by Greil Marcus
5 Lonnie Mack, “Stop,” from Live!—Attack of the Killer V (Alligator) Mack—a 49-year-old guitarist with a Flying V Gibson—once told a story about a mouse that crossed his stage in the middle of a tune; when Mack hit his “highest, most soulful note,” he said, the mouse dropped dead, and on those terms this nine-minute blues is a massacre: loud no matter how low you play it, containing an irreducible quietness no matter how high you crank it up.
6 Allan Moyle, writer and director, Pump Up the Volume (New Line Cinema) The full weight of this film about a teenager’s pirate radio station is the realization that the obscene idiosyncrasy of his nightly broadcasts is utterly right and proper, the First Amendment alive to itself, and under the law today completely impossible (as it wouldn’t have been during the early Reagan years, when free-market libertarians were running the FCC). Always threatening to turn into an already-made lousy movie—Footloose, Rock ’n’ Roll High School, Network, Heathers—it never does, thanks mostly to Christian Slater. In the end it can leave a smile on your lips and pain in your heart.
7 Gang of Four, Money Talks (Scarlett, U.K.) The Leeds postpunk band, reformed as a gang of two: singer Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill, plus hired musicians and vocalist Louise Goffin, daughter of Brill Building songwriters (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow”) Gerry Goffin and Carole King. The music takes its cue from King’s deeply layered sleeve collage on Pax Americana, which borrows as surely from Art & Language as from London’s Imperial War Museum and recent news photos of George Bush and Manuel Noriega—who appear here as twins, their arms raised together in comradeship.
8 Birney Imes, Juke Joint (University Press of Mississippi) These blazing pictures of crudely, seriously decorated black bars and nightclubs in the Mississippi Delta may be the first successful transference of Walker Evans’ style to color photography. Imes’ use of red yellow and blue is as extreme and unnatural as Evans’ somber framing, and as convincing. You page through the book spellbound, dizzy with its light; then you go into it again and again, picking out the ads made into art, the slogans of good times and gentility (“BE NICE OR LEAVE—THANK YOU”). Docked a notch for a cretinous introduction by novelist Richard Ford.
9 Eric Bogosian, “Benefit,” from Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll (SBK) The record of the performance piece: cheap shots, but with a We-Are-the-Worlder U.K. rocker on a talk show condemning drugs while stoned out of his mind, worth a few bucks.
10 David Robbins, editor, The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (MIT Press, catalogue of exhibition: 4 November–13 January 1991, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; 6 February–21 April, University Art Museum, Berkeley; 8 June–18 August, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.) Given that the Independent Group—Richard Hamilton, Reyner Banham, Lawrence Alloway, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter and Alison Smithson, and a few more—brought Futurism and Dada into British art schools, thus inspiring everyone from John Lennon to Johnny Rotten, it’s odd that pop music is hardly mentioned in this book. In another sense it’s not surprising: the IG was always engaged in a kind of slumming, a condescension carried through and confessed to in these pages. “We deliberately crossed up the borders of fine and popular art,” Alloway says, but Peter Smithson is more honest: “ ‘isn’t that a handsome picture or a handsome layout which I could parody for a fine art picture?’ ” The collage work of the IG was never so free as Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton’s brutal alterations of library books, which sent them to prison. Finally the group’s embrace of the popular emerges less as appropriation than as droit du seigneur. Pick to click: from the 1956 “This Is Tomorrow” show, Banham’s still-thrilling dada poem “Marriage of Two Minds,” even if they were divorced in advance.
DECEMBER 1990
1 Neil Young & Crazy Horse, “Over and Over,” from Ragged Glory (Reprise CD) Once upon a time Neil Young and a trio named Crazy Horse cut a tune called “Cowgirl in the Sand,” three verses serving as an excuse for three guitar breaks. On the first of those, Young made four stabs at a leading theme. He tried it as flamenco, screech, fuzztone; finally he gave up and played scales. Only second guitarist Danny Whitten, playing around the beat, held the sound together. Then Young sang the next verse and came off it so fast the expectations a listener brought to the second break never had a chance. With bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina pushing the rhythm and Whitten somehow anticipating the explosions going off in Young’s heart, the music changed into something there’s no word for: by split seconds it grew bigger, too big, blew away the room. That was in 1969; Whitten died in 1972 of a heroin overdose, his place taken by Frank Sampedro. The other difference is that this time Young gets it all on his first try.
