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MORRISON HOTEL -THE DOORS -

ELEKTRA EKS 75007

The Doors are truly the most American rock and roll band I’ve ever heard; like this country, when they’re good, they’re unbeatable and when they’re awful, they’re horrifying. And sometimes they’re horrifyingly good.

It isn’t just that Jim Morrison is a real, or imagined, motherfucker; nor that Robby Krieger is probably the best unknown guitar player in rock and roll or even that Ray Manzarek plays both piano and organ excruciatingly well on this record. It’s beyond even that; it’s beyond Morrison screaming "SAVE OUR CITY!" Which is a most patrioticly Amerikan thing to do, ain’t it?

It begins in the strangest of places, back where you hadn’t expected it, like America do, with John Densmore. Densmore has to be a drummer of great power and strength merely to be a Door but he is much more than that. Things I never realized about anyone’s music; exactly how important the drummer is, holding things down so they don’t get too dissonant at the top. Densmore is fast when he needs to be fast (“You Make Me Real”) eerie on “Indian Summer” where he needs to be, and the rest of the time is the bottom. (Remember, half the time the Doors don’t bother to use a bass.)

Robby Krieger is just a plain, unadulterated bitch; on this record his playing becomes very distinct, much more so than on the others where he always seemed to be overshadowed by Morrison or Manzarek. Krieger, the representative of the wrath of the silent majority. I don’t want to carry the analogy too far; but his explosion into real life, like the birth of a revolutionary cadre behind Nixon’s favorite slogan, is just so unexpected. On “Hard Rock Cafe” he plays Keith Richard rock riffs the way they always wanted to be played (but only Keith, previously, could play them). He explodes on “Waiting for the Sun", is unobtrusive where that’s necessary, complements Morrison

perfectly on “Indian Summer”, the masterpiece Doors song forever, just like “The End” used to be.

Manzarek is just Manzarek to the nth degree. A nightchild prodigy, he plays piano like no one else, plays organ so distinctively that you wonder why anyone else would bother (and it is he that introduced organ playing to a whole lot of people; how else explain the Vanilla Fudgies or Brian Augers? Mere Manzarek imitators, they leave you cold, cold, cold.)

Morrison, the epitome of the Doors, the epitome of all of us, carrying his sometimes horrifying,, sometimes absurd, always potent

vision out to the realms of America where they really need him. Like Jagger he offers no sanctuary (Like Jagger he also suggests where to find it; “You can’t always get what you want” croons Mick; “BLOOD SCREAMS THE PAIN AND CHOPS OFF MY FINGERS”, Morrison counters.).

I believed in the Doors when nobody else was listening; I still love the mellow “Runnin’ Blue” and the eerie "Soft Parade" from their last album. Morrison, I still say, is the most subversive dude on the planet; sounding innocous on “Wild Child” or “Touch Me”, whipping his cock out in Miami, Phoenix or Baltimore.

Where they really need him. And we really need the Doors, just like sometimes we need the Stones or the Stooges.

The Doors always make it real. Morrison just doesn’t bother trying to justify his mental voyeurism, he simply writes a song about it and the others back him perfectly. “I’m A Spy” sounds like southside Chicago on LSD.

We’re all a whole lot simpler than that, though; something we’re just beginning to find out. Not like Dylan, who in attempting simplicity became simplistic. No, Morrison makes the simplicity more real; he sings a carnal rock and roll sea

chanty,^screams “Land Ho” in the midst of it. Up against the mast motherfucker!

The Five’s new album is a joke after “Maggie M’Gill”; here is the true “Back in the USA” band. Morrison knows what it’s like on the seamy side of rock and roll. Writing Tennessee Williams lyrics for a rock and roll song:

“Miss Maggie M’Gill she lived on a hill

Her daddy got drunk and left her no will

She went down, down to Magic Town

The people down there, they

really like to GET IT ON!”

Then later;

“Illegitimate son of a rock and roll star

Mom and Dad in the back of a rock and roll car”

The holy triumvirate of rock and roll, Iggy, Morrison, Mick. All of them in bands perfectly built around their styles; here is where you can find out why Ray Manzarek is so great. Those quick little piano things, never finished, on “Hard Rock Cafe”, the acid *organ on “Blue Sunday” or “Queen of the Highway.”

