Real Life Rock (284 page)

8
Department of Counterhistory
In 2000, Al Gore was considering a running mate. He came close to picking John Edwards, then the number one rising-star fresh face of the Democratic party. Instead, most likely to distance himself as far as possible from Bill Clinton, he chose Joe Lieberman, a tribune of sanctimony so pious in his condemnation of Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal that Philip Roth gave
him a cameo in
The Human Stain
. As a candidate, Lieberman—who in 2008 was John McCain's first choice as a running mate, until McCain's campaign managers told him no—is best remembered for his vice-presidential debate with Dick Cheney, whom he graciously allowed to run all over him as if Cheney were a pickup truck and Lieberman Lucinda Williams's gravel road. Which didn't stop him: In 2003, Lieberman announced that he himself would seek the Democratic nomination for president. But there was a road not taken. Eighteen years before, in 1975, Bob Dylan had gathered figures from all across his career—Joan Baez, Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Neuwirth, countless more—for a traveling minstrel show.
WHO IS JOE LIEBERMAN?
ran the headline of an ABC News story on January 2, 2003. “Lieberman has spent most of his professional life in politics,” the piece ran in part, “but there's perhaps one aspiration he might have enjoyed pursuing. ‘I went through a Bob Dylan phase,' he said. ‘One of his tours was called The Rolling Thunder Review—when Joan Baez was with him and people would come and go. It would have been fun to have spent a few months with Dylan on The Rolling Thunder Review.' ” It might not have saved the country, but Joe Lieberman banging a tambourine for “Bob Dylan's 115th Dream” is something I would have paid money to see.

9
Jaan Uhelszki, “Off the Charts,”
California
magazine (Summer 2011)
On KALX, Berkeley's college radio station, and its tradition of recruiting guests to tape station IDs (number one on the charts, from the Reagan years: “This is Attorney General Ed Meese on KALX in Berkeley. It's a
crime
if you don't stay tuned”): “In February 1985, an emissary of Charles Manson called the station to arrange an interview. His one stipulation: He only wanted to talk about music. Reporters Arnold Woods '84”—
California
is the Berkeley alumni magazine—“and Kevin Kennedy taped the convicted serial killer at the state medical facility in Vacaville, and for a brief time afterward you could tune into the station and hear, ‘Hi, I'm Charlie Manson and you're listening to KALX in Berkeley.' ”

10
Frank Fairfield,
Out on the Open West
(Tompkins Square)
With his first album, the young California traditionalist seemed as if he was on his way to becoming his generation's Mike Seeger: an oldtimey musician who knew everything and could play anything, a librarian with such empathy for his archive of archaic styles that in moments he might stand alongside the old singers and players, as ghosts or in the flesh, singing with them like a brother. This album, made up mostly of songs that appear handed down but aren't, is proof that Fairfield is someone else: a wicked messenger passing through town and leaving everything slightly frayed, damaged, unfixed, every gaze deflected toward an object just barely out of sight. This happens in “Haste to the Wedding/The Darling True Love,” with one foot in the twenty-first century and the other in the eighteenth, neither foot staying in one place for more than a few measures at a time, and in “The Winding Spring,” where a banjo is its own reward. But with the first notes of “Poor Old Lance,” you know you're in different territory. The melody, really a fanfare, is bent, stretched, curved, seems familiar and teasingly out of reach—you could spend a day playing the song over and over, searching for the place you once heard that melody before giving up and admitting that probably you never did. The orchestration is glorious. Three fiddles, Fairfield, Justin Petrojvic, and Josh Petrojvic send the tune into the air and keep it there. Deep, slithering undertones from Brandon Armstrong's bull fiddle, played with a bow, keep it rooted to the ground, and sometimes pull the song under it. There is tension from the first. The words are hard to make out, because Fairfield's elisions, slides, slurs, and half-finished phrases are as much music as anything coming off the strings. But you catch enough: something about a man going down; a jailhouse, ten years. As this little play unfolds, chorus by chorus, the whole country comes into view, glimpsed as if over
a ridge: a place of discovery, joy, despair, defeat, “a land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy,” all enacted in a single prison cell.

