Greil Marcus’ Real Life Rock

1. Mudboy & the Neutrons

   Negro Streets at Dawn (New Rose, 99 rue du Cherche midi, 75006 Paris), and “5” ROYALES: Monkey Hips and Rice (Rhino 2-CD reissue, 1952–62). A big, noisy rumble; a testament to Memphis eccentricity; a revel that leaps from a growled, updated riff by the late bluesman Furry Lewis (“Our father who art in Washington/Slick Willie be his name/He taken me off Rabbit Track tobacco/Put me back on novocaine!”) to the deep soul of “Dark End of the Street.” Led by Rivertown favorite son Jim Dickinson, the set almost disappears into its own black hole with a deliriously cheesy white-boy trash version of the “5” Royales’ bizarre “The Slummer the Slum.” Released in 1958, the tune, Robert Ray of the Vulgar Boatmen recalls, “was always known in Memphis (where it was a huge hit, played by every high school garage band) as ‘The Stompity Stomp’ (which was the way it was always sung).”

   The “5” Royales themselves—a dynamic, still obscure R&B vocal combo featuring Lowman Pauling, a guitarist unparalleled in his ability to wring surprise from a song—get their due on Monkey Hips and Rice, a model retrospective with sparkling liner notes by Ed Ward. Originally from North Carolina, the “5” Royales began in the 1940s, as a gospel group; by the early ’50s they had found a protean rock ’n’ roll style that combined tremendous excitement with open spaces in the sound, so that even in the midst of a rave-up their records always breathed. Their “Slummer the Slum” is no “Stompity Stomp,” but a dance-floor mystery: “Don’t try,” chants Johnny Tanner off an extreme stop-time beat, “to figure out/Where I/Come from,” instantly summoning thousands of years of heavenly interventions, divine portents, and unnatural catastrophes, along with a couple of the most unlikely guitar solos ever played.

2. Mudboy & the Neutrons

   Negro Streets at Dawn (New Rose, 99 rue du Cherche midi, 75006 Paris), and “5” ROYALES: Monkey Hips and Rice (Rhino 2-CD reissue, 1952–62). A big, noisy rumble; a testament to Memphis eccentricity; a revel that leaps from a growled, updated riff by the late bluesman Furry Lewis (“Our father who art in Washington/Slick Willie be his name/He taken me off Rabbit Track tobacco/Put me back on novocaine!”) to the deep soul of “Dark End of the Street.” Led by Rivertown favorite son Jim Dickinson, the set almost disappears into its own black hole with a deliriously cheesy white-boy trash version of the “5” Royales’ bizarre “The Slummer the Slum.” Released in 1958, the tune, Robert Ray of the Vulgar Boatmen recalls, “was always known in Memphis (where it was a huge hit, played by every high school garage band) as ‘The Stompity Stomp’ (which was the way it was always sung).”

   The “5” Royales themselves—a dynamic, still obscure R&B vocal combo featuring Lowman Pauling, a guitarist unparalleled in his ability to wring surprise from a song—get their due on Monkey Hips and Rice, a model retrospective with sparkling liner notes by Ed Ward. Originally from North Carolina, the “5” Royales began in the 1940s, as a gospel group; by the early ’50s they had found a protean rock ’n’ roll style that combined tremendous excitement with open spaces in the sound, so that even in the midst of a rave-up their records always breathed. Their “Slummer the Slum” is no “Stompity Stomp,” but a dance-floor mystery: “Don’t try,” chants Johnny Tanner off an extreme stop-time beat, “to figure out/Where I/Come from,” instantly summoning thousands of years of heavenly interventions, divine portents, and unnatural catastrophes, along with a couple of the most unlikely guitar solos ever played.

3. Elvis Costello

   “Sulky Girl,” on Brutal Youth (Warner Bros.) A quiet, vaguely noirish lead-in on electric piano, and then these opening lines: “She wears a wedding ring her sister left to throw them off the scent/Just let them guess/It’s what they expect. . . .” Wouldn’t you keep listening?

