Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  APRIL 7, 1987

  1 Lonnie Mack, “Why,” from The Wham of That Memphis Man! (Alligator reissue, 1963) This tune offers a false choice: listening to the most stately ballad in the annals of white blues, or listening to a man kill himself. The choice is false because in the last verse you don’t get to choose.

  2 Tina Turner, “What You Get Is What You See” (Capitol) Not the track from the conformist Break Every Rule. Here, producer Terry Brittan takes a melody with the fervor of Graham Parker’s “Nobody Hurts You,” orchestrates it with the guitar-hero momentum of Dire Straits’ “Expresso Love,” explodes it with the kinetic release of the Rolling Stones’ “Shattered,” then challenges the singer to beat the band.

  3 Pussy Galore, Pussy Gold 5000 (Buy Our Records EP) I hate the way language is corrupted by people who use born-dead neologisms as if they were alive, as if they were more than shortcuts for dopes too lazy or hip to say what they mean, as with “take,” putatively a noun signifying one’s perspective on a given phenomenon, the pervasive employment of the word hiding its reduction of all perspective to an effete glance, as if nothing were worth more, as in “Holden Caulfield’s takes on the world” (Voice, March 17), or “Marx’s take on political economy” (my paranoid fantasy, until I saw a version of it in these pages), or, you know, Noah’s take on the Flood: “Big, isn’t it?” Fuck off and die, cretins.

  4 Mickey Rourke, Angel Heart (Tri-Star) Mouthing Bob Seger’s “Feel Like a Number,” Rourke came up with the only emotionally credible moments in Body Heat; he’s had lead roles ever since, but this is the first time he’s sustained the nervous, slimy, nihilistic tension of that performance for a whole movie.

  5 Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Scrap-heap,” from Track Rehearsals 1977 (KO bootleg EP, UK) They swallowed a lot of what made a difference in the Sex Pistols’ England; save for “Nicotine Stain” on The Scream, their first album, this is the only piece they were able to spit out.

  6 Elvis Costello, aka Various Artists, “Blue Chair” from Out of Our Idiot (Demon, UK) A blur on Blood and Chocolate, this version is pure pop craft. It’s in the lift of the chorus—which, every time it comes around, seems to come out of nowhere.

  7 Richard Krawlec, Time Sharing (Penguin) In this sickeningly convincing novel about a white couple so economically marginal they have become almost socially illiterate, when the woman turns on her transistor, “She swore she knew the words to the ads better than she knew the songs”—but so do most of us, and thus for a moment this fact makes easy sense. What doesn’t make easy sense is a larger fact, which Krawiec gets across on every page: the country has established enclaves of material and spiritual deprivation—black holes of possibility—that are so absolute pop messages cannot enter them, save as the tawdry beats against which a woman without money stands before a roomful of drunks and takes off her clothes.

  8 San Francisco Chronicle: Entertainment listing, March 1 “Reno, El Dorado Hotel: Bill Haley and the Comets.” Ars brevis, vita longa?

  9 Crime Story, (NBC, February 27) “Paulie,” says mob boss Ray Luca (a pompadoured Elvis-from-hell) to his gofer/hitman, “what you lack in intelligence, you make up in stupidity.” As this show was rock ’n’ roll from its Del Shannon theme song to its buried, fannish asides (“Let’s all get Dixie fried,” crows another Luca goon after a good bombing), that line is a perfect example of a form revealing its spirit.

  10 Andrew Britton, “Blissing Out—The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment” (Movie 31/32) After defining the hegemonic significance of two mystifications—the everyday notion that a work of popular culture can be “just entertainment,” and the “academic fiction” of autonomous textuality—Britton goes on, through more than 30,000 words, to investigate the American movies of the last several years as a reactionary project that has implicated its audience—gained its assent—in ways far more complex than the concurrent political project the cultural version at once trivializes and deepens. The extraordinary weight and determination of Britton’s essay has a side effect: the exposure of the impoverishment of what, in every realm of discourse, music no less than movies, politics no less than music, passes for criticism in the pages you and I read and write.

  MAY 5, 1987

  1 Michelob TV commercial, “I Move Better in the Night” (Needham Harper/Jeremiah Chechik, director) In this best of all possible music videos, every situation is infinitesimally developed, and then left completely open. A blond woman turns her head after kissing her boyfriend; there’s a blithe, irreducibly autonomous sensuality in her face that will never have anything to do with beer. In fact, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with her boyfriend.

