Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  7 Allen Ruppersberg, A Lecture on Houdini (1973), in “Houdini: Art and Magic,” Jewish Museum, New York (October 29, 2010–March 27, 2011) Easy to miss in this thrilling survey of the career and afterlife of the unforgotten escape artist is a small video cut into a large screen that’s showing footage of Houdini hung upside down and freeing himself from a straitjacket. On the small screen, you see Ruppersberg in a straitjacket, seated at a desk, twisting and stretching as he reads from a typescript of his own Houdini biography. Near the end, his efforts to wriggle loose become more desperate, and his reading more strangled, out of breath—and suddenly the real events he’s describing are suspended. As each sentence takes you closer to the end, the feeling is that if Ruppersberg can somehow escape before he reaches the description of Houdini’s death, Houdini won’t die.

  8–9 Carolina Chocolate Drops, “Sitting on Top of the World,” from Things About Comin’ My Way: A Tribute to the Music of the Mississippi Sheiks (Black Hen, 2009) and Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind (Music Maker Relief Foundation, 2006) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Yes, but with Rhiannon Giddens’s fiddle keening so distantly in the background, you can imagine that the Chocolate Drops are slowing the Memphis combo’s 1930 blues standard down almost to a stop as a way of slowing down the world, so they won’t have to get off—just as, five years ago, on a first album that said hello to almost everyone in the old-timey neighborhood, from “ Little Sadie” to “Sally Ann,” “Tom Dula” to “Black-Eyed Daisy,” they nevertheless jumped the train of “Old Cat Died” as if the same thing would happen to them if they couldn’t ride out of town on the rail of their own strings, so fast that moment to moment you can’t tell Giddens’s and Justin Robinson’s fiddles from Dom Flemons’s harmonica, which might be the whole point.

  10 YOU CAN CHECK OUT ANYTIME YOU LIKE, BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE, headline, Wall Street Journal (January 4) Over a picture of then-governor Jerry Brown with Linda Ronstadt and Glenn Frey of the Eagles, 1976, on the left, and Brown being sworn in as governor of California, 2011.

  Thanks to Chris Ohman

  MAY 2011

  1 PJ Harvey, Let England Shake (Vagrant/Island/Def Jam) It’s shocking to realize that her first album appeared nineteen years ago. While from one record to the next radical leaps alternate with at least one step back, from Dry to Rid of Me to the quicksand of 4-Track Demos, from To Bring You My Love to the bottomless Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea to Uh Huh Her to A Woman a Man Walked By with longtime collaborator John Parish—never mind the bootleg Blind Peggy Death—her sound has traveled with such immediacy, such an insistence that what you’re hearing is happening now, that notions of time, career, progress, or decline are meaningless.

  Here her voice feels higher, damaged. The back-and-forth with Parish (guitar and percussion, saxophone and trombone) is more delicate than ever; notes feel as if they’re reaching for each other and barely missing. But the deep-blues pessimism that has driven Harvey all along finds a field so stark you can’t not picture it. The terrain the songs claim—a country used up, “damp filthiness of ages,” acres of corpses, “arms and legs were in the trees”—lets you imagine Harvey started out to create a soundtrack after the fact to Children of Men—the sounds coming out of her mouth feel like Clive Owen’s face looked—and then decided to remake the whole picture instead. While ending one song with a line from “Summertime Blues.”

  2 Kathleen Hanna, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Joe’s Pub, New York (December 15, 2010, YouTube) As she goes on at length with the story of how she named the song, which she later found herself stripping to—it’s a stand-up routine, starting with graffiti on a fake teen-pregnancy center, graffiti on a bedroom wall, and then “one of those hangovers where you think that if you walk in the next room there could be a dead body in there?”—both glee and suspense take over the room. It’s the suspense of someone describing how history was made, which is to say describing how it might not have been; it’s the glee of having been in the right place at the right time, and for once saying exactly the right thing. When Hanna finally begins to sing the song itself in her little-girl voice, and the hairs rise on the back of your neck, you can feel them one by one.

