Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  10 Mekons, The Curse of the Mekons (Blast First, U.K.) and Wallace Shawn, The Fever (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Their 14 years as a transhistorical punk band have become the Mekons’ subject, but not in terms of career. Rather the Mekons’ subject is their quarrel with history, and their growing conviction that it means to leave them behind; Sally Timms, so quietly soulful she can make Rosanne Cash seem strident, sometimes makes this story feel fated, but it always hurts. In Wallace Shawn’s one-person perform-anywhere play, the subject is the impossibility of escaping from history, and there is no relief, no humor. There is simply the scream of a bourgeois sorcerer (to quote Marx, and the Mekons quoting Marshall Berman quoting Marx) who cannot get free of his magic, cannot break the contract that ties his comfort to torture, his priceless individuality to the facelessness of the poor, who must be made to “understand that the dreamers, the idealists, the ones who say that they love the poor, will all become vicious killers in the end, and the ones who claim they can create something better will always end up by creating something worse. The poor must understand these essential lessons, chapters from history. And if they don’t understand them, they must all be taken out and shot.”

  The Mekons are always exuberant, whistling in the dark, but this is tough stuff, no fun, sleepless nights: to be left behind by history is to have never existed at all. “Funeral,” about the collapse of Marxism—which on The Curse of the Mekons means any resistance to capitalism as the measure of all things—is “a dinosaur’s confession”: “This funeral is for the wrong corpse.” Shawn’s nameless tourist enjoying his cheap holiday in other people’s misery has a ticket to the funeral, but he doesn’t want to go: “Cowards who sit in lecture halls or the halls of state denouncing the crimes of the revolutionaries are not as admirable as the farmers and nuns who ran so swiftly into the wind.” Listen as you read, read as you listen, and you might be back in Bob Dylan’s “Memphis Blues Again”: “Now people just get uglier/And I have no sense of time.”

  OCTOBER 1991

  1 Ice Cube, as Dough Boy in Boyz N the Hood, directed by John Singleton (Columbia Pictures) On the covers of Amerikkka’s Most Wanted and Kill at Will, Ice Cube flaunts a death stare—sort of daring you to buy his records, it can seem. But his eyes contain almost all of the credibility in this very Hollywoodish low-budget film-from-the-heart about a black L.A. neighborhood. Plainly the most intelligent character in the movie, Dough Boy has less of a chance than any other to do anything with his life but wait for it to end. In his face, from shot to shot, scene to scene, is the dilemma of what it means to act in a world where you’ve consciously given yourself over to a fate that no one around you has even imagined that—unlike the football player or the studious kids—you could ever escape. And there’s worse than that in Ice Cube’s eyes: the wish to take at least some of the blame off himself, and the knowledge that he can’t, because no one would listen to talk like that from a man with eyes like his.

  2 Robbie Robertson, Storyville (Geffen) As point-man for the Band—guitarist, songwriter, spokesman—Robertson rarely sang. When he released his first solo album, in 1987, it came draped in curtains of overproduction, themes so elaborated and vocals so disguised it was hard to discern an actual human being behind any of it. But this clean, cool record—vaguely set in New Orleans and cut with such Crescent City flyers as the Meters, Aaron Neville, the Rebirth Brass Band, Chief Bo Dollis of the Wild Magnolias, plus subtle contributions from Band keyboardist Garth Hudson—is alive. Horns carry melody, but lightly; the sound is full of room. Robertson’s voice is smoked, airy, pinched, ranging from a whisper to a rasp, but most of all it is unprotected. Very quickly, you can understand the story the voice is telling: a story too spectral for plot or anecdote, let alone any kind of shout. There’s no travelogue in the lyrics, no dead references to gumbo or second-line; the music kicks off with a “Night Parade” and follows it.

  3 Muzak, in Virginia Cleaners (Berkeley, June 24) The—yes, I think “strains” is the only word—were distantly familiar, teasing. The tune got better by the second, then better than that. It turned out to be “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love),” perhaps the only Top 40 record that makes the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” seem elegant and Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” sober—and even beneath Muzak’s polka accordions and the huffing, middle-aged beat, you could hear the Swingin’ Medallions, way back in ’66, somewhere in South Carolina, laughing at history and time.

