Real Life Rock (145 page)

8
Posters for More Than Food restaurant (Jung von Matt an der Isar Agency, Munich)
“Guttes Essen statt bvser Krieg” (“Good eating instead of evil war”) is the slogan: airbrushed archival graphics show soldiers on the battlefield. While one waves a huge wooden soup stirrer instead of a rifle, two others, with Nazi insignia transformed into neutral striped epaulets, carefully study a menu in a bunker. Maybe Germany is taking Gerhard Schroeder's “New Start” business too far.

9
Steve Earle,
Transcendental Blues
(E Squared/Artemis)
Anyone singing with this much growly insularity wants not to tell you how much he doesn't know but how many times he's seen it all before. For the King of Dirt Road PC, every breath goes back to the breather. Atrocity: “The Boy Who Never Cried.”

10
John Garst, “Delia” (e-mail postings, June 10 & 14, courtesy John Dougan)
Two weeks ago I was praising David Johansen and the Harry Smiths' cover of Bob Dylan's rewrite of the traditional “Delia,” from Dylan's 1993
World Gone Wrong
—a song so seemingly generic it sounds more written by its genre than rooted in any facts. The number appeared in print as “One More Rounder Gone” in 1911; early research was done in 1928 by Robert W. Gordon of the Library of Congress (who “supposedly traced the song's origins to Savannah,” Michael Gray writes in his inexhaustible
Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan
). Blind Willie McTell recorded it, as have Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare and Ronnie Wood, not to mention Mr. Acker Bilk; Dylan first taped a livingroom version in St. Paul in 1960. “Seems to be about counterfeit loyalty,” he wrote in 1993. “the guy in the courthouse sounds like a pimp in primary colors . . . does this song have rectitude? you bet. toleration of the unacceptable leads to the last roundup.”

Garst, of Georgia, recently went looking for the story behind the song—someone is passing for white, a woman is murdered (“You loved all those rounders, never did love me”) and the killer is calm and humble—“and within two hours I had it.” With interpolations: “Delia Green, age 14, was shot and killed by Moses ‘Coony' Houston, age 15”—Dylan uses “Cutty”—“in the Yamacraw section of Savannah (characterized for me by a local historian as ‘poor, black and violent') at about 11.30 PM on Christmas Eve, 1900. She died Christmas day in her bed at home.” (“Wouldn't have been so bad/If the poor girl died at home,” Dylan has Delia's mother lament). “Delia and Coony had been ‘more or less intimate' (newspaper) for several months and Coony said something to the effect that he would or wouldn't let her do this or that. Delia reacted with strong words to the effect that he had no control over her whatever. He then shot her. All accounts, from the very beginning, emphasize how calm, cool, deliberate and polite Coony was. . . . He appeared in court wearing short pants (on the advice of his lawyer, I suspect). The jury asked the judge for a clarification at one
point, ‘What would be the sentence for a murder conviction with a recommendation of mercy?' The judge replied that the law specified life imprisonment. Shortly thereafter the jury returned with that verdict and the judge sentenced Coony to ‘life.' He replied, ‘Thank you, sir.' ” In other words, a Savannah murder that was no mystery when it happened, as a song turned into one, and which has already lasted longer than
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
has any chance to.

JULY
10, 2000

1
Ace Atkins,
Leavin' Trunk Blues: A Nick Travers Mystery
(Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's)
Following last year's
Crossroads Blues
, in which Travers, a white Tulane musicologist, uncovered both a cache of unreleased Robert Johnson recordings and the murders behind them, this tale of an aging Chicago gangster who uses the street name “Stagger Lee,” a long-dead South Side record producer named Billy Lyons and a forgotten singer rotting in jail takes time to escape the corniness of its premises. When it does it's because Atkins gets inside his detective's skin as a trespasser: “Why,” Travers hears Johnson asking him in a dream, “do you believe in a world that doesn't believe in you?” “I don't want to be in no paper,” Ruby Walker tells the professor—also a former New Orleans Saint and sometime blues harmonica player—when he interviews her in prison, and she doesn't mean the newspapers. As the book grinds to its end and the bodies pile up, you realize that all the investigator can do is hope someone else will pull the trigger, not because he can't but because it's not his story to end.

2
Amanda Ghost,
Ghost Stories
(Warner Bros.)
“Welcome to my filthy mind,” Ghost says to introduce herself, and she sounds like she's singing from the basement of a nightclub long after whoever locked up thought it was empty—but then she changes her clothes and gets all wistful instead. The result is a really great Spice Girls album.

3
Sinéad O'Connor,
Faith and Courage
(Atlantic)
Ever since “Mandinka,” O'Connor has worked hard to disguise the fact that she can sing rock 'n' roll like she's cracking a whip. There are moments of that here on “ Daddy I'm Fine,” a fast pop autobiography in which O'Connor celebrates her teenage hairstyles, boot styles and what it felt like to “wanna fuck every man in sight.” Otherwise this highly praised comeback is all sanctimony, albeit cosmic sanctimony.

4
Sarah Vowell, “On Patriotism and ‘The Patriot,' ”
open letters
,
July 4
“I think about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution all the time. Mainly because I watch a lot of TV. I keep a small, 95-cent copy of the two documents handy so that I can fact-check the constitutional interpretations in the shows of David E. Kelley and Aaron Sorkin. In my little booklet, the Declaration and the Constitution are separated by only a blank half-page. I forget that there are eleven years between them, eleven years of war and the whole Articles of Confederation debacle. In my head, the two documents are like the A-side and B-side of the greatest single ever released, recorded in one great drunken night.”

5–6
Colson Whitehead,
The Intuitionist
(Anchor) and Bob Dylan, “I'll Keep It With Mine,” from
the bootleg series, volumes 1–3 [rare & unreleased] 1961–1991
(Columbia)
Dylan's weary 1966 piano demo is about whether or not to get on a train; Whitehead's novel is a metaphysical mystery about elevator inspection; and these lines, from Whitehead's gnostic textbook “
Theoretical Elevators, Volume Two
, by James Fulton,” could have been written to translate the song: “You are standing on a train platform. A fear of missing the train, a slavery to time, has provided ten minutes before the train leaves. There is so much you have never said to your companion and so little time to articulate it. The years have accreted around the simple words and there would have been ample time to speak them had not the years intervened and secreted
them. The conductor paces up and down the platform and wonders why you do not speak. You are a blight on his platform and timetable. Speak, find the words, the train is warming towards departure.”