Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  2 Andrew Baumer, former bassist for Minimal Man, history lesson, on the occasion of his 38th birthday (January 6) “When I woke up this morning, to celebrate I put on my favorite record: the Sex Pistols. But when ‘Holidays in the Sun’ came on, it struck me—someday, when I have a child, and I want to tell my son or daughter about my favorite record, I’m going to have to explain what the Berlin Wall was.”

  3 Kinks, “The Way Love Used To Be” (Reprise, 1971) Save for Duncan Browne’s forgotten 1968 Give Me Take You, the sole exemplar of an unknown genre: Pre-Raphaelite rock.

  4 Warren Zevon, “Run Straight Down,” from Transverse City (Virgin) Once he gets the orchestration up, he doesn’t have to do much more than chant the title to bring on the night.

  5 Gang of Four, “History’s Not Made by Great Men,” from At the Palace (Mercury, 1984) As covered by CBS Evening News, December 1, with new lyrics: “Even world leaders, it would seem, no longer make history. All they can do is cope with history in the making.”

  6 Dangermice, Sound Session (Sounds! EP) A band centered on Marlene Marder (writer and guitarist for Kleenex and Liliput, 1978–84): straight stuff, except for “There’s a Light,” as harshly utopian as Liliput’s “Split.”

  7 Associated Press, worst news of the month (January 9) “Don Henley and Glenn Frey have settled their decade-old feud and will reunite the Eagles . . .”

  8 Andrew Goodwin, worst news of the month before (East Bay Express, December 29) Rock critic Goodwin reports on a conversation with Nightline correspondent James Walker, in Berkeley to research a show about bigotry in popular music: “Walker’s next stop is L.A., where he will interview NWA. Walker wants to know if NWA’s members speak English.”

  9 Los Angeles Times, news story (January 10) “Designers of Richard Nixon’s presidential library say that visitors will be able to question the former president and get an answer from his own lips—through the miracle of video. With the latest in computer wizardry and more than 400 video clips, the questioner will touch a screen and get an answer from Nixon’s video image. ‘It’s as if by some form of fortune, you actually meet the president,’ said designer Alex Cranstoun”—no doubt a fan of the Firesign Theater’s 1971 We’re All Bozos on This Bus, which featured the same psuedo-Nixon, and also detailed how to blow its fuse.

  10 Warner Bros., radio ad (January) For Laurie Anderson’s Strange Angels: “It has music you can listen to.” What’ll they think of next?

  MARCH 6, 1990

  1 Laurie Anderson, Strange Angels (Warner Bros.) Julee Cruise armed. Or David Lynch’s next movie.

  2 Wim Wenders, Emotion Pictures—Reflections on the Cinema, translated from the German by Sean Whiteside with Michael Hofman (Faber & Faber) Between 1968 and ’71 the German director was a film student, and also a critic, tossing out pieces on rock as film and film as rock (“The 10th Kinks LP—The 51st Alfred Hitchcock Film—The 4th Creedence Clearwater LP—The 3rd Harvey Mandel LP”); free-associating between records and movies, in almost every case essaying a page or two of nothing on his way to the image he’s looking for (on rock cinema, “A Non-Existent Genre”: a “close-up of a screaming girl is really only a reverse angle of a cameraman screaming with disgust”). The book ends with later, more conventional, and very angry articles, and with “The American Dream,” an endless 1984 poem. After 10 pages or so, if you last that long, its insistent banality begins to work as a set-up for occasional moments of vehement clarity (“The more impossible and unthinkable wars become/ . . . the more evident world-wide entertainment will appear/as the ‘continuation of politics by other means’ ”); farther on is as heartbreaking an account of the liberating effects of early rock ’n’ roll as one will ever read.

  3 Sinéad O’Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U” (Chrysalis 12-inch) The principal difference between O’Connor’s immersion in this Prince tune and classic ’60s deep soul ballads is that this runs five minutes and they didn’t go past three.

  4 B-52’s, “Roam” (Reprise) A good sound, thanks mainly to the absence of Fred Schneider’s smirking anti-singing, plus a double entendre on “around the world” worthy of ZZ Top, or Bullmoose Jackson’s 1952 “Big Ten Inch (Record of the Blues).” But if the song is suggestive it’s in terms of the video you automatically run in your head. The group settled for cutting the performance in half with a cheap travelogue of exotic places; that’s why they’ll never be more than a decent joke.

