Real Life Rock (155 page)

“American studies.”

“How'd you pick that?” I said.

“Same as anyone.” But of the other couple hundred students who had graduated with that degree, I doubt a single one would have given the same reason Kate did. “I love this country,” she said. I thought at first she was being disingenuous, but she got a look in her eye then which I have never forgotten. It was a look of highly intensified complacency—if that's possible—which I was sure no feast or threat of famine would ever shake.

6
Larry Clark,
Tulsa
(Grove)
From the director of
Kids
and
Another Day in Paradise
, his first work: a 1971 book of photos from the junk world of his long-extended youth. Deservedly legendary: if Robert Frank's
The Americans
was a picture of the roads that '50s teen mass murderer Charley Starkweather, the voice of Bruce Springsteen's “Nebraska,” might have taken if he'd gotten away, this is much worse—what if Starkweather had just stayed home?

7
From liner notes to
Nothing Seems Better to Me: The Music of Frank Proffitt and North Carolina—The Warner Collection, Vol. II
(Appleseed)
In 1940 folklorists Frank and Anne Warner taped hill singer Frank Proffitt's offering of a local ballad called “Tom Dooley,” about a 19th century murder of a young woman by her former lover. The song traveled, and in 1958 a collegiate trio from Menlo Park, Calif., made it No. 1 in the nation. (For the whole, rich story, see Robert Cantwell's
When We Were Good: The Folk Revival
.) Proffitt, in a letter from 1959:

I got a television set for the kids. One night I was a-setting looking at some foolishness when three fellers stepped out with guitar and banjer and went to singing Tom Dooly and they clowned and hipswinged. I began to feel sorty sick, like I'd lost a loved one. Tears came to my eyes, yes, I went out and balled on the Ridge, looking toward old Wilkes, land of Tom Dooly. . . . I looked up across the mountains and said Lord, couldn't they leave me the good memories. . . .

Then Frank Warner wrote, he tells me that some way our song got picked up. The shock was over. I went back to my work. I began to see the world was bigger than our mountains of Wilkes and Watauga. Folks was brothers, they all liked the plain ways. I begin to pity them that hadn't dozed on the hearthstone. . . . Life was sharing different thinking, the different ways. I looked in the mirror of my heart—You haint a boy no longer. Give folks like Frank Warner all you got. Quit thinking Ridge to Ridge, think of oceans to oceans.

Isn't this a little too good to be true?

8
Wallflowers on
Saturday Night Live
(NBC, Oct. 21)
I wrote about it weeks ago, but I still don't know how Jakob Dylan gets away with “Sam Cooke didn't know what I know,” let alone four times in one song. He does, though, and it's one of the weirdest accomplishments in pop-music history, and it's not his looks. I don't think.

9
“Crossroads of American Values,” Toyota commercial (NBC, CBS, ABC, beginning October)
Presumably thanks to Robert Johnson estate controller Steve LaVere, one can now enjoy the work of one of America's greatest artists merely by turning on the TV. It's the worst cover ever of a Johnson song, in this case the 1936 “Cross Road Blues,” featuring a horridly hyped-up white blues voice—compared with this, Randy “Mojo” Newman
is
Johnson. “
Down
to the crossroads / Tryin' to flag a ride,” the piece begins; cars are streaming, people are engaging in transactions, it's just full of busyness. “Goin'
down
to the crossroads,” the voice finishes up: “I believe I'm goin' down,” which means,
down
to the Toyota dealer's. Never mind the line from the song itself, about a black man about to be caught alone on a public road after dark, where he's as good as dead: “I believe I'm sinking down,” on his knees, in terror and surrender to his fate. The surrender part still works; only the fate has changed.

10
Waco Brothers at Brownie's (New York, Oct. 21)
“This is a much more
likable
Waco Brothers than last year,” singer and guitarist Jon Langford announced from the stage at the end of an all-day Bloodshot Records showcase at the CMJ Music Marathon. “That's what we're all about,” added guitarist and singer Dean Schlabowske, “likability.” “We don't play no
alt country,”
Langford continued. “That's a
Washington
word! We play real music for normal people!” True to their adopted George W. Bush “all things to all people” posture, they started off with “Fox River,” a celebration of a river that flows where it wants to flow, and ended with guest Sally Timms swaying to the irresistible melody of “Seminole Wind,” an ode to flood control. Otherwise the politics were up to the music, and vice versa, with Langford proposing “W.” as an all-purpose obscenity for the next four years (“ ‘W. off,' ‘W. you,' ‘That last song was pure W.,' ‘They really W.'d us over that time' ”) and introducing mandolinist Tracey Dear—like the rest of the Wacos, save token American Schlabowske, from the U.K.—as “a man who pays his taxes and can't vote! That's what your country was founded on: taxation without representation! Underpaid foreign workers like the Waco Brothers!” The sound fell apart heroically for Neil Young's “Revolution Blues,” put itself back together for Johnny Cash's “Cocaine Blues,” came home for the anti-Clinton “Coo Coo” rewrite “See Willy Fly By” (“Clinton's looking pretty good right now,” Langford said after the show) and rose as high as Waco Brothers music goes with Schlabowske's indelible “If You Won't Change Your Mind,” broken in half by a guitar solo that turned the word “bereft” into a physical sensation—a gorgeous sensation.

NOVEMBER
13, 2000

1
Ethan and Joel Coen,
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(Touchstone Films, due for release Dec. 21)
Three white prisoners escape from a Mississippi chain gang in the middle of the Depression and run straight into a series of blackouts about old-time music—starting when they stop their jalopy to pick up a young black man in suit and tie, bluesman Tommy Johnson, fresh from selling his soul to the devil for guitar prowess and ready to rock. Unlike the younger Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson (“Cool Drink of Water Blues,” 1928, though here he's given Skip James' music to play) actually bragged of the transaction. (What could be cooler?) When in the Coen brothers' version he's seized by the Ku Klux Klan for ritual sacrifice, he figures it's just payback coming sooner than he bargained for.

It's a scene that recalls
The Birth of a Nation
, but it's so culturally blasphemous there are really no precedents for it. In a
clearing in the dead of night, hundreds of Klansmen in pure white robes whirl about like a college marching band at halftime, executing lightning moves as if they were born to them. They come to rest in formation, facing a red-robed Grand Master. Johnson is brought before him—and then, from a high platform, from inside the Master's mask, issues the most horrifying, the most full-bodied, the most perfect rendition of the ancient plea “Oh Death” (“Won't you spare me over for another year?”) imaginable. As the long, tangled song goes on, with no accompaniment but the audience, the victim and the night, a lynching becomes a philosophy lesson—and the slapstick escape that follows takes off none of the chill.

2
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
soundtrack (Mercury)
Typically, the dynamism of the film doesn't translate into disembodied recordings—if, as with the torrential “Man of Constant Sorrow” the cons-plus-Johnson cut in a radio station, it's even the same recording. Pick to click, among the modern re-creations by the likes of Ralph Stanley, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, the Cox Family and the Whites: running under the titles, Harry McClintock's 1928 version of the hobo jungle anthem “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”