Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  Slick stared impassively from behind silvered shades. He saw a good-looking woman with a open-necked jar in one hand and a cork in the other.

  He smiled his professional approval. “Yeah baby, thats me, what can I do for a fine young thing like you?”

  Melvira corked the jar as soon as he answered her and walked out of the barbershop.

  She’s taken his soul—and with no more fuss than if she were serving a subpoena.

  4 The Troggs, Archaeology (1966–1976) (Fontana 3-CD box) In John Duigan’s lovely film Flirting—Beatleera teenage love in Australia—there’s a moment when a wispy, insistently affectionate piece of music comes on the soundtrack. It’s “With a Girl Like You,” a highlight of this collection. Here “Wild Thing” is just an immortal anomaly in a crude ten-year struggle to find the charts, and “I Just Sing,” “I Can’t Control Myself,” “Gonna Make You,” and 10 or 20 others, the real, ordinary story. The immortal and the ordinary come together on the last disc, “The Troggs Tape,” 11 minutes 45 seconds of argument accidentally salvaged from a wasted session in 1970.

  By then the Troggs hadn’t hit the American Top 100 for two years—an eternity in those days—and you can hear plain desperation straight off. “It’s a fucking number one! It is!” moans a young voice. “This is a fucking number one and if, if that doesn’t go, I fucking retire. I fucking do.” “It is a good song,” says an older, much-too-relaxed voice. “I agree—” “But it fucking well won’t be,” says the first voice, at once a general rallying his troops and a condemned man begging for one more day, “unless we spend a little bit of fucking thought and imagination to make it fucking number one!” And it goes on like that, the most profane pop document ever to surface, scared, hopeful, disgusted, doors slamming, instruments hurled to the floor, fights breaking out, a panorama of frustration, and aside from anyone’s everyday life there’s nothing like it anywhere.

  5 Cynthia Rose, Design after Dark—The Story of Dancefloor Style (Thames & Hudson) At first it looks like a particularly well-set-up picture book, covering clothes, record sleeves, posters, videos, faces, plus captions—but in Rose’s text you’ll find not gloss but an animating sense of detail and adventure. She gives style weight without letting it weigh down her subjects—the tribes of black and white Britons, some anonymous, some now famous, who in the 1980s remade leisure culture sideways—and the result is a little depressing. So much flair, so much energy, so many ideas, so many good smiles, and, finally, no power. Style changed but not society; no-future didn’t move an inch from where it stood in 1977.

  6–7 Sonic Youth, “Ça Plane pour Moi,” on Freedom of Choice—Yesterday’s New Wave Hits as Performed by Today’s Stars (Caroline) and Dave Markey, director: 1991: The Year Punk Broke (DGC Home Video) The bigger Sonic Youth have gotten the lower they’ve stooped—which is to say they’ll still pump out a track for fun or the betterment of humanity as readily as a nowhere band that only wants to get its name in print. “Ça Plane pour Moi,” by one Plastic Bertrand, was a near embarrassment in 1977—proof, from Belgium of all places, that a merging of punk and the Beach Boys might produce no contradictions whatsoever. On Freedom of Choice (all proceeds to Planned Parenthood) Thurston Moore rides the joke hard enough to prove that “guilty pleasure” is an oxymoron. 1991 is, offstage anyway, an embarrassing handheld Don’t Look Back imitation covering Sonic Youth on tour in Europe, with then-smaller-fry (Nirvana, etc.) in tow. Onstage it’s the strongest documentation of how hard Sonic Youth can push their own music you can get without breaking the law.

