Real Life Rock (36 page)

7
Lloyd Bentsen, Springsteen quote, campaign speech (November 7)
“No retreat, baby, no surrender,” he said. Credit him for not backing off from “baby.”

8
Eskimo, song title (unrecorded)
As in “An Historical Perspective, or, Neil Sedaka Never Instituted Fascist Policies.” Which is right up there with “Neil Sedaka, Horseman of the Apocalypse,” a chapter title in Richard Meltzer's
Gulcher
.

9
Traveling Wilburys,
Volume One
(Wilbury/Warner Bros.)
A/k/a Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Bob Dylan, and not bad, even if the Masked Marauders (Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and Chuck Berry) had more fun with the concept—Dylan's “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” is the first piece he's cut in ages that sounds as if he's having fun with words and music.

10
John Carpenter,
They Live
(Universal Pictures)
As critic Michael Covino put it, an E.C. comics version of
The Society of the Spectacle
.

DECEMBER
27, 1988

1
Cowboy Junkies,
The Trinity Session
(RCA)
Don't be fooled by the punk name or the “Sweet Jane” cover—or for that matter the “Sweet Jane” endorsement by Lou Reed. Margo Timmins has the pristine voice of so many early '60s Joan Baez imitators, a timbre wholly uncorrupted by personality. Beginning with an insufferable a cappella reading of the traditional ballad “Mining for Gold,” she turns the wretched of the earth into art (to borrow a phrase from Alice Walker): in the matrix of Timmins's sensibility that's all the redemption the wretched need. The folk-music revival has got to be stopped before all ambitious pop music dissolves into a contemplation of its own piety. There's no better place for it to stop than here.

2
Johnny Winter, “Stranger Blues,” from
The Winter of '88
(MCA)
The Elmore James tune, and an overdue reminder that the '69
Second Winter
remains one of the most exciting claims anyone has made on the rock tradition. With drums and bass behind him, Winter jumps his sinewy, snaking lines across the piece, refusing, as he did on
Second Winter
, both Clapton elegance and Hendrix grandeur. What you hear is smash, twist, high-stepping, every riff cutting itself short and then leaping forward. The pleasure is in the tension: knowing everything will turn out alright, as the guitarist scares you into sensing it just might not.

3
Herman's Hermits, “I'm Into Something Good,” in
The Naked Gun
(Paramount)
Postmod self-referentiality in a great trash film: after the song plays behind a falling-in-love sequence, its MTV credit appears on the screen.

4
Herschel B. Chipp,
Picasso's Guernica—History, Transformations, Meanings
(California)
Someday, when a writer has had the time to live with the right disc as long as Chipp has lived with
Guernica
, I'd like to read a book about a single record as vitally detailed, as richly contextualized, as completely realized, as this book about a single painting. Submit titles and rationales now; the winner runs here, and the prize is a copy of Chipp—a good deal, since it goes for $37.50.

5
Jewels, “Hearts of Stone,” from
Oldies But Goodies
Vol. 5 (Original Sound reissue, 1955)
The LP itself is ancient; the cut sounds new. Still unknown compared to the hit version made in the same year by Otis Williams and the Charms, this L.A. doo-wop explosion sums up the freedom unleashed in the first flush of rock 'n' roll, and proves that the music was anything but a linear development out of r&b (even if “R&B” was the name of the label on which the Jewels' record was originally released). In the unstable chanting of the chorus you can hear the thrill of making secret music public, and also the thrill of discovering that such an act makes old secrets (“
BADDA WADDA BADDA WAH
,” in this case) into a language not even the singers can understand.
The momentum is so strong, and so confused, you can't believe there's an ending to it, and when the performance does end, there's only one appropriate reaction: disbelief. Disbelief that it ended, and disbelief that it ever began.

6
Emily Listfield,
It Was Gonna Be Like Paris
(Bantam reprint, 1984)
Cool and touching—a Downtown novel already looking back to a time “when punk was punk.”