Real Life Rock (54 page)

8
Lou Reed and John Cale,
Songs for Drella
(Sire)
Good guitar.

9
Mark Kitchell, director,
Berkeley in the Sixties
(Kitchell Films) and Richard Lester, director:
Paul McCartney in His Times
(Memorial Stadium, Berkeley, April 1, short film introducing McCartney tour)
Combining documentary footage and now-interviews with the then-participants, Kitchell's movie replaces history with highlights: there's no texture, no sense of lived time. There are moments when the forgotten comes back as shock, notably then-governor Ronald Reagan, not the “easygoing monster” (Robert Christgau's perfect words) of the presidential years, but hawk-faced and harsh, matching the Mr. Big he played in Don Siegel's
The Killers
. Ultimately the picture is tinged with a condescending sentimentality; when it ended with Pete Seeger singing “We Shall Overcome,” the
we
seemed smugly narrow. I took part in most of what I was looking at, but I was far more moved by Lester's little triptych: “history” on the sides, Paul in the middle. At first it was an ordinary collage, Beatles surrounded by Kennedys and miniskirts and missile crises—with the soundtrack Beatle music more vivid than any of the images. Then Lester broke the formula: four unrelieved minutes of the Vietnam War, no Beatles and no Paul, simply tripled horror, all to “The Long and Winding Road,” which against what one was seeing was almost silent, sucked into the air. When the film ended with red, lurid night footage of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, it didn't seem cheap. Paul McCartney had been reduced to one person doing his work in times that overtook him. Then he came out and sang his songs as best he could.

10
Eddie Money, “Peace in Our Time” (Columbia)
Along with the title phrase, the lyric includes “heaven on earth,” “turning water into wine,” “streets of shame,” “cities of dust,” “phoenix from the flames,” “break down the walls,” “wheels of fortune,” “keep on keepin' on,” “on a wing and a prayer,” and “a song in our hearts,” encapsulating better than a hundred academic papers the poststructuralist refutation of “the original.” Or a dogged refusal to shut up.

JUNE
26, 1990

1
Madonna, “Blond Ambition Tour” (Oakland Coliseum Arena, May 20)
It doesn't matter how cool you are: this great production showcases gestures as shocking now as any Elvis Presley put on television in 1956, and it's a prissy myth that only those who disapproved of Elvis were shocked. Here, the interracial hermaphroditic porn of “Like a Virgin” was merely a warm-up for the blasphemies of “Like a Prayer,” which as a dance raised the music to the level of Foreigner's “I Want To Know What Love Is,” cut in with Ray Charles's “What'd I Say.” “This,” Madonna said on May 31 in Toronto, when police arrived with an order that she alter her performance, “is certainly a cause for which I am willing to be arrested.”

2
Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie,
Music Man—Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic Records, and the Triumph of Rock 'n' Roll
(Norton)
Engaging, seductive writing that never calls attention to itself, first-class business reporting—a music book you can actually read, not simply glean for gossip, though there's plenty of that, from Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's attempt to get Red Bird Records back from the Mafia to Mick Jones's pre-Foreigner bid to take over the corpse of Stax. The book is strongest as a shadow biography of Morris Levy—mobster, bad conscience of pop laissez-faire capitalism, and imp of the perverse—who talked his head off.

3
Clancy Eccles, et al.,
Clancy Eccles Presents His Reggae Revue
(Heartbeat CD reissue, 1967–72)
Rock steady, and never steadier—not a single twitching nerve.

4
Wedding Present,
Bizarro
(RCA CD)
As a singer, David Gedge sounds like John Cale on his obscure 1969
Vintage Violence
LP; as a guitarist he fronts a Leeds band whose influences seem to begin and end with the Velvet Underground's 8:47
1969
live version of “What Goes On”—and what goes on on
Bizarro
is a fanatical argument that true rock 'n' roll, or music, emerges only at that point where repetition takes on a charge so powerful not even rhythm can be heard. Listen to “What Have I Said Now?”—Fairport Convention's “A Sailor's Life” as redone by Joy Division—and tell Gedge he's wrong.

5
Sinéad O'Connor, green T-shirt (Berkeley Community Theater, June 4)
“PWA,” it read; her publicist said it meant “Paddies With Attitude,” not “Person With AIDS.” I don't know what the ACT UP sticker on the sleeve meant.

6
Catherine Adams, dispatch on Romanian elections (UPI, May 20)
“More than 80 political parties are participating in the elections,” Adams reported. “The Laughter Party, the Barking Dog Party, the Gypsy Home Decorators Party . . . More than 1000 foreign observers have begun traveling to some of the 3000 polling stations around the country to monitor the balloting. ‘I'm overwhelmed by the enthusiasm for democracy,' said Roy Hattersley, a British Labor Party deputy.” “Me, too,” said Monty Python.