythm inside the likes of Robert Johnson’s nearly seventy-year-old blues “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” and turning the tunes into fables: “Nobody really wants to hear the blues, because it’s too slow, it’s boring, it’s tedious—like life, like my life.” For an encore he and his brother played Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love,” and it squirmed the way Roy Orbison songs squirm in Blue Velvet and Mul-holland Dr. changing as it twisted: “Tell me hoodoo you love.”