  4 Charlie Feathers, Charlie Feathers (Elektra Nonesuch) Feathers hung around Sun Records in Memphis the same time Elvis did, and has claimed ever since that, in essence, he is Elvis; scores of records on more than a score of tiny labels have not proved his case. In fact he is a quirky, sometimes doggedly weird rockabilly survival, now lapsing into birdcalls and animal noises, now pumping his legend, and then (as, here, on “A Long Time Ago”) shifting without warning into a reverie—loose, spooky, wailing, and more than anything emotionally unclear—of the way things never were, of the man he never was. In moments like this there’s nobody like him.

  5 Chin-Chin, “Stop! Your Crying”/“Revolution”/“Cry in Vain” (Farmer Records, Zurich, Switzerland, 1986) Three Swiss women who sound like a whole batallion of Lesley Gores. The spirit of Lilliput lives, as it does also on.

  6 UnknownmiX, “Sincerely”/“Habibi” (RecRec Vertrieb, Zurich, Switzerland) Two women and two men who program their 7-inch like an “Oldies but Goodies” LP: a “Rockin’ Side,” all chirps and gulps, and a “Dreamy Side,” dark, Catholic, guilty, and forgiven.

  7 Jimmy Guterman and Owen O’Donnell, The Worst Rock-and-Roll Records of All Time (Citadel) A book that recognizes it’s as much fun to hate certain records and performers as it is to love others (or the same ones), and that insensate bigotry is the most fun of all. A lot of pages here get by on mere glee (on the 1984 Michael Jackson-Mick Jagger duet, “State of Shock”: “it seems as if the song takes longer to listen to than it did to record”), but there’s also rage, even paranoia—which can be even more satisfying than bigotry. On Bryan Adams’ 1985 “Summer of ’69”: “The sixties nostalgia that sprung up in the mid-eighties was a fraud by industry leaders who refused to divulge to a new generation that the unmatchable music was inextricable from the horrible events that split this country in two as nothing had since the Civil War. Instead, culturally uneducated kids were made to hear songs like Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Street’ . . . as no more than party ditties. It’s this imagined sixties—one without Vietnam, one without James Earl Ray, one without Altamont—that ‘Summer of ’69’ memorializes.” Yeah, but I still like it.

  8 Hole, Pretty on the Inside (Caroline) Coproduced by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, this debut set from an L.A. combo could pass for a Kim Gordon solo album, if you didn’t miss her wit. Somehow every song would jump a notch in flair if singer Courtney Love—who has a deep, harsh voice that without a stage is just too theatrical to wound—had changed her name to Courtly.

  9 Marc Cohn, Marc Cohn (Atlantic) The hit “Walking in Memphis” is a sentimental version of the quest made by the young Japanese couple in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train—corny, but also more vivid. The hit “Silver Thunderbird” is a mystified version of, oh, the Beach Boys’ “409,” but it carries a lift and it leaves an echo. Cohn has a thick voice with little play in it, and uses heavy, portentous piano notes without any humor. He can be written off as a decent Springsteen acolyte or an improvement on Billy Joel, which would still be second-rate; maybe he’s the new Bruce Hornsby. But his songs have shape and heart; one more hit—which I don’t hear on this first album—and he might turn his own corner.

  10 Public Image Ltd., Metal Box (Virgin U.K. reissue, 1979) Then as now, this unsuperseded miasma of loathing and dub comes in a can—though now instead of three 12-inch 45s there’s one CD, and the container is only four-and-three-quarter inches across. It’s so cute.

  NOVEMBER 1991

  1 John Lee Hooker, “I Cover the Waterfront,” from Mr. Lucky (C
harisma/Point Blank) At 74, the bluesman records with devotees gathered at his feet (here, Keith Richards, Albert Collins, Robert Cray, Johnny Winter, etc.), but he is not relaxed. With “I Cover the Waterfront” (not the standard, not exactly even a song), he takes the title phrase and for six minutes drifts through it, now a night watchman, now a night crawler. Booker T. Jones quietly vamps on organ, Van Morrison flicks brittle notes off a guitar, and Hooker seems to hold still, hovering over the docks and the water; there’s great calm in his voice, and certain death. It’s as if he died a long time ago, long since came to terms with that fact, but wants another look.

