by Greil Marcus
AUGUST 12, 1986
1 California Cooler, “Louie Louie” radio commercials (Chiat/DTV) Spots based on desiccated revisions of old rock songs (worst: “Runaround Sue” as a commercial for Zipwax—”I never thought I’d be singing about hair remover,” says a breathless ms.) have become so ubiquitous that ads featuring the real thing now work as relief—and none more than these, which offer a measured voice recounting the history and etiquette of wine ’n’ fruit juice consumption. The original buy traced the discovery of the beverage to California beaches, circa 1963—thus the Kingsmen, entering with a crash and tripping all over themselves—and provided a rundown on the drinking vessel de rigueur on the given beach (mayonnaise jar for Malibu, turkey baster for Santa Cruz). The latest argues that the stuff is appropriate to any setting—so, after the Kingsmen cover the beachfront, an opera singer essays “Louie Louie,” a jazz combo plays it, and a mariachi band turns it into ethnic festival music. It’s a true contribution to rock history: three more shots to add to college stations’ “Louie Louie” marathons, whose annual accumulations have already unearthed more than a thousand versions of a song that wasn’t even a hit for Richard Berry, its auteur.
2 Black Uhuru, Brutal (RAS) This sophisticated reggae combo lost a bit of soul with the departure of lead singer Michael Rose, but Junior Reid sounds enough like him to keep the story going; as always, the story is in the way chants, rhythms, and melodies are suspended, then stretched, broken, recreated. The story takes its power from the tension between the need to guard a secret and the wish to reveal it, the closest the group ever came to letting it loose was “Vampire,” the closing cut on the 1980 Sinsemilla, and its mood of gnostic initiation is present on almost every track of Brutal.
3 Chris Furby and Slim Smith, God Crazy (Workforce Corporation, UK/Last Gasp) Imagine the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ tract factory taken over by graduates of the Richard Hamilton School of Advertising Collage—the result is a sustained example of post-punk dadaism, a little comic book pamphlet so winning it might deconvert David Thomas, if not Michael Jackson. Listen to Jesus, stretched out on the cross: “You, too, can have a body like mine!”
4 Teena Marie, Emerald City (Epic) The white funk queen’s latest is being pushed as a breakthrough because it’s got horrible ballads, pseudo-Brazilian folderol, and third-rate jazz on side two. The action is on side one, Prince country: as with “Kiss,” you get pure sex without a single warning-label word. But “Kiss” was fore-play; this is the exchange of bodily fluids.
5 Moody Blues, “In Your Wildest Dreams” (Polydor) I spent two months trying to resist this soppy melody, and it can’t be done.
6 Timex Social Club, “Rumors” (Jay) A smash because the sound captures the concept: to listen is to eavesdrop.
7 Mr. T Experience, street flyer (Berkeley, July 11) It’s been said that “The moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play”; this photocopy, just band name, gig info, and former Attorney General John Mitchell, is a moment of real poetry.
8 Alex Bennett Show, July 8 (6:30–10 a.m. weekdays, KITS-FM, San Francisco) Bennett, who used to host Midnight Blue on New York cable TV, opens each day with “The Morning Obituaries”; regularly fighting for the mike with such motormouth comics as Bob Goldthwait, Steven Pearl, and Bobby Slayton, he runs the only wake-up show to carry an “Adults Only” disclaimer. Here, deferring to the random-drug-testing rules announced by Peters Ueberroth and Rozelle (“Commissioners of Urine”), Bennett inaugurated a new feature: a daily spin of the Peter Wheel to select a candidate from the world of pop. First winner, no surprise: Boy George.
9 Paul Brady, “Steel Claw,” from True for You (21/Atco) Brady made his name with traditional Irish music; now, with a tune that had a tepid debut on Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, he rocks out. It’s irresistible guitar-based traditional late-’60s music; the rest of the LP is traditional sub-Van Morrison music.
10 Anonymous, The International Battle of the Century—The Beatles vs the Third Reich (VE) In the spirit of Elvis’ Greatest Shit!!, an impeccably designed and produced bootleg parody of Vee-Jay’s 1964 The Beatles vs the Four Seasons. Back then, “scoring by rounds,” you were invited to rate “I Saw Her Standing There” against “Sherry”; now, you judge a muddy, previously unreleased 1962 Hamburg Star-Club tape against crowd noise. That is, “The Beatles Perform,” “Till There Was You,” “Where Have You Been All My Life,” and “To Know Her Is to Love Her,” and “The Audience Responds”: “Ach Du Leiber,” “Mach Shau,” and “Arbeit Macht Frei”—the latter being the slogan that once adorned the gates of Auschwitz. Sharp.
