1) Mendoza Line, “Sleep of the Just,” from “Almost You: The Songs of Elvis Costello” (Glurp)
Aren’t tribute albums terrible? This one is really terrible — and the Atlanta band’s view all the way into one of Costello’s greatest recordings ranks with Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and DJ Shadow’s “The Private Press” as the most undeniable sound of the year.
Maybe it was always obvious that the song is about the gang-rape of a local girl at an army base, with the woman looking back: “The soldier asked my name and did I come here very often/ Well, I thought that he was asking me to dance.” Maybe the song was always about the woman cherishing his death when his company’s transport vehicle is blown up: He’s getting the sleep of the just, all right, the big sleep. In Costello’s performance, though, the beauty of the composition makes the story into a fable, and the people in it float like ghosts.
Shannon McArdle is all flesh, still trying to wash off the stains after all these years. She makes her voice small and flat for the difficult shifts in timbre, removing any hint of professionalism. She’s as off-the-street as the woman in the middle of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” and the naturalism of the performance — carried from the beginning by a solemn church organ that is even more damning when it plays pop changes — is almost unbearable. The woman has her satisfaction over the soldier’s death, but that’s all she has. He and the rest took everything else.
That a woman is singing makes all the difference. Costello himself could go all the way into the song, but McArdle goes out the other side.
2) Boomtown Rats, “I Don’t Like Mondays” (Columbia, 1980)
Southern Tip reports from Tierra del Fuego, Argentina: “‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ was playing in a cab in Ushuaia. It sounded better than ever. I asked the driver to turn it up and told the person I was with he couldn’t talk. It made me think that radio is the farthest reaching, most democratic medium for art there is. How bad can it be to live in the southernmost city in the world, which is on an island — a city that to reach by car you have to cross the Straits of Magellan and twice cross the Chilean border — how bad can it be when the DJ plays ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’?”
3) Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer, “24″ (Fox, Tuesdays)
If Bill Clinton was not, as Toni Morrison famously claimed, the first black president, then Dennis Haysbert — who has, for reasons not unrelated to the racism that is the deep subtext of the Palmer character, received far more praise for his Sidney Poitier turn in the lifeless “Far From Heaven” than for his work here — is playing the first black Bill Clinton. It’s in his apparent naiveté, the way he carries his size, and most of all in the angry self-control in his face as he realizes once again that he’s been betrayed by one of his own, whatever “his own” means. As his estranged wife Sherry has been arguing since halfway through the show’s first season, there’s no such thing.
4) New Order, “Retro” (Warner Bros., 1980-2002)
Across four CDs of hits, remixes and live recordings, it doesn’t matter that the Manchester dance band’s 1983 “Blue Monday” remains the biggest selling 12-inch single ever. Compared to the Shep Pettibone mix of the 1986 “Bizarre Love Triangle” (where again and again, in moments memory can’t hold, the sound shifts faster than a fast cut in a film), “Blue Monday” remains a soap jingle. And compared to the full, 8 minute 41 second version of the 1982 “Temptation,” probably the best 12-inch single ever made (a journey comparable to the Boz Scaggs/Duane Allman version of “Loan Me a Dime,” moving from delirium to contemplation and, so violently, back again), the Shep Pettibone remix of “Bizarre Love Triangle” is very nice.
5) Touré, “The Portable Promised Land” (Little, Brown)
The author bio promises the Brooklyn writer’s first novel, “Soul City,” “soon enough,” but the best of the stories in this first collection are pieces of a novel reaching for each other, then backing away. There’s a lot of padding — credibility lists of negritude on the order of “The African-American Aesthetics Hall of Fame,” or “101 Elements of Blackness (Things That’ll Make You Say: ‘Yes! That There’s Some Really Black Shit!’)” that were done better in Darius James’ “That’s Blaxploitation!” There are stories that don’t take off. But the book drops all pose for the mystery of what happens when the borders between black and white begin to dissolve. In “Attack of the Love Dogma,” “The Playground of the Ecstatically Blasé,” the three-part “Black Widow Story,” “The Commercial Channel” and “They’re Playing My Song” Touré stops moving characters like toy soldiers and lets them move him. “The Black Widow Story” is a superhero comic book, a trash race novel, Chester Himes influenced by Lester Bangs — you have no idea what will come next. Is Charisma Donovan, high-school queen turned femme fatale turned porn star, a version of the Black Widow, a white woman who becomes the female Tupac “on a dare after drama class,” or are they the same person — and could either tell if either were? “You remember,” Touré says as he sets the scene, “how things were last summer when Jamais was brand-new and like, the only thing the city was talking about. The French Bistro décor. The barefoot girl in the glass case behind the bar sitting on a pillow reading Paradise Lost, all night every night …” — and somehow you do remember. You’re right there. And you don’t like it when the author lets you go, too soon.
6) Joshua Clover, “Modest $100 Million Proposals, for Better or Verse” (Village Voice, Nov. 27-Dec. 3)
On the $100 million-plus gift by rejected amateur poet Ruth Lily to Poetry Magazine: After three sensible notions on what to do with the money (“lobby for pro-education candidates,” “buy a million poetry books every year and give them away,” “free medical coverage to every poet accepted for publication”), Clover pulls out the stops. Such ideas, he says, “would burn a tiny fraction of the bequest: Instead of investing the remainder, Poetry could secede from the Union, purchase the Republic of the Marshall Islands (GDP: $99 million), and appoint their very own poet laureate, who would then meet the U.S. laureate in a battle to the death, wreaking unfathomable destruction across the landscape.”
