MADONNA
"The Beat Goes On"
A teaser from her November-slated album, computer-programmed in collaboration with Pharell. Kudos to Madonna in her race (to the death?) to stay ahead of the pop-tart brigade, but her contemporaneity fetish comes a cropper here: it announces itself from blip one as a piece of oppressive nothingness, as pleasurable as a rice-cake diet in a time of drought. I begin to hate it when Madonna prefaces an outbreak of ping-ponging robo-blips with the deadpan command: "Instrumentation." Among the things Madonna should never attempt again: rapping (remember that bit in "Vogue"?), or anything approximating an ironic tone. An artist who has made thin vocal technique and canny soullessness work in her favor should never try to sound as if she had no soul; in the deathless words of Jake LaMotta, "It defeats its own purpose."
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
"Radio Nowhere"
I wrote this a little over two years ago:
Craziness, color, recklessness, astonishment, not just outrage but outrageousness — that's what I want from Bruce Springsteen, as I want them from any artist. . . . You might say I'm asking the wrong things of the wrong person, and you'd be right — but you wouldn't have been back when Born to Run came out, or Nebraska. Springsteen needn't dye his hair yellow, or release an album of Dadaist verse shouted over industrial noise. Craziness comes in all colors, hot pink or olive drab, and an artist can astonish us by the simplest, most unassuming of means. That's what artists do.
"Radio Nowhere," the single from Springsteen's upcoming LP, is probably the closest he will ever come to taking advice from me. It's hardly industrial, but it is noisy; hardly Dada, but the rhymes rain down fast. It's the lament of an emotional Luddite inveighing against the lack of soul in our web-wired, satellite-spinning globe. He doesn't hate technology, just the way we substitute interface for interaction; to dramatize, his voice punches through a layer of not-quite-static, the backing a fast crunchy rock with distortion elements. (When was Springsteen ever distorted?)
As commentary, the single is cranky and predictable; as a noise, it's damned good. But I think what's most exciting about "Radio Nowhere" is that it reinvents that American night Springsteen has, in his best music and deepest soul, always inhabited. It's the great unending American night that is always hot even in winter, alive with voices even when there's no one around, whose sky always crackles with music and whose breezes smell of gasoline and chance. Born to Run came out of that night; Nebraska dissolved into it. His latter-day records have taken place in a dim twilight in a tired living room, expressing an intermediate funk full of borrowed voices and stale despair. "Radio Nowhere" gets him off the couch, into the car, into the dark, into the American night. We'll see if the album has the guts to stay there.
DEREK McCORMACK
The Haunted Hillbilly
This was found yesterday, near the back of an overstacked shelf in a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore on Broadway. It had a guitar-playing skeleton on the front and said this on the back:
STEP RIGHT UP!
A year ago he was the Star of the
GRAND OLE OPRY.
King of Country & Western.
And now? He can't play. He can't sing.
Hear his pitiful pleas!
Quiver to his Yellow Yodels!
What's he so scared of?
What reduced him to this sorrowful state?
A VAMPIRE!
A blood-drinking, soul-sucking fiend.
VAMPIRES LIVE!
See what they do to mortal men!
Step right up and feast your eyes on
THE WRECK WE CALL
THE HAUNTED
HILLBILLY!
All that come-on, plus an encomium inside from queer shock novelist Dennis Cooper, and Canadian critic Bert Archer saying "McCormack's an evil little blessing." It was autographed by the author. And there it was hidden in a dusty hole, peeking out at me, asking only five bucks.
Could you resist this thing? Me neither.
It's a novella that takes only as long to read as it takes to dream a bad dream; I read it in the dusk hour between sundown and blinding dark. The setting is Nashville, you're not certain when, but you'd guess late '40s, early '50s. The hero — no, the victim — is a gifted young country singer named Hank. Hank is married to a woman named Audrey, who sews his first suit and sends him looking for a shirt worthy of her stitchery. The narrator — all-seeing, all-consuming, all-perverse — is Mr. Nudie, a Nashville haberdasher catering to the Grand Ole Opry elite, who makes flamboyant stage suits replete with spangles, glasswork, rhinestones, sequins, and stylized depictions of country-associated objects (cacti, trains, guitars). The haberdasher spots the singer, and begins not only dressing him but owning him: taking pieces of his flesh and soul, and destroying those around him. You see, Nudie is a vampire, in fact a gay vampire, and possession is his game.
