Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  5 Nightline, “Justify My Love” video plus interview with Madonna, 3 December 1990 (ABC) For all the press this show got, no one seems to have mentioned the most shocking moment: at the end of a Rock the Vote anticensorship commercial, Donny Osmond in an SS uniform, grinning madly.

  6 Van Morrison, Enlightenment (Mercury) After twenty-five years his voice has turned thick; in another twenty-five it may still float, even if it’s on Van Morrison Sings John McCormack, who can be heard in

  7 Ethan and Joel Coen, Miller’s Crossing (20th Century Fox) What lifts this academically severe version of Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest, “The Big Knock-over”) out of its homage is the face of Gabriel Byrne’s Irish gangster. He has the malevolent intelligence you once saw in Bob Dylan, a look—and it’s far too complex to be a single look—that Sting, Chuck D., Ice Cube, and Sinéad O’Connor will be working on for years.

  8 Twin Peaks, 17 November 1990 (ABC) With Benjamin Horne briefly jailed for the murder of Laura Palmer (I still think he did it), his lawyer brother notices the cell’s metal bunk beds, thinks of the nice wooden bunks he once shared with Ben, then remembers something else from their bedroom: the two of them, 10 or 12, sitting wide-eyed in the dark as an older Louise Dombrowski danced for them with a flashlight, swaying magically to Angelo Badalamenti’s generically obvious version of the corniest plano-triplet doo-wop. The scene caught the feel of teenage sex you can find in fiction by Keith Abbott and Jill McCorkle and not often elsewhere: the mystery of an unfamiliar body, the other’s, yours, desire that breaks no rules because it dissolves them—desire that, unsatisfied, decades later, can make new sense as death. “I knew I was going to lie there with him on that sleeping bag and I was going to look through the slit in the drapes to that empty room, the windows there, beyond which the trees were lush and green,” McCorkle’s Kate remembers in Ferris Beach (Algonquin, 1990), prettifying, then not: “I was going to pretend that there was no day other than this one, no world beyond those trees; there was no future, no guarantee that I would turn sixteen, this was it.”

  9 Paris, The Devil Made Me Do It (Tommy Boy) A flat San Francisco rapper celebrated for his bring-back-the-Black-Panthers rhetoric (you won’t hear it anywhere else), his disc appropriately packaged with bios of Nat Turner, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton, ignoring what Malcolm X found out about Elijah Muhammad and sadly noting that in 1989 Newton was murdered by “unknown assailants,” as opposed to the Oakland crack dealer who confessed to the killing. In other words, pop Stalinism, or the kind of revisionism you can find in most textbooks on American history.

  10 Students in Biology and Society 451, AIDS and Society, 6 December 1990 (Cornell University student union) Having taped “Justify My Love” off Nightline, the class ran the video nonstop as part of AIDS Awareness Week, handing out condoms to the hundreds who came to watch—most of whom, the Cornell Daily Sun reported, “laughed self-consciously.” One condemned the clip as “warped.” “ ‘You should have to pay a quarter to see this video in an adult book store,’ said Alex C. Smith, ’92.” Wake up: Jesse Helms is not the enemy. The enemy is nice people you have to argue with.

  MARCH 1991

  1 Various radio stations, format violation, January 15 After so many years devoted to erasing the notion that in the mix of radio sounds one might expect a subject, it was a shock, on this strange, suspended day, to find the medium talking to you, in a kind of celebration of dread. No matter what button you pushed you were faced with the same conversation, the pressure drop of Edwin Starr’s “War,” or Bruce Springsteen’s cover of it, or Freda Payne’s “Bring the Boys Home,” Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” Gang of Four’s “I Love a Man in a Uniform,” Creedence Clearwater’s “Bad Moon Rising,” Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes the Flood,” an unidentified woman’s “Will Jesus Wash the Blood from Your Hands,” the Beatles’ “I Wanna Be Your Man” (relief, violation of the new format within the old format; it felt fabulous). Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance” seemed thin and arch, too far above the mess of confused, violently random emotion, morally insulated (though not so much as Sean Lennon and Lenny Kravitz’s Peace Choir smile-button video for their new version of the tune, so removed from fear its basic message might have been that Cyndi Lauper had found a way to get back on MTV). Cutting through the many voices, even those of songs only playing in your head—Elvis Costello’s “(What’s So Funny ’bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” maybe, or Metallica’s “One,” or Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” (“Your military arms,” so softly, “your petrochemical arms”)—was the Pogues’ “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” It’s a long, slow, unbearably bitter first-person account of a mutilated Australian soldier who came back from Gallipoli; Shane MacGowan collapses 70 years to make the man explain why he wishes he hadn’t come back, self-hate and wonderment dripping from every line. When the war began the next day HBO had Top Gun scheduled and the radio was back to normal.

