Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  10 Tallest Man on Earth, “It Will Follow the Rain,” 7″ with Shallow Grave (Mexican Summer) A.k.a. Kristian Mattson of Dalarna, Sweden, the Tallest Man on Earth sounds the way he wants to: as if he’s stuck his head out of his hole in east Kentucky just long enough to make you wonder if you shouldn’t crawl in after him. The guitar picking is of that seductive, mysterious strain that goes back to “The Coo Coo,” a calm inside the bluegrass nervousness. “Have you ever”—that’s all he needs to say to make you feel as if you have.

  MAY 2009

  1 Caroline Weeks, Songs for Edna (Manimal Vinyl) An “English Rose” (so described in a press release) setting Edna St. Vincent Millay to music? On the sleeve a leafy, garlanded Ms. Weeks holds a conch shell to her ear—the better to hear the glowing girl-poet of “Renascence” in 1912, a dead alcoholic in 1950? There’s a swan, for the 1921 “Wild Swans,” pressed onto the disc. I put it on, betting the music would be worse than the packaging.

  That was a while ago, and I haven’t taken it off. Weeks sings Millay’s words slowly. She sings Millay’s rhythms, or dowses for them. “Her poetry, you soon found out, was her real overmastering passion,” her old Greenwich Village friend Edmund Wilson wrote in 1952. “She gave it to all the world, but she also gave it to you.” A reader entranced by Millay’s lyricism—not yet catching the way a blunt nihilism would reach up out of the ether of a poem and scratch its face—can always convince herself she’s the “you,” and read Millay as if she were Sylvia Plath or J. D. Salinger, which is to say as if Millay is her. But Weeks sings—high, fingering her guitar, maybe with clarinetist Peter Moyse singing wordlessly behind her—as if she’s heard something others haven’t heard.

  Death—anticipated, remembered—is all over the songs. The album breaks after its first five pieces (among them “Renascence,” “What lips my lips have kissed,” “Wild swans”), beginning again with “The return,” from 1934, and you can almost sense an anchor being dropped.

  Weeks will nearly stop, letting a piece breathe. When she moves back into it you can hear that she’s hearing something she herself hadn’t heard before. This rhythm of encounter makes it all but impossible to follow the tracks as tributes, or homages, even if you’re reading along as Weeks puts her mouth around Millay’s words, or her body.

  “It was difficult for the romantics of the twenties to slow down and slough off their youth, when everything had seemed to be possible and they had been able to treat their genius as an unlimited checking account,” Wilson wrote. “One could always still resort to liquor to keep up the old excitement, it was a kind of way of getting back there.” As Weeks heads to the end of her project, the pace seems to slow even more, but more seems to be at stake. Each step carries the voice closer to a last word, whatever it might be—you’ll know it when you find it. The sulfurous air of David Bowie’s profoundly creepy “The Bewlay Brothers,” from his 1971 Hunky Dory, seeps into Weeks’s songs as if under their doors. There’s a sense of violation, of salvation as a joke, and a pagan self-destruction—getting lost, in a forest where priests can’t go—the only destination worth seeking.

  There’s no resolution in any single one of Weeks’s pieces. There’s no progression. Each song leaves the singer where she found it, or it found her. Maybe that’s why I keep going back to it.

  2 Bob Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour: Madness (Sirius XM, February 5) “Here’s a man, that some call the William Faulkner of jazz. Now, I’ve got to tell you. I’ve heard this guy play since the sixties, and I’ve never heard anybody call him ‘the William Faulkner of jazz’—but there it is in a book. I mean, somebody just wrote that. I can’t imagine anybody calling him ‘the William Faulkner of jazz.’ I mean, that’d be like calling Garnet Mimms the Gabriel García Bernal of soul music,” Dylan said, apparently introducing Gael Garcia Bernal to Gabriel García Márquez. “It’s just not done.

  “I’m getting excited over nothing. Let me just play the record. By the way—I consider William Faulkner to be the Mose Allison of literature. Here they are, together again, Mose Allison and William Faulkner, singing the Percy Mayfield song ‘Lost Mind . . .’ ”

  3 The Drones, Havilah (ATP/R) Gareth Liddiard could come from the far side of a Clint Eastwood western—set in his own Australia. There’s a desperation in his whole demeanor that speaks for some titanic struggle—resignation versus justice, or justice versus peace of mind. The tired way Liddiard sings “to be nailed to a door” (“Luck in Odd Numbers”) could be translated by any of those words. There are echoes of Neil Young or Rick Rizzo of Eleventh Dream Day in his guitar playing—a manic ditch-digging. There’s nothing here to match the death march of “Jezebel” on the 2006 Gala Mill—but what if there were?

  4 Flyer, Portland, Maine (January 28) The Obama that those of little faith dream of and that Obama refuses to be—the avenger, not the advertised Jesse Ray Carter, an OK Chris Smither-like bottleneck player—but where did whoever put Obama’s head onto the famous Jim Marshall photo of Johnny Cash find that scowl?

  5–6 James Tate, “The Wine Talks” and Charles Harper Webb, “The Secret History of Rock & Roll,” in Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, edited by Jonathan Wells (MTV Books, 2007) Tate is aiming for a sting, and even though he moves from a pleasant moment to a cruel joke, you’re still blindsided when it comes. As a technical performance the poem carries its own thrill. Webb begins with what you can take as a joke—

  Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley, Bill Haley & the Comets

  were lies created on recording tape by the same Group

  who made The Bomb, with the same motive: rule the world

  —but after three pages he’s made his case.

  7 Allen Toussaint, The Bright Mississippi (Nonesuch) Mostly solo piano, looking for the right elegy. But the opening “Egyptian Fantasy” lets you think there might be a pyramid under New Orleans where they have parties only on February 29, accounts of which are kept in a special copy of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.

  8 Sometymes Why, “Glorious Machine” on Your Heart Is a Glorious Machine (Signature Sounds) Ruth Ungar Merenda of the Mammals, Kristin Andreassen of Uncle Earl, Aoife O’Donovan of Crooked Still—and it’s O’Donovan who has the gift of atmosphere, who can change the temperature of a room. You can hear that on Crooked Still’s erotic embrace of old folk songs on its 2006 Shaken by a Low Sound, and how it all somehow vanished last year on Still Crooked—as if the cute title wasn’t a giveaway. You wouldn’t necessarily expect better from a group that spells sometimes with a y. But one soft deep breath into the title song and all resistance crumbles. “If you give me one reason not to leave, I’ll show you all the tricks up my sleeve”—as O’Donovan sings the words they find a circular pattern. They draw a circle around the people in the song. Anybody else, you can think, would repeat lines that good. O’Donovan lets them hang over the song, leaving you aching to hear them again.

  9 William Hogeland, “American Dreamers” in Inventing American History (MIT Press) On the lies surrounding two figures no one else would think of as political doppelgängers: Pete Seeger as a Stalinist, and William F. Buckley Jr. as a racist. Hogeland writes quietly, carefully, never letting his knowledge of the entire frame of reference of his argument make the reader feel ignorant, but he can hit. Pete Seeger’s having “inherited communism from his father,” the musicologist Charles Seeger, was a “decisive event in the history of American vernacular music.” Buckley’s 1957 National Review editorial calling for the suppression of black voting on the grounds that, as Buckley put it, “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage,” was, Hogeland shows, never disavowed, only smoothed away; it was of a piece with Buckley’s whole career as “the leisure-class warrior-philosopher, provoked to militancy by ubiquitous barbarism . . . battling to push back both the mob and the weak-willed mob enablers who were ruining the civilization that had produced his own gorgeousness.” Reaching the end of this forty-page essay, you can imagine such scores are there only to prepare the ground for
a passage that is more damning for its apparent affection: “Seeger and Buckley were public romantics. When they were young, and without regard for consequence, they brought charisma, energy, and creativity to dreaming up worlds they wanted—possibly needed—to live in. Because they made those worlds so real and beautiful that other people wanted to live in them too, they became larger-than-life characters, instantly recognizable a long way off, not quite real close up, and never quite grown up even when old.”

  10 The Land Beyond the Sunset (Google Films/YouTube) A fourteen-minute film from 1912, directed by Harold Shaw, about the New York Herald Tribune’s Fresh Air Fund—and the furthest thing from a documentary imaginable. There are the shadows of spirits on a shed, a magic book, and a child stealing a boat so that he can float off the end of the earth, just like Enid boarding her bus at the end of Ghost World.

  NOTE: In my last column, I said that the Adverts’ perfect 1978 album, Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts, featured a sleeve that “showed the title on a billboard with the ugliest public housing in the city behind it.” The Adverts were much sharper than my memory. The billboard read LAND OF MILK AND HONEY.