OCTOBER
2011

1–2
Amy Winehouse,
Back to Black
(Republic, 2007) and the Shangri-Las,
Myrmidons of Melodrama
(RPM, 1964–66)
Again and again after Winehouse died, on July 23, you could read her talking about how she'd written the self-mocking, self-loathing, unflinchingly fuck-you songs for
Back to Black:
“I didn't want to just wake up drinking, and crying, and listening to the Shangri-Las, and go to sleep, and wake up drinking, and listening to the Shangri-Las.” But she did. That's why she would let their deathly “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” drift into “Back to Black”—there is a stunning montage of her gorgeous performances of the two-pieces-in-one on YouTube. That's why, in “Rehab” and especially in her irresistible, unreadable 2008 Grammy performance of “You Know I'm No Good,” Winehouse was her own leader of the pack, but without a pack, without even girlfriends to ask her if she was really going out with him, if she was really going all the way, on her own, perhaps with nothing but the satisfaction of getting it right, saying what she had to say, adding something to the form that brought her to life as an artist, adding her name and face to the story it told. Yes, she wrote “You Know I'm No Good,” and like any work of art it was a fiction that bounced back on real life, maybe the author's, maybe not; as she sang it on the Grammys, you could hear her listening to the song as well as singing it, hear the song talking to her, hear her asking herself, as she sang, “Is that true? Is that what I want? Is that all I've got?”

“She could not stand fame any more than I could,” Mary Weiss, the lead singer of the Shangri-Las, said after Winehouse died. “I wish I could have helped her, even if she never sang publicly again. My hairdresser told me that is just ego, thinking that maybe you could possibly make a difference when others could not. I thought about it, long and hard. I do not think so. I would have only spoken about her pain, not drug usage, until (if ever) she was ready. I related to her so much it is a bit scary. . . . I will never understand why people get off kicking people when they are down and need help. How could that possibly make you feel better about yourself?”

With anyone else but Mary Weiss as a lead singer, the doom in Shangri-Las songs might have turned into a joke, but it never happened: every time, whether in “Remember,” “Give Us Your Blessings,” “Out in the Streets,” “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” or “Past, Present, and Future,” the singer was a different person, starting from the beginning, telling her story as far as it would go, which was never very far. Their songs, like Winehouse's, were all locked doors, doors that locked you out or that you locked yourself from the inside. But maybe because she is still here and speaking plainly, inside Weiss's words you can imagine other lives for Amy Winehouse: a junkie on the street like Marianne Faithfull, who finally walked away, back into the career she never really had the first time around, first recording in the same year the Shangri-Las first recorded, this year covering their ghostly “Past, Present, and Future” on a new album; a grimy singer with a guitar case open at her feet, like anyone in your town; a social worker with years of shock treatment behind her, like June Miller; a music teacher for kindergarteners; an old woman with stories nobody believes.

3
Amen Dunes,
Through Donkey Jaw
(Sacred Bones)
The music here—less abstract than vague—may be trying to live up to its cover photo by Deborah Turbeville, which could have appeared in Michael Lesy's
Wisconsin Death Trip:
a dark-haired woman with glasses, a hand held to her open mouth in alarm, and frightened eyes—eyes frightened by something behind them, not in front of them.

4–5
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, “Nebraska,” from
First Person Singular Presents
Debts No Honest Man Can Pay
(Pegasus Books, Berkeley, July 20) and
Debts No Honest Man Can Pay
(Veritas,
mccabeandmrsmillerband.com
)
Taking part in a performance series that means to redefine not only the literary event but the literary as such, the duo—guitarist and singer Victor Krummenacher, late of Camper Van Beethoven, and pianist and singer Alison Faith Levy, once of the Sippy Cups—stepped up to perform, or rewrite, Bruce Springsteen's 1982 album
Nebraska
, and they hit a vein right from the start, with the title song. As a murder ballad, Springsteen's account of Charley Starkweather and Caril Fugate's 1958 teenage murder rampage is as stark as a Robert Frank highway photo—a song so severe in its conception and performance it could have been made to deny anyone else the chance to sing it. Krummenacher and Levy, who later recorded all the songs from the show, with “Highway Patrolman” as the clear, soul-deep standout, seized Springsteen's song by doubling down, with Krummenacher as Starkweather and Levy as Fugate trading verses and sharing lines that in Springsteen's original had been Starkweather's alone. He was executed in 1959; Fugate, who claimed to be a hostage, was paroled in 1976. Since then she has never spoken of the eleven bodies she and Starkweather left across Nebraska and Wyoming, but she was speaking this night. She was there as Levy sang, “Me and him, we had us some fun”—and she came in without flinching to sing Starkweather's real-life line about what he wanted when he went to the electric chair, “Make sure my pretty baby / is sitting right there on my lap.”