Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  3 Gabriel Sibusi, “Call Me Mister!” from Flying Rock—South African Rock ’n Roll, 1950–1962 (Global Village cassette) An anthology of black South Africans reworking Elvis, Gene Vincent, the Drifters, Buddy Holly, etc., and surprising partly because it so precisely parallels the efforts of second-rank white American performers to do the same thing—from hopeless shouts of “Rog, rog, rog, everybody rog” (King’s Brothers’ “Zulu Rock”) to highly individualized attempts to shift steel-guitar phrasing into rockabilly (the Bogard Brothers’ “She Keeps on Knocking”). But Sibusi’s testament, recorded in the early ’60s, works on another level. As on a lot of the cuts, the instrumentation is only strummed acoustic guitar. The insinuating melody anticipates Desmond Dekker and the Aces’ 1969 reggae hit “Israelites” even as the vocal can recall New Orleans bluesman Rabbit Brown’s 1927 attack on “The Sinking of the Titanic”—a smoldering, gloating attack, because the Titanic advertised itself as for Caucasians only. Sibusi’s subject is race, and the Titanic of his own country, and though he sings from the shadows, his bare affirmation today reverberates so powerfully you hope he’s alive to feel it: “I will never be as ashamed as much / As you think.”

  4 Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, 101 Dalmatians (Chrysalis) This first album by two former London buskers is the noisiest and smartest record I’ve heard since early Wire—and more hysterical, in both senses of the word. It begins slowly; after five cuts the subject matter burns off its satire (“A Perfect Day to Drop the Bomb”) and the singing, or ranting, or insane critical recycling of pop references, leaves the world behind. Chuck Berry’s “Memphis” is smeared into “Long distance information get me Jesus on the line,” there’s a dialogue sample from (I think) Stan Freberg’s 1960 “The Old Payola Roll Blues,” and then a quote from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” so bloody and convincing (“DON’T / PUSH ME / ’CAUSE—”) you can’t believe the disk keeps spinning. I hope these guys stay healthy; they could change a lot.

  5 Nirvana, Bleach (Sub Pop, 1989) A close call between this debut lp and the chart-topping Nevermind, but here there’s less of a stagger, more inexplicable leaps. And whatever Nevermind has, it doesn’t have anybody ending a song called “School” with terrorized shouts of “NO RECESS! NO RECESS!” And neither does anything else in the history of rock ’n’ roll.

  6 Lou Reed, guitar solo, “Magic and Loss: The Summation,” on Magic and Loss (Sire) The talk-singing is no more pungent than elsewhere on this elegy, the lyrics are sticky (“There’s a bit of magic in everything / And some loss to even things out”), but there’s also a rising, hovering fuzztone that—to paraphrase Skip James on himself—has been and gone from places most music never gets to.

  7 Termites, Do the Rock Steady (Heartbeat reissue, 1967) With this on you could do it underwater.

  8 Bob Seger, “Like a Rock,” in a commercial for Chevy trucks (NFL playoffs, NBC and CBS, December and January) I’m not sure why the running of this 1986 single over glowing slo-mo shots of blue-collar folk sweating, hugging, and high-fiving is so much more depressing than anything else of its kind. It’s not simply the use of Seger’s “I was 18, didn’t have a care, workin’ for peanuts” reverie to drive home the message that in hard times, low wages + uncomplaining labor = patriotism—or “TRAVAIL, FAMILLE, PATRIE,” as the Gang of Four put it on the cover of A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, reproducing a coin from Vichy France. It may have more to do with the fact that Seger sings so insistently in the first person. This is a voice you don’t often hear in commercials, the soulfully privileged “I”—though when you come down to it, it’s unclear whether it’s the worker or the truck that’s singing.

  9 Little Jack Melody with His Young Turks, On the Blank Generation (Four Dots Records) There are moments here—mainly in “Happily Ever After (West of Eden),” a nightclub fantasia in which Frank Sinatra is both Adam and Eve and gives birth to all culture—where this would-be Weimar combo (banjo, harmonium, tuba) actually comes close to its ambition of realizing George Grosz in sound. But you probably wouldn’t want to make too much of it.