Robbie Krieger has everything down, down to the point where you listen as much for what he leaves out as for what he puts in. The ace rock and roll guitarist.

How fuckin’ American can you get? “I woke up this mornin’ and I got myself a beer/The future’s uncertain and the end is always near." Have mercy. There is none.

And when they threaten you know the potentialities in each of us for horror. “Waiting for the Sun” is one of the most horrifying songs I’ve ever ■ heard; “Waiting waiting waiting”. Oh, the Doors are always there; and isn’t there always someone you can bleed on?

I know Morrison is the Lizard King; you knqw Morrison knows he is the Lizard King. Believe it. The* Doors are masters of us all. Always waiting, to meet us at the back of the orgon “blue bus.” Or merely

“Waiting for you to come along”. We have.

And when I get up to turn the record over, again and again and again, I know this is the best record I’ve heard all year. And maybe will. And that it really doesn’t matter because the Doors are the Lizard Kings and the energy they make us see and feel is our own energy, slimy lizard, reptilian energy. America the land of dinosaurs.

“Blood on the streets in the town,of New Haven”; we’re all murderersl at heart and it’s all out in front here. I know this is a most horrifying rock and roll and I know the Doors have -presented us with the best record I’ve ever heard. So far.

Dave Marsh

ROBERT SCHEER’S A NIGHT AT SANTA RITA FLYING DUTCHMAN FDS 111 PETE HAMILL’S MASSACRE AT MY LAI FLYING DUTCHMAN FDS118

NARRATED BY ROSKO; JAMES SPAULDING-FLUTE; RON CARTER-BASS:

COMMENTARY/ BY NAT

HENTOFF. /'

There is no way that I can make

you grasp the import and impact of these recordings. I can only recommend them to you as the finest examples extant of what a record company with guts and honor can be doing at this point in history.

Both compositions, running between 20 and 40 minutes, capture a part of the real horror that exists in a country where, in the space of two years, we’ve seen everyone from Robert Kennedy to Fred Hampton ripped off, shot and murdered. The beast that stalks this land is exposed in the full disgust with which both of the articles are written, the utter despair one can find in Rosko’s voice and the atmosphere in which one must listen to them.

Bob Thiele is a brave man just to dare to put out these two albums; a conspirator at heart, he is doing what is necessary to expose all the rotten insides of Amerika. Dig this, from Hamil’s My Lai album:

"But the government shouldn’t get away with sentencing a handful of men and letting the others escape...The others include everybody who had anything to do with sending them there; Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Rostow , the Bundys and all the rest. Democrats and Republicans from three administrations and seven Congresses. Throw in those people who make napalm, M16s and other instruments of liberation and we might have a trial that is logical and goes after the real villians. I know

just the place to hold it. It’s a town called Nuremberg.”

Hamii’s piece is perhaps the stronger for that, however. With the lack of obscenity, for one thing, it is both more relatable and broadcast censorship is much less easily justified. It’s also more believable;

Cont. Next Page

Rosko’s voice is pure venom; Spaulding’s flute trembles at the beginning, in sheer horror at the thought of the act, and then, as if in realization of its truth and necessity, straightens out into a fine, hard line.

There’s more truth inside the covers of these two records than behind the facade of any pop-star, rockstar, hype-record you’ve paid for in the last six months. And, the real tragedy, the real cause for bitterness, is not that they won’t sell, because they will to those who’ve been exposed to them, but that the cloistered FCC ain’t gonna dig letting A Night At Santa Rita on the air, because of language, and that The My Lai Massacre is just too heavy for any but the bravest disc jockey.

Oh, you can’t blame them, I suppose; I mean, they have to protect themselves, right,. But, on the other hand, what good is “progressive” radio if material as important as this isn’t presented. I did hear portions of Santa Rita on the air when it was first released but then again...I really don’t want to mention whose show. You see?

Scheer’s account is from his Ramparts article of the same name. He was locked up for 16 hours in Santa Rita Rehabilatation Center as a result of Disturbances on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue.

Oh, you won’t believe it, maybe; there is that chance, I know. “In America it’s always comic book death, macabre, unreal.” Yes, it’s science fiction, the music contributing to that mood, but the comic book bloodshed is only hysterically funny. A Night at Santa Rita is about fear and bloodshed and the warped, twisted minds of the PIG. Yes, indeed, if we need anymore evidence that “every cop is a criminal,” Santa Rita fully provides it.

