Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus

  4 Cruzados, “Bed of Lies,” (Arista) The tune comes off the radio with the force of a bad dream you don’t want to wake from. “I’m drinking my way back into your heart,” Tito Larriva snarls at himself; guitarist Marshall Rohner knows how to hold a note just past the crucial split-second that has you begging for it.

  5 Sonic Youth, Sister (SST) Corrosive.

  6 Peter Laughner, “Cinderella Back-street” (Forced Exposure) An incandescent little piece from a man who founded Cleveland’s Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu, and died in ’77; a bit like Bob Dylan’s “I’m Not There” in theme, closer to Mick Jagger’s “Cocksucker Blues” in feeling.

  7 Darden Smith, “Bus Stop Bench” and “Stick and Stones,” from Native Soil (Redi Mix) Smith is a folkie, and he has a folkie’s smugness, but sometimes it fails him.

  8 Adam Parfrey, “The Book of Charlie” (Exit #3) As a graphics magazine, Exit is a sort of pagan-fascist version of RAW. Halfway through its celebration of Charles Manson is a collage that combines Mansonoid graffiti with the famous photo of Hitler and his advisors studying war maps, except that the heads of the advisors have been replaced by those of the Beatles—”vulgar simpletons,” says the artist, but nevertheless unwitting “messengers of the Gods,” “harbingers of Helter-Skelter.” Take a look.

  9 Ted McKeever, Eddy Current (Mad Dog Graphics) In this unfolding comic-book series, a good-hearted schizophrenic escapes from his asylum in order to save the world (he’s got to be back in 12 hours, so there’ll be one book for each hour). Problems: the world he wants to save tilts like the rooms in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, punks mug him, and a nun who thinks he’s Jesus Christ kidnaps him. Also—he hasn’t the vaguest idea of what he has to save the world from, though it’ll turn out to be a mind-control plot by a version of the PMRC.

  10 Rosanne Cash, King’s Record Shop (Columbia) Cash is looking for a subject. “Rosie Strike Back” takes off from Graham Parker’s “Nobody Hurts You” for its sound, and it sounds good, until you can no longer deny it’s didactic enough to serve as a public service announcement for battered women’s shelters; that takes about a minute. But “The Real Me,” a ballad, may stand up: it’s slow, warm, open, naked, and hard. “I want to crawl inside you, baby/But I don’t want you near.”

  AUGUST 28, 1987

  1 Jim Dodge, Not Fade Away, a novel (Atlantic Monthly Press paperback) Summer ’87: in a season of Real Death Rock, reaching a head on August 16 with the 10th Annual Graceland Wake ’n’ Family Picnic, the true auteur of the moment may be not Elvis Presley but Roger Petersen—who on February 3, 1959, took his single-engine Bonanza off the ground and almost immediately returned to it, along with Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens. Elvis remains buried beneath his own clichés; the plane crash is still turning up surprises.

  The plane crash has its own clichés. The big one is Luis Valdez’s lifeless film La Bamba, a goody-goody account of The Ritchie Valens Story redeemed only by Danielle von Zerneck’s touching, sunny performance as Valens’s real-life girlfriend Donna Ludwig (#3 on this month’s chart) and Marshall Crenshaw’s quick but revelatory portrayal of Buddy Holly as a hipster (#4). More promising (if unread) is Beverly Wendheim’s Ritchie Valens: The First Latino Rocker, a biography due later this month (Bilingual Review Press); it rates an easy #5 merely for its 23 pages of pictures. Maybe the radio will even drown out Los Lobos’s folkie Valens covers with Led Zeppelin’s unhinged version of his “Ooh, My Head”; ripped off and retitled (as “Boogie With Stu,” on Physical Graffiti), it’d still come in at #6. All of which pales against the big surprise, Jim Dodge’s Not Fade Away. Despite taking its title from a Holly tune, this is The Big Bopper Story—on a level no movie or biography will ever reach.

  In San Francisco, in 1965, a young ex-trucker named George Gastin is hanging on to what’s left of the Beat scene, making his rent smashing up expensive cars so their owners can collect on inflated insurance policies. Then his life begins to fall apart; faced with a cherry ’59 Cadillac a client wants torched, Gastin hesitates. In the glove compartment, he discovers a letter from the original owner, a rich spinster three years dead. “I am a 57-year-old virgin,” it begins. “I’ve never had sex with a man because none has ever moved me.” But the man to whom the letter is addressed moved her; one night, dialing for a classical station, the woman chanced upon “Chantilly Lace,” and had her life changed. The car, the letter says, is her way of returning the gift; it belongs to the man on the radio, the Big Bopper. But the letter is dated February 1, 1959.

