Real Life Rock (202 page)

8
Charley Patton (1891?–1934),
Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton
(Revenant), con't.
Sausalito Slim writes: “I'm avoiding trying to totally rewrite yet another piece for the Great Metropolitan Newspaper (they now want only ‘interview-based' record reviews, whatever that's supposed to mean. Me: ‘So, Neil Young, how come your new album sucks?' NY:
click
). They held on to my Charley Patton piece for six months, then rejected it
after the box set didn't win a Handy Award, because it wasn't ‘newsworthy.' And Revenant said they couldn't set up a phoner with Patton because he's been hanging with Mingus lately, and he's convinced him that letting the white man call him ‘Charley' is demeaning.”

9
Hobart Smith, “The Coo Coo Bird,” from
Songcatcher II: The Traditions That Inspired the Movie
(Vanguard)
These selections from 1960s Newport Folk Festival performances make it plain that Doc Watson was one of the dullest traditional singers ever to record and that Hobart Smith, a Saltville, Va., banjo player who died in 1965, was one of the most fierce. Surrounded here by Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Fiddlin' Arthur Smith and Roscoe Holcomb, he sounds as if someone or something has set him on fire, as if his only chance to escape is to run right out of his own skin.

10
“R. Kelly, R&B Star, Is Indicted on Child Sex Charges”
(
New York Times
,
June 6)
“Chicago, June 5—R. Kelly, the Grammy-winning R&B singer, was indicted today on 21 counts of child pornography after the authorities said he made a sexually explicit videotape with an underage girl that has been selling in bootleg versions on street corners across the country. . . . In a statement released this afternoon by his Los Angeles lawyer, Mr. Kelly said, ‘Even though I don't believe any of these charges are warranted, I'm grateful that I will have a chance to establish the truth about me in a court of law.' ” “Smacks of a desperation ploy,” writes one correspondent: “his one and only chance to be mentioned in the same breath with Chuck Berry.”

Thanks to Perfect Sound Forever

JULY
8, 2002

1
Jennifer Love Hewitt, “BareNaked” (Jive)
Not that the actress who once noted that the real message of the posters for
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
was “I Know What Your Breasts Did Last Summer” is playing off her body or anything. To start off this co-written single, the Queen of Televised Adorableness moves into a melody seriously picked out on acoustic guitar, then twists a line just like Sheryl Crow: “Didja ever have that dream where you're walking naked down the street?” Another terrific moment: “Didja ever feel so deep that you speak your mind, you put others right to sleep?” sung matter of factly, like someone shaking hair out of her face, and then a chord change hands the number over to the Britney factory. The song fights back, but it never gets out of that hole. Or that cloud. Or whatever that prison of vagueness is.

2
Nicolas Guagnini,
30,000
(1997–2000), in “Ultimas Tendencias” (Latest Directions), Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (June 16)
As you approach the piece in its gallery, bits of black paint on 25 wooden rods, 1 centimeter wide, 45 centimeters high, give the impression of many fragmented faces. Close up, as you circle the work, moving from right to left, the splotches resolve themselves into a single male face: dark hair, dark circles under the eyes, a neatly knotted tie. As you continue to circle, the face begins to dissolve until, when you arrive at the left side of the construction, it's a complete blank. What it was was a model for a proposed monument in a proposed Garden of Memory: a memorial to those executed, tortured to death or disappeared during Argentina's barbaric 1976–83 military dictatorship, a regime that announced itself as El Proceso Reorganización Nacional; Guagnini, born in Buenos Aires, was 10 when it began.

The feeling the thing gave off was this: you're walking down the street, now, 20 years after the fall of the generals, who today live among you, perhaps under house arrest, perhaps free. You think you see someone, someone you've assumed is dead. Like Dr. Zhivago glimpsing Lara from the bus, you rush toward the person—no, it's not who you thought it was. But then you see another one. And another. And another.

3
Nazareth Pacheco,
Untitled 1997–98
,
in “El Hilo de la Trama” (The Thread Unraveled),
Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (Buenos Aires, June 12)
For an exhibition subtitled “Contemporary Brazilian Art,” Pacheco, born in 1961, was working on the world as it was when she was a little girl, fashioning a severe cocktail dress out of black and white beads and safety razors. There was nothing punk about it. Hanging in the air, it was very nervous, very thin, very Warhol Party at the Factory, very neurasthenic, very future lung cancer.

4
Alvin Youngblood Hart,
Down in the Alley
(Memphis International)
Hart's previous re-creations of old American music—country blues, especially, but also his own songs, draped in the must of the past—seemed both felt and forced. You could imagine him in a time machine, dropping in quarter after quarter, the thing buzzing and smoking, giving off mood but never actually going anywhere. But here, as part of the first offering from a modestly ambitious new label—other releases include
The Missing Link
, previously unknown 1979 recordings by the cranky and very dirty hobo singer Harmonica Frank (1908–84), and a live album by Memphis soul singer Carla Thomas—Hart wears the old blues like clothes, kicking up a storm of banjo notes on “Deep Blue Sea” for the pleasure of the sound, clattering around “Broke and Hungry” as if it's his own apartment.

5
Robert Plant,
Dreamland
(Universal)
It happened in 1971 in “Rock and Roll,” “Stairway to Heaven” and “The Battle of Evermore” on
ZoSo
. With visionary versions of '60s chestnuts (“Morning Dew”), scattered country blues themes (“Win My Train Fare Home”) and originals (“Last Time I Saw Her”), it happens now. It's a leap through time—back in time, it seems, until the aura of the unlikely takes over. The freedom in the music is the freedom of rehearing old songs as if they had been imagined by other people, but never written, never recorded. If the songs are to be put into the world someone else will have to do it, so the singer volunteers. In this suspension, everything is in harmony and no possibilities of rhythmic force, of momentum generating more of itself (“Skip's Song,” from the late Skip Spence), are foreclosed. Since Led Zeppelin broke up Robert Plant has been much more a fan than a performer, but here the distinction is meaningless. He'll be 54 on Aug. 20, his skin is creased like tinfoil, but inside it he sounds completely at home.