Real Life Rock (32 page)

8
Joe Higgs,
Family
(Shanachie)
Cool walking.

9
Elvis Presley, for Blue Tana Lawn Shoes (advertisement in
Harpers & Queen
,
London, June)
“
ABUNDANCE
” it says, “by
ELVIS PRESLEY
.” “Not a barn dance,” it says. He's wearing blue and red “19th century floral design” shoes. They look great.

10
Pavel Büchler,
Untitled Portraits
(exhibition at Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, catalogue from Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, UK)
Büchler takes a wire-service crowd photo, blows it up, and isolates various individuals: from dress and manner, the time seems to be the '50s, the place Europe. Close up, the now-huge wire-service dots print out into nearly complete abstraction; from a distance, each picture fingers a victim, matched in police files and then tracked, caught, and executed. Is the picture Büchler worked from specific, or could he have made a concert photo just as creepy?

SEPTEMBER
13, 1988

1
Muriel Gray, “Boxing Clever,” interview by Alistar McKay in
Cut
(July)
In Thatch-erland you immediately notice a level of public discourse altogether different from our own. Despite the UK's lack of a Bill of Rights, the place has generated an intensity, a shamelessness, a sense of absolute stakes, that in the U.S. is muffled by calculation and strategy, by the realization that the American people are now an audience, not a polity: by the belief that Americans can now be addressed only through the sort of discourse that measures which sitcoms will stay on the air and which will get dumped. So it's a shock to pick up this Scottish culture magazine and read what Gray, a TV personality students recently elected rector, i.e., official spokesperson, of Edinburgh University, has to say. “If I could advise the Scottish people to do anything, I'd advise them to get down to the plant
where the
Sun
is printed and firebomb it. Seriously, if I had to have any terrorism in this country I would aim it at Murdoch. I'd like to see journalistic terrorism where they'd just keep setting fire to his newspaper printing plants, all over the country, all the time.”

2
Primitives, “Crash” (RCA)
A review of the band's album compared it favorably to a Peanut Butter Conspiracy LP—any one of which is a good bet for the worst psychedelic LP of the '60s—and that's what the Primitives
Lovely
is like. But their single, just now getting U.S. airplay after a few months floating around the margins, is the single of the year, guaranteed to sound as loud in 2005 as it would have in 1956.

3
Brian Wilson, “Goodnight, Irene,” from
Folkways: A Vision Shared—A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly
(Columbia)
Irene becomes a California girl. This is what post-postmodernist critics would call “the music of transgression,” if they could understand you can transgress to the right as well as to the left.

4
Book of Love, “Lullaby,” from
Lullaby
(Sire)
A tune to dream to—too good for sleep.

5
John Mellencamp, “Rave On,” from
Cocktail
(Elektra soundtrack)
A lot of Mellen-camp falls between the tracks: acoustic B-sides, his grandmother warbling on
Scarecrow
, the heavenly “Colored Lights” he wrote and produced for the Blasters, and now this straight shot at Buddy Holly on an album filled up by hip, lousy artists.

6
Philip Roth,
The Facts
(Farrar Straus)
There was more rock 'n' roll in Lyndon Johnson than in Bobby Kennedy; in this autobiography Roth, who in 1962 fashioned perhaps the most perfect integration of a rock song (“Earth Angel”) into fiction (
Letting Go
), names Johnson the muse behind
Portnoy's Complaint
. As a book,
The Facts
is trivial; this claim is not.

7
Aroma Disc, (Romance Division of Environmental Fragrance Technologies)
Lester Bangs once predicted rock would someday be no more than room spray; he couldn't have imagined records playing (on your special Aroma Disc Player) “Oriental Mystery,” “Seduction,” “Gourmet,” “Candlelight Dinner,” and “After Dinner Mint.” But this isn't rock. Where's “Baby Let Me Bang Your Box,” “Burn On,” “Incense and Peppermints,” “Hair Pie: Bake 1,” or “Cold Sweat”? Not that it would make any difference.