Real Life Rock (73 page)

5
Howlin' Wolf,
The Chess Box
(Chess/MCA 3-CD reissue, 1951–73)
A good sampler of the work of one of the major American artists of the postwar period, but the revelation of the digital transfer, which dulls the edge of guitarist Willie Johnson, is to foreground Hubert Sumlin, who replaced Johnson in 1954, as one of the great mysteries of the blues. Huge sheets of sound break off the performances like sheets of ice breaking off an iceberg; on the way to the sea they change into sheets of glass and the sea turns into pavement. The man behind Robbie Robertson's most explosive music, from Ronnie Hawkins' 1963 “Who Do You Love” to Bob Dylan's 1966 “Albert Hall” version of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Sumlin doesn't seem to know where the beat is, or need to know. He's an abstractionist; he could have played with Pollock.

6
Chuck Berry, the Willows, Betty Boo, et al.,
Music from the Film “A Rage in Harlem”
(Sire)
Except for Robin Givens the movie's a dud, and the music drowned out by gunfire and heavy breathing. But here new La Vern Baker bumps old Lloyd Price, Johnny Ace pleads for deliverance from Bo Diddley, James Brown meets Tommy Johnson in the form of Howlin' Wolf, and it's too bad there isn't at least some Robin Givens dialogue . . .

7
FSK (German-American Sextet), “Hitler Lives,” from
Son of Kraut
(Sub Up Records, Germany)
Founded in 1980, FSK now resembles the Mekons with a lot more yodeling and a frame of reference that frequently tunes into Armed Forces Radio. “Hitler Lives” was an AFR hit in 1947, a warning that the ideas had to be buried with the man; today, as HITLER LEBT! is proud graffiti and purification follows unification, FSK's cool, country rendition is almost wistful, until it turns into a rave-up.

8
Wir,
The First Letter
(Mute/Electra) and Kevin S. Eden,
Wire . . . everybody loves a history
(SAF Publishing Ltd., Wembley, UK)
On disc, England's original art punk band loses a letter, a member (Robert Gotobed, one of the all-time punk names, even if it was real), and comes back to life, unpredictable and nervy; in endless interviews, punctuated with photos of them dressing up like Sydney Greenstreet's contact in the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, they sound like anybody else.

9
Clash,
Clash on Broadway
(Epic/Legacy 3-CD reissue, 1977–82)
From “White Riot” to “Ghetto Defendant,” it takes them five years to get from Rasta London to the Paris Commune. It's an interesting trip.

10
Daniel M. Pinkwater,
Young Adults
(Tor paperback reissue, 1982/85)
This really is a “young adult novel”—in which five high school washouts reform as the Wild Dada Ducks, levy fines on each other for such crimes as uttering the word “life-style,” and foment a prank that leads to the election of the school's least-known student to all student offices, his transformation into a dictator with absolute power, and the defeat of
Dada by Heroic Realism. In other words, a parable of the 1918 Berlin Dada club as a crucible for Nazism.

MARCH
1992

1
Eleventh Dream Day,
Lived to Tell
(Atlantic)
Last April in these pages this fourth album from a Chicago four-piece seemed like a strong record; now it seems to cut loose from its time. And yet it is also exactly of its time: in its bitter, shamed embrace of exile and retreat, nailed again and again by Janet Beveridge Bean's loud, stoic drumming—she's learned something from Maureen Tucker, and something from Al Jackson. I come back to “It's Not My World” every week or so, when there's a need to redeem the ugliness of the news, to hide in the sound—to be stretched out on Rick Rizzo's long, tensed guitar passages as if they were a rack. Slipping into the lyrics that establish the song as just a set of stray fragments about how people are failing, are falling through the cracks, are finding that all doors open onto blank walls, you hit a chorus with no narrative connection to the bar talk you've been overhearing, but an absolute spiritual connection. The lyric jumps from third person to first, the singing is no longer conversational but stately, heavily cadenced, a curse read from some ruined pulpit: “Over and over / By and by / Living by habits / To get by,” the chorus begins, two people singing, but separately, as if they'll never meet, don't need to, don't want to. “The world might be changing / Outside my door / But that's not my world / Anymore.”

2
Gordon Legge,
The Shoe
(Polygon, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1989)
An expert, naturalistic novel about fandom as everyday life, nearly all of it: a few friends and their music in a nowhere town between Glasgow and Edinburgh. In their early 20s, querulous, trying to fend off cynicism and resignation, without real money or work, they talk about the radio, records, the pop press. They talk so intensely that if Jesus and Mary Chain's “Never Understand” is “the spirit of the good,” another disk reflects the human spirit as cesspool. For all that's shared, though—the attempt to act out in public the extreme feelings music provokes—fandom finally leaves each person a solitary, ruler of the kingdom of one's own taste, and prisoner of it too. “I played
Slippery People
and
Lady Marmalade
three times each,” one character says to another. “The thing that bugs me about listening to my records is that nobody ever sees me when I'm that happy, and if they did they wouldn't understand.”

3
Gabriel Sibusi, “Call Me Mister!” from
Flying Rock—South African Rock 'n Roll, 1950–1962
(Global Village cassette)
An anthology of black South Africans reworking Elvis, Gene Vincent, the Drifters, Buddy Holly, etc., and surprising partly because it so precisely parallels the efforts of second-rank white American performers to do the same thing—from hopeless shouts of “Rog, rog, rog, everybody rog” (King's Brothers' “Zulu Rock”) to highly individualized attempts to shift steel-guitar phrasing into rockabilly (the Bogard Brothers' “She Keeps on Knocking”). But Sibusi's testament, recorded in the early '60s, works on another level. As on a lot of the cuts, the instrumentation is only strummed acoustic guitar. The insinuating melody anticipates Desmond Dekker and the Aces' 1969 reggae hit “Israelites” even as the vocal can recall New Orleans bluesman Rabbit Brown's 1927 attack on “The Sinking of the Titanic”—a smoldering, gloating attack, because the
Titanic
advertised itself as for Caucasians only. Sibusi's subject is race, and the
Titanic
of his own country, and though he sings from the shadows, his bare affirmation today reverberates so powerfully you hope he's alive to feel it: “I will never be as ashamed as much / As you think.”