Real Life Rock (249 page)

9
Mary Weiss, “I Just Missed You,” from
Dangerous Game
(Norton Records)
A staircase, climbed to the top, and you can feel every step.

10
Howard Fishman, “I'm Not There (1956),” on
Howard Fishman Performs Bob Dylan & The Band's “Basement Tapes” Live at Joe's Pub
(Monkey Farm)
Not an interpretation but, for as long as it plays, an irrefutable translation of a legendary song that seems beyond human ken, and not only because half of its words are missing and you can't quite be sure if the other half are there or not. Soon to be a major motion picture.

JUNE
2007

1
Michael Thomas,
Man Gone Down
(Black Cat)
In this stupendously jittery novel, the narrator, with no idea how to make it to the end of the week when the bills come due, walks into a Brooklyn club on amateur night. Al Green is on the sound system, singing “Tired of Being Alone”—cut off to make room for Ed and Peter, a folk group, who before they can do their song about the day “we started bombing Afghanistan,” have to explain it—and the scene as Thomas lets it play is so perfect you can hardly bear to stay in the room. Even as your skin crawls over “It's a song about war, I guess. . . . But it's about the sadness of it all, which is something people don't really see,” you can't wait to find out how much worse it will get.

2
The Avett Brothers,
Emotionalism
(Ramseur)
Employing mainly guitar, banjo, and inferior recording equipment, two brothers from Greenville, North Carolina, listen for the Beatles. That opens the door to the house their songs make—a place where the doors stick and the floors aren't level. There's an odd, shifting light and folk-art knickknacks in the bedrooms, not to mention Buddy Holly 45s and a warped copy of the Band's second album in the attic.

3
The Polyphonic Spree, “Lithium,” from
Wait
(Good)
If you thought Kurt Cobain sounded psychotic on this, wait till you hear it sung over a tinkling piano by the president of your high school science club.

4
R. Crumb,
R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country
(Abrams)
Why are the faces of the blues and country performers weathered, while every jazz man's is smooth?

5
Samuel L. Jackson, “Stack-O-Lee,”
Music From the Motion Picture Black Snake Moan
(New West)
This is the prison version. Jackson stamps out the words as if he learned them there.

6
The Death of a Party,
The Rise and Fall of Scarlet City
(Double Negative)
Four people from Oakland, California, gulping, shouting, delirious, only occasionally pulling back to gain an inch of perspective, running right over a cliff (“She's too young to be sleeping with a married man, but you're too old to care”), and then scrambling back up to try it again. The songs are all mysteries, hard to penetrate, full of allure, demanding you solve them.

7
Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007)
“The French critic and provocateur Jean Baudrillard, whose theories about consumer culture and the manufactured nature of reality
were intensely discussed both in rarefied philosophical circles and in blockbuster movies like
The Matrix
, died yesterday in Paris,” Patricia Cohen wrote on March 7 in
The New York Times
. That same day a photo of an elderly Baudrillard reading on stage while accompanied by a very tall blonde got up as a queen from outer space popped up in my e-mail box. He was dressed in what appeared to be a gold lamé jacket. The Elvis costume came across as, yes, a critique of consumer culture, and also as an inadvertent admission that Baudrillard's intellectual glamour was that of a media player—one whose philosophy always fit snugly into the sound bites he deplored.

8
Rufus Thomas, “Stop Kicking My Dog Around,” from
Can't Get Away from This Dog
(Stax)
Thomas (1917–2001) claimed that Sam Cooke wrote this song for him, “backstage at a theater off Broadway that I was working with Sam, Jackie Wilson, and Lesley Gore,” and as Thomas recorded it sometime in the mid-'60s, it did have that Sam Cooke glide. But the song goes back to the minstrel shows—and so did Rufus Thomas. Could it have been that Cooke, even if he was only 2 when he left Clarks-dale, Mississippi, where he was born in 1931, remembered hearing Thomas sing the old piece as he passed through with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, and that Thomas forgot?