Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  6 AT&T, “Operator” radio commercial, with Jim Croce (1943–73) impersonator (NW Ayer) It’s creepy (that’s the hook), but also primitive (they didn’t even have to hire the soundalike), because it’s the wave of the future (or whatever tense applies): digital sampling now permits the rearrangement of any dead singer’s phonemes into an endorsement of absolutely anything. Imagine, say, Janis Joplin: “I’m sorry, babe/I had to go/But you don’t have to/‘Just say no.’”

  7 Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land—Themes and Developments in American Music (Oxford paperback reissue, 1964) Strongly influenced by D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, this study, unprecedented when first published and hardly superseded today, locates artists from Ives to Bessie Smith, Cage to Ellington, Copland to Robert Johnson just outside the gates of a Transcendentalist utopia—where, Mellers says, “We shall know at last that there is no differentiation between the genres.”

  8 Sisters of Mercy, “Gimme Shelter” (Brain Eater 12-inch, UK, 1983) The band is from Leeds, the record the flip of “Temple of Love,” the composition by Jagger and Richards, but punched up on the radio at night, about a minute into the drone, this Gothic performance sounds like a ritual from some pre-Christian Germanic forest—where, for the past thousand years, its cultists have been biding their time, waiting for the moment when the world will be ready to hear their terrible message.

  9 Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On—People, Politics, and the AIDS Epidemic (St. Martin’s) The lit-crit dismissal Shilts received in a recent VLS should not dissuade anyone from reading this tremendous book—overstated as a thriller, understated as a tragedy, realized as both—or from remembering that pop music has had less to say about AIDS than Ronald Reagan.

  10 New Monkees, New Monkees (Warner Bros.) Not terrible, even if they do play their own instruments; at least they don’t write their own songs.

  DECEMBER 15, 1987

  1 Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Effigy,” from Willie and the Poor Boys (Fantasy CD reissue, 1969) Most classic-rock CDs vitiate the original sound with separation, and sabotage it with exaggerated percussion so intrusive it turns performances that survived reprocessed stereo into blackboard-scratching parodies. (But you can hear the grain of the nails!) With Creedence CDs, the sound is heightened but not changed. “Effigy” was a plodding, earnest rerun of Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand” on LP; now, like a shell left over from a forgotten war, it explodes as a piece of absolute nihilism, for a moment silencing the records it prefigured: the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” in John Fogerty’s cold words, Gang of Four’s “At Home He’s a Tourist” in the irrationalism of his cutup guitar.

  2 Adverts, The Peel Sessions (Strange Fruit EP, UK, 1977) T. V. Smith seemed to scare himself with this version of “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes.” Why haven’t Scott and Beth B. made a movie out of it?

  3 Terence Trent D’Arby, “(Ain’t Gonna Play) Vienna” (refusal to honor contract for concert in Austria, November 10) I like the cool, spare “Santayana Mix” best: “I cannot in good conscience allow money being made off my back to go into the government coffers of a country that has, in its own superior judgment, elected a known Nazi conspirator to head its nation”—somehow, the sound of a major-label rock ’n’ roll singer making a political statement without 50 superstars in attendance is refreshing, bracing. But the “Atrocity Mix” is almost as good (lots of crowd noise, recorded live in Munich): “I DON’T WANT TO PLAY IN A COUNTRY THAT VOTED FOR A FUCKING NAZI.”

  4 Crickets, The “Chirping” Crickets (MCA reissue, 1958) Buddy Holly as the Beatles.

  5 Anonymous headline writer, “SERGEANT BILKO MISTAKEN FOR DALAI LAMA IN TIBET” (San Francisco Chronicle, November 14) Somewhere, Phil Silvers is smiling.

  6 Pet Shop Boys, “Rent,” from actually (Manhattan) You can hear this song as the testament of a man being kept by a woman; in England it’s obvious the rent is paid by another man. So the tune begs the question of how much room there is in it, which only a female singer can answer. Marianne Faithfull? Rosanne Cash? Kim Gordon? Syd Straw? Where is Lesley Woods?

  7 Keith Abbott, “Spanish Castle,” from The First Thing Coming (Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN) The action in this short story begins in the early ’60s dance hall pictured on the sleeve of The History of Northwest Rock, Vol. 4, during a battle of the bands between the Checkers and the Wailers (“Losing band to have heads shaved on stage”); it’s resolved in the front seat of a ’57 Oldsmobile. Nobody writes about high-school sex as well as Abbott. He does it all in a line, which you read over and over, as if one more reading will put all the details he’s led you to imagine on the page.

