ROCK DIARY

How unspeakably fantastic it was to see the TAMI show, again, the other evening, for the first time since its original release in 1965!

How hopeless it is to attempt to communicate my joy in watching the early Supremes, Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Chuck Berry, the Barbarians, the Stones, Billy J. Kramer and Heavy Friends, the incredible Lesley Gore and various other splendors doing in the heads of an audience of short-haired, cardigan-sweatered and knee-length skirted Santa Monica teens (among them your beloved columnist), Gerry wearing his guitar under his chin and singing out of the side of his mouth in the then-popular Liverpool manner, Billy J. doing the flitty little dance-steps in his patent-leather winklepickers while the Dakotas swung their axes skyward to dramatize especially heavy chord changes, James Brown being escorted off-stage four times, only to stagger back to scream a few more refrains of “Please Please Please” from his knees,

The Barbarians looking for all the world like amphetamined Beatlettes with their legendary hook-handed drummer shaking his hair all over the auditorium, everyone playing through amplifiers that look, to eyes that have beheld walls of Marshalls, like toys. Oh the rapture!

Leaving the theatre it dawned on me how incredibly jaded I’ve become in the last few years, how infrequent the really exhilarating rock and roll buzzes have been since my adolescence staggered to a considerably less than graceful conclusion a while past.

It’s not all me, I just know. It’s more that we in the audience have been alternately encouraging the wrong things from, and too docilely resigning ourselves to, the irrevocability of the imperfections of them on-stage.

Everybody’s too fucking serious. Stop being so fucking serious, everybody.

Since Hendrix and Cream turned the music biz topsy-turvy by selling bundles of albums without every having hit singles, most everyone’s taken to

regarding hit singles as desperately uncool (that is, of course, until it dawns on them that hit singles still speak lots more loudly to obtuse promoters than hit albums), the result being that listening to AM radio for more than four minutes at a stretch can be excrutiating, or worse. As I recall, listening to AM radio used to be good -simple-minded fun, on the order of, say, reading a comic book.

Quick! All you heavies out there, rescue the three-minute-single art-form and the AM airwaves from Dawn and similar such horrors.

Why is rock and roll so unglamorotis nowadays? Why do nearly all American groups think that coming out on-stage in jeans and snot-caked tee-shirts testifies to the devotion with which they pursue their inevitably unique artistic vision (which brings up the question of why every last no-talent gap on the road is convinced that his is a unique vision — what’s so terrible about > being unabashedly derivative?)

Can you imagine what a buzz Creedence would have been had they not looked like middle-aged hippies off the streets of Berkeley? — why, even the likes of that haughty John Mendelsohn would have suppressed their distaste for Fogerty’s caterwauling!

Why have even the once absolutely , breathtaking Who shed their sequins and lame for fucking tee-shirts? (Right, I know that Townshend claims to be lots more comfy in his boiler suit than in his gold-sequined jacket and frills, but shouldn’t Townshend be one of the last people you’d suspect capable of sacrificing flash and glamour for comfort?)

Listen, to insist on belaboring the point: flash and glamour and arrogance and hyperbole and superhumanity and the excitement those qualities necessarily evoke are what rock and roll is all about! Long live Rod Stewart! and, conversely, oblivion to the bearded, scraggly-haired, blue-jeaned rock and roll cadres who look just like the homeliest elements of their audiences!

More, much more, in the intriguing theme of rock and roll’s ability to survive its own seriousness about itself next month, by my deadline, for which I’ll have sufficiently recovered from the excitement of being awakened at six in the morning to find Los Angeles trembling violently, to be a trifle more coherent.

John Mendelsohn

ROCK DIARY

The Grand Funk Railroad are the best band in the land, and why.

Well, I was sitting near Robert Christgau and Ellen Willis, Near enough to be in their apartment. In the other days back when. And they were discussing who wrote better stoned and who just let his or her ego out. And played with it. And put it back.

And after a while I went home.

And I was sitting in Terry Knight’s apartment near his telescope so you could watch the other high-rise windows just up the street. And Terry was posing near a little bronze plastic

statue of a knight because I was holding a camera.

Then I told him that I had something else besides a camera. And he looked as if I said something dirty. But it was only some song lyrics I was pulling out of my pocket which I’d written.

Which brings me to Lenny Kaye and how I tried to explain to him and to Lisa and to Jean-Charles Costa, who was just listening and not pacing around the room like Lenny was disagreeing, that Grand Funk Railroad are the best band in the land, besides being immortalized as heroic figures though not overly intelligent-looking (certainly not college graduates) on a poster in Times Square or actually three long blocks leading to Times Square and all the queer fagots who don’t buy records to speak of cause they’re too busy with other things.

And this takes me back to Terry Knight again, but it is three years maybe later and I have long since forgotten about the song lyrics I’d left at his apartment that (k)night. And Terry has Artie “Peace, Love, And Woodstock” Kornfield’s old office at Capitol Records and needing anything in the way of interviews for my radio show I went there to interview Grand Funk Railroad and they were nice guys from the old Detroit Wheels and

Terry’s backup group The Pack, or something like that.

Sly Stone had a ■ concert and twenty-two thousand young facists showed up to make elbow room together in Madison Square Garden and on the bill as a warm up, get your drugs* to settle down, was Grand Funk Railroad. And the lead guitarist sunk to his knees and tore off his shirt and held the guitar out the length of hiS arm and played like a mama fucker, fucking mamas god damn it, you gonna eat shit, fuck you little mamas out there, I can play this cock suckin’ gueetar at arm’s length, my arm’s length.

Fuckin’ right he can. And he did it and it was like he had broken open his fly and was unraveling his cock for everyone to see and was gonna run an american flag up it just to prove something and then spray everybody in the orchestra so when Sly finally came out they’d all be covered with piss and wouldn’t Sly wonder. He being a bit of a mama fucker too in his own over-dressed way.

So I got up and started to shout so that Lenny could hear me cause Lisa was talking a little and Jean-Charles HE was playing the guitar. And I explained to them how Grand Funk Railroad started in a vacuum and created hit records and Lenny was

satisfied with the explanation though he denied it at first as I said before.

What I didn’t tell Lenny is that Grand Funk Railroad have a lot in common with the Blues Image since they have done what the Blues Image were trying to do and didn’t but by mistake had a hit record, a top 40 hit, and Grand Funk were trying to have a top 40 hit and by mistake had a hit album and then another mistake making two hit albums and so forth.

You’ve got to understand that they are the best band in the land, Grand Funk is the best band in the land. Cause they’re the only mama fuckers who really do it standing still. They couldn’t put one foot in front of the other and they ain’t about to try, why should they when they can be mama fuckers standing still?

Richard Robinson

P.S. Six months after Lenny and I worked this out you can read what Lenny has to say about Grand Funk in Rolling Stone and Cavalier. Also you can talk to Danny Goldberg, he not only likes them he also listens to their albums.

Oh, also, I called up Terry Knight to congratulate him and he said that I was only the second person to call him in a year to congratulate him.