Real Life Rock (267 page)

For all that, Dion stole the show. He opened with Buddy Holly's “Rave On”—and that had to be to remind both Dylan and the crowd of the night in early 1959, just days before Holly died, when a seventeen-year-old Robert Zimmerman sat in the Duluth National Guard Armory, Holly himself sang “Rave On,” and Dion was an opening act at that show, too. Now he was seventy, and his voice grew, opened, gained in suppleness and reach with every song. One by one, he put the oldies behind him, so that it all came
to a head with “King of the New York Streets,” from 1989.

It's a gorgeous, panoramic song: a strutting brag that in the end turns back on itself, a Bronx match for the Geto Boys' “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” It opens with huge, doomy chords, wide silences between the notes, creating a sense of wonder and suspension, and you don't want the moment to break, for the music to take a single step forward—just as, after the song has gone on and on, you can't bear the idea that it's going to end. From that almost-frozen beginning, the pace seemed to speed up with every verse, but it wasn't the beat that was doubling, it was the intensity and the drama. Dion's wails were as fierce as ever, but never so full of wide-open spaces, the voice itself an undiscovered country, and it was impossible to imagine that he had ever sung better.

8
Gov't Mule, “Railroad Boy,” from
By a Thread
(Evil Teen)
Upsetting a trainload of expert grind-it-out, the centuries-old melody and story of “Railroad Boy” (a.k.a. “The Butcher's Boy”), which sounds like the precursor of the Teen Death Song: “Tell Laura I Love Her,” “Last Kiss,” “Teen Angel,” but perhaps more to the point, “I Don't Like Mondays,” “Endless Sleep,” and most of all “Ode to Billie Joe.” Ruth Gerson made the connection explicit in 2008 with her
Deceived;
in Gov't Mule's hands, or hooves, it sneaks up on you like a villain in a
Scream
movie. Which makes the name of their label all too perfect.

9
Malcolm McLaren, “Shallow” (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, October 24, 2009–January 3, 2010)
Twenty-one “musical paintings”—which is to say, loops of found footage depicting people gearing up to have sex with soundtracks made up of smeared pop songs, snatches of interviews or spoken-word performances, and swirls of movie tunes. “No matter how shallow people say pop music is,” McLaren writes in his exhibition note, “it continues to confound, astound, and seduce something deep in all of us—the desire to change the culture and possibly, if it be only for a moment, change life itself. No matter how shallow people say sex is, it continues to occupy and post-occupy everyone's thoughts, forcing us to be irresponsible, childish and everything this society hates, and why not?” A topless blonde woman descending a staircase and dragging a fur coat behind her as Joy Division's “Love Will Tear Us Apart” answers Captain and Tennille's “Love Will Keep Us Together” is a joke that never comes to life. There's a shaggy, fleshy guy with his arm draped around a grinning beanpole; they don't seem to be listening to the bits of the Staple Singers' “Respect Yourself” floating in and out of a disco version of an old country blues, and when the camera pulls back to show a handgun jammed into the front of the second man's pants, you don't hear the music either, because now the man's faraway resemblance to Timothy McVeigh is undeniable. Best of all is a dressed-up seventies couple, seated on a couch, apparently watching a movie on TV, both smoking, with fragments of the Zombies' “She's Not There” circling their heads. It's super-slow motion; the slightest change in expression becomes an event that you follow in a state of suspense. As the man steals glances at the woman with a self-satisfied smile crawling over his mouth, her eyes widen in an expression of surprise or fright that imperceptibly but definitively changes into arousal, and then the sequence begins from the beginning. You watch them again and again—and then finally McLaren allows the film to go a step further. The man is still contemplating his conquest, the woman is still lost in her own world, until she turns her head and sees him, her eyes as clear as if she were speaking out loud: Who is this guy? Where did
he
come from?

10
Ed Sullivan's Rock and Roll Classics: The 60s
(PBS, November 29)
Fund-raising break commentary by host TJ Lubinsky: “Public television has always been there as an alternative to”—the Ed Sullivan Show?

Thanks to Liz Bordow, David Bordow,
David Ross, and Peggy Ross

MARCH-APRIL
2010

1
Yellow Fever,
Yellow Fever
(Wild World)
From Austin, Jennifer Moore and Isabel Martin play guitar, bass, and sing; Adam Jones plays drums and bass; and the early '60s meet the early '80s, neither of which anyone in the band is likely old enough to remember, which is simply to say that despite oldies formats there is no time on the radio. The band's music is full of air, with brittle Young Marble Giants rhythms—and its humor (quotes from the Jaynetts' 1963 “Sally, Go 'Round the Roses” and Ben E. King's 1960 “Spanish Harlem,” plus sexy organ right out of Freddy Cannon's 1962 “Palisades Park”) is sometimes muffled by Young Marble Giants archness, which has its own charms.

2
Stephen Thompson, “ ‘American Idol' and the Making of a Star”
(
Morning Edition,
NPR, December 23, 2009)
For Thompson's own ideal
American Idol
song, “On the Wings of Dreaming Eagles,” which you'll swear you've already heard, even if you can't remember whether it was Clay Aiken or Adam Lambert on season four or season seven.

3
Woods, “Born to Lose,” from
Songs of Shame
(Shrimper)
There's a broken, incomplete quality on every song here—something unknowable. But on this number—odd, incomplete, and, at 1:59, unsettlingly short—the name of the album comes into play. The tempo is slow, with bare guitar notes and distantly echoed backing vocals that come across less as voices than memories, or wind. From Brooklyn, Jeremy Earl's croaked, pleading singing is as spectral as anything else: the testimony of someone whose time has already run out, and who doesn't think he deserved a minute more than he got.

4
Ken Maynard,
Ken Maynard Sings The Lone Star Trail
(Bear Family)
With close to a hundred pictures between 1923 and 1945, Maynard (1895–1973) was the first singing Hollywood cowboy. Perhaps because of his high voice, he made only eight recordings, in 1930, with five—“Sweet Betsy from Pike,” “Fannie Moore,” “When the Roundup's Done this Fall,” “Jesse James,” and “A Prisoner for Life”—released here for the first time, and not one is less than haunted. He could be listening now to Woods's “Born to Lose,” smiling and saying, too bad they left that off my album.

5
Gigante,
written and directed by Adrián Biniez (Ctrl Z Films)
A very quiet movie about a surveillance worker at a huge Montevideo supermarket who falls in love with a floor cleaner while watching her on one of his video screens. He's enormous and moonlights as a bouncer at a nightclub; she's not pretty but endlessly appealing; he follows her all over town and beats up people who make catcalls at her. They finally meet, and you know it's a match made in heaven, because they both love Metallica and Biohazard.