2 Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Boy Williamson, as recorded by Alan Lomax, Blues in the Mississippi Night (Rykodisc CD with transcript) In 1946 three black men sat in a small studio with a folklorist and described and sang their music. Their subjects were peonage, violence, white supremacy, and death. The language they spoke summoned up an ancient world that promised mostly it would never change: mentioning a holster, Memphis Slim (Peter Chatman, 1915–88) referred to it as a scabbard. The men were certain their families would be killed if their talk were made public, and when the session was released, in the late ’50s, their names stayed missing. Now it’s history—meaning not that you can forget about it, but that once you’ve heard it you cannot.
3 Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out—The Raptures of Rock (Serpent’s Tall) Drunk on good French wine (mouth-filling Bataille red, astringent Kristeva white), a self-described “acolyte of obliteration” and “sucker-ass liberal” claims the pop present of A. R. Kane and Metallica over what anyone else cares to make of its past or future. “ ‘Bliss’ and ‘noise’ are the same thing,” this young British critic insists, as he grasps contradictions with both hands: “To embrace both decency and pop . . . to be a socialist by day and a hip hopper by night after a hard day’s campaigning, are quite feasible options, but only in a rotten, free-market society such as our own.” Thus Reynold’s credo, “Pop or a better world. The choice is yours!”—a good joke when he first flips it at you, a true riddle by the time you close his book.
4 Danzig, Danzig II—Lucifuge (Def American) What might happen if Jim Morrison reappeared fronting a mean, very efficient hard rock band: all those years in the grave would have turned his psychedelic shamanism into satanism, at least as a convincing career move. They would have also left him more ordinary, more passionate, and shameless, finally ready to admit how much he admires Gene Pitney.
5 Bob Dylan, “10,000 Men,” from Under the Red Sky (Columbia) His voice seems to drift away from him, all the way back to the way he sang “Trail of the Buffalo” 29 years ago, which may be where he left it.
6 Sidra Stich, curator, “Anxious Visions—Surrealist Art” (University Art Museum, Berkeley, through December 30; catalogue by Stich and others, Abbeville Press) Stressing the realism in Surrealism, arguing for its objects as versions of experience directly lived—the cataclysm of World War I and the political chaos of the next two decades—the show uses blowups of contemporaneous news photos as a frame. Most striking is “The Union of Bashed Faces,” ten formally dressed, hideously disfigured French veterans: “what,” Stich says, “the surrealists saw when they walked down the street” (and what, had this show been up 12 years ago, we would have seen—on punk flyers). Reflected off this item, the likes of Dora Marr’s uncanny photograph Père Ubu (1936: a fetal armadillo that looks a thousand years old) don’t seem precious, or in any manner fantastic. They seem most of all unfrivolous.
7 Boogie Down Productions, Edutainment (RCA) Hip-hop as lecture, thin and echoing—a great lecture, sometimes, as with “Love’s Gonna Get ’Cha (Material Love),” a dope-dealer parable that with its tinny toy-Uzi sound effects falls not far short of the empathy and fright of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message.”
8 Anonymous, Fascist—“Life Affirmation” issue A Xeroxed collage journal
, highlighted by an Archie comic with new speech balloons, wherein meliorist Veronica and CIA plant Archie outpoint commie dupe Betty in a dispute over Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, then call for violins to be dubbed in on every Replacements lp.
9 Spoc, “I Fought the Law” (wedding in Corunna, MI, 21 September, as reported by the AP) The groom was a major drug buyer fronting for a crime boss, or so the guests, all of them dealers, had been led to believe; when the band—COPS spelled backward—broke into the old Bobby Fuller Four hit, the bride pulled a gun from under her gown, and she and the rest of the wedding party busted everybody else. Whether it was a fitting homage to Fuller may depend on whether you believe his death in 1966 was due to accidental asphyxiation or, as rumor had it, gasoline poured down his throat.
10 Great Balls of Fire, Inc., Nampa, ID, Great Balls of Fire® Strike a match to one of these little gray spheres (six per box) and your charcoal or firewood starts up slow and steady, no flare, no smell. In a year or so they’ll have figured out how to make the things play the song while they burn.
