Real Life Rock (315 page)

7
Joel Selvin,
Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm & Blues
(Counterpoint Press)
Berns was a songwriter and a record producer; he died in 1967, at thirty-eight, leaving behind such epochal hits as the Isley Brothers' “Twist and Shout,” the Drifters' “ Under the Boardwalk,” Them's “Here Comes the Night.” He was also a man of the street, putting people together, avoiding others, looking over his shoulder, making deals that returned howling at his back. Selvin walks through his story with a Broadway swagger that at first feels contrived, third-hand, and after a hundred pages or so feels not only earned but musical, and a rhythm begins to count its way through the story. The songwriter Ellie Greenwich haunts the last part of the book like the ghost of a woman who doesn't know her life is already over; Berns courts death like a man singing Bo Diddley's “Who Do You Love?” under his breath. Again and again, Selvin brings forgotten recording sessions that any other chronicler would have ignored to such stirring life that they validate not only the story he has to tell but the worth of Berns's own life. In 1963 he went into the studio with a neophyte named Betty Harris, who recorded two of his songs: “Cry to Me,” already a huge hit for Solomon Burke, and “I'll Be a Liar.” Selvin lets you feel the contingency of the moment, how everything that happened—this inflection, that hesitation—could have turned out completely differently, and led to nothing. You probably don't know the performances, but the suspense that Selvin is building is too strong for you to turn to YouTube—and you know that what's there won't match the picture Selvin is drawing: “She didn't know Berns wrote ‘Cry to Me' when she auditioned for him by singing the song. She didn't know that he originally envisioned the song the way she sang it, slowed down to a crawl . . . from the first sob that bursts almost involuntarily from her throat, Betty Harris slowly, deliberately picks her way through the pathos,” Selvin writes. It's the word
picks
that throws the
scene into relief, producing images both of a woman walking with care and fright and of her picking at her own skin, her own heart.

8
Masha Gessen,
Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot
(Riverhead Books)
An incisive and powerful account of the desires, instincts, decisions, strategies, actions, and punishments of a few people who committed themselves to living as if they were free in a society built to ensure that they were not. The Russian American Gessen, author of
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
(who will not say “Pussy Riot” aloud), is first of all a reporter, and she traces the story of a performance-art collective that turned into a “fictional group” that turned into a real group, recording the playground shouts of “Kill the Sexist” at a playground, and then everything that happened, and didn't, when they took their next step, bringing their act into a cathedral. The tone can be sardonic, from the inside, not the outside: “They were ready. Sort of. Maybe. Almost.” Gessen also writes like a novelist, preternaturally attuned to the way the perpetrators of an action can lose control of it—“Something felt off among them, and each of them sensed it, the way each partner in a romantic relationship senses when it has started to crack, even though neither can say what went wrong and when”—and to the feelings of loss, missed chances, and abandonment that sometimes accompany even events that, in their small or enormous way, can leave a nation, or the world, or only a single person changed. “There is that moment in every action,” Gessen says of a woman who did not go into the cathedral, but might have, “when you have handed over your personal belongings to whoever is helping and you know exactly why you are there and you know what you are about to do and you feel that you can do anything at all and at the same time it is as though you could see yourself, so lithe, so young, so bright in every way, climbing up onto that platform—it was this moment she remembered.”

9
I Break Horses,
Chiaroscuro
(Bella Union)
Maria Lindén is from Stockholm; through the haze of this shimmering album you can see her playing both the middle-aged La Dolce Vita parties in
The Great Beauty
and the funeral scene in Baz Luhrmann's
The Great Gatsby
, if he'd shot it. You can see her spinning Alphaville's “Big in Japan” over and over in her teenage bedroom, and a few years later watching Julee Cruise swim her way through “Questions in a World of Blue” in
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
and realizing that was what she wanted to do with her life. This is synthpop draped in Gothic mystery so thick it would be corny if there were a single element in the music—vocals, melody, rhythm, texture most of all—that seemed fixed, settled, seen as a fact by the woman who made it. You could play this record all day long, and I've never played it less than twice in a row.

10
Sly and the Family Stone, “Stand,” from
Higher!
(Epic Legacy)
On this career retrospective, a moment from a show at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970: it's 7 a.m. The band is following Miles Davis, the Doors, the Who, and Melanie. The crowd is dead but the group somehow brings it to life; then someone hits Freddie Stone on the head with a soft-drink can and they leave. Before that there is Sly Stone, with a few sentences and a few notes that capture the best of what he left behind: “ People believe in a lot of different things—though our universal thoughts, in general. . . . I mean, the people who believe that what's up is up and down is down, simple things, you know. It's very easy to be fair, and don't kill nobody, and those things—hurts if you step on my toe: ‘Ouch.' A lot of things happened in the sixties”—and it's so displacing, to hear someone barely halfway through 1970 referring to “the sixties” as an already completely historicized past—“a lot of people
stood
in the sixties. A lot of people went down in the sixties—for standing. That's unfair.” He begins a clear, calm, floating a cappella “Stand,” as voices come in behind him, then instruments creep in as nothing but
the most distant, quiet vamp, and you can see a small band of people, dressed in white, as they were that morning, gathered in a circle, and then you hear a single drumbeat.

Thanks to Cecily Marcus and
Andrew Hamlin

JUNE
2014

1–4
Gina Arnold,
Exile in Guyville
(Bloomsbury/33 1/3); Liz Phair,
Exile in Guyville
(Matador, 1993); Pussy Galore,
Exile on Main Street
(Shove, 1986); Rolling Stones,
Exile on Main Street
(Rolling Stones, 1972)
Arnold is a wonderful writer: fearless, precise, full of doubt, never taking anything for granted. She's one of the few people left on the planet who uses
presently
correctly, which can create its own thrill. Going back to Liz Phair's once notorious, now often forgotten, absurdly in-your-face ambitious first album—“a story about a girl and a time and a place,” the indie-rock world of Wicker Park, in Chicago, in the early 1990s, but in Phair's hands a story told with such heart that you need no such details to catch every shade of meaning and emotion—Arnold has written a book about the past (“when dinosaurs, as personified by Dinosaur Jr., ruled the earth”), its follies and crimes (“Every past is worth condemning,” Arnold quotes Nietzsche, and then puts the words to work), and the idea of an imagined community that the past leaves behind (“Often I think I am a better informed citizen of Middlemarch, Bartsetshire,” Arnold says, “than I am of San Francisco”). And it's about what it means for a young woman to simultaneously take on both everyone in her town and take down the album that sums up everything that everyone in her town would like to sound like, look like, act like, be—to take down a whole way of being in the world. “At one point we had felt like misfits or we had felt like ‘others,' ” Carrie Brownstein recently said of the time she shared with Phair—in her case, in her own indie-rock community, in Olympia, Washington. “It was supposed to be come one, come all, you know? Freaks gather round and we'll provide you with shelter. And you get in these scenes and you realize, no, I've gone from one set of rules and regulations and codifications of how you should dress and what you should know to another. . . . What should have been inclusive felt very exclusive . . . there were times when I felt very flummoxed by the rules, very alienated, and I was trying way too hard to figure out not just what band to like, but am I liking the right album from that band. And then, am I liking the right band member in that band? Am I liking the right song on the right record? Have I picked the right year to stop liking the band?”