Real Life Rock (128 page)

8
Absinthe (74–75, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paris 1e)
On the way to the Picasso Museum, stop here and find yourself plunged into the turn-of-that-century haute bohemia of Barcelona, Picasso's first city. All the staff are in costume (you sort of hope): hair plastered to their skulls, black spit curls on their foreheads that a typhoon wouldn't dislodge, suits and dresses of outrageous and seductive design, the floor man and woman moving from customer to customer like tango dancers, the madame of the place sitting behind the counter like a madam, a dead ringer for an older, dissolute version of the woman in the Picasso Museum's 1918
Portrait of Olga in an Armchair
, a magical painting of Olga Khokhlova, Picasso's first wife. The store is magical. But in the window, seen from the street, is something more magical still. On a brilliantly attired male mannequin is a peacock feather scarf, gleaming with gold and beads, but somehow subtle in its splendor. It was the essence of dandyism: if in the 1830s Paris poet Girard de Nerval took his pet lobster for walks on a leash, this was as close as you could come to wearing one around your neck.

9
Sweetwater,
Cycles: The Reprise Collection
(Warner Archives/Rhino)
A recent VH1 film chronicled the Tragic Story of this band: adventurous hippies open at Woodstock, car crash sidelines lead singer and kills the group, the world turns, and 30 years later they reform for heroic comeback—reincarnated as, among others, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and Frederic Forrest of
The Rose
. This lovingly compiled set lets you hear the band as it really was: as Nansi Nevins makes a breakthrough to diffidence, her most passionate mode; as her sub–Grace Slick affectations give way to a shared aesthetic rooted somewhere in the final choruses of Marcia Strassman's “The Flower Children (Are Blooming Everywhere)”; as on the Woodstock stage one of the guys announces the band as “Sweetwawa” and is not immediately struck by lightning. These people were so bad it's embarrassing to be in the same room with them, and they're still resentful that they missed their “chance.”

10
Marianne Faithfull,
Vagabond Ways
(It/Virgin)
And when she gets it right, it can still be scary to be in the same room with her. Thanked, among others: Anita Pallenberg, Herman Melville, Kate Moss, and Elizabeth I.

NOVEMBER
29, 1999

1
Macy Gray,
On How Life Is
(Epic)
An almost old-fashioned soul record, with tunes that draw from surprising sources (“Do Something” from the Wailers' “Kinky Reggae,” “Caligula” from the Beatles' “Come Together,” “Still” from the Rolling Stones' “Shine a Light”) and a voice that recalls Eartha Kitt, Shirley Bassey and Tasmin Archer—for that matter, Gayl Jones—more than anyone on Atlantic or Motown. There's a thinness, a lack of glamour or costuming, in Gray's tone; you can imagine these songs as ordinary if acrid talk as easily as you can see them as performances. Soul music was about appearing to reveal
all, and Gray is plainly holding back, but that's part of what draws a listener in. It's as if something has been beaten out of the singer, and the real goal of the music is to get it back without giving up anything else. But that's just a notion; there are mysteries here. Momentum builds in “I've Committed Murder” until you can feel the sound won't escape the song; the last cut ends with a banjo, which is to say in the 19th century.

2
Nik Cohn & Guy Peellaert,
20th-Century Dreams
(Knopf)
Like their 1973
Rock Dreams
, cool fantasies of juxtaposition from writer Cohn, lurid realization from photo-collagist and painter Peellaert—as in Federal Agent at Large Elvis Presley smashing into a Yale dorm room to bust doper law student Bill Clinton.

3
Cellos, “Rang Tang Ding Dong (I Am the Japanese Sandman),” on
Bringing out the Dead: Music from the Motion Picture
(Columbia)
Doo-wop, and one of the most ridiculous records ever made. Plus, a backup singer revolts, stopping right in the middle of the song: “All you guys say the big things! All I ever get to say is, ‘Ah he goes . . .' ” A hit in 1957, and hard to find ever since.

4
ZZ Top, “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” on
XXX
(BMG)
Speaking of 1957, not to mention songs with parentheses, this cute Presley No. 1 was once described as Elvis “selling out to girls.” Done here as a stripper blues, with new lyrics about cheetahs and rhinos, it's more like cash on the bed.

5
Laurie Anderson, “Songs & Stories from
Moby-Dick
” (Zellerbach Auditorium, Berkeley, Calif., Oct. 29)
My friend Andrew Baumer reports on a show I couldn't make: “If I were as self-consciously clever and downright arch as Laurie Anderson, I'd probably say something like ‘How can a supposedly respectful and intelligent revision of
Moby-Dick
manage to be completely devoid of any reference to Freemasonry, castration or buggery?' The Edith Ann chair was silly and the much-vaunted Talking Stick was just a digital rehash of her magnetic-tape violin bow, but she's really hooked up with a killer bass player this time: Skuli Svernisson, who, despite his birth in Iceland, not Kokovoko, played like he should be coated in full body tattoos and eat nothing but beefsteaks. The high point came 20 minutes in, when the astounding Thom Nelis, over a diabolical funk bass line, did a whirling peg-leg tarantella with and on crutches, all the time screaming, ‘Have you seen the White Whale? He looks like NOTHING!'

“The oddest, and in retrospect most interesting, aspect of the whole performance was Anderson's unapologetically female take on this whale of a book. Maybe her ignoring the savage phallocentrism of it all in favor of celebrating the yearning, nurturing, healing elements I confess I'd ignored during my 20-plus rereadings throughout my adolescent and adult life might have been just a trifle disingenuous, and perhaps a teeny bit forced, in keeping with her elfin, ain't-I-clever persona, but so what. It never occurred to me that Melville's intention was to compose a meditation on the search for the secret love and beauty hidden within the human heart, but if Anderson sees it, it's obviously there.”