Real Life Rock (246 page)

5
Ellen Barkin, “It's nighttime in the big city . . .”
Theme Time Radio Hour With Bob Dylan
(XM Radio)
Every week, before Dylan as disc jockey begins spinning his discs and telling his tales, Barkin, the woman who so long ago in
Diner
couldn't put her husband's records back in the right order, now stands back and lowers the boom. After her opening line, what by now amounts to a poem in progress unfolds: “A woman walks barefoot, her high heels in a handbag . . . A man gets drunk, he shaves off his moustache . . . A cat knocks over a lamp . . . An off-duty cop parks in front of his ex-wife's house.” Is he stalking her, or do they still sleep together?

6
Cat Power,
Live on KEXP
(eMusic exclusives)
Four numbers recorded on the air with only guitar and piano, and likely a more complete summation of who this woman is and what she does than can be found anywhere else. It's all so quiet you don't know whether to hold your breath or scream.

7
Robert Plant,
Nine Lives
(Rhino)
In 1982 the ex-Led Zeppelin dervish drifted in a sea all his own, a surfer on a wave that never reached shore. That was “Far Post,” then a B-side, nearly impossible to find since. It's here. You can play it all day long.

8
Bob Dylan,
Modern Times
(Columbia)
Inside the sometimes slack rhythms and the deceptively easy lines, a deep longing. For a trail of dead.

9–10
Peter Stampfel: Karen Dalton,
It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best
(Koch, 1997) and Holy Modal Rounders,
Alleged in Their Own Time
(Rounder, 1975)
On
Gala Mill
, the Drones cover “Are You Leaving for the Country,” a song learned from a recording by the '60s Greenwich Village folk-scene jazz singer Karen Dalton. She had an acrid voice, and she lived an acrid life: caught like a pursesnatcher in Stampfel's song “Sally in the Alley.” He uses the lyrics to “Sally” to end his notes to the reissue of Dalton's 1969 album; he recorded it on the Holy Modal Rounders'
Alleged in Their Own Time
, nearly 20 years before Dalton died. You'll forget the Drones' “Are You Leaving for the Country”; you may forget Dalton's (on her just-reissued 1971 album
In My Own Time
). You won't forget “Sally”—a nursery rhyme about a junkie.

FEBRUARY
2007

1
Brian Morton,
Breakable You
(Har-court)
Sometimes, as in his first novel,
The Dylanist
, Morton has perfect pitch—and especially writing about parties, where people have to think of something to say, a kind of discomfort that takes away one's
sense of the novelist having to think of things for them to say. This time it's a literary party in New York: “E. L. Doctorow, remote behind his air of suave imperturbability, was talking to Laurie Anderson, who was, as always, carefully disheveled, and Lou Reed, who had the pruny monkeyish face of somebody's grandfather, but who was imperishably hip—the hippest man in the room, in any room, by definition.” What's so effective about the passage is how casually it distinguishes hip—or cool, the better word—from Doctorow's act. Cool is beneath the action, looking up; the air of smugness that surrounds every picture of Doctorow like smoke speaks for someone working much too hard to look as if he hasn't worked for years.

Reed demonstrated how it works not long ago, in an “in-conversation” night with the critic Anthony DeCurtis at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. On
Berlin
: “One of those career-ending moments” (though Reed later announced he'd be performing
Berlin
at St. Anna's Warehouse in Brooklyn, with a set by Julian Schnabel). On work: “When I can't write it's so impossible it's a joke, and I can't even imagine how it's done.” He broke character only when asked about “the stature of rock 'n' roll in the culture today”: “I just love a good rock band. Always have. . . . The first time I heard OutKast do ‘Hey Ya' for the first 15 seconds I was saying ‘Oh man, I could listen to this forever'—and then you kind of had to.” And when a woman in the audience asked him a question in a mall-rat accent so heavy he had to ask her to repeat it twice.

2
TV on the Radio,
Return to Cookie Mountain
(Interscope)
Before the election last November, the sense of dread loaded into this dark cloud—the way the group sounds as if it's been hiding out with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man at least since the start of the second Bush presidency—was inescapable. Now the feeling—echoing Frankie Lymon's doo-wop cry, the punk gloom of Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division, the clatter on the streets of Jonathan Lethem's
The Fortress of Solitude
—is just slightly less immediate. People are still running down one street, hiding in the corners of another, but you no longer have to feel as if that's the only possible way to live.

3
Chris Smither, “Diplomacy,” from
Leave the Light On
(Signature Sounds/Mighty Albert)
The same shift of real time onto music takes place with the old blues guitarist's song about the Iraq war—which it doesn't have to mention by name. The song is so what-the-fuck, so stuff-happens (“Slip-slidin' away,” Smither sings, apropos of nothing, or everything) that if it sounded brazen last fall, when Smither was knocking it out for Scott Simon on NPR's
Weekend Edition
or at Joe's Pub in Manhattan, today it sounds as if a good part of the country is singing along: “Take it or leave it, it's the deal of the day,” go the lines, the American sticking out his hand for the whole world to shake. “And if you leave it, you get it anyway.” It's as if millions of people actually heard this song—and as if this verse has, now, an extra line:
Hey—what kind of deal is that?