5) Bryan Ferry, "Frantic" (Virgin)

At first the latest solo album by the great fan-as-artist feels tired. By comparison to Ferry's outrageous version of Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" on "These Foolish Things" in 1973 (an album that also featured a hysterical take on Lesley Gore's "It's My Party"), new covers of Dylan's too-familiar "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Don't Think Twice" seem pro forma. It can take a while to catch how noisy, how vulgar the strings and harmonica make "Baby Blue," or how cutting the instrumentation on "Don't Think Twice" to piano reaffirms what the song really is: a melody. Then a few seconds of "Ja Nun Hons Pris," credited to Richard the Lion-Hearted and sung by soprano Mary Nelson, opens onto the gorgeous "A Fool for Love," where Ferry takes the king's cloak and nobody cares. After which "One Way Love" -- a melancholy, utterly obscure single by the Drifters in 1964, slightly more prominent that same year in a bouncy version by the Paris ye-ye singer Ria Bartok -- is the sun coming out.

6) Kills, "Black Rooster" (Dim Mak EP)

Press release: "A smoking 23 yr old American girl, a 'don't look at me' London boy with a thousand yard stare" -- and both of them with a thousand pounds of attitude worn like a slip. You might hear the Kinks or the Rolling Stones from 1964, Blondie's "Rip Her to Shreds" from 1976, X's "Los Angeles" from 1980, but that doesn't mean the Kills duo have heard them; they sound as if they're starting from scratch. There's a fierce guitar undertow on "Cat Claw" and a crunch in the male-female singing on "Dropout Boogie." Not to mention "Gum," a monologue.

7/8) "CQ," written and directed by Roman Coppola (MGM and Outrider), plus coming attraction

The best thing about this preening vanity project was a trailer for Jonathan Parker's "Bartleby," starring Crispin Glover. From "Back to the Future" to "River's Edge" to "Dead Man," Glover developed a persona of passive loathing at once so weird and recognizable it verged on obscenity -- but here he seems to have put everything he has into the barely different ways his precise, bland office worker can quietly deliver a five-word anarchist manifesto, "I would prefer not to." Too bad Herman Melville isn't around to hear him.

9) American Hi-Fi, Berkeley Community Theatre (May 23)

"Robert Johnson sang primitive blues about women," the producer Frank Driggs wrote in 1961 in the notes to "Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers," and the manner in which the words fell together made them toll like a bell. Opening for Elvis Costello, this self-proclaimed "rock 'n' roll band from Boston!" sang whiny songs about girlfriends.

10) Joel Selvin, "A Life With Rock Royalty," obituary for Sharon Sheeley (San Francisco Chronicle, June 2)

Sheeley wrote Ricky Nelson's 1958 "Poor Little Fool," his first No. 1 hit; with Jackie DeShannon she wrote the Fleetwoods' delicate 1961 "(He's) The Great Impostor." She died May 18 at 62. In 1959 she wrote "Somethin' Else" with Eddie Cochran, the most handsome of early white rock 'n' roll singers and, according to Nik Cohn's founding pop history "Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom," the most perfect. Sheeley was also Cochran's fiancé, injured in England along with Gene Vincent in the 1959 car crash that took Cochran's life. "Although Sheeley lived 42 more years, she never got over Eddie," writes Selvin, author of "Ricky Nelson: Idol for a Generation" and the unforgiving "Summer of Love." "She was never able to stay with another man for long. Cochran loomed over her life. She will be buried in a plot next to him."

"'Poor Little Fool' provided a modest annual stipend," Selvin concluded. "She lived quietly with her grown son, across the street from her sister. She entertained visitors with hilarious anecdotes and reminiscences, peppered with sly humor and innuendo. Sheeley was the original Riot Grrrl, even if those in her debt never knew. One young music business secretary sighed to Sheeley about Cochran's good looks a few years ago. 'Honey,' Sheeley said, 'you should have seen him when he was breathing.'"

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