by Greil Marcus
The tone is light, melodic, the vocal sly. The two guitarists find the pulse they will push and twist through the long instrumental passages of this four-minute-31-second sun shower, and the dynamics of the instrumentation are completely open, the excitement jumping ahead thirty or fifty years to prophesy the Allman Brothers’ “Blue Sky” and R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” You can get lost in this music, wonder what became of Lucious Curtis. But it’s the opening lines of the song that echo—again with that glancing attack, yet delivering a statement so weighted it can make you wonder where Lucious Curtis came from. The first line is broken up with hesitations, the second line is rushed, and the third line is a deep breath:
Babe, I went, and I stood up, on some high old lonesome hill
Babe I went and I stood up on some high old lonesome hill
And looked down on the house where I used to live
These are the words of a man who has seen all around his life, and is about to tell you everything he’s seen.
2 Alison Krauss & Union Station, Every Time You Say Goodbye (Rounder) Bluegrass fiddler Krauss sings in a warble that sounds first of all small. A second listen turns plaintiveness into toughness, and after that—well, her voice becomes a thing of real complexity, to the point where you can locate the soul in “Who Can Blame You” in the way she communicates that she doesn’t believe a word she’s singing.
3 Bill Buford, Among the Thugs (Norton) This is a book about crowd violence and English football fans: a milieu that caught up American-in-Britain Buford for eight years. His conclusion is extreme: “This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell.” Buford’s prose is almost unique these days: first-class, yet seemingly ordinary, straight, and never calling attention to itself (try reading P. J. O’Rourke after Buford—it can’t be done). The result is a noisy book about the fascist possibilities of Western democracy: “A crowd had been made by the people who had stepped into the street, and everyone was aware of what they had done; it was a creative act.” And what was created? “They were all strangers. This march was a march of strangers. More to the point: this march was a march. It recalled not football crowds, but demonstrations or protest rallies. You could see the surprise in the faces of the people near me; they had created something big, but weren’t sure how they’d done it.”
4 Ramones, “Poison Heart,” from Mondo Bizarro (Radioactive) The Ramones began as kings of irony, but Joey Ramone is most present when his heart is bleeding all over his sleeve. As on “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg”; the touching he-doesn’t-wanna-be-buried-in-a “Pet Sematary” (given Joey’s ruling pinhead persona, his fear is credible); and this ditty, all cornball angst and thrilling negative uplift.
5 Hopey Glass, “Great Lost Recordings,” in The Wire #102, September 1992 Glass on “My Happiness,” Elvis’ first, for-his-mother recording, as it surfaced 37 years after the fact, and why no one paid attention: “Sung to Gladys or himself, or the young Gladys in himself, [it] says quiet gentleness can also be an unearthly force.” At full length, as Glass seeks to understand Elvis not as a rebel but as a mother, a cultural mother, this is the most sophisticated and risky music criticism I’ve read in a long time, and a match for William Carlos Williams on Abraham Lincoln: “The Great Rail-splitter’s ‘All I am or ever hope to be I owe to my angel mother’; the walking up and down in Springfield on the narrow walk between the two houses, day after day, with a neighbor’s baby, borrowed for the occasion, sleeping inside his cape on his shoulder to give him stability while thinking about coming speeches. . . . The least private would find a woman to caress him, a woman in an old shawl—with a great bearded face and a towering black hat above it, to give it unearthly reality.”
6 Fred Bronson, The Billboard Book of Number One Hits (Billboard/Watson-Guptill) The third edition (“Rock Around the Clock” through Vanessa Williams’ “Save the Best for Last”) of one of the most entertaining and informative books ever written about pop music. The format is strict—one page with pic per disc—and depending on whether he’s writing about one-hit wonders Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs or four-time chart-topper Roxette, Bronson can cram the whole of a singular career into less than 1,000 words or stretch a pointless one over several pages without ever seeming bored. Exasperated, that’s another story.
7 Lynn Hope, “Morocco” (Saxophono-graph reissue, 1950–55, Sweden) Hope—a.k.a. Al Hajj Abdulla Rasheed Ahmed—had a national hit in 1950 with “Tenderly,” a sweet, snazzy sax instrumental typical of his relaxed style. Though you can imagine Big Red Little in the audience, you don’t hear Hope’s faith in Islam in his music—he led the only all-Muslim band in the country, turban on his head, fezzes for the rest—you hear rhythm & blues on the verge of taking shape, and then taking one step back.
8–9 Johnny Shines, Henry Townshend, Lonnie Pitchford, Honeyboy Edwards, Railroad Maintenance Crew, et al., Roots of Rhythm and Blues—A Tribute to the Robert Johnson Era (Columbia) and George Thoro-good, “I’m a Steady Rollin’ Man,” from The Baddest of George Thorogood and the Destroyers (EMI) Proof of Robert Johnson’s genius: there’s more of his spirit in Thorogood’s trash bonus track for a greatest-hits package than there is in a reverent tribute by the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
10 Paul Schrader, writer and director, Light Sleeper (Fine Line Features) Lousy as they almost always are, Schrader’s films almost always contain elements of obsession that cough up incidents so intense they all but come loose from their own movies. This time not even Michael Been’s obese soundtrack songs can filter what goes on in Dana Delany’s face. There’s a look in her eyes as she sits in bed with Willem Dafoe—a fluttering anticipation of ecstasy unto oblivion—that might have satisfied Louise Brooks. And too soon after that a look of such abasement and self-loathing even Brooks might have flinched at it.
DECEMBER 1992
1 Sinéad O’Connor, “War,” on Saturday Night Live (NBC, October 3) For the record: live TV, O’Connor in a long formal gown, Star of David necklace, nose stud, chanting her rewrite of Bob Marley’s “War” a cappella, her face shifting by imperceptible degrees from saint to thug, rat to Hedy Lamarr. Then for the last line, “The victory of good over evil,” she produces a picture of Pope John Paul II, rips it into pieces: “Fight the real enemy!” On audiotape, no visuals, it’s so suggestive: “Good . . . over evil,” then just switch, switch, the sound loud in its oddity.
This was a classic media shock. Even if you were with her all the way—after the fact—you had to realize that someone this intransigent will sooner or later put you on the other side. And if the act itself seems cheap, a setup, self-aggrandizing, ask yourself this: given the chance to say what I wanted to the whole country, would I have had the nerve?
2 Bob Marley & the Wailers, “War” (1976), on the 4-CD Bob Marley reissue Songs of Freedom (Tuff Gong) Originally the highlight of the mostly boilerplate LP Rastaman Vibration, and in fact Marley’s rewrite of a speech delivered in California in 1968 by Haile Selassie—then still Emperor of Ethiopia, and also “King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.” With Aston “Familyman” Barrett leading the way with bass notes more ominously confident than anyone’s found since, and a chorus of closely gathered horns following at a distance, the speech is turned into music, and the politics changed from one man’s statement into a common rite.
3 Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde (Atlantic Monthly Press) Very catchy jacket: nude blonde woman on rumpled bed lights cigarette. There’s not a moment in this increasingly tense short novel when the first-person narrator the cover girl’s standing in for is half so cool. As with most bohemias, punk slowly devolved toward oblivion and small-time criminal trade; set in San Francisco bad-news neighborhoods, this report on that milieu escapes the confines of genre. Near the end there’s a voyeuristic scene so fast, blunt,
and cruel that when you’re told “her eyes were dead” there’s no surface to go beneath; Steinke works with blood, sweat, and semen, not metaphors.
4 Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, at the Quake, San Francisco (October 6) Singer/guitarist Jim Bob and lead guitarist Fruitbat play with tapes carrying synthesized orchestrations that are at once huge and conveniently sized: they seem to fill a room precisely. That’s because lead actor Jim Bob’s physical and vocal timing is perfect, yet still comes off as no less spontaneous than any other rock performer’s moves. The drama, though, is unique. Fruitbat plays bemused sidekick—but after a few tunes his Faith No More T-shirt no longer seems to refer to that band. Jim Bob might be playing someone dying of AIDS who’s just realized Judgment Day is a con. Tall, thin, beaky, wearing a shirt covered with cartoon faces of the Big Bad Wolf, with just a buzz of brown hair save for a foot-long forelock he can shake for emphasis, Jim Bob has as evil a grin as you’ll ever see, and this night the music was so thrilling he only had to use it once.
