Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Sonic Youth, Walls Have Ears (no label) A deluxe two-LP bootleg, taken from a recent U.K. tour, and a map of where this downtown band can go. It meanders over a blurred terrain until flare-ups cause the music to contract past its surface of cryptic eschatology down to its unstable core: loathing, fatuity, confusion, smugness, play. The goal seems to be to turn amusement into dread, and to sustain dread long enough to turn it into a threat, which can be shaped into a song, which can be destroyed.

  3 Ted Nugent, Attempted Commercial Transaction Westinghouse recently put its Muzak subsidiary up for sale, and the Detroit guitar hero tried to buy it—and kill it. “Muzak is an evil force in today’s society,” he announced, “causing people to lapse into uncontrollable fits of blandness. It’s been responsible for ruining some of the best minds of our generation.” Nugent’s offer: $10 million. Westinghouse’s response: the 101 Strings version of “Oh No, Not My Baby.”

  4 Solomon Burke, “Love Buys Love,” from A Change Is Gonna Come (Rounder) Warm, knowing, perfectly rounded tones from a soul man who even in the heyday of the form never made the Top 20. Accompanied by a band whose touch is as light as it is firm, he sings with complete confidence, which isn’t to say that doubt doesn’t feed his every affirmation, either here or through the long reading of the title song. This is no revival, this is no comeback—this music is anchored, and the anchor goes to the bottom of the sea.

  5 James Robert Baker, Fuel-Injected Dreams (Dutton) A unrelievedly hyped-up, luridly funny novel about a legendary ’60s L.A. record producer who marries his Galatea and keeps her locked up in his mansion for years after. Not anyone you’d recognize, of course.

  6 Rosanne Cash, “Hold On” (Columbia) She challenges a man to commit himself to her with such musky self-possession it’s impossible to believe he’s worth the trouble. Not as good as “Seven Year Ache,” but what is?

  7 Hüsker Dü, Candy Apple Grey (Warner Bros.) Finally—finally, Bob Dylan has recaptured his voice. Thuggish hillbilly drunk on books with a half-ton of plains dirt in his mouth shouting from inside a stampede of blue oxen driven by Paul Bunyans, and yet for all its fury the voice is lyrical, you can almost hear him thinking as he wails, damning the loss of everything that’s left behind as he presses on to wherever it is he has to go.

  8 Mekons, Crime and Punishment (Sin EP, UK) Without the suicidal tendencies of Fear & Whiskey, this lacks weight—the weight of the world. Let’s call it “Fun and Games.”

  9 Sweet Beat, directed by Ronnie Albert, 1958 (Silvermine Video) One of the worst movies ever made, or anyway, one of the least—60 pallid British minutes of what the Angry Young Men were angry about. Then the insufferable heroine and her slime date walk into a nightclub where “Fred Parris and the Satins” (one of the Satins had left by this time, so they couldn’t be “The Five” anymore) are trying to lipsynch “In the Still of the Nite.” It’s strange: they’re so ordinary. Their hair isn’t even conked, they all but bump into each other, and the music is still shocking.

  10 Asger Jorn and Guy-Ernest Debord, Fin de Copenhague (Editions Allia reprint, 1957) Originally cut up, pasted, splattered, and printed (in an edition of 200) in 48 hours, this full-color little book at first seems like a slightly dated satire on advertising. With phrases and slogans from half a dozen tongues seeking whiskey bottles and models like feral orphans hunting for food, it becomes an attempt to extract secret codes from a language everyone understands and no one uses to think. “We have ways of making you talk,” Jorn and Debord seem to say to the fetishized commodity, tied to a chair but still wearing a shit-eating grin—Jorn, Danish painter (1914–73) waving his brush; Debord, “French political thinker” (so says the April Vogue) brandishing his scissors—and the result is advertising transformed into free-floating graffiti. The book now reads as a harbinger of the punk flier, and as a testament to just how far short of its own possibilities that great common art project has stopped.

  MAY 13, 1986

  1 The Costello Show (featuring Elvis Costello), “Sleep of the Just,” from King of America (Columbia) In a notably slow month, when such obvious critical hypes as Dwight Hokum seem possible until you have to listen, this deceptively quiet number is beginning to get airplay, and airplay is beginning to reveal its weight and complexity. Built around Mitchell Froom’s “doctored piano,” which has the shimmering sound of an old Leslie guitar, the song announces itself as a benediction; Jim Keltner’s brushwork keys the end of a line with the feeling of dirt being tossed on a coffin. The dread that’s been secretly building in the lyrics—images of black crows, a burning bus—doesn’t surface until the third, turnaround verse, though Costello barely raises his voice to tell the tale of soldiers gang-banging a centerfold on their barracks wall. His music has never been harder, or more delicate—and the year itself will have to turn around to produce a better song.

