Real Life Rock (110 page)

MARCH
1997

1
Warren Zevon,
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (An Anthology)
(Rhino)
The songs on this dauntingly solid two-CD retrospective—roughly crafted, built-to-last artifacts of a rounder's wasted life—come across as an unacknowledged pop anchor, a bad conscience, a refusal to go away. Across the years the bravado of muscled rhythm may yield to melody, to the hidden surges in “Looking for the Next Best Thing” or “Suzie Lightning,” but the change is just lines on a face; the singer doesn't change. In 1976 with “Desperados Under the Eaves,” Zevon asks you to listen to the air conditioner humming in his room in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel—humming “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the same time; in 1995 “Mutineer” is as defiant and as lost. Along the way there is a magnificent “Mohammed's Radio,” a 1980 live recording that becomes the ruined bohemians' drinking song the Rolling Stones' “Salt of the Earth” was meant to be; on this all-night show you can hear the future calling even as the past pulls you down. “Even Jimmy Carter's got the highway blues,” Zevon cries, half laughing, half shocked, and you can see the president looking at the Ayatollah Khomeini over one shoulder and Ronald Reagan over the other, standing somewhere in the middle of Nevada, the radiator of his empty limousine boiling over, his thumb in the air.

2
Oval,
94Diskont
(Thrill Jockey)
The claims this German techno trio make in their manifestos/PR copy read like parodies of Mike Meyers'
Saturday Night Live
Prussian hipster Dieter hosting his poststructuralist dance party “Sprockets.” Their fave aesthetic categories seem to be “offensive” and “disobident” (read that as “disobedient” at your peril; it's probably a new concept), and the calming, vaguely threatening ambient fields they depict are steps ahead of contemporaneous anti-dance music. Still, rather than the intended proofs of the obsolescence of music as we know it, what Oval make are proofs of the existence of a realm where music has always done its work, the subconscious.

3
Georgina Boyes,
The Imagined Village—Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival
(Manchester University Press/St. Martin's)
Unsentimental throughout, and startling when Boyes turns over the ideological stone of folk authenticity circa 1936 and forces the insects beneath it into the light. The genteel folk-dance summer camps of a movement born with John Ruskin and Morris dancing made common cause with Nazism; the search for the eternal Folk at the heart of a true England turned into an openly fascist precursor of the present day Men's Movement, with bands of brothers possessed of “The Secret of Memory” and dancing the Sword Dance, deep in the woods around their leaping fires. All “are consumed,” Rolf Gardiner wrote in
The English Folk Dance Tradition
, “by one fluid, electric, purging, flame of ecstasy, an exaltation, a cathartic frenzy, impossible to convey in words to one who has not experienced it.” And then it gets worse.

4–5
Koerner, Ray & Glover,
Blues, Rags & Hollers
(Red House reissue, 1963) and
One Foot in the Groove
(Tim/Kerr)
Thirty-four years ago, a Twin Cities folk blues trio—guitarists John Koerner and Dave Ray, har-monica player Tony Glover—put out an album that today feels like ice breaking.
The follow-up, recorded live on home ground, sounds not late but patient, all practical humor (“France Blues,” “Pick Poor Robin Clean”) and, with “Shenandoah,” a nostalgia beyond dreams.

6
Waco Brothers,
Cowboy in Flames
(Bloodshot)
Deconstruct the signifiers in the group name, the record title, and the label and you're halfway through the music, British country without apologies. The only stuff not coded is the thrill, the ride.

7
Mick Lasalle, “No Love Lost for Worst of '96”
(
San Francisco Chronicle
,
film wrap-up, 3 January)
On
The Evening Star
, “with Juliette Lewis, looking as fresh-faced and wholesome as a dead blues singer . . .”

8
John J. Strauss and Ed Decter, Creators/executive producers,
Chicago Sons
(NBC, Wednesdays, 8:30
PM
)
Speaking of dead blues singers, this sitcom about three bumbling brothers made me laugh a couple of times, but it hit home in one of the promos that aired earlier—where behind the it's-a-guy-thing antics you could hear someone turning Robert Johnson's 1936 “Sweet Home Chicago” into theme music indistinguishable from the Rembrandts' “I'll Be There for You” on
Friends
.

9
Wieden and Kennedy, Ad for Nike's Air Penny Basketball Shoe
(
The Times Magazine,
London, 23 November 1996)
“This is Penny Hardaway,” it says next to a small picture of the Orlando Magic star. “He is not a marketing commodity and he is not a puppet”—i.e.,
shut up
. Then the piece gets down to business: “listen: If you have a toothache, you don't call an interior decorator. If you're dirty, you don't turn on the vacuum cleaner. If you make athletic shoes, you don't ask referees or podgy sports writers how to make them better. If this is not perfectly clear we can come to your house and spray paint it on your walls in English, French, Italian or Esperanto.” In other words, if you don't understand this ad, call Nike and they'll send you an interior decorator?

10
New York Times
(national edition), Dada typesetting in article on Marcel Janco (“Bucharest Rediscovers Houses by a Modernist,” by Jane Perlez, 14 January)
“Tristan Tzara and Janco were among the founders of the anti-bourgeois Dada movement in 1916 when they were young art students in Zurich. (In Romanian, Dada movement in 1916 when they were young art students in Zurich. (In Romanian, Dada is ‘yes' said twice Dada is ‘yes' said twice . . . ).”