Chicago: 4x6

RECORDS

Chicago: 4x6

CHICAGO AT CARNEGIE HALL VOLUMES I, II, III, IV COLUMBIA

(Inasmuch as this album’s ambitions are so lofty, and its scope is so vast, that it would be presumptuous to expect one human mind to absorb it all, we have apportioned it to no less than six different critics. Their reports follow -Ed.)

The Shrinkwrap

Remember the Golden Age of Rock, when life began anew every day and Paul Williams was writing about Love’s Forever Changes as if it were as great a work of art as Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful? Predictably, even the shrinkwrap has deteriorated since then. I know, the companies have really gotten into stickum labels, so that cover artists (a term which takes on a whole new meaning in these graphic times) can be Creative without being Commercial, an ambition which has apparently been passed on by the musicians — somebody’s gotta keep the faith, after all. But the label on Chicago at Carnegie Hall represents a very unoriginal use of the form. Ah well, with all the studio time that went into this album, Columbia probably had to cut costs somewhere. Still, it’s too bad that the shrink-wrap on the Chicago is so loose that a lot of Christmas gift recipients are going to suspect their girlfriends of buying reviewer’s copies. Boxes are harder to shrink-wrap than albums, but not impossible. Remember A Gift from a Flower to a Garden? Now, there was a Christmas shrink-wrap.

Also, the lack of paper sleeves inside the cardboard sleeves inside the big box is a disgrace. The only way to avoid scratching these plastic documents is not to play them at all. Just leave the whole package out on the coffee table with the Chagall book you got for high school graduation. What a conversation piece that will be!

Robert Christgau

The Box

Why is this box different from all other boxes?

The answer is nine-fold; irony abounds.

Its spine is predolated. A hint of verdrian lake at the upper right-hand spinal corner. Spinal imprinting is off-center. Intentional so as to affect casualness? Unintentional^ the fault of paste-up man or production assemblist? Conjecture reigns. Mainly on the plains.

Acoustics: a pen placed in the hollow of the box takes on an obsidian and macabre aire of silence. When shaken in a regularized forward-backward pattern, one is reminded of the somhorific chuga-chuga-chuga of a transcontinental express train. A lighted cigarette in the box and shaken alternates mammalian thud with hushed anguish, ember ’gainst cardboard.

Imprinting: front and back, “Chicago” as sole dominant hieratic, empiricized, stately lection, the last remaining leave of autumn.

Timeliness: as perishible and auto-obsolescent as all get out. Will dissipate into a laughable-looking piece of spineless crap within a decade. This could have been prevented by re-inforced binding.

The rectangular opening of the box veritably reeks of the ricorsic saga of Man. If only it could speak! What wonders it might unfurl for the curious and callow ears of young and young at heart alike. Nor Byron with his lecher limp, nor Poe with starry stare, nor Villon, that petty thief and pimp, but the sere testament of muted existence. Once a sapling, now pulp.

It may be used as a large, rather unorthodox dice-shaking cup if one is actually quite stupid.This and Linear B have perplexed scientists for years, simply years.

For a total of five exterior planar surfaces involved in the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle, the angular vectors are only slightly less than unique.

It cannot house a runaway child.

The implications are myriad, the teeth shiney and white. Dental floss. Vitamin D. Nibbling the coronal regions, lips parted softly wet. All while it quietly snowed outside.

Nick Tosches

The Book

This is clearly a landmark case. A watershed. If there has been any doubt lingering in the minds of people concerning the ability of American corporations to creat absolutely vital necessities out of what had been hitherto mere fluff, addenda, superfluous garnishings in the broad output of marketable material known in the ranks as “product,” then this Chicago book, and what it portends for the future should end any uncertainty.

What we have here is a historical process. Back at the turn of the century, there was only one way to acquaint onesself with fine music. You had to patronize the great concert houses like the Academy of Music, the Met, and Carnegie Hall. These places were as close to a mass music media as people could get. In such halls one could appreciate the showcase orchestras of the nation (hardware) as they performed the work of the great composers (softward). Momentos of the occasions would also be passed out to the audiences. in the form of program sheets and booklets. Besides containing information, these booklets had the purpose of sparking memories of what were assumed to be great social events. But most of the time these sheets were impermanent, disposable items which could usually be found crunched up, crammed down in the cracks of the chairs. Generally one could express one’s station in life^merely by being THERE, duly noted in the coluifins.

With the invention of the phonograph record player, the momento trade went into a prolonged eclipse. One would merely buy the record of the symphony, or the opera, or the musical comedy score, and enjoy the music alone, apart from the joys of social aggrandizement. The concert halls, of course, continued to serve the needs of the “in” society until the obliteration of all social rankings in the form of mass culture. Seventy five years of avant garde art had destroyed all standards, and everything had become permitted. High grade stereo equipment (hardware) was in every home, and piles upon piles of albums (software) littered every corner. Things had reached such a state that the hitherto unchallenged works of such highbrow contemporary “classical” composers as Hindemith, Shostakovitch, Ives, and Stravinsky now had to compete on the same level as the Beatles, Grateful Dead, and the Mothers of Invention. It was clearly a mismatch.

On the concert scene, the old line art forms had found themselves in a blind alley by their very own attitudes of Haute Couture, as their own beloved and bejeweled socialites began to pack the front rows of the Who concerts and performances of Jesus Christ Superstar. Cut off from its function of social re-affirmation, the high art musical circuit found itself largely cut off from its roots and withering in the face of a rock plutocracy.

The manufacturers of pop music albums now were in full command of the market and decided to produce more and more spectacular album concepts (software). No longer could an album be a mere mechanical reproduction of the music, but an event in its own right. Since there was no way to materially improve the sound quality, packaging became all (outerware.) Recent albums have become more luscious to the eye, if not better musically, and so with this new Chicago album the momento trade has been re-introduced, and the art of cultural souveniors has reached a peak simultaneously with the inclusion of the Chicago book (underware).

To say the least, it is impressive. Far from being madfe to be kept inside the album box, this book was obviously designed to be placed in a position of Glory on top of the coffee tables in the fashionable living rooms of the Elite. The cover has a breakaway view of Carnegie Hall, where Chicago recorded the album. The tipoff is out front. Even if the owner was not able to attend the concerts themselves, the mere possession of the album alone means CLASS!

There is not much writing. A list of musicians, and the words to “It Better End Soon,” 4th movement, are done in a casual but elegant script. The bulk of the book is made up of photographs of the band on stage, singlely and together, all awash in crimson hues that vary slightly from picture to picture. The back shows a list of. every gig that the band has played since ’67, May 22 to be exact, in the Stardust Lounge, Rockford Ill. This last is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book, and the clincher touch. It is pure momento. No words beyond the barest minimum in telling who they are, and where they have been. And if that ain’t enough to impress you, then you’re a chawbacon.