7) “The Jimmy Show,” written and directed by Frank Whaley (First Look Pictures)
Whaley as a New Jersey man with a dead-end job who lives for open-mike nights at local comedy clubs, where the heartfelt cry “YOU SUCK!” is the most response he ever gets. Or, Bruce Springsteen, the Bizarro Years.
Johnny Cash, “American IV: The Man Comes Around” (American/Lost Highway)
The fourth time around for the Old Man Sings New Guy Songs concept is not too many, especially when so many old songs are part of the show: Could anyone else let the line “Sometimes in the saddle, I used to go gay” from “Streets of Laredo” slip by without a hint of self-consciousness? There are stunning duds, most notably a version of Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever (I Saw Your Face)” that reveals how horrible the song actually is (though there’s no footnote about how it inspired “Killing Me Softly,” which is even worse). Cash does best with a strong melody and a light, insistent beat — and here, with Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” he goes deeper into the composition than Trent Reznor ever did. As with U2′s “One” on his “III,” Cash understands the piece as a weight; he assumes it, and then, as you listen, lets it crush him. When “V,” “VI” or “VII” comes out posthumously, it won’t sound any more posthumous than this.
9) Duke Mitchell, “The Lion,” from “‘Gimme Dat Harp Boy!’ — The Roots of the Captain” (Ozit Records)
On a label named for the leading lights of London’s 1960s underground press, a heroically diverse collection of strange records that prophesied Captain Beefheart — a word like “influenced” is just too paltry — a very hot late ’50s-early ’60s fuzztone stomp. With the fuzztone played by saxophones.
10) Homer Quincy Smith, “I Want Jesus to Talk With Me” (“Tangled Roots,” Princeton University, Nov. 23)
At a conference on old-time music, Dean Blackwood of the “raw musics” reissue label Revenant talked about the idea of “phantom artists”: people whose names can be found on the labels of old 78s, but about whom nothing is known, including whether the names on the labels are real. He played a 1930 recording by Elvie Thomas, and the 50 or so people in attendance (including Brett and Rennie Sparks of the contemporary country Gothic duo the Handsome Family, whose performance would close the conference, and Tony Glover and John Koerner of the 40-year veteran Twin Cities roots band Koerner Ray & Glover, who had opened the event with their last concert — guitarist Dave Ray would die six days later) shook their heads in wonder.
Blackwood played a 1926 Paramount release by Homer Quincy Smith and mouths dropped open in shock. “I want Jesus to walk with me” — a man sings in a slow, measured cadence, making it plain he understands how much he’s asking for. The performance begins with the tinny sound of a calliope, which as Smith’s voice goes down to the bottom of a mine turns into a huge pipe organ. At the end, Smith lets his voice rise, until it seems a thing in itself, on its way to Jesus, leaving the singer behind. Another participant had prepared a response to Blackwood’s presentation, but as an instance of the great game of “Follow that, motherfucker!” I never saw anything like it.
1) Announcement (Madison Square Garden, Nov. 11)
For years, the same voice has opened every show with the same phrase, squashing the name at the end into one word: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Columbia recording artist, BOBDYLAN!” Last Aug. 9, though, a piece appeared in the Buffalo News in anticipation of a Dylan date in Hamburg, N.Y. It led with a paragraph recapitulating Dylan’s career. As print it was boilerplate — but to hear that paragraph now, appropriated as Dylan’s official new introduction, was pure media shock. It’s the displacement that takes place when the conventions of one form are shoved into the conventions of another form: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the ’60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the ’70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to find Jesus, and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’90s. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan!”
2) “Masters of War” (MSG, Nov. 11)
In 1991, with the Gulf War underway, Dylan stepped onto the stage at the Grammys telecast with his band. They were to play before Jack Nicholson presented Dylan with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The combo dove into a blithering, all-stops-out piece of rhythm, Dylan smearing every word into a single sound. It was “Masters of War,” from 1963, Dylan’s best, and most unforgiving, antiwar song — but you couldn’t necessarily tell. The song was buried in its performance, as if history were its true audience.
With a second Gulf War looming, there was no disguise when, seven songs into the first of two New York shows, Dylan gathered his small band into a half-circle for an acoustic, almost chamber-music version. Played very slowly, very deliberately, the performance made you understand just how good the song is. It wasn’t a matter of relevance. You could imagine that if the last war on earth had occurred 39 years ago — if the song had, by its very appearance, ended war — the song would still speak, just as a 7,000-year-old god excavated in Jordan and recently installed in the Louvre is still speaking, reminding you of what you came from, of who you once were.
3) Cover: Elvis Costello’s “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” 1977 (MSG, Nov. 11)
He didn’t sing about the shoes; having apparently invested more wisely than the angels, he wore them.
4) CD: “The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5: Live 1975 — The Rolling Thunder Revue” (Columbia)
Confusion in almost every vocal, a pound of sugar in almost every arrangement. Right, the famous “donned makeup in the ’70s” period.
