Real Life Rock (275 page)

3
Frazey Ford,
Obadiah
(Nettwerk)
For Ford, the most distinctive voice in the Be Good Tanyas, “Bird of Paradise” is not an image, it's a lilt. The words as she sings them are wings. It's that “San Diego alley,” sneaking out the darkness of the song and returning to it almost before you can register it, that's the image, and you can't see to its end.

4
Carlos,
directed by Olivier Assayas, at the Telluride Film Festival, September 4
In a conversation about his film on the terrorist Carlos, who from his murder of French police in Paris in 1975 to his capture in the Sudan nearly twenty years later was a oneman spectre haunting Europe, Assayas at first said that he had thought of scoring it to classic orchestral movie music throughout. “But the film did not want it. The film laughed in my face.” So from scene to scene—Carlos preening naked in a mirror, the takeover of the OPEC oil ministers' conference in Vienna in late 1976, after that the shooting of a military policeman at a Swiss checkpoint, a weapons delivery, a breakdown in communications—the movie is less scored to than invaded by post-punk songs so romantic and tough they create empathy for situations even as the film withholds it from its characters. New Order, the Feelies, the Dead Boys' “Sonic Reducer,” most viscerally Wire's “Dot Dash,” a song that seems to terrorize itself—not in any way keyed to the scenes in chronological, soundtrack-of-our-lives banality, they raise the question of whether the best and most adventurous music of the late 1970s and early 1980s was as animated by international terrorism, by the spectre of a world where at times it could seem that only a few armed gnostics were in control of anything, as by anything else.

5
David Thomson,
Humphrey Bogart
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
There are passages in each of Thomson's recent short biographies—Bogart, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman—that frame a classic film in terms no one else would choose. Here, on Bogart's Roy Earle, in the 1941
High Sierra:
“Earle was a killer, a thief, a loser—sure, he had a kinder side to him, and he got along in a strange tough way with Marie. But he never stopped the film and said, look, folks, I'm a reformed character. I'm a nice guy. Honest, I am. He never asked for anything. Maybe that's what Huston saw and maybe he guessed how it could fit in a new moment in American history when all of a sudden the real heroes didn't have to wear labels but could act as mean, as hard-bitten and as unsentimental as . . . Sam Spade or Rick Blaine or Philip Marlowe (or Tom Joad)”—the difference is Thomson's claiming a movie not for film history, which is what anyone else would have done, but for American history.

6
Cyndi Lauper, video for “Money Changes Everything,” from
The Body Acoustic
(Sony, 2005)
Who knew Tom Gray's 1978 “Money Changes Everything” (which five years later Lauper ripped up as a lament and stitched back together as vengeance) was all along looking for life as a fatalistic Appalachian stomp, something the grownups who are now singing it—playing it on fiddle and harmonium, swirling to it—absorbed as children like a lullaby or a slap?

7
Robert Plant,
Band of Joy
(Rounder)
Much is made of Plant's working with Nashville musicians under the name of the band he played in before he joined Led Zeppelin, back in the blimp age. But
against the free, unencumbered stroll through “Cindy, I'll Marry You Someday,” a commonplace song Plant learned from a recording by the great North Carolina folklorist Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882–1973), everything else—new songs, covers of numbers by Townes Van Zandt, the Minnesota duo Low, Los Lobos, Richard Thompson, Barbara Lynn, even the gothic spiritual “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down”—feels contrived. “When I found Bascom Lamar Lunsford,” Plant said recently, “I was born again”; the true roots he's getting back to are those he's yet to find.

8–9
Washington Square Park, New York City, 10 p.m., August 30
It was a hot night and the park was jammed; there were a lot of people with guitars out, under the arch, around the fountain, wherever there was an open space under the lights. But sitting on the ground in the dark, yards away from any other person, was someone singing and playing Rod Stewart's “Maggie May.” He sang it very slowly, as if he was still working it out—as on
The Rod Stewart Sessions 1971–1998,
a box set released last year on Rhino, you can hear Stewart working it out in the studio, plugging in nonsense lines, trying to get a hold on the melody, as if the song were coming out of the air, as if it wasn't simply his world-historic 1971 rewrite of the old Liverpool folk song about a prostitute and a sailor.

It was odd, and, if you were in the mood, heart-stopping. The man in the dark was in public, as if he had a need to make himself heard, to an audience as spectral as he had made himself. As a public performer, he had withdrawn into himself, where only his sound drew any listener to the dim outline of his body. So the strain of loss and regret that's one part of Stewart's original was now the whole song, but staged as if it were a play. The man was singing Stewart's words, following his tune, all the way back to the docks, and, as the song played out, Rod Stewart might never have been born.

10
Justin Sullivan and Friends,
Tales of the Road
(Attack Attack, 2004)
Looking around the Internet for odd Tom Jones songs, I stumbled on a video from this album and was stunned by as unforgiving a performance of “Masters of War” as I'd ever seen. Here the front man for New Model Army, along with the drummer and guitarist from the London punk band—who with Jones rammed their way through “Gimme Shelter” as if it were a collapsing building—begin a set recorded around Europe, mostly, it seems, in Germany, with the title song, apparently about the most tiresome subject in the annals of rock 'n' roll. But that's not it.

As with the music throughout the album, a dankness pervades everything, and with echoes of elements in rock 'n' roll most resistant to borrowing, even homage—Bruce Springsteen's harmonica in “Nebraska,” the reach of the Doors' “The End,” the primitivism of the Mekons' “The Building”—the very first minutes are the spookiest of all. In the place called up with “Sitting in the all-night café in a curl of smoke, telling tales of the road,” you might glimpse not a few aging musicians in a Greek restaurant in Soho but anarchists from the late nineteenth century meeting up in a Whitechapel tavern to pass secrets, then disappearing in the night. This isn't sorry-babe-the-road-is-calling-me. If it's a rock 'n' roll road then it's a different rock 'n' roll.

JANUARY
2011

1
Scott Shepherd in
Gatz,
directed by John Collins, produced by Elevator Repair Service (Public Theater, New York, October 29, 2010)
At the very end of this partly dramatized reading of
The Great Gatsby
—with various people working in and around a somewhat ratty 1980s office, here and there turning into Gatsby, Daisy, Tom Buchanan, and anyone else who appeared in Fitzgerald's pages eighty-five years ago—Shepherd puts down the book he's been reading from since he came across it in a desk compartment nearly eight hours before, and begins a drift all the way into the Nick Carraway
he's only intermittently portrayed, a drift into the canonized reverie of the final pages.