When you’re movin’ right up close to me That’s when I get the chills all over me Quivers down my backbone!

I get the shakin’ in my thighbone!

I get the shivers in my kneebone!

Shakin’ all over

Savagery, that’s what it is. Or what it is about, more aptly. Rock’n’roll has always had the intention of being both secret ritual and public rite, somehow amazing and mundane, ecstatic and common-place. It has the power to liberate the entire mental/physical complex (being) into a pinnacle of transcendent and quintessentially aboriginal energy.

Now if that’s too obtuse, try taking it like this:

Good Golly Miss Molly She sure like to ball

Or again:

Gimme that rock and roll music Any oF way you choose it Gotta be rock and roll music If you wanna dance with me.

How long has it been since anything affected us like that? How long since the thunder pumped out of a dozen transistors jellied your spine and crushed you back into the Impala cushions until you couldn’t breathe and HAD to move, get on up and dance to music. The MC5 neatly summed it up, rockin’ out behind a million watts: “Baby baby help me/You really really must/I need a healthy outlet/For my teenage lust.” But didn’t Little Richard say nearly the same thing just as niftily fifteen years before? “All round the world/Rock’n’roll is the only thing.” Right on, then let’s move; let’s discover the secrets of rock’n’roll, even though we both know that they can never be discovered. That’s why they are secrets and that is why they are pure fun. And why it is a joyous quest. C’mon everybody.

Who carries the Rock on? Who still knows how to Roll? The Rockicrucians, that’s who! The Rockicrucians have found a quest in their never-satiated thirst for more of the Rock, greater quantities of the Roll. If the energy is addictive, then may we all someday be addicted. “They have to have it,” John Sinclair said, and (as usual) he was right. Rob Tyner called it “the resenifier” and he was right too. The Chiffons called it “The Doo-Ron-Ron” and they were more right than any of us.

So if it’s there to be found, who’s got it? Flamin’ Groovies! MC5 (used to, anyway), Lou Reed and the Velvets, Iggy and the Stooges, Stones, John Lennon, Fleetwood Mac, Crabby Appleton and John Lennon. Rod Stewart and the Small Faces, Wild Angels, Brownsville Station, J. Geils, Bob Seger, Sir Douglas and The Band. Bob Dylan I, the Woolies, Mitch Ryder and Detroit, the old Young Rascals, and a million other bands, old and new who found it, briefly and as a guiding principle throughout their lives. You know a Rockicrucian band when you hear it — it’s the one that’s raucous and loud, the one people not only can but do dance to (Tina Turner, y’know), the one where the excellence of the music always treads the fine edge of pure sound. And if you’re a real Rockicrucian, you love the moments when the wave of music breaks into that purest energy as much as you love the music itself or more. It is the resensifier, and believe me friends, you ain’t lived til you’ve been resensified.

The Frut are Rockicrucians to a man, preserving the Secrets of Sound for The Rock of Ages, communing with the Holy Roll; in the finest sense, the rock and roll star is a holy man, and the Frut (being a rock’n’roll band in the finest sense) are no exception. Whatever its own structural limitations, rock and roll has always been a mode of purge, a method for going beyond the body and mind chasm into a fusion of both energy and matter states that is exhilarating and intensely mystic at once. It’s the first no-bullshit mass medium.

The white magic in the rock is the ancient cellular archetype; warped around a bit, it has driven Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Bopper, Sam Cooke, Jams and Jimi, Brian Jones and Eddie Cochran to an early end. Still, the purer it remains, the more likely you are to not only survive, but even prosper. If John Sinclair, whose belief in the power of the resensifier was the strongest I’ve ever witnessed (and I can testify!), is incarcerated for it, then perhaps he is our Job? Go see Elvin Jones, who has always had the Rockicrucian spirit, in an avant-Black Music sense, in Zachariah as Job Cain — you’ve never seen such pure emotiveness in anyone’s eyes before.

“Hail hail rock and roll, deliver me from the days of old!”, I say. Join the Rockicrucians! Discover the Secrets of Sound! Kick out the jams, motherfucker and:

“C’mon baby let the good times roll/We gonna stay here til it soothe our soul!”

II

DON’T BOTHER US, LEAVE US ALONE ANYWAY WE ALMOST GROWN

The Frut bring it all back, all of it; they’ve been around the Motown rock circuit for as long as mere Motor City mortals can "remember. Panama, their flamingly frizzed haired lead singer, has been in seven different bands called the Frut (or more properly, in its original incarnation, Frut of the Loom m Detroit trend (Psychedelic) Stooges and the M(otor) C(ity) Five being prime examples). The present complement is composed largely of tone-deaf souls, who understand little but that they HAVE TO HAVE IT. The Frut are a dream band, and their dream is in many ways our dream — to cure it all by just rockin’ on out. And the deficiencies of that attitude, one that we’ve all held at one time or another, are almost point-by-point the deficiencies of the Frut.

On the other hand, though, the Frut’s positive attributes are precisely the positive attributes of our collective dream. No, they’re not as technically perfect as some of your heavily-named British buddies but no matter — the Frut understand you and I and (since we’re all convinced that we’ve been misunderstood for so long by everyone, middle class children that we are) we ought to rejoice.

The Frut are as incandescently brilliant in their imperfections as your favorite teen-rock combo, whenever you were in highschool. The tale ofhow it came to be that way is best told by Panama, with his Motor City inflection, a nearly drawling sort of vocalizing that sounds just a trifle dense? Like you were listening to a true punk, you know? And the beauty of it is, after years of jaggersque pseudo-punks, you really are.

PANAMA: Lead wastrel of the Frut (all of whom are equally degenerate in appearance and action). Always lookin’ for some action, and always makin’ his own when there’s no way out. A rock and roll prince, he is very much like Leo Gorsey to the Bowery Boys of The Roll — The Frut.

