Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  6 Fiery Furnaces press release (Thrill Jockey Records, July) On the follow-up to the summer’s I’m Going Away: “The band is very optimistic—despite or because of it all—and will continue its ‘Democ-Rock’ efforts by releasing a fully-fledged ‘Derocmacy in America’ limited edition vinyl box-set. It might be called something like Your Cashier Today Was ACM CASHIER 96. . . .” Misreading “Derocmacy” as “Deromacy,” I asked Furnace Matthew Fried-berger if it was a typo, and if so, or not, what it meant. His reply: “It’s meant to be the equally idiolect-ed ‘Derocmacy.’ ‘Roc’ as in ‘Rock’. . . . But that’s neither here nor there. And maybe ‘Deromacy’ is one of those fruitful sort of typos. It might therefore have—unknowingly—been derived from ‘derivo’—meaning the derive or divert. So ‘Deromacy’ might refer to an imagined, or real, Diversionary Republic.—Or from ‘derogo’—the Derogatory or Critical Republic.—Or from ‘derosus,’ which apparently means ‘gnawed away’—so, the Eaten-Away Republic.

  “ ‘Derocmacy’ has to do with the ‘Democ-Rock’ thing, which started as a lark on our tour last year during the primaries. We had people vote on what we’d play and held a ‘caucus’ to determine what our next album would be. And I was to write songs, or put together songs, based on or determined by whatever printed ephemera fans had on them and put down on the stage (along with their song-votes). Receipts, mainly (So the cashier number on a receipt would provide the intervals for the tune, and so on). The slogan was ‘Make the details of your life the sound track to your life.’ ”

  7–10 Megan Pugh, “Who’s Bad? How the King of Pop changed the course of American dance by transforming its past” (FLYP, July 3). Michael Thomas, “I Was Not Michael Jackson” (New York Times, June 28). Bob Herbert, “Behind the Façade” (New York Times, July 4). Bill Wyman, “The Tragedy of Michael Jackson” (Wall Street Journal, July 15) These are a few of the few pieces on Michael Jackson’s death where writers had the heart or the nerve to dig out from under the endless stream of cant about the “sound track of my life” and “his gift to the world” and “now perhaps he can rest in peace.” In a scintillatingly linked essay on the website FLYP, Pugh set the scene with the spontaneous explosion of dance, not merely speech, that first greeted the news (“Fourteen-hundred prison inmates in the Philippines performed a massive, synchronized dance tribute in bright orange jumpsuits,” as you watch), and then moved out to trace Jackson’s debt to (and, clearly, study of) Bill Robinson, the nineteenth-century moonwalker Billy Kershands, Gene Kelly, and more, not diminishing Jackson’s work but allowing it to take on its full dimensions by expanding its context. Thomas, author of the novel Man Gone Down, a perfectly conventional realistic novel that can at times make you feel as if you’re reading Ulysses or Invisible Man, begins as harshly as he can, hearing the news on the radio, thinking about how he’d already left not only Jackson but his own brother behind: “He knows I don’t care about him.” He goes back to the 1970s and the Cousin 5, the living-room singing group he, his brother, his sister, and his two cousins formed in thrill and homage, and proceeds to twist his heart and yours. Herbert writes about a man who bought the world: about meeting Jackson in the mid-1980s, when he carried Emmanuel Lewis around “almost as a pet”—with Lewis, “probably 13 at the time, but he looked much younger, maybe 7 or 8,” a symbolic stand-in for the children in Jackson’s bed. Wyman presented Jackson as a man sustained only by his fame—sustained in the sense of Jackson himself feeding off his own renown. Wyman did not shy away from the hideousness of the face Jackson presented to the world, and not the face he got with plastic surgery: rather how, after inventing the previously unknown throne of the King of Pop and awarding himself the crown, “he developed a fondness for walking around in front of a large band of what seemed to be Central American military personnel; this was in the ’80s, the era of Salvadoran juntas and assassinations of priests and nuns. One album, HIStory, featured an enormous Soviet-style Jackson statue on the cover. Replicas of it were set up when he made public appearances.”

