Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  10 Sonic Youth, Henry Kaiser, Soul Asylum, and others, The Bridge—A Tribute to Neil Young (Caroline) Dedicated to “physically challenged children everywhere” (not a term Sonic Youth would use for a song—“Crips Galore” would be more like it), with “a portion of the proceeds” to the Bridge School, where Young’s two handicapped kids go, but lest we forget, the man himself, in 1984, endorsing Ronald Reagan: “You can’t always support the weak. You have to make the weak stand up on one leg, or half a leg, whatever they’ve got.”

  OCTOBER 17, 1989

  1 Elvis Costello, “Tramp the Dirt Down” (Greek Theatre, Berkeley, September 15) Who else could toss off cheap Reagan jokes (“Do you really think it was only last week he needed brain surgery?”) without cheapening a song about—well, there’s no word equivalent to “regicide” for elected rulers (“You can change the names if you like”), so “regicide” will have to do. Taken far beyond its recorded version, the tune was vicious and sensual; the next day, when Reagan appeared in every paper with his head half-shaved, he somehow looked like Zippy the Pinhead—who once shared a White House bed with Ron and Nancy, Ron questioning him about the fall of Yugoslavia to the Neosurrealists in 1963.

  2 Public Enemy, Protocols of the Elders of Zion (unreleased) Controversial, of course; disturbing (samples from Steely Dan’s “Pretzel Logic,” the Shoah soundtrack, tapes of Bilderburg conferences); and, given the powers that be, not commercial, not even recordable, altogether apocryphal, but nevertheless anguished, passionate, shot through with rage and ambiguity. Face it: it doesn’t matter if these artists don’t always know what they’re talking about, though few have the right to gainsay tracks like “Socialism of Fools/Fools of Socialism,” “Peace Ship,” or Professor Griff’s 11-minute silent rap over a Dr. Seuss LP, “How the Jews Stole Christmas.” Their business isn’t answering questions, it’s raising them. As they say in “Little Flower,” every few lines cut up with pieces of an old Father Coughlin broadcast: “He may be right/He may be wrong/I just want to bang the gong.”

  3 Charlotte Greig, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow—Girl Groups From the 50s On (Virago/Random House) She gets Arlene Smith of the Chantels right, brings her to life, and anyone who does is halfway home, even if the road goes all the way to Salt-n-Pepa. She covers the hits, but also scores of strange obscurities, and always with spirit. The “songs are a fascinating and accurate expression of the changing aspirations and preoccupations of women over three decades . . . [and] for that reason I have given the song lyrics more space than is usually accorded them,” Greig writes in an un-typically dry passage, then pulling the string: “The other reason I have quoted so extensively from them is because I like them.”

  4 Neil Young, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” on Saturday Night Live (September 30) SNL bandleader G. E. Smith can play anything and communicate nothing; on guitar, Young raised the rock Smith belongs under.

  5 Mick Jones, video for “I Just Wanna Hold” (Atlantic) As close as anyone has come to the good feeling of Van Halen’s video for “Jump.”

  6 Phil Phillips With the Twilights, “Sea of Love” (1959), in Sea of Love (Universal) Why is Al Pacino so freaked to find this in Ellen Barkin’s record collection? Didn’t he see Diner? She got it in the divorce settlement.

  7 Jonathan Richman, “Closer,” from Jonathan Richman (Rounder) Lousy album, lousy song, except for one line: “Meanwhile, back in the bed . . .”

  8 Bruce A and the Secular Atavists, “Tougher Than Jesus” (street flier) A Jehovah’s Witnesses-style comic strip about “the weird Asian Death Cult!!” of a “SAVIOR ON A STICK.” Also a band, offering “a cassette that will show the path of light and truth.”

  9 Jefferson Airplane, “Planes,” from Jefferson Airplane (Epic) The FAA is investigating.

  10 Howard Hampton, “Chinese Radiation,” in Artpaper, September An essay on music as memory, taking in Tiananmen Square, student leader Chai Ling’s elegy, and coverage of the event in the Western media (“That couldn’t happen here go the reassuring passwords: the massacre or the uprising?”), Charlie Haden’s 1969 Liberation Music Orchestra LP, Pere Ubu’s 1989 Cloudland (“deadpan and mercurial . . . a fire at your house viewed from a distant ridge”), and surrealist René Magritte’s 1929 On the Threshold of Liberty, “where we remain. The cannon has not fired, the panels have not fallen, what is on the other side is either our collective mystery or our collective amnesia.”

  William J. E. Lee’s music for Do the Right Thing, noted here last month, has been released as the film’s Original Score (Columbia).