The reason they won’t play Santa Rita is, of course, that it’s obscene. Bullshit. The real obscenity on this record is that it’s all true, it’s all real and it’s about time Amerika woke up to that.

Beatings and pummelings, viscious bastard PIGS that attack every decent thing inside of any human left on the planet, Scheer reveals full hatred, completely justified once you’ve heard. And if you haven’t you must. This is not a lesson in survival, it’s a textbook account of what the PIG-monster-demonic structure that we face every day, every way in Amerika can do to you.

Dehumanizing is no longer a sufficient word. We’re dehumanized by a thousand petty things every day and what Bob Scheer and a whole lot of others faced that night in Santa Rita wasn’t petty, a little bit. It was real Amerika, cold and cruel, as real as Altamont where we did it to ourselves.

The My Lai album, on the other hand, is more dispassionate, observational in its cataloguing of Amerikan war crimes, and rightly so. Hamil is attacking the entire monster, whereas Scheer saw it (not exclusively but primarily in this piece) in its homebound manifestation. What Hamil calls the “infection of Viet Nam” is a Goliathlike monster and he attacks with the perspective of David. One wonders whether there is still time to become victorious.

Scheer’s account happened, here, in Amerika, during the war that we tend to ignore (even more than we tend to ignore Viet Nam).

But Viet Nam is a war, a dirty filthy, despicable one and the My Lai album really brings that home. It could potentially bring tears, it might upset some stomachs, and you definitely won’t want it on as an adjunct for balling. It’s upsetting to know that something like this could be published in the New York Post and that, despite that, the war drags on. It’s upsetting to know a whole lot of things in modern day Amerika.

There’ is no real comparison between the two records; Santa Rita has, justly, received more press but My Laiis equally important. For one thing, far from being an exploitation of the Santa Rita album, as I first thought, it emerges as occasionally really thought provoking and always attacks central issues, issues too often ignored. The issue of war crimes is only one; a soldier writes to his wife that “This is an economic war” and that is another. Desertion, eulogy, revolutionessential ingredients to any full understanding of what it is we’re doing in Asia.

Thiele is planning, Nat Hentoff says in his liner notes, a series of these albums as an “Audio Quarterly”. If the next two issues are as excellent as these, we have cause to rejoice at finding a brave record company, one which refuses to bow before what must be, by now, some sort of exofficio pressure not to release any more.

Further, the music by Spaulding and Carter is always congruent, never obtrusive and in excellent taste throughout. Victor Kalin’s artwork on both covers is excellent, though the My Lai album really needs to be opened fully to appreciate it’s full impact.

In concept, design and execution, then, Thiele’s Audio Quarterly could become the first avant-garde news medium of the Seventies. One can only hope so. (Though I would suggest that the real source for his future albums will probably be the underground press.)

Buy these albums and learn exactly what we’re up against. It’s not too pleasant but then...neither is living im Amerika.

Dave Marsh

FOUNDER OF THE DELTA BLUES-CHARLEY PATTONYAZOO L-1020; I DO NOT PLAY NO ROCK AND ROLL-FRED McDOWELL-CAPITOL ST-409.

I’m not sure about the nature of the relationship, but cynicism and romanticism seem to go hand in hand. Maybe I couldn’t maintain my romanticism without a healthy dose of the cynical; maybe the latter protects me from the excesses of the former. Maybe they’re both just expressions of my susceptibility to extremes. I’m also not too sure how to define my feelings about these two albums, but those feelihgs contain a strong admixture of these qualities (or faults).

I don’t know why anybody else is attracted to country blues, but for me a large part of the fascination is with a certain otherworldliness I feel in the music. There’s certainly an eerieness in the sound quality of slide guitar, an engrossing alienness in the Delta singing style (the exaggeration of one aspect of the essential differentness of being a black-man in the south), and the rhythmic subtleties sometimes referred to as “country time.” It’s not just the attraction of a porthole onto a whole other kind of life; the music is totally relatable and completely real. To me, B.B. King’s “Why I sing the Blues” is at least 50% shuck; there’s an awful lot of tomming militancy going around these days, riding on the crest of a wave of fashion, and if Charley Patton’s “eating out of the white folks’ kitchen” isn’t wholly admirable, at least he wasn’t trying to kid himself. This is beginning to ramble, becoming more obscure. Back to the point.

