Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  7 Roxy Music, Total Recall—A History, 1972–1982 (Virgin Music Video) TV appearances, concert footage, and primitive videos: madly outré in the beginning, when Bryan Ferry and the band would do anything for a thrill, pathetic in the middle, when they’d do anything for a hit, and exploding off the screen with Ferry’s 1976 solo “Let’s Stick Together”—where, as he emotes in his stiff-legged way, then-girlfriend Jerry Hall sticks a long leg into the frame and then vamps across it with a bombshell grin so self-absorbed you can already feel Ferry’s heart breaking.

  8 Guy Debord, Panegyric—Volume I, translated from the French by James Brook (Verso) From the author of The Society of the Spectacle, a brief and elegiac memoir of a life lived in its shadows and cracks. With a notable chapter on drunkenness as part of Debord’s lifework, and a comment on the loss of taste imposed on alcohol by mass production: “No one had ever imagined that he would see drink pass away before the drinker.”

  9 Cargo Records, advertisement (Option, September/October) “This young band,” reads the copy for First of Many, the debut disk from a duo calling themselves the Future, “dares to capture 60’s folk-rock music, and blend it with the 70’s revival, to create a new sound for a new generation.” “NO FUTURE FOR YOU/NO FUTURE FOR ME”—this must be the payoff.

  10 First Presbyterian Church, Yellow Springs, Ohio, sermon announcement (September 1991) “What kind of country is it in which people believe God is Dead but Elvis is Alive?”

  JANUARY 1992

  1–3 Fastbacks, The Answer Is You (Sub Pop double 45); In America (Lost & Found CD, Germany, recorded 1988); . . . and his Orchestra/Everyday Is Saturday/Play Five of Their Favorites (Popllama CD reissue, 1987, 1984, 1982) Seattle’s Fastbacks must be the most time-defying band in the world. Their very first, 1981 recordings (available on the hard-to-find LP never fails, never works, Blaster! Records, 3 Dove Lane, Bristol BS2 9HP, UK) represented their only real brush with fame—the drummer was Duff McKagan, now bassist in Guns N’ Roses. From then to now the Fastbacks have hammered at the door of an imaginary audience, the millions who could care less about their heart-on-their-sleeve punk, as if it were most of all the fact that the door is locked that keeps them talking. Their sound—Kim Warnick’s eager, no-range vocals set against Kurt Bloch’s sometimes raging, sometimes questioning guitar—has never changed, or even exactly improved. They can still play as if the notion had just occurred to them, and there are small, perfectly realized tunes—on the radio, odd ambushes of anyone’s pop expectations—scattered all across their decade.

  The four songs on The Answer Is You, though, might be their most free-swinging—one great, self-sustaining, all-night argument, with flashbacks of the Buzzcocks in “Impatience” and of the Safaris’ gentle 1960 “Image of a Girl” in “Above the Sunrise.” . . . and his Orchestra is the band’s best album. In America is live (“Thanks for staying,” Warnick ends it, without attitude)—and proof that, six years after, the title number was still one of Their Favorites.

  The song “In America” sums up the warmth and the fear that seem to lurk behind the Fastbacks’ music. It opens hard, like a Sex Pistols outtake; in Warnick’s voice is the permission to speak that punk gave to everyone who couldn’t sing. But the theme is a big one, what someone thinking seriously for the first time in her life might think about: whether the country is too much of a lie to take. The answer is that the lie will kill you only if you let it. “Who said the government’s on your side?” Warnick snaps—and the liberation in that line, the exile and the isolation, so much given up and so much claimed, is more than most bands will ever think of wanting.

  4 Pulnoc, City of Hysteria (Arista) Led by Milan Hlavsa of the Plastic People of the Universe, from which Pulnoc derives, this Czech band making its major-label debut has more than 20 years of persecution and fandom behind it, and, as Vaclav Havel says in the sleeve notes, something more. The secret of the Plastic People, Havel wrote in 1984, had to do with “a certain, specific experience of the world that has been formed here by history not just over decades, but over the centuries, a spiritual and emotional atmosphere that belongs to this place and no other.” You can hear hints of that on what at first seems mostly a lively, aggressive piece of ’60s-rooted art rock that suggests Eric Ambler’s pre-WWII Central European espionage thrillers as distantly as it does the prayers of pre-Christian religion, or the guitar break in Christie’s 1970 “Yellow River” as precisely as it does the light touch of Merrilee Rush’s 1968 “Angel of the Morning.” Repetition, pushed hard for truths it will give up only after one more time, underpins a sound where the instrumental doo-wop intro to “City of Hysteria” (“city of history,” singer Michaela Nemcová seems to make it) is as right as the jerky, trailing beat of “End of the World.” The group’s style is altogether its own, and also plainly unfinished; most of the faces in this band are lined and puffy, their eyes have too much knowledge in them, but still they’re just starting. As for Havel’s insistence that “encoded” in the music of the Plastic People is “an important warning . . . [from] a place where the knots of history are tied and unraveled” (that really has to be an epigraph for the next reissue of Ambler’s Background to Danger), such praise for a dead band is now the treasure a living band could spend the next 20 years seeking.

