Like any other average San Diego couple, we were growing a bit tired of double features at the drive-in and watered-down drinks at Swinger clubs, so one recent weekend we took each other to romantic Los Angeles, for Crabby Appleton’s opening and the watered-down drinks at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. The trip was jammed with contrasts, for while there’s probably no town so tacky in its insensitivity as L.A., and no dive where the patrons work so hard at having a miserable time as the Whiskey, Crabby rose above the smog of ennwi-posturings to glow both with the spirit of kids “Looking for Love” in Southern California and untrammeled American rock ‘n’ roll.

Crabby played to two somewhat disparate crowds on two successive nights: Friday it was the “party” for local press, Names and various sycophants, at which jaded columnists sit glumly and young hotshots like Bangs sometimes drive over a hundred miles to attend, all for what is generally some of the rottenest music on the current promo pad and free drinks from bitchy waitresses. (Ours made us repeat an order for Chivas Regal and water four times, then corrected our pronunciation with a grating snap: “You mean Chee-vus Ree-gul!” Rubes take hives home (rom this town.)

Flack night was hardly what you’d call glamorous. People mill around, glad-hand each other through the funniest skein of hip contempt, dropping names and rumors. (This night various gossip grapevines had both Barbra Streisand and Fidel Castro solid cocaine snorters.) Most of the L.A. press seems determined to hit a premiere with an air of scowling boredom as sullen as that expected from fop superstars. Quality or intensity of performance is irrelevant to this scene, the finest music rolling back from a dead wall. Which is probably the main reason why Crabby so exceeded themselves when they got the kids on Saturday.

We met a few local names, like Chris Van Ness of the L.A. Free Press, publicists for various groups, and two footloose ex-members of Blues Image. Lester ended up surpassingly drunk, telling the Blues Image refugees without sarcasm that he’d loved “Ride Captain Ride” because it fit so beautifully between CSNY’s “Ohio” and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” on The Super Hits Volume Five.

Saturday was much better, although kids who frequent the Whiskey most regularly (and there are whole clots of them that you come to recognize immediately) are almost unresponsive and sometimes downright hostile as the press. The dancers are so relentlessly orgiastic that they finally seem like mannikins strapped to a numb treadmill of sexual mimicry. Some don’t leave the dancefloor for hours, and between sets a handful wriggle on to records, often right at the edge of the floor, directing their gyrations straight at the audience in a tired but dumbly determined exhibitionism that is absurd and pathetic but catches the eye of a rustic and maybe even titillates him at first. Many of the girls look extremely sexy in a crass sort of way, but the only time you seem to see them smile or acknowledge a partner at all is when he’s one of their bony shag-and-silk reflections. As lead Crabby Michael Fennelly said the next day, “The Whiskey’s basically a body shop,” whether you’re tourist.playing voyeur or regular looking to score.

Quite naturally, these audiences respond to the music according to their own unspoken codes. Quality, though perhaps more appreciated by dancers and weekending drug-brats than guzzling writers, really matters less than who you are and what you represent in the murky echelons of hip star status. Local bands are generally yawned at, likewise out-of-towners without corona like the Velvet Underground, but exploiters of inflated bugaloo such as Buddy Miles generally fare pretty well, and the crowds will almost literally devour any band from Britain, no matter how slipshod. Mike Fennelly observes with a wry grin: “The regular crowd at the Whiskey, they’ve seen it all. If you’re from England, you’re a hit at the Whiskey, no way they won’t love you. Talk with an English accent, be small and pretty and you’ve made it, doesn’t matter what you play or what you do.”

This night, with two local groups served up, the crowd attended for the most part to maintaining their special brand of weary cool. Second-billed were Smokestack Lightnin’, who should have called themselves the Badasses and have a lead singer (he blows harp about 75% of the time, too) who is positively the most pitiful scrap of scrawny, thigh-jiggling pseudo-Jagger in the history of Los Angeles, and is given to little fillips like changing Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” line to “Arlene grabbed me by the balls” and ad-libbing blues classics like: “I was walkin’ down Sunset/And I boogied on into the Whiskey-a-Go-Go/And then I got it on!”

