Real Life Rock (254 page)

JANUARY
2009

1
Fiery Furnaces,
Remember
(Thrill Jockey)
Present-day New Yorkers by way of Oak Park, Illinois, Eleanor Friedberger, who does almost all of the singing, and brother Matthew Friedberger, the guitarist-organist-pianist who writes most of the songs and composes the train-wreck arrangements, plus whoever is playing bass and drums with them at any given time, are the most unpredictable band in the country. Or rather their songs are the most unpredictable. They start in one place and moments later they're looking back at themselves from the other side of the street without giving you a hint of which side you're on. This is a double live album, and their best—or, anyway, the album that takes their music further than any before it:
Gallows-bird's Bark, Blueberry Boat, Bitter Tea
, the notorious
Rehearsing My Choir
, about the Friedbergers' grandmother. The song structures might be jazz, in the same way that Steely Dan made rock and roll out of jazz, except that Steely Dan songs actually have structures, and Fiery Furnace songs often seem to have trapdoors and banana peels; the themes (“Single Again”) might come from the Carter Family.

The package carries an unusual warning: “Please do not attempt to listen to all at once.” No kidding: after only the first disc—twenty-four cuts, with twenty-five on the second—I was exhilarated, spinning, and would have played it again immediately if I hadn't been completely exhausted. I have no idea how the band keeps up with itself. There's Hendrix all over the guitar, but calliope in the organ. Sometimes the vocals drop so far back they seem to be off-stage. Arrangements are too complicated to be made up on the spot, but you can hardly credit people patient enough to craft them before the fact. Eleanor Friedberger's style is conversational but frantic, racing through domestic horror stories and Hong Kong crime films, the music pulling her like a marionette, an arm flailing here, a leg buckling there, her head whipping around in circles. She's exasperated, she's got to get it out, she has to tell you the story, but the phone is ringing and she has to take this call but there's another call coming in OMG someone just cut her off and oh, right, where were we? “And then they drove me to an Albertsons outside of Boise,” she relates in the hubbub of “Oh Sweet Woods,” deliberately, to make sure you can follow this, “and took me into a back room. And they said they wanted to balance my checkbook,” a sexual reference you might not have heard before, but the innuendo is unmistakable,
Hey, baby, how'd you like me to balance your checkbook?
except that doesn't seem to be it at all, “and they said they wanted to organize my receipts,” which doesn't exactly have the same ring to it, “and itemize my expenses and that I had the key to a safety deposit box with treasury bonds and the key to another safety deposit box where I'd stashed away the only pewter pocket watch that ever belonged to Joseph Smith's great-great uncle's brother-in-law—and I said, You've got the
wrong
Eleanor Friedberger.”

“Half the record is from actual shows and half is the hourlong set from our
Bitter Tea
tour recorded totally live in my apartment,” Eleanor wrote when I asked how the
album was made. “As Matt says, it's a live album about live albums.” “Did you have people over to make an audience?” I asked. “There wasn't enough room to have people over!”

2
Doors,
Live at the Matrix
(Rhino)
It's March 1967 and you've wandered into this supposed folk club on Fillmore in the Marina in San Francisco and there's a four-piece band onstage with a tall lead singer who flops all over the place. They have an album out,
The Doors
, and maybe you've heard a few tracks on KMPX, the FM station that's still alternating music you never imagined hearing on the radio with shows in Chinese and Tagalog. Now they're six or seven minutes into, not exactly anything that fits the word
song
, but some Freudian psychodrama that somehow never loses its musical moorings, and—and, listening to this double CD, as opposed to the countless Doors live albums dumped on the market over the last few years (Philadelphia! Boston! Even
Boot Yer Butt!
, the cavernous, almost mystically fuzzy set of bootleg recordings compiled by Rhino in 2003), you can feel yourself as you might have been then, born or not, looking at the stage, at the few people at the tables in the room, trying to take in even a fraction of the sound, and wondering,
What the hell is going on?

3
Frozen River,
Shattuck Theatre, Berkeley (March 6, 2008)
An oddly noisy audience for an art film about a destitute woman in upstate New York who turns to smuggling illegal immigrants over the border: a man boos the preview for
A Girl Cut in Two
, presumably to let everybody else know he disapproves of girls being cut in two. What's shocking is the way people snigger at the heroine's poverty when the cheap cord she tries to use to tow a car snaps, or when there's nothing in the house—her trailer—for her kids to eat but popcorn and Tang.

4
KT Tunstall, “Little Favours” (Virgin, 2007)
Tunstall hits high notes by letting her voice break; as it does, you hear someone questioning herself, her motives, what she wants. The spectral presence that hovers somewhere in the sound—part Sarah McLachlan, part Dion, a presence made of will and doubt—has been generated by the radio itself. When it comes on, it seems to have drifted in from another country, another time, more likely the future than the past, as in the day after tomorrow.

5
Brenda Lee, “Break It to Me Gently,” on
Mad Men
,
“The Gold Violin” (Season 2, Episode 11, AMC)
Closeout music after the episode ends with January Jones throwing up in the car on her way home from the party where she finds out her husband is sleeping with the comedian's wife. It's 1962, when the song would have been on the radio, but it never sounded so threatening when it was.

6
Shawn Colvin, “Viva Las Vegas,” on
Till the Night Is Gone: A Tribute to Doc Pomus
(Forward, 1995)
If you make a movie where nobody is anything but stupid, does that make you smart? Feeling unclean after the Coen Brothers'
Burn After Reading, The Big Lebowski
was like discovering an enclave of democratic spirit in, say, the Department of the Interior: Jeff Bridges thinks he deserves respect, so he treats everybody else with respect. But this slow, twilight version of the old Elvis song, running under the closing credits, picking up a motif carried in the film itself in predictable fashion by T-Bone Burnett and Carter Burwell, contains a landscape that the L.A. of the picture never touches: a whole city of dead ends.

7
Classic Blues Artwork from the 1920s—2009 Calendar
(Blues Images)
Ads made for the Negro press by the old Paramount label—Kokomo Arnold's 1934 “Milk Cow Blues” gets a light boost as “The Greatest Record Ever Made”—and taking off into the ether with a tableau for Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1928 “Worried Blues.” In a room with cracking plaster and a potbellied stove, a man in a suit, suspenders, and glasses is asleep on a bed; even passed out, he looks like a lawyer. A barefoot woman in a shift sits up straight and eager, smiling at the door, where a well-dressed man carrying a box labeled
SHOES
stands grinning—and you get the feeling what she really wants from her outside man is . . . shoes.