Real Life Rock (161 page)

The most modest, unsensational painting in the exhibit—Baader's phonograph, with an LP on it, though in the painting there's no hope of identifying the record—is the most arty of the pictures on the page. But if you dismiss it you'll miss the book's most interesting footnote: “An inspection [of the original prints] involving careful scrutiny with a high-powered microscope as well as computer-enhanced re-imaging” revealed “that the record on the turntable in Baader's cell was Eric Clapton's 1974 release
There's One in Every Crowd
.” Storr goes on
to relate the music and lyrics to the event, but the event doesn't bring the born-dead music to life.

7
Caroline Sullivan,
Bye Bye Baby: My Tragic Love Affair With the Bay City Rollers
(Bloomsbury USA)
There were many 1977s, of course; this unapologetic fan's memoir by a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey is powered by one question: will the author, pushing 20 in those days, ever lose her virginity? To one of
them?
Halfway through the book it seems she does. Seventy pages later it seems she didn't. I think she did, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

8
Dean Santomieri, “crude rotation” (Archipelago)
Musique concrète, beginning with echoes of marching music so faded they might be from the First World War.

9
Kelly Harrell, “The Cuckoo She's a Fine Bird,” from
Kelly Harrell: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Volume 2, 1926–1929
(Document)
For perhaps the most commonplace of all Appalachian ballads, a normally canny Virginia singer offers a primitive, self-effacing vocal orchestrated between verses not by mountain fiddle but Central European nightclub violin. Plus a real cuckoo clock. You want weird, this is weird.

10
The First Family's Holiday Gift to America: A Personal Tour of the White House
(Fox, Dec. 15)
Bill Clinton walks you into his Music Room, set up both for playing and remembering. On a wall there's a picture of him jamming with Kenny G, a poker hand's worth of gold “Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” discs from Fleetwood Mac, and Herman Leonard jazz photos, lovingly described, including the famous one of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon wreathed in smoke. There's Elvis onstage, pensive off it, and on a shelf a ceramic version waving from a pink Cadillac. Last shot before the tour moves on: a litter of saxophones, real and jewelry size, brass, gold and silver, scattered randomly, like junk for the country to throw out.

FEBRUARY
5, 2001

1
Vladimir Mayakovsky/El Lissitzky,
For the Voice
(MIT Press)
In 1923, in Berlin, the futurist poet and the suprematist designer made a thrillingly Soviet book: poems that flew off the page as signs broke out of pictures and letters severed themselves from words, then regrouped in lines and paragraphs, so that each poem was forever in contest with itself, the ante upped every time you came back to the same black-andred page. In this stunning edition, there are 5 1/4-inch-by-7 3/8-inch facsimiles of the original edition, in Russian and, translated by Peter France, English, plus
Voices of Revolution
, a volume of critical essays edited by Patricia Railing.

You start with the noise the pictures make, and in that language nothing that follows really matches the second poem, with “beat out our march” pounding across two pages, the last two words standing up to a suprematist red square only by refusing to stay in formation. Then you start to read, and after the fourth poem, “Scum,” the other voices in the book can feel silenced. “Give me a rich man,” you can almost hear Mayakovsky chanting in his rumbling voice (as you can hear him for real in the 1914 and 1920 recordings collected on the anthology
lunapark 0,10
[Sub Rosa], “the fattest / the baldest. / By the scruff of his neck I'll haul him / in front of the Famine Committee. / Look.” What you're now looking at is the cannibalism that swept through parts of the countryside during the civil war that followed the revolution. People posed for pictures of themselves with the remains of people they'd killed to eat; Mayakovsky doesn't flinch. Like a true early-20th century avant-gardist, he goes for the jugular: “Son? / Father? / Mother? / Daughter? / Whose turn.” In London, he sees a banquet: “May / savages, / eaters of human flesh, / from the colonies come scavenging.” He travels to Paris, Berlin, revolution following him across the map, and the curse on the bourgeois world begins to seem automatic, until he returns to Soviet Moscow:
“May your fat steak be turned into scissors / and cut your stomach apart.” In 1930, face to face with the murder of the revolution as since the first decade of the century he had written it out, he shot himself. He was 35.

In 1918 Mayakovsky and others had called for poets to take up brushes and paint whole towns. “This seemed to be utopian,” El Lissitzky said in 1922, “and yet subsequently it came to pass.” “You know, this is a most interesting piece of work,” Lenin said of Mayakovsky's 1921 “150 Million.” “A peculiar brand of Communism. It is hooligan Communism.” But by the end of the decade Mayakovsky stood accused of bohemianism and social parasitism. In her essay “A Revolutionary Spirit,” Railing quotes Russian critical theorist Ramon Jakobson's 1931 “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets”: “We strained toward the future too impetuously and avidly to leave any past behind us . . . as for the future, it doesn't belong to us either. In a few decades we shall be cruelly labeled as products of the past millennium. All we had were compelling songs of the future; and suddenly these songs are no longer part of the dynamic of history.”

Tall, robust, with a threatening shaven skull and even more threatening eyes, Mayakovsky entered legend as part of the first crop of glamorous, inscrutable 20th century performers to be harvested young, joining in his own time Rudolph Valentino and Bix Beiderbecke, then as the years went on James Dean, Charlie Parker, Patsy Cline, Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. But he was from another country, one that he partly invented and that in any case no longer exists. You look at
For the Voice
and struggle to believe its 1923 ever happened: that the book was ever published, made, thought up, even a notion abandoned as soon as it came into view. Even that stretches credulity. All that power, packed into a few small pages, a rebuke to the future we live in.

2
Butchies,
Butchies 3
(Mr. Lady)
A trio from Durham, N.C., that manages to combine vocal ache and prettiness, majestic chords and tiny drum sounds, “woo-hoohoos” and ugly stories, speed and what seems like a dead stop, until you realize they never stop moving.

3
Paul McCartney,
Liverpool Sound Collage
(Capitol)
In the footsteps of Walter Ruttmann's 1930 Berlin
Weekend
(covered here Aug. 21, 2000), for the Peter Blake show “About Collage,” at the Liverpool Tate through March 4, the Cute One excavated his old town according to noise-music experiments the mop-tops first pursued in 1968 with “Revolution 9.” The difference for these pieces, made to play in the exhibition space, is that the 1965–69 voices of the Beatles McCartney mixes into his own ambient street recordings sound only vaguely familiar. John, Paul, George and Ringo sound not only as if they came from these streets but as if they went back to them, to live.