5 Bushwick Bill, Little Big Man (Rap-A-Lot) To be young, four feet two inches tall, black, and conscious—a solo shot by the lead bad dream of Houston’s Geto Boys. “Where I’m from is a modern-day motherfuckin’ Vietnam,” he says plainly; movie suspense music keeps you hooked as crossing vocals trade violent fantasies and laments over how little is left of a chance for a decent life. The two sides come together with a true-crime track: “Ever So Clear,” the tale of how Bushwick, drunk on Ever-clear, tried to force his girlfriend to shoot him. She missed his brain but took an eye.
6 Brenda Kahn, Epiphany in Brooklyn (Chaos/Columbia) So you’re at this party and this woman with great legs has you backed into a corner with how much she’s talking, she’s smart, she’s really smart, she’s so smart and she talks so fast she sucks the air right out of the room. You were having fun till that happened.
7–8 Beat Happening, You Turn Me On (Sub Pop/K Records) and Roger Corman, director: Teenage Caveman (Columbia TriStar video) Yea, verily, and how weird. T’was with producer Jerry Dennon of Beat Happening’s own Great Northwest that English pop star Ian Whitcomb recorded his horrible 1965 international smash “You Turn Me On.” Thus you can chalk up Beat Happening’s new album title—anomalous for this doggedly we’re-flat-and-we’re-proud trio—to cultural memory. But it’s unlikely their Olympia, Washington, hometown provides the connections that would have tipped them off that their tune “Teenage Caveman” would hit the stores the same season as the reissue of its namesake: an unbelievable 1958 oedipal drama starring a loin-clothed Robert Vaughn and a lot of dinosaurs. That convergence you have to credit to serendipity, or the fact that Beat Happening singer Heather Lewis’ heart is always in the right place. For more information, see Beat Happening 1983–85 (K/Feel Good All Over), Jamboree (Sub Pop/K, 1988), and Dreamy (Sub Pop, 1991).
9 Peter Gabriel, US (Geffen) When he’s on—as with “Come Talk To Me,” with Sinéad O’Connor making trouble in the background—he’s beginning to sound like Richard Harris looks.
10 Dave Morey, “10 at 10,” KFOG-FM 104.5, San Francisco (September 23). Running since 1982, Morey’s every-weekday show contextualizes “ten great songs from one great year” by combining often forgotten hits with audio documentary far richer than radio news ever offered in its own time. Morey creates the instant history the radio should have delivered, and the results are often startling, as with his Barry Goldwater montage from the 1964 election. He opened with a soundbite from Goldwater’s speech accepting the Republican nomination, cut to the candidate’s response to a student’s question about avoiding war (“Peace through strength”), to the Goldwater slogan that made so many people nervous, “IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE’S RIGHT”—and then, with no pause whatsoever, Morey hit you in the face with the brittle opening chords of the Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away,” the Buddy Holly cover that introduced them to the U.S.A. Bomp budda BAH—it was no contest. This was a discourse contradiction, a discourse warp; the previous forms of speech disappeared, were rendered incomprehensible, turned into babble by the emotional clarity of a few harsh seconds of true rock ’n’ roll—a language that didn’t translate back. That this event—this imaginary event?—was anything but inevitable was proven by Morey’s next segue, into the Temptations’ “The Way You Do the Things You Do.” It made no breach; it translated into the political speech around it with ease.
JANUARY 1993
1 Lou Reed, “Foot of Pride,” at “Columbia Records Celebrates the Music of Bob Dylan,” Madison Square Garden, NYC, October 16 (radio and pay-per-view TV broadcast) In Bob Dylan’s version, from 1983, this long and muscular song sounds vaguely influenced by Lou Reed. In Reed’s version Judgment Day looms and—backed by Booker T., Duck Dunn, and Steve Cropper, the MGs minus the late Al Jackson—Reed leads its charge. All debts are paid before the first line closes; from then on the tune is Reed’s more than it was ever Dylan’s. All those years of clunky talk songs, good ones, bad ones—here Reed grabs a note, rings it, wrings it: like Jimi Hendrix said, he’ll kiss the sky. For the first time in an era Reed sings, heading into each chorus like Jan Berry, if Jan Berry were to finally solve Dead Man’s Curve—and as written the chorus is so strong each one seems as if it has to be the last, as if nothing could follow it. Lou, you’ve got to put this out.
