Real Life Rock (146 page)

7
“Germaine Krull—Photographer of Modernity,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (through July 30)
In Munich and Berlin, Krull (1897–1985) staged incandescent nude lesbian tableaux and angled new buildings as godheads. But her most striking pictures are of friends and associates, notably
S. M. Eisenstein (1930)
, cropped so that only below the chin is there any air, the rest of the face overwhelming the frame, allowing the filmmaker's big, beady eyes to leave the present-day viewer an impression of the sexually repressed madman, the Ed Gein, the Jason whose hockey mask is his own face;
Etude (1931—portrait of Wanda Hubbell)
, stunning both because Hubbell is so beautiful and because, tears on her face, eyes down, she has lent herself to a generic portrait of the film actress, not remotely mistakable for anything else, that is, a real person; and
Walter Benjamin (1926)
, where, despite a reddish-brown tint added to the critic's mustache, light seems to glow behind this black-and-white image, in the long and tousled hair, until you see a Jewish Elvis, if not a 1920s Lou Reed.

8
America,
Highway: 30 Years of America
(Rhino)
“Spanning three decades and nearly all of America's 23 albums,” says the press release, “
Highway
contains 64 tracks in a three-CD boxed set that features the classic rock staples ‘A Horse With No Name,' ‘Sister Golden Hair,' and ‘Ventura Highway,' ” and, if one is writing on Independence Day as Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell are performing at Wellesby Park in Sunrise, Fla., one must ask two questions: what does it say about this country that this group has gotten away with recording 23 albums? And, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, could even the dead listen to 64 straight America songs?

9–10
Dave Alvin,
Public Domain
(Hightone) and John Lee Hooker,
The Unknown John Lee Hooker: 1949 Recordings
(Flyright)
Rockabilly rootsman Alvin bids for the ultimate Americana album, with fabulous colored old photos (a black cowboy in what looks to be a sheep herd's worth of chaps) and a matching set of p.d. hits: “Shenandoah,” a variant of Mississippi bluesman Tommy Johnson's “Maggie Campbell,” “Railroad Bill,” “Delia,” “East Virginia.” Just over half a century ago, in Detroit, Hooker—a variant of whom appears in
Leavin' Trunk Blues
as Elmore King—did something similar, responding to a Czech cartoonist and record collector's wish for the old country stuff no one wanted to hear anymore with solo versions of “Two White Horses,” “Rabbit on the Log,” “Six Little Puppies and Twelve Shaggy Hounds,” “John Henry,” “Jack O'Diamonds,” the ancient ring shout “Old Blind Barnabus” and a variant of what would become “Mystery Train.” The difference is absolute. Alvin sings every commonplace tune in a plummy, unquestioning manner that suspends whatever is uncertain, unfinished or threatening about any of the unkillable songs; Hooker addresses artifacts of the local culture of his Mississippi childhood, which were in fact emblems of a vernacular national culture, as if they threaten him directly, and as if he has the ability to stare them down and wait them out. The whole point of commonplace music is to take up a song everyone knows, that everyone is sick of, that everyone was
born
sick of, and then to sing it and make it be heard as if the singer is creating the song on the spot, drawing on familiarity and dissolving it in the same motion. Alvin does the opposite. He sings like the musical director of a summer camp; he's going to teach you these songs, and exactly how to sing them. Hooker's the guy telling ghost stories after lightsout, stories so laconically offhand you can never get them just right when you try to tell them to somebody else.

JULY
24, 2000

1
Dido, “Thank You,” from
No Angel
(Arista)
What's most interesting about the
way this piece now emerges from Dido Armstrong's 1999 debut album is how completely its first minute and a half—the material sampled by Eminem on his recent “Stan”—now seems definitively appropriated. On
No Angel
, an otherwise dulled record that begins in dance clubs in London and might as well be on the beach at Ipanema by its end, you're listening to a number about a woman with a hangover. The drifting, fatalistic quality of the melody seems all out of proportion to its insistently ordinary payoff—with an insistently ordinary melody stretched over the remaining two minutes—which is that the singer is grateful to her boyfriend, whose love redeems bad days. This does not quite match what Eminem does with Dido; using her music to place beauty in between the pages of an awful story, he makes her into the angel of death.

2
Dick Slessig Combo, presented by Jessica Bronson, “Rock Your Baby,” at the Portland, Ore., Art Museum (July 7)
Carl Bronson, bass, Steve Goodfriend, drums, and Mark Lightcap, guitar—the Dick Slessig Combo, as in dyslexic—were playing on L.A. conceptual artist Jessica Bronson's internally lit bandstand for the Portland opening of “Let's Entertain,” a motley assemblage of glamorous art statements first staged at the Walker in Minneapolis. They were at least a half-hour into a performance that would eventually cover 90 minutes before I realized the nearly abstract, circular pattern the trio was offering as the meaning of life—it was all they were playing, anyway—was from George McCrae's effortlessly seductive 1974 Miami disco hit. Or rather the pattern wasn't from the tune, it
was
the tune, the thing itself. Variation was never McCrae's point (the big moment in his “Rock Your Baby,” the equivalent of the guitar solo, is when he barely whispers “Come on”); finding the perfect, self-renewing riff was. “I could listen to that forever,” I said to Bronson when he and the others finally stepped down for a break. “We'd play it forever if we were physically capable,” he said. The bandstand is empty now, but a 50-minute edit of the number will be running in the air above it, over and over, through Sept. 17.

3–4
Billy Bragg and Wilco,
Mermaid Avenue Vol. II
(Elektra) &
'Til We Outnumber 'Em
(Righteous Babe)
Mermaid Avenue Vol. II
is Bragg and Wilco's proof that the light touch of last year's astonishing completions of lyrics Woody Guthrie never got around to making into songs was a fluke. Compared to the blanket of piety enveloping a Guthrie tribute from a 1996 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame conference—featuring Bruce Springsteen, Ani DiFranco, the Indigo Girls and more, every speaker droppin' his g's (never has plain-folks talk sounded more affected)—it's Little Richard's “Ready Teddy.”

5
Shalini,
We Want Jelly Donuts
(Parasol)
The singer lives in North Carolina, and you can imagine her small songs, pushed forward in a flat, conversational voice, as a fantasy of knocking the acronym made by her title off the top of her local charts, where it means “What Would Jesus Do?”