  2 Slits, “New Town,” from The Peel Sessions (Strange Fruit, EP, UK, 1977) Cute—until you realize it’s about heroin.

  3 Oingo Boingo, “Not My Slave” (MCA) Pointless old “new wave” group finally devolves into the new Raspberries. I guess it was worth the wait.

  4 77’s, “I Can’t Get Over It” (Island) Faceless: words and music just this side of absolutely nothing, but the band finds a tough groove, and the guitarist knows just what to do with it, and what not to.

  5 Nike TV commercial, “Revolution” (Beatles/Wieden & Kennedy) “Poetic justic,” says Howard Hampton. “The song’s essential mealiness of mouth comes home to roost.” Licensing by Michael Jackson, with the approval of Yoko, who says (by permission of Michael Jackson), “You know it’s gonna be/Alright.”

  6 Fleetwood Mac, Tango in the Night (Warner Bros.) Some people find this kind of dull, but it’s saving dentists millions on novocaine, the American Association of Anesthesiologists is sponsoring the tour, and Wizard won a furious bidding war for the air freshener rights—in a month or so, when you spray your room with “Evergreen” or “Floral,” you’ll hear FM’s new melodies at the very same time. Of course, some people think they already do.

  7 Joyce Milman and Mark Moses, “You Read It Here April First” (Boston Phoenix, April 3) Gossip columns are boring because they try to make you care about what boring people actually do. The one-step-beyond approach turns up the real inside dope, as in this notably sustained effort, where “Paul Simon’s next album promises to be another eclectic trendsetter. The multi-Grammy winner is recording an album in faraway Minneapolis with a local musician named ‘Prince’ who plays what the natives refer to as ‘funk.’ Says Simon, ‘I heard a tape of this wonderfully joyous music at Sting’s. . . . He said it was simply titled 1999, and I went crazy trying to track down the artist. . .’ ”

  8 Culturcide, “Industrial Band,” from Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-revolutionary America (no label) Citing Lautréamont on the necessity of plagiarism, these Houston illegals bent on the exposure of pop as a false consciousness machine play other people’s hit records and sing their own words over them. They can’t get here from there—can’t get off the records and into the social milieu they want to talk about—but that leaves one small classic, which underneath is still Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band”: “Now, these fine ladies, they had a plan/They was out to meet the boys in the band/They said, ‘C’mon, dudes, let’s have sex!’/But we just talked about child abuse and Hitler’s SS . . .”

  9 Wim Mertens, Educes Me (Crepuscule, Belgium) On a day so bad it seemed every other person I saw deserved to die, I walked into a record store that was playing this piano-and-incomprehensible-vocal item by the man who also works as Soft Verdict. It sounded like 17th century cathedral music, composed after the mass had been celebrated and everyone had gone home—though it turns out the melodies are cheap pop spun into a web of preciosity. It calmed me down like cold medicine kicking in.

  10 Elvis Costello, “I Want You” (San Jose Civic Auditorium, April 16) Quietly diseased on disc, performed solo this is a horror movie that doesn’t need special effects: The Servant, maybe, or M. The words, “I want you” alternate every other line with collapsing scenes of torture, flagellation, remorse, bloody glee; at first you’re convinced it’s all happening in the singer’s mind, next
that it’s happening in the flesh. “I want you/And when I wake up,” Costello sang, just as he does on Blood and Chocolate—and then he pulled the string. Hanging onto the end of it were Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin, who came tumbling into the song like new victims: “—and put on my makeup/I say a little prayer for you/Because I want you . . .”

  JUNE 2, 1987

  1 The Mad Peck, Mad Peck Studios—A Twenty-Year Retrospective (Doubleday) The adventures of a band of comic-strip rock critics whose watchword is “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t headed straight to cut-out heaven” (typical subjects include Donny Iris, the Idolmaker soundtrack, and the second Human Sexual Response LP), this picks up where Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock left off. Best concept: the “Inflatable Meat Loaf Love Doll.” Best plot: faced with sky-rocketing doo-wop prices, a former member of the Five Royal-Keys hijacks a plane to come up with the money to buy a copy of his own 45.

  2 Suzanne Vega, “Luka” (A&M) Despite her insufferable recitations and her coy way with words (tunes published by Waifersongs, Ltd.), this woman isn’t merely a wilting flower to be pressed between pages of Tennyson. She’s also a natural hit-maker, Janis Ian ’87, and “Luka” does for wife-beating what “Society’s Child” did for racism. Better, Vega can make her singing seem like real talk: skirting a good melody and ignoring a bell-ringing guitar solo, her phrasing is so naturalistic it sounds as eerie as the female vocal in Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.”

