Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  10 John Waters, Hairspray (New Line Cinema/MCA soundtrack) The real, forgotten Toussaint McCall stands on a ghetto dance-hall stage and sings “Nothing Takes the Place of You” (it was a hit in ’67, this is ’62, but who cares); four kids leave the room. As they huddle in doorways on the street, making out, a bum walks by, picks up the song, and drowns out the artist: in this moment the song belongs to the derelict as if he wrote it. There hasn’t been as true a rock ’n’ roll event on screen since the garbage-can pounding of the would-be Little Richard at the end of Floyd Mutrux’s ’78 American Hot Wax.

  APRIL 26, 1988

  1 Primitives, “Crash” (RCA UK) The bounce of the Jamies’ ’58 “Summertime, Summertime,” toughened up with ’88 cynicism and doubt: from its first bars, a natural hit.

  2 Del-Lords, “Judas Kiss,” from Based on a True Story (Enigma) Eric Ambel’s singing may be too open, too faceless, to make this explosive cut last, though Syd Straw’s edgy backing vocals help—but it doesn’t matter. Seventeen years ago the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers” was a good idea; now it’s great rock ’n’ roll.

  3 Eric Clapton, Crossroads (Polygram reissue, ’63–’88, six LPs, four CDs) This is overkill—disturbing, desperate moments lost in a 73-cut assemblage of dross and dates, confusion and careerism. It’s got that acrid digital sound, complete with jumps and drop-offs, lacking all warmth and presence, turning what once were shocks into lifeless exercises in remix. “Layla” is a horror: what you get, along with all the words, as if they were the point, is a man singing to a backing tape.

  At its most distinctive, there was something heroic, something tragic, about Clapton’s playing—you don’t sense self-expression so much as struggle: the resistance of the music in the guitarist’s mind to his will to realize that music, his resistance to losing himself in the sound he can make. What’s being transcended is a kind of neurotic distance, a wish to disappear, to cease to be; the result is focus, elegance, balance—not blues. It’s there in the solo in Cream’s ’66 “Spoonful,” especially the three final notes; most of all, it’s in the long, unsatisfied, unsatisfiable solo that ends Dave Mason’s “Look at Me Look at You,” which closed his ’70 Blue Thumb LP, Alone Together. That performance is not on Crossroads, and I’m glad.

  4 Reverend Lonnie Farris, Vocal and Steel Guitar (Eden Records) Walk into a room where this is playing and you’ll ask what it is before you say hello. What it is is (a) what Eric Clapton wanted on the Bluesbreakers’ ’66 “All Your Love,” and (b) an L.A. minister in 1962 with a steel guitar that sings like a Leslie. The shimmering, liquid chords are so evanescent you see them more than you hear them; Farris’s guitar doesn’t talk, it paints.

  5 Alex Bennett, a so-far undenied report, in two parts (Alex Bennett Show, KITS-FM, San Francisco, April 4) Part one: Yoko Ono is married. Part two: she got married four months after John Lennon was shot.

  6 Deficit des Années Antérieures, When a Cap Is Rising (Big Noise/Red Rhino 10-inch LP, UK) Tape collages with song overlays, ’82–’86, from a Belgian outfit: what Wire would be if it were a little more arty, but no less sly.

  7 Coolies, “Coke Light Ice,” from Doug (DB) Doug is a “rock opera” tripping on its own parodies, but this tune may emerge in years to come as a classic of redeemed triviality, which in some times (these) is at least half of what pop is for: a full-length song, driven by undifferentiated paranoia, about one man’s inability to get more Coke than ice out of his favorite hamburger joint.

  8 Rykodisc, press release for The Atmosphere Collection: 8 Hours in the Big Apple (April 1) Including “Gowanus Canal,” “Busy Office,” and “Haitian Taxi Driver,” this eight-part ambient CD set is “intended for ‘passive’ listening,” “designed to pummel the listener into resigned desperation,” and “can be programmed to play all day … thus inducing a low-range psychosis in most listeners.” It’s just a joke—but why? Folkways once put out Sounds of the Junkyard, featuring “Burning Out an Old Car.” And the fidelity today would be so much better …

  9 House of Schock, “Middle of Nowhere” (Capitol) Best post-Go-Go’s record, by the drummer, who had the only good smile in the band.

