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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Aug 5, 2002 | 1-3) David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, "Death Letter," on "Shaker" (Chesky Records); White Stripes, "Death Letter," on "De Stijl" (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 1998); and Son House, "Death Letter," on "Son House: Father of the Delta Blues -- The Complete 1965 Sessions" (Columbia Legacy, 1992)
Son House (1902-88) was the most melodramatic of the great Mississippi Delta blues artists, and when he sat in New York City in 1965 to record "Death Letter" for the first time, he pulled out all the stops -- just as he'd done with the sardonic "Preachin' Blues" in 1930, when he first recorded. In 1965 he wasn't the musician he'd been as a young man, but the drive to thread a song through six minutes or more was still there. The guitar playing is splayed, but it cuts to the bone; the man recalling the death of the love of his life takes satisfaction from the fact that he will never get over it.
White Stripes Jack and Meg White attack "Death Letter" as Steve Miller might have, a couple of years after House cut it: Miller on stage at the Fillmore in San Francisco, determined to prove that disrespect -- a tone more mordant than wounded, an orchestration less elegant than simply loud -- is the surest route to the truth. With their band still coming together in 1998, the Detroit punk combo is as stumbling as House was, and they care as much as he did: that is, not at all. Again and again they climb the spine of the song, leaping off like little kids diving from a rock into a pond. They climb out, shake the water out of their hair and the song is theirs.
Punk progenitor Johansen -- New York Dolls frontman in the 1970s, lounge lizard Buster Poindexter in the decades that followed -- takes a different tack in his current incarnation as tramp folklorist. He shambles into the tune as if it's obvious, as if its tale wouldn't even be worth telling if he weren't already drunk. Against House's more than seven minutes, or the White Stripes' branding-iron sound, Johansen needs only four laconic minutes to make the dead woman in the song perhaps more dead than she's been before. There's something about Johansen's sense of humor -- his weird way of communicating that even as he's getting his story across he's forgetting something more important -- that allows him to relax into songs a contemporary white man should be ashamed to even consider singing.
4) Comet Gain, "Réalistes" (Kill Rock Stars)
Three in the morning in someone's London apartment, unattached men and women not giving up on the night: At first you hear blithering, then the smartest blithering you've ever heard. Then shots in the dark: "There's no security in purity." Then anguish and hope, forgiveness and curses, and a heartbreaker from its title to the last note: "Why I Try to Look So Bad." By this point you're hearing people you'd like to meet.
5) Bernard Weinraub, "'Six Feet Under' Leads Emmys with 23 Nominees" (New York Times, July 19)
"'Six Feet Under' was not shown to a test audience, as it would be at a network," series creator Alan Ball tells Weinraub. "Nobody ever suggested bringing people from a mall to get their opinion of the show" -- and can you imagine? Mall people judging the work of the man who wrote "American Beauty"? The man who unmasked American suburbia as a land of moral hypocrisy and spiritual decay as not more than three or four hundred other movies had ever done before?
