Real Life Rock (287 page)

2–3
Mekons at Bell House (Brooklyn, October 7, 2011)
and
City Winery (Manhattan,
October 8, 2011)
At Bell House, before a surging, stand-up throng, they opened with “Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem”—the trip the heretic takes, so that at the end any place can be the New Jerusalem. In the frenzy of the performance, everyone was a crusader, a Templar knight, a Ranter, a Familist, a Shaker, a Muggletonian. It was Norman Cohn's
Pursuit of the Millennium
boiled down to a chant and blown up into “Hey Bo Diddley.” Later, with the Zuccotti Park occupation in its first month, guitarist Jon Langford announced he was “ going to Wall Street.” There were cheers. “To see my investment banker,” he went on. “Play golf with Hank Williams Jr. and Hitler.” Sally Timms stepped forward to sing “I love a millionaire,” and you could see her crooning it at the head of a march, the song now a manifesto of ambivalence, self-hatred, whoredom, money, surrender, and rage. The next night at City Winery, with the band seated in a minstrel-show half circle for an audience of chattering texters, except for Rico Bell sacrificing his firstborn son for “Hard to Be Human Again,” the band did not quite come across—but in a place that a few nights before had hosted a “ Music of Sting Wine Pairing” (twenty-five songs, seven wines, with “tasting notes placed at your table” to “reveal why we think each wine flight goes with the particular songs it's paired with”), who could?

4
Deep Dark Woods,
The Place I Left Behind
(Sugar Hill)
The band is from Saskatoon; their music comes from the Appalachian highlands. Burrowing inside the ambience of Clarence Ashley's “Dark Hollow Blues,” and summoning the menace of half-forgotten local legends, they live up to the cool suggestiveness of their album title. But what's new is swooning lead guitar from Burke Barlow: an expansive, keening, thrillingly modern sound old-timey music almost never gets.

5
Tony Bennett and Amy Winehouse, “Body and Soul,” from Tony Bennett,
Duets II
(RPM)
Put this in your computer and iTunes will tell you it's Easy Listening. Not anymore. You can hear Bennett forming the words, one by one; Winehouse was speaking her own language.

6
Kim Criswell, “One,” in
Happy Days in the Art World,
written by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, directed by Toby Frow, NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (November 1, 2011)
Two men, once a couple, now just collaborating artists, wake up in a bunk-bed limbo; after about a hour of
Waiting for Godot
–like freaking out, making sardonic jokes, and wondering if they still have a career, Criswell shows up as a blind hysterical postmodern Federal Express delivery person and steals the show like Jim Brown breaking into a Woody Allen drawing-room comedy. And then at the end, when she's apparently dead, she lifts herself off the floor on one elbow and in a full, clear voice sings the U2 song.

This is the great modern melody, a match for the Wailers' “Redemption Song.” U2's original is stiff, bellowing, but they left a treasure on the road for anyone to find. The song actually seems to ennoble whoever sings it: Johnny Cash, Warren Haynes, Kim Criswell, so many more to come.

7–8
Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra,
MTO Plays Sly
(Royal Potato Family) and Sly Stone,
I'm Back! Family and Friends
(Cleopatra)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? Yes, and Sly Stone dives into the quicksand with his first new music under his own name since the Treaty of Versailles: old songs featuring Ray Manzarek, Ann Wilson, Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter. Actually, it's not terrible; there's just no reason to listen to it. But Steven Bernstein's downtown New York assemblage is another story. Very little is obvious: not Martha Wainwright diving into “Que Sera, Sera” as if it were a well, the disturbing moans all through “Sly Notions 2/Fun,” the Dean Bowman and Vernon Reid rediscovery of the blues in “Time.” The musicians and singers seem to be chasing the music down, not remotely sure they'll catch it, or that they deserve to.

9
Washington Phillips, “A Mother's Last Word to Her Son” (1927), in
We Need to Talk About Kevin,
directed by Lynne Ramsay (BBC Films)
In the ultimate bad-seed picture,
a Texas gospel singer with a tragic voice emerges to say that from the day Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly's son was born there was no hope.

10
Bo Diddley, “Hey Bo Diddley,” on
Shindig
,
1965 (YouTube)
Around the time this show aired, well-meaning people were making films in which one could see first-rank blues singers offering European audiences approximately 5 percent of what they'd need to get over in a South Side bar. In a sort of TV-studio-as-night-club setting, with well-dressed couples at his feet, the Great Reverberator smashes out of the box with the first note, handsome, powerful, flashing an outrageous rubber-legged strut, his band steaming, and a horn section that looks like it was recruited out of a Delta Sig house at the University of Myrtle Beach. “If this were any better,” John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in, “I think my head would burst into flames.”

Thanks to Steve Weinstein

FEBRUARY
2012

1
Rid of Me,
written and directed by James Westby (Phase 4 Films/Submarine Deluxe)
In 2002—though it looks earlier: people can still smoke in bars—a woman is kicked out of her marriage and stranded in a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. All she wants is revenge: on her ex-husband, his old girlfriend/new wife, his worthless friends, on herself for buying into the scam in the first place. Katie O'Grady walks her character through her dead-end room, into a job in a candy store, down supermarket aisles, and then, as a formerly nice middle-class genteel housewife in her thirties, straight through punk, until she ends up lying down drunk on a sidewalk in the middle of the night. It all rings so true you don't really believe she's going to get up; the movie could end right there, but it doesn't. Because there's still this subplot about a Cambodian rock song the director wants to get in.