Real Life Rock (232 page)

9
Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, “Redemption Song,” video directed by Josh Cheuse (Epitaph)
On a downtown New York street, a man spray-paints a memorial portrait of the onetime Clash frontman; the portrait of Strummer covers an entire wall. People of different ages gather to watch it go up, or gaze seriously as they pass by. Others pose in front of it, proudly, giggling, some as if they're humbly (Steve Buscemi) or defiantly (Jim Jarmusch, Cara Seymour) putting their handprints into the picture, joining it. At the end there's performance footage, just strong enough to make you say,
Ah, shit
.

10
Rock Hall Highlights, #3 (Cleveland, Dec. 7)
“Steven Tyler Bust. 1997. Fabricated by Kevin Yagher Productions”—in a Lucite cube, a replica of the Aerosmith singer with hair flying, eyes bulging, mouth all but swallowing the microphone clutched in disembodied hands. A visitor: “This is the best. I think this is what we all want for Steven Tyler: to have his head cut off and put in a box.”

JANUARY
14, 2004

1
Mr. Airplane Man,
C'mon DJ
(Sympathy for the Record Industry)
A Boston duo—Margaret Garrett, guitar, Tara McManus, drums and organ—recording in Memphis, then calling out from the Memphis murk. They go back, past Mazzy Star, Robin Lane, the Spikedrivers, to young white men playing blues in the Sun studio in the mid-fifties, then back from there, to a bar where the customers are so drunk they can't even tell what color they're supposed to be. The result sounds as contemporary as anything by such like-minded outfits as the White Stripes, the Kills, the Fiery Furnaces: an insistence that the present is a con, the past a myth, music a mask. You don't think about that in the stomp of “Red Light” or the haze of “Don't Know Why,” but in “Wait for Your Love” the vocals are buried, and so are the guitar and the drums. Everything takes place behind a curtain, until with a final whamwhamwham the band hits and runs.

2
Kill Bill Vol. 1—Original Soundtrack
(Maverick)
Not that there's anything less than fabulous here, but the eleven minutes plus of Santa Esmeralda's mariachi version of the Animals' “Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood” is almost beyond human intent.

3–4
Cold Mountain—Music from the Miramax Motion Picture
(DMZ/Columbia) and
Goodbye, Babylon
(Dust-to-Digital 6-CD reissue, 1902–60)
The sensibility that producer T Bone Burnett brought to the
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
soundtrack doesn't work for
Cold Mountain
; Jack White and Alison Krauss seem to be looking over the horizon at something else, something that actually interests them. The new recordings of Sacred Harp singers—people following a primitive notation system as the means to bring a whole
community into a complex song—have spirit, but there's no ground in the sound. To hear what the form, or philosophy of life, can be, seek out the country-religious music collection
Goodbye, Babylon
. Pressed into the tinny confines of commercial 78s from the 1920s or '30s, people stand and deliver themselves to God, as if by pure will they can make him listen. If he can turn away from the Huggins & Phillips Sacred Harp Singers' 1928 “Lover of the Lord,” with the lead voice of a nerdy teenage girl deep inside the sound, he's not worthy of them—not worthy of the dead. As an all-night DJ shouts in Geoffrey O'Brien's forthcoming book
Sonata for Jukebox
, “Alabama gospel records from before recording was invented”—that's the feeling.

5
Spam e-mail (Jan. 3)
Why is it that the words “Young Goodman Brown”—referring to the 1835 Nathaniel Hawthorne story where a devout Puritan is drawn into the devil's forest (“On he flew, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy”), toward a coven of Satanists and, at its center, his wife, Faith—keep popping up in the upper-left corner of Paris Hilton video ads?

6
Hootie & the Blowfish, video for “The Goodbye Girl,” from the TNT original movie
Neil Simon's “The Goodbye Girl”
(Jan. 16, 18, 20)
It runs on
Law & Order
central as an endless commercial: the musicians playing in the rain plus Patricia Heaton of
Everybody Loves Raymond
as a wan middle-aged woman acting mainly with her nose job and Jeff Daniels offering come-hither eyes in a sad-puppy face—compared to this, his
Dumb and Dumber
character was Sean Connery in
Robin and Marian
. Cutting in and out of the movie, the band seems inspired, risking anything, even electrocution, to pay homage to David Gates, who first recorded this terrible song, back in 1978, right about the time Bread stopped fooling anybody.

7
American Blues Festival 1962–1966
,
2-DVD set (HIP-O Records)
Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Rush, Victoria Spivey, Memphis Slim, even Howlin' Wolf, and more, in Germany, in hokey but appealing stage sets or before polite audiences, and all giving at best 10 percent of the minimum they could have gotten away with back in Chicago. Except for T-Bone Walker on “Don't Throw Your Love on Me So Strong,” plainly too much of an artist to think he's more the owner of the music than it is of him.

8
The Cooler
,
directed by Wayne Kramer (Gryphon Films)
There's nothing happening here but Alec Baldwin's performance, pushing far beyond his 1992 role as the sales-force executioner in
Glengarry Glen Ross
. The scene where Baldwin's Old Vegas casino boss explains his values to Ron Livingston's New Vegas business-school mobster is supposed to dramatize passion and experience against callowness and training, and it does—as a display of what it means to disappear into a character, to let him walk without the puppet strings the director is so obviously using on Livingston. Also featuring an unsurprisingly convincing turn by 'N Sync's Joey Fatone as craven lounge singer Johnny Capella.