Real Life Rock (31 page)

7
Bob Dylan, “Silvio” (Columbia)
A tune by Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead's writer, but the story isn't that the Dead rejected it first. The story is the arrangement, which goes back to Bill Haley for its suppression of elision or surprise. Dylan has always sung in country time, with an idiosyncrasy of rhythm and meter only certain musicians could keep up with: when he sings, he invents or he does nothing, but this is far less than nothing. “Silvio” suggests he has so little left of his style he couldn't even make a convincing Budweiser commercial—there's more musical freedom in the average Budweiser commercial than there is here. Dylan's music now has meaning only as neuroticism.

8–10
Larry Williams, “She Said ‘Yeah'” (Specialty, '59)
I went into an oldies store looking for a copy of “Bony Moronie” and saw this on the flip of “Bad Boy.” The clerk said it wasn't the same song the Rolling Stones used on
December's Children
in '65, but it was, and that made sense: the Beatles cut “Bad Boy,” the Stones turn the record over. But the change is curious. Williams enunciates clearly, almost trips over the broken beat, and takes 1:50 to make a non-event out of a nonsong. Jagger takes a deep breath and spews; dropping the internal quotation marks, the band crashes through in 1:30, setting a personal speed record, and more or less accidentally leaving behind one of their five or six most exciting performances. The song is now even less of a song, but the nonevent becomes an event—which is why, more than two decades later, it can still overturn the numbers surrounding it on Pussy Galore's
1 Yr Live
. There was, it turns out, a certain momentum built into that broken beat; absent either style or genre, it found a language and made history.

AUGUST
9, 1988

1
Prince, Lovesexy tour opening, Bercy, Paris (July 8)
A million-dollar set that does everything but shoot baskets into the onstage hoop, enough hardware to fill two 747 cargo jets or 14 trucks, record-quality sound, the most sophisticated lighting in the history of mass entertainment, countless costume changes, skits, and dances in the course of a three-hour show, a nine-piece ensemble with every step blocked out, every gesture scripted, not a drop of sweat left to chance, the whole contained in one man's head, rehearsed past the point of role and into the theatrical realm where artifice and routine communicate as necessity and will, like a 50-year-old soul legend singing her greatest hit last week at the Lone Star with more passion than it brought from her when it topped out at number three in 1964—this is Prince in 1988.

The show is backed up musically, and it transcends itself when sound supersedes merely physical movement, merely electronic color; though people gasped at certain shifts in staging, this was the real shock. “When You Were Mine” caught it, opening on Prince's guitar with the heroic confusion of the first seconds of Claudine Clark's “Party Lights,” but sustaining the
excitement of that opening through three, five, six minutes, the guitar shaping the singing to ring changes of wit on regret, seduction on defeat, maturity on adolescence, blues on rock 'n' roll. It was one of those moments when, confronted with the distant figure on the stage, with the huge noise that years of concert-going cannot quite connect to the performer's body, you almost shudder at the reaction building inside you, asking, “Is this real? Is this happening?” You shut your eyes, trying to commit a thousand nuances to memory, but memory will barely hold a few—and you know that for all the rehearsals, all the effects, for every detail of the perfect script, the song can never be played precisely this way again. Like a fan who won't wash the hand that's touched the star, you're afraid to go to sleep, in fear of what you might forget.

2
Lee Maynard,
Crumb
(Washington Square paperback)
Set in a nowhere West Virginia town a few years after the war, this novel about teenagers and sex could have been called “Country Without Music.”

3
Terri Sutton, “Women in Rock—An Open Letter,”
Puncture
#15)
Why the Bangs (the Fucks) turned into the Bangles (the Glitter). “Biased critics aren't doing music reviewing. They're doing police work.”

4
Reggie Jackson Chevrolet, (Berkeley, CA)
In the showroom, the man's black-cherry '55 Bel Air and a bubbling Wurlitzer with pristine tone. Number one on the jukebox: Chuck Berry, “No Money Down.”

5
Van Morrison & the Chieftains,
Irish Heartbeat
(Mercury)
Not as good as
Into the Music
, but close.

6
Brian Wilson,
Brian Wilson
(Sire CD)
The music is chirpy Beach-Boys Spector retread; the flat vocals grow flesh with every playing. But the sanctity of David Leaf's therapeutic liner notes (like that attending Patti Smith's gruesome “People Have the Power,” or Tracy Chapman's stutters on “Fast Car”) is disgusting. If you want Brian to get well, send him a get-well card: c/o Traubner and Flynn, 1849 Sawtelle Blvd., Suite 500, Los Angeles, CA 90025.

7
Happy Flowers, “They Cleaned Out My Cut With a
WIRE BRUSH
” (Homestead)
Flipper lives.