Real Life Rock (64 page)

8
Rolling Stones, “Gimmie Shelter” (as licensed for a PSA for the American Red Cross)
What a fine conceit: a paramedic squad as a band, with, among others, Paul Shaffer “on keys” (at a blood-drive computer) and Carly Simon “on lead,” heroically guiding some kids to safety with the same expression of celebrity noblesse oblige that Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin spent a whole film critiquing with the 1972
Letter to Jane: Investigation of a Still
. It's no use saying the song deserves better; a commercial for home insurance would be better.

9
R.E.M., “I Walked with a Zombie,” from
Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye—A Tribute to Roky Erickson
(Sire)
This is a metaphor—for R.E.M. It's also their best recording.

10
Richard Huelsenbeck,
Memoirs of a Dada Drummer,
edited by Hans J. Klein-schmidt (University of California Press reissue, 1974)
Hulsenbeck (1892–1974) was the Dada African (also a bourgeois German medical student), pounding his big drum and chanting “Negro poems” on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. Perhaps because he wasn't an artist but a noisemaker, a troublemaker, Herr Bad News, he became Dada's most unapologetic chronicler and least evasive storyteller. Top tale in
Memoirs
: Richard meets a girl from a nice family who appreciates his promising future but not the embarrassing stuff he does on stage—in other words, she won't sleep with him unless he agrees to give up Dada. He's in agony, he feels the zeitgeist in his heart every night in the cabaret. On the other hand . . . Thus he gives in—but, as he would later write, “Dada was a creature which stood head and shoulders above all present,” and when the big night comes he turns up impotent. So he went back to the nightclub.

MAY
1991

1
Bob Dylan, at the Grammy Awards (CBS, 20 February)
Thirty years after arriving in New York from Minnesota, Bob Dylan stepped forward to be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The blanket of acceptance that had been draped over the show was so heavy the
WAR SUCKS
T-shirt New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg wore to the American Music Awards a few weeks earlier would have been forbidden here; maybe that's why Dylan sang “Masters of War,” and maybe that's why he disguised it, smearing the verses into one long word. If you caught on to the number, the lyrics did emerge—“And I'll stand o'er your grave/'Til I'm sure that you're dead”—but lyrics were not the point. What was was the ride Dylan and his band gave them. With hats pulled down and dressed dark, looking and moving like Chicago hipsters from the end of the '50s, guitarists Cesar Diaz and John Jackson, bassist Tony Garnier, and drummer Ian Wallace went after the song as if it was theirs as much as Dylan's: a chance at revenge, excitement, pleasure. You couldn't tell one from the other, and why bother?

With this career performance behind him, Dylan took his trophy from a beaming Jack Nicholson; he squinted, as if looking for his mother, who was in the audience. “Well,” he said, “my daddy, he didn't leave me much, you know, he was a very simple man, but what he tell me was this, he did say,
son,
he said”—there was a long pause, nervous laughter from the crowd—“he say, you know it's possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you and if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your own ways.”

Then he walked off. He had managed to get in and out without thanking anybody, and this night it really did seem as if he owed nobody anything.

2
Rolling Stones, “Highwire” (Rolling Stones Records)
There's a helplessly celebratory cast to the flabby, crowded, let's-hope-
for-the-best closing choruses of this Desert Storm disc, but the action is up front, in the open sound that drives the verses (built around “Get up, stand up” and “Catch a fire,” old revolutionary phrases from Bob Marley and the Wailers), in the amazingly cynical snap Mick Jagger uses to break up every line. Recorded just before the air war began, hitting the radio just as the ground war was ending, the song's timing made it simultaneously moot and dangerous: it came off as a cheap exploitation of the last war and a set-up for the next one.

3
Enigma,
MCMXC a.D.
(Charisma)
For the nearly 12 minutes of “Principles of Lust,” which includes the world-wide Gregorian chant-hit “Sadeness,” probably the best heavy-breathing number since Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg's 1969 “Je t'aime (moi non plus)”—which enjoyed a certain revival after Gainsbourg's March 2 death in Paris, though Conservative leader Jacques Chirac said it was Gainsbourg's song “Harley-Davidson” that was “engraved on my heart.”

4
Oliver Stone, director,
The Doors
(Tri-Star)
Nothing could be easier than to write this movie off, but there are currents of empathy at work throughout that bring you face to face with “the '60s” as a true curse: no grand, simple, romantic time to sell to present-day teenagers as a nice place to visit, but a time that, even as it came forth, people sensed they could never really inhabit, and also never leave. Stone catches this displacement in the concert sequences near the end of the Doors' career. He makes a terrific noise out of instruments, fans, booze, nudity, fire, feedback, and history, but as he moves the show on he makes the sound stop. All you can fix on is Val Kilmer's Jim Morrison, in a moment of complete suspension, caught between wondering how he got where he is and accepting that he can't go forward and he can't go back. It may not be the story the band set out to tell, but it's what the movie has done to

5
The Doors,
The Doors
(Elektra, 1967)
It didn't cost much to listen to “Take It As It Comes” (“Time to laugh/Time to live/Time to die,” etc.), “The Crystal Ship,” or the last, quiet minute of “The End” when they were new, but now you can hear an ugly momentum in the music, the music's urge to catch up with the people who made it. Forget the soundtrack album, forget best-of's and greatest hits; this is all you need, and, maybe, all there ever was.