Real Life Rock (274 page)

6
Eminem,
Recovery
(Aftermath)
What makes Eminem different is a sense of jeopardy: a bedrock conviction that whatever there is in life worth having, and whatever of that you might have, you don't deserve it. Maybe in anyone else's hands that would translate into self-pity, fake panic, hair-pulling desperation—but not here. In these songs, it translates into a kind of ethics, where the person speaking tries more than anything to see every possible point of view, every conceivable response, every missed chance, all at once.

7
Leah Garchik,
San Francisco Chronicle
(June 29)
Dep't. of Lest We Forget: “I got my hands on that issue of
Rolling Stone
with the interview that caused the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the cover of which was particularly interesting because its main focus was on Lady Gaga with a pair of guns (borrowed, I assume) and a pair of buttocks (her own, but probably air-brushed). The story about ‘Obama's General' was mentioned in the smallest cover line of anything else, indicating the editors didn't think it would cause much fuss.

“Surely all the trouble it did cause must have been the result of a simple mistake: an editing mix-up in interviews. Obviously, someone mistakenly put McChrystal's lines in Lady Gaga's mouth and vice versa.

“What McChrystal really said about the commander-in-chief: ‘I've really never loved anyone like I loved him. Or like I love him. That relationship really shaped me. It made me into a fighter.' About his relationship to the soldiers: ‘I'm really good to the people around me. . . . I'm not a diva, in any sense of the word.' About the war in Afghanistan: ‘I committed myself to my heartbreak wholeheartedly. It's something that I will never let go. . . . As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.'

“What Lady Gaga really said about the obligations of being a star: ‘How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner? . . . I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner.' About her social life: ‘All these men, I'd die for them. And they'd die for me.' On dressing for the stage: ‘It's shirts and skins, and we'll kill all the shirts.' And on current events: ‘Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan.' ”

8
Philip Kerr,
If the Dead Rise Not
(Putnam)
In Kerr's now six-book Bernie Gunther series—following the onetime Berlin cop and private detective through the Nazi era, to postwar Vienna and Perónist Argentina, now book-ending Berlin in 1934 and Havana twenty years later—the whodunnit, or even the why-dunnit, has never been the point. The battle Gunther fights is against his own sense of oppression, miasma, nihilism. Here Kerr has his hard-boiled wisecrack machine revved up to high—“Don't get me wrong,” Gunther says, in lines that bounce off the screaming faces at Tea Party rallies, “I just love Nazis. I've a sneaking suspicion
that ninety-nine point nine percent of Nazis are giving the other point one percent an undeservedly bad reputation”—but as 1934 fades out in a horror of murder and blackmail, and 1954 takes shape as a game of love and blackmail Gunther can't win, the wisecracks dry up. You want Gunther to end up with the woman he's been in love with for twenty years as much as he does, but you don't have to pay the price—until the last pages, which make the most depressing ending to any novel I've read in years.

9
Cabaret—The Adult Entertainment Magazine
(August 1956)
A friend passed on this nightclub trade publication, devoted mainly to strippers; the headlines were, with unbelievably garish cover photo,
I TAUGHT JAYNE MANSFIELD ABOUT SEX
(inside comedown: “I taught her about sex as it is manufactured in Hollywood”) and
WHO THE HELL IS ELVIS PRESLEY
? (inside surprise: aside from a few obviously made-up quotes—“I'd like to study dramatical acting. I don't care nothing whatsoever about singing in no movie”—a smart and accurate profile). But the most displacing tidbit came on the last page, in the “Backstage” column by one Arch Ayers, where you could find the real Jayne Mansfield: “
PUBLICITY MAD
Jayne Mansfield will do anything to make the papers. Shortly after telling Winchell and three other columnists that she had broken off with her current flame, Robbie Robertson, she was heard on the phone telling her boyfriend: ‘But Robbie, you don't believe all that stuff you read in the columns.' ” Reached in New York, Robertson had this to say: “Don't you just hate it when one of those bombshell chicks blows your cover. I was only twelve at the time, but I knew how to make a woman feel special.”

10
Elvis Presley, “Stranger in My Own Home Town”
In truth, “Who the hell is Elvis Presley?” is a question that has never been answered—or, as Nick Tosches once put it, “Elvis Presley will never be solved.” Here he is in 1970, spinning out songs in the studio, grabbing on to an old Percy Mayfield number, taking it slowly, languidly, until the pressure just barely increases, and suddenly you know you're hearing the sort of plain truth Elvis almost never permitted himself: he knows the envy, the resentment, the hate behind every smiling face. The performance appeared only in 1995, on
Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential 70's Masters,
but with lines missing the Internet now gives back.

“I'm going back down to Memphis,” Elvis sings, though plainly that's exactly where he already is. “I'm going to start driving that motherfucking truck again.” You hear a defiance inseparable from self-loathing, a man who sees the envy, the resentment, the hatred in every smiling face: “All those cocksuckers stopped being friendly / But you can't keep a hard prick down.” There's no sense of obscenity or provocation as he sings. It's plain speech, but with that last line he's gone, off into a country only he can enter, into the utopia of his own gifts, where not even a song as good as this one can tell a fraction of what he knows. As he turns his back and walks away, he's “just standin' here wonderin,' ” as he himself had to have sung out loud more than once, “if a matchbox would hold my clothes.”

Thanks to Doug Kroll, Nick Tosches, and Jim Marshall

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER
2010

1
Bryan Ferry,
Olympia
(Astralwerks)
Want to hear a whole album of “Slave to Love”—or a whole album about hanging around in bars, pretending you're younger than you are, an undercurrent of lounge-lizard ooze bringing everything to . . . life? Thanks in part to Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera and saxophonist Andy Mackay, there's not a false note—especially when a deliriously romantic, regretful, deep-soul embrace of Traffic's it's-too-late ballad “No Face, No Name, No Number” takes the singer out of
Olympia
's incandescently sleazy paradise, stranding him within sight of a real-world home he'll never reach.

2
Biutiful
,
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, at the Telluride Film Festival,
September 5
Javier Bardem as a father dying of cancer, trying to raise two children while keeping his head above the sewage of the criminal underground economy in Barcelona—and as misery accumulates, in his body, in his family, on the streets, in the basement where illegal Chinese workers sleep, his panic increases, and he begins to slow down, because he can't keep up. The movie captures the look and feel of Barcelona as a place where people live, not just as a theme park—imagine Woody Allen's
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
in this cauldron, and it vaporizes in a second. At nearly two and a half hours, the picture, the story, is not a minute too long; like the lives it describes, it's too short. It's draining; when I walked out I felt as if I'd just given blood.