Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  5 Joe Posnanski, “# 23: Tom Cheek on Joe Carter’s game-winning World Series homer in 1993,” from “Thirty-Two Great Calls” (SI.com, October 14, 2010) Posnanski:

  “I see Joe Carter every now and then. He lives in Kansas City and every so often we will be at the same event and we’ll make some small talk. I’ve never asked him—making me one of four people in American [sic] who has not—but I do wonder what it does for the rest of your life to hit a home run that wins the World Series. How often do you think about it when no one is around? How does it make you feel to talk about it every single day?* At some point does it feel like someone else hit it, someone you aren’t anymore?

  “Anyway, Tom Cheek’s call was memorable.

  “ ‘Touch ’em all Joe, you’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!’ ”

  “*I think about this with musicians. You write a song, and you work on the words (‘Wait, what else rhymes with heaven?’) until it’s exactly what you want it to sound like. You bring it to the band, and maybe they collaborate, add a guitar thing here, a drum thing there. You record it, then record it again, and again, and maybe again. And when you finally get it down, through production, you really like it. You think it might become a hit.

  “Does it occur to you while you are doing it that it really might become a hit? And if it does, yes, of course, it will make you a lot of money. But you might have to play this song FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE? Does it occur to you that you may end up traveling city to city, for years and years, and every time you start this song people will go crazy and they will sing along, and after a while the song may become used up for you, but it will NEVER become used up for them? They will never get tired of it, not ever. When you are old and retired, and you show up somewhere, they may STILL want you to sing that song. In fact, for them this song actually is you.

  “Every time Bruce Springsteen pours his heart into Born To Run, my admiration for him doubles.”

  6–8 Sam Amidon, I See the Sign (Bedroom Community, 2010), All Is Well (Bedroom Community, 2007), “The Only Tune” on Nico Muhly, Mothertongue (Bedroom Community, 2008) A twenty-nine-year-old folk singer, Amidon is wispy, indistinct, insinuating, at his best suggestive of something he can’t quite get across. He has his own style, his own approach, but he seems most of all to be listening to himself, and even on All Is Well, dedicated to Dock Boggs, his hero and mine, it wasn’t enough to keep me listening. But across nearly the last fourteen minutes of Nico Muhly’s Mothertongue, otherwise operatic translations of English heresies, there is more than a glimpse of why Amidon may someday turn his voice into a language.

  He takes up an old folk song, or simply an old folk phrase, the sort of thing that has migrated from tune to tune for hundreds of years: “The cruel wind and the rain.” He begins with an odd hesitation, as if in a recital he can’t push through a mirror, the words coming out one at a time: “There, there, there were, there were, there were two, there were two, there were two sis, there were two sis, there were two sisters. . . .” And then a murder.

  It’s incalculably spooky, the way the action comes out of nowhere, the way Amidon has prepared you to expect nothing. His light voice is weightless here, which is not the same thing; retelling this fable, he sounds as if he heard it only once removed from the actual event. Now he’s lying in his bed late at night, wondering how much of the story he believes, turning it over and over in his mind, trying to make it hold still, trying to decide if he wants to believe it or not.

  Then his voice changes—it’s bent, deeper, insistently unmusical, unpleasant. Now he’s trying to enter the story, almost as a character, and the ululations in the background bring forth a whole chorus of cemetery spirits. They’ll let Amidon into the story, but not out of it (“I do not believe the rage the dead experience can be contained by the grave,” says Detective Dave Robicheaux in James Lee Burke’s The Glass Rainbow); Amidon is right at the doorstep of the song. His voice stretches, you hear objects fall in the background, a piano tinkles atonally, and he seems to walk away.

  Then he’s floating through the verses again, back in the story: “He made fiddle pegs from her long finger bones.” You can hear her breathing in the background, as if she’s not dead, as if she can feel herself being cut up, like Uma Thurman buried alive in Kill Bill. The tone never changes. Does the singer believe any of it, now? Is he just playing with the story, which he heard just yesterday? The woman behind him believes it.

  The production is very formally avant-garde, yet somehow implied by the song itself—a version of the song the song itself wanted to hear. And that is true folk music if anything is.

