Real Life Rock (163 page)

3
Twin Princess,
The Complete Recordings
(Hidden Agenda/Parasol)
An arty duo from Seattle—arty right down to their not-weird version of Frank and Nancy Sinatra's 1967 “Somethin' Stupid”—but with enough charm to make you want to walk through the galleries where the stuff is playing. No. 1 this week: “Deep Sleep,” repetition as its own reward. Moving up: “Gimme a Kiss.”

4
The Incredible Moses Leroy,
Electric Pocket Radio
(Artemis)
Long ago, a big, sloppy-looking man called Larry “Wild-man” Fischer used to stand on street corners in Berkeley and Los Angeles and importune passersby: “Hey, you want to hear a new-type song for a dime?” If you said yes, something indescribable came out: flat and toneless, but weird enough (Fischer's sidewalk hit was about his mother committing him to a mental hospital) and sweet enough to make you wonder—and, if not cough up another dime, hang around to listen if anyone else did. In 1968, during his freak-show period, Frank Zappa put out a Wildman Fischer double LP on his Bizarre label; it got great reviews. A follow-up did not; outsider artists are supposed to temporarily overcome their psychoses, not have careers.

Ron Fountenberry of San Diego—who as a performer takes the name of his great-grandfather Moses Leroy (1900–90), a Houston civil rights activist who, from the '30s to his death, spoke, sued, demonstrated and finally, in his last years, as a voter registrar, sat behind a desk to change his city and his country—stands somewhere between Larry Fischer and Brian Wilson. You can't tell the studio genius from the kid fooling around in his bedroom. Leroy's cutting and pasting, as unpretentious as a strip mall, results in songs that throw you off: sunny, disconcerting, glowing with the smiles of benign phantoms. Absolutely nothing seems to be at stake in this music other than amusement. Leroy works at it, and singer Camilla, taking a number every few tracks, gets to enjoy it. You take Leroy's radio out of your pocket whenever you remember it's there, to see what's on; always, it's something you've almost heard before.

5
Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash,
Walk Alone
(Ultimatum)
More from San Diego: for getting away with (or licensing) the name, the phrase “dead soldier” and the hearty male chorus on “Texas Sun”—which might remind you of the beginning of the cattle drive in
Red River
, when Howard Hawks cuts from one cowboy face to another, and you know that whatever's coming next, it won't be as good.

6–7
Taj Mahal,
Taj Mahal
(Columbia Legacy, recorded 1967)
When you listen to
Rising Sons Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder
(Columbia Legacy), a collection of unreleased demos recorded in Los Angeles in 1964, you can't believe Taj (né Henry Fredericks) ever made it to
Taj Mahal
—even if it took three years and a trip around the block. The country blues from the earlier
sessions are as dead as the dog the man pokes with a stick in Bruce Springsteen's “Reason to Believe” (“Like if he stood there long enough / That dog'd get up and run”). On
Taj Mahal
, the former member of the Pioneer Valley Folklore Society and the rest of, as the
New York Times
embarrassed its members into saying, Mr. Mahal's band, with Cooder still in tow, took momentary title to songs that had been sung by hundreds before them. Hammering his har-monica, Taj pulls Sonny Boy Williamson's “Checkin' Up on My Baby” inside out—
that's
where she is, right inside the song!—and on the long stroll he takes through “The Celebrated Walking Blues” he suspends the more than three decades between its first recording and his own, between the more than three decades since his recording was first heard and today. “Hehheh,” he says, in what might be the most lascivious half-second in blues, until a few minutes later, when he says it again: this, you're sure, is the sound everyone who came before was looking for, and that everyone, Taj included, has been looking for since. The big, bulging notes on his slide guitar flap in the air like wash on a line, then billow up in the wind of Cooder's mandolin; the rhythm makes all the time in the world, and when the recording ends, you know the song doesn't.

8
Levon Helm & the Barn Burners at Biscuits and Blues (San Francisco, Feb. 6)
They went into Muddy Waters' “I'm Ready.” “They're using that in Viagra commercials now,” said Maria Muldaur, leaning across the table. You've seen it: guy prancing around his apartment, dressing sharp, because now the song doesn't mean he's ready ready ready to fuck. It means he's ready ready ready to see the doctor to talk about why he can't.

9
Taj Mahal, “The Celebrated Walking Blues,” on
Taj Mahal
(Columbia Legacy)
Not that Viagra wasn't already in the song, or anyway its ancestors: “Got to go to Memphis, baby / To have my hambone boiled / You know I done laid around here in Clarksdale, baby, until my / Little old hambone was spoiled.” And if that doesn't work, you go see the gypsy. That always works. And always costs.

10
Nick Bromell,
Tomorrow Never Knows—Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s
(University of Chicago Press)
A short, passionate study written from inside the story it tells, and less about drugs, perhaps, than the way adherents of a music and a culture came to recognize that the ground beneath their feet had turned into air. Bromell, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, sums up in a passage of surpassing cruelty: “Just four years earlier,
yeah, yeah, yeah
, they were taking to the dance floor because
something was happening
. Now they found that they could not, after all, escape from history. Nor could they make it. How, except with ‘Tombstone Blues' or ‘Yer Blues,' could they name this condition—one in which the earth's most privileged cohort was also powerless, radicalized for nothing, fated to wait for decades on the watchtower, listening to the wind rise and watching the approach of two riders who knew their destiny yet would never, it seems, arrive?”

MARCH
5, 2001

1–3
Oh Susanna,
Sleepy Little Sailor
(Catamount),
Johnstown
(Stella/Square Dog, 1999) and
Oh Susanna
(Stella, 1997)
Oh Susanna is singer, guitarist and songwriter Suzie Ungerleider of Toronto. There's the echo of the North Carolina mountains in her voice, but on
Sleepy Little Sailor
, the first record she hasn't put out herself, you can also hear Sarah McLachlan. You can also hear someone with nothing to prove: no one else would have the nerve to take up Otis Redding's “I've Got Dreams to Remember” and then sing from inside the song as Redding did not; Ungerleider puts you on the street as she sees her lover with someone else, letting you feel his tongue in her mouth. And you can hear Tanita Tikaram's unexplainable “Twist in My Sobriety,” from 12 years back, as Ungerleider moves into “All That Remains”
and “Forever at Your Feet,” as elegant musically as they are unstable as stories—
What happened?
they leave you asking.
Is he, is she, already dead?