Real Life Rock (21 page)

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.