Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  3 Janice Benally, Harman Yellowman, Toby Topaha, et al., “I Think We’re Alone Now,” theme from Have You Ever Seen a Rainbow at Midnight?, video on Navajo children’s art by Bruce Huck (Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, New Mexico) The kids in Huck’s class made good art; what I can’t get out of my mind are the harmonies they put on the old Tiffany song.

  4 Joe Grushecky and the House-rockers, Rock and Real (Rounder CD) Bleeding-heart, guitar-led small-combo rock from the man whose Iron City House-rockers made the best mainstream rock ’n’ roll of the early ’80s with Have a Good Time But Get Out Alive. This isn’t on that level, but “Freedom’s Heart” and “How Long” (with the only good lyrics anyone’s produced on the Iran-contra crimes) say the next one might be. For there to be a next one a few people will have to buy this one.

  5 Monotones, “Book of Love” on The Newlywed Game (Barris Entertainment) Intro: in a montage of ancient photos of justmarrieds, the lips of the frozen brides and grooms mouth the song like a Terry Gilliam Monty Python mock-up.

  6 Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, “SEE THE REVOLUTIONARY WORKS OF A ’60S RADICAL” (ad copy for Courbet Reconsidered) “He was a firebrand, assailed by critics as an upstart in muddy boots. He was a rebel who challenged the preconceptions of the ’50s establishment, leading his radical movement into the ’60s. The 1860s.”

  7 James Brown, “I Got You (I Feel Good)” (wake-up call, Discovery space shuttle, March 14) Did JB?

  8 Nick Kent, “Roy Orbison: The Face Interview” (The Face, February) “I first saw Elvis live in ’54. It was at the Big D Jamboree in Dallas and first thing, he came out and spat on the stage. . . . It affected me exactly the same way as when I first saw that David Lynch film. I didn’t know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it.”

  9 Elvis Costello, “You’re No Good” on “Veronica” maxi-single (Warner Bros. four-track CD) Maybe the dank, drum-machined version of the Linda Ronstadt hit was vengeful payback for the guilt Costello felt collecting checks for the Ronstadt covers he says he hated; that’s what it was on the radio. My CD had an apparently jokey opening: a few seconds of “Whole Lotta Love.” But the tune went on to its conclusion, to be followed by “Rock & Roll,” which was followed by . . . a whole disc’s worth of the best of Led Zeppelin. So much for futurism.

  10 Untouchables, “Agent Double O Soul” (Twist/Restless) Not as good as Edwin Starr’s ’65 original, better than the last nine James Bond movies.

  MAY 30, 1989

  1 Chet Baker, Chet Baker sings and plays from the film “Let’s Get Lost” (RCA) For a listener who knows nothing about jazz, Baker’s art was in his face: the way the golden boy pan of the ’50s already implied the lizard grimace of the ’70s and ’80s, the way the junkie ruin still contained what was destroyed. That double reflection is one of the stories told in Baker’s singing on these nine end-of-the-road tracks: a caress, beautiful and revolting, a spider kiss. The only tune that doesn’t hurt is Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue”; it’s as if Baker had to live with a song for an age before he could bring it to life.

  2 Madonna, “Like a Prayer” video (MTV) Her defenders ought to stop pretending this isn’t blasphemous; of course it is, at least according to the strictures of any above-ground Christian sect. What’s “like” a prayer here is like the sensuality of pissing drunk as caught in Henry Bean’s novel False Match (“the closest I ever came to prayer,” says the narrator): it’s sex, specifically Madonna’s fantasy of resurrecting Jesus by taking him into her mouth. Probably Salman Rushdie would understand; I imagine him somewhere in England, bent over his desk, an I AM MADONNA button pinned to his lapel.

  3 Pauline Kael, Hooked (Dutton) On Something Wild: “The movie gives you the feeling you sometimes get when you’re driving across the country listening to a terrific new tape, and out of nowhere you pull into a truck-stop and the jukebox is playing the same song.”

  4 Mark Ribowsky, He’s a Rebel: The Truth About Phil Spector—Rock and Roll’s Legendary Madman (Dutton) Nothing like the whole truth, but some strong lines, the worst high school reunion story you’ve ever heard, and good depth perception, as in Teddy Bear Marshall Lieb’s analysis of the Wall of Sound: “It was more air than sound.”

  5 Stan Ridgway, “Goin’ Southbound,” on Mosquitos (Geffen) Ridgway has a way of twisting his voice around a lyric as if the effort is the only way to dull a toothache; this cut lets you hear more twist than effort, which is to say, mannerism.

  6 Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart, Bongo Fury—Live in Concert at Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin, Texas, May 20th & 21st, 1975 (Rykodisc CD) Beefheart sings like his clothes are unraveling; then Zappa takes out the trash.

  7 Jon Wozencroft, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Rizzoli) This premature enshrining of the 31-year-old UK designer, celebrated for his album jackets and alphabets, catches Brody’s perspicacity, from his words on Andy Warhol (“his art was subversive for about fifteen minutes”) to handwritten restaurant menus (“Distant utopias. It’s also a class distance, it’s offering the promise that for a short period of time you can be ‘one of us’”). Most striking is the way his record work signifies a transfer of unfettered, world-historical design (the sense that the future is riding on the success or failure of a design) from books to records. In the ’20s and ’30s, John Heart-field, Vavara Stepanova (see Alexander Lavrentiev, Vavara Stepanoua, MIT), and other Europeans made books explode out of their covers, turning them into objects that almost talked like people, or nations, or events, or history as such. Brody doesn’t do that, but sometimes he seems to be trying.

  8 Marc Eliot, Rockonomics—The Money Behind the Music (Franklin Watts) “Nowhere,” Eliot writes in this shocking exposé, which comes in a first printing of 50,000 copies, most of which will soon be selling for $4.95, “was there any obvious R&B influence or direction in Elvis’s career. Whenever he was asked about how he developed his singing style, he was always careful to avoid any mention of black music.”

  9 Ex, Aural Guerrilla (Homestead) One of the atrocity posters included with this Test Department-does-it-better noise ’n’ politics LP matches photos of people being marched off under guard: “GERMANY—’44” paired with “ISRAEL—’88.” That the first shot (which looks more like ’39 than ’44, but the two sets of double digits make the point more neatly, so what the hell) is of Jews being marched to extermination and the second is of Palestinians being marched to detention or brutalization is the kind of political distinction the Ex’s noise so blithely transcends.

  10 Moonglows, “Come Back Baby” (presumed title) Heard this on NPR: sounds like a house party. Can’t find it. Reward.

  JUNE 20, 1989

  Zero “By 3:15 a.m., students, chanting, ‘Fascist, fasbeast, beast,’ faced a line of helmeted soldiers sitting in the street in front of the Museum of Revolutionary History.

  “Suddenly, a woman of about 20, wearing a light-colored summer dress, jumped up from her place on the ground, and ran toward the soldiers, her arms in the air. She was followed by about six more students. All were cut down by bullets.”—Mary Ganz, San Francisco Examiner, Beijing, June 4

  JULY 18, 1989

  1 Pulnoc, tape of performance at the Kennel Club, San Francisco (May 5; thanks to Adam Block) The Czech band, leavings of the Plastic People: in “Dopis” (Letter)—in the slow pace, in the way the group shifts lyrical readymades into mysticism—there’s a hint of Joseph Skvorecky’s “Emöke” from The Bass Saxophone, the tale of a Hungarian woman who somehow contains an ineradicably pagan, pre-Christian soul. That sense of the ineradicable may be at the root of the current rediscovery of free speech in parts of Central and Eastern Europe; to Westerners it may sound like resurgent nationalism, but if it is, “Dopis” says we haven’t begun to understand the borderlessness of the idea.

  2 My Sin, “My Sin” (Endless Music cassette single) A one-man “not a BAND but a living breathing thing” takes a buttoned-up suburban gospel singer o
ff the radio, adds synthesized drums, bass, and a terrific, rising guitar line that turns the singer into an avatar; Jimmy Swaggart enters, preaching, his every line followed by a pounding Spanish translator; then the not-a-BAND jumps on the vocals and matches Swaggart’s fervor—no easy trick. It’s the best single of the half-year; the sleeve art (or whatever you call it on a cassette) won’t be topped.

  “Zero” (AP/Wide World)

  3 Dr. Licks, Standing in the Shadows of Motown—The Life and Music of Legendary Bassist James Jamerson (Dr. Licks Pub., Wyne-wood, PA) Born in 1936, Jamerson died of alcoholism in 1983. This big, spiral-bound tribute combines an illustrated biography (“I used to go out behind the house where there were all these ants on the ground, and I would take a stick and stretch a long rubber band across it and play for the ants. I would make the ants dance”), a musical analysis complete with scores, and two hour-long cassettes of raucous interviews and various bassists recreating Jamerson’s art on instrumental versions of Motown hits, with the bass on its own channel. Most effective is Phil Chen, with the intro to “Reach Out I’ll Be There”—heart-stopping, even secondhand.

  4 Tom Petty, “Runnin’ Down a Dream” on Full Moon Fever (MCA) Nothing, until guitarist Mike Campbell takes over for the long finish, the perfect fade.

  5 Charles Burns, “Teen Plague,” in RAW, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Penguin) The burning comic strip that, as it ran in various alternative weeklies last year, caused countless decent folk who would never shake hands with the Reverend Donald Wildmon to demand the thing be, well, you know, not “censored,” exactly, but, say, published somewhere else . . .

  6 John Mellencamp, “Big Daddy of Them All,” on Big Daddy (Mercury) The LP gets dull fast; the lead cut, so loose it’s nearly abstract, is undeniable: a modal folk sound that says, “Louder! Play me louder!”

  7 Lara Stapleton, “Butthole Surfers,” in BigFire-ProofBox #2 Stapleton goes to hear the band and sees a naked woman onstage as part of the act, finally as the whole show: “She squirms, heroin stupor smile. ‘Fuck the bitch!’ this guy behind me yells. I turn around, look him in his barren skinhead eyes. He towers over me, and I’m a big girl. I’m a big girl.” It gets worse, and she runs: “We’ll smash bottles and hold them against throats and take money and we’ll be gone.” It’s punk a hundred steps over the line it erases.

  8 McKenzie Wark, “Elvis: Listen to the Loss,” in Art & Text #31 (City Art Institute, Paddington, Australia) An argument that Elvis destroyed his career with his ’68 comeback TV special, because he could never match it.

  9 Jon Savage, interview with Tom Vague, in Vague #21 (London) The British critic on rage as an essential part of criticism.

  10 Moonglows, “I Was Wrong” (Lost-Nite reissue, 1953) Misidentified in May as “Come Back Baby,” provided by Donn Fileti of Relic Records, and taken so slowly it sounds like the turntable’s jamming. But twice the group breaks out in shouts and moans and stomps, leaving behind a doo-wop aesthetic that makes no sense whatsoever.

  AUGUST 15, 1989

  1 Don Henley, The End of the Innocence (Geffen) THIS ALBUM I really do wish Don Henley would stop addressing all his songs to the same hapless frail Cat Stevens so gently sneered at in “Wild World.” If you listen to the title tune more than once (and if you listen to the radio for more than 10 minutes you will), you might catch just a hint of rape IS SO GOOD or anyway a theft of virginity, in “Offer up your best defense,” even though the line is likely meant to sound, not mean IT’S RIDICULOUS.

  2 Priscilla Harris, in Great Balls of Fire!, dir. Jim McBride (Orion) I think she’s the one who does the shimmy when Dennis Quaid plays “Whole Lotta Shakin’” behind the chicken wire—whoever it is, she burns a hole in the screen. On the other hand, the short fat fanny who kicks off the bop, on-camera for about a second, isn’t exactly waiting in line at the bank.

  3 Diamonds, “Think About It,” on Lee “Scratch” Perry and friends, Open the Gate (Trojan 3-LP box reissue, mid-’70s) Trojan’s current 30-album-plus reissue series forces you to buy nearly blind, so you keep the records playing until they give up their many ghosts. With a feeling close to any cut on the Melodians’ unsurpassed pre-meditation, this is one, a very quiet heartbreaker stepping up to the ineffable on a melody that’s a surprise every time it lifts.

  4 Don Henley, “I Will Not Go Quietly,” on The End of the Innocence (Geffen) The title phrase promises a track as clunky as “Dirty Laundry.” How’s he going to make those stiff words swing? Pump up the volume, rock the house.

  5 Gina Arnold, “Fools Rush In” (East Bay Express, Berkeley, CA) No more appalled or less snotty work on the Who’s $2000-a-seat Tommy revivals has appeared than in Arnold’s weekly column: a few phone calls produced the interesting fact that the shows were anounced as “benefits” well before anyone had troubled to figure out who’d get the money. Polling her readers on what concert might be worth such a tab, she got a more or less final answer from Martin Buonochristiani: “the Clash, circa 1977, the Rolling Stones (‘before they got bored, say around ’68, ’69), and Bob Dylan (‘before he got born, say 1966 . . .’) all on the same bill and all opening for Robert Johnson.”

  6 Gentlemen, “Don’t Leave Me, Baby,” on The Golden Groups, Vol 48 (Relic reissue, 1954) What sets this otherwise merely fine piece of black vocal music apart is the graceful, deepening blues guitar bridge. Why wasn’t there more of this in doo-wop? It’s too late to know.

  7 Don Henley, “How Bad Do You Want It?” on The End of the Innocence (Geffen) Not bad enough, he says convincingly—she’ll never learn.

  8 Rolling Stones, Get Satisfaction ... If You Want! The Best of BBC Radio Recordings 1963–65 (Swingin’ Pig bootleg CD) Eighteen shots from the stage and the studio, highlighted by Bo Diddley’s “Cops and Robbers,” Buster Brown’s “Fannie May,” and a snatch of ancient interview: “Mick, you’ve achieved so very much on the international scene. What is there left to make you want to go on?”

  9 Beijing University, “First Student Protest” (San Francisco Chronicle, July 26) “In the first known revival of student protests here since the army crushed a pro-democracy movement last month, about 300 Beijing University students gathered Sunday night at a campus courtyard and sang Communist songs. . . . ‘We are forced to endure hours of political study every day, telling us that the soldiers killing our classmates was a glorious victory,’ [one student said]. ‘Sarcasm is our only means of dissent.’ ”

  10 Don Henley, “The End of the Innocence” (Geffen) “This titled man that we elected king,” he says, and you can hear how plainly felt the idea was, how carefully he constructed the line, and how contrived it seems. But the way he sings the word “king,” letting it break, is like the way Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash sing the last “remember” in the Nashville Skyline version of “Girl From the North Country,” 20 years gone.

  SEPTEMBER 19, 1989

  1 Natural Spiritual Orchestra, incidental music composed and conducted by William J. E. Lee, in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (Universal) Sometimes suggesting Aaron Copland, sometimes Randy Newman—but more urgent, more confusing—Lee’s (Spike’s father) half-buried work is seemingly as foreign to its Brooklyn setting as modern African sounds would be; in a movie where every actor is immediately questioned by another, the music plays as the film’s second mind. It’s not on the soundtrack album.

  2 Hüsker Dü, “Diane,” on Metal Circus (SST, 1983) Guy hits on a girl. He says he loves her. He proves it by pulling out his heart with his hands.

  3 Lee Cotten, Shake Rattle & Roll—The Golden Age of American Rock ’n Roll, Volume 1:1952–1955 (Pierian Press/Popular Culture, Ink., Ann Arbor, Michigan) This big, day-by-day log of shows and record releases—“an intellectual feast,” to borrow Robert Bork’s phrase—exposes the anomaly of Living Colour’s “black rock” for the racist construction the last 20 years have made it, demonstrating that, once, “rock ’n’ roll” was a black name, a black idea, embraced and pursued by black musicians and hustlers not as a compromise but on i
ts own new terms, even if Cotten does cheat a bit: here, rockabilly is barely “rock n’ roll.” Call it affirmative action.

  4 Fine Young Cannibals, “Don’t Look Back” (Sire) Has this title ever been on a bad record?

  5 David Fincher, video for Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence” (Geffen) From Walker Evans’s 1935–38 FSA photos to Robert Franks’s 1959 The Americans (one of Fincher’s shots is an almost exact recreation of Franks’s “View from a hotel window—Butte, Montana”) to something more: a bride, turning in an empty room with her new husband, trying to hide a smile so shy and full of promise neither Evans nor Franks would have known what to do with it. Whether it’s the same woman who later appears as a prostitute, or as a mother whose eyes have given up their life wholly to a movie screen, is uncertain.

  6 Link Wray, Rumble Man (Ace, UK) Wray cut “Rumble,” a guitar instrumental described by its title, in 1957; he was in his middle or late twenties. Now, near 60, with undiminished flash and conviction, he becomes the oldest rocker to make a good record, lining out the who-cares stomp the Rolling Stones have pledged for their fifties since they were in their thirties. It’ll be a surprise if anything on Steel Wheels outlives Wray’s “Draggin’ ” or “Aces Wild.”

  7 Louise Brooks, in Barry Paris’s Louise Brooks (Knopf) The woman in G. W. Pabst’s 1929 silent film Pandora’s Box, more than 40 years later, to “one of her last lovers”: “If I ever bore you it’ll be with a knife.”

  8 Julee Cruise, Floating Into the Night (Warner Bros.) Ten variations on Blue Velvet’s “Mysteries of Love,” produced by David Lynch, who would have known how to direct Louise Brooks (1906–85): a bore in the daytime, visionary at 3 a.m.

  9 Monte Moore, comment during A’s-Yankees telecast, on spotting a man in an Elvis mask sitting in Yankee Stadium, August 28 (KICU, San Jose) “The next manager.”