Real Life Rock (44 page)

7
Don Henley, “How Bad Do You Want It?” on
The End of the Innocence
(Geffen)
Not bad enough, he says convincingly—she'll never learn.

8
Rolling Stones,
Get Satisfaction ... If You Want! The Best of BBC Radio Recordings 1963–65
(Swingin' Pig bootleg CD)
Eighteen shots from the stage and the studio, highlighted by Bo Diddley's “Cops and Robbers,” Buster Brown's “Fannie May,” and a snatch of ancient interview: “Mick, you've achieved so very much on the international scene. What is there left to make you want to go on?”

9
Beijing University, “First Student Protest”
(
San Francisco Chronicle
,
July 26)
“In the first known revival of student protests here since the army crushed a pro-democracy movement last month, about 300 Beijing University students gathered Sunday night at a campus courtyard and sang Communist songs. . . . ‘We are forced to endure hours of political study every day, telling us that the soldiers killing our classmates was a glorious victory,' [one student said]. ‘Sarcasm is our only means of dissent.' ”

10
Don Henley, “The End of the Innocence” (Geffen)
“This titled man that we elected king,” he says, and you can hear how plainly felt the idea was, how carefully he constructed the line, and how contrived it seems. But the way he sings the word “king,” letting it break, is like the way Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash sing the last “remember” in the
Nashville Skyline
version of “Girl From the North Country,” 20 years gone.

SEPTEMBER
19, 1989

1
Natural Spiritual Orchestra, incidental music composed and conducted by William J. E. Lee, in Spike Lee's
Do the Right Thing
(Universal)
Sometimes suggesting Aaron Copland, sometimes Randy Newman—but more urgent, more confusing—Lee's (Spike's father) half-buried work is seemingly as foreign to its Brooklyn setting as modern African sounds would be; in a movie where every actor is immediately questioned by another, the music plays as the film's second mind. It's not on the soundtrack album.

2
Hüsker Dü, “Diane,” on
Metal Circus
(SST, 1983)
Guy hits on a girl. He says he loves her. He proves it by pulling out his heart with his hands.

3
Lee Cotten,
Shake Rattle & Roll—The Golden Age of American Rock 'n Roll, Volume 1:1952–1955
(Pierian Press/Popular Culture, Ink., Ann Arbor, Michigan)
This big, day-by-day log of shows and record releases—“an intellectual feast,” to borrow Robert Bork's phrase—exposes the anomaly of Living Colour's “black rock” for the racist construction the last 20 years have made it, demonstrating that, once, “rock 'n' roll” was
a black name, a black idea, embraced and pursued by black musicians and hustlers not as a compromise but on its own new terms, even if Cotten does cheat a bit: here, rockabilly is barely “rock n' roll.” Call it affirmative action.

4
Fine Young Cannibals, “Don't Look Back” (Sire)
Has this title ever been on a bad record?

5
David Fincher, video for Don Henley's “The End of the Innocence” (Geffen)
From Walker Evans's 1935–38 FSA photos to Robert Franks's 1959
The Americans
(one of Fincher's shots is an almost exact recreation of Franks's “View from a hotel window—Butte, Montana”) to something more: a bride, turning in an empty room with her new husband, trying to hide a smile so shy and full of promise neither Evans nor Franks would have known what to do with it. Whether it's the same woman who later appears as a prostitute, or as a mother whose eyes have given up their life wholly to a movie screen, is uncertain.

6
Link Wray,
Rumble Man
(Ace, UK)
Wray cut “Rumble,” a guitar instrumental described by its title, in 1957; he was in his middle or late twenties. Now, near 60, with undiminished flash and conviction, he becomes the oldest rocker to make a good record, lining out the who-cares stomp the Rolling Stones have pledged for their fifties since they were in their thirties. It'll be a surprise if anything on
Steel Wheels
outlives Wray's “Draggin' ” or “Aces Wild.”