Real Life Rock (216 page)

7
The Jimmy Show
,
written and directed by Frank Whaley (First Look Pictures)
Whaley as a New Jersey man with a dead-end job who lives for open-mike nights at local comedy clubs, where the heartfelt cry “
YOU SUCK
!” is the most response he ever gets. Or, Bruce Springsteen, the Bizarro Years.

8
Johnny Cash,
American IV: The Man Comes Around
(American/Lost Highway)
The fourth time around for the Old Man Sings New Guy Songs concept is not too many, especially when so many old songs are part of the show: could anyone else let the line “Sometimes in the saddle, I used to go gay” from “Streets of Laredo” slip by without a hint of self-consciousness? There are stunning duds, most notably a version of Ewan MacColl's “The First Time Ever (I Saw Your Face)” that reveals how horrible the song actually is (though there's no footnote about how it inspired “Killing Me Softly,” which is even worse). Cash does best with a strong melody and a light, insistent beat—and here, with Nine Inch Nails' “Hurt,” he goes deeper into the composition than Trent Reznor ever did. As with U2's “One” on his
III
, Cash understands the piece as a weight; he assumes it, and then, as you listen, lets it crush him. When
V, VI
or
VII
comes out posthumously, it won't sound any more posthumous than this.

9
Duke Mitchell, “The Lion,” from
“Gimme Dat Harp Boy!”—The Roots of the Captain
(Ozit Records)
On a label named for the leading lights of London's 1960s underground press, a heroically diverse collection of strange records that prophesied Captain Beefheart—a word like “influenced” is just too paltry—a very hot late '50s–early '60s fuzztone stomp. With the fuzztone played by saxophones.

10
Homer Quincy Smith, “I Want Jesus to Talk With Me” (“Tangled Roots,” Princeton University, Nov. 23)
At a conference on old-time music, Dean Blackwood of the “raw musics” reissue label Revenant talked about the idea of “phantom artists”: people whose names can be found on the labels of old 78s, but about whom nothing is known, including whether the names on the labels are real. He played a 1930 recording by Elvie Thomas, and the 50 or so people in attendance (including Brett and Rennie Sparks of the contemporary country Gothic duo the Handsome Family, whose performance would close the conference, and Tony Glover and John Koerner of the 40-year veteran Twin Cities roots band Koerner Ray & Glover, who had opened the event with their last concert—guitarist Dave Ray would die six days later) shook their heads in wonder.

Blackwood played a 1926 Paramount release by Homer Quincy Smith and mouths dropped open in shock. “I want Jesus to walk with me”—a man sings in a slow, measured cadence, making it plain he understands how much he's asking for. The performance begins with the tinny sound of a calliope, which as Smith's voice goes down to the bottom of a mine turns into a huge pipe organ. At the end, Smith lets his voice rise, until it seems a thing in itself, on its way to Jesus, leaving the singer behind. Another participant had prepared a response to Blackwood's presentation, but as an instance of the great game of “Follow that, motherfucker!” I never saw anything like it.

JANUARY
20, 2003

1
The Best News of the Week: “Arrest in Punk Singer's '93 Slaying” (Associated Press/
San Francisco Chronicle
,
Jan. 12)
“
SEATTLE
—A Florida man has been arrested and charged with murder after DNA linked him to the death of rising punk-rock star Mia Zapata in 1993, police said.

“Police said Jesus C. Mezquia, 48, was arrested late Friday in the Miami area. His DNA profile matched a sample taken from the crime scene more than nine years ago, police said.

“Zapata, the 27-year-old lead singer of The Gits, was last seen alive July 7, 1993, in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Her beaten body was left on a street curb more than a mile away. She had been strangled with the drawstring of her Gits sweatshirt.

“Police had no leads in the slaying. The Seattle music community—including its biggest names, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden—raised $70,000 to hire a private investigator, but eventually the funds dried up.”

2
Donnas,
Spend the Night
(Atlantic)
“Faster than sound,” as Big Brother and the Holding Company put it 35 years ago in San Francisco, up the Peninsula from the Donnas' Palo Alto. But Big Brother didn't have Skyline Boulevard in their blood. Speed-shifting on the Skyline turns at midnight, way above the Stanford hills, is just what the Donnas' new music feels like—except when it feels like X in 1980, the punk band burning their song “Los Angeles” into the pavement like rubber. Today “You Wanna Get Me High” jumps off the radio, as familiar as weather, as much of a shock as lightning hitting your house. “Take It Off” is right behind. This is what rock 'n' roll never forgets—or rather it's what rock 'n' roll always forgets, until people like Brett Anderson, Maya Ford, Torry Castellano and Allison Robertson find it.

3
Alison Krauss and Union Station,
Live
(Rounder)
Fine, fine, but across two discs it's the smallest sound that cuts the deepest: “Forget About It,” sung as if the singer's walking out on a fight at 4 a.m., her tiredness indistinguishable from her contempt.

4
Michael O'Dell, letter to the editor,
City Pages
,
Minneapolis (Dec. 4)
Among pages of letters praising
City Pages
editor Steve Perry's Nov. 27 cover story “Spank the Donkey,” in which Perry argued that people of good will should abandon the Democratic Party in favor of generations of Republican rule sufficient to produce conditions conducive to the election of
Ralph Nader: “You should go back to singing for Journey.”

5
Mark Halliday,
Jab
(University of Chicago Press)
Ken Tucker writes: “Pop and rock have inspired some of the worst poetry ever, from Patti Smith to Tom Clark to Jim Carroll to Exene to Jewel to Amiri Baraka (New Jersey could have avoided the controversy over Baraka's anti-Semitism if they'd just gotten an advance of the Roots'
Phrenology
and heard him ‘perform'). But Mark Halliday consistently makes music work for him as subject matter. In
Jab
he imagines a session trumpet player during the recording of Jan and Dean's ‘Surf City' in 1963: