Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  6 Umberto Tozzi, “Gloria,” in Gloria, written and directed by Sebastián Lelio (Roadside Attractions) At the end of the picture, in present-day Santiago, Chile, in a nightclub for people in their fifties, a woman dances alone to what, inevitably, is her song: she’s named Gloria, too. Laura Branigan had the huge English-language hit; the Italian original is only slightly less cheesy. Yet something begins to happen. Played by Paulina García, Gloria has just perpetrated a spectacular breakup with a man who always disappears on her. There’s the vaguest suggestion that his dishonesty is of a piece with the likelihood that he once perpetrated disappearances under the Pinochet dictatorship. No one Gloria’s age could have missed the hint dropped in the script, but she doesn’t seem to care—we don’t know what she was doing then, and what she wants is not justice but sex and affection. But she doesn’t get much of either, and now, in the nightclub, going back and forth to the beat, the staircase in the rhythm of the song begins to assemble itself, and she climbs it. You can feel her body lift with each step. No, she doesn’t get anywhere. There’s no deliverance. Her life doesn’t change. The affair is just one more thing to put in the past. But the song has given her far more than the man ever did.

  7 Season 2, Episode 4, House of Cards, Netflix After a CNN interview exposing a newly promoted general as a man who raped her in college, Claire Underwood is at home with Vice President Francis Underwood. There are hints he used to be a folkie: “ ‘Dark Was the Night,’ ” he says at one point, “gets me every time.” Now they’re smoking a cigarette they’ve forbidden each other. “Sing me something,” she says. “What do you want to hear?” “Anything.” “Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly, let me tell you my mind. / My mind is to marry, and never to part. My mind is to marry, and never to part,” he sings, in a deeper voice than the song usually carries. “Before we get married, some pleasure to see, before we get married some pleasure to see”—and as banjo and dobro come up behind him on the soundtrack, the camera pans right, right out of the shot and into black. You don’t hear him sing the rest of the song—where he kills her.

  8 Dex Romweber Duo, Images 13 (Bloodshot) A rock ’n’ roll equivalent of lounge music. Very dumb and very fun.

  9 David Kinney, The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob (Simon and Schuster) This could have been a condescending, for that matter sneering, portrait of cultists, monastics, gnostics, and fools: people who can not only name every song on Empire Burlesque but also tell you their secret meanings. Instead it’s warm, open, discerning. You encounter people who’d be death bending your ear at a bar, but others whom you might want to meet.

  10 Stephen Colbert, “Happy Birthday,” on The Colbert Report, Comedy Central (March 6) Stephen Colbert had a news report about the ninetieth anniversary of the publication of the song that probably tops “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” the first verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “Guantanamera” on the Everybody Knows It chart. The difference is that thanks to a revolution—or really a counterrevolution—in intellectual property law, “Happy Birthday” is still under copyright, and if you don’t protect a copyright, it dissolves into the common square of public domain, so Warner Music does everything it can to make sure that if “Happy Birthday” is sung in any public place or forum—in a movie, on the radio or TV, but also to celebrate the birthday of a cast member at the end of a Broadway show or a Cabinet member at a Cabinet meeting, in a YouTube video, even in a restaurant—you’re supposed to pay.

  Sure. Like you’re going to take your grandmother to Geno’s for her ninetieth and when the whole family starts up the proprietor’s going to run over and tell you to stop or Warner Bros. is going to shut him down. “Don’t believe these people are protective of their intellectual property?” Colbert said. “Marilyn Monroe sang it to President Kennedy, and in one year they were both dead.”

  JULY-AUGUST 2014

  1 Kim Gordon with Nirvana, “Aneurysm,” Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Barclays Center, Brooklyn (April 10) That Nirvana used its time onstage to have only women take Kurt Cobain’s place was the deepest kind of tribute to a man who in his music did everything he could to, in Camille Paglia’s words, “escape our lives in these fascist bodies.” But Joan Jett (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”), Lorde (“All Apologies”), and St. Vincent (“Lithium”) were karaoke. Late of Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon was the singer her song was asking for, whether it was Cobain or someone else, even if now the song was getting more than it asked for. In a gray dress—“a dress by Theory I found. It reminded me of the dress I wore on that 1991 tour with Nirvana, just about a foot longer”—she was fierce, her head down, her eyes hooded. As she charged across the stage, the song might have been trying to run away from her, scared to death, but it didn’t make it.

