Real Life Rock (256 page)

4
Ty Segall
(Castle Face)
Away from the San Francisco punk combo the Traditional Fools, Segall dives into one-man-band bedroom classicism. Very mid-'60s—with the Seeds, the Standells, and Bo Diddley smiling down from the walls—until “Oh Mary,” a leap into the crazed undergrowth of the '50s, where you never knew what you'd find when you turned over a rock: most likely some guy screaming about “Oh Mary” while chasing a beat as if it's a snake and he's on a horse.

5
Eugene Carrière,
Two Women
(Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis)
Though the painting is from the late nineteenth century, the mood is shockingly modern—a picture where the present is already the past. In a portrait that calls up Margarethe von Trotta's
Marianne and Juliane
, about two sisters, a ghostlike face hovers over the shoulder of a woman in a red dress holding her chin in her hand, her eyes looking off to the right, into the future, toward death. This is a picture of a woman thinking—and the feeling is that by some chance the painter has caught something that has never happened before.

6
Serena Ryder, “Sweeping the Ashes,” from
is it o.k.
(Atlantic)
A twenty-five-year-old from Peterborough, Ontario, Ryder presses hard, and over a whole album the feeling can go soft. But this is the first track; it hasn't yet worked as a warning a listener might take to the rest of her songs, and so a simple angry love song rises up like an epic. The tie to ordinary life is never cut—not with a banjo running the rhythm—but all Ryder has to do is take a deep breath to open up the song, to blow the clothes off the floor of her bedroom and reveal how much territory the performance actually claims. If you heard this on the radio you might come away feeling bigger, stronger, defiant.

7–8
TV Smith,
In the Arms of My Enemy
(Boss Tuneage) and Jamie Palmer, video for “Clone Town” (
vimeo.com/1945972
)
In 1978, Smith led his band through the perfect London punk album,
Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts:
the sleeve showed the title on a billboard and the ugliest public housing in the city behind it. Now he looks like someone you'd cross the street to avoid, old, beaten down, muttering to himself, consumed by his own fury. “Clone Town” isn't even Smith's best new song, but it presents the character he's made fully: a crank, unwilling to keep his mouth shut, the man with the bad news, even if that makes him someone you'd cross the street to avoid. “You don't really want to know how they get those prices so low!” he sings in a battering closing refrain, the phrase taking on another exclamation point with every repetition—but you do, you do.

9–10
Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel,
Live Fast, Die Young—The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause
(Touchstone, 2005) and
Rebel Without a Cause
,
directed by Nicholas Ray (Warner Bros., 1955)
Even without a single distinctive sentence—note the tripping-over-its-own-feet syntax of the subtitle—this book is irresistible. With all of the principals other than writer Stewart Stern dead—James Dean (1955), Sal Mineo (1976), Ray (1979), Natalie Wood (1981), a wipeout, as if Dean came back in that Porsche Spyder to get them—Frascella and Weisel rely mostly on actors who in the film played gang members (Corey Allen, Frank Mazzola, Steffi-Sidney, Beverly Long, Dennis Hopper) to reconstruct it. But because the movie changed the way the world looked, how it felt, they only have to apply a bit of pressure to a tiny matter—the sixteen-year-old Woods's simultaneous affairs with Ray (on his urging) and Hopper (on hers), the fate of Dean's red jacket—to
find their own drama. Today the gravity in the picture belongs wholly to Dean, and the gravity is a matter of an intellectual energy so bright the man carrying it seems constantly on the verge of bursting into flames.

MARCH-APRIL
2009

1
Cat Power,
Dark End of the Street
(Matador)
Six numbers left over from
Jukebox,
her deadly covers collection from 2008, but with every song here—most deeply with her version of Brendan Behan's “The Auld Triangle”—the slow ache of Chan Marshall's voice comes through like a promise that might take her a lifetime to keep.

2–3
KT Tunstall, “Little Favours,” from
Drastic Fantastic
(Virgin, 2007) and “Mr. Fritter,” “The Tunstallator” (YouTube)
So fierce on its own terms, as Tunstall's voice wraps itself around her own body; in another life it opens up into a bizarre video, credited to an “ex-teacher,” a slightly balding man of about thirty-five who'll turn out to be a cross between Terence Stamp in
The Collector
, whoever killed the Black Dahlia, and your everyday bondage fetishist. “I just want to show you something I've been building for the last few months,” he says before he beckons you into his house to show you a life-size puppet topped by a rotating box of Tunstall faces with an ugly slashed mouth. After jerking the strings on the mouth, on the metal hook that serves as the hand on the plastic guitar, and the body, all in sync to the music—precisely, which only makes it worse—the man, silently singing along with the drumbeat that opens the record, ties the strings around his own face as he kneels before his idol, just like Ed Gein draping the faces of the women he killed over his own. And the song still sounds glorious.

4
Irma Thomas, “Wish Someone Would Care,” from
Soul Queen of New Orleans
(Mardi Gras) or
Swamp Dogg Presents Two Phases of Irma Thomas
(S.D.E.G.)
Not the quiet original, from 1964, the saddest song that ever hit the Top 40, but a shouting version cut in 1973 with the eccentric soul singer Swamp Dogg at the controls, reproduced by him twenty years after that—turning up now late in
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
, for a few moments in a diner late at night, as if from somewhere in the back, maybe a dishwasher singing to herself and keeping time off the beat by banging on the counter with a fork.