Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  November 13, 1986

  Dear Greil Marcus

  Re “Real Life Rock Top Ten” in November 11th issue of VV.

  “10. Unknown Guitarist, ‘Apache,” Piazza Maggione, Bologna, Italy.”

  . . . his name was Beppe. I too was in the square on that magical Sunday in October (the 12th). (He had written his name on the amp.)

  Fantastico!

  Tina Yagjian

  Brooklyn, NY

  DECEMBER 16, 1986

  1 John Lennon, Menlove Avenue (Capitol) From the infamous “Lost Weekend” period: side 1 offers bad outtakes from the ’75 oldies LP, while side 2, live studio rehearsals for tunes used on the ’74 Walls and Bridges, contains the strongest music Lennon made from the ’71 Imagine on down. With a small combo (led by guitarist Jesse Ed Davis), there’s the feel of a private blues session, but it wasn’t just the hysterical smear of strings and horns that ruined these songs on Walls and Bridges. It was their vocal mirror: the histrionics of “Steel and Glass,” the portentous, selfconsciously sensitive phrasing of “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” Now there’s a quiet, nihilistic confrontation with ugliness, lyrics just bitten, or chased out of control: “There you stand/With your toilet seat/And your Mickey Duck/And your Donald Fuck.” “Fuuuu-uh-uh-uuuuck,” that last word is actually sung; it’s a chance for Lennon to say what he means, and he only finds out what he means as he happens upon the syllable, bends it, stretches it, breaks it, swallows it.

  2 Mel McDaniel, “Stand on It” (Capitol) A country hit, and the best Springsteen cover since “Spirit in the Night” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band: full-throated middle-aged rockabilly glory.

  3 New Order, “Bizarre Love Triangle” (Factory U.K. 12-inch) On LP, you get Gillian Gilbert’s gorgeous synthesizer riff; here you get that plus the startling transformation of Bernard Sumner’s perfunctory vocal into a vocoded chorale that, alone of all the elements in this recording, lives up to its title.

  4 Merry Christmas from the Sonics/Wailers/Galaxies (Etiquette reissue, 1965) This might have taken longer to record than it does to play (a half-hour); after all, with three bands, you have to figure in a few minutes for them to set up. Big theme is perfidy of Santa Claus (“Don’t believe in Christmas/’Cause I didn’t get nothin’ last year,” wail the Sonics; “Santa Claus/Won’t you tell me please/What you’re gonna put/Under my Christmas tree/And he just say/NOTHIN’, NOTHIN’, NOTHIN’, NOTHIN’,” sonicize the Wailers), but let’s not forget the Wailers’ touching “Maybe Next Year,” a reverie so delicate and slow they have a real problem keeping the thing from coming to a complete stop.

  5 Coolies, dig . . ? (dB) A precise and gleeful mutilation of Paul Simon hits. “Feelin’ Groovy” as it might be played on the nod, a Duane Eddy-style instrumental version of “Mrs. Robinson”—by the end, there’s little left of the songs but their vapidity, and it may be only copyright control that keeps the Coolies from taking on the townhouse jive of Graceland next, which deserves it more.

  6 Sid & Nancy, directed by Alex Cox (Goldwyn) This is where a phrase like miseen-scène helps; you need a concept that vague to pretend to know why songs contrived a decade ago, sung by actors who offscreen disclaim any feeling for them, can still terrify and thrill.

  7 Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality—Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minnesota) The mass psychology of fascism is a cliché; this short, scholarly, jargon-free, almost conversational investigation of the aesthetic, utopian, avant-garde appeal of the movement in France from the ’30s through the Occupation can be read as a study of fascist pop life.

  8 Marty Robbins, Rock’n Roll’n Robbins (Bear Family German reissue, 1954–58) All the extremes of “rock” are missing here. The voice is supple, sensual, friendly (even on the morbid “Footprints in the Snow”); the guitar playing alternates cowboy cool-water with tumbling, tricky bluegrass runs; the whole is a comfortable, completely convincing account of white blues. It’s what happened whan a singer who always leaned to the western side of c&w tried to jump on a trend: a unique sound, not to mention a unique spelling.

  9 Steven Gaines, Heroes and Villains—The True Story of the Beach Boys (NAL) Disgusting, repulsive, hateful—also pointless, save as the last word anyone will need on these cretins.

