Real Life Rock (30 page)

5
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “She's the One” (Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA, May 2)
This time around, this is the one.

6
Critical Texts
,
v. V. #1
For C. O'Brien's “At Ease in Azania”—which, because it's fundamentally sympathetic, turns out to be the most convincing rejection of Paul Simon's bid for the Nobel Peace Prize. “
Graceland
was free to say anything it liked about what it engaged except what it did say: nothing.”

7
Beach Boys, (TV commercial—sorry, I was too mesmerized to catch what for)
As Mike Love jerks around the stage imitating a puppet with steel strings, you realize his longtime support for George Bush is no affectation—as a pop star, Mike Love
is
George Bush.

8
Jackie Collins,
Rock Star
(Simon & Schuster)
I figured this would be a good excuse to get a fix on Ms. Collins. I was wrong.

9
Forgotten Rebels, “Surfin' on Heroin,” from
Surfin' on Heroin
(Restless reissue)
Madness from Ontario. The line “I'm surfin' on a sea of puke” (delivered with such fervor you could see the singer doing it) thrilled any number of college radio listeners in '83; in the tradition of Minnesota's Trashmen (“Surfin' Bird,” '63), the first band to prove that only the ocean-deprived can realize the boundless possibilities of stupidity that lie behind the hedonism of California surf music, it closed out the
New Grove Dictionary of American Music
entry on the genre three years later. For that single slice of ineradicable miasma, this bunch will live forever.

10
Ronald Fraser, editor:
1968: A Student Generation in Revolt—An International Oral History
(Pantheon)
The story behind side three of
The Story of the Clash
: slanted, riddled with errors and omissions (i.e., Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Japan), but graced with the genius for synthesizing testimony with narrative that made Fraser's
Blood of Spain
irresistible. What comes through is not sentiment but passion.

JUNE
21, 1988

1
Benny Spellman, “Life Is Too Short,” from
Fortune Teller
(Charly r&b reissue, '59, UK)
The seeker after deep soul usually bypasses New Orleans, even though it produced Irma Thomas's “Wish Someone Would Care.” This is on the same level. The slow, quiet vocal is accompanied only by piano triplets, acoustic bass, brushes; when genre mannerisms surface in the singing, a sense of isolation so strong it is very nearly mystical wipes them away.

2
David Kennedy, “Debbie Does Swaggart”
(
Penthouse,
July)
These black and white reenactments of “poses” Debra Murphree struck for the Rev. Jimmy Lee Swaggart are not what one might have expected: grimy and cold, Kennedy's photographs carry a hint of Larry Clark's
Tulsa,
and an echo of Michael Lesy's
Wisconsin Death Trip
. They ought to be turned into punk flyers and stapled on telephone poles all over America, and they probably will be.

3
Wire,
A Bell Is a Cup Until It Is Struck
(Enigma/Mute)
Dreamy, smart, and vague. In two years they'll be on Windham Hill.

4
Jamie Reid and Jon Savage,
Up They Rise—The Incomplete Work of Jamie Reid
(Faber & Faber)
From the sly early '70s Suburban Press posters and stickers (“
THIS WEEK ONLY. THIS STORE WELCOMES SHOP-LIFTERS
”) through his Sex Pistols sleeves and ads, Reid practiced as a media alchemist, certain he could change critical theory into a threat and irony into violence.

5–6
Squeeze and Dave Edmunds Band, Budweiser commercials (AM radio)
What's sold here is not name or personality but style. The familiar but chart-poor groups are not announced, and that anonymity provides an aural itch that you scratch when you remember the product with which the style is associated. The spots take the language of a performer and reduce
it to two or three constituent elements; the result is that the performer's language—made of incipient clichés that, by means of a confrontation with a specific occasion of performance, are sometimes dissolved into an efflorescence that transcends cliché and extends language—is now reified into a single cliché hard enough to dominate any mere occasion. From now on, this is all the performer will have to say. His performance will communicate in terms of how well it approximates the reification of the commercial, not necessarily because the commercial will have been more widely or intensely heard than any other work by the performer (though it probably will have been), but because the commercial will now have completed—in fact, realized—the performer's career. When one hears an old Squeeze or Dave Edmunds record, it will sound like an attempt to formulate a cliché—to produce a style so recognizable and narrow that it can be marketed as an object, as a thing—which is what that record will have been.