5) Paul Muldoon, “Bob Dylan at Princeton, November 2000,” from “‘Do You, Mr, Jones?’ — Bob Dylan With the Poets and Professors,” ed. Neil Corcoran (Chatto & Windus, U.K.)
Muldoon is a poet (author most recently of “Moy Sand and Gravel”), co-author of Warren Zevon’s recent “My Ride’s Here” and a professor at Princeton. Leading off this new essay collection with a new poem, Muldoon goes back to the show Dylan played at Princeton in 2000 — which took place in Princeton’s Dillon Gym. “‘You know what, honey? We call that a homonym,’” the narrator of the poem says to the woman he’s with as the concert starts. Then Dylan’s only previous appearance at Princeton enters the poem — in 1970, when Dylan was present not to play but to accept an honorary degree. “He wouldn’t wear a hood,’” the narrator of the poem remembers. “‘You know what, honey? We call that disquietude.’”
6) Cover: George Harrison’s “Something,” 1969 (MSG, Nov. 13, available on bobdylan.com)
A final encore, done very straight. Musicians love this song; they admire the ability to craft anything that’s at once generic, anonymous and likely to generate income for a hundred years.
7) “Summer Days” (MSG, Nov. 11)
In a perfect world, this would be the turnaround cut on a live album called “Having a Rave-Up With Bob Dylan!”
“Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” (MSG, Nov. 11, available on bobdylan.com)
Dylan’s first performance of the song since he recorded it with the Hawks in a basement of a big pink house in upstate New York 35 years ago. Two of the five who were there then are dead. The house was recently on the market as a prime Dylan collectible. The tune still blew the air of pure American fedupness: “Pack up the meat, sweet, we’re headin’ out.”
9) “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (MSG, Nov. 11)
From 1965. The audience always waits to cheer for “Sometimes even the president of the United States must have to stand naked.” By now the song has outlasted almost as many presidents as Fidel Castro: Lyndon Johnson (no problem, for a man who liked to receive guests while sitting on the toilet), Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton (who as president was stripped naked, and who you can imagine singing the line to himself) and now George W. Bush. The line took nothing away from the last man on the list; he lives in the armor of his own entitlement.
10) “All Along the Watchtower” (MSG, Nov. 11)
The second of two encores, it began very strangely, with guitarist Charlie Sexton rolling a few spare notes that seemed to call up a distant western — Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man,” maybe, with Neil Young’s improvised and timeless guitar soundtrack. It was in fact the opening of Ferrante & Teicher’s 1961 twin-piano hit “Theme From ‘Exodus,’” from the movie based on Leon Uris’ 1958 novel about the creation of the state of Israel. Whether you caught the reference or not, it took the song about to emerge from its own history — one of Dylan’s most world-ending, from 1968, a year that over and over again felt like the end of the world — out of itself. Now the song was going to speak with a new voice: That was the promise that little introduction made.
It was impossible to imagine that Dylan ever played the song with more vehemence, or that, this night, six days after the midterm congressional elections, the performance was not utterly political, as much a protest song as “Masters of War.” Not when, after Dylan, Sexton and guitarist Larry Campbell led an overwhelming instrumental climb through the tune’s themes following the closing verse, Dylan came back to the mike to sing the opening verse again in a wild voice, throwing the last lines across the seats and out of the hall like a curse: “Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth/ None of them, along the line, know what — any — any of it — any of it is — worth.”
1-2) “8 Mile,” directed by Curtis Hanson (Universal), and Eminem, “Lose Yourself,” on “Music From and Inspired by the Motion Picture ’8 Mile’” (Sony/Interscope)
The picture is alive to Eminem’s presence, and he is alive to the picture, seeming to withdraw from the camera even as he pulls its eye toward him. Taking the viewer through a few days in the life of a white Detroit rapper in a black milieu — the adventures of a young man whose attempts to step out of oblivion are at best wary and at worst, and most believable, terrified — Eminem gives a performance that is all gravity. When the movie ends, there is a sense that it has, in fact, ended — that the movie has caught its own story.
Then “Lose Yourself” begins to play under the closing credits, and in an instant it blows the film away. The music dissolves the movie, reveals it as a lie, a cheat, as if it were made not to reveal but to cover up the seemingly bottomless pit of resentment and desire that is the story’s true source. Again and again the piece all but blows up in the face of the man who’s chanting it, Eminem lost in his rhymes until suddenly people are shouting at him from every direction and the music jerks him into the chorus, which he escapes in turn. The piece builds into crescendos of power, climbing ladders of refusal and willfulness step by step, rushing nothing, never reaching the top because it is the music itself that has put the top so high.
It’s Eminem’s greatest single recording, but it’s more than that. As with Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You),” the Miracles’ “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” or Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it’s one of those moments in pop music that throws off everything around it, setting a new standard, offering a new challenge, proving that, now, you, whoever you are, can say anything, and with a beauty no one can gainsay. That’s what’s happening here. The cutting contest at the end of “8 Mile” is a small thing compared to the cutting contest “Lose Yourself” throws down on pop music as such.
