Real Life Rock (80 page)

8
Ashtray,
Ashtray
(Shoe Records)
Bare-bones lyricism, crude male and female vocal leads, and a guitarist who can play his string all the way out.

9
Chris Hunt, director,
The Search for Robert Johnson
(Sony Music Video)
Willie Mae Powell was Johnson's lover in the '30s; the look on her still-beautiful face when she listens to Johnson's “Love in Vain,” which mentions her, is worth a lot, as is blues researcher Mack McCormick's highly sophisticated analysis of Johnson's psyche. They may even be worth sitting through a lot of stilted, overrehearsed interviews and endless takes of narrator John Hammond, Jr., strangling Johnson's songs.

10
Bono, “Can't Help Falling in Love,” from
Honeymoon in Vegas—Music from the Original Soundtrack
(Epic Soundtrax)
This set mixes by-the-numbers Elvis covers (Billy Joel's “All Shook Up,” Ricky Van Shelton's “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”) with surprises: a thrilling ride through “Suspicious Minds” with Dwight Yoakam and an uncredited Beth Anderson, a torchy, Mary Lou Barton–styled “(You're The) Devil in
Disguise” by Trisha Yearwood, a hipster “Jailhouse Rock” from John Mellencamp. The stunner is Bono's twisted reading of the ultimate Big E show-closer, here accompanied principally by an old Elvis interview running in the background. As Bono climbs the golden ladder of the song toward a falsetto so desperate it's all too obvious who he can't help falling in love with, the man himself—or the boy; Elvis sounds very young, and completely guileless—talks about a book called
Poems That Touch the Heart
. After two minutes, Bono fades into the ether, and from out of it comes that familiar voice: “Yessir, I'll be looking forward to coming back. Yessir, I'm looking forward to it.”

NOVEMBER
1992

1
Lucious Curtis, “High Lonesome Hill,” on the various-artists anthology
Mississippi Blues—Library of Congress Recordings 1940–1942
(Travelin' Man)
With the national music companies no longer digging up the South, folklorist John Lomax came to Natchez in 1940 to make field recordings. Among those whose songs he cut into his 12-inch acetates one Saturday was singer-guitarist Curtis, working with second guitarist Willie Ford. Curtis never recorded again, and if there is another country blues performance quite like “High Lonesome Hill” I haven't heard it.

The tone is light, melodic, the vocal sly. The two guitarists find the pulse they will push and twist through the long instrumental passages of this four-minute-31-second sun shower, and the dynamics of the instrumentation are completely open, the excitement jumping ahead thirty or fifty years to prophesy the Allman Brothers' “Blue Sky” and R.E.M.'s “Losing My Religion.” You can get lost in this music, wonder what became of Lucious Curtis. But it's the opening lines of the song that echo—again with that glancing attack, yet delivering a statement so weighted it can make you wonder where Lucious Curtis came from. The first line is broken up with hesitations, the second line is rushed, and the third line is a deep breath:

Babe, I went, and I stood up, on some high old lonesome hill

Babe I went and I stood up on some high old lonesome hill

And looked down on the house where I used to live

These are the words of a man who has seen all around his life, and is about to tell you everything he's seen.

2
Alison Krauss & Union Station,
Every Time You Say Goodbye
(Rounder)
Bluegrass fiddler Krauss sings in a warble that sounds first of all small. A second listen turns plaintiveness into toughness, and after that—well, her voice becomes a thing of real complexity, to the point where you can locate the soul in “Who Can Blame You” in the way she communicates that she doesn't believe a word she's singing.

3
Bill Buford,
Among the Thugs
(Norton)
This is a book about crowd violence and English football fans: a milieu that caught up American-in-Britain Buford for eight years. His conclusion is extreme: “This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell.” Buford's prose is almost unique these days: first-class, yet seemingly ordinary, straight, and never calling attention to itself (try reading P. J. O'Rourke after Buford—it can't be done). The result is a noisy book about the fascist possibilities of Western democracy: “A crowd had been made by the people who had stepped into the street, and everyone was aware of what they had done; it was a creative act.” And what was created? “They were all strangers. This march was a march of strangers. More to the point: this march was a march. It recalled not football crowds, but demonstrations or protest rallies. You could see the surprise in the faces of the people near me; they had created something big, but weren't sure how they'd done it.”

4
Ramones, “Poison Heart,” from
Mondo Bizarro
(Radioactive)
The Ramones began as kings of irony, but Joey Ramone is most present when his heart is bleeding all over his sleeve. As on “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg”; the touching he-doesn't-wanna-be-buried-in-a “Pet Sematary” (given Joey's ruling pinhead persona, his fear is credible); and this ditty, all cornball angst and thrilling negative uplift.

5
Hopey Glass, “Great Lost Recordings,” in
The Wire
#102, September 1992
Glass on “My Happiness,” Elvis' first, for-his-mother recording, as it surfaced 37 years after the fact, and why no one paid attention: “Sung to Gladys or himself, or the young Gladys in himself, [it] says quiet gentleness can also be an unearthly force.” At full length, as Glass seeks to understand Elvis not as a rebel but as a mother, a cultural mother, this is the most sophisticated and risky music criticism I've read in a long time, and a match for William Carlos Williams on Abraham Lincoln: “The Great Rail-splitter's ‘All I am or ever hope to be I owe to my angel mother'; the walking up and down in Springfield on the narrow walk between the two houses, day after day, with a neighbor's baby, borrowed for the occasion, sleeping inside his cape on his shoulder to give him stability while thinking about coming speeches. . . . The least private would find a woman to caress him, a woman in an old shawl—with a great bearded face and a towering black hat above it, to give it unearthly reality.”