Real Life Rock (97 page)

6
Charles Arnoldi,
Hound Dog
,
in “The Architect's Eye,” Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (November 1993–March 1994)
In the opening exhibition in Frank Gehry's fabulous new pile, a stunner: 120 inches by 104, acrylic on wood, black-gray-blue with slashes of red, though actually it bespoke less any sort of hound dog, or “Hound Dog,” than a Texas chainsaw massacre of
Demoiselles d'Avignon
. Maybe Jonathan Richman can figure this one out.

7
John Lydon,
Rotten—No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs
(St. Martin's)
Whipped into
shape by Keith and Kent Zimmerman, two record-business tip-sheet editors, and fleshed out in long stretches by interviews with various there-when's, from Chrissie Hynde to Lydon's father, this “authorized autobiography of Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols” is a terrible disappointment. If he'd forced himself to write the book himself, you can think, Lydon would have had to confront both his success and his failure; instead, he more or less denies everything.

And yet, near the end, there's a weird reminder of a passage from Umberto Eco's
Foucault's Pendulum
, his great pseudodetective story about the mystery of the Knights Templar. One character is expounding upon the difference between the “four kinds of people in the world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.” The lunatic, he explains, “is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.” After nearly 350 pages of insisting that the Sex Pistols were all about him, 350 pages in which he tries doggedly to keep the world-historical stopped up in its bottle, Lydon offers this: “The Royal family has been brought up to believe it's God's will for them to be where they are. That's what I find so disgraceful. . . . Think back. The only group of knights that did good were the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar. They were all exterminated because they gave up money, power and position. They were like early Franciscans and that could not be tolerated by the British establishment and they were slaughtered to a man. What would you call them? Early Communists? Their love of humanity above the love of selfishness attacked the establishment by their very existence. They fought all their wars and were a pre-SAS, the top assassins of their day, but they gave up all worldly goods, too frightening for the powers that be to tolerate for too long. Now I'm certainly no Knights Templar and I'm not out looking for the Holy Grail. . . . Which brings us back to the Royal family.”

And which may leave us where we started: John Lydon may be a lunatic, but the punk syllogism remains intact—everyone else is a cretin, a fool, or a moron.

8
Howlin' Wolf, “Rollin' and Tumblin',” “I Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog No More,” “Woke Up This Morning,” “Ain't Going Down That Dirt Road,” on
Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog
(MCA Chess 2-CD reissue, 1951–69)
In 1968 Howlin' Wolf was forced to record a psychedelic album eventually released as
This Is Howlin' Wolf's New Album. He Doesn't Like It
. (“Dogshit” is what he called it.) Perhaps as compensation, at the same sessions the tape ran when he picked up an acoustic guitar and battered out pieces of old blues like a man knocking branches off a tree with an axe, just for the hell of it.

9
Rob Wasserman, “Fantasy Is Reality/Bells of Madness,” from
Trios
(MCA/GRP)
Bassist Wasserman's bit is that he plays with two additional, famous people (pairing Neil Young and Bob Weir, say); the results are not staggering. But the cut featuring famous nutcase Brian Wilson and his famous (ex-Wilson Phillips) daughter Carnie on his own tune—unlike the rest of the album, produced by Don Was—is disturbing. The melody contains a preternatural lift, Carnie Wilson's voice shimmers, and when she presses on the
hear
in “But when I hear the bells of madness” the effect is lovely and horrible precisely to the same degree.

10
th Faith Healers UK,
Imaginary friend
(Elektra)
Drone band with sense of humor makes what may turn out to be best album of year.

SUMMER
1994

1
Robert Cantwell, “When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Music Revival,” in
Transforming Tradition
,
ed. Neil V. Rosenberg (University of Illinois Press)
Starting with the Kingston Trio's long-scorned 1958 #1 hit “Tom Dooley” and ending with the “national seance” of the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, this plainspoken essay rewrites
history with music, and vice versa. Diffusing a perfectly sketched, generic, white, middle-class, suburban, postwar upbringing across the whole spectrum of American legend and experience, Cantwell pours old wine into a cruet that suddenly gleams with transparency: “the revival made the romantic claim of folk culture—oral, immediate, traditional, idiomatic, communal, a culture of characters, of rights, obligations, and beliefs, against a centrist, specialist, impersonal, technocratic culture . . . of types, functions, jobs, and goals.”

As Cantwell begins to trace the roles played by his characters—those figures dancing on the surface of “Tom Dooley,” or hiding in its grooves—he makes the wine new. Surrounding the youthful folk acolytes of the late '50s and early '60s he finds the outlaw Tom Dula (who murdered his exlover, Laura Foster, in North Carolina in 1866) and Dr. Tom Dooley (an American doctor whose work in Laos inspired the Peace Corps), Wild Bill Hickok and Clint Eastwood (early on, as a TV cowboy), Appalachian ballad singers of the '20s and Paris existentialists of the '40s, Dr. Spock and John Lomax, Doc Watson and the Coasters, Ichabod Crane and Laura In-galls Wilder, Robin Hood and Theodore Roosevelt, Marlon Brando and of course James Dean—who, rather miraculously, Cantwell makes new along with everybody else, precisely by introducing him to everybody else. Tom Joad and Leatherstocking, Nicholas Ray (director of
Rebel without a Cause
, but also “closely associated as a radio producer in the 1940s with the left-wing folksong movement in New York”) and Willa Cather, New Deal populists and blackface minstrels: all of them, in Dean's hesitant speech and broken, then furious gestures, make a seance of their own. The only problem with this generous essay is that it is available only in the sort of over-priced volume most libraries can no longer afford, and no paperback is planned. Short of an essay collection by Cantwell—the author of
Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound
(1984, Da Capo) and the recent
Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture
(University of North Carolina Press)—pray for remaindering.

2
th Faith Healers UK,
imaginary friend
(elektra)
“Psychedelic” is the only word for this obsessive band, led by the buried but mesmerizing vocals of one Roxanne. Using repetition, distance, and the sort of indecipherable echoes that still make Moby Grape's “Indifference” feel unstable, the group works with negative space, creating it, filling it, then leaving it empty again. The sound can suggest George Grosz, Otto Dix—you sense an outraged innocence beneath a veneer of cynicism. The band bets the farm on the last cut, “everything, all at once, forever” (the complete lyric): for 19 minutes 58 seconds they try to turn bad news into transcendence, and the fact that the change never comes sustains the meandering, patient, fed-up performance to the end. It's a false ending, though: after 12 minutes 25 seconds of silence, your CD player visibly counting backward to keep you from removing the disc, the song returns for another 7 minutes 35 seconds. This is a little boring.