“Well sure, we almost got killed at L’Anse Creuse High School,” he begins* relishing the idea of laying this one on ya. It’s gonna be a killer, guys, and even if it isn’t there’s lots more where this one came from. Sit back and relax; Panama could pull off a fifteen minute stint on the next Ed Sullivan Show and walk off stage without a trace of perspiration sullying his armpits. (If you’d like to think it makes a difference.)

“You see, we were, like, the first long-haired crumbs in Mount Clemens. We had the semi-psychedelic band, y’know? The kids really dug us hnd that, but there were a lotta guys, see, back in ’65, or ’66 even, who just weren’t into long hair at all. Like they were gonna KILL ya if they saw ya.”

He is amused, knowing that they meant it and that, then as now, he relished the idea of the challenge. Besides, this is history and he obviously lived through it; there’s something to be said for that this afternoon — the tokes are plentiful and Panama and the Frut require little else, save music, to keep them happy.

“So we were on stage at L’Anse Creuse and there were these guys who’d got guest passes and for the whole week, before the gig, y’know, these . . . these heavy greaser dudes would be cornin’ up to me, buddies of mine, and sayin’ ‘Norm you guys better not show up Friday night . . . Because, if you do . . . we’re gonna take allaya . . . tie ya up . . . and CUT YER HAIR OFF . . . ’ So I said, ‘Y’know, we gotta play the gig, so you just better tell the boys to cool it.’

“The gig turned out to be like a real heavy trip. Like, we were backstage before the set with about twenty of our greaser buddies just HANGIN’ back there, just in case we were attacked. We got out on the stage and they were standin’ in the back, hangin’ there, lettin’ these other guys see ’em so they would know that they weren’t gonna hafta mess around with just five guys but they were gonna hafta handle about twennyiive.

“That was a heavy, heavy night,” he says, shaking his shoulder length auburn natural, “People were cqmin’ up to me, tellin’ me the car windows were smashed. But actually, they weren’t. Just to get us outside so they could start it.” t There’s the echo of a real Rockicrucian lullaby. The conflict, the energy, the violence that is crucial to the Rockicrucian (i.e., in this instance, traditional rock’n’roll) stance. Mystic though the Rockicrucians may be, they most definitely ain’t passive. Not that to be a real rocker that you have to be a brawler; on the other hand, when the gauntlet is thrown down you either pick it up or you don’t. Rockicrucians always do. We don’t need nobody to womp his belt on our backdoor step; why we’d womp him right in the head with a tirechain, if he ever tried somethin’ like that.

But the L’Anse Creuse Incident epitomizes what it was to grow up in the first wave of longhair rock’n’roll in this country. Remember, long hair didn’t have any ersatz implications then,, it was only an indicator that you were deep into rock’n’roll.

The essential ambience then is still that of the greaser-punk. The swagger, the beer, the flash of cycle and grind of gear, the ass-shakin’ and the love-makin’. Now that we’re all so seemingly far out we can look back on that era with more than nostalgia and less than condescension — perhaps we can realize what a truly beautiful time that was, a transitional state, a beginning for a culture that could grow to half-a-million inhabitants on certain summer weekends but that always intended to function year ’round. Perhaps it was only the beginning that was pure, indeed, if even that was; at any rate, the first discovery of our mutual identity must have come as a “shiver down the backbone” of every one of Us. “I can’t get no girl reaction,” summed it up. If Mick dagger was that, frustrated then who wasn’t? And the Frut, being lineal descendants of the most infamous greaser/punko band of all time, Mitch Ryder anji the Detroit Wheels (supposedly nee Billy Lee and the Rivieras) know what the spirit of that time is all about.

Ill

CALLIN’ OUT AROUND THE WORLD ARE YOU READY FOR A BRAND NEW BEAT?

To understand and truly appreciate the Frut, as with any highly localized phenomenon, you’ve got to understand the nature of the region from which they come — Detroit and Ann Arbor and their environs. In this case, you’re in luck, for the author has not lived here for the past twenty-one years without spending considerable time trying to dope the essence of the place out.

Early Detroit music was shaped mostly by Motown. Billy Lee got down in grungy, filthy (I hardly need note, funky) midtown cafes with the Four Tops and a crew of black hustlers and neo-bohemians; as Billy became more and more popular at the now legendary Walled Lake Casino (some thirty-five miles northwest of the main part of the city), the high school rock circuit, in Oakland (Pontiac) and Macomb (Mt. Clemens) Counties began taking shape. ? and the Mysterians were regulars at my favorite hang-out, Mt. Holly, Punch Andrews (Bob Seger and Brownsville Station) and Dave Leone (of the local booking agency, of today, DMA) ran a set of clubs called the Hideouts and the Crow’s Nests and Hullabaloos all added their throb to the beat of the day. In Ann Arbor, the notorious Jeep Holland was fashioning a mini-empire of his own, with the aid of his tremendous knowledge of rock and roll and rhythm and blues and the talents of Scott Morgan and the Rationals, most hotably, to aid him. The parochial school dances were in full swing, Mike Quatro was just beginning to wake up from his Lawrence Welk slumber in Grosse Pointe, finding a new world of freaks to exploit and the d.j. hops “just keep on cornin’ ”.

The Frut were the only band of any reknown to emerge from the northeast side, half-way to Port Huron/Sarnia (the Blue Water Bridge, which may or may not have something to do with the Blue Water Line song, translates itself into Canada there), on the very shores of Lake Huron.

