Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  3 Herman’s Hermits, “I’m Into Something Good,” in The Naked Gun (Paramount) Postmod self-referentiality in a great trash film: after the song plays behind a falling-in-love sequence, its MTV credit appears on the screen.

  4 Herschel B. Chipp, Picasso’s Guernica—History, Transformations, Meanings (California) Someday, when a writer has had the time to live with the right disc as long as Chipp has lived with Guernica, I’d like to read a book about a single record as vitally detailed, as richly contextualized, as completely realized, as this book about a single painting. Submit titles and rationales now; the winner runs here, and the prize is a copy of Chipp—a good deal, since it goes for $37.50.

  5 Jewels, “Hearts of Stone,” from Oldies But Goodies Vol. 5 (Original Sound reissue, 1955) The LP itself is ancient; the cut sounds new. Still unknown compared to the hit version made in the same year by Otis Williams and the Charms, this L.A. doo-wop explosion sums up the freedom unleashed in the first flush of rock ’n’ roll, and proves that the music was anything but a linear development out of r&b (even if “R&B” was the name of the label on which the Jewels’ record was originally released). In the unstable chanting of the chorus you can hear the thrill of making secret music public, and also the thrill of discovering that such an act makes old secrets (“BADDA WADDA BADDA WAH,” in this case) into a language not even the singers can understand. The momentum is so strong, and so confused, you can’t believe there’s an ending to it, and when the performance does end, there’s only one appropriate reaction: disbelief. Disbelief that it ended, and disbelief that it ever began.

  6 Emily Listfield, It Was Gonna Be Like Paris (Bantam reprint, 1984) Cool and touching—a Downtown novel already looking back to a time “when punk was punk.”

  7 Michael Barson, Lost, Lonely, & Vicious—Postcards From the Great Trash Films (Pantheon) Old movie posters, topped by Roger Corman’s ’58 Teenage Caveman (“PREHISTORIC REBELS against PREHISTORIC MONSTERS”), featuring Robert Vaughn, looking at least 35, drawing his bow against some kind of swamp thing, which presumably represents his father. He can’t really be rebelling against dinosaurs, can he?

  8 Almost Grown, premiere (CBS, November 27) This generational drama (the generation being the one supposed to respond to rock-sourced commercials) kicks off in 1962, though the dialogue says it’s 1988: “Gimme a break,” says one character. “I’m outta here,” says another. While nobody says “It’s history,” there’s a moment where the marketing strategy is coded into the storyline—thus rewriting history as mere hindsight, sealing the superiority of the present over the past. “Turn it down,” Dad says over James Brown. His teenage son doesn’t sulk, or run away, or get his bow out of the closet: he makes a rational argument. “Dad, it’s a force. Rock ’n’ roll could even become like—a huge business!” Dad: “Son, in this country, it doesn’t mean anything unless it can sell products. Can you imagine this stuff selling cars?”

  9 Bangles, “In Your Room” (Columbia) Sexy, if you’re a 16-year-old boy, or ever were.

  10 All Things Considered, segment on the death of Roy Orbison (National Public Radio, December 7) Here’s a man whose music has never left the radio, who’s in the midst of a major comeback, and on the day the news breaks only this station, of all those monitored by a select group of dumb-founded listeners, bothered to follow the announcement with a song.

  JANUARY 24, 1989

  1 Donald Hall, “Prophecy,” from The One Day (Ticknor & Fields) The voice in this section of Hall’s great book-length poem (“Your children will wander looting the shopping malls/for forty years, suffering from your idleness,/until the last dwarf body rots in a parking lot … the sky will disappear like a scroll rolled up”) shares cadences Bob Dylan once used, and Johnny Rotten and Grandmaster Flash and in his yea-saying way even Chuck Berry. Like them, Hall-as-Isaiah is all too conscious of the absurdity of his powerless, fire-bringing voice, and like them he triumphs over that absurdity by merging his love of language with a loathing only language can make real, defining what rock ’n’ roll no longer dares to say.

  2 Keith Richards, Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium, Oakland (December 13) Utterly personal in sound and feeling, with a stretched, uncertain sense of determination focusing guitar lines, melodies, words, vocal textures, the songs from Talk Is Cheap were in every case more unsettling, more exciting, than the Stones tunes Richards chose: “I Wanna Be Your Man,” “Connection,” “Time Is on My Side.”