JANUARY 1991
1 Susan McClary, “Living to Tell: Madonna’s Resurrection of the Fleshly,” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (University of Minnesota Press) McClary, a professor in the School of Music at the University of Minnesota, writes that her certification as a guardian of the highest and purest of Western art traditions demanded only a single sacrifice: “that I never ask what any of it means.” Thus McClary moves from female characters in 17th-century opera to Laurie Anderson as an apostate, but also as a teacher who’s found her own voice, a critic empowered by feminist theory and the thrill of fandom. “The strategies of Madonna’s songs are those of one who has radically conflicting subject positions—one who has been taught to cheer for resolutions in cultural narratives, but who also realizes that she is of the sort that typically gets purged for the sake of that resolution”—this is the ordinary language version of McClary’s formal, precisely musicological reading of the uncanny reversals and suspensions in Madonna’s “Live to Tell,” a reading as intense and lucid as the record itself.
2 Roxy Music, Heart Still Beating (Reprise/EG) A concert recorded in 1982 in Fréjus, France, by the remains of the best band of its time. Exquisite, though only fans will care; one day, some may even claim to have been there.
3 Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings (Columbia reissue, 1936–37); Hindu Love Gods (Warren Zevon with members of R.E.M.): “Travelin’ Riverside Blues,” from Hindu Love Gods (Reprise/Giant); Led Zeppelin: “Travelling Riverside Blues,” from Led Zeppelin (Atlantic four-CD reissue, 1969) Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson finally made the pop charts last fall, 52 years after his death. The occasion was the release of a 41-track boxed set—marred by scholastic programming, dumbly cropped photos, erroneous lyric transcriptions, and an illiterate, coyly racist biographical essay by coproducer Stephen C. LaVere. Two noisy, scattershot versions of one of Johnson’s shapeliest songs—both natural singles—erase LaVere’s garbage with pop trash.
4 Blake Babies, Sunburn (Mammoth) A Boston trio (Freda Boner, drums; Juliana Hatfield, bass & vocals; John Strohm, guitar & vocals) that hints at the heedless negations of Minnesota’s Babes in Toyland, though ultimately Hatfield’s teenage voice shies away back to Clare Grogan of Altered Images, and Strohm’s plain-talk “Train” harks back much farther than that: “I know that train you’re riding on / It’s 16 coaches long / My baby’s on that train and gone.” It speaks perfectly to
5 Alison Krauss, “Steel Rails,” from I’ve Got That Old Feeling (Rounder) She’s a teenage bluegrass fiddler with hundreds of years in her throat. The voice is small, always reaching for melody, somehow always slow within quick tempos, but her knowledge doesn’t hold against
6 Rosanne Cash, Interiors (Columbia) She may stand as the greatest of the Cash family. Seduced by rock ’n’ roll but unable to trust it, again and again she’s reembraced country, even waved at Las Vegas, but her touch betrays the fear that someday, in her career or in her private life, she could end up just like anybody else.
7 Marcia Ball, Lou Ann Barton & Angela Strehli, Dreams Come True (Antone’s) Hot stuff from white Texas soul singers who define their genre at the ends of certain lines, where words fray into instinctive melisma; thick, weathered voices that go clear in moments of surprise; and, with Barton’s “Bad Thing,” a last-call rocker written by bassist Sarah Brown, the sound of a whip hitting flesh, mainly to keep time.
8 Mick Fleetwood with Stephen Davis, Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleet-wood Mac (Morrow) For 23 years drummer for a group that today bears no resemblence to the drunken, obscene, blues-purist ensemble as which it began, Fleetwood’s pop history cum autobiography (“too stupid to do anything else”) is irrepressibly engaging and happily shallow—profoundly shallow, maybe. Fleetwood is ordinary and he treasures his ordinariness; his tale is shadowed by the early departures of his first three guitarists, all victims of one or another kind of madness. The term “deep blues” is rightly reserved for black artists, but Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green—born Peter Greenbaum, a Jew who became a solitary, sackcloth Christian—deserves it as Duane Allman never did and Eric Clapton never has. Listening today, Green’s late-’60s Fleetwood Mac blues—more than any, “Love that Burns,” inspired by Chicago bluesman Otis Rush’s “Double Trouble” and perhaps outreaching it—are shockingly cruel, romance caught at just that pass where it turns into nihilism. Mick Fleet-wood has played on a dozen memorable pop hits, but once he touched genius; his book is about how pleasant it is to be free of it.
