Real Life Rock (46 page)

7
Jonathan Richman, “Closer,” from
Jonathan Richman
(Rounder)
Lousy album, lousy song, except for one line: “Meanwhile, back in the bed . . .”

8
Bruce A and the Secular Atavists, “Tougher Than Jesus” (street flier)
A Jehovah's Witnesses-style comic strip about “the weird Asian Death Cult!!” of a “
SAVIOR ON A STICK
.” Also a band, offering “a cassette that will show the path of light and truth.”

9
Jefferson Airplane, “Planes,” from
Jefferson Airplane
(Epic)
The FAA is investigating.

10
Howard Hampton, “Chinese Radiation,” in
Artpaper
,
September
An essay on music as memory, taking in Tiananmen Square, student leader Chai Ling's elegy, and coverage of the event in the Western media (“
That couldn't happen here
go the reassuring passwords: the massacre or the uprising?”), Charlie Haden's 1969
Liberation Music Orchestra
LP, Pere Ubu's 1989
Cloudland
(“deadpan and mercurial . . . a fire at your house viewed from a distant ridge”), and surrealist René Magritte's 1929
On the Threshold of Liberty
, “where we remain. The cannon has not fired, the panels have not fallen, what is on the other side is either our collective mystery or our collective amnesia.”

William J. E. Lee's music for
Do the Right Thing,
noted here last month, has been released as the film's
Original Score
(Columbia)
.

NOVEMBER
14, 1989

1
Neil Young, “Rockin' in the Free World” (acoustic), from
Freedom
(Reprise)
It's a horror story, Young onstage wailing his lament for dead values as the distracted, drunken crowd shouts him on, barely able to catch the “free world” buzzword and cheer, all irony as wasted as the fans. The performance also seems like a setup: with even a harmonica rack in place, the persona of the folk-prophet without honor is too complete, the crowd too cretinous to be anything other than an audience tape cut up and mixed in like a laugh track on a sitcom. Then you might read the credits—“Recorded at Jones Beach”—and then you can hear why the crowd gathers itself for its biggest ululation: it's tossing a beach ball back and forth.

2
Bryan Ferry/Roxy Music,
Street Life/20 Great Hits
(Reprise, 1972–85)
The story of a style, not an attitude, distilled to its essence in “More Than This” (Roxy
Music, '82), where the guitar solo is just a phrase, so evanescent and so much a part of a whole you can't remember precisely how it sounds any more than you can forget you heard it. But with “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” (Ferry, '73), who needs essence?

3
Lemonheads, “Luka,” from
Lick
(Taang!)
Depending on your mood, this thrilling fuzztone job on Suzanne Vega's Walter Keane klassic is proof her melody can't be smashed, a camp destruction of neofolkie piety (suggesting, say, a version of “Fast Car” by Lee Atwater, recently signed to Curb Records), or a reversal as tough as Ferry's “Hard Rain”: a joke that ends up as moving as the original. Whatever it is, it grabs your attention like a mugging—as does the sleeve of
Lick
, a Jesse Peretz photo so erotic it's painful.

4
NBC Today,
“Robert Johnson” (October 15)
“Me and the Devil Blues” on national TV, and never stranger.

5
Steve Erickson,
Leap Year—A Political Journey
(Poseidon Press)
For the scene with Tipper Gore in the New York bar, the night before the 1988 presidential primary: “ ‘Purple haze! Is in my brain!' She says over and over, angrily, ‘I was
there
, I was there, man. I was a child of the Sixties.' ”

6
Bo Jackson and Bo Diddley, “Cross Training” (Nike TV commercial)
Jackson on the diamond, gridiron, basketball court, and hockey ice: unstoppable, until he straps on Diddley's cigar-box guitar and hits a bum note. Next installment: Jackson meets Derek.