Real Life Rock (290 page)

6
Robert W. Harwood, “ ‘Stack O'Lee Blues'—the first sheet music (and more)” (
iwentdowntostjamesinfirmary.blogspot.com
, December 20, 2011)
From 1924, the first publication of the true-crime bad-man ballad that came out of St. Louis in 1895, reduced to a lame tune and lyrics about a new dance craze keyed to a racist playground chant. The sheet-music art is what's uncanny: in red, blue, pink, white, and black, a swirling abstraction, in circles and rectangles, that calls up the dada experimental films being made at exactly the same time.

7–8
“Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk—An Introspective” (Brooklyn Museum, through January 8)
and
Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” (1959, YouTube)
A big room, centered by
Blossom
(2007), an installation with a huge tree growing through a piano with its bench knocked over and lying in dirt: a prepared piano that plays a slow version of “Strange Fruit.” Nearby is
Cheshire
(2007), a video showing a large tree with black men climbing it, a lynching tree reclaimed with the smile of the Cheshire cat when one man reaches the top, where when black screen-breaks appear you hear “Strange Fruit” by Imani Uzuri. Here “Strange Fruit” is fixed, a reference point, unlike the 1959 footage of Holiday, old and ravaged, singing the song in a nightclub with unparalleled vividness, so that every word makes a separate scene you are forced to visualize, that she is forced to visualize—you can see and hear her resisting the song, as if she can barely stand to sing it. The piece by Biggers that lives up to this performance is
Bittersweet the Fruit
(2002), where a tree branch with leaves, installed horizontally, has a two-by-three-inch video screen cut in. It's described as an allegory of the pickup-truck lynching of James Byrd Jr., in Jasper, Texas, in 1998—one of the killers, Lawrence Brewer, was executed on September 21, 2011, two days before Biggers's show went up—you see, in a wooded area like the scrub forests Byrd was dragged through, a naked black man with gray dreads seated playing a piano. The sound plays backward, slow, fuzzed, then frantically speeding up and clattering—and the sense is that of the man trying to go back in time, to when he wasn't dead.

9
Randy Newman, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” from
Live in London
(Nonesuch)
It can be hard to hear the world catch up with Newman's misanthropy.

10
“Gaga Constellation” Christmas windows, creative direction by Nicola Formichetti, directed by Tim Richardson (Barney's Workshop, New York, December 14, 2011)
Various Gaga fantasies—and the one that works is
Gaga Machine
, with LG's body painted gold and transformed into a Futurist
motorcycle. Passing by, Marinetti would have broken the glass and climbed on.

MAY
2012

1
Alison Faith Levy, “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” from
World of Wonder
(Mystery Lawn Music)
On an album of children's songs, this glorious recording—with startling new verses pitting a mouse against a cat, a monkey against a tiger, a hippo against a snake, and the spider against a bumblebee—comes forth huge, pounding, with a passionate vocal from Levy and, from producer Allen Clapp, the most convincing re-creation of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound anywhere. Precisely, it's “Itsy Bitsy Spider” as the Ronettes' “Be My Baby,” the feeling bigger with each chorus, and each chorus more ambitious, more deliriously affirming Levy's animal-kingdom moral fables.

But Spector, now serving nineteen-to-life for second-degree murder in the 2003 shooting death of the failed actress and House of Blues hostess Lana Clarkson, remains as much an author as Levy. Released in 2009, Vikram Jayanti's trial documentary,
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
, can leave you almost certain that Spector did not kill Clarkson (after watching his attorneys present forensic evidence at his first trial, which hung the jury, you can imagine Spector bringing out a gun, showing it off, listening to Clarkson talk about how worthless her life had turned out to be, and then handing it to her: “Go ahead and kill yourself, I don't care”). On February 21 the Supreme Court refused to review the case; as Spector waits out his time, I hope this puts a smile on his face.

2
Eleanor Friedberger at the Independent, San Francisco (February 4)
Appearing with Friedberger were a drummer, a bass player, and guitarist John Eatherly, who's likely in his mid-txwenties, looks sixteen (“That song was about fun times,” the thirty-five-year-old Friedberger said at one point, “back when I was his age”), and has the fastest hands I've ever seen. He reminded me of Tim Lincecum: he seems to invent melodies as he plays others, and he can shred. His face is always quiet; there's a lyrical slide in his attack that takes the coolness off what might seem like technique for its own sake, and if his lyricism is still a step or two away from soul, it will come. Friedberger herself is impossible to fix, a singer who at her most distinctive comes across like someone arguing over the phone. A rambling, seemingly scattershot set turned on a dime with the unreleased “When I Knew.” It's the kind of bouncing, emotionally blunt song the radio was invented to play, a song you hear once and then play over and over in the radio of your memory, hoping that when it is released it'll sound half as right. For an encore, Fried-berger came out alone and sang “(Ummm, Oh Yeah) Dearest,” recorded by Buddy Holly on acoustic guitar in his Greenwich Village apartment the month before he died, when he was younger than Eatherly. The song is so perfectly written (by Ellas McDaniel—Bo Diddley—Prentice Polk, and Mickey Baker) that it doesn't seem written at all, and Friedberger let it sing itself, as if she were following a step behind, in love with the way every barely sung “Ummm, yeah” opened into catacombs of affection and regret.

3
Jennifer Castle,
Castlemusic
(No Quarter)
From Toronto, Castle was one of the Siren voices on Fucked Up's
David Comes to Life
. Here she wanders like a pilgrim through the desert once crossed by Paula Frazer of Tarnation, Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, Julee Cruise, and, maybe most of all, Kelly Hogan's “(You Don't Know) The First Thing About Blue.” Two-thirds of the way through, with “Misguided,” Castle reaches a pitch of mystical transport so gorgeously ethereal she seems about to drift off into lands that don't appear on any map. But then everything gets tougher, and the desert turns into Duane Eddy's forty miles of bad road.

4
Dave Bickler on
The Colbert Report
(Comedy Central, February 2)
As an answer record to Newt Gingrich's unauthorized
use of Survivor's “Eye of the Tiger” at campaign rallies, Survivor lead singer Bickler took the stage and made a heroic, without-a-breath dash through what could have been an entire page of Gingrich's
A Nation Like No Other
—to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger.” “A nation explicitly Christian!” he declaimed: “Of the tiger!” When Bickler got to Gingrich quoting Patrick Henry, he made “Give me liberty or give me death” sound like a power ballad.