Records

Records

Everybody knows that Motown has nothing to do with Detroit. The challenge that Motown presented to the prevailing axis of the music industry when Berry Gordy first set up shop was a challenge on the power structure’s own terms. The assumptions were the same; there was no new intellectual or moral stance. It was just a question of doing the same job better. Finding a formula, molding artists and music to the new readymades, and grinding out the product. The orientation was wholly commercial, wholly pragmatic, completely successful within the framework which the Motown people chose for themselves. Of course, the Motown formula sprang to a degree spontaneously from the genius of Smokey Robinson and others, but once evolved, it was applied relentlessly. Newwine in old bottles, the same old Biz with a slightly shifted power base.

It’s not completely a Bad Thing, mind you; a lot of people have made a lot of bread through being susceptible to the Motown molding process, who might not have been able to get what they wanted any other way. But organic music, the new music, our music, progressive music, living music, whatever you can call it, has nothing to do with the Motown operation. Why, Motown even has a bowling team.

Anyway, so Motown, now a Force in the Biz, looks for new worlds to conquer, and like Colgate-Palmolive moving into the mouthwash business, makes its assault on “The Underground” this month. They have a new label, Rare Earth, and an initial release of five albums: S.F. Sorrow, by the Pretty Things; Blues Helping, by Love Sculpture; Rare Earth, by a band of the same name\ Messengers, by The Messengers; and Bedlam, by the Rustix. Taking the albums in order of interest . . .

S.F. SORROW - THE PRETTY THINGS; RARE EARTH RS 506.

Gone are the Pretty Things of yesteryear. Back when the various possibilities of long hair and all that were first being explored, in 1964 or thereabouts, right after the Rolling • Stones had begun to associate the phenomenon with funk, the Pretty Things wre presented to the American public, on Hullabaloo or Shindig or one of those programs, as a raunchier version of the Stones. And the main thing about them was that pretty, they weren’t. They had, for the time, hair way down to here, they were scruffy looking, for the time, and they were playing rhythm and blues which, for the time again, was pretty dirty. Actually, they sounded a lot like the Stones (Dick Taylor, lead guitar, one of the two original P.T.’s still with the band, had formerly played bass for the Stones. Not being able to find my copy of The Real Story of The Rolling Stones as Told to Billy Sheppard, I can’t tell you why he left.), but not too much of that was being done at the time, and it sounded pretty distinctive. And they exuded the same kind of primal energy that only the Stones (and maybe the Poets) were then putting out. They had one hit, Road Runner, and an album on Fontana (The Pretty Things, SRF 67544), and they drifted into obscurity.

This album is, of all things, a Rock Opera. It’s about Sebastian F. Sorrow, who is born to the life of a factory town, falls in love with the girl next door, and when war comes, feeling the call of duty, becomes a soldier. When the war is over, he finds himself “in a strange land called Amerik” (get it?), a place of “many bright new and bigger factories,” and plenty of work for everyone. Deciding to make this his home, Sorrow sends his childhood sweetheart a balloon ticket, and waits for her to join him. But the balloon crashes and burns as it lands, and sorrow is left to wander the streets of New York alone and forlorn. One evening, while brooding on a bench in “Central Clearing” (get that one?) he is approached by the mysterious Baron Saturday, who takes him on a psychedelic excursion into despair, a flight to what Sorrow has thought was the moon, but turns out to be his own head. Baron Saturday takes him through the mouth and into the mind, a hall of mirrors where fragmented reflections show him his past life. Finally, through “two immense opaque windows,” he sees the most painful sight yet.

“Ip the morning when the heavy mantle of the dream had slipped from his shoulders, Sorrow began to search for new values.” But neither he nor the people around him can be saved. The blight of the factories grow, and madness envelops him, an old man, alone.

OK. All this is done in neo-Sgt. Pepper Psychedelic, with appropriate textures and colorations. If the story line is kind of threadbare, at least it’s no more so than any other “opera” has ever been, and if it seems a trifle contrived, well, that, too is in the Grand Tradition. As to whether or not a Rock Opera should exist at all, I can venture no opinion, but as far as I can tell, the best effort in that direction so far has been The Small Faces’, on the second side of Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake (the round album), Significantly, it was also the least ambitious, and it was all right there on the record; you didn’t need a libretto with it to know that there was a story involved (I listened to S.F. Sorrow the first time without looking at the jacket, and I’ll be damned if I knew it was anything but a bunch of tunes). The music was better, too.

As a collection of tunes, S.F. Sorrow doesn’t stand up that well. It’s mind music, which is I suppose ok, but it doesn’t really lead you through any psychedelic garden of delights. Its biggest fault is probably that is’s about two years out of date; you’ve heard it all before, and it’s kind of boring. I heard part of it on the radio last night, though, and it sounded pretty good. Come to think of it, that’s also the only way I could ever stand to listen to the Moody Blues, so I don’t know.

BLUES HELPING - LOVE SCULPTURE; RARE EARTH RS 505.

RARE EARTH - RARE EARTH; RARE EARTH RS 507

BEDLAM - RUSTIX; RARE ~ EARTH RS 508 MESSENGERS MESSENGERS; RARE EARTH RS 509.

A three man English blues band playing three man English blues band music; that is to say, blues tunes with very little blues feeling.

A Michigan bar band aspiring to In-A-Gadda-DaVida with 21 minutes and 30 seconds of Smokey Robinson’s Get Ready.

A Rochester, New York bar v. band sounding like every other bar band in every other medium size city in the country: brassy and boring.

A band that sounds like they were some recording studio owner’s (who didn’t really know anything about recording) pet: long solos on bubble gum music.

Rare earth, indeed.

The Love Sculpture set, for example. It’s not that it’s a bad record, it’s just that you’ve ! heard it a hundred times before. The same waterfall of notes that lead players in trios usually seem to think necessary; after a while it gets a little boring. Not all those notes make sense, you see. And when guitar player Dale Edmunds strives for spareness, as on Don’t Answer The Door,

. you discover the paucity of ideas that motivates the flash on the other tunes. At the same time, Edmunds plays some pretty good licks, like on Wang Dang Doodle (especially toward the end).

The thing about most English blues bands is that by the time the music gets this far removed from the experience which gave birth to it, much of its intelligibility and coherence is lost. An exceptional white American band like Canned Head, made up of guys whose lives are far more tied up in the blues than these three English dudes, can pull off On the Road Again, and retain some of the flavor of Will Shade’s consciousness and all that went into the song, but when Love Sculpture does it, that whole dimension is lost, and you wind up with a cut that is somewhat precious and not really relatable. Nevertheless, this is music that by its dynamics and textures demands your attention - it’s not background music - the only thing is, that attention could be better spent with any one of a thousand other records.