  10 Nedra Olds-Neal and Michael Brooks, producers: The Words and Music of World War II (Columbia/Legacy double CD) This two-hour 23-minute documentary includes the expected words—excerpts from speeches by FDR, Neville Chamberlain, Churchill, plus copious Edward R. Murrow broadcasts and Axis propaganda from Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw-Haw. The shock is in the songs, from “Remember Pearl Harbor” (“We’ll die for liberty”) to “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” to “The Deepest Shelter in Town” to “Wonder When My Baby’s Coming Home”—if you ever wondered if rock ’n’ roll was really necessary, the answer is here. Save for a few numbers by the black a capella Golden Gate Quartet (especially “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer,” seemingly based on Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”), there is not simply an absence but a negation of any true emotion, be it fear, pride, anger, excitement, love, pain. The exclusion of subjectivity is too complete to be explained by the propaganda needs of the Home Front—the Home Front didn’t need a version of “When the Lights Go On Again” that makes Barry Manilow sound like James Brown. After two hours, it’s hard to feel anything but disgust, and confusion: how could any country win a war on music like this?

  But the narration—credited to Michael Brooks, script, and Gary Nunn, commentary—has all along been shifting, from stalwart to acrid, embattled to cynical. As General MacArthur announces the Japanese surrender, it shifts once again, into the real, which in the context that has been created is weird beyond weird: “The ghastly death and destruction, the broken promises, the men and the women physically and mentally destroyed by the war do not concern us here. For this is a fairy tale, and fairy tales must end happily. So let us relive that build-up to everlasting love, peace, and happiness, in the bright new world of 1945.” And then into one Ginny Simms belting out “I’m Gonna Love That Guy.” And then enter the Firesign Theater.

  APRIL 1992

  1 Vulgar Boatmen, Please Panic (Caroline/Safehouse) I left town two days after first playing this light, irreducible set of songs about falling into ordinary love affairs and getting into your car and driving away; for four days “Calling Upstairs,” “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” “You’re the One,” and “Allison Says” drew in Buddy Holly’s “Well All Right,” the Young Marble Giants, John Cale, the Fleetwoods, General Johnson and beach music, and spun them all off. The numbers played so casually in my head, the drift of one tune breaking off only to be picked up by the melody of another, and the songs seemed not made but found—but if it were that easy the songs would be faceless, and the people in them come to life as soon as they’re named. More next month.

  2 Malcolm McLaren, director, The Ghosts of Oxford Street, 25 December 1991 (BBC4, UK) This TV fantasia (with Happy Mondays, Sinéad O’Connor, Shane McGowan, and others) was conceived by McLaren in art school in the ’60s, and its nostalgia is less for the London shopping street than for the idea of the film itself. Planned as a history of the street, it is realized as a Christmas special, with McLaren as Anticlaus. But while he appears all over the place—as Fagin, as interlocutor, as a little (bad) boy—he may be most present in Tom Jones’ Gordon Selfridge, the American entrepreneur who drew a million people to his great Oxford Street department store in the week it opened in 1909. It’s funny to have “Selfridge” cover Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)” before the fact, though the joke goes on too long without getting any better. But then McLaren explains how Selfridge looted his own company, how at 84 he was forced out, how every day he returned to stand in front of his store in shabby clothes, wondering, like any shopper, at the marvel he’d built. With real heart, Jones sings “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” and the scene runs aways from its story, and into McLaren’s: the agony of victory, the thrill of defeat.

  3 Wedding Present, Seamonsters (RCA) As always, as a guitarist David Gedge of Leeds seeks that faraway margin where repetition do
esn’t repeat but doubles back on itself, when sound turns into a snake, swallows its own tail, and comes out the other end, the listener still looking in the wrong direction. But as a singer he now refuses to budge: his voice is rough, pebbled, grinding, all fatalism. He pulls against his own music; he loses.

  4 Digital Underground, “No Nose Job,” on Sons of the P (Tommy Boy). Oakland rapper Eddie Humphrey III has a lot of people bouncing around in his voice, among them a stunned ’50s hipster and Alfred E. Neuman—but instead of big ears he’s got a big nose. He insists on its social function in the context of stardom: trimming the bone for better video presence really means “bailing out of the community and place where you come from.” Is that why so many faces on MTV seem to come from nowhere?

  5 Burning Spear, Marcus Garvey/Garvey’s Ghost (Mango CD reissue, 1976) As a tribute to the founder of the Jamaican/American Back-to-Africa Movement—Garvey was born in 1887 and died in 1940; I don’t know why the set proclaims “SPECIAL RELEASE TO CELEBRATE THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF MARCUS GARVEY’S BIRTH”—the first disk, with Winston Rodney’s singing, convinces you he’s still dead. The second, the coolest dub album ever made, is proof he’s still waiting.

  6 Scarface of the Geto Boys, Mr. Scar-face Is Back (Rap-A-Lot/Priority) Houston gangster rap: sex ’n’ death as rape ’n’ murder. It’s ugly, even evil, disgusting—yet pushed to such extremes of cynicism, self-loathing, and shame that hesitation rises up in the midst of every act.