  9 Gang of Four, Content (Yep Roc) Just as The King’s Speech is an action-packed thriller about speech therapy, the Gang of Four’s 1979 debut album Entertainment! was an action-packed thriller about false consciousness and commodity fetishism. There was resistance—a strangled no inside almost every moment of panic.

  The feeling on Content, the first album of new songs in sixteen years by singer Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill, with bassist Thomas McNeice and drummer Mark Heaney as new members, is that of a kind of frantic longing. It’s the metallic sound of people caught in the trap of modern capitalism—wanting what they can’t have and, worse, what they don’t even want, people consumed by a sense of a loss every time an ad appears or a purchase goes into the computer. It’s a music of confusion, until the tone shifts with “A Fruit Fly in the Beehive,” where the person running through his own nightmares wakes up, the dream still in front of his eyes, and begins to think, and the result is a moment of calm surrounded by a sense of jeopardy. Gill counts off the rhythm circling each line, each idea.

  10 U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, concession speech (November 2, 2010) Feingold came into the Senate in 1992 with Elvis at his back—to counter negative ads against him in the Democratic primary, he ran a don’t-believe-everything-you-read spot with the banner headline ELVIS ENDORSES FEINGOLD. The next day everyone in the state knew who he was, and that he had a sense of humor. He went out with the same flair. “So—so—so, to all of you,” he said finally. “In the words of, who else, Bob Dylan: ‘But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free / I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.’ ” He quoted Dylan’s “Mississippi” as if the words were old and familiar, from Wordsworth, maybe; it was all in the lift, the barest hint of surprise, he gave to “not weary”—something Dylan, for all the times he recorded the song (for Time Out of Mind in 1997, for Love and Theft in 2001), never found. “So,” Feingold said finally, “it’s on to the next fight. It’s on to the next battle. It’s on to 2012! And—and!—it is on to our next adventure. Forward!”

  Thanks to Ken Tucker and Ben DeMott

  FEBRUARY 2011

  1 Jeffrey Foucault, Cold Satellite (JeffreyFoucault . com) A collaboration with the poet Lisa Olstein, who wrote the words for Foucault’s drawl—a drawl that sometimes grows a tail so long it curls around itself, with a country feel that puts the people who live in the Nashville charts to shame. Then a deep-ditch electric guitar takes a country song into the blues, and lets it go back where it came from. Nothing is pressed, to the point that sometimes the way the voice pulls away from a word or a guitar from a phrase is its own kind of preciousness—but not in “Twice I Left Her,” which shifts the music into a more resolute kind of quiet, a bigger emptiness in a single room. An acoustic guitar figure comes up against drums buried far away, like a memory. The story creeps out, and stops well short of its end, though you can glimpse it. Foucault drifts over the words so lightly that they seem to fade as they’re sung, and you might stop trying to hear them as words, let them come as sounds.

  2 Cee Lo Green, “Fuck You,” from The Lady Killer (Elektra) The emotions in these three minutes and forty-two seconds are so wonderfully scrambled—I hate you, I hate your money, I hate her for loving your money, I love her anyway, you can keep your money, just let me have her back, but following you both arou
nd all over town is better than staying home and hating myself—that every time the singer gets to the chorus, you can imagine that he’s never felt better in his life.

  3 Gary Kamiya, Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler (Simon & Schuster) From the new Pulp History series, Kamiya’s startlingly immediate text plus documentary photos, maps, and blazing war-comics illustrations by Jeffrey Smith. With crisscrossing stories from Norway, Paris, and London, the tension, the excitement, and the glamour build until you feel like you’re trapped inside of every good antifascist movie ever made. Until the end, in a torture chamber in Dachau, when you are trapped by history.

  4 KT Tunstall, “Uummannaq Song,” from Tiger Suit (Virgin) “Hold your fire—I’m coming out and I’ll tell you the truth”: in the front, her voice is pop, singing harmlessly defiant lines, reaching for a hit and a spread in GQ. But in the back, her shouts are pulling in another direction, where she’s running for her life even though she’s the last person on Earth.

