Real Life Rock (291 page)

5
Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Light Is Faster Than Sound” (June 23), from
Live at the Carousel Ballroom, 1968
(Columbia Legacy)
Six minutes. Total riot. Punk shamed. Desperation, release, fear and driving right through it, hitting a wall, climbing over it, falling into a swamp. As Jim Thompson wrote in 1952 in
The Killer Inside Me
, “A man is hanged and poisoned and chopped up and shot, and he goes right on living.” There are screams that seem to come from other than ordinary bodies,
wow-wow-wows
that sound like hurricanes chafing at the starting block, a feedback solo that breaks up as it's played, or as it
arrives
—can you go faster than sound, on your own two feet, with the wind of a nightmare at your back, a nightmare you can't bear to wake from because you want to know how it turns out?

6
Deborah Sontag and Walt Bogdanich, “8 Guilty for Prison Massacre in Rare Trial of Haiti's Police”
(
New York Times,
January 19)
Or Judge Dread lives. In 1967, the Jamaican ska songwriter and producer Prince Buster took on the mantle of an Ethiopian judge come to Kingston to rid the land of its scourge of thugs; across three historic singles—“Judge Dread,” “The Appeal,” and “Judge Dread Dance” (a.k.a. “The Pardon”)—he piled hundred-year sentences on teenage murderers, jailed their lawyers, left them weeping and pleading for mercy, then set everybody free and left his seat to lead a cakewalk through the court: “I am the judge, but I know how to dance.” Judge Dread reappeared on January 19, in Haiti, in the person of Judge Ezekiel Vaval, when, in an act that broke the culture of impunity that had always surrounded Haitian government officials of any sort, he sentenced eight police officers to prison for a jailhouse massacre they had perpetrated and covered up. “The decision of the judge is his expression of the truth,” said Judge Vaval, as in cadences that matched Prince Buster's in both spirit and form he handed down sentences of two to thirteen years of prison and hard labor, giving police chiefs the longest terms. “There are other versions that exist but this is mine. And that is the law.”

7
Gaslight Anthem, “Changing of the Guards,” on
Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan
(Amnesty International/Fontana)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? Yes, especially when they're for a good cause, and
four CDs long
—but Gaslight Anthem, from New Jersey, puts so much humor and dread into this
Street Legal
number, unrealized in Dylan's own hands, that you forget it's a Dylan song. Elsewhere, even on the few tracks worth hearing more than once (Diana Krall's “ Simple Twist of Fate,” Ziggy Marley's “Blowin' in the Wind,” Miley Cyrus's “You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” Bryan Ferry's steely “Bob Dylan's Dream”), words generally come out more clearly than on the originals, because so little is going on musically, either in terms of playing or singing—there's nothing else to listen to, to be distracted by. “ People have a hard time believing that Shakespeare really wrote all of his work because there is so much of it. Do you have a hard time accepting that?” Dylan was asked in 1991. “ People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them,” he said.

8
Barack Obama, “Sweet Home Chicago,” White House Blues Night (February 21/PBS, February 27)
In what would have been Robert Johnson's hundred–and–first year, one of his songs was sung by the president of the United States. After a command from the guitarist Buddy Guy (“I heard you singing Al Green—you have started something, you gotta keep it up now”), he started out flat on “Come on, baby don't you want
to go / Come on, baby don't you want to go,” and then with a rounded, lifting tone just barely swung “Chicago” into the night. He couldn't have taken the tune from the band more casually; he must have heard this song all his life.

9
Venus in Fur,
written by David Ives, directed by Walter Bobbie (Manhattan Theatre Club, New York, December 18; now at the Lyceum)
“Like the Lou Reed song?” says Nina Arianda's Vanda as this storming, shape-shifting two-person comedy gets going. An actress shows up late to try out for a part, only the director is there, he says they might as well get it over with, and then the battle begins. It's Naomi Watts's audition scene in
Mulholland Dr
. with a subtext out of Camille Paglia's
Sexual Personae
—translated by Betty Hutton in
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
and by Martha Raye in
Monsieur Verdoux
. Unless Vanda is the lost sister of the Marx Brothers crossed with Lady Gaga and Helen of Troy, who after more than three thousand years has a lot of scores to settle.

10
“King's Court,” Super Bowl Pepsi commercial (NBC, February 5)
After dispatching various miserable contestants for a single can of Pepsi, King Elton John is faced with
X Factor
queen Melanie Amaro, who, packaged as a stand-in for the Queen of Soul, steps up to perform a hideously over-souled and oversold version of Aretha Franklin's “Respect.” After Elton sheepishly awards her the coveted red, white, and blue can, she zaps him into a dungeon and gives everyone in the court a free drink. In a better world, Elton would have sent her back to her TV show: “Lady, I
served
with Aretha. I know Aretha. Aretha is a friend of mine. Lady, you're no Aretha.”

JUNE
2012

1
“Robert Johnson at 100,” Apollo Theater, New York (March 6)
Charles Taylor reports from the scene: “The trick to feeling comfortable in Sunday clothes is to make sure that Sunday isn't the only day you wear them. The famous 1930s picture of Robert Johnson looking sharp in his three-piece suit was projected over the stage for much of the centennial celebration, and the casual ease of everything about Johnson in that picture acted like a judgment on the parade of supplicants, posers, pretenders, and mediocrities who passed beneath. The ones who stood up to Johnson's gaze were confident enough to sport their own style. Taj Mahal, walking out with the calm familiarity of a beefy working man approaching a job he long ago mastered, played and sang ‘Hell Hound on My Trail' with a sound rooted to the earth while moving with the lightness of Jackie Gleason. Sam Moore's high vocal was at first lost in ‘Sweet Home Chicago' but the sweetness of his voice gradually drew you in like a beckoning finger. Elvis Costello, striking an unconscious echo of Johnson's crossed-knee posture, performed a charming ‘From Four Until Late' as if the evening's honoree were George Formby, master of the English music hall. The Roots, who bend their knee to no one and do tradition the honor of never treating it as tradition, unleashed a staccato ‘Milkcow's Calf Blues' that was flabbergasting in its confidence. With ?uestlove's drumming controlling singer-guitarist Kirk Douglas like a puppet master's strings, the number grew into a duet recalling the unexpected and joyous rapport in
Diner
when Timothy Daly shakes up a lagging strip-club duo by taking over the empty piano, finding allies in the suddenly knife-sharp drummer and in the tired dancer out front, who responds as if she were once again the youngest girl on the bill. No one was more at home in his style than James Blood Ulmer, who followed Taj's ‘Hell Hound' with his own, never leaving his seat in the house band, using his voice and guitar to emit a series of yelps and moans and mutterings that could have been devil dogs at the crossroads, or the spirits of Stonehenge. The other ghost present, the faint smile on Ulmer's face, suggested that the phantoms of the ages were all his familiars.”