Real Life Rock (93 page)

8
Modern Lovers,
Live at the Long-branch Saloon
(Fan Club/New Rose, France)
Mostly from a 1971 Berkeley show, back when Jonathan Richman wasn't just odd but unbelievable: a pudgy world-class guitarist trumpeting naïveté as the fount of all values. The most perfect moment here, though, comes from a 1971 or '72 show at Harvard. “I think this song is one of the worst songs that I've ever heard in my whole life,” guitarist John Felice says, introducing “Wake Up Sleepyheads.” “Thank you, John,” says Richman. “It's really disgusting,” Felice continues, “and I really don't want to play on it, but they're making me.” “You like the chord changes,” Richman says. “I like the chord changes,” Felice admits, “but the words are horrible.” “That's OK,” Richman finishes. “I sing the words, so it's alright.” “But I hate the song—”

9
Frank Hutchison, et al.,
White Country Blues (1926–1938): A Lighter Shade of Blue
(Columbia/Legacy)
Kicking off with “K.C. Blues” and “Cannon Ball Blues” (both 1929) by the uncanny West Virginia slide guitarist Hutchison, moving on to Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers' “Leaving Home” (1926) and “If the River Was Whiskey” (1930), the first disc of this two-CD set is an almost perfect backdrop to Bob Dylan's recent
World Gone
Wrong
. The second disc is dead, but you won't care.

10
Robert Altman, director, Altman and Frank Barhydt, writers,
Short Cuts
Altman's characters have sometimes taken his sneer away from him (
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
), but the sneer does all the work in this film, though perhaps more economically than in the past. With
Nashville
Altman's contempt for his material was so vast he had actors playing country singers write and perform their own songs; here he merely posits a nightclub with an all-black clientele (save for Tom Waits and a party that wanders in by accident) and an all-white jazz band, led by a white singer. Yes, it's Annie Ross, who's supposed to have seen better days, but the only thing phonier than her singing is her patter.

FEBRUARY
1994

1
Andreas Ammer & FM Einheit,
Radio Inferno
(EGO/Rough Trade, Germany)
This astonishing radio play was written by Ammer, produced by Herbert Kapfer, and aired last year in Munich on Bayerischer Rundfunk. Here it's a single 34-track CD: Dante's
Inferno
, cantos I through XXXIV, recast in German, English, and Latin, with all time scrambled. Apt musical composition combines with inspired sampling (a bit of the Temptations' “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” gongs and bells in a background so deep the sounds don't seem to be coming from your speakers) and an even more inspired cast: Blixa Bargeld as Dante; Phil Minton as Virgil, his guide; Yvonne Ducksworth as Beatrice (“and characters from hell”); and John Peel, the great BBC dj, as
your
guide, the voice of authority, the man with the microphone, sardonic, entertaining, professional, surprised by nothing, so cool ice wouldn't melt in his mouth no matter what circle of hell he's covering.

It's an insane conceit, a shadow play with the 20th century plunged into the 14th and then locked up. Peel: “The surrender to sin leads, by degradation, to solitary self-indulgence. Here, beatnik Burroughs has to read his own book, for all eternity.” John Cage and Marcel Duchamp call out in their own voices; soon enough all are possessed by the spirit of Bosch, laughing at the tenth circle, which is filled with the Falsifiers, the Modern artists “stricken by hideous diseases,” the Dadaists “covered in ulcers.” “Welcome to the Terrordome,” Peel announces with utter contempt. “We're coming to the countdown to Hell, our Eternal Hit Parade of Sin and Punishment—” It's funny at first. At the end, too. Strange things happen on the way.

2–3
Tara Key,
Bourbon County
(Home-stead) & Funkadelic: “Maggot Brain,” on
Maggot Brain
(Westbound reissue, 1971)
Key has been an effective lead guitarist for well over a decade, first with Louisville's Babylon Dance Band (not a name to leave behind), then with Antietam. Six or seven cuts into her first solo disc she lets loose with a twisting, uncertain exploration of heretofore hidden passages in her music, as if the likes of “V.O.B.” were her Mammoth Cave and her guitar both torchlight and pickaxe, as if her terrain didn't exist until she opened it up. It's a thrilling, mysterious kind of tension she creates—the tension of self-discovery, so many years on. Twenty-three years ago the late Eddie Hazel, guitarist of Funkadelic, went farther without, so to speak, leaving his room, almost without moving. “Maggot Brain” begins where Peter Green's 1967 “Supernatural” left off, meandering slowly, always more slowly, over ten perfect minutes, toward a peace beyond words. Guess that's why the original
Maggot Brain
liner notes, crypto-Nazi cultspeak from the Process Church of the Final Judgment, are included with the new CD—just in case you get too confident, you know?

4
Janis Joplin, “Coo Coo,” from
Janis
(Columbia/Legacy 3-CD reissue, 1966)
“We Americans are all cuckoos,—we make our homes in the nests of other birds,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1872, and no one who has recorded this scary Appalachian
ballad ever got more homelessness out of it than Joplin did. The leap she takes coming off the second line of each verse—a wail that's part abandonment to desire, half abandonment to death—was the promise her music, and her myth, almost always made, a promise she could almost never keep when tape was running.

5
Mudboy & the Neutrons, “Land of 1000 Shotguns,” from
Negro Streets at Dawn
(New Rose, France)
When this tune started life, as “Land of 1000 Dances,” the Apache Dance was probably not one of those writer Chris Kenner had in mind. These days, on certain Negro streets, it may be the only one left.

6
Kristin Hersh, “Cuckoo,” from
Hips and Makers
(4 AD)
Wordsworth, 1804: “shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice?” Why not a spell?