  7 All-Star Band with Special Musical Guest Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone,” Late Night with David Letterman 10th Anniversary Special, February 6 (NBC) Carole King, piano, lit up the screen; guitarist Chrissie Hynde and organist Paul Shaffer played their instruments for percussion; after standing in for the devil in the film Crossroads, guitarist Steve Vai looked thrilled to have God on his side; and Dylan was merely along for the ride that, by this time, in these hands, the song could produce by itself.

  8 Londonbeat, “I’ve Been Thinking About You” (Radioactive/RCA) A multicultural groove patched together from a little-note South African rhythm guitar, a guitar solo left over from Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” and a vocal that might as well be by Billy Ocean—the sound the Fine Young Cannibals would be making, if they were still making sound.

  9 Harry Connick, Jr., “The Star-Spangled Banner,” at the Super Bowl, January 26 (CBS) His hair was raised so high he looked like he was wearing the Statue of Liberty on his head. Too bad it wasn’t last year; he could have tied a yellow ribbon around his neck.

  10 Elvis Presley, Collectors Gold (RCA 3-CD set, 1960–69) This set of rehearsals and outtakes has been rightfully dismissed, but it has its moments, and the most suggestive comes with a warm-up for “Going Home,” a throwaway ballad from 1968. “PAPA OO MAU MAU papa oo mau mau papa oo mau mau,” Elvis announces. “Be talkin’ in unknown tongues here in a minute.” Before the band can stop him he slides into a distant second of “I Got a Woman,” and you can imagine he is going to take the song home, back to the glossolalia from which both he and it came, the primal swamp of deliverance and revelation—Well, of course not.

  MAY 1992

  1 UnknownmiX, DominaDea (ReeDee Distribution) Magda Vogel sings in Spanish, English, Italian, French, and Dada. The whole brings up the spirit of a dubbed 1930s Czech spy movie, or the enchanting, disturbing tones of Ildiko Enyedi’s 1989 My 20th Century, a film from Hungary—borders slipping around a center hard with consequence and danger. This precise, experimental quartet, which can ride a good beat when it finds one, shares a field with Pulnoc; as Central Europe returns to history, a new music is perhaps a half-step ahead.

  2 Jimmie Rodgers, Last Sessions, 1933 (Rounder) “The Father of Country Music”—and the first great white bluesman—made these recordings just days before his death from tuberculosis, and in moments they are wrenching, with no parallels I know of. On “Blue Yodel No. 12,” Rodgers fades the word “home” in the line “I know she’s never coming home.” He’s trying to disguise the rasp in his chest, but his technique and his commitment to the song are such that he produces something very different: an instant of absolute blues, where a certain word, a certain signifier, is so hurtful it can’t be borne. The conventional blues device is to drop the word and play up its absence on guitar. Rodgers lets the word surface—and then, as if by hoodoo, he makes it disappear.

  With “Yodeling My Way Back Home” he can make nothing disappear. His wails build between the verses, until very soon he is plainly going too far. Neither his formal structures nor his persona can contain the fear and acceptance in the death sound he’s making. It’s not easy to listen to; the vibrations of his voice unbalance the room. It’s like the last shots of F. W. Murnau’s Tabu, with Matahi swimming to his death against the tides, chasing the skiff that has taken Reri—which, as Pauline Kael has written, “is headed for nothing so commonplace as land.”

  3 Jess Mowry, Way Past Cool, a novel (Farrar Straus Giroux) In Oakland, “the Friends”—a tiny gang of 12-and 13-year-old black boys—try to create comradeship and enforce decency on their few blocks of turf, in “a blind fight for a freedom they knew existed but saw only as secondhand shadows behind a TV screen. It was like the ancient cartoon where a starving wolf tried to eat a picture of a Thanksgiving turkey.” The threat of murder and the temptation of addiction, of oblivion, are constants; no one has any reason to expect to grow up. Again and again, you have to remind yourself how young the characters are. From the kids to the 16-year-old dope dealer who functions as the devil to his tortured bodyguard—the real focus of the story—each can believe he’s seen or done too much for adulthood to promise any mysteries. Not having enough to eat is a leitmotiv, and so is the closed nature of the society the Friends inhabit, where “San Francisco” and “cable cars” are references to another planet. As are stray mentions of Oakland’s rap heroes. Hammer, Too Short—their hits have been sucked out of this vacuum, leaving only a vague sound of mockery, an Oakland without music.

