Real Life Rock (306 page)

5
Rihanna, “Stay” (SRP)
It was stunning on
Saturday Night Live
months ago. On the radio, played constantly, the daring of the performance, its challenge to everything around it—the refusal of melisma, the singer not owning the words but letting them capture her, almost no accompaniment but a simple, chording piano—stands out so plainly you can hear the more extreme record the singer, the writers, and the producers might have wanted to make: Rihanna, a melody, a lyric, and absolutely nothing else.

6
Twenty Feet from Stardom,
directed by Morgan Neville (Tremolo Productions)
A documentary about black female backup singers that owes its life to producer Gil Friesen, who died last December. Darlene Love is the heroine, but every woman here reads from her own book. Most confounding is Lisa Fischer, so wrapped up in her own language as she hums and scats into a microphone today, so one-dimensional as she tried for a solo career in the 1970s with the likes of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's “Southern Man.” Most dignified, and the most fun, is Merry Clayton, talking about the third verse of “Gimme Shelter.” It's the middle of the night in Los Angeles, and the phone rings—there's some group, “The Rolling—the Rolling Somethings,” they need a singer. “They picked me up with silk pajamas on,” she says, “a mink coat, and a Chanel scarf.” “I didn't know her from Adam,” Mick Jagger says; he still can't believe she showed up in curlers. She can't believe what she's supposed to sing. “I said, what? ‘Rape—murder—it's just a
shot
away'?” They run through it once. Jagger asks if she'll do another take. “So I said to myself,” Clayton says—and you can see her setting her mouth, tensing her body—“I'm going to do another one—I'm going to blow them out of this room.” You hear the naked track, just her in dead air; you hear how she did it, her voice breaking, the near-stop just after the last “it's” in “It's just a shot away” that makes all the difference. And it's not even her best story. “Many years ago, when I was singing with Ray,” she says of her time as one of Ray Charles's Raelettes, “I saw this guy
contorting
in the front row of the concert. I'm saying to the rest of the girls through my teeth, ‘Who
is
that guy? What's
wrong
with him?' ” She ended up singing behind Joe Cocker, too.

7
The Company You Keep,
directed by Robert Redford, written by Lem Dobbs (Voltage Pictures, 2012)
Thirty years after a Weatherman robbery that left a bank guard dead, the whole crew comes up from underground as Redford crisscrosses the country to get Julie Christie to clear his name. It's a good movie. At seventy-one, Christie is Friedberger's “I Am the Past” in the flesh; she has a pull the woman in
Billy Liar, Darling
, or even
Don't Look Now
only hinted at. And what's altogether remarkable, what keeps the story clean, what keeps it whole, is that there is no soundtrack-of-their-lives. No “It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding).” No “Turn! Turn! Turn!” No “War.” No “Bad Moon Rising.” Not one song.

8
The Canyons,
directed by Paul Schrader, written by Bret Easton Ellis (IFC Films)
A New Poverty Row Productions project, starring a glass house high in the L.A. hills and rotting cinemas in abandoned strip malls. “About kids who got in line for a movie and the theater closed, but they stayed in line anyway, because they had nowhere else to go,” Schrader says—and a Los Angeles where film culture consists of people in their twenties with money from
their parents financing “run-of-the-mill slasher movies in Arizona.” Starring Lindsay Lohan, who goes all out, and porn star James Deen, who's believable until he has to kill someone, which he didn't really have to do.

9
Levon Helm, “Kingfish” (
Rollingstone.com
)
A clip from the documentary
Ain't in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm
. On
Electric Dirt
, the Randy Newman tribute to Huey Long seemed like a setpiece about two professional Southerners. Here it's so relaxed, the singer as satisfied as the listener, and the song something Helm could have been singing since he was ten.

10
Julie Bosman, “Judging ‘Gatsby' by Its Cover(s),” the
New York Times
(April 25)
Boycott independent bookstores? In a story about new editions of
The Great Gatsby
—that is, about which stores are stocking only the Baz Luhrmann movie tie-in with Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover (Walmart) and which only the one with the original spooky-eyes art—Kevin Cassem of McNally Jackson, a beloved independent in New York, told Bosman that the movie version was beyond the pale: “ ‘The Great Gatsby' is a pillar of American literature, and people don't want it messed with. We're selling the classic cover and have no intention of selling the new one.” Bosman apparently caught the genteel fascism in Cassem's attitude; she asked him “ whether the new, DiCaprio-ed edition of ‘Gatsby' would be socially acceptable to carry around in public.” “I think it would bring shame to anyone who was trying to read that book on the subway,” Cassem said. So it's better not to read the book at all than to read it with the wrong cover? Or is Cassem going to be the literary Bernie Goetz?

SEPTEMBER
2013

1
Counting Crows,
Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did on Our Summer Vacation)
(Collective Sounds/Tyrannosaurus)
After five top-ten albums on a tony major, the last in 2008, Counting Crows have put out a set of covers on their own label, some of them from little-known or never-heard bands they came up with in Berkeley in the late 1980s and early '90s. “Every last bit of it,” singer Adam Duritz writes, “felt utterly unique and every last bit of it was being repeated somewhere else, lived by somebody else, experienced by a thousand ‘someone else's' in places all over like Minneapolis and Seattle and Boston and New York City and, of course, in a little town called Athens, Ga., not to mention London and Dublin and Glasgow.” As in those words, and as in all of Counting Crows' best work, Duritz is sentimental, nostalgic, pleading, shameless; he wears his heart on his sleeve while the band, especially guitarists Dan Vickrey and David Immerglück, do their best to tear it off and throw it around the room. It becomes clear that with no period affectations, no genre inflections, Duritz is a soul singer; he sings to plumb the depths. Whether on Kasey Anderson's 2010 “Like Teenage Gravity” or Fairport Convention's 1969 “Meet on the Ledge,” he demands the songs explain themselves to him—why this word leads to that one, why the melody curves away from him when he thought he had it in his grasp, why the song cries out for something he can't give but the musicians can, must—and the only way to make the songs do that is to sing them. It happens most acutely with Dawes's 2010 “All My Failures.” In the original, the vocal is thin to the point of preciousness; you can hear the singer listening to himself. You can hear vanity, the way the song may not need you at all—and, for that matter, you don't necessarily believe the singer believes he ever failed at anything. Counting Crows pushes hard from the start, and in the play that's instantly under way, Duritz is a witness—to his own failures, sure, but also to yours. And then you are a witness to his, and to your own. And then you play it again, wondering why it sounds so good.