Rob Houghton

The Posters

First there’s the small poster with their picture on it. What, there’s only 7 of em?! Amazing that they have a sound as big as a house with only seven guys, you’d think there’s 50 of em or 60 or something! Well there’s the guy with the “loose lips sink ships” shirt, it’s not a bad shirt but it’s kind of dull and why wasn’t there one in the package with the albums and the posters? Then there’s the guy to his right who has that belt type thing around his waist but it’s not in the belt loops, maybe it’s really a pouch or something: doesn’t the damn fool know pouches don’t go with red shirts with collars that stick outside the lapels on a white suit? The guy on the extreme right of the poster looks most at home trying to look decadent for that new Chicago decadent look, he’s at home all right but that don’t make him look exactly decadent either, he just looks kind of more comfortable as if he sneaked into the picture from the Flock or something, or maybe from the Idea of March. The guy on the left side of the poster is a total dork and he’s flexing his muscles like he was Jeff Beck or something, or Mark Lindsay.

The other poster with the group in it is 6’x3’ or 3’x6’ depending on how you hang it. When you unfold it it sounds like a distant crinkle like some moth balls in a closet getting stepped on a mile and a half away. If you don’t wanna tear it while you’re, unfolding it you better have a friend along for the ride, cooperation is essential. But there ain’t that much cooperation in evidence on the poster, just a lot of brass and slides, so many slides you’d think it was a Slide Hampton album instead of Chicago! The hit of the poster is the guy who’s playing either guitar or bass with the Belkin t-shirt. It’s blue and white and again there could of been one in the package, paper simply won’t do. There’s either a guitarist or a parrot on the shirt and Mark Farner makes a guest appearance way over near the left edge.

But the greatest poster in the bundle is the one of Carnegie Hall in sepia. It shows 57th St. and 7th Ave. and down 7th Ave. appears to be the George Washington Bridge, I didn’t know until I saw this picture that they moved the bridge uptown sometime between then and now. Up on the top of the building is where Ruth Ann of Columbia’s 5 th floor takes her ballet lessons. Downstairs is the Carnegie Lyceum where they probably had movies downstairs and now there’s hamburgers or something in that very spot. Over towards 6 th Ave. is where Mercury is with Paul Nelson at the helm. Across on the other side of 7th Ave. is Connie de Nave and her crew. No fire escapes are in evidence so it must’ve been before the Triangle fire. No flags out on the pole so the weather must’ve been vile. The architecture is Paleolithic with touches of Romanesque. The bricks are made of clay. Maurice Mitke heads the bill at Carnegie with some other guy named Ferrigno, just foreigners played there in those days. Now Chicago has broken the barriers and Americans can play there without a single hassle: thank Chicago for making it possible!

R. Meltzer

The Voting Poster

Chicago has always made much of The Revo and personally I never really begrudged them that, though if it hadn’t been for the ’68 Democratic Convention and subsequent trial no doubt they would never have bothered. But now, as the band reaches its commercial apogee, we find that the Revolution turns out to be — voting. What else. Abbie Hoffman has already said it’s ok, so I guess it is.

However, like all other potential loss-ofinnocence affairs, Chicago fans had better be aware of just what they are, and are not, getting themselves into. Political fatigue and lack of political imagination has brought us to this hoary Same Old American Political Place, and before anyone gets all excited about how a few million “youth votes” are going to change the world they ought to know just what the game is.

The purpose of voting, so says American political science, is to attach the voters to the government — make them trust it, make them feel like they have some power over it. It is basically an illusionary process, albeit an important one. It has little to do with making substantive choices or effecting substantive change. Voting is a way of legitimizing the political system, because the very act of voting forces the voter to suspend, or completely abandon, his alienation from the system, since he is at the moment participating in it: it makes you, the voter, feel that the system is legitimate. This is supposed to be the name of the game — it’s what James Madison thought when he wrote the Constitution and what James Guercio thinks when he writes, “we would have a whole new ball game — no matter who runs — and a whole new politics.” Neither Madison or Guercio worry about who runs, but Madison was smarter because he knew he could fool people like Guercio into thinking that new voters meant new “ball game.” The idea is that the governmental system goes on independent of whoever it is that is elected or appointed to run it.

This is not completely true, but it is substantively true. George McGovern, if elected, would not give us a “new politics,” he would be president of the same system. He might not like it, but it’d be true all the same. He would do some things differently than Nixon, and they would be important things, but they would not change the face of the nation, though they might marginally affect the quality of life for the middle class and help stave off serfdom for the lower class and blacks. He would not, however, free all political prisoners, abolish the CIA and the FBI, destroy big corporations, and regulate business, even if he wanted to. Our system is hardly so maleable. As we move right from McGovern the possibilities get even more marginal, even though they remain crucial. For example, no Democratic candidate, not even Henry Jackson, would appoint the kind of ghouls to the Supreme Court that Nixon has, and his appointments mean, for example, that the convictions of the Chicago 7 will be upheld, that hundreds' will be executed in the next year or so, that Leslie Bacon will go to prison, etc, etc, that 15 year old kids whose mothers are on welfare will be forced to work for the government in a new kind of slavery, that Pun Plamondon will lose his appeal, you name if. It might not be different under JacksonMuskie or Humphrey-McGovern, but it might be. SoTt’s worth thinking about. But none of these men are going to change the Universities, the ghettos, or our foreign policy.

James Guercio and his boys would have you think that voting will change the world. It won’t. They would have you think that voting will make everything peachy keen. It won’t. They would have you believe it will do everything some others want you to think macrobiotics, nudity, LSD, Scientology or astrology will do. It won’t and neither will any of the others. The only thing that will produce whatever it is you want in politics is years of paying attention, taking action, summoning courage, and taking risks: the creation of a tradition of politics outside the system that takes marginal chances like voting for what they are, and nothing more.

Don’t get fooled again. Vote, but don’t get your hopes up. Don’t feel cheated if your candidate wins and nothing happens. Voting is not the name of the game, it’s just a wild card.

Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter His empty eyes gaze strange beauty shows This parade of grey-suited grafters

A choice of cancer or polio!

— The Roiling Stones

Yep, it’s still a choice. I’d choose cancer, myself. Just don’t fool yourself that you’re choosing everlasting bliss.

Greil Marcus

The Records

I like this album because it’s on Columbia. I trust them, I believe in their product, because Columbia is the General Motors of the record industry. They consistently come up with the best of everything: best logo, best lettering in artists’ names and album titles, best photography, best cardboard. I know some thankless souls are now talking as if the whole wide universe belonged to the Kinney corporation and Columbia were just a doddering old has-been, but I believe in sticking by my old friends. I mean, which has more prestige to you —f a box of Kix or Cheerios?

But being on Columbia isn’t the only thing that makes Chicago at Carnegie Hall a classic. If you balk at buying by brand alone, another surefire way of guaging the worth of an album is to take a gander at the grooves themselves. Notice the/ light and dark patterns. If there are more light patterns than dark ones, it means that the grooves are wider, which means in turn that the record is heavier because there’s more music crammed into each and every groove! Not only does this album weigh in at 3.23 pounds, but it’s so jampacked with sounds that it’s got grooves wide enough to satisfy even the most picayune of connoiseurs. Anybody that tells me it’s not the heaviest album of the year just doesn’t know his math. '

Loving Chicago at Carnegie Hall as much as I do, though, I still don’t play it very often. In fact, I’ve only played it once since I got it, and never intend to play any of it again. But then, I don’t really have to; it is sufficient unto itself, an existing entity, and playing it too much would only put smudges and scratches on its pristine surfaces. So who cares if it’s Chicago’s worst album? Does it really matter that the songs sound exactly like they do on the studio albums except for being immeasurably more sodden and stuffed with long directionless solos? Or that the brass arrangements sound like Stan Kenton charts played backwards? Or that as technically competent as Chicago may be, there are just too many times when you can hear all the parts better than the whole?

