IMAGINE JOHN LENNON

APPLE

We were driving home after dinner. The radio was on. Loud. It appeared suddenly.

In the middle of the night In the middle of the night I call your name Oh Yoko oh Yoko, my love will turn you on.”

“Turn that up,” I snapped, sitting up straight, immediately all ears.

In the middle of a shave In the middle of a shave I call your name Oh Yoko, Oh Yoko, my love will turn you on.

So this is the new John Lennon record. Well, it’s really fine. “Little louder,” I called.

“In the middle of a dream ...

Smile. So it’s not quite over yet, huh, John? No primal scream this, it’s almost lilting. Rock’n’roll though. Like early Spector.

The car pulled into the drive. Charley turned the ignition off and flipped it back onto “Acc.” The song concluded:

“Oh Yoko, oh Yoko, Oh Yoko...

and then a harmonica bleat as sharp and sure as any on Another Side.

“Damn!” I boomed when it was over. “It’s the song John and Dylan always should have written for Phil Spector to produce for the Crystals!”

John Lennon: Plastic Ono Band struck with such impact that Lennon’s next release was by definition, an event for those reached by the first. (No small number, though scarcely as large as the audience for the Beatles, Or even the other solo moptops.)

In the spring, just as the sky was beginning to clear, and just in time for Mayday, “Power to the People” made its appearance. (In fines-; Beatles’ tradition, it’s not included on Imagine.)

“Power to the People” was exhilarating. Like “Give Peace A Chance,” it was a-beerhall song, only its politics were less naive or, at least expressive of a more radical naivete. The honking sax, the thundering chorus, Lennon’s sharp, powerful vocal made it one of the best, and least played, singles ever done by any major rock artist. It can stand up to “Instant Karma” and “Cold Turkey” any day.

“Power to the People” summed up a lot of our most positive political emotion, but it also carried the implicit challenge of making that emotion concretely manifest.

Say you want a revolution We better get it on right away Get on your feet And into the street, singing... Power to the people! Power to the people! Power to the people! Power to the people! Right on!*

It was a service, in a way. It gave us somthing to tack our political energies onto, something to hum when we did manage to find it on the radio, and something to rejoice in — we’d finally found a rock star who was willing to stand next to us.

My greatest hope was that, besides pointing out contradictions, John would begin to aid us resolving them. I hardly expected him to resolve anything for me, but I did hope he’d shove me in the right direction.

Imagine came on the radio long before copies were available in stores. That’s a compliment, I suppose, but it’s also a drag. The music was so accessible, and you couldn’t get your hands on it. The wait was frustrating, but — as brief snatches seemed to prove - worthwhile.

Nonetheless, despite high expectations and partially because of them, Imagine is not a total success. John Lennon is more than ever on our side: he is making the most valiant and conscious attempt to help us define ourselves any rock and roll star has ever made. He is doing it brilliantly, with music that is fine rock and roll, and with lyrics that occasion ally sum up the best of what we all feel.

On the other hand, because we know John is attempting to speak to us and for us, Imagine can be something of a disappointment. Its politics are crude, occasionally as naive as “Give Peace A Chance.” (“O.K., one more, but that’s it,” Abbie Hoffman is supposed to have said.)

Unlike its predecessor, Imagine is often vindictive and petty, especially when talking about Paul McCartney. “How Do You Sleep” seems to be the most played song on the album, at least on FM. I guess it’s pretty neat that one of the Beatles has made a slap at Paul; I suppose it seems pretty funny.

But after the joke’s novelty has worn off we’re left with some pretty sour grapes. After all, John’s face is not altogether clean in the whole affair — no one’s ever is in that sort of divorce. Most of all there’s a real contradiction between J ohn’s supposed politics and his total lack of compassion for his old song mate. Paul just isn’t John’s enemy — except on the personal level — and it seems petty to make a six minute issue of it here.

Worse, the case John makes is extremely self-righteous. “How do you sleep?” I wonder too, but this attack seems unnecessary. Calling Linda Paul’s “momma” is just silly; it’s as silly as jt would be for Paul to write a song that called Yoko John’s “tutor.” (And both statements are partially accurate.) It’s equally sexist, too.

Based on the evidence they presented in their late September appearances on the Dick Cavett show, John and Yoko still have a lot of problems to deal with in the realm of sexism.

“Where’d you get your shirt, Yoko?” Cavett asked.

“I got mine ...” John answered.

That would be almost funny’ as a case in point if it wasn’t symptomatic of the entire program. Yoko rarely was allowed ^ by John — to answer any of the questions Cavett asked her, and when she did, it was always with addenda and clarification by Lennon.

There’s something to be said for the idea that Yoko is not as articulate in English as John, but she’s hardly incapable of answering simple questions.

Of course, the television show — especially the second segment — was both entertaining and impressive on its own terms (sexist though they may, in part, have been). Yoko’s “Mrs. Lennon,” from her forthcoming album, is by far the best, most Western and most rock‘n’rolly song she has ever performed; the film clips were all adequate at the very least, and John was frequently very funny.

Better yet, neither John nor Yoko attempted to use Cavett’s program as a platform to make any big “statements.” It would undoubtedly have seemed pompous and pretentious to do so. The couple times Yoko tried to make one of her aesthetic briefs, in fact, she began to seem a little ludicrous. (That still doesn’t excuse John, of course, unless you presume — and some do — that he’s her press agent.) It was only towards the end of the second segment that John suggested to Dick that he’d better start relating to “the red and black revolution.” Even that was handled with a wit that charmed everyone. It certainly didn’t seem threatening (even if it did seem a little ominous).

Imagine is a lot like John and Yoko’s Cavett appearance. It doesn’t attempt to make any major statements, except the one about Paul, but when it does have something to say it’s generally well-put.

The only time Imagine falters, just like the only time John and Yoko faltered, is when Lennon deserts the myth he’s been building. “How Do You Sleep” is an instance of that; it deserts the positive healthy arid progressive tack John takes in (for example) “Power to the People,” for vindictiveness. Opening old sores, seems pointless in light of the important things John has to say. “Don’t lookback,” is still good advice.

There’s a striking tendency, first manifested in the John Lennon album, towards literalism here. John has chosen real life imagery in his new songs, and it will be the test of his songwriting to keep making those images as exciting and powerful as they become in “Oh Yoko” and “Imagine”. The only time he retreats from realism is in “Gimme Some Truth,” which is really a statement of purpose anyway, and therefore open to rhetoric on a higher level.