But mediocre as it is, Blues Helping can be taken seriously. It’s impossible to take any of the three American Rare Earth bands at all seriously.

Rare Earth don’t do anything particularly badly, but they don’t do anything particularly well, either. It’s soul-oriented bar music about which I have nothing to say. When I first listened to the album, the thing I thought about most was when it would be over.

The Rustix and Messengers albums were both produced by one R. Dean Taylor, a cat who thinks that you capture the excitement of a live performance by overdubbing a crowd noise track at about three times the volume it would have been recorded at if the band were actually playing live. The cuts on which he does this, and the tunes he wrote for the Messengers lp are the low points in an otherwise dismal hour’s worth of music. His songs (A Little Bit For Sandy, Window Shopping, Greyhound To Indiana) sound like early Monkees material. Derivitive of Early Monkees, actually.

But I have to describe these albums to you. Take Bedlam, for example. It starts off with Feelin ’Alright (Rare Earth also does this tune on their album, and both bands manage to completely avoid the spirit of the original), and moves to / Guess This Is Goodbye, which is a “softly burning candle at the crossroads of my memory”' song. Wonderful. Then I Heard It Through The Grapevine, with canned crowd noises. Skipping across the high points, there’s Wednesday’s Child, which sounds a whole lot like the Temptations’ recent singles, the now required “goin’ up to the country” tune, Country, which is performed as a march (with added strings and horns), Free Again, which is like a lower register Frank Sinatra number, too mawkish to be believed, and a Message song, That’s What Poppa Told Me, which I just can’t go into right now.

You know these dudes can’t teach you anything. Even their influences are so pedestrian: Blood, Sweat & Tears here, Crosby, Stills & Nash there. This could be one of a countless number of bands, bar musicians dressed up in bell bottoms, fancy shirts and vests (why do these people always think vests are de rigeur?), trying to work with readymades they don’t really understand.

The Messenger’s album is more of the same. It starts out with canned crowd noise on Louie Louie, and goes downhill from there. For example, they do what I guess is supposed to be a heavied-up version of the Boxtops’ The Letter, but it’s just like the crowd noises: readymade bullshit heaped on without discretion or taste. One nice thing about the record is that now I know what the words to Louie Louie are.

I could have lived without the knowledge.

Deday LaRene

THE BAND; CAPITOL STA0132

The Band conclusively proves -that the Band are exactly what Music From Big Pink showed them to be; a damn fine, extremely enjoyable rock and roll band. How so many people got tied up in the peripheral data of country and western nuance and started calling this record “hillbilly hip” or whatever the term is for non-honky c&w this week, is far beyond me.

The only thing one does with this album is sit down and enjoy it - like, Rag Mama Rag will probably inspire you to smile . . . hopefully, you do. Now, certainly, we find a great degree of rural Canadian funk enclosed within our archaic looking package but then, again, Faron Young ain’t too likely to list it as one of his favorites. In the field of instrumentation alone, there are far too many quasi-esoteric devices used to justify referring to this as “country rock”.

The first thing that impressed me about the band was that they have a sound -characterized first, by Levon Helm’s drumming. It’s hardly classic rock percussion; when Levon taps a cymbal it’s an event. He also relies, far more heavily than any drummer I can ever remember in any idiom, on his "footwork. Secondly, providing the color, are Garth Hudson’s organ and Jaime Robertson’s guitar playing. That’s the rock element. The country factor largely comes from Richard Manuel’s vocal; to someone unfamilar with a Canadian accent, it certainly must sound like below-Mason/Dixon sharecropper U.S. of A. redneckisms. In reality, that’s just the way the friendly Canuck speaks . . . it’s rather pleasant once you’re used to it. Listen to Gordie Howe sometime ... or even Lome Greene.

The other reason for a country interpretation most certainly is due to the fact that the spiritual referrents are rural; and, in the dear old Amerika we all grew up in, rural has come to mean southern. Sorry, folks, and next time let’s not be 'so ethnocentric. The Band themselves talk about the theme of the record being harvest . . . it’s really a great view of what the Midwestern farmer is all about. My father who grew up on a Midwestern farm (and whose father was Canadian) would understand this album really well, I think.

The individual songs are all j excellent examples of what the Band can do; the choice of what’s best relies upon a decision as to what you’d prefer to see them be. Me, I listen to Cripple Creek and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down a lot. Rag Mama Rag isn’t a song I’d smoke a whole lot of dope to but it would stand up well behind some beer •' and your favorite women, maybe while “relaxin’/in my/sleepin’ bag”. On this cut and Dixie Garth runs the gamut of rock piano playing. Really tasteful stuff.

Jemima Surrender opens the second, featuring Hudson playing these neat little solos around Robertson’s guitar and what must be Richard Manuel’s baritone. Rick Danko’ bass work with Helm’s always impressive drumming make this an instrumentally excellent cut. The herky-jerky Manuel vocal is used to it’s best there (in fact, Richard’s vocals were the disappointment of that record for me.) Look Out Cleveland almost descends into a yodel. At first I hated it but after not being able to get it out of my head for a couple of days I decided peaceful coexistence was the wisest course. I tend to like all the tunes where the piano/organ combination is used (e.g, Chest Fever on Big Pink).

Jawbone is a rock and roll song disguised as a jugband stomp. And King Harvest Has Surely Come is hearkening back to the best work of the Big Pink l.p.

But those are just my favorites - seven songs out of twelve isn’t a bad percentage. And I never said I didn’t like the others. The Band is gonna be around for awhile . . . not that they haven’t been already..

Dave Marsh

Emergency! The Tony Williams Lifetime

EMERGENCY! - THE TONY WILLIAMS LIFETIME; POLYDOR 25-3001 Emergency; Beyond Games;

Cont. on next page

Where; Vashkar; Via The Spectrum; Road; Spectrum; Sangria For Three; Something , Spiritual.

Tony Williams, drums; John M Laughlin, guitar; Larry Young, organ.

It seems like only yesterday . that the greatest drummer in the world (my choice) started popping up on various Bluenote recordings — with the D. J.’s usually mentioning the fact that this cat who played so much and who had a style so distinctive that after a few hearings you could identify him right away no matter who he was backing up - that this cat was only 17. Actually it wasn’t only yesterday, it was 1963.

