Real Life Rock (319 page)

6
Pere Ubu,
Carnival of Souls
(Fire)
David Thomas's love for recycled titles pays off in this wave to the 1962 horror movie, which Pere Ubu has accompanied in-theater. “Golden Surf II,” the first song, shoots out like a flood, and then you can ride the wave of transmogrification that sweeps over the whole album. “Carnival” is a combination of “96 Tears” and “The Signifying Monkey” on the surface; below it you can hear second and third rhythms and hints of second and third voices everywhere. “Irene” is Lead Belly's “Goodnight, Irene” hammered by “I Put a Spell on You”—but recalling Lead Belly's last lines, which the Weavers cleaned up for their 1950 hit version. “If Irene turns her back on me / I'm going to take morphine and die”—this might be closer to the Handsome Family's modern murder ballad “Arlene.” The killer is the last number, the twelve-minute “Brother Ray”: a revisiting of the Velvet Underground's “Sister Ray,” but also of Thomas's own numbers “ Little Sister” and “Runaway.” Thomas walks back and forth in front of a weather report of a jangling groove, telling his story about a phone call from the desert, about how Brother Ray—himself a version of the brother in Raymond Chandler's
The Little Sister
, just before, or maybe after, he turns up dead—just
has
to get it across that he's going to play cards with God in heaven, Thomas at first jocular, a medicine-show majordomo, then wistful, then faraway, each voice marveling, in its manner, over the way some songs never stop teasing you with the possibility that, no matter how many times you've heard them or sung them, you were wrong all along.

7–8
Rolling Stones,
Acoustic Motherfuckers
(Kobra Records, bootleg) and Nicholas Confessore, “Republicans at Romney
Retreat Search for Focus,” the
New York Times
(June 14)
For the indelible regret of its opening strum, the standard version of “You Can't Always Get What You Want” is included on
Acoustic Motherfuckers
, otherwise a collection of if not altogether acoustic then quiet, downplayed outtakes, mostly from the late '60s. There are revelations here, and all are a matter of delicacy and restraint: Mick Jagger's vocals in “You Got the Silver,” making the official version, with Keith Richards singing, seem coarse and shallow; in “Wild Horses,” the acoustic guitar coming up in front of the singer, then falling behind him, the way a single mandolin note can break you, and then the way Jagger, by stepping away from a word as he sings it, can break your heart; Jagger and Richards together hovering over “Sister Morphine” as if they're afraid they'll wake it up. And as for proof that the depths of this music have yet to be plumbed, all you have to do is read the papers: “On Friday afternoon, former Gov. Mike Huck-abee of Arkansas delivered a stump speech that was equal parts red meat and rueful political self-improvement. Republicans, he said, need to stand up for working-class voters, while Washington needs more compromise.

“ ‘The Rolling Stones were the greatest political philosophers of all time,' Mr. Huck-abee told the crowd, ‘and they got it right: “You can't always get what you want.” ' ”

9
Street musician, corner of Fifth Street North and Third Avenue North, Minneapolis (June 7)
In a light rain, as we approached Target Field, where the Twins would beat the Astros 8–0, you could make out a high, keening sound that didn't fit. We passed a Latin drum crew; the high sound got more definite if not louder, and as we turned onto a desolate block it did fit. There was a fiddler, and he might have been a hundred and forty years old: that is, he looked fifty, maybe sixty, but his hat, suit, beard, and mustache made an image of him coming up at that age from West Virginia in the 1920s, and his tone was from the nineteenth century if not before. His music, too, smeared time and place: the harsh, up-and-down cadence from his fiddle, “Shenandoah” splintering into what might have been “East Virginia,” was shrouded in low, shapeless moans that felt like an argument about the insufficiency of language to tell any kind of truth worth hearing. He was still singing three hours later, looking as if he'd been playing across town outside Nicollet Park when Babe Ruth drove in six runs on a barnstorming tour in 1924.

10
Kara Walker,
A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant
,
Creative Time, Brooklyn (May 10–July 6)
Cecily Marcus reports from New York: “Everyone is talking about the massive woman taking up the back of the building. She's worth talking about, but I want to talk about the boys lining the path to the sugar Sphinx. The boy sculptures are life-sized and realistic. They lack any of the exaggerated features that make the woman in the back a showpiece. The boys are field hands, supplicant and abused, cast of molasses that is breaking down at every moment. At their feet are pools of melting molasses blood. Some have lost legs or arms, and in the humid heat inside the sugar factory, the molasses drains the color from the sculptures, leaving them a translucent reddish, or even white in places. Worse, there are sugar parts dropping from the building onto them, dripping, then cooling, then dripping, leaving the boys' backs, arms, chests, faces mottled and disfigured. They have been beaten and sent back into the fields to work. This art will look different every week it's open. Some of it won't live to see the end.”