“Truth,” I suppose, is even more potently name-calling than “How Do You Sleep” but it’s so ingenous and it’s images are so wonderful that it’s not at all distasteful. Who can dislike:

No short haired-yellow bellied son of tricky dicky Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me With just a pocketful of hope Money for dopeMoney for rope ... All I want is the truth Just gimme some truth*

That’s not vicious, that’s really, truly funny. And what does “money for dopemoney for rope” mean? John does understand, because he has experienced.

“Imagine” is amazing because it very nearly makes a song of New Left ideology. Of course, it’s New Left ideology at its most simplistic, but if one is looking one can find internationalism (“Imagine there’s no countries”) communalism (“Imagine no possessions”) and a few other things. (“Imagine all the people living for today,” has something to do with our politics, but I’m not sure I can define precisely what.)

The simplisitics of “Imagine” and “Gimme Some Truth” are forced by the medium. There’s not room to say much more, because it’s rock and roll. (Someone once suggested that the Kinks, with their penchant for British history, should do a single called “An Essay on Human Understanding” but translated into rock and roll that just comes out “Like A Rolling Stone,” anyway.)

Still there are a couple of times John blows it. He seems tom between fantasy/ romanticism and hard-edged realism, and strangely enough, his realism tends to show up in his sexual songs and his romanticism in his social ones.

“Crippled Inside,” for example, is merely mewling self-pity, the sort of fantasy that whines: “We’re all hurt so bad, it’s a wonder we can make it through the day much less actually accomplish anything.” “I Don’t Wanna Be A Solider” operates from the same premise as “Give Peace A Chance:” at least the latter was upfront about its naivete.

“How?” is the worst offender. In a certain sense, it expresses existential confusion, especially in the last verse when the persona is transformed from “I” to the all inclusive “we.” But for the most part it sounds merely self-pitying in the extreme. John hasn’t totally deserted Primal Therapy, I guess, and that’s too bad. ( The best moment of the first half of the Cavett show was John’s “It didn’t work Arthur!” as he lit his first cigarette.) Both “Crippled Inside” and “How?” might have worked in the context of the Plastic Ono Band album. But here they come across as self-conscious plays for sympathy.

“It’s So Hard” makes a different sort of complaint: “I feel like going down.” As always, the music tells the tale. It just keeps on rockin’. That’s no advance over “Yer Blues,” but has anybody ELSE come up with a better prescription for despair in the meantime?

It is John’s love (or Yoko) songs that seem to work best. Here his literalism is like a breeze; these are mature love songs, perhaps Western pop culture’s first,certainly among its finest.

“Oh Yoko”, which was written three years ago, is the finest of the lot. It’s the first love song I ever heard that said very much about what a love affair seems to be like. “My love will turn you on,” seems less a macho declaration than a sincere and simple statement of intent and fact. The music is absolutely pure, shimmering its way up to that great harmonica break that ends it.

Even starker, “Oh My Love,” makes a statement as honest and anti-romantic as “Oh Yoko” and even manages to define Lennon’s happiness with Yoko: “For the first time in my life/ My eyes are wide open.” It gets a little sentimental, but, it seems to be honest sentiment. He really does loveher after all.

But the thrust of the love songs on Imagine becomes important primarily because they don’t reinforce the sexual images and roles we’re trying to change. There’s no head-on confrontation with sexism here, but that’s just as well. After the Cavett show, I don’t think John is ready for one, at least not publicly, and I’d rather feel elated than depressed.

Still, if there are no explicitly, anti-sexist remarks here, neither are there any expressions of undying love or self-conscious machismo assertions of “I’ll take care of yuh, honey.” “Jealous Guy,” which is unremittingly honest, and ghastly familiar, rips away at all of that:

I was feeling insecure You might not love me anymore I was shivering insidef

If “Don’t Let Me Down” (as another friend once suggested) is a song from John to Cynthia about Yoko, then “Jealous Guy” is a song, at least tangentally, from John to Yoko about his relationsip with Cynthia. “Don’t Let Me Down” is quite obviously the stronger song — though “Jealous Guy” is beautiful in a simple, unpretentious way, with John and Nicky Hopkins’ pianos the only visible accompaniment — but “Jealous Guy” is more important. It’s the first rock and roll record that’s about real vulnerability and insecurity and it’s humility is more real because it’s so familiar. The apology always comes down to “I was swallowing my pain.”

I wish that apology was directed to Paul, though. Ever since the Beatles broke up, I’ve thought of Paul as the one we lost — “those freaks was right when they said you was dead” has crossed my mind more than once, And today I don’t feel so good about that. . . he’s an easy target. You can blame Paul for punking out — that is what he did — but “How Do You Sleep” winds up making my skin crawl. It’s really vicious and John Lennon, and the rest of us, had better be above that, or we’re all jammed. Songs like this tend to degrade everyon'e concerned with them, and my hope is that we’ve learned our lesson, and J ohn his

So where does John go from here? He pulled a switch on us this time in a sense. After all the “dream is over” riffing of John Lennon, Imagine ’s preoccupation is with new dreams. Bigger ones, and 'maybe better but dreams nonetheless. Perhaps he sees his function as one of confusion and challenge: Can you keep up with me? If that’s the question he’s asking, then we can all rejoice, because that would fill a gap that Bob Dylan left before or after (it doesn’t matter which) John Wesley Harding.

Still, he’s also chosen to bear the responsibility of demystification of the pop ideal. “They’re all middle class and bourgeoise,” he said in the Red Mole interview, of American bands, “and they don’t want to show it.. . But if these middle class groups realize what’s happening and what the class system has done then it’s up to them to repatriate the people and to get out of all that bourgeoise shit.”

He couldn’t have stated his own dilemma more coherently. Imagine sometimes seems to promise that he will but almost as frequently it says that John is very very confused. The Cavett show says similar things: John seems torn between myth-making for himself and Yoko and his new found fascination with being able to demystify his public image.

Because he has dared to make the daring statements he made on John Lennon and, in some sense, on Imagine John Lennon probably has more options open to him right now than any rock star ever had. He also has assumed more responsibility. It’s wonderful that he cares about us, of course, but it will be interesting to see how he responds to the continuing demand his audience — certainly, the most progressive and adventurous audience in rock — will make on him to (quite literally) “put up or shut up.”