Tony’s record debut was on ’ a Jackie McLean Bluenote date called One Step Beyond. In fact it was alto saxist McLean who discovered Tony in the oblivion of a Boston nightclub in December of 1962 and brought him to New York to I work with him in a Living Theater production of The Connection (McLean had been in the original Living Theater 1 production of that famous play about drug addicts when it first opened in 1959). This led to other gigs and Bluenote recordings under such leaders as trumpeter Kenny Dorham, trombonist Grachan Marcus. Ill, and pianist Herbie Hancock. Each record he appeared on was enhanced, was made something a little more exciting than it would have been otherwise. He did two records as a leader for Bluenote, Lifetime and Spring, both of fhem free flowing and forward looking with a tendency toward introspection, utilizing talents like tenor saxists Wayne Shorter and Sam Rivers (who Tony had played with in Boston), Herbie Hancock, and bassists Richard Davis and Ron Carter. As avant-garde as these records were, none of them really even hinted at what Tony’s 1969 conception would be when he would bring his newly formed group to Poly dor.

McLean didn’t have Tony for long. Miles Davis snatched him up in ‘63 and it was the beginning of a beautiful metamorphosis for both trumpeter and drummer. I won’t go into details aboutTony’s five year tenure with Miles (which is still being released on records, records always lagging behind time -the latest lag release being the beautiful In a Silent Way). If you haven’t heard any of those many Miles-Williams collaborations by now -tough. But I will relent and reccomend what I think is the best and most exciting example of how Miles and Tony turned each other ‘round and ‘round

Miles Davis In Europe -Columbia CS 8983 - which was recorded live in France at the Antibes Jazz Festival in 1963. Tony recently left Miles and formed his own group and this two-record set is their first release.

About the group and what they display on the record: guitarist John McLaughlin, a new man from Britian who was also featured on Miles In a Silent Way, has the necessary versatility to keep up with Tony’s conception. He can play in any style convincingly

the sustained note style of hard rock, wa-wa, lean linear phrases like many modern mainstream jazz guitarists, chordal comping, and various sounds as yet unclassified. Larry Young is the only organist I can think of that I can stand listening to for any length of time (and this record is over an hour long). A few years back I dug Jimmy Smith and his funky exuberance, but I changed and he didn’t which was a drag. And it seemed like every organist in the world was trying to emulate Jimmy Smith. But, Young is more interested in shadings and colorings (and wierd sounds) than in funky cliches. And when he solos, his style is comparable to a modern impressionistic pianist —someone like Herbie Hancock.

The surprising thing about this record is that the organ-guitar-drums combination has always been one of the dullest in jazz. But to call this a jazz record is to tell less than half of it (like saying “Moby Dick is about a whale” to quote someone I can’t remember). Says Tony in the liner noted “My idea was to create my own audience where I didn’t have to compete with any musician’s concept, not rock, not let jazz or any other form dictate my musical development.” The energy level on the album is fantastically high — the versatility and interaction consistantly dazzling.

Another surprise is that Tony recites and sings on this album, but only on three cuts (Beyond Games, Where, and Via the Spectrum Road). His high soft vocie has an unearthly effect although the lyrics are occasionally banal. The high energy, the different directions, the “openess” of this group to all music — it would really be far out if Tony brought his Lifetime to Detroit. The sad part is that he would probably be stuck into

Baker’s Keyboard Lounge when his real audience can be found in either of Detroit’s two rock palaces. Shame.

Anyway, if you’ve been keeping your head open to new sounds then you probably are ready for this record. And, of course, it’s fum because like Tony says “It’s having fun that makes you grow.”

Richard C. Walls

IKE AND TINA TURNER: RIVER DEEP - MOUNTAIN HIGH

A&M SP 4178 PRODUCED BY PHIL SPECTOR

If the producer has begun to assume a position of increasing prominence in rock today, the roots of that change can be directly traced to one man, Phil Spector.

Spector has been the genius behind a number of once popular groups. The first was The Teddy Bears with To Know Him is To Love Him. According to the legend, the lyrics came from his father’s tombstone. Then the Ronettes, Darlene Love, the Crystals, Bobb B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans. The approach was known as the “wall of sound”. Instrumental backing so heavy that it forced the singer to swim in a bath of sound. Very tight charts, strings and horns and guitars, almost drumless; the sound was nearly classical, often compared to Wagner.

Spector probably had his greatest commerical success in this country with the Righteous Brother’s You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’ in 1965. At this point his stature was such that he only needed to produce one album a year in order to maintain his position. There were few competitiors (though god knows, Bob Crewe tried valiantly).

The next year, Phil decided that he’d like to produce Ike and Tina Turner. The Turners and their Ikettes had long been stone spade r’n’b favorites. Their music was an acquired taste, much more popular with black and British audiences than with white American youth. (The British have always dug rhythm and blues more than white Americans. As witness, the Stones or Beatles doing Marvin Gaye or Little Richard tunes). And it had always had that hard edge,

characteristic of pre-Motown soul.

It was a noble experiment; a smashing success in Britain, a dismal failure in the United States. As a consequence this album wasn’t released until now in the U.S. although, since it was so popular and influential in Britain, there has been much clamoring for it on this side of the ocean for the last two years.

ROLLING STONE was supposed to have had the record to give away with a subscription offer this spring but A&M, which holds the American rights, chose not to release it at that point. But with the success of the Blue Thumb recording of Ike and Tina they’ve apparently decided that the time is opportune.

First it sho aid be made clear that Spector didn’t produce all of this album, only half of it. Six cuts were produced by Ike Turner even though the album credits only Spector (indeed, the liner notes suggest that A&M considers it more a Phil Spector album than an Ike and Tina Turner record.) The British version lists who produced what; this version lists only Phil as the producer. Taking for granted that Turner produced his own songs and Spector his own, we can assume that Ike produced: / Idolize You, A Fool In Love, Make Em ’ Wait, Such a Fool For You, and thfot Spector did: River Deep, Hold On Baby and I’ll Never Need More Than this. Since It’s Gonna Work Out Fine was an Ike and Tina hit alone and Save the Last Dance for Me and A Love Like Yours are obviously wall of sound approaches, this leaves only Oh Baby! and Every Day I Have To Cry debatable. Oh Baby is only too obviously Ike’s (Spector would never, could never, produce anything with that hard a sound. All his songs’ edges are sort of rounded off by the strings.)