SEPTEMBER 9, 1986
1 Terry Clement & the Tune Tones, “She’s My Baby Doll,” from Sin Alley (Big Daddy) Crammed with 1955–61 obscurities that make Carl Perkins sound like an accountant and Hasil Adkins seem like a craftsman, this is the most demented rockabilly compilation since Juke Box at Eric’s. Clement leaps out of the pack, possessed by a thought the urgency of which stands undimmed by the passage of time: “Well, rich girl wears expensive perfume/Poor girl does the same/My girl don’t wear none at all/But you can smell her just the same.”
2 Forced Exposure #10 Operating on the premise that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice—and fun, too,” this thick punk-maudit quarterly has become the crucial music magazine in the U.S. That may be mainly due to Steve Albini, whose long “December Diary” is the high point of #10; his subject is candor, how it turns life into a war, and why it’s worth fighting—at home, at work, in print, on stage. Albini’s premise might be found in something the late Alexander Trocchi wrote: “We must do everything to attack the ‘enemy’ at his base, within ourselves.”
3 Charlatans, Alabama Bound (Eva, France/Performance Distributors, New Brunswick, NJ) Killed by MGM in 1966, these addled folk-blues tracks by the first exemplars of the “San Francisco Sound” are historic; they’re also a curio. But the last number—nine minutes 50 seconds of the title song, the band’s signature tune—remains as rough and luminous as it was on the day it was performed: June 13, 1969, at the Charlatans’ final show.
4 Matt Mahurin, Sleeve photo for The Lover Speaks (Geffen) Forget the record, which offers a U.K. translation of some of Phil Spector’s pomposities with none of his desire; the cover portrait, a woman naked visible from her shoulders up, shot in the Victorian style of Julia Margaret Cameron and posed in a corrosive moment of (since The Lover Speaks claims influence by Barthes, we’ll call it) “jouissance,” is one of the sexiest things you’ll ever see.
5 Jamie Reid, (please wash your hands before) Leaving the 20th Century (Josh Baer Gallery, 270 Lafayette St., New York, September 12 through October 4) I haven’t previewed this exhibit of the Sex Pistols’ art director’s work from the early ’70s on, just the catalogue/poster. But there should be wonders here, such as the pre-Pistols sticker Reid made up for clandestine posting in supermarkets: “LAST DAYS. BUY NOW WHILE STOCKS LAST. This store will be closing soon owing to the pending collapse of monopoly capitalism . . .”
6 Lee “Scratch” Perry, “Grooving,” from Battle of Armagideon (Millionaire Liquidator) (Trojan, UK) What you slip into the supermarket Muzak system after you’ve put up Reid’s stickers.
7 Neil Young, Advertisement for Landing on Water (Geffen), in New Musical Express, July 26 “A Return to Rock Roots,” trumpets the copy, sweeping up after Young’s recent commercial disasters; a photo-collage shows Neville Chamberlain brandishing his “piece of paper,” now replaced by the sleeve of Landing on Water. The implication seems to be that Geffen, which sued Young to force him to produce salable music, is Chamberlain, and that Young is—Hitler? Who paid for this ad? What does it mean?
8 Anna Paczuska (text) and Sophie Grillet (art), Socialism for Beginners (Writers and Readers) A good comic strip survey, noted for the two-page spread on “les Enragés,” fringe radicals of the French Revolution, presented as a punk band.
9 Elvis Costello, “I Want You,” from Blood and Chocolate (Col
umbia) An anomaly on an LP that’s a lot closer to Nuggets than King of America: with a nod to “ Going Down Slow,” a spare, determined, pitiless love song to a living corpse.
10 Robert Shelton, No Direction Home—The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (Beech Tree) Shelton published the first Dylan review, and it turned out to be a hook in his side. In the works for more than 20 years, his book finally arrives at a length of 578 pages, bleeding with incomprehension. Like Myra Friedman in Buried Alive, her Janis Joplin biography, Shelton falls helplessly into the role of village explainer. Any sense of play and discovery is banished; the endless search for sources and meanings doesn’t open up the story, it narrows it. Still, Dylan’s conversations with Shelton, from 1962 through 1985, all previously unpublished, are unparalleled in their sincerity and frankness: they make the book important. So cut this item out of the paper, take it to the bookstore, pull the book off the shelf, flip to pp. 14–18, 24–25, 38–40, 60, 63, 90–91, 109–10, 124, 129, 131, 188, 195, 279, 280–81, 287, 341–62, 479–81, 485–86, 491–92, and have a good time.
