Real Life Rock (175 page)

Even as a young man, Ashley had a squeaky, baffled old-codger's tone. He reveled in the deadpan mysteries of “Haunted Road Blues” and “Dark Holler.” But those songs, like “Coo Coo Bird” and “House Carpenter,” are the high culture of oldtimey. On
Greenback Dollar
, drawn from Ashley's various string bands as well as his solo recordings, low culture pulls harder: hokum rules. Ashley performed in black-face on the minstrel-show, medicine-show circuit; you can hear the blackface snigger in Ashley's amazingly obscene “My Sweet Farm Girl,” which gets both cunnilingus and analingus into a single verse. You can hear the common, secret culture of the south in Ashley's detailed versions of the true-crime ballads “Frankie Silvers,” “Old John Hardy” and “Naomi Wise.” And in an extremely vicious reading of “ Little Sadie” you can hear a man who might have reason to forget his own name.

3
Julien Temple, on
The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle
(1980) and
The Filth and the Fury
(2000),
Fresh Air
(NPR, July 3)
The director on why
Swindle
was just that—his and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren's attempt to force fans to confront their worship of idol-smashers—and on how
Filth
was his attempt to give the surviving band members the chance to tell their own stories, all of them “scarred for life” by a process in which Temple was not innocent: helping to drag them through “the chemo-therapy of fame.”

4–7
David Gray,
Flesh
(EMI reissue, 1994),
Sell, Sell, Sell
(EMI reissue, 1996),
White Ladder
(ATO) and
Lost Songs
(ATO)
For those who think memoirs written by white people in their 50s or younger are true.

8
White Stripes,
White Blood Cells
(Sympathy for the Record Industry)
As the disc unwinds, the smart, bashing punk offered by a Detroit ex-husband (guitar, vocals) and ex-wife (drums) opens into the near nursery rhyme of “We're Going to Be Friends” or the INXS slickness of “I Think I Smell a Rat.” Maybe Jack and Meg White really do have sympathy for the record industry. But for the moment the heart of their music seems to be in “Offend in Every Way,” a harsh, expert storm of old guitar riffs, old curses and the steady, disinterested beat of someone who sounds as if she learned the story in the womb. The sound starts in Memphis, where the music was recorded, and then heads for the hills.

9
Amir Bar-Lev,
Fighter,
Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival (April 4)
After escaping the Nazis in his native Czechoslovakia, a man returns after the war to help remake his country. The Stalinist government sends him to prison, where every day loudspeakers blast “that optimistic socialist music” (period footage shows a robust, bright-faced young couple in traditional Czech dress dancing a traditional Czech dance; they look just like Ricky Martin and Britney Spears)—“the kind of music my father always called organized farts.”

10
Nick Hornby,
How to Be Good
(Riverhead)
The narrator tells her husband of 20 years she's “been seeing someone.”

“I'm presuming that you'll be moving out in the next couple of days,” he says.

“The affair's over,” she says. “As of this minute.”

“I don't know about that,” he says. “But I do know that no one asks Elvis Presley to play for nothing.”

JULY
30, 2001

1
Club 8,
Club 8
(Secret Agenda)
From a Swedish duo (Karolina Komstedt, vocals; Johan Angergard, instruments and writing), dream pop with the undertow dream pop
needs. “Love in December” plays off the phrase “I'll be there for you,” but where the Rembrandts'
Friends
theme song promises that the singer will make jokes when you can't decide what to wear, here the singer might be promising she'll sit by your deathbed, and the promise is sweet; in the rolling tones of “Say a Prayer” light shades and dark swirl like ye-ye singers entertaining Bateau-Mouche passengers on the Styx, not the Seine. It's a love-and-espionage sound that's been missing since the Belgian band Hooverphonic's 1996
A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular
—apparently a sound only Europeans can make, or hear.

2
Allan Ball, producer,
Six Feet Under
(HBO, July 8)
Thirty-ish Nate, on the trail of his late father's hidden life, discovers his secret hideaway: a grimy four walls behind a restaurant, fitted out with ratty couch, dirty coffee table, big TV, a phonograph and a rack of LPs. It looks just like Beavis and Butt-head's video room. Nate pulls out an album and cues it up: the Amboy Dukes' 1968 psychedelic horror
Journey to the Center of the Mind
, Ted Nugent's first big moment. Nate imagines his father in the place: doing the frug in his three-piece undertaker's suit, smoking dope with bikers, bringing in a prostitute for a blow job, picking off people on the street with a sniper's rifle. Nate falls asleep on the couch; in a dream, he turns to his dad as the queasy '67 sound of “Spooky” fills the dead air: “What the hell is this place, this music? Since when do you listen to the Classics IV? Who the hell are you?”

3
Mary Gauthier,
Drag Queens in Limousines
(In the Black)
A self-consciously dark, would-be Gothic set of songs—so self-conscious, as with the miserabilist autobiography of the title song (“I hated high school, I prayed that it would end / The jocks and their girls, it was their world / I didn't fit in”; Janis Ian's “At Seventeen” was more than anyone needed to hear about this, and that was a quarter-century ago), that there's no room for Gauthier to move to her own rhythms. But on “Our Lady of the Shooting Stars” she doesn't press, doesn't worry that you might miss the point. Her voice makes shadows; the music unwinds slowly, and you have no idea where she's taking you. To the miserabilist “Karla Faye,” as it happens, about Karla Faye Tucker, executed in Texas. (“ ‘
Please don't kill me!' ”
laughed then Gov. George W. Bush over her letter asking for clemency.) It doesn't matter. The voice in “Our Lady” is singular, beyond anything classy country singers like Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch would ever reach for.