Real Life Rock (176 page)

4–7
Go-Go's,
God Bless the Go-Go's
(Beyond);
Return to the Valley of the Go-Go's
(IRS, 1994); “Belinda Carlisle Rocks Naked”
(
Playboy
,
August); Jane Weidlin,
Dear Weirdos
(Experience Music Project, Seattle)
The reformed band is more alive on the new
God Bless the Go-Go's
than it was on a few dull 1994 cuts tacked onto
Return to the Valley of the Go-Go's
, its “half dive into the unknown, half heard it all before” retrospective. Lead singer Belinda Carlisle sounds more alive than she looks in
Playboy
, smoothed and inflated beyond nature. But of the new songs (which include “Daisy Chain,” a three-minute, 45-second
Behind the Music
mea culpa), only “Insincere” even hints at the fierceness and ambition that took the group out of the new world of late-'70s Los Angeles punk and into the hearts of young girls all over America when
Beauty and the Beat
, their 1981 debut album, hit No. 1. All of that is present on the first CD of
Return
: dirty, late-night performances and rehearsals from 1979 and 1980, with Ventures-style guitar snaking through the noise so distantly it's as if Charlotte Caffey were playing from the back of the room; the bitterness in “This Town,” which after 20 years is still unsatisfied; the defiance and delight in “Our Lips Are Sealed,” which after 20 years is still undeniable. All that's missing, really, is an enhanced track with a clip of Carlisle's nervous, hard-nosed interviews in Penelope Spheeris' 1980 film
The Decline . . . of Western Civilization
, and guitarist Jane Weidlin's 1978 fan letter to Los Angeles punk heroes the Weirdos: a
fantastic collage that, beginning on a roll of toilet paper with an ad for the Fruit-of-the-Month Club pasted onto the first sheet, proceeds from manifesto (“Who needs fruit when you can be a weirdo?”) to P.S. (“John I think you're really keen”) while taking in Alka-Seltzer tablets, a vinyl belt, photographs of the author, a rubber glove and instructions on how to brush your teeth.

8
Cyndi Lauper, “Money Changes Everything,” at Boston Pops (Independence Day)
Boston Blackie, aka Lindsay Waters, reports on a live performance of Lauper's greatest recording: “In 1984 I rushed to the TV when called to see Cyndi Lauper sing on national television. This was in Minneapolis and we were just about to move to Boston. We listened to ‘She's So Unusual' all the way across the country as we cried because we were leaving the Twin Cities: she with her downtown manners from New York and some songs from Uptown Minneapolis from Prince. Now on the Fourth of July I found myself called to the TV again.

“Seeing her now, packed into her skimpy silver dress with the super-short skirt, was strange. There she was, doing the bump with Mr. Conventional Keith Lockhart, in the most conventional city in the U.S. The Boston Pops threatened to give us Cyndi Pops. She sounded good and fresh and peppy, but the scene put me in mind of how time and place change things as absolutely as money. In the 18 years since she first sang the song, the city of Boston, and especially the area around the Hatch Shell on the Charles River, has changed because money has poured into the city. Downtown Boston has gone and is going through a major re-shaping. Boston is a city of old money, of people who would rather sit on their money than spend it. Luckily the taxpayers of the U.S. can be called on to make up the difference when the locals are frugal, so all the new bridges, roads and high-rises can be paid for by new money. The place Lauper was playing encouraged one to see her performance in the most cynical light, but she bopped so hard you could almost imagine that Boston was on the verge of the change it has resisted for at least a hundred years.”

9
Michael Mann, producer,
Crime Story
reruns on A&E (Mondays)
On July 16 it was Chicago, 1963: a 1986, first-season episode about a psycho killer who's a dead ringer for Stiv Bators. It was graphic beyond anything on network television before or since, and from beginning to end there were great cars, shot from street level, great clothes and great hair, especially the bizarre flattop pompadour on mob comer Ray Luca (Anthony Denison). But the truest moment came in the opening scene: a party for Lt. Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) and his Major Crime Unit, the whole hipster crew and their wives and girlfriends dancing slow and cool to the hometown Impressions' 1963 hit “It's All Right.”

10
Flier for Gossip show at 7th St. Entry (Minneapolis, July 8)
For the unkempt Arkansas threesome, Sharon Stone crossed her legs in
Basic Instinct
. The near white-out glow the artist had imposed over the too-familiar image erased the role Stone played in the picture as the object of gossip, replacing it with something sexier: the suggestion that she's about to whisper it in your ear.

AUGUST
20, 2001

1
New Pornographers,
Mass Romantic
(Mint)
Put five guys from Vancouver in a band that would rather be Oasis or even the Small Faces in their arty period—or the Beach Boys topping “Good Vibrations” or, why not, the Beatles—together with someone doing a good imitation of Phil Spector crinkling up tinfoil, bring in Bloodshot country singer Neko Case and watch a smile spread through the room, and then watch it soar into the sky like a balloon, and Case fly through the air like Supergirl, or anyway Helen Slater, who will do. “The song, the song, the song that's shaking me,” Case warbles off her feet in “Letter From an Occupant”; I couldn't make out the next line, but the boys' “woo-woo-woo-woo, weeooo's” were clear as day. Then came the
opening shots of “To Wild Homes,” and I found myself applauding. In the car, in the fast lane. From last year, and for good.

2
Bobby “Blue” Bland,
Two Steps From the Blues
(MCA)
From 1961: the first full album by the strangest-looking and most original postwar blues stylist—a man whose sense of tragedy was as carefully cut as his sharkskin suits. Never too much drape, never a fold showing, with so many different threads running through the material the result is a glow, the glow of despair and loss at twilight, be it the gentle “Lead Me On” or the horrifying “St. James Infirmary.” On the front: Mr. Bland himself, jacket slung over his shoulder like Frank Sinatra, mounting the two steps that will take him inside the blue-paneled building where, you can bet, he will inquire about his royalties. “What royalties?” Duke Records president Don Robey will ask him. “I don't see your name on any of those songs.”

3
David Rakoff,
Fraud
(Doubleday)
Rakoff's embarrassed stories are mostly funnier and creepier on
This American Life
than on the page, where you can begin to think he went begging for his Wrong Guy for the Wrong Job assignments. Thus the center of gravity here is not Rakoff at all, not as our guide to the absurdities of contemporary speech and mores or weird cool person. “The Best Medicine” is a report on the Sixth Annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., where the self-congratulation of the event—Eric Idle: “They are the finest people in the world, aren't they, comedians?”—leads Rakoff to question the legitimacy of his own birth: “Yes, not like those pushy, conceited Doctors Without Borders, and don't get me started about that bitch Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.” “There's really no arguing with Preston Sturges,” he says, referring to
Sullivan's Travels
and its insistence that all people want out of art is something to take their mind off life, “but it bears repeating that even though laughter may well be ‘the best medicine,' it is not, in point of fact, actual medicine.” This won't win Rakoff cheers from the positive-attitude crowd, but he's already had cancer.