  Thanks to John Coleman, Tom Denenberg, and Tom Luddy.

  JUNE 2009

  SPECIAL FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT EDITION

  1 Miguel João (Chiado Square, Lisbon, April 6) A street singer with an early Springsteen look and an unusual style. Most people trying to sing songs on the order of the Wailers’ “Concrete Jungle” or Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”—songs that are like whales in their power to displace everything around them—act at least slightly embarrassed. João strummed sharply, with silences, and sang as if he’d written the tunes the night before—as if, with great seriousness, he was fooling with them, experimenting, working them out as you watched.

  2 A Canção da Saudade, directed by Henrique Campos (1964) At Leão d’Ouro in Lisbon, the literature professor Américo António Lindeza Diogo pulled out his iPod to pass around a perfect print of “the first Portuguese rock-and-roll movie.” Starring pop star Vitor Gomes and Ann-Margret lookalike Soledad Miranda, it’s a parable of cross-generational conflict as expressed through—and ultimately resolved by!—music: traditional fado v. the new sound, which ultimately blend into a new new sound. What’s so gripping about the film is that you may have already seen it a dozen times: with the same plot, the same faces, the same gestures, the same contrived, spontaneous songs and dances, the picture was made between 1957 and 1965 in the US, the UK, Germany, France—for all I know Canada, Mexico, South Africa, India, Brazil. All except for one stunning shot: the cast ringing a stairwell and looking down to the camera on the distant bottom, just like the Beatles on the cover of their first album.

  3 “William Eggleston, Paris” (Fondation Cartier, Paris, through June 21) From Atget to Brassai to van der Elsken and beyond, in photographs Paris has always been a black-and-white city. The approach the Memphis color photographer takes is to all but escape Paris as a subject. His intent is not to capture a unique city but to let his eye move toward whatever attracts it, and the result is that the strongest images might have been made in Chicago, Beijing, Berlin, or Buenos Aires. One picture showed a tableau that could have come from any city where technology is advertising before it’s anything else. Oozing confidence, health, and freedom, a man and a woman walk down a corridor of an ultramodern (which thus already looks out of date) gallery or mall or office building. But they appear superimposed, as if they’re projections, not people—and seemingly superimposed over them is an Asian man on a cell phone, bigger, and if anything more confident. In the background, an older couple walks away from our gaze; they seem both symbolic and dropped in. In the middle, shadows of two men in an office discussing something in a relaxed way communicate almost subliminally. Was this picture taken, in the vernacular sense, or was it in a literal and not photographic sense made—and never actual at all? That’s precisely not how Eggleston works, which makes you wonder what, if anything, this is a picture of.

  4 “The Jazz Century: Art, Film, Music and Photography from Picasso to Basquiat” (Musée du quai Branly, Paris, through June 28; Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, July 21 through October 18) A huge, very popular exhibition, with an overemphasis on visual art with a capital A instead of, say, a Billie Holiday dress or Duke Ellington’s tuxedo. But despite a black hole almost before the show gets under way—positing 1917 as the year of the birth of jazz, when it had been all over New Orleans since the end of the nineteenth century, led by Buddy Bolden’s band, of which there survives one photograph, because in 1917 the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first record with the word jass in the title, and the Navy shut down the Storyville red-light district (once upon a time purists would have called this the year of jazz’s death, not birth)—there were highlights around every corner:

  • In an opening wall of pre-jazz sheet music—coon songs, minstrel standards—a full-color illustration for E. T. Paull’s 1899 composition “A Warmin’ Up in Dixie”: black men and women dancing around a fire in the woods. It’s where slaves would go to sing forbidden songs, which might be coded spirituals—“Daniel in the Lion’s Den,” for one—but here it’s a Devil’s Sabbath, with the firelight reflected in the dancers’ eyes turning each one demonic. Racist, but not about nothing.

  • Sheet music for Bert Williams’s “Nobody,” in 1906 a number one hit for nine weeks. “Latest Oddity Successor to ‘I May Be Crazy But I Ain’t No Fool,’ ” reads a tagline. Is it jazz? As music, no. As heart, all the way.

  • A first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age. A little band and lots of dancers on the jacket—it should have been a curio. But it was the thing itself, and it had an aura you could have touched if it wasn’t in a glass case.

