Real Life Rock (171 page)

8
Bob Dylan,
Bob Dylan Live: 1961–2000
(Sony Japan)
Sixteen tracks, from “Wade in the Water,” taped in 1961 in Minneapolis, to “Things Have Changed,” from Portsmouth, England, last year. Killers: the old ballad “Handsome Molly,” from the Gaslight in 1962, and “Dead Man, Dead Man,” studio version on
Shot of Love
, 1981. Taped in New Orleans that same year, “Dead Man” is a textbook warning against the devil, if you listen as if you're reading; if you hear it, it's a poker game, and the singer's winning.

9
Pre-Dylan Alert! Robert Cantwell, “Darkling I Listen: Making Sense of the ‘Folk-ways Anthology,' ” talk at “Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular” (Getty Center, Los Angeles, April 20, 2001)
About old American music, as first recorded in the 1920s and assembled by Smith in 1952 as the six-LP anthology
American Folk Music
—which, given the degree to which he absorbed it, in the late '50s and early '60s might have been Bob Dylan's pillow. The records were not quite the songs, and the performances of the songs were not quite the songs either, Cantwell argued: when seven decades ago those who Dylan once called “the traditional people” faced new machines, what resulted were “thought experiments, science fictions—newer than new, as it were, and older than old. They lead us, finally, to the
Anthology
's central mystery: How can
these
performances have found their way to
those
records? Or better, these records to those performances?—questions that would not arise at all were it not for the still deeper question with which Harry has confronted us:
What is a record?
”

With the strange old sounds (“It is the
sound
of the old records we have, not the records themselves”), Cantwell said, Smith “placed us roughly where the listeners to Edison's phonograph were, phenomenologically speaking, in the early weeks of its public unveiling, when, according to the editor of the
Scientific American
, ‘the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that [it] was very well, and bid a cordial goodnight.' At succeeding demonstrations young women fainted; eminent scientific heads were convinced it was a trick of ventriloquism; a Yale professor pronounced it a flat-out hoax. What was this machine that could steal the human voice? That could make absent people present—or was it that it rendered present people absent? That immortalized the human voice, but at the
same time abolished it? What can one say of a machine that brings the dead back to life, but in the same instant buries them again?” No one has ever come closer to rendering Smith's selections—the likes of the Alabama Sacred Heart Singers' “Rocky Road” or Blind Lemon Jefferson's “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”—in mere words, as opposed to, as with Dylan's versions of the latter, on his first album in 1962, and in the basement tapes sessions five years later, more recordings.

10
Anonymous Dylan fan (e-mail, May 7)
“Bob birthday blast of coverage reminds me of fifties country song—
I forgot to remember to forget
—except updated—
I forgot, then remembered then forgot then remembered then remembered why I never should have forgotten in the first place
.”

MAY
29, 2001

1
Michael Sergio, director/writer,
Under Hellgate Bridge
(Cuva Pictures)
One baroque scene in this worthless New York mob 'n' junkies movie: evil low-level mobster Vincent and noble pretty boy ex-junkie Ryan, one-time rivals over ex-junkie Carla, now married to Vincent, give each other dirty looks in the local bar. Vincent's thugs have Ryan pinned to a chair; Vincent, in a fancy suit, waltzes Carla around a table gleaming with blue stemware. Wearing a matching blue cocktail dress, Carla, who Vincent has shot up “for old time's sake,” flops on his shoulder as the jukebox plays Terry Cole's rendition of Bobby Bland's 1959 “I'll Take Care of You,” one of Bland's most delicate and painful recordings. “I know you've been hurt / By somebody else,” Cole sings as Vincent lays Carla on a table and sodomizes her, grinning at Ryan until his face breaks up in orgasm: “I can tell by the way you carry yourself.” “This really takes me back,” Vincent says.

2
Trailer Bride,
High Seas
(Bloodshot)
Melissa Swingle, singer and multi-instrumentalist leader (saw, guitar, banjo, harmonica, piano) of this country band, which sounds like an old motel on Route 66 looks, is going to have to change her “I Used to Be Disgusted, Now I Try to Be Amused, But Usually It's Not Worth the Effort” T-shirt sooner or later. But not just yet.

3
John McCready, “Room at the Top,”
Mojo
(May)
The story of Joe Meek, the UK's first real independent record producer. The Tornadoes' 1962 “Telstar,” which alone among period pop songs playing in the “Les Années Pop” show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris this spring came across as a match for the best of the pop art on the walls, was his biggest hit; he killed himself in 1967 after shotgunning his landlady to death. McCready on Meek's work with songwriter Geoff Goddard: “Like Joe, Goddard was an amateur spiritualist with a Buddy Holly obsession. Goddard's interests pushed them to attempts at contacting dead stars—Al Jolson, Mario Lanza, and even Buddy. The sessions prompted Geoff to pen Mike Berry's ‘Tribute to Buddy Holly.' Joe and Geoff decided to call up Buddy and see if he thought the record would be a hit. His reply? ‘
SEE YOU IN THE CHARTS
.' ”

4
Colson Whitehead,
John Henry Days
(Doubleday)
Anthropologist Harry Smith found the ballad “John Henry”—or the story of the ex-slave and spike driver who dies in a race with a steam drill—bottomless. No less than four versions are included on the four volumes of Smith's
Anthology of American Folk Music
—by the Williamson Brothers and Curry (“Gonna Die With My Hammer in My Hand,” 1927), Furry Lewis (“Spike Driver Blues,” 1928), J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers (“John Henry Was a Little Boy,” 1936) and the Monroe Brothers (“Nine Pound Hammer Is Too Heavy,” 1936). Scattered through this novel about a young journalist on a junket for the release of a John Henry stamp are Whitehead's versions of the way the song generates versions of itself: tales of how singers find the song, or how the song finds its singers, be they a present-day crackhead or a Jewish song-plugger a hundred years ago. Whitehead's hero stands in the way of a story trying to tell itself, but there is deeper
writing here than in novels that have nothing wrong with them.

5
Jonathan Franzen, “Freeloading Man,” review of Colson Whitehead,
John Henry Days
,
New York Times Book Review
(May 14)
Novelist Franzen leads with the declaration that he was “irritated” by Whitehead's having made the hero of his first novel,
The Intuitionist
, a woman: “Although it's technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist's fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened”—
smallened?
—“by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level,
not male at all?”
Leave aside the assumption that women are by definition “smallened,” or, for that matter, the case of Henry James (who, some have argued, was, you know, not exactly male at all, at least as Franzen seems to define male). By the lights of Franzen's argument, Whitehead, who is black, should also not attempt to inhabit white characters, which he does throughout
John Henry Days
, and Franzen, who is white, should certainly not be judging the work of a black novelist. But since he is, we can fairly ask: is he using Whitehead as his fantasy sex object? Is he trying to colonize territory that rightfully (at least as Franzen defines “rightfully”) belongs to black writers? Does he perhaps believe himself to be, at some shallow level, not white at all? Or is he simply a moron who should never write about anyone but himself?