Real Life Rock (82 page)

6
Brenda Kahn,
Epiphany in Brooklyn
(Chaos/Columbia)
So you're at this party and this woman with great legs has you backed into a corner with how much she's talking, she's smart, she's really smart, she's so smart and she talks so fast she sucks the air right out of the room. You were having fun till that happened.

7–8
Beat Happening,
You Turn Me On
(Sub Pop/K Records) and Roger Corman, director:
Teenage Caveman
(Columbia TriStar video)
Yea, verily, and how weird. T'was with producer Jerry Dennon of Beat Happening's own Great Northwest that English pop star Ian Whitcomb recorded his horrible
1965 international smash “You Turn Me On.” Thus you can chalk up Beat Happening's new album title—anomalous for this doggedly we're-flat-and-we're-proud trio—to cultural memory. But it's unlikely their Olympia, Washington, hometown provides the connections that would have tipped them off that their tune “Teenage Caveman” would hit the stores the same season as the reissue of its namesake: an unbelievable 1958 oedipal drama starring a loin-clothed Robert Vaughn and a lot of dinosaurs. That convergence you have to credit to serendipity, or the fact that Beat Happening singer Heather Lewis' heart is always in the right place. For more information, see
Beat Happening 1983–85
(K/Feel Good All Over),
Jamboree
(Sub Pop/K, 1988), and
Dreamy
(Sub Pop, 1991).

9
Peter Gabriel,
US
(Geffen)
When he's on—as with “Come Talk To Me,” with Sinéad O'Connor making trouble in the background—he's beginning to sound like Richard Harris looks.

10
Dave Morey, “10 at 10,” KFOG-FM 104.5, San Francisco (September 23).
Running since 1982, Morey's every-weekday show contextualizes “ten great songs from one great year” by combining often forgotten hits with audio documentary far richer than radio news ever offered in its own time. Morey creates the instant history the radio should have delivered, and the results are often startling, as with his Barry Goldwater montage from the 1964 election. He opened with a soundbite from Goldwater's speech accepting the Republican nomination, cut to the candidate's response to a student's question about avoiding war (“Peace through strength”), to the Goldwater slogan that made so many people nervous, “I
N
Y
OUR
H
EART
Y
OU
K
NOW
H
E'S
R
IGHT
”—and then, with no pause whatsoever, Morey hit you in the face with the brittle opening chords of the Rolling Stones' “Not Fade Away,” the Buddy Holly cover that introduced them to the U.S.A. Bomp budda
BAH
—it was no contest. This was a discourse contradiction, a discourse warp; the previous forms of speech disappeared, were rendered incomprehensible, turned into babble by the emotional clarity of a few harsh seconds of true rock 'n' roll—a language that didn't translate back. That this event—this imaginary event?—was anything but inevitable was proven by Morey's next segue, into the Temptations' “The Way You Do the Things You Do.” It made no breach; it translated into the political speech around it with ease.

JANUARY
1993

1
Lou Reed, “Foot of Pride,” at “Columbia Records Celebrates the Music of Bob Dylan,” Madison Square Garden, NYC, October 16 (radio and pay-per-view TV broadcast)
In Bob Dylan's version, from 1983, this long and muscular song sounds vaguely influenced by Lou Reed. In Reed's version Judgment Day looms and—backed by Booker T., Duck Dunn, and Steve Cropper, the MGs minus the late Al Jackson—Reed leads its charge. All debts are paid before the first line closes; from then on the tune is Reed's more than it was ever Dylan's. All those years of clunky talk songs, good ones, bad ones—here Reed grabs a note, rings it, wrings it: like Jimi Hendrix said, he'll kiss the sky. For the first time in an era Reed
sings
, heading into each chorus like Jan Berry, if Jan Berry were to finally solve Dead Man's Curve—and as written the chorus is so strong each one seems as if it has to be the last, as if nothing could follow it. Lou, you've got to put this out.

2
Larry Doyle, writer, Alan Kupperberg, illustrator,
The Fantastic Foursome
(comic book insert to
Spy
,
October)
Sure to be a valued artifact of the '92 election, and the story line is wickedly consistent: the opening panel has superheroes Bill (“The Golden Doughboy”), Hillary (“Sweet-and-Sour Girl”), Al (“The Wooden Wonder”), and Tipper (“The Hearth Keeper”) campaigning as a band (“Born to Run the U.S.A.”), and the drama reaches its apex when Barbara Bush (“Silver Ox”) calls Tipper a bitch and Tipper slaps her mouth shut with a PMRC parental-advisory label.

3
Soul Asylum,
Grave Dancers Union
(Columbia)
A balanced, lyrical, commercial album from an outsider combo a lot of people thought had seen its day—but if you want your heart broken in the middle of a laugh, go right to “Without a Trace.” A little detail like “Don't forget your mace/If you're out walking late” slips through this slapstick chronicle of no-future almost before you have a chance to realize that's not the way it has to be.

4
Chuck Berry, et al.,
Stoned Alchemy
—
27 Original Blues and R & B Hits That Inspired the Rolling Stone
s
(Instant/Charly reissue, 1948–64, UK)
A collection based on obscure Stones numbers, from odd singles to ancient rehearsal tapes, and topped by Bo Diddley's bizarre 1956 mini-play “Cops and Robbers.” “Yeah,” the cop says after the robber's been collared, “we gonna put him so far back in jail this time, they gonna have to pump
air
in to him.” I wonder if Mick still has a copy.