  10 Alan Cranston, “Zschau’s Greatest Hits” (Robert Shrum Associates) This TV spot was Cranston’s last shot in his barely successful fight to hold his California U.S. Senate seat against the hard-right shift of “moderate” G.O.P. challenger Ed Zschau, already notorious for flip-flopping. It came on like a K-Tel ad, frantic and loud, lots of Zschau-faces pointing in different directions, a type overlay blaring song titles as a Wolfman Jack imitator growled them: “How Many Times can a Man Change His Mind,” “Zschau Bop Flip Flop,” and, sealing the package, “Both Sides Now.”

  JANUARY 13, 1987

  1 Wire, Snakedrill (Mute U.K. 12-inch) Active in London from ’77 to ’80, this foursome sometimes played songs lasting under a minute, but even the longest were as gnomic as that gesture. A wash of repetition disguised careful sonic choices, and the edge of the music, and the moment, was never reduced, merely removed from the obvious: “I am the fly—the fly in the ointment” was Wire’s version of “I am an antichrist.” On Snakedrill, the band’s first recording in years, neither the sound nor the role-playing has changed. “ ‘A Serious of Snakes,’” the best of the four tracks, starts off with some punning on “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” and the title tells you who the Gardener is; weaving a dramatically modulated melody around the conceit, Wire seems as implacable, as mysterious, and as new as it did a decade ago. I take this to mean not that Wire was ahead of its time, but that Wire caught its time, and that time has stood still—that the chiliastic voice found in London in the first year of punk has hardly been answered, let alone superseded.

  2 Coolies, “Having My Baby,” from dig . . ? (dB) After the singer professes his devotion to the point of delirium, there’s a spoken passage: the father to be lets it slip that, well, you may be having my baby, but, you know, “I still got two weeks left on my Greyhound card,” gotta go now, and, anyway, “You ain’t the only woman in town. Come to think of it, you ain’t the only woman in town who’s—”

  3 Communards, “Disenchanted” (MCA) An LP’s worth of Jimmy Somerville’s falsetto gets irritating; here, his spirit goes as high as his pitch.

  4 Sylvester, “Sooner or Later,” from Mutual Attraction (Warner Bros.) A desanctified gospel stomp, until the last choruses, when instrumentation drops away and Sylvester begins to harmonize with two women. They reach a state of ecstatic distraction, words coming loose from prayers and functioning only as signals of sexual abandon. What you’re hearing isn’t just church singing, but an altar call.

  5 George J. Sowden, “American, 1983” (Memphis Milano) In 1956, Ettore Sottsass signed a manifesto affirming that “creation can now be nothing less than a synthesis aiming at an integral construction of an atmosphere”; in 1981 he and others, including Sowden, formed the Memphis design group in Milan, naming it after Bob Dylan’s “Memphis Blues Again.” The group has lived up to that old manifesto with certain endlessly suggestive everyday objects, and this is one of them: it looks like a ’50s movie robot, tells time, and rocks around itself.

  6 Alphaville, “Jerusalem,” from Afternoons in Utopia (Atlantic) German trio heads back to the ’60s to ask the musical question, “What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?”

  7 Jay Cotton & Gary Panter, Pee Dog #2 (Spooky Comics) This is what’s so funny. “Blasphemy? Yeah, I guess you could say . . . ‘we’re into it,’” runs the intro to Cotton and Panter’s coprophiliac comic book—a visual equivalent of the Butthole Surfers—which begins with an exotic dancer emitting the Main Course of the Last Supper and ends with Jesus lugging his Cross up to Golgotha while reciting the complete text of “I Want to Know What Love Is.”

  8 Beastie Boys, “I’m Down” (tape) The old Beatle screamer, scheduled for Li
censed to Ill but chilled by new copyright owner Michael Jackson because of supposed bad language, this is circulating, even on the radio. On one hearing, it sounds more like the Beach Boys having fun with “Barbara Ann” than the bloody killer rape job you might expect.

  9 Blind Boy Grunt & the Hawks, The Basement Tapes, Vols. 1 & 2 (Surprise bootlegs) A few finished numbers missing from the official or common bootleg version of the fabled ’67 Dylan and Band sessions (the eerie “I’m Not There,” the corny “Sign on the Cross”)—otherwise, over two double LPs, lo-fi fragments and rejects. It’s all what it claims to be, save for four tracks the Hawks cut with Tiny Tim in rehearsal for the ’68 film You Are What You Eat (“Be My Baby,” “I Got You Babe,” etc.), and they’re the high point.

