Real Life Rock (52 page)

7
Rolling Stones, “You Can't Always Get What You Want,” from
25
×
5
(CBS video)
An edit of a clip from an unreleased '69 TV special, which replaces the regret and nostalgia
of the
Let It Bleed
cut with a definite lack of charity.

8
Bruce Sterling, “Dori Bangs,” in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction
(September 1989)
What if rock critic Lester Bangs hadn't died in 1982 and comix artist Dori Seda five years later, but rather met, got married, and lived on? Sterling's story is compelling because it reads like gossip.

9
George Harrison, discourse on karma, in “The Quiet Wilbury,” interview by Mark Rowland
(
Musician,
March)
“It was such a waste, some stupid person. If John had been killed by Elvis, it would have at least had meaning!”

10
Jacob Weisberg, “Washington Diarist,” in the
New Republic
(March 5)
An argument that the Velvet Underground played no small role in naming and even making what Czech president Václav Havel calls the country's “Velvet Revolution”—through the agency of the Plastic People of the Universe, Velvets followers who once recorded and performed at Havel's farmhouse. On the other hand, since Frank Zappa (recently made adviser to the Czech minister of culture) reports Havel is a big fan of Zappa's own
Bongo Fury
, maybe one ought to be thankful Havel didn't announce the “Bongo Revolution.” That would have really confused people, especially future historians, who would likely conclude that the Czech victory over Stalinism had its roots in dubbed Hollywood exploitation movies about beatniks—which, to some degree, it probably did.

MAY
1, 1990

1
Herb Ritts, Marianne Faithfull, Gap ad
(
Vanity Fair,
April)
“What were once vices are now habits,” the Doobie Brothers smirked for an album title in 1974. Ritts's portrait, almost unrecognizable without a caption, says that what were once scars are now features: a junkie tattoo and a Pre-Raphaelite face.

2
Lisa Shrage, as Mary Lou Mahoney in
Hello Mary Lou—Prom Night II
(Virgin Vision Video, 1987)
In a movie sharp enough to favor Ronnie Hawkins's “Mary Lou” over Ricky Nelson's title song, Shrage is a murdered '57 prom queen back from the dead 30 years later: the human equivalent of Christine, Stephen King's demonic '58 Plymouth. Where's Shrage been since?

3
Chris Thomas,
Cry of the Prophets
(Sire/Hightone)
He's the son of '50s Louisiana bluesman Tabby Thomas, and if this LP had been released in the mid-'60s, in the heyday of deep feeling deep South r&b, it would have seemed like a curio: too eclectic. Today it's a shock, because deep soul has hardly been heard in public since Al Green's
The Belle Album
, and because nobody's heard deep soul guitar or deep soul crying applied to crack and Uzis. Up against the likes of N.W.A., Thomas sounds pathetic—but also real.

4
Don Letts, director,
The Punk Rock Movie
(1979, Rhino Home Video)
England, 1977. The Slits are fierce (drummer Palmolive seems to care the most); so is X-ray Spex (with Lora Logic). Eater plays with a pig's head on the stage, a huge cleft cut into its skull. When the song ends the bandmembers hack at the head, stab it, then throw what's left to the crowd. They are acting out (a) the seventh verse of the Eagles' “Hotel California”; (b) Margaret Murray's 1921
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
, which holds that even after nearly 2000 years Christianity remained threatened by the devil worship of the lower orders; or (c) a rite secretly passed down through the centuries by British pagans masquerading as Christers. But the Sex Pistols, with Johnny Rotten in a suit coat and bow tie looking a lot like Baudelaire, make Eater's ritual seem secondhand, because it is so literal; with the Pistols, (c) is the only answer, and the only question. Their “no future” means the whole of the past, a tidal wave.

5
Silos,
The Silos
(BMG/RCA)
Folk rock, pursuing the thin sound of Prince's “When You Were Mine” into its rhythms, all coolness and regret: “Picture of Helen” and “I'm Over You,” the latter taking two minutes to essay a classic driving song, only to pull up short and admit it's about immobilization and loss.

6
Sinéad O'Connor, “Black Boys on Mopeds,” from
I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got
(Chrysalis)
“Margaret Thatcher on TV/Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing/It seems strange that she should be offended.” The lifetime O'Connor invests in the word
offended
is, as singing, a match for the gestures of the man who, a year ago, played chicken with the tanks of the ruling class.