Real Life Rock (103 page)

5
Frontline, “Hillary's Class” (PBS, 15 November)
In this examination of the women of Wellesley '69 and their devil's choice between career and family, the ground opened up straight off, at commencement ceremonies 25 years ago. Republican Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the main speaker, had just concluded his remarks on student protest (“a perversion of democratic privilege”) when Hillary Rodham, the first Wellesley student ever chosen to address her own class, stepped up in turn. She put aside her speech and talked back: “As the French student wrote on the wall of the Sorbonne,” she said, “ ‘Demand the Impossible.' We will settle for nothing less.” After the Republican victories of last November, Speaker-presumptive Newt Gingrich famously derided Hillary and Bill Clinton as “counterculture McGoverniks,” and the unusual suffix was meant for automatic, subconscious decoding: first back to beatnik, and from there to the source of that word in Sputnik, the first space satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, and thus the root translation—commie. But what Hillary Rodham quoted that day was Situationist graffiti, from the uprising of May '68. That event has been written out of history, and so, many times, has Hillary Clinton, but I doubt we've heard the last from her.

6
Nirvana, “Lake of Fire,” from
MTV: Unplugged in New York
(DGC)
Almost every tune the band did this night sounded ancient, but none more so than this Meat Puppets number. With its lyric constructed like an authorless folk ballad—each line at once a literal non sequitur and a poetic link to any other—the out-of-nowhere reference to “the Fourth of July” suggested that here, as in “The Coo Coo,” in America the type case of this kind of song, the Fourth of July is a predestined date, waiting, deep in unknown traditions, to be found and used. In other words, the feeling the music gives off is that as a talisman the Fourth of July not only preceded the Declaration of Independence but called it into being.

7
Dave Marsh and James Bernard, editors,
The New Book of Rock Lists
(Fireside)
The table of contents includes 27 chapters, 533 subsections, and no page numbers. This is very avant-garde.

8
Laurie Anderson,
Bright Red/Tight-rope
(Warner Bros.)
The archness in her voice that since the 1983
United States
has left her disembodied is gone. Now she sounds at home in her own skin—given the current state of the United States, not a moment too soon. You take your prophets where you find them, if you can find them.

9
KABL-FM, bus advertisement (Berkeley, 15 November)
“B
IG
98.1,” it read. “Biggest Hits of the '70s. If Keith Richards Were Alive Today, He'd Be Listening to Us.” Could be; at the Voodoo Lounge show I saw, the best music of the night was Elmore James' “Madison Blues”—the record, playing in the dead time between the opening act and the headliners.

10
Guns N' Roses, “Sympathy for the Devil,” in
Interview with the Vampire
(Geffen Pictures)
At the film's close, as a car speeds across the Golden Gate Bridge, this most menacing of all Rolling Stones songs comes on. It is the most menacing less because of its themes than because of the impossible certainty in Bill Wyman's bass, taking your feet out from under you, hurling you toward a destination you can neither credit nor resist—I mean, it moves like nothing else. The performance is so rich Jean-Luc Godard could build an entire movie around the emergence of its arrangement (his 1968
Sympathy for the Devil
has just been released on video by ABKCO). But here, at the end of a film that gets stronger—more menacing—as it goes on, instead of the thing itself there is, by Geffen Records' own, a horrible imitation: generic, cloddish, ham-fisted and, in Axl Rose's singing, hysterical, as if the end, the end of the vogue for his band, is all too plain. For the movie it's a major false note: Lestat would have better taste.

FEBRUARY
1995

1–2
Chieftains,
The Long Black Veil
(RCA) and Sharyn McCrumb:
She Walks These Hills: A Novel of Suspense
(Scribner's)
Both album and detective story take their title from “Long Black Veil,” a 1959 Lefty Frizzell hit revived by the Band for their first album—an “instant folk song,” as co-composer Danny Dill described it, because it had the feel of a 200-year-old Appalachian ballad. On the latest version of the tribute album (you recruit the stars and back them up yourself), the song is the best thing Mick Jagger has put his name to in years. It's also the ghost in McCrumb's third “ballad book,” the key less to her murders than to the mystery of the Tennessee mountains, where old crimes cling to the hills like smoke. Along the way, the Chieftains loosen up their revered Irish traditionalism, drawing luminous, self-realizing performances from Mark Knopfler (a wistful “Lily of the West”), Sinéad O'Connor (“The Foggy Dew” and “He Moved Through the Fair”), and Tom Jones (“Tennessee Waltz/Tennessee Mazurka”)—and McCrumb, writing long before the fact, throws the national orgy of pious incredulity over Susan Smith's killing of her children into ordinary light. In McCrumb's pages, both the song and her characters let a reader understand that what most distinguished Smith from the countless other Americans who each year kill their children was her use of her crime momentarily to become, before the whole country, what she must have felt herself to be: a star, her own abandoned child.

3
Antietam,
Rope-a-Dope
(Home-stead)
Tim Harris (bass) and Tara Key (guitar) can't sing—not in the time-honored rock 'n' roll tradition of can't sing, but can't sing the way normally proportioned human beings, which they are, can't kiss their elbows. Yet every time you're about to give up on this music, Key summons a passage on her instrument that does sing: a twist around a corner that a second before wasn't there, a breakaway.