Real Life Rock (310 page)

8
Girls Names,
The New Life
(Slumber-land Records)
A Belfast dream-pop four-piece, with, as it happens, only one girl's name in its lineup, and that's appropriate. There are words in guitarist and singer Cathal Cully's songs, but sometimes there don't have to be, and at their most effective—“Projektion,” elegant, unpretentious Old World surf music—the occasional human-voice sounds are just another instrument. You can hear Barbara Gogan's Passions, from London, and the Young Marble Giants, from Cardiff, in the late 1970s; the Chantays' “Pipeline” from 1963; but most of all Alphaville, that lovely, bitter German synth combo from the mid-1980s, whose “Forever Young” has so far lived forever at high-school graduations. Girls Names lives in a more-abstract forever.

9
Crockett Johnson,
Barnaby, Volume One: 1942–1943,
edited by Philip Nel and Eric Reynolds (Fantagraphics Books)
Johnson is best known for the children's book
Harold and the Purple Crayon
, in which a round-faced, apparently bald little boy creates the world with a single crayon—just like God. But that little boy first appeared, in the early 1940s, in a daily grown-ups' comic strip in the pages of the left-wing New York tabloid
PM
, as Barnaby. He lives in a nice house with his nice parents in a nice suburb. His world is also inhabited by a beer-drinking, cigar-smoking, permanently hungry, profoundly irritating fairy godfather in a pork-pie hat and gossamer wings named Mr. O'Malley, who manages to fuck up every conceivable patriotic, virtuous, charitable, unselfish, necessary wartime endeavor—a neighborhood blackout, a scrap-metal drive—while somehow maintaining an uncanny ability to help Barnaby expose Nazi spy rings. Until, at the end of this big, smiling collection, the House Un-American Activities Committee comes along, and O'Malley, who previously sabotaged a mayor's radio speech with a Duke Ellington record, takes over with an investigation of a man in a red suit. It's wonderful the way Barnaby ignores his parents' attempts to humor him about his delusion, to talk him out of it, to prove that fairies don't exist, and lucky it's the '40s, not the '50s, when they would have packed him off to a child psychiatrist. There's no way Jack Kerouac, along with every other selfconsciously cool person in New York, wasn't reading this. O'Malley turns into Neal Cassady, the guy who's not quite human, who never shuts up, who drives you crazy, and who can make anything happen, just like that. There will be a
Volume Two
; in the meantime, there's also Nel's lively, inspiring
Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI; and Transformed Children's Literature
(University Press of Mississippi).

10
Lester Chambers, “ People Get Ready,” Hayward Russell City Blues Festival, Hayward, CA (July 13):
For the record: on the day George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder, Chambers, seventy-three, of the Chambers Brothers, dedicated the Impressions song to Trayvon Martin, saying that if its composer, Curtis Mayfield, had been alive he might have changed the line “There's a train a-comin' ” to “There's a change a-comin.' ” Dinalynn Andrews-Potter, forty-three, then leaped onto the stage and knocked him to the ground. One week later, on August 19, Chambers, who had to cancel shows because of injuries
caused by the attack, announced that he would file a five-million-dollar suit against the city of Hayward, Andrews-Potter, the concert promoter, and those responsible for concert security, saying he was left unable to perform for at least the rest of the year—but his main complaint was that Andrews-Potter, who was charged with felony counts of assault and elder abuse, was not charged with a hate crime. Her attorney said she was a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder—and, NBC Bay Area reported, claimed that “the beat of the song triggered the attack.” Presumably, if the case goes to trial, Andrews-Potter will have to name the song that caused her original trauma. And then, if there is any justice, at least in the realm of people coming up with really great excuses for horrible acts—and Andrew-Potter's is much better than the one Zimmerman's lawyer provided for him, charging that the unarmed Martin was indeed armed, “with a sidewalk”—whoever owns the copyright will be able to sue her. For libel. Or slander. Defamation. Loss of earnings due to fear that the song might cause harm to others. Or just for the pleasure of watching Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and others defend her defense. I mean, you can already hear them saying:
Have you ever heard “A Change Is Gonna Come”? I mean, really heard it?

Thanks to Linda Mevorach,
Deborah Freedman, and Charles Taylor

JANUARY
2014

1
Pearl Jam and Sleater-Kinney, “Rockin' in the Free World,” Tampa, Florida, 2003 (YouTube)
This is no all-star jam. This is rock 'n' roll celebrating the human spirit, a good song, and itself. It's two bands touring together, but now one band, six men, three women, Janet Weiss hammering stand-up percussion next to Jack Irons's drums, Carrie Brownstein facing off with Stone Gossard, Mike McCready soloing joyously while Corin Tucker and Eddie Vedder throw verses back and forth as if each is the other's all-time teen dream and they're going to make this senior prom last forever, even if the Neil Young number they're dancing to is really Carrie's bucket of blood.

2
Stanley Crouch,
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker
(HarperCollins)
There's a moment in this stirring book when Crouch, homing in on the first Joe Louis–Max Schmeling fight, in 1936, links the three minutes of a prizefight round to the three minutes of one side of “a 78-rpm record, all a jazz band needed to make a complete musical statement.” It's part of a plain and poetic argument about the effect of recording technology on both fighting and jazz. It's part of a rewriting of the legacy of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, and of how he “almost instigated an interior ethnic riot” when “he chose to go through Harlem bragging about how much money he'd won by betting on the German.” Page by page, the book is unpredictable before it's anything else. It ends in 1940, with Parker taking his first steps in New York, still a teenager, but the sense of an odyssey completed, the wind of history at one man's back as he begins to blow it out ahead of himself, is overwhelming.

3
Rosanne Cash,
The River and the Thread
(Blue Note)
A soul-music travelogue, taking in Memphis, Faulkner, Dockery Farms, the Civil War, Robert Johnson's gravesite, Bobbie Gentry's Tallahatchie Bridge, and Money, Mississippi, the town where Emmett Till was lynched and thrown into the river that runs under the bridge. You don't have to hear any of that; the words don't point to places on a map. What you hear is time passing.

4
Rachel Harrison,
Fake Titel
(D.A.P.)
An elegant catalog for an exhibition (beginning in Hannover, Germany, in 2013, and ending at the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium, on January 4, 2014) most notable for a series of unflinchingly rough 2011–12 colored-pencil portraits of Amy Winehouse—Winehouse
as a Picasso model, or maybe a muse. Wine-house is juxtaposed with Picasso's harlequins, his Gertrude Stein, or his cubist nudes; as she seems to be using her handheld mike as a spray can to conjure
Guernica
out of the air, her own features crack and bend, one eye sliding below the other, her skin bruising in greens and purples. With her beehive seemingly bigger with each picture, her mouth bigger, she begins to resemble a rotting inflatable sex doll—or a junkie decomposing before she's even dead. Yet you are never free of Winehouse's presence, power, desperation, defiance, or need. The tension between her self-presentation as a cartoon and the tragedies enacted in her music is patent here—and finally, with Winehouse sharing an image with Marie-Thérèse Walter, you can see her not as some sort of doppelgänger for Picasso's women, models from life or specters from history, but as their voice.