Real Life Rock (53 page)

7
Virginia Madsen, as Dixie Lee Boxx in
Long Gone
(HBO movie, 1987)
Though she's in the tradition of big American blonds (as aerobic Madonna is not), if Madsen had taken Mamie Van Doren's role in
High School Confidential
it would have been a different movie: everything Madsen does radiates intelligence and will. This good flick about a '50s Florida minor-league baseball team has a superb rockabilly/doo-wop soundtrack; Madsen seems to be the only character who knows what the songs are about.

8
Heart, “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You” (Portrait)
Since “Magic Man,” Ann Wilson's theme has been lust and loss—loss of control. She'll have to push to take the story any farther.

9
Smithereens, “Behind the Wall of Sleep” from
Especially for You
(Enigma, 1986)
As good as Richard Thompson's “Wall of Death.”

10
Jerry Roberts, on California gubernatorial candidate John Van de Kamp's address to the state Democratic Party convention
(
San Francisco Chronicle
,
April 9)
“The straitlaced Van de Kamp's appearance was most memorable for the music selected for his introduction to the delegates—the rock and roll classic ‘Johnny B. Goode.' Van de Kamp spent part of the weekend laid up in a back brace . . . aides denied speculation that he hurt his back practicing a Chuck Berry-style duck walk.” Lee Atwater rocks on.

MAY
29, 1990

1
Babes In Toyland,
Spanking Machine
(Twin/Tone)
Three women who take up the challenge the Slits laid down in 1977. As if no more than a minute has passed, they shout back: harridan shouts, bloody laughter.

2
Marianne Faithfull, at Slims, San Francisco (April 17)
There was a searing, anti-art ending on the arty “Sister Morphine”; with “Broken English,” the lyric's insistence that the singer didn't know what the Baader-Meinhof terrorists were talking about was now an insistence that she understood every word.

3
Chai Ling, on
Nightline
(ABC, April 17)
A few days after the killings in Tiananmen Square last year, Chai Ling, a leader of the demonstrations, smuggled a tape from her hiding place: “I am still alive,” she began. Those words were a stoic anticipation and refusal of the quick death she was facing as she spoke. This night, just a few days escaped from China, she appeared from Paris on a screen talking in voice-over translation to Ted Koppel, who ignored her amazing smile in favor of asking her if she intended to meet with George Bush; better he should have asked if she wanted to meet with Sinéad O'Connor.

4
Surreal Estate,
La Revolution Surrealiste
(Salvador, 1985)
Up against a dozen discs, including A Tribe Called Quest's smart backing track and dead vocals, this defunct Ann Arbor trio's precious, postpunk affectations gave something back: mainly Detroit's 1967 Spike Drivers, their uncollected “Strange Mysterious Sounds.”

5
Bobby “Blue” Bland, Junior Parker, Earl Forest, and Johnny Ace,
The Original Memphis Blues Brothers
(Ace reissue, 1951–53)
The title refers less to Bland et al. than to Matt Murphy, guitarist on these sessions, who later turned up in
The Blues Brothers
, where he walked out on Aretha Franklin to play with his soul brothers John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd; the music is on side one, Bland wailing “Drifting from Town to Town” three times. His singing is so saxophonic it suggests that if an instrument can talk, to truly communicate a singer has to get past words.

6
Joel Selvin,
Ricky Nelson—Idol for a Generation
(Contemporary Books)
A moderately compelling biography of a moderately
compelling singer, whose moderately awful end was coded in his moderate rebellion against the moderately repressed life he was supposed to live.

7
Richard Beymer, on
Twin Peaks
(ABC, May 3)
In bed with Piper Laurie, the town Slime King gets up, brandishing one of the non sequiturs the script piles on its red herrings: a tiny Elvis whiskey decanter. “Going to give Little Elvis a shower,” he says. But what's in the bottle?