Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  8 Lou Reed and John Cale, Songs for Drella (Sire) Good guitar.

  9 Mark Kitchell, director, Berkeley in the Sixties (Kitchell Films) and Richard Lester, director: Paul McCartney in His Times (Memorial Stadium, Berkeley, April 1, short film introducing McCartney tour) Combining documentary footage and now-interviews with the then-participants, Kitchell’s movie replaces history with highlights: there’s no texture, no sense of lived time. There are moments when the forgotten comes back as shock, notably then-governor Ronald Reagan, not the “easygoing monster” (Robert Christgau’s perfect words) of the presidential years, but hawk-faced and harsh, matching the Mr. Big he played in Don Siegel’s The Killers. Ultimately the picture is tinged with a condescending sentimentality; when it ended with Pete Seeger singing “We Shall Overcome,” the we seemed smugly narrow. I took part in most of what I was looking at, but I was far more moved by Lester’s little triptych: “history” on the sides, Paul in the middle. At first it was an ordinary collage, Beatles surrounded by Kennedys and miniskirts and missile crises—with the soundtrack Beatle music more vivid than any of the images. Then Lester broke the formula: four unrelieved minutes of the Vietnam War, no Beatles and no Paul, simply tripled horror, all to “The Long and Winding Road,” which against what one was seeing was almost silent, sucked into the air. When the film ended with red, lurid night footage of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, it didn’t seem cheap. Paul McCartney had been reduced to one person doing his work in times that overtook him. Then he came out and sang his songs as best he could.

  10 Eddie Money, “Peace in Our Time” (Columbia) Along with the title phrase, the lyric includes “heaven on earth,” “turning water into wine,” “streets of shame,” “cities of dust,” “phoenix from the flames,” “break down the walls,” “wheels of fortune,” “keep on keepin’ on,” “on a wing and a prayer,” and “a song in our hearts,” encapsulating better than a hundred academic papers the poststructuralist refutation of “the original.” Or a dogged refusal to shut up.

  JUNE 26, 1990

  1 Madonna, “Blond Ambition Tour” (Oakland Coliseum Arena, May 20) It doesn’t matter how cool you are: this great production showcases gestures as shocking now as any Elvis Presley put on television in 1956, and it’s a prissy myth that only those who disapproved of Elvis were shocked. Here, the interracial hermaphroditic porn of “Like a Virgin” was merely a warm-up for the blasphemies of “Like a Prayer,” which as a dance raised the music to the level of Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is,” cut in with Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” “This,” Madonna said on May 31 in Toronto, when police arrived with an order that she alter her performance, “is certainly a cause for which I am willing to be arrested.”

  2 Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie, Music Man—Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic Records, and the Triumph of Rock ’n’ Roll (Norton) Engaging, seductive writing that never calls attention to itself, first-class business reporting—a music book you can actually read, not simply glean for gossip, though there’s plenty of that, from Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s attempt to get Red Bird Records back from the Mafia to Mick Jones’s pre-Foreigner bid to take over the corpse of Stax. The book is strongest as a shadow biography of Morris Levy—mobster, bad conscience of pop laissez-faire capitalism, and imp of the perverse—who talked his head off.

  3 Clancy Eccles, et al., Clancy Eccles Presents His Reggae Revue (Heartbeat CD reissue, 1967–72) Rock steady, and never steadier—not a single twitching nerve.

  4 Wedding Present, Bizarro (RCA CD) As a singer, David Gedge sounds like John Cale on his obscure 1969 Vintage Violence LP; as a guitarist he fronts a Leeds band whose influences seem to begin and end with the Velvet Underground’s 8:47 1969 live version of “What Goes On”—and what goes on on Bizarro is a fanatical argument that true rock ’n’ roll, or music, emerges only at that point where repetition takes on a charge so powerful not even rhythm can be heard. Listen to “What Have I Said Now?”—Fairport Convention’s “A Sailor’s Life” as redone by Joy Division—and tell Gedge he’s wrong.

  5 Sinéad O’Connor, green T-shirt (Berkeley Community Theater, June 4) “PWA,” it read; her publicist said it meant “Paddies With Attitude,” not “Person With AIDS.” I don’t know what the ACT UP sticker on the sleeve meant.

  6 Catherine Adams, dispatch on Romanian elections (UPI, May 20) “More than 80 political parties are participating in the elections,” Adams reported. “The Laughter Party, the Barking Dog Party, the Gypsy Home Decorators Party . . . More than 1000 foreign observers have begun traveling to some of the 3000 polling stations around the country to monitor the balloting. ‘I’m overwhelmed by the enthusiasm for democracy,’ said Roy Hattersley, a British Labor Party deputy.” “Me, too,” said Monty Python.

