Real Life Rock by Greil Marcus Page A

they were the point, is a man singing to a backing tape.
    At its most distinctive, there was something heroic, something tragic, about Clapton’s playing—you don’t sense self-expression so much as struggle: the resistance of the music in the guitarist’s mind to his will to realize that music, his resistance to losing himself in the sound he can make. What’s being transcended is a kind of neurotic distance, a wish to disappear, to cease to be; the result is focus, elegance, balance—not blues. It’s there in the solo in Cream’s ’66 “Spoonful,” especially the three final notes; most of all, it’s in the long, unsatisfied, unsatisfiable solo that ends Dave Mason’s “Look at Me Look at You,” which closed his ’70 Blue Thumb LP,
Alone Together
. That performance is not on
Crossroads
, and I’m glad.
    4 Reverend Lonnie Farris,
Vocal and Steel Guitar
(Eden Records) Walk into a room where this is playing and you’ll ask what it is before you say hello. What it is is (a) what Eric Clapton wanted on the Bluesbreakers’ ’66 “All Your Love,” and (b) an L.A. minister in 1962 with a steel guitar that sings like a Leslie. The shimmering, liquid chords are so evanescent you see them more than you hear them; Farris’s guitar doesn’t talk, it paints.
    5 Alex Bennett, a so-far undenied report, in two parts (Alex Bennett Show, KITS-FM, San Francisco, April 4) Part one: Yoko Ono is married. Part two: she got married four months after John Lennon was shot.
    6 Deficit des Années Antérieures,
When a Cap Is Rising
(Big Noise/Red Rhino 10-inch LP, UK) Tape collages with song overlays, ’82–’86, from a Belgian outfit: what Wire would be if it were a little more arty, but no less sly.
    7 Coolies, “Coke Light Ice,” from
Doug
(DB)
Doug
is a “rock opera” tripping on its own parodies, but this tune may emerge in years to come as a classic of redeemed triviality,which in some times (these) is at least half of what pop is for: a full-length song, driven by undifferentiated paranoia, about one man’s inability to get more Coke than ice out of his favorite hamburger joint.
    8 Rykodisc, press release for
The Atmosphere Collection: 8 Hours in the Big Apple
(April 1) Including “Gowanus Canal,” “Busy Office,” and “Haitian Taxi Driver,” this eight-part ambient CD set is “intended for ‘passive’ listening,” “designed to pummel the listener into resigned desperation,” and “can be programmed to play all day … thus inducing a low-range psychosis in most listeners.” It’s just a joke—but why? Folkways once put out
Sounds of the Junkyard,
featuring “Burning Out an Old Car.” And the fidelity today would be so much better …
    9 House of Schock, “Middle of Nowhere” (Capitol) Best post-Go-Go’s record, by the drummer, who had the only good smile in the band.
    10 Henry Silva, in
The Manchurian Candidate,
(1962, MGM/UA) and
Above the Law
(Warner Bros.) The linkage between the villains Silva plays in the new
Above the Law
(a sort of Chuck Norris-bloodbath for leftwingers) and the re-released
Manchurian Candidate
(the best American movie made between
Citizen Kane
and
The Godfather
) is a nice twist. It half implies that after the failure of the Soviet-Chinese Communist-American fascist Manchurian Candidate plot, the Silva character went over from the KGB to the CIA, found work as a torturer in Vietnam, made his pile with Company cocaine, and then—
    MAY 31, 1988
    1 Clash, “Complete Control,” from
The Story of the Clash, Volume I
(Epic reissue, ’77) The purpose of this conventional double-LP, complete with unreadable life-on-the-road notes by the group’s “valet,” seems to be to certify the Clash as a conventional rock band. The fact that there was something more at stake in the