  3 Elko Ishioka and Arata Isozakl, “Performance” installation, Tokyo: Form and Spirit (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) Sixty video monitors were playing a loop of Japanese TV commercials in a mock-up of a Shinto temple (“Church of the Media,” or “Shrine of the Commodity,” or something). On came two pastel Godzillas, apparently a happily married couple, carrying coffee cups on a stroll through the suburbs, over which they towered like upright dirigibles, and then Debbie Reynolds poked her head out of the soundtrack: “I hear the cottonwoods whisperin’ above/Tammy, Tammy, Tammy’s in love.” It turned out to be an ad for Live Beer.

  4 Mud Boy & the Neutrons, “Memphis Blues Again,” from Known Felons in Drag (New Rose, France) Actually, Jim Dickinson, lately producer of the Replacements’ new LP, in drag, offering a brand of Memphis craziness the Replacements’ “Alex Chilton” doesn’t hint at.

  5 Darius Smith, I Can’t Explain #3 (Shred cassette) Ohio bands of the so-you-fell-down-why-not-get-up stripe, notably the female Manwich, plus the Prom Sluts from Florida and Pussy Galore live in Cincinnati. “Mystery train issue/dedicated to the 1966 Beatles,” though both the Beatles and Elvis would be surprised.

  6 Oliphant, Editorial cartoon, May 9 (Universal Press Syndicate) “FCC RADIO POLICE TODAY ARRESTED SURGEON GENERAL KOOP FOR BROADCASTING AIDS WARNINGS WHICH CONTAINED SEXUAL INNUENDO.”

  7 Age of Chance, Crush Collison (Virgin EP) In 1920, in Berlin, dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck called for an “art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs from yesterday’s crash.” These guys don’t know from art; they’re working on the crash.

  8 Robert Hewison, Too Much—Art and Society in the Sixties, 1960–75 (Oxford) What’s remarkable about this analysis of convulsed British culture is Hewison’s determination to take its most absurd manifestations seriously, and on their own terms. At a distance of two decades, such an approach necessarily misses the spirit of the era, and the book’s weakness is that it sometimes makes the still-incredible almost obvious. Overpriced, but essential; watch for the paperback.

  9 Beverly Paterson, Voices Green and Purple—A Comprehensive Guide of California’s Amazing Garage and Freakbeat Bands of the Sixties (Skylark Press) If you get enough records together, all of social history falls into place—or anyway in your lap. Remember the Velvet Illusions’ “Acid Head”/“Velvet Illusions,” where the band, which included one Steven Weed, “sang about how cool and admired they were”? No? Well, how about Patti Smith’s “Piss Factory,” backed with her rewrite of “Hey Joe,” where she celebrated the kidnapping of Patti Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had to beat up Steven Weed to get Patty out the door and into the trunk? Does Steven Weed remember?

  10 Loudon Wainwright III, More Love Songs (Demon, UK) Tired, but a far more believable account of the compromises demanded by feminism than Alix Kates Shulman’s gooey In Every Woman’s Life . . . Top cut: “The Back Nine,” a why-go-on ballad built out of golf metaphors. He’s still the only person who can make “whom” work as rock ’n’ roll, and perhaps the first to try “ middle-aged.”

  JUNE 30, 1987

  1 Tapps, “Hurricane” (JDC 12-inch) Re-leased about a year ago, this dance track has a light rhythm, a fast beat, a pleasantly Stacey Q-style vocal, and an ordinary lyric: “You knock me down like a hurricane,” etc. But just when you think you’ve heard it all before, the singer pulls back, and returns with a stutter—a fluid, wordless “yip yip yip yip” so sustained, intricate, and erotically complex it makes the Silhouettes seem clumsy. I know, it was done with electronics—but it feels like a tongue.

  2 Catherine McDermott, Street Style—British Design in the 80s (Rizzoli) In 1953, a 19-year-old named Ivan Chtcheglov wrote a visionary manifesto, “Formula for a New Urbanism.” “We are bored in the city,” he began, “there is no longer any Temple of the Sun . . . the hacienda where the roots think of the child and the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. Now that’s finished. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built.” Mediated through the ’60s generation of U.K. art-school radicals, this document became an almost secret inspiration for punk; in 1982, Tony Wilson of Factory Records commissioned designer Ben Kelly to build the Hacienda—as a nightclub in Manchester. The pages McDermott devotes to Wilson’s attempt to answer Chtcheglov’s challenge leap out of this full-color paperback like a moment of silence in a roomful of noise.

  3 Mason Ruffner, “Gypsy Blood,” from Gypsy Blood (CBS) Strong, heedless, grinning, violent rockabilly, played the way Jimi Hendrix would have played it, if he’d played rockabilly: with the tremolo arm.