  2 Blue Sky Boys, “Where the Soul of Man Never Dies,” from Something Got a Hold of Me—A Treasury of Sacred Music (RCA reissue, 1936) This modest white-gospel embrace of the unknowable says it’s the Holy Land; Sam Phillips once said it was Howlin’ Wolf.

  3 Ed Sanders, The Family—The Manson Group and Its Aftermath (Signet/NAL reissue, 1971) Twenty-two years later it still sits there, right in the middle of the Beach Boys’ 20/20, “Never Learn Not to Love.” “A disturbing lyric and an hypnotic sound,” read the liner notes to the CD reissue. No kidding: credited to Dennis Wilson, in truth the song was written by Charles Manson. He titled it “Cease To Exist,” and that’s what it says, even now. Even now: “Out there somewhere,” Sanders says at the end of this extensively updated edition of one of the few great books on and from the ’60s, “are the scattered handful of foreheads with faint fading X’s. . . .” If that doesn’t make your flesh creep maybe the book won’t scare you. Here sex can seem uglier than murder, murder more casual than sex, sex so often ritual, dog blood poured on copulating bodies a logical extension of the standard Family initiation or its everyday, California, do-your-own-thing version of Adamite and Free Spirit beliefs and practices that went back almost a thousand years. Even without the material on the Process Church of the Final Judgment and the Solar Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, removed after the first edition because of lawsuits (but that’s what libraries are for), Sanders’ narrative casts a spell so strong it can suck in almost anything. I saw the Shangri-Las in a TV nostalgia clip doing “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” and in their blithe teenage nihilism they could have been from Manson’s harem; I heard Neil Young singing about an old man with a kind voice and wild eyes in “Mansion on the Hill”—the one with the creaky psychedelic music drifting out of the windows—and who else could it be? “He was different,” Young remembered a few years ago. “Something about him that’s . . . I can’t forget it. I don’t know what you would call it, but I wouldn’t want to call it anything in an interview.”

  4 Sydney Youngblood, Sydney Young-blood (Arista) The shift from the classically arranged soul misery of “I’d Rather Go Blind” to the dance of hooks in the following “Sit and Wait” indicates this young singer could take Roland Gift’s place in Fine Young Cannibals if he had to, but he won’t have to.

  5 Robert Klein, “Fabulous 50’s,” from Child of the 50’s (Rhino reissue, 1973) The comic throws every trick of the genre into this doo-wop parody, and every one shines, especially the recitation, “And so/I wrote a letter/To Joe McCarthy/In the sky”—“Joe McCarthy/In the sky,” echoes the falsetto chorus—“I said, ‘My teacher is a Communist. . . .’ ”

  6 Tony Scherman, “The Hellhound’s Trail—Following Robert Johnson” (Musician, January) The best result of the botched release of Johnson’s Complete Recordings is this set of interviews with 11 contemporary musicians on the ’30s country bluesman. Vernon Reid presses the tension between the existential and the social, Robert Plant the thri
ll of the unexplainable, Ry Cooder impossibility (“It is very hard to do . . . I don’t play Robert Johnson’s music, ’cause I just can’t get in the door”), Jim Dickinson talks about madness, and Billy Gibbons about “why the Mississippi Delta blues—the work of just a few people, who were black, illiterate, who were from a whole other world than urban people in the ’90s—can still affect us so deeply”: because “there was no reason, ethnically or politically or spiritually, for these guys to hold back.”

  7 Chumbawamba, “Ulrike,” from Slap! (Agit-Prop) As a reggae horn section kicks up dust, a duet from beyond the grave: a pseudo-Meinhof, insisting in a clear, un-solemn pop voice that she’s not sorry (“Don’t think I walked into banks to stand in the queue”—Raymond Chandler wouldn’t have minded having written that); then Elvis, not pseudo but sampled (credited as a band member doubling on Quaaludes and Placydil), aiming “Can’t Help Falling in Love” right back.

  8 David Lee Roth, A Little Ain’t Enough (Warner Bros.) It’s been seven years since “Jump” but he can still rewrite “Back Door Man” and call it “Hammerhead Shark.”