  10 WFMU-FM, Lowest Common Denominator, Fall ’86 (Upsala College, East Orange, NJ) Fanzine from the left-side dial spot (91.1) already described in these pages as “The #1 Choice of Lowlife Scum.” There’s an homage to Bobby Sherman, a poem about Vince Everett (Elvis in Jail-house Rock), serious analysis of pop trends, and, completing our survey of contemporary religion, a summation of what it means to live in a world where God is dead, “JEAN-PAUL SARTRE FOR DODGE DARTRE,” a flyer apparently scavenged from a telephone pole in Seattle, which plumbs the black hole of existential vertigo even better than Wire. Sartre: “In my journey to the end of the night, I must rely not only on dialectical paths of reason. I must have a good solid automobile, one that eschews the futile trappings of wordly ennui and asks only for the most basic maintenance. My Dodge Dartre offers me this basic solace, and as interior parts fall off I am struck by the realization of their pointlessness. I may not know if the window is up or down. It is of no consequence.”

  FEBRUARY 10, 1987

  1 Minutemen, “ballot result” (SST retrospective, 1980–85) This is what was left after guitarist D. Boon lost his life in late ’85: two LPs worth of demos, outtakes, stage tapes, audience cassettes, radio checks, and Mike Watt’s bloody charge into Roky Erickson’s “Bermuda.” A few album cuts have been thrown in for continuity, and the upshot is, if not the best Minutemen set, the most accessible and the most fun. Yes, they really were the Grateful Dead of punk (replacing karma with politics, faith with irony, boogie with rage, folkiness with artiness), and also the Beach Boys, and also their fans.

  2 Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, “Two Hearts,” from Live/1975–85 (Columbia) This ought to be a single—with a live “I’m Goin’ Down” on the flip.

  3 Pauline Murray and the Storm, “New Age” (Polestar, UK) Murray sang Penetration’s generic punk manifesto “Don’t Dictate” ten years ago, and she’s been chasing her own voice ever since: dreamy, sweet, playful, confused, lyrical, above all naïve. It’s all in her tone; from “Dream Sequence” in 1980 to now, she’s answered questions no one else is even asking.

  4 Larry Speakes, White House Press Briefing, January 8 Which he opened by playing a tape of “That’s All Right (Mama).” And continued by announcing that while he had no new information on the president, reporters could ask him “anything at all about the King.”

  5 Sun Records, The Country Years, 1950–1959 (Sun/Bear Family, W. Germany) Unlike the Sun Blues Years box, which was an epic, this spectacularly packaged, over-priced ten-LP set is an ordinary story; its deepest themes aren’t refusal and desire, but acceptance and routine. So you reduce your expectations, and notice small but gleaming anomalies, the product of an ordinary story being pushed just beyond itself, or given perfect shape. This might be Howard Seratt’s quiet folk-gospel, the rare sound of a man at peace with himself, or Cash King and the Miller Sisters’ “Can’t Find Time to Pray,” so delicate it almost hides its sting: “You must find time to die.”

  6 Eddie Money, “Bring on the Rain,” from Can’t Hold Back (Columbia) Gene Pitney lives.

  7 Julee Cruise, “Mysteries of Love,” from Blue Velvet: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Varèse Sarabande) Sort of like Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”—as composed by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, and performed by Rosie and the Originals.

  8 Muslim Gaze, Hajj (Limited 4, UK) This may be the first disc inspired by the Iran debacle, and simply as an artifact, it has an ominous power. The combination of the all-knowing face of Khomeni on the front cover, what seems to be the baffled, scared face of Reagan on the back, and the title—as Mike Watt says on “ballot result,” “one title is worth a million lyrics,” and Hajj doesn’t have any.

  9 Los Lobos, By the Light of the Moon (Slash) Fine. But not superfine.

  10 Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People Is Wrong (Academy Chicago reprint, 1959) As author of The History Man and Rates of Exchange, Bradbury has become increasingly impressed with his own sense of humor since publishing this rather chilling comic novel about the wasteland of postwar British liberal culture. Here the humor cuts, and it never claims the page merely for the sake of a joke. Bradbury understands that sometimes the gift of humor is to ease the way to seriousness, as in the following passage, just the musings of one of his characters, and also a eulogy appropriate to any person, at any time, in any place: “But the life one leads cuts out all the lives one might have led; one is never a virgin twice; events engrave themselves. Life is a unity to the soul. We meet events halfway; they are part of us, and we are part of them; nothing is incidental. Ahead comes the point where all events exist at once, and no new ones are in sight, the point on the edge of death, which is a reckoning point.” Play that dead band’s song again.