Imagine is a truly fine album, for all my reservations. I haven’t been happier with a post-Beatles solo album, on all fronts, except for John Lennon: Plastic Ono Band and on a mass level this is more effective, and therefore superior. If J ohn can continue this pace, we’re going to be all right.

“Ya gotta leave ’em with hope,” Bob Dylan told Peter Fonda. John’s done better than that: he’s left us with the assurance that after the old dream is over, the new one’s just begun.

Dave Marsh

*Copyright 19 71, MacLen Music

†Copyright 19 71, MacLen/Ono Music

ONE DOZEN ROSES SMOKEY ROBINSON & THE MIRACLES TAM LA

I don’t know about this one. Everyone seems to like it but I just don’t know. Understand, I never really liked “Tears of a Clown” — when it was originally released as the last cut of the Make It Happen album, I used to take quick strides over to the record player and hit the reject lever every time that ricky-ticky carnival midway music started up. Successfully revived and installed, here as one of the new album’s choice cuts, “Tears” still sounds oppressively cute. The insistent double-time beat qnly cuts through the syrupy circus motif with a jangly nervousness. Smokey treated the subject of happiness masking sorrow with much more subtlety and feeling in “Tracks of My Tears” (Compare the lines, “Take a good look at my face/ You’ll see my smile looks out of place/ If you look closer it’s easy to trace/ The tracks of my tears” with “Don’t let my glad expression/ Give you the wrong impression/ Don’t let this smile I wear/ Make you think that I don’t care” — both fine pop lyrics with a nice felicity of rhyme, but there’s a depth in the first missing from the second.) Perhaps what’s most disturbing is the uncomfortable strain between the jaunty brightness of the musk and the “sadness” of the song. Smokey’s singing fuses these elements rather well, solving his own form-content problem with a heartache undercurrent that seeps out around the edges of the bouncy phrasing, but on the whole “Tears” falls into an unsatisfying limbo.

If it avoids this form/content conflict, “I Don’t Blame You At All” succumbs to the follow-up-song weakness by recapturing the sound of “Tears of a Clown” (minus the circus touches it’s only mildly irritating) but forgetting about everything else. Again, the rhymes are clever but the song is boring. “Crazy About The La La La, ” yet another step away from “Tears,” still retains a lot of that song’s “cuteness” only this time it’s spread to the lyrics. Ok, it does have its attractions — any song with an intro of Smokey talking can’t be all bad —. but you have to be in a charitable mood to find them. Paul Simon’s “Cecilia” fits right in here; what banality. I believe Smokey picked it just because of the word “jubilation,” but that’s not a good enough excuse.

That takes care of “Tears of a Clown,” its obligatory follow-ups and other attendant flotsam. The rest of the album, while not top-grade Smokey & The Miracles, is fine, just fine. (A problem here: If I’d just accept the fact that Smokey Robinson isn’t writing any more masterpieces like “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” or “Fork in the Road,” I might appreciate his current work more fully for what its is — clever, intelligent, at its best delicately subtle — instead of weighing them in against the classics and then tipping the scales with my memories. With few exceptions, however, the songs of the past two or three years seem slightly shallow when compared with the deep songs that came before. Everything’s just a little too facile now. It’s this too: Smokey just doesn’t make me cry any more.)

Two Smokey songs save the album for me — “Satisfaction” and “When Sundown Comes.” “Satisfaction,” not to be confused with a J agger-Richa,rd song, is a lush showcase for Smokey’s singing: one crushed sigh, one sweet drawn-out “ooo” from the man will wipe me out and this song is oozing with them. The lushness is not the chokin’ kind, merely a silky background that begins with violins in muted hesitation, harps like waves rolling in from the distance to be joined by a teasing guitar — all of course overladen with this delicate drum-cymbal beat — Smokey comes , in with a brief humming “moan” and takes you into the clouds. The Miracles — Bobby Rogers Pete Moore, Ronnie White and Robinson’s wife Claudette who records but does not perform with the group and is pictured on the album’s cover — are lovely as always, providing the perfect hushed backing, anticipating or echoing Smokey’s lead, giving the sound warmth and density. The lipes may not sound like much — the refrain: “Having my baby with me daily is satisfaction enough for me/ Oh and holding her tightly by me nightly/ That’s satisfaction enough for me” — but hearing Smokey sing them, you’d swear they were among his best.

“When Sundown Comes” opens up'the album on a mournful note. If it’s not immediately exciting, the song has some pleasures to reveal in time. The opening lines are beautiful in their simplicity: Smokey, as the man trying to satisfy himself that life goes on even though love dies, sings, “Things can change/ Even the mountains can change/ Sundown comes round over and over again.” At the other end of the album is a new version of Robinson’s great “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” originally made by the Marvelettes. This treatment is a bit thin for my taste, padded with some silly shoo-bop-de-bops and missing the bite of the original, but just to hear those lyrics again is a joy.

Robinson’s output has fallen off considerably from the time when he supplied the bulk of the material not only for the Miracles but the Temptations, Mary Wells and the Marvelettes as well. As on the group’s last album, Pocketful of Miracles, Smokey fills in here with other new material so similar ip feeling and style to his own that you have to look at the credits to distinguish it. “I Love You Dear” and “That Girl,” the latter a perfect number for the Jackson 5, stand out here. Nice.

I approach new Smokey & The Miracles albums the way an insecure lover receives a sheaf of love letters: the immediate pleasure gives way to a gnawing disappointment because the expectations are so great that nothing, nothing can ever satisfy them. I start ripping into phrases, finding reassurances one day but emptiness the next. It’s absurd. Gotta get some critical distance. I mean, The Miracles are my all time favorites, but Smokey we just can’t go on meeting like this.

Vince Aletti

NEW WAYS BUT LOVE STAYS SUPREMES MOTOWN

TOUCH SUPREMES MOTOWN

In the beginning the Supremes personified the mystique of the black girl groups: elusive, intriguing and yet stunningly open to sexual fantasy, one could become emotionally involved with them collectively. A bit of choreographed wholesomeness and a great deal of funky magnetism. We couldn’t very easily have gotten that from the Shirelles, the Chiffons, or the unwieldy Marvellettes (with the five original members). But with the Supremes it was there, astonishingly compact and accessible. .1 still carry a dogeared publicity card, sent through the mail, inscribed in ball-point pen with my own name (!) and signed (! !) by all three of them.

