Real Life Rock (72 page)

7
Strawberry,
Smash-Up—Story of a woman
(Endless Music CD)
Bits of monologue orchestrated out of a song or two and a lot of bad-dream electronics (the musician goes by Ursula, the producer by My Sin) finally take over in Strawberry's long account of incest, prostitution, heroin, cocaine, living homeless in a cemetery, and epiphany (“I knew I couldn't fuck another man for money”). Every line of the tale is affectless, unimpressed with its own pathos—on
Oprah
or
Geraldo
this wouldn't do at all—and somehow validated by the soul Strawberry puts into the first cut of the set, a simple version of George Jones' “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”

8
Neil Young and Crazy Horse,
Arc
(Reprise)
The two
Weld
CDs make a conventional live album, mostly redundant footnotes to songs prv. rl. Advertised as a random collage of onstage feedback,
Arc
seems almost composed, and sadistically so: a giant body of noise that for 35 minutes edges toward release and then gets distracted.

9
John Helleman, “Rouble without a Cause,” in
The Modern Review
(Autumn 1991, UK)
“It's past midnight, 20 August, and Boris Yeltsin is hunkered down in the bowels of the Russian White House in Moscow. Outside, several hundred members of the resistance militia man the hastily assembledn
barricades. Three of them will die later in the night. In his sanctuary, Yeltsin sits alone, pondering that time, for him, is running out. . . . He puts on ‘Are you Lonesome Tonight?' ”

Think about it. Here is this man, at the crossroads of history, and he wants to know what Elvis Presley has to say about it. This is what he has to say about it: “You know, someone said, the world's a stage, and each must play a part . . .” Is that what Yeltsin was listening for? Or was it the high-lonesome catch in Elvis's voice as he traced the verses like a man running his fingers over the pages of an old book, over words that no longer make sense?

10
Phil Spector,
Back to Mono (1958–1969)
(ABKCO 4-CD box)
Girl groups, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, the Crystals, Darlene Love, the Christmas album, lost treasures from Love's “Strange Love” to the Ronettes' “Paradise,” the
legacy
—and, even “mastered in analog,” as it says here (with the information still stored and transmitted digitally), not the real thing, not even close. Spector's “Wall of Sound,” Marshall Lieb, the producer's first collaborator, once said, “was more air than sound,” and there's no air here. What's left is self-evidently a replica of a sound, a sheen without lungs or sweat: pinched, cold, not human.

Don't go near it. Look for the out-of-print LPs, especially the U.K.
Rare Masters
series; look for the singles, or wait for the vinyl bootlegs. “The mind has been tricked, but the heart is sad,” Neil Young recently said of digital reissues. “It doesn't know why it can't feel the music.”

FEBRUARY
1992

1
Otis Rush, “Double Trouble” (1958), on
Groaning the Blues
(Flywright LP, UK) or
1956–58: His Original Cobra Recordings
(Flywright CD, UK)
A year or so ago you could have heard Rush's song as a personal statement or a Chicago blues classic, but not today. Now, bad times have expanded the music, blown it up: there are countless people traversing its two and a half minutes, and they grow smaller, more indistinct, as Rush's voice gets bigger and his guitar moves like a virus. Sagging horns bring images of men and women walking the streets with their shoulders slumped; in the slow, hesitating drift of the main theme to the end of each chord progression, you can almost hear feet shuffling. “Some of this generation is millionaires,” Rush sings in bitter wonder, breaking the last word into three parts, “million-air-es,” making it fit the rhythm, but also making the word strange. The horns, guitar, and piano converge on the beat in a fury, but only for a phrase; then they separate, muted, as if they have nothing to say to each other. From line to line rage turns into embarrassment, oppression into shame. “You laughed at me walkin', baby,” Rush shouts, then steps back like Paul Muni in
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
dropping into the shadows of the film's last shot, the voice quiet now: “But I have no place to go / Bad luck and trouble have taken me / I have no money to show.” By this time there is no place in the city the music doesn't touch, or anyway no closed door it isn't knocking on.

2
Gambang Kromong Slendang Betawi, “Stambul Bila,” from
Music of Indonesia 3: Music from the Outskirts of Jakarta
(Smithsonian Folkways/Rounder)
Nine minutes and 12 contemporary seconds in which you might imagine anything from a late-'30s Southeast Asian jazz band that got it all wrong to a troupe of original Dadaists who recorded underwater. At first the apparent complete disassociation between the drums, flute, stringed instruments, male singer, and female singer is funny; then boring; then it begins to make sense, and then you just barely miss the connection, just as Sydney Greenstreet puts the wrong piece of paper into Hugo Ball's pocket in the weird nightclub of this song.

3
Kid Balley, Tommy Johnson, Bukka White, Willie Brown, Ishmon Bracey, Louise Johnson, Son House, and Bertha Lee,
Masters of the Delta Blues—The Friends of Charlie Patton
(Yazoo reissue, late 1920s/early 1930s)
Twenty-three cuts—and with both founder
Patton (as a singer) and legatee Robert Johnson absent, this may still be the best country blues anthology ever assembled. The two guitars (House and Patton or Brown) on Son House's original “Walking Blues” sound as clearly in the guitar line snaking behind John Mellencamp's vocal in his new “Get a Leg Up” as they do in Johnson's he-must-have-three-hands playing: there's no distance from here to there. But on some tunes—Kid Bailey's whispery “Rowdy Blues,” anything by Tommy Johnson—music that in fact opened into the future, into our present, seems to close in on itself, to shut its own door. The echo that remains leaves you wondering: if these dead people are in some way my ancestors, who am I?

4
Henri Lefebvre,
Critique of Everyday Life—Volumé One
(1947/1958), translated by John Moore (Verso)
In English for the first time (the 1971
Everyday Life in the Modern World
was a tepid finale by comparison), this seductive, noisy, always querulous, always open text had its roots in the '20s, in Marxism and Surrealism—which is to say that Marx is the judge, alienation is the crime, the commodity is the defense, Surrealism is the prosecutor, and you are both the victim and the accused.