Masters of Reality: How Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, and John Oliver Make Us Face Ourselves

Real Life Rock Top 10: Greil Marcus on the stinging brilliance of John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight,” Dylan at Desert Trip, and Randy Newman’s ode to Vladimir Putin.
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1. “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” (HBO, October 9) This is the best show on television. The most screamingly funny moments come when true outrage is brought down to earth with references to third-rate bands or bad movies that somehow make the outrage more real (on this night, in the central segment on Guantanamo, an analogy of Vanilla Ice stealing a song from Queen, with interview footage of Mr. Ice, who looks like a robot made out of Swiss cheese going green around the edges, explaining that the bass lines are different, and then singing them, trying to make his sound different from theirs, and failing). There might be a running subtext on media idiocy almost too gross to credit (here, on the mind boggling odiousness of Billy Bush). There is the most intellectually acute and rhetorically fast writing anywhere (on this episode, Oliver’s instant analysis of Paul Ryan’s response to Donald Trump’s sex tape as Victorian sexism). A main story might run 20 minutes and say more than a three-page takeout in the New York Times, let alone any story on any other television or radio outlet.

This night the subject was President Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo Bay. There is a history of the place, international condemnation of what we’ve done with it. There’s a shot of the prison library; it’s explained that the most popular books are Harry Potter titles.

“And before you think that those library books provided an escape,” Oliver says, “just listen to Shaker Aamer, who was released last October, after being held without charge for nearly 14 years.” Oliver goes off, and we are looking at a deeply self-possessed 49-year-old Saudi citizen and British resident with a beard and long hair pulled back.

“You know,” he says, “they got, they got an island in Harry Potter, it says, Azkaban—where there’s no happiness. They just—suck all your feelings out of you. And—and you don’t have no feeling anymore.”

Oliver returns: “No amount of sugar-coating can cover up the reality of what we have done at Guantanamo Bay. Because in the early years, interrogation techniques included physical beatings, short-shackling, a very painful technique in which a prisoner’s arms and legs are shackled together, for long periods, and hours, and sometimes days, of repeated loud music, which is horrendous, although sometimes, that last technique backfired, because that same Harry Potter-loving inmate grew up loving American rock music, and would annoy the guards by singing along. And just listen to him describe the one song that gave him the most consolation.” There’s a cut back to Aamer.

He smiles*.* “I’m sure everybody would laugh when they hear this, ’cause I used to sing it a lot. Because the words, I thought, the words affect me, the words make me feel like, Yeah, it’s me again. Which is Whitesnake, ‘Here I Go Again.’”

In the theater where the show is being taped and Aamer is shown on a monitor, the audience laughs. And in a terribly serious tone, Aamer says, “The words go,” and he recites:

*Here I go again, on my own
**Going down the only road I never known
**Like a drifter, I was born to walk alone
**’Cause I know what it means, to walk alone
**In only street of dreams
*And here I go again

“And it’s true,” Aamer says, “because it’s just dreams, dreams that I’ll be home one day, dreams that I’ll be free. Dreams that Guantanamo will be closed.”

Oliver comes back: “You know you are miserable when you are finding solace in a fucking Whitesnake song.” Yes, they are possibly the most degrading band in the history of popular music—perfect, really, to score the Donald Trump sex tape—Oliver had opened the show with it, of course. But it wasn’t a cheap way for Oliver to take the sting off—in other words, to sugar-coat what he’d just shown. That’s the way Oliver works: kill you, jerk you back to life with a gob-smacked joke, and then go right back to the story—and because he moves so fast, almost always leaving you a half-step behind, the joke takes nothing away from what you’ve just seen. Somehow, the show left Aamer with even more dignity than he would have had if Oliver had played him straight. You can go back to him on YouTube over and over again, like a song you can’t get out of your head.


2. Bob Dylan, “Masters of War” at Desert Trip (Indio, California, October 8) More than in any other performance of this song I’ve ever heard, the young-man perspective was completely erased, and in its place was the spectre, more than the presence—as if the physical fact of presence had been elided—of an old man who has seen everything and is unwilling to accept anything, someone who has become more and more certain of his right and power to judge as time goes on, the world does not change, and the critique he made of it so many years before suffers no cracks or rust, only scars, like notches on a gun. As the crimes the song speaks of expand in the telling, you hear the judgment pronounced, and you all but hear it received.


