Real Life Rock (260 page)

6
Bonnie “Prince” Billy,
Beware
(Drag City)
“ ‘My Life's Work' would be his ‘My Way,' ” Will Oldham says in the April issue of
Mojo
, speaking of Elvis Presley and one of his new songs; on the cover of the album he looks just like Friedrich Nietzsche. “That's my dream. When I meet him I'll say, I've got this tune, man, you wanna see if you can get behind it? I'm sure he would, because he's already sung it so many times. In my mind, I hear him.” I don't hear it, but I'm still trying.

7
Neko Case,
Middle Cyclone
(Anti)
People seem to be reviewing Neko Case's hair more than her music.

8
Van Morrison,
Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl
(Listen to the Lion)
Listen to “Madame George”—that's what Morrison is doing.

9
Standard Hotel (Los Angeles, March 8)
Phone buttons:
FRONT DESK, ROOM SERVICE, VOICE MAIL, HOUSEKEEPING, MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER
. And also
FLUFFER
, though that might mean more in the San Fernando Valley than in L.A.

10
Lisbon, April 6
A friend on her apartment overlooking the Cemitério dos Prazeres (the Cemetery of Pleasures): “I have a great view of eternal life.”

JULY-AUGUST
2009

1
Bob Dylan,
Together Through Life
(Columbia)
Casual, to the point where the clumsiness comes to the surface—except with “Forgetful Heart,” where a shadow passes over the singer's face. But nothing here quite carries the weight of a scene from last season's
In Treatment,
when Mia Wasikowska's smart, sarcastic, suicidal teenage gymnast Sophie turns the tables on Gabriel Byrne's fifty-something psychologist Paul Weston, as if once she was so much older but she's younger than that now and he's too old to know what she's talking about. “ ‘The times they are a-changing,' ” she says as a session is ending. “It's from a Bob Dylan song. My gift to you.”

2
P J Harvey and John Parish,
A Woman A Man Walked By
(Island)
From “Sheela-Na-Gig” on her first album, in 1992, Harvey has never made any secret that her music is meant to make a home for an avenging pagan goddess. Any song called “Pig Will
Not” all but promises that figure will appear in a great snout mask, making inhuman sounds, and that is what happens: “
WILL NOT
!” she shouts in acrid fury, making a sound Fucked Up would pay for if they could get Harvey to sell it. “
I WANT YOUR FUCKING ASS
!” she yells in “A Woman a Man Walked By/The Crow Knows Where All the Little Children Go,” the latter part of the title turning Harvey into a witch. You step back before these moments, and go back to them when you think you're equal to them, not just because nothing else here is.

3
“American Letterpress: The Art of the Hatch Show Print” (Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington, through July 19; Durham Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, October 31, 2009, through January 10, 2010; Austin Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, February 13 through May 9, 2010)
The Nashville company's blunt, colorful block designs haven't changed much from movie posters in the '30s (“She's the
WOMAN
behind the
KILLER
behind the
GUN
!
J. EDGAR HOOVER
tells her amazing story in ‘
PERSONS IN HIDING
' ”) to concert promotions for the likes of Beck or the Strokes today. A walk through the show brings a sense of repetition most of all. But there are ghosts on the walls, and suspense even in the captions. As with the very first Hatch bill, for a lecture in Nashville in 1879 by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, as both a social reformer and an adulterer at the time likely the most famous preacher in the United States, now speaking on “The Reign of the Common People”: “Parquet and Dress Circle, 1-, Family Circle, 1-”—and, for the onetime fire-breathing New England abolitionist, no doubt a concession to local custom: “Colored Box, 50¢.” As with these lines, below a wall of '50s prints: “Imagine the scene at Hatch. Two men are setting type for posters on tables side by side. One is a poster for the Rabbit Foot Minstrel Show . . . the other is a poster for someone named Presley.”

4
Levon Helm,
Electric Dirt
(Vanguard)
Born in 1940, growing up in Arkansas, Helm saw the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and he saw Elvis, both before he was fifteen. You can hear those events in this music, especially on the call-and-response in Larry Campbell's “When I Go Away,” with Helm pounding his voice as if it were his drums as others shout back at him as if he were a mountain and they're in it for the echo. Helm's 2007
Dirt Farmer
, which won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album, is pale compared to Allen Toussaint and Steven Bernstein's sliding New Orleans horn arrangements, especially for “Kingfish,” Randy Newman's ode to Huey P. Long. With throat cancer behind him, and most recently on-screen as a very convincingly dead Confederate general in Bertrand Tavernier's
In the Electric Mist
, Helm now sounds most of all robust, perhaps with his best music since the Band's
Last Waltz
ahead of him.