Real Life Rock (113 page)

10
Richard Linklater,
SubUrbia
(Gramercy Pictures)
Based on Eric Bogosian's devastating portrait of lost youth trapped in the decaying wreckage of the modernity of our nation, or, as a patron put it as the credits rolled, “How many times have we seen this movie?”

SUMMER
1997

1
Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, “Johnny Cash” on
A World Without Dave
(Cooking Vinyl America)
In the midst of a typically sour travelogue through the post-Thatcher, presumptively pre-Blair (or for that matter post-Blair) ruins of British social life, a pause in a bar. No matter how bitter the singer feels (“The people here should be in a zoo,” he mutters), nothing can rush him, nothing can shade the love he still feels for what life should be. The names this duo use—
CUSM
, “Jim Bob,” “Fruitbat”—have always been there to disguise the fact that most of all they want to break your heart.

2
Spice Girls, On
Saturday Night Live,
April 12 (NBC)
Yeah, sure. But this bad?

3
John Sheinbaum, “Think About What You're Tryin' to Do to Me: Rock Historiography and Race-Based Dialectics,” at “Re-pre-sent-ing Rock: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Rock Music and Culture” (Duke University, April 6)
In the midst of a passionate, carefully prepared presentation on the critical construction of Aretha Franklin's “Think” as craft and the Beatles' “Eleanor Rigby” as art, Sheinbaum, a graduate student at Cornell, noted that while Paul McCartney had asked producer George Martin for a string arrangement in the mode of Vivaldi, what he got “was a lot closer to a Bernard Herrmann film score.” Sheinbaum played a few seconds of the Beatles record; the lights were on, but suddenly everyone in the room was watching
Psycho
.

4
Tarnation,
Mirador
(Reprise)
There's something of Deborah Kara Unger's face as she appears in
Crash
in Paula Frazer's voice: a faraway coldness that's both alluring and repellent. Neither the singer nor the actress seems absolutely human. The difference is that the deaths Frazer has in her heart are versions of the Carter Family or Roy Orbison, while the deaths Unger's Catherine has in hers are just versions of herself.

5
Big Red Ball, “Drown,” on
Stuck on AM: Off the Record in Minneapolis
(TRG)
On a compilation of on-air recordings for the best college radio station imaginable—Radio K, 770 AM in the Twin Cities, daylight hours only—a harsh, accelerating chant from the 1994 “three-Lisa-lineup” of a defunct band who here fall somewhere between Grace Slick's Great Society in 1966 and the Gang of Four in 1978. I heard it on the radio, along with a solid hour's worth of
other knockouts I'd never heard on the radio, among them a Frank Zappa rant, an eerily distant Heavens to Betsy track, and a '50s pep talk on clean living.

6
Fleetwood Mac,
“London Live '68”
(Thunderbolt/Magnum)
An audience recording, maybe even a bootleg, and a zero, until halfway in guitarist Peter Green locks into Willie Dixon's “I Don't Know Which Way to Go” and you realize he never will.

7–8
Bettie Serveert,
Dust Bunnies
(Matador)
Cool. But their “I'll Keep It With Mine,” from the
I Shot Andy Warhol
soundtrack (Atlantic), is not cool. It's sweet, but inside that sweetness Carol van Dijk is so defeated she's singing less to any lover than to all the now-dead souls in Mary Harron's movie, swaying back and forth so relentlessly that a song Bob Dylan wrote thirty-two years ago for Nico sounds like a song Liz Phair wrote for herself.

9
Paradisette (Stockholm), Diesel for Successful Living postcard (free postcard racks everywhere)
In his day, Stalin had the heads of purged generals cut out of photos and new faces pasted in; now Diesel, for reasons of its own, offers the famous Yalta photo of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Uncle Joe, all smiling, and, through the magic of digital technology, with superleggy babes draped all over them. I think it's a subliminal ad for the Spice Girls—proof that along with the present, they rule the past.

10
Dana Bryant, et al.,
Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro
(Astor Place)
The '60s singer-songwriter received respectful notices when she died earlier this year, but don't let that fool you: as this tribute album insists, saint was always her shtick. “Her concerts were religious experiences,” writes producer Peter Gallway. “Laura gowned, surrounded by roses, alone in purple light at the grand piano. Her style, her holiness, her reclusivity, her high standards became the stuff of legend. Her records were even more intimate, more natural”—and the world recoils almost as one: “ ‘More
natural?
' ” Many of those who wouldn't recoil are included on this pre-posthumous production: admirers from Jane Siberry to Sweet Honey in the Rock, Rosanne Cash to Suzanne Vega. They all sound mannered and self-conscious (gosh, wonder why), all offering little encomiums of their own. Only Lisa Germano avoids embarrassment: “I thought it'd be refreshing to do a song about somebody else's boyfriend for a change.”