  4 Vulgar Boatmen, Please Panic (Caroline/Safehouse) The insinuating power of this combo has a lot to do with the lightness with which it approaches almost every tune—and the nearly subliminal weight provided by Helen Kirklin’s viola. Just as central is an odd sense of distance. The emotional economy is almost always teenage—the people in the songs react with the confusion, woundedness, and pride of teenagers—but the guitarist and lead singer, Robert Ray, is the 48-year-old director of film and media studies at the University of Florida. He doesn’t remember, and he doesn’t relive. Like the couple in Almost Grown, a TV series of a few years back where the same actors played themselves from their teenage 1960s to their middle-aged ’80s in constant flashbacks and flashforwards, Ray feels for the contours of the present and discovers an unresolved past.

  5 Barrington Levy, Turning Point (Profile) Old-fashioned reggae, full of petty musical theft, heart-stopping dub piano, lunatic dance-hall rock, strange effects (what is that chirping bird doing on “Lipstick”?), and, on the back cover, an outfit that could bring back the zoot suit.

  6 Harold Meyerson, “Then There Were Two?,” review of unreleased Bill Clinton video (LA Weekly, March 20–26) “The next church is Union Missionary Baptist on Chicago’s Westside . . . with a congregation that is black working class and poor and that practices religious rituals not far removed from the members’ Mississippi roots. The music, though, is pure Chicago: organ, piano, electric guitar, and drum kit. . . . ‘The church is not a place for saints, but for sinners,’ [Clinton] begins, ‘but all of us are called to do the Lord’s work.’ Amens echo again—and the organ and drums, too; apparently, they will accompany Clinton throughout. . . . He omits his statistics on rising income inequality and conveys their sense in short rhythmical sentences: ‘It is honestly true, more people are working harder for less.’ He cites experiments in tenant-managed projects, model schools, community development banks. After each, he says ‘If it can be so, why can’t it be so everywhere else?’ The drums roll, the guitar and organ riff for a
second, the amens rise. ‘We are tired of being divided by race!’ (Music and amens.) ‘We are tired of being divided by gender!’ (Music and amens.) ‘We are tired of being divided by income!’ (Music and amens.) And then, raising his voice, he closes with scriptural passages about faith and redemption: he shouts it over the music and the congregation’s own shouts, and he leaves the crowd in ecstasy.”

  7 PiL, That What Is Not (Virgin) With the Sex Pistols, as a great ranter John Lydon was also a great singer: grabbing words with his teeth, he twisted them into new shapes before he swallowed them. But for years now he’s merely chanted, forcing his lyrics and his bands into the same square boxes. Here there are hints of jailbreak by both the musicians and Lydon himself. Sometimes it almost seems as if you’re listening to a real person.

  8 The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Reverence”/“Heat” (Blanco y Negro/Warner Music, UK) The top spin is a dull grind on hero fetishism (“I want to die like JFK,” etc.): the buried cut breaks in all directions with the wah-wah of the gods.

  9 Nymphs, Nymphs (DGC) Hellfire from Los Angeles. In concept.

  10 Jon Wayne, Texas Funeral (Fist Puppet/Cargo reissue, 1985) A guy who’s been listening to too much Beat Farmers breaks into a radio station just over the Mexican border and turns on the transmitter, but he’s deep in his second bottle and he can’t keep the microphone in focus. “Officer,” he warbles from his “Texas Jailcell” (along with the title cut there’s also “Texas Cyclone,” “Texas Wine,” “Texas Polka,” and so on), “this Indian says he needs some sexual healing.” Play this next time somebody brings up the Cowboy Junkies; it’ll drive them right out of the room.

  SUMMER 1992

  1 Stanley Booth, Rythm Oil—A Journey Through the Music of the American South (Pantheon) “ After nearly three hours, with the audience so bored that it was on the point of having a religious experience”—the line is typical of the sparks that fly in Booth’s chronicle, a collection of portraits published over the last 25 years but running, as he puts it, “from slavery in 1940s south Georgia to murder in 1960s Memphis and back again to savagery in 1990s Georgia, with many laughs along the way,” and many casualties, too. The book is bitter (“Watching Memphis’s most brilliant products die out of work had made me fervent”), shifting from experience to nostalgia, wonder to elegy, and carried by a certain sense of mission: Booth saw remarkable things, and he has a duty to pass them on. His ruling theme is the struggle of the performer to move an audience. A 1968 piece has B. B. King fighting the same battle in the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco and the Club Paradise in Memphis—the crowds are different, so are the tactics, but the stakes are the same.