Real Life Rock (49 page)

7
Bob Black, “On the Art Strike”
(
Art-paper
,
December)
Black takes bad ideas seriously. “On January 1, 1990—if they comply with the directives of the PRAXIS Group—all artists will put down their tools for three years,” he begins. Then he imagines the result of this “ostentatious renunciation,” promoted as a utopia where “plebian masses, no longer cowed by ‘talented bullies,' are in turn expected to rush into art like fresh air into a vacuum”: “Not, as is pretended, the general strike of the proletariat, but rather something already depicted in a work of
art
—the general strike of the capitalists in Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged
.”

8
MTV,
Decade—1980–1989
(December 24)
A two-hour tribute to digital editing, with talking heads both stupid (John Mellencamp, Tina Turner, and most of all Linda Ellerbee) and not (Frank Zappa, David Byrne, Roseanne Barr). Best line, Don Henley: “Reagan had a bedside manner for a dying nation.”

9
Album of the Decade, Mekons,
Fear & Whiskey
(Sin, 1985, UK)
Take your choice.

10
Single of the Decade, Foreigner, “I Want To Know What Love Is” (Atlantic, 1984)
Because in the last minute, you find out.

FEBRUARY
6, 1990

1
David Acomba, director; Maynard Collins, writer,
Hank Williams—The Show He Never Gave
(Drifter Films, Canada, 1982, the Nashville Network, January 1)
Aired on the 37th anniversary of Williams's death and set in a bar the night before: December 31, 1952. Playing Williams, country singer Sneezy Waters doesn't look like him, doesn't necessarily sound like him, but within minutes he is him, running through the hits and making each one into an event the people in the crowd will never forget. They mill around the foot-high platform that serves as a stage, as close to Williams as pogo dancers were to Johnny Rotten, but without starlust, as if it's just one more night in a long life. After jokes about alcoholism and divorce—after lead-in stories as complex, scripted, and seemingly spontaneous as those Bruce Springsteen tells—Williams/Waters ends his first set with “Alone and Forsaken.” It's a number as awful and anomalous in the Williams catalogue as “Hellhound on My Trail” is in Robert Johnson's. The words fail to fit into “Cold, Cold Heart” as the messy structure of “Hellhound” breaks up the order of even “Me and the Devil Blues”; the cadence damns the melody of “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” as the antibeat of “Hellhound” destroys the rhythm of “Terraplane Blues.” It seems clear, after Waters's “Alone and Forsaken”—listen to the Mekons' version on
The Edge of the World
—that nothing could follow it, but after a short time in his dressing room Williams comes back for his second set, and it's time to pay the piper: in blood (Williams's), sweat (his and the audience's), and tears (his, theirs, yours).

2
Andrew Baumer, former bassist for Minimal Man, history lesson, on the occasion of his 38th birthday (January 6)
“When I woke up this morning, to celebrate I put on my favorite record: the Sex Pistols. But when ‘Holidays in the Sun' came on, it struck me—someday, when I have a child, and I want to tell my son or daughter about my favorite record, I'm going to have to explain what the Berlin Wall was.”

3
Kinks, “The Way Love Used To Be” (Reprise, 1971)
Save for Duncan Browne's forgotten 1968
Give Me Take You
, the sole exemplar of an unknown genre: Pre-Raphaelite rock.

4
Warren Zevon, “Run Straight Down,” from
Transverse City
(Virgin)
Once he gets the orchestration up, he doesn't have to do much more than chant the title to bring on the night.

5
Gang of Four, “History's Not Made by Great Men,” from
At the Palace
(Mercury, 1984)
As covered by
CBS Evening News
, December 1, with new lyrics: “Even world leaders, it would seem, no longer make history. All they can do is cope with history in the making.”

6
Dangermice,
Sound Session
(Sounds! EP)
A band centered on Marlene Marder (writer and guitarist for Kleenex and Liliput, 1978–84): straight stuff, except for “There's a Light,” as harshly utopian as Liliput's “Split.”