Real Life Rock (42 page)

8
Marc Eliot,
Rockonomics
—
The Money Behind the Music
(Franklin Watts)
“Nowhere,” Eliot writes in this shocking exposé, which comes in a first printing of 50,000 copies, most of which will soon be selling for $4.95, “was there any obvious R&B influence or direction in Elvis's career. Whenever he was asked about how he developed
his singing style, he was always careful to avoid any mention of black music.”

9
Ex,
Aural Guerrilla
(Homestead)
One of the atrocity posters included with this Test Department-does-it-better noise 'n' politics LP matches photos of people being marched off under guard: “
GERMANY
—'44” paired with “
ISRAEL
—'88.” That the first shot (which looks more like '39 than '44, but the two sets of double digits make the point more neatly, so what the hell) is of Jews being marched to extermination and the second is of Palestinians being marched to detention or brutalization is the kind of political distinction the Ex's noise so blithely transcends.

10
Moonglows, “Come Back Baby” (presumed title)
Heard this on NPR: sounds like a house party. Can't find it. Reward.

JUNE
20, 1989

Zero
“By 3:15 a.m., students, chanting, ‘Fascist, fasbeast, beast,' faced a line of helmeted soldiers sitting in the street in front of the Museum of Revolutionary History.

“Suddenly, a woman of about 20, wearing a light-colored summer dress, jumped up from her place on the ground, and ran toward the soldiers, her arms in the air. She was followed by about six more students. All were cut down by bullets.”—Mary Ganz, San Francisco
Examiner
, Beijing, June 4

JULY
18, 1989

1
Pulnoc, tape of performance at the Kennel Club, San Francisco (May 5; thanks to Adam Block)
The Czech band, leavings of the Plastic People: in “Dopis” (Letter)—in the slow pace, in the way the group shifts lyrical readymades into mysticism—there's a hint of Joseph Skvorecky's “Emöke” from
The Bass Saxophone
, the tale of a Hungarian woman who somehow contains an ineradicably pagan, pre-Christian soul. That sense of the ineradicable may be at the root of the current rediscovery of free speech in parts of Central and Eastern Europe; to Westerners it may sound like resurgent nationalism, but if it is, “Dopis” says we haven't begun to understand the borderlessness of the idea.

2
My Sin, “My Sin” (Endless Music cassette single)
A one-man “not a
BAND
but a living breathing thing” takes a buttoned-up suburban gospel singer off the radio, adds synthesized drums, bass, and a terrific, rising guitar line that turns the singer into an avatar; Jimmy Swaggart enters, preaching, his every line followed by a pounding Spanish translator; then the not-a-
BAND
jumps on the vocals and matches Swaggart's fervor—no easy trick. It's the best single of the half-year; the sleeve art (or whatever you call it on a cassette) won't be topped.

“Zero” (AP/Wide World)

3
Dr. Licks,
Standing in the Shadows of Motown—The Life and Music of Legendary Bassist James Jamerson
(Dr. Licks Pub., Wyne-wood, PA)
Born in 1936, Jamerson died of alcoholism in 1983. This big, spiral-bound tribute combines an illustrated biography (“I used to go out behind the house where there were all these ants on the ground, and I would take a stick and stretch a long rubber band across it and play for the ants. I would make the ants dance”), a musical analysis complete with scores, and two hour-long cassettes of raucous interviews and various bassists recreating Jamerson's art on instrumental versions of Motown hits, with the bass on its own channel. Most effective is Phil Chen, with the intro to “Reach Out I'll Be There”—heart-stopping, even secondhand.

4
Tom Petty, “Runnin' Down a Dream” on
Full Moon Fever
(MCA)
Nothing, until guitarist Mike Campbell takes over for the long finish, the perfect fade.

5
Charles Burns, “Teen Plague,” in
RAW
,
Vol. 2, No. 1 (Penguin)
The burning comic strip that, as it ran in various alternative weeklies last year, caused countless decent folk who would never shake hands with the Reverend Donald Wildmon to demand the thing be, well, you know, not “censored,” exactly, but, say, published somewhere
else
. . .

6
John Mellencamp, “Big Daddy of Them All,” on
Big Daddy
(Mercury)
The LP gets dull fast; the lead cut, so loose it's nearly abstract, is undeniable: a modal folk sound that says, “Louder! Play me louder!”