Meanwhile, one wall features a color film of reptiles, with bug-eyed lizards spitting seven-foot mucousy tongues and giant rattlesnakes lunging fangs into rats and then ever-so-slowly swallowing them whole. Andy stares with repelled fascination, and Michael teases her with all the healthy affection that lies at the heart of Crabby’s vision: “ ‘Euooh, how disgusting!,’ she said, and wrinkled her face. ‘You look like you just bit a lemon. I admit it’s a wierd notion of entertainment, but that’s L.A.’ ” •

Minutes later, though, Crabby Appleton got their chance to steer the mood somewhere else, and they are on tonight, rolling out great chunky tapestries of authentic rock ‘n’ roll and failing to lift the crowd through no fault of their own. Their music sounds kind of like a cross between the Everly Brothers and the Rascals, with tasty hints of off-shoots like the Troggs, and occasional interludes of soft, wistful bossa nova for balance. A young band (Fennelly, who plays lead guitar and writes and sings all the songs, is only 22), they reflect American adolescence — its yearning, confusion, frenzies.

The passionate shrillness of the vocals, the alternately hesitant and swaggeringly assertive sound, and lyrics like “Funny now how after all this time I feel the same” and “I get by anyway I can/Hope it don’t take too long/’Fore I see my light,” all sound and feel like a sincere statement of the concerns of a Teenage America far removed in spirit and perhaps in time from the sullen zombies at the Whiskey. And this sense of enthusiasm and vitality is a prime ingredient in Crabby’s success. There’s no distance at all between them and the emotions they’re trying to express: everything they play has the same sense of ingenuousness with which Mike Fennelly expresses profound admiration for both Led Zeppelin and football.

Their first ablum and last two singles reflected all this, but it comes across unmistakably in the live show. They work hard and obviously get a huge charge out of what they’re doing, which in itself is refreshing these days. What’s more, they look like a rock ‘n’ roll band should look. Fennelly stands far right, turned about 90° between audience and band, singing in plaintive cries, then fierce and seething as he bears down on the guitar, churning out taut chords while spitting imprecations at it and jutting his jaw not for machismo-exploitation but with the same slightly desperate self-assertion as some kid gunning down the afterschool street with his muffler loosened for volume.

The second visual vector of live-Crabby is drummer Phil Jones, who has the long, emaciated, liver-lipped Jagger jib, and looks properly sullen on the a(lbum cover but conveys a howling glee in person and also looks the most like some Terrytoon referent to their name. With an enormous mouth which is usually hanging open in a loony grin, he never sits but lolls like some village idiot. But his drumming is fantastic, wildly intense frith no showoffy gimmicks or conceited solos (long rhythm breaks involve flying tradeoffs between Phil and Cuban conga-player Flaco Falcon). He slams home a sure foundation for each song, fast and intricate but seldom overbusy, and sometimes when he’s really driving his glasses will fall to his chin and bounce there for the rest of the song, or, more commonly, his face flies into a jumbled ecstacy, goggle-eyes rolling and jaw careening sideways like nothing so much as some epileptic Horace Horsecollar in the throes of a seizure. It’s one of the funniest and most beautiful sights we’ve seen on a stage this year, a visual flash of imbecile bliss that would be embarrassing if it weren’t so joyously indicative of the primal sensation of rock ‘n’ roll.

The rest of the group, if less of a spectacle, is tight and sure and always there. Emigre Flaco, who escaped the Castro regime in 1960 and has played with Gabor Szabo among others, is short and thin: his name means “skinny falcon” in Spanish, although he reminds you more of half of Heckell and Jeckyll with his great sharp nose and slit-eyes squinting behind the smoke from the cigarette usually hanging down, tough-guy style, from his lips. He drinks hard and looks like he lives harder, and is really a rather quiet, observant man who probably thinks of his role entirely in terms of professional musicianship. His congas and timbales fill out the sound and add bite without stooping to the cluttered exhibitionism of Santana, and just now he’s starting to work a cracking bullwhip into one song, just for a little crowd-clutching tinge of Zeppelinean savagery. He grins a little too wryly when he does it, but with some woodshedding we’re sure his whip will cook as smartly as his drums.