  Gastin decides to take the car where it belongs—to the Big Bopper’s grave, at first, then to the site of the plane crash. A skimpy plot is hung on the premise, but the life of the novel is in Gastin’s adventures along the way: a series of hilarious and ultimately mystical encounters with phantom characters as strange and believable as the 57-year-old virgin fan of “Chantilly Lace.” There’s a mad scientist testing theories that later showed up in Jacques Attali’s Noise, the world’s greatest traveling salesman, the 97-year-old woman who owns the land where the plane went down, others less easy to describe, all of them cut from the same vein of American fiction first mined by Melville in The Confidence-Man. What drives Not Fade Away is Gastin’s growing suspicion that he’s destined to join this company—to lose his status as a man with a place in time and become a road-spirit, no more and no less than a song half-heard at 3 a.m. in the middle of the Nevada desert, or in a rich woman’s house in San Francisco.

  2 Lucy de Barbin and Dary Maters, Are You Lonesome Tonight? The Untold Story of Elvis Presley’s One True Love—and the Child He Never Knew (Villard) In a month glutted by such corpse-in-your-mouth Elvis product as Jane and Michael Stern’s all-filler Elvis World (Knopf, #9 on the level of Stay Away, Joe), Lee Cotten’s shoddy Elvis Catalog (Doubleday, #10, ditto), and RCA’s repackagings of the ’54–’55 Sun and ’69 Memphis comeback recordings (for the insensate every-instrument-in-its-place remastering of the ’69 stuff, a combined #7 ’n’ #8), this bizarre memoir will supersede Dodge’s fantasy of a woman who bought a Cadillac for a man she never met—not in the annals of rock, but in those of psychopathology. That is: Lucy de Barbin claims to remember every telling detail of her more than two-decade affair with Elvis, which resulted in two pregnancies and one child, and I believe she does remember. One day, a woman heard a song on the radio, and it sparked a fantasy, shared by millions, that the song was sung to her. Rather than accept the cruelty and degradation of her real life, unlike the rest who heard the song, this woman lived out the fantasy, and she is living it out today. In other words: the same radio that in Not Fade Away made a woman happy made Lucy de Barbin pregnant in Are You Lonesome Tonight?

  SEPTEMBER 22, 1987

  1 John Mellencamp, The Lonesome Jubilee (Mercury) This time out of the box, even a number called “We Are the People” makes it.

  2 Kim Wilde, “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” (MCA 12-inch) Holland-Dozier-Holland built a terrible inexorableness into this tune, a no-way-out that Vanilla Fudge found by slowing the melody down and Wilde (Kim, or producer Ricki) gets by speeding it up. What’s new is the extraordinary sense of desperation the song calls forth from a nakedly ordinary voice: the way K.W., in pursuit of high notes she’ll never reach, throws herself off the cliff of “. . . and let me find somebody ELSE” is rock ’n’ roll art if anything is.

  3 Einstürzende Neubauten, Feunf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala [Five on the Richter Scale] (Relativity) A tone poem about the progress of entropy; with surges of Romantic, classical themes, an accounting of what’s already been lost.

  4 KALX, Station I.D. (90.7 FM, Berkeley) “THIS IS ATTORNEY GENERAL ED MEESE! YOU’RE LISTENING TO THE NEWS ON KALX, BROADCASTING FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA! IT’S A CRIME IF YOU DON’T STAY TUNED!” And it may be a crime if you do—if UC alumnus Meese, whose voice this truly is, catches KALX airing Pussy Galore’s “Cunt Tease” again.

  5 Contras, Ciphers in the Snow (Whit-tier Records) “The name, of cours
e, is not a reflection of our political views but our musical vision, to be rock’s counter-revolutionaries”—whatever that means. Since the real contras are Reagan’s Rasputins, and just as hard to kill, these “Contras” are probably even dumber than their little disclaimer. The music is smart: rangy punk with lots of room in the sound for cowboy-ballad guitar and a singer who, no matter how fast the tempo, settles all questions with a deadpan drawl, most notably on “Dead Guy,” probably the best ever why-I-didn’t-do-my-homework song (are there any others?).