  Unlike the thugs he liked to dress up as, Jackson didn’t have people killed. He enacted a complex drama that implicated millions of people in labyrinthine ways. With the avalanche of biographies and biopics to come, it will be hard to see even the curtain behind which that drama took place, but gathering these pieces and others as tough-minded in one place would be a first step.

  NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2009

  1 Mike Seeger, 1933–2009 August was a wipeout in American music: the rockabilly original Billy Lee Riley, dead at seventy-five on the second; the punk flash Willy DeVille at fifty-eight on the sixth; the electric guitar pioneer Les Paul at ninety-four on the thirteenth; the Memphis termite Jim Dickinson, a.k.a. leader of Mudboy and the Neutrons, at sixty-seven on the fifteenth; Ellie Greenwich, cowriter of “Da Do Ron Ron,” “Be My Baby,” and “Leader of the Pack,” at sixty-eight on the twenty-sixth. But the cruelest note may have been struck with Mike Seeger, the folklorist, producer, filmmaker, and scholar-on-his-feet, dead at seventy-five on the seventh. He died beloved and respected, but also bitter—over the fact that as a singer and player in his own right, those whom Bob Dylan once called the folk police never accepted him as a peer of those he helped rescue from obscurity and bring into the light: Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, and countless more—great artists who themselves had no trouble accepting him at all.

  2 Drones, Bell House (Brooklyn, September 9) Having flown in that day from Australia, complaining of jet lag and offering to share bronchitis with the sparse crowd, they threw out one ferocious song after another. “Sitting on the edge of the bed crying,” Gareth Liddiard sang over and over, with storms of noise whirling around his head, the words muttered, chanted, shouted, whispered, until the piece seemed less about a broken heart than the human condition. Guitarist Dan Luscombe said they’d be doing songs from their 2005 album . . . Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By. It was a prosaic promise: the embattled us the band enacts against the empowered them waiting outside the club that was itself the shelter from the storm the Drones were dramatizing. But it didn’t come off that way. The music was so strong, so full of loose wires twisting through the air in a spastic dance, that you could imagine that yes, you were the “you” in “your enemies”—and that Liddiard, Luscombe, bassist Fiona Kitschin, and drummer Michael Noga were your enemies, and that as they floated by this was the song they sang.

  3 Mad Men, “My Old Kentucky Home” (AMC, August 30) It’s the wedding party for Roger Sterling of Sterling Cooper, the white-haired dandy who’s dumped his wife for a secretary, now offering the guests his rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home”—in blackface. It’s 1963, the height of the Civil Rights movement; the refusal of the history that’s being made elsewhere in America magnifies the gruesomeness of the act. It can stay in your mind like an overheard insult: the presumption that the subjects of Sterling’s performance will be excluded from its audience, unless they’re maids or houseboys, in which case they’re invisible anyway.

  4 Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (Penguin) In the late ’60s and early ’70s, people used to talk about the great hippie detective novel. About a dope deal, of course, with an outsider/outlaw version of Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer—and Roger Simon’s Moses Wine, starting out in 1973 with The Big Fix and still on the case thirty years later, wasn’t it. Hunter Thomson played the role well in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and then dissolved in his own hype. Pynchon’s Doc Sportello somehow realizes the fantasy.

  There’s lazy writing—the repeated use of the screenwriter’s “a beat” to signal a pause, neologisms (“At the end of the day”) that weren’t there then, set pieces lifted from the likes of The Little Sister or The Chill (the visit to the big mansion, the hero doped up in the locked room)—but Pynchon’s affection for Sportello’s time and place, Los Angeles circa 1970 with the shadow of the Manson murders still hanging in the air, is overwhelming, and it’s this that powers the book. What’s new is Pynchon
’s depiction of the economy of the hippie utopia as altogether heroin-driven; Sportello himself, a one-time skip tracer who’s graduated into the world of the licensed PI, beach bum division, who at twenty-nine could be a former member of the Charlatans; and Sportello’s nemesis, the infinitely manipulative LAPD homicide detective Bigfoot Bjornsen. “The whole field of homicide’s being stood on its ear,” he says, “—bye-bye Black Dahlia, rest in peace Tom Ince, we’ve seen the last of those good old-time L.A. murder mysteries I’m afraid. We’ve found the gateway to hell, and it’s asking far too much of your L.A. civilian not to want to go crowding through it, horny and giggling as always, looking for that latest thrill. Lots of overtime for me and the boys I guess, but it brings us all that much closer to the end of the world”—and you can almost see Squeaky Fromme, not to mention generations of Los Angeles psychics and mystics, perched on his shoulder, smiling like the Mona Lisa. There is a line that in any other hands would be ridiculous but here feels exactly right—a line that to get off the ground needs a whole book behind it, that hits the note the book itself needs to lift off into the air. “He waited until he saw a dense patch of moving shadow, sighted it in, and fired, rolling away immediately, and the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time”—a moment that fades into an ending nearly tragic in the gorgeousness of all that will soon pass away. Doc Sportello would be about seventy now—there’s a whole series of stories behind him or, for Pynchon, ahead of him.