2 Larry Doyle, writer, Alan Kupperberg, illustrator, The Fantastic Foursome (comic book insert to Spy, October) Sure to be a valued artifact of the ’92 election, and the story line is wickedly consistent: the opening panel has superheroes Bill (“The Golden Doughboy”), Hillary (“Sweet-and-Sour Girl”), Al (“The Wooden Wonder”), and Tipper (“The Hearth Keeper”) campaigning as a band (“Born to Run the U.S.A.”), and the drama reaches its apex when Barbara Bush (“Silver Ox”) calls Tipper a bitch and Tipper slaps her mouth shut with a PMRC parental-advisory label.
3 Soul Asylum, Grave Dancers Union (Columbia) A balanced, lyrical, commercial album from an outsider combo a lot of people thought had seen its day—but if you want your heart broken in the middle of a laugh, go right to “Without a Trace.” A little detail like “Don’t forget your mace/If you’re out walking late” slips through this slapstick chronicle of no-future almost before you have a chance to realize that’s not the way it has to be.
4 Chuck Berry, et al., Stoned Alchemy—27 Original Blues and R & B Hits That Inspired the Rolling Stones (Instant/Charly reissue, 1948–64, UK) A collection based on obscure Stones numbers, from odd singles to ancient rehearsal tapes, and topped by Bo Diddley’s bizarre 1956 mini-play “Cops and Robbers.” “Yeah,” the cop says after the robber’s been collared, “we gonna put him so far back in jail this time, they gonna have to pump air in to him.” I wonder if Mick still has a copy.
5 International Secular Atavism, stickers The Traditional Family Values set, highlighted by a loving heterosexual couple in a prayerful if sodomitic position, a collage of headlines on clerical pedophilia, and “ ‘JESUS CHRIST’ THREW UP IN MY CAR.” “He was wearing a yellow rented party dress which was wrecked,” the sticker continues. “He was heard saying ‘I don’t fucking care . . . It’s not fucking mine.’ ” If you think it’s easy to think up stuff like that, try it yourself.
6 Heavenly, Le Jardin de Heavenly (K/Cargo) Beatle echoes cut with a present-day cynicism so light it merely seems like doubt. There hasn’t been a vocal smile as good as Amelia Fletcher’s since Claire Grogan broke up Altered Images.
7 Robbie Robertson, “Canon” (Part 2) (includes “Playing Chess with Bobby Fischer in Bellevue Reverie) from Beneath The Underdog,” on Hal Willner Presents Weird Nightmare—Meditations on Mingus (Columbia) Reading from Charles Mingus’ autobiography on this mostly-musical tribute album, Robertson catches one border station of ’60s Manhattan bohemia, like a narrator for an episode of The Twilight Zone, or maybe Peter Gunn.
8 Blue Blouse, postcards Eight proofs that the ’20s Soviet agit-prop collective Blue Blouse—a 100,000-strong perform-anywhere “living newspaper”—actually existed: gro
up poses of the stolid “Physical Culture Dance,” the Arthurian “Strengthen the Might of the Red Army,” the grinning roundelay of “Revolt of the Toys,” and the flirtatious “Five Year Plan.” With tableaux that make production sexy, these postcards from a vanished time truly speak from a new world, albeit not quite a real one.
9 Frederick Pollack, “Theses on Intellectuals,” in Representations #39, Summer 1992 A rollercoaster that only goes down: 161 sentences on why intellectuals underestimate the will to power, the pleasures of scapegoating, and the joy of inflicting pain. Extra-credit reading: The Old Testament. Soundtrack: anything by Guns N’ Roses.
10 Terry Gross, interview with Neil Young, on Fresh Air, November 5 (NPR, originating from WHYY-FM, Philadelphia) This rare audio interview with Young featured direct answers that came to flat stops, silences that left the air not dead but surprised, a tone that at first sounded like impatience and soon came across as authority, plus an exchange on how easily Young might fit into Nirvana. Gross: “Most of the people who play that kind of loud, grunge sound are much younger. I wonder how you felt as somebody in your 40s who’s been playing since the mid ’60s, playing a music that mostly people who are a generation younger than you—” Young: “None of these old guys around know how to do it.” “None of the old guys around know how to do it?” “No, they don’t. They can’t do it, you know, so they don’t do it. That’s why I’m still doing it, ’cause I know how. If they were as lucky as me, they’d be doing it too. I mean, it’s fantastic. There’s no sensation like it.”