Real Life Rock (78 page)

10
Patricia Kennealy,
Strange Days—My Life With and Without Jim Morrison
(Dutton)
Kennealy married Morrison in a Celtic handfasting ceremony in 1970; she writes as if she took a deep breath the day she heard he'd died and is only now letting it out.

SEPTEMBER
1992

1
The Earliest Negro Vocal Quartets, 1894–1928, (Document, Austria)
One day in 1894, in Washington, D.C., the Standard Quartette—H. C. Williams, Ed De Moss, R. L. Scott, and William Cottrell—cut a number of cylinders for Columbia. Only one survives—“Keep Movin',” the earliest recording of African-American music yet discovered. It's just as spooky as its distant provenance suggests. Emerging now out of a wash of distortion and surface noise is a single, strong tenor, then a full, closely shaped chorale; what you hear, first, is the nearly ten decades that separate you from them. But there is nothing foreign here. If formally the unaccompanied singing seems primarily genteel, the passion is at odds with its bounds, and soon you're hearing
church sermons, street preachers, gospel choruses, marching bands, Walt Disney's
Song of the South
, Paul Robeson's “Old Man River,” the national anthem, funeral lamentations, folk tales told in the rounded, plummy tones of the Carolinas . . .

The other 22 recordings collected here can't match the power of this stray artifact, though there is not a completely obvious moment among them. The a cappella Dinwiddie Colored Quartet (1902) was clearly in the crowd-pleasing business, mixing animal tales and black-to-white-to-black Stephen Fosterish arrangements into a flat, effective formula. The Male Quartette's “The Camp Meeting Jubilee” (1910) is exactly that: a little play. As up-to-date as Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch (not to mention David Byrne, Paul Simon, Sting, and dozens more), Polk Miller and His Old South Quartette (1909–10) featured a white singer and his black backing group. They played Carnegie Hall, flogging a sort of antebellum nostalgia act about the good old days before the Yankees came: “The Watermelon Party” plus “The ‘Old Time' Religion.” Mark Twain called two of their numbers “musical earthquakes”—though perhaps not these.

In sum, more sociology than music, leading off with a fact of history that also transcends it: “the mystic chords of memory.”

2
X-Tal,
Everything Crash
(Alias)
Fronted by J Neo, who has a lot of heart and no attitude in his thin punk voice, and sparked by bassist Allison Moseley and violinist Carrie Bradley, this small-time San Francisco combo wears their defeated leftist politics on their sleeves and can open for the Mekons without letting you forget them when the headliners come on. They write good songs, but much better than good are Moseley's cover of Fairport Convention's “Genesis Hall” and Neo's despair-hate-grief-and-rage cocktail “Black Russian,” which ends with the meanest Elvis tribute I've ever heard: “So pour me another Black Russian,” Neo says to the bartender, “and let's get real, real
gone
for a change.”

3
Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine,
1992—The Love Album
(Chrysalis)
More exciting, overwrought, high-pop songs about power, corruption, and lies, not to mention
AIDS
, child abuse, alcoholism, poverty, rape, and heretic-burning, keyed by “The Only Living Boy in New Cross”—which is sort of based on the Trade Winds' 1965 “New York's a Lonely Town” (“When you're the only surfer boy around”)—and topped off by a straight version of “The Impossible Dream.” Heard in the right mood, this can be very depressing.

4
Anonymous performance, downtown Manhattan subway (May 12)
Two young black men, one short, the other tall, moved fast through the car and stopped in front of two women, one white, one black, both in their 20s. “
CAN WE ASK YOU A QUESTION?
” they shouted at the black woman. When she didn't answer they jacked up the pace: “
CANWEASKYOUAQUESTION-CANWEASKYOUAQUES
—” As she sat stone-faced they fell silent, struck a pose, and then, slowly, asked anyway: “What's your name / Is it Mary, or Sue?”—and then went on through almost the whole of Don & Juan's 1962 doo-wop hit. As the black woman broke into embarrassed smiles and the white woman got out a dollar, I wondered why the guys, already heading for the next car, had left off the song's kicker, “Shooby doo-waht do wha.” The tall one looked over his shoulder: “Shooby doo-waht do-
WHAHHHHHH
,” he and his pal sang, giving the last syllable a fabulous lift, and they were through the doors.

5
EMF, “Search and Destroy,” on
unexplained EP
(EMI)
A superhot cover of Iggy Pop's hottest song, all keening melody, guitar like bad weather, drooling glee. Maybe payback for last year's horrible, inescapable “Unbelievable”—you may not believe in censoring music for content, but what about for form?

6
Valerie Buhagiar, in
Highway 61
,
dir. Bruce McDonald (Skouras Pictures)
As the can't-take-your-eyes-off-her-bad-girl-on-the-run, Jackie Bangs—Lester's sister?

7
Walter Karp,
Buried Alive—Essays on Our Endangered Republic
(Franklin Square Press)
Karp, who died in 1989, was a brave and finally ranting political critic best known for his work in
Harper's
. He left behind a brutal, point-by-point account of what's at stake in this year's election: a choice between betrayal and tyranny. Seems easy enough to me.

8
Sadie Plant,
The Most Radical Gesture—The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age
(Routledge)
A clear, engaged explication of the least obscure Situationist texts (notably Guy Debord's
Society of the Spectacle
and Raoul Vaneigem's
The Revolution of Everyday Life
), along with a long, cool look at how the likes of Baudrillard and Lyotard got famous enough not to need first names by reducing such texts to fashionable mush.