Real Life Rock (174 page)

6
Chris Walters,
The Ghost of Jim Thompson Stalks L.A.
,
collage of title and excerpt from letter from Bonnie Bakley to Robert Blake before the signing of a prenuptial agreement in October 2000 (letter from
New York Daily News
,
May 9)
“I think psychologically it helps me get even with mankind,” Bakley wrote to her soon-to-be husband and, after Bakley's unsolved shooting May 5, widower (he went back to the restaurant where the two had had dinner to get his gun, Blake told police, then returned to his car and found her dead), of her life as a grifter. “My father tried to get fresh with me when I was seven, while my mother was in the hospital having Joey [her brother]. He died before I could grow up and kill him.”

7
KFRC-FM (San Francisco, June 17)
“ Father's Day Superset,” featuring Marvin Gaye, who on April 1, 1984, gave his father the ultimate Father's Day present. On the air, Bob Dylan immediately followed, though not with “Highway 61 Revisited,” which begins, “God said to Abraham, kill me a son—”

8
Joy Division,
Les Bains Douches 18 December 1979
(Factory)
The severe, serious, nevertheless thrilling sound of young men walking all night in the Manchester rain—thrilling because, in the course of that long walk, anyone can find out what he really wants, anyone can fall behind, anything can happen—as captured mostly at what sounds like a very underattended show in Paris. As with other severe, serious post–Sex Pistols groups—Wire, the Cure—there's the chilly feel of postwar espionage films, the voices of people who have no idea how they found themselves in jeopardy, let alone how to get out. There's no balance in the performance, no obvious match between Ian Curtis' singing, Peter Hook's bass, Bernard Albrecht's guitar and Stephen Morris' drums: As soon as you think of the Velvet Underground you think of the Doors, and then realize that, compared with this band, they were all about order.

The most brutal and beautiful numbers here are taken from January 1980 live recordings in Holland. “Digital” is too strong, too hard, too much; on “Atmosphere,” the distant, silent-movie organ sound that would give the band that went on as New Order, after Curtis' suicide on May 18, 1980, a claim to the deepest dives of the new decade and, along with Foreigner's “I Want to Know What Love Is,” its best singles: “Temptation” and “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Joy Division's second, 1980 album was called
Closer
; this could have been called “Close Enough.”

9
Eddie Cochran,
The Town Hall Party TV Shows 1959
(Rockstar Records video)
The rocker remembered in his own country mostly for “Summertime Blues,” and beloved in the U.K. because he toured there and died there (in a car crash in 1960), appears
on a Los Angeles country music show with his band Dick D'Agostin & the Swingers, who are much better than their name. Seemingly taking his visual cues from Edd “Kookie” Byrnes of the L.A. private eye hit
77 Sunset Strip
, Cochran is short, compact, well-dressed and absurdly good-looking, his pompadour so big and glossy it just begs for Byrnes to show up and lend Eddie his comb. But he doesn't need it until “Money Honey,” the second-to-last song of the night. Cochran is singing, playing guitar, chewing gum and rotating his shoulders all at the same time, and every element seems necessary for the spell he casts. “Whenever we put this on,” said the counterman at Down Home Music in El Cerrito, Calif., as he and everyone else in the place tried to keep doing what they'd been doing, “I never get any work done. I might as well take the rest of the day off.”

10
Roger McGuinn,
Treasures From the Folk Den
(Appleseed)
Given McGuinn's startlingly warm, open work on old American music with Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett of Wilco (see
The Harry Smith Connection
), this should have been, as Dikembe Mutombo recently put it, a walk in the cake. Thanks to contributions by worn-out Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Odetta, Jean Ritchie and Josh White Jr., the result is an earnest workshop, with the main lesson being How Not to Do It. This comes courtesy of excruciating performances in which Pete Seeger, who for six decades has accepted that he cannot sing blues, does. “I realize I'm used to slightly different chords,” he says in the most refined voice imaginable. “They're not logical chords.”

JULY
16, 2001

1
Unitas,
Porch Life
(No Idea)
They could have called it “Blood on Our Sleeves”—on this rough set of songs about being fans in a band, everything is familiar, nothing fits and anything is an occasion for passion. “What's your favorite Uncle Tupelo song?” says the singer to you or the other three guys in the group; his is “Screen Door.” (From
No Depression
, 1990, Rockville Records—the lyric sheet is footnoted to discographical information on the music everyone on the porch is talking about, that everyone loves, that everyone feels oppressed by.) The sound is tear-away; you can almost feel the pieces pulling apart. The band ram through their songs as if they don't want to give you time to talk about what's wrong with them, or for that matter what's right—say, the fierce, double-back riff in “Unitas (Picks A) Fight Song” (“The only thing more boring than you is your audience”—quick, think of a comeback for
that
). There's even a manifesto. “I'm not about to advocate forming a committee to go out and confiscate copies of Start Today and the Minor Threat discography, but it almost sounds like a good idea.” The manifesto ends with a question: “ ‘How is this a punk rock record?' If you don't know, I'm not telling.” It's a punk rock record because the people who made it have been around the block too often to care whether they look cool this time around. Which doesn't answer the question of why this Gainesville band named itself after the quarterback for the Baltimore Colts.

2
Clarence Ashley,
Greenback Dollar—The Music of Clarence “Tom” Ashley, 1928–1933
(County)
Ashley (1895–1967) was one of the greatest of the “old-timey” singers—those who, in the first third of the 20th century, sang as if the new century was a trick that would disappear soon enough, as if only songs made long before you were born would hold your interest for more than a season. He was born Clarence and recorded under that name, but everyone knew him as Tom; when the bottom fell out of the oldtimey market in the '30s, the recording artist Clarence Ashley disappeared and the performer Tom Ashley kept on. In 1960, at a fiddler's convention in North Carolina, he and guitarist Clint Howard and fiddler Fred Price were approached by folklorist Ralph Rinzler, who asked if they had knowledge of a Clarence Ashley, whose bottomless recordings of “Coo Coo Bird” (1929) and “House Carpenter” (1930) had
been collected on Harry Smith's 1952
Anthology of American Folk Music
. “Clint Howard recalls the moment,” one can read in the
Greenback Dollar
notes: “Fred and me had known Tom all our lives, but we just knew him as Tom. So I said, ‘No, I don't. Do you know a Clarence Ashley, Tom?' Tom started to say, ‘No,' but he had a second thought: ‘Hell, I'm Clarence Ashley!' ” As a public artist, he began a second life, but musically there was really no change from his first.