Real Life Rock (230 page)

10
Press release on CMJ Music Marathon in New York City (Seattle, Oct. 25)
“200 years ago Lewis and Clark, after learning of the Louisiana Purchase, left the East Coast to explore the rest of the New Land. Bringing a Newfoundland dog named ‘Seaman' and Lewis' slave ‘York,' the two set out on a historic journey that is still marveled at today. Their now legendary voyage reveals the natural desire of man to explore the world around him.

“This month Sub Pop Records will follow the same path of William Clark and Meriwether Lewis (except totally in reverse!) to CMJ in New York. Accompanying us will be our Chihuahua Vito and our intern ‘York.' ”

DECEMBER
3, 2003

1
Johnny Cash with Joe Strummer, “Redemption Song,” from Johnny Cash,
Unearthed
(American/Lost Highway)
The title of this five-CD set—four discs of outtakes from the 1996–2003 “American Recordings” sessions, plus a best-of—is weird at best: poor Johnny's less than three months in the ground and already they've dug him up? But from versions of “Big Iron” to “Salty Dog,” from “The Banks of the Ohio” to “Chattanooga Sugar Babe,” songs find their ghost, and nowhere more than on Bob Marley's testament. The weight Cash brings to the very first lines, “Oh pirates, yes they rob I/ Sold I to the merchant ship”—a physical weight, a moral weight, the weight of age and debilitation—is so strong it floats the song as if it were itself a ship, sailing no earthly ocean. The reversal of what would be Cash's “me” for Marley's “I” makes a crack in the earth, a man stepping into another time, another place, entering fully into another history. Then Joe Strummer comes in, plainly nervous, rushing the words precisely as he does not on the shivering version of “Redemption Song” on his own posthumous release,
Streetcore
: He's tight, blank, and the performance never recovers. By the end it's all but dead—and those first moments will bring you back again and again, trying to make the recording come out differently. Five CDs don't come cheap, but the radio does, and a song like this is what the radio is for: to shock whoever's listening.

2
The Volebeats,
Country Favorites
(Turquoise Mountain)
With tunes from famous country songwriters Roky Erickson, Abba, Serge Gainsbourg, and George Clinton, the York Brothers' sexy-then-and-sexy-now 1949 “Hamtramck Mama” plus six of their own songs, not a false note.

3
“Edith Piaf, la môme de Paris,” Hôtel de Ville, Paris (through January 31, 2004)
In a room where the walls are covered with song lyrics, words highlighted in lavender: “bleu,” “mourir,” “destin,” “ciel,” “ rose,” “non,” “enfer,” “lumière,” “rue,” “rêve,” “pleurer,” “coeur,” “chagrin,” “homme,” “heureux,” “amour,” “ivresse.”

4
Ida Lupino in
Road House
,
directed by Jean Negulesco (1948)
Playing a nightclub singer in a bar over a bowling alley, she talks her way through “One for My Baby” until it feels like a Shakespearean tragedy rendered by the Dead End Kids. “That's the best singing without a voice I've ever heard,” says an astonished Celeste Holm.

5
Oliver Hall writes in about subliminal censorship (Nov. 4)
“Something I overheard tonight at a coffee house: ‘It's a race dog owner's worst dream, that the dog'll catch the white rabbit. The dog'll be destroyed, he'll never race again. Kurt Cobain caught the white rabbit, and he realized it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. And he shot himself.' I loved the odd lyrical way she put this—she'd just been gabbing about her anemia to an uninterested date—and hated what she said. It's been so odd watching Kurt Cobain's transformation over the past decade, from yelping sewer rat to cautionary tale; as I recall, for five years after he died, the only Nirvana songs you heard on the radio were ‘All Apologies' and ‘Come as You Are.' When I was sixteen some other teen broke into my house and stole all my Nirvana CDs. I replaced them when the insurance check came and was shocked to find the liner notes to
Incesticide
deleted, as I was shocked, watching the rerun of the band's first
Saturday Night Live
appearance, that the French kiss between Cobain and Krist Novoselic had been edited out of the end credits, and shocked every time I have to remind my friends of the Michael Jackson impersonator Nirvana sent up to accept their MTV award. Sometimes I feel like Charlton Heston in
The Omega Man
, the last person on earth, who knows every line of dialogue in
Woodstock
.”

6
Grandpaboy,
Dead Man Shake
(Fat Possum)
Fat Possum has branched out from old southern black men self-consciously playing blues to younger northern white men self-consciously playing self-conscious blues, as if it's, you know, all music, whatever that means. Jon Spencer is enough of a jerk to pull this off, but Paul Westerberg isn't.

7
Bobdylan.com
store
Featured items: “Self-Portrait Throw Blanket,” “Masked & Anonymous Tee,” “Jonny Rock ‘I'll Be Your Baby Tonight' Corset.”

8
John Humphrys, review of Lynne Truss's
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
(
The Sunday Times
,
London, Nov. 9)
“Truss writes: ‘The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the contractive “it's” is an unequivocal sign of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian “kill” response in the average stickler.' I think she probably understates the case when she argues that people who persist in writing ‘good food at it's best' deserve ‘to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.' Lightning strikes are altogether too random. There should be a government task force with the single duty of rooting out such barbarians and burning them at the stake.”