It’s all filthy. I grew up as far from Detroit (though due north) as the Frut, and the foundry grit on the windowsills is my earliest memory. That foundry dust, vile as it is, eats away at not only aluminum siding and automobile finishes but also at the very heart of those who must live in it. Growing up in Mt. Clemens, the Frut had to deal with much the same thing. (People who grew up in Detroit, proper, almost had it better; there the middle class neighborhoods, and even some of the (white) working class ones were removed by a distance of several miles from the worst of the industrial areas.)

Grungy as it was, it couldn’t help but produce partisans equal grit. It’s NOT just the factories — it’s also the fact Detroit’s street sweeping crews do easily the least efficient in the nation. I remember that my first time in Chicago, of places, I was astounded at how clean the gutters were, wide the sidewalks. Factory belly of the universe, indeed; there’s chance that the Motor doomed

a good Motor City was doomed to fate long before Henry Ford had his initial better idea. The people the region drew were thoroughly keyed into and conditioned to deal with the throb of the stamping plant and the grind of the gear and axle factory. The city possesses the most honcho of the honkies, I suspect, besides large

suspect, quantities of emergent hillbillies, spades, Poles, Germans and few confused Jews. THIS is the last frontier, right outside the very walls where I sit. It is part of the pattern of psychedelicdom’s plan to save the world, of course, to get back to the land. In Detroit, you

first have to find the land. But if we can save the Motor City, rest assured, we can save it all. Problem: Who to carry vision out to? A hundred thousand mikes and a million tokes later, getting very scary. We may have been diffuse, too lax sharing substances (rock’n’roll among them) which may lead to new, or at least different and sometimes higher, states consciousness. May I said, they don’t have to and most

them, as we’ve discovered, don’t. Now, that’s hardly a unique problem in Detroit. But its manifestation, as embodied by the Frut and certain other freak progenitors, is as peculiar to Motown as Coney Island hamburgers. First off, culture in Detroit is as mythic as rock and roll itself. There never started out to be any indigenous culture in this city, there is no peculiarly Detroit perspective, as there is in, let us say, New York or San Francisco or even L.A. Except for the youth ghetto, the city thinks midwesternly, not in terms of Detroit but in terms of the midwest. The best thing that’s about is a vague trace of what the Indians may have left.

But once Pontiac died, all the magic was gone, for sheer lack of interest or anyone to carry it on. And it was not until Berry Gordy and then Billy Lee and then the Grande Ballroom emerged that the magic came back, in some small but everpresent, always perceptible degree. And it had to come back hard and high energy, too, because the very nature of the city was, and is, dead-set against the Rockicrucian Spirit, and all its implications. It wasn’t just the cops, who were only extra piggy (because of Detroit) but

not unique in the fact that they were pigs at all. No, the city was as a anti-metaphysical as the cars that are so aptly its symbol. And it recognized the return of the Magic, it recognized it and moved swiftly to destroy. Fortunately, the hardy perennials have survived and will continue. To the early adolescent fringe then, watching the para-psychedelic lovechildren wend their wondrous ways about the dance floor must have been greatly amusing — but also not a little exotic and fascinating. For these kids, dropping out , was not half so much a way of finding a new “love ethic” (if they were even aware what that was, exactly) but a way of escaping the harrowing Detroit factories. (Which

are a whole hell of a lot more horrifying than most people think.) The Frut come out of pre-ordained assembly line tradition, far more than that of the college-bred middle class — their parents, as far as I can tell, are probably all workers — and are the prime example of what I mean. “We had only even played the Grande once,” Panama began, setting into his tale of what the early hippies in Detroit “and that when the that runnin’ around with roller skates and shit, and every band playing their psychedelic songs, with one of those little boxes that you turned the little thing and there’d be all these weird little noises come out.

“You look back,” Panama continues, summing up everything in one short burst, “and that was a weird time for everybody. You’d play something and nobody’d ever heard it. You’d do somethin’ and you’d never heard it. But there was probably about twenty people doin’ it somewhere. You didn’t know, you’d just go, ‘Shit, this is real cool.’ And you’d look at this switch marked ‘Reverb’ on your amplifier and you turned it on one day, and somethin’ happened twice, and you’d go, ‘That’s heavy’.

“So we went in there, and did our shit, man, but we never had enough money to get one of them little boxes. We. fucking couldn’t do that shit, so we just started doing our own songs. Like ‘Sugarcube Dream’ and shit like this. ‘I Love You Baby But You Don’t Dress Cool’, we did that then but we revised it for the album.

“Those were great days; now everyplace you go, people, audiences, know more about your amp than you do. I can’t set up one of them mothers for shit, but I can call some chick who fuckin’ takes off her clothes in the middle of “Take Your Clothes Off And I’ll Love You’ and she’ll come up there. And FIX it, fix it right away. With her clothes off.

“Some chick did that, the other night it happened again. We were doin’ the song, ‘Take Your Clothes Off’ and some chick took her blouse off and walked around.”

I ventured that that was pretty far out. “Oh,” Panama replied, “It was in Toledo, that’s the amazing part of it.”

I don’t think that there has ever been a magazine article about a band of the Frut’s genre. They come from the great American teen club rock & roll dream machine, straight from the suburbs into the grinning arms of the huge poster of John Sinclair that greets all those who enter the famous Warren-Forest area of Detroit. Unable to understand professionalism, because their brothers hadn’t been folk singers but hot rodders, they resorted to an inverted amateurism — “Sure, $250 a night and we were like flippin’ out. Right. A lotta, lotta money,” Panama recounts — that demanded the performers be cool, but not necessarily musically excellent. The MC5 told the story best:

“Well, I feel pretty good And I guess that I could Get you crazy, now baby Cause we all got in tune When the dressing room Got so hazy now baby I know how you want it mama Hot quick and tight The girls can’t stand it When you’re doin’ it right So let me up on the stand So I can KICK OUT THE JAMS!

