Real Life Rock (186 page)

3
www.findagrave.com
It was Connie Nisinger, a high school librarian in the
Midwest, who decided that this interesting site needed a picture of the final resting place of Billy Lyons, shot dead in St. Louis on Christmas Day, 1895, his corpse kicked through time ever after in the countless versions of “Stag-o-lee,” “Stacker Lee” and “Stagger Lee.” Click “Search by name,” type in “William Lyons,” and there is Lyons' plot in St. Peter's Cemetery in St. Louis, sec. 5, lot 289. The site allows you to “Leave flowers and a note for this person”: keep clicking and you can leave a cigar or a beer instead. Advertising bars include “Contact Your High School Class-mates”—to find their graves?

4
Hanif Kureishi,
Gabriel's Gift
(Scribner)
Screenwriter for the socially commonplace and artistically unique London romances
My Beautiful Laundrette
and
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
, writer and director of the stupidly dismissed
London Kills Me
, author of
The Buddha of Suburbia
,
The Black Album
and
Intimacy
, Kureishi is a born storyteller, but he is not a natural novelist. On the page, his dialogue can seem perfunctory, looking for another medium, a way from one place to another, not what a person would say: “ ‘Talent might be a gift but it has to be cultivated. The imagination is like a fire or a furnace; it has to be stoked, fed and attended to.' ” The man talking, speaking to a teenage boy, is a great rock star from the 1970s, still worshipped; far more alive on the page than the star or the boy—or dead on the page, which here amounts to the same thing—is Rex, the boy's father, who once played with the star. Save for his moments in that man's sun, he has been a nobody, and he has stoked, fed and attended to his failure until, after nearly 30 years, he can almost live off of it.

There are thousands upon thousands of middle-aged men like Rex, each one the butt of every musician joke, their delusions of glamour inseparable from their resentment of almost everyone they meet, men for whom aging means only helpless self-parody. Yet while Kureishi's version contains them all, gives off the smell of fear they carry, Rex is not only a version, a type or a joke. Even though you may not want to, you can see him, imagine the way he talks, the way he moves, and even if you know too many people whose lives he is living out, he doesn't look or move like they do. In that sense Kureishi, if not a natural novelist, is a real one.

5–6
Ernest C. Withers,
The Memphis Blues Again: Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
,
selected and with text by Daniel Wolff (Viking Studio) &
American Roots Music,
edited by Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren and Jim Brown (Abrams)
While not as rich as Withers'
Pictures Tell the Story
, in which music was one element in the great social drama of the Civil Rights movement, there is a reminder of Withers' true vision in a portrait of Aretha Franklin at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference event two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., her face swollen—from tears or a beating you can't tell. Otherwise there's merely fabulousness, everywhere you look: Louis Jordan and his father in matching 10-gallon fedoras, the Moonglows in action, a crowd waiting outside the Club Ebony in the rain, B. B. King accompanied on facing pianos by Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich, a Hollywood Elvis back in town and posing as if he's already slept with everyone in it. It's history as rumor, as a story you know can never be nailed down, proven, finished, only forgotten, until someday people will find these pictures and disbelieve everything they say.

American Roots Music
—the book of the PBS TV series—is very nearly a miracle: it makes the twisted tale of American music, its strands intertwined like lovers hiding from the light, seem bland. Worse, it makes the tale seem obvious. And, as it is obvious, it has nothing new to say, which means that as a tale it was over before it began.

The Withers book is $14 cheaper, too.

7–8
Britney Spears Live from Las Vegas
(HBO, Nov. 18) &
Jennifer Lopez Live
(NBC, Nov. 20)
Howard Hampton writes: “In case you missed it, I can tell you that I watched Britney Spears' concert and I missed it too. It's as if she's made of flesh-colored Teflon.
You can look, but your gaze just slides right off the surface. It's not simply that she lacks imagination, personality, charisma, or stage presence” (hosting
Saturday Night Live
last year, she had it all) “but that this absence is the structuring principle of her act. There's not even the pretense that those different voices are really coming out of her body, to the point where her piped-in vocals were like canned fetish objects, floating over the stage like props. It comes across like a Vegas Club Silencio converted into a vocational junior high school for strippers.” Two nights later, Gary Radnich of San Francisco NBC-TV affiliate KRON ended his nightly sports report with detailed comparison footage of the Spears and Jennifer Lopez specials, naming Lopez the clear winner because she had more costume changes—and because while “When Jennifer Lopez crawled on the floor she acted like she meant business. When Britney Spears crawled on the floor you wanted to say, ‘Get up.' ”

9
Mick Jagger,
Goddess in the Doorway
(Virgin)
Reviews are saying this isn't really terrible. It's really terrible.

10
Berkeley, Calif., Contra Costa Ave. (Nov. 17)
On our woodsy street, the mail carrier walks with dignity, handling dogs, obstructions of foliage and hanging gardens of huge spider webs with determination, humor and a pith helmet. After watching her negotiate a particularly steep and slippery walkway, a neighbor offered encouragement: “All this, and then the
anthrax
terrorists. I'll bet when you went to work for the post office you didn't realize you'd be a, a—” The neighbor couldn't find the right word. “A warrior!” the mail carrier said.

Thanks to Andrew Hamlin

DECEMBER
10, 2001

1
Jim Borgman, editorial cartoon
(
Cincinnati Enquirer
,
Dec. 1)
In 1963, for the sleeve of
Meet the Beatles
(
With the Beatles
in the U.K.), photographer Robert Freeman pictured John, George and Paul from left to right on top, with Ringo directly below Paul: the left sides of the faces white, the right sides in shadow, then-shockingly long black hair and black turtlenecks isolating the faces against the starkest black background imaginable. All Borgman did was black out the two faces on the left. On the occasion of George Harrison's death, nothing I read, heard or saw came close.

2
Paula Frazer,
Indoor Universe
(Birdman)
The former singer for Tarnation—which always seemed to imagine itself as the lounge act at Heartbreak Hotel—still can't crush a fly in her fist. It's not that she won't; she can't close anything all the way. Her orchestrations might be made out of swamp gas; the closer she gets to the objects of her desire, the less substantial they are. Making her way into the vampirish “Stay as You Are” as if she's pushing cobwebs out of her face with every step, she flats on her words as they end a phrase, hesitating, almost stopping. Patrick Main's organ carries her forward like a stick on a stream. You can play the song again and again, waiting for the melody to exhaust itself, to reveal why something so familiar sounds less obvious each time you hear it—though you might also play it again and again because only three songs later Frazer is singing with a rose clenched in her teeth, which sort of ruins the effect.