RSSThe five familiar outtakes and B sides included are a bonus--the strength of this music is that its historical moment is so definitively over, forcing us to hear or rehear it as pure sound. Steve Jones's immense, bluesless riffs and Paul Cook's stone simple beats have gained magnitude with the years. Original bassist Glen Matlock always provided melodic glue. And it's impossible to miss how John Rotten-Lydon's hilariously ill-humored gutter-prophet howl, now broadened but not softened with age and a decade-plus of paid acting lessons in Public Image Ltd., could define both a new rock voice and a new rock attitude. Sure Bollocks is where the curious should start. But this one is more than the profit-taking reprise it pretends to be.
When Amy Rigby moons over the bookstore clerk who checks her knapsack, you figure out not just that her j-o-b is only a means to leisure, which is how it works for most people, but that her leisure has a lot of slack in it. Diary of a Mod Housewife (Koch) reveals how good girls stay loose after 30. If Beer & Kisses isn't on some chart soon, she should move to Nashville. She'll like the rents.
Playboy, Aug. 1996
 |
June 1996 | Sept. 1996 |  |