Decidedly not. And for those of you who recognize the essential need for an album such as this, and don’t want to defile your own copies even by breaking the shrinkwrap, I will list the highlights of the eight sides:

*In the “free form” piano intro to “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” Robert Lamm is introduced as “Mr. Chops,” deriving from the fact that his roommates jokingly called him “Chopin” in college, and then goes into a solo equal parts Roger Williams, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” and “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” -■

*In “It Better End Soon — Second Movement,” Walter Parazaider takes off on a long and wildly eclectic flute solo, starting with “Morning Song” from Greig’s “Peer Gynt Suite,” shifting abruptly into “Dixieland,” to cheers from the audience, and thence to “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” complete with martial drum-rolls.

*For the “preaching” vocal improvisation in the Fourth Movement of “It Better End Soon” — “We’ve gotta do it right/ Within this system/ Gonna take over/ But within this system” — the They Got The Guns But We Got The Numbers Award.

““Listening to “I’m a Man” on the radio, feeling good, knowing you don’t have to buy or play the whole set to know what’s good on it.

““Wondering whether “Anxiety’s Moment” is a ripoff of “Moonlight Sonata” or “Unchained Melody.” Wondering whether it matters.

If there’s one thing Chicago’s got, it’s variety. They also have no trace of originality, but I don’t think that matters very much either. They saw a void, they came and they filled it. With putty and plaster of paris, but they did fill it. And if you think that’s any small potatoes, just check out the Billboard or Record World or Cash Box charts, where their first album is still riding high after two and a half years. Until very recently none of their albums had ever left the charts. They have conquered this world, and will do it again with this Christmas-timed album, which has exactly the same songs as their others except for the inclusion of a new one about Richard Nixon. It will be the obvious present for people to grab for young kin they don’t know too well, and since it retails for enough that they’re only gonna have to sell about a copy a store to do a million bucks’ worth of biz, it should become a gold record almost on the day it’s released. In fact, at this point there’s only one further pinnacle for Chicago to scale:

When they get to Chicago VII, they can release a seven-recotA set, with one entire album for each member of the group. - a whole record of nothing but Peter Cetera’s bass, another of Lee Loughnane on trumpet, etc. — playing a 40-minute version of “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It is?” and then we can get seven record players, and have the greatest concert of all time!

Lester Bangs

MEATY BEATY BIG AND BOUNCY THE WHO DECCA

There isn’t much to say. They’ve really let us down this time. I don’t know if anyone else resents it, but I do. Why reissue things for the second (third) time on an album when you have such an incredible backlog of material? C’mon Peter: who won’t get fooled again?

They pulled it once before, of course, or rather Decca did: the Magic Bus album. But this is different. We’ve all dreamed about the album that would have “I Can’t Explain” and “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere.” Those of us committed enough even went out and bought Direct Hits, which doesn’t have those two but which does have the magic “jail release” single: “Under My Thumb” and “The Last Time,” done for the Stones when they got popped in ’67.

Or traded tapes and money for things like Ready Steady Who for live versions of “Disguises” and “Circles” and “Barbara Ann.” Or bought singles so we could get “Dogs Part Two.” The British A Quick One for “Heatwave.” The Backtrack series, especially Entwistle’s The Ox for “Heaven and Hell,” and “In the City.”

And after all the midnight fantasizing, hours and hours of talking over coffee and cigarettes at five a.m. and on to dawn, designing our own Who album, one that wouldn’t repeat anything, one that would include the marvelous Townshend guitar solo that totally changes the complexion of “The Kids Are All Right” on the British My Generation album, the one that’d put it all together for us so we wouldn’t have to hunt anymore, what did we get? Third hand “Happy Jack” and a new version of “Magic Bus,” that’s what.

Sure, “I’m a Boy” is both different from the single and a great song on its own terms, and of course, “I Can’t Explain” and “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” will forever scorch the ears of all who hear them. Are we greedy, in our disappointment, or just savvy?

I still think the Who are the best rock and roll band in the world. I still think that Peter Townshend knows what’s going on and talks about it better than anyone else in rock and roll. I still think the Who are the most important band of the last decade, more significant (for me, at least) than the Stones, because they’ve had it all and never stopped pushing us, avant-garde and pop all at once, brilliant and niave and therefore a precise reflection of the counterculture.

But I also know, without having to think about it, that Meaty Beaty isn’t half what it pretends to be, nor is it anywhere near what it COULD have been. It’s not the album we dreamed about, Peter, but since there’s so much other stuff lying around unissued, do you think you could try it again? That Greatest Flops title still rings in my ears, a hundred thousand times stronger than anyone’s gimmicky Worst of. Greatest Flops could be just that, great and unfound (if not unremembered), it still could be. Give it a try, huh, just for us? Whaddaya say Pete?

Dave Marsh

SOUNDTRACK: FRANK ZAPPA'S 200 MOTELS, FEATURING THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION AND THE ROYAL PHILHARMONIC UNITED ARTISTS.

Dear Lester:

I really don’t know what you expect me to say about this record. I sat down and tried to listen to it, and even managed to get through three sides and about a third of the way into the fourth, when I leaped up out of my chair, having come to the realization that not only was it the most irritating thing I’d ever heard (not quite true, actually — some of today’s electronic music composer,s are way ahead of Zappa in that respect), but it was pointless, dull, and stupid. Zappa’s prime irritating technique seems to be tone clusters (aggregations of minor seconds) in the higher registers of muted brass, with screeching voices that sound like amphetamine transvestites on helium belaboring a kind of humor that isn’t too far removed from the ol’ peepee-doo-doo school.

As far as Zappa being a “composer,” he seems to be using that word like a squid uses black ink. I must admit that one of the cuts on side two, either “Redneck Eats” or “Centerville,” has some interesting orchestral texturing somewhere in it, but that’s either blind luck or else the application of a skill that makes itself evident nowhere else on the album. And I might add that the almost-microscopic score fragments on the inside front cover of the little booklet (probably to impress someone who knows nothing, about such things) don’t seem tb have too much to do with the music on the record. Although three measures is hardly enough to tell .for sure. I guess to someone who’s been listening to some of the simpler forms of blues-based rock for his whole musical career the harmonies Zappa employs might sound tantalizingly “modem,” but I only hear some imitation Varese in the percussion work (which Zappa’s been doing for years), and some echoes of Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht in the massed strings. Plus lots and lots and lots of boring Mothers Of Invention shit.

