Real Life Rock (131 page)

According to one account, Frankie Baker shot Allen Britt in St. Louis on Oct. 15, 1899, and ever since, as was said of Abraham Lincoln after John Wilkes Booth shot him, they've belonged to the ages, or whoever wanted them. No one cared about the facts; the story had room in it, and so singers, composers, playwrights, painters all took their places in the tale, changing names, faces, races, time and place. On
Songs From My Funeral
, the piece begins as if in some '50s nightclub in L.A., after hours, James Dean on the bongos, Chet Baker looking on, wondering whether to join in, wondering if he's Frankie or Johnny, wondering if he'd rather cheat and die or be wronged and kill. As Domino tells the story in this club—like someone pulling petals off a daisy: he loves me, he loves me not—it's a story everyone knows, something that happened back in the '20s, in New York, wasn't that it, Greenwich Village, didn't Edmund Wilson write something about this, something about him and Edna St. Vincent Millay? Or was it up in Harlem?

Domino is now coming out of
Anna Christie
, and as she fills in the details, the very perfection of her face—and, beneath the skin, the inhumanity perfection suggests—sexualizes the legend in a wholly new way. Suddenly, as Domino recites the necessary opening lines, “Frankie and Johnny were lovers/Oh lordy how they could love,” you see Frankie's hands all over Johnny, unbuttoning his new suit, Johnny's hands under Frankie's dress, right on the street. When Frankie sees Johnny with Alice Fry, your heart goes into your throat, just as Frankie's goes into hers: No, no, you say, it can't end this way! But she has to shoot him—“Rooty toot toot,” as Domino makes it happen, Frankie's last words before she gives up her life to myth.

Something this complex, unhurried and seemingly uncontrived—unfolded—happens with almost every tune. You can't get close to the bottom of any of them, even though you may have heard these songs all your life; Domino has, after all, and she hasn't gotten to the bottom of any of them, just dropped the false bottom of overfamiliarity out of each. As a result the old music comes back to a listener not like a ghost from the past, begging to be remembered, but as if from the future, certain nothing we do can change anything.

2–8
“America Takes Command—1950s into the 1960s,” in “The American Century Part II, 1950–2000,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Lisa Phillips, chief curator (New York, through Feb. 13)
On the top floor, a moan from several galleries away took me to the section's “Culture Site,” a collection of representative books, magazine covers, film stills and, in this moment, Hank Williams' 1950 “Ramblin' Man.” Surrounded by ads for Cold War hysteria and the post-war boom, it sounded so old—older than any other object present on any of the floors, except, in the “Monochromatic Abstraction” mezzanine, from 1966, Brice Marden's peasoup, prairie-flat
Nebraska
, which could have had a little radio playing the Bruce Springsteen song hidden behind it. Then Williams was followed by Muddy Waters' 1950 “Rollin' Stone,” and then Elvis Presley's 1955 “Mystery Train.” (Billboard for the whole “American Century Part II” show: Warhol's
Double Elvis
doubled, under the headline “
GET HERE BEFORE ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING
”—shouldn't it be “leaves”?) Contextualized like this, “Mystery Train” sounded exactly like “Rollin' Stone”—it was all in the rhythm, speeded up but also opened up—until Elvis hit his high notes, and Williams was back in the saddle. Then Elvis laughed, and he was on his own.

The picture Williams had taken me away from was Wallace Berman's 1964
Papa's Got a Brand New Bag
, a fierce collage with a lot of story-untold empty space: Muhammad Ali in a cap, shouting, looking just like Elijah Muhammad; three Rolling Stones, in dark cutouts; a figure I couldn't recognize except generically, a type-case of the American drifter-killer, flanked by two detectives; people with swastikas on their
foreheads; naked white women, from a sex magazine, probably, though in this unstable setting they looked as if they were on their way to the gas chambers. It all fit with a poster for the 1954 radioactive-ants movie
THEM!
On the far left, a fleeing man looked exactly like Ronald Reagan; in the center, a speech balloon coming out of a woman's mouth read, “Kill one and two take its place!” Well, isn't that the American way? Buy one, get one free?

9
Handsome Family,
Odessa
(Carrot Top)
From 1994, this turned up in a bin: first, fully realized attempts by Chicagoans Brett and Rennie Sparks to transfer the fatalism of the old murder ballads into modern life. As in “Moving Furniture Around,” a celebration of clinical depression.

10
Bobby Fuller Four, “A New Shade of Blue,” on
Boys Don't Cry
soundtrack (Koch)
The first sign the filmmakers are going to get Charles Starkweather country right comes right at the beginning, when Brandon and Candace, neither of whom will survive the film, pick each other up at a bar, and this gorgeous rockabilly crying song—altogether forgotten until now, it seems to have been made to be forgotten—is floating in the background. It was 1966, the Texas band had scored with “I Fought the Law,” they filled up an album, this was on it, and then Fuller was found dead in an L.A. parking lot. Of “asphyxiation,” the coroner ruled. Because someone had poured gasoline down Fuller's throat.

JANUARY
24, 2000

1
Warren Zevon,
Life'll Kill Ya
(Artemis)
The old rounder borrows his old melodies, his old ideas and kicks over his own rocking chair: “I Was in the House When the House Burned Down” is “Excitable Boy” with humor intact, but no longer a joke, because when the house burned down the singer found he had nowhere else to go; he still lives in the ashes. So he blows his horn, gets syncopation out of his guitar, passes it off to the drummer and steps up to the mike. As Zevon imagines himself back to the Crusades, back to Graceland (“He was an accident waiting to happen,” he begins, speaking like a witness in court, a storm-warning guitar line hanging over his head. “Most accidents happen at home”), into the ground, the album takes on such a sweep that the house that burned down comes to seem less a place than Zevon's whole era, that time Billy Joel sings about in “We Didn't Start the Fire.” Of course we did, Zevon says. Want a light?

2
John Carman, “Mob Rule”
(
San Francisco Chronicle
,
Jan. 14)
Saturday Night Live
ran a hysterical parody of
Sopranos
reviews on Jan. 15, but unlike most of the cream-in-their-jeans crowd—TV critics who sounded like nothing so much as the swells who take Tony to their golf club and treat him like an exotic pet—Carman has something to say. “There's a reason Tony can't find his bliss at home; at his strip-joint hangout; or in his psychoanalyst's office. He's a criminal; his life has rotted from the inside out.” But that's just a warm-up. The code of the show is in its language, Carman writes, in all the variations of “fuck” except the one that takes a “Let's” in front of it: “The f-word as an adjective serves to demean the noun it modifies. As a nonsexual verb, it demeans the direct object. The language itself is lifenegating, and the negation of life is the rampant disease corrupting Tony's two families, biological and criminal.”

3
Etta James, “A Sunday Kind of Love,” on
Her Best
(Chess)
In 1960, “Miss Peaches” drifts around the old song as if it's “Since I Fell for You,” as if she has all the time in the world.

4
Bonnie Raitt voted into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in first year of eligibility
I was complaining about this to another music writer. “I think her body of work is superior to Ruth Brown's,” he said of the R&B pioneer inducted in 1993. But neither Brown nor Raitt has a body of work. Brown had a string of singles, Raitt has a bunch of albums; you flip through them, looking for a moment when you say, yes, this made a difference. If you place Brown's 1949
“Teardrops from My Eyes” against, say, Raitt's 1989
Nick of Time
, you'll see that mannerism can never speak the language of style—and that Raitt, in her honest, dedicated way as false a singer as Michael Bolton (who really does love “When a Man Loves a Woman,” you know), is being honored for her class. In the Marxist sense.