What Do You Call Father John Misty?

Real Life Rock Top 10: Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan’s theory of atomic rock, the musical throwbacks of “Big Little Lies” and “The Young Pope,” the godly facades of Father John Misty and St. Vincent, and more.
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1. The New Pornographers, Fox Theatre, Oakland (April 13) It’s wonderful to see this band age: Neko Case, looking as if she’s lived in the wind for the last five years, there from the time of the band’s first album, exploding out of Mass Romantic in 2000 with “Letter from an Occupant”; synthesizer player Blaine Thurier, always a presence, a rock; Kathryn Calder at keyboards since the mid-2000s; Simi Stone, occasionally picking her violin like a guitar, over the last two years; drummer Joseph Seiders; guitarist Todd Fancey; bassist John Collins; and founding songwriter and guitarist A.C. Newman, the Clark Kent behind the sometimes superhuman sound the band can make. Thurer’s and Collins’s beards were gray; by comparison Seiders looked like a teenager. The whole sight folded into a sense of common purpose, commitment, community: at their best they’re one big pump organ, as if everybody is playing everybody else’s instrument. Their last albums have been flat, and this night they seemed tired, but with the second number they were flying: one of those moments when you cannot fully connect what you’re seeing to what you’re hearing. If a hurricane could smile, “The Laws Have Changed” would be it.

They never reached those heights again. Despite the joy and authority in Stone’s singing, I’ve never seen them less exuberant—at times, even a step away from going through the motions of a song, with no will to take it past itself. No, you can’t make it happen every night, and you never know when it will or it won’t, why it was or it wasn’t. I didn’t see anyone there who looked as if he or she wouldn’t be back the next chance they had.


2. Father John Misty, Pure Comedy (Sub Pop) If a smooth croon with perfectly rounded syllables from a penitent wandering through our valleys of error is what you’re looking for, this is for you. Of course there’s an out: Father John Misty is a persona, one of those people, like St. Vincent, who you’re supposed to know is really Annie Clark, who perform as—who perform as artists of such pretentiousness you couldn’t possibly figure out how to talk to them. “Uh Ms., ah, Saint—” No, there’s no way to address a saint: to be a saint you have to be dead. “Father—Father John”—already, you’ve ceded all authority, even if the Lone Pilgrim says you can call him Josh Tillman. Such characters allow themselves to appear as if touched by God, which is what they’re selling, and laugh at you if you’re so square not to know who they really are: to join their club.


3. Bob Dylan, “Q&A with Bill Flanagan” (bobdylan.com, March 22) After Chuck Berry died, it seemed web sites popped up like mushrooms to show where he’d taken the guitar introduction to “Johnny B. Goode” from to prove that his music was nothing new, that it was only ignorance, or vanity, that led his listeners to think that not only was the music different, they might be, too. The argument for real history will never be made better: “Rock and roll was indeed an extension of what was going on—the big swinging bands—Ray Noble, Will Bradley, Glenn Miller, I listened to that music before I heard Elvis Presley. But rock and roll ... was skeleton music, came out of the darkness and rode in on the atom bomb and the artists were star headed like mystical Gods. Rhythm and blues, country and western, bluegrass and gospel were always there—but it was compartmentalized—it was great but it wasn’t dangerous. Rock and roll was a dangerous weapon, chrome plated, it exploded like the speed of light, it reflected the times, especially the presence of the atomic bomb which had preceded it by several years. Back then people feared the end of time. The big showdown between capitalism and communism was on the horizon. Rock and roll made you oblivious to the fear, busted down the barriers that race and religion, ideologies put up. We lived under a death cloud; the air was radioactive. There was no tomorrow, any day it could all be over, life was cheap. That was the feeling at the time and I’m not exaggerating. Doo-wop was the counterpart to rock and roll. Songs like ‘In the Still of the Night,’ ‘Earth Angel,’ ‘Thousand Miles Away,’ those songs balanced things out, they were heartfelt and melancholy for a world that didn’t seem to have a heart. The doo-wop groups might have been an extension, too, of the Ink Spots and gospel music, but it didn’t matter; that was brand new too. Groups like the Five Satins and the Meadowlarks seemed to be singing from some imaginary street corner down the block.”


4. Deadmen, The Deadmen (Gang Switch) Justin Jones doesn’t have a strong enough voice to sustain his band over heavy airplay, which they probably won’t get, which means their music may hold its shape. It’s marvelously insinuating stuff, if you’re a sucker for songs inspired by Once Upon a Time in the West—and not just Ennio Morricone’s dreamy soundtrack, but the hesitations behind every move Charles Bronson makes: the music of them. As the band opens up, you can hear so many others who’ve touched their toes in this desert: the Vulgar Boatmen, Alison Krauss, the odd conviction, the convincingness, behind Bad Company’s “Bad Company,” Woody Guthrie’s “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key” as rescued by Billy Bragg. Put this on as background music, do anything but listen to it, and then wonder why you’re not doing anything else.


