Real Life Rock (189 page)

10
Overheard in a hospital waiting room (Palo Alto, Calif., Dec. 4)
“As a former Deadhead—” “Is there really such a thing as a former Deadhead? Shouldn't it be recovering Deadhead?”

JANUARY
28, 2002

1
Mendoza Line,
Lost in Revelry
(Misra)
From Georgia, the sound of people who expect nothing, don't even necessarily think they deserve more and nevertheless want everything: a lifetime guarantee and an airtight alibi, as the Tubes once put it; “A damn good disguise to live this one down,” as they put it. With Shannon McArdle rising bar by bar out of the perfect picking of “Whatever Happened to You?” there is the sweetness of Brinsley Schwarz; there is the doubting undertow of Richard and Linda Thompson. The sound of people in love with each other and not trusting each other: on “We're All in This Alone” you could be listening to the Mekons, if the Mekons had come out of the U.S.A. At its unpolished best, as on “Red Metal Doors,” the music moves by like traffic. Male and female voices throw the songs back at each other—“Mistakes were made tonight,” as they warble over fuzztone—but there's no end to the game. And there is, on the back of the press release, in the form of a look back over the last few years, a manifesto:

“The seller,” the band writes, “could not sell without guilt, the buyer could not buy without shame. . . . And after a certain period of buying, day after day, at the most exorbitant prices, all that we would never have wished to be given as a gift, the relationship between our shopkeepers and us began to seem surprisingly antagonistic. Were our merchants, it crossed our minds more than once, actually trying to kill us?” Then the band turns into the sellers, selling its music: “From the sad sacks who made it, to the sad sacks who bought it . . . or has anyone doubted that the consumer has been viciously and systematically tricked all these years? Really? And did you really believe that the consumer himself didn't know?” The band finishes: “We must accurately reflect the real burden and real struggle of America, the essential question which only an American asks and only an American can answer: namely, what have you done with the relatively limitless freedom and prosperity which you've been given as a gift?” For people who named themselves for the batting average beneath which one sinks into oblivion to become one with, as Dostoevski put it in “The Grand Inquisitor,” “those God forgets” (i.e., .200), they are beginning again from the beginning; the heartland may be wherever they happen to be playing tonight.

2
Christopher Hitchens, “For Patriot Dreams”
(
Vanity Fair
,
December)
After describing his attachment to New York and his return, following the destruction of the World Trade Center, to lecture “newly enrolled New School students, some of whose parents wanted them back in the heartland, that they'd be sorry forever if they abandoned the city at such a time,” the British journalist, for whom “heartland” is only English for “unserious place where rubes live,” turned his readers into just those rubes, asking himself, or rather asking his readers to ask him, “Shall I now take out the papers of citizenship? Wrong question. In every essential way, I already have.” Or, as the guy with an American flag flying from his SUV and an FDNY cap on his head said when a kid asked him, “Gosh, mister, are you really a New York fireman?”: “Son, in every essential way . . .”

3
Loudon Wainwright III,
Last Man on Earth
(Red House)
Over these many years, a little of Wainwright has gone a long way.
Inside his funny upper-middle-class folk music he's so naked about his embarrassments his forced rhymes can embarrass the listener—maybe that's what goes a long way. But here gruesomely autobiographical tunes dig in, until you want more than anything for the singer to find his way out of his misery. You root for him to escape his loneliness, the shadow of his mother's death, his failures, his dodgy cult audiences, to get out of bed.

4
Neal Pollack & the Pine Valley Cosmonauts,
The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature
(Bloodshot)
The idea is good: in a package designed as a parody of the hallowed Harry Smith
Anthology of American Folk Music
, Kelly Hogan, Sally Timms and Jon Langford spin old-timey fiddle spells as
McSweeney's
-designated parody of the great American writer reads his parodies of great American writer blather—from the sound of his voice, because he had nothing better to do after being turned down for a part in
Swingers
. Unbearable.

5
Robert Salladay, “Media Pack Keeps Condit on Tightrope”
(
San Francisco Chronicle
,
Jan. 12)
On Rep. Gary Condit's appearance at a candidates' forum at the Branding Iron Restaurant in Merced, Calif.: “Condit offered only his now-famous Chiclet smile and silence to reporters' questions about the Levy controversy. . . . It had been another strange hour for Condit, who sat quietly during most of the luncheon, occasionally suppressing a smile at the assembled competition. That included Paul Yonker, a very intense-looking Vietnam veteran carrying a folded American flag. ‘I believe it's time to go back to the moon,' said Yonker, a Republican rancher from Mariposa, which is outside Condit's 18th congressional district. ‘They had a biosphere. It worked in the Southwest. Let's go to the moon. I believe in the flag amendment.' Others included Elvis Pringle, a Los Angeles record producer who said he wanted to build a space center in the Central Valley but offered absolutely no details; a college professor who talked so fast that he was almost unintelligible; a San Jose gas station manager who read . . . his . . . speech . . . very . . . slowly; and a former state assemblyman whose remarks consisted of quoting the Constitution and singing Lee Greenwood's ‘God Bless the USA' in its entirety.”

6–7
Buddy & Julie Miller,
Buddy & Julie Miller
(Hightone)
Country singers and writers, currently the toast of New York, and striking—especially for Julie Miller's shredded punk vocals, which can keep the slickness of the arrangements at bay for only so long.

8
Mirah, “Cold Cold Water” (K single) and
Advisory Committee
(K)
Mirah, a Pacific Northwest singer who used to go by the unwieldy but untoppable name Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlya, is as modest as Chan Marshall as Cat Power, and more insinuating—her high voice makes it unnecessary for her to spend the first moments of each number burning off her own pretentiousness. “Cold Cold Water” is haunting, but it could also be someone looking out the window and thinking of the Temptations' “I Wish It Would Rain.” The song leads off
Advisory Committee
, which is full of experiments with tone, tempo and orchestrations that leave their songs behind—a record that feels as if it were recorded too soon.