Real Life Rock (28 page)

5
Little Richard, Presentation of Best New Artist at the 30th Annual Grammy Awards (CBS-TV, March 2)
To himself, as everyone knows—an announcement that got the self-described “born-again black Jew” a nomination to fill the vacant cantor's post at San Francisco's Temple Beth Sholom. Let's see Jesse Jackson match that.

6
Pamela Rose, “Hello, Hello, Taco Bell” (Tracy-Locke)
Rose normally reserves her florid belting for the Zazu Pitts Memorial Orchestra, a camp 'n' Motown outfit; what makes this radio commercial pornographic is her hysterical attempt to convince you she's never wanted another human being as much as she wants Taco Bell's current 99¢ (plus tax) special. There's talk Rose may even get a contract out of it—if the one numerous listeners have pledged to take out on her doesn't go through first.

7
Nick Lowe,
Pinker and Prouder Than Previous
(Columbia)
An almost perfect Nick Lowe album: madly idiosyncratic tunes that sound so generic they'd be all but anonymous on the radio.

8
Alan Leatherwood, “Preservation Halls: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”
(
Option
,
March/April)
A Cleveland report on a boondoggle worthy of the Pentagon.

9
Jerry Lee Lewis,
Keep Your Hands Off It!
(Zu-Zazz reissue, UK, 1959–62)
Sun-label songs and instrumentals, loose and rangy and fine, with Jerry Lee and teen bride Myra on the cover. Proof that there's no bottom to the Lewis vault—which means his next album has to be a bootleg, a half-dozen outtakes of the drooling “Big Legged Woman” intercut with the sermon on Lewis-sins that first cousin Jimmy Swaggart made Nick Tosches cut out of his Lewis bio
Hellfire
. The cover should be fabulous.

10
John Waters,
Hairspray
(New Line Cinema/MCA soundtrack)
The real, forgotten Toussaint McCall stands on a ghetto dance-hall stage and sings “Nothing Takes the Place of You” (it was a hit in '67, this is '62, but who cares); four kids leave the room. As they huddle in doorways on the street, making out, a bum walks by, picks up the song, and drowns out the artist: in this moment the song belongs to the derelict as if he wrote it. There hasn't been as true a rock 'n' roll event on screen since the garbage-can pounding of the would-be Little Richard at the end of Floyd Mutrux's '78
American Hot Wax
.

APRIL
26, 1988

1
Primitives, “Crash” (RCA UK)
The bounce of the Jamies' '58 “Summertime, Summertime,” toughened up with '88 cynicism and doubt: from its first bars, a natural hit.

2
Del-Lords, “Judas Kiss,” from
Based on a True Story
(Enigma)
Eric Ambel's singing may be too open, too faceless, to make this explosive cut last, though Syd Straw's edgy backing vocals help—but it doesn't matter. Seventeen years ago the Rolling Stones' “Dead Flowers” was a good idea; now it's great rock 'n' roll.

3
Eric Clapton,
Crossroads
(Polygram reissue, '63–'88, six LPs, four CDs)
This is overkill—disturbing, desperate moments lost in a 73-cut assemblage of dross and dates, confusion and careerism. It's got that acrid digital sound, complete with jumps and drop-offs, lacking all warmth and presence, turning what once were shocks into lifeless exercises in remix. “Layla” is a horror: what you get, along with all the words, as if they were the point, is a man singing to a backing tape.

At its most distinctive, there was something heroic, something tragic, about Clapton's playing—you don't sense self-expression so much as struggle: the resistance of the music in the guitarist's mind to his will to realize that music, his resistance to losing himself in the sound he can make. What's being transcended is a kind of neurotic distance, a wish to disappear, to cease to be; the result is focus, elegance, balance—not blues. It's there in the solo in Cream's '66 “Spoonful,” especially the three final notes; most of all, it's in the long, unsatisfied, unsatisfiable solo that ends Dave Mason's “Look at Me Look at You,” which closed his '70 Blue Thumb LP,
Alone Together
. That performance is not on
Crossroads
, and I'm glad.

4
Reverend Lonnie Farris,
Vocal and Steel Guitar
(Eden Records)
Walk into a room where this is playing and you'll ask what it is before you say hello. What it is is (a) what Eric Clapton wanted on the Bluesbreakers' '66 “All Your Love,” and (b) an L.A. minister in 1962 with a steel guitar that sings like a Leslie. The shimmering, liquid chords are so evanescent you see them more than you hear them; Farris's guitar doesn't talk, it paints.