Zappa’s trip seems to be on the wane, and his function seems to be as kind of the Rap Brown to suburban-housing-development America: “YOU’RE ALL PLASTIC, YOU LEAD MEANINGLESS LIVES, YOU’RE ALL FUCKED UP.” “Gee, Fred, he’s right.” “I know, Ethel, but what can we do about it?” “Oh, I don’t know. But sometimes I wish we could do something.” A friend who saw the movie reported that the audience was mainly the people Zappa inveighs against, and the guys who sat directly in front of him were three young stockbrokers with short hair who chain-smoked joints all through the show. I feel sorry for Zappa the same way I feel sorry for the wives of narcotics agents and the San Francisco Japanese who are now more American than the Anglos next door: they have put themselves in a hell of a position, but they only got there by unremittlingly working towards that goal. And now they’re there.

So Zappa finally got to make his movie. And he’s given employment, both directly and indirectly, to some jfood musicians in his time. I heard a story once that there is a famous 24-hour delicatessen in Hollywood where there was a table reserved for Phil Spector, Lenny Bruce, and Frank Zappa, who would meet there and talk way into the night lo those many years ago. Spector’s art is a timeless one, and he is constantly improving it like the perfectionist he is. Lenny became obsessed with an obvious point and it killed him. As Spector widened his scope, Bruce narrowed his until it choked him. Zappa seems to want to do both at the same time. Too bad, because if nothing else, he’s intelligent. But nothing stinks quite so bad as an intelligence gone stale. And, without a doubt, that’s what at least the music of 200 Motels is all about. Too bad.

Ed Ward

ELECTRIC WARRIOR T. REX REPRISE

In England there’s this little bantam, Marc Bolan by name, who’s got a voice like a starving baby eaglet, has had four straight #1 records and sets them on fire. All the sudden idolatry is at least partially explained by the recent switchover of Bolan and his group T. Rex to electricity. You can’t go on singing about horny unicorns forever, so it’s tough titty, folk freaks and Tyrannosaurus purists, because Electric Warrior marks the complete and irreversible transformation of Bolan from misplaced minstrel to bona fide Child Of The Rock.

Bolan is a low key rock ‘n’ roller. As opposed to laid-back roll music, which is basically a non-participative, non-activating sort of music, Bolan’s is real rock ‘n’ roll that’s underplayed rather than underdone and never fails to get you there on time. Before I heard this album, a lot of things were bothering me, like how I was going to pay the $70 I owe the gas station for car repairs, why my car still doesn’t work, what were these stories about my girlfriend running away with a dwarf from Minnesota etc. etc. etc. Now, however, the first thing I thought about when I woke up this morning, the very-first thing, was “Jeepster” from Electric Warrior.

Just like a car You’re pleasing to behold I’ll call you Jaguar If I may be so bold

Your motivation is so sweet Your vibrations Are burning up by feet

Girl I’m just a Jeepster for your love.*

“Jeepster” may not be as far out metaphorically as some of the others. Any issue of Esquire magazine from the Fifties would have had something similar in it. The word itself isn’t in my vocabulary but that shuttle-bus rhythm sure is. Both “Jeepster” and “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” are instant ditty-bop classics like “Ride a White Swan” was. You can hear either or both a million times, and they never get anything but better. “Bang a Gong” is like all the best T. Rex material, in that is posesses a kind of rolling rhythm, a roly-poly shuffle-type sound that’s sly (with a lower-case “s”) and sexual if you want it to be.

Well you’re slim and you’re weak You got the teeth of the Hydra upon you You’re dirty sweet And You’re my girl

Get It On Bang a gong Get It On.*

There are also some throwbacks to the older, softer (tinnier) Tyrannosaurus Rex material, which serve to balance out the faster stuff. Now, of course, these tunes are augmented by drums, electric bass and, wouldja believe it, ex-Turtles Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman on backing vocals. Despite the somewhat retrospective quality of these numbers, “Cosmic Dancer” stands out as one of the finest pieces the group has ever done. Lyrically the song is somewhat reminiscent of David Bowie, while the vocal sounds as if it were recorded in pre-terra outer space. In a disembodied voice, Bolan croons:

I was dancing when I was twelve I was dancing when I was aaah:

I danced myself out of the womb Is it strange to dance so soon? I danced myself into the tomb But then again once more I danced myself out of the womb.*

Such feelings are hardly new. I was looking up something in the encyclopedia in Junior High when I came across an entry about this religious group in Pennsylvania called the Shakers who stqod in lines and received mystic vibrations. I learned later that these vibrations often became frenzy. The article was illustrated by some artist’s dusky conception of hollow-eyed people with vibration lines around their bodies. To this day I have never looked at that page again, but having heard this album I understand at last and know I’ll be listening to it for moons to come. I don’t know what planet you started from, Bolan, but I’m glad you stopped here.

Pinky S. Niestone XLIII

*Copyright Tro/Essex Music (ASCAP)

THERE'S A RIOT GOIN' ON SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE EPIC

As many have noted, Sly Stone’s style revolves around so many factors that it may, paradoxically enough, be as limited as it is ground-breaking. Combine that with his awesome propensity for self-annihilation and you get clunkers like this one.

Commercially, there’s no problem. The nature of Superstardom being that anything is better than nothing, the people who’ve waited more than two years for new Sly music broke this into the charts at 39, and be the second week it was 7 and solid gold. I only wonder if all those people have yet been able to convince themselves that they like what they got.

The album is dominated by the same plodding, lethargic beat that continues seemingly, unabated for 45 minutes. I listen to it and my mind wanders off in the middle of a song, returns in the middle of the next song for a couple seconds, and then wanders right back off again. Listening again on earphones only makes me disinterested quicker. Sly simply has nothing to offer; having listened a few times as I write this, the only cuts I can even recall are the Dr. Johnish “Family Affair,” which I’ve been hearing regularly on AM for a good three weeks, and the title cut, which is 0:00 minutes of blessed silence.

Did anyone expect this album to be any good, given Sly’s antics? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that if some band off the streets had brought these tapes into a record company to try to get a contract, they would have been shown out the door before they could say “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf.” Instead, there’s celebration that Sly was able to get out an album at all, a sad and revealing commentary for sure.

At this point, it’s trite to say Sly’s in trouble. His stature is such that he’ll be.given plenty of second chances — which is more than most people get — and I sure hope he’s got enough brains left to make the most of it.

John Morthland

PERFORMANCE: ROCKIN'THE FILLMORE HUMBLE PIE A&M

Baby, Thass Rock, ‘n’ Roll: A Review In Four Parts

Part One: How I Stopped Worring And Learned To Love The Pie.

In one respect, I’d rather this album hadn’t been released. It will do the same for Humble Pie that Tommy did for the Who, that is, bring the group out of the hands of a small segment of hard-core devotees and into full view of the common rabble. It isn’t enough that the album is pure fire, but it’s also a specially priced two-record set that I’ve seen on sale for as little as $2.97. Disgusting. If you haven’t endured with the group through the bad days, you don’t deserve to jump on the bandwagon now.

But on the other hand, why should you be deprived? Life is so short, after all. And if the album really hadn’t been released, I shouldn’t have heard it either.