  8 George Michael, Faith (Columbia) SWM, friends call me a hunk, confused, repressed, into Prince, has put teenybopper idol past behind with “confused, repressed, first-rate white Prince album” (Voice, December 15). If you want my sex, write my fan club.

  9 Talulah Gosh, “Talulah Gosh” (53rd & Third, UK, also on Indie Top 20, Vol. II, Revolver/Cartel, UK) Sounds like Pauline Murray—and even though she’s not on it, you have to take her sound where you can find it.

  10 Paul Grushkin, The Art of Rock—Posters from Presley to Punk (Abbeville) This high-gloss, $85, 516 pp. book is unfortunately not for browsing. First of all, at 12 lbs. it’s too heavy. Second, more than three-fifths of it is taken up by hundreds of tiny reproductions of ’65–’87 psychedelic or postpsychedelic items (many masterpieces, many turkeys) that need a full-page format to communicate with any immediacy at all. You need to spend hours with this monster, picking out the thousands of stray, telling ephemera, be they legends on James Brown broadsides (“A Show for the Entire Family,” says a ’66 Apollo announcement; “SEX POWER AND LOVE,” reads a poster from ’71), or lines from one of Grushkin’s interviews (“I’ve never gotten the same thrill out of having one of my cartoons printed in a magazine as much as seeing one of my old fliers—something I did for a punk gig the week before—laying in the gutter,” says Shawn Kerri), or the picture of my brother on p. 412, or the skull handbills for my niece’s husband’s former band on pp. 478–79.

  JANUARY 19, 1988

  1 Absolut Vodka ad, (New Yorker, December 21) You open the four-page insert, pull the strip at the fold, and out comes the melody of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Taking the pages apart, you find a sort of music box, about the size of a hearing aid, but much thinner; while the sound it makes isn’t loud, it seems to travel through floors. The machine is efficient: mine has been playing for more than 48 hours now.

  There are here possibilities for the creation of disturbance, for the promulgation of aesthetic displacement and social uncertainty, far beyond the obvious brutalism of beat boxes or the street-art critiques of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzman. “My ultimate vocation is to be an irritant,” Elvis Costello once said. “Not something actively destructive, but someone who irritates, who disorientates. Someone who disrupts the daily drag of life just enough to leave the victim thinking there’s maybe more to it all than the humdrum quality of existence.” And that’s what this device can do. The mechanics can’t be that complicated; it ought to be easy to copy, program, and disseminate. Imagine tens of thousands of undetectable music boxes, coded with “Summertime, Summertime,” “Come On in My Kitchen,” “Jump,” all secreted in the crevices of skyscrapers, in the cracks of telephone poles, stuck under bus seats, rugs, desks (in your office, in the Office of Management and Budget, behind the presidential seal the next time there’s a televised White House news conference). Imagine “You Are My Sunshine” and “When a Man Loves a Woman” turning the whole country into one vast theater for the aural itch of a song you can’t get out of your head, but now every song, a different one every few minutes, every few steps, people saying, “God, what is that, I know it, I just can’t—”

  Who knows, there might be a lot of interesting new conversations. There might be rioting in the streets. It might be the end of civilization as we know it. You read it here first.r />
  2 Charlie Haas, Bob Roe, et al., “Lost Documents of 1987” (California Magazine) Including a suppressed decision by Judge Ginsburg, written under the influence, a paste-up for Roiling Stone’s junked special issue celebrating the 20-week anniversary of the 20-year anniversary of the Summer of Love (“One thing is certain: there will never be nostalgia for the sixties like that again”), and William Casey’s last letter to Bob Woodward: “I want to apologize for drifting off in the middle of our last chat. . . . Anyway—to answer your question from last time, let me say again that I believed, and I still believe, that ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ is Pink Floyd’s best album . . .”

  3 Neil Young, “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)” (Rolling Stone Magazine’s 20 Years of Rock ’n’ Roll, November 24, ABC-TV) After two hours of lulling performance clips, this was a shock—as music, terrorism; in context, the abyss.

  4 Prince, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” (Paisley Park) But in the last minute he takes the place of Duane Allman.

  5 Mekons, New York (ROIR) Proof that “Hard To Be Human” is their best moment on stage.

  6 Jonathan King, “He’s So Fine” (Rhino) Proof that all of George Harrison’s songs were written by one Ronald Mack.

  7 Prince Buster, Judge Dread (Melo-disc) The only LP I’ve ever found with all three parts of the Coasters cum-rock-steady saga of the Ethiopian judge who knows how to dance.

