Real Life Rock (193 page)

3
Elvis Costello,
This Year's Model
(Rhino reissue, 1978)
No album ever has to sound better, but God help us if any album ever sounds more under pressure. With “This Year's Girl,” “The Beat,” “Hand in Hand” and “Lipstick Vogue,” both the singer and the band are so swept up in the cruelty of the music it's hard to credit the multitude of choices shuddering out of every note, word or riff—what can come across as pure emotion can also communicate as craft. What feels like spew one day will feel like someone biting his tongue the next. No wonder that “Radio, Radio” and “Night Rally,” both burning on their own terms, feel contrived by comparison; next to numbers that can scare you because they cut the ground out from under your feet, they're just protest songs. In sum, a world-historical statement—plus, as with all the new double-CD Costello reissues on Rhino, an extra disc of junk.

4
Caitlin Cary,
While You Weren't Looking
(Yep Roc)
Big, chiming guitars are one of the corniest devices in rock 'n' roll, but sometimes there's no better way to say that no matter how bad the story you're telling, you're coming out of it like Timi Yuro with “What's a Matter Baby (Is It Hurting You)”—as pure vengeance. That's the feeling the fiddler from Whiskeytown gets on “Thick Wall Down,” despite the fact that her words tell a story about how bad turns into good. It's one more proof that the refugees from the never-so-hot band are better off on their own—Ryan Adams with glory-rock success, Cary, unafraid to sound too much like Sarah McLachlan, with tunes that might stick.

5
44th Annual Grammy Awards (CBS, Feb. 27)
The only highlight, from a very diminished Jon Stewart: “In Afghanistan, they were ruled by a totalitarian regime for five years, and when Afghanistan was liberated, the first thing that happened was that
music
was played on the streets there. (Applause from the hall, but somberly; this
is a tribute.) And three days later even they were sick of Creed.” (Rumbles of protest from at least a few in the seats: that wasn't very nice, especially after Stewart had set them up to act patriotic.)

6
Dennis Miller Live
(HBO, Feb. 22)
Since Bush assumed the presidency, the one-time gadfly has become an administration cheerleader and his audience a gang of chanting dittoheads (this night people laughed mockingly over attorney Gloria Allred's assertion that the Supreme Court decision that made Bush president was “wrong,” as if to say, “That's just
so
2000, you cunt”). There's still room for good writing, though Miller has trimmed his famous blind references with I.D.s, perhaps because he thinks his new crowd might be a bit slow on the uptake. “We're not living in a police state,” he said during his rant. “The only people longing for 1984 are the original members of the band Whitesnake”—and it's that “the band” that bleeds the line dry.

7
24
(Fox, Feb. 26)
As it begins to emerge that presidential candidate Sen. David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) is being run by forces unknown to him, his wife, Sherry Palmer (Penny Johnson Jerald), tries to keep him focused—by insisting that Palmer's asking who he's actually working for can wait until after the California primary. “We're almost there,” she says reassuringly—and more like Angela Lans-bury in
The Manchurian Candidate
every week. The premise of this show from its first episode was that you can't trust anyone; you, the viewer, really can't. It's stunning that the level of tension hasn't simply been sustained over three months, but deepened.

8
Daniel Wolff, co-author of
You Send Me: The Life & Times of Sam Cooke
and editor of Ernest C. Withers'
The Memphis Blues Again
,
considers a White House photograph officially titled
The President and Presley Examine Documents
,
and initiates a caption contest. The results so far:

Wolff: “So, if I read this correctly, you're saying that if I can dream of a better land, where all good people stand hand in hand, then why can't that dream come true?”

“Yes, sir.”

Dave Marsh: Kissinger (listening through keyhole) “Damn! Adorno swore this was impossible!”

Anonymous staffer at the Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, Ark.: “I'm sorry, Mr. Presley, but what you're asking is just not feasible.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. I'll be back.”

9
Low and Dirty Three,
In the Fishtank
(Konkurrent)
Premise: the Dutch label “invites bands to whom they are strongly related”—in this case the Duluth crawlers and the Australian instrumental trio led by Warren Ellis' violin—“to record while touring Holland.” So every number, including what might be the first version of Neil Young's “Down by the River” cut by a woman, Low's Mimi Parker, seems 10 minutes long, and not too long. Drifting in and out of “When I Called Upon Your Seed,” Parker turns the music into a church; it's as unnerving, and as lacking in doubt, as the scratch of Ellis' fiddle in “Cody.” You can almost hear the water freeze—the canals in Amsterdam, Lake Superior, the Bass Strait.

10
Law and Order
(NBC, Feb. 27)
Trying to nail a company that sells personal information taken off anyone's computer, Elisabeth Röhm's young assistant D.A. Serena Southerlyn does a little research on her boss, Sam Waterston's crusty Jack McCoy, just to see how hard it might be. “You listen to a lot of Beatles and fusion jazz,” she says, confirming the clichés of the character. “And you have what I can only describe as a very weird obsession with the Clash.”

MARCH
25, 2002

1
Pink, “Don't Let Me Get Me” (Arista)
This is a heartbreaker, and it makes every one of the male loser hits of the last decade—Radiohead's “Creep,” Offspring's “Self Esteem,” Beck's “Loser”—come off like pickup lines. The snap of Pink's rhythm sense makes you almost certain the woman whose story this is will get out of it—out of her own skin—but around every sharp turn is the voice of self-hate, the only thing her
parents ever taught her, and then you just don't know.