Real Life Rock (219 page)

T: So they will be vulnerable?

F: Actually, the president has made it very clear that he has no dispute with the people of Iraq. That's why the American policy remains a policy of regime change. There is no question the people of Iraq—

T: That's a decision for them to make, isn't it? It's their country.

F: Helen, if you think the people of Iraq are in a position to dictate who their dictator is, I don't think that has been what history has shown.

T: I think many countries' people don't have the decision—including us.

Thanks to Chris Walters

City Pages 2003
2004

APRIL
9, 2003

1
A.R.E. Weapons,
A.R.E. Weapons
(Rough Trade)
New York City, very self-mocking about their street smarts, very anguished about the street, and utterly expert in a way that hides all craft. Guys come hunching down the sidewalk in their leather jackets: “Let's hear it for America,” says the singer, sarcastic and completely straight. As a heartfelt adolescent plea for parental forbearance, “Hey World” has the defiant lift of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's “Our Time” and the regret of the Clash's “This Is England”—you can imagine it coming out of Claire on
Six Feet Under
, and it's stirring. “You're either part of the problem,” you hear as the band sets you up to ignore its clichés, “or you're part of the fucking miserable solution we call life.”

2
The Kills,
Keep on Your Mean Side
(Rough Trade)
The U.S./U.K. duo starring in a very hot version of their song “Fuck the People”—and very casually. And not so casually on a primitive punk rewrite of Lead Belly's “Don't You Leave Me Here.” There's a cold bravado: “Don't you leave me here/Got my name stitched on your lips so you won't dare.” But the performance collapses now into a then. You're back in a time and place where someone left behind might never get out—no trains, no cars, no busses, no horses, no maps.

3
Bob Dylan for Victoria's Secret (Fox, March 4)
“Only two things in this world worth botherin' your head about and them's sex and death,” says a “debauched Midwestern businessman” in Michael O'Donoghue and Frank Springer's 1968 comic serial “The Adventures of Phoebe Zeitgeist.” That's the only explanation for the commercial that uses B.D.'s suicidal 1997 “Love Sick” to orchestrate a montage of underwear models looking dour under their hooded eyes. But it's a better Dylan setting than the nearly four-hours-long God-blessed-the-Confederacy film
Gods and Generals
, which features his “Cross the Green Mountain.” I haven't seen the picture, but I have seen the TV trailer featuring Robert Duvall sitting in a chair as Robert E. Lee and opining through a mouthful of molasses, “ 's in Gawd's han's naw,” as if to say, “Hey, don't blame
me
.” On the other hand, “Love Sick” is an actual song. At more than eight dying minutes, “Cross the Green Mountain” might as well be the movie.

4
Randy Newman for Ford (Fox, February 18)
For the first time in recent memory, a Newman tune was not nominated for an Oscar, and Randy must be feeling the pinch—or decided
Fuck it
, once and for all. Instead of merely licensing, say, “I Love to See You Smile” to McDonald's to rewrite and rerecord into eternity, he's writing from the ground up and selling his own voice. “It's right there in front of your eyes,” he sings with exuberance and shame. “If you haven't looked at a Ford lately—look again.”

5
David Lynch and John Neff,
BlueBob
(Solitude/Ryko)
Lynch on words, drums, guitar, Neff on guitar, drums, vocals: Link Wray opening for Pere Ubu. “I Cannot Do That” is the musical equivalent of an outtake from
Lost Highway
, furiously sustained; out of the all-directions-at-once noise of “In the Pink Western Range” comes a dog, “barking like Robert Johnson.” But the hit is “Thank You, Judge,” an R&B divorce-court novelty.

6
The Raveonettes,
Whip It On
(The Orchard)
Forget the Danish twosome's advertised Buddy Holly homage. In moments—“Chains,” “Cops on Our Tail,” “Beat City”—they make it into the film noir they're watching.
Gun Crazy
, probably.

7
AFI,
Sing the Sorrow
(Dreamworks)
San Francisco goths with a cast of thousands don't know the meaning of pretentious, but you wish they did.

8
Eva Cassidy, “Fields of Gold,” from
Songbird
(Blix Street)
You hear this slow cover and you want to know who it was who made the Sting song feel as if it were hundreds of years old; that the singer has been dead since 1996, the year she recorded it, has nothing to do with it at all.

9
New Orleans, March 9
All sorts of music comes out of the doors in New
Orleans: Bob Seger and disco in souvenir shops, the Drifters and the Young Rascals in the big, high-ceiling Rue de la Course coffeehouse at 3128 Magazine Street, Billie Holiday's greatest hits one day and Sisters of Mercy the next in CC's Community Coffee on Royal. It's rare to find music so quiet you have to be still to notice it—and when you do, it sticks. In what was previously the morning madhouse of Mothers at 401 Poydras, Robert Johnson's 1936 “Ramblin' on My Mind” now got lost in the dim light of the new, half-empty backroom—and in Luigi's muffaletta joint at 915 Decatur, in the middle of the sleaziest block on the sleaziest tourist street in town, you could barely make out a plinking banjo and a hesitating vocal in a crude version of “Spoonful.” At first I was sure I'd heard it before—the feel and the style of the piece were somehow implied by the song. But there was too much space between the notes, too much air in the sound. “Do you know who's singing?” I asked the counterman. “It's WWOZ! 90.7!” he said. “It's Will Slayden, recorded in 1952,” said the WWOZ DJ a few minutes later. “It's new:
African-American Banjo Songs from Western Tennessee
. Do you want the address? It was put out by the Tennessee Folklore Society, MTSU Box 201, Murfreesboro, TN 37132. Isn't it great?”