3-5) Goyard, 233, rue St. Honoré, Paris (Oct. 27)
You hear postwar jazz in any even vaguely expensive place in Paris. An otherwise painfully quiet restaurant features an entire Johnny Hodges live album; a hotel on the site of the fabled Tabou nightclub, once the haunt of Boris Vian, Juliet Gréco and Miles Davis, now offers a live trio, or disembodied voices determined to simultaneously mine the legacy and smooth it away. But in a posh luggage shop, empty except for a customer and a salesman, someone had programmed jazz chart toppers — though, really, it was only Peggy Lee’s 1958 “Fever” that allowed you to hear Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1956 version of the Merle Travis folk song “Sixteen Tons” as jazz.
With both recordings the orchestration was so spare it was almost spectral, something you imagined rather than heard. You could picture each performer lit by a single spot, otherwise in complete darkness on his or her nightclub stage, moving so minimally that the slightest gesture would communicate as a promise or a threat. Except for Ford’s big final chorus, nothing was even dramatized. The recordings were about bringing out a single, unique tale-teller, removing everything else from the world the song made, leaving nothing but the hipster smile in the first word and the orgasmic smear of the last of Lee’s “Daddy-0 don’t you dare,” nothing but the throwaway snap in Ford’s “A lotta men didn’t, a lotta men died.” The songs stayed in the air; after these one-of-a-kinds, Bobby Troup’s 1946 “Route 66″ was just sweeping up.
6) “Bubblegum Babylon” (VH-1, debuting Nov. 24)
From west of Philadelphia, Widmerpool reports on a “‘history’ of pop pop-music, which the show seems to think began with David Cassidy and culminated in Britney”: “At one point, Danny Bonaduce says that at the height of the ‘Partridge Family’s’ popularity, on tour, ‘It was like Saddam Hussein — you had to keep moving from safe-house to safe-house.’ After this context was placed in my mind, I wondered what stopped the producers from spirit-gluing a beard onto the also-interviewed Monkee Peter Tork, so he could do his uncanny Osama bin Laden impersonation. The repulsively casual pop-group/Hussein comparison gave a new perspective to the ‘Dick Van Dyke’ episode in which Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore provide a ‘safe-house’ for British invasion hitmakers Chad and Jeremy. Except C & J didn’t ask DVD or MTM to kiss their armpits in fealty; I bet Peter and Gordon would have.”
7) Varin Frères (Amédée and Eugène), “Reims, cathèdrale, gargouille et jeune homme en casquette, vers 1854,” in “Chefs d’Ouevres de la Collection Photographique de la Musée d’Orsay” (Paris, through Feb. 23)
In a passageway high in the cathedral, near a gargoyle, a man in a white shirt, dark pants, a scarf around his neck and a dark cap with a big bill slouches against a wall, right hand on his hip, left hand on his knee. It’s perhaps the earliest photograph ever made of ’50s cool — of Marlon “Wild One” Brando-James “Rebel Without a Cause” Dean-Elvis leaning-against-a-motorcycle Presley cool. Eighteen-fifties cool.
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), directed by Don Siegel (Ojai Playhouse, Ojai, Calif., Oct. 19)
Muzot (Genevieve Yue) writes: “Stars Dana Wynter and Kevin McCarthy were there for a brief Q&A session at the end. The screening itself was disappointing — a DVD instead of 35 mm, a false start in the Spanish language option and an uncomfortable shoebox theater preserved as a historical landmark — but I had the great experience of watching the movie with a group of junior high school students, a few rows in front of me, who were seeing it for the first time. No real fright, but plenty of giggling and cheering. When the actors stepped up, Dana Wynter looked blankly at the audience and declared herself a card-carrying pod. Kevin McCarthy scanned the theater suspiciously, everything about him gruff, and, speaking to no one in particular, said, ‘Are they all pods? No! We have to do it again.’ Not everyone knew how to react; it stung like an accusation, a familiar panic that wasn’t so easy to laugh at. I got the feeling this had become his line, worn not like the flat joke of an aged actor but a reminder of what made his warnings in the film so powerful to begin with, a sounding of the voice from the hills.”
9) Northern State, “Dying in Stereo” (Northern State)
I wouldn’t say a word against a Long Island hip-hop trio with an MC who calls herself Hesta Prynne — except that with that name she’s going to have to deliver stronger stuff than the charming “The country’s getting ugly, and there’s more in store/ But don’t blame me, ’cause I voted for Gore.” Something like —
10) Election flyer, www.moveonpac.org (Princeton University, Nov. 5)
“REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME — VOTE”
1) Sam McGee, “Railroad Blues,” from the anthology “Classic Mountain Songs” (Smithsonian Folkways)
McGee (1894-1975) played guitar with Uncle Dave Macon in the 1920s, with Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith in the ’30s and ’60s; in this 1964 recording he blows holes through the idea of “country music,” the “breakdown,” the “guitar solo.” Long, thin notes stretch into the air until you think you can’t hear them anymore, but you can; bass strings swoop down to rescue the melody from the silences that are almost left behind. It’s a workout, a cutting contest — but more than anything an acting out of the pioneer spirit, of America as experiment, as, “Hey, there’s always something better over the next hill,” but deep down not really caring if there is or not, not if to get from one place to another you can move like this.