Part Two: Random Thoughts on Live Albums in General And This One In Particular.

There are three ways to record a live album.

1. With Lots of crowd noise, excitement, group to audience rapport, general rowdyisms and boisterousness (e.g. The Kinks’ Kelvin Hall and the Stones’ Got Live).

2. Professionally Slick (e.g. Live At Leeds).

3. Miscellaneously rotten, which furthur subdivides into

a) sickeningly hipster (Woodstock).

b) boorishly amateur (e.g. anything manufactured with a $4 tape recorder, where the engineer cleverly disguised the microphone by sitting on it).

Rockin’ The Fillmore may be the greatest of the free-reign (type one) live albums ever. It is better than Kelvin Hall or Got Live merely because it is twice as long. Steve Marriot and Humble Pie really know how to win an audience. Unlike Live A t Leeds which suffers somewhat because the visual is lost, Rockin’ The Fillmore presents such tremendous humour and joie de vivre, and Marriot communicates so well, that the recorded version of the concert is easily able to stand alone on its own merits. Listen to the 16:00 “Rolling Stone” which encompasses all of side three. Here Steve relates a charming little anecdote about a girl-friend’s mother who “ain’t had none for a long time,” and sets it against a backdrop of pure rock communication. The guitars add as much to the tale with their insinuating whines and riffs as the speaker does. Pure joy. Pure raunch.

Rock and Roll has got to be fun, or why bother with it? So, admitting that Humble Pie has all the musical balls of Sabbath or Zeppelin, why not take the laughs instead of the doom or the paranoia? Dig?

Part Three: More Generally Random Thoughts Titled So They Look Organized.

1. Along with Rod Steward, Steve Marriot is probably the best rock and roll shouter we have. On the opening lines of “I’m Ready,” he actually sounds like Tina Turner, and on everything else he sounds like a guy whose life depends on how much vitality he can infuse into a song. When he talks he sounds like any one of a thousand cockney shysters you’ve ever seen live or on the tely. It doesn’t really matter that Peter Frampton quit the band. Peter Framptons are plentiful. Steve Marriots only come along once a year or so.

2. A & M had the audacity to actually blip out one of Steve’s little slips of the tongue, (course we all know how impressionable you 18 year olds can be). Chances are that if they hadn’t, you wouldn’t have even noticed anything was so horribly wrong, but they did, and hence my virgin sensibilities are saved until the next time I have dinner with my old man.

3. The 25 minute version of “Walk On Guilded Splinters” is the only low point on an otherwise faultless album. It kind of drags, and isn’t really all that exciting. If it was meant to be a change of pace, it works to excess. Humble Pie are better rock and rollers than pseudo-bluesters.

Part Four: Conclusion

If they told me I was being exiled to Baffin Island tomorrow, and that I could only take one album with me, this would be it. I’ve really been living on it since I got it. Also, I shouldn’t really tell you this, but, yesterday I was talking to God on the phone, and he sez to me, “Ya know man, these guys ain’t bad.” And he was right. But it’s a funny thing he didn’t know that a long time ago.

Al Niester

Mighty War Machine, Familiar as a heartbeat

LED ZEPPELIN ATLANTIC

This album has one of the more, notable titles in pop history. Si Zentner of Ralph Marterie or somebody one released an album called “QX*%S$F!” or something approximate, and the Dead certainly scored with Aoxomoxoa. Why do these people think they have to pin such outlandish monickers on their product? Well, it’s just a trend, to be cute, because nobody wants to be so unimaginative any more as to name their albums after songs on them and yet Sticky Fingers and Love It To Death are the only recent albums to effectively utilize the Sgt. PepperBlonde On Blonde era trick of tying up the whole bag of tunes in a single clever phrase that serves as comment or concept. For a while the big thing was to name, say, your fourth album after your group since your first album had some cosmically verbose title anyhoo. Santana just pulled this one on their new set. Then people started calling their records snappy things like I, II, III, etc., but most of them are getting away from that because not as many people are going to buy an album called Chicago LXXVI. But Led Zeppelin really scooped the whole field with this one. What are people gonna call it? I’ve studiously avoided mentioning it by name in this review, although Dave Marsh suggested “Atlantic SD 7208” might be a good handle. Sometimes I actually believe that these bands think up these titles just to confound reviewers, magazines, trade-journal charts and the editors of the Schwann catalog. By punking out and calling the album by the group’s name, we concievably confuse it in the public mind with a first or other album by that name. The solution^ in this case anyway, is that Atlantic has supplied the Icelandic runes of the title to all trade and public journals they’re sending it to. But will Billboard and Record World and Cash Box take the trouble to run it? Probably not; but CREEM will! And that’s the whole ball of wax.

And once you get past the runes to the tunes, what do you get? A Led Zeppelin album. It sounds pretty much like you’d expect it to, but there’s nothing wrong with that; most of the biggest and best stars of rock ‘n’ roll history have found ¶. relatively limited style and pursued it with minor changes. Led Zeppelin have taken the best aspects of the Yardbird’s style and the British flash blues tradition and inflated them into a mighty war machine that makes up in force and bigness of sound what it lacks in subtlety or variety. They’ve taken a lot of abuse from the rock press for this, being denigrated variously for “ripping off’ black blues and sounding to more imaginative ears like the tonal equivalent of a 1933 Nuremburg rally. If they weren’t so resolutely tasteless even in their attempts to be arty it might be different, but the Zep have stuck to their crass guns, and maintained their position as one of the most popular groups in the world and probably the secret kick of more than a few people with standards on their sleeves.

And it’s true that Led Zeppelin II is one of the great psychedelic production albunfs of all time, a pop classic precisely by its excesses of form and proportion. “Whole Lotta Love” was the ultimate jive-ass macho masterpiece and ultimate phased headphone tripout too even if largely lifted from a song on an old Small Faces, album. The band’s unsung propensity for dealing with mutated folk forms led to some mighty interesting and distinctly British lyrics about the depths of Mordor and the like* and in their third album to the beginning of an acoustic experiment that many called the ultimate bastardization but was no less justified than anybody else’s version of “Gallows Pole.” Besides, “Immigrant Song” was the first rock ‘n’ roll song ever about Vikings, and how much farther from the blues can you get?

Their new album, like the last, is nowhere near the skull-blitz that Led Zep II was, and doesn’t even have as many songs as III. Which means that the songs tend to be longer, which means that they tend to turn into jams that aren’t as flashy as those on Led Zep I and sometimes bog down. There’s more “pretty” folk-derived stuff too, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Nevertheless, if, er, ah, uh, Atlantic SD 7208 is far from the best Zeppelin album, it still has immediate impact - as contrived as his approach is, Jimmy Page still thinks largely in terms cataclysmic - and I’m playing it more and more and louder and louder as I become familiar enough with the contents to distinguish the songs with strong similarities from each other and make out most of the lyrics from Robert Plant’s singing, which is beginning to get as close to pure glottal-feedback garble as Iggy’s ever was. I’m still not sure exactly what he’s talking about in “Misty Mountain Hop,” and the sense of strain in his vocal style from the beginning is becoming more apparent, but whattaya expect from a contortionist anyway? That constrictolaryngeal shrillness is part of his charm. And the song itself moves in such an odd rush, sounding jumbled but never quite pushing the rhythm off its precarious ledge, that you’re always slightly disoriented enough not to look for parts so much as a sense of lunging, recoiling submergence. Same thing applies to “Black Dog,” which is an absolutely typical slab of Led Zep blood-and-iron boogie thunder, and even more to “Rock and Roll,” which is not nearly as brilliant but several thousand leukocytes thicker than Lou Reed’s song of the same name, and features the rather self-deprecating lyrics: “It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled/ Been a long time since I did the Stroll.” Nahh, if “Whole Lotta Love” wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll this ain’t either, and it sure ain’t the Stroll, but it’s surely guitarro hysteria of a thick textured blast akin to the Stooges’ on Funhouse, and the surest single on this album.