We turned up the car radio and danced to some truly great three-minute masterpieces: “Come See About Me,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” “Stop! in the Name of Love,” “Back in My Arms Again.” In their five-year run, however, all was not so sweet for the Supremes. Finally, in 1969, they released “Someday We’ll Be Together,” a semi-gospel ballad, and it seemed beyond their range. The vibrant call-and-response style of the earlier records was all but lost in the strings; the intentional showcasing of Diana Ross was dissolving the Supremes as a group.

By the time Diana split, the prestige of the Supremes — and most of their emotional following — had fallen so far that the imminent announcement of her replacement caused little but bitter cynicism, especially in the rock press, but also, I believe, in the adoring, record-buying public. Jean Terrell took over as lead singer, and the group put out “Up the Ladder to the Roof,” a beautiful single, but not one strong enough to make us immediate believers again. An album {Right On) followed; sounding like a combination of several producers’ projections of the new group’s sound. The cuts were strong, uptempo pieces, a collection of singles just this side of paradise. Miss Terrell’s voice promised more depth and bite than Diana now seemed willing to deliver.

The new Supremes’ second album, New Ways but Love Stays, found a fairly cohesive style for the girls: Producer Frank Wilson’s driving stomp production, along with almost Spectorian music and sound backgrounds, and, a touch of psychedelia that is not always too successfully integrated. Although the songs are held together by the sort of dynamics Holland and Dozier used in the earlier days, the music and vocal interaction is looser, allowing a more individual feel. There are several tracks that seem of a piece with the great old songs, done in a more varied instrumental and vocal style. The drive of “Stoned Love,” for example, can be felt in the incredible rush it achieves breaking out of the churchy, symphonic introduction. “Together We Can Make Such Sweet Music” has hand-clapping, for God’s sake, and a very nice travelling guitar. “It’s Time to Break Down” is the most interesting, even as it fails to hold together as a song with a real sense of climax. It attempts to fuse the stomp fourbeat with insinuating violin, bass, and percussion flourishes and a hair-raising electric guitar solo. The fusion isn’t always there, but along the way one can hear exquisite pauses, phrasing, and instrumental buildup, worthy of the attention of any contemporary rock musician. “Come Together,” is tailored to the Supremes’ new style, instead of inhibiting it (an old Motown trick with other groups’ material). The Beatles’ musio fits beautifully into the tight, bulldozing arrangement (you’re on edge until the stomp finally takes over midway) and the lyrics lend themselves to Terrell’s teasing, echoed vocal. She is now singing more maturely and sensually, sounding more at ease than Diana Ross ever could. In “Shine On Me” she works into several semi-climaxes, and, as the music abruptly changes pace, she begins to sing against and around the almost dissonant tempo variations, bringing them back into rein.

If New Ways contains some striking set pieces, Touch, the latest album, satisfies as a whole (except, perhaps, for “Time and Love,” which is handed down from Laura Nyro via Barbra Streisand). Producer Wilson here is working with more basic love/lost love material. No psychedelic touches which distract when they should flash. He has eliminated the extraneous and solidified the intensities. The girls adapt to this as a group, with fuller and more varied harmonies. The interplay of the voices highlights the close lead-and-repeat, and then turns around to feature background solos, like Mary Wilson’s in “Touch.” The. Supremes sing “Nathan Jones” almost as a single ensemble, keeping Terrell’s voice a fraction out in front to propel the background. The “old” group feeling is there, the sex, the irresistable musical unit. But it is maintained by three distinct singers: witness the tension of the voices in “It’s So Hard for Me to Say Goodbye,” the riffs bounced off each other at the end of “Here Comes the Sunrise.” the lilting cadence backup in “Happy (Is a Bumpy Road).” There’s a wonderful blending of the secular and the religious in “Love It Came to Me This Time”; Terrell finishes off with a “my-my-my” that perfectly sums up the devotion and uplift of the song.

This is the sort of freshness and integrity that once made Diana Ross and the Supremes so great. That it doomed them to turn stale as faded superstars is both its strength and its weakness. Let’s hope the new Supremes don’t get quite that popular. It’s so nice to be hooked again.

Mark Vining

CLOSER TO THE GROUND JOY OF COOKING CAPITOL

High energy? Who needs it.

This band hardly even rocks. Lots of roll and soul, r&b, and funk but who has any use for electric eclectic, you ask? Well, hand slapping, finger snapping and toe tapping ain’t a bad beginning and before long you’ll find ’em shakin’ it out on the dancefloor. I didn’t hesitate. This band really cooks and apparently finds it a Joy. So will you.

Not exactly “high” energy, blit plenty of it. Joy of Cooking don’t'lack or repress their power but instead creatively control and channel it from and into every possible direction. Instrumentation, vocals and lyrics are perfectly (almost mathematically) arranged, seemingly without effort, to provide one of the most remarkable albums this year. There’s none comparable, except perhaps their first record which Closer To The Ground is equal to if not superior.

A few songs struck with unusual impact. Either because I recalled them from J of C’s usually superb show at Mandrakes in Berkeley &/or because the tunes were live numbers chosen among the finer new material. These highlighters, “Closer To The Ground”, “Humpty Dumpty” and “First Time, Last Time” are treated with professional finesse and subtle drive. Not only do the tunes reveal Joy’s talent as musicians but composers/songwriters as well.

The lyrical content, important and so integrally woven with the music, deserves mention. The words are written for songs, not poems or message maneuvers. The music is equally relatable - giving you a taste of Colorado, prison trains or blue grass. Listen to either words or music and be consciously unaware.of the other, enabling a concentration necessary to enhance the appreciation of both. In other words, they compliment each other beautifully ... it takes two to Tango.

They say a lot (nothing heavy, nothing trite) without shouting. “Closer To The Ground” charts the gambit of useless searching, telling you the answers are on this planet. “First Time” deals with dreamin’ vs. schemin’ or the dangers of honky tonkin’. “Humpty Dumpty” isn’t a polemic against chauvinism but a campaign for independence (ultimately personal freedom):

You got to know what you want to do in this old world Because if you don’t If you don’t even try Somebody gonna pick you up and take you for a ride ... Don’t you know I’m ridin’ around in a circle Living off my man

“A Thousand Miles”, “Sometimes Like a River” and “The War You Left” are less funky but just as well coordinated. Most ideas are based on the bluesy “I lost my baby” or parallel themes and the music moves at that soulful pace. However, an optimistic attitude prevails: “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice ...”