  2–3 James Carr, “The Dark End of the Street,” on You Got My Mind Messed Up (Goldwax/Vivid Sound reissue, 1966, Japan) and the Commitments: “The Dark End of the Street,” in The Commitments, directed by Alan Parker (20th Century Fox) Carr was only about 24 when he recorded this ballad about adultery that makes “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right” seem like Whitney Houston material—but he sounded much older, or maybe ageless. He’s been called “The World’s Greatest Soul Singer,” but if his style is the essence of the genre he’s also defined by it, and never escapes it. There’s terrible fright when he almost stops “The Dark End of the Street” to call out, “They gonna find us, they gonna find us,” but then he’s rescued by the very classicism of his own performance.

  A quarter-century later the tune shows up in a movie about a fictional, present-day white Dublin band, a bunch of kids who want to play soul music—to carry the torch of freedom it once symbolized—or maybe just get heard, get around. So the musicians, backup singers, and lead singer Andrew Strong, 16 (looking 30, sounding 24?), haul the song onto the stage of their first-ever gig as if it’s a dead man’s corpse and it’s up to them to bury it, hide it, or bring it back to life. They’re amateurs, we’ve seen that their passion most often produces only bum notes, but this time Strong gets his hands around the dead man’s throat and begins to strangle air into him. Not even a memory of Carr’s restraint, his knowledge, remains in the song; the people on the screen seem to get bigger as the music seems to rise in volume. The performance is crude, noisy, sweaty, confused, a mess, and there were tears on my face before it was half through.

  4 Duncan Browne, Give Me Take You (Immediate/Sony Music Special Products reissue, 1968) Pre-Raphaelite rock, and one of a kind.

  5 Geto Boys, We Can’t Be Stopped (RAP-A-LOT/Priority) The Geffen label dropped this Houston outfit’s first disk for excessive violence, misogyny, and necrophilia, and there’s plenty of ho’-bitch spew on number two. But spinning hard at the center, so hard it throws off almost everything else, is “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” something between a bad dream and a reverie—the sort of confession that has to be made to the whole world, never to a friend, because a friend might see you differently but the world won’t see you at all. Socially sanctioned (or anyway genre sanctioned) rage dissolves into a doubt that has no support outside of its own reality, its own vertigo; it calls up shades of empathy and regret that vanish before they can be named. Plus there’s “Trophy,” an anti-Grammy rant that scores with Elvis’ award for “Most Appearances Made After Death.” He can’t be present, “due to illness,” so accepting instead is—the Grateful Dead.

  6 Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Out in the Cold” (MCA) You need ten random seconds on the radio to know you have to hear it again, two or three the next time around to know that you are. It’s nothing new: Petty’s been a hit machine since 1977, playing a loner sensitive enough to whine about being tough. Save for those rare exceptions when his songs are about someone else (“American Girl,” “Refugee”), his music has zero content, just rockabilly formalism. All that’s formally different this time is the breakup of the number by drums, not guitar—and yet the urgency is unstoppable. It’s by the book but it can sound like Petty’s got the only copy.

  7 Private Joke, “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” on All Things Considered (National Public Radio, August 29) As sung by Mikhail Gorbachev with postcoup lyrics, the closing shouts of “Hey, I’m back! I’m back!” echoing as if no one is listening.

  8 Negativland, “U2” (SST) The California collage unit makes fun of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and so comprehensively you might begin to feel sorry for Bono. Among numerous interjections and found aural objects, the hook is a sample of D.J. Casey Kasem chirping “That’s the letter U—and the numeral two!” so many times he turns into Mr. Rogers. Squelched just weeks after release by U2’s label—if the band has a sense of humor they’ll put it out themselves.

  9 Van Morrison, Hymns to the Silence (Polydor) An ambitious career survey by means of 21 new songs, and finally flat, too clean, well-crafted, and lifeless. But there are moments, as when Morrison chants “Take me back” five times, and then, with complete disregard for rhythm or timing, caring for nothing but bitterness and exile, just says what he means: “To when the world made more sense.”

  10 Avengers, The Avengers (Target Video, 1978—try used-video or -music stores) The tape is dim and smudgy, the right tone for eight live shots from San Francisco’s best punk band. Target gets a little arty with “Car Crash,” intercutting a lot of stock car-crash footage and a highway patrolman setting up a roadblock. It takes a few seconds to realize it’s Ronald Reagan—in 1964, in Don Siegel’s version of The Killers, in his last and best role, as Mr. Big.

