Real Life Rock (19 page)

10
Loudon Wainwright III,
More Love Songs
(Demon, UK)
Tired, but a far more believable account of the compromises demanded by feminism than Alix Kates Shulman's gooey
In Every Woman's Life
. . . Top cut: “The Back Nine,” a why-go-on ballad built out of golf metaphors. He's still the only person who can make “whom”
work as rock 'n' roll, and perhaps the first to try “ middle-aged.”

JUNE
30, 1987

1
Tapps, “Hurricane” (JDC 12-inch)
Re-leased about a year ago, this dance track has a light rhythm, a fast beat, a pleasantly Stacey Q-style vocal, and an ordinary lyric: “You knock me down like a hurricane,” etc. But just when you think you've heard it all before, the singer pulls back, and returns with a stutter—a fluid, wordless “yip yip yip yip” so sustained, intricate, and erotically complex it makes the Silhouettes seem clumsy. I know, it was done with electronics—but it feels like a tongue.

2
Catherine McDermott,
Street Style—British Design in the 80s
(Rizzoli)
In 1953, a 19-year-old named Ivan Chtcheglov wrote a visionary manifesto, “Formula for a New Urbanism.” “We are bored in the city,” he began, “there is no longer any Temple of the Sun . . . the hacienda
where the roots think of the child and the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac
. Now that's finished. You'll never see the hacienda. It doesn't exist.
The hacienda must be built.”
Mediated through the '60s generation of U.K. art-school radicals, this document became an almost secret inspiration for punk; in 1982, Tony Wilson of Factory Records commissioned designer Ben Kelly to build the Hacienda—as a nightclub in Manchester. The pages McDermott devotes to Wilson's attempt to answer Chtcheglov's challenge leap out of this full-color paperback like a moment of silence in a roomful of noise.

3
Mason Ruffner, “Gypsy Blood,” from
Gypsy Blood
(CBS)
Strong, heedless, grinning, violent rockabilly, played the way Jimi Hendrix would have played it, if he'd played rockabilly: with the tremolo arm.

4
Misow, “When it All Comes Down (Catechism)” (Factory 12-inch)
When the going gets tough, the smart get cryptic.

5
Rolling Stones,
Beggars Banquet
(London reissue, 1968)
With the oncebanned bog-graffiti sleeve: the scrawled “Ronald Reagan is a
sissy
” reminds you how little has changed, the lyricism of the music how much.

6
Rice-Armandt-Hart-Broadhurst Band, “Twist and Shout” (Compleat Angler Bar, Bimini, March 28)
It would be poetic justice—some kind of justice, anyway—if the Isley Brothers turned out to have a greater effect on the next presidential election than Bruce Springsteen did on the last one.

7
Big Black,
Headache
(Touch and Go EP)
A cold, hard rhythm, when Steve Albini can manage to stay out of his own way.

8
Peter and the Test Tube Babies, “Louise Wouldn't Like It” (Profile)
But Wire fans would.

9
Camille Peri, “Our Shirelle—Doris Jackson's Life in Rock and Roll”
(
Image
magazine,
San Francisco Examiner
,
May 31)
A sensitive profile of a woman who now lives in Sacramento and still performs with her own “Shirelles,” but the highlight comes with a story Jackson tells about a tour the original group made with Little Richard: “Things had just opened up in Washington, D.C., in about 1962 to the point where black acts could stay downtown. Well, we were all playing at the Howard and Little Richard decided he was going to stay at one of the downtown hotels. At the time he was traveling with eight uniformed guards, gorgeous guys, and as part of his act they would roll out a red carpet and he would walk on it, wearing a robe, the whole bit. When his limo pulled up at the hotel his guards rolled out his carpet and stood at attention and Richard in his robe came out and was greeted by the management. But as the week went on and his bills started to mount, they called up to his room and said, ‘Sir, we're so happy you've chosen to stay at our hotel, but could you please tell us what country you're king of?' ”