  3 Low Anthem, Smart Flesh (Nonesuch) A lot of people hear worry and trouble in Arcade Fire and the Decemberists, but all I find are bland, warming voices reassuring the listener that somebody cares. On their fourth album, this Providence quartet—whose Myspace profile lists its genre as “Comedy/Minimalist/Psychedelic,” which is as helpful as “Harry Reid/Patsy Cline/ Humphrey Bogart” might be—goes for the nihilism of real art: saying what you want to say without wondering if it’s going to do anybody any good. “Boeing 737” opens with a flurry of thrilling noise and a tale so lacking in piety you start playing the movie it calls up before the first verse is half over. “I was in the air when the towers came down / In a bar on the 84th floor,” the singer says, like a drunk in another bar who’s told this story so many times he actually believes it. But two tracks earlier, in “Ghost Woman Blues,” the singer has already convinced you that the ghost he saw in the cemetery wasn’t a ghost at all, that both the woman and the song might be two hundred years old, and by now you’re ready to believe anything.

  4 Vladimir Putin, “Blueberry Hill” (December 11, 2010, YouTube) Phil Bronstein, San Francisco Chronicle, January 10: “In front of a fawning crowd, including Hollywood celebrities, Putin charmingly sang ‘Blueberry Hill.’ It reminded me of those Adolf and Eva home movies at Berchtesgaden, laughing and playing with their German shepherds.” Or, as Eva, a big Al Jolson fan, liked to do, dressing up in blackface.

  5 Gang of Four, First Avenue, Minneapolis (February 12) In front of an unfawning but enthusiastic crowd whose ages, from twenties to sixties, matched those of the four onstage—founding members Andy Gill and Jon King in their mid-fifties, new members Tom McNiece and Mark Heaney in their forties and thirties but appearing much younger—the strongest performances were physical epics. Compositions that were once tied to specific social or political circumstances—“Armalite Rifle,” about torture in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, or the stop-time, spoken “Paralysed,” about mass unemployment and forced redundancy under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s—reemerged as basic, general, borderless tales, to be told around the campfire of a show like this one. “Do As I Say,” from the band’s recent Content, was a hysterical, then implacable acting-out of an all-pervasive tyrannical madness. These songs and others went on and on, as if for each number the writers had forgotten to include a way out. It was one long analysis; the cheering was loud after the first encore and louder after the second.

  6 Antietam, Tenth Life (Carrot Top) As the leader of this undefeated New York trio, singer and guitarist Tara Key has never pulled her punches, but never have they landed so fiercely, and with such grace, as they do here, six songs in. “Clarion” is an instrumental, a melody building on its own lyricism, all sunsets and sunrises, until it fades into “Better Man,” where it reveals itself as a fanfare, because this is the song—relentless, confident, triumphant, every swagger earned and paid for a hundred times over—you didn’t know you were waiting for.

  7 Social Distortion, Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes (Epitaph) Over nearly twenty years this Southern California punk band—led by Mike Ness, who sometimes comes across as the bad seed of namesake Eliot—hasn’t come close to making a poor record. This is staggering.

  8 Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury) “After more than a dozen years roaming the ghostly corridors of Broadcasting House in the dead of night, knowing no one was listening to anything he produced—for who, at three o’clock in the morning, wanted to hear live poets discussing dead poets, who might just as well have been dead poets discussing live poets?—he resigned.”

  9–10 Platters, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (Mercury) Released in 1958, just months after Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues,” it’s drifted through its own haze ever since, now for a long moment hovering over Michelle Williams and Rya
n Gosling for the awful sex scene in Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, until the music fades away and dies as the sex does. Bryan Ferry covered the Platters’ version—the composition goes back to the 1930s—in 1974 for Another Time, Another Place, trying to get underneath the Platters’ soaring, heroic embrace of the song, to find a smaller song inside of it. Sneaking in behind the closing credits in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, his version is gorgeous, threatened, a heart exposed, and for a verse or so he’s allowed to say everything the movie can’t, or more likely won’t.