  10 Henry Silva, in The Manchurian Candidate, (1962, MGM/UA) and Above the Law (Warner Bros.) The linkage between the villains Silva plays in the new Above the Law (a sort of Chuck Norris-bloodbath for leftwingers) and the re-released Manchurian Candidate (the best American movie made between Citizen Kane and The Godfather) is a nice twist. It half implies that after the failure of the Soviet-Chinese Communist-American fascist Manchurian Candidate plot, the Silva character went over from the KGB to the CIA, found work as a torturer in Vietnam, made his pile with Company cocaine, and then—

  MAY 31, 1988

  1 Clash, “Complete Control,” from The Story of the Clash, Volume I (Epic reissue, ’77) The purpose of this conventional double-LP, complete with unreadable life-on-the-road notes by the group’s “valet,” seems to be to certify the Clash as a conventional rock band. The fact that there was something more at stake in the Clash’s career than a career is suppressed by the exclusion of idiosyncrasy, playfulness, and despair (“The Right Profile,” “Brand New Cadillac,” the broken, empty-handed ’85 “This Is England,” what was left after Thatcherism erased the last traces of the white riot) in favor of rebel-rock shtick and chart hopes (“The Guns of Brixton,” “Lost in the Supermarket,” “Stay Free,” “Should I Stay or Should I Go”).

  Given the shape of the package, the numbers on side three—all from ’77–’78, when punk was still an idea seeking its field—send a nearly incomprehensible message of disruption, desire, and fear. Even less explainable, now, is that at the heart of this side is a performance that as pure sound stands as the greatest rock ’n’ roll recording ever made. Oddly, it’s about the Clash’s career, at least on a literal, lyric-sheet level: their label-sanctioned protest single about their label committing the atrocity of releasing an earlier single without the band’s permission. Big deal. Yet from this flimsy soapbox they leap musically to a dramatization of autonomy, community, personal identity and social contestation, and with a few scattered slogans (“THIS MEANS YOU!”) make those usually abstract notions as real, as dangerous, as any moment governed by love or money, hate or war. Across more than 10 years of listening to “Complete Control,” one reaction has always come first: disbelief. Disbelief that mere human beings could create such a sound, disbelief that the world could remain the same when it’s over.

  2 Monty Python, The final rip off (Virgin reissue) The same stuff that’s been on all the other records, but not in the same order.

  3 Pet Shop Boys, “Always on My Mind” (Manhattan) Now they say they meant no harm to either Elvis or the song. Trust the tale, not the teller.

  4 Jimmie Davis, “Down at the Old Country Church,” from Barnyard Stomp (Bear Family reissue, ’31, West Germany) A two-time racist governor of Louisiana (elected on the basis of his purported authorship of “You Are My Sunshine”), Davis had a lot of alter egos way back when: Jimmie Rodgers imitator, dirty songster, white Negro. Here the latter combines a rewrite of “When the Saints Go Marching In” with the bottleneck of black guitarist Ed Shaffer, a/k/a “Dizzy Head,” and the result is dreamy, sensual—humid.

  5 Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “She’s the One” (Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA, May 2) This time around, this is the one.

  6 Critical Texts, v. V. #1 For C. O’Brien’s “At Ease in Azania”—which, because it’s fundamentally sympathetic, turns out to be the most convincing rejection of Paul Simon’s bid for the Nobel Peace Prize. “Graceland was free to say anything it liked about what it engaged except what it did say: nothing.”

  7 Beach Boys, (TV commercial—sorry, I was too mesmerized to catch what for) As Mike Love jerks around the stage imitating a puppet with steel strings, you realize his longtime support for George Bush is no affectation—as a pop star, Mike Love is George Bush.

  8 Jackie Collins, Rock Star (Simon & Sc
huster) I figured this would be a good excuse to get a fix on Ms. Collins. I was wrong.

  9 Forgotten Rebels, “Surfin’ on Heroin,” from Surfin’ on Heroin (Restless reissue) Madness from Ontario. The line “I’m surfin’ on a sea of puke” (delivered with such fervor you could see the singer doing it) thrilled any number of college radio listeners in ’83; in the tradition of Minnesota’s Trashmen (“Surfin’ Bird,” ’63), the first band to prove that only the ocean-deprived can realize the boundless possibilities of stupidity that lie behind the hedonism of California surf music, it closed out the New Grove Dictionary of American Music entry on the genre three years later. For that single slice of ineradicable miasma, this bunch will live forever.

  10 Ronald Fraser, editor: 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt—An International Oral History (Pantheon) The story behind side three of The Story of the Clash: slanted, riddled with errors and omissions (i.e., Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Japan), but graced with the genius for synthesizing testimony with narrative that made Fraser’s Blood of Spain irresistible. What comes through is not sentiment but passion.