  2 Woods, With Light and With Love (Woodsist) Jeremy Earl’s Brooklyn band sounds less like Brooklyn—or anywhere, or any time—with each new record. The nine-minute title song is the sort of have-guitar-will-travel excursion you don’t hear anymore—John Andrews’s organ keening in the background, Earl’s high voice breaking the pace, then increasing the pressure until only another guitar can stand up to it. Serpent Power did it with “The Endless Tunnel,” Neil Young with “Cowgirl in the Sand,” Steely Dan with “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years”—while this is playing, you won’t care. At the end, with “Feather Man,” Earl twists a single tiny theme on an acoustic guitar and suddenly you’re hundreds of years in the past, hiding out in the Scottish highlands, waiting for the invaders from the south. How did the band get from one place to another as if all they had done was move from one chair to another? With the sense that in the time it takes to move from one chair to another, the room might disappear.

  3 Bikini Kill, Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah (Bikini Kill Records) For the seven 1991 live performances and practice sessions on the B-side: a band that can barely play discovering itself and realizing that getting better is the worst thing they can do.

  4 Bryan Ferry, the Fox Theater, Oakland, California (April 14) With a six-piece band, not counting his own keyboards and two backing singers whose outfits made them look like shimmying layer cakes, the music was mostly sludge, drowning in an echo broken only by the kind of paint-by-numbers big-move guitar solos that Ferry’s music doesn’t need and that Roxy Music was made to escape. The air cleared only for “Oh Yeah,” a lace curtain that’s been blowing in its window for thirty-four years without ever fraying, and John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy.” Roxy Music began playing it just after Lennon was shot; Ferry communicated all of the pathos he made the song shoulder then, and he made the song carry it now. You felt the way that death can swallow life, and how at least one song escaped.

  5 Secret Cities, Walk Me Home (Western Vinyl) Wonderful press-release lead for a group that, after Strange Hearts, recorded in 2011 over email, now steps out with an album made in an actual studio, albeit Tiny Telephone, in San Francisco, which I like to think is actually a telephone booth under the freeway, where the three got a sound somewhere between the two-girls-one-guy Fleetwoods, from Olympia, Washington, in 1959, and a barely existing female punk band like the Anemic Boyfriends, from Alaska in 1980: “Charlie Gokey delved into Roy Orbison’s ballads about losers in love while becoming a civil liberties attorney in Washington, DC. Alex Abnos locked into New Orleans soul masters like King Floyd & Dr. John as he became a journalist in New York City. And Marie Parker became a teacher in the band’s spiritual home of Fargo, North Dakota.” And Gokey has passed his new muse to Parker: in “Bad Trip,” “Playing with Fire,” and “The Cellar,” she recalls Paula Frazer of Tarnation, whose “Big O Motel”—“Heartbreak Hotel” but cheaper—remains the truest Orbison homage there is. She drifts through the songs, not as if she were walking down the street but as if the streets were walking by her, and she were watching.

  6–7 Kronos Quartet, “Last Kind Words Blues,” arranged by Jacob Garchik, in John Jeremiah Sullivan, “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie,” New York Times Magazine (April 13) and Nat Bald
win, In the Hollows (Western Vinyl) Sullivan tells a long tale of Geeshie Wiley and L. V. Thomas, two women from Houston who in 1930 recorded six inimitable sides for Paramount in Wisconsin and then disappeared. At the end of the online version—which also features videotaped interviews and all of the Wiley-Thomas recordings—the Kronos Quartet appears with a startling performance of Wiley’s most distinctive number. As Sunny Yang on cello, John Sherba on violin, and Hank Dutt on viola map the territory solely through pizzicato, making a setting where David Harrington’s violin follows Wiley’s original vocals like a second mind, as if Wiley would have sung the song without words if she could have gotten away with it, they rebuild the song from the first note up.