  5 The White Ribbon, directed by Michael Haneke (Telluride Film Festival, September 5) In 1913, a series of disasters overtakes a small German village, and the events come most starkly to life in two linked shots in this black-and-white film. A woman, a worker, has been killed in an accident. Haneke places the camera to take in a rough, crumbling room where her naked body has been set on a bed. The camera waits. The woman’s husband walks into the room. He covers the body. He leaves the room. The camera eye remains in place; you wait. Not long after, two children are about to be caned by their father, the town minister. With the camera positioned to take in a carefully decorated hallway, the epitome of bourgeois propriety, they pass into the next room. The door is closed; the camera remains focused on the hallway. The camera waits; the viewer waits.

  In both cases, with these long and stationary shots, the action, either on camera or off, ceases to matter. It is the places that come to life, that witness, that hear, and that translate what has occurred for the viewer, which is to say they lead the viewer to imagine what else these walls have seen—or, perhaps more particularly for Haneke, since the movie is a parable about the emergence of Nazism, what they will see. The dread and foreboding in these waiting images, with ambient sound, the sound of the rooms breathing—they are not only part of a greater drama, but visually its black holes—can load the same qualities into the seemingly more benign images from which they are so directly drawn: Walker Evans’s 1936 photos of tenant family shacks in Hale County, Alabama.

  6 Jean (Hans) Arp, Birds in an Aquarium, c. 1920 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) In Richard Powers’s 2003 novel The Time of Our Singing, Delia Daley, an African American pianist from Philadelphia, and David Strom, a German-Jewish refugee physicist from New York, meet in the crowd at Marian Anderson’s 1939 performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. “The bird and the fish can fall in love,” is the line that runs through the book, “but where will they build their nest?” “The bird can make a nest on the water,” one reads on the last page. “The fish can fly.” With this small assemblage of wood cutouts—in beige and black, what could be a neolithic mother figure as background; in grey, two schematic bird goddesses on the figure’s chest, a red heart in one, a black heart in the other; and at the base, or the belly, rolling waves in red, brown, and blue—Arp made the fable come true.

  7 Mekons, “Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem,” Great American Music Hall (San Francisco, July 28) With his cadaverous sunken eyes, Lu Edmonds, who plays such ancient instruments as the saz, had the look of one of the seventeenth-century heretics the song is about: the look of one of them as he might have been then, and as he might be today if he’d never died. I thought I heard someone call out for “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” which in this context was “Free Bird.”

  8 Deer Tick, Born on Flag Day (Partisan) There’s great depth here, rooted in folk tunes many generations older than the musicians. The way John McCauley can mock himself and still convince you he means every word he says lifts lines out of the burgeoning Providence noise. “Smith Hill” is a sardonic song about nihilism so moving I had to stop it, then play it again to hear McCauley sing “I could drink myself to death tonight, I could stand and give a toast.” Perhaps best is “Friday XIII,” a duet with the Providence singer Liz Isenberg, whose readiness to find a laugh anywhere brings back Townes Van Zandt’s “Waiting Around to Die”—without any death. “I can drink a lot better than I could in my teens,” the guy promises; “oooooo” goes the girl. Hidden track: “Goodnight Irene”—party version.