  JUNE 21, 1988

  1 Benny Spellman, “Life Is Too Short,” from Fortune Teller (Charly r&b reissue, ’59, UK) The seeker after deep soul usually bypasses New Orleans, even though it produced Irma Thomas’s “Wish Someone Would Care.” This is on the same level. The slow, quiet vocal is accompanied only by piano triplets, acoustic bass, brushes; when genre mannerisms surface in the singing, a sense of isolation so strong it is very nearly mystical wipes them away.

  2 David Kennedy, “Debbie Does Swaggart” (Penthouse, July) These black and white reenactments of “poses” Debra Murphree struck for the Rev. Jimmy Lee Swaggart are not what one might have expected: grimy and cold, Kennedy’s photographs carry a hint of Larry Clark’s Tulsa, and an echo of Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip. They ought to be turned into punk flyers and stapled on telephone poles all over America, and they probably will be.

  3 Wire, A Bell Is a Cup Until It Is Struck (Enigma/Mute) Dreamy, smart, and vague. In two years they’ll be on Windham Hill.

  4 Jamie Reid and Jon Savage, Up They Rise—The Incomplete Work of Jamie Reid (Faber & Faber) From the sly early ’70s Suburban Press posters and stickers (“THIS WEEK ONLY. THIS STORE WELCOMES SHOP-LIFTERS”) through his Sex Pistols sleeves and ads, Reid practiced as a media alchemist, certain he could change critical theory into a threat and irony into violence.

  5–6 Squeeze and Dave Edmunds Band, Budweiser commercials (AM radio) What’s sold here is not name or personality but style. The familiar but chart-poor groups are not announced, and that anonymity provides an aural itch that you scratch when you remember the product with which the style is associated. The spots take the language of a performer and reduce it to two or three constituent elements; the result is that the performer’s language—made of incipient clichés that, by means of a confrontation with a specific occasion of performance, are sometimes dissolved into an efflorescence that transcends cliché and extends language—is now reified into a single cliché hard enough to dominate any mere occasion. From now on, this is all the performer will have to say. His performance will communicate in terms of how well it approximates the reification of the commercial, not necessarily because the commercial will have been more widely or intensely heard than any other work by the performer (though it probably will have been), but because the commercial will now have completed—in fact, realized—the performer’s career. When one hears an old Squeeze or Dave Edmunds record, it will sound like an attempt to formulate a cliché—to produce a style so recognizable and narrow that it can be marketed as an object, as a thing—which is what that record will have been.

  7 Bob Dylan, “Silvio” (Columbia) A tune by Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead’s writer, but the story isn’t that the Dead rejected it first. The story is the arrangement, which goes back to Bill Haley for its suppression of elision or surprise. Dylan has always sung in country time, with an idiosyncrasy of rhythm and meter only certain musicians could keep up with: when he sings, he invents or he does nothing, but this is far less than nothing. “Silvio” suggests he has so little left of his style he couldn’t even make a convincing Budweiser commercial—there’s more musical freedom in the average Budweiser commercial than there is here. Dylan’s music now has meaning only as neuroticism.

  8–10 Larry Williams, “She Said ‘Yeah’” (Specialty, ’59) I went into an oldies store looking for a copy of “Bony Moronie” and saw this on the flip of “Bad Boy.” The clerk said it wasn’t the same song the Rolling Stones used on December’s Children in ’65, but it was, and that made sense: the Beatles cut “Bad Boy,” the Stones turn the record over. But the change is curious. Williams enunciates clearly, almost trips over the broken beat, and takes 1:50 to make a non-event out of a nonsong. Jagger takes a deep breath and spews; dropping the internal quotation marks, the band crashes through in 1:30, setting a personal speed record, and more or less accidentally leaving behind one of their five or six most exciting performances. The song is now even less of a song, but the nonevent becomes an event—which is why, more than two decades later, it can still overturn the numbers surrounding it on Pussy Galore’s 1 Yr Live. There was, it turns out, a certain momentum built into that broken beat; absent either style or genre, it found a language and made history.

  AUGUST 9, 1988

  1 Prince, Lovesexy tour opening, Bercy, Paris (July 8) A million-dollar set that does everything but shoot baskets into the onstage hoop, enough hardware to fill two 747 cargo jets or 14 trucks, record-quality sound, the most sophisticated lighting in the history of mass entertainment, countless costume changes, skits, and dances in the course of a three-hour show, a nine-piece ensemble with every step blocked out, every gesture scripted, not a drop of sweat left to chance, the whole contained in one man’s head, rehearsed past the point of role and into the theatrical realm where artifice and routine communicate as necessity and will, like a 50-year-old soul legend singing her greatest hit last week at the Lone Star with more passion than it brought from her when it topped out at number three in 1964—this is Prince in 1988.

