Greil Marcus' Real Life Rock

1. K. McCARTY

   “Walking the Cow,” on Dead Dog’s Eyeball: Songs of Daniel Johnston (Bar None, P.O. Box 1704, Hoboken, NJ 07030). Late of Austin’s Glass Eye, Kathy McCarty here dedicates herself to a whole album’s worth of compositions by the Austin idiot sacre. Most often the oddity of the tunes falls short of their length, but McCarty’s breathless dive into “Walking the Cow” comes without warning, and for its 3 minutes 13 seconds no warning could catch her. The singer has escaped from the asylum. She has you by the throat, and the only thing more crazy than her eyes is her reasonableness. You can’t even croak back, but her voice is full, her madness audible only in the farthest curves of a bending phrase; a true rock ’n’ roll string section raises a wall of sound and puts your back up against it. You don’t know me, but right now we have to walk the cow. You do understand this, don’t you? If you don’t understand this, you do understand that the singer has only a second to get her words out before she forgets what they mean.

2. BEATLES

   “Baby It’s You,” from Live at the BBC (Apple/Capitol, recorded 1963). “Cheat, cheat”—they get as much into those two words as the world got out of “A Day in the Life.”

3. RICHARD CANDIDA SMITH

   Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California (University of California, $35). This chronicle of the emergence of an avant-garde in California after World War II maintains a magical balance between empathy and skepticism; it is a very long book that never begins to suggest it is exhausting its subject. While not effacing the events or cultural movements of the world at large, the book, like its subjects (in greatest detail, Kenneth Rexroth, Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Wallace Berman, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Robert Duncan), escapes them. What comes forth is a sense of an attenuated but vibrant public life—even if the circle of friends you showed your work to was your public, even if your public life was a public secret, a secret you weren’t sure you wanted to make public and likely as not couldn’t make public even if the desire was there. “What was left then was to operate as a dream substratum within American society, influencing without being recognized. . . . The rejection of the world as it is flings one into an otherworldly limbo between heaven and hell. By choosing retreat the avant-garde transformed themselves into a reservoir of pure tendentiousness that would become increasingly attractive and relevant as the mechanisms for extracting consensus in American society collapsed. Like [DeFeo’s) The Rose, the avant-garde of the beat era was less a definable image than a response waiting to be activated.”

4. SALLY TIMMS

   To the Land of Milk & Honey (Feel Good All Over, P.O. Box 148428, Chicago, IL 60614). Except for a romantic, retitled cover of Jackie DeShannon’s 1964 “When You Walk in the Room,” the 35-year-old Mekons veteran less sings her songs than drifts through them, world-weary, expecting nothing from the future but time. When she calls up an afternoon in Central Park with “the Grateful Dead performing for the Czar,” she sounds far better acquainted with the latter than with the former.

5. LAURIE ANDERSON

   The Ugly One with the Jewels and Other Stories—A Reading from "Stories from the Nerve Bible” (Warner Bros.). The Book of Revelation, retold in the voice of Goodnight Moon. To begin with. Her best album.

6. ANDREAS AMMER, FM EINHEIT AND ULRIKE HAAGE

   Apocalypse Live (Reine Ego/Rough Trade Records, Postfach 230 243, 44639 Herne, Germany), and YABBY U: King Tubby’s Prophesy of Dub (Blood & Fire reissue, Ducie House, 37 Ducie St., Manchester M1 2JW, UK, recorded 1976). More Revelation remakes, this time formally so, complete with ancient woodcuts and portraits of prophets and saints. Apocalypse is an English-German radio play, by turns hilarious and Wagnerian, with music from ’50s refrigerator commercials, Bible movies, and the sound of collapsing mountains alternating with the spiels of an American huckster and a continental theologian, both selling the end of the world. Prophesy is a Jamaican meditation, positing the end of the world because the composer, Vivian Jackson, seems already to have survived the great event. As such the music is the perfection of a form, or a perfect statement of redundancy: all dub is aversion of Revelation.

7. YABBY U

   King Tubby’s Prophesy of Dub (Blood & Fire reissue, Ducie House, 37 Ducie St., Manchester M1 2JW, UK, recorded 1976), and ANDREAS AMMER, FM EINHEIT, AND ULRIKE HAAGE: Apocalypse Live (Reine Ego/Rough Trade Records, Postfach 230 243, 44639 Herne, Germany). More Revelation remakes, this time formally so, complete with ancient woodcuts and portraits of prophets and saints. Apocalypse is an English-German radio play, by turns hilarious and Wagnerian, with music from ’50s refrigerator commercials, Bible movies, and the sound of collapsing mountains alternating with the spiels of an American huckster and a continental theologian, both selling the end of the world. Prophesy is a Jamaican meditation, positing the end of the world because the composer, Vivian Jackson, seems already to have survived the great event. As such the music is the perfection of a form, or a perfect statement of redundancy: all dub is aversion of Revelation.

8. VIOLENT GREEN

   Eros (Up, P.O. Box 21328, Seattle, WA 98111–3328). Offering homages to Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith and sounding like neither, this rough three-piece is interested more in drama than in sound, more in sound than in songs; track by track they seem interested less in music than in ritual. Singer-guitarist Jennifer Olay might have a soulmate in Come’s Thalia Zedek, but while Come’s recent gestures toward conventional rhythms suggest an acknowledgment that a band is completed by an audience, Violent Green’s conventional rhythms seem like a setup: eliciting the conventional expectations of a listener, the band can then dissolve them. The rhythms don’t disappear, they simply cease to matter. As the disc moves on, what at first was vague begins to feel dangerous. Olay’s deep, burred voice erases whatever face you might have mentally attached to it. That is the rite—the removal of all ego, all personality, the merging of whoever’s playing and whoever’s listening into a single, pagan smear: “the long slow suck,” as Camille Paglia once called it.

9. ELASTICA

   Elastica (DGC). Like Veruca Salt, the Breeders, and Belly, they’re female- dominated and photogenic—here the guy plays drums and looks like David Byrne. The difference is that they’re English and the vocals are less cute, though even more colorless. The album could be an A+ senior thesis—on Wire, the Buzzcocks, and other avatars of arty punk—by a student who’s got her professor’s number; there’s not a moment that hasn’t been calculated, fussed over, and bled dry. One spin and the music is used up.

   Like their market-niche peers, Elastica know how to preen. Like Veruca et al. they might have been designed for cover stories, even if all they have to sell is attitude—which is short of posture, which is short of stance, which is short of position, which is short of action, which is short of blood on the floor, which is to say short of Heavens to Betsy. The attitude Elastica and the others are selling is that the last thing on their minds is a good pop song, like Veruca Salt’s “Seether’’—cool, disdainful, hip, those high, high voices instantly catching your ear and then refusing to let go. Within days (if not hours) the performance has turned into an irritation that reveals its genius: this was a jingle before it was a song, and so effective a jingle that it’s as if the number had already been licensed to promote something else. ”Seether’’ is its own commercial, and what it’s advertising is commercial space for the likes of Elastica, the Breeders, Belly, or Veruca Salt—in other words, the bands are their own commercials

10. ANHEUSER-BUSCH

    Cross Roads Beer (“Where Substantial Flavor and Easy Drinking Meet”). Or, where Robert Johnson meets yet another incarnation of the Devil: in the TV commercial, as white folk frolic over this insipid beer, a Cream-style version of the Mississippi bluesman’s 1936 signature tune pounds the message straight out of the frame. Who gets the money?