Real Life Rock (102 page)

7
Kurt Schwitters,
Ursonate
(
WERGO
Schallplatten GmbH, Mainz, Germany)
The sound of a very old radio playing a very old record (on this CD, you can hear the original shellac discs spinning): the legendary sound-poetry epic, here 41 minutes 29 seconds, by the legendary German Dada Merz-man, only recently discovered, and recorded in . . . nobody knows. The piece sounds overwhelmingly influenced by the far shorter letter-sound poems of Schwitters' 1920s Dada comrade Raoul Hausmann, except that the only Hausmann recordings one has to go on were made in the '50s and the sonically more ambitious Schwitters, also Hausmann's postwar partner, died in 1948. For the moment, let the puzzle rest with this: if you could stick your head all the way into the big end of one of the giant ear horns that served as amplifiers on the earliest phonographs, it's the blips and rushes of its ocean you might hear in
Ursonate
.

8
Colin Escott with George Merritt and William MacEwen,
Hank Wilsons: The Biography
(Little, Brown)
In earlier books on Sun Records, Escott wrote with a dogged academicism; now he's found both his style and his heart. Avoiding the Hunter Thompson–like sensationalism of Chet Flippo's harrowing 1981
Your Cheatin' Heart
, Escott—facing down a figure who on the terms of conventional biography is a specter behind scandal and who yet remains “almost desperately real through his music”—ends up in a graveyard far more awful. “There's the notion that the writer or poet calms his troublous soul by reducing it to rhyme,” Escott finishes, ready to seal the case he's made. “For Hank Williams, though, as he pulled off his boots and eased himself gingerly onto his bed, the little verses scratched out in his untutored spidery handwriting almost certainly offered no relief at all.”

9
Tom Jones,
The Lead and How to Swing It
(Interscope)
He's 54; his last hit came in 1988, with “Kiss,” and he still hasn't gotten over Prince. He has gotten better—on Yaz's “Situation,” madly so.

10
Sheryl Crow,
Tuesday Night Music Club
(A&M)
It's fine for her to rip off Stealers Wheel's “Stuck in the Middle with You” for “All I Wanna Do”—Stealers Wheel is thankfully long gone. But since Ricki Lee Jones is very much around, it seems premature for someone to make the top ten by absconding with her entire act.

JANUARY
1995

1
Allen Ginsberg,
Holy Soul Jelly Roll—Poems and Songs, 1949–1993
(Rhino Word Beat 4-CD box)
I put this on out of curiosity; except for performances I had to repeat, I played it straight through to the end. It is, somehow, a monument without pretensions, a testament of ambition without hubris, a year's worth of lectures on the origins of language without pedantry. Like a long singing from the Haftorah, the 63-minute-plus “Kaddish” only explodes at the end, shuddering toward a dissolution that, here, is the only way to wholeness. The previously unreleased version of “America,” live in Berkeley in 1956, changes the solemn heart-breaker of Ginsberg's 1959 studio recording into a stand-up comedy routine not far from
Richard Pryor—Live in Concert
. The best album of 1994—no contest.

2
Hole, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco (11 November)
Fronting bass, drums, and lead guitar with her own guitar in her hands and one leg hoisted onto a monitor speaker, Courtney Love has a number she runs on the crowd between songs: a lot of casual-sounding talk about what she dislikes about the site of a given show, former sex partners (especially whoever might be present), a fair amount of undifferentiated loathing, and a few well-placed invocations of Kurt Cobain (“I wrote this with my husband”; “Will you just come back, dick-head!”). It's a punk version, or her version, of “
HELLO, SAN FRANCISCO
!”—which you usually hear bellowed out at the Oakland Coliseum. But as a standard routine her words come off as detritus she happened to find onstage, and the fact that her music has the same offhand, let's-get-it-over-with quality produces a strange effect. There are no divisions between patter and song, and rather than everything communicating like performance, nothing does. The shifts between talk and music, shifts that given the band's precision timing you don't have to notice, merely take a conversation to another level; the burr in Love's voice is the same whether she's insulting someone, negotiating the careful steps of her time-stopping “Asking for It,” or tossing off half of “Hungry like the Wolf.” The result reminded me more than anything of a recent all-acoustic, sit-down, no-smoking, mother-in-the-audience concert by Iris DeMent, baring her soul and everyone else's with her “No Time to Cry,” reinventing country music by treating it like ordinary speech—except that Love was more believable.

3
Libby Gelman-Waxner,
If You Ask Me
(St. Martin's)
Collected columns from
Premiere
on what really matters in the movies—the way clothes determine attitude, and vice versa. Too bad no music critics
have figured out an equivalent approach, which allows for, or for that matter demands, the ability to comment on anything at any time—as when Gelman-Waxner blithely mentions, in the course of reviewing
Ghost
(or rather explaining the subtext of same to her seven-year-old), that “the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, is spoken of as the entrance to the underworld in the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

4
Unnamed Dixieland Band, unnamed New Orleans Sanitation Department driver, encounter (19 November)
In the French quarter, a small combo was churning out a tepid version of very old style for the Grand Opening of a nondescript bar. The musicians spilled out into the street, so when the garbage truck came up Dumaine and tried to turn onto Chartres the driver found the way blocked. He blasted his horn—and then, as if he'd just noticed the awfulness of the noise he'd failed to silence, picked up the band's half-dead riff and punched it out on the horn, once, twice, three times. He completed his turn and growled on down the street, still playing, leaving the band to its miseries.