Real Life Rock (6 page)

JUNE
10, 1986

1
The Honeys, “The One That You Can't Have,” from
Dream Babies—Girls and Girl Groups of the Sixties
(Capitol/EMI UK)
You have to slog through a lot of dross to get to this final cut—a '63 Brian Wilson composition/production for Marilyn Rovell (later Mrs. Brian), her sister Diane, and cousin Ginger Blake—but is it ever worth it. Save for “Wouldn't It Be Nice,” nothing the Beach Boys ever touched came out half this warming. The sound is lightly Spectorish, anticipating and surpassing the BB's
Pet Sounds:
a perfect, lilting aura for the lead Honey's vocal, which has no parallels in rock. She's talking to herself, wondering over the paradoxes of life on earth as circumscribed by the mores of a suburban high school (“The one that you can't have/Is the one that you want the most”). Cuteness that in a decade or so would harden into Valley-girl cliché is full of personality, a reach for the tones and elisions that might catch what one girl wants. The singing is displacingly amateurish—you can believe the style is being made up as the song is sung—and it holds a feeling of delight so patent you can almost see it in the air.

2
Robert Plant, “Far Post” (Esparanza/WEA Japan)
Unavailable here as the B-side of the non-U.S. version of the '83 “Big Log” single, import copies have lately been turning up courtesy of Jem; loose and taut as a cowboy's rope spinning just before it's shot
out to catch a calf around the neck, this
swings
. Plant's laconic vocal rides over barroom piano into the smokiest, least pretentious music he's made since Led Zeppelin blew up; he actually sounds like a human being.

3
Dobie Gray,
From Where I Stand
(Capitol)
The follow-up to “Drift Away,” a mere 13 years late. It's country soul, in the same way that Charlie Rich is soul country.

4
Sweet Dreams,
directed by Karel Reisz (Thorn EMI/HBO Video)
What makes this Patsy Cline biopic work is Reisz's refusal to dramatize: both Jessica Lange (Cline) and Ed Harris (husband) give one-note performances, but they hit their notes. What makes the movie powerful is the use of Cline's recordings for Lange to lip-synch: as opposed to
Nashville
and
Coal Miner's Daughter,
where country music was judged such shit the actors were allowed to do their own singing, thus reducing the characters they played, in
Sweet Dreams
Lange's character becomes a mystery—an ordinary, exuberant woman with many worlds in her throat. The extraordinary fidelity in the remastering of Cline's tunes brings out subtleties of phrasing and motive that don't exist on record: you hear Cline aiming above her working-class status, not knowing how to get there, prettifying her passion, the passion swallowing the prettifying—and that's all the drama the movie needs.

5
Little Richard,
Early Studio Outtakes
(Sunjay)
Marvels from the '50s, highlighted by lines from “I Got It” that took years to make official vinyl, and then in a funk version that wiped off all their drool: “It ain't what you do it's the way how you do it/It ain't what you eat it's the way how you chew it.”

6
Test Dept.,
The Unacceptable Face of Freedom
(Ministry of Power/Some Bizarre UK)
English friends say this tape-collage LP captures the mood in Britain better than anything else, mainly by turning the loop on the sleeve into noise: “The State Forced to Concede the Empire Abroad, Finally Turns on Its Own People to Create a New Empire at Home. The Last Colony. The State Forced to—”

7
Heart, “Nothing at All” (Capitol)
Voices carry.

8
Radio commercial for Mercury Sable (Young & Rubicam)
It begins with the Four Tops' stirring “Reach Out.” “I remember the first time I heard this song,” says a man wistfully. “It was the night my first girlfriend
dumped
me . . .”

9
O Love Is Teasin'
(Elektra)
It is of paramount importance that all people of good will avoid (if not invade record stores to burn) this three-LP boxed set of '50s retakes of ancient Appalachian ballads, unless such people harbor the irrepressible wish to hear “Barbara Allen” sung with the down-home charm of a public television station break.

10
“Lost Dog,” street flyer (Berkeley, January 1986)
This stood out among a score of other punk handbills stapled onto a telephone pole; it's been bothering me ever since I ripped it down and tacked it over my desk. There's a sort of Mr. Bill putty animal, a few lines of type carefully inked over so you can't read them, a screaming “
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DOG
??,” the words “The noblest, most rational and most intelligent beast God ever made,” and a cartoon of dogs and humans dressed for a fancy party taking place somewhere between Periclean Greece and prerevolutionary France. I thought I had it figured out as a cryptic record ad when a tune called “Fluffy,” about a “lost dog,” came on the local college station, but a call proved the song three years old. Is this a new band? A new philosophy? A new void?