  5 Mötley Crüe, “Kickstart My Heart” video and Paula Abdul: “Opposites Attract” video Two proofs that the current ruling MTV aesthetic is nearly indistinguishable from soft-core porn: action shots (Mötley Crüe’s stage moves, Abdul’s all-promising grin) so brief they verge on the subliminal, so out of reach the only feeling they leave behind is frustration.

  6 Electric Eels, Having a Philosophical Investigation With the Electric Eels (unreleased recordings from 1975, Tinnitus) As in Having a Rave Up With the Yardbirds; on “Agitated” and “Jaguar Ride,” these progenitors of Cleveland’s Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu almost do.

  7 Filippo Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, translated from the Italian by Suzanne Brill, edited by Lesley Chamberlain (Bedford Arts reissue, 1932) As a committed Fascist, the enemy of all passéism takes his crusade to the ultimate enemy: pasta (“originated by the Ostrogoths”). Thus, popping up throughout this hilarious, delirious master-work, the likes of “‘The Excited Pig’—A whole salami, skinned, is served upright on a dish containing some very hot black coffee mixed with a good deal of eau de Cologne,” and realization, now, that cuisine à la Zippy the Pinhead (tacos with Liquid Paper sauce) fixes Bill Griffith’s hero not as a dyslexic for all seasons but as a professor paying polite homage to the great days of the avant-garde.

  8 Rolling Stones, “Fancy Man Blues,” from After the Hurricane: Songs for Montserrat (Chrysalis CD) Rote and soulless, but a dozen similar rehearsals, bootlegged as Blues by the Numbers, might be a way out of the “How to Write Pop Songs” slime of “Mixed Emotions” and the rest of Steel Wool. Dream on, as the Five Keys once put it.

  9 Ronnie McDowell (voice) and Michael St. Gerard (mime), “My Happiness,” in Elvis (ABC-TV, February 6) The original for-his-mother’s-birthday recording, here dramatized as bereft of everything but heart. The actual artifact, lost since 1953, turned up recently; McDowell must have heard it.

  10 Super Hits of the 70s: Have a Nice Day, Vols. 1–5 (Rhino CDs) Checking out this series of horrors (Sugarloaf’s “Green Eyed Lady,” Ocean’s “Put Your Hand in the Hand,” so many more), you ask why Rhino stopped short of the bottom: Five Man Electrical Band’s “Signs,” wherein the hippie rebel pulls off his disguise to reveal the true face of the age—the Jesus Freak. Rhino says it’s on the way.

  APRIL 3, 1990

  1 Pete Seeger, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” from We Shall Overcome—The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert, June 8,1963 (Columbia double CD) I first heard Bob Dylan’s song as Seeger sang it, just days before the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King replaced Dylan’s armageddon (“hard rain” meant, among other things, nuclear fallout) with a vision of liberation. But both King and Dylan spoke the same, apocalyptic language; it was never Seeger’s. His version of the song seemed like a final statement 27 years ago, in the flesh or on the original, one-LP Carnegie Hall recording, but today it’s plain the moment made the music. Seeger notoriously lacked any blues feeling, and “Hard Rain” is proof he had none for country, not even for Child ballads; as Woody Guthrie or Big Bill Broonzy he was Henry Ward Beecher, Yankee abolitionist to his toenails. This performance documents one of the great musical events of the American postwar period, but the event is no longer musical; to hear how scary the song can be, you have to listen to Bryan Ferry sing it.

  2 Midnight Oil, Blue Sky Mining (Columbia) As with U2, there’s good guitar in the storm of politics and morals, but the hooks are not smothered in a personification of universal humanism, perhaps because singer Peter Garrett doesn’t seem very impressed with himself. He doesn
’t even necessarily write the songs, which frees him to function as just another instrument.

  3 Robert B. Ray, “The ABC of Visual Theory,” in Visible Language (Autumn 1988) Playing within the strictures of the self-referentiality of current critical theory, Ray (of the Vulgar Boatmen and the University of Florida at Gainesville) takes on the hegemonic artificiality of the alphabet, picking up, among other items, “Barthes,” “Rochefort, Joseph,” “Vertov, Dziga,” and “Louie, Louie.” The last is discussed as happenstance, an incident interesting on its own terms: the supposedly obscene lyrics of the Kingsmen’s ’63 single working on millions of people like Poe’s purloined letter, hidden in plain sight.

  4 KALX-FM, two-and-a-half hours of Lou Reed, on the occasion of his 47th birthday (March 2, Berkeley) Upsetting, since these days if you hear two songs in a row from the same performer you figure he or she just died.

