Real Life Rock (208 page)

7
Robert Greenfield,
S.T.P.—A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones
(Da Capo)
A reissue of the 1974 account of the Rolling Stones' 1972 return to the U.S.A.—with tickets, at least in San Francisco, to make amends for the 1969 horror at Altamont, a flat $5. This is the same tour followed in Robert Frank's film
Cock-sucker Blues
—named for the song Mick Jagger sings as the picture begins—and Greenfield's book exposed how much of the movie was staged, and how much of the tour, crowded with celebrities from Truman Capote to Marisa Berenson to Dick Cavett and other rock gods, was not. Again and again the book took its readers into dark rooms, then woke them up in time to make the bus—or would have, had the book had readers. In 1974 it was, as Greenfield notes in a new foreword, “the very first full-length book ever published about the rock 'n' roll tour. Those times being what they were, though, no one expected those who loved the Stones to rush out and buy this volume. They were too busy getting high and listening to
Exile on Main Street
. Which is why only fifteen hundred hardback copies and thirty-five hundred trade paperback copies were ever printed.” It entered oblivion as a classic.

Today the book is confusing. What Greenfield describes is happening so fast no sense of in-the-past holds; the action seems to be taking place in the present moment. And then, on the last page, with the tour running into the next year: “Michael Jagger had his whole life in front of him, with several already left behind. The Stones would go on as long as he needed them to. . . . For Jagger was a young man, just thirty.” At this point the book falls on the reader like a building, carrying all the weight of what the Rolling Stones so purposefully accomplished in the few years before Greenfield drew what he seems to have suspected might not have been an arbitrary line, along with the weight of what they didn't bother to do in the many years that, now, bring us to the band's latest swing through the economy.

8
Dixie Chicks,
Home
(Open Wide/Columbia)
With all the publicity about rebel girls with big smiles taking on the Nashville machine and taking country music back where it belongs, you expect more than . . . dobros.

9
Hall Robinson Choir, “St. Louis Blues,” from
Walk Right In—When the Sun Goes Down: The Secret History of Rock 'n' Roll, Vol. 1
(Bluebird/RCA)
There are endless riches in archivist Colin Escott's new excavations in the Bluebird and RCA vaults, and imaginative, non-canonical programming: here the classically trained baritone Paul Robe-son's 1926 “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the Carter Family's 1930 “Worried Man Blues” and Mississippi blues singer Robert Petway's unnervingly simple 1941 “Catfish Blues” seem to come from the same radio station. But there is an odd displacement in “St. Louis Blues,” the last cut: 20 professional male and female voices with a repertoire of spirituals recording in Hollywood in 1939 and here led by an exuberant woman singing as if from the soundtrack of Vincente Minnelli's 1943 all-black musical
Cabin in the Sky
. It might take only a moment to realize that Ike and Tina Turner's 1966 “River Deep, Mountain High” is a rewrite, and that its producer and co-writer
Phil Spector had to have heard the Hall Robinson Choir's version—and that when he took Ike and Tina into Gold Star Studios in Hollywood his goal was to top it. Which he did.

10
24 Hour Party People
,
directed by Michael Winterbottom (United Artists)
Manchester, England, late '70s: There are passages in this droll dramatization of a long episode in pop history that show Joy Division finding their sound, then what seem like huge crowds in tiny nightclubs finding and losing themselves in the now stark, now all but dreamed songs, and they are the most powerful and mysterious musical sequences I've ever seen on film. Actor Sean Harris looks little like Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, but the nervousness of his dancing—a trance you wouldn't want to enter and may barely stand to watch—makes David Byrne in
Stop Making Sense
look like Daffy Duck. Harris' Curtis is on to something, he hasn't decided whether he can say what it is, when he hangs himself the movie goes from Olympus to a parking lot, and you no more than the people in the movie will believe that neither you nor they will ever make it back.

SEPTEMBER
23, 2002

1
Press release, D. Baron media relations (Sept. 12)
“Los Angeles, CA—Celebrated recording artist composer Warren Zevon, one of rock music's wittiest and most original songwriters, has been diagnosed with lung cancer which has advanced to an untreatable stage.” Playing: “Mohammed's Radio,” the churchy live version from the 1982
Stand in the Fire
(“Even Jimmy Carter's got the highway blues”); the delirious rising in the 1978 “Johnny Strikes Up the Band”; the regret in the melody of “Looking for the Next Best Thing” in 1982; the shared dread of “Run Straight Down” in 1989; the delicacy of “Suzie Lightning” in 1991 and “Mutineer” in 1995. From 1976, when he went public with “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” on the album
Warren Zevon
, it has been more than a quarter century of gunplay and bravado, not for a moment concealing Zevon's loathing for his own betrayals and those of the world around him. “I was in the house when the house burned down,” he sang in 2000. From afar he has been a good friend.

2
Music in Balthazar (New York, Sept. 5)
For a still-hot restaurant with a reputation for cool to uphold, either a new concept of cool or real problems with the concept. Playing indistinctly in the background as we come in after 11—can it be, no, it can't be, why
is
it? It's Scott McKenzie's “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” from 1967, one of the sappiest songs of all time. Then a lot of terrible
Saturday Night Live
–style fake jazz. Then finally, loud, every note standing out: “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, probably the greatest pop recording of the last 50 years, and not dinner music. Not even walking-out music. Not even cool. Far beyond cool, in a realm where the concept is an embarrassment.

3–4
Slobberbone,
Slippage
(New West) and Plastic Mastery,
In the Fall of Unearthly Angels
(Magic Marker)
On “Springfield, IL.,” the first track of Slobberbone's
Slippage
, the hard, loose, fast band from Denton, Texas, combines a desperate country vocal that's all over the room with a guitar playing off its own promises, never quite paying off, replacing each moment where the music falls just short with a greater promise. You get the feel of a terrible place the musicians want only to escape—why is it so full of life? In a much more punk manner, with floating chords and vocals lifting away from their songs, Plastic Mastery of Tallahassee catches the same fear, the same hurry. It's a queer sound: the sound of people almost but not sure there is no place for them.