  2 Bryan Ferry, “Is Your Love Strong Enough” (MCA) Standard Ferry romanticism, which shows up Keith Richards’s ballad on Dirty Work for the glop it is.

  3 Stephen Davis, Hammer of the Gods—The Led Zeppelin Saga (Ballantine) Davis wildly overrates the music, digs up and then smooths out endless incidents of exploitation, sexism, and violence, and finally makes an ultimately meaningless story moving. Still, you’ve got to like the bit about drummer John Bonham placing below Karen Carpenter in the ’75 Playboy music poll.

  4 Bryan Adams, “Summer of ’69” (A&M) It won’t last. Why should it?

  5 28th Day, “I’m Only Asking,” from 28th Day (Bring Out Your Dead/Enigma) Bassist Barbara Mannings takes this folk-rock trio into Robin Lane territory, where vulnerability leads to doubt, which might lead to trouble.

  6 Desert Hearts, directed by Donna Deitch (Goldwyn) This movie about a free-spirited lesbian and her tightass divorcée love-object in 1959 Nevada has been predictably celebrated as a statement, but for the first half of the film, before F-S L Patricia Charbonneau gets what she’s after, the atmosphere is irresistible. That’s because Deitch has understood ’50s music as a promise not of teenage lust but of pansexual desire: here, Johnny Ray’s “Cry,” Ferlin Husky’s “Gone,” Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” and Elvis’s “Blue Moon” take on a power they never had before. If Deitch’s version of self-realization is old, she makes the music she uses to dramatize it new.

  7 Chuck Berry, Rock ’n Roll Rarities (Chess/MCA) Out-takes and oddities. Not great (the sterio remix of “Nadine” could be subtitled “Unhit Version”), but indispensable.

  8 Jackson Browne, Lives in the Balance (Asylum) Nothing could be easier than to dismiss this LP about U.S. atrocities in Central America; Reagan waves the bloody shirt, and Browne counters by wearing his bleeding heart on his sleeve. But the album is an act of real bravery—far more so than “Sun City”—and hearing “For America” on the radio, I pound the dashboard in time with my rage.

  9 Fuzz Box, We’ve Got a Fuzz Box and We’re Gonna Use It!! (Vindaloo UK 12-inch) Four women who do what they say.

  10 Jill Pearlman (writer) & Wayne White (illustrator), Elvis for Beginners (Writers & Readers/Norton) The leftist “For Beginners” line of “documentary comic books” has produced superb work, but to find Elvis in the company of the likes of Marx, Freud, and Orwell is less shocking than Pearlman’s heedless contempt for her subject. In contradistinction to the rest of the series, Elvis appears in a glossy color cover rather than in flat, serious grey or beige; the black-and-white interior design and illustration replaces the usual dense detail and wit with blaring caricatures; and the text, which must have taken Pearlman at least three hours to write, is riddled with errors: Marion Keisker, Sam Phillips’s co-manager at Sun Records in Memphis in 1953, turns up as “Marion Tipler”—simply because Pearlman and White get her mixed up with one Gladys Tipler, noted on a nearby page as Elvis’s ’53 employer. The capper comes on the page between the Tipler/Keisker flub. Some years ago, in a review of Albert Goldman’s Elvis, I wrote that Goldman’s perversion of Phillips’s early-’50s statement of his ambitions as a record produce
r (Goldman’s transformation of “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars” into “If I could find a white boy who sang like a nigger, I could make a million dollars”) would be cited in books to come, and pervert the history of rock ’n’ roll itself; until Elvis for Beginners, I was wrong. No, this isn’t the tenth best item to seek out in May 1986—but it ought to be at the top of anyone’s bottom list.