4. Tasmin Archer

   Shipbuilding (ERG/SBK). Archer is a classy young British singer with a voice she can take lower than you’d expect. Here she makes a better case than Elvis Costello did on Spike that “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” is one of his best. She does real damage with her own “Lords of the New Church.” Archer seems to sing around a song; then suddenly you realize she’s singing straight from its heart. From her own heart? Maybe not yet.

5. Mekons

   Retreat from Memphis (Quarterstick). Yes, fans, it’s that big fuzz-tone sound of the Mekons! Except that on the very first cut the guitar calls up Sergio Leone’s elegiac Once upon a Time in the West, and by the last the band is back in the 1640s, laughing at the church: “Never wanna work, always wanna play, pleasure, pleasure, every day.”

6. Charles Arnoldi

   Hound Dog, in “The Architect’s Eye,” Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (November 1993–March 1994). In the opening exhibition in Frank Gehry’s fabulous new pile, a stunner: 120 inches by 104, acrylic on wood, black-gray-blue with slashes of red, though actually it bespoke less any sort of hound dog, or “Hound Dog,” than a Texas chainsaw massacre of Demoiselles d’Avignon. Maybe Jonathan Richman can figure this one out.

7. John Lydon

   Rotten—No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (St. Martin’s, $22.95). Whipped into shape by Keith and Kent Zimmerman, two record-business tip-sheet editors, and fleshed out in long stretches by interviews with various there-when’s, from Chrissie Hynde to Lydon’s father, this “authorized autobiography of Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols” is a terrible disappointment. If he’d forced himself to write the book himself, you can think, Lydon would have had to confront both his success and his failure; instead, he more or less denies everything.

   And yet, near the end, there’s a weird reminder of a passage from Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, his great pseudodetective story about the mystery of the Knights Templar. One character is expounding upon the difference between the “four kinds of people in the world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.” The lunatic, he explains, “is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.” After nearly 350 pages of insisting that the Sex Pistols were all about him, 350 pages in which he tries doggedly to keep the world-historical stopped up in its bottle, Lydon offers this: “The Royal family has been brought up to believe it’s God’s will for them to be where they are. That’s what I find so disgraceful. . . . Think back. The only group of knights that did good were the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar. They were all exterminated because they gave up money, power and position. They were like early Franciscans and that could not be tolerated by the British establishment and they were slaughtered to a man. What would you call them? Early Communists? Their love of humanity above the love of selfishness attacked the establishment by their very existence. They fought all their wars and were a pre-SAS, the top assassins of their day, but they gave up all worldly goods, too frightening for the powers that he to tolerate for too long. Now I’m certainly no Knights Templar and I’m not out looking for the Holy Grail. . . . Which brings us back to the Royal family.”

   And which may leave us where we started: John Lydon may be a lunatic, but the punk syllogism remains intact—everyone else is a cretin, a fool, or a moron.

8. Howlin’ Wolf

   “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” “I Ain’t Gonna Be You Dog No More,” “Woke Up This Morning,” “Ain’t Going Down That Dirt Road,” on Ain’t Gonna Be Your Dog (MCA Chess 2-CD reissue, 1951–69). In 1968 Howlin’ Wolf was forced to record a psychedelic album eventually released as This Is Howlin’ Wolf’s New Album. He Doesn’t Like It. (“Dogshit” is what he called it.) Perhaps as compensation, at the same sessions the tape ran when he picked up an acoustic guitar and battered out pieces of old blues like a man knocking branches off a tree with an axe, just for the hell of it.

9. Rob Wasserman

   “Fantasy Is Reality/ Bells of Madness,” from Trios (MCA/GRP). Bassist Wasserman’s bit is that he plays with two additional, famous people (pairing Neil Young and Bob Weir, say); the results are not staggering. But the cut featuring famous nutcase Brian Wilson and his famous (ex-Wilson Phillips) daughter Carnie on his own tune—unlike the rest of the album, produced by Don Was—is disturbing. The melody contains a preternatural lift, Carnie Wilson’s voice shimmers, and when she presses on the hear in “But when I hear the bells of madness” the effect is lovely and horrible precisely to the same degree.

10. Th Faith Healers UK

    Imaginary friend (Elektra). Drone band with sense of humor makes what may turn out to be best album of year.