  5 Paul Auster, Sunset Park (Henry Holt) Moving through this tale of Brooklyn squatters are the themes Auster has been pursuing since his first novel, City of Glass, appeared in 1985: the way a ghost can come out of nowhere and leave everything changed. Life is a field of unlikelihood: “That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don’t happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered.” That is philosophy, but in real life lives actually lived can become so spectral they disappear back into the not-lived. Unlikelihood turns into forgetting and facts into fables, as with a character catching the news of the death of a pitcher who, on the mound in 1976, talked to baseballs before throwing them past baffled hitters: “First Herb Score, and now Mark Fidrych, the two cursed geniuses who dazzled the country for a few days, a few months, and then vanished from sight.”

  6 Rod Stewart, Once in a Blue Moon: The Lost Album (Rhino) From 1992. For his covers of Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back,” the Contours’ “First I Look at the Purse,” and more—but especially for “Shotgun Wedding.” Stewart’s hero Sam Cooke didn’t do this? Why not? Yes, he was already dead when Roy C wrote it, but for a song this right he could have climbed out of the grave.

  7 Daniel Lanois, Soul Mining: A Musical Life (Faber & Faber) A producer looks back. And remembers how much better Time Out of Mind would have been if Bob Dylan hadn’t interfered.

  8–9 Keith Richards, Life (Little, Brown) and Dangerous Minds, “Deconstructing ‘Gimme Shelter’: Listen to the Isolated tracks of the Rolling Stones in the Studio” (danger-ousminds.net) “I wrote ‘Gimme Shelter’ on a stormy day,” Keith Richards says, and even with the Bulwer-Lytton cloud floating over the words, they can send a chill through your skin, because you are about to hear—maybe: who knows what he’ll say?—the story of the rock ’n’ roll song that, from “Mystery Train” to “Ready Teddy” to “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” to “A Change Is Gonna Come” to “Like a Rolling Stone,” the form itself was asking for all along. “I was sitting there,” Richards says a few pages later, “just looking out of Robert’s window and looking at all these people with their umbrellas being blown out of their grasp and running like hell. And the idea came to me. You get lucky sometimes. It was a shitty day. I had nothing better to do . . . I wasn’t thinking about, oh my God, there’s my old lady shooting a movie in a bath with Mick Jagger. My thought was storms on other people’s minds, not mine.”

  That’s one version. When you hear the pieces of the song on their own, each part—separate tracks for Richards’s two guitar lines, the vocals, bass, and drums—is so strong it becomes not a part but a version of the whole. With each track four minutes, the length of the full song, so that there are silent periods whenever the given element isn’t present, there’s nothing that isn’t thrilling on its own terms. Richards is so thoughtful, and at the same time such a master of instinct—he knows what he’s going to want, and uses that knowledge as a guiding hand when pure desire seems the engine of his playing—that you could listen for hours without beginning to get to the bottom of the work. The shocker is in the vocal track—Mick Jagger and the soul singer Merry Clayton in tandem. There’s a dank, hollow echo behind every word, as if they were recording in a mine shaft. It’s not apparent if you listen to the song as it has played on the radio for the last forty years, but here it’s overwhelmingly present: the source of the depth of the sound of the whole.

  Whether or not Jagger and Clayton recorded separately, at different times, even in different places, as you listen you hear them singing face to face. With the first “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away,” Clayton soars, dives down, in complete control, like an eagle surveying the whole territory of the song, and suddenly her voice almost breaks. As Jagger shouts in the background, she seems to hesitate, falling behind the beat, the song itself, then rushes back, finding her footing in the maelstrom: “It’s—just—” And then all the way back, reclaiming the song with its hardest, most desperate moment, with the cadence of the last three words like someone throwing herself down a flight of stairs in a harsh and perfect rhythm: “A shot away.” It’s one of those panicky instants in the creation of a piece of music that could never be predicted or planned, and that only the best record-makers hear for what they are and leave in, letting the mistake define what will be left behind. “What key? What key?”

  10 Lisa Olstein, “Radio Crackling, Radio Gone” (lisaolstein.com) This poem could be about Katrina or any other natural disaster, and Olstein’s own reading is a flat, conversational, unpretentious, ordinary recitation: a young person’s voice, American and modern, accentless, without attitude or pose, picking its way through the ruins piece by piece.