9 Pet Shop Boys, “Being Boring,” from Behavior (EMI) Bohemian life as lived by British art students—very distant, flattened words, the joys of insularity, and the first true follow-up to the duo’s 1987 “Rent,” a tale of expensive male prostitution, though from which side you were never sure, as you’re not here.
10 Edwin Heaven, writer & director, trailer for 13th Annual Mill Valley Film Festival (Act One theater, Berkeley, 6 October 1990, preceding Henry & June) It was hilarious: a celebration of the Art of Film by means of an impossibly rushed montage of super-pretentious silent-movie clips. Oddly, the audience didn’t laugh. After the credits rolled, there was a final title card: “FREE JAMES BROWN!” The house roared as one, as if the director’s sole real homage was some kind of joke; then, when the last title to Henry & June came up, with the information that, after Paris, June Miller became a social worker, the crowd responded with the same mass titter. Talk about “High & Low” . . .
FEBRUARY 1991
1 ZZ Top, “My Head’s in Mississippi,” Recycler (Warner Bros.) Mick Jagger may have achieved union with the map of the South in “Parachute Woman,” but Billy Gibbons, with his feet in Texas, is probably the first to eat it. The lurching beat and the voice he can’t quite pull out of his throat describe what it means to remember a ten-day drunk in the middle of another one: you see God in a toilet bowl. “I keep thinking ’bout that night in Memphis,” Gibbons testifies. “Lord, I thought I was in heaven / I keep thinking ’bout that night in Memphis / I thought I was in heaven / But I was stumblin’ through the parking lot / Of an invisible 7-Eleven.” This will have been up and down the charts by now, but it’ll be back.
2 Sharyn McCrumb, If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (Scribner’s) A chilly, carefully paced murder mystery about the return of Vietnam ghosts to a small Tennessee town that seems to have spent the last twenty years looking over its shoulder. The story revolves around three kinds of music: the sheriff’s “internal Muzak,” the radio that plays in his head according to the clues everyday life kicks up; the hit parade of his Viet-vet deputy, mostly lurid sounds of Hendrix, the Doors; and the traditional Appalachian tunes of the famous-long-ago ’60s folksinger who’s lately moved into town. In every case, music is compulsively mnemonic, never utopian, enclosing, never liberating. The strands come together when, according to the archaic ballad “The Knoxville Girl,” a girl is found floating in the song’s river, and the sheriff’s rad
io turns on “Moody River,” sung by Pat Boone, “almost mindlessly cheerful,” the sheriff thinks, but then he’s not the DJ, just the receiver. Finally the killer comes back from the war: “Sex is good, but killing is better. You can remember killing clearer.” And music even more clearly than that.
3 Sisters of Mercy, Vision Thing (Elektra) Gloom and doom from Leeds, England, with a brutal title song about George Bush and a hit, “More,” produced by notorious Meat Loaf-meister Jim Steinman: very pretentious, and convincing from beginning to end.
4 Geraldo, “The Women They Sang About,” 28 November 1990 (CBS) Featuring Angela Bowie (“Angie,” Rolling Stones, 1973), Barbara Ann Rizzo (“Barbara Ann,” Regents, 1961, Beach Boys, 1965), Peggy Sue Rackham (“Peggy Sue,” Buddy Holly, 1957), and Donna Fox (“Donna,” Ritchie Valens, 1958). The Regents were present to sing “Barbara Ann” as its namesake danced with Geraldo, but the real action was with Fox. Geraldo asked her if it was true, as shown in the film La Bamba, that Valens wrote “Donna” for her because her father wouldn’t let her go out with a Hispanic. It was certainly true, Fox said: “My dad wasn’t a very nice man. I haven’t seen my father since I was 18. . . . I snuck out. I climbed out the window.” “Was your dad waiting for you?” “No, he was usually passed out.” No songs about that, then, but another exchange was mythical even if it happened, a novel in a day. When La Bamba was released, Rackham read in the paper that Fox lived in Sacramento, as does she. She called her up. “Are you the Donna in the song?” Oh no, thought Fox, who’d been inundated by calls from ’50s cultists, another one. “Yes,” she said. “Well,” said Rackham, “I’m Peggy Sue.”