  9 The Texas Sheiks (Tradition & Moderne) Even with shimmering cover art by Ed Ruscha, there’s something inherently hokey about old-time old-time music mavens—led by Geoff Muldaur, who came out of the Club 47 in Cambridge nearly fifty years ago—going back to the well one more time. The bet is that the allure in tunes first recorded in the ’20s and ’30s—“The World Is Going Wrong,” “Poor Boy, Long Ways from Home,” “Traveling Riverside Blues”—remains a treasure to be found, no matter how many times you might have thought you touched it. It pays off most improbably in Johnny Nicholas’s vocal for his revision of Skip James’s 1931 “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.” The imitation of James’s growl, his cadence, the weight of a tramp wearing all the clothes he owns on his back—it’s embarrassing, and then it’s a trance. And then it’s a sting, as Nicholas shows his hand and explicitly tips a song composed in the trough of one depression onto the edge of another one.

  10 Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) In this novel, a T-shirt: DADA: IT’S NOT JUST FOR UMBRELLAS ANYMORE.

  JANUARY 2010

  1 Gossip, Music for Men (Columbia) After years living off the novelty that singer Beth Ditto is bigger than female singers are supposed to be, this trio has produced an album as cool and impassioned as anything since the heyday of Book of Love. Everything that might get in the way of put-you-on-the-spot vocals and slap-back rhythm has been pared away; the songs breathe and snap. That you might hear Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug” or Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy” in “Heavy Cross” doesn’t mean the band is recycling someone else’s hits; the musicians have a jukebox in their collective head, just like anybody else. That turns up an “I Heard it through the Grapevine” quote in “Love Long Distance” so graceful it can almost make you doubt you’ve heard it before—and even if you know you have, the Bronski Beat beat, thin, clean, and swirling, will make you forget. With “Spare Me from the Mold,” as strong an image as you can ask from a song title, they head out into a rave-up so hot they can turn it into a breakdown with the twist of a neck. Sometimes craft gives as much pleasure as vision; sometimes vision sneaks right out of craft.

  2 Dion, “ Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms),” in Big Fan, written and directed by Robert D. Siegel (Big Fan Productions) Near the end of a film that in the pitch meeting you can see Siegel trying to sell as a cross between Buffalo ’66 and The King of Comedy (“What about The Fan?” “It’s ‘Big Fan,’ and who remembers The Fan anyway?” “Me?”), there’s a no-ambient-sound slow-motion bar scene where the hero, the schlub “get a life” was invented for, walks through the place like Robert De Niro in his Mohawk, all sorts of conflicting and repressed desires flooding him like a bad cold; the only sound you hear is the flipside of Dion’s 1968 “Abraham, Martin & John,” the most threatening record he ever made. Somebody knows their stuff.

  3 Bill Pullman in Oleanna (John Golden Theatre, New York, October 20, 2009) Immediately after the final, violent “cunt” scene,
Pullman, the professor, and Julia Stiles, the student, the only characters in this revival of David Mamet’s 1992 play about sexual harassment and feminist conspiracy, return to the stage with copious distance between them—“The curtain call is as directed as anything else,” said a friend—and he looks haggard, confused, shaken, as if he truly has been somewhere else and isn’t back.

  4 Catherine Corman, Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City (Charta) It seems like an unassailable idea: matching original dialogue or descriptions to new photographs, stalk Los Angeles as if scouting locations for remakes of all the Philip Marlowe movies, for every building he ever walked into or out of—the exits, so often leaving a body behind, usually being more memorable than the entrances. But as the pages turn, it becomes clear Chandler’s writing never needed illustrations—or that a picture of a city hall is not going to stand up to “He had my wrists now, instead of me having his. He twisted them behind me fast and a knee like a corner store went into my back. I can be bent. I’m not City Hall,” never mind that a picture of an expensive Moorish tower sucks the irony out of the last line. But there’s one plain and ghostly exception, a version of the house where, in The Little Sister, Orrin Quest found a room. In Corman’s hands it’s a rickety wooden staircase leading to a door topped by a crude English sunrise motif, with two palm trees hovering over the building like giant undertakers: an image that carries so much suspense the quote facing it dies on its page.