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October 4) I haven’t previewed this exhibit of the Sex Pistols’ art director’s work from the early ’70s on, just the catalogue/poster. But there should be wonders here, such as the pre-Pistols sticker Reid made up for clandestine posting in supermarkets: “ LAST DAYS.
BUY NOW WHILE STOCKS LAST . This store will be closing soon owing to the pending collapse of monopoly capitalism . . .”
    6 Lee “Scratch” Perry, “Grooving,” from
Battle of Armagideon (Millionaire Liquidator)
(Trojan, UK) What you slip into thesupermarket Muzak system after you’ve put up Reid’s stickers.
    7 Neil Young, Advertisement for
Landing on Water
(Geffen), in
New Musical Express
, July 26 “A Return to Rock Roots,” trumpets the copy, sweeping up after Young’s recent commercial disasters; a photo-collage shows Neville Chamberlain brandishing his “piece of paper,” now replaced by the sleeve of
Landing on Water
. The implication seems to be that Geffen, which sued Young to force him to produce salable music, is Chamberlain, and that Young is—Hitler? Who paid for this ad? What does it mean?
    8 Anna Paczuska (text) and Sophie Grillet (art),
Socialism for Beginners
(Writers and Readers) A good comic strip survey, noted for the two-page spread on “les Enragés,” fringe radicals of the French Revolution, presented as a punk band.
    9 Elvis Costello, “I Want You,” from
Blood and Chocolate
(Columbia) An anomaly on an LP that’s a lot closer to
Nuggets
than
King of America:
with a nod to “ Going Down Slow,” a spare, determined, pitiless love song to a living corpse.
    10 Robert Shelton,
No Direction Home—The Life and Music of Bob Dylan
(Beech Tree) Shelton published the first Dylan review, and it turned out to be a hook in his side. In the works for more than 20 years, his book finally arrives at a length of 578 pages, bleeding with incomprehension. Like Myra Friedman in
Buried Alive
, her Janis Joplin biography, Shelton falls helplessly into the role of village explainer. Any sense of play and discovery is banished; the endless search for sources and meanings doesn’t open up the story, it narrows it. Still, Dylan’s conversations with Shelton, from 1962 through 1985, all previously unpublished, are unparalleled in their sincerity and frankness: they make the book important. So cut this item out of the paper, take it to the bookstore, pull the book off the shelf, flip to pp. 14–18, 24–25, 38–40, 60, 63, 90–91, 109–10, 124, 129, 131, 188, 195, 279, 280–81, 287, 341–62, 479–81, 485–86, 491–92, and have a good time.
    OCTOBER 7, 1986
    1 Art Bears,
The World As It Is Today
(Re Records, UK, 1981) This old LP, new to me, arrived in the mail courtesy of Chris Cutler, editor of
Re Records Quarterly
, disc ’n’ magazine journal of radical pop theory; I threw it on, and played nothing else for days. “Out of town!” cried a man in a lugubrious voice. “My work takes me out of town!” Why was he so upset? His moans made the song into a statement of pure pathos; a displacing effect, given that the label said this was “The Song of Investment Capital Overseas.” It was capital itself that was singing: like the slaver in Randy Newman’s “Sail Away,” it was capital, not its victims (“I burn the houses down/. . . Lay out plantations/And bring prosperity/To the poorer nations”), who needed the listener’s compassion, deserved it, was getting it. The whole album moved on that level, its gnomic parables full of screams, the sound suggesting the Weimar proto-rock of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, or the doomy Futurism of Antonio Russolo. Eager to learn more, I opened the booklet of credits and lyrics, only to stop at the first line: “Play at 45 rpm.” Uh-oh.
    2 Pussy Galore,
groovy hate fuck
EP (Shove) Enough of that confusing