Real Life Rock (27 page)

5
Bar-Kays, “Certified True” (Polygram 12-inch)
Certified Cameo, anyway.

6
John Crawford,
Baboon Dooley—Rock Critic!
(Popular Reality Press Ann Arbor, MI)
First full-length book on the subject—even if it is all comic strips, even if the highlight is the flashback “Witness to Beatnik Glory.”

7
Swellsville: A Critical Guide for Consumer Deviants
(Winter of Our Discontent 1988 issue)
Fanzine with '60s UK would-be teen idol Heinz on the cover (I never heard of him either) and lots of words inside: “The inescapable truth is that avoiding critical thought doesn't dispel the need for it—it only submits you to somebody else's.”

8
Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, “I Have Come Out to Play,” from
Modern Lovers 88
(Rounder)
Much of the LP is vague, but the emotion is specific here, chased down till it gives up its own momentum; when Richman muffles the instruments and breaks out with “Rover, red Rover, come on over,” his whole career finds a home in the line.

9
Byrds,
Never Before
(CBS Special Prodcuts/Re-Flyte/Murray Hill/Outlet Book Co. archaeology, 1965), and T Bone Burnett:
The Talking Animal
s (Columbia)
Dullest records of the month.

10
Joni Mabe, “Love Letter to Elvis” (Primitivo gallery, San Francisco)
The show
was called
Elvis the King, a Folk Hero;
amidst Howard Finster's suspect tributes and a
Rock Dreams
ripoff, Mabe's collages stood out. In this giant handwritten valentine, you couldn't tell the dementia from the parody (if there was any)—reading along with “You could have discovered that sex and religion could be brought together in your feelings for me,” pulled up short by the closing “confession”: “I'm carrying your child. The last Elvis imitator I fucked was carrying your sacred seed. Please send money. Enclosed are photographs of myself and the earthly messenger you sent.” That was an ugly ceramic Elvis doll; all around the letter, snapshots showed Mabe rubbing her bare breasts against it, grinning.

MARCH
29, 1988

1
Roddy Doyle,
The Commitments
(Heinemann, London)
Finally, a novel about a band—a white band in contemporary Dublin dedicated to '60s soul music—that's not about success and failure, rise and fall. What it's mostly about is rehearsing, but no one has ever gotten more music on the page simply by turning up the volume: putting lyrics in caps and dramatizing the way a song resists the people who want to play it, the way they can make that song their own. The story is small, and it has room for an infinity of readers: here, listeners.

2
Billy Stewart, “Baby, You're My Only Love,” on
Okeh Rhythm & Blues
(Epic reissue, compiled 1982)
Startling—though the arrangement is a doo-wop cliché and Stewart's addled vocal style (which produced a single pop smash, “Summertime,” 1966) is only marginally off-market. What gives this '57 nonhit its flesh-crawling power is the guitarist—Bo Diddley, maybe—who, every few lines, strips a low, corrosive run down the strings, revealing doo-wop courtly love as a high-wire act by making the sound of someone cutting the net.

3
Beat Happening,
Jamboree
(Rough Trade)
As if the last 13 years never happened, this little band from Olympia, Washington, invents punk rock—more or less the way the Marine Girls, with their homemade
Beach Party
cassette, invented it in 1981 in Hatfield, England.

4
Jesse Belvin,
“Hang Your Tears Out To Dry”
(Earth Angel reissue, Sweden 1951–57)
There's a book to be written on '50s Los Angeles r&b: a sober history, tracing artists and businessmen, or a James Ellroy splatter-mystery, with the records appearing only as instants of impossible respite. Made out of the paradox of sun and confinement, the music was at once far more frankly pessimistic, clowning, and casual than the East Coast group sound or Southern band-based black rock. Belvin was perhaps the best pure singer of his place and time; leading off with the ineffable “Dream Girl,” a labyrinth of blocked escape routes from the smooth prison of West Coast racism, this is the best collection of his work.