OCTOBER 7, 1986
1 Art Bears, The World As It Is Today (Re Records, UK, 1981) This old LP, new to me, arrived in the mail courtesy of Chris Cutler, editor of Re Records Quarterly, disc ’n’ magazine journal of radical pop theory; I threw it on, and played nothing else for days. “Out of town!” cried a man in a lugubrious voice. “My work takes me out of town!” Why was he so upset? His moans made the song into a statement of pure pathos; a displacing effect, given that the label said this was “The Song of Investment Capital Overseas.” It was capital itself that was singing: like the slaver in Randy Newman’s “Sail Away,” it was capital, not its victims (“I burn the houses down/. . . Lay out plantations/And bring prosperity/To the poorer nations”), who needed the listener’s compassion, deserved it, was getting it. The whole album moved on that level, its gnomic parables full of screams, the sound suggesting the Weimar proto-rock of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, or the doomy Futurism of Antonio Russolo. Eager to learn more, I opened the booklet of credits and lyrics, only to stop at the first line: “Play at 45 rpm.” Uh-oh.
2 Pussy Galore, groovy hate fuck EP (Shove) Enough of that confusing Old World art music; here’s some plain-speech New World raw meat—or, as one of the tunes has it, “Dead Meat.” Particularly appealing is “Cunt Tease,” and the way guitarist Julia Cafritz shouts “FUCK YOU!” every time vocalist Jon Spencer makes it to the title phrase.
3 Roy Orbison, “In Dreams,” as mimed by Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch (DEG) Speaking of dead meat . . .
4 Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories, 1890–1954 (Record Research) Chart chronicle of top pop records—except that in pre-Elvis eras, racial and cultural exclusion precluded any real surveys of extra-bourgeois American popular taste. Whitburn’s response is heroic: collating countless forgotten lists, he’s created his own charts in retrospect, and the results change history. By placing, say, the Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon to Know” (an epochal “race music” hit that never made the official pop charts of its time) at #13 in late 1948, Whitburn rescues scores of performers from the ghettos to which phony charts once condemned them, allowing those artists to be seen in the context of mainstream popular culture for the first time. Expensive and essential.
5 Beat Farmers, “Riverside,” from Van Go (Curb) Just a slight, descending figure, played on two guitars, which says all there is to say about what can happen when the bars close.
6 James Brown and Steven Wells, Attack on Bzag/Molotov Comics (Manchester, UK) A fanzine that can’t decide if it likes the didacticism accessible through words better than the noise accessible through collage, though any reader/auditor is going to choose the noise.
7 Jacques Attali, Noise—The Political Economy of Music (Minnesota) At once a clear history of all post-Roman motivated Western noise (“ music”) and a delirious theoretical proof that, with a few breaks, such noise can transform, and thus save, the world. Originally published in French in 1977, Noise at once called for punk and proved its historical necessity; as with all good French critical theory, the clarity is inseparable from the delirium.
8 Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach, a novel (Poseidon) It seems to begin in the future, but I’m not sure it does. In this no-future, “ music” is banned, but it comes out of the ground, collapses buildings, and turns a police state into a question mark: “In a town where music is a topographical map, the music of the earth is legal and the music of men is not,” says a cop. “I don’t make the fucking laws. . . . Get rid of the radio, Cale.” In the best novel I’ve read this year, there are a lot of red herrings and shaggy dog stories; what it is Cale might be hearing on his illegal radio is the one missing answer a reader can’t imagine.
9 Beach Boys, Be True to Your School (Capitol reissue, c. 1963) Including the correct, 45 rpm, previously non-LP version of the title song; the perfectly generic “Surf Jam”; and the fabulously repressed (doo-wop, which was to say, in 1963, joked-up) “I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man” (i.e., Murry Wilson, whom son Brian once served a plate of stool).
10 Art Bears, The World As It Is Today (Re Records, UK, 1981) At 45 rpm, the pathos of the slow speed becomes hysteria. Screams become screeches; Weill and Eisler remain; Russolo disappears. The singer turns out to be a woman, Dagmar Krause, far more powerful here than on her new Supply & Demand—Songs by Brecht/Weill & Eisler, possibly because the tunes by percussionist Chris Cutler and guitarist/synthesizerist Fred Frith, composers for the Art Bears, say more about the world as it is today. I still like the record better at 33.
