Real Life Rock (148 page)

4
Salon Table Talk (July 27)
Hazel Shade: “I keep thinking that Lorillard and Brown & Williamson, et al., should simply start a cigarette campaign like the Apple and the Gap khaki ads. Think of it, a sexy picture of every interesting person since the inception of photography: ‘Bob Dylan smoked.' ‘FDR smoked.' ‘Albert Einstein smoked.' ‘Greta Garbo smoked.' ‘Miles Davis smoked.' ‘Albert Camus smoked.' Wouldn't it be great?”

William Ham: “A few years ago, I wanted to pitch the American Psychiatric Association an ad featuring that classic picture of Lou Reed with the Iron Crosses shaved into his tonsure with the legend ‘Lou Reed Had Shock Treatment.' I really think it could have touched off an electrode re nais sance.”

5
CBS Radio News (July 27)
For a spot on Federal District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel's decision, later stayed, mandating suspension of Napster operations, an interviewer found guitarist G. E. Smith, late of the
Saturday Night Live
band and Bob Dylan's “Never Ending Tour” and famed for his ability to combine obsequiousness with self-glorification: “It costs money to get our product out there,” Smith said, then complaining that people take it off the Net for nothing and “it's not fair.” As if anyone would pay money for a record because his name was on it—with Napster he might get heard by accident. So score one for the judge.

6
René Magritte,
La lectrice soumise
(The Subjugated Reader), 1928, in “Magritte” (San Francisco Museum of Art, through Sept. 5)
Very vulgar, with heavy lines and none of the stylized stillness of a typical Magritte: a woman with dark hair, brown eyes, thick eyebrows, yellowish skin, gray sweater, black skirt, seated against a blue background and holding a book. The shock and horror on her face, her bugged-out eyes, make you wonder: why didn't Alfred Hitchcock buy this and use it as his logo?

7
Onedia,
Steel Rod EP
(Jagjaguwar)
A Brooklyn combo with an avant-garde rep leaves no hint of it here, and leaves little enough of an impression with the five songs listed. It's the untitled hidden track, which pops up less than a minute after the official program ends, that pulls you in: a trash rehearsal, a 15-minute organ riff the rest of the band takes up as the meaning of life for lack
of any better suggestion. Not the sort of thing one can publicly release these days, and not in any way distinctive, just what thousands of bands have done for 50 years when a lack of inspiration struck them, as complete a version of What Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time as you'll find anywhere.

8–9
John Fahey,
How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life
(Drag City Books) and
The Essential Bill Monroe & the Monroe Brothers
(RCA)
In his recent collection of stories the experimental guitarist recalls the day in the mid-'50s that a record on the radio changed—or, maybe, took—his life: “Then I heard this horrible, crazy sound. And I felt this insane, mad feeling . . . I went limp. I almost fell off the sofa. My mouth fell open. My eyes widened and expanded. I found myself hyperventilating. When it was over I tried to get up and go and get a paper bag to restore the correct balance of power between oxygen and carbon monoxide. I screamed for help but nobody was around and nobody came. I was drenched with sweat. It was like I had woken up to a new and thrilling and exciting horror movie.” The disc that occasioned this response—and Fahey is just warming up; wait 'til he gets to the record store—was Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys' 1941 cover of Jimmie Rodgers' 1930 “Blue Yodel No. 7.” Play it now: can you hear what a teenager heard one day when he, oh, had the flu or something, if he isn't making the whole thing up? Enough to keep you listening. There's something off about the rhythm, something somehow not right.

10
Bob Dylan: The American Troubadour,
directed by Stephen Crisman, written by Ben Robbins (A&E, Aug. 13)
This two-hour documentary is a thrilling exercise in the legal doctrine of fair use. With no permissions forthcoming for any material controlled by its subject, let alone a contemporary interview, the drama proceeds according to occasional fragments of old recorded Q&A's, enough panning of still photos to make you think the career in question predated the invention of motion pictures, never more than a single chorus of any given song and a great deal of time devoted to the pronouncements of not very many talking heads, during which Todd Gitlin, in the '60s a head of Students for a Democratic Society and currently a sociology professor at NYU, emerges as his generation's David Halberstam. Around the edges are traces of an untold story: a circa-1958 tape of Dylan's Hibbing, Minn., high-school combo the Golden Chords harmonizing on a piece of original doo-wop (“I'll be true, I love you, yes I do”—after a moment it sounds more like Fargo's Bobby Vee's earliest Buddy Holly imitations) is really not that far from the 1967 Basement Tapes Dylan tune “Dontcha Tell Henry” as performed now by Levon Helm of the Band. At 60 he's been through cancer and looks it. He sounds it: his barely audible rasp, mandolin clutched to his chest, calls up a simple music that will outlive its singers, not that people like Helm or Dylan seem likely to grant that death's mortgage on their bodies ought to take priority over the music's lien on their souls.

AUGUST
21, 2000

1
Walter Ruttmann,
Weekend Remix
(Intermedium)
Tricky, tricky, tricky. In 1930 filmmaker Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941) premiered an 11-minute, 10-second radio play: a sound collage depicting an ordinary Berlin weekend. Ruttmann used street sounds, speeches, a cat meowing and children playing, and what he got were changes in mood and meaning every time you listen. Heard now, the cadences of men engaging in public address inescapably call up the cadences we know from Hitler: that was the time, and those were the rhythms of that time's speech. So doom and portent are coded into the piece after the fact, and you can't get rid of them. Simultaneously, though, you hear people out for a good time: you hear free time. The work is absorbed by the history that followed it; then it escapes that history, and your own sense of what happened, the knowledge you bring
to the work that it doesn't have, sucks you in. You are listening to what life was like in one place before that place would force a change in what life was like, all over the world.

Barbara Schäfer and Herbert Kapfer of Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich—a radio station responsible for the most ambitious and inventive radio plays being produced today—invited six contemporary sound artists to take on “Weekend,” lost until its rediscovery in New York in 1978. Here, bits of sound that are peripheral on the original may come to the center; bits of contemporary songs weave in and out of tones and mechanics that are undeniably far away; new rhythms are made with the sound of cellphones and computers at work. DJ Spooky and John Oswald achieve the most extreme displacement—a sense that we remain right where Ruttmann found his century, 70 years ago. Or should have. Or could have.