Real Life Rock (196 page)

7
Van Morrison, “He Ain't Give You None,” “Linden Arlen Stole the Highlights” and “Snow in San Anselmo” (KALX-FM, Berkeley, Calif., March 11)
The nearly hysterical blues monologue from
Blowin' Your Mind!
(1967) yielded to the painfully hesitating piano opening of the tune from
Veedon Fleece
(1974), which faded into the inconclusive weather report from
Hard Nose the Highway
(1973), raising the question of whether or not Morrison had, in fact, just died—why else does anyone get three songs played in a row these days? I
remembered the writer Jonathan Cott calling the beginning of “Linden Arden” a “prayer”; I realized that for all the times I'd played the cut in my own house, wanting nothing more than to get lost in its forest, I'd never listened to the words, which in a car came across directly. The story was about men sent to kill the man the song was named for, and how he killed them instead: at the foot of all the pre-Raphaelite sunbeams in the music, blood on the floor. I also realized how little distance separated “Linden Arden” from Elton John's “Your Song.”

8
Neil Young,
Are You Passionate?
(Reprise)
Clink, clink, clink—it might happen between Young and Booker T. Jones and Duck Dunn of Booker T. & the MGs onstage, but not in the studio. No wonder Crazy Horse had to come in and juice this long afternoon nap with nine minutes of “Goin' Home,” by-the-numbers but still bottomless grunge. The Flight 93 song, “Let's Roll,” starts off with chills down your spine, but they come from what you carry within yourself, not what the singer's giving out. This is no “Ohio”; by the second verse your mind is already wandering.

9
Rocket From the Tombs,
The Day the Earth Met Rocket From the Tombs: Live From Punk Ground Zero, Cleveland 1975
(Smog Veil/ Hearthan)
Not to be confused with Rocket From the Crypt—not in this life, not in the next—the band that became Pere Ubu puts down demos, gets up on stage, throws what they have at the crowd to see if any of it will come back. This is part of the history of guitarist Peter Laughner, who died in 1977 at 24, used up by himself, a shocking legacy behind him: sounds no one else would ever make, from the jittery lead to “What Love Is” to the deliberate, suicidal cadence of “Ain't It Fun.” Here you can't tell if Laughner's sardonic attitude is covering up the pain or if the pain is just there to root the attitude—until he underlines breaks between verses with what can seem like four versions of himself, too many guitars speaking different languages and no translator needed, and you don't care. He hammers away at a fuzztone, again and again, convincing you he's said what he has to say, that he's used up the song. Then he steps into a stately, Clapton-like solo, and you can see him holding his instrument the way Errol Flynn held a sword.

10
Bruce Conner,
2002 B.C.
(Available through the Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles)
This DVD collects eight 16mm films made by the San Francisco experimental artist, including the 1966
Breakaway
with Toni Basil and the 1981
Mea Culpa
for David Byrne and Brian Eno's
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
. But the time-stoppers are in the 1967
White Rose
, a seven-minute mystical documentary, scored to Miles Davis'
Sketches of Spain
, about the removal of Jay DeFeo's huge painting
The Rose
from her San Francisco apartment, and two found-footage pieces on Conner's Kansas 1940s childhood, the 1976
Take the 5:10 to Dreamland
and the 1977
Valse Triste
. From inside a high school science film, or a training film for animal husbandry majors, or a Chamber of Commerce promotional film, you see another movie beginning: David Lynch's
Blue Velvet
. At the least, this is surely where Lynch saw it beginning. And that, for the few minutes these films last, is just the beginning.

APRIL
22, 2002

1
Elvis Costello,
When I Was Cruel
(Island)
This always surprising work reaches into the netherworlds of such long-ago Costello compositions as “I Want You,” “Pills and Soap” and “Green Shirt.” More than that, it conjures up the displacement—the weird sense of privileged resentment—of the overlooked “My Dark Life,” made in 1996 for the
X Files
tribute
Songs in the Key of X
(now included on the Rhino reissue of Costello's
All This Useless Beauty
, from the same year). And with Steve Nieve, keyboards, and Pete Thomas, drums,
When I Was Cruel
is a redrawn breath of Costello's 1978 voice, the thuggishness thickened in the throat like a certain thickening of the body. The tunes are rough, hard, inventive,
moving too fast: “Like a Jewish figure revolving on a music box.” Really? Did I just hear that coming out of the song, or did I write it in myself?

The heart of the album—across years of experiments, Costello's best since
All This Useless Beauty
, if not far better—may be “When I Was Cruel No. 2” (“When you were cruel?” cry the fans. “When weren't you?”). The slow performance has the languid feel of post–
La Dolce Vita
movies, everybody passed out in their Pucci outfits and only the singer walking through the gilded room, deciding what to take. The music is built around a tiny sample “from a '60s italian pop record by the great singer, mina,” repeated every six seconds: “Oh, no,” she seems to be saying. It's an indelible bit of rhythmic punctuation, and like Eminem's use of Dido's “Thank You” in his “Stan” but infinitely more subtle, a commentary on the story the singer is telling, insisting on doubt, melodrama and bad news.

2
Christian Marclay,
Guitar Drag
,
in “Rock My World: Recent Art and the Memory of Rock 'n' Roll” (California College of Arts & Crafts Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, through May 11)
It's not clear from the works on display here—grounded in their existence as visual or mixed-media works, rather than as visual referents to musical events, and thus combining into a much more successful show than any of its many forgotten rock 'n' art precursors—whether “The Memory of Rock 'n' Roll” means the present-day memory of a finished thing or the memory the music carries within itself. That's especially true of turntablist and collage artist Marclay's video, made in Texas in 2000: 14 minutes of an electric guitar dragged behind a pickup truck. The guitar is attached to an amp in the truck bed, so that as it's scratched and battered over rocks, brush, road and dirt it howls with noise. Shot from a comfortable distance, then very closely, then too closely, as if you're only an inch from the action, the guitar is self-evidently a solid-body version of James Byrd Jr., as he was dragged to death by Texas racists in 1998. Part of what is horrible, and fascinating, about
Guitar Drag
, though, is that most viewers will know that Byrd came to pieces, and the guitar doesn't. Long before the video is over, the guitar stops emitting sound; it loses its guitarness, and even its metaphor. It turns into stuff, junk, something someone tied to a truck for lack of anything better to do with it. Still, at the end, you wonder if it might be fixed—and, if it could be, what it would sound like. People can be killed, Marclay's piece says; rock 'n' roll may be dead, which means you can't kill it.

3
Dirty Vegas,
Days Go By
(Capitol)
A sampler for a forthcoming album makes it plain that the way this modest piece of London dance music daft punks its way out of the Mitsubishi commercial where most Americans first heard it—with a sense that, in the right car, on the right road, with this song on the radio, you really could disappear into an eternal pop memory, shared by all—is in the electronically distorted vocal, reaching for what's already behind it. That is, an acoustic version of the song is a complete zero.