Real Life Rock (168 page)

The result was a truly religious deliverance. The woman seemed ready to kiss the host's feet, to pledge to him her unborn children. By the logic of her performance, had she lost they would have had to put her down, like Jane Fonda at the end of
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

5
Persona Grata (17, rue du Temple, Paris 4e)
Just across the Pont Neuf on the Right Bank is Conforama, a household furnishings department store. What's inside—items guaranteed to put you to sleep on your feet—seems to translate the name of the place: a play on
confort
(comfort), to an English speaker it reads Conform-o-rama. But small stores offering typical French design—simplicity combined with uniqueness, a lack of ostentation with flair—are all over the city, and this one stood out. Persona Grata is divided into sections, each with its own manifesto—“Good Taste? Bad Taste?” “Design? Child's Play!” “Objects: Stories without Words”—and a Princess
toaster, all gleaming silver except for a black base and handles, paid off on the last one. Without a single anthropomorphic feature it was nonetheless a face. It grinned, saying, “Good morning. Click me.” It was welcoming, but it also suggested it had a mind of its own—that as much as it was there to serve you, it would wait for you to go to sleep, and then get up and wander all over the house, moving things.

6–7
Cat-Iron,
Cat-Iron Sings Blues and Hymns
(Smithsonian Folkways) & 15.60.75, aka the Numbers,
Jimmy Bell's Still in Town
(Hearthan)
Cat-Iron was a blues singer from Natchez, Miss. In 1958 Frederic Ramsey Jr. recorded him and wrote him up in the prestigious
Saturday Review
. All through Ramsey's interesting piece—the liner notes to the original Folkways release, included on the custom cassettes or CDs you can now order through Smithsonian Folkways—run the lyrics of “Jimmy Bell,” Cat-Iron's signature number. Otherwise second-or thirdhand, here Cat-Iron's guitar takes on its own voice, stating no theme, only dropping hints, pulling you closer; as he sings, he seems less to be telling a story than promising he'll tell you later. No wonder: Jimmy Bell, with “greenbacks enough to make a man a suit,” has come to drive the women from the church. “All you need,” he tells his sister, “is not to shout.” The sense of some enormous transformation is in the air. What it is you can't tell.

In 1975, opening for Bob Marley, singer-guitarist Robert Kidney took his seven-piece, three-sax band from Kent, Ohio, onto the stage of the Agora in Cleveland. “Jimmy Bell” was the Numbers' wipeout piece, as much Bobby Darin's “Mack the Knife” as Cat-Iron's cryptic crusader. Picking up on the bare syncopation in the Cat-Iron version, the Numbers press the rhythm right away, the bass slithering over the beat like a snake, then rhythm guitar, then Kidney's thin voice, insisting on that greenback suit until you can see it walking down the street as his lead guitar picks up the bass's theme and flails it like a whip. Across nearly 11 minutes, the performance is all play and menace, all here and now, all origins erased, a reach beyond the story to the willfulness in which it begins, a willfulness only a long, mean solo will turn up. By the time Kidney returns to words Jimmy Bell has come and gone and come back again, and you're on the next train out. “Up the road I'm going,” Jimmy Bell tells his wife. “She said,” Kidney shouts for her in terror, “She said, ‘What road?' ”

8
Reuters, “British Sequel to ‘The Omen' ”
(
International Herald Tribune
,
March 20)
“London—The Labour Party will use a spoof video based on the cult 1970s horror movie ‘The Omen' to assail its rivals in approaching elections. . . . The video [uses] imagery and music from ‘The Omen' to liken Conservative leader William Hague to the character Damien, the son of the devil, and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to the anti-Christ.”

Too bad the Democratic Party won't have the nerve to come up with its own version, even though it might put a crimp in GOP plans to rename the entire country after Ronald Reagan.

9
Debbie Geller, producer of the Arena documentary
The Brian Epstein Story
and author of
In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story
,
visits the 31st Annual Beatlefest (March 17)
“I don't know if you've ever been to one of these things. I never have and assumed it would be full of obsessive Beatle collector types and there certainly were a lot of those. But what really struck me were the middle-class, middle-aged and younger clean-cut suburbanites there, virtually all of whom were having a great time. The vast floor of a chain motel in true Nowheresville, N.J., was broken up by ad hoc groups of guys with guitars and lots of people standing around them singing with unself-conscious enthusiasm and energy. Lots of them had their kids with them, who didn't seem embarrassed by mom and dad and were even singing with them most of the time.

“I'm only telling you this because I think you might understand, or maybe not, the sense of loss I felt in the face of this enthusiasm.
Not that they've ever been anything less than the most popular group ever, but this current re-renaissance of interest in the Beatles has meant that my own original relationship to the group is becoming more and more distant. I can talk about the importance they had to me and all, but I can't remember what it felt like anymore. It's hard to remember a time when everyone didn't know all the words to all the songs, when the Beatles were doing unexpected things, when you couldn't predict what was going to happen, when a Beatle record being released was a major event and when they were so glamorous and their world was so glamorous, you could barely imagine what it was like.

“Rather than feeling a sense of commonality with people as I watched them singing the songs I've known the words to as well for at least 30 years, I felt like they were singing songs sung by a different band.”

10
The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash,
Directors Guild of America Theatre Complex (Los Angeles, March 9)
After a screening of the 1978 TV film about the Bizarro World version of the Beatles, Rutles Neil Innes, Eric Idle and Rikki Fattar came out for a panel discussion and questions from the audience. Idle was asked if it was true that Jermaine Jackson had bought the rights to all the Rutles songs. He didn't get it right away.

MAY
1, 2001

1
Ass Ponys, “Kung Fu Reference,” on
Lohio
(Checkered Past)
The voice is pained and passionate, the voice of a fan of the TV series who, the melody convinces you, wants more than anything in this world for the show to mean as much to you as it does to him. Why? Because, you find out in a verse you'd rather not have understood, this man has nothing in his life but a choice between
RoboCop
and
The Bride of Frankenstein
—whatever's on tonight. The chorus seals the song: “If you ever gave a damn for Sonny Jim / I know you will—remember him.” It's in the rise and fall, the shining light that, for some reason, 26 years after the show went off the air, isn't out, even if like me you never watched it, or heard of Sonny Jim. A heroic guitar solo seems to carry its own double inside itself; it's uncanny, and like all great guitar solos not an interlude, but the story translated, elevated, pushed out in front of itself like a life the singer will never live.

2
“No Depression in Heaven—An Exploration of Harry Smith's
Anthology
of
American Folk Music
,” produced by Hal Willner (Getty Center, Los Angeles)
The '60s Cambridge folkie Geoff Muldaur led the assemblage. He looked like the kindly town pharmacist; when he opened his mouth a dynamic version of Noah Lewis' 1928 “Minglewood Blues” came out like a tiger. “You're going to be killing a lot of people tonight, aren't you?” fiddler Richard Greene asked Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family, who was one of only four or five people under 40, or maybe 50, on the stage. “That's what I do best,” she said sweetly. Sparks writes lyrics about murder and clinical depression for her husband, Brett, to sing; she introduced the Blue Sky Boys' 1936 “Down on the Banks of the Ohio” as a song in which “a woman is slaughtered to ensure the river remains full.” “This record sounds like it came from Mars,” Greene said, kicking off Floyd Ming and His Pep Steppers' 1928 “Indian War Whoop” (a new version orchestrates Baby Face Nelson's arrest in
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
). It sounded just like Slim Whitman's “Indian Love Call,” which in
Mars Attacks!
makes all the Martians' heads explode.