Real Life Rock (262 page)

5
Tom Meyer, “Back Page” cartoon
(
San Francisco Chronicle,
May 17)
There's an older man shouting at his unhappy daughter: “Hey—we had to pay for our parents' Social Security, you have to pay for ours!” “Your parents were part of the Greatest Generation that delivered us from the Depression and the Nazis. . . .” she says, shoving her finger into his potbelly: “
Your
generation gave us Iraq, the Great Recession, trillion-dollar deficits, and Duran Duran!”

6
Ed Zuckerman, writer, “Rock Star” episode of
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
(USA, May 3)
The first show with Jeff Goldblum as Detective Zach Nichols. “I have a Grammy!” says Daniel Gerroll as old washed-up British rock star Philip, now landlord, sexual blackmailer, band manager, and killer, when Goldblum sneers at him. “Milli Vanilli had a Grammy,” Goldblum says mordantly, turning himself back into the crotchety rock critic he played in
Between the Lines
in 1977.

7–8
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with David Ritz,
Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography
(Simon & Schuster) and Josh Alan Friedman, “Jerry Leiber: Kiss My Big Black
Tokhis!
” in
Tell the Truth Until They Bleed: Coming Clean in the Dirty World of
Blues and Rock 'n' Roll
(Backbeat)
With Ritz, who's been ear and pen for autobiographies by Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, and more, the songwriters who from the beginning of their partnership in 1950 defined rhythm and blues and rock and roll talk their tales one after the other, back and forth: tales told before, in many cases, but not with such a sense of satisfaction and reflection, with such a lack of guile or resentment. Leiber speaks of deriving the words for “Is That All There Is?,” eventually an indelible hit for Peggy Lee in 1969, from Thomas Mann's “Disillusionment,” while Stoller says he went for the spirit of Kurt Weill for the music; together they recount trying to sell the song to Marlene Dietrich (“The song you just sang is who I am,” she tells Leiber, “not what I do”), then Barbra Streisand. What about Lotte Lenya? Ultimately they take Lee into the studio, she sings the song again and again, and they settle on take thirty-seven, because, for take thirty-six, when the three got it all—“Peggy had done it. We had done it. The enormous potential in this strange little song had been realized”—the engineer forgot to press the
RECORD
button. Leiber relates a lot of the same stories in Friedman's profile; with the gentlemanliness of Ritz's presentation replaced by Friedman's insistent street-grit milieu and tough-guy narration, they aren't half so convincing.

9
Eliot Ross,
Passover at Jake's: The Rosenbloom Seder Plate,
2008, in the “Dorothy Saxe Invitational: New Works/Old Story—80 Artists at the Passover Table” (Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, February 27–June 2, catalog available through the museum)
“An assemblage of objects memorializing my father and his brothers who never took time off to celebrate a Jewish holiday,” Ross says: on a blue and white Pabst serving tray, with
WHAT
'
LL YOU HAVE
? emblazoned on the edge, there's a snapshot of the four Rosenbloom brothers posing in front of a bar, and before them an ashtray with a few butts, a cigar stub for a lamb shank, a shot glass, the whole thing held up with a Budweiser bottle.

10
Elvis Presley, “That's All Right” (Cole Coffee, Oakland, May 23, 8:30 a.m.)
For a minute, the little coffee spot had no customers. As I walked in I caught the first strum of Elvis Presley's first record. “
That's
nice,” said one of the three twentyish women behind the counter. Another took my money and began dancing as the first one starting singing. A feeling of freshness and confidence rang through the music and into the air of the room.

OCTOBER
2009

1
Worst News of the Month:
CRIME LEADERS KRAY TWINS SCHEMED TO TAKE OVER AS THE BEATLES
'
MANAGERS
(
Entertainment Daily,
June 21)
The scheme the Krays supposedly hatched was simple: instead of cutting up Brian Epstein with swords, threaten to expose him as homosexual—never mind that Ronnie Kray was gay himself. You can imagine that John Lennon might have found the prospect of being managed by the scariest people in London cool beyond cool—for about five minutes.

2
Ettes,
Do You Want Power
(Take Root)
With guitarist Coco Hames in front, drummer Poni Silver in back, and bassist Jem Cohen in the middle, this is a punk band—and depending as much on your mood as on their intentions, you might pick up the swooping grandeur of the Adverts' “Great British Mistake,” the speed of the Clash, the distance and space the Rolling Stones found in rhythm and blues. Songs can take off so fast they all but leave you behind. But the oddest notes might be the most compelling, a few months or years down the line: the way the I-Can-Wait-Forever Appalachian voice of “O Love Is Teasin' ” or “The Cuckoo” winks out of the verses of “While Your Girl's Away,” the Cheshire-cat smile in “Keep Me in Flowers.”

3
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,
directed by Werner Herzog (Saturn Films)
Nicolas Cage's lieutenant walks into a surveillance room across the street from a house detectives are checking out, hallucinating his head off from crack and coke.
“What are these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?” he says, as one of the lizards only he can see begins to rotate an eye while Johnny Adams's New Orleans version of “Release Me” comes out of its mouth—or its nose, or whatever it is that iguanas sing out of.

4
Nicholas Rombes,
A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1974–1982
(Continuum)
You can't use this for reference, and not because there's no table of contents. Jumping all over the place is too much fun. A typical entry is the faux-referential “Ongoing force of
me,
the,” which cites a 1987 Johnny Rotten response to an “interviewer's statement that there had not been anything as revolutionary as the Sex Pistols”: “There has been something as revolutionary as the Sex Pistols. The ongoing force of
me
.” You might laugh as you skip backward or forward to
Dhalgren
(1975 novel by Samuel R. Delany, news to me) or “Punk, influence on something other than music or fashion”; you might also be stopped in your tracks by phrase-making I doubt could have been produced by anyone else on earth.