Real Life Rock (243 page)

3
Mandy Moore,
American Dreamz
(Universal)
Almost too good on her numbers in the hard-nosed
American Idol
parody where she'll do anything to win, but she'll live in film history for the way she delivers a single line: “I'm not physically attracted to other people, but . . .”

4
Chris Walters
From a friend, a haiku for Gene Pitney, 1941–2006, who in the early '60s, with “Town Without Pity” and “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance,” caught the voice of the outsider too bitter to shake anyone's lying hand: “Can't cut my own throat / Before I tell this whole town / To go fuck itself.”

5
The Handsome Family, “All the Time in Airports,” from
Last Days of Wonder
(Carrot Top)
From the surrealist Albuquerque folk duo, slow power chords behind the details that can make an airport the black hole of everyday life: late at night, “the cages pulled across the stores,” and in the morning, “when they drive the waxer across the floor.” It's dead air you don't want to breathe, but you can't help it.

6
B. Molcooli and Band, “He Don't Love You,” Berkeley Farmers Market (March 4)
A toddler walked up to the soul singer and an accompanist and held one hand to each of their guitars, letting the sound go right into his skin.

7
The King
,
directed by James Marsh, written by Milo Addica and Marsh (Think-Film)
One Elvis Valderez (Gael García Bernal, Che Guevara in
The Motorcycle Diaries
) gets out of the Navy and sets forth to remake the family of the father who left him a bastard, the father he's never met, now a middle-class fundamentalist preacher (William Hurt, so good you may not recognize him). The movie is a version of the demonic Elvis who emerged in the popular imagination after the real Elvis's death—demonic because, as a king, he holds absolute power over others' hearts—but pushed farther than ever before. With Pell James as Elvis's half sister, indelible when she realizes she's going to hell.

8
The Doors,
“Doors Ride Again—box set, movie, and Vegas show in the works for the band's 40th anniversary”
(
Rolling Stone
,
May 4)
That's not all. When Jim Morrison died, Evan Serpick reports, organist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger wanted to go for commercials, but drummer John Densmore said no: “Onstage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That's not for rent.” Now he's saying yes: “We might consider something technology-oriented, or some hybrid car or something, but it's gotta be right.” And for the movie, they'll only do nudity if it's absolutely necessary to the script.

9
The Sopranos
,
“Live Free or Die,” April 16 (HBO)
Vito, the only loyal man Tony has left, is exposed as a homosexual. He flees, planning to kill himself before anyone in the mob can do it for him. In a New Hampshire diner, the cook, seeing him for who he is, makes him feel at home as he never has in New Jersey; other gay men come in. In an antique store run by a gay man, Vito stares at a license plate: “Live Free or Die.” Can he? Doesn't that promise apply to him, too? Coming up behind him, playing in full under the credits: X's desperate, depressed version of Dave Alvin's “4th of July,” and the promise and heartbreak of American democracy goes right to your chest.

10
Sleater-Kinney, “Jumpers,” Great American Music Hall, San Francisco (May 3)
Guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker pulled a thread that unraveled the music and tied it in a knot, but it was Janet Weiss who caught the drama. “She's got the best drummer's hair ever,” said a friend.

AUGUST
2006

1
Jon Langford, “Lost in America,” from
Gold Brick
(ROIR)
This summer Bruce Springsteen will be getting thousands on their feet with “John Henry,” cheering the tale of a man who in the years after the Civil War died proving he could hammer through rock faster than a steam drill. In October, Oxford will publish Scott Reynolds Nelson's
Steel Drivin' Man
, where John Henry is real-life prisoner number 497 in Virginia's Richmond Penitentiary. But in Jon Langford's leaping “Lost in America,” John Henry is the country itself. He's there when the last spike is driven into the Transcontinental Railroad, walks away from the fight with the drill, dies in the “Wreck of Old 97,” turns up as a soldier at Abu Ghraib—and, just possibly, takes the September 11 planes back from their hijackers and breaks Columbus out of Guantánamo. It's as rousing as Springsteen's version, and absolutely heartbreaking, which for some reason the actual “John Henry” folk song never is.

2
The Lovekill,
These Moments Are Momentum
(Astro Magnetics)
Cleveland by way of Omaha, and more exciting than driving the 800 miles at 100 mph.