Thus we have two albums to deal with and compare; an Ike Turner production and another Phil Spector production. Turner’s music, classicly as in Idolize You, is hard, more or ■ less traditional rhythm and blues making fantasic use of Tina’s voice as a sensual solo instrument. The Horns, in typical R and B fashion are used to play backing riffs, as rhythm instruments, counterpoint to the Ikettes.

Spector’s sound on the record is typically string oriented. Soaring crescendoes of orchestration follow Tina’s vocal delivery. The wall of sound is built making it virtually impossible to

distinguish individual instruments.

The Ikettes sing a rhythmic backing as opposed to their previous (under Ike) funky counterpoint. The string riffs on River Deep, Mountain High, are very reminiscent of the Righteous Brothers on Lovin’ Feelin ’.

The success of the album is really built on which of, or how many of, Spector’s tunes work. All of Ike’s do, for the obvious reason that that’s the sound Tina is supposed to have. The Spector tunes can only be allowed to work if one can appreciate that there is a, possibility of different kinds of soul. Tina’s voice isn’t the same on Idolize You as it is on A Love Like Yours but both songs are still funky, moving, Tina Turner songs. And Hold On Baby, for example, is a screaming Tina Turner song which Spector’s arrangement fits perfectly into.

Spector’s weakness is in chosing material a shade too mawkish for Tina’s voice. Tina’s appeal is built upon sensuality and, robbed of that, she is only Dionne Warwick. On two of the Phil Spector cuts she is robbed of that throatness and they both fall flat on their faces. Save The Last Dance for Me and I’ll Never Nood More Than This are simply over-spectored. They sound like they were arranged with left-over charts from Ronettes records. And it just isn’t fair to sandwich Every Day I Have To Cry between the fantastic Such A : Fool For You and Oh Baby! Tina ends the latter cut nearly screaming and then you have - this huge string thing and she minces in like Nancy Wilson.

Still, this is a historic album and a hell of a good one. That the experiment only worked half of the time is the only drawback, but then experiments are not necessarily meant to be .successful. And River Deep Mountian High is a really beautiful piece of music. George Harrison may be right in calling it “the perfect record.” For that and Idolize You and three or four of the other cuts on this record it’s worth the money.

Dave Marsh

TAJ MAHAL - GIANT STEP/DE OLE FOLKS AT HOME; COLUMBIA GP 18.

You’ve really got to like Taj. He’s gone back to touch his roots (realizing that there was music before Elmore James) with a sense of and he never falls into a; cultural nationalist unpleasantness. At the same time, he’s essentially an L. A.

Street spade. Not a street spade exactly, dealing watches or cocaine out of a dirty sport jacket, but a street spade, hanging out on the Strip, jiving with all his good buddies. An L.A. street spade, which means he listens to the Flying Burrito Brothers and all that, and that his sense of humor sometimes gets a little precious. But although I’ve never met him, I know he’s a good dude.

The peculiar Southern California orientation (I guess) results in an unusual (and not always good) melange. Like Six Days on the Road, a Dave Dudley classic shitkicker tune given a Chuck Berry treatment over a country music lead from Jesse Edwin Davis, who has a pretty good sense of humor himself. Or the title song, Giant Step, which 1 guess is from some crummy movie or other, and smacks heavily of early post-Dylanism (“Take a giant step outside your mind,” and like that). Or the entirely forgettable Keep Your Hands Off Her, which just sounds like shitty Otis without horns.

On the other hand, you get things like Give Your Woman What She Wants, which counterposes a slide guitar lead with Memphis soul singing. It’s not really a new synthesis or anything like that, but it sounds pretty good, and it’s something 1 never heard done before. And the bumpy, stop-filled treatment he gives Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, which reminds me a lot of Corinna, the best thing on the second album, but doesn’t work quite as well.

He also throws in a couple of uninspiring formula shuffles. You ’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond, for example, stands out in my mind as a tune I won’t remember tomorrow, or ever play the album with the intention of hearing. And to fill out the formula, there’s Bacon Fat, a slow down blues on which they all stretch out, often not to their advantage. The harp break drags, and Jesse Edwin Davis (love that name) carries his typical understatement a bit too far.

And then there’s the second record of the album. Alone with his banjo, steel bodied guitar and harp, Taj puts on a little entertainment for all his good friends “out there on the other end of this phonograph needle.” Here’s where his fascination with primitive blues finds its purest expression. I suppose it’s admirable that he’s together enough to do Linin’ Track and Wild Ox Moan as unselfconsciously as he does, but a lot of the interest that this kind of quasi-field holler usually holds for me lies in the fact that when I’ve heard them before, on Library of Congress Recordings, and the like, they’ve been recorded slices of life; when it’s a Georgia chain gang singing, the sound evokes mental pictures of the scene of their creation. Now I know that Taj ain’t swingin’ a hammer, so a lot of it comes off as if not cute; then maybe just a little dull. Of course, I’m no musicologist, and the . musical interest that much of this stuff holds for me is, I suppose, marginal. Not so with Country Blues-No. 1, or Candy Man, or Annie’s Lover; or about, in fact, half the stuff on this record. (I could, however, do without his Bill Cosby routine on A Little Soulfull Tune).

The first cut on Taj’s first album was Leavin ’ Trunk, a fantastic jam which he approached, but never quite lived up to, on that set. The second album was even spottier, and this album could have been effectively pared in half; I’m afraid that Taj can’t yet fill four sides with consistently relatable music. (But then, how many bands can?) To have him sitting on your front porch, rapping and messing around with his guitar for a couple of hours would be one thing, but the distance that recording interposes between the artist and the listener requires something more, something that, as of yet, Taj hasn’t been able to sustain.

Deday LaRene

ARLO GUTHRIE RUNNING DOWN THE ROAD; REPRISE 6346

Arlo Guthrie deserves better than to be analyzed as a junior edition of Bob Dylan, out of phase a year or two, although Running Down the Road invites precisely that sort of analysis. The superrelaxed live performance flavor of the first

two albums has given way to a much more polished, if no less relaxed approach. He’s working more with a band, as a band, and there’s a new emphasis on the augmented instrumented instrumental aspects. Folk has phased into modern country, the balladeer into the performer. His singing shows greater attention to phrasing and inflection that is conventionally appealing. And he got his hair cut. At the same time, his images are getting more abstract, sometimes more complex, direct and yet often . obtuse. And he’s looking badder, if you can apply that word to him at all.

