Real Life Rock (37 page)

7
Michael Barson,
Lost, Lonely, & Vicious—Postcards From the Great Trash Films
(Pantheon)
Old movie posters, topped by Roger Corman's '58
Teenage Caveman
(“
PREHISTORIC REBELS
against
PREHISTORIC MONSTERS
”), featuring Robert Vaughn, looking at least 35, drawing his bow against some kind of swamp thing, which presumably represents his father. He can't really be rebelling against dinosaurs, can he?

8
Almost Grown,
premiere (CBS, November 27)
This generational drama (the generation being the one supposed to respond to rock-sourced commercials) kicks off in 1962, though the dialogue says it's 1988: “Gimme a break,” says one character. “I'm outta here,” says another. While nobody says “It's history,” there's a moment where the marketing strategy is coded into the storyline—thus rewriting history as mere hindsight, sealing the superiority of the present over the past. “Turn it down,” Dad says over James Brown. His teenage son doesn't sulk, or run away, or get his bow out of the closet: he makes a rational argument. “Dad, it's a
force
. Rock 'n' roll could even become like—a huge business!” Dad: “Son, in this country, it doesn't mean anything unless it can sell products. Can you imagine this stuff selling cars?”

9
Bangles, “In Your Room” (Columbia)
Sexy, if you're a 16-year-old boy, or ever were.

10
All Things Considered,
segment on the death of Roy Orbison (National Public Radio, December 7)
Here's a man whose music has never left the radio, who's in the midst of a major comeback, and on the day the news breaks only this station, of all those monitored by a select group of dumb-founded listeners, bothered to follow the announcement with a song.

JANUARY
24, 1989

1
Donald Hall, “Prophecy,” from
The One Day
(Ticknor & Fields)
The voice in this section of Hall's great book-length poem (“Your children will wander looting the shopping malls/for forty years, suffering from your idleness,/until the last dwarf body rots in a parking lot … the sky will disappear like a scroll rolled up”) shares cadences Bob Dylan once used, and Johnny Rotten and Grandmaster Flash and in his yea-saying way even Chuck Berry. Like them, Hall-as-Isaiah is all too conscious of the absurdity of his powerless, fire-bringing voice, and like them he triumphs over that absurdity by merging his love of language with a loathing only language can make real, defining what rock 'n' roll no longer dares to say.

2
Keith Richards, Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium, Oakland (December 13)
Utterly personal in sound and feeling, with a stretched, uncertain sense of determination focusing guitar lines, melodies, words, vocal textures, the songs from
Talk Is Cheap
were in every case more unsettling, more exciting, than the Stones tunes Richards chose: “I Wanna Be Your Man,” “Connection,” “Time Is on My Side.”

3
Jane Kramer, “Letter from Europe”
(
New Yorker
,
November 28)
Fans of Missing Foundation should note this cool and disturbing report on bohemia armed: the post-'60s, postpunk antimovement Autonomen as a ruling force in the Kreuzberg section of West Berlin. If the boys and girls in Godard's
Masculin-Féminin
were the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, the people Kramer writes about are the children of Fassbinder and amphetamine, except that they're not children.

4
Don Julian and the Meadowlarks, et al.,
The Dootone Story Volume One
(Ace reissue, '55–'61, UK)
Regarding Vernon Green, lead singer of the Medallions, the
strangest doo-wop group to come out of Los Angeles or anywhere else (represented here not by their hit, “The Letter,” but by its flip, “Buick '59,” recorded 1954—Green chose the title because he thought it would keep the disc “current for at least five years”): “a polio victim … [he] attributed his musical ambition to a time in 1945 when Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a survivor of polio, visited Green's crippled children's school and presented him with a set of leg braces. ‘It was then I realized I could be somebody important,' Green said.” He's still performing, as is, amazingly, almost every other principal musician featured on this good record.

5
Joel Whitburn,
Top R&B Singles 1942–1988
(Record Research)
More than ever before, the numbers tell stories.

6
Richard Huelsenbeck, “Four Poems from
Phantastische Gebe
te” (Fantastic Prayers), on
Audio by Visual Artists
(Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine No. 21)
Park Avenue psychoanalyst, Berlin dadaist, and co-founder of the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 in Zurich (where these poems were composed; they were recorded in New York in '67), Huelsenbeck was not a visual artist. More than any of his dada comrades he was a “bruitist,” a noisemaker, and more so in his dada manifestos and histories than in his occasional poems. There's little of his mad-dog spirit left in this reading, but a bit in the contributions of some of the tape's other 29 performers. Top cut: Joseph Beuys's '70 “Ja Ja Ja Ne Ne Ne.”