  8–9 Quentin Tarantino, director, Reservoir Dogs (Miramax) and Abel Ferrara, director, Bad Lieutenant (Aries Film) Evidence that pop tunes say far more as part of a film’s soundtrack than in their own videos is all over these movies. In Bad Lieutenant, a dark-night-of-Harvey Keitel’s-soul number that’s about as liberating as a sermon on homosexuality by John Cardinal O’Connor, the only moments that don’t seem like a total crock come when Schoolly D’s “Signifying Rapper” and Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love” are playing—with Keitel slow death-dancing to the latter, just as he did almost 20 years before in Mean Streets. In Reservoir Dogs, a truly cruel picture where the shocks in the action hurt the viewer, the most perverse theme has to do with what the characters are listening to and talking about as their dishonor-among-thieves roundelay breaks up: a horrible, kind-of-catchy “Sound of the Seventies” retrospective on the local classic-rock station, with Stephen Wright in a perfect impersonation of what a classic laid-back ’70s DJ would sound like after two decades of Quaaludes. “Stuck in the Middle with You,” by Stealers Wheel, the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” and more, more, to the point where you dread what song might be up next as much as what atrocity you might have to watch, which brings us to—

  10 Billy Ray Cyrus, “Achy Breaky Heart (Dance Mix)” (Mercury) Yes, he might be a walking score in some future edition of Trivial Pursuit, he may never have another mass hit, but he’s not going to be forgotten anymore than the world has yet escaped the specter Debby Boone raised with “You Light Up My Life,” which in 1977 was number one for ten weeks. There is an elemental stupidity in “Achy Breaky Heart,” a phrase so dumb it’s humiliating to say out loud; in the dance mix, over 7 minutes long but it might as well be 17 or 70, with some guy hee-hawing in the background over and over, as if to say “WE FOOLED YOU! AND WE’RE DOING IT AGAIN!,” stupidity becomes a sort of blessedness, a form of pop grace. Like Sheb Wooley (“The Purple People Eater,” number one for six weeks in 1958) or Ross Bagdasarian (as the Chipmunks, with “The Chipmunk Song,” number one for four weeks in that same weird year) before him, for as long as his song lasts—as long as he wants—Billy Ray Cyrus can get away with anything.

  SUMMER 1993

  1 Andre Braugher, in Homicide—Life on the Street “Three Men and Adena” (NBC, March 3) For decades now, scripts of one version or another of “The Robert Johnson Story” have bounced around Hollywood (though the closest anyone’s gotten to an actual movie was John Fusco’s putrid Crossroads, shot in 1986 by Walter Hill). Every conceivable black actor or singer has been mentioned for the role of the ’30s Mississippi bluesman, but the search can stop now. It’s not only that Andre Braugher, playing a Baltimore homicide detective, looks enough like Johnson to be his son. It’s not that when Johnson’s trail (cold since his death in 1938) was finally picked up in the ’70s it led to Maryland, where Johnson’s sister lived—thus making it possible that Braugher’s detective could be, in character, Johnson’s great-nephew. (I know he says he’s from New York in this episode; that’s just to confuse the suspect.) As an actor, Braugher draws on the qualities of restraint, thoughtfulness, and jeopardy that animate Johnson’s greatest songs. Were “Come On in My Kitchen” playing on the soundtrack as Braugher tries to lead the suspect into a trap, no one would notice that the dates of the recording and the drama were 57 years apart.

  2 Joe Dante, director, Charlie Haas, writer, Matinee (Universal Home Video) With John Goodman having a great time impersonating ’50s/’60s movie shlockmeister William Castle opening a new horror flick in South Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis (it’s “Mant—Half Man, Half Ant”; bits are featured in Matinee proper, but the video will include the complete, 20-minute version shot for continuity), you get A-bomb radiation coming at you from both sides. The movie’s tremendous fun. What’s most interesting, though, are the tendrils of alien culture nibbling at the corners of the frame. A Beat couple arguing about the First Amendment, their Ban the Bomb daughter busting up a high school air raid drill, a clean-cut kid with a secret Lenny Bruce record, a J.D. with a D.A. and a switchblade he’ll hold to your neck to make you listen to his poetry, and the weird question that hangs in the air, “Where are the Negro kids?”—in every case, portents of a culture, in both senses of the word, that the all-white world of Key West can’t completely stop. But if this is subversion, where is rock ’n’ roll? Back home in the bungalow, just keeping time (it’s the Tokens, doing “The Lion Sleeps Tonig
ht”)—no more threatening than a metronome.

  3 Bobby Bland, I Pity the Fool—The Duke Recordings, Vol One (MCA 2-CD reissue, 1952–60) The coolest blues singer who ever was, and one of the deepest.