The rest of the song describes what the bands look like: “I’m startin’ to sweat, my shirt’s all wet — What a feeling! And I’m stoned to the bones and three thousand people out to see me — You got to have it baby, you can’t do without it, when you get the feeling you got to sock ’em out.”; and their effect on the audience: “So you got to give it up/You know you can’t get enough Miss McKenzie — ‘Cause it sticks in your brain and drives you insane with the frenzy/The wigglin’ guitar girl, the flash of the drums/if you wanna keep ’em rockin’ til mornin’ comes — Let me be who I am — And let me Kick Out the Jams!”

Or what the Five said in “Come Together”: “I am out/You are in/Let us form a link and/Come Together!” These things bear quotation precisely because the MC5 were the most influential band on the Motor City scene and the Frut are perhaps the most visibly “Detroit” of all our bands since their sound was shaped by the Five’s ideas, in large measure, I am sure — their lyric ideas are directly related to lines like “I may be a white boy but I can be bad too” (from “Motor City’s Burnin’ ”).

The great egalitarian teen dream machine functions to this day in the lost Hullabaloos and roller rink auditoriums of the Midwest. True, much of the glamour is gone, silently replaced by constipated virtuosos and less-than-rollicking “rock” groups, but back in ’65 that was all there was, that and the beer parties.

“In the beginning we were playing these parties, like for a really, really lotta kids, y’know? Marijuana was just cornin’ into the scene, you just started hearin’ little flickers about it. We were gettin’ high on, like, rum and coke. Holly, our lead player, then and now, used to be blasted on rum and cokes, every time we played. Every time we played we’d drink a bottle of rum,”

The quest then, jams in hand, was for the elusive wood-grain spirits. For those under 21, alcohol meant a risk that loomed as large as buying a lid of weed or a hit of acid; a spirit of pure adventure and fun reigned, transcending the bittersweet daze of the liquor itself.

But again, it was the hard-nosed edge that made it all worthwhile. For example, the dirty assed fist fight that was requisite at every party, just to let you know you’d been there, much like a picador at a bullfight. A tiny tense moment of confrontation — the energy fulfilled, and then the house came down. Arms-, chairs and noses broken, bottles smashed, chaos with a sanquine smile, pigs called, everyone splitting, the last left perhaps ending in jail, at best only sorely shaken.

It was there That we learned that we were up against the Establishment; they hated the volume of our music, the mellowness and reckless quasi-courage of our drunks. Macho though it be, we’d defend it to the death. For it seemed necessary at the time, and probably was -0 a step in the process, a necessary stage in the personal liberation of each of us.

Now though, the most accessible (and least significant?) ready-mades of our culture are available to the very foofball-headed creeps we were trying to avoid in the first place. The mistake was to try to avoid; it is true that we have to eliminate them, but it is more precisely true that we have to eliminate their state of consciousness. It’s the same kind of consciousness, it must be understood, that would attempt to rationalize rock ’n’ roll through amalgm with European formulations (classical-rock) or the most sterile and outdated of jazz progressions (jazz-rock, or at least 90% of it — Colosseum and the Tony Williams Lifetime being the only noteworthy exceptions). And the only way to save us from both of those effects is a return to the true spirit of rock ‘n’ roll — the Rockicrucian spirit.

Santana owes to that spirit much of their appeal — even if not well-realized, they do operate from that precept and as a consequence are a natural drawing card for the hard-nosed edge. The Frut, in their own Midwestern manner, speak to a mass of kids who partake of the same spirit. By and large, the problem and the glory of the Frut is the problem and the glory of each of us, and that of our culture as a whole.

IV

GOOD BAD BUT NOT EVIL (A Narrative by Panama; An Exposition by the Author)

I first heard the Frut in its oldies format at a pop festival in Sarnia, Ontario, the date of which is forever imbedded in my mind. It was August 14, 1969, Woodstock Sunday.

They literally blew my mind; not only was the technical ability of the band itself incredibly lax, the Famed Warbles, the band’s vocal chorus (Mosely the Punk, Wildman Rapucci, Meadowlark Brenner) were so astoundingly off-key and unwarbly that I was shaken. Here was a living threat to anyone’s taking the Rock over-seriously, of trying to make it “arty”. A band with more than music — a band with great SOUND. Never mind that they were filthy, unkempt, hairy, even degenerate, in appearance with even less semblance of chic. Never mind that the guitarist was so close to a cannabis o.d. that he could barely function; discard all those pretensions, friends and fellow freaks, because this is ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC.

As if by instinct, audiences in the sticks picked up on their special magic, their rejuvenation of a bygone era and returned it in kind. Thus:

THE FAMOUS TOLEDO OHIO FRISBEE FLINGING CONTEST AND PARTY STOMPDOWN (as told by Panama, to the Author)

“Well they like us in Toledo, ever since the Toledo Pop Festival two years ago.

“I caught a frisbee. The crowd ROSE ... I was standin’ there on about 20 Blue Meanies, a mixture of acid and the, you know; we’d been up all weekend, and I was standin’ there, dancin’ during ‘Running Bear’... thousands of people there and this THING comes out of the air. I went ‘Jesus Christ!’ It’s cornin’ right at my fuckin’ head. I can hardly see, so I just went like this (SNATCH!) and I caught it. The. whole place just STOOD UP, man, so I started throwin’ shit at ’em; I said, ‘Here’s some shit’, that I had, and I threw some beers. And then I said, ‘Now, what you gonna give ME?’

“Everything. Every fuckin’ article. Watermelon rinds; the fuckin’ stage ... a barrage of shit for about ten minutes, every fuckin’ thing, they threw up on that stage. That was a big big thin|».

“Fuckin’ bands were standin’ there, waitin’ to come on, gettin’ hit in the face with watermelon rinds. You know? I just couldn’t believe it.