Now, some of -these developments were things that Dylan went through a couple of years ago, and some of them he’s going through right now. On some of them he’s switched directions, and some of them relate linearly to Dylan today. But the forwards where Dylan went backward in respect oT this, backwards where Dylan went forward in respect of that indicate that the forwards and backwards are false constructs - that you can’t judge one man by the progress of the other. And the whole enterprise tastes suspiciously like Methedrine, which is to say . . .

This is a pretty nice album. He sings Woody’s Oklahoma Hills, the family exaggeration, there’s a nice instrumental of Pete Seeger’s Living In The Country, that sounds just like that, and Mississippi John Hurt’s Creole Belle is lilting/corny/pretty in his nicest voice. There’s Gus Cannon’s Stealin’, done the way we would have used to done it if we had ever used to do it. And there are some good new Arlo Guthrie tunes.

Like Wheel of Fortune, which I think is the best thing on the album. It’s easy and mellifluous, and it shows a fascination with word sounds that evoke meaning out of the sense impression rather than the words themselves. Which is to say, the words are nice, but the overall sense is kind of obscure if you take them in sentences. I suppose you could say he’s getting more obscure in his writing. Compare Wheel of Fortune, or Every Hand In The Land With anything on the first album, for example.

And Oh, In The Morning, which is even farther from the first album:

Oh, in the morning Feel like the sun Coming up on daytime Shine on everyone.

Coming up on darkness Want me in your arms

Let me know another lonely night

Has come and gone.

Oh, in the evening Feeling lone at last All of the things That the daytime brings Flow gently in the past There is nothing left to see ‘Cept the stars and moon Let me know another lonely day

Is coming through.

Simple but complex but direct but abstract. You know?

His images, though, are simpler , than Dylan’s taken level for level. His rambling is more dustbowl-pure. He’s not driven, like you might have thought the young Dylan was, he just likes to move around (or stay still, or whatever). Of course, that’s what Dylan was saying about himself all along, I guess, but what he said and did was more susceptible to an interpretation of intensity than what Arlo’s been doing.

So, like 1 said, a pretty nice album. It’s got some other good stuff on it that I haven’t mentioned, too. No cute stories, though.

Deday LaRene

ROLAND KIRK VOLUNTEERED SLAVERY - ATLANTIC SD 1534 Volunteered Slavery; Spirits Up Above; My Cherie Amour; Search For the Reason Why; I Say a Little Prayer; One Ton; A Tribute to John Coltrane (a. Lush Life b. A fro-Blue c. Bessie’s Blues); Three For the Festival

Roland Kirk, tenor sax, flute, nose flute, manzello, stritch, gong, whistle, and vocals; Charles McGhee, trumpet; Dick Griffen, trombone; Ron Burton, piano; Bernor Martin, bass; Sammy Brown, Jimmy Hopps or Charles Crosby, drums.

For those who don’t know, Roland Kirk is the man who puts three horns in his one mouth and plays them simultaneously. He is also blind, a fact which he occasionally refers to jokingly while chatting with the audience. And he is brilliant. And erratic. And he has this record out with two sides - a studio side and a “live” side.

Roland is completely uninhibited and overflowing with music. He plays a variety of instruments in a variety of styles but is generally agressive, celebrating the pure joy of creating. A Roland Kirk record will always have many aspects, some a drag, some outrageous, some exhilerating, some ecstatic. This one has the full range.

The studio side is pretty light weight stuff, with the exception of two cuts. On My Cherie Amour Roland has taken Stevie Wonder’s mediocre pop song and has changed it into a very pretty flute piece. And dig the baby police siren at the beginning and Roland’sraunchy la la la’s. I Say a Little Prayer opens up with tenor sax and rhythm section in time suspension with Roland saying “They shot him down, they shot him down to the ground - but we’re gonna say a little parayer for him; anyway.” (Martin Luther King? Malcolm X?) This is the ; best of the studio cuts. He j plays the melody with his three horns in one mouth bit and it really moves. His tenor solo has more quotes in it then I’ve ever heard before in any kind of solo - two from Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, one from Out of This World and about half dozen more from songs that sound familiar but vyhose names I can’t recall. All surrounded by Roland’s own ideas which range from funky to far out. Nice. The other cuts on this side are marred by the Roland Kirk Spirit Choir. They sound just about like what you would expect them to. Medium uncool.

The “live” side, recorded at 1968 Newport Jazz Festival where Roland was a big hit,, features the mad genius in the throes of a creative frenzy. It starts with a Kirk original, One Ton which has a maniacal flute sole and we’re off. The Coltrane tribute is a tour de force featuring a lush tenor ballad, a rousing manzello foray (a manzello is similar to a soprano sax), and a bouncing tenor blues. The first two {Lush Life and Afro-Blue) were popular Coltrane recordings and the last (Bessie’s Blues, dedicated to early blues singer Bessie Smith) was a Coltrane original. This eight minute ten second tribute makes the record worth buying. Festival is the frantic finish with Roland’s solo threatening to tear up both his flute and my speakers. He growls, snorts, yells, moans into his instrument and the effect (which has been unsuccessfully imitated by other people) is an overall total assault on the listener - and it’s music ’cause the vocal whailings and flute sounds are an integrated whole. Dig it. Once you absorb it, its no longer an assault, it’s an ecstatic affirmation of, and I know I already mentioned it, the pure joy of creating.

Cont. on next page

I would say that this is Roland’s best album since Rip, Rig, and Panic which was released about two or three years ago. I would say buy it. I would.

Richard C. Walls

MITCH RYDER - THE DET ROIT-MEMPHIS EXPERIMENT - DOT DLP25963

This album is an exemplification of everything that’s wrong with the music presently wending its way to us from Stax. Make no mistake, despite the label this is a Stax album. It’s the MG’s, it’s produced by Steve Cropper and sounds like everything else to come out of that town for the last two years. One , wonders if Steve Cropper has lost his balls. How else explain this record?

Some choice music has come out of Memphis in the last five years. Otis and Carla, Aretha, Pickett - enough good music so that other, non-rhythm and blues, artists have begun to record there. This is one of our first chances to sample the product.

We know what Ryder can do, but on this album he’s never turned loose long enough to have a chance to do it. One is inclined to wonder whether it is Memphis which is at fault. Is Cropper capable of producing only artists in the mold of Pickett and Redding? Mitch Ryder isn’t Otis Redding and Steve Cropper’s failing is that he doesn’t understand as much.