  5 Nancy Savoca, director, Dogfight (Warner Bros.) This modest, very believable film about a young soldier (River Phoenix) and the folksinger-worshiping “dog” (Lili Taylor) he meets the night before shipping out for Vietnam (November 21, 1963) uses a lot of period music, but it comes off the screen with its conventional signifiers reversed. Joan Baez’s pristine rendition of the ancient ballad “Silver Dagger” now communicates, or fails to communicate, the way bad pop is supposed to—it’s brittle, self-conscious, and completely timebound. But Claudine Clark’s “Party Lights” and other putatively disposable commodities seem like events—chants of flesh, will, and endless echo.

  6 Bob Marley and the Wailers, One Love at Studio One (Heartbeat reissue, 1963–71) The rude–boy ska–beat Wailers, back when Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer (now the only one not dead) lived from disk to disk. It’s a thrill to hear their first, not because “Simmer Down” is a classic but because it’s so inescapably a smash (this song can’t wait to get released and be a hit). The group covers everyone in sight (Dion and the Belmonts, Jimmy Clanton, Junior Walker, the Beatles) in quest of the same success, then stumbles into Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone.” Bunny Wailer sings a quiet, mournful lead; the opening beat is textbook “Louie Louie”; the chorus remains as Dylan wrote it; the verses are new, Old Testament imagery Dylan would have used if he’d thought of it: “Time like a scorpion/Stings without warning.” Oh, this is so good.

  7 Strawberry, Smash-Up—Story of a woman (Endless Music CD) Bits of monologue orchestrated out of a song or two and a lot of bad-dream electronics (the musician goes by Ursula, the producer by My Sin) finally take over in Strawberry’s long account of incest, prostitution, heroin, cocaine, living homeless in a cemetery, and epiphany (“I knew I couldn’t fuck another man for money”). Every line of the tale is affectless, unimpressed with its own pathos—on Oprah or Geraldo this wouldn’t do at all—and somehow validated by the soul Strawberry puts into the first cut of the set, a simple version of George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”

  8 Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Arc (Reprise) The two Weld CDs make a conventional live album, mostly redundant footnotes to songs prv. rl. Advertised as a random collage of onstage feedback, Arc seems almost composed, and sadistically so: a giant body of noise that for 35 minutes edges toward release and then gets distracted.

  9 John Helleman, “Rouble without a Cause,” in The Modern Review (Autumn 1991, UK) “It’s past midnight, 20 August, and Boris Yeltsin is hunkered down in the bowels of the Russian White House in Moscow. Outside, several hundred members of the resistance militia man the hastily assembledn barricades. Three of them will die later in the night. In his sanctuary, Yeltsin sits alone, pondering
that time, for him, is running out. . . . He puts on ‘Are you Lonesome Tonight?’ ”

  Think about it. Here is this man, at the crossroads of history, and he wants to know what Elvis Presley has to say about it. This is what he has to say about it: “You know, someone said, the world’s a stage, and each must play a part . . .” Is that what Yeltsin was listening for? Or was it the high-lonesome catch in Elvis’s voice as he traced the verses like a man running his fingers over the pages of an old book, over words that no longer make sense?

  10 Phil Spector, Back to Mono (1958–1969) (ABKCO 4-CD box) Girl groups, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, the Crystals, Darlene Love, the Christmas album, lost treasures from Love’s “Strange Love” to the Ronettes’ “Paradise,” the legacy—and, even “mastered in analog,” as it says here (with the information still stored and transmitted digitally), not the real thing, not even close. Spector’s “Wall of Sound,” Marshall Lieb, the producer’s first collaborator, once said, “was more air than sound,” and there’s no air here. What’s left is self-evidently a replica of a sound, a sheen without lungs or sweat: pinched, cold, not human.

