Real Life Rock (83 page)

5
International Secular Atavism, stickers
The Traditional Family Values set, highlighted by a loving heterosexual couple in a prayerful if sodomitic position, a collage of headlines on clerical pedophilia, and “ ‘J
ESUS
C
HRIST
' T
HREW
U
P IN
M
Y
C
AR
.” “He was wearing a yellow rented party dress which was wrecked,” the sticker continues. “He was heard saying ‘I don't fucking care . . .
It's not fucking mine
.' ” If you think it's easy to think up stuff like that, try it yourself.

6
Heavenly,
Le Jardin de Heavenly
(K/Cargo)
Beatle echoes cut with a present-day cynicism so light it merely seems like doubt. There hasn't been a vocal smile as good as Amelia Fletcher's since Claire Grogan broke up Altered Images.

7
Robbie Robertson, “Canon” (Part 2) (includes “Playing Chess with Bobby Fischer in Bellevue Reverie) from
Beneath The Underdog
,” on
Hal Willner Presents Weird Nightmare—Meditations on Mingus
(Columbia)
Reading from Charles Mingus' autobiography on this mostly-musical tribute album, Robertson catches one border station of '60s Manhattan bohemia, like a narrator for an episode of
The Twilight Zone
, or maybe
Peter Gunn
.

8
Blue Blouse, postcards
Eight proofs that the '20s Soviet agit-prop collective Blue Blouse—a 100,000-strong perform-anywhere “living newspaper”—actually existed: group poses of the stolid “Physical Culture Dance,” the Arthurian “Strengthen the Might of the Red Army,” the grinning roundelay of “Revolt of the Toys,” and the flirtatious “Five Year Plan.” With tableaux that make production sexy, these postcards from a vanished time truly speak from a new world, albeit not quite a real one.

9
Frederick Pollack, “Theses on Intellectuals,” in
Representations
#39, Summer 1992
A rollercoaster that only goes down: 161 sentences on why intellectuals underestimate the will to power, the pleasures of scapegoating, and the joy of inflicting pain. Extra-credit reading: The Old Testament. Soundtrack: anything by Guns N' Roses.

10
Terry Gross, interview with Neil Young, on
Fresh Air
,
November 5 (NPR, originating from WHYY-FM, Philadelphia)
This rare audio interview with Young featured direct answers that came to flat stops, silences that left the air not dead but surprised, a tone that at first sounded like impatience and soon came across as authority, plus an exchange on how easily Young might fit into Nirvana. Gross: “Most of the people who play that kind of loud, grunge sound are much younger. I wonder how you felt as somebody in your 40s who's been playing since the mid '60s, playing a music that mostly people who are a generation younger than you—” Young: “None of these old guys around know how to do it.” “None of the old guys around know how to do it?” “No, they don't. They can't do it, you know, so they don't do it. That's why I'm still doing it, 'cause I know how. If they were as lucky as me, they'd be doing it too. I mean, it's fantastic. There's no sensation like it.”

FEBRUARY
1993

1
Jonathan Richman,
I,
Jonathan (Rounder)
Good news: from the premier
regressive in pop music, his best album since the '77
Rock 'n' Roll with the Modern Lovers
. The sound is living room pristine, the technique a wave at second-rank '50s rockabilly and particularly unaccomplished '20s country blues, and the instrumentation is extant, barely: that is, Richman and friends can make a guitar, tambourine, and handclaps feel like a whole band. Material includes a rediscovery of surf music (“Grunion Run”), a rewrite of “Gypsy Woman” into “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar” (“Well, the first bar, things were stop and stare/But in this bar, things were laissez-faire”—he pronounces it two different ways, both correct), a heartwarming tribute to the Velvet Underground (“America at its best”—now that Richman's transcended his influences he can wallow in them), and the hysterical “Rooming House on Venice Beach.” Starting with a normal beat, Rich-man is soon falling over himself with the gross
hippieness
of the place; he sings as if he still can't believe he was ever there. “The ancient world was at my reach,” he chants, but he means people who were '60s relics long about, oh, 1970: “The ancient drunk guys/Passing the cup,” or “The weirdo weird guys/Passing the hat.” As social history this ranks with the fabled “Dodge Veg-O-Matic,” the Modern Lovers' number about the worst car ever made. Bad news: title is sort of dumb.

2
Bob Dylan,
Good As I Been to You
(Columbia)
Solo versions of very old ballads and prewar blues standards—“other people's songs,” but these songs are as much Dylan's as anyone else's, and he sings them with an authority equal to that he brought to Blind Lemon Jefferson's “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” in 1962. The authority is not the same, though; there's more freedom in it now. “Little Maggie” is always played for its melody, but Dylan goes for its drama, the drama of a weak, scared man in love with an unfaithful drunk. The music is cut up, stretched, snapped back: each line opens with a stop, and at its end just fades out. The more historical numbers—18th-and 19th-century tales of, to be blunt, imperialist class war and primitive capitalist exploitation—are personalized, Dylan inhabiting the first-person narratives as if he lived them twice. It's only after a time, when the melancholy and bitterness seem too great for one voice, that you hear them as history, as more than one man's plight. Finally all of the story is shared, the singer only its mouthpiece, medium for private miseries within the great sweep of disaster; these songs are yours as much as anyone else's. As for the guile, the slyness, the pleasing cynicism in the singer's voice—he gets to keep that.