We Are Normal And We Want Our Freedom

We Are Normal And We Want Our Freedom

John Mendelsohn

And Roy is going to write a song about that now.

And at six o’clock in the morning after the last session where Richard Olsen was engineer (you play Tom Corbitt this time and I’ll play the space monster but tomorrow I get to play Tom Corbitt and use the ray gun) and Cyril and I in his little Walt Disney sized Volkswagon with Mickey Mouse movies in the door pouches. And he doesn’t even own a projector.

And ten years from now they’ll be sitting on their faded couches feeling very very sad and empty. Tears truckin down as they get old and have no money for anything and their color cartoon fades into life.

There is a certain reality and wrinkled experience tha New York City groups like The Rascals have that no San Francisco band will ever achieve.

The Grateful Dead may give us all electric heaven, but they can’t create the atmosphere of Steve Paul’s Scene in the young days . . . and go and play in it. No one can. Which is why the Dead can endure and the Rascals can’t. Time has passed the Rascals, Strangers, Magicians, Spoonful, Lost Sea Dreamers, Tradewinds, Innocence, Myddle Class, and Vagrants by. Time and place were essential to them and to their music. Time and place haven’t got a whole lot to do with the Dead.

But weighing down the same scale is Dan Hicks and the like. Time has passed him by too. He certainly hasn’t noticed. Neither have the Groovies and, from the conversations I’ve had with Richard Olsen, The Charlatans could just be again.

But like the magicians who had a time and place and are no longer, Dan Hicks needed a time and place and we didn’t give him one. We never slowed down enough to pickup the real subtleties of our own music. Dan Hicks was the subtlest thing I know. And when his new, often mentioned album comes out, he will be again.

But what can we do by way of preparation? Listen to the Van Dyke Parks album again? Get hip to Ron Elliott? Look for “32-20” on Kapp as a single? No, that has passed by unnoticed for most of us as well. There is little active preparation.

Can I write an article and motivate you? Can you read anymore anyway. Let me just review it song by song: Original Recordings, An Epic Record

“Canned Music”. Musicians just want to get laid. And sometimes it can be your girl.

“How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?”. Now Dan, really.

“I Scare Myself’. And it feels good.

“Shorty Takes A Drive”. Hello, Shorty!

“Evenin’ Breeze”. The ever present apostrophe.

Side Two

“Waitin’ For The 103”. Now if I could truly say that I can follow this song through all three minutes and forty-three seconds then I could truly say I am closer to being complete. Which I am not.

“Shorty Falls In Love”. Hello, Shorty!

“Milk Shakin’ Mama”. Could happen to any of us. But most of us only have dreams about it.

“Slow Movin’ ”.

“It’s Bad Grammer, Baby”.

“Jukies’ Ball”. Innocently racist.

Bob Jonston produced the album and should talk about it more. Sherry and Christina are cloud ladies with soft summer rain in every breath. Remember the name: Dan Hicks. A fine fellow, he.

To me, the most distressing phenomenon in rock and roll during 1970, such obvious tragedies as the discovery by young audiences of reds on a mass scale and simultaneous acceptance of such garbage as Grand Funk Railroad, the sudden acceleration of the mortality rate among superstars, and the polarization in England of good clean honest pimply pop (uncool) and “progressive” music (cool) aside, has been the spread of what I suggest may be referred to for the sake of convenience as The Leon Russell Syndrome, which involves a faceless army of sometime Delaney & Bonnie Friends hanging around together in various combinations behind various diffident emerging solo artists to saturate us with a steady spew of music that, while superbly-played and unerringly “funky” (in a most unimaginative way), is also completely predictable and consequently ultimately very boring.

(God help us both, lest all my sentences come out tha long!)

It looks like one big back-slapping mutual admiration society, doesn’t it, all these tambourine-shaking wind-up musical dolls (as Ed Ward so incisively described victims of over-exposure to Leon Russell) playing on one another’s albums. Trouble is that the results of their intense affection for one another is more apt to inspire us in the audience to either tear our hair out in dismay and nod off from boredom than to clap our hands together and yell, “Yay-yeah!”

Look at the Dave Mason album, on which the presence of this crew inspires the man to write several hundred miles below the potential for brilliance such of his work with Traffic as “You Can All Join In,” “Feelin’ Alright,” and especially “Paper Sun” indicated he possesses. Look at Clapton’s “solo” album — surrounding himself with Russellettes inspired him to all but completely sublimate those aspects of his musical personality suggested by things like “Badge” in deference to an armful of characteristically dispensable Delaney pulp. And when Cocker goes out on the road with this gang at the suggestion of Denny Cordell and Russell (in whose presence his work has degenerated dramatically since the first album), he’s inspired only to nearly drench us in wretched soul-caricaturizing excess, to scream himself conceivably permanently hoarse in order to be heard over Russell’s characteristically wretchedly excessive arrangements.

And the list of victims of the Syndrome daily grows longer, now extending past Stephen Stills all the way up to George Harrison, whose new album reportedly contains one record devoted to a jam with several of the Russellettes.

Me, I no longer even bother to open albums on which Rita Coolidge and her vibrato-heavy background chorus, drummer Jim Gordon, bassist Carl Radle, hornmen Jim Price and Bobby Keys, or Russell are among the musicians credited, cos I know exactly how they’re going to sound. All that they had to say (which never struck me as a lot to begin with) was said on the first Delaney & Bonnie album. When you’ve heard any of their at-best - d i spensab1e and at-worst-downright-obnoxious instant-soul, brother, you’ve heard it all, judging from their track record, regardless of who happens to be ostensibly in the spotlight.

On a less indignant note (see,

driving all the way out to distant Pasadena to be bored beyond recognition by Derek & The Dominos really did me in), I should like to

explain that the title of this column was, uh, ripped-off from a song by the Bonzo Dog Band, each of whose four albums I should like to recommend to you without reservation at the outset.

In a forthcoming column I’ll

attempt to explicate my irrepressible biases so that no one will be led

astray. For the moment I’ll say only that I think The Stooges are closer to being the ultimate rock and roll band than anyone in memory, love the words “pud” and “killer” and will do my damnedest not to use them improperly, regard Nik Cohn’s Rock From The Beginning as the finest rock aiid roll book ever written, and wear my tevis tight.