Real Life Rock (123 page)

5
Quickspace,
Precious Falling
(Hidden Agenda/Parasol)
U.K. drone band derived from th faith healers. (Thee Headcoats won their “e” in a poker game, I think they said.) Not as demented as that great combo (their 1993
Imaginary Friend
remains the most blithelessly extreme music of the decade), but with a neat trick: fast drone. Squealing and clicking in “Hadid,” they appear as naked people in a field regressing as you listen: regressing not to a pre-verbal childhood but to a previous species.

6
James Lee Burke,
Sunset Limited
(Island/Dell paperback)
“St. Peters Cemetery in ten minutes,” says a witness to cop Dave Robicheaux. “How will I recognize you?” “I'm the one that's not dead.” Don't let your mouth write checks your ass can't cash, Robicheaux should say—but he doesn't use profanity. He won't even tolerate it unless it comes out of the mouth of his partner, Helen Soileau. (“I met Miss Pisspot of 1962 at the jail this morning,” she says of an FBI agent.) It's not that he gives her a break because she's a lesbian; somewhere in the literary archetype Leslie Fiedler set out in 1948 in “Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!” she's playing Jim to Robicheaux's Huck.

7
Glad bags commercial (A&E, Sept. 9)
A happy female gospel version of Mississippi bluesman Skip James' brittle, miserabilist 1931 “I'm So Glad” (famously redone in 1967 by Cream), and a travesty: not because it's being used to sell plastic bags, but because of the suggestion that it was originally used to sell God.

8
Vanity Fair/Neutrogena party at the Telluride Film Festival (Sept. 3)
The Neutrogena banner at the Skyline Guest Ranch was fairly modest, but against a backdrop of the Colorado Rockies, which were throwing up Matterhorns everywhere you looked, a big poster of the September
Vanity Fair
was like litter. It was the Bruce Weber shot of wistful, windblown, ridiculously blond Carolyn Bessette Kennedy—a face that, the setting revealed, was unmistakably slipping into camp, into that realm of the undead where “The Private Princess,” as the magazine named its cover girl, had already joined not Princess Di but “America's people's princess”—as Patsy Ramsey calls her late daughter, JonBénet.

9
Associated Press, “ Music, the Universal Language,” Sept. 13
“ After a week of chaos and terror in East Timor, Indonesia's powerful military boss sang ‘Feelings' yesterday to show why he can't walk away from the independence-minded province.

“To cheers from retired military officers at a party, Defense Minister Gen. Wiranto dedicated the song to foreign journalists: ‘I hope you have the same feelings, like me, for East Timor.'

“His eyebrows arched in restrained emotion, Wiranto held the microphone in both hands and stood stiffly in a yellow batik shirt and crooned as a band played the 1975 hit popularized by Paul Williams:

“ ‘Feelings, nothing more than feelings . . .' ”

I can't go on. This is just too sick. You always knew the song was rotten, but evil?

10
Fastbacks,
The Day That Didn't Exist
(Spinart)
It's scary that Seattle's Fastbacks formed 20 years ago, that except for the drum spot the lineup has never changed, that they've never made it, that their music has never gotten better, only utterly failed to exhaust itself. Guitarist Kurt Bloch writes songs about the everyday that somehow contain the state of the union; bassist Kim Warnick sings them in a punk voice that's flat until you hear it as a form of address, as real talk; guitarist Lulu Gargulio keeps the other two honest. Here, one of the days that didn't exist can be found on “I Was Stolen”: “We tried to save the world last fall,” War-nick says in her high, girlish warble, as if nothing could be more obvious; when she follows with “You remember that we didn't save anything at all,” the story seems to end before it's had a chance to begin. But the story goes on, it gets interesting, full of fury and good works, and by the time the story is over you're no longer convinced these people left the world as they found it—not 20 years ago, not last fall.

OCTOBER
4, 1999

1
Fred Eaglesmith,
50-Odd Dollars
(Razor & Tie)
Opening with a backwoods ballad drunk on Led Zeppelin's “When the Levee Breaks,” a stolid-looking man says he knows his country when he sees it, especially in old cars. Listen to “Georgia Overdrive” and try to convince yourself that for two minutes you don't want to be in the driver's seat more than you want to be anywhere else.

2
Jay Mohr as Peter Dragon in
Action
(Fox, Sept. 16)
Desperate, the producer runs to the house of his whore/script consultant, where he finds her with a client, who is down on his knees and cleaning her floor. Despite the bustier and black mask the guy is wearing, Dragon recognizes him as a Disney executive; “My name is Andri,” the man insists. Dragon looks him in the eye: “My name is Luka,” he says. “I live on the second floor . . .” You can't tell if the vicious glee in his face comes from having a rival where he wants him, or finally finding a use for the stupid lines that have been bouncing around in his head for more than 10 years.

3
Michael Ochs,
1000 Record Covers
(Taschen)
At 7 inches by 5 inches and 768 pages, this dense object is not a typical album-cover-art book, where designs supposedly fashioned according to vision or genre are presented for your admiration. Opening with Hen Gates and His Gaters' 1957
Let's Go Dancing to Rock and Roll
(happy white kids in red convertible, balding dad-like person at the wheel) and closing with Oasis' 1994
Definitely Maybe
, this is stuff—the sort of stuff you'd find flipping LPs in a vinyl emporium, sleeves warped, images scratched or faded or gleaming with an eagerness hiding the truth that the people you're looking at are probably dead. Not looking at all dead, however, is the dead girlfriend on the cover of J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers' 1964
Last Kiss
. There's been a car crash, but while her eyes are closed, her hair isn't even mussed. “Rumor has it that first printings of this cover actually had blood dripping from the girl's face but it was airbrushed out,” Ochs says—but that would have only made the fact that the girl's arm resting on her skirt is plainly held there by still-functioning muscles even more weird. The boyfriend, in perfectly pomaded ducktail and gray business suit, looks at the girl's face as if he can't figure out why she's playing dead. But he's supposed to be about to bestow “our last kiss”—to act out the most convincing moment in the song. In 1964 and this year, with Pearl Jam's stoic, anguished, unteenage version, the words are rushed—“I kissed her our last kiss.” It's as if the singer can barely stand to remember what happened, and it catches you up. The burr in Eddie Vedder's voice, the labor you can feel from gestures you can't see, makes the quickness of the moment even more dramatic, almost secretly dramatic, than it was 35 years ago: You feel the moment, but you don't necessarily register it. The sour guitar note that closes the record says both you and the band know this dumb old song is a joke, but nobody told the singer, and that's why it's a hit. As for the cover of the album Pearl Jam's “Last Kiss” is on—
No Boundaries: A Benefit for the Kosovar Refugees
(Epic)—it shows a young man bent over, his hands gripping his neck, his whole body in a posture of despair. He's already learned about last kisses—the kind there's no time to give.