Real Life Rock (33 page)

8
Joe Strummer, “The Return of Smokin' Joe,” interview by Matthew Colin in
Cut
(July)
“I wish we hadn't taken it so seriously… . It said, ‘Let's sweep away everything and start again,' but after a few years when all the old buzzards came back, it obviously hadn't swept away anything. It was a hiccup rather than a complete change.” “Didn't you realise that was inevitable all along,” says the recuperative voice of the interviewer. “Well, I should have. I'd seen all that before when I was taking my O levels, all that Vietnam protest stuff and Paris raging in '68 … then again, maybe we wouldn't have gotten into it without being so completely fanatical.” The key word here is not “fanatical,” it's “we.”

9
Pat Benatar, “All Fired Up” (Chrysalis)
In the sound and feel the record's reaching for, it's a lot like Patti Smith's “People Have the Power,” and there's nothing to that record but its reach. But “All Fired Up” is twice as convincing, many times more exciting, and Benatar hasn't had a hit for years. How come no one's raving about
her
comeback?

10
Albert Goldman,
The Lives of John Lennon
(Morrow)
Imagine it's all true; a lot of it is. Then connect the music to the truth. There you have a paradox, which the author doesn't want you to solve.

OCTOBER
4, 1988

1
Randy Newman, “Dixie Flyer” and “New Orleans Wins the War” from
Land of Dreams
(Reprise)
Whether or not these songs are simple autobiography, they're presented as such, and for a man who's always sung as a character actor, it's a shock. As the tunes roll easily on a piano that communicates socially, that sets a mood of shopping,
banter, strolling, a mood so commonplace it validates every personal detail, Newman is singing about being Jewish in a gentile world, about late '40s racism as a natural fact, about the skewed, impossible, utterly concrete memories of childhood: his father coming back from the war to tell the people of New Orleans they'd won, and so sparking a citywide celebration—in 1948. “Maybe they'd heard it, maybe not,” Newman remembers. “Probably they'd heard about it, just forgot”—and the way he sings the last two words of each line is as profound as anything in “Sail Away.”

2
White of the Eye
(dir. Donald Cammell, Paramount video)
For Cathy Moriarty, who uses obscenity with more conviction than anyone else in the movies.

3
Midnight Oil, “The Dead Heart” (Columbia)
The title plays against the singsong: “We carry in our hearts the true country/And that cannot be stolen.” In other words, the country (in their case, Australia, and it doesn't matter that they're singing as Aborigines; in your case, as you listen, your country) is up for grabs. This band is not kidding—not, like others on the charts, making political music out of populist pieties. They're in the game for the wisdom their music can be made to give up.

4
The Sun
“
STATUE OF ELVIS FOUND ON MARS
—Satellite Beams Back ‘All Shook Up'” (September 20)
Let's see
Doonesbury
and
Bloom County
top that.

5
Simon Frith,
Music for Pleasure—Essays in the Sociology of Pop
(Routledge)
Eighties daily journalism and the footnoted scholarship it provoked: a collection in which each piece is engaged in a conversation with every other.

6
Bo Diddley,
Bo Diddley's Beach Party
(Chess reissue, 1963, Japan)
Recorded live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when it cost a buck or two to get in. It costs $20 now, but if you were there, or ever wished you were, it might be worth it.

7
David Lindley & El Rayo-X,
Very Greasy
(Elektra)
Even the bad covers (“Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Werewolves of London”) echo the misanthropic wit (in the singing) and the love of the world (the guitar playing) that made Lindley's 1981
El Rayo-X
as personal in its way as
Astral Weeks
. Don't wait for the next one, David—the feeling is back, the momentum is there.