Real Life Rock (177 page)

4
Katastrophywife,
Amusia
(EFA/Almafame)
In 1990 Babes in Toyland of Minneapolis—singer and guitarist Kat Bjelland, drummer Lori Barbero, bassist Michelle Leon—released
Spanking Machine
on the local Twin/Tone label. It was as free and fierce a sound as anyone found in the post–Sex Pistols era—and there was nothing like Bjelland screaming, as an effect, as an event, an event taking place in one of her songs or off the record, in the street outside wherever the group was playing that night. Neal Karlen's
Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock and Roll Band
chronicled what happened next: a lifeless, overworried album on a major label, a “triumphant spot on the 1993 Lollapalooza, the most prestigious tour in rock and roll,” and that was that. Now Bjelland has a new trio with at least three puns in its name, and how her head stays on her body I have no idea.

5
Oxford American
No. 40
The bad news is that the passionately edited bimonthly literary magazine from Oxford, Miss., is going quarterly. It's not a shock. To take nothing away from Roy Blount Jr. and his “Gone Off up North,” when the hardest bite in your pages comes from your humor columnist, too many other people are biting their tongues. The good news is that the Fifth Annual Music Issue is probably the best so far. Witness after witness steps forth to testify in favor of an ignored, forgotten, misjudged or misunderstood pioneer, obscure genius or contemporary prophet without honor. From James Hughes on the Gants (“Mississippi's Beatles”) to Robert Bowman on Linda Lyndell (“The Woman Who Saved Stax”) to Bill Friskics-Warren on Bill Nettles (“protorockabilly” from the late '30s) to Billy Bob Thornton on his new album to David Eason on country singer-songwriter Steve Young and more, more, more, the reader can't wait to hear what the writers are talking about, and the 22-track CD included with the magazine gives you instant access to crushing disappointment. Mississippi's Beatles are really Mississippi's Beau Brummels (but odd enough to send
me to the record store in search of
Road Runner! The Best of the Gants
on Sun-dazed). Billy Bob Thornton's “Ring of Fire” is absolutely terrible. Steve Young is still a bore. In other words, the CD will save you the money the writers had almost convinced you to spend. Not that they would take a single word back: these are fans ripping off their shirts to show you who's really tattooed on their chests. They don't care if you agree with them, they just want you to look, and why not? Why shouldn't the writing be more convincing than the music? But then you come across something as emotionally tricky, as musicologically intense, as Tom Piazza's “A Light Went on and He Sang,” on country blues founder Charley Patton, and even if you've been listening to Patton for years, you know that when you close the magazine you'll cue up a disc and hear the man for the first time.

6
Gin Blossoms, “Found Out About You,” from
New Miserable Experience
(A&M, 1992)
“Yes, the Blossoms are still broken up,” reads the Unofficial Gin Blossoms Home Page, “but you can follow the former members in their new efforts . . .” Do they hold up so well because singer Robin Wilson still sounds not only miserable, but as if nothing could possibly have changed, including the world? Or because song-writer Doug Hopkins included his 1993 suicide in his 1992 songs?

7
Clash,
Take It or Leave It
(Wise/P.F.P. vinyl bootleg)
Recorded May 8, 1977, in Manchester. Awful sound. And when they go into “J.A.”—the Maytals' “Pressure Drop”—you can hear the world stand up and change.

8–9
Maggie Greenwald, director,
Songcatcher
&
Music From and Inspired by the Motion Picture “Songcatcher”
(Vanguard)
The movie never gets out of its clothes, thanks to Janet McTeer, whose imperious Lily (When can I take a
bath?
McTeer seems to be asking every five minutes) is loosely based on Maud Karpeles, who with Cecil Sharp in 1916 to 1918 collected more than 1,600 variants of 500 songs from 281 singers in the Appalachian highlands. One remarkable scene: country singer Iris DeMent as a mountain woman offering the collector “When First Unto This Country”—the words are prosaic, the feeling loaded into them otherworldly—just after her husband has sold their farm for 50 cents an acre to oily Earl Giddens (David Patrick Kelley), local representative of McFarland Coal. Another: after a brawl at a dance, Giddens, beaten to a pulp by hero Tom Bledsoe (a comfortably beefy Aidan Quinn), pulls himself to his feet, closes his coat over his pistol and launches into “Oh Death.” He walks off into the night, leaving the song to whoever wants to finish it—not, luckily, the red-robed Klan leader who declaims it like a speech in the Coen Brothers'
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
What are the chances of this ancient, bottomless song turning up in two general-release movies in one year?

DeMent's performance, as thin and brittle as anything she's ever recorded, is listed as “Pretty Saro” on the soundtrack album; “Oh Death” is sung by Kelley, Hazel Dickens and Bobby McMillon as “Conversation With Death.” There are other fine moments, among them Rosanne Cash's “Fair and Tender Ladies” and, from Emmylou Harris' florid “Barbara Allen” to Allison Moorer's horrid “Moonshiner,” too many songs sung to the mirror. For a better song-catching film, seek out David Hoffman's early-60s
Music Makers of the Blue Ridge
(Varied Directions) if you can find it; for the songs behind the story from people who never left where the songs came from, walk into any good record store and look for Doug and Jack Wallin,
Family Songs and Stories from the North Carolina Mountains
(Smithsonian Folkways), which has no flies on it.

10
David Thomas, David Johansen, Steve Earle and Philip Glass, “Kassie Jones,” from Hal Wilner's Harry Smith Project (Royce Hall, UCLA, April 26)
The big all-star jam to close the all-star concert, and thanks to Glass, who sounds as if he's playing underwater, and as if he grew up doing it—“Mr. Boogie,” Thomas says disdainfully, after announcing the supergroup as Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young and trying and failing to figure out who's who (“Love the one you're with, baby!” someone shouts)—the singers disappear right into the song. You can sense them attempting to hold back, to maintain some shred of individuality while exploring how a railroad man who actually lived turned into a figment of the common imagination, but the only way to tell the story is to let it tell itself.

SEPTEMBER
4, 2001

1
Great Pop Moments (That Should Have Happened Even if They Didn't Division): Valerie Mass, “ People” column
(
Denver Post
,
Aug. 6)
“
Elton John
spilled the beans about his former liquor-soaked, drugged-out life in an interview with
The London Mirror
. . . . John said he met
Bob Dylan
and
George Harrison
at a party he was hosting in Los Angeles but was unable to talk any sense to them. ‘I'd had quite a few martinis and [God] knows how much cocaine. So I started babbling on about how [Dylan] had to come up to my room and try on my clothes . . .' ”