The book's style, suitable to its content, is stripped not just to the bone, but to the marrow. ("Hank steps out. A gasp goes up. His suit's starry. Spotlights bend off his blazer. He sings his song. The one on his suit. About being blue.") And if those character names sound familiar ... yes, there was a real country singer named Hank. His last name was Williams, and his first wife was named Audrey, and he was brilliant, a once-in-a-century changer and shaper of his form. Hank Williams died from too many pills at the age of 29, looking pale and skeletal in the dark rear seat of a limo on his way to a show. They say his corpse looked almost as if it had been emptied of blood. But he looked that way alive, too.
And yes, there is a real Mr. Nudie. Or was: he died April of last year. Nudie Cohn, born in Kiev, Russia, made suits for everyone from Roy Rogers to Buck Owens, Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy) to Robert Redford (The Electric Horseman), the Sons of the Pioneers to the Flying Burrito Brothers. He made Elvis's gold lame suit — the one worn by the King on Elvis's Golden Records, Vol. 2, as if precisely to substantiate the record's timeless headline: 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong!
The Haunted Hillbilly is a conflation of fact and fiction. Just enough of the facts are misplaced, or displaced, to prevent exact correlation with the principals' received biographies, and so to leave holes, or open graves, in the spaces between known realities. For instance, Nudie had a wife named Bobbie; there is a woman named Bobbie in The Haunted Hillbilly, but she is Hank's girl. Hank Williams died in Oak Hill, West Virginia; the book's Hank never escapes Nashville. Hank's nemesis throughout the story is Ernest Tubb, the "Texas Troubadour," a real person, an Opry favorite — but not, so far as I know, the insanely treacherous figure depicted here. The book ends with Nudie, still on the prowl, finding and fixing on a new boy, a new idol, a new tailor's dummy (or "judy") for his rhinestone designs: a boy who says his name is Johnny Horton. Johnny Horton who had a number of hits, became a country superstar, and married Hank Williams's first wife Audrey before meeting a premature death in 1960.
The book's spookiness is in its conflations. Its Nashville is a graveyard, done up in All Souls' colors, in which ghouls and live ones, clean facts and gross fantasies copulate. Hank Williams's depleted corpse, Nudie's outrageous clothes (made partly, McCormack reckons, from such materiel as human bone fragments), and even Robert Johnson's satanic bargain (the pop myth of the sold soul) are part of the grim procession. Nudie's evil accomplice is named "Dr. Wertham," and that can be nothing but a reference to the once-famed Dr. Fredric Wertham, innovative social psychologist, opponent of grisly EC comic books, and author of the notorious anti-comics jeremiad Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Not least of the shades haunting the story is that of Spade Cooley, Hollywood cowboy, grinning bandleader, and purveyor of watered-down, radio-friendly Western swing who, beset by paranoid delusions, in 1961 tortured and beat his wife to death as his daughter watched. Judging from his crimes and his photos, Cooley had a lot more vampire in him than either Hank Williams or Nudie Cohn. (For that whole story, see the relevant chapter in Nick Tosches's Country, or see here. Note further that Cooley was pardoned by California Governor Ronald Reagan only a few years into his sentence, presumably for sentimental reasons — one old Hollywood hand taking pity on another.)
What you have here — and it is worth picking up if found peeking from a high shelf, asking only five dollars and an hour's attention — is some kind of demon fetus pickled in a jar of Southern moonshine, the malformed spawn of Rosemary's Baby and King Death.
GLEN CAMPBELL
"It's Only Make Believe"
Glen was another of Nudie Cohn's clients, and gave the old man his unofficial benedictory with "Rhinestone Cowboy." Well, feh on that Glen Campbell. My Glen Campell is the one who shone for a few brief years (say, 1966-70) as a pop singer backed by his fellow Wrecking Crew members; who made Gentle on My Mind (1967), an album that has been a favorite since I was knee-high to a tree stump; who sang an uncredited lead on the priceless Sagittarius single "My World Fell Down" (the sole slick studio anomaly on Nuggets); and who ended his days of greatness with this piece of operatic agony, the totality of which proves his instinctive genius as a pop singer.