  Best known for his playing with Dirty Projectors, Baldwin, leading on double bass and vocals, works with his own version of Kronos Quartet: Rob Moosre on violin, Nadia Sirota on viola, Clarice Jensen on cello, and Otto Hauser on drums. The attack is completely different. There’s peace of mind in the Kronos Quartet piece, as a goal; here the goal is harshness, bad weather, bad news. The music is precise, defined—nothing, you feel, could have been done any differently—and driven like a horse on fire. The pleasure this brings is bottomless: you’re in the presence of people who seem to know exactly what they’re doing without any faith that they’ll see another sunrise.

  8 Fairport Convention, “Tam Lin” (1969), in How I Live Now, directed by Kevin Macdonald (Magnolia Pictures) Howard Hampton writes in: “Best music cue of last year: the film drops a sullen, insulated American teen (Saoirse Ronan, impressively unsympathetic) into the country of Children of Men. She barely registers that the England she has been shunted off to is under siege; picked up at the airport by an underage cousin in a filthy jeep, she doesn’t want to make small talk, so he slips a cassette in the tape deck. What is this? she asks in dismay: Fairport Convention’s variant of the centuries-old ‘Tam Lin,’ where Richard Thompson’s electric guitar chords bring a dark sky to earth and Sandy Denny makes you believe she could turn men into trees. By the film’s end, the girl will have witnessed war and rape, shot two men, and dug through piled corpses to find the body of the boy in the jeep. You can never be sure what’s going on behind Ronan’s blankly piercing eyes, but you have the feeling “Tam Lin’ never leaves her head as the world is coming undone.”

  9 Conference at Night (2012), directed by Valérie Mréjen, in “Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (March 13–June 20) The late ’40s in the United States were a kind of great exhaling: after holding its breath through sixteen years of depression and war, around 1948 the country finally began to breathe again. A new excitement, a sense of release; blasphemy, and possibility changed the way people walked and talked. It came out over the next years as “Howl,” On the Road, the music that would take the name “The Birth of the Cool,” A Streetcar Named Desire, Jackson Pollock’s Paleolithic splatter paintings, In a Lonely Place. But there was also a great letdown, as the country returned to ordinary life, without the hero stories of the war or the horror stories of the Depression, and the letdown is what Hopper painted in 1949 in Conference at Night—or it’s what, more than six decades later, a French director and three French actors saw in the painting, and caught in a four-minute-and-fifty-four-second film. After all the great adventures, three people talk dispiritedly, but insistently, as if they are trying to convince themselves that something actually depends on them doing something one way as opposed to another way, or doing it at all as opposed to not doing it at all, and about the maintenance strategies, memos, meetings, and accumulation of files, all to be dealt with tomorrow, that will be needed to keep the conversation going. It’s Office Space, generations away, in the flick of an eyelash.

  10 Bob Dylan in the ’80s: Volume One: A Tribute to ’80s Dylan (ATO) Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Sure. But they’re not usually a threat.

  Thanks as always to Barbara

  Shelley and Andrew Keir

  SEPTEMBER 2014

  1 Lana Del Rey, Ultraviolence (Polydor/Interscope) The best that could happen to this whirlpool of an album—freezing up only with its last number, “The Other Woman,” a torch song written by Jessie Mae Robinson and a hit for Sarah Vaughan in 1955, which is structured, which is obvious, and which compared to everything else here sounds artificial and fake—is for it to sell its requisite five million copies and then be completely forgotten. Erased from public memory, so that generations from now, when someone opens a closet and finds—along with the Lana Del Rey hologram projector and the Lana Del Rey Barbie—a CD and an old box to play it on, that person will wonder what it is, and hear it at least as clearly as anyone living now, but in a world where our frame of reference is completely gone. Everything I’ve read about this record is about its words, literal-minded, Philistine readings that assume that the I in any song is a real person, and the same real person: What is Lana Del Rey telling us about herself? But no good song—no good creative work of any kind—is literal. Even if the artist starts out thinking she knows exactly what she means to say, the rich text, as I once read, resists not only the reader but the writer as well, and intent vanishes into the swirl of the songs. The music is gorgeous, and uncanny—words matter only when they play a musical role. You can hear the singer fall in love with the staircase she makes out of the repetition of “I fucked my way up to the top . . . fucked my way up to the top”—it’s not a confession; it’s a rhythm. Again and again, a chord comes down, breaks like a wave, flows back, and you keep listening for that moment to repeat itself, but it never quite does. Lana Del Rey knows how to wait out a song, and this album may know how to wait out its time.