  JUNE 10, 1986

  1 The Honeys, “The One That You Can’t Have,” from Dream Babies—Girls and Girl Groups of the Sixties (Capitol/EMI UK) You have to slog through a lot of dross to get to this final cut—a ’63 Brian Wilson composition/production for Marilyn Rovell (later Mrs. Brian), her sister Diane, and cousin Ginger Blake—but is it ever worth it. Save for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” nothing the Beach Boys ever touched came out half this warming. The sound is lightly Spectorish, anticipating and surpassing the BB’s Pet Sounds: a perfect, lilting aura for the lead Honey’s vocal, which has no parallels in rock. She’s talking to herself, wondering over the paradoxes of life on earth as circumscribed by the mores of a suburban high school (“The one that you can’t have/Is the one that you want the most”). Cuteness that in a decade or so would harden into Valley-girl cliché is full of personality, a reach for the tones and elisions that might catch what one girl wants. The singing is displacingly amateurish—you can believe the style is being made up as the song is sung—and it holds a feeling of delight so patent you can almost see it in the air.

  2 Robert Plant, “Far Post” (Esparanza/WEA Japan) Unavailable here as the B-side of the non-U.S. version of the ’83 “Big Log” single, import copies have lately been turning up courtesy of Jem; loose and taut as a cowboy’s rope spinning just before it’s shot out to catch a calf around the neck, this swings. Plant’s laconic vocal rides over barroom piano into the smokiest, least pretentious music he’s made since Led Zeppelin blew up; he actually sounds like a human being.

  3 Dobie Gray, From Where I Stand (Capitol) The follow-up to “Drift Away,” a mere 13 years late. It’s country soul, in the same way that Charlie Rich is soul country.

  4 Sweet Dreams, directed by Karel Reisz (Thorn EMI/HBO Video) What makes this Patsy Cline biopic work is Reisz’s refusal to dramatize: both Jessica Lange (Cline) and Ed Harris (husband) give one-note performances, but they hit their notes. What makes the movie powerful is the use of Cline’s recordings for Lange to lip-synch: as opposed to Nashville and Coal Miner’s Daughter, where country music was judged such shit the actors were allowed to do their own singing, thus reducing the characters they played, in Sweet Dreams Lange’s character becomes a mystery—an ordinary, exuberant woman with many worlds in her throat. The extraordinary fidelity in the remastering of Cline’s tunes brings out subtleties of phrasing and motive that don’t exist on record: you hear Cline aiming above her working-class status, not knowing how to get there, prettifying her passion, the passion swallowing the prettifying—and that’s all the drama the movie needs.

  5 Little Richard, Early Studio Outtakes (Sunjay) Marvels from the ’50s, highlighted by lines from “I Got It” that took years to make official vinyl, and then in a funk version that wiped off all their drool: “It ain’t what you do it’s the way how you do it/It ain’t what you eat it’s the way how you chew it.”

  6 Test Dept., The Unacceptable Face of Freedom (Ministry of Power/Some Bizarre UK) English friends say this tape-collage LP captures the mood in Britain better than anything else, mainly by turning the loop on the sleeve into noise: “The State Forced to Concede the Empire Abroad, Finally Turns on Its Own People to Create a New Empire at Home. The Last Colony. The State Forced to—”

  7 Heart, “Nothing at All” (Capitol) Voices carry.

  8 Radio commercial for Mercury Sable (Young & Rubicam) It begins with the Four Tops’ stirring “Reach Out.” “I remember the first time I heard this song,” says a man wistfully. “It was the night my first girlfriend dumped me . . .”

  9 O Love Is Teasin’ (Elektra) It is of paramount importance that all people of good will avoid (if not invade record stores to burn) this three-LP boxed set of ’50s retakes of ancient Appalachian ballads, unless such people harbor the irrepressible wish to hear “Barbara Allen” sung with the down-home charm of a public television station break.

  10 “Lost Dog,” street flyer (Berkeley, January 1986) This stood out among a score of other punk handbills stapled onto a telephone pole; it’s been bothering me ever since I ripped it down and tacked it over my desk. There’s a sort of Mr. Bill putty animal, a few lines of type carefully inked over so you can’t read them, a screaming “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DOG??,” the words “The noblest, most rational and most intelligent beast God ever made,” and a cartoon of dogs and humans dressed for a fancy party taking place somewhere between Periclean Greece and prerevolutionary France. I thought I had it figured out as a cryptic record ad when a tune called “Fluffy,” about a “lost dog,” came on the local college station, but a call proved the song three years old. Is this a new band? A new philosophy? A new void?