  3 Jane Kramer, “Letter from Europe” (New Yorker, November 28) Fans of Missing Foundation should note this cool and disturbing report on bohemia armed: the post-’60s, postpunk antimovement Autonomen as a ruling force in the Kreuzberg section of West Berlin. If the boys and girls in Godard’s Masculin-Féminin were the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, the people Kramer writes about are the children of Fassbinder and amphetamine, except that they’re not children.

  4 Don Julian and the Meadowlarks, et al., The Dootone Story Volume One (Ace reissue, ’55–’61, UK) Regarding Vernon Green, lead singer of the Medallions, the strangest doo-wop group to come out of Los Angeles or anywhere else (represented here not by their hit, “The Letter,” but by its flip, “Buick ’59,” recorded 1954—Green chose the title because he thought it would keep the disc “current for at least five years”): “a polio victim … [he] attributed his musical ambition to a time in 1945 when Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a survivor of polio, visited Green’s crippled children’s school and presented him with a set of leg braces. ‘It was then I realized I could be somebody important,’ Green said.” He’s still performing, as is, amazingly, almost every other principal musician featured on this good record.

  5 Joel Whitburn, Top R&B Singles 1942–1988 (Record Research) More than ever before, the numbers tell stories.

  6 Richard Huelsenbeck, “Four Poems from Phantastische Gebete” (Fantastic Prayers), on Audio by Visual Artists (Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine No. 21) Park Avenue psychoanalyst, Berlin dadaist, and co-founder of the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 in Zurich (where these poems were composed; they were recorded in New York in ’67), Huelsenbeck was not a visual artist. More than any of his dada comrades he was a “bruitist,” a noisemaker, and more so in his dada manifestos and histories than in his occasional poems. There’s little of his mad-dog spirit left in this reading, but a bit in the contributions of some of the tape’s other 29 performers. Top cut: Joseph Beuys’s ’70 “Ja Ja Ja Ne Ne Ne.”

  7 Peppermint Harris, et al., ‘Black’ Rock ’n’ Roll (Savage Kick) Hear black singers get just as confused by Little Richard as country singers did.

  8 “Quarrymen,” Quarrymen Rehearse With Stu Sutcliffe Spring 1960 (Pre-Beatle bootleg) Possibly. Also possibly outtakes from Let It Be.

  9 Nancy J. Holland, “Purple Passion: Images of Female Desire in ‘When Doves Cry,’” in Cultural Critique #10, Fall 1988 “Textuality is all you really need,” is Holland’s punning motto, and her reading doesn’t betray her text. But watch out for “Rock Music and the State: Dissonance or Counterpoint?” by Katrina Irving, who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “state,” let alone “rock.”

  10 “Louie,” Louie’s Limbo Lounge (Las Vegas Grind Vol. 2) (Strip) Preternaturally crude and worthless go-go rock recorded at a syphilitic dive (“Featuring the world’s loveliest buxotics!”) between ’55 and ’65. It’s a version of the primeval sink from which sometimes emerge crazed masterpieces—the chord changes in Art Roberts’s “Give Her the Axe, Max!” might be signals from outer space—though not this time. Still, there is “Louie Oversees a Recording Session With One of His Artists”—that being “Wiggles,” a “retired burlesque singer” an armed Louie shoots halfway through the date because “Wiggles,” who according to the liner photos was Adlai Stevenson, sings too clearly.

  FEBRUARY 21, 1989

  1 Elvis Costello, “Tramp the Dirt Down,” from Spike (Warner Bros.) This ode to the death of Margaret Thatcher—Costello names her—recalls his “Pills and Soap,” “Little Palaces,” and “Sleep of
the Just” in its arrangement. Anchored in regret and hatred, it also begins in Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” “With God on Our Side,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” There’s a lot of death here, in the deliberate cadence of the first verse, in the rage that follows, in the way Costello forms the words “cheap,” “maimed,” “pitiful,” and especially the phrase “subtle difference”—the “subtle difference,” in Thatcher’s England, “between justice and contempt.” To make true political music, you have to say what decent people don’t want to hear; that’s something that people fit for satellite benefit concerts will never understand, and that Costello understood before anyone heard his name.

  2 Ciccone Youth, The Whitey Album (Blast First/Enigma) More fun than their cover of the White Album would ever have been—and, finally, Kim Gordon’s show, from the bad-dream “G-Force” (hers, yours) to a version of “Addicted to Love” that makes slick pop into everyday speech and, after all his worthless years, really ought to send Robert Palmer back where he came from.

