Real Life Rock (51 page)

7
Filippo Marinetti,
The Futurist Cookbook
,
translated from the Italian by Suzanne Brill, edited by Lesley Chamberlain (Bedford Arts reissue, 1932)
As a committed Fascist, the enemy of all passéism takes his crusade to the ultimate enemy: pasta (“originated by the Ostrogoths”). Thus, popping up throughout this hilarious, delirious master-work, the likes of “‘The Excited Pig'—A whole salami, skinned, is served upright on a dish containing some very hot black coffee mixed with a good deal of eau de Cologne,” and realization, now, that cuisine à la Zippy the Pinhead (tacos with Liquid Paper sauce) fixes Bill Griffith's hero not as a dyslexic for all seasons but as a professor paying polite homage to the great days of the avant-garde.

8
Rolling Stones, “Fancy Man Blues,” from
After the Hurricane: Songs for Montserrat
(Chrysalis CD)
Rote and soulless, but a dozen similar rehearsals, bootlegged as
Blues by the Numbers
, might be a way out of the “How to Write Pop Songs” slime of “Mixed Emotions” and the rest of
Steel Wool
. Dream on, as the Five Keys once put it.

9
Ronnie McDowell (voice) and Michael St. Gerard (mime), “My Happiness,” in
Elvis
(ABC-TV, February 6)
The original for-his-mother's-birthday recording, here dramatized as bereft of everything but heart. The actual artifact, lost since 1953, turned up recently; McDowell must have heard it.

10
Super Hits of the 70s: Have a Nice Day,
Vols. 1–5 (Rhino CDs)
Checking out this series of horrors (Sugarloaf's “Green Eyed Lady,” Ocean's “Put Your Hand in the Hand,” so many more), you ask why Rhino stopped short of the bottom: Five Man Electrical Band's “Signs,” wherein the hippie rebel pulls off his disguise to reveal the true face of the age—the Jesus Freak. Rhino says it's on the way.

APRIL
3, 1990

1
Pete Seeger, “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall,” from
We Shall Overcome—The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert, June 8,1963
(Columbia double CD)
I first heard Bob Dylan's song as Seeger sang it, just days before the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King replaced Dylan's armageddon (“hard rain” meant, among other things, nuclear fallout) with a vision of liberation. But both King and Dylan spoke the same, apocalyptic language; it was never Seeger's. His version of the song seemed like a final statement 27 years ago, in the flesh or on the original, one-LP Carnegie Hall recording, but today it's plain the moment made the music. Seeger notoriously lacked any blues feeling, and “Hard Rain” is proof he had none for country, not even for Child ballads; as Woody Guthrie or Big Bill Broonzy he was Henry Ward Beecher, Yankee abolitionist to his toenails. This performance documents one of the great musical events of the American postwar period, but the event is no longer musical; to hear how scary the song can be, you have to listen to Bryan Ferry sing it.

2
Midnight Oil,
Blue Sky Mining
(Columbia)
As with U2, there's good guitar in the storm of politics and morals, but the hooks are not smothered in a personification of universal humanism, perhaps because singer Peter Garrett doesn't seem very impressed with himself. He doesn't even necessarily write the songs, which frees him to function as just another instrument.

3
Robert B. Ray, “The ABC of Visual Theory,” in
Visible Language
(Autumn 1988)
Playing within the strictures of the self-referentiality of current critical theory, Ray (of the Vulgar Boatmen and the University of Florida at Gainesville) takes on the hegemonic artificiality of the alphabet, picking up, among other items, “Barthes,” “Rochefort, Joseph,” “Vertov, Dziga,” and “Louie, Louie.” The last is discussed as happenstance, an incident interesting on its own terms: the supposedly obscene lyrics of the Kingsmen's '63 single working on millions of people like Poe's purloined letter, hidden in plain sight.

4
KALX-FM, two-and-a-half hours of Lou Reed, on the occasion of his 47th birthday (March 2, Berkeley)
Upsetting, since these days if you hear two songs in a row from the same performer you figure he or she just died.

5
Robert Plant, “Hurting Kind (I've Got My Eyes on You),” from
Manic Nirvana
(Es Paranza)
Inside the familiar noise is humor, the thrill of discovery, maybe the hint of a quest. After 20 years on the assembly line attaching the hysterical to the frantic, he still can't deliver mere product.

6
Aaron Neville, “For Your Precious Love,” from
Midnight Orchid
(Rhino CD, recorded 1981)
Neville's trademark is overworrying, getting so many syllables out of a phrase (none of them melismatic, all of them clipped) he makes Otis Redding sound like Sam Cooke. Thus on most of this five-song oldies disc Neville barely gets started, hacking so much angst into the verses you lose track of what he's singing about—but with his embrace of Jerry Butler's 1958 hit, you wonder why he has to stop.