2) Don DeLillo, Belknap Lecture, Princeton University (Oct. 16)
DeLillo read from his forthcoming novel, “Cosmopolis,” due next spring, about a day in the life of one Eric Packer, a 28-year-old billionaire currency trader. As the book opens he’s in his white limousine, on his way to get a haircut. Refusing to dramatize, letting the words carry the story, DeLillo read quietly, and the result was a dreamlike rhythm. As Dave Hickey says of “Chet Baker Sings,” there were “no range dynamics, no tempo dynamics, no expressive timbre shifts, no suppression of extant melodics, no harmonic meandering, no virtuoso high-speed scales.” Later there were questions from the audience. “What do you know about being fabulously wealthy?” a woman asked. “I can spell both words,” DeLillo said.
3) “Piss off Ryan Adams, win a prize!” (Oct. 17)
The tale of Ryan Adams’ response to a fan who shouted out for Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69″ — Adams screaming, demanding the house lights be turned on, identifying the offender, paying him $30 as a refund for his ticket and refusing to play until the guy left the hall — even made it into Time. But not the response of songwriter Robbie Fulks, on his Web site: “Any reader on this site who attends a Ryan Adams show and disrupts the show with a Bryan Adams song request will receive in return merchandise” — T-shirts and autographed CDs — “of his or her choice equal to the cost of the ticket, from my online store … please provide the date and location of the show, what you yelled, and what Ryan’s reaction was.”
4 and 5) 16 Horsepower, “Folklore” (Jetset) and Woven Hand, “Woven Hand” (Glitterhouse/Germany)
In its best work, as with the 2000 “Secret South,” the Denver combo 16 Horsepower calls up the specter of itinerant preachers you can’t tell from thieves. It’s scary to believe David Eugene Edwards’ voice — it can be scarier not to. But “Folklore” lacks all conviction — and no one can get away with sounding bored with a song as good as the Carter Family’s “Single Girl,” let alone with Hank Williams’ “Alone and Forsaken.” Edwards could have been saving it all for his solo project Woven Hand — here, from the first notes, a banjo clattering as if the distant past is rushing forward so fast the future will be defenseless against it, nothing is certain. You understand what it means to wander in the desert, abandoned by God and hating every human face, and you wonder why such a life sounds so rich.
6) Ramsay Midwood, “Shoot Out at the OK Chinese Restaurant” (Vanguard)
Whether Midwood has a degree in creative writing from Harvard or was born in a graveyard in Alabama, he’s selling weirdo country shtick. But he’s also got Skip Edwards playing organ. “Monster Truck” is going nowhere until a descending wash of sound takes you out of the performance, and suddenly you’re floating down a river on a raft; nothing is happening in “Fisherman’s Friend” until there’s this odd little squeak, and then a new, wordless voice is singing the song, with humor and depth, and a momentum that seems to have come out of a need or a desire nothing in the music has even hinted at is burning off the pose. Strange.
7) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Irving Plaza, New York (Oct. 15)
On their 2001 EP this New York trio was rough, sardonic, pulling an anthem, “Our Time,” out of the ground: “Our time/ To be hated!” singer Karen O chanted. This night, opening for Sleater-Kinney, all they had were gestures, and by the time they got to “Our Time,” the last song, it felt like not even the band believed a word it said.
“Ferus,” at Gagosian Gallery, New York (Sept. 12-Oct. 19)
In a celebration of the revolutionary Los Angeles Ferus Gallery, which from 1957 to 1967 showed many of the most surprising works by Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn and Ed Keinholz, the most powerful piece was an unusual Andy Warhol “Triple Elvis” from 1963. Back then, Ferus mounted a whole show of Warhol Elvises, using the giant panels to make a labyrinth the visitor had to find a way through. Unlike most “Triple Elvis” works, the one in the Gagosian showed not three separate versions of Elvis from the movie “Flaming Star” — Elvis in cowboy gear, pointing a gun out at the world, his body hunched, his black-rimmed eyes falling into his face — but only two. On the right side of the piece there was a single, stable image. On the left there was a single image with a shadow breaking out of it, as if the Elvises were shaking, about to come apart. As Elvis’ body separated from itself, the terrified blankness in his eyes was more alive than ever.
9) Chieftains, “Down the Old Plank Road: The Nashville Sessions” (RCA)
Backing such outsider-country names as Alison Krauss, Lyle Lovett, Martina McBride, Vince Gill, Buddy and Julie Miller, Gillian Welch and Patty Griffin, plus Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck and John Hiatt, the hallowed Irish quintet leads them through the thickets of such great numbers as Dock Boggs’ “Country Blues” and Uncle Dave Macon’s “Way Down the Old Plank Road,” into a land of such blandness you can barely tell you’re listening, let alone to who or what. It’s an acting out of America as, “Well, whether or not there’s always something better over the next hill, you’re probably better off not knowing.” I blame the Chieftains; no one else here has ever been so dull.