Led Zeppelin are also getting deeper here into the folky stuff than ever before, and the results are uneven. “Going To California” is a lapping moderato bit that’s as stereotypic in its intent “lyricism” and “beauty” as the other songs are in their frenzy, and bores the piss out of me, while “Stairway to Heaven” is a lapidary ballad with p*o*E*T*I*C lyrics (“And it’s whispered that soon if we all call the tune/ Then the piper will lead us to reason”) that’s as lush as a Kleenex forest. But in “Battle of Evermore” they apply acoustics in a brilliant way that’s as surface-skittery as the power leads on “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Black Dog” and as internally unified. Plus Sandy Denny joining in with a beautifully arcing and swooping Grace Slickish vocal for one of the, yes, loveliest things (another is “That’s the Way” on Zep III) the band has ever recorded. And they finish things off with the best summary wowser since “How Many More Times” on their first album and get in some blues licks too which are not only proper but actually listenable, actually exciting: “When the Levee Breaks” is a great, groaning, oozing piece of sheer program music, one of the best things ever done by this group, with some growling harmonica that harkens straight back to the days of the Yardbirds, early Paul Butterfield and Manfred Mann’s version of “Smokestack Lightning.” Except that they had the sense not to drag theirs on for seven minutes; but then, the Zep seldom makes this mistake and when they do I’d much rather it’d be with a gorgon like “Levee” than a thicket of misbegotten mush like “Stairway to Heaven.”

Led Zeppelin are not nearly as pretentious in their actual music as in its exterior accoutrements. At this point they can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned, unless they should forsake their coagulated raveups to keep ascending them stairways to heaven until they’re lost in the stars. They’re stars already, but that’s not why I don’d expect any more from them than and am totally satisfied with the utterly predictable. It’s because things as familiar as my own heartbeat often-times are the quickest accelerators of heart’s-pulse and stomping feet. So don’t pay any attention to the smartasses who tell you that this album’s just Zo-So.

Lester Bangs

TEASER AND THE FIRECAT CAT STEVENS A & M

Teaser and the Firecat is Gat Steven’s third album since his resurrection. Happily, it offers little that we haven’t heard before. The same elements that made the previous two {Tea for the Tillerman and Mona Bone Jakon) so successful are repeated here: the intriguing material sung with honesty and clarity and without self-consciousness; the delightfully simple backing rhythms that infringe on Cat’s singing no more than necessary; Cat’s warmly professional voice and totally unique phrasing abilities. All the elements that have helped make Cat one of the biggest stars of 1971.

But while Teaser and the Firecat contains examples of the best of Stevens, it also shows a little of the worst. One of Steven’s strong points is that his material is never nagging, but always^ smooth and unagitating. Not even his faster paced stuff is a drag to listen to, as it could very well be considering the limits of his ensemble. Most of this new album is the same way, but not all. The album starts off with two relatively weak numbers, which, were it not for Cat’s reputation, would cause most reviewers to scrap it right there. “The Wind” is a (thankfully) short, banal little ditty that you might have sung with your 250 pound soprano music teacher in grade school. “Rubylove” is a song reflecting Cat’s Greek heritage, and even features a solo bouzoukia run, but still doesn’t measure up to Cat’s standards because of its repetition and unaccustomed harshness. These two numbers are alleycats to Stevens’ usually fine Persian quality (yuk), and even the third cut, “If 1 Laugh,” isn’t overly captivating, having as it does a certain “deja vu” quality. The song seems to reflect what might happen if all of Cat’s songs were fed into a computer in a search for the'norm.

“Changes IV” offers an acceptable quicker number, and serves as an adequate lead-in for what must be one of the finest songs Cat has ever recorded. “How Can I Tell You” offers a very real presentation of the difficulty of communication between a man and a woman, and is sung with the intensity and sense of helplessness that the topic requires. It is a completely moving and thought-provoking experience, set to a truly beautiful melody, and if you are a rich elitist pig with lots of $$$$$, it is probably worth the cost of the entire album.

But if side one is perhaps a little scant, side two more than makes up for it. “Tuesday’s Dead” is a fine sing-along number based around calypso rhythms (a Greek Desmond Dekker? Far Out, mon). “Morning has Broken” is a song of praise, and is valuable if only because it shows some of the neat jams you’ve been missing while laying in bed Sunday mornings for the last ten years. “Bitterblue” is the third cut, and the second best on the album, as far as I’m concerned. A faster number based on the traditional Stevens method of 40% sing - 20% instrumental break — 40% sing, its main appeal stems from the fact that the drums come across as predominantly as the rest of the rhythm section, the only song in which they do, and indeed, the only song for which this technique would work. The final two cuts, “Moonshadow” and “Peace Train” are by now such a deeply rooted part of your radio experience that I won’t bother with them (although ain’t it neat to see a record with “Includes the hit single etc. etc. etc.” glued on outside the cellophane again!)

Cat Stevens is secure in his popularity as long as he goes on giving us plebs exactly want we want, middle-of-the-road niceties for the Pepsi generation. Get it while you can.

Alan Niester

MUSWELL HILLBILLIES THE KINKS RCA

Where to begin? I’d like to find the redeeming virtue in this album but I’m not sure that it has one. It’s a shame, ten years later, to find the Kinks dredging up Sticky Fingers remnants and trying to write British nursery rhymes for the future (“Have A Cuppa Tea”) but that’s what Muswell Hillbillies is composed of. It’s not just poor, it’s horrible.

Ray Davies, ordinarily a fairly perceptive soul (“Lola,” “Top of the Pops”) when he’s not trying to be the Toynbee of the counterculture, has allowed himself to become whimsical, pandering and maudlin in his own age. That is, when he’s not being just an ordinary British sap on the street, drooling over supposed neurosis and plentiful physical problems: scrawny girl-friends, too much booze and a rheumatic heart. There are tales on this record that would make the next Palsy Telethon look like a Pop Festival.

> He almost gets off a couple times: “Skin and Bones” sort of works, except that like too much of the music here, the sound is disjunctured and discordant and sloppy, and poorly produced to boot; “Muswell Hillbillies” has some cursory thematic interest. I guess what the record might be about is what Britain sees America as, and what that vision is doing to British people (“Oklahoma U.S.A.” operates out of the same framework.) But since Davies doesn’t have anything to add but the totally obvious, what’s the use?