  JULY 15, 1986

  1 Mekons, The Edge of the World (Sin, UK) This lacks the insinuative potency of last year’s Fear and Whiskey, that astonishing tale of termite rebels burrowing into dark times, but thanks to Rico Bell’s accordion and Susie Honeyman’s violin, it comes on stronger; the territory remains the same. Once more, you can follow real people struggling with real questions: how do we live when all we cherish has been buried in the shit of power? Answers range from oblivion to good conversation. A cracked, impassioned cover of “Sweet Dreams” is cut off and you’re plunged into “Dream, Dream, Dream” which is a joke and a nightmare; it leads to “Slightly South of the Border,” an unhappy explanation of why small pleasures like shopping, strolling, and good conversation dry up when they’re severed from a sense of the world-historical, a conviction confirmed by a hard and bitter Celtic fiddle piece that calls up Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Richard Thompson’s “Withered and Died,” Wire’s “I Am the Fly,” and turns out to be Hank Williams’s “Alone and Forsaken.” The Edge of the World is a map of a secret time and place: here, now.

  2 Absolute Beginners, directed by Julien Temple (Orion) For the moment in the race riot when the thug called Flikker (Bruce Payne) pours gasoline on a coloured family’s piano, lights a match, and bangs out “Great Balls of Fire” as the keys go up in flames.

  3 Wilson Sisters, “1972” (flexi-disc in Monitor #6: Pop—Subversion and Surveillance, Oxford, UK) They—whoever they are—make what’s likely the least spooky year in rock history sound like the most.

  4 Joseph Ellroy, Blood on the Moon (Avon paperback) Two decades after the Everly Brothers hit the charts with “Cathy’s Clown,” a mass murderer writes on a wall in the blood of his latest victim: “I’M NOT KATHY’S KLOWN.” “Maybe it’s a clue,” says a cop, and it is—to this very gory mystery, and to the mysteries of pop metaphor.

  5 Zone 1/2, edited by Michel Feher and Sanford Kwinter, designed by Bruce Mau (Urzone/Johns Hopkins University Press) This big, internationalist dramatization of urbanism is a map of a public time and place—here, now—a picture of the shit of power. The premise that “Productive space [is becoming] diffused throughout the urban fabric, while a new wave of puritanism subjects the household to the ethics of the factory” is shaped by 13 essays (most striking are Annie L. Cott’s coolly horrifying “Neoconservative Economics, Utopia and Crisis” and Eric Alliez and Feher’s inspired “The Luster of Capital”), nine art projects (see page 32 for John Baldessari’s “Crowds With the Shape of Reason Missing”), and 19 replies to a what’s-happening-with-the-city questionnaire, which take form as mini-essays and mini-art projects (go to page 456 for examples of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projection art)—all that’s missing is a flexi of the Gang of Four’s “At Home He’s a Tourist” b/w “It’s Her Factory.” Ignoring pop music, Zone defines the social terrain that in ephemeral, everyday instants pop has to reveal
for what it is, or could be: the temporal space new music will have to occupy if it is to be the sound of the city, not just sound in the city.

  6 Bob Dylan With the Heartbreakers, “Lonesome Town,” Greek Theatre, Berkeley, June 13 “Ricky Nelson did a lot of my songs; I’d like to do one of his.” A lovely gesture, and it worked. As for the rest of the show, Dylan traded emotional nuance for rote chanting so doggedly that when my seat-mate wondered if the next number might not be “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” it was impossible to hear what followed as anything else. Two verses later, we deciphered it as a speeded-up “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.”

  7 Sonic Youth, Evol (SST) By far their most pop, even rational, release, and still opening more doors to the void than the offerings of such putative allies as Big Black. I mean, if BB’s Atomizer is flesh-eating, they ordered off a menu.

  8 Madonna, “Live To Tell” (Sire) This is terribly contrived, and in a month or two it’s going to sound like the luster of capital, if not the shit of power. For the moment, it’s one more proof of her mastery.

  9 Rolling Stones, “Dirty Work,” from Dirty Work (Rolling Stones) Maybe the redundancy is a code, a clue: this kicks off like their ancient “Empty Heart,” which is what it describes. Then it begins to fall apart, and Mick Jagger’s recognition of the emptiness in his own heart keeps it going. What you’re hearing is auto-cannibalism: Jagger feels the remnants of “Salt of the Earth” in his heart, and so, dramatizing the neoconservative utopia, he eats it.

  10 Mekons, Club DV8, San Francisco, June 26 Best oldie: their own eight-year-old “Where Were You?” Best performance: “Hard To Be Human Again.” Best line: “Do you want to be part of the crime, or do you want to be part of the punishment?”