“And still, to this very day, people come up to me in Toledo and say, ‘Hey aren’t you the guy who caught that Frisbee?’ I’d like ’em to say ‘Hey ain’t you the guy whose band played a great set?’ After those bands though, I woulda stood up for a dog act.”

But what Panama doesn’t see, apparently, and what we must, is that in a very special way the audience was complimenting him on a great set. It’s great, spontaneous slapstick moves like frisbee flinging that rock’n’roll is made of. That’s a song, my man. (A song being a snatch of something that you can potentially remember.)

The core of the Frut’s (or any real neo-greaser/punk unit’s) punk-rock stylisms is one of boundless joy and great happiness. Living the cosmic giggle, in a certain term but what is sometimes disturbing is that the Frut might see that as a boundary; if there is a purpose to our collective madness, it is too eclipse the cosmic giggle, to make the planet less of a joke. Some will contend that that is impossible — that the giggle is all there is. All I can say to that is, more acid.

The disturbing part of Panama’s dialogue, however, is his nonchalant description of “the and acid.” Now, everyone by now should know that there isn’t any the, for reasons of expense and difficulty of synthesis. If rock’n’roll bands, who have always been regarded as the very vanguard of youth culture, and are at least an elite, don’t understand about bullshit dope (which is not quite the same as hard dope — the Frut don’t mess with needles, of course . . . that attitude is TOTALLY alien to the Rockicrucian aesthetic.) how can we expect the larger segments of freakdom to do anything but be equally wanton in their dope usage? There may be something momentarily nifty about Sly Stone or David Crosby snorting coke, BUT there’s something absolutely horrific about the attitude it implies. It is terrifically absurd to permit our pop stars indulgences we don’t particularly want to encourage, and even want to stamp out, in ourselves. The Frut, who are at least nascently political, should be the first to know better.

Certainly, I would not suggest that the moral implications of their dope usage imply anything repulsive, ethically or aesthetically, about the Frut, nor that that would outshine their dynamite music. What I object to is what Lou Reed calls being “a smorgasbord schmuck.” And that applies to over-use of anything ... a little bit of bogus dope is overuse and I don’t think we can ever afford to forget that.

Still the Frut are a killer band. However, they seen) occasionally to lack perspective on what they are about. Maybe if they didn’t, they couldn’t do what they do; maybe if it is well thought out, It doesn’t happen. Only Christopher Milk can answer that question, for they are perhaps the best thought-out band in history; as for the Frut they began on a hunch.

Not that it swooped down out of the void, any more than rock’n’roll itself did. The real beginning was not necessarily in Panama’s legendary six previous Fruts. As for what it was, Panama himself is the best delineator.

“Well I had this summer to fill, and the rest of the band had just split on me. I mean, all the guys quit and we were hangin’ there, nothin’ to do. So L say, ‘Cozmo, you can play bass in my new band/

“And like, Cozmo, he was my road manager. You know, we had to have some kind of name for him, he needed a place to stay. We had some jobs to play, so we said, ‘You’re our road manager.’

“Well, we were always talkin’, the guys would get together and talk about startin’ this ’57 rock’n’roll band. And just bein’ really drunk, you know, and really shitty. People would really get mad and shit. Like Frijid Pik.

“ ‘Cause we had noticed that there were some of those bands that would get people really pissed off you know. We wanted to be one of those bands really bad. Bob (“Crunchy Cristals” on the album), he was down in Florida, he was just down there tryin’ to get into the University of Miami — but he couldn’t ge it. They ended up gettin’ fucked up and stayin’ ina Holiday Inn with his tuition that his mother gave him. And like, it was real—-ly funny.

“So I called him up. I said, ‘Bob get back here, we’re gonna start your long lost dream band. The legendary ’57 band.’ So he said, ‘Far out, we’re on our way.’ Well, I went, ‘Far out, we’re really gonna go.’ Because ... we had all the dope in town, Every bit of it, between Snidely and George and Neil. An; Dennis was my equipment man at the time. I said, ‘Wild Man, I’m gonna make you a rock’n’roll star. You are now a Warble. You are now a member of the Famed Warbles.’ And he said, ‘I don’ wanna do it.’

“I said, ‘Fuck ya, man, yer gonna do it.’ And to this day, that fucker, every time we play . . . every fuckin’ time ... ‘I don* wanna do it! He don’t wanna go out on the fuckin’ stage.”

“He’s scared man,” interrupted Mosely the Punk, laconically.

“What’s funny is,” noted Panama, toking heavily and taking no notice, “none of these guys, except for Bo and myself, had ever played on stage. Like the Warbles were dealers and now they’rS singin’. They didn’t know HOW to sing, they can’t carry a tune. Like Bob just plays these chords and these guys try to get as close to it as they can. And we never really worked out what they would do, you know, except when they were recording, and then they couldn’t remember a whole song.”

They do most of their tunes from memory — of Troy Shondell’s “This Time” Panama noted, “I haven’t heard that song since ’57. Bob just started playin’ this jam, and I sang those words, they just came out.” Primordial archetypes already — it must be something similar.

“But the Warbles,” Panama continued, “they’d just start doin’ alia this shit, and I’d be flippin’ out, you know. But I’d have to go, ‘Leave it in, just leave it in, we can’t afford any more takes on it.’ ”

Like most other things, the Frut recorded almost by accident. They had simply chanced upon a recording studio in New Haven, near their home in (honest to god!) Starville. Given their choice of label-titles, they chose Trash as the most coherent and obvious; Trash was Iwetofore known for putting out “party records” on the seamier side of Doug Clark and The Hot Nuts.

