Real Life Rock (65 page)

6
Fastbacks,
Very, Very Powerful Motor
(Popllama)
Unreconstructed punk with a lot of melody, no apologies (though there is a tune called “Apologies,” along with “Trouble Sleeping,” “What To Expect,” “I Won't Regret,” and “I Guess”), and Kim Warnick, for whom singing flat is just a form of realism.

7
Gang of Four,
Mall
(PolyGram)
Where you don't pick up pennies because you don't want anyone to think you have to.

8
H. L. Goodall, Jr.,
Living in the Rock N Roll Mystery—Reading Context, Self, and Others as Clues
(Southern Illinois University Press)
An argument that “interpretive ethnography is to cultural studies what rock n roll is to social life,” though the real questions here have to do with what “rock n roll” is, and the balance between social life and one's own life, finally unshareable no matter how loudly one shouts the awful facts. “In addition to the lives we lead we also live lives we don't lead,” Goodall says; now on stage with his band, now following realtors around as they inspect properties, he makes himself his own test case, switching sides as self and other, musician and fan, detective and dupe, social scientist and impostor.

9
Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, editors,
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
vols. 1–4 (Anchor)
Speaking of impostors . . .

10
Pink Floyd, Julie Christie, the Small Faces, David Hockney, the Marquess of Kensington, etc.,
Tonite Let's All Make Love In London
(See for Miles reissue, 1968)
To end our mini-'60s survey, this weird artifact: the augmented soundtrack to a forgotten Swinging London movie by Peter White-head. Pink Floyd offers nearly half an hour of intriguingly vague psychedelic music;
one Vashti sings bits of the charmingly innocent “Winter Is Blue”; and various people talk about various aspects of the New World, from Edna O'Brien on sex to Mick Jagger on his plans to go into politics to Michael Caine and Lee Marvin (what's he doing here?) on miniskirts: Marvin is pro, Caine is con. It's a lot of fun, and pathetically trivial: people trying to describe the enormous energies of change and having a hard time thinking of anything to say. But then you run into Whitehead's 1990 liner notes: “Never forget that what that time meant to the people who were responsible for creating that whole period and mood . . . was the love of freedom, in the profound sense, the hatred of fascism, in every sense . . .” He goes on: “It was a time of anarchy, yes, but also a time of sowing . . . seeds of hope and the future. Those seeds are continuously sprouting in the most unexpected places, and there are a lot of them still under the soil. . . . Keep an eye on those verges at the side of the concrete road . . . those margins at the side of that colossal text, that thrust of rationality and falsification. . . . Be ready when it comes—the flood—Salome dancing again—the demise of history.”

I found it hard to gainsay a word; I put the disc back on and tried to make it give up even a hint of what Whitehead was talking about. It didn't. Someone was crazy, but I don't know who.

SUMMER
1991

Bob Dylan's
the bootleg series, volumes 1–3 (rare & unreleased) 1961–1991
(Columbia) contains a shadow version of his entire career, embedded within 58 performances. They range from a tune taped in a Minnesota hotel room in 1961 to an outtake from the 1989 album
Oh Mercy
; along the way, three CDs collect concert recordings, alternate takes, rehearsals, and publishing demos, programmed roughly year by year. A lot of it is dross, a history of unfinished ideas or un-transcended clichés, a book of footnotes. Other parts work as a series of interruptions—of the whole, of whatever you happen to be doing—moments that leap out of the chronology and stop it cold, turn it back on itself. Some seem to need no context, and to make none; some seem to fall together and make a story.

Beginning with the fourth track:

1
“No More Auction Block,” from a show at the Gaslight Caf
é
in Greenwich Village, late 1962
The song was composed in antebellum times by escaped slaves who had reached the end of the Underground Railroad, in Nova Scotia. As “Many Thousands Gone,” it was probably first taken down from black Union soldiers in the middle of the Civil War, in 1862, precisely a century before Bob Dylan mixed it into an otherwise undistinguished set comprising mostly New York folk-scene commonplaces: “Barbara Allen,” “Motherless Children,” “The Cuckoo,” and so on.

The number opens here with a few hurried but isolated guitar notes, which instantly promise a weight no other song sung this night will achieve. Throughout, the guitar sound suppresses melody (though the melody Dylan sings is the one he took for “Blowin' in the Wind,” a piece as ersatz and clumsy as this is real and shaped); instead it produces a strange hum, maybe the sound history makes when for a few minutes it dissolves. Not the acting a singer might do, or impersonation, but a transforming empathy breaks down all distance, not of persona, or race, but of time. When Dylan sings, “No more/ Auction block/ For me”—and then, much more slowly, “No more/ No more”—there's no reference to any symbol. The auction block is a thing, you can touch it, people are standing on it: “Many thousands gone.” The hesitations in the singing are so eloquent, so suggestive, that they generate images far beyond these of the “driver's lash” or “pint of salt” in the lyric. I thought of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, black members of the 1968 U.S. Olympic team, standing on the victory blocks in Mexico City after taking gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash, each with bowed head and
a raised fist in a black glove. A small protest against racism, a silent no to the assassination of Martin Luther King, and it caused a firestorm: the men were all but arrested, then sent back. The picture of the two of them that was flashed around the world seemed to terrify the nation; listening now to a 21-year-old Jewish folkie as he sang “No More Auction Block” six years before, you can feel the reason why. In the symbolic matrix their gestures made, Smith and Carlos suddenly knew, and everyone just as suddenly understood, what they were standing on.

Skipping 12 tracks:

2
“Who Killed Davey Moore?,” from a concert at Carnegie Hall, 26 October 1963
Fashionable bleeding-heart pieties about a boxer who died after a fight with Sugar Ramos—in 1971 Dylan himself would be present for the first Ali-Frazier match—but also songwriting as intricate and satisfying as Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield's “Calendar Girl.” With referee, fans, manager, gambler, sportswriter, and opponent each stepping forward in ritual denial, the lyric is almost all dialogue; the filler between rhymes (“ ‘It's hard to say, it's hard to tell' ”) can seem like genius. You can sense a new energy here: the thrill of getting it right.

Skipping one track: