Real Life Rock (23 page)

4
Jonathan Valin,
Fire Lake
(Delacorte)
The theme of the seventh Harry Stoner mystery is that of a thousand feature stories now lining birdcages: “The '60s Revisited—The Music! The Drug Culture! The Free Love Generation!” The difference is that for ex-junkie Karen Jackowski, time stopped when the '60s ended; for time to start again only means that the '60s are catching up with her.

5
The Jesus and Mary Chain,
Dark-lands
(Warner Bros.)
Car music.

6
Van Morrison,
Poetic Champions Compose
(Mercury)
And when the going gets tough, the tough get down on their knees and pray. The sound is close enough to New Age to appear on Windham Hill (each side opens with a vapid instrumental), but as on all of Morrison's recent albums, there are a lot of dead flies trapped in the gossamer threads, and sometimes the threads don't even need the flies.

7
Billy Lee Riley, “Trouble Bound,” as used on
Private Eye
(NBC, Fridays at 10 p.m.)
Running behind bad news in this Eisenhower-era corpse opera, Riley's brooding '56 rockabilly ballad made as perfect a moment as I've seen on TV this year. But such contrivances define the show's limits—even with a recent script based on President (of the Screen Actors Guild) Ronald Reagan's notorious deal with MCA, it's all concept, no fire.

8
Vivien Vee, “Heartbeat” (TSR 12-inch)
Italian disco with every rhythm trick known to Western man (“good for aerobics,” it says), a little-girl vocal reminiscent of Claire Grogan of Altered Images, and an extraordinarily warming upsurge every time the melody peaks for the apparently deathless couplet, “One-two-three/Baby what you do to me.”

9
Fearless Iranians from Hell,
Die for Allah
(Boner)
Speaking of death, or numerology, the noise here doesn't exactly transcend itself, but “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10/See I can count to ten” does.

10
PiL, “Open and Revolving,” from
Happy?
(Virgin)
Yes—but everywhere else on this record, the door has closed.

NOVEMBER
17, 1987

1
Pet Shop Boys,
actually
(Manhattan)
Thatcherism is now a pop tradition, and this exquisite album measures the costs of “People's Capitalism” as subtly as Springs-teen's
Nebrasku
exposed the nihilism of our own “National Renewal.” Casting back no farther than Soft Cell's “Tainted Love,” Human League's “Don't You Want Me,” and Alphaville's “Forever Young,” the music is almost subliminally affecting; the singing is full of doubt—consciousness. The theme of love and money—the impossibility, now, of telling one from the other—comes into deep focus with “Rent,” the smooth, bitter tale of a kept man, singing for a kept country.

2
Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins,
The One Million Dollar Quartet
(S bootleg reissue, 1956)
Not like the dim, truncated artifact-for-artifact's-sake that surfaced some years ago, but uncut, the sound so bright and present the legends might be setting up in your living room. Despite a dozen spirituals, what's startling is the patent lack of religious feeling: this is a celebration of worldly stardom and its loosening of all constraints (“Well, it's Saturday night, and I just got laid . . . ah, paid”). Elvis dominates, most notably trying once, twice, three times to top Jackie Wilson's Las Vegas version of “Don't Be Cruel,” because he's sure it topped his. Available for a short time only at a record store not far from where John Fogerty went to high school.

3
Bruce Springsteen,
Tunnel of Love
(Columbia)
For the mood of “Tougher Than the Rest.”

4
Rolling Stone
,
XX Anniversary Issue
(#512, November 5–December 12)
“By the time the Labour party came into power in Britain in 1964, youth culture was already a
fait accompli
. That is, youth had already
benefited from the prosperous inflationary period of the early sixties—that whole period of teenage consumerism that Colin MacInnes wrote about in books like
Absolute Beginners
. . . .” So says Professor Michael Philip Jagger in this extraordinary compendium of new interviews with 34 traditional
RS
favorites: three blacks, three women, one twofer, and no punks. The leading questions emphasize “The Sixties” as concept and legacy; the answers are usually thoughtful, honest, hard-nosed, and sometimes (the first paragraph of the Keith Richards entry) pure poetry.