  Thanks to Daniel Marcus

  JUNE 2011

  1 Gareth Liddiard, Strange Tourist (ATP) The film critic Mick LaSalle, in the San Francisco Chronicle, recently answered a reader’s query as to why the superb film Never Let Me Go—the movie about an English boarding school attended exclusively by boys and girls destined to be harvested for their organs—failed to receive an Oscar nomination as one of the ten best films of the year. “. . . a movie’s chances go down if viewers feel like killing themselves after an hour,” LaSalle replied. Strange Tourist is like that: a man sitting in a room, hitting notes on an acoustic guitar, meandering through tales of one defeat after another, with alcohol leaving tracks on the songs like a snail. But Liddiard leads the Drones, who with far more drama, dynamism, and fury can also make you feel like killing yourself, or anyway wishing the world would end, or wondering if, in one symbolically complete event at a time—a school shooting here, a successful Republican filibuster there, a new Lucinda Williams album on the horizon—it hasn’t already. Here, in a quiet, artless, shamed, constricted way, a person emerges: a fictional construction, someone without a flicker of belief or, for that matter, interest in redemption, cure, or another life. Against all odds, especially across the more than sixteen minutes of “The Radicalisation of D,” the final track, he makes you want to know what happens next.

  2 Jay-Z, Decoded (Spiegel & Grau, 2010) An old-fashioned artist’s book—thick, gorgeous, a collage of memoir, rhymes, photos, newspaper front-pages, drawings, paintings, and so dense in mass and swift on the eye that you have no idea what might appear each time you turn a page. For me the book lit up when I stumbled on the page with an old picture of Ronald Reagan—from the ’40s or ’50s, looking ingratiating and slick—with the shadow of Osama bin Laden peering over his shoulder. The little super-imposition swirled: Jay-Z’s point was that Reagan was happy to see New York turn into Crack City, that we’ve forgotten the “historical amnesia and the myth of America’s innocence that led us into the war in Iraq.” But to me, Reagan came right out of the book, smiling over Jay-Z’s shoulder, handing him a Medal of Freedom, telling him that he, like all of the other people on the stage, was an American hero for proving that in this great country anyone can make himself so rich democracy is beside the point.

  3–4 Mildred Pierce, directed by Todd Haynes, written by Haynes and Jon Raymond (HBO) and Michal Grover-Friedlander, Operatic Afterlives (Zone Books) At the end of the fourth episode, Kate Winslet’s Mildred, Brian F. O’Byrne’s Bert (Mildred’s ex-husband), and a few others gather excitedly at one of Mildred’s restaurants; someone brings out a 1930s box radio and places it on a table. They’re going to hear the radio debut of Mildred and Bert’s daughter Veda: a “coloratura soprano,” though they’re not sure what that is. Mildred and her daughter, played by Morgan Turner as a child, and by Evan Rachel Wood as a near adult, are more than estranged; her daughter considers her mother, a successful businesswoman, little more than a peasant. There’s nervousness all over Winslet’s face.

  The radio show is vulgar, all noisy ads and smarm: Veda banters icily with the idiot announcer. There’s a fanfare-commercial, and then Veda begins to sing. On the sound track, it’s the Chinese coloratura Dilber, performing “Bell Song” from Léo Delibes’s 1881–82 opera Lakmé—but we’ve already seen Evan Rachel Wood, a woman with a screen presence so fierce and delicate that we picture her face on the face of the radio as the sound comes out, and the tension on Winslet’s face is replaced by terror.

  In Operatic Afterlives, the Israeli musicologist Michal Grover-Friedlander argues that, at its most extreme, opera, “founded as it is on the myth of Orpheus,” is “an attempt to revive the dead with the power granted to singing.” This is what we are hearing, if not something more. Opera may be about the production of sounds of such purity, transcendence, and force that they deny the fact that they could be made by mere human beings—and thus the audience and the singer herself can be absorbed into the notion that the singer is not human, but other than human, or inhuman. As one cannot imagine a mere mortal making such sounds, she ceases to be mortal. It’s not that she becomes immortal; she was never born, and therefore she cannot die. It’s the emergence of a monster of grace; as Mildred and Bert look on, they realize they have created this monster. Haynes shows the faces of the people listening, and then there’s a slow pan across the radio, with sound coming out of the deco mouth of the speaker, as if the monster could turn into an inanimate object, or bring it to life—as if the radio is itself alive, or as if a deadly homunculus lives inside it.

  5 Attachments, Go Away (attachments.bandcamp.com) Jonathan Richman is back! In the shape of an Oakland quartet having too much fun to be embarrassed by anything, just like the man himself.