So' while I don’t exactly love the terrible sound quality on the Charley Patton album, I don’t hate it either (I can see where it contributes to the otherworldliness, voice from the past attraction, but I’m not so far gone as to grasp for that when the music smokes like it does; and I’m not so jaded as to dismiss the record as a chore to listen to). And while I don’t exactly hate the rambling, somewhat foot-shuffling, obviously affected monologues on the Fred McDowell album, I don’t really like it (maybe I’m reading some of that in, but the whole thing seems kind of contrived to me).

And while the Charley Patton sides give some of their excitement up to the poor recording and astounding surface noise, I can’t help but think that if the Fred McDowell album were as poorly recorded it would be pretty dull. Maybe it’s time I got a little more explicit.

The standard riff about Charley Patton, Son House and Willie Brown seems, to be that House was the most lyrical and the best vocalist, Brown the most melodic and proficient guitar player and Patton the most interesting rhythmically (in a form which brought rhythmic invention to the fore). Patton was a devil, the prototypical bad nigger: lazy,

shiftless, he loved his whiskey and beat his women. He died a young, probably dissolute death after making some of the most popular race records of the late 20’s and early 30’s. His singing voice was harsh and rasping and his pronunciation and intonation were squalid in the extreme. This album is the most complete collection of his works to date.

It was put together not from well preserved old masters, but from favorite 78’s, some of which have been played almost to extinction, and the poor recording technology and high level of surface noise stand out like the proverbial sore thumbs. You can get past them, though, and what you hear is a rich patchwork of rhythms. Guitar, singing and spoken asides work in incredible hypnotic poly rhythms. Record review bullshit poesy aside, he does things you wouldn’t believe. The classic slide guitar descriptiop/complement is that the player makes the guitar talk. Patton does it, and he holds these fantastically convoluted conversations with himself, and sometimes with Willie Brown or fiddle player Henry Sims.

There are some weak spots, some' predictabilities, some places where the energy level falls a bit (the wordy, didactic, but interesting, liner notes refer to a “spirit gap” in most of the products of the last sessions), but for the most part this is music of fire and magic. Like I said, the shitty recording quality doesn’t make listening a chore, although it would certainly be nice to have him well recorded, with ringing overtones and the presence that the vitality of the music deserves. If the sound quality on this record were as good as, say the Robert Johnson sides on Columbia, it would be an absolute mindfuck.

The Fred McDowell album is another matter. McDowell plays here for the most part with somewhat hesitant bass and drum accompaniment. I can understand the hesitency. It’s hard to work out country time in this kind of ensemble setting; for the most part they don’t try, and they seem to be oppressed with the feeling that they’re limiting McDowell’s invention, and so hang well back. McDowell, for his part falls into a lot of pretty monotonous rhythmic comping and lets himself be carried along. The result is a not too otherworldly melange with some nice figures but not too much fire.

McDowell has a nice sharp tone, though, and since he seems to be playing less than he might, the overall sound is pretty clean and pleasant to listen to. My disappointment with the effort is in its total accessibility. This isn’t mystery music, and it seems to me that the best thing about the blues is that in exploring the dark (and not so dark, I suppose) parts of life and hard times, it confronts you with the bittersweet intangibles of making your way. The music aches, but it doesn’t explain, and you can never explain how or from where the music bleeds. The blues is a low down shakin’ chill/Ain’t never had em, hope you never will” ! - I’m rambling again The point is, it's not supposed to be pleasant. Maybe it makes you feel better, or maybe it makes you feel worse, but what McDowell is giving us here is Delta Muzak. It’s nice, it’s palatable, but it’s highly stylized, and in trimming the music down a lot of the feeling (and the blues, let me say it like everybody else has said it, is most of all a feeling,)is gone. The album is halfway between the county blues and something else, and it’s not bad, but it doesn’t give me what I want from Fred McDowell.