Positioned, oddly enough, as the opener to The Glen Campbell Goodtime Album (1970), Campbell's "Make Believe" towers over even Conway Twitty's spectacular 1958 original. The huge production is less Spector's Hollywood than M-G-M's; there is a clarity and separation, a stage-show detail to the arranging that Spector never went for. It verges on bombast, in fact it is bombast, but Campbell's voice gives it pain, drama, and desire. The thing is, his voice was objectively so limited: strained at the top register, thin in the middle. But on material that mattered to him, it was unrelentingly passionate, full of emotional aspiration. It was the sound of an ordinary man reaching for grandeur, of Joe Buck before the mirror, singing his pain, expressing fearlessly.
"It's Only Make Believe" is the perfect song for Campbell — as "You're My World" and "Crying" were perfect side-enders to Gentle on My Mind. The song is built as a struggle, a climb: the melody leads the singer inward and upward, each chord raising the stakes on the last, to deposit him at the climax of each verse at a new peak of wanting and not-having. Campbell fights to stay on top of the orchestration, on top of the song; fights to give his emotions primacy over the noise, to assert his identity over the desolation the lyrics promise. Hal Blaine said Glen had a sixth sense for how to make great pop records. He proves it here, by upping the ante on Conway Twitty in at least three ways. First, the song's orchestration and activity grow denser, more dramatic, with each verse. Second, Campbell gives the song an all-important key change — thus pitching himself in the last verse against an even stiffer struggle, his ordinary voice against even more extraordinary demands. Lastly, he makes the climax out of a single note: MY only prayer will be. Unlike Twitty, Campbell gives melisma to that note, bending it upward over the melody, hurling it atop the tumult. At that moment, the singer could either go down forever, or take every honor in the universe. Campbell gives the moment its due. It's the last bit of gut he's got to give, his last chance to beat the song and stand tall. He does it. The song ends on a burst of ecstasy, as if trumpeting the ordinary man's unexpected heroism.
A devastating, exhilarating moment: a note to break the heart, and explode the spirit. So I say it is proof of Glen Campbell's greatness. Of deep feeling, of love, of passion, of a reach for beauty to the exclusion — if only for that moment — of anything else in the world; to the exclusion of the world itself. What more we could want from a pop record, I can't guess.
ED SANDERS
Beer Cans on the Moon
And then there's Ed. The offensive discarded consumer objects of the title can say nothing worse about the travesties perpetrated on nature by man than this album of godawful hippie broadsides. By the author of The Family, no less.
ZODIAC
Directed by David Fincher
For those unfamiliar with the case (serial killings, Bay Area, late '60s-early '70s), probably pretty boring; for those who have read the Robert Graysmith book, it ranges from the fascinating to the frustrating. The best scenes and deadliest scares come in the first hour, from which point momentum and shape dribble down to an ending that snatches back a saving shred of horror from the broad black vanishing pool of a two-and-a-half-hour sit. Fincher is some kind of diabolical genius, part hateful and part possessed: his creations (Seven, Fight Club) are sparing of love, but they combine sensual disgust and chic misanthropy with a delight in movement, montage, and music. His good films are like chilled corpses animated from within by excited, unsettled spirits that push the cold skin outward, rattle the bones, convulse the limbs, promise restoration and redemption to a world painted in cadaver colors.
The use of music is occasionally remarkable. Fincher doesn't cheat: the songs are all period-appropriate, and there is nothing that wouldn't have issued from a Bay Area car radio tuned to the Top 40 in 1969, with an occasional side-dial to early album-oriented FM. A lot of the jazz and extended rock standards (not to mention David Shire's original score) run from effective atmosphere to unobtrusive wallpaper, but at least two musical juxtapositions merit mentioning. The opening sequence begins with Independence Day fireworks and ends with blasts of gunfire on Lover's Lane; musically, it begins with Three Dog Night's "Easy to Be Hard" (How can people have no feelings), and ends with Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (Here comes the roly-poly man singing songs of love). Set against these events, the plaintive plea of the first and fearful tremor of the second speak with more clarity, terror, and implication than they ever have before — and certainly more than they ever wanted.
Not since the Turtles' "Happy Together" ended Adaptation has an ordinary song, heard so often it is no longer heard, been so infused with new emotional capability. So reanimated, if you will, with excited, unsettled spirits.
posted by Devin McKinney @ 7:34 PM