  4 Melodians, Swing and Dine (Heartbeat reissue, 1967–75) Jamaica’s finest: a floating sound, kicking off with a tune about Expo ’67, a search for a smile, but with an undertone of regret over something far too great to put into words.

  5 Rosanne Cash, The Wheel (Columbia) In the last few years it’s been incumbent upon female singers even one step away from punk to expose themselves if they want serious sales action. Posing in a bra will do, but a discreetly naked chest is better: witness Melissa Etheridge, Sade, and now Rosanne Cash, the Jennifer Jason Leigh of pop music—a supremely talented, dedicated artist who knows what trouble is worth. Why we need proof—as opposed to an until-proven-otherwise assumption—that a given singer has breasts is unclear, unless what’s really going on is a need for proof that any female singer can be made to whore for her label or her listeners. Presumably it’s working for Cash: Entertainment Weekly splashed The Wheel’s insert pic—Cash flat on her back, roses on her breasts, come-hither smile on her lips—over a full page.

  You wouldn’t deduce such a move from the music. As a singer, Cash retains a dignity that seems located more in her songs than in any persona; her fervor is undiminished. The title track, a mostly elegant composition, opens without warning into realms of delirium. Still, despite the slow, smoky “Seventh Avenue” and the off-the-beat realism of “The Truth About You,” as the disc plays you can feel Cash holding more and more of herself back. By the time she reaches the last cut, “If There’s a God on My Side,” the music doesn’t end, it just stops.

  6 Basehead, Not in Kansas Anymore (Imägo) As on the 1992 Play with Toys, Michael Ivey redefines hip-hop philosophy, placing above all others the question of whether it’s worth getting to one’s feet and leaving one’s apartment—and if it is, why. After an opening in a C&W club where Basehead, presumably booked by mistake, introduces its first number as “a song about the problems that the white male has to face in America today” (the song consists of about two seconds of fuzztone), Ivey meanders, drifts, and complains about sex, police harassment, racism, oblivion, girlfriends, boredom, and drive-by shootings, until each sounds most of all not fun and he sounds like someone you’d love spending time with. Who knows, maybe the whole thing’s one long personals ad. So you play the record again, maybe wondering about the empty dog-muzzle on the cover. That is, if it’s for Toto, where’s the dog? But by then you can already feel the bite.

  7 Bob Dylan, on Guns N’ Roses’ cover of his “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” in The Telegraph 42 (Summer 1992) “Guns N’ Roses is OK, Slash is OK, but there’s something about their version of that song that reminds me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I always wonder who’s been transformed into some sort of clone, and who’s stayed true to himself. And I never seem to have an answer.”

  8 Ishmael Reed, Japanese by Spring (Atheneum) A bitter, hilarious novel about multiculturalism, where a Japanese concern buys the failing Jack London College in California in order to, among other things, change Ethnic Studies to “Barbarian Studies,” and one Chappie Puttbutt, a would-be Clarence Thomas who’s just been turned down for tenure despite years of kissing white ass, suddenly finds himself fronting the show. Reed himself enters in the last pages to settle a few scores; like a retired gunslinger forced to take on some rough business before the big church social, he finds himself wondering if there was “no end to the sacrifices he would be called on to make on behalf of Western civilization.” Given that this self-described “mongrel” (“African, French, Irish, Cherokee”) has made it his mission not so much to change that civilization as to lead others to see it for the crazy quilt it already is, the answer would have to be no. Reviewers would love Reed to keep to his supposed place as an African-American novelist, but it isn’t his place and he’s never stopped there long enough to do more than kick down the fences around the plot. He’s an all-American writer now moving into world beat, and there’s no telling what story he’ll tell next, though I’d love to see him send Jean-Bertrand Aristide back to Haiti. The way things are going, that may be the only way Aristide’ll get there.

  9 Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet, Davies Hall, San Francisco (March 15) I had to drag myself back to The Juliet Letters (Warner Bros.), Costello’s song cycle with the UK’s version of our Kronos Quartet, and the live version revealed why: the Brodskys are not exciting. The songs disappear into predictable arrangements and bland orchestrations. But onstage, surrounded by a crowd alternately polite and hysterical—almost a Randy Newman crowd in its self-congratulatory enthusiasm—Costello the singer took over. He’d never given himself so much range; he’d never been more musically playful. On the encores, the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” sounded just right next to Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars.”