Their full sound is no accident or studio trick and depends neither on volume nor gimmicks, but rather the vocals and instrumentation have their own intensity and quality — never weak, never blatant. The harmony in both is tastefully blended. Sharp strong leads flow with ease and a maturation not manly groups produce or could copy with the same gutsiness.

The success of this album lies in all of the above and more. Besides, two women just so happen to be the leaders.

Thanks for the ride.

Robbie Cruger

How I learned to stop worrying and love ...

GRATEFUL DEAD WARNER BROTHERS

It seems a confession of heresy, but I have never really liked the Dead, either musically or as personalities. Perhaps it’s that very sacrosanct quality that turned me off so quickly and consistently, although any reasonable consideration of their recorded work leaves anybody not in the storied 144,000 Friends Of The Band with the impression that not only is their track record not very good, but they have never really had to prove themselves because anybody with that many friends doesn’t need to answer the indicated questions no matter how spotty their sales have been.

The final bitter bringdown for me occurred when I attended their August concert in Los Angeles at Lawrence Welk’s Palladium. I had never seen the Dead live, although certain friends had assured me that the sustained mass orgasm generated at those celebrations more than compensated for the slipshod records; so here I was, milling through a crowd of rather unusually disheveled freaks, the people from that psychic whistlestop in the new American West where Unisex exists as a pragmatic fact of studied poverty in identical sackcloth and jeans and tumbleweed hairdos. As soon as the Dead began to play, people everywhere broke into the patented Grateful Dead Ecstacy Dance, which you will recognize even if you’ve never seen it, and many did not stop for the rest of the evening. The Dead themselves merely tatted along, weaving a few of their stock riffs into vague and random, configurations without ever really finding the texture to tighten and carry you up. It was the definitive artifact in boring, redundant, unadventurous music, and just as I began to get really restless a friend turned to me and said: “Wait’ll they’ve been doing this for about an hour, man; that’s when they really start to cook!”

I came away from that concert not merely disliking the Dead but hating them and all that they stood for — i.e., self-conscious hipness as a marketable commodity and innocuous “social movement.”

Now their new live album has been released, and I am stunned and turned around, because after dozing at their sides and inveighing against the band for so long I find myself positively enthused over this record, understanding experientially what I’d previously. extrapolated from myth and riding the music like those very burrhead hippies writhing to the “Lovelight” script.

And it’s not so very much because I have had some storybook Sunshine flash resulting in a cosmic change of heart; I still think that almost everythin else they’ve recorded except the first side of their first album is porouse with great stretches of sheer stultifying boredom and excruciatingly lame vocals. But I remember what a respected friend once said: “The Dead may only hit their magic chord two nights a year but when they do they’re the best thing in American music.” And this album was recorded on one of those nights when the spirit of band and Occasion was strong enough to bring them and their audience together in a rousing rip-up that’s not only great American music but a tonal personification of the American West both as musical genre and, more importantly, state of mind. Meaning that the Dead at their rare best are not only an important rock ‘n’ roll myth of our time, they are a fascinating latter-day component in the myth of the Pacific frontier that will still be important when, as Jack Kerouac said, “all your San Franciscos will have to fall again and bum.”

One of the most exciting elements of that myth is its heterogenity; one of the prime totems of the early days of acid-rock ballroom bands in San Fran was that said bands were “bringing all music together” somehow, folk and rock and blues and jazz and raga, and even if it wasn’t as true as the ultimately corrosive factor that most of the Frisco musicians were rooted to their ankles in the cement of their folkie backgrounds, it can’t be denied that when all those styles were fused by truly talented hands, as in the first Moby Grape album, the result was some of the most simultaneously skull-crunching and life-sustaining hybrid Rock of all time.

Which, bless my soul and blitz my bones, is exactly what’s happening here. If you never like another San Francisco album after Moby Grape’s first, I, still guarantee that this album will tickle your synapses and convey all the unstrained intellectual excitement that any music should have. The Dead’s recent ventures into tissues of perhaps too-delicate C&W laidbackism are represented of course, but the fire that piarks truly alive music is never far from the surface. “Bertha” fades in naturally as breath itself, and all through the rest of side one, from Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” to the Creedence-ish “Playing in the Band,” the Dead push subtly at the walls of their most rustic American riffs with consistent and time-biding energy, so you’re always aware of how close those pone tones are to the jazz rambles from the cities, the droning patonalities of points further East, and finally the atom-splitting conceptions from the musical stratusphere.

The second side gives them a chance to break through to those realms and prove the pure unity already assumed, in an 18-minute jam from Anthem of the Sun, but at the crucial point .they prove themselves still as short of outlandish breakthrough into free music as they were on that album, and it shapes up as liquid but supremely predictable Dead riffing. Which swirls down into the album’s real puddle: side three’s equally mundane New Riders-oriented “Me and My Uncle,” “Big Boss Man” (nobody but Jimmy Reed should ever have done it), and “Me & Bobby McGee” (overworked into the ground already). But just when you’re ready to doze off and dream of resenting them all over again, they hit you with a “Johnny B. Goode” done just like it should be, and midway through side four they even manage to find something crisp and fresh in “Not Fade Away.”

Even if it’s arguable that the album would have sustained itself better as a single record, the music is mostly lucid and worth a spin anytime, as opposed to the pseudo-avantgardism (“Feedback”) and pusillanimous Pigpen blooze of the first live album. And even if I still think they’re Tom Hippies and probably never will learn to love them for their own smug selves, I’ve at least stopped worrying because now I know at last that they can and do when, great galloping. Googamooga, the Karmic Vibes are Right, play some mighty rock ’n’ roll. In spite of everything, and I can barely believe it myself, I’m a Grateful Dead fan.

Lester Bangs

THE RETURN OF DOUG SALDANA DOUG SAHM PHILLIPS

I haven’t written a god damn record review in well over a year. The last several reviews I managed to crank out before I quit should never have been written. There just came a point for me where the whole thing began to seem entirely useless. The record Biz, the groovy people that run it, the groups, the rock press, one album after another of highly sensitive, down-with-it, back-to-thecountry, introspective, controlled, self-indulgent music — tell-tale traces of a generation in rapid retreat.