  Don’t go near it. Look for the out-of-print LPs, especially the U.K. Rare Masters series; look for the singles, or wait for the vinyl bootlegs. “The mind has been tricked, but the heart is sad,” Neil Young recently said of digital reissues. “It doesn’t know why it can’t feel the music.”

  FEBRUARY 1992

  1 Otis Rush, “Double Trouble” (1958), on Groaning the Blues (Flywright LP, UK) or 1956–58: His Original Cobra Recordings (Flywright CD, UK) A year or so ago you could have heard Rush’s song as a personal statement or a Chicago blues classic, but not today. Now, bad times have expanded the music, blown it up: there are countless people traversing its two and a half minutes, and they grow smaller, more indistinct, as Rush’s voice gets bigger and his guitar moves like a virus. Sagging horns bring images of men and women walking the streets with their shoulders slumped; in the slow, hesitating drift of the main theme to the end of each chord progression, you can almost hear feet shuffling. “Some of this generation is millionaires,” Rush sings in bitter wonder, breaking the last word into three parts, “million-air-es,” making it fit the rhythm, but also making the word strange. The horns, guitar, and piano converge on the beat in a fury, but only for a phrase; then they separate, muted, as if they have nothing to say to each other. From line to line rage turns into embarrassment, oppression into shame. “You laughed at me walkin’, baby,” Rush shouts, then steps back like Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang dropping into the shadows of the film’s last shot, the voice quiet now: “But I have no place to go / Bad luck and trouble have taken me / I have no money to show.” By this time there is no place in the city the music doesn’t touch, or anyway no closed door it isn’t knocking on.

  2 Gambang Kromong Slendang Betawi, “Stambul Bila,” from Music of Indonesia 3: Music from the Outskirts of Jakarta (Smithsonian Folkways/Rounder) Nine minutes and 12 contemporary seconds in which you might imagine anything from a late-’30s Southeast Asian jazz band that got it all wrong to a troupe of original Dadaists who recorded underwater. At first the apparent complete disassociation between the drums, flute, stringed instruments, male singer, and female singer is funny; then boring; then it begins to make sense, and then you just barely miss the connection, just as Sydney Greenstreet puts the wrong piece of paper into Hugo Ball’s pocket in the weird nightclub of this song.

  3 Kid Balley, Tommy Johnson, Bukka White, Willie Brown, Ishmon Bracey, Louise Johnson, Son House, and Bertha Lee, Masters of the Delta Blues—The Friends of Charlie Patton (Yazoo reissue, late 1920s/early 1930s) Twenty-three cuts—and with both founder Patton (as a singer) and legatee Robert Johnson absent, this may still be the best country blues anthology ever assembled. The two guitars (House and Patton or Brown) on Son House’s original “Walking Blues” sound as clearly in the guitar line snaking behind John Mellencamp’s vocal in his new “Get a Leg Up” as they do in Johnson’s he-must-have-three-hands playing: there’s no distance from here to there. But on some tunes—Kid Bailey’s whispery “Rowdy Blues,” anything by Tommy Johnson—music that in fact opened into the future, into our present, seems to close in on itself, to shut its own door. The echo that remains leaves you wondering: if these dead people are in some way my ancestors, who am I?

  4 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life—Volumé One (1947/1958), translated by John Moore (Verso) In English for the first time (the 1971 Everyday Life in the Modern World was a tepid finale by comparison), this seductive, noisy, always querulous, always open text had its roots in the ’20s, in Marxism and Surrealism—which is to say that Marx is the judge, alienation is the crime, the commodity is the defense, Surrealism is the prosecutor, and you are both the victim and the accused.

  5 Howlin’ Wolf, The Chess Box (Chess/MCA 3-CD reissue, 1951–73) A good sampler of the work of one of the major American artists of the postwar period, but the revelation of the digital transfer, which dulls the edge of guitarist Willie Johnson, is to foreground Hubert Sumlin, who replaced Johnson in 1954, as one of the great mysteries of the blues. Huge sheets of sound break off the performances like sheets of ice breaking off an iceberg; on the way to the sea they change into sheets of glass and the sea turns into pavement. The man behind Robbie Robertson’s most explosive music, from Ronnie Hawkins’ 1963 “Who Do You Love” to Bob Dylan’s 1966 “Albert Hall” version of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Sumlin doesn’t seem to know where the beat is, or need to know. He’s an abstractionist; he could have played with Pollock.

