Real Life Rock (207 page)

9
John Paxson,
Elvis Live at Five
(Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's)
On a Dallas TV station looking for a new angle on the 25th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, a producer and a computer genius create a virtual Elvis and, making no pretense that it is anything but the image of a dead man, turn him into a talk show host. Then the station owner takes over and turns Elvis into a demagogue, taking on homosexuals, immigrants, Hare Krishnas, his denunciations backed by footage created by means of the same technology that keeps Elvis talking. Soon homicidal mobs roam the land, their victims driven before them: “Thousands of men, women and children in a long snaking line of misery and fear stumbling through the winter snows of Nebraska.”

Very convincing. No happy ending.

10
Bruce Springsteen, “The Rising,” on
Late Night With David Letterman
(CBS, Aug. 2)
With Steve Van Zandt singing into Springsteen's mike along with Patti Scialfa as the song hit its last choruses, it was impossible not to see his dimwitted
Sopranos
thug Silvio Dante there too. And that made it feel as if the song meant, among other things, to kill somebody.

SEPTEMBER
9, 2002

1
Scott Ostler, “Insincerity Taken to New Levels”
(
San Francisco Chronicle
,
Aug. 31)
On baseball's new labor-management agreement: “At the news conference, ever-hip Commissioner Bud Selig quoted the Beatles, saying of the negotiations, ‘It's been a Long and Winding Road.' And as the Beatles noted in that song, ‘We've seen this road before.'

“Unfortunately, Selig did not quote from the Beatles' tune ‘Money (That's What I Want).' ”

2
Holiday Inn School of Hospitality and Resort Management, University of Memphis (Aug. 16)
A blond woman approached the desk at this training hotel: “I'm checking out: Linda Evans.” “Linda Evans?” said a man standing next to her. “From
Dynasty
?” “A long time ago,” she said. “But I killed all my husbands.”

3
Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs
,
conceived and organized by Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan & Charles Traub (Scalo Books)
A compendium of more than 1,000 pictures drawn from the evolving downtown exhibition that, beginning about a week after last year's terrorist attacks, opened itself to photographs from professionals and amateurs, until it seemed everyone in New York was taking part. Some 5,000 photos were scanned, filed and printed, and, within the limits of the makeshift space at 116 Prince Street, hung like laundry.

There is no telling what image will break down all defenses, erase the year's time, open the hole in the ground and in your memory. For one person I know it was the man in a T-shirt that read “
I
'
VE GONE TO PIECES
,” the splayed fingers of his right hand over his face. For me it was a young woman holding an American flag during a vigil or memorial gathering in Washington Square Park: the flag as if billowed by no more than the expression on her face, some combination of stoicism, sadness and an absolute inability to read the future.

4
Sleater-Kinney,
One Beat
(Kill Rock Stars)
“Turn on the TV,” the second cut, “Far Away,” begins, and the singer does: from Portland, Oregon, she sees the World Trade Center, and then what's left of it—nothing. But this opening moment doesn't carry over into the rest of the song, and guitarist Corin Tucker's high, hard shouts miss the moment even as she calls it up. Across the rest of the album, Tucker, guitarist Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss seem to miss their targets, even if their targets are each other. What's missing is a certain spark, that dimension of expectation and desire that previously made so many songs outrun themselves. Except perhaps in the rolling and rumbling choruses of “Light-Rail Coyote,” here the band is in front of its songs, looking back at finished things. Years after they appeared, “Dig Me Out,” “ Little Mouth,” “Jenny” and “Was It a Lie?” are not finished things.

5
Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Compaq Center (San Jose, Aug. 27)
One of Springsteen's talents is in bringing his biggest numbers down to earth. He opened with “The Rising,” which immediately set the show on a high plateau, looking down on the ruins of the World Trade Center, from the perspective of what writer Homi Bhabha named “the Unbuilt.” Much later, Springsteen introduced the band. “The Goddess of Love,” he said of his wife, singer and guitarist Patti Scialfa. “I like to call her mental Viagra. Come on up for the risin',” he said.

6
Peter Wolf, “Growin' Pain,” from
Sleepless
(Artemis)
Peter Wolf has been around long enough to show up in Robert Greenfield's 1982 novel
Temple
, drunkenly fronting the J. Geils Band in a Cambridge club in the late '60s and explaining the meaning of “L7” to the hero. With J. Geils he went from blues and soul to the '80s hits “Love Stinks” and “Centerfold”; on his own he married Faye Dunaway and made albums. None came close to the shuddering blasts of cold air that stormed all over the J. Geils Band's 1970 cover of John Lee
Hooker's “Serve You Right to Suffer”—or the smile in “Love Stinks.”

“Growin' Pain” has every year of that story in it—that story as ordinary life unmarked by stardom. It moves on a sharp, bouncing beat, but lost bets and blown chances pull against it, filling the tune with the likelihood that the dead ends of the lives chronicled in the song will never open onto any better road. Wolf gets stronger as the number goes on, but even as the sound rises he seems to sing more quietly, as if to offer old friends a respect the world they live indenies them.

Sleepless
will get momentary attention for Mick Jagger's “You're So Vain”–style vocal on the banal “Nothing But the Wheel” or Steve Earle's cowboy shtick on “Some Things You Don't Want to Know.” But this song may keep coming back.