Real Life Rock (184 page)

8
James Mathus & His Knockdown Society,
National Antiseptic
(Mammoth)
The Squirrel Nut Zippers have their old-music cabaret act down, but they're too cute. So the North Mississippi Allstars, who are not cute but don't sing as well as Mathus, shove the Zippers' leader face down into the dirt and he comes up spitting it out, but not all of it. Charley Patton's “Shake It and Break It” turns into rubber band music, but there's a rhythmic undertow to all the best tunes here, pulling back against the dominant rhythm, the players questioning the voice and vice versa. “Spare Change” (“Ain't worth a dime today”) is dark, deadly, the blues as Chuck Berry once defined them: “When you ain't got no
money.”
It's a modest version of Otis Rush's deep-blues “Double Trouble,” all on the surface, as deep as it has to be.

9
Fastbacks, “Waterloo Sunset,” and Heather Duby, “The Way Love Used to Be,” from
Give the People What They Want: The Songs of the Kinks
(Sub Pop)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? There isn't a performance on
Hank Williams: Timeless
(with Bob Dylan, Sheryl Crow, Mark Knopfler with Emmylou Harris, Emmylou Harris with Mark Knopfler, Keith Richards, Beck and Johnny Cash on hand) worth playing twice.
Give the People What They Want
features mostly performers who wouldn't know how. But here—with the two most uncoverable songs Ray Davies ever wrote—two singers, faced with exquisite melodies they cannot in fact sing, humble the songs before the flatness of their own voices. Duby doesn't even try to make “The Way Love Used to Be”—a reach into a past that never existed that is so passionate you can imagine it was composed by Jack the Ripper—her own; she merely lets it carry her. Can she keep the song's promise? Yes, because while Davies was singing to himself, Duby is singing to another person, a person she has herself made real. “Terry and Julie” in “Waterloo Sunset” might have been Davies' wave to Terrence Stamp and Julie Christie, but as Kim Warnick looks out the window of the song's old man, she is both of the people she gazes at; she owns the world.

10
Wayne Robins writes:
“20 Oct: I'm riding the subway this afternoon down from Times Square. Three black men with plenty of mileage on them get on unobtrusively at 34th St. One of them says to a woman in a loud voice: “Ma'am, do you know what time it is?” The elderly man sitting across from me looks at his watch and yells back, ‘One o'clock.' ‘No!' one of the trio shouts gleefully. ‘It's doo-wop time!' At which time the three men begin singing one of the most beautiful a cappella versions of ‘In the Still of the Night' I've ever heard. As I reach into my wallet to put a dollar in the contribution bag, I realize my face feels turned inside out from smiling. It was the happiest I've been for 60 seconds in the last five weeks.”

NOVEMBER
12, 2001

1
Beth Orton, “Stolen Car,” from
Central Reservation
(Arista, 1999)
A guitar plays
like a cello, straight through to the end, through feedback, as if nothing can change. That sense of rootedness, of permanence, drives this broken-voiced ballad of no way out. The woman who steps forth—as opposed to the younger person who sings the smooth tunes that follow this opening cut—is a familiar face in certain parts of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Coventry, Leeds. She's in her 40s, in her 50s, still beautiful, her face longer than it was, her eyes piercing, her jaw a warning. Like the heroine of Alison Fell's 1984 novel
Every Move You Make
, she's been through feminism when it was a closed, even Stalinist movement; unlike the heroine of Rod Stewart's “You Wear It Well,” the radical blues have left marks all over her. Now she lives alone. She teaches or runs a gallery or works in publishing. Everything she left behind, everything that left her behind, is in her voice, which says there was no other choice, and that it was a choice.

2
Bob Giraldi, director,
Dinner Rush
(Worldwide)
Though it opens with a mob execution right in the street, within minutes the film is all laughs: in Tribeca, in a one-time trattoria that's now the latest genius-chef hot spot (the real Gigino, a trattoria on Greenwich St. between Duane and Reade), everything goes wrong. Taking time out to place one last ruinous bet, and taking time out from that to fuck the receptionist who the chef thinks is his girlfriend, the sous-chef is throwing the kitchen out of whack. A famous food critic arrives and raises her eyebrow in doubt while the chef panics. A gallery owner blows in with a huge party and within minutes has bugs crawling over everyone's flesh. The power goes out. Gangsters show up with no intention of leaving until the place is in their name. John Corbett (Sarah Jessica Parker's boyfriend in
Sex and the City
) sits at the bar, amused at the human comedy—and at some invisible point everything that was funny is suddenly not.

3
Good Rockin' Tonight—The Legacy of Sun Records
(London/Sire)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? Here, for a TV documentary, everyone from Paul McCartney to Bob Dylan to Sheryl Crow to Bryan Ferry add nothing to Memphis explosions, from Charlie Rich's deep “Who Will the Next Fool Be” to Warren Smith's dark-hollow “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache” to Elvis' slow-walking “Don't Be Cruel” (yes, a Sun recording—by Jerry Lee Lewis), while Johnny Hallyday and Elton John massacre Carl Perkins' “Blue Suede Shoes” and Lewis' “Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On.” Only one man escapes to tell the tale: Kid Rock, with the Howling Diablos of Detroit, leaping onto “Stick” McGhee and His Buddies' “Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” (a hit on Atlantic in 1949, and a Lewis touchstone from that day to this) as if it's a horse he can ride all the way into the present, which he does, shouting “
NO FLIES ON ME, SUCKERS
!” all the way home.

4
Michael Guinzburg,
Top of the World, Ma!
(Cannongate)
Pure raunch—which turns into pain and suffering, which turns into a reader's empathy for people you can hardly believe exist: Willem de Kooning cured of Alzheimer's by a miracle drug and fucking his brains back, a teenager cheating on her mother, a man with a world-historical case of acne, a young hustler chasing a rumor that Jackson Pollock ended his life as a pedophile and, near the end, a new board game, “The American Dream,” where you win by parlaying immigrant identities and attendant handicaps into money—that is, the American Dream. “Mariah's a Guatemalan midget with cooking skills but no English at Georgetown Law,” says one player of her opponent, “and I'm a Lithuanian prostitute with AIDS just off the boat working in a
Dunkin Donuts.”
No happy ending.

5
Hissyfits, “Baby,” on
Letters From Frank
(Top Quality Rock and Roll)
Standing out on a disappointing album from Brooklyn's sunniest, trashiest, most worried guitar-based rave-up girl group, a floater: a small voice that takes on deeper textures with every phrase, a simple pulse that goes in circles even as it rushes toward the finish line.