Real Life Rock (91 page)

10
Firesign Theater,
Shoes for Industry!—The Best of the Firesign Theater
(Columbia Legacy reissue, 1967–75)
If you've lost your old lps by the best comedy group in the history of the phonograph record, this is a road back to a rather more convincing account of '60s liberation than can be found in books. If you've never heard the most effective surrealists in the history of Dada, this is the place to start. But Peter Bergman, David Ossman, Phil Proctor, and Phil Austin are still around—why did they ever stop? “Our best albums,” Bergman told Steve Simels, who wrote the notes to this set, “had a theme underneath them—the War. And when the War was over, we lost our theme.” “There was something about the Eighties—the anti-surrealist politics of the Eighties—that was wrong for the Firesign Theater,” says Ossman. The group promises a new record,
The Illusion of Unity
, in 1994: “Sure enough,” Bergman says, “when we kicked the fascists out of office it was time for the Firesign Theater to come back.” If the record is any good the return of the Firesign Theater won't make up for all of Bill Clinton's failings, but it'll make up for some of them.

DECEMBER
1993

1
Lee Smith,
The Devil's Dream
(Ballantine)
“One time years back, when she was sitting on the porch hooking a rug and singing one of these mournful old hymns, as she frequently did, little Ezekiel asked her, ‘Aunt Dot, how come you to sing that old song? How come you don't sing something pretty?' For he knew full well how pretty his Aunt Dot could sing if she took a mind to, and how many songs she knew. She turned to look at him, pursing her mouth, and said, ‘Honey, they is pretty singing, and then they is true singing.' ”
The Devil's Dream
is about true singing. It's a spell-caster of a novel, with a family ghost wending its way from the 1830s into the present, from a hollow in Virginia to Nashville, from a young woman destroyed by God's curse on her fiddle to her great-great-great-granddaughter
with a Ph.D. in deconstruction from Duke. Along the way the ghost makes country music history, tossing up a rockabilly singer (“that dark dangerous look the women like, that's what Johnny's going for, kind of a cross between Porter Wagoner and an undertaker”), expecting no peace and finding none. Always, whatever music is found is framed by “The Cuckoo Song,” an ancient, mystical tune about not being at home in the world, and “Blackjack Davey,” an even older fable about a wife and mother who abandons her home to fuck a faithless lover—and the lives of Smith's men and women are framed by these songs, too. They can't get out of them—not because they are weak, or uneducated, or trapped in the prison of fundamentalist religion, but because the songs are so deep.

2
PJ Harvey,
4-Track Demos
(Island)
There's more freedom on these one-woman overdubs than on Harvey's group albums—more freedom as wish and realization, on guitar and in the voice. What sounded like contrived effects on
Dry
and especially
Rid of Me
are events here. “Oh, she fucked my memory,” Harvey sings on the demo for “Yuri-G”; I can't make out what she's saying on the
Rid of Me
version, but it isn't that.

3
Muddy Waters, licensed music in TV ads for Timberland waterproof clothing (W L. Gore & Associates, Newark, Delaware)
Beginning in a simple verbal/visual pun, these spots—people slogging through mud and rain while the late Chicago bluesman thunders on like a South Side Jeremiah—are weirdly unstable. It's media shock: you're not prepared for something this powerful in a television commercial. Uncontextualized, or miscontextualized, the music may for a fleeting moment seem stronger here than it ever has elsewhere. What were they selling again?

4–5
Ted Levin and Ankica Petrović (recording, compilation, annotation):
Bosnia—echoes from an endangered world—Music and Chant of the Bosnian Muslims
(Smithsonian Folkways) and Ammiel Alcalay et al.,
Lusitania
no. 5 (Fall 1993)—
For/Za Sarajevo
At the Miss Besieged Sarajevo pageant last May, it wasn't traditional Bosnian music that was played but “Eve of Destruction.” On
Bosnia
, an anthology of 1984–85 field recordings plus a few popularized folk numbers, you don't hear desperation; most intensely you hear serenity (“
Ezan
,” a Muslim call to prayer) or strength. PJ Harvey fans will have no problem with “
Ganga: Odkad seke nismo zapjevale
” (How long we sisters haven't sung), even if, in Ankica Petrović's words, “Urban dwellers tend to dismiss
ganga
as simply unorganized (or disorganized) sound.” Here three women from the village of Podora+ac in northern Herzegovina fill Levin and Petrović's tape less with voices than with hearts, lungs, stomachs—whole bodies. In Herzegovinian fact or Appalachian-American analogy, this is mountain music: melisma and flattened tones twist themes until the individual and the community, the present and the past, are both complete and indistinguishable. As Petrović writes, “Singers and their active listeners achieve maximal harmony through dissonance.”

Though Serbs and Croats as well as Muslims practice
ganga
, Petrović's comment is obviously no metaphor for politics, and the
Bosnia
collection doesn't work as background music to
For/Za Sarajevo
, a living tombstone of essays and classic texts running in both English and Serbo-Croatian. The CD is from what was a country, the journal number is a cemetery map. There are no atrocity photos, just a few pictures of people, artworks, objects, architecture. Entries open with an almost biblical incantation from Me+a Selimović's 1966
The Dervish and Death
(“I begin this, my story, for naught—with no benefit to myself nor to others, from a need that is stronger than profit or reason, that my record remain”) and move toward Tomaž-Mastnak's enraged, incisive “A Journal of the Plague Years: Notes on European Anti-Nationalism,” where the legacy of fascism meets the unfinished business of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, on Muslims:
“It is not enough to humiliate them, they should be destroyed”). “I would not call this a conspiracy,” Mastnak says of Europe's acquiescence in the Bosnian genocide. “It is more like a dream coming true.”

“D
ON'T
L
ET
T
HEM
K
ILL
Us,” read the banner, in English, carried by the 13 swimsuited contestants in the Miss Besieged Sarajevo contest. In a way, you can find them all in the most striking art in
For/Za Sarajevo
, Mustafa Skopljak's 1993
Sarajevo 91' 92' 93' 94'
, from the O
BALA
Gallery's Witness of Existence project. Little terracotta faces with odd expressions are placed in holes on a bed of dirt; it's a graveyard, but all the graves are open and everybody, from whatever century or religion, is still alive and looking right at you.

6–8
Mekons, “Millionaire” and
I
♥
Mekons
(both Quarterstick) and
The Mekons Story, 1977–1982
(Feel Good All Over reissue)
I
♥
Mekons
, which has been wandering in the desert of the music business since at least 1991, is muscular, confident, anguished—perhaps just right for a group that currently rotates on a Chicago–New York–London axis. Yet “Millionaire” (with three live tracks appended) all but floats over the rest of the music, Sally Timms' rich country vocal so soulful and Tom Greenhalgh's guitar such an upheaval the tune deserves its own disc. As for
The Mekons Story
(originally led by the pretitle
it falleth like the gentle rain from heaven
), it's a strange assemblage of scraps and shouts, broken promises and drunken regret: a stirring would-be suicide note from a time, now more than ten years gone, when the already-old band first tried to give up the ghost.