Real Life Rock (231 page)

9
Brian Morton,
A Window Across the River
(Harcourt)
From the author of
The Dylanist
, a quiet third novel about the revival of a love affair that by the end of the book will likely strike the reader as more of a mistake than its protagonists can bear to admit—and also a revival of so-called K-mart fiction, where brand names and pop songs, now taken out of Bobbie Ann Mason's mid-south and given a literary Manhattan twist, take over the imaginations of people who are trying to think. Here there's
NYPD Blue
, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and, in the 35-year-old heroine's panicked reaction to a doctor's recommendation that her last living relative be moved to a hospice, Christopher Hitchens attacking Mother Teresa “because some of the people she cared for in her hospice could have been cured” but for her belief “that it was best for them to die and go to heaven” (“I'm not thinking right, Nora thought. I shouldn't be thinking about Christopher Hitchens at a time like this”) and not knowing “what irony was anymore—not since Alanis Morrissette put out that song ‘Isn't It Ironic?' and all the reviewers pointed out that the things she was referring to as ironic, rain on your wedding day and so on, weren't actually ironic at all.

“Probably, she thought, I shouldn't be thinking about Alanis Morrissette right now.

“Alanis Morrissette and Christopher Hitchens.

“Together at last.”

10
Atmosphere,
Seven's Travels
(Epitaph)
Slug still wears his heart on his sleeve, and as smart noises and off-stage interjections come together as context, chorus, and audience, its beat is as true as it ever was. Especially on the gorgeous “Always Coming Back Home to You,” an ending so emotionally clear it's no surprise Slug, Ant, and DJ Mr. Dibbs couldn't rest with it, adding a hidden track as if to take the edge off a language they're not altogether comfortable speaking.

DECEMBER
24, 2003

1
Natalie Merchant,
The House Carpenter's Daughter
(Myth America)
The songs are from Fairport Convention,
The Anthology of American Folk Music
, protest-song handbooks, an 18th-century hymnal, a one-time Ithaca, New York, folk band called the Horseflies. With her thick, heavy voice, Merchant hangs over the tunes as if, in the infinitely suggestive words of so many other songs, she's letting her hair hang down, covering the songs in every meaning of the word. Fiddle from Judy Hyman (of the Horseflies) is the instrument that most often takes the lead, shaping the songs—“Down on Penny's Farm,” a worker's complaint that Bob Dylan turned into “Maggie's Farm,” is taken as a country stomp—but what Merchant does is plainly uncanny. “House Carpenter's Daughter”: that makes Merchant the child abandoned when her mother left her carpenter husband for a demon lover, so Merchant sings these songs from the inside, from a distance, sneaking up behind them, looking up at them like a child, looking back at them like an old woman. A dance unreels like a memory more than an event; a story becomes not a memory but an account of an event that is sure to take place tomorrow.

You don't know where you are. “Which Side Are You On?” written by Florence Reece during a miner's strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1932, doesn't come off like a protest song. Though the lyrics remain specific—“You'll either be a union man/Or a thug for J. H. Blair”—the setting of the song, the time and place it makes, is not. With a ghostly chorus—you can see the dead saying,
I see living people
—Merchant leads the performance as if into a battle that was lost before she was born, and that will be fought when she's gone. When she sings the Carter Family's “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” you're at the funeral, and then you're drunk at the wake. Each is less a memory or an event than a ceremony—as is almost every song here, high-stepping or barely moving at all.

2
Highlights from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (a.k.a. Rock Hall), #1 (Cleveland, Dec. 7)
Poster for the fourth-to-last appearance of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson:

WINTER DANCE PARTY

Laramar Ballroom

Fort Dodge, Iowa

January 30, 1959

Dancing for Teenagers Only—Balcony Reserved for Adult Spectators

3–5
Ryan Adams,
Love Is Hell, pt. 1
,
Love Is Hell, pt. 2
,
LLOR N KCOR
(Lost Highway)
Adams seems to have stepped into the void left by the disappearance of the audience for Counting Crows, by far the best straight-ahead rock 'n' roll band of the last decade. Unlike Counting Crows' Adam Duritz, whom
San Francisco Chronicle
critic Aidin Vaziri, reporting on a recent local show, described as “looking like a barefoot bus driver with an octopus strapped to his head,” Adams appears to be a regular guy—sensitive, all heart, gets angry because he feels so much, but no serious hang-ups or a need to act out. Adams looks more like the successful nonentity John Mayer, for whom Counting Crows had to open on their last tour, or for that matter Josh Groban. And underneath his clatter and angst, what he has to offer is different mostly in style from what Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard are selling.

6
Dixie Chicks,
Top of the World Tour—Live
(Open Wide/Columbia)
One big grin. Not included: “My mother always said, when you can't say something nice, go to
London and say it in front of 20,000 people”; “I Believe in Love.”

7
Rock Hall Highlights, #2 (Cleveland, Dec. 7)
Poster: along the top, “E. J. Recreation Center, Johnson, N.Y.” Then: “Direct from Nashville, Tenn.” Then, in enormous type: “
HANK WILLIAMS
.” Details of lesser acts follow, culminating at the bottom, in the biggest letters save for the headliner's, with “
CARL PERKINS
‘Mr. Blue Suede Shoes.' ” But Hank Williams died on New Year's Day, 1953, three years before Carl Perkins released “Blue Suede Shoes”—how could they be on the same bill? Because, just above “
HANK WILLIAMS
,” in type so small it almost isn't there, you can just make out “Audrey (Mrs.).”

8
24
(Fox, Dec. 9)
When temporary Counter Terrorism Unit command Michelle Dessler (Reiko Aylesworth)—previously notable this year for an embarrassingly low-cut top and push-up bra—confronts apparent mole Gael (Jesse Borrego), it's in a head-on, full-face closeup, and suddenly you're seeing someone you haven't seen before. There was a toughness in the stillness of the moment; you could sense a real character beginning to emerge. Given the rhythm of the show, that means you have no idea where she'll go, or be taken.