Even today I hear much in the records which is simply bald-faced reactionary. And I mean reactionary in a political sense. It’s gotten so bad that I can’t even tune in the car radio without becoming angry. There are the Beach Boys telling us to stay away from student demonstrations — the same old crap you got from mom and dad. Then come the Stones to bombard us with that good ole racist, sexist rock and roll of “Brown Sugar.” This is followed by The Who announcing confidently that the new politics is just like the old politics and that “we won’t get fooled again.” And, worst of all, the omnipresent Rare Earth exclaims, “I put my faith in the people, but the people let me down. So I turn the other way and carry on anyhow.”

. Apparently, “the people” only get one chance these days and then it’s mop! — “I just want to celebrate another day of life.” In other words, everybody back to that selfish, callous individualism that we grew up on and which made this nation near great. Who’s writing these songs? John Mitchell?

Unfortunately, I am not convinced by the arguments of some of my friends that the Stones, bless their hearts, are actually doing high level satire on their racism of the past, or that the Beach Boys’ music says something that their reactionary lyrics do not. I guess I’m just not subtle enough to catch these wonderful nuances. To me these songs say what they say. And what they’re saying is this:

“We really thought there was a revolution coming. We thought it would come and be over with and that would be that. When it didn’t arrive, we stopped moving and went back to our own private lives. See you later.”

What s lacking in the music, as elsewhere, is any sense of our own history. There seems to be little awareness of the fact that if lasting change is to take place, it will have to come as the result of a continuing struggle over a long period of time, mounted at many many levels, and requiring all of the energy, craft, creativity and patience we can muster. A lot of people seem to have gotten the idea that the revolution, like Woodstock, would come at 10:30 on a Friday morning, cook for a few days and be over. No wonder they’re disillusioned.

But it is possible that the present lull in things actually conceals some very positive developments. We can hope that people are using this time to think seriously about what they’ve been through recently and to re-shape their lives in fruitful directions. We can hope that somewhere in the frightening silence of the past year and a half, the people have been building new alliances, new projects and new communities.

It is for this reason that I take great joy in the new album offered us by Sir Douglas — the most interesting, hopeful rock and roll record to reach my ears in a long, long time. Doug Sahm took the present lull not as an opportunity to pump up his balloon of personal stardom, but as a chance to go back to the place where he’d gotten the music in the beginning. On the cover of the album he tells the story:

“Who’s Doug Saldana? Doug Saldana is a name my friends on the west side gave me many years ago. Being a white boy, but sharing deep things with my Chicano brothers, they decided to call me that.

“Somewhere around January, 1971, I left California to return to my home town of San Antonio, Texas after a five year absence, mostly to see old friends, play music with them and record some of them who would probably never have been heard unless we did it that way. Such as Rocky Morales, the great Chicano tenor man of the West Side family, Jack Barber, part-time barber and one of San Antonio’s finest bass players, and Leonidas Baety, part-time baker, donut maker, maracas shaker and tenor player.”

The music that comes out of this reunion is the rough-hewn R&B played in hot, steaming, beer-soaked barrooms of the Chicano part of town. It’s true that much of the performance is a bit rocky and a little out of time. But with all of the slick professionals coming out of the studios these days, it’s really nice to hear some music that you know was made by human beings. There are two good sides here of really fine, solid, rocking tunes. And above it all Doug Saldana’s voice soars like an eagle guarding a precipice. He’s never sung better.

This is not a political album and I would not ask that it be one. What it is, however, is a search for a pre-political community, the union of Chicano and Anglo brothers and sisters. Anyone who’s been listening to what the Chicanos have been saying recently has gotten an earful, and Doug Saldana is proud to admit that he got his earful long ago. For this reason, most of the songs on the album carry a very clear, simple moral message. They tell us to live what we preach and preach what we live to our brothers. They tell us to recognize that we have a destiny that we share with others, and that we must find that destiny and be honest to it. They remind us that we do not live in this world in total isolation, condemned to an eternal celebration of loneliness, but that there are others here also, persons with problems much like our own. We must find them and work something out together.

Doug Saldana’s message is given to us with a great deal of courage and good taste. I believe we will be seeing more signs of life very soon.

Langdon Winner

FUTURE TENSE THE QUINTET UNITED ARTISTS

AUG IE'S WESTERN HEAD MUSIC CO. AUGIE MEYER POLYDOR

These two records, taken together with Doug Sahm’s recent metamorphosis into Doug Saldana, show the current state of the Sir Douglas Quintet - confused. To begin with, all three records have in common drummer John Perez, and the magic organ sound of Augie Meyer, and, of course, that unique kind of militant Texasism that Sir Doug and his people have always displayed.

But there is quite a gap between the three, too. Doug, as usual, has the voice and the fine hand at picking arrangements and material. As you can read in Langdon’s review, he’s got himself a fine album. It’s good to see an artist of Doug’s stature finally stretch out and “do his thing” so well, but it would be a shame for the band that helped him get to where he is today to have to recede into the background. Even as sidemen on the Saldana album they’re not quite the Quintet. I mean, any group of guys that’ve been playing together that long have got to have something that is a collective sound a way of presenting things that the five soloists couldn’t approximate.

That’s why it’s so good to see that the Quintet has been able to stick together despite the changes. Lacking Sir Douglas, they did the next best thing and called in one of his proteges, Byron 4tBig Guitar Sonny” Farlow (who, with the “El Paso Ramblers” — i.e., the Quintet — put out a single of Doug’s “Catch The Man On The Rise” on Warners last year) to handle the vocals and some of the songwriting chores. He does just fine. In fact, he does so well that I’d venture to say that his “Dica Dica” is the standout cut on the whole Future Tense album. Another talented musician who’s always been at the Quintet’s fringes is Jim Stallings, who had a million-selling hit in France with his adapted Indian dance, “Hey Ya Hey Ya.” (Not only did Liberty not release it over here, but I don’t think Stallings has ever seen a cent from its French success — he didn’t even know it was a hit until he went to France on other business.) On the Quintet album, Stallings is playing bass, replacing Harvey Kagan (who shows up on Augie’s album), and doing a re-make of “Hey Ya,” another outstanding cut.

In fact, the whole of Future Tense is thoroughly enjoyable. Big Guitar Sonny is just the right vocalist, full use is made of the famous organ-and-maracas sound, the material is perfect (listen to their remake of “The Rains Came,” for instance), and the whole thing is the kind of sunshine-y good time music the Quintet does so well, and, I hope, will continue to do.