  4 Misow, “When it All Comes Down (Catechism)” (Factory 12-inch) When the going gets tough, the smart get cryptic.

  5 Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet (London reissue, 1968) With the oncebanned bog-graffiti sleeve: the scrawled “Ronald Reagan is a sissy” reminds you how little has changed, the lyricism of the music how much.

  6 Rice-Armandt-Hart-Broadhurst Band, “Twist and Shout” (Compleat Angler Bar, Bimini, March 28) It would be poetic justice—some kind of justice, anyway—if the Isley Brothers turned out to have a greater effect on the next presidential election than Bruce Springsteen did on the last one.

  7 Big Black, Headache (Touch and Go EP) A cold, hard rhythm, when Steve Albini can manage to stay out of his own way.

  8 Peter and the Test Tube Babies, “Louise Wouldn’t Like It” (Profile) But Wire fans would.

  9 Camille Peri, “Our Shirelle—Doris Jackson’s Life in Rock and Roll” (Image magazine, San Francisco Examiner, May 31) A sensitive profile of a woman who now lives in Sacramento and still performs with her own “Shirelles,” but the highlight comes with a story Jackson tells about a tour the original group made with Little Richard: “Things had just opened up in Washington, D.C., in about 1962 to the point where black acts could stay downtown. Well, we were all playing at the Howard and Little Richard decided he was going to stay at one of the downtown hotels. At the time he was traveling with eight uniformed guards, gorgeous guys, and as part of his act they would roll out a red carpet and he would walk on it, wearing a robe, the whole bit. When his limo pulled up at the hotel his guards rolled out his carpet and stood at attention and Richard in his robe came out and was greeted by the management. But as the week went on and his bills started to mount, they called up to his room and said, ‘Sir, we’re so happy you’ve chosen to stay at our hotel, but could you please tell us what country you’re king of?’ �
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  10 Dr. Sanford Kellman, advertisement (San Francisco Chronicle, May 10) The rock ’n’ roll “door policy” was something new in San Francisco when it arrived in “SoMa” (South of Market, the city’s imitation SoHo) a year or so ago; now hardly an art-dollar venue is complete without an authentic New York attitude cop. Kellman, owner of the I-Beam, long among the most congenial and adventurous local clubs, bought space to say no: “This admission process is illegal according to city business codes, state licensing regulations and nationally accepted civil rights standards, to say nothing of its moral bankruptcy. Neither the public nor the licensing authorities would tolerate these admission practices in any other form of business.” And people used to complain about Bill Graham.

  JULY 28, 1987

  1 Fastbacks, . . . and his Orchestra (Popllama) and Everyday Is Saturday (No Threes EP) No gimmick here, no persona, no concept: just the will to communicate. With early-’70s trash as a first cause and ’77–’80 U.K. punkpop (X-ray Spex, Revillos, Girls at Our Best) as the end of history, singers Kim Warnick (bass) and Lulu Gargiulo (guitar) and writer Kurt Bloch (lead guitar) make old sounds and gestures seem like the only language they’ll ever need to say everything there is to say. The flattened vocals produce an overwhelming sense of realism, the rave-ups and hidden rhythm-jumps the kind of drama real life seeks and usually doesn’t find—especially, these days, on records. I love this band.

  2 Hank Williams, “Ramblin’ Man,” from Hey Good Lookin’—December 1950–July 1951 (Polydor reissue, 1951) Chilling. Chill-out. Why he froze to death.

  3 Bernard Lewis, The Assassins—A Radical Sect in Islam (Oxford reissue, 1967) The emergence of punk was so epistemologically disruptive it brought forth ancestors few of its adherents could have suspected existed. Among them was Hasan-i Sabbah, who in 11th-century Iran founded a murderous, gnostic Shi ‘a (or “Shi‘ite,” or “Chi-Lite”) cult that survives today in the Hezbollah group, Shi‘as who take hostages in Lebanon. Hasan was supposedly as well the author of the nihilist maxim punk grasped almost as soon as it learned to read: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” The high point of Lewis’s scholarly, unfailingly lucid story comes in 1164, when, after the death of Hasan-i Sabbah, a second Hasan announced the millennium and “the end of the law,” putting Hasan-i Sabbah’s purported slogan into practice: “ ‘they spoke of the world as being uncreated and Time as unlimited’ ”; because in the “ ‘world to come there is no action and all is reckoning,’ ” it was declared that on earth “ ‘all is action and there is no reckoning.’ ” That sentiment survived in the Sex Pistols.