Real Life Rock (289 page)

8
“Viggo Mortensen: Hollywood's Grungy Antihero,”
New York Times Style Magazine
(December 4, 2011)
Inside, accompanying a profile by Zoë Heller, Mortensen has a fifty-three-year-old's lines cracking his face when he grins. In the retouched cover photo, all pensive and fey under a watch cap, he looks exactly like Justin Bieber.

9
Carolyn Hester, “Lonesome Tears,” Teatro Bibiena, Festivalettertatura, Mantua, Italy (September 9, 2011) and on Hester's
From These Hills
(Road Goes on Forever, Outpost, 1996)
Hester, a Greenwich Village folkie from the late '50s and early '60s, recorded her first album in 1957 at Norman
Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico, with Buddy Holly chipping in on guitar during rehearsals; one of the songs she cut was “Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair.” When Holly and the Crickets played London the following year, the show began with a ghostly organ sound, but no organ, no musician; then a platform rose from beneath the stage, revealing Holly alone at the keyboard, playing “Black Is the Color” as if it was the only song anyone needed to hear. In Mantua, in a severe, steep eighteenth-century theater where Mozart once performed, Hester took the stage with her two daughters and, before running through a set of wasn't-that-a-time chestnuts, stilled the room with Holly's “Lonesome Tears,” the song as she played it at once earthy and delicate, sounding both like a handed-down ballad and a perfectly crafted pop song. “The day before yesterday was his birthday,” she said, with a tone that made you think not a week had gone by since his death in 1959 that she hadn't thought about him.

10
“Regifting: Songs My Mother (or Some Other) Gave Me,” hosted by Joe Christiano and Theresa Kelly, St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Albany, California (December 4, 2011)
“Cover songs only!” was the first of a list of rules for a hootenanny of “passed on” tunes (“This Land Is Your Land,” went a list of suggestions, “Up on the Roof, My Yiddishe Momme”)—along with the disclaimer that original songs would be permitted only if they were “credited in performance to Paul Anka.”

Thanks to Diann Blakely

MARCH-APRIL
2012

1
Roots,
Undun
Even if you catch only a phrase here and there, the story this shape-shifting album tells is plain. Just through the feel of the music, you know you are following the story of a single person, as he slowly pulls himself out of simple questions and simple answers and into a sense of self that throws off anyone else's idea of who he's supposed to be, even if he's drowning in confusion, conflict, voices hammering in his head, all answers to any questions far behind him. The voices telling his tale continually change—on “Lighthouse,” the sound couldn't be more toothpaste, but it's also a relief from the street life swirling around it. There's a reason the Geto Boys' “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” is quoted early on: the same humility, the same sense of struggling to know what you don't know, runs through the songs like a river to cross. The rapping is close to ordinary speech—the bravado, the sneer, that makes so much rapping one-dimensional and tiresome isn't in this music. But the more you listen the more you hear—stray echoes of Dion & the Belmonts, Coolio's “Gangsta's Paradise,” the ambition and the willingness to slow down, not to rush, of Sly and the Family Stone's
There's a Riot Goin' On
. You don't want this to end, and not only because of dread at what the ending will be.

2
A Place to Bury Strangers,
Onwards to the Wall
(Deep Oceans)
From New York, the spirit of Joy Division—until the riptide of the title song, when the band all but changes places with New Order. But New Order never had a singer like Alanna Nuala—a.k.a. Moon—who as she rides through the middle of the number could be a horsewoman riding a ghost.

3
Pina,
directed by Wim Wenders (HanWay Films)
An unforgettable moment in this gorgeously vivid tribute to the late choreographer Pina Bausch, as performed by members of her Tanztheater Wuppertal, from her 1978 piece “Kontakthof,” with Peter Dennis's delirious 1975 version of Jimmy Dorsey's 1946 “T. D.'s Boogie Woogie” pushing them on. A line of men seated in chairs, dressed in suits, hammer their way across the floor toward a line of women in slinky dresses rubbing themselves against the wall behind them—a routine that in its aura of trance and violence seems to capture the ambitions of every avant-garde nightclub from the Cabaret Voltaire on down. As a 3-D movie
Pina
ought to be on a double bill with Werner Herzog's
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
.

4
Comet Gain,
Howl of the Lonely Crowd
(What's Your Rupture?)
Formed in 1992, this British group appears here stuck in the Beat past of the '40s and '50s, with the references to Allen Ginsberg and David Riesman followed by “Herbert Huncke, Pt. 2,” a tune about the Times Square junkie celebrated by Jack Kerouac in
On the Road
that the Velvet Underground forgot to record; “The Ballad of Frankie Machine,” pushed wonderfully by singer Rachel Evans; and the last track, “In a Lonely Place,” which lets Humphrey Bogart's damned face look back over all the wasted years. It doesn't seem like a concept, merely people in the band wrapping themselves around things they like, and nothing gets in the way of a vocal diversity, of the surprise eruptions of feeling (the guitar break in the lovely, soulful “ After Midnight, After It's All Gone Wrong,” the thrill of “Thee Ecstatic Library”) that make you want to see the band opening for the New Pornographers.

5
Rocket from the Tombs,
Barfly
(Fire)
The group formed in Cleveland in 1974; now, almost buried behind singer David Thomas's self-questioning, crooning croak, is the most subtle and quietly passionate guitar band in the land. A land perhaps defined by the faces on the back of the CD sleeve that the musicians key their names to: Vachel Lindsay (drummer and organist Steve Mehlman), Edgar Allen Poe (guitarist Cheetah Chrome), Mark Twain (bassist Craig Bell), Herman Melville (guitarist Richard Lloyd), and Stonewall Jackson (Thomas).