Real Life Rock (95 page)

Since a verbal commentary would inevitably fall short of the one Dylan had already provided, I thought
World Gone Wrong
needed a visual commentary, by someone who could let the music spark a picture. Given the opportunity, I asked Mike Kelley; he demurred, suggesting Raymond Pettibone. But then, paging through
Mike Kelley—Catholic Tastes
, the catalogue Elisabeth Sussman edited for Kelley's recent retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, I realized the picture was already there.
Winter's Stillness #1
is from 1985: a top border illustrates the title in Currier & Ives clichés; below it there's a rough drawing of the map of the U.S.A. The top two-thirds are blank; then Kelley's version of the Mason-Dixon line stretches from coast to coast, with the lower third of the country dark and dank, the word “Hillbillies” dripping excreta into a lake of slime. On that lake is a cabalistic symbol, seemingly named in Kelley's caption, a pun on hillbilly cliché and on the title of the piece itself: “A
NEW KIND OF STILL—IT DISTILLS PURE INBRED EVIL
. T
HE FOUL-SMELLING MASH SINKS TO THE BOTTOM—FIRE-BREWED
. D
OWN HERE IT IS
.
U
H UH
.” If that doesn't outdistance Dylan it sure as hell keeps up with him.

7
Folkes Brothers, Laurel Aitken, Owen Gray, Theophilus Beckford, et al
.,
Tougher Than Tough—The Story of Jamaican Music
(Mango 4-CD reissue, 1958–93)
Sure, it's all great. But the first disc, covering 1958 through 1967, has the aura of people waking from a four-century sleep to take back their island from Columbus and all who came after him; only their skin color has changed.

8
ZZ Top,
Antenna
(RCA)
R
EPAIRS COMPLETED
. R
OAD OPEN1
. S
PEED LIMITS STRICTLY ENFORCED
.

9
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, induction ceremonies, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel Grand Ballroom (New York City, 19 January)
Just think: in four years, Aerosmith will be eligible.

10
Ian Softley, director,
Backbeat
(Gramercy Films)
As a movie about the Beatles in Hamburg in the very early '60s, this is perfectly adequate. As a movie about the love affair between then-Beatle bass player Stuart Sutcliffe and Hamburg photographer Astrid Kirchherr, which is what
Back-beat
wants to be, it's a blank. Sheryl Lee is wasted as Kirchherr; like her soulmates in Heavens to Betsy she goes to extremes or she goes nowhere, and her underwritten part gives her nowhere to go and nothing to do, save to sit around looking knowing and occasionally pull off her sweater.

What's most intriguing in
Backbeat
is its presentation of Kirchherr's world, the world of the Hamburg Exis, or existentialists: a flamboyant, costumed, forbidding, sexually ambiguous haute bohemia. The question the film begs is where this supremely self-confident outsider milieu came from, given the suppression of bohemian cultures under the Nazis and the privations of the post-war period. Did Kirchherr and her friends hark back to the Weimar Dadaists, or did they come together in the same spirit as their peers in Paris, London, San Francisco, and New York? What were their resources—and how different, really, was Liverpool's working-class beat-group scene, where
Un Chien Andalou
was as familiar as Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, from Hamburg's bourgeois Beat scene, where Sartre was a hero and Chuck Berry arrived via Armed Forces Radio? Did worlds collide, or were they the same?

At least in the Beatle literature, this is a question no one has asked, let alone answered. Stuart Sutcliffe died in 1961, but Astrid Kirchherr, now in her mid 50s, is still living in Hamburg; it's unlikely she's forgotten a thing.

APRIL
1994

1
Rickie Lee Jones, “Rebel Rebel,” on
Traffic from Paradise
(Geffen)
One of the
really great
David Bowie songs, brought to life with the intimacy of two people off in the bathroom halfway through a concert, fixing their makeup and taking their heads off.

2
Jimmy Reed, the Spaniels, etc.,
The Vee-Jay Story
(Vee-Jay 3-CD reissue, 1953–65)
An imaginatively programmed assemblage of gritty, close-to-the-ground smashes and obscurities from the black-owned Chicago label that in 1963 brought America the Beatles (“Please Please Me” fell short of the charts; “From Me to You” struggled to #116) and went belly up three years later. For the paranoid inside story of the emergence and ruin of this pioneering company, see Joseph C. Smith's novel
The Day the Music Died
, from 1981; for the prosaic version, in which genius and genre coexisted in a state of exquisite tension, listen to the alcoholic prophecies of Jimmy Reed's primitive “High & Lonesome,” the doo-wop swoon of the El Dorados' “At My Front Door,” the doom-struck pop rhythms of Dee Clark's “Your Friends,” and the overwhelming emotional striptease of Little Richard's greatest blues, “I Don't Know What You've Got But It's Got Me.” The year is 1965; Richard, wailing, testifying, madly gesticulating, is the genius; an unknown Jimi Hendrix, on guitar, is the genre. And two years later they'd changed places.

3
Mike Leigh, writer & director,
Naked
This portrait of rape in present-day London
may be a parable of the ruins of Thatcherism, but there are older echoes. Charming scum Johnny (David Thewlis) might be a time-traveler from the plague years; he seems almost to rot as the movie goes on. His exgirlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp) has the sort of deep, heavy face that pretty much left the screen when talkies arrived. She can recall Gloria Swanson, or even Albert Dieudonné in Abel Gance's
Napoléon
. Still, no-future is what the film is always about: erasing the future as it comes into being, registering what's being left behind and letting it go. Desperate for company, a guard in an empty deluxe office building takes a homeless Johnny inside and guides him through the place; he clears locks with some sort of post-Modern security wand, a black baton with a white tip. “What's that,” says Johnny, “a Dadaist nun?”

4
Eugène Atget,
Atget Paris
(Hazan, Paris, and Gingko Press, Santa Rosa, CA)
At-get was a real street photographer—that is, he took pictures of streets, not of “street life”—and from the 1890s to about 1914 he mapped the Paris that had escaped the enormous hands of Baron Haussmann, from the Pont Neuf in the 1st
arrondissement
to the falling-down shacks at the farthest edges of the 20th. People who know—Louis Chevalier, for one, in his 1977
The Assassination of Paris
—will tell you that Atget's city was destroyed in our own time, and that to reach for the smoky auras captured in the 840 photos collected here is sheer romanticism, no matter how seemingly familiar a lot of Atget's streets still look. Well, give it a test. Unlike so many other Atget volumes, this is no coffee table book. At 5½ by 7⅝ by 2½ inches, it's like an elegant brick; you can hold it in your hand, using the pictures as a map of the city, following where they lead, and see if the city is still there.