The simply laid the record out on different people. It sold well, well enough so that the Trash pressing is now thoroughly unavailable. . None of the songs, however, were performance-cleared (ASCAP/BMI) and that may have made airplay minimal. That’s cleared up on the new version, which is on Westbound, who also have the crazed Parliafunkadelicment Thang and Teagarden and Van Winkle. There’s a new cover as well — the front adds a third color to the sketch (nothin’ short of incredible) and fucks up the liner notes even worse than the old one. But it is enough for the Frut that they have been captured at last on wax. And though “Buzz-Buzz-A-Diddle-It” will shortly be a single, none of the Frut seem to be over-anxious about its possibilities, which is refreshing. And strange, because the SOUND of the record really is good.

I remember the first time I heard it; they trouped into our offices about eight p.m. one evening, slipped “Donna” on the turntable, with the cryptic announcement “This is the cut,” and slid out the door. I flipped out completely. (Panama said later, “We really worried about that one [“Donna”]. People really got weird after that dude died, y’know, burnt their record collections and shit.”) I was so excited that immediate phone calls were placed to Lester Bangs and Mad Peck, I believe. Mad later reported that “This Time” was a big smash in his circles in Providence and Lester responded with the review that appeared here a couple issues back.

What’s all the excitement about? The Frut have delved into a stream of rock that has remained almost un-recorded, since the early ’60s. Where Sha *Na Na hits on vocal groups and the Flamin’ Groovies and Brownsville pick up on fifties Sun songs and the like, Frut lambaste such dynamite jams as “Bristol Stomp” and “Running Bear”. They’ve crossed the revivalist division between the fifties and sixties by choosing the strangest and most impossible of both eras. Wimp-rock tunes done with a Rockicrucian beat.

Myriads of hard-rock ooze are sliding out of the industry once again, to saturate the Rock with the face-less innuendoes of Frankie Avalons and Fabians galore in the persons of such as the new Paul McCartney, Elton John and even the Melanie-Laura Nyro school of acne-soul.

True enough, the Frut play pure schlock but, from a time when there was nothing else, the Frut have managed to recollect those tunes which retained the core spirit of the Rock. They are both pre-Beatle and post-Presley, which puts them in the void, somehow, maybe even in the nefarious ozone-that-was. Purely simplistic and simplisticly pure.

“Running Bear” is the perfect example — hippie fascination with Native American (Indian) culture reduced to the least common denominator. Done by the Frut, especially in live performance, where they are liable to tape joints to arrows and shoot them to the crowd and toss cases of Ripple wine to their admirers, it speaks not half so much of Running Bear’s love for little White Dove (“with a love that couldn’t die”) as it does of aboriginal lifestyle. (Even more perfectly, it’s published by Big Bopper Music.)

Better yet, there own warped minds have produced such instant classics as the Berrychuck (as Andrew Oldham once put it) “Chiffon Baby”, “I Love You Baby (But You Don’t Dress Cool” and the inimitable “Take Your Clothes Off (And I’ll Love You)”, a jam which every spaced-out honey seems to assume is a dare to do exactly that. As noted earlier, they often do.

Their music demans a remembrance of Bobby-sox and Brylcreem, Chevys and shackled levis, burgers and fries, illicit comic books, real television and milk in glass bottles, Budweiser, Golden Goodies weekends and back-seat blow jobs. In short, all those days when you “jumped into your seat so (you could) cruise on out”, those years when the cut of your clothes and the length of your hair spelled out unquestionably not only who but what you were.

ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN AND TELL TSCHAIKOVSKY THE NEWS!!!

In the beginning there was nothing but rock Then somebody invented the wheel And things just began to roll!

You say that music’s for the birds You say you can’t understand the words Well baby if you did You’d really blow your lid Baby that is rock and roll

— The Coasters/“That Is Rock and Roll”

Seeing the Frut is a joyous participatory event. The last time was at the Auto Show, in the basement of Detroit’s Cobo Hall. “Running Bear” came off slick, and then straight into the theme of the band, “Take Your Clothes Off.” While Wildman Rappuci hid his handsome features from the crowd, Mosely the Punk and Meadowlark Brenner reeled drunkenly across the stage, occasionally running into bassist-fop John Kozmo, the only one of the Frut who really fits your popstar stereotype in terms of appearance. Panama leaned on his mikestand like some surreal parody of Jim Morrison and Snidely Whiplash’s drums thundered on, paying not so much heed to the beat of the tune as to the beat of the cannabis that pounded in his brain. As for Crunchy Cristals — Panama said as they came off the stage, “I don’t know what we’re gonna do about him — he’s startin’ to sound good. ”

I remember the fifties, my pre-adolescence, and the transitional state between the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations that really marked my coming of age, with a clarity that is disturbing. They are grey years, filled with exactly the kind of nana that Richard Nixon would so love to reinstitute in the land. A sleazy era, with no action, sly or otherwise.

Not to retreat to any specious theories, but mightn’t it have been better that JF& were assassinated — might not the minimal Kennedy magic, placed in his position of virtually absolute power, have snuffed the situation in the bud, been enough to dupe us all in to thinking that the New Frontier was located on Pennsylvania Avenue? One wonders — how long did it take us to discover that WE were the new frontier? And how long for us to get on with the business of creating that new frontier in our image of what it should be?

Those are the kind of images that the sound of the Frut can conjure. A vast wonderment at historical coincidence and such. We have all felt apocalyptic ennui since the dawn of rock’n’roll, and that sense is such an important part of the spirit of the Frut (and of the Rockicrucians) that it is impossible to lose it. “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose,” our foremost delineator once commented. The Frut operate on that premise, they are brave enough to pick up the challenge and go out and try to grab whatever they can, try to save a little piece of it and show it around to their friends, as if to say, “Here, here it is, this is what you are seeking, this and nothing else. And it’s yours, it’s at your feet, all you have to do is remember.”