  8 The Johnnys, Highlights of a Dangerous Life (Enigma) Australian cowboy rock with a better beat than the Beat Farmers.

  9 Foreigner, Inside Information (Atlantic) What the hell—there’s a hit here somewhere.

  10 Artemy Troitsky, Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia (Omnibus Press) As a history of an imitation and a paean to glasnost, this survey by the Soviet Union’s top rock networker can only be prelude. The prehistory is full of mystery and wonder: early bootlegs of Western pop cut “on ribs” (used X-ray plates), tales of the late ’40s stilyagi (“stylists,” USSR approximations of zoot-suiters and Teddy Boys), or Leningrad fan Kolya Vasin’s discovery of “meaning in life”: “A friend came to me and asked if I’d heard about the new sensation, the Beatles, and put on a tape recorded from a BBC broadcast. It was something heavenly, I felt blissful and invincible. I understood that everything other than the Beatles had been oppression.” Kim Philby, eat your heart out.

  MARCH 1, 1988

  1 James Burton & Bruce Springsteen, “Oh, Pretty Woman,” from Roy Orbison and Friends: An Evening in Black and White (Cinemax, or MTV clip) What you don’t get anymore: two guitarists trading a riff, making it into a phrase, and then, taking all the time in the world, writing a book. The moment was so invisibly sustained, suspended even out of the time of the song, that when MTV followed with Pink Floyd’s “On the Turning Away,” and David Gilmour stood still and played an endless, stately, perfectly generic late-’60s cosmic solo, even that sounded inspired.

  2 Terence Trent D’Arby, “Wonderful World” (Columbia 12-inch) There are only three kinds of rock fans: those who think Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” is better than his “Wonderful World,” those who think the opposite, and those who can’t decide. D’Arby must fall in the latter camp. The complexity of his own music can be traced back to the consciousness of “Change,” but so far that complexity exposes too much self-consciousness—”Wishing Well,” the A-side of this disc, dies when you start hearing how many times he had to rehearse his laughter. The easy melody of “Wonderful World” gives D’Arby a chance to be a soul singer, not just a genius. When he covers the verse Paul Simon added to Cooke’s version, “Don’t know much about the Middle Ages/Look at the pictures I just turn the pages,” he lets you see him squirming at his school-room desk, confused, wishing he did know about the Middle Ages—which, off the record, D’Arby surely does.

  3 Larks, When I Leave These Prison Walls (Apollo reissue, 1950–54) Very smooth, professional, almost supper-club doo-wop; when a blues sensibility surfaces, it’s a shock.

  4 Peter Sloterdijk, “Dada Chaotology” from Critique of Cynical Reason (Minnesota paperback) “A subterranean line leads through the culture of hatred in our century—from Dada to the punk movement,” says the 40-year-old author of this hit West German study of “enlightened false consciousness” (what’s left when revolutionary consciousness goes to sleep). Dada/punk is an old argument, but it has force here. That’s because, working with documents previously innocent of English translation, Sloterdijk is talking about Berlin dada, less an art movement than a free speech movement—an explosion of spleen that produced a language so cruel and self-contradictory (“We were for the war and today Dadaism is still for war,” draft-dodger Richard Huelsenbeck announced in early 1918) it burned off all irony, leaving behind nothing but words that dared the listener to believe they meant what they said. Sloterdijk is one of the first to try.

  5 Bar-Kays, “Certified True” (Polygram 12-inch) Certified Cameo, anyway.

  6 John Crawford, Baboon Dooley—Rock Critic! (Popular Reality Press Ann Arbor, MI) First full-length book on the subject—even if it is all comic strips, even if the highlight is the flashback “Witness to Beatnik Glory.”

  7 Swellsville: A Critical Guide for Consumer Deviants (Winter of Our Discontent 1988 issue) Fanzine with ’60s UK would-be teen idol Heinz on the cover (I never heard of him either) and lots of words inside: “The inescapable truth is that avoiding critical thought doesn’t dispel the need for it—it only submits you to somebody else’s.”

  8 Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, “I Have Come Out to Play,” from Modern Lovers 88 (Rounder) Much of the LP is vague, but the emotion is specific here, chased down till it gives up its own momentum; when Richman muffles the instruments and breaks out with “Rover, red Rover, come on over,” his whole career finds a home in the line.

  9 Byrds, Never Before (CBS Special Prodcuts/Re-Flyte/Murray Hill/Outlet Book Co. archaeology, 1965), and T Bone Burnett: The Talking Animals (Columbia) Dullest records of the month.