Dave Davies is probably the highlight of the album: some of his guitar playing is really fine. And little swatches of “Oklahoma U.S.A.” are pleasantly textured; the accordian is effectively utilized, more like the Stones on “Backstreet Girl”, as .opposed to the Band. Which means European rather than American. Or nothing, nothing at all.

Because who ever bought a Kinks album for the way the accordion sounded? C’mon, Ray, how ’bout another “Lola?”

Dave Marsh

LUC FERRARI: PRESQUE RIEN

NO. 1; SOCIETE II KONSTANTIN SIMONOVITCH & ENSEMBLE INSTRUMENTAL DE MUSIQUE CONTEMPORAINE DE PARIS

DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 2543004

The European avant-garde classical composers, clannish little men whose mbred intellects and unbelievably unlistenable “compositions” have led more than one classical fan to bemoan the death of his favorite music, have always seemed to me like an easy target. They sit around formulating compositional theories that are usually little more than an excuse for fucking around with some dials here and there and getting some foundation (in enlightened Europe, usually a government-sponsored one, no less) to pay the expenses for their orgies of excess. These people are taken seriously be a good many people — they are given grants to pursue their work, they are hired to teach music in universities, they attend and disquss with incredible seriousness each other’s concerts, they are recorded and the recordings are evaluated by critics who are scared to admit they can’t understand what they’re, hearing (possible because there is nothing to understand) and lastly, they are listened to by music fans who think they’re not with it unless they force * this stuff into their input hoppers.

The leading charlatan amongst these culturally-accredited clowns is Karlheinz Stockhausen, to whose blurpings and squeepings the Beatles took acid and declared him a genius. I have never ceased to be amazed at a person who, under the guise of being a composer, gathers an ensemble of singers and musicians together, provides them with pieces of graph paper containing a few dots and lines as well as some remarkably non-specific verbiage called “compositional parameters” and then mikes them, runs the mike through a couple of volume controls manned by himself and a couple of cronies, instructs the ensemble to start “interpreting” their music, turns the volume controls up and down, and calls the ensuing chaos “music.” Every time I read of this jerk receiving sixfigure grants for this kind of thing, I am always sorely tempted to gather a few friends, rent a hall for an evening (better rent some tuxedoes, too), bill it as the Vector Studies Institute Chamber Ensemble, and see if it couldn’t be mushroomed into a scam to get the participants some easy cash. Another fantasy I’ve had is farting, burping, breaking things, and so on onto a tape, drawing up a small graph to go with it, registering the thing as a “composition,” and using it to get a teaching post at some small liberal midwestern college. I’m sure that it 'is only my lack of a Master’s Degree that keeps this fantasy from being realized.

So as you can see, I have a deep, long and well-documented (see my Rolling Stone article, “Electronic Roll,” which appeared in May, 1969) history of hatred for the established European (and European-influenced — i.e., academic American) “avant-garde.” Since so many of these people have gotten their efforts released on Deutsche Grammophon’s Avant-Garde series,. I was certainly not prepared to like this record. In fact, I put it on with the idea of generating some vitriol so I could write some nasty reviews.

But Ferarri is okay, it seems. For one thing, he is a devotee of Edgar Varese, the father of serious avant-garde music. Like any father, Varese’s words are seldom heeded by his childreri: “Music is organized sound.” Ferarri, it seems, realizes this, although he is as lax as any of his contemporaries in doing anything about it. Still, the idea of organization comes more easily to him than to many of them, since he is a filmmaker in addition to being a composer, with six musical films to his credit, including a homage to Varese and one on Cecil Taylor. -

The two pieces here show Ferarri to be a “musical organizer” of some skill. Societe II is basically just another silly avant-garde freakout, with its subtitle “and if the piano were a female body,” which may give you a clue to what it sounds like. Scored for piano, 3 percussion instruments and 16 instruments, it makes all the usual sounds, but with a difference: there is an undeniable subcurrent of actual HUMOR here! Thus, familiar “light classical” melodies appear here and there out of the chaos, played with an almost unbearably tongue-in-cheek air by the ensemble, and at one point there is what sounds like a freefor-all on, in, and around the piano, with people jumping here and there and socking each other. It’s fun.

But the real reason to get this album is Presque Rien No. 1, a tape-composition guaranteed to astound you. Subtitled “Daybreak on the beach,” it is just that — an almost cinematic compression of the first few hours of morning on an Italian beach, recorded live. The more you listen to it, the more you hear. One motif that recurs throughout is motors: the fishing boats leave early, a helicopter passes overhead, and, at one incredible moment, somebody starts a bus or a big truck, idles it for a while and then drives it right through your livingroom. Then there are human voices: a guy calling “Rocky!” and Rocky yelling back, a group of men who call out to some of the men on the beach, and one of them, whose voice ends the album, singing a haunting melody. Throughout the piece, there are also electronic “locusts,” whose repetitive scratchings eventually take over, givi the listener a very realistic impression of how hot the day will be. As the liner notes say, “If it should occur to anyone that this were no longer ‘art,’ he would be entitled to his opinion, and Ferarri would be happy.” Like I said, it seems like he might be okay.

This album is so far out of the ordinary, and it costs enough, that I am hesitant about recommending it to you, but the dedicated journeyer in search of new sonic thrills (and those who have been trying to convince themselves that Stockhausen is Art) would be well advised to look for this disc. Me, I’m gonna hope he gets a grant to make a Presque Rien No. 2.

Ed Ward

KING OF ROCK AND ROLL LITTLE RICHARD REPRISE

Well he is, yeah he is, sure he is. 1 And the sonuvabitch knows it too and so do whatever Kinney gremlins promulgated this abortion. He even says it right on top of the deck: “Tell Creence-uh Clearwater tell Sly Stone ’e oughta leave ROCK ‘N’ ROLL alone!” and furthermore “The beauty’s still on duty!” and furthermore “SHUT UP!” Which is better than burbling about God’s Bouquet and is what he shoulda said to H.B. Barnum or whoever suggested H.B. Barnum to him or whoever got him to sign with this company. Not that this company’s just naturally bad, it’s just that they’re not a rock ‘n’ roll cartel they’re a bardic significance crypto-MOR cartel and they know it too which is why they’re signing people like Donovan and Seals and Crofts and asserting with inflexible authority that it’s Where They Belong and they’re right but Little Richard doesn’t belong to anything but the spirit of the jive time roar and he is timeless but he sounds old on this album and that’s wrong.