Thanks to Steve Perry

My first thanks go to Steve Wasserman at Yale, who went for this book even when it looked as if it would come out at more than a thousand pages. Also at Yale I thank Eva Skewes for her good humor and indefatigable digging, John Donatich, Mary Pasti, Jennifer Doerr, Sonia Shannon, Jay Cosgrove, Brenda King, and Heather D'Auria. Rich Black provided the cover art, and Lyndee Stalter at Westchester Publishing Services helped produce the book. Emily Forland, Emma Patterson, Marianne Merola, and Henry Thayer at Brandt and Hochman were as ready and responsive as ever. And it is a pleasure to thank the people who over the years have contributed to the columns collected here, sometimes by name, sometimes not, and here noted not alphabetically, so that those looking for their names will see what good company they've kept: Ed Ward, Steve Weinstein, Howard Hampton, Chris Walters, Sarah Vowell, Ken Tucker, Genevieve Yue, Emily Marcus, Barry Franklin, Charles Taylor, Mary Weiss, Robert Christgau, Oliver Hall, Kayla D'Alonzo, Pete D'Alonzo, Cecily Marcus, Mark Sinker, Alan Berg, the late Debbie Geller, Lindsay Waters, Wayne Robins, Jenny Marcus, Sean Wilentz, Joshua Clover, Penelope Houston, Dave Marsh, Michele Anna Jordan, Tina Yagjian, Bill Brown, the late Andrew Baumer, Jon Wiener, Betsy Bowden, Steve Perry, Don Filetti, Robert Polito, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Mary Davis, Jon Savage, Rob Symmons, Eric Dean Wilson, and Jacob Mikanowski.

“Answering Machine.” Words and music by Green Velvet. Copyright 2000.

“Bob Dylan at Princeton.” By Paul Muldoon. From the book
“Do You, Mr. Jones?”: Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors
(Chatto & Windus, 2002).

“Desolation Row” from the book
Miracle Atlas
(Writers and Books, 2011) by Jay Leeming.

“Dixie Flyer.” Words and music by Randy Newman. Copyright 1988 by Twice as Nice Music.

“Double Trouble.” Words and music by Otis Rush. Copyright 1958 by Cobra Record Corporation.

“I Don't Know.” Words and music by Pink Nasty. Used by permission.

“In Memory of the Rock Band Breaking Circus.” From the book
Belmont
(Graywolf, 2013) by Stephen Burt.

“Judas Kiss.” Words and music by Scott Kempner. Used by permission.

“Matchbox, Defined.” Words and music by Robert Kidney. Used by permission.

“My Head's in Mississippi.” Words and music by ZZ Top. Copyright Rube Bears, Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, 1990.

“Our Time.” Words and music by Karen Lee Orzolek, Nicholas Joseph Zinner, Brian Chase. Copyright 2001 by Chrysalis Music Ltd.

“Prophecy” from
The One Day
by Donald Hall. Copyright © 1988 by Donald Hall. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

“Street Hassle.” Words and music by Lou Reed. Copyright 1978 by Arista Records.

“The Song of Investment Capital Overseas.” Words and music by Chris Cutler. Copyright Recommended Records.

“Too Repressed.” Words and music by Aoife O'Donovan. Used by permission.

“Trumpet Player, 1963” from the book
Jab
(University of Chicago Press, 2002) by Mark Halliday.

“Waiting on Elvis, 1956” by Joyce Carol Oates. Copyright © 1978 Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.

This index is an index of top ten columns and is not a comprehensive index of all the names mentioned in the book.

Abbott, Keith,
30

“The ABC of Visual Theory” (Ray, Robert),
60

Abdul, Paula,
59

About a Boy
(film, Weitz, C., & Weitz, P.),
305

Above the Law
(film, Segal),
35

Abramović, Marina,
511

Absinthe (shop),
181

Absolute Beginners
(Temple),
9

Absolutely Fabulous
(Saunders),
284

“Absolut Pistols” (Sex Pistols postcard),
326

Absolut Vodka (advertisement),
30
–31,
426

Abstraction (O'Keefe),
426
–27

“The Abusing of the Rib” (Atmosphere),
168

Acconci, Vito,
323
–24