Real Life Rock (222 page)

7
Patricia Tallman in
Night of the Living Dead
,
directed by Tom Savini (STZ, May 2)
The lone woman to escape the plague of cannibal zombies—mute with shock in the beginning, by the end she's ready to shoot anything that moves—wakes up to find the sun shining and the spell broken. She watches as a crowd of yahoos torment a zombie in a corral while others use lynched corpses for target practice; she flinches as the bodies jerk in the air. “They are us and we are them,” she says. “Say what?” says a hunter. “Nothin',” she says, afraid again. I suppose this shot-for-shot 1990 remake isn't as good as George Romero's 1968 original, but it was still too much to take: too close to home, which is to say to the picture the country has been offering itself on the nightly news.

8
James Mathus Knockdown Society,
“Stop and Let the Devil Ride”
(Fast Horse)
If the appropriation of old country blues by the White Stripes or the Be Good Tanyas bothers you, here's what it sounds like when it's done without wit, imagination, or a decent beat. The devil wouldn't be caught dead riding with these guys.

9
Yeah Yeah Yeahs,
Fever to Tell
(Inter-scope)
The feeling of people pushing through a crowd, when there's no crowd.

10
Charles Taylor, “Chicks Against the Machine,”
Salon
(April 29)
A steely, cant-destroying account of how and why, after their
Primetime
interview with designated patriot Diane Sawyer and their naked
Entertainment Weekly
cover, the Dixie Chicks can now open their shows with “I Won't Back Down”—and close them with Natalie Maines announcing “Our final encore tonight is gonna be ‘Dixie.' ” “ After all,” Emily Robison or Martie Maguire can say, “it was Abraham Lincoln's favorite song.”

JUNE
4, 2003

1–10
David Thomas, “Disastodrome!” (Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Los Angeles, February 21, 22, 23)
It was a version of a Raymond Chandler mystery, with tough, cool, and fooled detective Philip Marlowe written out in favor of the bit characters hanging around the corners of the plot, and it brought forth a large cast. There was (1) impresario-writer-director-actor-singer-musician Thomas himself, since 1975 leader of the avant-Cleveland band Pere Ubu, a huge man leaning on a cane, letting himself down into a chair and seeming to fall asleep as others moved around him, (2) poet Bob Holman, (3) Frank Black, late of the Pixies, (4) Robert and Jack Kidney of 1560-75, a combo from Kent, Ohio, that goes back before the last number in its name, (5) composer Van Dyke Parks, (6) the Two Pale Boys, trumpeter Andy Diagram and guitarist Keith Moliné, plus Yo La Tengo drummer Georgia Hubley, (7) singer Syd Straw, (8) actor George Wendt, and (9) the current incarnation of Pere Ubu itself, along with (10) a reunited Rocket from the Tombs, the spectral pre-Ubu band in which Thomas's story began: a rocket on its way back to the tomb, featuring not only the living—Thomas, bassist Craig Bell, and guitarist Cheetah Chrome—but also, with Richard Lloyd of Television standing in for guitarist Peter Laughner (1953–77) and singer Stiv Bators (1949–90), the specter of the dead.

It was a queer assemblage, and the noisy crowd that gathered for the three-night
performance festival wouldn't have been surprised that the show passed under the radar of the national music press, the art press, the theater press. The crowd knew it was lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

The stories Thomas spread across the three nights—about bands forming and breaking apart, people meeting and separating, the interstate highway system, the towns the interstate left behind, the way elements of speech, commerce, and culture disappear, and how, after those things are gone, people like those on Thomas's stage appear to reenact them—were most of all suggestive. As the tale unfolded, the cast grew even larger, drawing familiars and doppelgängers. On the second night, for the increasingly nervous, so-called improvisational opera
Mirror Man
—part sermon, part rant, part minstrel show, part lecture on spiritual uplift—the scene opened in a diner. Off to the side was a bus-stop bench with an ad for a wax museum. With musicians spread across the back of the stage, Frank Black walked out of the crowd in an aloha shirt, looking less like himself than John McCain, communicating the same sense of solidity and frustration. George Wendt, Black, and Thomas sat down together on the bench, and as the audience waited for it to collapse under their seven or eight hundred pounds, Wendt was Babe Ruth and Thomas was Fatty Arbuckle. But when Thomas took the microphone—Panama hat on his head, his cane like chemotherapy, a sign of both debilitation and a will not to die—the character who came out of his body was, someone said, more like Orson Welles as Father Mapple in the movie version of
Moby Dick
—or Welles as Hank Quinlan in
Touch of Evil
.

