Real Life Rock (55 page)

7
Fleetwood Mac, “Save Me” (Warner Bros.)
Rock economics: the guitar solo costs nobody anything; the way Christine McVie sings “Is it one or the other, baby?” was paid for a long time ago.

8
Rod Stewart and Ronald Isley, “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You)” (Warner Bros.)
Flying back from the U.K. in 1966, I found the Isley Brothers' original on the audio; for the next 14 hours Swinging London dissolved as I waited for the headset to give up the tune again and again. As a 1990 video it's a period piece: ignoring Holland-Dozier-Holland's sweetest melody, the slowly vamping go-go girls have that ultra-'60s Edie Sedgwick coldness down pat, and they're hard to resist. But on the radio, where it's just as hard to tell feathered Rod from pony-tailed Ron, the music is flooded with a new warmth, probably because Rod and Ron are riding the melody, and toward the same goal: their shared past.

9
The Ghost of Gene Chandler, “Duke of Earl,” on
Billboard Top Rock 'n' Roll Hits—1962
(Rhino CD)
Digital displacement No. 7891: did you know this featured organ, guitar,
clarinet
? It does now—and if you believe that sound converted into numbers tells the truth, what once seemed a primarily casual piece of singing has now been revealed as a precise, professional, altogether constructed piece of orchestration. I'm not sure we're richer for this information.

10
Charles Freeman, proprietor, E. C. Records, arrested on charges of distributing obscene material for selling copies of 2 Live Crew's
As Nasty As They Wanna Be
(Fort Lauderdale)
“America is free, free for everybody,” he said two days after federal judge Jose Gonzalez found the music “as much against the law as assault, rape, [or] kidnapping.” “I'll go to jail, and I'll come back and sell it again.”

JULY
24, 1990

1
Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin,
Site Specific Installation
,
in “Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism” (Tacoma Art Museum, through September 9, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, November 1 through January 6, 1991)
Over your head is a labyrinth—or spiderweb—of household detritus. Below is a clear pool with hundreds of scissors, batteries, rags, broken toys; the pool is layered and infinitely deep. Crumbling Greek columns connect the pool to what seems like its overhead reflection. But the stuff overhead is real; the stuff below is just imagery. It feels like the opposite. The piece has a room to itself, and it makes a world; it should be called “The Archaeology of Everyday Life,” or “The Ruins.”

2
Sonic Youth, “Tunic (Song for Karen),” from
Goo
(Geffen)
Dressed up as Karen Carpenter in heaven—or stripped naked—Kim Gordon insists on the edge that was almost always cutting in Carpenter's singing, the edge Carpenter did everything she could to hide, failing only with “Superstar,” “Merry Christmas Darling,” her life, and this song.

3
Romantics, “What I Like About You” (Diamond Vision reissue, 1980)
Once the Oakland A's took Kool and the Gang's “Celebration” as a theme song, and had a Coasters' hit rewritten as “Billy Ball.” Now, at the Oakland Coliseum, you hear the Romantics every time the A's win, except when the Diamond Vision archivists program Michael Morales's version. It's not as good, but you won't hear it anywhere else.

4
Jon Wiener, on Albert Goldman's
Life
cover story, “Thirteen Years After the Death of
ELVIS PRESLEY
New Evidence Points to an Inescapable Conclusion—
SUICIDE
” (June)
“When Goldman brings out a new paperback of his Lennon book, he will discover that he was wrong; Lennon committed suicide. People told him, it was there in his notes, but he missed it.”

5
Van Morrison, “Almost Independence Day,” from
Saint Dominic's Preview
(Warner Bros, 1972) and X: “4th of July,” from
See How We Are
(Elektra, 1987)
It's right that flag burning is legal, but I could never do it; to say that the flag is only a symbol is to trivialize the diversion of religious epistemology into secular Western culture since Jehovah forbade images of himself, which is to say that to burn the flag is to make a kind of exile. If you want confirmation that the flag contains betrayal as well as promise, you can listen to these songs. X asks the promises of the Fourth of July to redeem the betrayals of a marriage; the conflation of the personal and the political is insensate and inevitable because the promises are boundless. Morrison watches from Marin as fireworks explode over San Francisco Bay. The lights are shrouded in the fog that rolls in over the Marin hills, and very nearly the whole of the instrumentation is in the Moog synthesizers of the late Bernie Krause and Mark Naftalin, who make a foghorn sound—a fog sound. But if fireworks are already exploding, why is it “almost” Independence Day?