Real Life Rock (24 page)

5
Jovan Acin,
Hey, Babu Riba
(Orion Pictures)
A bizarre twist on the “L. O. V. E. across the knuckles of his right hand/H. A. T. E. across the knuckles of his left” motif—not to mention proof that rock 'n' roll was invented in Yugoslavia, in 1953, by fans of Lionel Hampton's “Hey, Bop-a-Re-Bop,” as a protest against Titoism.

6
AT&T, “Operator” radio commercial, with Jim Croce (1943–73) impersonator (NW Ayer)
It's creepy (that's the hook), but also primitive (they didn't even have to hire the soundalike), because it's the wave of the future (or whatever tense applies): digital sampling now permits the rearrangement of any dead singer's phonemes into an endorsement of absolutely anything. Imagine, say, Janis Joplin: “I'm sorry, babe/I had to go/But you don't have to/‘Just say no.'”

7
Wilfrid Mellers,
Music in a New Found Land—Themes and Developments in American Music
(Oxford paperback reissue, 1964)
Strongly influenced by D. H. Lawrence's
Studies in Classic American Literature,
this study, unprecedented when first published and hardly superseded today, locates artists from Ives to Bessie Smith, Cage to Ellington, Copland to Robert Johnson just outside the gates of a Transcendentalist utopia—where, Mellers says, “We shall know at last that there is no differentiation between the genres.”

8
Sisters of Mercy, “Gimme Shelter” (Brain Eater 12-inch, UK, 1983)
The band is from Leeds, the record the flip of “Temple of Love,” the composition by Jagger and Richards, but punched up on the radio at night, about a minute into the drone, this Gothic performance sounds like a ritual from some pre-Christian Germanic forest—where, for the past thousand years, its cultists have been biding their time, waiting for the moment when the world will be ready to hear their terrible message.

9
Randy Shilts,
And the Band Played On—People, Politics, and the AIDS Epidemic
(St. Martin's)
The lit-crit dismissal Shilts received in a recent VLS should not dissuade anyone from reading this tremendous book—overstated as a thriller, understated as a tragedy, realized as both—or from remembering that pop music has had less to say about AIDS than Ronald Reagan.

10
New Monkees,
New Monkees
(Warner Bros.)
Not terrible, even if they do play their own instruments; at least they don't write their own songs.

DECEMBER
15, 1987

1
Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Effigy,” from
Willie and the Poor Boys
(Fantasy CD reissue, 1969)
Most classic-rock CDs vitiate the original sound with separation, and sabotage it with exaggerated percussion so intrusive it turns performances that survived reprocessed stereo into blackboard-scratching parodies. (But you can hear the grain of the nails!) With Creedence CDs, the sound is heightened but not changed. “Effigy” was a plodding, earnest rerun of Neil Young's “Cowgirl in the Sand” on LP; now, like a shell left over from a forgotten war, it explodes as a piece of absolute nihilism, for a moment silencing the records it prefigured: the Sex Pistols' “Anarchy in the U.K.” in John Fogerty's cold words, Gang of Four's “At Home He's a Tourist” in the irrationalism of his cutup guitar.

2
Adverts,
The Peel Sessions
(Strange Fruit EP, UK, 1977)
T. V. Smith seemed to scare himself with this version of “Gary Gilmore's Eyes.” Why haven't Scott and Beth B. made a movie out of it?

3
Terence Trent D'Arby, “(Ain't Gonna Play) Vienna” (refusal to honor contract for
concert in Austria, November 10)
I like the cool, spare “Santayana Mix” best: “I cannot in good conscience allow money being made off my back to go into the government coffers of a country that has, in its own superior judgment, elected a known Nazi conspirator to head its nation”—somehow, the sound of a major-label rock 'n' roll singer making a political statement without 50 superstars in attendance is refreshing, bracing. But the “Atrocity Mix” is almost as good (lots of crowd noise, recorded live in Munich): “
I DON'T WANT TO PLAY IN A COUNTRY THAT VOTED FOR A FUCKING NAZI
.”

4
Crickets,
The “Chirping” Crickets
(MCA reissue, 1958)
Buddy Holly as the Beatles.