Things start off strongly enough, with the perfect imitation of a whooping roadhouse mob on “The King of Rock and Roll” and the intro to the second tune, but the instant he plunges into “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” you know there’s jive afoot and not the right kind either but the kind that clogs and slows the peristaltic boogie. Richard himself said it better than I ever could in “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”: “Tell Three Dog Night their bark’s much bigger than their bite!” So where’s this wino toad shit that never made that much sense in the first place cornin’ from, anyway? He fares somewhat better on “Brown Sugar” but then the steamy racist ribaldry of the song probably tickles his perverse instincts far more than the qualified sensibilities of the liberal souls whb took umbrage at the Stones’ version. Although that chick vocal chorus behind him is a hell of a lot closer to Mad Dogs & Yammerers than the Raelettes. Aww, whaddaya expect in this day and age? Fuck you, Jack, I expect Godhead and Orgasm recycling from the tonal bank of the universe and no weasly whines fill the bill. Especially from the Original Numbah One King Tut Poo-Bah shrieking out the Protocols of Jive in no uncertain terms a decade and a half now! When people got him down doing Hank Williams songs so out of character it’s embarrassing, I reach for my revolver!

And now it’s time to lay the blame and hopefully the bane with it. The first problem is a gent named H.B. Barnum, who produced this here sesh and I wouldn’t be surprised if he even presumed to play piano just like Richard Perry did on Fats Domino’s Reprise album. Who is H.B. Barnum? Well, he had a coupla hits back in the early Sixties, and’s made good for himself and his family in the sessionman racket since. In his hit incarnation he was something analogous to the black Floyd Cramer. And if you don’t know or care who Floyd Cramer was^nd I don’t blame you I will onomatopoeate: tinkle, plunk, THUD. And what trusty ole H.B. has done here is saddle Little Richard with one of the lamest rhythm sections ever heard on good wax; graph ‘em somewhere ‘twixt bar band and rubber band, but those cats plod all the way. I mean it is plain mortifyin to attend. The King tries; he screams and whoops and pushes and champs at the dull bit of his surroundings, but the true tragedy is that they drag him down to the point where he ends up sounding like some flabby old fart jacked up on Thyroid pills, wheezing with the Six Fat Dutchmen straight to poorhouse pension. And Little Richard is young, always has been and always will be, and that’s the miracle.

If you don’t believe me, the next time you’re in a record shop set your Ronsen to this trash and turn and dig or demand an album that came out on Epic just this summer called Cast a Long Shadow. It’s a reissue of a couple of things recorded late in the Sixties, so it proves that Little Richard ain’t no fodder for the old folks’ home, because it has some of the best stuff he’s ever done, including “Function at the Junction,” “Land of a Thousand Dances,” “I Don’t Wanna Discuss It” (also known in versions by Rod Stewart and Rhinoceros as “You’re My Girl”), an incredibly driving piano shout called “Well” and all the old serenades to Jenny and Molly and Lucille and the rest done as highwired and sassy as ever. It’s also produced by Larry Williams, which is who Reprise would call if they had any sense, and it’s a rock ‘n’ roll classic if ever there was one and one or two or three or no matter how many, is never gonna be enough for a man who never stops.

Lester Bangs

ROTTEN TO THE CORE CRABBY APPLETON ELEKTRA ,

WACKERING HEIGHTS THE WACKERS ELEKTRA

At first glance these two don’t seem to have much in common, aside from the fact that they’re both on the sanre label. While that’s not altogether untrue, it’s not completely accurate either.

Crabby’s album is certainly the more exciting of the two. In fact, this group is probably one of the five or six best mainstream rock bands still together. They bounce through neo-Top 40 jams aplenty with a verve and directness that is seldom matched anywhere, and lead singer/guitarist/songwriter Michael Fennelly (also the “face” of the group) conveys all of this with a resourcefulness that is certainly unmatched by anything that’s come from Southern California of late.

The .Wackers on the other, hand, show less of this effervesence and generaily come off as pretty soft-poppers. Sadly, that’s not at all the group’s on-stage persona; the basic stance of the group, live, is much more Beatle-rock, innocent and naive in a refreshing way.

When a speck of their onstage flash does gleam through, the Wackers’ potential is obvious. They use twelve-string (double-six, actually) leads a lot, and when they don’t sound a little like a mutant Byrds, the guitar work tends to remind very much of George Harrison’s later work with the Beatles.

Bob Segarini and Randy Bishop of the Wackers both came from Roxy, which was another underrated, if not totally realized Elektra band of a few seasons back. They do a lot of the Wackers’ songwriting, and it’s strange that the music here comes off so soft and near-wimpy. They do have an exciting stage show, and the tapes of their second album, part of which we heard not too long ago, look about as good as you’d want from non-embattled, non-heavy rockers. Mainstream, proficient and relaxed.

That record and their projected “live” package (supposedly another of the legendary Kinney samplers) are the things to watch for, though. Aside from “Don’t Be Cruel”, their current single* and a striking original called “On the Way Up”, which sounds even better live, there really isn’t much here to recommend. (But wait’ll you hear their version of “She Loves You”: they shake their heads in time and the rendition even has those ethereal “Ooooos” that chilled so many souls ten years ago.)

Crabby, on the other hand, are busy perfecting an already successful direction. It is largely Fennelly’s group, I think, much the way Creedence is Fogerty’s. They’re not quite mainstream the way CCR is, though, mainly because they have two drummers (well, the second’s a conga player) and because they are post-Creedence in conception. But like the Fogerty group, they have an unparalleled sense of drive and rhythm and generally tough lyrics, which support Fennelly’s adolescent yet powerful vocal sallies very well.

Rotten to the Gore is their second album, and if it isn’t quite as good as their near-perfect first offering, then there’s not very much wrong with it, either. Part of the deficiency is due to some experimentation, some of which works very well (the countryish “Paper to Write On”, which is everything the Dead ever attempted brought to fullness), and some of which drags (they re-recorded their dangerously hard “Lucy,” a single of the early part of year, and it isn’t anywhere near as good, for example.) And for once, they just take a tune and blow it, maybe because it’s so inane: “You Make Me Hot,” which is really amateurish and nearly offensive. Still, for “Tomor row’s A New Day,” “Lookin’ For Love”, “Lov*e Can Change Everything,” and “Smokin’ in the Morning” this is one of the very best examples of post-Creedence mainstream rock and roll around.

Dave Marsh

'NUFF SAID IKE & TINA TURNER UNITED ARTISTS

What we got here is a healthy dose of processed jive. I own every single Ike & Tina Turner album I’ve ever been able to lay my hands on, and let me tell ya, a few of them twenty-odd albums are no good. But usually the bad ones were floor scrapings put together by a record company after I.&T.T. had moved on. ’Nuff Said is technically perfect but nothing on it is very exciting.

The album was recorded in Ike’s spiffy new recording studio and from the production stancjpoint it’s their best allpum since Outta Season. Unlike River Deep and Mountain High and Come Together you don’t have to deal with annoying shifts in production quality from cut to cut. Apparently Ike now has the means at his disposal to do it exactly the way he wants with no compromises. Well folks, this time around his amusement is our boredom. In short, Ike went bananas, overdubbing every cut, and generally being eclectic until even Tina’s voice couldn’t carry the load. She gives it a good try on “Baby (What You Want Me To Do)” but eventually the horns win. On the very next cut he uses the roller derby organ from Byrdmaniax AND TOO MANY HORNS AGAIN and piano and guitar and bass and drum all at the same time and it’s all so modulated even M.O.R. can deal with it. On and on it goes. There’s really ho reason to go on.

The Masked Marvel