Ryder never gets the chance to cut loose and wail, his undeniable trademark. Oh sure, r there are screams but I, ; could’ve plotted them. They’re j put in to fit a style, a context,

[ a mold. It’s bad enough to contend with stereotypes : coming out of the hard rock-blues-psychedelic scene. You could always look to Memphis for honesty. Motown soul may have been plastic but never Stax. Otis Redding, plastic? Wilson Pickett, stereotyped? Not a chance.

The material always fit their styles. They wrote half of it with Steve Cropper, anyway. Classic music, In the Midnight Hour and Dock of the Bay most prominently, but fitted into the integral style of each performer. Here we face the opposite. Cropper has a formula and Ryder was to be shaped, cajoled, coerced into fitting it. That the material,,the production, the formula had: nothing to do with what makes Mitch Ryder an excellent performer wasn’t taken into consideration.

Ryder’s primal earthiness is lost upon material conceptualized for, I’m sure, Otis Redding. And if this was an Otis album it’d be damn good. Otis could even get away with Boredom, but given the restraints placed upon Ryder’s talent, the song is trite and worthless.

There are some interesting cuts on the album; and it is interesting to listen to Mitch’s Otis cut, Direct Me. This is a ' strong cut, not quite in the same manner as Otis did it and far better than that. The rapping, a la the king, even works. But here Ryder is let loose to sing his own way, not to be bogged down in the trappings of the formulization they call the Stax sound.

One other cut, Liberty, really works. The only other thing that bears listening is Ryder’s own tune Push Aroun ’. The rest is just warmed over stuff Cropper had left over from Otis sessions. As Ryder told me of the album, “Don’t buy this unless you’re still into the MGs — or maybe interested in Mitch Ryder.”

Since we haven’t heard from Mitch Ryder in two years it’d be rather nice to hear what he can still do. Hopefully, the next album will be more reflective of his talents or lack of them, not of someone else’s.

Dave Marsh

JAN AND LORRAINE -GYPSY PEOPLE; ABC ABCS-691.

Jan and Lorraine are veteran Detroit folkie chicks, and this is their first album, recorded over in England. It’s a Detroit production, though, with jacket art by Connie Keelan, who is Richard Keelan’s (ex-Spikedriver, ex-Misty Wizard) old lady. Two of the tunes are by Richard, with the rest, except for the title song, penned by Jan or Lorraine.

What this is is a modern folk music album. If you like Joni Mitchell, you’ll probably like this. At its best (e.g., Gypsy People, Life’s Parade), it’s fragile, beautiful and inventive. At its worst (e.g., Break Out the Wine, Snow Roses), it’s precious, dull and silly or mawkish.

There’s a “I can’t hold you,

I hope you find yourself” song (Bird of Passage), and “I know I’m not the one for you any more” (Foolin’ Myself), a “Good Time, old fashioned ricky ticky let it all hang out fun” song (Olde Tyme Movie), a “pathways of my mind” (The Assignment Song-Sequence), all that good stuff. Their harmonies are sometimes effective, sometimes not; the combination of two high voices sometimes grates, sometimes hypnotizes; the playing is sometimes nicely unobtrusive, sometimes engaging, sometimes, dull. What can I say? Within the genre, it’s an OK album.

The overwhelming disappointment I felt, though, is with their treatment of Keelan’s Break Out the Wine, which has always been one of my favorite tunes. To me, the song is about an expansive, happy feeling, like an LSD “it really doesn’t matter,” but Jan and Lorraine give it a fussy, dry treatment, clipping the words that it seems to me ought to come rolling out. What it sounds like most is the Singing Nun, and that ain’t the kind of song this is. “If I fade at last/it won’t be because of my past,” but the way they sing it, it doesn’t sound like they even have a past. I had been looking forward to hearing the album for that one song, and when I heard it, it kind of soured me on the whole record. Hence the low energy review. I don’t know, maybe you’ll like it, though.

Deday LaRene

APPLETON SYNTONIC MENAGERIE - JON APPLETON; FLYING DUTCHMAN FDS 103.

Chef D’Oeuvre; Nickelharpan; Infantasy; Georgianna’s Fancy; The Visitation; Newark A irport Rock; Spuyten Duyvil; Second Scene Unobserved; Times Square Times Ten.

FLIGHT FOR FOUR - JOHN CARTER AND BOBBY BRADFORD QUARTET; FLYING DUTCHMAN FDS 108.

Call to the Festival; The Second Set; Woman; Abstractions For Three Lovers; Domino.

COME AND STICK YOUR HEAD IN - SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION; FLYING DUTCHMAN FDS 102 Blue Sir-G-O; Space Shout; Don’t Make Promises; Thumbs Up; Night Thing; Stone Shake; Time Stitch.

Bob Thiele should be a familiar name to anyone who has feasted on the works of Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Albert Ay ter, or a host of other modern innovators; familiar because for many years he was A&R man and producer for magical Impulse Records. Of course, he wasn’t responsible for the brilliance and art of these people, but he did help them put their artifacts together and get them out to us. So, a moment of silent thanks.

Fine. And now Thiele has started his own record company-Flying Dutchman. It’s hard to say exactly how responsible Thiele is for the music that will come out on this label. He only produced one of these three (Flight for Four, which sounds more like an Impulse product than the other two) while on the others he is listed as “executive producer.” But I assume that he has the final word on who is signed to the label and what is released on it. Judging from his past associations one would expect some heavy music. Well, I have here three of the company’s first releases — the sounds range from fair to excellent, and final judgment on Thiele’s venture is being witheld.

We’ll start with fair and work our way up. The group called Spontaneous Combustion is composed of nine studio musicians, a necessarily Versatile breed of cat. The leader is Gary Coleman, an ex-Mother of Invention, which explains the Zappa influence (expecially the; Zappa of Uncle Meat, and evenj more especially the Zappa of the famous King Kong Variations) on most of his compositions - particularly Stone Shake, and the last part of Thumbs Up, where the deranged Good Humor truck of Uncle Meat fame makes a surprise guest appearance. All the musicians here (two guitars, two reedmen, one keyboard man, one electric bass player, two drummers and one percussionist) are the kind that are inevitably referred to as “accomplished” or “competent,” and while there is no lack of technical virtuosity, there is often a lack of imagination, the bum thing about that being that this lack seems to be the result ot restraint, i.e., the desire to make something with (“commercial potential”) “Funky jazz instrumentals became a drag a long, long time ago especially since the occurence of the high energy electric guitar. Not that the whole album’s a drag; it just fails to work up a satisfactory amount of heartfelt energy. Some exceptions: reedman Tom Scott has some good Coltranish solos on a few cuts, the effect being reminiscent of Steve Marcus; on Time Stitch, the best and longest (10:51) cut on the album, there’s a recurring riff that any high energy rock band would be proud to claim - but of course our boys here keep it rather under-stated so it won’t mess your mind too much and ruin your dinner. Final words: if you like Steve Marcus or King Kong, then stick your head in and combust.

