Real Life Rock (278 page)

7
Daniel Lanois,
Soul Mining: A Musical Life
(Faber & Faber)
A producer looks back. And remembers how much better
Time Out of Mind
would have been if Bob Dylan hadn't interfered.

8–9
Keith Richards,
Life
(Little, Brown)
and
Dangerous Minds,
“Deconstructing ‘Gimme Shelter': Listen to the Isolated tracks of the Rolling Stones in the Studio” (
danger-ousminds.net
)
“I wrote ‘Gimme Shelter' on
a stormy day,” Keith Richards says, and even with the Bulwer-Lytton cloud floating over the words, they can send a chill through your skin, because you are about to hear—maybe: who knows what he'll say?—the story of the rock 'n' roll song that, from “Mystery Train” to “Ready Teddy” to “Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On” to “A Change Is Gonna Come” to “Like a Rolling Stone,” the form itself was asking for all along. “I was sitting there,” Richards says a few pages later, “just looking out of Robert's window and looking at all these people with their umbrellas being blown out of their grasp and running like hell. And the idea came to me. You get lucky sometimes. It was a shitty day. I had nothing better to do . . . I wasn't thinking about, oh my God, there's my old lady shooting a movie in a bath with Mick Jagger. My thought was storms on other people's minds, not mine.”

That's one version. When you hear the pieces of the song on their own, each part—separate tracks for Richards's two guitar lines, the vocals, bass, and drums—is so strong it becomes not a part but a version of the whole. With each track four minutes, the length of the full song, so that there are silent periods whenever the given element isn't present, there's nothing that isn't thrilling on its own terms. Richards is so thoughtful, and at the same time such a master of instinct—he knows what he's going to want, and uses that knowledge as a guiding hand when pure desire seems the engine of his playing—that you could listen for hours without beginning to get to the bottom of the work. The shocker is in the vocal track—Mick Jagger and the soul singer Merry Clayton in tandem. There's a dank, hollow echo behind every word, as if they were recording in a mine shaft. It's not apparent if you listen to the song as it has played on the radio for the last forty years, but here it's overwhelmingly present: the source of the depth of the sound of the whole.

Whether or not Jagger and Clayton recorded separately, at different times, even in different places, as you listen you hear them singing face to face. With the first “Rape, murder, it's just a shot away,” Clayton soars, dives down, in complete control, like an eagle surveying the whole territory of the song, and suddenly her voice almost breaks. As Jagger shouts in the background, she seems to hesitate, falling behind the beat, the song itself, then rushes back, finding her footing in the maelstrom: “It's—just—” And then all the way back, reclaiming the song with its hardest, most desperate moment, with the cadence of the last three words like someone throwing herself down a flight of stairs in a harsh and perfect rhythm: “A shot away.” It's one of those panicky instants in the creation of a piece of music that could never be predicted or planned, and that only the best record-makers hear for what they are and leave in, letting the mistake define what will be left behind. “What key? What key?”

10
Lisa Olstein, “Radio Crackling, Radio Gone” (
lisaolstein.com
)
This poem could be about Katrina or any other natural disaster, and Olstein's own reading is a flat, conversational, unpretentious, ordinary recitation: a young person's voice, American and modern, accentless, without attitude or pose, picking its way through the ruins piece by piece.

Thanks to Joshua Clover

MARCH-APRIL
2011

1
Eminem and Lil Wayne, “No Love” on
Saturday Night Live
(December 18, 2010)
In a performance that reduced the original collaboration for Eminem's
Recovery
to a stiff rehearsal, Lil Wayne was the carpenter, with enough conviction in his hesitating syllables to cause pain: “No love lost, no love found” cut. Then Eminem takes the song, walking the boards Lil Wayne nailed down, clumsily, with no ability to create a rhythm out of physical movement, and it doesn't matter: the staccato beat he makes, then rides, that shoots his words out in front of him is jaw-dropping. The momentum he generates between the walls of each beat
seems almost beyond the ability of a body to produce it. On record, the number isn't so far beyond its sample of Haddaway's somewhat cheesy 1993 “What Is Love (Baby Don't Hurt Me)”; here, it touches “Lose Yourself,” the shocker that ran under the credits for
8 Mile
—when you thought the movie was over, and the real story was just starting.

2
The Fiery Furnaces, “I'm Not There,” Le Poisson Rouge, New York (December 5, 2010)
Over the last few years, Howard Fishman and Sonic Youth have translated and recorded this once-almost-incomprehensible Bob Dylan song. This night, it seemed to have drifted into Eleanor Friedberger's mind unbidden, and she told its tale as if, now, it was her life to lead.

3
Anika,
Anika
(Stones Throw)
The Nico-like face, the Nico-like voice—for that matter the Nico-like consonants—it reeks of concept. But Skeeter Davis's 1963 “End of the World” always had something uncanny—something from beyond the grave—beneath its lost-love lyrics, and the twenty-three-year-old Anika Henderson—she's English, her mother is German—brings it to the surface. And there's something deeply displacing, and gripping, about hearing “Masters of War” sung with a German accent. Suddenly, all sorts of people who weren't in the song before are now crowding its stage: Nazis, yes, but also Marianne Faithfull with her “Broken English,” inspired by Ulrike Meinhof, and the female German terrorists who in Olivier Assayas's
Carlos
—Julia Hummer's Nada, Nora von Waldstätten's Magdalena Kopp, Katharina Schüttler's Brigitte Kuhlmann—are more fearsome than the men, maybe because they seem so eager to be consumed by the fire they're trying to make.

4
Peter Hujar,
Thek Working on Tomb Effigy 8, 1967,
in “Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (October 21, 2010–January 9, 2011)
One of a series of photos in a slide show, this leaps out. It's tall, thin, blond, long-haired Thek standing at a work table, with his “Dead Hippie” sculpture lying flat on a platform—a sculpture of himself, or almost. The figure is Thek, but inhumanly incomplete, the features rough and crude, the right arm missing a hand, and the positioning of the figure is pure déjà vu. It's the artist in the intermediate stage of growing his own pod: a one-man remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.

5
Sheryl Lee in
Winter's Bone,
directed by Debra Granik (Lionsgate)
Somehow, teenage Maddy Ferguson didn't follow cousin Laura Palmer into the river. She ran off into the woods, all the way across the country, changed her name, and twenty years later turned up in the Ozarks as a forty-year-old woman (not quite looking or speaking as if she was born there, though it's hard to believe anyone in the film's mountains wasn't), just for the chance to look Jennifer Lawrence's sixteen-year-old in the eye, to see herself, to give the girl the kind of loving, no-hope smile she could have used herself, back before she was dead.