  9 California State Department of Motor Vehicles, radio public-service announcement (1991) 800 number to call for newly mandated training required for minor’s motorcycle operator’s license: 227-4337—or, as the ad put it, “CCR-IDER.” And you thought bureaucrats couldn’t sing the blues.

  10 Ice Cube, “Dead Homiez,” from Kill at Will (Priority) In naked mourning, the L.A. rapper gives up his armed ’n’ dangerous pose to wear his heart on his sleeve—the sleeve of his DEAD HOMIEZ T-shirt, which can be yours for only $12.95. Add $3 for shipping and handling.

  APRIL 1991

  1 Pamela Page and Patrick Montgomery, Rock and Roll the Early Days (Archive Films, 1985, running occasionally on VH-1) Of all the documentaries on the subject—each one picking up much of the same stock footage of Elvis, of DJs breaking barbaric records on the air or White Citizens Council spokesmen denouncing animal music—none touches this one. That may be because it focuses so sharply on black artists and dancing. White zoot-suiters turn “Roll Over Beethoven” into Roll Over Isaac Newton; then black teenagers rise out of their seats in some Tropicana hotel ballroom and explode into a kicking line that’s plainly not of this world—not this world, anyway. Clips of a shockingly cloddish Bill Haley are cut away into performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Treniers—and Bo Diddley, who even in this company seems most of all strange, the Alien King. Poker-faced, riding that underwater guitar sound that simply does not connect to anyone else’s rhythms, he negates the genre even as it’s forming. He’s at once primeval, inescapably African, and almost formally avant-garde, anticipating and then leaping past the Fluxus music of the years to come and back to Dada, which in certain moments thought it was African too. Throughout the production there’s a controlling sense of novelty coming off the singers and dancers—the bounce of the new, an apprehension of the never before. It’s so strong that, as you watch, it can produce an unwanted corollary: never again.

  2 Eleventh Dream Day, Lived To Tell (Atlantic) Made by a four-piece Chicago band, this is a record to get lost in, with vocal action that’s hard to catch hovering over grinding, growling guitar noise like a heat mirage on a highway no one’s driven for years. Guitarist Rick Rizzo does most of the singing, but it’s drummer Janet Bean, rushing in at the end of a verse like Exene Cervenka ambushing John Doe in X, who nails song after song. Words emerge in fragments in a seamless aural setting; the whole, once you glimpse it, is exhilarating and bleak, the exhilaration of people saying what they mean even if they wish they could talk about something other than their fear of loss, defeat, and hiding. The music holds an inner drama, summed up in lines by Bean: “There’s this thing, lately/Where the sound of tearing fabric/Is louder than the traffic.”

  3 a-ha, East of the Sun, West of the Moon (Warner Bros) Meaningless pop songs from a Swedish boy group.

  4 Book of Love, Candy Carol (Sire) Dreamy, mysterious pop songs from a New York girl group. More or less meaningless, though not, were it to hit the radio, the muscular dance track “Quiver,” as in “She/Makes me. . . .”

  5 Randy Newman, “Lines in the Sand” (Reprise) Not for sale, distributed only to DJs, and no surprise most didn’t play it. Against the piety of “Voices That Care,” the Hollywood tribute-to-the-troops number (they should have called it “We Are the War”), this was an elegy in advance: a cold, defeatist funeral march.

  6 Sport, Skels Life #10 (Mystery Fez) Skels is a decent rock ’n’ roll outfit but Skels Life is a great rock ’n’ roll comic book, a 12-page collage of ’60s underground styles, pornography, and male girdle ads that usually operates on the level of Jess’s ’50s Dick Tracy revisions. I keep coming back to one of the artworks that beat out Sport’s latest bid for a government grant: Sinéad O’Connor as painted by “Walter Keen.”

  7 Bob Marley & the Wailers, Talkin’ Blues (Tuff Gang/Island) An impeccable live set cut in 1973; when Marley sings “I remember / On the slave ship,” “the mystic chords of memory” is no metaphor.

  8 Rolling Stones, “Gimmie Shelter” (as licensed for a PSA for the American Red Cross) What a fine conceit: a paramedic squad as a band, with, among others, Paul Shaffer “on keys” (at a blood-drive computer) and Carly Simon “on lead,” heroically guiding some kids to safety with the same expression of celebrity noblesse oblige that Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin spent a whole film critiquing with the 1972 Letter to Jane: Investigation of a Still. It’s no use saying the song deserves better; a commercial for home insurance would be better.