5. Devlin, “Watchtower,” in “The Young Pope” (HBO) Most episodes of this irresistibly cruel drama by Paolo Sorrentino—and absolutely of a piece with his movies The Great Beauty (2013) and *Youth *(2015)—opened with Jude Law’s forty-something pope strolling through a Vatican corridor decorated with paintings that trace the history of the church. The paintings were so vivid that, when Law passed them, and the people in them began to move, it seemed only natural—or that, when they went back to their mandated positions, still and fixed, it seemed unnatural, as if something real was being taken away. But that impression was because of the coiling tension in the music that was playing as Law walked on down the hall—not strolling, actually, but really high-stepping to a displacing version of “All Along the Watchtower.”

It was displacing because it wasn’t immediately apparent what it was. Sooner or later you heard it: an instrumental version of Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s version—in this world, the term original meant nothing. But what was it, and where did it come from?  It turned out to be the backing track of the London rapper Devlin’s 2012 “Watchtower.” It’s some record: the performance video shows Devlin flanked by the singer and producer Labrinth and the now all-world superstar Ed Sheeran, here looking precisely as if he wandered in after sleeping off a drunk in an alley. Sheeran strums his guitar and sings Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” without missing a slip, which is to say he sings all of Hendrix’s slips with the lyrics as if they *are *the original. It’s a weirdly thrilling thing to watch. Devlin unloads, furiously, attacking all the conceits of the song, its claims to knowledge, irony, smashing himself against Sheeran’s heartfelt singing, the way he communicates that it’s a privilege to sing the song—there’s no sense of privilege in anything Devlin does, it’s all filth and sin and corruption and nothingness, the treasures he’s won are water in his hands. In certain shots you see another guitarist, a drummer. You don’t see Labrinth’s hands at the controls, which are what made it happen.


6. Dwight Garner, “From Camille Paglia, ‘Free Women, Free Men,’ and No Sacred Cows,” The New York Times (March 24) “She repeats the same arguments and anecdotes over and over again. Reading this book is like being stranded in a bar where the jukebox has only two songs, both by Pat Benatar.”


7. “Big Little Lies,” “You Get What You Need” (HBO, April 2) For the big school fundraiser, the women are in cocktail dresses, the men in Elvis costumes—wildly inventive, from the expected straight jumpsuits and ’68 Comeback black leather to a floppy Hawaiian shirt and the black and white stripes from the big production number in Jailhouse Rock. Everyone gets up to sing the Elvis songbook, and as the night played the choices could not have been less obvious: “How’s the World Treating You,” “The Wonder of You.” The killer was “Treat Me Nice” as pantomimed in a curling crouch by the the actor Larry Bates but sung by series director Jean-Marc Vallée (credited as Jimmy Valley—there’s a name for a ’50s rock’n’roll singer who never made it), and Zoë Kravitz’s “Don’t.” Vallée slowed his song down so drastically, and Bates moved through it so coolly, that it felt as if the bouncing little ditty was actually about something. “Don’t” was already slow, but Kravitz too brought it almost to a stop between every word, so that you heard fear, dread, portent, a life out of control. You heard “Don’t”—please, please, don’t—instead of what the song pretends it’s about: “Baby, don’t say don’t.” You could hardly bear for her to leave one word behind and go on to the next, because the first word as she paused over it was so deep, and you could feel that the second would be even more intense. The song was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; Leiber is dead, but I hope Stoller didn’t miss it.


8. Patti Smith on “The Current,” Minnesota Public Radio, Minneapolis (89.3 FM, March 8) On being in the Nobel breakfast room the day after: “I mean, some of the greatest scientists in the world, past laureates and present laureates, telling me how he got them through medical school, he got them through tough times when they were trying to prove a certain theorem, or looking for a cure for some horrible disease, or trying to break down biochemistry, and what were they listening to, Bob Dylan.”


9. Hari Kunzru, White Tears (Knopf) “He was just a vehicle for his obsession,” one collector of blues 78s from the ’20s and ’30s says of another—and the strangeness of the notion, that the urge to acquire, to accumulate, to own a tiny piece of the world and thus feel like the ruler of all of it, can turn a person into his own host, subject to the whims of his haunting, powers this novel. You’re as trapped by the obsession as Kunzru’s characters. And then, at the crucial moment, when everything is about to explode—well, maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, and for the rest of the book, that’s all there is, and you stop caring long before you finish it, hoping that somehow Kunzru will pull it off.


10. Marvin Gershowitz, comment on YouTube album “Moby Grape—Live (Historic Live Moby Grape Performances 1966-1969),” posted by 67Psych: “Did the devil loan you his record collection?”


Thanks to Cecily Marcus. And thanks to Ryan Dombal for fine editing. This is the last installment of this column in Pitchfork.  Beginning in May it will appear in the Village Voice.