Real Life Rock (63 page)

8
David Lee Roth,
A Little Ain't Enough
(Warner Bros.)
It's been seven years since “Jump” but he can still rewrite “Back Door Man” and call it “Hammerhead Shark.”

9
California State Department of Motor Vehicles, radio public-service announcement (1991)
800 number to call for newly
mandated training required for minor's motorcycle operator's license: 227-4337—or, as the ad put it, “CCR-IDER.” And you thought bureaucrats couldn't sing the blues.

10
Ice Cube, “Dead Homiez,” from
Kill at Will
(Priority)
In naked mourning, the L.A. rapper gives up his armed 'n' dangerous pose to wear his heart on his sleeve—the sleeve of his
DEAD HOMIEZ
T-shirt,
which can be yours
for only $12.95. Add $3 for shipping and handling.

APRIL
1991

1
Pamela Page and Patrick Montgomery,
Rock and Roll the Early Days
(Archive Films, 1985, running occasionally on VH-1)
Of all the documentaries on the subject—each one picking up much of the same stock footage of Elvis, of DJs breaking barbaric records on the air or White Citizens Council spokesmen denouncing animal music—none touches this one. That may be because it focuses so sharply on black artists and dancing. White zoot-suiters turn “Roll Over Beethoven” into Roll Over Isaac Newton; then black teenagers rise out of their seats in some Tropicana hotel ballroom and explode into a kicking line that's plainly not of this world—not
this
world, anyway. Clips of a shockingly cloddish Bill Haley are cut away into performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Treniers—and Bo Diddley, who even in this company seems most of all strange, the Alien King. Poker-faced, riding that underwater guitar sound that simply does not connect to anyone else's rhythms, he negates the genre even as it's forming. He's at once primeval, inescapably African, and almost formally avant-garde, anticipating and then leaping past the Fluxus music of the years to come and back to Dada, which in certain moments thought it was African too. Throughout the production there's a controlling sense of novelty coming off the singers and dancers—the bounce of the new, an apprehension of the never before. It's so strong that, as you watch, it can produce an unwanted corollary: never again.

2
Eleventh Dream Day,
Lived To Tell
(Atlantic)
Made by a four-piece Chicago band, this is a record to get lost in, with vocal action that's hard to catch hovering over grinding, growling guitar noise like a heat mirage on a highway no one's driven for years. Guitarist Rick Rizzo does most of the singing, but it's drummer Janet Bean, rushing in at the end of a verse like Exene Cervenka ambushing John Doe in X, who nails song after song. Words emerge in fragments in a seamless aural setting; the whole, once you glimpse it, is exhilarating and bleak, the exhilaration of people saying what they mean even if they wish they could talk about something other than their fear of loss, defeat, and hiding. The music holds an inner drama, summed up in lines by Bean: “There's this thing, lately/Where the sound of tearing fabric/Is louder than the traffic.”

3
a-ha,
East of the Sun, West of the Moon
(Warner Bros)
Meaningless pop songs from a Swedish boy group.

4
Book of Love,
Candy Carol
(Sire)
Dreamy, mysterious pop songs from a New York girl group. More or less meaningless, though not, were it to hit the radio, the muscular dance track “Quiver,” as in “She/Makes me. . . .”

5
Randy Newman, “Lines in the Sand” (Reprise)
Not for sale, distributed only to DJs, and no surprise most didn't play it. Against the piety of “Voices That Care,” the Hollywood tribute-to-the-troops number (they should have called it “We Are the War”), this was an elegy in advance: a cold, defeatist funeral march.

6
Sport,
Skels Life
#10 (Mystery Fez)
Skels is a decent rock 'n' roll outfit but
Skels Life
is a great rock 'n' roll comic book, a 12-page collage of '60s underground styles, pornography, and male girdle ads that usually operates on the level of Jess's '50s Dick Tracy revisions. I keep coming back to one of the artworks that beat out Sport's latest bid for a government grant: Sinéad O'Connor as painted by “Walter Keen.”

7
Bob Marley & the Wailers,
Talkin' Blues
(Tuff Gang/Island)
An impeccable live set cut in 1973; when Marley sings “I remember / On the slave ship,” “the mystic chords of memory” is no metaphor.