Augie Meyer’s album, though, doesn’t fare so well. Made, I am sure, with the best intentions, it still sounds like Polydor was trying to force him into becoming a Texas version of Link Wray. There is lots of out-of-tune singing and guitar playing, Augie’s lead vocals are weak, and the whole thing seems to be the result of confusing a lack of polish for funk. One thing I will say for the album, it has a really appealing cover, which is far more than can be said for Future Tense's confusing pseudo-psychedelia, (the musicians pictured aren’t even identified!).

Okay, now, how do all these groups fit in in real life? Apparently a nationwide tour is in the works (at last we get to see Sir Doug!!) with Augie’s band opening the show, the Quintet coming on next, and finally Doug taking the stage with a brass section, the Honky Blues. Now if that doesn’t sound like a good idea ... Whew!

Ed Ward

BARK JEFFERSON AIRPLANE GRUNT

Excuse me. New Jefferson Airplane. Or at least that’s what it says on the cellophane thingy that comes off with the shrink-wrap. But it is a new Plane. New label, new personnel (Papa John and the enigmatic Joey Covington), i«,w sound (the electric violin fits right in, and it almost makes up for the loss of Marty Balin, almost), a new band, for all practical purposes. And, like any new band, it’s still feeling its way around. And the record sounds like it.

Now, I may be wrong, but it seems to me that with the loss of Spencer Dryden, one of the finest and surely one of the most inventive drummers rock has ever seen, and Marty Balin, who knew how to make a vocal blend that would make your hair stand right up on end, the Jefferson Airplane stopped being a group, a functioning six-member musical performance unit, and became an amalgam of variously talented individuals. As a result, on Bark we have a couple of Paul Kantner songs, a Hot Tuna number, a couple of Grace Slick songs, and so on. While it’s true that the Kantner songs and the Hot Tuna cut (“Wild Turkey”) are far superior to anything on the Kantner and Tuna albums, I still think that somebody time-warped from the Airplane’s 1968-69 days of glory would guess all kinds of things on hearing them before he guessed the Airplane.

Apparently, the group intends to keep going as a group, but one can only speculate as to the success they’ll have doing it. It may well be a fact that the days of the Airplane are through, and that the up-and-coming bands the label has signed (including the Airplane spinoffs) will be the ones that will be making the history from here on. Or, as Jorma says in his painfully honest song “Third Week In The Chelsea,” “So we go on moving trying to make this image real” and “All my friends keep telling me that it would be a shame/to break up such a grand success and tear apart a name/but all I know is what I feel whenever I’m not playing/and emptiness ain’t where it’s at and neither’s feeling pain.” His only conclusion is that “what is going to happen now is anybody’s guess.”

So we are left with Bark, the first bit of product from what promises to be a pretty interesting venture, Grunt Records. Like I said, it’s an uneven album. Kantner has three songs, and only one of them, “When The Earth Moves Again,” is any good at all (and it is very good — clear, ringing, anthemic, appealing to the baser fascistic tendencies, perhaps, but what the hell); Grace also bats one out of three, but the one, “Never Argue With A German If You’re Tired, or European Song,” is a real killer in its use of wowser bizarro musical effects. The rest of the songs, while they don’t sound all that much like the Airplane, are pretty fine. The Tuna-like jam, “Wild Turkey,” displays Papa John’s talents like they haven’t been displayed before (and one wonders how he relates to this confusing bunch of youngsters so well). Joey Covington comes up with the first bit of acapella in the progressive rock genre in “Thunk,” and, thanks to the miracle of sixteen-track, he does a creditable, if weird, job. “Pretty As You Feel,” written with Jack and Jorma, and sung with Grace (pun semi-intentional), is, I would guess, a satire of commercials, since it sounds so much like one. It’s catchy, though, and it might be the single from the album, who knows?

Basically, then, what Bark is is a picture of the Jefferson Airplane, new, improved, at some kind of a crossroads. The only kind of guess I d care to hazard from here is that there are some interesting things ahead for Grunt Records, including Papa John’s solo album, Grace’s solo album, the next Hot Tuna album, albums from several of the groups they’ve signed, including One and the Ace of Cups, and — who knows? — the Jefferson Airplane just might be up in there, too ...

Ed Ward

RAINBOW BRIDGE, (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) JIMI HENDRIX REPRISE

This is typical Hendrix, in the sense that it’s about equally divided between superior music and the stuff that fizzles and never quite gets off the ground. What makes the album so special is (hat the superior music — the whole first side, the first cut on the second — is just about the best he ever put on record.

Right from the beginning, Hendrix had opened a Pandora’s Box of the guitar, and he spent most of his life trying to control that which he had unleashed. His first posthumous album seemed to indicate that at the time of his death, he had decided to put that aside for a while, relax, and play his version of living room music.

Not entirely so, it turns out, for on most of these cuts he meets it head on and comes out on top. And some of them were done around the time of the Cry of Love sessions, though the recordings here also go all the way back to 1968. (This isn’t a live album, as you’re led to believe.)

One thing’s for sure — “Dolly Dagger” and “Pali” just didn’t fit with the last album, but they do here. Both push and scream like mad. On “Earth Blues” his singing is urgent, his solo frenetically perfect; I think it’s one of the few times the song came out on tape like Jimi heard it in his head, not at all jumbled but a tight, rocking song.

But the real gems are “Room Full of Mirrors” and “Star Spangled Banner.” “I used to live in a room full of mirrors, and all I could see was me” sounds like his own story as much as “Voodo Chile,” actually the other side of that story. The echoplex makes it Hendrix at his spaciest. On “Star Spangled Banner,” he harmonizes, by manipulating tape speeds, three guitars to sound like 50 plus a monstrous organ; it’s an anthem all right.

The long live cut on the second side shows the Hendrix we’ve all seen a few times, too: taking off for a long solo, hitting a dead end, falling back on an old trick to regroup and try again . . . for over 10 minutes. And the notes say “Hey Baby” was recorded at Electric Lady, but it that’s so, the band must have been playing from a studio down the street.

That last cut leaves me with my fingers crossed that whoever’s in charge of such things has the sense to stop releasing Hendrix material when they run out of tapes that are technically and musically worthy. You really must hear Rainbow Bridge, though; it contains some of the finest music ever by one of the best.

