Real Life Rock (48 page)

7
Vulgar Boatmen,
You and Your Sister
(Independent Label Alliance CD)
From Gainesville, Florida: insinuating songs orchestrated by a quiet band and sung in a reedy voice, the tunes very '50s in their casualness, present-day in their insistence on doubt. The best tunes center on girl's names (“Mary Jane,” “Margaret Says,” “Katie”) or on the way metaphors of unrequited love can turn into politics: “Change the World All Around,” a subtle retrieval of the momentum in “Heroin.”

8
Syd Straw,
Surprise
(Virgin)
More surprising on the radio than on the turntable, where too many words on one track after another trip up the autonomy of the songs. Still, proof that sometimes sweet dreams are made of sweetness.

9
Mekons, “Memphis, Egypt,” from
Rock'n'Roll
(Twintone/A&M)
In the annals of rock epistemology, this account of the struggle between, more or less, commercial radio and listener-supported radio, as one band fought not to be “consumed by rock 'n' roll,” at least corrects Talking Heads' “Cities,” where David Byrne sang of “Memphis—home of Elvis, and the ancient Greeks.”

10
Grace Catalano,
New Kids on the Block
(Bantam)
You can laugh at fan-bios, but it's all Creedence Clearwater ever got. There are still no books on Jackie Wilson, the Band, Martha Reeves, Sly Stone, Alan Freed, Fats Domino, or the Monotones.

JANUARY
9, 1990

1
Alison Krauss and Union Station, “Two Highways,” from
Two Highways
(Rounder)
A shining bluegrass tune, moving fast, but seemingly coming very slowly,
maybe because of the lifetimes in Alison Krauss's young voice. “Only time will tell if I have made a loser's choice”—there's a memory of a road Dolly Parton might have taken, but no mannerisms or borrowings are audible. This is a song where even bad lines are suggestive: “Will I hear the melody I searched for oh so long,” Krauss sings. If this isn't it, what is?

2
Carl Hiaasen,
Double Whammy
(Warner Books)
Inside this terrific mystery about bass fishing is a tiny novel—not screaming to get out, but happy right where it is. Sometime in the '70s a reformist governor of Florida subverted on all sides by developers' money quits, disappears, and turns up years later as a swamp rat known as Skink. He's a saint but he doesn't talk like one: speeding down the road in a villain's top-down Corvette he rips Whitney Houston out of the tape deck, throws it in the air, and growls. “Got any Creedence?”

3
Little Richard,
The Specialty Sessions
(Ace/Specialty reissue, 1955–64, UK)
Given Richard's nearly monolithic attack, this is nowhere near so playable as boxes devoted to Jerry Lee Lewis or Buddy Holly; the remastering is often scholastic, bringing up the voice and losing the sound. But halfway into the eight LPs or six CDs a story emerges: songs carried over from session to session, months between attempts to get it right, a saga of a refusal to settle for anything less than a division of history: the division, say, between the first take of “I Got It” and the ninth.

4
Steve Propes, et al, liner notes to Los Angeles reissues on Mr. R&B labels, Sweden (Jaguars,
The Way You Look Tonight
,
1955–61, Earth Angel; Hollywood Flames,
The John Dolphin Sessions
,
1951–56, Earth Angel; and Jimmy Wright,
Let's Go Crazy Baby
,
1953–56, Saxophonographic)
The music is not great; the tale it tells, of the hustle and miscegenation of early L.A. rock, is. The notes to the LP by the Jaguars (two blacks, an Italian, a Chicano—their “Charlene” was redone by Los Lobos on the
La Bamba
soundtrack) trace a line that began with backing on a worthless Walt Disney-Davy Crockett-craze number and ended in failure: a line that connects Buddy Ebsen to Richard Berry to the Lettermen to the Penguins to David Lee Roth.

5
Georgia Satellites, “It's All Over But the Cryin',” from
In the Land of Salvation and Sin
(Elektra)
In the vein of Lynyrd Skynyrd's
Street Survivors
, and good enough to be on it.

6
Dave Marsh,
The Heart of Rock & Soul
(Plume)
A close reading of 1001 singles, Scheherazade at the jukebox—the longest book of rock criticism ever published, one that every reader will rewrite, and far and away my friend's top work. As a skeptic about punk his entries on the Sex Pistols are profound; as a fan who finds the high point of rock in the mid-'60s he offers a double-slap in the face that has Chuck Berry on one cheek and
Sgt. Pepper
on the other.