3. White Girl, written and directed by Elizabeth Wood (FilmRise) At the end, Morgan Saylor’s Leah sits down for her first class of her sophomore year at her college in New York. “How was your summer,” someone asks. Well—


4. Kaleo, “Way Down We Go” (Elektra) I heard this on the radio just after the shattering ending of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and it was as if the second song had grown out of the first. There are hints of Chris Isaak, Robert Johnson, Marvin Gaye, Flipper, and most of all the steely cadence, the two feet planted and nothing moving them, of Rihanna’s “Stay” in this severe and elegant soul ballad. I had no idea what it was, but I guessed at the title and found it on YouTube. I wasn’t expecting an Icelandic band fronted by one Jökull Júlíusson.  As Chuck Berry put it, it goes to show you never can tell.


5. Colson Whitehead, from Acknowledgments, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday) “The first one hundred pages were fueled by early Misfits (‘Where Eagles Dare [fast version],’ ‘Horror Business,’ ‘Hybrid Moments’) and Blanck Mass (‘Dead Format’). David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages, so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.”


6. The Handsome Family, Unseen (Milk & Scissors) Over the last few years, their albums got somewhat obvious. This is not. And it’s gorgeous.


7. Randy Newman, “Putin” (Nonesuch) This is the perfect conceptual bookend to pair with Newman’s 2007 “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” a quiet, despairing song about the wreckage and ruin of the George W. Bush administration and those before it—a song that takes comfort in the belief that while “the leaders we have” are “the worst that we’ve had,” there were worse. Newman names the Roman Caesars, the divines of the Spanish Inquisition, Hitler and Stalin and King Leopold of Belgium—but he doesn’t sound very convinced. It was a truly miserable thing to listen to.

“Putin,” Newman’s intervention in this year’s election—an answer record to Vladimir Putin’s own—couldn’t be more different. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht must be jumping up and down in their graves in happiness: this is so German, so 1920s, so after-hours-Berlin with everyone doped to the gills and shouting along. The song takes flight with its chorus, the Putin Girls, pumping him up, erasing his doubts, jabbing him in the side to get him going. “I can’t do it!” he shouts, as the weight of history presses down on him—can he become the master of the world? Then he thinks back to the glorious past. “Who won Napoleon?” he yells and the girls answer: “We did!” “Who won World War II?” “The Americans,” comes the answer, but he knows they’re just boosting him up: “That’s a good one!” Then fear takes over again: “Lenin couldn’t do it! I don’t know, Stalin couldn’t do it! If they couldn’t do it, why you think I can?” Because who else is going to do it?

In Randy Newman’s best music he leaves you wondering where you stand, what you think, what you believe, how the world works. This is a postcard that may take years to truly be delivered.


8. William Stout, Legends of the Blues, with an introduction by Ed Leimbacher (Abrams ComicArts, 2013) “Dedicated to Willie Dixon & Robert Crumb,” this set of cartoon and text portraits of more than 90 musicians—including people R. Crumb, who once published a collection of blues trading cards, would never touch, like Johnny Otis, Chuck Berry, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins—is distinguished by the softness of Stout’s lines, which resolve themselves into warmth and empathy. You open the book (I found it on a remainder shelf) at random and see—hear—a musician you think you know as someone new: Blind Willie Johnson in the middle of the night in a graveyard, a spare tree hanging over his head like a hand. But best of all is what Stout does with cigarettes. The ash burns right through a thin cloud of white smoke, making an eye that’s looking right at you.

Illustration by William Stout


9. and 10. Little Walter, “Blue and Lonesome” (Chess, 1959) and Rolling Stones, “Blue and Lonesome” from Blue & Lonesome (Interscope, December 2) “I’m blue and lonesome,” Walter Jacobs declares in his thick, measured voice. He takes a deep breath—and then from the absolute depths of that act the word “as” in “as a man can be” emerges, slowly, drawn out, like a sea monster, and the record has begun. The audacity of tackling a work on this level—a work where the harmonica break, a hurricane, sums up the career of Little Walter, whose “Hate to See You Go” and “Just Your Fool” are also included on this album of blues covers, as “Blue and Lonesome” itself could sum up the blues—is pretty shocking. How in the world would you do it? When I heard the Rolling Stones were taking it on, it seemed the only way to approach this song was on your knees: do it as a simple, quiet folk song, or go down in the flood. We’ll see.