  MARCH 10, 1987

  1 Chris Isaak (Warner Bros.) Neorockabilly as received will and idea: formal almost to the point of abstraction. In print it sounds sterile, and in a year it may sound that way on record, but for the moment, shaped by Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” and Jody Reynolds’s “Endless Sleep,” it sounds like the last breath of true, which on Isaak’s terms is to say lost, romance.

  2 Peter Davles, The Last Election (Vintage) At first, a rather obvious black-humor novel about England as Margaret Thatcher heads into her fifth (fourth?) (third?) term; then it gets ugly. Then it gets uglier. Then the worst happens: you start taking it seriously.

  3 Age of Chance, “Kiss” (Fon, UK) Here’s Prince’s elegant masterpiece, turned into a trash masterpiece; ripped to shreds, beer poured all over the pieces, which are then lapped up and spewed out all over again. Instant party, with an edge of menace—the Beastie Boys should be half so tough, or so touching.

  4 Ben E. King, Stand by Me—The Best of Ben E. King and Ben E. King and the Drifters (Atlantic reissue, 1960–75) Craven cash-in on the second appearance of the title tune in the Top Ten (1961 and ’86), shamefully omitting “Tippin,” a mature and measured ’78 comeback bid. Great anyway—notably for the way King’s singing on the Drifters’ 1960 “This Magic Moment” now stands out as one of the most commanding performances in rhythm & blues.

  5 James Brown, “How Do You Stop?” (Scotti Bros. 12-inch) It’s hip to dismiss Dan Hartman’s productions of the Godfather of Soul as white-flour makeup, but this dance-floor ballad is something new for Brown: full-toned, emotionally generous. It brings to mind the Brook Benton of “Rainy Night in Georgia,” or Van Morrison, who thinks soul music came from “Caledonia”—i.e., Scotland, when whiteness was in flower.

  6 Not Bored #11 A critical-theory fanzine dedicated to the proposition that not all received ideas are bad, especially if you can play with them. Highlight: inside dope on recent graffiti wars at SUNY Buffalo, based on an article about undergraduate negation that appeared in Internationale Situationniste #11, a critical-agitation journal published in Paris in 1967. Numbers of serendipity, or serendipity of numbers?

  7 Scotch, “Take Me Up” (zyx 12-inch, West Germany) What New Order would sound like if they went bubblegum—which they may yet.

  8 Alvis Wayne, “Sleep, Rock-a-Roll, Rock-a-Baby,” from Texas Rockabilly (RR reissue, c. 1956, France) With Presleyish fervor filtered through a shimmering rain of steel guitars, the result is a reverie: a curio as gorgeous as it is unique.<
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  9 Bill Flanagan, Written in My Soul—Rock’s Great Songwriters Talk About Creating Their Music (Contemporary) Given his stated limits—the rock tradition that can be traced to message-mongering folk music—Flanagan’s interviews seek out clichés and turn up revelations. Willie Dixon (a token ancestor) damns gospel music as a means of social control; Neil Young (a typical inheritor) argues that while as form blues and country preceded rock ’n’ roll, as spirit rock ’n’ roll preceded blues and country—rock ’n’ roll, Young says, is what blues and country emerged to control. Flanagan is prissy about music in the marketplace, and time and again he tries to get his subjects to buy into his equally prissy brand of ethics, but they won’t do it. As always, dumb questions provoke the best answers.

  10 Chuck Berry, “Rock ’n’ Roll Music,” from More Rock ’n’ Roll Rarities From the Golden Age of Chess Records (Chess/MCA reissue, 1956) In Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock (first published in 1970, soon to be reissued by Da Capo), one can read that “Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock and Roll Music’ predicts in 1957 the later outbreak of African nationalism, ‘It’s way too early for the congo/So keep a-rockin’ that piano.’” This sort of absurdist connection is a good part of what listening to rock ’n’ roll is all about: the immediacy of the music transposing itself into an epistemology of simultaneity. Still, reading Meltzer, you automatically think: Berry must have meant “the conga,” the dance, meaning “too early” as too-early-in-the-evening-for-such-a-stomp. Here, with the original demo of “Rock ’n’ Roll Music,” one discovers that Berry did say, did mean, “conga”—which is to say that one must base a whole way of understanding rock ’n’ roll on a slip of the tongue.