  9 R.E.M., “I Walked with a Zombie,” from Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye—A Tribute to Roky Erickson (Sire) This is a metaphor—for R.E.M. It’s also their best recording.

  10 Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, edited by Hans J. Klein-schmidt (University of California Press reissue, 1974) Hulsenbeck (1892–1974) was the Dada African (also a bourgeois German medical student), pounding his big drum and chanting “Negro poems” on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. Perhaps because he wasn’t an artist but a noisemaker, a troublemaker, Herr Bad News, he became Dada’s most unapologetic chronicler and least evasive storyteller. Top tale in Memoirs: Richard meets a girl from a nice family who appreciates his promising future but not the embarrassing stuff he does on stage—in other words, she won’t sleep with him unless he agrees to give up Dada. He’s in agony, he feels the zeitgeist in his heart every night in the cabaret. On the other hand . . . Thus he gives in—but, as he would later write, “Dada was a creature which stood head and shoulders above all present,” and when the big night comes he turns up impotent. So he went back to the nightclub.

  MAY 1991

  1 Bob Dylan, at the Grammy Awards (CBS, 20 February) Thirty years after arriving in New York from Minnesota, Bob Dylan stepped forward to be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The blanket of acceptance that had been draped over the show was so heavy the WAR SUCKS T-shirt New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg wore to the American Music Awards a few weeks earlier would have been forbidden here; maybe that’s why Dylan sang “Masters of War,” and maybe that’s why he disguised it, smearing the verses into one long word. If you caught on to the number, the lyrics did emerge—“And I’ll stand o’er your grave/’Til I’m sure that you’re dead”—but lyrics were not the point. What was was the ride Dylan and his band gave them. With hats pulled down and dressed dark, looking and moving like Chicago hipsters from the end of the ’50s, guitarists Cesar Diaz and John Jackson, bassist Tony Garnier, and drummer Ian Wallace went after the song as if it was theirs as much as Dylan’s: a chance at revenge, excitement, pleasure. You couldn’t tell one from the other, and why bother?

  With this career performance behind him, Dylan took his trophy from a beaming Jack Nicholson; he squinted, as if looking for his mother, who was in the audience. “Well,” he said, “my daddy, he didn’t leave me much, you know, he was a very simple man, but what he tell me was this, he did
say, son, he said”—there was a long pause, nervous laughter from the crowd—“he say, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you and if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your own ways.”

  Then he walked off. He had managed to get in and out without thanking anybody, and this night it really did seem as if he owed nobody anything.

  2 Rolling Stones, “Highwire” (Rolling Stones Records) There’s a helplessly celebratory cast to the flabby, crowded, let’s-hope-for-the-best closing choruses of this Desert Storm disc, but the action is up front, in the open sound that drives the verses (built around “Get up, stand up” and “Catch a fire,” old revolutionary phrases from Bob Marley and the Wailers), in the amazingly cynical snap Mick Jagger uses to break up every line. Recorded just before the air war began, hitting the radio just as the ground war was ending, the song’s timing made it simultaneously moot and dangerous: it came off as a cheap exploitation of the last war and a set-up for the next one.

  3 Enigma, MCMXC a.D. (Charisma) For the nearly 12 minutes of “Principles of Lust,” which includes the world-wide Gregorian chant-hit “Sadeness,” probably the best heavy-breathing number since Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg’s 1969 “Je t’aime (moi non plus)”—which enjoyed a certain revival after Gainsbourg’s March 2 death in Paris, though Conservative leader Jacques Chirac said it was Gainsbourg’s song “Harley-Davidson” that was “engraved on my heart.”

  4 Oliver Stone, director, The Doors (Tri-Star) Nothing could be easier than to write this movie off, but there are currents of empathy at work throughout that bring you face to face with “the ’60s” as a true curse: no grand, simple, romantic time to sell to present-day teenagers as a nice place to visit, but a time that, even as it came forth, people sensed they could never really inhabit, and also never leave. Stone catches this displacement in the concert sequences near the end of the Doors’ career. He makes a terrific noise out of instruments, fans, booze, nudity, fire, feedback, and history, but as he moves the show on he makes the sound stop. All you can fix on is Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison, in a moment of complete suspension, caught between wondering how he got where he is and accepting that he can’t go forward and he can’t go back. It may not be the story the band set out to tell, but it’s what the movie has done to