  6 Five Jones Boys, Four Blackbirds, Three Peppers, Five Breezes, etc., The Human Orchestra—Rhythm Quartets in the Thirties (Clanka Lanka reissue, 1932–40, Sweden) This is a very entertaining collection of formally ambitious performances that now seem like novelty records. It shouldn’t be that way: the “human orchestra” of, say, the Jones Boys Sing Band’s “Pickin’ a Rib” is likely a direct (if forgotten) ancestor of today’s human beatboxes. In any larger context, though, this music is stranded in time: most of all, evidence that the theory of musical evolution cannot account for the shift from the pre-war black group sound to the doo-wop rock ’n’ roll style that first gained shape in 1948 with the Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon to Know.” The shift was a breach, and it was social.

  7 Residents, Stars & Hank Forever!—The American Composer Series, Volume II (Ralph Records) One side of John Philip Sousa, as “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Semper Fidelis” might have worked on the Eraserhead soundtrack, and one of Hank Williams, whose “Ramblin’ Man” no longer lusts for the other side, but comes from it.

  8 Richard Berry, “Louie, Louie” (Earth Angel reissue, 1953–58, Sweden) Lacking the crucial legal-jeopardy discs (“Riot in Cell Block #9” with the Robins’, “The Big Break,” “Next Time”), this is solid L.A. doo-wop, which was greasier than the East Coast version. Plus more proof that if there’s a hell the composer of “Besame Mucho” belongs in it.

  9 John Carman, review of Martin Scorsese’s video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad” (San Francisco Chronicle, September 2) Good rock criticism from a TV columnist: “Scorsese’s film turned out to be the longest build-up to one bad song since the conception, birth, and early life of Debby Boone.”

  10 Mick Jagger, “Let’s Work” (Columbia) There are moments when you find yourself responding, yes, there is a reason, a reason beyond a love of one’s own celebrity, even beyond the fear of losing it, that this song was written and sung . . . not that Jagger’s words, which in the course of his long and distinguished career have often impinged on a world inhabited by persons other than himself, provide a clue as to what that reason might be.

  OCTOBER 20, 1987

  1 Chuck Berry, The Autobiography (Harmony) “I adjusted swiftly back to the general trends of society’s majority,” he says of his release from prison in 1963, “and settled down with friends in the subtle minority.” There are volumes in that line, whole sociologies and poetics, and it’s altogether emblematic of this remarkable testament: if the controlling theme of the book is racism (just overshadowing sexual adventurism, family love, and money-wit), its heart is in its language. What at first seems like doggerel (“Speaking of beauty, she had little to share, but if charms were hours, she had years to spare”) turns into a unique and open voice, which only occasionally calls up the voice Berry used in his songs. (That voice, it’s now clear, was not his at all, but his rendering of a fantasized conversation between audience and performer, crowd and observer: a pop construct.) Berry leaps past such categories as “prose style,” demanding older, more ambiguous locutions: “phraseology,” “cacology,” “conjure.” And of course there are countless good stories, none quite exhausting its facts, most sealed with a touch of bile: “I remember having extreme difficulty while writing ‘Promised Land’ in trying to secure a road atlas of the United States to verify the routing of the Po’ Boy from Norfolk, Virginia, to Los Angeles. The penal institutions were not then so generous as to offer a map of any kind, for fear of providing the route for an escape.”

  2 Big Black, Songs About Fucking (Touch and Go) As with Sonic Youth’s Sister, a slight move towards accessibility makes the void this now-defunct band tried to map more believable than ever before. With great sleeve art, a drum machine with a personality, and a cover of Kraftwerk’s “Model” as a Rosetta Stone, the songs—events, really—quickly open into the terrain once occupied by PiL’s “Pop-tones,” and then dig in.

  3 Pussy Galore, Pussy Galore, Right Now! (Caroline) A little vague, maybe—nothing so arresting as “Pretty Fuck Look.” Still, if when the Rolling Stones made The Rolling Stones, Now!, they’d also cut a secret version, this is what it might have sounded like.

