Real Life Rock (251 page)

7
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss,
Raising Sand
(Rounder, 2007)
The old rocker and the bluegrass queen: very nice people. Very polite. To each other, to the songs, and to you. But all the singing is whispering and it was the dullest album of the year.

Onstage, though, fervor comes out—especially for Led Zeppelin songs that go back to the woods. On YouTube videos from this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Druids in “Battle of Evermore” take to the skies: two final minutes of furious mandolin slashing and Plant's snaggletoothed hair bucking (“Bring it back! Bring it back!” My God, are you sure? Bring what dragon back?) as if the notes have him on a trip wire. For “When the Levee Breaks,” with Plant quieting Krauss's keening fiddle to let lines from Bob Dylan's “Girl from the North Country” float through to be lost in the flood, the song sweeps up Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, who recorded it in 1929, and walks their ghosts across the stage.

8
Carolyn Jessop with Laura Palmer,
Escape
(Broadway Books, 2007)
“I was born into a radical polygamist cult. At eighteen, I became the fourth wife of a fifty-year-old man. I had eight children in fifteen years. When our leader began to preach the apocalypse, I knew I had to get them out.” In case you were wondering what she's been doing since
Twin Peaks
.

9
Randy Newman, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” from
Harps and Angels
(Nonesuch)
It's been clear for some time that the theft of the 2000 election laid the foundation for the Bush administration as such: if they could get away with that—with the Supreme Court having discredited itself to get Bush into the White House, the last check was gone—they could get away with anything. And, says Newman's unmade bed of a song, the bed of someone who hasn't gotten out of it for days, they did.

The number was first floated on iTunes in 2006, then adapted as an op-ed piece for the
New York Times;
now, to shards of the tune to “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” Newman runs through the worst leaders in history, from Stalin and Hitler back to King Leopold of Belgium and Torquemada, trying to convince himself they were worse than our own, but who cares if they weren't? In a verse the
Times
left out, he thinks about the curse of history: “You know it pisses me off a little / That this Supreme Court is gonna outlive me.” “Get over it,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in April of
Bush v. Gore
. “It's so old by now.” He'll get the last word, but to sing even a clumsy song in the face of that knowledge is not nothing.

10
What I really want to do is be Edmund Wilson, or “Interview with the Doors,”
Mojo Navigator
#14, August 1967, collected in
Bomp! Saving the World One Record at a Time
,
edited by Suzy Shaw and Mick Farren (Ammo)

JIM MORRISON:
“Interviews are good, but . . .”

MOJO:
“Oh, they're a drag.”

JM:
“Critical essays are really where it's at.”

OCTOBER
2008

1
I'm Not Jim,
You Are All My People
(Bloodshot)
A songwriting collaboration between the novelist Jonathan Lethem and Walter Salas-Humara, singer-guitarist for the Gainesville, Florida, band the Silos—and from the first track you're somewhere utterly familiar where nothing quite fits. “Mr. October” is the title, but you might have to listen a long time before you catch Reggie Jackson flashing across the TV screen in the bar, just as the singer (Salas-Humara, as on every number) is having trouble putting the bits of memory the tune assembles together. Hangover music—
Did that really happen?
—but the first reason you might miss Mr. October is that the melody, running down descending lines on the guitar, breaking up as the lyrics aim for the last line of a verse, is almost too sweet to bear. It carries regret for the fact that neither you nor the singer can come away from this song with any certainty. Did the singer ever see any of the people he's singing about again?

The half-light of “Mr. October” is filtered through everything that follows: the
noir one-liners in “Missing Persons” (“a bum tries to sell you his hat”), catchy bubble gum (“Amanda Morning”), a depressed ballad that would have fit in Lethem's
Men and Cartoons
if baseball cards count as cartoons (“The Pitchers Gave Up”), and, maybe with more sticking power than anything else, three shaggy dog stories, spoken-word pieces that could have come off of a 1950s Beat comedy LP by Ken Nordine, one of which actually features a dog. A man with a talking dog walks into a bar, where the old routine immediately shatters. The guy telling the story keeps a level head, but he can't keep the story straight. The bartender's comebacks don't fit the lines he's handed. It's a
Twilight Zone
episode that can't find its way out of the first act. “I've been in every bar in every joke in this country,” the guy says, as if he deserves to know how all this comes out as much as you do.

2
Robert Altman,
Santana, Altamont Speedway, Livermore, CA, December 1969,
in
The Sixties
(Santa Monica Press)
Everyone knows Carlos Santana's the-pain-of-the-universe-is-in-my-fingers grimace, and this is one of the best shots ever made of the guitar god hitting that note. Except that he's playing maracas, which kind of takes the edge off.

3
Miranda Lambert, “Famous in a Small Town,” from
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
(Sony)
From last year, not the hit, still floating around the country stations, an expert number about truth, lies, and gossip: “Everybody dies famous in a small town,” and, even in your grave, you'll never hear the end of it. “We heard he was caught red-handed with her mama,” Lambert sings querulously. “So that's just what they let us all believe.” You mean that with-her-mother story was a cover-up? For
what
?

4
Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter,” in “The Dark Defender,” on
Dexter,
season two (Showtime)
Dexter walks into a bar . . . to find the bartender who killed his mother with a chain saw thirty-four years before, in front of him, when he was three. Slow motion, tilted image, with a red filter, and as Michael C. Hall opens the door, the song comes up on the jukebox; at the end of the long lead-in, when the last guitar note breaks over the rest of the music, he sits down at the bar. The music moves on. The suspense that is generated is the suspense the piece has gathered to itself over all these years, never sounding like the past, still sounding like the future.