Real Life Rock (58 page)

5
Lonnie Mack, “Stop,” from
Live!—Attack of the Killer V
(Alligator)
Mack—a 49-year-old guitarist with a Flying V Gibson—once told a story about a mouse that crossed his stage in the middle of a tune; when Mack hit his “highest, most soulful note,” he said, the mouse dropped dead, and on those terms this nine-minute blues is a massacre: loud no matter how low you play it, containing an irreducible quietness no matter how high you crank it up.

6
Allan Moyle, writer and director,
Pump Up the Volume
(New Line Cinema)
The full weight of this film about a teenager's pirate radio station is the realization that the obscene idiosyncrasy of his nightly broadcasts is utterly right and proper, the First Amendment alive to itself, and under the law today completely impossible (as it wouldn't have been during the early Reagan years, when free-market libertarians were running the FCC). Always threatening
to turn into an already-made lousy movie—
Footloose, Rock 'n' Roll High School, Network, Heathers
—it never does, thanks mostly to Christian Slater. In the end it can leave a smile on your lips and pain in your heart.

7
Gang of Four,
Money Talks
(Scarlett, U.K.)
The Leeds postpunk band, reformed as a gang of two: singer Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill, plus hired musicians and vocalist Louise Goffin, daughter of Brill Building songwriters (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow”) Gerry Goffin and Carole King. The music takes its cue from King's deeply layered sleeve collage on Pax Americana, which borrows as surely from Art & Language as from London's Imperial War Museum and recent news photos of George Bush and Manuel Noriega—who appear here as twins, their arms raised together in comradeship.

8
Birney Imes,
Juke Joint
(University Press of Mississippi)
These blazing pictures of crudely, seriously decorated black bars and nightclubs in the Mississippi Delta may be the first successful transference of Walker Evans' style to color photography. Imes' use of red yellow and blue is as extreme and unnatural as Evans' somber framing, and as convincing. You page through the book spellbound, dizzy with its light; then you go into it again and again, picking out the ads made into art, the slogans of good times and gentility (“
BE NICE OR LEAVE—THANK YOU
”). Docked a notch for a cretinous introduction by novelist Richard Ford.

9
Eric Bogosian, “Benefit,” from
Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll
(SBK)
The record of the performance piece: cheap shots, but with a We-Are-the-Worlder U.K. rocker on a talk show condemning drugs while stoned out of his mind, worth a few bucks.

10
David Robbins, editor,
The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty
(MIT Press, catalogue of exhibition: 4 November–13 January 1991, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; 6 February–21 April, University Art Museum, Berkeley; 8 June–18 August, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.)
Given that the Independent Group—Richard Hamilton, Reyner Banham, Lawrence Alloway, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter and Alison Smithson, and a few more—brought Futurism and Dada into British art schools, thus inspiring everyone from John Lennon to Johnny Rotten, it's odd that pop music is hardly mentioned in this book. In another sense it's not surprising: the IG was always engaged in a kind of slumming, a condescension carried through and confessed to in these pages. “We deliberately crossed up the borders of fine and popular art,” Alloway says, but Peter Smithson is more honest: “ ‘isn't that a handsome picture or a handsome layout which I could parody for a fine art picture?' ” The collage work of the IG was never so free as Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton's brutal alterations of library books, which sent them to prison. Finally the group's embrace of the popular emerges less as appropriation than as droit du seigneur. Pick to click: from the 1956 “This Is Tomorrow” show, Banham's still-thrilling dada poem “Marriage of Two Minds,” even if they were divorced in advance.

DECEMBER
1990

1
Neil Young & Crazy Horse, “Over and Over,” from
Ragged Glory
(Reprise CD)
Once upon a time Neil Young and a trio named Crazy Horse cut a tune called “Cowgirl in the Sand,” three verses serving as an excuse for three guitar breaks. On the first of those, Young made four stabs at a leading theme. He tried it as flamenco, screech, fuzztone; finally he gave up and played scales. Only second guitarist Danny Whitten, playing around the beat, held the sound together. Then Young sang the next verse and came off it so fast the expectations a listener brought to the second break never had a chance. With bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina pushing the rhythm and Whitten somehow anticipating the explosions going off in Young's
heart, the music changed into something there's no word for: by split seconds it grew bigger, too big, blew away the room. That was in 1969; Whitten died in 1972 of a heroin overdose, his place taken by Frank Sampedro. The other difference is that this time Young gets it all on his first try.

2
Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Boy Williamson, as recorded by Alan Lomax,
Blues in the Mississippi Night
(Rykodisc CD with transcript)
In 1946 three black men sat in a small studio with a folklorist and described and sang their music. Their subjects were peonage, violence, white supremacy, and death. The language they spoke summoned up an ancient world that promised mostly it would never change: mentioning a holster, Memphis Slim (Peter Chatman, 1915–88) referred to it as a scabbard. The men were certain their families would be killed if their talk were made public, and when the session was released, in the late '50s, their names stayed missing. Now it's history—meaning not that you can forget about it, but that once you've heard it you cannot.