  7 Fleetwood Mac, “Save Me” (Warner Bros.) Rock economics: the guitar solo costs nobody anything; the way Christine McVie sings “Is it one or the other, baby?” was paid for a long time ago.

  8 Rod Stewart and Ronald Isley, “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You)” (Warner Bros.) Flying back from the U.K. in 1966, I found the Isley Brothers’ original on the audio; for the next 14 hours Swinging London dissolved as I waited for the headset to give up the tune again and again. As a 1990 video it’s a period piece: ignoring Holland-Dozier-Holland’s sweetest melody, the slowly vamping go-go girls have that ultra-’60s Edie Sedgwick coldness down pat, and they’re hard to resist. But on the radio, where it’s just as hard to tell feathered Rod from pony-tailed Ron, the music is flooded with a new warmth, probably because Rod and Ron are riding the melody, and toward the same goal: their shared past.

  9 The Ghost of Gene Chandler, “Duke of Earl,” on Billboard Top Rock ’n’ Roll Hits—1962 (Rhino CD) Digital displacement No. 7891: did you know this featured organ, guitar, clarinet? It does now—and if you believe that sound converted into numbers tells the truth, what once seemed a primarily casual piece of singing has now been revealed as a precise, professional, altogether constructed piece of orchestration. I’m not sure we’re richer for this information.

  10 Charles Freeman, proprietor, E. C. Records, arrested on charges of distributing obscene material for selling copies of 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be (Fort Lauderdale) “America is free, free for everybody,” he said two days after federal judge Jose Gonzalez found the music “as much against the law as assault, rape, [or] kidnapping.” “I’ll go to jail, and I’ll come back and sell it again.”

  JULY 24, 1990

  1 Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Site Specific Installation, in “Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism” (Tacoma Art Museum, through September 9, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, November 1 through January 6, 1991) Over your head is a labyrinth—or spiderweb—of household detritus. Below is a clear pool with hundreds of scissors, batteries, rags, broken toys; the pool is layered and infinitely deep. Crumbling Greek columns connect the pool to what seems like its overhead reflection. But the stuff overhead is real; the stuff below is just imagery. It feels like the opposite. The piece has a room to itself, and it makes a world; it should be called “The Archaeology of Everyday Life,” or “The Ruins.”

  2 Sonic Youth, “Tunic (Song for Karen),” from Goo (Geffen) Dressed up as Karen Carpenter in heaven—or stripped naked—Kim Gordon insists on the edge that was almost always cutting in Carpenter’s singing, the edge Carpenter did everything she could to hide, failing only with “Superstar,” “Merry Christmas Darling,” her life, and this song.

  3 Romantics, “What I Like About You” (Diamond Vision reissue, 1980) Once the Oakland A’s took Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” as a theme song, and had a Coasters’ hit rewritten as “Billy Ball.” Now, at the Oakland Coliseum, you hear the Romantics every time the A’s win, except when the Diamond Vision archivists program Michael Morales’s version. It’s not as good, but you won’t hear it anywhere else.

  4 Jon Wiener, on Albert Goldman’s Life cover story, “Thirteen
Years After the Death of ELVIS PRESLEY New Evidence Points to an Inescapable Conclusion—SUICIDE” (June) “When Goldman brings out a new paperback of his Lennon book, he will discover that he was wrong; Lennon committed suicide. People told him, it was there in his notes, but he missed it.”

  5 Van Morrison, “Almost Independence Day,” from Saint Dominic’s Preview (Warner Bros, 1972) and X: “4th of July,” from See How We Are (Elektra, 1987) It’s right that flag burning is legal, but I could never do it; to say that the flag is only a symbol is to trivialize the diversion of religious epistemology into secular Western culture since Jehovah forbade images of himself, which is to say that to burn the flag is to make a kind of exile. If you want confirmation that the flag contains betrayal as well as promise, you can listen to these songs. X asks the promises of the Fourth of July to redeem the betrayals of a marriage; the conflation of the personal and the political is insensate and inevitable because the promises are boundless. Morrison watches from Marin as fireworks explode over San Francisco Bay. The lights are shrouded in the fog that rolls in over the Marin hills, and very nearly the whole of the instrumentation is in the Moog synthesizers of the late Bernie Krause and Mark Naftalin, who make a foghorn sound—a fog sound. But if fireworks are already exploding, why is it “almost” Independence Day?