  3 Drifters, Let the Boogie-Woogie Roll: Greatest Hits 1953–1958 (Atlantic CD) Forty cuts to match the label’s 40th anniversary, mostly the ethereal, playful, deep soul meanders of Clyde McPhatter, but highlights too from Gerhart Thrasher: “Your Promise To Be Mine,” pressing hard, histrionic, almost a threat. With the first notes of McPhatter’s “Lucille,” the opening cut here, an obscure B-side, the intensity, the directness of feeling, is staggering, and you don’t know where it comes from—it’s as if centuries of emotion could be called up and shaped at will. You can hear the Orioles, and also Hoagy Carmichael, a hint of Fred Astaire, more of Billie Holiday. Making McPhatter into an actor in plays of his own device, the CD sound is perfect for the ballads; with the big tempo numbers, “Money Honey” and “What’cha Gonna Do,” it can’t find the rock. But you can find the big tempo numbers anywhere else.

  4 James C. Faris, “Comment on ‘The Origins of Image Making’ by Whitney Davis” (Current Anthropology, June 1986) “Can we predict from Davis’s generative approach the images that came to characterize the Upper Paleolithic? Why these images rather than others … ? Nor will this approach to capacities account, in any non-trivial sense, for fascism, belief in afterlife, the periodic table, rock and roll, or the incest prohibition.” And they said it wasn’t world-historical.

  5 When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water, Timothy (Shimmy Disc) A triumphant cacophony riding an against-all-odds melody, the last sound you hear before every barrier falls and liberty reigns forever—and an oddity on an EP that includes covers of Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love With You” (1968), Eric Burdon’s “Girl Named Sandoz” (1967), and the Singing Nun’s “Dominique” (1963), all of which are better remembered than the Buoys’ “Timothy” (1971).

  6 Alphaville, The Singles Collection (Atlantic) “Big in Japan” is still chilling; the fast mix of “Forever Young” is still the best Eurodisco ever made.

  7 David Feldman, “Astonishing Similarities Between the Death of Elvis Presley and the Death of John F. Kennedy,” (Alex Bennett Show, January 24, KITS-FM, San Francisco) Not that astonishing: “Presley slept with Priscilla Presley; Kennedy slept with Priscilla Presley …”

  8 Marshall Berman, “Why Modernism Matters” (Tikkun, January/February) And why postmodernism never did.

  9 Fall, “Kurious Oranj” (BMG/Beggars Banquet) Pointlessness as its own reward.

  10 Lee Atwater, Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Percy Sledge, et al., “Celebration for Young Americans” (George Bush inaugural, January 21) In which, led on guitar by the chairman of the GOP national committee, various black Americans took the stage to validate the institutionalization of their exclusion from their own society, simultaneously suggesting that political parties will soon sign up musicians just like corporations do. Best commentary: John Rockwell, New York Times (January 22); Ed Ward, Austin Chronicle (“The Ward Report,” January 20); and Thomas Schlegel, in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle (February 2): “According to Atwater, ‘There is a place for black people in the Republican Party’ … the same place that has been offered by the white establishment since Reconstruction, singing and dancing for the rich and scaring poor whites at election time.”

  MARCH 31, 1989

  1 Fine Young Cannibals, “She Drives Me Crazy” (I.R.S. 12-inch) General Johnson (“It Will Stand,” with the Showmen, “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” with the Chairmen of the Board) fronting Hot Chocolate (“You Sexy Thing,” “Every 1’s a Winner”)—well, not exactly, but they have HC’s feel for rhythms that disguise their hardness, and like GJ Roland Gift has a voice so determinedly eccentric he could never be mistaken for anyone else. This moves slowly, all muscle, until after a minute or two every change signals a release that Gift always returns to half-deny, a sweetness he can’t accept. There are more words to this song than “She drives me crazy [doot-doot]/Like no one else/She drives me crazy [doot-doot]/And I can’t help myself,” but there don’t seem to be, and there don’t have to be.

  2 Elvis Costello, “Leave My Kitten Alone,” on Late Night (NBC, March 3) Who else would be so unprofessional as to waste three minutes of network time with a Little Willie John tune when he could have been advertising his new single? Who else would be so professional as to respond to “How do you write your songs?” with an answer that nailed a Spike track in your mind more surely than the song itself?

