Real Life Rock (121 page)

8
Old Time Relijun,
Uterus and Fire
(K)
A punk trio that believes in the past—and that running headlong down a path naked will get you somewhere you want to be. “Jail” echoes both the thrash Descendents of Redondo Beach and Chicago bluesman Magic Sam: desperate, a confession, weird moments of reflection in the noise. “I have a lot of time on my hands,” the singer tells you. “I got a lot of good books to read.”

9
Magnetic Fields,
69 Love Songs,
Vols. 1–3 (Merge)
Stephin Merritt of this and other bands is running this show—writing all the songs, singing most of them in his cloying, sub-Morrissey voice, listing 90 instruments he plays, including not merely “jug” but “Paul Revere jug,” which is to say that the preciousness of the project is all too apparent. (The voice is cloying on purpose, you fool.) But there's something intriguingly tentative and random about the words and the music, in the stupid puns and often slow, counted cadences. Just when you're ready to give up, a different singer will come in like someone on the street waving at the floats in a passing parade. You might find the radiant Shirley Simms hammering an old country vocal to a Bo Diddley beat on “I'm Sorry I Love You” (“It's a phase I'm going through”—you ought to hear that on
Sex and the City
before the season is out) or Claudia Gonson on “Yeah! Oh Yeah!”—though the exclamation points
are strictly postmodernist. A rough version of the guitar line from the Feelies' “Raised Eyebrows”—itself the inheritor of every great guitar melody from “Wild Weekend” to “Layla”—kicks off a very up-to-date version of Paul and Paula's horrid 1963 “First Quarrel.” Gonson is flagellating herself over the possibility that her marriage has always been a joke no one bothered to tell her: “Did you dread every phone call, could you not stand me from the start?” “Yeah, oh yeaaaaaaah,” Merritt moans in languid ecstasy. It's clear this is how the husband gets off; for the wife you can't tell, but I doubt it.

10
The Bad Seed
,
with Patty McCormack (Castro Theater, San Francisco, July 16)
In 1956 a 10-year-old McCormack played an 8-year-old serial killer in blond pigtails named Rhoda; the role was so perverse and her performance so fierce she burned up a whole career in advance. This night, with McCormack appearing after a screening of the film, the theater was packed with raucous gay men, but once the movie started the hooting part of the crowd was often shushed by those who didn't want to miss a word.

McCormack came out to be interviewed by
Village Voice
gossip columnist Michael Musto. Instead of the female female-impersonator you often get with half-forgotten mini-legends, she sat down as a fast, cool, completely alive woman in her 50s. She looked like a cross between Carol Lynley and Debbie Harry; Musto couldn't keep up with her. On her Catholic mother refusing to let her do the 1959 shocker
Blue Denim
: “[At 14] I thought about that and understood: I was allowed to kill people as long as I didn't sleep with them.” (Lynley ended up getting pregnant and almost having an abortion instead.) Patty's little Rhoda dispatched whoever got in her way with whatever was handy—fire, blunt instruments, a staircase; the story's conceit was that it was all in the genes, because her grandmother was a homicidal maniac. “Did you play Rhoda as pure evil, or as cursed?” Musto asked. “I played her as right,” McCormack said without a smile, and nobody made a sound.

SEPTEMBER
7, 1999

1
The Best News of the Week,
Denver Post
,
Aug. 22
“Universal Records has confirmed that Spin Doctors lead singer Chris Barron [‘Little Miss Can't Be Wrong' etc.] has been diagnosed with a rare paralysis of his vocal cords. Barron is meeting with doctors who have indicated that he may never regain the full use of his voice. He now cannot speak above a whisper. All promotional activities for the band's new CD, ‘Here Comes the Bride,' are on hold.”

2
Trailer Bride,
Whine de Lune
(Bloodshot)
A small cowboy combo that plays as if it's not expecting more than the 10 people in the audience to show up, fronted by a woman who sings like she's wondering who she has to fuck to get out of going through everything twice. As if anybody knows.

3
Alison Krauss,
Forget About It
(Rounder)
For the title song, built around the way they say it and mean it not in mob-movie New York but in the rest of the country—not far from the way Bob Dylan said “Don't think twice,” a whole lost world in three words. As always with Krauss, whose voice has the unsatisfiable yearning of her own bluegrass fiddle—unsatisfiable because the sound remembers a land of milk and honey—she needs hills and valleys in the melody to come to life, to pull away from the music and the listener, to get lost, then to come back just far enough to pull your string: to pull it right out of you. Songs on an even plane defeat her every time.

4
Marine Research,
Sounds from the Gulf Stream
(K) and “Parallel Horizontal”/“Angel in the Snow”/“I Confess” (K single)
Moving from Talulah Gosh to Heavenly to her new five-piece, Amelia Fletcher of Oxford, England, has lost a step each time. The fatigue now drawing her voice back still doesn't hide what makes that voice, all sweetness and worry, one of a kind.

5
Aspen Festival Orchestra, Kyoko Takezawa, soloist, Elgar's “Violin Concerto in
B Minor” (Aspen Music Festival, Aug. 15)
In “Allegro”—deliriously romantic and ominous—the whole first movement seemed to resolve itself into chase, run. The piece was the apparent source of all the high-class, high-gloss film noir music of the '40s (
Gilda
,
The Lady from Shanghai
,
Double Indemnity
, any production that could afford a real score)—so much so that the music, played now, isn't merely familiar, it's fabulously generic. You cannot attach, say, a certain gesture by Rita Hayworth or Orson Welles or Barbara Stanwyck to a given lift in the music, a particular door opening into a darkened room to a threatening slide on Takezawa's special “Hammer” Strat—I mean,
Strad
, her 1707 “Hammer” Stradivarius. But moment to moment the piece, read back on the films that plundered it, gives up near-images that stop the soundtracks as they play in your head. The plot rushes forward, breaking over the hesitations of the actors, smearing all of them into one.