Real Life Rock (221 page)

8
Rosanne Cash,
Rules of Travel
(Capitol)
Great Harlequin Romance cover.

9
Porch Ghouls,
Bluff City Ruckus
(Roman/Columbia)
Great
God's Little Acre
trash-paperback-jacket-style cover. A song called “Nine Dollars Worth of Mumble” that's worth four minutes of your time. And “Girl on the Road (Ford Fairlane),” which goes right over a cliff. Or rather the bluff, which is to say out of Memphis and into the drink.

10
“Eating It” comedy showcase, Luna Lounge (New York City, January 20)
Sarah Vowell writes: “As part of MLK day, they asked the audience to sing along with ‘Ebony and Ivory,' the white people doing McCartney's part and the black people Stevie Wonder's. This meant a whole room drowning out Paul, followed by maybe one sheepish black guy, the only one in the audience, singing along with Stevie. The point being, even us smart, good-hearted New York wiseacres who cringe at the thought of segregation find ourselves socially segregated by default. I had started out the
day reading King's speech to the Memphis sanitation workers, marveling at the way he could call for togetherness without a hint of icky, sappy fakery, and there I was hours later, singing sap. Yet when I was singing my part, singing along with Paul, even though there's hardly a lamer song, I found myself singing embarrassingly loud.”

MAY
14, 2003

1
The New Pornographers, “The Laws Have Changed,” from
Electric Version
(Matador)
Neko Case pipes in the background like an organ. Then, as a multiple exposure, she's high above the music, singing down to a single image of herself. Male voices take over the blips in the background as Case goes back to the sky. “So all hail—What will be revealed today,” she trills, but, as on the New Pornographers'
Mass Romantic
, she's the revelation, and coming out of this band there's no sound richer than hers abroad in the land today.

2
The White Stripes, Warfield Theatre (San Francisco, April 28)
The unbelievable brazenness of the Betty Boop cartoons that preceded the band fit right in with the drama that followed: every tune seemed to have its familiar, and not in the restagings of Lead Belly's “Boll Weevil” or Son House's 1965 “Death Letter.” How can they seem to get Herman's Hermits' “I'm Henry VIII, I Am” and Pussy Galore's “Cunt Tease” into—or maybe out of—the same song? Where did Vicki Lawrence's “Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” come from? Or more to the point, where did it go?

3
Christopher Logue,
All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's ‘Iliad': Rewritten
(Farrar Straus Giroux)
Logue's
Iliad
project is not to retranslate it, but to rewrite other translations. The innovation is the rampant use of modernisms (“The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip”) or neologisms (“Greekoid scum!”). It can seem gimmicky. And then you are right there, in the action, less reading than listening: “Think of raked sky-wide Venetian blind./Add the receding traction of its slats/Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up./Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.”

4
The Folksmen, “Never Did No Wanderin',” from
A Mighty Wind: The Album
(DMZ/Columbia)
Christopher Guest's movie lives up to its title; comparisons of this set of overmilked gags with Guest's loving neurot-o-rama of
Best in Show
are as self-congratulatory as its worst songs. Are reviewers really that pleased they get the joke? But on the radio, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer's frighteningly accurate parody of a Kingston Trio “whalin' song” comes off as very nearly the real thing: catchy, faintly embarrassing, stirring.

5
The Be Good Tanyas,
Chinatown
(Nettwerk America)
Speaking of faintly embarrassing, there is that name—but by the second track on their second album, this Vancouver trio is long gone, setting up house in the late Townes Van Zandt's “Waiting Around to Die.” With the foreboding melody, they call up “Streets of Laredo” (hear it on Johnny Cash's
American IV
) or “Hills of Mexico” (hear Roscoe Holcomb on
Mountain Music of Kentucky
). Frazey Ford and Samantha Parton sing as if they're already dead; Trish Klein's high, slow harmonica solo, drifting across the years from Country Joe and the Fish's “Bass Strings,” seals the coffin. And then there is a version of Kid Bailey's 1929 “Rowdy Blues,” as light, sweet, and unhurried as Canned Heat's “On the Road Again”—which, suicidal as it is, takes you right back to “Waiting Around to Die.” And then it's hard to listen to anything else for the rest of the day.

6
Scott Amendola and Carla Bozulich, “Masters of War”
(
www.protest-records.com
) Bob Dylan's hardest antiwar song: over nine minutes, it gets bigger, and noisier. There are moments when the storm in the music makes it difficult to remember what you're listening to. Bozulich's voice, never so convincing with the Geraldine Fibbers—never convincing you so much is at stake—is thick, considered, like Anna Domino's in Snakefarm. In moments it can be arty in its
strangled effects—and then Amendola's drumstick comes down in a manner so artless it's scary. But it's Eric Crystal's shredding saxophone solo that nails the song to the ground, that takes it somewhere it hasn't been before, not on
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
in 1963, not when Dylan smeared it into the 1991 Grammy show, during the first Iraq war. The hectoring self-satisfaction of speakers at antiwar rallies begins to creep into Bozulich's voice after that (the tone that lets you know the last thing such people want is for the powerful to do good; if that happened, how could they feel superior?)—but then, for the final verse (“And I'll stand over your grave till I'm sure that you're dead”), the instrumentation drops to almost nothing, bare taps and silences, and you hear someone speaking for herself.