I suppose you have to bear in mind that when Charley Patton made the records that make up the Yazoo album he was a young man, quite a bad dude by all reports. Fred McDowell isn’t young any more, and it shows. Like on ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,” an intensely sexual song which he sings here with the innoncence of old age. Compare this with the vital and virile sensuality which Patton displays on almost all of the cuts on the Yazoo album. McDowell ain’t dead yet, though, and his best on this record is : “Everybody’s Down On Me,” which comes at the end of his introductory rap on side two. Here he plays without bass or drums, building a really effective vocal around a slow (if somewhat stylized) rhythmic/ melodic . figure. Unconfined by a fhythm section, he lets the time ebb and flow and throws in some nice stops. Some of the licks are rushed and lack tension, but it’s a nice relief from the somewhat stultifying bump-chinkbump-chink that otherwise predominates, and he lets his guitar follow and play against his voice a lotmore than he does anywhere else. Actually, it’s a good cut.

But I’m at best bored by his musings and meanderings (I won’t say what I think of them when I’m in a really foul mood), just like I am at all these kind of recorded dissertations on what the blues is like to live. (This by the way, is cynicism.) Maybe I’m not being fair, but it seems kind of patronizing on the part of both performer and audience, it’s often just jiving and posturing, and it’s all so meaningless. Even by indirection, two lines from Patton’s “Green River Blues” say a lot more to me: “Some people say the Green River Blues ain’t bad/Then it must not a been them Green River Blues I had.”

Suddenly it seems that I’m not being fair to Fred McDowell. It’s a nice record, it doesn’t revolt me the way Electric Mud does,it’s some kind of blues, even with the fadeouts and all. I think a lot of people will buy it and dig it and think they’ve got something that they don’t, although what it really is is ok too. I don’t think very many people will buy the Charley Patton album. I guess what it all comes down to is that a lot more people should buy both of them and the} (and I)( should dig them each for what they are.

Deday LaRene

LIBERATION MUSIC ORCHESTRA

CHARLIE HADEN IMPULSE AS 9183

“The Introduction”, “Song , of the United - Front’ ”; “El Quinto Regimento” (The Fifth Regiment) “Los Cuatro Generates (The Four Generals)”, “Viva La Quince Brigada’’ (Long Live the Fifteenth Brigada)”; “The Ending to the Frist Side”;. “Song for Che”; “War Orphans”; “The Interlude (Drinking Music)”; “Circus ‘68, ‘69”; “ We Shall Overcome”.

Perry Robinson, clarinet; Gato Barbieri, tenor sax, clarinet; Dewey Redman, alto and tenor sax; Don Cherry, cornet, Indian wood and bamboo flutes; Mike Mantler, trumpet, Roswell Rudd, trombone; Bob Northern, French horn hand wood blocks, crow call, bells military whistle; Howard Johnson, tuba; Paul Motian, Andrew Cyrillie, percussion; Sam Brown, guitar, Tanganikan guitar, thumb

piano; Carla Bley, piano, tambourine; Charlie Haden, bass violin.

One man’s cosmos is another man’s mystery. That’s one way of explaining something.

The best music is unspeakably good. This isn't the best, but it is good. The first side arrives from the spirit of the Spanish Civil War. The second side arrives from the spirit of Liberation in general.

Carla Bley’s arrangements are perfectly rich, often offering nostalgia but never parody (except the drinking song which is a qualified parody). The lovely arrangements flow into free playing. This is the mystery music. I can only speak for my (?). Roswell Rudd’s fat brass leaps are exhilarating. Why? It’s so happy. So simple. Dewey Redman is very passionate.

Some of the free passages have a very dense texture. On side one, the Spanish flavor is maintained

Some of the free passages have a very dense texture. On side one, the Spanish flavor is maintained even then. The sounds that don’t mesh play against each other. Some of the sounds shouldn’t be there. But that’s the price and it’s a small one.

Haden’s “Che” starts side two with bass virtuosity. A memorable melody, dark and strong. The percussion is more company than accompaniment. Adds body. I should be writing this in a cave somewhere. The music will inspire me and I’ll run out with a flaming torch to toss through the window of the governor’s mansion.

Or I’ll fall in love with my cave.

“War Orphans” (by Ornette Coleman) is harder to get into because it’s mostly a piano solo and it’s difficult to match Carla Bley’s introspection. But it’s worth it. Anyway, peace. A rare feeling pure and benovelent.

