Real Life Rock (41 page)

7
James Brown, “I Got You (I Feel Good)” (wake-up call,
Discovery
space shuttle, March 14)
Did JB?

8
Nick Kent, “Roy Orbison:
The Face
Interview”
(
The Face
,
February)
“I first saw Elvis live in '54. It was at the Big D Jamboree in Dallas and first thing, he came out and spat on the stage. . . . It affected me exactly the same way as when I first saw that David Lynch film. I didn't know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it.”

9
Elvis Costello, “You're No Good” on “Veronica” maxi-single (Warner Bros. four-track CD)
Maybe the dank, drum-machined version of the Linda Ronstadt hit was vengeful payback for the guilt Costello felt collecting checks for the Ronstadt covers he says he hated; that's what it was on the radio. My CD had an apparently jokey opening: a few seconds of “Whole Lotta Love.” But the tune went on to its conclusion,
to be followed by “Rock & Roll,” which was followed by . . . a whole disc's worth of the best of Led Zeppelin. So much for futurism.

10
Untouchables, “Agent Double O Soul” (Twist/Restless)
Not as good as Edwin Starr's '65 original, better than the last nine James Bond movies.

MAY
30, 1989

1
Chet Baker,
Chet Baker sings and plays from the film “Let's Get Lost”
(RCA)
For a listener who knows nothing about jazz, Baker's art was in his face: the way the golden boy pan of the '50s already implied the lizard grimace of the '70s and '80s, the way the junkie ruin still contained what was destroyed. That double reflection is one of the stories told in Baker's singing on these nine end-of-the-road tracks: a caress, beautiful and revolting, a spider kiss. The only tune that doesn't hurt is Elvis Costello's “Almost Blue”; it's as if Baker had to live with a song for an age before he could bring it to life.

2
Madonna, “Like a Prayer” video (MTV)
Her defenders ought to stop pretending this isn't blasphemous; of course it is, at least according to the strictures of any above-ground Christian sect. What's “like” a prayer here is like the sensuality of pissing drunk as caught in Henry Bean's novel
False Match
(“the closest I ever came to prayer,” says the narrator): it's sex, specifically Madonna's fantasy of resurrecting Jesus by taking him into her mouth. Probably Salman Rushdie would understand; I imagine him somewhere in England, bent over his desk, an
I AM MADONNA
button pinned to his lapel.

3
Pauline Kael,
Hooked
(Dutton)
On
Something Wild:
“The movie gives you the feeling you sometimes get when you're driving across the country listening to a terrific new tape, and out of nowhere you pull into a truck-stop and the jukebox is playing the same song.”

4
Mark Ribowsky,
He's a Rebel: The Truth About Phil Spector—Rock and Roll's Legendary Madman
(Dutton)
Nothing like the whole truth, but some strong lines, the worst high school reunion story you've ever heard, and good depth perception, as in Teddy Bear Marshall Lieb's analysis of the Wall of Sound: “It was more air than sound.”

5
Stan Ridgway, “Goin' Southbound,” on
Mosquitos
(Geffen)
Ridgway has a way of twisting his voice around a lyric as if the effort is the only way to dull a toothache; this cut lets you hear more twist than effort, which is to say, mannerism.

6
Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart,
Bongo Fury—Live in Concert at Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin, Texas, May 20th & 21st, 1975
(Rykodisc CD)
Beefheart sings like his clothes are unraveling; then Zappa takes out the trash.

7
Jon Wozencroft,
The Graphic Language of Neville Brody
(Rizzoli)
This premature enshrining of the 31-year-old UK designer, celebrated for his album jackets and alphabets, catches Brody's perspicacity, from his words on Andy Warhol (“his art was subversive for about fifteen minutes”) to handwritten restaurant menus (“Distant utopias. It's also a class distance, it's offering the promise that for a short period of time you can be ‘one of us'”). Most striking is the way his record work signifies a transfer of unfettered, world-historical design (the sense that the future is riding on the success or failure of a design) from books to records. In the '20s and '30s, John Heart-field, Vavara Stepanova (see Alexander Lavrentiev,
Vavara Stepanoua
, MIT), and other Europeans made books explode out of their covers, turning them into objects that almost talked like people, or nations, or events, or history as such. Brody doesn't do that, but sometimes he seems to be trying.