  • Illustration by Aaron Douglas for the “Charleston” chapter of Paul Morand’s 1929 jazz novel Black Magic: a black jazz club, in smoky grays. In the foreground, people at tables, dominated by a long arm and a hand resting on a chair, from the left; in the background, a saxophonist seated in a chair, a pianist behind him; in the middle, hanging down almost to the empty dance floor, a noose: more suggestive and shocking—because it was inside a jazz image—than the pictures of actual lynchings that bracketed the exhibition’s illustrated time lines this artifact was part of.

  • Cover story, Etude Music Magazine, August 1924: “The Jazz Problem: Opinions of Prominent Public Men and Musicians.”

  • Jazz Magazine, October–November 1954, sidebar to an article titled “Bird Lives! Bird Lives! Bird Lives! Bird Lives! Bird Lives! Bird Lives!” (and he wasn’t even dead yet): the poet Ted Joans reporting on a “dada-surrealist party (poems by Breton, Prévert, Péret, etc.)” in Greenwich Village: “Parker arrived without a costume . . . but he improvised one”: taking off his shirt and shoes, rolling up his pants, and whiting up his face into a mau-mau mask. Who was this joke on? Who got it?

  • And, among many film clips, perhaps the most explosive moment of all: the “Come to the City” sequence of F. W. Murnau’s 1927 silent Sunrise, with the flapper seducing the married country man with tales of thrills, glamour, jazz: she kisses him in the marsh where they’ve been lying, and suddenly it all appears, with a pounding band right in your face, the conductor throwing his arms into the air, all of it overwhelming, with lightning superim-positions and tilted frames that perhaps more than anything in all of cinema say, This is what movies were for, this is why they were invented, to catch this movement.

  5 Walter Mosley, The Long Fall (River-head Books) On I’m Not Jim’s You Are All My People, the Jonathan Lethem/Walter Salas-Humara collaboration “Walks Into” is an infinitely complex stand-up routine on the opening line of the all-all-American joke—and out of this cradle endlessly rocking comes a Mosley version, in his first novel featuring a black New York City private eye named Leonid McGill. One tricky, unstable theme of the book is that racism isn’t what it used to be—but, McGill says as he walks into Oddfellows Pu
b, a white man’s bar in Albany, “it wasn’t 2008 everywhere in America. Some people still lived in the sixties, and others might as well have been veterans of the Civil War. In many establishments I was considered a Black Man; other folks, in more genteel joints, used the term ‘African-American,’ but at Oddfellows I was a nigger where there were no niggers allowed.”

  6 Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Beware (Drag City) “ ‘My Life’s Work’ would be his ‘My Way,’ ” Will Oldham says in the April issue of Mojo, speaking of Elvis Presley and one of his new songs; on the cover of the album he looks just like Friedrich Nietzsche. “That’s my dream. When I meet him I’ll say, I’ve got this tune, man, you wanna see if you can get behind it? I’m sure he would, because he’s already sung it so many times. In my mind, I hear him.” I don’t hear it, but I’m still trying.

  7 Neko Case, Middle Cyclone (Anti) People seem to be reviewing Neko Case’s hair more than her music.

  8 Van Morrison, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Listen to the Lion) Listen to “Madame George”—that’s what Morrison is doing.

  9 Standard Hotel (Los Angeles, March 8) Phone buttons: FRONT DESK, ROOM SERVICE, VOICE MAIL, HOUSEKEEPING, MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER. And also FLUFFER, though that might mean more in the San Fernando Valley than in L.A.

  10 Lisbon, April 6 A friend on her apartment overlooking the Cemitério dos Prazeres (the Cemetery of Pleasures): “I have a great view of eternal life.”

  JULY-AUGUST 2009

  1 Bob Dylan, Together Through Life (Columbia) Casual, to the point where the clumsiness comes to the surface—except with “Forgetful Heart,” where a shadow passes over the singer’s face. But nothing here quite carries the weight of a scene from last season’s In Treatment, when Mia Wasikowska’s smart, sarcastic, suicidal teenage gymnast Sophie turns the tables on Gabriel Byrne’s fifty-something psychologist Paul Weston, as if once she was so much older but she’s younger than that now and he’s too old to know what she’s talking about. “ ‘The times they are a-changing,’ ” she says as a session is ending. “It’s from a Bob Dylan song. My gift to you.”