Real Life Rock (247 page)

4
Murray-Dodge Hall, Princeton University
I'm sitting in the courtyard of this small Gothic pile, reading Lester Bangs's 1971 rant “James Taylor Marked for Death” for a class I'm teaching, coming on his mini-generational history about the way counter-cultural messianism “sent us in grouchy packs to ugly festivals just to be
together
and dig ourselves and each other, as if all of this meant something greater than that we were kids who liked rock 'n' roll and came out to have a good time, as if our very styles and trappings and drugs and jargon could be in themselves political statements for any longer than about 15 stoned seconds, even a threat to the Mother Country!”—and there in front of me, courtesy of the class of 1969, commemorating its 25th reunion in 1994, is a large granite cylinder with a yin-yang symbol and, engraved in block letters, lyrics from Joni Mitchell's insufferable “Woodstock”: “We are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.” All I could think was
how remarkable it was that they both ended up here, still arguing.

APRIL
2007

1
Pink Nasty,
Mold the Gold
(
pinknasty.net
)
A singer and guitarist from Wichita, Kansas, she doesn't even try to live up to her name. “We could go to Starbucks/And talk a lot of shit about people/We don't know, now/Who probably live in New York”—you get the feeling that the borders of the life described are Starbucks over here and
Seinfeld
reruns over there. Whether the songs are full of rhythmic stop signs (the gorgeous, almost doo-wop ballad “Hot Pink House”) or move so fast you can't imagine them stopping for anything (“Dirty Soap”), there's a pugnacious, resentful depression all over the music, but it's a depression alive to itself: it might be one person's way of taking revenge on the world.

2
The Moaners,
Blackwing Yalobusha
(Yep Roc Records)
Speaking of depression—Melissa Swingle, who can play anything, and Laura King, who plays drums, sound as if they long ago disappeared into the black hole and came out completely unimpressed.

3
Shut Up & Sing
(The Weinstein Company)
Barbara Kopple, co-director here with Cecilia Peck, is still best known for
Harlan County, U.S.A
., her 1977 documentary about a miners' strike; this film, about the Dixie Chicks trying to come up with the nerve to spit in the hurricane of abuse that followed lead singer Natalie Maines's 2003 denunciation of George W. Bush, isn't altogether different. The women are millionaires, but a memory of destitution, or a sight of it somewhere in the future, is present in the bones of their faces. The passion and fear that drive a strike are present in “Not Ready to Make Nice,” which, as it takes shape and then emerges as a finished thing—calm, resolute, and hard—is like a woman watching her own autopsy: whatever it said to you on the radio, the song here, with real-life death threats behind it, holds as much terror as defiance. “Now that we've fucked ourselves anyway,” Maines says at one point, “I think we have a responsibility to . . . continue to fuck ourselves.”

4
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
(USA)
You're the devil!” a man says to Kathryn Erbe's Detective Alexandra Eames, in the episode called “Cuba Libre,” after she's tricked him into giving himself away. “You should see me in a blue dress,” she says flatly—and given the resolute plainness of Erbe's character, the line would work almost as well if she said, “You should see me in a dress.” But then it wouldn't have that Detroit snap, right back to Shorty Long's 1964 “Devil With the Blue Dress,” and Detective Eames wouldn't get to walk off with the barest curve of a smile on her face.

5
Paula Frazer and Tarnation,
Now It's Time
(Birdman Records)
After years of silence the female Roy Orbison returns, shrouded in swamp gas as always—with the sense that what you're hearing isn't quite there; with her syncopated yet faraway melodies or a spectral wail deep in the sound, every hesitation in Frazer's voice says she isn't telling you a fraction of what she could.

6
Michael Tolkin,
The Return of the Player
(Grove Press)
The Hollywood insider panicking, keeping his head down, his mouth forming nothing but
yes
; he's learned “to give up his own taste . . . and to surrender to the audience. He consoled himself with the example of Eric Clapton, a brilliant musician who might have been as difficult for the masses as Bob Dylan, or Hendrix if he had lived, but Clapton pursued the middle way.”

7
Pet Shop Boys,
Pop Art: The Hits
(Capitol Records/EMI)
A great career for Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, and all of it might fit in Dusty Springfield's mouth as she breathes “Ah-ha-
ha
” in her guest spot on the 1987 “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” lifting the last syllable just slightly, perhaps the sexiest wave goodbye in all of pop music.

8
Jerry Lee Lewis,
Last Man Standing
(Artists First)
Because he's frozen solid.