Real Life Rock (85 page)

MARCH
1993

1
Sarah Shankman,
The King Is Dead
(Pocket Books)
Set in Tupelo in the midst of an international barbecue cook-off, this entrancing murder mystery—a combination of Carl Hiaasen's
Double Whammy
and Elaine Dundy's
Elvis and Gladys
—is Shankman's fifth featuring amateur sleuth Sam (Samantha) Adams, and the first in which the prose isn't held back by tedious plotting. A web of full-blown Southern characters trailing hazy pasts moves the story on with slap-back dialogue (“ ‘Do you think y'all are related?' ‘Only if you think sleeping with the same man makes women kin' ”); Sam Adams, functioning less as private eye than as catalyst, stays out of the way and lets a biting, felt critique of the Southern class system emerge alongside a progressively creepy Jesse Garon Presley impersonator. Like Bobbie Ann Mason or Jill McCorkle with a more convincing sense of humor, or anyway less to worry about, Shankman communicates a joy in making words dance on the page that's rare in the best fiction: “The second bullet flew like a little bird right into Obie's open mouth and out the back of his head.” This is a book of pleasures; it only made me nervous when I realized the pages were running out.

2
Eleventh Dream Day,
El Moodio
(Atlantic)
Singer/drummer Janet Beveridge Bean throws bar talk in your face like cold water with “Making Like a Rug” (you lie), domestic quarrels fade as windows open onto the trouble in the streets outside, and on “Rubber Band,” singer/guitarist Rick Rizzo asks the musical question, How far can a phrase be stretched before every trace of the meaning it began with is gone?, and doesn't answer it.

3
Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Kenny Rogers, Bill Clinton, James Ingram, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett, Dionne Warwick, Michael Bolton, children's choruses, adult choruses, and more, more, more, “We Are the World,” An American Reunion (HBO, January 17)
It may be that behind the great good feeling of this performance lies only propaganda, a fabulous sheen of communitarian self-recognition disguising a new government that means to leave the country as it found it. But as John F. Kennedy proved against his own will, or for that matter his thoughtlessness, false promises can be taken up by those who only hear the tune and don't care about the copyright. If, as Robert Ray of the Vulgar Boatmen puts it, “The
sound
of Dylan's voice changed more people's ideas about the world than his political message did,” then the same can be said of the sound of Kennedy's voice and his political acts. The same may prove true of Bill Clinton's demeanor and his political instinct—as opposed to his personal instinct—to pull back at the first sign of trouble. The double-hearted rule but do not govern; desires have been loosed in the air and there's no telling where they'll light.

4
Peter Blegvad, Roman Bunka, Holger Czukay, Raymond Federman, John Greaves, Jon Sass, Stefan Schwerdtfeger, with special appearances by Richard Huelsenbeck and Hans Richter, and produced by Herbert Kapfer and Regina Moths,
dr. huelsenbeck's mentale heilmethode
(Rough Trade Rec, Germany)
A free-swinging, altogether unpredictable tribute to the Cabaret Voltaire Dadaist and New York psychoanalyst, this radio-play version of Huelsenbeck's “psychological salvation system” explodes all over the place: in the six-and-a-half-minute
Berlin Dada donny-brook “
röhrenhose rokoko-neger-rhythmus
,” in the weird “
hottentotten-kral new york
,” in the ghostly occasional samples from lectures and interviews by Huelsenbeck himself, and especially with American Peter Blegvad's rendition of the old Dada hit “
Ende der Welt
,” which is here performed in English, as a blues. Huelsenbeck, who always thought his act was “Negro poetry,” a kind of German ragtime, would be—well, who knows what he'd be?

5
Social Distortion, “Cold Feelings” (Epic)
The subjectivity—the passion and flair—in this well-scarred L.A. punk combo's songs is easy to miss, because the thrash 'n' burn sound and Mike Ness' flagellant vocals—he might as well have “Born to Lose” tattooed on the inside of his throat—are so utterly generic. Every tune begins with a promise that you've heard it all before. But there's a weariness here, a fury reduced to a twitch, that puts you in touch with a particular person, the singer, not someone you'd meet anywhere else. Ness throws his words over his shoulder as if that way he could actually get rid of what they say; the band throws them back. “Try to separate my body from my mind,” he says, having long since seen through the paradox and still not caring that what he wants can't be done. He keeps saying it, and after a minute or two everything our nation's film critics say happens in
Bad Lieutenant
happens here. Not only do you look all the way into someone else's broken mirror, you care what you see.

6
On the Wall, Inc.,
Scream
giant inflatable
Yes, 50 multicolored vinyl inches of Edvard Munch's all-time chart topper, “The timeless work of art that sums up all the stress, tension, frustration, and just plain AUUGGHH! that we all feel now and then.” If you hate Jeff Koons this'll have you sweating blood, but I imagine some people take theirs to bed with them.

7
Jimi Hendrix, “Star Spangled Banner,” in a TV public service announcement for Children Now/California (KTVU, Oakland, December 18)
The shattered Woodstock instrumental, running under a black and white, documentary-style montage of children writhing on the floor in gas-station bathrooms, picking through dumpsters, smiling, huddling together, looking scared, as if they were listening to the dead man: “He's playing our song!” An obvious idea, with a complete follow-through.

8
Bob Dylan, “Chimes of Freedom,” An American Reunion (HBO, January 17)
Yeah, he sounded terrible, but did you see that jacket? Purple, with black appliqué? On a night when Michael Jackson looked less human than the Mickey Mouse-men in Disneyland commercials, Dylan looked like he'd just bought a Nashville haberdashery.