  5 Robert Plant, “Hurting Kind (I’ve Got My Eyes on You),” from Manic Nirvana (Es Paranza) Inside the familiar noise is humor, the thrill of discovery, maybe the hint of a quest. After 20 years on the assembly line attaching the hysterical to the frantic, he still can’t deliver mere product.

  6 Aaron Neville, “For Your Precious Love,” from Midnight Orchid (Rhino CD, recorded 1981) Neville’s trademark is overworrying, getting so many syllables out of a phrase (none of them melismatic, all of them clipped) he makes Otis Redding sound like Sam Cooke. Thus on most of this five-song oldies disc Neville barely gets started, hacking so much angst into the verses you lose track of what he’s singing about—but with his embrace of Jerry Butler’s 1958 hit, you wonder why he has to stop.

  7 Rolling Stones, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” from 25×5 (CBS video) An edit of a clip from an unreleased ’69 TV special, which replaces the regret and nostalgia of the Let It Bleed cut with a definite lack of charity.

  8 Bruce Sterling, “Dori Bangs,” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction (September 1989) What if rock critic Lester Bangs hadn’t died in 1982 and comix artist Dori Seda five years later, but rather met, got married, and lived on? Sterling’s story is compelling because it reads like gossip.

  9 George Harrison, discourse on karma, in “The Quiet Wilbury,” interview by Mark Rowland (Musician, March) “It was such a waste, some stupid person. If John had been killed by Elvis, it would have at least had meaning!”

  10 Jacob Weisberg, “Washington Diarist,” in the New Republic (March 5) An argument that the Velvet Underground played no small role in naming and even making what Czech president Václav Havel calls the country’s “Velvet Revolution”—through the agency of the Plastic People of the Universe, Velvets followers who once recorded and performed at Havel’s farmhouse. On the other hand, since Frank Zappa (recently made adviser to the Czech minister of culture) reports Havel is a big fan of Zappa’s own Bongo Fury, maybe one ought to be thankful Havel didn’t announce the “Bongo Revolution.” That would have really confused people, especially future historians, who would likely conclude that the Czech victory over Stalinism had its roots in dubbed Hollywood exploitation movies about beatniks—which, to some degree, it probably did.

  MAY 1, 1990

  1 Herb Ritts, Marianne Faithfull, Gap ad (Vanity Fair, April) “What were once vices are now habits,” the Doobie Brothers smirked for an album title in 1974. Ritts’s portrait, almost unrecognizable without a caption, says that what were once scars are now features: a junkie tattoo and a Pre-Raphaelite face.

  2 Lisa Shrage, as Mary Lou Mahoney in Hello Mary Lou—Prom Night II (Virgin Vision Video, 1987) In a movie sharp enough to favor Ronnie Hawkins’s “Mary Lou” over Ricky Nelson’s title song, Shrage is a murdered ’57 prom queen back from the dead 30 years later: the human equivalent of Christine, Stephen King’s demonic ’58 Plymouth. Where’s Shrage been since?

  3 Chris Thomas, Cry of the Prophets (Sire/Hightone) He’s the son of ’50s Louisiana bluesman Tabby Thomas, and if this LP had been released in the mid-’60s, in the heyday of deep feeling deep South r&b, it would have seemed like a curio: too eclectic. Today it’s a shock, because deep soul has hardly been heard in public since Al Green’s The Belle Album, and because nobody’s heard deep soul guitar or deep soul crying applied to crack and Uzis. Up against the likes of N.W.A., Thomas sounds pathetic—but also real.

  4 Don Letts, director, The Punk Rock Movie (1979, Rhino Home Video) England, 1977. The Slits are fierce (drummer Palmolive seems to care the most); so is X-ray Spex (with Lora Logic). Eater plays with a pig’s head on the stage, a huge cleft cut into its skull. When the song ends the bandmembers hack at the head, stab it, then throw what’s left to the crowd. They are acting out (a) the seventh verse of the Eagles’ “Hotel California”; (b) Margaret Murray’s 1921 The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which holds that even after nearly 2000 years Christianity remained threatened by the devil worship of the lower orders; or (c) a rite secretly passed down through the centuries by British pagans masquerading as Christers. But the Sex Pistols, with Johnny Rotten in a suit coat and bow tie looking a lot like Baudelaire, make Eater’s ritual seem secondhand, because it is so literal; with the Pistols, (c) is the only answer, and the only question. Their “no future” means the whole of the past, a tidal wave.