  The show is backed up musically, and it transcends itself when sound supersedes merely physical movement, merely electronic color; though people gasped at certain shifts in staging, this was the real shock. “When You Were Mine” caught it, opening on Prince’s guitar with the heroic confusion of the first seconds of Claudine Clark’s “Party Lights,” but sustaining the excitement of that opening through three, five, six minutes, the guitar shaping the singing to ring changes of wit on regret, seduction on defeat, maturity on adolescence, blues on rock ’n’ roll. It was one of those moments when, confronted with the distant figure on the stage, with the huge noise that years of concert-going cannot quite connect to the performer’s body, you almost shudder at the reaction building inside you, asking, “Is this real? Is this happening?” You shut your eyes, trying to commit a thousand nuances to memory, but memory will barely hold a few—and you know that for all the rehearsals, all the effects, for every detail of the perfect script, the song can never be played precisely this way again. Like a fan who won’t wash the hand that’s touched the star, you’re afraid to go to sleep, in fear of what you might forget.

  2 Lee Maynard, Crumb (Washington Square paperback) Set in a nowhere West Virginia town a few years after the war, this novel about teenagers and sex could have been called “Country Without Music.”

  3 Terri Sutton, “Women in Rock—An Open Letter,” Puncture #15) Why the Bangs (the Fucks) turned into the Bangles (the Glitter). “Biased critics aren’t doing music reviewing. They’re doing police work.”

  4 Reggie Jackson Chevrolet, (Berkeley, CA) In the showroom, the man’s black-cherry ’55 Bel Air and a bubbling Wurlitzer with pristine tone. Number one on the jukebox: Chuck Berry, “No Money Down.”

  5 Van Morrison & the Chieftains, Irish Heartbeat (Mercury) Not as good as Into the Music, but close.

  6 Brian Wilson, Brian
Wilson (Sire CD) The music is chirpy Beach-Boys Spector retread; the flat vocals grow flesh with every playing. But the sanctity of David Leaf’s therapeutic liner notes (like that attending Patti Smith’s gruesome “People Have the Power,” or Tracy Chapman’s stutters on “Fast Car”) is disgusting. If you want Brian to get well, send him a get-well card: c/o Traubner and Flynn, 1849 Sawtelle Blvd., Suite 500, Los Angeles, CA 90025.

  7 Happy Flowers, “They Cleaned Out My Cut With a WIRE BRUSH” (Homestead) Flipper lives.

  8 Joe Higgs, Family (Shanachie) Cool walking.

  9 Elvis Presley, for Blue Tana Lawn Shoes (advertisement in Harpers & Queen, London, June) “ABUNDANCE” it says, “by ELVIS PRESLEY.” “Not a barn dance,” it says. He’s wearing blue and red “19th century floral design” shoes. They look great.

  10 Pavel Büchler, Untitled Portraits (exhibition at Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, catalogue from Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, UK) Büchler takes a wire-service crowd photo, blows it up, and isolates various individuals: from dress and manner, the time seems to be the ’50s, the place Europe. Close up, the now-huge wire-service dots print out into nearly complete abstraction; from a distance, each picture fingers a victim, matched in police files and then tracked, caught, and executed. Is the picture Büchler worked from specific, or could he have made a concert photo just as creepy?

  SEPTEMBER 13, 1988

  1 Muriel Gray, “Boxing Clever,” interview by Alistar McKay in Cut (July) In Thatch-erland you immediately notice a level of public discourse altogether different from our own. Despite the UK’s lack of a Bill of Rights, the place has generated an intensity, a shamelessness, a sense of absolute stakes, that in the U.S. is muffled by calculation and strategy, by the realization that the American people are now an audience, not a polity: by the belief that Americans can now be addressed only through the sort of discourse that measures which sitcoms will stay on the air and which will get dumped. So it’s a shock to pick up this Scottish culture magazine and read what Gray, a TV personality students recently elected rector, i.e., official spokesperson, of Edinburgh University, has to say. “If I could advise the Scottish people to do anything, I’d advise them to get down to the plant where the Sun is printed and firebomb it. Seriously, if I had to have any terrorism in this country I would aim it at Murdoch. I’d like to see journalistic terrorism where they’d just keep setting fire to his newspaper printing plants, all over the country, all the time.”