LOONEY TOONS

Part One: CRAZY ’BOUT THE LA-LA

So Lester Bangs came back to his Midwestern home after a lengthy farewell to Sweet Home San Diego; the best thing about that — in the aesthetic sense — is that El Bangs likes the new rock and roll better’n anybody. Not only that, he’s articulate.

So we both wind up listening to Black Sabbath a lot — actually, I sort of leave it up to him to put it on, since I O.D.’d on Master of Reality awhile before he arrived, and sometimes things need a rest. (Like, I don’t care to ever hear “Sympathy For The Devil” again.)

Then, our local paper, the Fifth Estate called to ask if I would write a piece on Grand Funk’s second homecoming, since I have been known to shoot off my mouth both frequently and publicly on the subject of the Ferocious Flintlings and their rejection by all and sundry in the vaunted Alternative Media — a relatively monolithic syndrome, indeed, considering its pretensions. I said, O.K. Of course.

And I got to thinking that just about every Third Generation band suffers from the same black out. I mean, pick a Heavy Metal rock group and even if you choose at random you’ll note that there has never been a feature hardly anywhere ever written on them from a FAN, or by a fan, and that all the other stuff is sort of like . Aronowitz telling his old New York Post readers about the Beatles back in days of yore. Even though Alice Cooper and the Stooges and the MC5 are constantly written about — and in the most adventurous, avant-garde, and yea, even revolutionary parts of the country their records get played once or twice a week — it doesn’t matter. Alice, Iggy and the Five are all second generation people who just stumbled onto Third Generation Rock and liked it. I mean, they are absolutely Heavy Metal personalities but the culture they come from was obviously aluminum sauce pan. Whereas, you dig, Sir Lord Baltimore’s brats undoubtedly teethed upon Alice’s nipple and Iggy’s dog-collar and Fred Smith’s myth-making — as opposed to Bob Dylan’s or Chuck Berry’s, for example, but I am sure afraid that this will come up part two pretty soon if we don’t change paragraphs right now.

(Made it!) I could hardly explain this rock and roll, new though it be, to anyone, because if you can’t hear it you have to go back to John Sebastian/ Chuck Berry’s definition of who can’t hear it — and why — and/or you didn’t like them either and aren’t reading this magazine, much less the column.

And if you do like ’em, who then am I to tell ya why? Besides, I don’t KNOW anything afeout music, but I do preterucU sometimes I know a little about what I think and that I may sometimes be thinking and that you might, sometimes, too, and that therefore we can talk to one another. Or I to you and you can write nasty letters about it. (Think I don’t read ’em huh? All rock writers read their mail. Sneaky fuckers ain’t we? And I was wrong about the Who album and there, now I won’t have to put it at the end. But I still don’t like “Goin’ Mobile.”)

Now then, I also thought about why the Media didn’t like Third Generation bands and I got real confused. (Also there is the problem of why writers are changing their minds about the situation and d.j.s haven’t, thereby making it look like linear media is more mobile than electric, which we all know shquldnH.be true but that is for part two, NEXT MONTH.)

But you listen to these people and why they don’t like all these bands, or any particular one (Grand Funk being a synonym, in some senses, for them all) and you just get CONFUSED.

Like, this one disc jockey tells me about how aesthetically terrible they are, but I accidentally (never listen to FM radio on purpose, y’understand) hear his show and he plays Frank Zappa telling terrible jokes — and I mean aesthetically OFFENSIVE — so what could he know?

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Another disc jocular says that they’re all politically offensive, because it’s all hype and they’re controlled by evil capitalists, sucking the life force right out of the tender young loins of our brethen and peers. True enough. But I got trapped into listening to his show and he played the Rolling Stones, whose label is owned by the Kinney Corporation, the largest media conglomerate in the nation, and the Beatles, whose label is owned by EMI — the “largest recording organization,” it says right on every album cover, “in the world.” —' and Bob Dylan, who records for CBS, which is not exactly my idea of small pickin’s, corporately speaking, if we may. And if Grand Funk and Black Sabbath and SLB and the rest aren’t any better, can they be any worse?

Yet another d.j. claims that “Grand Funk and all those people” make kids take reds, the rationale being that since so much of GFRR, et al.’s audience takes these horrible downer pills (and they are horrible, there’s no question about that) then they must be making them do it. Which is an interesting point: I wonder why the Beatles weren’t tried for Charlie Manson’s Helter Skelter? And did you notice Bob Dylan’s line about “I started out on burgundy and soon hit the harder stuff”? Huh, didja? Why, let’s get a grand jury and investigate this mongrel jew who is corrupting . . . Call Harry Anslinger, will ya?

But finally a disc jockey tells me that he has been able to get the “Grand Funk” audience (what a symbol GFRR is now!) to listen without actually playing their records and I finally figure out what the deal is, yup, I got it now, this is it:

THEY’RE SCARED

Because they don’t understand. And the reason they don’t understand — oh this is all the Lights on The Great Pinball Machine In the Sky lighting up at once and you get 5,678 free games and a double chocolate ice cream cone to boot - IS BECAUSE THEY’RE TOO FUCKING OLD.

Generation gap? Nah, just a spirit gap. It ain’t so much because old Father Chronology’s got ’em as it is that they’re so old they can’t grow up and do what’s obvious to anyone with enough of the Spirit of Ra in their dust to breathe daily.

Of course, it’s awful to think of it but what’s gonna happen to these old farts? When the kids are still out on their own limb with Captain Beefheart blattin’ in one ear and the Sabbath in t’other and not thinkin’ either particularly far out but merely the Cqre music of their lives, why what are we gonna do with these old d.j.s and such, as they raise their horrified hands to their chests and fall in contorto despair, railing against the viperous youth and their fuckin’ NOISE, why what’s gonna happen?

They’ll probably have a HEART ATTACK, and FALL RIGHT OVER.

AND THEN WE’LL DRIVE ’EM TO THE HOSPITAL, AND WHEN THEY WAKE UP AND FIND OUT THAT WE’RE USIN’ THE SANCTIFIED SOUNDS OF PAUL McCARTNEY FOR ELEVATOR MUZAK - AND THAT GEORGE HARRISON HAS BEEN BANISHED TO A COLONY TENDED BY LEPERS - WELL, WHAT’RE THEY GONNA DO THEN?

MUTATE OR DIE.

(Next Month: PART TWO: JEEZ I CAN’T FIND MY KNEES: Third Generation Rock as the Descendant of Folk-Rock and Why James Taylor Isn’t.)