  Thanks to Joshua Clover

  MARCH-APRIL 2011

  1 Eminem and Lil Wayne, “No Love” on Saturday Night Live (December 18, 2010) In a performance that reduced the original collaboration for Eminem’s Recovery to a stiff rehearsal, Lil Wayne was the carpenter, with enough conviction in his hesitating syllables to cause pain: “No love lost, no love found” cut. Then Eminem takes the song, walking the boards Lil Wayne nailed down, clumsily, with no ability to create a rhythm out of physical movement, and it doesn’t matter: the staccato beat he makes, then rides, that shoots his words out in front of him is jaw-dropping. The momentum he generates between the walls of each beat seems almost beyond the ability of a body to produce it. On record, the number isn’t so far beyond its sample of Haddaway’s somewhat cheesy 1993 “What Is Love (Baby Don’t Hurt Me)”; here, it touches “Lose Yourself,” the shocker that ran under the credits for 8 Mile—when you thought the movie was over, and the real story was just starting.

  2 The Fiery Furnaces, “I’m Not There,” Le Poisson Rouge, New York (December 5, 2010) Over the last few years, Howard Fishman and Sonic Youth have translated and recorded this once-almost-incomprehensible Bob Dylan song. This night, it seemed to have drifted into Eleanor Friedberger’s mind unbidden, and she told its tale as if, now, it was her life to lead.

  3 Anika, Anika (Stones Throw) The Nico-like face, the Nico-like voice—for that matter the Nico-like consonants—it reeks of concept. But Skeeter Davis’s 1963 “End of the World” always had something uncanny—something from beyond the grave—beneath its lost-love lyrics, and the twenty-three-year-old Anika Henderson—she’s English, her mother is German—brings it to the surface. And there’s something deeply displacing, and gripping, about hearing “Masters of War” sung with a German accent. Suddenly, all sorts of people who weren’t in the song before are now crowding its stage: Nazis, yes, but also Marianne Faithfull with her “Broken English,” inspired by Ulrike Meinhof, and the female German terrorists who in Olivier Assayas’s Carlos—Julia Hummer’s Nada, Nora von Waldstätten’s Magdalena Kopp, Katharina Schüttler’s Brigitte Kuhlmann—are more fearsome than the men, maybe because they seem so eager to be consumed by the fire they’re trying t
o make.

  4 Peter Hujar, Thek Working on Tomb Effigy 8, 1967, in “Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (October 21, 2010–January 9, 2011) One of a series of photos in a slide show, this leaps out. It’s tall, thin, blond, long-haired Thek standing at a work table, with his “Dead Hippie” sculpture lying flat on a platform—a sculpture of himself, or almost. The figure is Thek, but inhumanly incomplete, the features rough and crude, the right arm missing a hand, and the positioning of the figure is pure déjà vu. It’s the artist in the intermediate stage of growing his own pod: a one-man remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  5 Sheryl Lee in Winter’s Bone, directed by Debra Granik (Lionsgate) Somehow, teenage Maddy Ferguson didn’t follow cousin Laura Palmer into the river. She ran off into the woods, all the way across the country, changed her name, and twenty years later turned up in the Ozarks as a forty-year-old woman (not quite looking or speaking as if she was born there, though it’s hard to believe anyone in the film’s mountains wasn’t), just for the chance to look Jennifer Lawrence’s sixteen-year-old in the eye, to see herself, to give the girl the kind of loving, no-hope smile she could have used herself, back before she was dead.

  6 Allo Darlin’, Allo Darlin’ (Fortuna Pop!) Breathy, small-voice pop that makes a world of ease and nimbleness, leaping over tall buildings or anyway garden fences in a single bound. (“I’ve got no money to burn but I’m going to burn what I’ve got,” Elizabeth Morris sings in “Silver Dollars,” and you don’t exactly believe her; “I know this band is awful but I like them an awful lot,” she goes on, and you absolutely do.) Funny, breezy, smart: references include Max von Sydow, Woody Allen, Johnny Cash, old “I’d Rather Fight Than Switch” cigarette ads, and Weezer, the latter to derisive laughter, which could be the most perfect moment here.