The other two Crabbies are organist Casey Foutz and bassman Hank Harvey. Casey has had plenty of classical training, and it shows without being showy in the slightly baroque scales running through his solos and a consistent sense of economy rare among rock organists. Harvey, on the other hand, teethed on Dick Dale and the Deltones. Tall and shy, he bears a certain gaunt suggestion of some stooped deacon of a bird in those old Terrytoons. He doesn’t talk much and stands to the rear onstage, but his full, strong punches are an unmistakable component of Crabby’s attack.

They do essentially the same show every night, with “Go Back,” “Lucy” and “Grab On” in each set because they were the band’s three singles, make great dance numbers and are simply their very best work. “Lucy” is a classic pounding piece of bulldozer rock, as basic and rightly heavy as the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” with lyrics to match (“My little Lucy/Ohhh, she tastes so good!”) It should have been a hit, as should “Grab On,” with its sizzling, telegraphic intro and bridge reminiscent of the Blues Magoos’ “We Ain’t Got Nothin’ Yet” and a chopping chorus hold with love-stunned awe: “I’ve never seen anyone like you/Lowdown ladies and fallen-out females always seem to follow me round/Grab on to somethin’ high like you/ And I know that I won’t go down.”

“Go Back” is still as fresh as it was a year ago. Most of Crabby’s music, in fact, seems to have a vitality and staying power as innocently substantial as the early Byrds, with some of the rawness and violence of a period group like the original Pretty Things. Not surprisingly, 1965-66 is the era that the band remembers and reminisces about most enthusiastically, and there’s a little bit of what was in the air then in their sound, as when Mike briefly slides the strings across the mike stand in “Lucy,” arid you remember all the teen club bands you saw doing that through 15-minute “I’m a Man” ragas. Except that here it’s harnessed and applied very specifically to enhance the song; this is one band that never forgets anything once learned, and each faint echo of the mid-Sixties renaissance is like a fresh breeze.

Continued on page 76.

Crabby Appleton

Continued from page 43.

Saturday afternoon we sat sipping carefully at short hangover beers by a pool in verdant Laurel Canyon, wondering why more of the storied Canyon Names and Ladies weren’t at the party, and exchanged banter and cosmic truths with the band while some of the more sanguine veterans of the press party stoned up and -sometimes swam naked in the pool. It was a relaxed gathering, without pressure of hype or Scene mongering. Joe Lala of Blues Image was there, but didn’t say hello for some reason, along with a gaggle of writers and publicists including Jerry Hopkins, John Carpenter (two separate people approached us and introduced themselves as John Carpenter), Tom Nolan and Pat Faralla of Elektra.

We sat at the edge of the pool and made a dutiful attempt to conduct the standard popstar interview with Crabby, but soon realized that the usual questions were much less rewarding than simply chewing the rag with the band. They have a sense of humor and whimsey that won’t submit to requests for expostulations on What It All Means, but if you wait long enough you get the whole story anyway and with a certain rambling eloquence. In between, we talked about things like drugs (they used to drink Romilar, kids) and various approaches to the article (“Blase Crabby Appleton lounged by their Laurel Canyon pool, as ravenous 14-year-old groupies climbed all over them,” or “Crabby Appleton can sniff more cocaine at one sitting than the Rolling Stones!”) Michael teased Andy some more by offering to teach her the Right On slap-handshake, then grabbed a photog’s camera and did a Blow Up routine (“C’mere, honey!”), Phil Jones lolled sideways once more like God’s own goon, and Hank Harvey tried his best to answer questions that didn’t make sense in the first place.