10) Bob Dylan, “Train of Love,” from “Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Songs of Johnny Cash” (Lucky Dog)
Aren’t tribute albums terrible? Dylan almost never does good work on them, but here, surrounded by Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle (it’s against the law to make a tribute album without him), Travis Tritt, Keb’ Mo’, the unspeakable Hank Williams Jr., Bruce Springsteen, Mary Chapin Carptenter, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris and Rosanne Cash, he gets real, real gone, though not before pausing to wave goodbye: “I used to sing this song before I ever wrote a song,” Dylan says before “Train of Love.” “I also want to thank you for standing up for me, way back when.” Way back in 1965, onstage at the Newport Folk Festival, where, as the current revisionist line has it, nothing actually happened.
1-3) Mekons, Mercury Lounge (Sept. 21, New York City)
Swinging east on their 25th anniversary tour, the old punks added a special show by popular demand — “a concept,” singer and guitarist Jon Langford said from the stage, “with which we are not that familiar” — at 6 p.m. Noting that one fan praised the idea as “a Mekons dream come true — home by 9!” Langford announced the door policy to the crowd already crammed into the small room: “Nobody under 40.” Nobody left. The band, from accordion on one side to fiddle on the other, ranged from the primitive rant “The Building” to singer Sally Timms’ dreamy bombscapes of a ruined London, but it was when various members began to read from the group’s just-published “Hello Cruel World: Selected Lyrics” (Verse Chorus Press) that the performance transcended the night. Elegantly printed, illustrated with photos and Blakean cartoons, the book doesn’t read like a conceit — that is, you actually can read it — but that was no preparation for what happened when the words were read out on stage. The idea seemed an utter contradiction: Why have someone step out of a band and read song lyrics when the band was present and ready to play them? In truth, the first reading, Langford with “Funeral,” came off as a clichéd political speech. But then the lyrics truly began to change shape, to lift off on such flights of rhetoric they became unrecognizable as songs. When non-singing drummer Steve Goulding stepped to the front of the stage and raised the book, the words rang like Shakespeare.
“Failure in the short run guarantees success in the long run,” Neil Young once said. The Mekons’ run, not exactly toward success, a quarter-century of small clubs, small labels, day jobs and a calling that has not worn out, has been a long one in itself. So long that later that night, as Langford, Timms and accordionist Rico Bell broke for dinner at Chinese place called Kam Chueh, the fortune that turned up in one cookie did not quite communicate as a portent: “The seeds of success lie in your last failure.” On the terms of success, every Mekons show is a failure.
4) The Great Crusades, “Never Go Home” (Glitterhouse/Germany)
When this Chicago foursome set off on their third album, with “Hand Grenade Head” and “Out of Our Little Town” (“They don’t sell sleeping pills over the counter,” Brian Krumm sings, and you know that’s as hopeful as the song will get), they carry themselves like Midwestern gangsters: with the determined, bitter nihilism of Tom Hanks in “Road to Perdition,” but also the gleeful nihilism of Billy Zane in “This World, Then the Fireworks.” But as the road out of town gets longer, you hear a guitar player putting a south-of-the-border melody on “The Wild Bunch,” surf combos tuning up in Southern California in 1962, a steel-guitarist clocking in in Nashville, a banjo player picking for himself somewhere in Virginia in the 1920s, and the band never hurries a step.
5) San Francisco Giants vs. St. Louis Cardinals, National League Championship Series, Game 3 (Fox, Oct. 12)
At Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, as a man in the bleachers had a home run bounce off his hands for the second time, a camera picked up a shirtless man sitting behind him, his mouth hanging open. One announcer speculated that the shirtless guy was dumbfounded that rubber-hands had blown two chances in a row. A second announcer noted that shirtless was wearing headphones, and the camera pulled in: The guy wasn’t surprised, he was completely zonked. “He must be listening to the Grateful Dead,” said the announcer. Someone back at Fox World Domination put on an impossibly vague Dead track (Deadheads would call it abstract), with Jerry Garcia whispering “odelay” over and over as guitar notes struggled to take shape and then died like minnows and the tune went on and on and the face of the man in the headphones never changed.
6) Jim Jocoy, “We’re Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy, SF/LA 1978-1980″ (powerHouse Books)
At first Jacoby’s full-length posed color portraits of people on the scene seem to owe everything to the black-and-white pictures in Isabelle Anscombe’s 1978 “Punk” — for that matter, the SF/LA punks seem to owe everything to the Londoners in the Anscombe book. But the longer you look — and not, particularly, at the shots of Joan Jett, Exene Cervenka of X, Johnny Thunders or other stars — the more you begin to see what it took to remake yourself as a freak, as a social idiot, as someone you weren’t meant to be. A woman with short black hair in a short black vinyl skirt who looks like a follower of the early San Francisco punk band Crime; a blond woman wearing red, black blue, yellow, white and green stripes and squiggles, smoke drifting over her face like a small cloud; a small woman dressed demurely in black and blue and something in her eyes that seems to be daring the world to fuck with her, and not because she knows what will happen if it does — soon enough, you’re seeing real people everywhere.
