Real Life Rock (252 page)

5
James Lee Burke,
The Tin Roof Blow-down
(Simon & Schuster)
The ten-minute egg: Detective Dave Robicheaux and his boss, Sheriff Helen Soileau, approach Detective Lamar Fuselier at a crime scene, a hut holding the rotting bodies of two men shot to pieces. (“Their viscera was exposed, their facial features hardly recognizable. Their brain matter was splattered all over one wall. Both men wore sports coats, silk shirts, and expensive Italian shoes with tassels on them.”) Fuselier throws tough-guy repartee at Robicheaux, who once saw him cheating on a police exam. “ ‘Mind if we take a look?' Helen said. ‘Be my guest,' he said, finally taking notice of her. His eyes traveled up and down her person. ‘We got barf bags in the cruiser if you need one.' ‘Give it to your wife,' she said.”

6
Bob Dylan, “32–20 Blues” from
Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series No. 8
(Sony)
Robert Johnson recorded it in 1936, Bob Dylan in 1993 for his
World Gone Wrong,
lines from it traveled the South through the first decades of the twentieth century before turning up in 1956 in the Crickets' “Midnight Shift”—and here, on a three-CD set made up mostly of footnotes to official releases from the last twenty years, it breaks the pace. The dominant tone of the thirty-nine performances is reflective; this is a search for a groove. The syncopation Dylan finds on acoustic guitar at first lags behind his singing; before he's a third through, the fluttery beat has made room for the voice to slide right off the lines, until you can follow the last words of verses (“none”—“nuhhhhnnnn”—“come,” “right,” and a “hell” so faint it might not be that at all) as if they're rabbits running through the brush.

7
Dario Robleto, Military issued blanket infested with hand-ground vinyl record dust from Neil Young's “Cortez the Killer” and Soft Cell's “Tainted Love,” in “Neo-Hoodoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith” (Menil Collection, Houston, June–September; P.S.1, New York, October 19–January 26, 2009)
Beige-cream, with light red stripes, thin on the sides, thicker in the middle: a true army blanket from the mid-1880s. Yes, it calls up soldiers passing out blankets infested with smallpox during the Indian wars after the Civil War—if it's not the thing itself—but it's also a swirl of confusion. “I understand ‘Cortez the Killer,' ” I said to Robleto in Houston, “but why ‘Tainted Love'? Because the blankets were tainted?” From his response it didn't seem as if that notion had even occurred to him. “Soft Cell,
soft sell
,” he said—hey, says the Army, we just want to warm up our Indian brothers and sisters on those chilly Plains nights. “But also because of all that '80s synth-pop,” Robleto said. “It was like another British invasion”—more like the one in the seventeenth century than the one in the twentieth. Or, as Memphis bandleader Jim Dickinson once put it, turning the story inside out, “Giving synthesizers to the British was like giving whiskey to the Indians. Their culture never recovered.”

8–10
Anton Corbijn's film about Joy Division really should have been titled after the band's “Atmosphere”; in
Control
(Genius DVD), from the emergence of the post–Sex Pistols band to the suicide of singer Ian Curtis in 1980, the dark skies and darker streets of Manchester overshadow any story. Even rooms have clouds in them. The second half of the film is predictable, tiresome, like real life, or the biopic version of a real life, but the first hour is like a storm, like a perfect punk show: when the band takes the stage for the first time, when they finished “Transmission”—the actors playing and singing—I realized that half a minute had gone by and I hadn't taken a breath. What Sam Riley as Curtis does with the song (“No language, just sound”)—what he does with his face even more than his voice—and what Corbijn does with his camera are as shocking as anything I've seen on a screen. On
The Factory, Manchester, Live 13 July 1979
, included as a second disc with the recent reissue of Joy Division's first album, the 1979
Unknown Pleasures
(Factory), Curtis sounds as if he were twenty feet tall; Bela Lugosi, passed on by Bryan Ferry, is coming out of his mouth. The performance of “Transmission,” the last number, is what was channeled for
Control
, and it's a frenzy, itself seemingly channeling Sarah Bernhardt in one of her tear-my-heart-from-my-own-breast speeches—until, near the end, Curtis lets loose. It's impossible to say what he lets loose with: nothing so commonplace as a scream or a shout, nothing so earthly as a cry of rage or anguish or frustration. It was nothing the band could summon at will. With
University of London Live 8 February 1980
, on the reissue of the 1980
Closer
(Factory), the music is already freezing, trapped in contrived arrangements meant to frame Curtis's increasingly jittery song structures; the band has become its own prison. People don't kill themselves for reasons; they kill themselves to end the story.

With thanks to Chris Walters

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER
2008

1
The Gits,
directed by Kerri O'Kane (Liberation Entertainment)
They were Mia Zapata, vocals; Matt Dresdner, bass; Andrew Kessler, a.k.a. Joe Spleen, guitar; and Steve Moriarty, drums. They formed at Antioch in 1986 and moved to Seattle in 1989, in time to catch the second wave of Northwest punk. The first half of this long-after-the-fact documentary is the band coming together, finding its music, and the pace is frustrating. You get only tiny snatches of songs, onstage, on the sound track, and what little is there is so alluring, so full of the spirit of someone driving herself through a storm of her own making, so delicious (“Another Shot of Whiskey,” “Here's to Your Fuck”—they took Dennis Hopper's rants in
Blue Velvet
and
made a language out of them) that you can barely stand it when the film moves back to exposition, interviews, scene-setting. Inside the band's velocity, the sound has grandeur; as Moriarty pounds shirtless and Dresdner and Kessler leave the action to Zapata, she is shockingly alive onstage, breathing the band's tremendous, unpredictable rhythms like air. But as the band members tell you how they began to come into their own, you are there, and, bit by bit, whole songs begin to assemble themselves, in complete performances, in cutups of many performances, in costumes (street clothes, Medieval court jesters), in haircuts: “While You're Twisting, I'm Still Breathing,” “Bob (Cousin O.),” “Second Skin.” It's a great thrill to watch a whole creation take place in full before you, a song as a life lived. I've never seen the special quality of liberation punk offered people brave enough to take the stage and hold it put across so powerfully onscreen—and as the band members talk years later, they don't hide the sense of privilege they still retain, the privilege of, once, making their own drama.

Zapata was raped and strangled to death sometime after 2 a.m. on July 7, 1993, on a deserted Seattle street. The second half of the movie is a funeral and a cold-case police procedural, the long story of a small community shattered, paranoia replacing comradeship and rivalry:
It could have been any of us
, a fear that cuts both ways. Selene Vigil of 7 Year Bitch is a quiet, bitter, dignified presence: “She was missing in action.” The case gets nowhere; Joan Jett fronts the three men to sing Gits songs and raise money to hire a detective: they “found out a lot of dirty about a lot of people”—about people they knew, that is—but no leads. You see the tombstone:

MIA KATHERINE ZAPATA AUG. 25, 1965–JULY 7, 1993 CHERISHED DAUGHTER-SISTER-ARTIST-FRIEND-GIT

Ten years later, a DNA match pulls up a felon in Florida. He's returned to Seattle to stand trial: a huge thug with death all over his face. Vigil: “This is the last person that she saw. She was looking into this guy's eyes.” O'Kane trusts her story; she never embellishes, never tells you something you've already heard. She's not afraid of her story, either; there's not an unearned look on any face she found.

2
Lucinda Williams,
Little Honey
(Lost Highway)
The very first track ends with a flourish so drawn-out and self-congratulatory she might as well have dubbed in applause over the last note.