Earlier, when the curtain came up, Syd Straw stood at the diner table, dressed in an aquamarine uniform, holding a pot of coffee, but she didn't seem to move. Black and Georgia Hubley sat down and Straw took their orders. The stillness of the scene—as off to the left Bob Holman recited a broken narrative, sounds bounced off the walls, and songs were begun and sometimes finished—pushed the scene even farther into the background than it actually was; Edward Hopper's
Nighthawks
drifted into your mind as easily as it drifted out of it.

David Lynch was the missing actor, if he really was missing. When on the first night Robert Kidney held the stage like a bad dream, he could have been Dennis Hopper's “well-dressed man” from
Blue Velvet
. “Look for me down at One-Eyed Jacks,” he said, gesturing toward the whorehouse in
Twin Peaks
. Kidney wore a dark suit, dark shirt, dark tie, a fedora pulled down over his face so that all you could see of his features was that they were creased and old; he sang in a mellifluous, weirdly unaged voice, his guitar stopping the rhythm inside the likes of Robert Johnson's nearly seventy-year-old blues “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” and turning the tunes into fables: “Nobody really wants to hear the blues, because it's too slow, it's boring, it's tedious—like life, like my life.” For an encore he and his brother played Bo Diddley's “Who Do You Love,” and it squirmed the way Roy Orbison songs squirm in
Blue Velvet
and
Mul-holland Dr
. changing as it twisted: “Tell me hoodoo you love.”

Moment to moment, incident to incident, song by song, others stepped into Kidney's, or Lynch's, shoes: Syd Straw, sitting at the diner table alone, her head in her hands, the weight of her fatigue capsizing the theatrics of the men on the stage like Peggy Lipton's
Twin Peaks
waitress at the end of her shift; Thomas sitting at a desk with a manual typewriter, crumpled paper, and what looked like a week-old sandwich as if he were Jack Nance in
Eraserhead
, clenching his teeth as if that would force thoughts out of his clotted brain; and, everywhere, a sense of time as something used up somewhere in the past, by someone else.

The difference between Lynch's American towns and the decaying towns on and off Thomas's Lost Highway—the phrase repeated so often it finally fell somewhere between a prayer and a brand name—was
that in the darkest, most dead-end actions Thomas orchestrated in Los Angeles, there was always the sense that they were a setup, that all together they made a story which, when you heard the punch line, you would understand as a joke. When on the last night the 49-year-old Thomas gave his all to Rocket from the Tombs' adolescent lament “Final Solution,” it didn't end up so far from Dion and the Belmonts' “Teenager in Love.” But the punch line never came, unless it was the last line of “Nightdriving,” somewhere in
Mirror Man
, I think, as if Thomas was floating across all the chanting voices, incantations, and reverb guitar of the night before and the night to come: “See ya a
round
, sucker!”—the second syllable of the third word cracking like a whip, like a grin as big as the room.

JUNE
25, 2003

1
John Mellencamp,
Trouble No More
(Columbia)
Old songs, old singer, fresh sound: Mellencamp turns Dicky Do and the Don'ts' obscure 1959 doo-wop “Teardrops Will Fall” into stupendous backwoods rockabilly, with fiddle playing by Miriam Sturm that shoots up from inside the music like the wind Toni Marcus blew through Van Morrison's “Full Force Gale.” Taken up in the last few years by David Johansen as well as the White Stripes, Son House's “Death Letter” is now some kind of subterranean pop hit; in Mellencamp's version there's a shift halfway through its six minutes—Michael Ramos's organ coming in to let you know that the reality of death is setting in, that the singer too is now sliding toward death—that is so sure, so unafraid of itself musically and so terrified of itself morally, that the song leaves the pop world and goes right back to the dead man who wrote it. And yet, with good covers of compositions by Robert Johnson, Hoagy Carmichael, or Willie Dixon flashing by, it's “To Washington”—a modest rewrite of “White House Blues,” a 1926 Charley Poole number about the McKinley assassination—that may cut the deepest. The first verses, setting the scene of the last presidential election, seem timeless, as if they're taking place far in the past; the final verses, about the Iraq war, are the sort of protest lyrics that don't outlast the time it takes to sing them. But it's the melody, picked out on mandolin by Mike Wanchic—the traditional power of the melody, the way it anchors the theft of Florida in 2000 in a murder that took place in 1901—that makes the tune hurt, filling it with sadness, loss, betrayal, defeat.