John Morthland

SIR LORD BALTIMORE MERCURY

DUST KAMA SUTRA

Groups like Black Sabbath, Grand Funk and Cactus may strike their detractors as nothing more than exercises in absolute redundance, but it should be obvious by now that all r&r songs and forms repeat others out of a catalog which probably hasn’t received much more than 4 or 5 major new entries since at least 1967, so everybody from the Stones to the Bugaloos is just rearranging various configurations of jive forever. And the thing about the Sabbaths and Funks is that they’re not so hypocritical as the Stones or Airplane about pulling last year’s trusty handle on you - since repetition is repetition they let the ineluctable modality of redundance take its natural course.

It’s not that the Stones or Airplanes are so much moreprolific than the Funks and Cactuses, as that the devices in the arsenals of the latter are just closer together than those of the former. And if you look at it one way, admitting the consideration that all the songs in the universe are just branches off that one feedback river, then it becomes obvious that the closer together they get the closer they and we all are to Universal Unity and Godhead. Who needs, when all is said and done, all this fucking “variety” cluttering up the place? If the songs on Black Sabbath albums sound similar enough at first hearing that you can’t tell ’em apart, well, that’s the unity that makes it possible to play a Black Sabbath album forever. One man’s monotony is another’s mesmerism.

The flip side of the platter is that, of course, and again contrary to conventional wisdom which bemoans something called (among other things) “the Led-Funk phenomenon,” neither Led Zeppelin nor Grand Funk nor Black Sabbath nor Cactus nor the two albums I’m reviewing here sound very much at all like each other except insofar as each eschews the excessive proliferation of baroquely fancydan riffs, and all operate on the holy repetition principle. So if you like one, don’t be afraid to get another one just because some pedant tells you they all sound alike.

Sir Lord Baltimore are one righteously ragged outfit from New York I believe with a future bright as a blast furnace ahead of them. They took their name from a character in the flick Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, so right away you know they’ve got more class than The Quinames Band or somebody off the beam enough to call themselves A ndwella — which group leader claimed was the name of a goddess who came to him in a dream, for Chrissake.

Their music not only lives up to their name; it’s better. Simply, Sir Lord Baltimore sound much of the time like a distillation of the din in a sheet metal factory set to the beat of a ballpeen hammer smashing the rubble of a leveled tenement into even smaller rubble — what more could any reasonable man ask? If you think noise is good, if you think things are oftimes more interesting without a cumbersome melody in the way, if you nourish notions that the real electronic music is all this flat, crashing, tuneless amped-up guitar clanging that’s thrived these last years, then this is the album for you.

On second thought, their first album, Kingdom Come might be the better buy of the two. I like it better because in general they tend to play faster on it than they do on this one, and I really can’t find anything hereon as crazed as “Pumped Up” on Number One. Fact, this effort do get just a tad pretentious in the openning stretch which is occupied by the 11-minute Big Production Ambitious Suite “Man From Manhattan,” which is subdivided into short sequences and makes it in part but largely flips in to to. Why does every god dam good Crashboom band that comes along get yes pumped up indeed so soon on the set and start thinking in terms of vast rocknroll cantatas and symphonies and suites? Lotsa short songs keeps the fan content. Think about it, guys. The final seal of the Plague on “Man From Manhattan” is that it seems when you listen carefully to have something to do with that goddam Jesus Christ who must not be just PR becuz ya can’t escape from the fuckin name anywhere these days. I’ll believe it’s not a hype when I hear his album. If he really is from Manhattan like SLB then maybe he’s all right, but with this big a hype you just gotta smell a dead fish somewhere.

CHEESE FOR _.

When he is really drunk I glimpse tiny frightened mice running behind his eyes looking for a hole to test and reject in favor of her bright teeth:

No coward ever encounters a complete surprise.

v. marlowe

The rest of the songs on here more than compensate for “Man From Manhattan’s” excesses, though, with their own appropriate excesses. “Where Are We Going,” recorded live, sounds nothing like Chicago like you’d think but rather resembles Cactus de-Blues’d and thyroided thru the ceiling with one atomic case of the guitarro heebie jeebies.

The real treat lies at the end of side two with “Ceasar LXXI,” (’71 - clever, huh?) a real period piece that will challenge the word-deciphering apparatus of your inner ear with all the mind-boggling stubbornness of a Double Crostic. And laster than least for he’s almost first, I gotta tell you that vocalist John Garner (or maybe it’s Gary Justin — both take lead vocals at different times but sound exactly alike as far as I can tell) sounds like a cross between David Peel and Wavy Gravy and is one of the most exciting and original new lead singers of the year because aside from them two worthies he sounds like absolutely nobody else on the fucking planet from Maine to Bizoo except maybe for Gary Justin.

Another goodie that you might wanta latch onto if you’re not amped out after steeplechasing with SLB is Dust, an outstanding debut on a passel o’ counts. The first good thing about Dust is the front cover of their album, which is a*brown-tinted photo of three half-rotted corpses in one of those Mexican cellars where they shove stiffs too poor for propriety’s pine box. The pic won’t make you puke but it’s a great idea anyway, damn refreshing after this long summer of fuzzy brats standing in front of all them identical farmhouses with all 513 members of their Carolina commune of which 483 play some sort of instrument however humble somewhere in the album. Mercy!

Another thing that makes Dust shine is their song titles: “Stone Woman,” “Chasin’ Ladies,” “Goin’ Easy,” “Love Me Hard,” “From a Dry Camel,” “Often Shadows Felt,” “Loose Goose.” When your orbs run down a roster like that, you know you’re in for no meal of prissy french poodle parfait dillydallyings, you’re in for some WHAM and BAM! You already know what most of the songs sound like from, the titles, so I won’t bother describing ’em except to tell you that the band’s specialty is faster-than-fast amphetamine streaks up and down scales, zooooommmm varrroooommm faster than your old hotrod but not as fast as a SST. Which ought to give you some idea if you got any smarts in math atall. Besides lugging home the big gold cup for fastest debut of the month and being exciting from hither to yon, it should also be said that they beat SLB in the repetition sweepstakes, in fact they beat Black Sabbath, in fact they beat every fucking body I’ve seen tracked lately except maybe Frank Gund so I’m gonna hold a derby and’ll let you know and in the meantime if you’re ambivalating go the fuck on and buy Dust because they play about two speeding locomotives faster than Grand Funk and that’s usually preferable unless you’ve been bitten by tsetse flies or have just slipped out of your civvies into a coma. In which case the perfect prescription is a headline I saw on the San Jose Times the other day: ‘NOISE CAN CRAZE.’

Lester Bangs