  NOVEMBER 14, 1989

  1 Neil Young, “Rockin’ in the Free World” (acoustic), from Freedom (Reprise) It’s a horror story, Young onstage wailing his lament for dead values as the distracted, drunken crowd shouts him on, barely able to catch the “free world” buzzword and cheer, all irony as wasted as the fans. The performance also seems like a setup: with even a harmonica rack in place, the persona of the folk-prophet without honor is too complete, the crowd too cretinous to be anything other than an audience tape cut up and mixed in like a laugh track on a sitcom. Then you might read the credits—“Recorded at Jones Beach”—and then you can hear why the crowd gathers itself for its biggest ululation: it’s tossing a beach ball back and forth.

  2 Bryan Ferry/Roxy Music, Street Life/20 Great Hits (Reprise, 1972–85) The story of a style, not an attitude, distilled to its essence in “More Than This” (Roxy Music, ’82), where the guitar solo is just a phrase, so evanescent and so much a part of a whole you can’t remember precisely how it sounds any more than you can forget you heard it. But with “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (Ferry, ’73), who needs essence?

  3 Lemonheads, “Luka,” from Lick (Taang!) Depending on your mood, this thrilling fuzztone job on Suzanne Vega’s Walter Keane klassic is proof her melody can’t be smashed, a camp destruction of neofolkie piety (suggesting, say, a version of “Fast Car” by Lee Atwater, recently signed to Curb Records), or a reversal as tough as Ferry’s “Hard Rain”: a joke that ends up as moving as the original. Whatever it is, it grabs your attention like a mugging—as does the sleeve of Lick, a Jesse Peretz photo so erotic it’s painful.

  4 NBC Today, “Robert Johnson” (October 15) “Me and the Devil Blues” on national TV, and never stranger.

  5 Steve Erickson, Leap Year—A Political Journey (Poseidon Press) For the scene with Tipper Gore in the New York bar, the night before the 1988 presidential primary: “ ‘Purple haze! Is in my brain!’ She says over and over, angrily, ‘I was there, I was there, man. I was a child of the Sixties.’ ”

  6 Bo Jackson and Bo Diddley, “Cross Training” (Nike TV commercial) Jackson on the diamond, gridiron, basketball court, and hockey ice: unstoppable, until he straps on Diddley’s cigar-box guitar and hits a bum note. Next installment: Jackson meets Derek.

  7 Michael Barson, Rip It Up!—Postcards From the Heyday of Rock ’n’ Roll (Pantheon) Made from movie posters, sheet music, concert programs, and fan magazines, notably Tommy Sands vs. Belafonte and Elvis. Barson’s I.D.: “Sands had one fairly huge hit early in 1957, ‘Teen-Age Crush,’ and never saw the Top Ten again, though he did marry Nancy Sinatra. Brooklyn-born Harry Belafonte fared better, with several calypso-flavored hits in 1956 and ’57, and a long life as an LP artist who appealed to an older audience. Elvis had a few hits, was drafted, then returned to driving a truck for Crown Electric in Memphis and was never heard from again.”

  8 Rolling Stones, Detroit (bootleg, 1969) The songs are slowed down, cut to cadence almost like marches; they hover, like prophecies remembered generations after they were delivered; you hear only the singer, who seems scared of his own power, and the guitarists, who revel in theirs, “ ‘We Didn’t Really Get It On Until Detroit’—M. Jagger,” it says on the sleeve—which, 20 years later, sort of begs the question.

  9 Bob Dylan, Oh Mercy (Columbia) Producer’s record, shapely and airless. Featuring Daniel Lanois as the director who likes to chalk marks on the floor and Dylan a
s the actor who has to hit them.

  10 Neil Young, “Rockin’ in the Free World” (electric), from Freedom Well over 40, like most of the people starring in this column, Young alone among them uses his past for context, not careerism. Mick Jagger sings “Satisfaction” today because there’s money in it, and no doubt; at his best Young always sounds as if he’s ready to blow every dollar on what he has to say. Here, with lyrics left out of the Jones Beach version, he erases Ronald Reagan and lets George Bush be his own man: the cadaverous face of his silent crimes. More to the point, it’s Young’s best ride since “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze” on Re·ac·tor eight years ago, which in the time frame Young creates means nothing at all.

  DECEMBER 12, 1989

  1 Howlin’ Wolf, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” from Killing Floor (Chess, Japan, out of print) One minute of the primeval from the great electric bluesman. The only accompaniment here is acoustic guitar; no band could match the broken country time. The guitarist is unnamed, the date unlisted, there’s no other known Wolf recording like it, but there must be more. Where?

