Real Life Rock (70 page)

8
Negativland, “U2” (SST)
The California collage unit makes fun of “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For,” and so comprehensively you might begin to feel sorry for Bono. Among numerous interjections and found aural objects, the hook is a sample of D.J. Casey Kasem chirping “That's the letter
U
—and the numeral
two
!” so many times he turns into Mr. Rogers. Squelched just weeks after release by U2's label—if the band has a sense of humor they'll put it out themselves.

9
Van Morrison,
Hymns to the Silence
(Polydor)
An ambitious career survey by means of 21 new songs, and finally flat, too clean, well-crafted, and lifeless. But there are moments, as when Morrison chants “Take me back” five times, and then, with complete disregard for rhythm or timing, caring for nothing but bitterness and exile, just says what he means: “To when the world made more
sense
.”

10
Avengers,
The Avengers
(Target Video, 1978—try used-video or -music stores)
The tape is dim and smudgy, the right tone for eight live shots from San Francisco's best punk band. Target gets a little arty with “Car Crash,” intercutting a lot of stock car-crash footage and a highway patrolman setting up a roadblock. It takes a few seconds to realize it's Ronald Reagan—in 1964, in Don Siegel's version of
The Killers
, in his last and best role, as Mr. Big.

DECEMBER
1991

1
Buzzcocks,
Spiral Scratch
(Document CD or 12”, U.K.) and
Time's Up
(Document CD, U.K.)
In the summer of 1976, in Manchester, the Buzzcocks formed on the model of the Sex Pistols; in October, with Howard Devoto as singer, they went into the local Revolution studio and for something under $100 of mike time cut their songs. Released in February 1977, the EP
Spiral Scratch
was only the third U.K. punk disk to be issued; more than that, it was the first independent, do-it-yourself U.K. punk record; and more than that, it was definitive. “Boredom” (“I'm living in this, uh, movie,” Devoto snapped, “But it doesn't move me”) was an instant anthem, or rather a fragment of an anthem floating away to be caught by its listeners. It set the tone: sarcastic (many of the tunes had their genesis in a notebook where Devoto had set down all-purpose, lumpen-surrealist insults), distracted, thin, spidery, and most of all in a hurry. Carl Perkins' “Blue Suede Shoes” was about taking a stand; “Breakdown,” “Friends of Mine,” and the rest (bootlegged as
Time's Up
again and again over the years) were about evading an enemy more sensed than defined, and then turning up at his
back, then disappearing. The feeling was anonymous—a dare taken and won.

Devoto went on to more ornamented music with his groups Magazine and Luxuria; led by guitarist Pete Shelley, the Buzzcocks made sharp, poppy punk through the decade (re-formed, they tour the clubs even now). But October 1976 was their moment. With “Lester Sands (Drop in the ocean)” they caught an ancient snarl, blindly retrieving the voice of the Ranters along with echoes of their cosmology (“Every creature is God,” it was written in 1646, “every creature that hath life and breath being an efflux of God, and shall return to God again, be swallowed up in him as a drop is in the ocean”). Blasphemy edged out of their blank complaints; ambition rose from the songs and came down as vengeance.

“History is made by those who say ‘no,' ” Jon Savage writes at the close of
England's Dreaming
, his recreation of the Sex Pistols' era, “and Punk's utopian heresies remain its gift to the world.” On
Spiral Scratch
and
Time's Up
that gift was offered as ordinary, unspectacular, everyday life; since the music was made the world has changed enough that, putting on the disks today, it can seem as if the gift is being opened for the first time.

2
Bruce Thomas,
The Big Wheel—Rock & Roll and Roadside Attractions
(Faber and Faber)
Elvis Costello's former Attractions bassist on the road, living in a dream, remaking it on the page with a born writer's love of the right phrase and a loathing for cliché, and, finally, trying to break away: “There were times when it all made sense. After all, nobody plays a piece of music just to get to the last note. There were some nights when everything went with that effortless kind of swing that requires a certain kind of effort to allow. Nights like those were never the same and could not be repeated; they contained a feeling of being a spectator as well as a participant.”

3
Nirvana, video for “Smells like Teen Spirit” (directed by Samuel Bayer, DGC Records)
Lear to Gloucester: “There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, corruption”—all this when the visual setup is no more than a small crowd and a furious Seattle three-piece in a high school gym.

4
Ashtray, “Trailer”/“Riding on the Train” (Shoe Records)
A nothing day in the present on the A side wars against a timeless, lyrical chorus shared by guitarist Joe Leifheit and bassist Sarah Howells on the B; the balance tips to the past and into it.

5
Erasure,
Chorus
(Sire)
Dance music you can use sitting still, at 3
A.M
.

6
Brian Morton,
The Dylanist
(HarperCollins)
In this novel about a young woman growing up through the lives lived and surrendered by her parents, ex-Communists who still believe, what begins in mildness turns graceful and then quietly hard. Bob Dylan is Sally Burke's talisman—she's a Dylanist, a young union man tells her as she revels in a bootlegged copy of the incomprehensible, never released Basement Tapes tune “I'm Not There” (“This,” she says, “may be the greatest song ever written,” and she's right); she's “too hip to believe in anything but [her] own feelings.” But she grows past Dylan, too—in her late 20s, “when she looked at his records, she could never find anything she wanted to hear.” In the end who she is is more fated, a life made of a contradiction Dylan might have escaped but she can't: “She would never find a home, as [her parents] had, in the effort to transfigure the world. But in her belief that she lived in a world that needed to be transfigured, she'd probably always feel homeless.”