An interlude next, an ode to Boone’s Farm or whatever.

Then the high point (for me). “Circus”. A musical description of the 68 Democratic Convention. A clever bass intro then chaos with whistles, snatches of old songs, and feelings screaming to be heard. And from somewhere an organ plays a part of “We Shall Overcome”, aloof and rather sad. Good. The point is well made.

The finish is Rudd leading a complete version of “We Shall Overcome”. He always cracks me up. So much spirit.

Fade with sweet chord.

Buy.

Richard C. Walls

MOONDANCE - VAN MORRISON; WARNER BROS. 1835

If I could I’d write a celebration of Van Morrison. Moondance promises to engrain itself as deeply as Astral Weeks has. It’s like a fan unfolding, the more artifacts, the more of the man, and here, unique artifacts, a unique talent. The new album is marginally more' accessable than Astral Weeks in that the feeling of distance that one often took away from the first record is gone -Moondance is warmer. But it’s pretty much the album you might have expected.

I would have to say that Van Morrison has the best Van Morrison voice around today. I was going to say Van Morrison has the best rock and roll voice and that might be true too, but the first is more true because his voice is perfectly suited to the kind of music he makes, which isn’t quite rock and roll or anything else. Or maybe it’s his voice which makes it something else which means that it isn’t a rock and roll voice at all because, etc. But of course he could do something else with it, but then why should he when he’s hardly begun to exhaust this. It’s like the Loving Spoonful, who were often criticised for being musically single-minded and not incorporating the new directions that rock and roll was moving in those days; but I always thought that was kind of silly because nobody else was doing that kind of thing, and if they had abandoned that form there would have been nobody to do it at all and I found it extremely relatable. Likewise, there’s nobody else doing Van Morrison type stuff, and I find it extremely relatable. (Not that I’ve heard anybody come down on this album for being just more of the same. I guess I just have big changes on my mind.)

It’s full of haunting, exotic sounding stuff. The overall feeling is kind of like twenty-first century calypso, and a lot of that comes from the horns. They tun the gamut from cocktail jazz (“Moondance,” the only sterile sounding thing on the album, the weakest cut, and a throwback to “Young Lovers Do,” which was certainly the weakest cut on Astral Weeks) and Stax-inspired fills (out of Delaney and Bonnie, with a hint of that certain edge, on “Come Running,” which moves from a superordinary fill a little way into the exotic, but not much) to unique and indescribable presence that lends the music a crystalline brilliance (“Into The Mystic” especially, and “Glad Tidings,” where saxes and organ play in a block, and a hint of it on the opening cut, “Stoned Me”). The music isn’t dominated by the horns, but they are in large part responsible for the memorable exotics that give the album its flavor. The horns and of course the voice. Usually he sings against the horns and sometimes he sings inside them (like on “These Dreams of You,” with a King Curtisstyle warbling rock and roll solo done on the soprano sax). He’s always riding on the cushion of the music, and he never rushes.

The lyrics have the same paintingwith-words quality that he demonstrated on Astral Weeks. These fantastic phrases hang in your mind, lines, images, expressions. I’ve never thought about the Meaning of a Van Morrison tune, but (and maybe because of that) I believe he’s one of the world’s great songwriters. I was going to drag a few lines out to shatter you, but there are just too many.

Buy this record.

Deday LaRene

LIVE DEAD - THE GREATFUL DEAD - Warner Bros. WS1830

This album is the first indication that the Dead are finally ready to make the move long expected of them, a breakthrough in the grey room from the nearly neanderthal rock patterns of the past into weird fusion of LSD and nookie orientated space music.

Dead music is always an organic whole and never better presented than here. Opening with the spaced out rhythm pattern s of “Dark Star” it soon becomes ultraclear that they’re merelywarmingupiAWeir/ Lesh guitar battle ensues, perfect front for Jerry to soar off into his own realm, somewhere between Sun Ra and the old blues masters. He understands and utilizes electric guitar more for its electrical aspect than its previous role as mere acoustic entertainment device. In his hands, and those of all too few others, the guitar’s potentials as a piece of electric technology are being realized.