I don’t think that the Frut are headed for mass stardom, unfortunately; it is no doubt to soon for that, too soon for all of us to discover our commonality once again. I am positive that they are a cult taste, and that that cult is gathering momentum, and that soon, soon enough, the cult will once again become visible and the whole process will start over again. Hopefully this time we will learn from past errors and retain the spirit so that all may progress into a definition of self that is free from death vices.

Continued on page 62♦

Continued from page 37

Still, more than any other “revivalist” band, they are relatable to masses of kids. The reason for that is simple: The Frut relate to that which we all can remember. Even the youngest of us was alive when “Bristol Stomp” was whomping up the charts; and I really do believe that we retain all of it, once we’ve heard it, even precognitively.

For those who were born past the mid-fifties, for those who are now only sixteen or seventeen, Chuck Berry is a rumor. The Dovells are less so, even if the younger members of the rock audience don’t always want to admit it; they do respond to it, though, at the best level.

We were all there, we all lived it, or the periphery of it and we all loved it. And in the end, the only way to attract a mass following is to give ’em what they want. I don’t subscribe to the theory that they don’t know what they want, I think that they do, that they know precisely what they need. The kids (which is all of us, in the end) just haven’t figured out yet how to go about getting it. And the Frut give people what they want on a very high level. Besides they’re not afraid to get in there and mix it up politically and it is very important that this time politics be upfront in the beginning.

“The revolution started back in ’57,” Panama insists. “That’s when people started gettin’ rowdy . . . that’s when they started thinkin’, man, they were lettin’ it out . : . and the way they got it out.

“The pigs understand it more than the kids. They say, ‘Jesus Christ, here them guys are, startin’ it all over again. Startin’ the revolution all over again. And the second time man, will probably be the last.’ The only safe place for a band like the Frut now is the moon.”

Our failure has been in being unable to transmit our love for the Rock to a wider audience. That is the meaning of what Greil Marcus says about Grand Funk in “Rock A Hula Clarified” (but you’ll have to wait ’till next issue for that one). The GFRR has a different musical concept from the Rockicrucians, that’s true, of course, but they do have the spirit, the feeling for the Rock.

The Frut understand it, as well, and their sense of history carries them beyond tastelessness to a new fusion of the seventies and the fifties and mid-sixties. They do the jams that the kids are familiar with, as well as the ones that the Rockicrucians are fondest of. What’s more, their music is stripped of almost every pretension. 'As though incompetents could make any moves towards pretension.

For their pains,, and their intense involvement with the entire Northeast side community, the Frut have indeed, as Jesse Crawford notes in the liner notes to the album, “Spent more time in the slammer thay any ten cats I know. They play Rock and Roll. It’s just that simple!”

VI

AMERIKKKAN RUSE

I learned to say the pledge of allegiance

Before they beat me bloody down at the station

They haven’t got a word out of me since

I got a billion years probation

’69 American terminal stasis

The air’s so thick it’s like drownin’ in molasses

I’m gettin’ tired of payin’ these dues

And I’m sick to my guts of the American Ruse

Mt. Clemens is not the easiest place in the world for freaks to live in. “We . . . live in a very unrevolutionary part of town. We still meet people on the street and they go, ‘Get a haricut.’ Which you found five years ago in the same city. They just don’t WANNA get usedrto it.”

Shakin’ street It’s got that beat Shakin’ street It’s got that sound Shakin’ street You gotta get down

If you doubt that it’s like that, listen to this:

THE FRUT’S FIRST BUST (Narrator : Panama)

“The one guy who had dope on ’em walked in after we had already been busted for dope which we didn’t have. And the other cat, Boom Boom had one gram of hash on him and he dropped it as they were walkin’ into the bedroom. And he was nude — if you can picture this — he was nude, NO clothes on, standin’ in his bedroom doorway. One of the cops goes ‘Frisk him.” And Boom Boom’s goin’, ‘Frisk what?! Are you crazy!?!’ The other guy’s over there in Holly’s bed, he’s layin’ there and he gets into sleepin’ where nothing, nothing, can wake him. So the guy starts shakin’ him, with a gun at his head.

“This guy runs into my room and says, ‘STATE PIGS GET UP!’ and runs outta my room, doesn’t even watch me. I’m sittin’ there, I gotta drop a hit of speed I had. So I’m in jail, runnin’ around, everybody’s really sad and I’m singing songs. They told me to sit down and shut the fuck up but I couldn’t.

I had one little diet pill that my chick got for me so’s I could stay awake one night, you know.

“The pig runs in my room, flashes his badge in my face and screams, ‘STATE PIGS GET OUTTA BED!’ I was dreamin’, and like I said, like . . . (long pause). . . ‘Shit.’ I was tryin’ to relate to what I was supposed to do when the state pigs came into out hourse. And well, I went, This must mean somethin’ man.’ And I ran and got the pill.

“So they just got down, they saw Boom Boom drop a piece of hash, and the pig starts beatin’ the shit out of him, to get him to spit it out. And Boom Boom, he’s sittin’ there and he’s fuckin’ beatin’ up these pigs . . . he’s fightin’ ’em. And actually beatin’ the shit out of THEM,

“So they handcuff him, nude, and put his clothes on him and took him to the hospital and pump his stomach. They didn’t find anything though, and that’s a lotta shit , to go through, tubes up your nose'and everything, so he’s gonna sue ’em.”

Of the half-dozen people charged in the first bust, no one was convicted. But it was only the first in a series of raids on both individual members of the band and the Frut as a whole. The second mass bust was even more incredible: that one nearly destroyed the Frut’s career.

“We were supposed to be playin’ with Alice Cooper at the Eastown. Alice Cooper, the Stooges and us .. . Friday night, we played there, but we were getting John,yKozmo, that is, our bass player, out of jail in Pontiac. This-was our period of busts, you dig?