  6 Chuck Berry, the Willows, Betty Boo, et al., Music from the Film “A Rage in Harlem” (Sire) Except for Robin Givens the movie’s a dud, and the music drowned out by gunfire and heavy breathing. But here new La Vern Baker bumps old Lloyd Price, Johnny Ace pleads for deliverance from Bo Diddley, James Brown meets Tommy Johnson in the form of Howlin’ Wolf, and it’s too bad there isn’t at least some Robin Givens dialogue . . .

  7 FSK (German-American Sextet), “Hitler Lives,” from Son of Kraut (Sub Up Records, Germany) Founded in 1980, FSK now resembles the Mekons with a lot more yodeling and a frame of reference that frequently tunes into Armed Forces Radio. “Hitler Lives” was an AFR hit in 1947, a warning that the ideas had to be buried with the man; today, as HITLER LEBT! is proud graffiti and purification follows unification, FSK’s cool, country rendition is almost wistful, until it turns into a rave-up.

  8 Wir, The First Letter (Mute/Electra) and Kevin S. Eden, Wire . . . everybody loves a history (SAF Publishing Ltd., Wembley, UK) On disc, England’s original art punk band loses a letter, a member (Robert Gotobed, one of the all-time punk names, even if it was real), and comes back to life, unpredictable and nervy; in endless interviews, punctuated with photos of them dressing up like Sydney Greenstreet’s contact in the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, they sound like anybody else.

  9 Clash, Clash on Broadway (Epic/Legacy 3-CD reissue, 1977–82) From “White Riot” to “Ghetto Defendant,” it takes them five years to get from Rasta London to the Paris Commune. It’s an interesting trip.

  10 Daniel M. Pinkwater, Young Adults (Tor paperback reissue, 1982/85) This really is a “young adult novel”—in which five high school washouts reform as the Wild Dada Ducks, levy fines on each other for such crimes as uttering the word “life-style,” and foment a prank that leads to the election of the school’s least-known student to all student offices, his transformation into a dictator with absolute power, and the defeat of Dada by Heroic Realism. In other words, a parable of the 1918 Berlin Dada club as a crucible for Nazism.

  MARCH 1992

  1 Eleventh Dream Day, Lived to Tell (Atlantic) Last April in these pages this fourth album from a Chicago four-piece seemed like a strong record; now it seems to cut loose from its time. And yet it is also exactly of its time: in its bitter, shamed embrace of exile and retreat, nailed again and again by Janet Beveridge Bean’s loud, stoic drumming—she’s learned something from Maureen T
ucker, and something from Al Jackson. I come back to “It’s Not My World” every week or so, when there’s a need to redeem the ugliness of the news, to hide in the sound—to be stretched out on Rick Rizzo’s long, tensed guitar passages as if they were a rack. Slipping into the lyrics that establish the song as just a set of stray fragments about how people are failing, are falling through the cracks, are finding that all doors open onto blank walls, you hit a chorus with no narrative connection to the bar talk you’ve been overhearing, but an absolute spiritual connection. The lyric jumps from third person to first, the singing is no longer conversational but stately, heavily cadenced, a curse read from some ruined pulpit: “Over and over / By and by / Living by habits / To get by,” the chorus begins, two people singing, but separately, as if they’ll never meet, don’t need to, don’t want to. “The world might be changing / Outside my door / But that’s not my world / Anymore.”

  2 Gordon Legge, The Shoe (Polygon, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1989) An expert, naturalistic novel about fandom as everyday life, nearly all of it: a few friends and their music in a nowhere town between Glasgow and Edinburgh. In their early 20s, querulous, trying to fend off cynicism and resignation, without real money or work, they talk about the radio, records, the pop press. They talk so intensely that if Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Never Understand” is “the spirit of the good,” another disk reflects the human spirit as cesspool. For all that’s shared, though—the attempt to act out in public the extreme feelings music provokes—fandom finally leaves each person a solitary, ruler of the kingdom of one’s own taste, and prisoner of it too. “I played Slippery People and Lady Marmalade three times each,” one character says to another. “The thing that bugs me about listening to my records is that nobody ever sees me when I’m that happy, and if they did they wouldn’t understand.”