Real Life Rock (25 page)

5
Anonymous headline writer, “
SERGEANT BILKO MISTAKEN FOR DALAI LAMA IN TIBET
”
(
San Francisco Chronicle,
November 14)
Somewhere, Phil Silvers is smiling.

6
Pet Shop Boys, “Rent,” from
actually
(Manhattan)
You can hear this song as the testament of a man being kept by a woman; in England it's obvious the rent is paid by another man. So the tune begs the question of how much room there is in it, which only a female singer can answer. Marianne Faithfull? Rosanne Cash? Kim Gordon? Syd Straw? Where is Lesley Woods?

7
Keith Abbott, “Spanish Castle,” from
The First Thing Coming
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN)
The action in this short story begins in the early '60s dance hall pictured on the sleeve of
The History of Northwest Rock, Vol. 4
, during a battle of the bands between the Checkers and the Wailers (“Losing band to have heads shaved on stage”); it's resolved in the front seat of a '57 Oldsmobile. Nobody writes about high-school sex as well as Abbott. He does it all in a line, which you read over and over, as if one more reading will put all the details he's led you to imagine on the page.

8
George Michael,
Faith
(Columbia)
SWM, friends call me a hunk, confused, repressed, into Prince, has put teenybopper idol past behind with “confused, repressed, first-rate white Prince album” (
Voice
, December 15). If you want my sex, write my fan club.

9
Talulah Gosh, “Talulah Gosh” (53rd & Third, UK, also on
Indie Top 20, Vol. II,
Revolver/Cartel, UK)
Sounds like Pauline Murray—and even though she's not on it, you have to take her sound where you can find it.

10
Paul Grushkin,
The Art of Rock—Posters from Presley to Punk
(Abbeville)
This high-gloss, $85, 516 pp. book is unfortunately not for browsing. First of all, at 12 lbs. it's too heavy. Second, more than three-fifths of it is taken up by hundreds of tiny reproductions of '65–'87 psychedelic or postpsychedelic items (many masterpieces, many turkeys) that need a full-page format to communicate with any immediacy at all. You need to spend hours with this monster, picking out the thousands of stray, telling ephemera, be they legends on James Brown broadsides (“A Show for the Entire Family,” says a '66 Apollo announcement; “
SEX POWER AND LOVE
,” reads a poster from '71), or lines from one of Grushkin's interviews (“I've never gotten the same thrill out of having one of my cartoons printed in a magazine as much as seeing one of my old fliers—something I did for a punk gig the week before—laying in the gutter,” says Shawn Kerri), or the picture of my brother on p. 412, or the skull handbills for my niece's husband's former band on pp. 478–79.

JANUARY
19, 1988

1
Absolut Vodka ad,
(
New Yorker
,
December 21)
You open the four-page insert, pull the strip at the fold, and out comes the melody of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Taking the pages apart, you find a sort of music box, about the size of a hearing aid, but much thinner; while the sound it makes isn't loud, it seems to travel through floors. The machine is efficient: mine has been playing for more than 48 hours now.

There are here possibilities for the creation of disturbance, for the promulgation
of aesthetic displacement and social uncertainty, far beyond the obvious brutalism of beat boxes or the street-art critiques of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzman. “My ultimate vocation is to be an irritant,” Elvis Costello once said. “Not something actively destructive, but someone who irritates, who disorientates. Someone who disrupts the daily drag of life just enough to leave the victim thinking there's maybe more to it all than the humdrum quality of existence.” And that's what this device can do. The mechanics can't be that complicated; it ought to be easy to copy, program, and disseminate. Imagine tens of thousands of undetectable music boxes, coded with “Summertime, Summertime,” “Come On in My Kitchen,” “Jump,” all secreted in the crevices of skyscrapers, in the cracks of telephone poles, stuck under bus seats, rugs, desks (in your office, in the Office of Management and Budget, behind the presidential seal the next time there's a televised White House news conference). Imagine “You Are My Sunshine” and “When a Man Loves a Woman” turning the whole country into one vast theater for the aural itch of a song you can't get out of your head, but now
every
song, a different one every few minutes, every few steps, people saying, “God, what
is
that, I know it, I just can't—”

Who knows, there might be a lot of interesting new conversations. There might be rioting in the streets. It might be the end of civilization as we know it. You read it here first.

2
Charlie Haas, Bob Roe, et al., “Lost Documents of 1987”
(
California Magazine
)
Including a suppressed decision by Judge Ginsburg, written under the influence, a paste-up for
Roiling Stone
's junked special issue celebrating the 20-week anniversary of the 20-year anniversary of the Summer of Love (“One thing is certain: there will never be nostalgia for the sixties like that again”), and William Casey's last letter to Bob Woodward: “I want to apologize for drifting off in the middle of our last chat. . . . Anyway—to answer your question from last time, let me say again that I believed, and I
still believe
, that ‘Dark Side of the Moon' is Pink Floyd's best album . . .”

3
Neil Young, “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)”
(
Rolling Stone Magazine's 20 Years of Rock 'n' Roll,
November 24, ABC-TV)
After two hours of lulling performance clips, this was a shock—as music, terrorism; in context, the abyss.