  3 Saints, “Grain of Sand,” on Prodigal Son (Mushroom/TVT) A new wrinkle on Demosthenes: after 12 years, Chris Bailey sings as if that sand is in his throat, as if singing is the only way to keep it from turning into a pearl. He was a punk, after all.

  4 Chuck Russell, director, The Blob (RCA-Columbia video) For the scene where the yo-yo spinning projectionist gets blobbed. Someone comes into the booth to find out why the film has broken, then he looks up at the ceiling and sees a hideous face screaming silently out of the slime—and the yo-yo, dangling from what used to be a hand, still running up and down, perfectly.

  5 Henry S. Kariel, The Desperate Politics of Postmodernism (Massachusetts paperback) Most books with “postmodernism” in their title are once-removed frog-speak: Americans trying to squeeze a drop of insight or prestige not out of the world but out of Lyotard or Baudrillard, and with all the charge of a bad game of Scrabble. Kariel, of the University of Hawaii, writes in his own voice, and the desperate politics of his title are his politics. His arguments seek a thin cultural margin where he believes the possibilities for new kinds of speech and action are still alive. Whether or not Laurie Anderson, among others he talks about, is mapping that line, this book, as Charles Perry once wrote about what I don’t remember, is like finding a hamburger in a medicine cabinet.

  6 Eddie Murphy, producer, Thomas Schlamme, director, What’s Alan Watching?, pilot (CBS, February 27) Alan is a teenager with a TV in his room; the show is based on the premise that changing channels is the primary cultural—no, social—experience of our time. Of all the wonders Alan turned up this night, most bizarre was footage on James Brown’s incarceration: not, it seemed, as news, but as instant movie-of-the-week. Murphy played Brown, of course (also a “Free James Brown” James Brown clone); the bit was shocking both as a violation of decency and as a violation of media temporality. Alan didn’t seem to know who James Brown was; I can’t wait to see how Almost Grown follows up. On TV, generational fiction is now the milieu that counts; any real TV movie on James Brown is already irrelevant.

  7 Tone-Loc, “Funky Cold Medina,” on Loc-ed After Dark (Delicious Vinyl/Island) There’s more to this L.A. rapper than “Wild Thing.” His timbre is odd, and it can tell a story.

  8 Bobbie Ann Mason, Love Life—Stories (Harper & Row) Tales of mall-dwellers, in which changing channels is only apparently the primary social experience of our time.

  9 Johnny O, “Fantasy Girl” (Micmac 12-inch) Dream lover, where are you?

  10 Jerry Garcia, guitar on “Slow Train,” on Dylan and the Dead (Columbia) This is a horrible album. When “All Al
ong the Watchtower” starts, even though the backing is country-thin (listen to what the Band did with it on Before the Flood), you think the melody is so dramatic nothing could break it; then Dylan, sounding too much like Elvis in his final “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” does the impossible. But there’s an uncanny splendor in Garcia’s rote “Slow Train” break; I know I’ll never play the record again to hear it, and smile every time the radio gives it back.

  APRIL 18, 1989

  1 Gérard de Thame, video for Tanita Tikaram’s “Twist in My Sobriety” (Warner Bros) On record, the number is an elliptical folkie conceit, and the seductiveness of the piece dries up before it’s over. The video makes the song rich, confusing, scary. In a green-yellow wash over black-and-white footage of Mayan peasants smiling (Guatemalan peasants? Mexican? Hollywood extras?), or standing in mud—the mud crusting around their feet like leprosy—or staring straight ahead as if the only thing to do about death squads is wait for them, a view from the inside of a battered worker’s car focuses on a revolver dangling from the rearview mirror. “Twist in My Sobriety,” Tikaram sings again and again—what does it mean? A break with the monotony of ordinary life, she says in an interview, which doesn’t speak for the people you’re watching. Or does it? The phrase rises out of the video, malevolent and impenetrable, on MTV destroying everything around it, except for Metallica’s “One.”

  2 Guadalcanal Diary, “Always Saturday” (Elektra) “I want to live where it’s always the same … I wish I lived in a shopping mall”; it’s the Beach Boys in hell, “I Get Around” as “I Don’t Wanna Get Around.” “So many choices, it’s not fair/I hop in the car, and I just sit/There.” The melody snaps, the performance seems to have no real stops in it, the sound is irresistible; you resist the message before you’ve quite grasped it. The strategy is old, and it will never wear out: take a negative idea and put it across with all the positive energy you can.