Real Life Rock (92 page)

9
Al Kooper,
Rekooperation
(MusicMasters/BMG)
Blues and soul instrumentals—a jam on Richard Thompson's “When the Spell Is Broken” keeping company with “Soul Twist-ed” and “Honky Tonk”—but after hours, with the doors locked, somebody stealing the tape that wasn't supposed to be running anyway.

10
CBS-TV, Philadelphia Phillies/Toronto Blue Jays, game two, World Series (Toronto, October 17)
Lest we forget: with the Phillies' John Kruk, the coolest guy what is what am this night, at bat, a camera panning the stands for celebrities zoomed in on the only man in the place whose hair could make Kruk's look good. In a just world this is what Michael Bolton would be remembered for.

JANUARY
1994

1
Dramarama,
Hi-FiSci-Fi
(Chameleon)
So smart and funny they could pass for American Kinks, this New Jersey guitar band wears its heart on its collective sleeve with a shamelessness beyond any upstanding Englishperson. In “Work for Food” lead singer John Easdale, singing as himself, is pushing a shopping cart with everything he owns down the street (“The records never sold and that was that”); he tells you exactly what's in it. He's pathetic, a joke, not quite heartrending, and completely believable. It's a great idea. But “Shadowless Heart” is a great song: slow, cool, disturbing, knowing, near death, like Social Distortion without the blood and guts—without the distortion. I play it over and over, and I still can't tell: “You got a shadowless heart,” Easdale sings, but is that good or bad?

2
John Irvin, director, Sam Resnick and John Mcgrath, writers:
Robin Hood
(Fox Video)
With Patrick Bergin underplaying the Errol Flynn in Robin and Uma Thurman playing Maid Marian as a swan—and featuring Jeff Nuttal, author of
Bomb Culture
and longtime mainstay of British bohemia, as Friar Tuck—this 1991 ambush of the Kevin Costner vehicle of the same year is sexy, wisecracking, deliriously hip, and a shock. Throughout the film, Saxon anti-clericalism builds as a counter to Norman power (Tuck peddles holy relics—he's got St. Peter's finger—made out of chicken bones), eventually turning into outright paganism: the Merry Men invade the baron's castle on All Fool's Day, with Tuck as Lord of Misrule and everyone else costumed as animals, spirits, shamans, trees. Druidic
ceremonies blast the Church like a hurricane blowing away a tract home. The Cross is toppled by the Golden Bough—and at the end, when Robin and Marian marry, it's as king and queen of nothing so transitory as a manmade kingdom, but of the May.

3
Bratmobile,
Pottymouth
(Kill Rock Stars)
Three young American women have fun and experience, as the Slits once put it, and get more mileage out of the word “fuck” than the Mamas & the Papas did out of the word “yeah.” They're so fast they burn up their own tracks, barely leaving a trace; it's not individual tunes that stick in the mind but the thrill of making they all carry, sort of “Hey, Hey We're the Monkees” armed with humor and obscenity.

4
Denis Johnson,
Jesus' Son
(HarperPerennial)
In these linked tales of losers circling around a bar so far below the normal economy that people try to pay with money they've copied on Xerox machines, the narrator sometimes notices too much: “seeds were moaning in the gardens” is supposed to be dope talking, but it's Literature. Far more often, though, the holes that drugs and booze put in the narrator's memory fill up with gestures that grow into acts that are recreated as compulsions, small pictures of fate. “The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce”: using the cliché of the first description to disguise the unusualness of the second is real writing.

5
Bikini Kill,
Pussy Whipped
(Kill Rock Stars)
The original pointwomen (well, three women, one man) for riot grrrl, a movement now happily dismissed by the likes of
Newsweek
as last year's fad (“Young feminists,” Jeff Giles wrote recently, “with R
APE
and S
LUT
scrawled on their bellies”—sure sounds like a fad), prove they've only just begun to talk. They play the way good graffiti looks.

6
Counting Crows, “Mr. Jones,” on
August and Everything After
(DGC)
“I want to be Bob Dylan!” Adam Duritz of Berkeley admits two-thirds of the way through this irresistibly desperate, demented song about stardom, a song that could be about almost anything else—the emotion is that loose, that confused. As for Mr. Jones, presumably the same one Dylan was after in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” he doesn't seem like anyone to be trusted, though the singer does trust him, which means the trouble the music constantly suggests on this track ought to pay off elsewhere on the album, which it doesn't.

7
Mary Lou Lord, “Some Jingle Jangle Morning” (Kill Rock Stars)
Airy, folky, but hard, too: a character out of one of Denis Johnson's stories escapes from Johnson's book, just like almost all the women in the book do, and then gives up on dope, as they probably don't.