Real Life Rock (45 page)

7
Louise Brooks, in Barry Paris's
Louise Brooks
(Knopf)
The woman in G. W. Pabst's 1929 silent film
Pandora's Box
, more than 40 years later, to “one of her last lovers”: “If I ever bore you it'll be with a knife.”

8
Julee Cruise,
Floating Into the Night
(Warner Bros.)
Ten variations on
Blue Velvet
's “Mysteries of Love,” produced by David Lynch, who would have known how to direct Louise Brooks (1906–85): a bore in the daytime, visionary at 3 a.m.

9
Monte Moore, comment during A's-Yankees telecast, on spotting a man in an Elvis mask sitting in Yankee Stadium, August 28 (KICU, San Jose)
“The next manager.”

10
Sonic Youth, Henry Kaiser, Soul Asylum, and others,
The Bridge—A Tribute to Neil Young
(Caroline)
Dedicated to “physically challenged children everywhere” (not a term Sonic Youth would use for a song—“Crips Galore” would be more like it), with “a portion of the proceeds” to the Bridge School, where Young's two handicapped kids go, but lest we forget, the man himself, in 1984, endorsing Ronald Reagan: “You can't always support the weak. You have to make the weak stand up on one leg, or half a leg, whatever they've got.”

OCTOBER
17, 1989

1
Elvis Costello, “Tramp the Dirt Down” (Greek Theatre, Berkeley, September 15)
Who else could toss off cheap Reagan jokes (“Do you really think it was only
last
week he needed brain surgery?”) without cheapening a song about—well, there's no word equivalent to “regicide” for elected rulers (“You can change the names if you like”), so “regicide” will have to do. Taken far beyond its recorded version, the tune was vicious and sensual; the next day, when Reagan appeared in every paper with his head half-shaved, he somehow looked like Zippy the Pinhead—who once shared a White House bed with Ron and Nancy, Ron questioning him about the fall of Yugoslavia to the Neosurrealists in 1963.

2
Public Enemy,
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
(unreleased)
Controversial, of course; disturbing (samples from Steely Dan's “Pretzel Logic,” the
Shoah
soundtrack, tapes of Bilderburg conferences); and, given the powers that be, not commercial, not even recordable, altogether apocryphal, but nevertheless anguished, passionate, shot through with rage and ambiguity. Face it: it doesn't matter if these artists don't always know what they're talking about, though few have the right to gainsay tracks like “Socialism of Fools/Fools of Socialism,” “Peace Ship,” or Professor Griff's 11-minute silent rap over a Dr. Seuss LP, “How the Jews Stole Christmas.” Their business isn't answering questions,
it's raising them. As they say in “Little Flower,” every few lines cut up with pieces of an old Father Coughlin broadcast: “He may be right/He may be wrong/I just want to bang the gong.”

3
Charlotte Greig,
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow—Girl Groups From the 50s On
(Virago/Random House)
She gets Arlene Smith of the Chantels right, brings her to life, and anyone who does is halfway home, even if the road goes all the way to Salt-n-Pepa. She covers the hits, but also scores of strange obscurities, and always with spirit. The “songs are a fascinating and accurate expression of the changing aspirations and preoccupations of women over three decades . . . [and] for that reason I have given the song lyrics more space than is usually accorded them,” Greig writes in an un-typically dry passage, then pulling the string: “The other reason I have quoted so extensively from them is because I like them.”

4
Neil Young, “Rockin' in the Free World,” on
Saturday Night Live
(September 30)
SNL
bandleader G. E. Smith can play anything and communicate nothing; on guitar, Young raised the rock Smith belongs under.

5
Mick Jones, video for “I Just Wanna Hold” (Atlantic)
As close as anyone has come to the good feeling of Van Halen's video for “Jump.”

6
Phil Phillips With the Twilights, “Sea of Love” (1959), in
Sea of Love
(Universal)
Why is Al Pacino so freaked to find this in Ellen Barkin's record collection? Didn't he see
Diner
? She got it in the divorce settlement.