  6 Gang of Four, The Peel Sessions Album (Strange Fruit, UK, 1979–81) The most exciting account available of the discovery that everything we understand as natural is someone else’s project.

  7 Social Distortion, “Ball and Chain,” from Social Distortion (Columbia) The Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers” without humor, but that lack, perhaps forcing you to take the singer’s self-pity seriously, could be what’s kept this crude number sneaking around the radio for months. What’s simple—simplistic—about the tune, and that includes the blurry guitars, the fourth-hand lyrics, the worn-out voice (which senses a hit), is also what’s irreducible about it. Verdict: a classic.

  8 Gene Pitney, the Embers, the 5 Be-lairs, etc., Unreleased Gems of the 1950s—The Hartford Groups (Relic, 1957–59) Doo–Wop looking for a way out of itself, topped by Pitney’s “Victory” and “Darkness.” Yep, he was weird from the start.

  9 Guns N’ Roses, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” from Days of Thunder soundtrack (Paramount) Little Richard cut the answer record in 1957.

  10 Anonymous, “The Insult That Made a Stiff Out of a Stooge!” in Skels Life #7 (March) The old Charles Atlas wimp-who-gets-sand-kicked-in-his-face comic-strip ad, fanzined. The creep sits on the beach listening to Guns N’ Roses’ “immigrants and faggots. . . . police and niggers,” gets dog shit kicked in his face, goes home, and kicks his dog: “I’m sick and tired of being a piece of human refuse!” Next panel: he’s hanged himself. Dog, thinking: “Cool.”

  AUGUST 28, 1990

  1 Cetu Javu, “A Donde,” B-side of “So Strange” (ZYX, West Germany, 1989) Erasure as Alphaville, in excelsis.

  2 Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic—Jimi Hendrix and the Post-War Rock ’n’ Roll Revolution (St Martin’s) Criticism, not bio, magically combining irreverence with utter seriousness.

  3 Odds, “Truth or Dare,” from By the Seat of Our Pants (demo cassette) From Vancouver, postpunk but also post-Beatles: full-throated, nothing-held-back singing so bent on its own epiphanies it cuts loose from its own band. Not as simple as it sounds.

  4 Alice Donut, “My Boyfriend’s Back,” B-side of “Demonologist” (Alternative Tentacles, San Francisco, CA) The 1963 No. 1 hit by the Angels, redone as a grunge-fest, almost a disease, sung by a guy, of course, with horrible new lyrics, which is why some sort of milestone in the new (rock) historicism is reached with the author’s credit: “Traditional.”

  5 Two Nice Girls, Like a Version (Rough Trade US) Among five covers, a faithful reprise of the Carpenters’ “Top of the World” and an angelic reading of Sonic Youth’s “Cotton Crown” (the pairing anticipated Sonic Youth’s Karen Carpenter tribute, “Tunic,” and very naturally—real fans don’t hear the genre boundaries record companies think sell records), plus TNG’s own “I Spent My Last $10.00 (On Birth Control and Beer)”—“My life was so much simpler/When I was sober/And queer.”

  6 Dave Ray and Tony Glover, “HIV Blues,” from Ashes in My Whiskey (Rough Trade US) In the early ’60s (John) Koerner, Ray & Glover were folkie blues players, and what they did then Ray (guitar) and Glover (harmonica) do now, except on this cut, which is blues without modifiers. Glover doesn’t so much sing as let his voice break over the words; the fluttery harp and the shuddering electric guitar (there’s a touch of Lowell Fulson’s “Tollin’ Bells”) make a sound that seems to dissolve as soon as you hear it; they take the song where Glover’s vocal can’t, or won’t.

  7 John Densmore, Riders on the Storm—My Life With Jim Morrison and the Doors (Delacorte) The drummer writes as a man still trying to get the echo of an explosion 20 years gone out of his head, and thus addressing the better parts of his modest book to Morrison in heaven, hoping Jim will get the joke that the echo now likely has more fans than the explosion ever did: “Cigar-Pain, remember him? The young bum (and there weren’t as many young ones then) who used to hang around our rehearsal studio and burn his tongue with a lit cigar in order to acquire a singing voice like you . . . news came recently that he killed his mother and then himself. . . . He got our lyrics all wrong; he was supposed to kill his father and fuck his mother!”

  8 Sonic Youth, “Mary-Christ,” from Goo (Geffen) Nothing close to it since Captain Beefheart, 1969: “Tits tits the blimp the blimp/The mother ship the mother ship/The brothers hid under their hood/From the blimp the blimp.”

