Real Life Rock (71 page)

7
Roxy Music,
Total Recall—A History, 1972–1982
(Virgin Music Video)
TV appearances, concert footage, and primitive videos: madly outré in the beginning, when Bryan Ferry and the band would do anything for a thrill, pathetic in the middle, when they'd do anything for a hit, and exploding off the screen with Ferry's 1976 solo “Let's Stick Together”—where, as he emotes in his stiff-legged way, then-girlfriend Jerry Hall sticks a long leg into the frame and then vamps across it with a bombshell grin
so self-absorbed you can already feel Ferry's heart breaking.

8
Guy Debord,
Panegyric—Volume I
,
translated from the French by James Brook (Verso)
From the author of
The Society of the Spectacle
, a brief and elegiac memoir of a life lived in its shadows and cracks. With a notable chapter on drunkenness as part of Debord's lifework, and a comment on the loss of taste imposed on alcohol by mass production: “No one had ever imagined that he would see drink pass away before the drinker.”

9
Cargo Records, advertisement
(
Option
,
September/October)
“This young band,” reads the copy for
First of Many
, the debut disk from a duo calling themselves the Future, “dares to capture 60's folk-rock music, and blend it with the 70's revival, to create a new sound for a new generation.” “
NO FUTURE FOR YOU/NO FUTURE FOR ME
”—this must be the payoff.

10
First Presbyterian Church, Yellow Springs, Ohio, sermon announcement (September 1991)
“What kind of country is it in which people believe God is Dead but Elvis is Alive?”

JANUARY
1992

1–3
Fastbacks,
The Answer Is You
(Sub Pop double 45);
In America
(Lost & Found CD, Germany, recorded 1988); . . .
and his Orchestra/Everyday Is Saturday/Play Five of Their Favorites
(Popllama CD reissue, 1987, 1984, 1982)
Seattle's Fastbacks must be the most time-defying band in the world. Their very first, 1981 recordings (available on the hard-to-find LP
never fails, never works
, Blaster! Records, 3 Dove Lane, Bristol BS2 9HP, UK) represented their only real brush with fame—the drummer was Duff McKagan, now bassist in Guns N' Roses. From then to now the Fastbacks have hammered at the door of an imaginary audience, the millions who could care less about their heart-on-their-sleeve punk, as if it were most of all the fact that the door is locked that keeps them talking. Their sound—Kim Warnick's eager, no-range vocals set against Kurt Bloch's sometimes raging, sometimes questioning guitar—has never changed, or even exactly improved. They can still play as if the notion had just occurred to them, and there are small, perfectly realized tunes—on the radio, odd ambushes of anyone's pop expectations—scattered all across their decade.

The four songs on
The Answer Is You
, though, might be their most free-swinging—one great, self-sustaining, all-night argument, with flashbacks of the Buzzcocks in “Impatience” and of the Safaris' gentle 1960 “Image of a Girl” in “Above the Sunrise.” . . .
and his Orchestra
is the band's best album.
In America
is live (“Thanks for staying,” Warnick ends it, without attitude)—and proof that, six years after, the title number was still one of
Their Favorites
.

The song “In America” sums up the warmth and the fear that seem to lurk behind the Fastbacks' music. It opens hard, like a Sex Pistols outtake; in Warnick's voice is the permission to speak that punk gave to everyone who couldn't sing. But the theme is a big one, what someone thinking seriously for the first time in her life might think about: whether the country is too much of a lie to take. The answer is that the lie will kill you only if you let it. “Who said the government's on your side?” Warnick snaps—and the liberation in that line, the exile and the isolation, so much given up and so much claimed, is more than most bands will ever think of wanting.

4
Pulnoc,
City of Hysteria
(Arista)
Led by Milan Hlavsa of the Plastic People of the Universe, from which Pulnoc derives, this Czech band making its major-label debut has more than 20 years of persecution and fandom behind it, and, as Vaclav Havel says in the sleeve notes, something more. The secret of the Plastic People, Havel wrote in 1984, had to do with “a certain, specific experience of the world that has been formed here by history not just over decades, but over the centuries, a spiritual and emotional atmosphere that belongs to this
place and no other.” You can hear hints of that on what at first seems mostly a lively, aggressive piece of '60s-rooted art rock that suggests Eric Ambler's pre-WWII Central European espionage thrillers as distantly as it does the prayers of pre-Christian religion, or the guitar break in Christie's 1970 “Yellow River” as precisely as it does the light touch of Merrilee Rush's 1968 “Angel of the Morning.” Repetition, pushed hard for truths it will give up only after one more time, underpins a sound where the instrumental doo-wop intro to “City of Hysteria” (“city of history,” singer Michaela Nemcová seems to make it) is as right as the jerky, trailing beat of “End of the World.” The group's style is altogether its own, and also plainly unfinished; most of the faces in this band are lined and puffy, their eyes have too much knowledge in them, but still they're just starting. As for Havel's insistence that “encoded” in the music of the Plastic People is “an important warning . . . [from] a place where the knots of history are tied and unraveled” (that really has to be an epigraph for the next reissue of Ambler's
Background to Danger
), such praise for a dead band is now the treasure a living band could spend the next 20 years seeking.

5
Nancy Savoca, director,
Dogfight
(Warner Bros.)
This modest, very believable film about a young soldier (River Phoenix) and the folksinger-worshiping “dog” (Lili Taylor) he meets the night before shipping out for Vietnam (November 21, 1963) uses a lot of period music, but it comes off the screen with its conventional signifiers reversed. Joan Baez's pristine rendition of the ancient ballad “Silver Dagger” now communicates, or fails to communicate, the way bad pop is supposed to—it's brittle, self-conscious, and completely timebound. But Claudine Clark's “Party Lights” and other putatively disposable commodities seem like events—chants of flesh, will, and endless echo.

6
Bob Marley and the Wailers,
One Love at Studio One
(Heartbeat reissue, 1963–71)
The rude–boy ska–beat Wailers, back when Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer (now the only one not dead) lived from disk to disk. It's a thrill to hear their first, not because “Simmer Down” is a classic but because it's so inescapably a smash (this song
can't wait
to get released and be a hit). The group covers everyone in sight (Dion and the Belmonts, Jimmy Clanton, Junior Walker, the Beatles) in quest of the same success, then stumbles into Bob Dylan's “Like A Rolling Stone.” Bunny Wailer sings a quiet, mournful lead; the opening beat is textbook “Louie Louie”; the chorus remains as Dylan wrote it; the verses are new, Old Testament imagery Dylan would have used if he'd thought of it: “Time like a scorpion/Stings without warning.” Oh, this is so good.