7) David Gates, “Everybody Must Get Sloshed” (New York Times Book Review, Oct. 13)
On Tim O’Brien’s novel “July, July,” about a class of ’69 30th-anniversary college reunion and how dreams of a better world turned to dust, gold dust that still shines with the pain of hopes abandoned and hearts that even under a carapace of corruption beat on to the music the man can’t bust even though he did. Choosing among requisite “uptight Republican housewife,” “draft-dodger who split for Canada” and “still-traumatized Vietnam veteran” with “a voice in his head,” Gates homes in on the latter, or rather his “imaginary friend,” one “Johnny Ever.” “Talk about cynics!” says Gates. “‘Seen it once, seen it a zillion times,’ this hard-boiled internal parasite tells his host. ‘We’re talkin’ grand illusion here. Fairy tales … “Hair.” Your whole wacked-out generation, man, it got turned around by all that tooby ooby walla starshine crud.’” “Edgy stuff,” Gates says. “If you can’t believe in ‘Hair’ anymore, what can you believe in?”
8 and 9) Ed Ward on Domino Records, “Fresh Air” (NPR, Sept. 3) and “The Domino Records Story” (Ace)
Resident pop historian Ward told the story of an odd little label launched in 1957 in Austin, Texas, by a team of solidly middle-class white entrepreneurs who met at a business seminar called “How to Market a Song.” They experimented. Their strangest record was Joyce Harris’ New-Orleans-style chant “No Way Out”: No way out from your love, was the concept; it wasn’t the feeling, which was life and death. A male voice begins the song with “I gotcha! I gotcha! And there’s no way out –” twisting the last word into a drawl so menacing you can’t believe anyone can answer him; Harris does, if only by sounding as if she’s tearing snakes out of her hair.
The label’s stars were the Slades, especially with their original version of “You Cheated” — a reworking of the Penguins’ 1954 doo-wop classic “Earth Angel” — which became a national hit when in 1958 it was covered by the Shields, who as they were black and the Slades, whose passionate, close-harmony rehearsal tapes are the hidden treasure of “The Domino Records Story,” were white, turned the vitally important American tradition of whites strolling to riches on the backs of blacks on its head. Or anyway sideways: Jesse Belvin, who wrote “Earth Angel,” was the lead singer of the Shields, and as with white covers of black records, compared to the Slades the Shields were slick.
Ward played the Slades’ “You Cheated” — rough but reaching, for just what you couldn’t quite tell. The soul music that was just around the bend? A transparency in the tune the singers couldn’t quite find? Hollywood? The humid last notes hung in the air, as if they were ready to burst into rain. “It was a magnificent record,” Ward pronounced, as if stunned at his own story, at the glory a marketing seminar could turn up, just like that.
10) “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” (NBC, Oct. 4)
“That’s another 25 years,” Detective Ice-T says to a murder suspect, setting up a line that for a moment left film noir heroes from Humphrey Bogart to Guy Pearce in its dust. “Your parole officer isn’t born yet.”
1) and 2) “Igby Goes Down,” written and directed by Burr Steers (United Artists) and trailer for “The Man From Elysian Fields,” directed by George Hickenlooper (Goldwyn)
Movie logic: At the end of “Igby Goes Down,” Jason Slocumb Jr., played by Kieran Culkin, visits a catatonic man in a mental institution: his father Jason Slocumb. It’s Bill Pullman, who we’ve seen in flashbacks willfully driving himself out of his family, out of society, out of his mind. The Western-hero face was still there, some years back, the features sharp, but even then this once-strong, silent man was silent because he had nothing to say. It’s one bad step past the familiar: The father’s sardonic smile, when he still recognized his son, is from the chump Pullman played in “The Last Seduction,” the deadness in his eyes now from the terrified man he played in “Lost Highway” — it’s as if he’s stepped out of those roles only to complete them.
The same confusion between art and life — are Bill Pullman’s previous roles part of his filmography or his biography? — is at work in “The Man From Elysian Fields,” where Mick Jagger looks at once like the gangster he played in 1970 in the “Memo From Turner” sequence of “Performance” and a desiccated version of a 60-year-old Jennifer Love Hewitt. Here he appears as the pimp Luther Fox, which is to say that he is also playing a version of James Fox, who in “Performance” played the real gangster, and for whom Jagger’s “Elysian” character is half-named. Far more deeply, though, Jagger is appearing as a fantasy version of himself, 35 years after the Rolling Stones, last hitting with the 1965 “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” were definitively erased from public consciousness by the San Francisco sound of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and It’s a Beautiful Day. After decades as the highest paid gigolo in Europe, what else would he be doing but running an escort service?
3) Thalia Zedek, “You’re a Big Girl Now” (Kimchee EP)
“I got tired,” are the first words the relentlessly thanatopic singer and guitarist offers — but except on Bob Dylan’s title song, not tired enough.
4) Justin Timberlake, “Like I Love You” (Jive)
‘N Sync update: While Joey Fatone takes Broadway in “Rent,” Lance Bass “remains hopeful” that his backers will come through with the $20 million for his Russian space flight (His backers? He didn’t have the dough himself? And what do they get? Product placement?), Chris Kirkpatrick weighs a bid for the Republican nomination to take on Sen. Bob Graham in ’04 and J.C. Chasez considers trying to save the Devil Rays, Justin Timberlake has gone for the solo career. He’s got the Neptunes at the board, the “Thriller”-period Michael Jackson hat, the “Bad”-period Michael Jackson yelps, the George Michael “Faith” arrangement and a paint-thinner voice.
