WE ARE NORMAL

Put on your gladest gladrags, friends and neighbors, and join me in bellowing exuberant hallelujahs — what to my mind is the second greatest band in rock and roll history has come together again (at least the crucial ingredients thereof) after eighteen months of silence and/or failure, which truly exhilarating news fairly leapt from page three of the February 20 Melody Maker: "Bonzos Reform . . . (temporarily) to be billed as Viv Stanshall, Neil Innes and Freaks . . . I daresay Roger Spear will come along on a few gigs with us . . . we are writing a lot of new stuff."

Rejoice! While Stanshall on his own managed to produce just one curious but scarecely extraordinary single (“Labio-Dental Fricative”) during the months since the group split (during most of which he was reported to have been a self-committed resident of a sanitarium), while Innes’ interim group venture. World, was just shockingly mediocre, together they are capable of producing and perpetrating the most stirring ’50’s-derived classic rock and toll, the most incisive satire, the most magnificent madness, and, yes, the most beautiful love-songs you or I have ever heard, as the four Bonzo albums released to date vividly attest. Truly, if, by some unkind whim of Fate, you’ve not encountered the Bonzo before now you’ve got one of the rock and roll life’s most joyous experiences awaiting you.

A man could almost get religion in the face of such heavensent tidings as these.

The question, of course, to ease gracefully into the second portion of this issue’s rantings and ravings, is whether the world will be ready for them this time around.

In recent appearances with my own dynamite group, the relaxez Christopher Milk, whose stage-show includes a healthy dose of satirical fare, I’ve bfeen shocked and dismayed to discover that audiences as a general rule find it incredibly difficult to relax with something that defies instant comprehension to the point of being able to respond to it on its own terms (in C. Milk’s case, to laugh along with it).

From not yet meeting a member of a C. Milk audience who fails to perceive the need to qualify whatever appreciation he may have had for the group’s humorous aspects with something on the order of, “Of course you’re sure not such heavy musicians,” I’m beginning to become convinced that any group that attempts anything more ambitious than heavy boogie/jamming, particularly anything even faintly theatrical, is taking its career in its hands.

At a gig we played last November at UCLA, where one might reasonably expect to encounter at least a slightly more intelligent and open, less reds-incapacitated audience than outside in the streets, a really tight display of rock and roll theatre at its currently most ambitious by Alice Cooper was received with terse coolness immediately after a competent but completely typical set of all the usual indistinguishable boogie standards by an anonymous group of completely typical hippies evoked near-hysteria.

And of the 16,000-plus people at a recent Faces concert in L.A. who creamed in their Male bellbottoms through every completely predictable lick of Savoy Brown guitarist Kim Simmonds’ endless soloes, how many would have reacted to Bonzo drummer Legs Larry Smith’s tap-dancing feverishly in oversized falsies during the break on “Hello Mabel” with anything better than, “Well, he sure ain’t much of a drummer, is he? My guess would be perhaps ten or eleven at the outside.

Please just never talk to me about how unprecedently hip today’s young audiences are. Today’s young audiences would make Pavlov salivate with delight.

How, you ask, does a group like the Bonzo or Alice Cooper or C. Milk get through to an audience such as this, one that’s thoroughly conditioned itself to go beserk for one thing but to miscomprehend completely anything else?

Stay tuned to this magazine, friends and neighbors, and I’ll let you know. As soon as (and if I ever) sort it out myself, which I’m not real confident I’m ever gonna be able to do.