“I got out of the draft, finally talked this Army spade shrink into lettin’ me out of the draft and I have never yet been able to celebrate that. The second I got home, ‘John’s in jail.’ They cut his hair off, he was in there for two weeks. We played the Si nclair Benefit (January 25, 1970) without him, And then we had to play the Eastown and we HAD to get him out.

“So I was down at the Oakland County jail, at about 10 o’clock gettin’ him out and they were gettin’ ready to throw ME in jail and cut MY hair off. ‘Well, let’s gut this guy’s hair, just while he’s here payin’ the bond.’ I said, ‘Lookit, you guys, just take it easy.’ They said, ‘Shut the fuck up and gimme the goddamn money.’ These guys were really bogue, I’m teilin’ ya. Just the worst. They were NUTS.

“So we got John but, but late, the Stooges had to go on before us. Everybody’s mad. I just said, ‘Jesus Christ, I was just gettin’ my guy outta jail.’ So we played, but John hadn’t played with us for two weeks. All his hair cut off, the fucker looked like Mr. ’57. He’s hangin’ out there, coppin’ that lean, and we were freakin’ out. He’s just been in jail and all he could say was jail talk. I man, when you call your lead singer, ‘Turnkey.’ ... we couldn’t understand it.

“Well, the next night, we had everything all planned out perfectly, taped joints to arrows to shoot during ‘Running Bear’ and had cases of wine to throw at the audience and our bodies painted for ‘Take Your Clothes Off’ and everything. We’re just walkin’ out the door and . . . BOOM! In walk these pigs. They dump this bag on the table, run upstairs and come back down, pick up the bag and say, ‘We got it, let’s go.’ That was it. It took us another six months to get another job at the Eastown and the bookin’ agency says we’re unreliable. Jesus Christ, we’re in fuckin’jail.”

Of course, the blatant illegality of the busts enabled the band to beat them all. What is more interesting is that the group held together in such a situation, one that would immediately have rent most bands asunder.

It’s not merely that they have come to grips with politics, though that is a factor, “See, when somebody mentioned revolution before we didn’t know what they were talkin’ about, we really didn’t know. We didn’t have any experience with it. How could we even complain about living in America when we sat on this farm for six months and did anything we wanted to? Anything. The pigs would drive by and we’d wave to ’em. And that was where it was at. We said, ‘Well shit man, these guys are talkin’ about revolution, they’re really crazy.’

“And then they came like the Gestapo and that’s how you find out what the revolution is all about. ’Cause you know, we were livin’ better than anybody I knew and then all in one day we were livin’ worse. It was the end.”

Liberation Music is where you find it, these days, and no amount of carefully structured polemics is ever going to show people what a bust will. The Frut aren’t afraid to act in an explicityly political manner now.

In the same sense as John Sinclair, the Frut have suffered police hasassment because of, not their politics (they didn’t consciously have any at the time they were popped) but rather because they were living (n a manner that infuriated the minions of law’n’order to the point where they just couldn’t stand it.

It is exactly those things that busted the Frut that haveheld them together. I attribute much to the fact they live communally. They’re family. And they aren’t the type of musicians others pick for their bands; they’re not virtuosi.

So unwanted by others, ignored by the big biz shysters and harassed by the pigs, the Frut proceed upon their merry way. Living a dream, acting out a collective primeval fantasy nightly, whether on stage or at home. Capturing the vitality and intensity of the mu,sic at a much higher level than anyone else (or nearly so) around them. Even those cracked up to be super-whatevers.

Do you believe in magic? The Frut did, from the beginning.

“Kozmo only started playin’ bass three days before we played our first gig. He played it upside down and only knew how to play three strings. He still uses the same $35 bass. He learned his first run the day we started the band. He was the' only guy around that was still around, you know?

“I mean, the first month of our band, we were so high, all we DID was practice, day and night. We said, ‘Shit, we’re ready in three days.’ And we went to Benton Harbor, for $250. We went on that stage and nobody knew what to do.

“I had been on stage for four years, man, and I was scared. I thought, ‘Oh fuck, we in big trouble.’ So we went in, and just freaked out. In the middle of ‘Dorina’, I’m layin on the floor in hysterics and I couldn’t stop laughin’. We were playin’ this rock and roll song and all of a sudden they turned off all the lights and turned on about ten strobe lights.

“We STOPPED!

“I’m goin’ over the mike, ‘Turn the lights on, turn on the lights, turn on the lights, turn on the lights! Turn on the fuckin’ lights, goddamn it!’ We were so scared man, and we couldn’t see. We sorta settled down after that but we only had six songs we knew, they were all in the same key and we did ’em about three times each.

“The amazing thing is they thought we were GREAT. You know, the owner is about eighty years old, or somethin, and he’s thinkin’ you’re some new trend. There were even these chicks there who had seen the old band there, three weeks before . . . and that band was so tight, you know; . . . And then I came in with this and they’re goin’ ‘Jeez, you guys are really gettin’ good!’ They didn’t even realize we’d changed bands or anything. That shows you where the old band was at.”

That should show all of us where just about everybody’s band — they’re all SO FUCKIN’ TIGHT — is at, presently. It should show you, as well, how the true spirit of rock and roll always wins out in the end, even with a dozen strobes goin’ off in your face, so that you’re blind.

If the Frut are significant, and after all this verbiage they’d better be, their significance is this: that they have proven, ultimately, that rock and roll is not a music, that rock and roll is a spirit. The Rockicrucian spirit, that anyone who loves rock’n’roll music can detect at a moment’s notice in anything.

But you know, that ain’t what it says in the Rockicrucian hymnal, not at all. What it says there is the real magic phrase, the one with which it all began and the one with which it all ends:

WOP BOP A LU BOP A LOP BAM BOOM!