Real Life Rock (69 page)

8
Hole,
Pretty on the Inside
(Caroline)
Coproduced by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, this debut set from an L.A. combo could pass for a Kim Gordon solo album, if you didn't miss her wit. Somehow every song would jump a notch in flair if singer Courtney Love—who has a deep, harsh voice that without a stage is just too theatrical to wound—had changed her name to Courtly.

9
Marc Cohn,
Marc Cohn
(Atlantic)
The hit “Walking in Memphis” is a sentimental version of the quest made by the young Japanese couple in Jim Jarmusch's
Mystery Train
—corny, but also more vivid. The hit “Silver Thunderbird” is a mystified version of, oh, the Beach Boys' “409,” but it carries a lift and it leaves an echo. Cohn has a thick voice with little play in it, and uses heavy, portentous piano notes without any humor. He can be written off as a decent Springsteen acolyte or an improvement on Billy Joel, which would still be second-rate; maybe he's the new Bruce Hornsby. But his songs have shape and heart; one more hit—which I don't hear on this first album—and he might turn his own corner.

10
Public Image Ltd.,
Metal Box
(Virgin U.K. reissue, 1979)
Then as now, this unsuperseded miasma of loathing and dub comes in a can—though now instead of three 12-inch 45s there's one CD, and the container is only four-and-three-quarter inches across. It's so
cute
.

NOVEMBER
1991

1
John Lee Hooker, “I Cover the Waterfront,” from
Mr. Lucky
(Charisma/Point Blank)
At 74, the bluesman records with devotees gathered at his feet (here, Keith Richards, Albert Collins, Robert Cray, Johnny Winter, etc.), but he is not relaxed. With “I Cover the Waterfront” (not the standard, not exactly even a song), he takes the title phrase and for six minutes drifts through it, now a night watchman, now a night crawler. Booker T. Jones quietly vamps on organ, Van Morrison flicks brittle notes off a guitar, and Hooker seems to hold still, hovering over the docks and the water; there's great calm in his voice, and certain death. It's as if he died a long time ago, long since came to terms with that fact, but wants another look.

2–3
James Carr, “The Dark End of the Street,” on
You Got My Mind Messed Up
(Goldwax/Vivid Sound reissue, 1966, Japan) and the Commitments: “The Dark End of the Street,” in
The Commitments
,
directed by Alan Parker (20th Century Fox)
Carr was only about 24 when he recorded this ballad about adultery that makes “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right” seem like Whitney Houston material—but he sounded much older, or maybe ageless. He's been called “The World's Greatest Soul Singer,” but if his style is the essence of the genre he's also defined by it, and never escapes it. There's terrible fright when he almost stops “The Dark End of the Street” to call out, “They gonna find us, they gonna find us,” but then he's rescued by the very classicism of his own performance.

A quarter-century later the tune shows up in a movie about a fictional, present-day white Dublin band, a bunch of kids who want to play soul music—to carry the torch of freedom it once symbolized—or maybe just get heard, get around. So the musicians, backup singers, and lead singer Andrew Strong, 16 (looking 30, sounding 24?), haul the song onto the stage of their first-ever gig as if it's a dead man's corpse and it's up to them to bury it, hide it, or bring it back to life. They're amateurs, we've seen that their passion most often produces only bum notes, but this time Strong gets his hands around the dead man's throat and begins to strangle air into him. Not even a memory of Carr's restraint, his knowledge, remains in the song; the people on the screen seem to get bigger as the music seems to rise in volume. The performance is crude, noisy, sweaty, confused, a mess, and there were tears on my face before it was half through.

4
Duncan Browne,
Give Me Take You
(Immediate/Sony Music Special Products reissue, 1968)
Pre-Raphaelite rock, and one of a kind.

5
Geto Boys,
We Can't Be Stopped
(
RAP-A-LOT
/Priority)
The Geffen label dropped this Houston outfit's first disk for excessive violence, misogyny, and necrophilia, and there's plenty of ho'-bitch spew on number two. But spinning hard at the center, so hard it throws off almost everything else, is “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” something between a bad dream and
a reverie—the sort of confession that has to be made to the whole world, never to a friend, because a friend might see you differently but the world won't see you at all. Socially sanctioned (or anyway genre sanctioned) rage dissolves into a doubt that has no support outside of its own reality, its own vertigo; it calls up shades of empathy and regret that vanish before they can be named. Plus there's “Trophy,” an anti-Grammy rant that scores with Elvis' award for “Most Appearances Made After Death.” He can't be present, “due to illness,” so accepting instead is—the Grateful Dead.

6
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Out in the Cold” (MCA)
You need ten random seconds on the radio to know you have to hear it again, two or three the next time around to know that you are. It's nothing new: Petty's been a hit machine since 1977, playing a loner sensitive enough to whine about being tough. Save for those rare exceptions when his songs are about someone else (“American Girl,” “Refugee”), his music has zero content, just rockabilly formalism. All that's formally different this time is the breakup of the number by drums, not guitar—and yet the urgency is unstoppable. It's by the book but it can sound like Petty's got the only copy.

7
Private Joke, “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” on
All Things Considered
(National Public Radio, August 29)
As sung by Mikhail Gorbachev with postcoup lyrics, the closing shouts of “Hey, I'm back! I'm back!” echoing as if no one is listening.