  6 Secret DJ, Philadelphia International Airport (March 13) Playing as you got off the plane, as you walked down the terminal, into the baggage-claim area, music to—soothe your nerves? Wake you up? Torture your brain? What is that? And it was Bob Dylan’s 1966 “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” Bill Deal & the Rhondels’ obscure 1969 “What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am?”, the Beach Boys’ glorious 1963 “Be True to Your School,” and, with a crack, a surge, the kind of urgency that was not in music before rock ’n’ roll, the Animals’ 1964 “I’m Crying.” I don’t think I’ve heard a set that good on an actual radio station in twenty years.

  7 Gil Scott-Heron, “Me and the Devil,” from I’m New Here (XL) The song communicated resignation when Robert Johnson sang it in 1937, and it communicates resignation now. The difference is that Johnson’s devil was specific; here it seems to be life itself.

  8 Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner) From the author of Eat the Document, a new novel about a musician and his sister, both of them in their late forties. The book maps a post-punk milieu where the sense of completeness punk offered, in this case in Los Angeles, never goes away. Spiotta can capture whole lives in the most ordinary transaction, and make it cut like X’s “Los Angeles” or the Avengers’ “Car Crash,” as when the brother comes to his sister for money, for gas, for food: “I pulled open a drawer. I riffled through the papers until I found a credit card offer that included some low-interest-rate checks attached to a piece of paper upon which many caveats, warnings, catches, and asterisks (which I supposed meant risks of a sidereal nature) were printed in the classic credit-card tiny faint print. The first time you actually read the words printed on these things was to feel the last connection to your childhood die. I filled one out for a thousand dollars.”

  9 Randy Newman, The Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 2 (Nonesuch) The second of his solo piano recordings of old songs reaches its height with the first of them, “ Dixie Flyer,” about Newman’s mother leaving L.A. for her native New Orleans during World War II, when Newman’s father was overseas. The regret in the opening notes as he looks back is awful: as he sings now, his father is dead, his mother is dead, this is his attempt to feel for himself the dilemma the world dropped on them like a bomb, and they will never hear him, never understand how fully he understands. The train crosses the country, Newman is barely born, but he feels the journey, hears what it means to be Jewish in the South. He flinches, he pushes harder, takes a stand, draws a line in the sand, and he leaves who he is behind that line, because he knows he would have made the same choice his mother did. It all happened in 1988 on Land of Dreams, but not with this depth of compassion, this hate: “Trying to do like the gentiles do / Christ, they wanted to be gentiles too
/ Who wouldn’t down there, wouldn’t you? / An American Christian / God damn!”

  10 RaveUps, “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” (Eagles Hall, El Cerrito, California, April 9) As a Yardbirds tribute band, they hit their stride with a cover of the Yardbirds’ cover of Bo Diddley. “I look like a farmer, but I’m a lover / Can’t judge a book by looking at the cover,” Dave Seabury sang—wiry, balding, coat and tie, a used-car dealer’s mustache, thirty years ago the drummer in the East Bay punk band Psychotic Pineapple. Until the last chorus, when you couldn’t read his face or his tone: “I look like an insurance salesman, but I’m a male prostitute!”

  JULY-AUGUST 2011

  1 Robert Johnson, The Centennial Collection (Columbia Legacy) Johnson’s 1936 and 1937 recordings—to quote the late Wilfrid Mellers in his unsurpassed study Music in a New Found Land, “the ultimate, and scarifying disintegration of the country blues. . . . The expression of loneliness—the singer speaking with and through his guitar—could be carried no further”—have been reissued in countless formats since they were first collected, in 1961. They have been remastered, reengineered, rebalanced, all but reamed to bring out the sound you can’t hear but should. But never like this. For this celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth, on May 8, 1911, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, there are new liner notes by the blues historian Ted Gioia and by Johnson copyrighter Steve LaVere—but what the music now needs is a full technical report. La-Vere’s praise for digital transfers and noise reduction by the engineers Steven Lasker and Seth Winner is not adequate. What they’ve done is a revelation: they have stripped the past from Johnson, the nearly three-quarters of a century from then to now, and placed him and you in the same room. He’s playing to you, trying to get across. You are trying to tell him that you’ve never heard anything like this before, even though you have his records, even in a half dozen redundant editions, played to death, the covers of the original LPs instantly memorized for the drama of the first, the ordinariness of the second, which, coming in the wake of the first, was more dramatic still: the idea that some individual with a name and a face could be responsible for music that, no less than the forgotten playwright Aeschylus stole from, rewrote the human spirit. You’re trying to tell him all this; he’s listening.