Real Life Rock (257 page)

5
Orioles, “Crying in the Chapel” in
Revolutionary Road,
dir. Sam Mendes (sound track album on Nonesuch)
Hidden in this adaptation of a 1961 novel about spiritual death in the suburbs of New York in 1955—a book that would never be mentioned today if it had been set in Michigan or California—is one strange scene. Leonardo DiCaprio's self-loathing business-machine promotion man Frank Wheeler sits in his cubicle late at night, speaking into a Dictaphone. “Knowing what you've got,” Wheeler says deliberately. “Knowing what you need,” he says. “Knowing what you can do without”—all with the Orioles' ethereal harmonies about peace and redemption drifting somewhere behind him, as if from another building. “I live from day to day,” they sing, their words aimed right at the office drudge Wheeler has become. But the group sets an inescapably poetic mood, and for a moment you can believe that the artist that Wheeler and his wife know sleeps somewhere inside of him is about to break through. “That's inventory control,” Wheeler says.

5
Beyoncé, “All I Could Do Was Cry,” in
Cadillac Records
(Sony Pictures)
The Chess Records story, with Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Etta James, Chuck Berry: one thing after another and no sense of having gone from one place to another, with a finale listing the date of each of the principals' inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as if they needed that validation. The reason to see it is Beyoncé, singing James's songs with such drama, conviction, and simultaneous mimicry and invention you can hardly credit her own musical career as anything
but a marketing strategy. Yes, she's a businesswoman: after getting under the skin of this music, why else would she still be out there twirling in her own melismatics, over-souled and overdressed? What happens here happens most completely with James's early “All I Could Do Was Cry.” It's the first song we see her cut in the studio—off to the side, you see Jeffrey Wright's Muddy Waters shut his eyes and lift his eyebrows in admiration as Beyoncé comes down hard on a line, and you know just how he feels. Omitted from the soundtrack album in favor of one of Beyoncé's own songs—but you can find the whole scene on YouTube, where you can also hear James herself.

6
Teddy Thompson, “Down Low,” from
Upfront & Down Low
(Verve Forecast, 2007)
Hidden in his collection of dull versions of country standards is a single original: the cruelest, most self-pitying, least overstylized, and best Chris Isaak ballad in years. Minus only Chris Isaak.

7
Alvin & the Chipmunks, “Don't Stop Believin,' ” from
Undeniable
(Razor & Tie)
Finally, the supposedly most downloaded song of the twentieth century gets the singer it always needed.

8–9
Stanley Booth, “Triumph of the Quotidian,” in
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008,
ed. Elisabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski (Whitney Museum/Yale) and
Eden
,
dir. Declan Recks (Samson Films)
On the white gallery walls of the Whitney, in a show that closed in January and is now at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Eggleston's deadpan color photos didn't hold their places; they got lost in the crowds looking at them. In the catalog, though, each image on its own page, you can hear what Eggleston is after: silence. As in his 1972 picture of shoes under a bed, creating the atmosphere of a room no one has entered for years, nearly everything he processes through his camera and his darkroom looks abandoned. That makes room for Stanley Booth to tell stories, and one started me thinking about how songs travel. In
Eden
, a film about a miserable Irish couple's tenth anniversary, Aidan Kelly's Billy Farrell leaves his wife in a disco for a party, chasing a girl he thinks has eyes for him, though all she sees is an old man. He passes out drunk; in a room behind him, people start singing “House of the Rising Sun.” Farrell wakes up, automatically singing along, sees the girl, stumbles to his feet, and as he grabs her, forcing himself on her as she tries to push him away, the song continues, but now the voice you hear belongs to Sinéad O'Connor, an avenging angel who seems to be singing from inside Farrell's heart, which she's turned against him. The song has gone from its commonplace beginnings somewhere in the American South, somewhere in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, to Bob Dylan's first album, in 1962, to the Animals' epochal 1964 worldwide hit, to countless versions by street singers and karaoke belters, to a party in an Irish town in the early twenty-first century, where if nothing else it's a song everybody knows, and from there into the spectral hands of a woman who could stare down anyone on the planet—and who's to say where its true home is, who owns it, whose singing most rings true? “A number of years back,” Booth says of Eggleston, “he was honored by the Photographic Society of Japan at a Tokyo ceremony on the occasion of photography's sesquicentennial anniversary. When he accepted his award, Eggleston, who speaks little Japanese, sang, in English, ‘Heartbreak Hotel.' Still singing—‘I been so lonely, baby'—he went out to the sidewalk, where a Japanese woman he remembers as ‘very beautiful' looked into his eyes and said, ‘Oh so lonely.' ”

10
Tallest Man on Earth, “It Will Follow the Rain,” 7
″
with
Shallow Grave
(Mexican Summer)
A.k.a. Kristian Mattson of Dalarna, Sweden, the Tallest Man on Earth sounds the way he wants to: as if he's stuck his head out of his hole in east Kentucky just long enough to make you wonder if you shouldn't crawl in after him. The guitar picking is of that seductive, mysterious strain that goes back to “The Coo Coo,” a
calm inside the bluegrass nervousness. “Have you ever”—that's all he needs to say to make you feel as if you have.

MAY
2009

1
Caroline Weeks,
Songs for Edna
(Manimal Vinyl)
An “English Rose” (so described in a press release) setting Edna St. Vincent Millay to music? On the sleeve a leafy, garlanded Ms. Weeks holds a conch shell to her ear—the better to hear the glowing girl-poet of “Renascence” in 1912, a dead alcoholic in 1950? There's a swan, for the 1921 “Wild Swans,” pressed onto the disc. I put it on, betting the music would be worse than the packaging.

That was a while ago, and I haven't taken it off. Weeks sings Millay's words slowly. She sings Millay's rhythms, or dowses for them. “Her poetry, you soon found out, was her real overmastering passion,” her old Greenwich Village friend Edmund Wilson wrote in 1952. “She gave it to all the world, but she also gave it to you.” A reader entranced by Millay's lyricism—not yet catching the way a blunt nihilism would reach up out of the ether of a poem and scratch its face—can always convince herself she's the “you,” and read Millay as if she were Sylvia Plath or J. D. Salinger, which is to say as if Millay is
her
. But Weeks sings—high, fingering her guitar, maybe with clarinetist Peter Moyse singing wordlessly behind her—as if she's heard something others haven't heard.