  10 Joni Mabe, “Love Letter to Elvis” (Primitivo gallery, San Francisco) The show was called Elvis the King, a Folk Hero; amidst Howard Finster’s suspect tributes and a Rock Dreams ripoff, Mabe’s collages stood out. In this giant handwritten valentine, you couldn’t tell the dementia from the parody (if there was any)—reading along with “You could have discovered that sex and religion could be brought together in your feelings for me,” pulled up short by the closing “confession”: “I’m carrying your child. The last Elvis imitator I fucked was carrying your sacred seed. Please send money. Enclosed are photographs of myself and the earthly messenger you sent.” That was an ugly ceramic Elvis doll; all around the letter, snapshots showed Mabe rubbing her bare breasts against it, grinning.

  MARCH 29, 1988

  1 Roddy Doyle, The Commitments (Heinemann, London) Finally, a novel about a band—a white band in contemporary Dublin dedicated to ’60s soul music—that’s not about success and failure, rise and fall. What it’s mostly about is rehearsing, but no one has ever gotten more music on the page simply by turning up the volume: putting lyrics in caps and dramatizing the way a song resists the people who want to play it, the way they can make that song their own. The story is small, and it has room for an infinity of readers: here, listeners.

  2 Billy Stewart, “Baby, You’re My Only Love,” on Okeh Rhythm & Blues (Epic reissue, compiled 1982) Startling—though the arrangement is a doo-wop cliché and Stewart’s addled vocal style (which produced a single pop smash, “Summertime,” 1966) is only marginally off-market. What gives this ’57 nonhit its flesh-crawling power is the guitarist—Bo Diddley, maybe—who, every few lines, strips a low, corrosive run down the strings, revealing doo-wop courtly love as a high-wire act by making the sound of someone cutting the net.

  3 Beat Happening, Jamboree (Rough Trade) As if the last 13 years never happened, this little band from Olympia, Washington, invents punk rock—more or less the way the Marine Girls, with their homemade Beach Party cassette, invented
it in 1981 in Hatfield, England.

  4 Jesse Belvin, “Hang Your Tears Out To Dry” (Earth Angel reissue, Sweden 1951–57) There’s a book to be written on ’50s Los Angeles r&b: a sober history, tracing artists and businessmen, or a James Ellroy splatter-mystery, with the records appearing only as instants of impossible respite. Made out of the paradox of sun and confinement, the music was at once far more frankly pessimistic, clowning, and casual than the East Coast group sound or Southern band-based black rock. Belvin was perhaps the best pure singer of his place and time; leading off with the ineffable “Dream Girl,” a labyrinth of blocked escape routes from the smooth prison of West Coast racism, this is the best collection of his work.

  5 Little Richard, Presentation of Best New Artist at the 30th Annual Grammy Awards (CBS-TV, March 2) To himself, as everyone knows—an announcement that got the self-described “born-again black Jew” a nomination to fill the vacant cantor’s post at San Francisco’s Temple Beth Sholom. Let’s see Jesse Jackson match that.

  6 Pamela Rose, “Hello, Hello, Taco Bell” (Tracy-Locke) Rose normally reserves her florid belting for the Zazu Pitts Memorial Orchestra, a camp ’n’ Motown outfit; what makes this radio commercial pornographic is her hysterical attempt to convince you she’s never wanted another human being as much as she wants Taco Bell’s current 99¢ (plus tax) special. There’s talk Rose may even get a contract out of it—if the one numerous listeners have pledged to take out on her doesn’t go through first.

  7 Nick Lowe, Pinker and Prouder Than Previous (Columbia) An almost perfect Nick Lowe album: madly idiosyncratic tunes that sound so generic they’d be all but anonymous on the radio.

  8 Alan Leatherwood, “Preservation Halls: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” (Option, March/April) A Cleveland report on a boondoggle worthy of the Pentagon.

  9 Jerry Lee Lewis, Keep Your Hands Off It! (Zu-Zazz reissue, UK, 1959–62) Sun-label songs and instrumentals, loose and rangy and fine, with Jerry Lee and teen bride Myra on the cover. Proof that there’s no bottom to the Lewis vault—which means his next album has to be a bootleg, a half-dozen outtakes of the drooling “Big Legged Woman” intercut with the sermon on Lewis-sins that first cousin Jimmy Swaggart made Nick Tosches cut out of his Lewis bio Hellfire. The cover should be fabulous.