The Carter Bradford album is a stone jazz album. And it’s good. Not as earthshaking as it would have been if it had been released six or seven years ago, but solid, with no jive or shuck and highly recommended to jazz freaks. The main influence is Ornette Coleman with a dash of Sonny Rollins in Carter’s compositions. The tempos are very flexible and the musicians are responsive to each other, providing colors or complementing phrases. Bassist Williams is strong, a necessity in a group without a piano. Bradford can cook and be reflective at the same time, somewhat like Freddie Hubbard only without Freddie Hubbard’s strong brassy sound. He occasionally squeezed notes in the manner of jazz’s most famous note squeezeer, Lee Morgan (all this isn’t mere name-dropping but valid references to interest or disinterest you in buying the record.) Carter is an obvious Ornette derivative, only a little less lyrical than the master. But a nice sound and ' an approach to the clarinet that prevents it from sounding like maple syrup. Drummer Freeman plays the whole drum set without being oppressive. Good session.

And now, Appleton’s Syntonic Menagerie. Appleton means Jon Appleton, the electronic composer. Syntonic means being in harmony (responsive and adaptive) to the social or interpersonal environment. Menagerie means a collection, and is usually used in reference to animals. So, forgetting about the animals, we can translate the album’s title to be “Jon Appleton’s Collection of Natural Environmental Harmonies.” Right on.

This music is much more valid than all those Moog jive interpretation of rock tunes I’ve heard. The new electronic music must create new forms or else it is a freak style with a traditional content. Like the Moog version of the Beatles’ Blackbird - .it sounds funny, but that’s all. It’s not a piece of music with any merits of its own; it’s good old Blackbird fed through a machine. But Appleton’s thing is much heavier than those Moog jams; Iris content lives up to his style. Any piece on this album is purely a creation of electronic music and cannot be transferred to any other musical idiom. And there lies the excellence.

The music pushes the mind toward descriptive fantasies: space farts, amplified wind thermometers (rising), death by foghorn, metal teeth dropping against a window pane, aluminum bags boiling -it’s all here. But there’s more to Appleton’s conception than giving us sounds we haven’t heard before, since he uses as the basis for many cuts normal environmental sounds: waterfalls, TV commercials, subways, children’s voices, airplanes, and on one cut, people in an airport giving their opinions on “the new electronic music” (Newark Airport Rock). None of the people seem to know what they’re talking about, but few will admit it. Around these environmental sounds are woven the electronic fantasies. Here is an album that is unique; it can really turn your head around.

Verdict: Thiele scores

pretty good for a start. This is going to be a very versatile label that I hope doesn’t exhaust itself trying to please too many people.

Richard C. Walls

JOE COCKER! A&M SP 4224

This is ope of the finest rhythm and blues records released since the death of Otis Redding. Despite the adverse criticisms of Cocker as a cockney Ray Charles, he continues to impress with his voice, dynamism and sheer guts. Further, Cocker seems to possess that essential charisma • that' is the difference between the merely good and the great.

As with the first album, Cocker’s choice of material is generally excellent - the fault, surprisingly enough, lies in the production. I say surprisingly, first because Denny Cordell did such an excellent job on With a Little Help from My Friends ( A&M SP 4182) and, secondly, because Leon Russell, the West Coast Steve Cropper, assisted in this album’s production. While there aren’t any glaring lapses of taste there is an occasional incongruity; for example, on the album’s version of Delta Lady there is a\ single saxophone riff which throws the listener far off the track of Cocker’s basic emotion.

Dear Landlord rolls off Cocker’s lips so plaintatively as to make even Sneeky Pete’s steel guitar proper in relationship. The importance of good lyrics to a rhythm and blues performer has not gone unnoticed; as much as Cocker reminds one of Charles, Charles’ choice of material of late has been pure Frank Sinatra. Dear Landlord and Bird on the Wire fit Cocker’s' voice perfectly; he makes each into his own song. And if he explores only the saddest portions of each, he explores them to such a degree that the loss is hardly important.

Joe Cocker’s energy is remarkable — bursting on stage, a small bundle of hair and grubbiness, looking as raw as his voice, dancing what can only be described as a sailor’s .jig. His appearance and manner are that of a British mariner. That energy can occasionally transform an inately happy song into a piece of cathartic anguish. On the last album the song was Bye Bye Blackbird; here it’s Lloyd Price’s Lawdy Miss Clawdy. The seque of this cut with She Came in Through the Bathroom Window is an idea tinged with genius. The energy levels are almost identical, as if the two songs were meant to fit together.

Cocker transmits exactly the right “feel” (you could call it “soul”) to the basically nonsense McCartney lyric to make She Came-In communicate the classical groin grabbing rock and roll message.

A production lapse is felt on Hitchcock Railway; the song is just a shade too fast to be right. It comes off, especially with the extremely fast cut between backing vocal and Cocker alone (in/out/zoom!), as far too frantic.

That’s Your Business, honky-tonk piano and all, is startlingly reminiscient of Yes Sir That’s My Baby. Yet the song is far more bitter than that; it’s really the Cocker equivalent of Hit the Road Jack. “Ain’t you glad you got nowhere to weep/Ain’t you glad you got nothin’ to seek,” affects me the same way that Otis’ “What you need honey/I got it.”

I never liked or understood Something until I heard Cocker’s version. Harrison places emphasis on the verse (“Something in the way she moves/Attracts me like no other lover”) while Cocker attacks the chorus — “You ask me will my love grow/Idon’t know, I don’t know”. The stature of a r’n’b performer is often borne out by his interpretation of basically non-r’n’b material. For Cocker to transform Something into a bitter tune is a feat few others could accomplish.

Delta Lady despite *the saxophone riff, despite the occasionally overwhelming over-presence of backing vocals is still the single of the year. The guitar riffs sound so horn-like that I was amazed to note the album was done completely without them. That’s really a rhythm and blues feat; only Mitch Ryder has done it in recent years.