  4 Jonathan Valin, Fire Lake (Delacorte) The theme of the seventh Harry Stoner mystery is that of a thousand feature stories now lining birdcages: “The ’60s Revisited—The Music! The Drug Culture! The Free Love Generation!” The difference is that for ex-junkie Karen Jackowski, time stopped when the ’60s ended; for time to start again only means that the ’60s are catching up with her.

  5 The Jesus and Mary Chain, Dark-lands (Warner Bros.) Car music.

  6 Van Morrison, Poetic Champions Compose (Mercury) And when the going gets tough, the tough get down on their knees and pray. The sound is close enough to New Age to appear on Windham Hill (each side opens with a vapid instrumental), but as on all of Morrison’s recent albums, there are a lot of dead flies trapped in the gossamer threads, and sometimes the threads don’t even need the flies.

  7 Billy Lee Riley, “Trouble Bound,” as used on Private Eye (NBC, Fridays at 10 p.m.) Running behind bad news in this Eisenhower-era corpse opera, Riley’s brooding ’56 rockabilly ballad made as perfect a moment as I’ve seen on TV this year. But such contrivances define the show’s limits—even with a recent script based on President (of the Screen Actors Guild) Ronald Reagan’s notorious deal with MCA, it’s all concept, no fire.

  8 Vivien Vee, “Heartbeat” (TSR 12-inch) Italian disco with every rhythm trick known to Western man (“good for aerobics,” it says), a little-girl vocal reminiscent of Claire Grogan of Altered Images, and an extraordinarily warming upsurge every time the melody peaks for the apparently deathless couplet, “One-two-three/Baby what you do to me.”

  9 Fearless Iranians from Hell, Die for Allah (Boner) Speaking of death, or numerology, the noise here doesn’t exactly transcend itself, but “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10/See I can count to ten” does.

  10 PiL, “Open and Revolving,” from Happy? (Virgin) Yes—but everywhere else on this record, the door has closed.

  NOVEMBER 17, 1987

  1 Pet Shop Boys, actually (Manhattan) Thatcherism is now a pop tradition, and this exquisite album measures the costs of “People’s Capitalism” as subtly as Springs-teen’s Nebrasku exposed the nihilism of our own “National Renewal.” Casting back no farther than Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” and Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” the music is almost subliminally affecting; the singing is full of doubt—consciousness. The theme of love and money—the impossibility, now, of telling one from the other—comes into deep focus with “Rent,” the smooth, bitter tale of a kept man, singing for a kept country.

  2 Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, The One Million Dollar Quartet (S bootleg reissue, 1956) Not like the dim, truncated artifact-for-artifact’s-sake that surfaced some years ago, but uncut, the sound so bright and present the legends might be setting up in your living room. Despite a dozen spirituals, what’s startling is the patent lack of religious feeling: this is a celebration of worldly stardom and its loosening of all constraints (“Well, it’s Saturday night, and I just got laid . . . ah, paid”). Elvis dominates, most notably trying once, twice, three times to top Jackie Wilson’s Las Vegas version of “Don’t Be Cruel,” because he’s sure it topped his. Available for a short time only at a record store not far from where John Fogerty went to high school.

  3 Bruce Springsteen, Tunnel of Love (Columbia) For the mood o
f “Tougher Than the Rest.”

  4 Rolling Stone, XX Anniversary Issue (#512, November 5–December 12) “By the time the Labour party came into power in Britain in 1964, youth culture was already a fait accompli. That is, youth had already benefited from the prosperous inflationary period of the early sixties—that whole period of teenage consumerism that Colin MacInnes wrote about in books like Absolute Beginners. . . .” So says Professor Michael Philip Jagger in this extraordinary compendium of new interviews with 34 traditional RS favorites: three blacks, three women, one twofer, and no punks. The leading questions emphasize “The Sixties” as concept and legacy; the answers are usually thoughtful, honest, hard-nosed, and sometimes (the first paragraph of the Keith Richards entry) pure poetry.

  5 Jovan Acin, Hey, Babu Riba (Orion Pictures) A bizarre twist on the “L. O. V. E. across the knuckles of his right hand/H. A. T. E. across the knuckles of his left” motif—not to mention proof that rock ’n’ roll was invented in Yugoslavia, in 1953, by fans of Lionel Hampton’s “Hey, Bop-a-Re-Bop,” as a protest against Titoism.