Real Life Rock (255 page)

8
Scott Simon, “Ole Miss: Presidential Debate Host, Cultural Treasure,” on
Weekend Edition
(NPR, September 27, 2008)
The day after the first McCain–Obama debate, reflections on how Oxford, Mississippi, has changed from the time when James Meredith arrived on campus in 1962 as the first black student in the University of Mississippi's history: the student body rioted, members of the mob killed two people, and every student stood up and walked out when Meredith entered his first class. “I'm glad that in these times it may be hard for us to imagine the
courage
of James Meredith,” Simon said, in his typically flat, soothing way, which is usually a setup for something blunt: “He walked across campus, went to class, and put his head down to sleep in a place where he
knew
that there were people nearby who wanted to kill him.” Forty-six years later, there's a statue of Meredith on campus and Oxford is a sophisticated town with “visible integration”; it was only two years ago that the old-time music band Crooked Still, which can dive very deeply, felt a need to redo Bob Dylan's 1963 “Oxford Town,” but they're from Boston. “For years,” Simon said, “Mississippi was considered a state that was only
barely
a part of the country”; now it “played a role in electing the next president.” Simon paid tribute to the sacrifices of those who had lived and died to make it so, and then cued Robert Johnson's 1936 “Cross Road Blues.” In Johnson's Mississippi, to be caught on the road after dark could mean death for a black man; Simon's implication was that Mississippi had crossed over. Johnson's recordings have been remastered so the sound is full and complete, but this began tinnily, from a distance. Then Johnson hit a loud, quivering note on his guitar and you were in a barn, the note was a shot, and the story wasn't about James Meredith at all, it was about Emmett Till.

9
The Exiles,
directed by Kent McKenzie (Milestone) and Revels,
Intoxica!
(Sundazed)
Last year saw the first-time commercial release of this 1961 film about American Indians wandering through life in the Chavez Ravine sector of Los Angeles—a Los Angeles that was wiped away for Dodger Stadium. As people gather in apartments, go out to bars, pile into cars, there's a constant, real-time sound track by the Revels of San Luis Obispo (“Six Pak” and “Church Key” were California hits in 1960): wherever there's a jukebox or a radio in the movie, the Revels are on it, a pseudo–surf band distinguished by the unrelieved crumminess of its sound, which turns every echo of something distinct, unique, contingent, unlikely—moments in the music that might remind you of the Everly Brothers, Jack Scott, Don and Dewey, the Champs, Santo and Johnny—into the same cheap, grimy insult the film itself follows in every frame, as if to say, as the film won't quite allow itself to do,
I don't care, I don't care if you care, so why should you? Give up!

10
Paul Beatty,
Slumberland
(Bloomsbury)
A novel in the voice of DJ Darky, a.k.a. Ferguson Sowell, an African American from Los Angeles who hangs out at the Slumberland bar in Berlin in the years before and after the wall came down. Searching-for-the-perfect-beat plot aside, what makes this book sing on every page is the fact that you're in the presence of someone who's so smart you don't want to miss a word he says. I don't mean Beatty. Our DJ with his phonographic memory—he never forgets a sound—has opinions on everything, and every one of them, tossed out as punch lines and wisecracks and put-downs and tears in his beer, seems the result of hours of thinking it over: the rebuke, the pose, the atrocity, the psychopathology of everyday life in the form of what's on the jukebox. We meet Lars Papenfuss, a “master spy who used his cover as a pop-culture critic to prop up dictatorial movements like ‘trip-hop,' ‘jungle,' ‘Dogme 95,' and ‘graffiti art' instead of puppet third-world governments.” “I hate Wynton Marsalis in the same manner Rommel hated Hitler,” DJ Darky says, pushing his German-historical hangover for lack of anything better to do. “Whenever I hear Marsalis's trumpet playing I feel like the Desert Fox forced to come
to grips with the consequences of totalitarianism after the war has been all but lost.”

FEBRUARY
2009

1
Frank Fairfield, “Darling Corey” / “I've Always Been a Rambler” (Tompkins Square 7
″
/myspace.com/frankfairfield
)
A young Californian who sings and plays as someone who's crawled out of the Virginia mountains carrying familiar songs that in his hands sound forgotten: broken lines, a dissonant drone, the fiddle or the banjo all percussion, every rising moment louder than the one before it.

2
There'll Always Be an England: Sex Pistols Live from Brixton Academy
with
The Knowledge of London: A Sex Pistols Psychogeography
,
directed by Julien Temple (Rhino/ Freemantle DVD)
At the show, from 2007, there seems to be almost as much footage of the audience as of the band, and what's odd, if you've been anywhere recently where fame is on the stage, is that you see almost no one holding up a cell-phone camera, taking a picture of an event instead of living it out, even if a thirtieth-anniversary show is a picture of another show before it is anything else. Instead, people are shouting, jumping up and down, shoving, and most of all singing their heads off. Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock (“You're a lucky cunt,” Rotten says near the end, “because this is the best band in the world”) find moments they might not have found before. The old British tourist song “Beside the Seaside” is sung in full as a lead-in to “Holidays in the Sun”; in the fiercest passages of “God Save the Queen” and “Bodies” a true dada vortex opens up as words lose their meanings and seem capable of generating entirely new ones. But the real fun is in the “psychogeography” (“The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”—
Internationale Situationniste
#1, June 1958), which is the band minus Rotten taking us on a tour of its old haunts. Cook and Matlock look the same as they did in 1976, merely older, but Jones is unrecognizable. Onstage he looks like one of his own bodyguards; here, wrapped in a heavy coat, with dark glasses and a cap pulled down, he could be a mob boss or merely a thug with money in his pocket. The three are touring Soho, checking the hooker ads in doorways. (Jones goes up, comes down: “That was great! But she made me wear a johnny.”) “It's like a fuckin' Dickens novel,” Jones says, surveying the sex shops, the dubious hotels, the strip clubs they once played (the El Paradiso, they remember, was so filthy they cleaned the place themselves). “I feel like a bucket of piss is going to come flying out the window.” They visit pubs, search for old performance spaces (“Do you know where Notre Dame Hall is? The Sex Pistols did a show there—ever heard of the Sex Pistols?”), and like spelunkers they navigate dank hallways until they reach their old rehearsal space and crash pad off Denmark Street. Rotten's caricatures of the band members are still on the walls, plus “Nanny Spunger” (Sid Vicious's Nancy Spungeon) and “Muggerade” (manager Malcolm McLaren by way of Malcolm Muggeridge). And there is the outline of a manifesto, words running down a wall:

AWFUL

HEARTACHE

STUPID

MISERY

ILL BOOZE

END DEPT ILL

SICK

DISMAL

“This is where we began to take it seriously,” Glen Matlock says. “If there was half an idea floating around, we was in a position to do something about it.”

3
Tom Perrotta,
Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies
(Berkley, 1994)
Perrotta's ongoing chronicle of men and women moving through the last decades (
Election, Joe College, Little Children, The Abstinence Teacher
) is no secret. But until a few months
ago I'd completely missed this first book, a collection of stories following one Buddy, of Darwin, New Jersey, from Cub Scouts to the summer after his first year in college. There doesn't seem to be a moment Perrotta doesn't get right, or more than right: “On Friday, Mike was holding hands with Jane. On Monday he had his arm around a hot sophomore named Sally Untermeyer, while Jane drifted through the halls, looking like she'd just donated several pints of blood.”