Real Life Rock (304 page)

9
B. F. Shelton, “Oh Molly Dear,” from
The Return of the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
(Yazoo)
Speaking of
The Return of the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
, there has always been something terribly creepy about the Appalachian standard “East Virginia,” which begins, “I was born / in East Virigina. / North Carolina / I did roam. / There I courted a fair young maiden. / What was her name / I did not know.” It's that missing name: it turns the song into a stalker's confession. Or worse: maybe only barely below the surface, it's a murder ballad. Except that in this version, recorded at the Bristol Sessions at the Virginia-Tennessee border in 1927, there's no maybe, and so convincingly it's a secret you might rather not have been told.

10
Christophe Gowans, “The Record Books” (
ceegworld.com/the-record-books
)
Speaking of untold secrets, “If best-selling albums had been books instead,” reads a tag line to this site, and then you see, say, Sonic Youth's
Daydream Nation:
an elegant book jacket where the art seems to suggest a British judge in a white wig looming like weather over a tiny skiff. But the true action is in the little book-catalog summaries: here, “60s radical thinker Kenton ‘Sonic' Youth's polemic about the refusal to embrace the tide of West Coast philosophies in his native country, Papua New Guinea.” And then you can't stop.
Blood on the Tracks
returns as a twenty-five-cent '50s romance thriller, New Order's
Power, Corruption and Lies
as a business manual,
Abbey Road
as a Penguin Classics reprint of a minor novel by Graham Greene, and, perfectly, Van Morrison's
Astral Weeks
looking like a mildewed tract found in the basement of some foreclosed country manse: “This appears to be either a learned book of astrology or a misinformed book of astronomy, written in an impenetrable ancient Dutch dialect. There are many amendments and
corrections—in a rough hand—peppered with large quantities of swearwords still in use today. Peculiar.”

JUNE
2013

1
Blind Lemon Jefferson in
Lore,
directed by Cate Shortland, written by Short-land and Robin Mukherjee (2012, Music Box Films)
Germany, 1945, immediately after the surrender: the older sister in a Nazi family tries to lead her siblings to safety. At an American checkpoint, a scratchy old song that in the next years will be recorded by Carl Perkins and then the Beatles is playing on a portable phonograph; the sound rises, then seems to fragment in the air. It's “Matchbox Blues,” from 1927. Whatever the idea behind its use in the film—literally, working as a refugee song: “Standing here wondering, will a matchbox hold my clothes”—it waits on the screen as a harbinger of the postwar world these children will be entering. The sound is archaic, the specter is modern.

2
Nomi Kane,
Jingle Bell Rock, SXSW 2010
and
Namaste, Home Is Where the Boss Is
in
Wings for Wheels
and
Sugar Baby
(
brewforbreakfast.com
)
Kane is an autobiographical Berkeley comix artist. Her thin, plain lines and utter refusal of caricature or exaggeration produce a pathos and sweetness that capture the pain of children that parents can't touch. That's true even when the child and the adult who can't save her turn out to be the same person—as with
Home Is Where the Boss Is
, the chronicle of an entire life, from five or six (“For a time I was convinced Bruce and the Big Man lived behind the speaker grate in my Dad's Honda hatchback”) to adulthood. And there is
Sugar Baby
, the diary of a little girl diagnosed as diabetic. Her doctor gives her “an old friend to help [her] practice injections”; it looks like a Raggedy Ann inflatable sex doll. In “ Family Restaurants,” the girl goes into the restroom to inject herself in the stomach; two older girls come in, see the needle, and walk right back out. “This place has really gone downhill,” one of them says.

3
Hollis Brown,
Ride on the Train
(Alive)
Presumably named for the Bob Dylan song about a South Dakota farmer who kills his five children, his wife, and himself, this four-piece guitar band from Brooklyn is keeping forgotten Lynyrd Skynyrd promises. The title song, the first track, goes far enough, but with “Walk on Water,” near the end, the stops come out, the rivers are crossed, and you can see all the way to the Pacific.

4
Phil Spector,
written and directed by David Mamet (HBO)
This isn't about Phil Spector. It's about Al Pacino, and the way actors carry their roles with them all across their careers. At the end of
The Godfather: Part III
, Michael Corleone's daughter is shot, and then, years later, we see him as an old man, sitting in the Italian sunlight, toppling off his chair dead. This is what happened in between: in a mansion that feels like a haunted house, caution has turned to paranoia, pride to megalomania, resentment to rage, intelligence to suspicion. All of Pacino's awful tics and jerks and shouting find their vessel, and you can't bear to miss a word he says.

5
Mark Fisher, “Eerie Thanatos: Nigel Kneale and Dark Enlightenment,” in
The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale,
edited by S. S. Sandhu (Texte und Töne/Colloquium for Unpopular Culture)
In this collection dedicated to the British screenwriter Kneale's
Quatermass
TV and film project, which through the 1950s and 1960s pushed the theme of alien invasion ever more steadily as a threat not from outer space but from within human beings themselves, Fisher takes on the final, 1979 installment. Here the scientist Bernard Quatermass, now an old man after his battles to save the world in
The Creeping Unknown
(1955) and
Five Million Years to Earth
(1967), is bent on rescuing his daughter from a millenarian youth suicide cult: “In place of the hippie dream of a renewed Earth, his trance-intoxicated postpunk proto-crusties—the Planet People—long for an escape into another world, another solar system.” The analogue in 1979, Fisher goes on, wasn't
Star
Wars
or
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
but Joy Division, in Manchester, acting out the collapse of the Industrial Revolution in the city where it was born: “The breathtaking audacity of
Unknown Pleasures
, after all, lay in its presumption that youth culture was essentially thanatoid. Maybe only the Stones had made that equation so starkly, but even they had only hinted at it, returning to more familiar hedonic territory. Joy Division were unremitting: a black-hole effect, an inversion and terrible turning back against itself of rock's exhilaration and energy.”

6
Kacey Musgraves,
Same Trailer, Different Park
(Mercury)
When a young performer receives ecstatic coverage all at once in toney outlets—in this case, “Kacey Musgraves's Rebel Twang” by Carlo Rotella in the
New York Times Magazine
, a rave in the daily
Times
by Jon Caramanica, a celebration on NPR by Will Hermes indistinguishable from a press release, with the adjective
beautiful
applied to conventional song structures and accompaniment—chances are there's less there than listening is likely to turn up. When Melissa Swingle called her country band Trailer Bride, you could hear that story in her voice; all you hear in Musgraves's is confidence, as a stance or a marketing strategy. Musgraves has staked out a position as a fearless opponent of country-music piety (“Ms. Musgraves's assault is full-frontal,” Caramanica writes), but something else is going on. “If you save yourself for marriage you're a bore,” Musgraves sings in “Follow Your Arrow,” sounding sick of the hypocrisy she's lived with all her life. “If you don't save yourself for marriage you're a whore”—“-ibble person,” she dribbles off. Cool way to say what you mean while playing by the rules of country music and mocking them at the same time, or flattery of the listener cool enough to get the joke, which is everyone? It's not the rebellion that sells the song, it's the coyness.