  2 Cyndi Lauper, She’s So Unusual: A 30th Anniversary Celebration (Portrait/Epic/Legacy) The first disc is the original album, with the four top-ten hits. The second is out-takes, and the first of them, an “early guitar demo” of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” opens back into a career that might never have happened. The recording is stunning—and also dark, doom-struck, absolutely negative, frantic, panicky, the girl all dressed up to have fun taking one last look in the mirror and reeling from what she sees.

  3 Cabaret, directed by Sam Mendes, the Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54, New York (June 13) Cecily Marcus reports from New York: “At the end, Nazism has seeped in everywhere. Alan Cumming’s Emcee comes back to center stage, wearing the same black leather trench coat that started the show. He starts undoing the buttons, sort of suggestively, but not really. If you saw the movie, you expect him to be just another Nazi. But in a move that is both a total shock and suddenly makes absolute sense, the Emcee is wasted, standing there dressed in concentration camp pajamas with a yellow star and a pink triangle. It’s not a costume; it’s not entertaining. It’s horrifying and real and makes you wonder why you never understood this story before, no matter how many times you have heard it.”

  4 Amanda Petrusich, Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records (Scribner) Mostly focusing on discs from the 1920s and ’30s on the Paramount label, this book is so alive to its subject, to the grail of the music, that it pulls the reader through the author’s speculations about Collector’s Neurosis or her scuba-dive into the mud of the Milwaukee River in search of records discarded there the better part of a century ago. “But the more I thought about why” collectors gave up their lives to the rare, the arcane, the unfindable, Petrusich writes, “the less I cared,” and that’s the key to her sensibility: she wants to get inside the music she’s writing about, and she does. Her best writing is about listening, rooted in her “base, possibly shameful desire to hear someone so overcome by emotion that they could no longer maintain any guise of dignity or restraint,” and as she listens the mask drops from her face as well: “I wanted to crack it into bits and use them as bones,” she says of Mississippi John Hurt’s 1928 “Big Leg Blues”—you don’t know if she means the shellac or the song. She quotes James Weldon Johnson’s “O Black and Unknown Bards” to catch the brea
th of Geeshie Wiley’s 1930 “Last Kind Words Blues”: “How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?” Charley Patton’s sound translates itself into a single image: “Some goon waiting outside.” She watches the collector Joe Bussard as he pulls a record from his shelves and puts it on his turntable, listening to him listen, to the way as the record spins he can’t hold still: “At times it was as if he could not physically stand how beautiful music was.” Petrusich will make you desperate not only to hear the records she’s writing about—though only single copies of the actual discs may survive, you can hear everything on YouTube—but to feel the way they make her feel, to feel the mask dissolve on your own face.

  5 Dave Hickey, Pirates and Farmers (Ridinghouse) In a world divided between pirates and farmers, Hickey makes sure you know what he is—but any posturing dissolves when he homes in on Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm as a “disobedient object” or pulls the plug on the Hunter Thompson cult (“I found myself, for the first time, feeling sympathy for Johnny Depp”). There’s a lot of re-reading in this collection of pieces from 1999 to the present, and it explodes when Hickey goes back to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It’s 2007, the book’s fiftieth anniversary, and Hickey tells you he read it exactly fifty years before, “when I was in my early teens”; that he bought it “off the rack, in hardcover, because we were a transient family and the title, On the Road, seemed to promise some insight into that peculiar gift and affliction”—he wasn’t falling for any best-seller hype, no way. OK, cool. But his account of reading it again twenty years later, after finding himself embarrassed by re-reading Sartre or Hesse or Rilke, isn’t cool: “It was like being hit by a truck. It was so much better than I ever would have imagined that I wanted to cry.” It’s that high-art swoon, so you aren’t ready for him to argue that the book’s closest cultural kin might be This Is Spinal Tap: “They both get sadder every time. . . . With each subsequent experience the truth gets tougher; there is more rage in the lunacy and outrageousness. The folly of vanity and demented hope becomes more excruciating.” But that’s not all that lasts. “No story in Dickens or Kerouac is so abject that you do not feel the joy of the author who is writing it,” Hickey says, and that holds true for him, too.