  DECEMBER 1991

  1 Buzzcocks, Spiral Scratch (Document CD or 12”, U.K.) and Time’s Up (Document CD, U.K.) In the summer of 1976, in Manchester, the Buzzcocks formed on the model of the Sex Pistols; in October, with Howard Devoto as singer, they went into the local Revolution studio and for something under $100 of mike time cut their songs. Released in February 1977, the EP Spiral Scratch was only the third U.K. punk disk to be issued; more than that, it was the first independent, do-it-yourself U.K. punk record; and more than that, it was definitive. “Boredom” (“I’m living in this, uh, movie,” Devoto snapped, “But it doesn’t move me”) was an instant anthem, or rather a fragment of an anthem floating away to be caught by its listeners. It set the tone: sarcastic (many of the tunes had their genesis in a notebook where Devoto had set down all-purpose, lumpen-surrealist insults), distracted, thin, spidery, and most of all in a hurry. Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” was about taking a stand; “Breakdown,” “Friends of Mine,” and the rest (bootlegged as Time’s Up again and again over the years) were about evading an enemy more sensed than defined, and then turning up at his back, then disappearing. The feeling was anonymous—a dare taken and won.

  Devoto went on to more ornamented music with his groups Magazine and Luxuria; led by guitarist Pete Shelley, the Buzzcocks made sharp, poppy punk through the decade (re-formed, they tour the clubs even now). But October 1976 was their moment. With “Lester Sands (Drop in the ocean)” they caught an ancient snarl, blindly retrieving the voice of the Ranters along with echoes of their cosmology (“Every creature is God,” it was written in 1646, “every creature that hath life and breath being an efflux of God, and shall return to God again, be swallowed up in him as a drop is in the ocean”). Blasphemy edged out of their blank complaints; ambition rose from the songs and came down as vengeance.

  “History is made by those who say ‘no,’ ” Jon Savage writes at the close of England’s Dreaming, his recreation of the Sex Pistols’ era, “and Punk’s utopian heresies remain its gift to the world.” On Spiral Scratch and Time’s Up that gift was offered as ordinary, unspectacular, everyday life; since the music was made the world has changed enough that, putting on the disks today, it can seem as if the gift is being opened for the first time.

  2 Bruce Thomas, The Big Wheel—Rock & Roll and Roadside Attractions (Faber and Faber) Elvis Costello’s former Attractions bassist on the road, living in a dream, remaking it on the page with a born writer’s love of the right phrase and a loathing for cliché, and, finally, trying to break away: “There were times when it all made sense. After all, nobody plays a piece of
music just to get to the last note. There were some nights when everything went with that effortless kind of swing that requires a certain kind of effort to allow. Nights like those were never the same and could not be repeated; they contained a feeling of being a spectator as well as a participant.”

  3 Nirvana, video for “Smells like Teen Spirit” (directed by Samuel Bayer, DGC Records) Lear to Gloucester: “There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, corruption”—all this when the visual setup is no more than a small crowd and a furious Seattle three-piece in a high school gym.

  4 Ashtray, “Trailer”/“Riding on the Train” (Shoe Records) A nothing day in the present on the A side wars against a timeless, lyrical chorus shared by guitarist Joe Leifheit and bassist Sarah Howells on the B; the balance tips to the past and into it.

  5 Erasure, Chorus (Sire) Dance music you can use sitting still, at 3 A.M.

  6 Brian Morton, The Dylanist (HarperCollins) In this novel about a young woman growing up through the lives lived and surrendered by her parents, ex-Communists who still believe, what begins in mildness turns graceful and then quietly hard. Bob Dylan is Sally Burke’s talisman—she’s a Dylanist, a young union man tells her as she revels in a bootlegged copy of the incomprehensible, never released Basement Tapes tune “I’m Not There” (“This,” she says, “may be the greatest song ever written,” and she’s right); she’s “too hip to believe in anything but [her] own feelings.” But she grows past Dylan, too—in her late 20s, “when she looked at his records, she could never find anything she wanted to hear.” In the end who she is is more fated, a life made of a contradiction Dylan might have escaped but she can’t: “She would never find a home, as [her parents] had, in the effort to transfigure the world. But in her belief that she lived in a world that needed to be transfigured, she’d probably always feel homeless.”