Hello Little Friend is a gentle Leon Russell song that exposes a side of Joe Cocker we hadn’t been exposed to previously. Cocker’s voice is in fine form and this tune bears out Leon’s songwriting potential. It’s surprising to find Cocker has this gentle side for he was so virile on everything else he’s done. It’s not that this song isn’t virile, it’s just an air of warm gentleness he exudes; the only thing like it is Otis Redding’s Try A Little Tenderness. . . .

And Joe Cocker’sDarlin’Be Home Soon. Maybe it’s just because I found the breakup of the Lovin’ Spoonful affected me the way Cream’s dispersal did others. Or because Joe Cocker has interpreted John Sebastian’s genius so righteously. Or just because there are associations with the song that I make on a personal level. Whatever, this is the first song I ever saw Joe Cocker do and I don’t think I’ll ever forget that small figure’s change on stage. The whole drama of Sebastian’s lyric acted out in face and voice. The Grease Band pumping out excellent musical accompaniment — he should do an album with just them, they’re exactly the backup he needs. Anyway, whatever this has deteriorated into, this song has a lot to do with why I think Joe Cocker is the greatest r’n’b singer since Otis.

Whether that comment is valid isn’t really important. What is important is that Joe Cocker can take any kind of material and make it valid. Like the man himself said: “It doesn’t matter if it’s jug band music or rhythm and blues”.

Dave Marsh

THE FIRESIGN THEATER WAITING FOR THE ELECTRICIAN, OR SOMEONE LIKE HIM

The humor on the first Firesign Theater album relevantly functions on several levels. There is the unexpected, the paradox, the reversal of reality, puns, the irrational and dread. On the first side are three skits: the first one dealing with the rape of the American Indian and the American continent over the years; humor and pathos mixed in appropriate quantity. The second skit is about a hip Dude Ranch and Collective Love Farm; it makes no kind of humor that becomes much more gratifying when your perception of the absurd has been heightened. Like when Naked Lunch ^ basically a grimly humorous nightmare, becomes a three ring circus after a few thoughtful tokes. Skit number three is a reversal bit, a future where everything’s cool, where “groovy” is the standard salutation, and one of the most heinous crimes is to be stopped by the cops (who are also “groovy”) and be found unstoned. When a father finds out that his son has been going to an underground Study Cell. “You mean?” “That’s right. . . your son’s a drop-in!” OK. If it isn’t always funny, it’s at least consistent. The skit also makes one aware of the: harshness of in-group mores —: like even in a hip community there can be a stifling of» individuality - like having to ! do something expected of you which you simply don’t wanna do. Think about it next time you bum rap someone who doesn’t care for grass (assuming, of course, that he’s not down on you for not being like him).

Now we turn the record over and get into the really deep stuff. The whole side is the title skit. I think if Burroughs hadn’t set a precedent thisfantastic thing wouldn’t have happened. Not . that this is as stark as Burroughs - there are no orgasm deaths here — but the underlying mood is permeated with death, dread, murder, insanity. And it’s pretty funny stuff, too. All four things mentioned above are ; completely preceived, aside from direct experience, through laughter, if at all -they are most abstractly and ineffectually perceived through the mass media. For example (aside from the obvious , example of a newscast) a murder on some plastic TV j show like Mannix or Dragnet disgusting pig show on the tub) is merely perceived as the beginning or end of a game, or even a game itself. The act of murder and the being of the murderer are abstractions which we watch move from ! point A, where we first understand this skit by the Firesign Theater where we follow a lost man through various stages of nightmare,, complete with political intrigue, prison, electrocution, lynching, dread (a frantic pleading voice crying “Mother? . . . I’ll be j good . . . Mother?”), and now ; we are near death and totally at a loss to reason with the human game — so we are given a game to remind us of the comforts of TV/Radio consiciousness: Beat the

Reaper!

I’ll reveal no more. Buy the record yourself and try to find

Cont. on next page out what I’m talking about.

Richard Walls

PLACES AT ONCE WHEN YOU’RE NOT ANYWHERE AT ALL?

This isn’t as funny as their first record, but it’s heavier, much heavier, with more manifestations of media conciousness, more psychological word games and Oedipal puzzles - and more relentless satire. The first side bombards us with the media we live with, or were at least raised on, which is mainly TV and old movies, Steve Reeves and Don Vadis, crazed used care salemen, John Garfield and Peter Lorre, the Voice of America, the boys in blue, Joe Pyne, sports, oddballs and your balls up for grabs, hippie punk, editorial feedback, and, for a limited time only, this amazing offer, just for you, Mr. and Mrs. John Smith of Any town, U.S.A. - the side starts off satirizing a man giving a used car sales pitch, but soon the pitch is for a different product, the ultimate in a pre=packaged all-purpose consumer good: the product is Amerika, and it’s dirt cheap.

I didn’t laugh much during the 28 minutes and 27 seconds of the first side, but I was engrossed. There’s no plot, so I won’t tell you what it is, but there’s a cast of thousands, a joke a minute, things to be sold and stereotypes to be told, and everything else that makes this country grate my nerves. At the end of everything, I haven’t

HOW CAN YOU BE IN TWO

told you that we’re back with the used car salesman and his strange rapid money-grubbing rap which begins to merge into the famous free-form interior monologue of Molly Bloom from Joyce’s Ulysses. Should we ponder the comparison, or are the Firesign boys just throwing in the kitchen sink? If we ponder, the conclusion is this: plunging into the depths of Amerika’s unconscious we come up with a thousand different words used to describe a hunk of metal formed in Detroit. Amerika is not spiritually empty, it’s spiritually full — full of shit. And it’s all here, in a sanitary satirical wrapper to dull the stink.

The second side, called side A-F, is something different. It’s a radio thing, with a lot of cliches worked over in an episode of a private eye series. This is fun and games, and nostalgia for some (not me, I’m only 20). It has what are, by now, the Firesign Theater trademarks: rapid pace,

humorous stereotypes, purposely corny one-liners (groaners), confusion, puns, hip references, dope references, insanity. It’s good, but after the first side, who’s in the mood? This should have been side one, so listen to it first and make it side one yourself. It’s all about Nick Danger, Third Eye. It has a plot of sorts, but it doesn’t matter. Lean back, light up and enjoy.

Incidentally, on the cover is a picture of Marx (Groucho) and Lennon (John) with the totalitarian demand “All Hail.” Rumor has it that if you hold the cover upside down and look at it under an infrared light you can see a picture of Dan Carlisle, John Small and Russ Gibb molesting Paul McCartney. But you know where rumors are at.

Richard C. Walls