Real Life Rock (244 page)

3
Gang of Four, “Natural's Not in It,” from
Entertainment!
(EMI)
“The problem-uh, of-uh leisure,” Jon King chanted uncertainly on the band's first album, in 1979; he made the notion sound like a black hole. Now the song will kick off Sofia Coppola's
Marie Antoinette
. “Andy and I thought it was a fantastic idea to use this song for the film, when we heard it was a new take on the costume drama,” King says of himself and Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill. “It seems to have shook up the audience
in Cannes. It could easily be French parochialism about a Yank taking on this iconic figure without due deference. It's the only developed country where there'd be a prosecution of a rapper for criticizing Napoleon and de Gaulle.”

4
Peter Carey,
Theft
(Knopf)
“We had been born walled out from art, had never guessed it might exist,” says an Australian painter in Carey's new novel, “and then we saw what had been kept from us.” The resentment is patent, but still it's a shock when fragments of pop songs—art the man wasn't born walled off from—explode in his mouth as he rails against a 16th-century art critic: “You went to the finest schools all right but you are nothing more than a gossip and a suck-up to Cosimo de' Medici. I was a butcher and I came in through the bathroom window.”

5
Ronnie Dawson et al.,
Rockin' Bones: 1950s Punk & Rockabilly
(Rhino)
Across 101 tracks from 1954 through 1964, the trash (Dwight Pullen's “Sunglasses After Dark”) is so giddy it makes the masterpieces (Elvis's “Baby Let's Play House”) feel like folk music.

6–9
Irma Thomas, Dr. John, Elvis Costello, Allen Toussaint, Bruce Springsteen
In the work Thomas and Dr. John did last fall for the collection
Our New Orleans
(Nonesuch), you could almost hear Katrina blow away decades of complacency. Now they walk blankly through their paces on the formally similar package
Sing Me Back Home
(Burgundy), credited to the no-doubt already disbanded New Orleans Social Club. On Thomas's own
After the Rain
(Rounder), the songs are classy, the arrangements contrived, and once past a tense, every-breath-I-take remake of the Drifters' 1960 “I Count the Tears,” the singing is confused. Costello and Toussaint's
The River in Reverse
(Verve Forecast)—recorded last November and December in Los Angeles and New Orleans—is tedious. But in Concord, California, on June 6, Springsteen's update of Blind Alfred Reed's 1929 complaint “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” rang true even through the self-congratulatory stomp of his huge “Seeger Sessions” band. It was his verse about George W. Bush's first visit to New Orleans after the flood; “He took a look around, gave a little pep talk, said ‘I'm with you,' then took a little walk,” Springsteen sang.

10
Jon Langford,
Nashville Radio
(Verse Chorus Press)
Almost any one of these photo-based paintings of old country singers would serve as a grimy, plastic-covered image on a tombstone. But there's so much hidden-in-plain-sight detail in the pictures—mottos, slight facial distortions, quotations—that by
page 120
Hank Williams as St. Sebastian (in a cowboy hat but otherwise naked from the waist up, from a photo taken after an arrest) seems obvious. All the graves are open.

OCTOBER
2006

1
Weegee, “Heartbreak Pillow” c. 1945, in
Unknown Weegee
,
International Center of Photography, New York City
The street photographer, here shooting a small bed in a small room: a headboard, what looks like a gilt bedspread, and a heart-shaped pillow that might be covered in heavy fabric, big enough for only one head. A decade before the fact, it's the clearest glimpse ever of the inside of Heartbreak Hotel.

2
Peter Spiegelman,
Death's Little Helpers
(Vintage Crime)
A private eye is trying to get information out of his client, who just wants to bite his head off. The Ramones on her stereo aren't helping. Then she puts on Roxy Music, which stops the action the way a sap on the back of the detective's head would in a normal crime novel. “She sat at the drafting table, stubbed out her cigarette, and rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers. . . . I watched her and listened to the music and we sat that way for what seemed a long time.” Four minutes, thirty seconds: The song is “More Than This,” never sounding more true than it does in the silence of a page.

3
The Blow,
Paper Television
(K)
You get the feeling Khaela Maricich's voice can go
anywhere without her leaving her room in Olympia—even, as in “True Affection,” 20,000 leagues under the sea. “You were out of my league,” Maricich sings, bringing the old story back to dry land, maybe making you care more about how her story turns out than you ever did about Jules Verne's.

4
Pere Ubu,
Why I Hate Women
(Smog Veil)
On the inside sleeve: “This is an irony-free recording.” Which refers to . . . the album title? The songs (including “My Boyfriend's Back,” which is not a cover of the 1963 hit by the Angels)? Or how to live?