  2 KALX, pledge-drive spots (FM 90.7, University of California at Berkeley, November 10) “Hello,” says a creamy phone-sex voice. “I’m your Pledge Mistress. . . . If you’d like to make a donation, press one. If you need encouragement to leave your deposit, press. . . .” Even better was an evangelist, droning on and on in plummy, pukey tones about the final struggle between the Mammon of “Commercial Radio” and the holiness of “Listener-Supported Radio,” his syntax impossibly garbled by insensate repetition and the slow train of his mind.

  3 David Remnick and Marc Fisher, dispatch on the resignation of the Czechoslo-vakian Communist Party presidium (Washington Post, November 25) “Taxi drivers led a manic procession through Wenceslas Square, honking their horns. A man carried a victory cake to the center of the celebration. All around, people were lighting firecrackers and sparklers. A single trumpeter, like the leader of a New Orleans jazz wedding, led a few hundred people up the promenade.”

  4 MTV, graphic (November 12) Picture: the Berlin Wall. Soundtrack: electric version of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Title: “ANOTHER BAD IDEA BITES THE DUST.” And another irony buried under it.

  5 Elizabeth Shogren, “A New Political Generation” (San Francisco Chronicle, November 25) “Anne-Kathrin Pauk, 23, an elementary school teacher and publicist for the Berlin branch of a fledgling political party, exemplifies the role played by the younger generation in East Germany’s fast-paced reforms. ‘A lot of my friends already left, but now my friends are deciding to stay and try to change our country,’ said Pauk. . . . Pauk has brought her own style into her classroom. At the start of each class period in East Germany, pupils stand erect and report to their teacher in military fashion. The first day of her class, Pauk made it clear that she was different. After the pupils reported in their usual way, she stood at attention and sang the American song ‘We’re in the Army Now.’ Then she translated the words for her astonished, giggling pupils. Her students no longer report at the beginning of class.”

  6 Actuel, sponsorship of pirate radio station off the coast of the People’s Republic of China Yes, they’ll probably be playing “Rockin’ in the Free World,” but as the sound of the Beatles’ “Revolution” said “rise up” even when the words said “don’t,” the sound of Young’s attack on our version of the Free World may simply say that when you can bring sound to this level, you’re free.

  7 Vulgar Boatmen, You and Your Sister (Independent Label Alliance CD) From Gainesville, Florida: insinuating songs orchestrated by a quiet band and sung in a reedy voice, the tunes very ’50s in their casualness, present-day in their insistence on doubt. The best tunes center on girl’s names (“Mary Jane,” “Margaret Says,” “Katie”) or on the way metaphors of unrequited love can turn into politics: “Change the World All Around,” a subtle retrieval of the momentum in “Heroin.”

  8 Syd Straw, Surprise (Virgin) More surprising on the radio than on the turntable, where too many words on one track after another trip up the autonomy of the songs. Still, proof that sometimes sweet dreams are made of sweetness.

  9 Mekons, “Memphis, Egypt,” from Rock’n’Roll (Twintone/A&M) In the annals of rock epistemology, this account of the struggle between, more or less, commercial radio and listener-supported radio, as one band fought not to be “consumed by rock ’n’ roll,” at least corrects Talking Heads’ “Cities,” where David Byrne sang of “Memphis—home of Elvis, and the ancient Greeks.”

  10 Grace Catalano, New Kids on the Block (Bantam) You can laugh at fan-bios, but it’s all Creedence Clearwater ever got. There are still no books on Jackie Wilson, the Band, Martha Reeves, Sly Stone, Alan Freed, Fats Domino, or the Monotones.

  JANUARY 9, 1990

  1 Alison Krauss and Union Station, “Two Highways,” from Two Highways (Rounder) A shining bluegrass tune, moving fast, but seemingly coming very slowly, maybe because of the lifetimes in Alison Krauss’s young voice. “Only time will tell if I have made a loser’s choice”—there’s a memory of a road Dolly Parton might have taken, but no mannerisms or borrowings are audible. This is a song where even bad lines are suggestive: “Will I hear the melody I searched for oh so long,” Krauss sings. If this isn’t it, what is?

  2 Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy (Warner Books) Inside this terrific mystery about bass fishing is a tiny novel—not screaming to get out, but happy right where it is. Sometime in the ’70s a reformist governor of Florida subverted on all sides by developers’ money quits, disappears, and turns up years later as a swamp rat known as Skink. He’s a saint but he doesn’t talk like one: speeding down the road in a villain’s top-down Corvette he rips Whitney Houston out of the tape deck, throws it in the air, and growls. “Got any Creedence?”

  3 Little Richard, The Specialty Sessions (Ace/Specialty reissue, 1955–64, UK) Given Richard’s nearly monolithic attack, this is nowhere near so playable as boxes devoted to Jerry Lee Lewis or Buddy Holly; the remastering is often scholastic, bringing up the voice and losing the sound. But halfway into the eight LPs or six CDs a story emerges: songs carried over from session to session, months between attempts to get it right, a saga of a refusal to settle for anything less than a division of history: the division, say, between the first take of “I Got It” and the ninth.

  4 Steve Propes, et al, liner notes to Los Angeles reissues on Mr. R&B labels, Sweden (Jaguars, The Way You Look Tonight, 1955–61, Earth Angel; Hollywood Flames, The John Dolphin Sessions, 1951–56, Earth Angel; and Jimmy Wright, Let’s Go Crazy Baby, 1953–56, Saxophonographic) The music is not great; the tale it tells, of the hustle and miscegenation of early L.A. rock, is. The notes to the LP by the Jaguars (two blacks, an Italian, a Chicano—their “Charlene” was redone by Los Lobos on the La Bamba soundtrack) trace a line that began with backing on a worthless Walt Disney-Davy Crockett-craze number and ended in failure: a line that connects Buddy Ebsen to Richard Berry to the Lettermen to the Penguins to David Lee Roth.

  5 Georgia Satellites, “It’s All Over But the Cryin’,” from In the Land of Salvation and Sin (Elektra) In the vein of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors, and good enough to be on it.

  6 Dave Marsh, The Heart of Rock & Soul (Plume) A close reading of 1001 singles, Scheherazade at the jukebox—the longest book of rock criticism ever published, one that every reader will rewrite, and far and away my friend’s top work. As a skeptic about punk his entries on the Sex Pistols are profound; as a fan who finds the high point of rock in the mid-’60s he offers a double-slap in the face that has Chuck Berry on one cheek and Sgt. Pepper on the other.

  7 Bob Black, “On the Art Strike” (Art-paper, December) Black takes bad ideas seriously. “On January 1, 1990—if they comply with the directives of the PRAXIS Group—all artists will put down their tools for three years,” he begins. Then he imagines the result of this “ostentatious renunciation,” promoted as a utopia where “plebian masses, no longer cowed by ‘talented bullies,’ are in t
urn expected to rush into art like fresh air into a vacuum”: “Not, as is pretended, the general strike of the proletariat, but rather something already depicted in a work of art—the general strike of the capitalists in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.”

  8 MTV, Decade—1980–1989 (December 24) A two-hour tribute to digital editing, with talking heads both stupid (John Mellencamp, Tina Turner, and most of all Linda Ellerbee) and not (Frank Zappa, David Byrne, Roseanne Barr). Best line, Don Henley: “Reagan had a bedside manner for a dying nation.”

  9 Album of the Decade, Mekons, Fear & Whiskey (Sin, 1985, UK) Take your choice.

  10 Single of the Decade, Foreigner, “I Want To Know What Love Is” (Atlantic, 1984) Because in the last minute, you find out.

  FEBRUARY 6, 1990

  1 David Acomba, director; Maynard Collins, writer, Hank Williams—The Show He Never Gave (Drifter Films, Canada, 1982, the Nashville Network, January 1) Aired on the 37th anniversary of Williams’s death and set in a bar the night before: December 31, 1952. Playing Williams, country singer Sneezy Waters doesn’t look like him, doesn’t necessarily sound like him, but within minutes he is him, running through the hits and making each one into an event the people in the crowd will never forget. They mill around the foot-high platform that serves as a stage, as close to Williams as pogo dancers were to Johnny Rotten, but without starlust, as if it’s just one more night in a long life. After jokes about alcoholism and divorce—after lead-in stories as complex, scripted, and seemingly spontaneous as those Bruce Springsteen tells—Williams/Waters ends his first set with “Alone and Forsaken.” It’s a number as awful and anomalous in the Williams catalogue as “Hellhound on My Trail” is in Robert Johnson’s. The words fail to fit into “Cold, Cold Heart” as the messy structure of “Hellhound” breaks up the order of even “Me and the Devil Blues”; the cadence damns the melody of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” as the antibeat of “Hellhound” destroys the rhythm of “Terraplane Blues.” It seems clear, after Waters’s “Alone and Forsaken”—listen to the Mekons’ version on The Edge of the World—that nothing could follow it, but after a short time in his dressing room Williams comes back for his second set, and it’s time to pay the piper: in blood (Williams’s), sweat (his and the audience’s), and tears (his, theirs, yours).