  5 Silos, The Silos (BMG/RCA) Folk rock, pursuing the thin sound of Prince’s “When You Were Mine” into its rhythms, all coolness and regret: “Picture of Helen” and “I’m Over You,” the latter taking two minutes to essay a classic driving song, only to pull up short and admit it’s about immobilization and loss.

  6 Sinéad O’Connor, “Black Boys on Mopeds,” from I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (Chrysalis) “Margaret Thatcher on TV/Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing/It seems strange that she should be offended.” The lifetime O’Connor invests in the word offended is, as singing, a match for the gestures of the man who, a year ago, played chicken with the tanks of the ruling class.

  7 Virginia Madsen, as Dixie Lee Boxx in Long Gone (HBO movie, 1987) Though she’s in the tradition of big American blonds (as aerobic Madonna is not), if Madsen had taken Mamie Van Doren’s role in High School Confidential it would have been a different movie: everything Madsen does radiates intelligence and will. This good flick about a ’50s Florida minor-league baseball team has a superb rockabilly/doo-wop soundtrack; Madsen seems to be the only character who knows what the songs are about.

  8 Heart, “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You” (Portrait) Since “Magic Man,” Ann Wilson’s theme has been lust and loss—loss of control. She’ll have to push to take the story any farther.

  9 Smithereens, “Behind the Wall of Sleep” from Especially for You (Enigma, 1986) As good as Richard Thompson’s “Wall of Death.”

  10 Jerry Roberts, on California gubernatorial candidate John Van de Kamp’s address to the state Democratic Party convention (San Francisco Chronicle, April 9) “The straitlaced Van de Kamp’s appearance was most memorable for the music selected for his introduction to the delegates—the rock and roll classic ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ Van de Kamp spent part of the weekend laid up in a back brace . . . aides denied speculation that he hurt his back practicing a Chuck Berry-style duck walk.” Lee Atwater rocks on.

  MAY 29, 1990

  1 Babes In Toyland, Spanking Machine (Twin/Tone) Three women who take up the challenge the Slits laid down in 1977. As if no more than a minute has passed, they shout back: harridan shouts, bloody laughter.

  2 Marianne Faithfull, at Slims, San Francisco (April 17) There was a searing, anti-art ending on the arty “Sister Morphine”; with “Broken English,” the lyric’s insistence that the singer didn’t know what the Baader-Meinhof terrorists were talking about was now an insistence that she understood every word.

  3 Chai Ling, on Nightline (ABC, April 17) A few days after the killings in Tiananmen Square last year, Chai Ling, a leader of the demonstrations, smuggled a tape from her hiding place: “I am still alive,” she began. Those words were a stoic anticipation and refusal of the quick death she was facing as s
he spoke. This night, just a few days escaped from China, she appeared from Paris on a screen talking in voice-over translation to Ted Koppel, who ignored her amazing smile in favor of asking her if she intended to meet with George Bush; better he should have asked if she wanted to meet with Sinéad O’Connor.

  4 Surreal Estate, La Revolution Surrealiste (Salvador, 1985) Up against a dozen discs, including A Tribe Called Quest’s smart backing track and dead vocals, this defunct Ann Arbor trio’s precious, postpunk affectations gave something back: mainly Detroit’s 1967 Spike Drivers, their uncollected “Strange Mysterious Sounds.”

  5 Bobby “Blue” Bland, Junior Parker, Earl Forest, and Johnny Ace, The Original Memphis Blues Brothers (Ace reissue, 1951–53) The title refers less to Bland et al. than to Matt Murphy, guitarist on these sessions, who later turned up in The Blues Brothers, where he walked out on Aretha Franklin to play with his soul brothers John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd; the music is on side one, Bland wailing “Drifting from Town to Town” three times. His singing is so saxophonic it suggests that if an instrument can talk, to truly communicate a singer has to get past words.

  6 Joel Selvin, Ricky Nelson—Idol for a Generation (Contemporary Books) A moderately compelling biography of a moderately compelling singer, whose moderately awful end was coded in his moderate rebellion against the moderately repressed life he was supposed to live.

  7 Richard Beymer, on Twin Peaks (ABC, May 3) In bed with Piper Laurie, the town Slime King gets up, brandishing one of the non sequiturs the script piles on its red herrings: a tiny Elvis whiskey decanter. “Going to give Little Elvis a shower,” he says. But what’s in the bottle?