  10 Rosey Golds, “Reader, I Married Him—Priscilla as Gothic Heroine,” in Perfect Beat 2 no 1 You got it—Priscilla Presley is Jane Eyre, but is Mrs. Rochester Gladys or Elvis? Originally delivered as a breathless talk in Sydney last year, Golds’ essay ranges over the whole corpus of the genre for metaphors and familiars (Col. Parker turns up as Dr. Frankenstein), but from start to finish it soars with the extremism, the passion and fear, the corny apocalypse, of your favorite Gothic novel. Happy ending, too. Sort of.

  OCTOBER 1993

  1 REM video, conceived by Michael Stipe, directed by Peter Care, “Man on the Moon” (Warner Bros.) This is the best video I’ve seen since Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—though formally there’s nothing unusual about it, just the standard pillaging of the last forty years of American independent cinema. The piece starts off with Michael Stipe striding across a western desert in a cowboy hat, lip-syncing his song about illusion and reality, identity as fact or choice, and the late comedian Andy Kaufman, who at times thought he was a professional wrestler or Elvis Presley. In black and white, split screens, grainy textures, overlit figures, double exposures, fades even within frames, and of course super-fast cutting are used smartly. Not even the way the design matches words to images (when Stipe sings about an asp, you see a snake: when he mentions “Mr. Darwin,” you see the pages of a human-evolution textbook flipping) is oppressive. A terrific feeling of empathy, of loss and regret, grows in the piece. The second time Kaufman rises up, like a ghost in the mix, in his Elvis outfit, you know Stipe loved the man.

  Stipe hitches a ride on a truck, which drops him, at dusk, at the Easy-Rest Diner (the lyrics say “truck stop”). The way Peter Care brings Stipe to the door is pure Bruce Conner: flashes are piled onto flashes—seemingly hundreds of cuts to move a man a few steps—and it’s as quietly thrilling here as it was in 1967, when Conner took you into Jay DeFeo’s studio with his film The White Rose. Stipe sits down at the bar and signals for a beer. The expression on his face as he does so (his modesty, his happiness to be in this place) is striking, but no setup for what happens next. The camera begins to move around the bar, picking up old people, young people, men, women, pool players, drinkers, people just standing around in this nameless western place: where they’re from. And every one of them is lip-syncing the words to “Man on the Moon.”

  There’s nothing new about this device: as a trick of self-glorification (“I’d like to teach the world to sing—my song”) it’s as old as MTV. It was used perhaps most famously, and certainly most obnoxiously, by Talking Heads in “Wild, Wild Life,” where a bunch of small-town types in David Byrne’s vanity film True Stories were trotted onto a stage to mouth snatches of the tune like contestants on The Gong Show. “Man on the Moon” takes place in a different world. Face to face, line by line, what you’re seeing and hearing comes across as ordinary conversation: somehow it seems as likely that the weathered old man in the cowboy hat would be saying “Man on the Moon” as “Gimme another one, Joe.” The tableau expands—begins to construct itself as a fe
eling, something shared, the way a song on a jukebox can change a room—and suddenly you realize you don’t want this to end. You begin to worry that it will—even though you’re not sensing the song nearing its end, you’re simply drawn into the bar, this intimate place, part of it.

  The cuts are not so fast now. You get to know the faces, the people. The warmth in the room is as physical as the sensation of a cold lifting. The room seems to be swirling, though it’s not, there are no more special effects; by this point it’s emotion that’s moving too fast to keep up with. And then in the midst of this fine conversation, this magical invocation of community in its smallest, most everyday dimensions, the camera gives up a second or two to a blonde woman, smiling to the person she’s talking to—not at the camera. The knowledge in that smile, a knowledge that’s superior to nothing, that assumes everyone in the room knows what she knows: the pleasure and confirmation as the woman puts her lips around “They put a man on the moon”—it’s as perfect a moment as you’ll find anywhere, though for you, watching this video, the moment will be somebody else saying the same thing.