Real Life Rock (101 page)

9
Beck's Beer Commercial, “Sail Away” spot (Wensauer • D.D.B. Needham, Düsseldorf)
I once wondered what would happen if Randy Newman's greatest song, conceived as a slaver's recruiting pitch, were heard anytime, anywhere—part of the noise of any given day. Well, here's the answer. Though only the title phrase and a hint of melody are used, the song is instantly recognizable behind footage of tall ships and waves surging. Why? To catch a vague echo of its evil, to give the commercial just the subliminal edge it needs?

10
Fastbacks,
“Answer the Phone, Dummy”
(Sub Pop)
After 14 years of evading anything resembling professionalism—seemingly abandoning all craft to glance a tune off your heart—bassist Kim Warnick and rhythm guitarist Lulu Gargiulo are singing lead guitarist Kurt Bloch's songs with a new confidence, which doesn't hurt lines like “I learned something today/People don't think the way I do.” As always, the smallest incidents of memory or present-day this-'n'-that rush forward with a sense of fate and consequence, practical joke and tragedy, puzzlement and wonder—for example, the possibility of actually finding out “what it really was/An observatory does.” And speaking of great titles . . .

DECEMBER
1994

1
Stuart Davis,
The Back Room
,
1913, and Thomas Hart Benton,
House in Cubist Landscape
,
ca. 1915–20, in “American Art, 1900–1940: A History Reconsidered” (San Jose Museum of Art, through October 1995)
Drawn from the vaults of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, this survey show is full of surprises; these paintings leap out. In Davis' dank barroom hide-away there's a lone drummer standing in for a band, one couple dancing, others immobilized. Their roughed-out faces could be prototypes for the 1933 Charles Laugh-ton classic
The Island of Lost Souls
(“Are we not men?”). It looks like a place you'd likely never get into—an aura of pleasure earned, bled for, rises out of the frame. The piece is just around a turn from Benton's water-color, which is as white as Davis' sanctuary is black. Here is an Appalachian pastoral upended by shapes impossible in nature, trees and fields and rivers now a jumble of Cubist blocks; an arch into the sky could be two tree trunks fallen against each other or a direct route to a Primitive Baptist heaven. It's as if the liquid bodies and landscapes of Benton's later, celebratory Americana represented not only freedom but an attempt to escape the violence implicit in a once trendy, momentarily irresistible style. Soundtracks: for Davis, Memphis Jug Band, “Turpentine Blues” (1927), on
Memphis Jug Band—Volume One
(JSP/UK); for Benton, Carter Family,
My Clinch Mountain Home—Their Complete Victor Recordings, 1928–1929
(Rounder).

2
R.E.M., “Wall of Death,” on
Beat the Retreat—Songs by Richard Thompson
,
a tribute album (Capitol)
On Richard and Linda Thompson's 1982
Shoot Out the Lights
and ever since, I'd heard “Wall of Death” (collected on
Watching the Dark—The History of Richard Thompson
, Rykodisc) as an affirmation by then-Sufi Thompson of some
sort of Islamic trial by endurance: you know, they hang you on the wall of death in the morning when it's 120 degrees and if you're still alive by sundown your heart is true. Thompson's guitar and the wispy vocals were suggestive before they were anything else; the only lines I ever caught were “I'll take my chances on the wall of death” and “Beware of the bearded lady,” which meant who knew what. But on R.E.M.'s magic carpet of a cover version, with steel guitar making the strange familiar and Michael Stipe wanting everything and as close to being scared of nothing as he'll ever be, I found myself looking down from the ride and discovered that the song is about a carnival attraction. O.K., so you knew it all the time—but I still believe that if musicians cover songs by recutting them, listeners cover songs by mishearing them.

3
Jimi Hendrix,
Woodstock
(MCA)
Astonishing. Everyone's heard of it, but for 25 years only the 30,000 or so who were left to sit out the festival's finest hour—63 minutes—actually heard it. Fifteen minutes into the performance, it seems impossible he could go farther than “Hear My Train A Comin',” but about halfway through, with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” the fervor and drive of Hendrix's playing goes over some edge, and it's as if he caught a glimpse of where his train was going. Whether he did or not, you do.

4
Spice 1, “Strap on the Side” (Jive)
This is a mean, ugly Oakland rap about a big gun and using it; running in the background, sometimes alongside, is a meandering, intensely melodic, conversation-with-the-mirror reverie that, while reinforcing the threat of the dominant speech with its words, in its tone falls just short of calling the song's own bluff.

5
The Cranberries,
No Need to Argue
(Island)
The confidence that can come from even a rather bland top ten hit like “Linger” has changed Dolores O'Riordan's voice. Now it's more ordinary, idiosyncratic, Irish, bitter, and most of all unpredictable.

6
Quentin Tarantino, Lawrence Bender, and Karyn Rachtman, executive album producers,
Pulp Fiction—Music from the Motion Picture
(MCA)
The music here comes off much weirder than it does in the movie, mainly because concept albums based in second-rate California surf instrumentals are uncommon these days. Dick Dale & His Del-Tones' 1963 “Misirlou” is relatively well-known, but the likes of the Revels' 1964 “Comanche” or the Tornadoes' 1962 “Bustin' Surfboards” are completely obscure. This stuff appeared right about the time
Pulp Fiction
director Tarantino was born, and disappeared soon afterward. On disc it's close to a foreign language, and also completely bracing; as a frame its very nearly heroic reach for a decent riff makes Dusty Springfield's “Son of a Preacher Man” feel like deep soul (it is) and Urge Overkill's “Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon,” their two-year-old cover of a 27-year-old Neil Diamond hit, sound like Elvis fighting over the song with the grittiest white street singer, Joe Grushecky in his Iron City Houserocker days, maybe—like heaven on the run from hell.