6) Gin Blossoms, "Found Out About You," from "New Miserable Experience" (A&M, 1992)
"Yes, the Blossoms are still broken up," reads the Unofficial Gin Blossoms Home Page, "but you can follow the former members in their new efforts ..." Do they hold up so well because singer Robin Wilson still sounds not only miserable, but as if nothing could possibly have changed, including the world? Or because songwriter Doug Hopkins included his 1993 suicide in his 1992 songs?
7) Clash, "Take It or Leave It" (Wise/P.F.P. vinyl bootleg)
Recorded May 8, 1977, in Manchester. Awful sound. And when they go into "J.A." -- the Maytals' "Pressure Drop" -- you can hear the world stand up and change.
8-9) Maggie Greenwald, director, "Songcatcher" & "Music From and Inspired by the Motion Picture 'Songcatcher'" (Vanguard)
The movie never gets out of its clothes, thanks to Janet McTeer, whose imperious Lily (When can I take a bath? McTeer seems to be asking every five minutes) is loosely based on Maud Karpeles, who with Cecil Sharp in 1916 to 1918 collected more than 1,600 variants of 500 songs from 281 singers in the Appalachian highlands. One remarkable scene: country singer Iris DeMent as a mountain woman offering the collector "When First Unto This Country" -- the words are prosaic, the feeling loaded into them otherworldly -- just after her husband has sold their farm for 50 cents an acre to oily Earl Giddens (David Patrick Kelley), local representative of McFarland Coal. Another: After a brawl at a dance, Giddens, beaten to a pulp by hero Tom Bledsoe (a comfortably beefy Aidan Quinn), pulls himself to his feet, closes his coat over his pistol and launches into "Oh Death." He walks off into the night, leaving the song to whoever wants to finish it -- not, luckily, the red-robed Klan leader who declaims it like a speech in the Coen Brothers' "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" What are the chances of this ancient, bottomless song turning up in two general-release movies in one year?
DeMent's performance, as thin and brittle as anything she's ever recorded, is listed as "Pretty Saro" on the soundtrack album; "Oh Death" is sung by Kelley, Hazel Dickens and Bobby McMillon as "Conversation With Death." There are other fine moments, among them Rosanne Cash's "Fair and Tender Ladies" and, from Emmylou Harris' florid "Barbara Allen" to Allison Moorer's horrid "Moonshiner," too many songs sung to the mirror. For a better song-catching film, seek out David Hoffman's early-60s "Music Makers of the Blue Ridge" (Varied Directions) if you can find it; for the songs behind the story from people who never left where the songs came from, walk into any good record store and look for Doug and Jack Wallin, "Family Songs and Stories from the North Carolina Mountains" (Smithsonian Folkways), which has no flies on it.
10) David Thomas, David Johansen, Steve Earle and Philip Glass, "Kassie Jones," from Hal Wilner's Harry Smith Project (Royce Hall, UCLA, April 26)
The big all-star jam to close the all-star concert, and thanks to Glass, who sounds as if he's playing underwater, and as if he grew up doing it -- "Mr. Boogie," Thomas says disdainfully, after announcing the supergroup as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and trying and failing to figure out who's who ("Love the one you're with, baby!" someone shouts) -- the singers disappear right into the song. You can sense them attempting to hold back, to maintain some shred of individuality while exploring how a railroad man who actually lived turned into a figment of the common imagination, but the only way to tell the story is to let it tell itself.
About the writer
Greil Marcus's piece on Gil J Wolman's "scotch art" collages is collected in the anthology "Gil J Wolman: Défense de Mourir" (Editions Allia, Paris). For more columns by Greil Marcus, visit his column archive.
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