Real Life Rock (57 page)

7
John Densmore,
Riders on the Storm—My Life With Jim Morrison and the Doors
(Delacorte)
The drummer writes as a man still trying to get the echo of an explosion 20 years gone out of his head, and thus addressing the better parts of his modest book to Morrison in heaven, hoping Jim will get the joke that the echo now likely has more fans than the explosion ever did:
“Cigar-Pain, remember him? The young bum (and there weren't as many young ones then) who used to hang around our rehearsal studio and burn his tongue with a lit cigar in order to acquire a singing voice like you . . . news came recently that he killed his mother and then himself. . . . He got our lyrics all wrong; he was supposed to kill his
father
and
fuck
his mother!”

8
Sonic Youth, “Mary-Christ,” from
Goo
(Geffen)
Nothing close to it since Captain Beefheart, 1969: “Tits tits the blimp the blimp/The mother ship the mother ship/The brothers hid under their hood/From the blimp the blimp.”

9
Guns N' Roses, “Civil War,” from
Nobody's Child—Romanian Angel Appeal
(Warner Bros.)
Closing out a set of unbearable piety (the “angels” are orphans, like fetuses are “innocent human life”), this titanic slab of hard rock is staggeringly powerful, at least until Axl Rose's whining chant of “
I DON'T NEED YOUR CIVIL WAR
” cuts against both the music and its context. The Romanians certainly needed the civil war the music dramatizes—but then Axl doesn't look beyond number one, and not just on the charts.

10
Colin Hughes, “Search for Antichrist leads soldiers astray”
(
London Independent/San Francisco Examiner
,
July 23)
“Five men and one woman, all of whom worked with the 701st Military Intelligence Brigade . . . [and] belonged to the End of the World Group . . . went AWOL on July 9 from their station in Augsburg, West Germany . . . The soldiers set off for Florida in search of the Antichrist but apparently failed to find the biblically prognosticated evil one before being arrested last Sunday in Gulf Breeze, Fla. Now they are awaiting court-martial on desertion charges.” Reached in Los Angeles, John Lydon, former singer for the rock group the Sex Pistols and one-time self-professed “Antichrist” had “No comment.
Probably they just wanted to go to Disneyworld. The media always lie. Anyway, I wasn't in Florida. Ha ha ha ha ha.”

My apologies to Bernie Krause, who I killed off in last month's entry on Van Morrison's “Almost Independence Day”; he isn't dead, though this column is, at least in these pages. It will reappear in
Artforum,
beginning with the November issue. My thanks to Doug Simmons for 57 months of friendly editing and good talk
.

Artforum 1990
1998

NOVEMBER
1990

1
W. T. Lhamon, Jr.,
Deliberate Speed—The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s
(Smithsonian Institution Press)
Lhamon's thesis that the American '50s were culturally rich is not so novel as it might have been when he began his book, ten years ago, but his set pieces are shockingly original. On Chuck Berry's “Promised Land,” for instance, heard since 1964 as Berry's “poor boy's” happy odyssey from Virginia to California—“but that,” Lhamon says, “is its minstrel mask.” Noting that the song was written in prison, Lhamon redescribes it—so vividly and with such historical detail you could say he reinscribes it—as a coded but insistently specific parable of the early civil rights movement, reconnecting Rock Hill, South Carolina, to the Freedom Rides, Birmingham to its bombed church, and the poor boy's “broke down” Greyhound to the Freedom Riders' torched bus. Safe in Los Angeles, the singer calls home, Tidewater 4-1009: “He achieves the promised land only after a hell of a trip; everyone the poor boy cares about is still in hell.”

2
Luther Campbell and 2 Live Crew,
Banned in the U.S.A.
(Luke/Atlantic)
Bruce Springsteen got as much as he gave when he let the former Luke Skyywalker (the name banned by George Lucas, not the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, or the federal judiciary) redo his “Born in the U.S.A.” for this celebration of free speech. Not only is it as stirring as the first version, it replaces the dead patriotism that fans from Ronald Reagan to millions of audience fist-thrusters loaded onto the song with the ironies Springsteen wrote but could never get heard.

3
Fastbacks, “In the Summer” et al. (No Threes/Steve Priest Fan Club)
A band that's wandered for nearly a decade in the pop wilderness plays like it's ready for another thirty. For two numbers the wilderness is all you hear—doubt, fatigue, and holding back—and then comes “Everything That I Don't Need,” written by guitarist Kurt Bloch, sung by Kim Warnick. In the ep's sleeve photos, both of them look too old and beaten for the glory of this small refusal: rock simple, rock treasure.

4
Patrick Wright, “Gesture Politics,” in
New Statesman & Society
(vol. 3 no. 103, June 1)
On Jan Budaj, a Slovakian “stoker-intellectual” from Bratislava, who “spent the seventies pursuing a cultural civil war against the Communist regime. . . . Drawing on such sources as Conceptual Art, Duchamp and Dada, Budaj set out to demonstrate the lies on which Communist ‘reality' was built. He hung his own renegade version of the conventional slogan-ridden red banner on a prominent public building in Bratislava: it bore the obligatory red star and a completely meaningless jumble of letters, and the success with which it proved its point could be counted through the many weeks that passed before the authorities recognized it as a fake. . . . He produced highly realistic official posters advertising cultural events which could never happen in Bratislava—a concert by Abba and Bob Dylan, or the coming of Ingmar Bergman's latest film. Box offices were inundated.”