Michael’s story is the Rock Rake’s Progress, from getting a ' guitar for his 9th birthday to touring with the Doors. He grew up in New Jersey, but walks, talks and jokes like a Westerner, was once on a Columbia album by a one-shot group called the Millenium, and has been through most of the musical styles of the Sixties at one time or another. Surprisingly or not, however, one of the most basic components of the group’s sound, the high wailing vocals, Jiarkeri right back to his first big influence, the Everly Brothers: “I started out listening to the Everly Brothers and digging the first Elvis Presley movies in junior high — started writing songs in 7th grade. I didn’t go through a big purist thing — I lived in suburbia, a very sheltered life. But we used to he^r things like “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love” on the radio a lot. That’s when I learned three chords on the guitar and used to rock along with the Everly Brothers, pictured myself being an Everly Brother one day if they ever needed another one.

“When I first came out here I was living in a coffeehouse on Sunset Strip, doing a protest number. I was writing songs with titles like‘This Trouble’s Been Goin’ On Too Long’ ((laughs))

— when I was young and foolish, y’know. I was into a very ethnic hippie thing, didn’t care about making records — too busy wearing my Bob Dylan cap an’ blowing my harmonicas at tht Establishment. \

“After that I was in a psychedelic group called the Yellow Brick Road; we were in another coffeehouse, playing psychedelic ragas and being Far Out. You go through phases until you get to the point where you can make your own music without following trends. I think we’re at that point now.”

He laughs a lot when he tells it, and it is very funny, just as the rock ‘n’ roll story always should be for a white kid spawned in the lap of America. He met the other members of the band in the summer of 1969, when they were in a “commercialized acid-blues” group called Stonehenge with guitarist John Weider of Eric Burdon’s Animals. Weider was called back to England to replace Ric Grech in Family when he got his big chance in Blind Faith, and Mike Fennelly was brought in as replacement. Which was fortunate, because he had already written over a hundred songs, they started to rehearse some chosen at random, and just six months later their first album was recorded quickly and well.

Phil Jones came up, toppled into a chair (not particularly stoned, that’s just his style) and lolled sideways once more. His seeming lethargy doesn’t mask some dark neurosis but comes off as a logical expression of his roots in the Midwestern suburbs where he probably spent a good chunk of his formative years plopped on the couch in just this posture watching the cartoons. Rather than the petulant passivity of the spoiled-brat brand of popstar he resembled on the album, he represents the evolutionary zenith of the era of parental permissiveness, allowed to pursue indolence until it becomes a kind of state of grace.

Like Casey, Phil has loads of musical “background” — his mother sang soprano, and he sang in a Methodist Church choir in Iowa — but preferred to jive with less-schooled buddies. He joined his first group while in high school in Oskaloosa, Iowa, playing drums and trying to direct them into some blues, starting with the early Rolling Stones and eventually getting into stuff like Muddy Waters and maybe feeling a little puristsuperior about it because few of the other kids were onto it yet “and it’s sort of fun to have that when you’re 18 or 19.” They called themselves the Yeti, “after the Abominable Snowman, and our big thing was to feel very high-class because we had all Vox equipment.”

Eventually he and Casey, who also hailed from Iowa, came west together and wandered through various Coast bands before coming through Stonehenge to Crabby Appleton. Lii.e the others, he’s not particularly fazed by new fame or the arrogance it can bring, but does feel a bit bemused and mildly intimidated by suddenly figuring in the expectations of so many people, and the certain aura of unreality surrounding many of the people and situations such a career asks him to deal with. And for all the cartoon levity of his demeanor, he spoke most intelligently and reflectively of what the fact of being a big-time rock ‘n’ roll band should and potentially could mean: “We’re a fairly young band. Sometimes it’s wierd — I don’t really feel like I wanna give my life away. We’re not into the super popstar identification scene, but sometimes you kind of almost feel trapped. I wish you could just play music with people without having to put up with the kind of scenes you have to go through. It’s easy to get cynical, where it all seems like such a game. Even though a lot of the cynicism is more defensiveness than anything else. Sometimes you hate having to play for crowds, but it’s fun when you can play and really make people happy, like last night was a really good party, everybody got drunk and had a good time. That’s fun, that’s what rock ‘n’ roll’s for.”

