Real Life Rock (5 page)

MAY
13, 1986

1
The Costello Show (featuring Elvis Costello), “Sleep of the Just,” from
King of America
(Columbia)
In a notably slow month, when such obvious critical hypes as Dwight Hokum seem possible until you have to listen, this deceptively quiet number is beginning to get airplay, and airplay is beginning to reveal its weight and complexity. Built around Mitchell Froom's “doctored piano,” which has the shimmering sound of an old Leslie guitar, the song announces itself as a benediction; Jim Keltner's brushwork keys the end of a line with the feeling of dirt being tossed on a coffin. The dread that's been secretly building in the lyrics—images of black crows, a burning bus—doesn't surface until the third, turnaround verse, though Costello barely raises his voice to tell the tale of soldiers gang-banging a centerfold on their barracks wall. His music has never been harder, or more delicate—and the year itself will have to turn around to produce a better song.

2
Bryan Ferry, “Is Your Love Strong Enough” (MCA)
Standard Ferry romanticism, which shows up Keith Richards's ballad on
Dirty Work
for the glop it is.

3
Stephen Davis,
Hammer of the Gods—The Led Zeppelin Saga
(Ballantine)
Davis wildly overrates the music, digs up and then smooths out endless incidents of exploitation, sexism, and violence, and finally makes an ultimately meaningless story moving. Still, you've got to like the bit about drummer John Bonham placing below Karen Carpenter in the '75
Playboy
music poll.

4
Bryan Adams, “Summer of '69” (A&M)
It won't last. Why should it?

5
28th Day, “I'm Only Asking,” from
28th Day
(Bring Out Your Dead/Enigma)
Bassist Barbara Mannings takes this folk-rock trio into Robin Lane territory, where vulnerability leads to doubt, which might lead to trouble.

6
Desert Hearts,
directed by Donna Deitch (Goldwyn)
This movie about a free-spirited lesbian and her tightass divorcée love-object in 1959 Nevada has been predictably celebrated as a statement, but for the first half of the film, before F-S L Patricia Charbonneau gets what she's after, the atmosphere is irresistible. That's because
Deitch has understood '50s music as a promise not of teenage lust but of pansexual desire: here, Johnny Ray's “Cry,” Ferlin Husky's “Gone,” Buddy Holly's “Rave On,” and Elvis's “Blue Moon” take on a power they never had before. If Deitch's version of self-realization is old, she makes the music she uses to dramatize it new.

7
Chuck Berry,
Rock 'n Roll Rarities
(Chess/MCA)
Out-takes and oddities. Not great (the sterio remix of “Nadine” could be subtitled “Unhit Version”), but indispensable.

8
Jackson Browne,
Lives in the Balance
(Asylum)
Nothing could be easier than to dismiss this LP about U.S. atrocities in Central America; Reagan waves the bloody shirt, and Browne counters by wearing his bleeding heart on his sleeve. But the album is an act of real bravery—far more so than “Sun City”—and hearing “For America” on the radio, I pound the dashboard in time with my rage.

9
Fuzz Box,
We've Got a Fuzz Box and We're Gonna Use It!!
(Vindaloo UK 12-inch)
Four women who do what they say.

10
Jill Pearlman (writer) & Wayne White (illustrator),
Elvis for Beginners
(Writers & Readers/Norton)
The leftist “For Beginners” line of “documentary comic books” has produced superb work, but to find Elvis in the company of the likes of Marx, Freud, and Orwell is less shocking than Pearlman's heedless contempt for her subject. In contradistinction to the rest of the series,
Elvis
appears in a glossy color cover rather than in flat, serious grey or beige; the black-and-white interior design and illustration replaces the usual dense detail and wit with blaring caricatures; and the text, which must have taken Pearlman at least three hours to write, is riddled with errors: Marion Keisker, Sam Phillips's co-manager at Sun Records in Memphis in 1953, turns up as “Marion Tipler”—simply because Pearlman and White get her mixed up with one Gladys Tipler, noted on a nearby page as Elvis's '53 employer. The capper comes on the page between the Tipler/Keisker flub. Some years ago, in a review of Albert Goldman's
Elvis
, I wrote that Goldman's perversion of Phillips's early-'50s statement of his ambitions as a record producer (Goldman's transformation of “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars” into “If I could find a white boy who sang like a nigger, I could make a million dollars”) would be cited in books to come, and pervert the history of rock 'n' roll itself; until
Elvis for Beginners
, I was wrong. No, this isn't the tenth best item to seek out in May 1986—but it ought to be at the top of anyone's bottom list.