  9 Guns N’ Roses, “Civil War,” from Nobody’s Child—Romanian Angel Appeal (Warner Bros.) Closing out a set of unbearable piety (the “angels” are orphans, like fetuses are “innocent human life”), this titanic slab of hard rock is staggeringly powerful, at least until Axl Rose’s whining chant of “I DON’T NEED YOUR CIVIL WAR” cuts against both the music and its context. The Romanians certainly needed the civil war the music dramatizes—but then Axl doesn’t look beyond number one, and not just on the charts.

  10 Colin Hughes, “Search for Antichrist leads soldiers astray” (London Independent/San Francisco Examiner, July 23) “Five men and one woman, all of whom worked with the 701st Military Intelligence Brigade . . . [and] belonged to the End of the World Group . . . went AWOL on July 9 from their station in Augsburg, West Germany . . . The soldiers set off for Florida in search of the Antichrist but apparently failed to find the biblically prognosticated evil one before being arrested last Sunday in Gulf Breeze, Fla. Now they are awaiting court-martial on desertion charges.” Reached in Los Angeles, John Lydon, former singer for the rock group the Sex Pistols and one-time self-professed “Antichrist” had “No comment. Probably they just wanted to go to Disneyworld. The media always lie. Anyway, I wasn’t in Florida. Ha ha ha ha ha.”

  My apologies to Bernie Krause, who I killed off in last month’s entry on Van Morrison’s “Almost Independence Day”; he isn’t dead, though this column is, at least in these pages. It will reappear in Artforum, beginning with the November issue. My thanks to Doug Simmons for 57 months of friendly editing and good talk.

  Artforum 19901998

  NOVEMBER 1990

  1 W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed—The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Smithsonian Institution Press) Lhamon’s thesis that the American ’50s were culturally rich is not so novel as it might have been when he began his book, ten years ago, but his set pieces are shockingly original. On Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land,” for instance, heard since 1964 as Berry’s “poor boy’s” happy odyssey from Virginia to California—“but that,” Lhamon says, “is its minstrel mask.” Noting that the song was written in prison, Lhamon redescribes it—so vividly and with such historical detail you could say he reinscribes it—as a coded but insistently specific parable of the early civil rights movement, reconnecting Rock Hill, South Carolina, to the Freedom Ri
des, Birmingham to its bombed church, and the poor boy’s “broke down” Greyhound to the Freedom Riders’ torched bus. Safe in Los Angeles, the singer calls home, Tidewater 4-1009: “He achieves the promised land only after a hell of a trip; everyone the poor boy cares about is still in hell.”

  2 Luther Campbell and 2 Live Crew, Banned in the U.S.A. (Luke/Atlantic) Bruce Springsteen got as much as he gave when he let the former Luke Skyywalker (the name banned by George Lucas, not the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, or the federal judiciary) redo his “Born in the U.S.A.” for this celebration of free speech. Not only is it as stirring as the first version, it replaces the dead patriotism that fans from Ronald Reagan to millions of audience fist-thrusters loaded onto the song with the ironies Springsteen wrote but could never get heard.

  3 Fastbacks, “In the Summer” et al. (No Threes/Steve Priest Fan Club) A band that’s wandered for nearly a decade in the pop wilderness plays like it’s ready for another thirty. For two numbers the wilderness is all you hear—doubt, fatigue, and holding back—and then comes “Everything That I Don’t Need,” written by guitarist Kurt Bloch, sung by Kim Warnick. In the ep’s sleeve photos, both of them look too old and beaten for the glory of this small refusal: rock simple, rock treasure.

  4 Patrick Wright, “Gesture Politics,” in New Statesman & Society (vol. 3 no. 103, June 1) On Jan Budaj, a Slovakian “stoker-intellectual” from Bratislava, who “spent the seventies pursuing a cultural civil war against the Communist regime. . . . Drawing on such sources as Conceptual Art, Duchamp and Dada, Budaj set out to demonstrate the lies on which Communist ‘reality’ was built. He hung his own renegade version of the conventional slogan-ridden red banner on a prominent public building in Bratislava: it bore the obligatory red star and a completely meaningless jumble of letters, and the success with which it proved its point could be counted through the many weeks that passed before the authorities recognized it as a fake. . . . He produced highly realistic official posters advertising cultural events which could never happen in Bratislava—a concert by Abba and Bob Dylan, or the coming of Ingmar Bergman’s latest film. Box offices were inundated.”