5) Dave Morey, “Ten at Ten” on KFOG-FM (San Francisco, Sept. 11)
The matchless daily show that usually interpolates “10 great songs” and sound bites from “one great year” made a one-day switch, airing listeners’ request messages and then the songs they wanted played to commemorate the attacks of the year before. Many of the messages were singular. A man noted that “Sept. 11 was always a happy day for me,” because it was his father’s birthday, then told how his father, a crisis manager in Iowa, immediately flew to New York to do what he could. Another man spoke of playing Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” on a jukebox in a bar, upsetting the other patrons — “but that was a time when you felt you could go up to anybody and start talking,” and so he did. But of all the songs chosen — from Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence” to U2′s “Walk On” to the Corrs’ “When the Stars Go Blue” — only Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms” reached the event, and then only in Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing, a hurtful funeral oration for a funeral that, you might have sensed, could take place only in the arc of the oration’s own music.
6) and 7) Bert Berns, “The Heart & Soul of Bert Berns” (Universal) and Solomon Burke, “Don’t Give Up On Me” (Fat Possum)
Berns, a legendary New York record man, was 38 when he died in 1967. Collections honoring such a figure usually come in boxes; ignoring Berns’ pop hits with Van Morrison and the McCoys, this is a single disc of nine deep-soul numbers that Berns wrote and produced, plus one misguided homage. Some of the tracks here were big — Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” and “Cry to Me,” Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters’ “Cry Baby,” Irma Franklin’s “Piece of My Heart,” the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout.” Some — the obscure Hoagy Lands’ heart-stopping “Baby, Come On Home,” Freddie Scott’s “Are You Lonely for Me, Baby” and the Drifters’ “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You” — might never have existed at all. But together these records make a picture so delicate you can almost hear the performers’ fear that anything they do will break it. You hear strange, astonishingly delicate bits of instrumentation — guitar triplets, a hesitating piano, room to breathe all through the arrangements — that produce the feeling that the great voices Berns recorded were not quite of this earth.
“If everybody sang this song, I believe it would save the whole world,” Solomon Burke announced in 1964 as he moved into “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” Today, singing new songs by Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Dan Penn, Tom Waits, Nick Lowe and Brian Wilson, he sounds most of all unsure of himself. He can dominate the material, but just from the outside. Only on producer Joe Henry’s “Flesh and Blood” — deathly slow, every moment felt through and then left behind with regret, the next step taken without an intimation of hope — does he sound like he’s wearing his own clothes.
& 9) “Absolut Pistols” (Absolut Vodka ads, available in postcard form at Tower Records) and the Sex Pistols at Inland Invasion, Devore, Calif. (Sept. 14)
Absolut used the “Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols” art, with the pink “Sex Pistols” in a lumpy version of the bottle. Not quite as nervy as the online Dos Equis “Viva la Revolucion” ad from a few years ago that featured lifelong alcoholic Guy Debord of the Situationist International (“Made his own dead time,” Dos Equis said, rewriting situationist-inspired graffiti from the May ’68 revolt in France, “Live without dead time”), but Dos Equis didn’t have to ask permission to use Debord’s name, because he’d already killed himself. The Sex Pistols — Johnny Rotten, Paul Cook, Steve Jones and Glen Matlock, which as a functioning commercial enterprise last month played for 52,000 people at a punk festival in Southern California — charge and approve, and more power to them.
10) Sleater-Kinney, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco (Sept. 22)
Jane Dark reports: “Having seen Sleater-Kinney four or five times, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them do a cover. And never wanted to — they’re too good at sounding like themselves. They sounded like themselves last night, except more so: Where I was standing, Carrie Brownstein’s vocals and Corin Tucker’s guitar both seemed low, so the band resolved to axioms: Corin’s voice ripping open the complicated, angular spaces of Carrie’s shifting figures. Janet Weiss has grown into a tremendous drummer, beyond tremendous — undeniable.
“The Fillmore seemed a little large, and swallowed up the songs from when they were small: ‘I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,’ which I still believe is their greatest (if not in fact the greatest) song, seemed attenuated, a perfect little bomb that couldn’t blow up the whole room. But the new songs were better than on record, and ‘You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun’ and ‘Words and Guitar’ were better than ever, particularly for what they didn’t do — for all the ways, no matter how massively compelling, they would never be rawk anthems.
“They did do a cover. They did an anthem. It was Bruce Springsteen’s birthday and they hauled off and played ‘Promised Land’ to start the encores. They played it tight and fast with no fooling around, with close harmonies in the chorus, and at the beginning of the third verse where there’s that part about ‘desert floor’ it sounded to me like they were saying ‘Desert Storm’ and suddenly you understood that these women singing a guy’s coming-of-age song weren’t just taking liberties, they were talking liberties: that ‘Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man’ wasn’t an illusion of independence, of the dream of getting out of your hometown, like so many Bruce songs. It was about the inseparability of that particular swagger and being draft age. Bruce’s ‘desert floor’ was a different desert altogether, so far outside your hometown that the people had names you couldn’t pronounce. A couple of minutes later Corin was howling ‘Dig me out’ over and over, and it seemed like the hole was the whole world.”
Thanks to Howard Hampton and Jason Gross of Perfect Sound Forever.