That focus on the primal rock ‘n’ roll party ethos as life style and goal rather than the supercilious trappings of hip stardom has not sent Crabby Appleton careening to the top yet; in the past few months they have played mostly gigs at schools, small teen clubs and rock ‘n’ roll fairs of one sort and another, to audience response largely as warm as the, pardon the exprssion, vibes of the group itself. And they have a new album now, as solidly rooted in the Yearning Amerikid tradition as the first with the added booster of some stylistic fillips that can’t fail to grab even the trendiest listeners. After temporarily considering Split Ends and Broken Eardrums (I suggested that one way to insure instant sales would be to call it Eric Clapton, but they didn’t laugh for some reason), they’ve settled on Rotten To the Core and a picture of their Terrytoon namesake in the corner of the cover.

I attended some of the sessions, and even before the words were added y >u coult feel that the irrSsistable vitality that was always their hallmark is as strong as ever. “Lucy” is there in a protracted version, as well as a pride of new opuses, the strongest of which is probably “It’s So Hard,” containing yet another instantly-unforgettable lyrical flash: “Don’t you think it’s the crudest request in the world/ Askin’ a man to stay away from the girl that he loves?” Although Mike’s not doing so bad either when he hits you in a later deck with “Volkswagen Sandy, she’s my/ Mustang Sally/ Lives out in San Fernando Valley/ Gonna drive my hot rod right/ Up her alley/ Lookin’ for love!” Mike smiles: “We never try to make our lyrics very cosmic. Most of the songs just come out of some situation I’ll go through in an average day where we live. Why reach any farther?” And then he introduces you: “Isn’t she the prettiest little thing you’ve seen in L.A.?”, and then head out in her blue VW to the Faces concert in Long Beach, where a kid in the crowd shyly sidles up as we’re leaving and says: “Aren’t you Mike Fennelly of Crabby Appleton?”

“Sure am,” says Mike, and thanks him when the boy says how much he likes their music, no false modesty or conceit, just ingenuous pleasure and a Southern California kid culture sense of always maintaining in the most sanguine way. Afterwards we even go to the hangout where the band and their neighbors cruise in their VW’s and chrome Frankensteins, and scarf our onion burgers talking about the album Point being that, just like Grank Funk claim to be or implicitly are^ Crabby Appleton not only have something to offer their audience, they are their audience, with the added bonuses of a wealth of basic talent and an already apparent ability, shared with a small number of truly fine bands from the Stones on down, to keep growing constantly past wherever they were the last time we caught them and perhaps even — if the interpersonal weather is right — never stop.

And if they are their audience, they are so not in reflecting those cadaverous crowds at the Whiskey but in cruising consonant with that shy kid outside the Faces concert and the ones leaning against their bumpers at the burger stand. And since those kids seem to. yearn more and more for the joys of good old unselfconscious rock ‘n’ roll, the next year should be a very big one for Crabby Appleton.

Success probably won’t turn their heads much, though. Like all the best bands from Year One, Crabby are in it for love as well as money and adulation. They have a ball when they play and don’t get too hung up analysing why, and they want the audience to have the same revivifying experience, simply so everybody can be happy, get loose, get their rocks off and know they’re alive. As Mike Fennelly said to us, sitting by the pool gazing down the canyon and the years: “We went to the first Easter love-in in Elysian Park in 1967, and it was fantastic — all these thousands of people, all on exactly the same trip. Since then it’s all gotten kind of sour, because everybody knows what you’re supposed to do at a love-in, and it’s like going to a party and knowing you’re supposed to have a good time. Same with concerts. Like to hear Sly now, everybody knows the ‘Higher’ trip, they all get up and go ‘Higher!’ and say ‘Oh yeah, this is as exciting as Woodstock!” But it’s not, and maybe you can’t even have anything like that anymore. I dig audiences that don’t try to appear to be anything but just wanna have a good time without even thinking about it. I dig audiences that just want to get zapped.”