Shaking loose, they begin to weave those crazyquilt textures and patterns that are the mad Owsley’s legacy. To the ’zone, my man. Waves of sounds and walls of energy in an assault on the orgones that no one else-would think of attempting, much less pulling off. They do.

Side two starts off with St. Stephen also recorded on their last record Auxomoxoa. St. Stephen, by the way, was the first Christian martyr. He was stoned to death. Pigpen’s vocal is a frontal assault, unrelatable ’til you’ve lived with it. Best to go back and check out the other records if you haven’t; this one goes down easier with the others as background, anyway.

Somewhere along in the seventh minute, we switch to “The Eleven”, which rushes for another ten minutes then eases into the introduction to “Lovelights.”

At this point Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann have made double drumming seem superflous; they’re sensitive enough, to each other and the band, but there ain’t anything really amazing happening back here. All the action is up front with Jerry Garcia’s electric high octane guitar, right where it belongs. So, despite appearances, we still have a rock group on our hands.

The beginning of “Turn On Your Lovelights” i$ a guitar-organ-drums breakdown to feature the killer Pen. He’s finally got it together, the astounding heights of high - energy, solar - furnace blues power. Then a quick drum solo... really ace.

Even if they feel a whole hell of a lot different, Pen, in the middle of the song he’s made his trademark, is as masterful at controlling an audience as even Jagger. It’s a nice kind of ritual cleansing of the mind with elements of Joe Tex and B.B. King. After they’ve been jamming for a good hour they still manage to pick up incredibly for “Lovelight’s” lightning conclusion. Leaving us in such a frenzied state it’s only a courtesy to let us down easy with “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” The real highlight of this is Pen’s distinctive organ work. The same Weir/Garcia lines that brought us there brings us back. Just in time for...

An eight minute feedback orgy aptly titled “Feedback”the. Dead’ll break bread with ya but they won’t mince words.Thiscut is like a lesson out of a book Ono must be trying to copy. This is far - out where Yoko’s is a cold - sore. (It just won’t go away.)

Then, “WeBid You Goodnight.”* Which, believe it or not, is an Incredible String Band composition. You think they can’t do it justice? Well, like Mick Jagger used to say, it’s the singer, not the song.

Finally, a great album from the Dead. Outasite. Dav-e Marsh

ALCHEMY - THE THIRD EAR BAND; CAPITOL SKAO 376.

It’s Druid music the Third Ear Band are making, I think. A lot of people in this country say they’re sure they were once Indians; I suspect that there are a lot of people in England who have a similar kind of Druid -memory, and I suspect that these dudes are ^among them. Really, haven’t you ever found yourself squatting in a swamp or a patch of woods and flashed on what it was like to be an Indian? Suddenly, harmony with the life system becomes overwhelming, you feel intimately a part of the planet; it all seems so familiar, and you know that’s the way the pre-Amerika American Indians felt all the time. Similarly, Druids were indiginous English “primitives” whose lives were built around the natural harmonies, if my conception of them isn’t too far off. I’ve always associated them with celebrations of the earthly rhythms, festivals of the changing seasons (whether or not they actually did erect Stonehenge - I just read something that said that for

sure they didn’t), and the conception I’ve always had of them is that their lives were built around these kinds of natural changes, that they lived in very close harmony with the earth.

This is Earth music, with an air of mystery, Druids weren’t just like the Indians, after all; there’s a darker air about them (or at least my notions of them). This is not music with which to beat the gutter. It doesn’t take you on any soaring flights to glittering neverlands of shimmering beauty. For the most part it’s night music, with only occasional glimpses of the dawn. It’s not always pleasant - it’s often pretty dismal - but it’s hypnotic. It’s close counterpoint to the primal rhythms of the earth engines.

“Stone Circle” is a bit of light (I was once at Stonehenge at dawn and it was like this - the feeling of ageless continuity bringing a lightening, but not real joy), and “Lark Rise,” which is appreciably lighter than anything else on the album. But for the most part the music is dark and heavy and seems to drag on and on, as I guess it’s supposed to. The rhythms are simple while diffuse. I can’t say I really like it, but it seems to be beyond my dislike. I think it works.

I wonder what else these people can do - I can’t imagine owning more than one record like this. If this is night music, maybe the next album, will be daytime songs; if this is a winter album, maybe they’ll make one for spring next time. Dedav