NOVEMBER 11, 1986
1 David & David, “Swallowed by the Cracks,” from Boomtown (A&M) It wasn’t Bob Dylan, it was Satchel Paige who said “Don’t look back”—because “someone might be gaining on you,” and whoever it was has long since passed the singer of this song. “This drunken old whore,” David Baerwald half jokes, half snarls from a back table in some L.A. dive: “You see, we’d been swallowed by the cracks, fallen so far down/Like the rest of those clowns, begging bus-fare back.” Those lines are too cold, too unpleasant, to do anything but pull the string on a life, but as an overdubbed one-man-band David Ricketts has a feel for the light touch, strong melodies, good rhythms; his music and Davitt Sigerson’s careful, anonymous production give Baerwald back the will he’s mourning. A great song to listen to when you’re miserable.
2 Cameo, “Word Up!” (Atlanta Artists) A piece of funk so imaginative and clean it’d fit on Prince’s Dirty Mind; a trick vocal; and a lyric that starts off as if it’s going to try to teach you a new dance (“The Word,” or something), turns into Ashton, Gardner & Dyke’s “Resurrection Shuffle,” the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird,” the Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself,” and then gets complicated.
3 Billy Bragg, “Levi Stubbs’ Tears” (Go! 12-inch, UK) A knife in the heart—and, in the best of all possible worlds, the last song the Four Tops will sing before Levi Stubbs’s promised retirement in 1990.
4 Impotent Sea Snakes, Too Cool for Rock & Roll (Pravda) From Florida: leading off with “Pope John Paul Can Suck My Dick” (it’s not anticlerical—the singer’s doing Johnny a favor), moving on to “Missing Link” (i.e., black people) and “I Caught AIDS from a Dead Man,” this set of cheap but extremely detailed slurs isn’t especially shocking, and it isn’t funny. What it is is pointlessly vicious and obscene, and listening to it in 1986—as opposed to, say, 1979—carries a certain charge: you wonder how long it might be before this sort of public speech is made illegal. (It already is in North Carolina; see “University Under Fire,” James B. Meigs’s report on that state’s recent nullification of the First Amendment, Rolling Stone, September 25.)
5 Eddie Money, “Take Me Home Tonight” (Columbia) Urgent, with a good idea: “Just like Ronnie sang,” pleads the man to his one-night would-be, and then there she is, Ronnie of the Ronettes in the flesh, warbling “Uh-uh-uh-oh/Be my little baby . . .” She sounds terrible, hopeless—and she’s right in your lap,
when she should have been mixed back, emerging only as a radio ghost. The number still makes it.
6 Stacey Q, “Two of Hearts” (Atlantic) Not as good as Madonna’s “True Blue,” better than anything on Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors.
7 Bangles, “Walk Like an Egyptian” (Columbia) Not as good as Steve Martin’s “King Tut,” better than the Pyramids’ “Here Comes Marsha.”
8 Smokey Robinson, “The Star-Spangled Banner” (Fenway Park, Boston, October 23) Not as good as Marvin Gaye, better than José Feliciano.
9 Del Shannon, “Runaway,” theme song for Crime Story (NBC, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.) As lead cop Dennis Farina’s wife, Darlanne Fluegel is the sexiest woman on TV.
10 Unknown guitarist, “Apache” (Piazza Maggiore, Bologna, Italy, October 12) Throughout the weekend, the streets and plazas of central Bologna fill with citizens. Thousands and thousands of people, old and young, most of whom have taken the bus in from cheaper districts, gather together: they form groups and leave them, talk and argue, look for friends and find them. They’re not shopping, or hanging out in cafés: they walk the streets and mill in the plazas as if they’re on a pilgrimage to the place where, culturally, they were born. “I love my native city more than my own soul,” Machiavelli wrote some four centuries ago; the people in Bologna seem to act out that sentiment as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. It’s the pleasure of being part of something bigger than yourself; look for greed, resentment, or nervousness in these streets, and you won’t find them. It was the most exuberant version of public life, of what used to be called “public happiness,” I’ve ever witnessed.
In the midst of this ordinary festival—square in the middle of the biggest plaza in the city—was a guitar player with a mike and a little amp. There was something about the air, or the way the people baffled it, or the way the man played, that carried his notes hundreds of yards, and yet kept them from blaring at a distance of 10 feet: kept them from interrupting whatever anyone else might want to do. It struck me that there has never been a bad version of “Apache” (Jorgen Ingmann, 1961, first and last German surf instrumental); the melody is simply too sweet. But this was 10 in the morning; the guy was still there, as many people joyously listening as joyously ignoring him, 12 hours later.