LOONEY TOONS

Writing about writing is almost the equivalent of thinking about thinking. We all know where that gets you, most of the time.

It might be worth risking sometimes, though. Especially right now, since so many rock and roll writers have missed so many boats in the last year.

Part of the problem might be seen as the lack of a responsible and responsive medium, a magazine or newspaper as keyed in to the needs and desires of its audience as it is to its advertisers and authors. Naturally, CREEM is just as bad — if not worse — than anything else in that. Too many articles on in-group faves (Stooges, Velvets, Beefheart) have passed thege pages and not enough about people who are really significant. Not that -Stooges or Velvets-type stuff isn’t important, too, but it’s gotta be done in the context of what people already care about, Popularity — by Which we mean am hit singles and fm hit albums m means something, after all.

1 Secondly* there is. an inclination among those who write about the culture to presume that the music industry to which it is so closely tied is one and the same, with it. That’s really a ruse; and one that should be put dowh as quickly as possible. Rock and roll magazines aren't supposed to be adjuncts, of the Music Biz; they are supposed to be part of that mebu'lous pack of people and ideas we call our culture. Youth culture, alternative c u lture , c o n c i o u s n e s s III counter-culture, whatever. It sure ain’t found in the offices of the Music Bizness.

But, since most of the people who write about rock'n’roll these days don’t seem to have any rdot feeling for what it IS, and for where if comes from (from whence it derives its energy) that shouldn’t be any great surprise.

On the other hand, it’s amazing that one could write about Little Richard and/or Grand Funk and be pissed off because there wasn’t enough “music” there. Or, to put it a little differently, there’s more to a rock'n’roll show than what’s on stage.

Problem Three: The Wild Angels Problem, Greil Marcus called it. Especially here, but also elsewhere (and when you stop to think about it, all of these problems are found in even worse degree on the pseudo-hip FM “undergrouhd”, flop-forty radio stations) rock'n’roll is too often seen as a dying art, something that needs to be held onto with clutching fingers or else its gonna slip right out of oUr fingers curl up in a corner, and die a painful death. Meainwhile', the real shit is being squeezed to death between our fingfers, and/or., left out in the cold, where it’s .finding a whole new audience and the rock'n’roll writer suddenly finds that he ’s the one freezin’.

Well, rock and roll ISN'T an anachronism, change as' it might, but everybody with a brain in his head should be able to see that now. It’s just that you .read a lot of the stuff that’s written about rock these days and you start to think so.

These: are the Sundry reasons why we will leave' that writer’s notice on page six so large. ; I ' /

Even rejected manuscripts fill a function,, you know. They key us into what the audience for our rag is thinking about, and how it’s thinking about it, and every once in a while (more often than you think)%you find something there that everybody should see. So you publish it.

Teenagers, in a closed system, could become the silent majority of the rock press and that’s ridiculous,; Because TEENAGE would seem to me.to be one definition of rock'n’roll, in3 the first place. It’s all strange.

Langdon Winner (who virtually “discovered” Capt. Beefheart) sums up a lot of the rest of this problem:

I’ve gone past the point of wanting to write merely for the sake of writing. Publication without purpose js a crime. I’ve spent the better part of my life sifting through words that should never have been written. Sometimes I find a gem amidst the crap. But riot often .. . The idea that there should be “rock critics” now seems to me totally repulsiv e. The readers of Rolling Stone, tor example should have written all of those “reviews”, not the staff of experts (friendly experts but still misplaced oracles). Rock and roll could easily become the cadaver which endless schools of hostile critics cut, slice, bend and mutilate for their own purposes. I am not thrilled that certain English , departments have now included rock and roll as a subject for their well-known critical techniques . ... When writing ’ appears, someplace or other about rock and roll, I think that it ought to' spring from, sources very close to the real experience of listening to the music and trying to find a place for it in one's life.

certainly cquldn',t say what I mean as well, because ..that last, especially is EXACTLY what we’re talking about here. Only those who live in the music can talk about it, and I don’t mean musicians, who have for the most part FM stereo/tape decks in their cars anyway. I mead love the music because it excite? them and tells them things that almost nothing else either does or can. t v-

Maybe the audience is always going to be a McLuhanistic half-step in front of what is written about them and their music; that’s probably as it should be. , But what is written about their music should, always be written as “our music.’-’ Because I feel the music, or Langdon does, or any of a number of people you’ll hopefully find and continue to find herein, do on that personal level and we hope that you do too. (

If you do, CREEM really wants'to be “a forum where anyone who finds his voice can speak,” That’s Langdon again, and again, I just could not find a better way to say it.

Still, there are certain things we have all learned about how this mess is run, and in some future columns maybe some of us (hopefully not just me) can discuss some of them. But first you have to be aware, I guess, that it’s your magazine, if you want it to be, if you’ve got something to say.

We hope yqu like it.

Since Lester (who’s now the “Record Review Editor”, a title he, deserves for being silly enough to move from California to Michigan, and for other reasons that aren’t clear til you’ve lived .with him) keeps saying this column is getting too “heavy,” let’s end light this time:

Note 1: Greil Marcus, who wrote the Sticky Fingers review in this issue, has promised me that he will eat a copy of that review as published in the magazine if Mick Jagger does as he has promised and bequeaths a James Taylor-like solo album. If such a thing should happen, watch for pix here. Mike Goodwin is supposedly negotiating for motion picture rights.

Note 2: I named my dOg Gloria (see Loony Toons in Vol. 3, No. 4) because of Van Morrison, not becauseof Shadows of Knight or Them. Just because I happen to think that Van Morrison is what a rock'n’roll performer should be like, in a \yhole lot of ways. *And not because I wanna be your dog either.

Note 3: It’s about time that we noted, and we hereby do, that we are proudly distributed in an edition of many more thousahds than before, by Curtis Circulation Company who also are saddled with people like Esquire and Rock (and Rags before its recent and unfortunate demise.) So, who knows, maybe someday we’ll be big time and I’ll get a new typewriter ribbon and a new pair of boots and a new record player. And after that, we can all retire. And all of that.

Let it rock, huh? ^