Ono, Raitt,Taylor and a pair of Lauras: Sisterhood is Powerful

Ono, Raitt,Taylor and a pair of Lauras:

FLY YOKO ONO APPLE

Anybody with the right attitude, a few ideas and some moxie can create art if not Art. Or maybe that�s Art if not art, since the inflation of the idea takes it out of the realm of craft and turns it into a stereotype, a caricature which can be exploited by almost anybody with access to the media who carries themself right. What�s actually produced is secondary to the gesture, the pose and self-PR which are themselves great creative achievements.

Gesture is important in rock �n� roll too, but in a somewhat inverted sense. The Art stance predicates a sort of aluminum detachment, creator and creation in a glycerine symbiosis if not always that organically related. But in rock �n� roll, the organic bloom is everything even if it�s ragweed or sprouts in a hothouse. The gesture, the attitudes, the moxie are all means toward an involvement that�s intense and purging, as opposed to the refrigerated autism and often neutral surfaces of late avant-garde art. What begins in perhaps nothing more than the ballsy assertiveness of attitudes and unrefined gestures can end in art if not Art, because here more than anywhere else the myth fertilizes the reality. Which is why Jerry Rubin and such dudes derived so much of their politics from the operative assumptions of rock.

Yoko Ono couldn�t carry a tune in a briefcase. She has a mind-bending vocal range nearly comparable to such a primordial yodeler as Yma Sumac, whose old Capitol # album of pre-Anno Domini areterioaccelerant headhunter anthems/raveups, Voice of the Xtaby (Ed. Note: Lester did not make this album up. It is for real! Honest.) is still one of the alltime platters of arcane skull-pulves. But just ask her to sing �Raindrops Keep Failin� On My Head� or �Come Rain or Come Shine� or even �Mairzy Doats� — phoo! Lainie Kazan she ain�t. Not even Lydia Pense. But fuck that, dames like them are a dime a drugstorefull. Yoko is a great singer, has become one through sheer persistence, and proven once and for all that when you reach the end of the alley, talent don�t matter a gnat�s turd when it comes to rock�n�roll, what matters is a malleable mania and an almost deranged sense of drive. Keep swimming upstream long enough and you�ve gotta hit the fount of the Eternal Tone sooner or later unless you�re ignorant enough to cop and try to come on cute.

Yoko�s there. She paid her dues to scale the volcano too. From Two Virgins, through Unfinished Music # 2 and Wedding Album, people mainly clucked sympathetically or made cracks about poor misguided John, but public and sundry absolutely hated Yoko. That Jap bitch�s yammering was even uglier than the body she revealed to the world along with John�s in their infamous Rolling Stone/ Two Virgins poster (one of the great mistakes of our time — two homely fools posing sternly for world peace through the public pecker) and more aggravatingly pretentious than her linty little Grapefruit Art dribbles. �Cambridge #69� from Unfinished Music #2 alone was 26 minutes of little-modulated shrikes of admirable endurance but precious little imagination as entries in the shriek idiom go. The addition of John Tchichai and another New York ESP Records �freejazz� saxman didn�t mean shit — all a lot of people think you�ve got to do to give your gurglings and garble some credence is cop one of these cats, who most likely is scuffling for cabfare anyway, to tootle and squeak behind you a little bit. It just ain�t so.

Everything John and Yoko did together sucked Dalai Lama dork till the Toronto Peace album where Yoko�s micro tonal glottal spasms in �Cold Turkey� revealed her to have some rhythmic sense, i.e. when to' lay out and when to come in hacking and spitting. But I still couldn�t take the long freakout on side 2 until I read in a rock mag where some fanatic compared it to �Sister Ray� and Trane�s �Meditations�, so I gorged myself with drugs (5 th of Ten High) and listened through headphones one night and dug it almost as much as Stooges� �L.A. Blues.� The next morning I played it again at top volume despite the fact that my crippled landlady had already threatened to have her faggot son toss me out in the street on my ear already spongified by Sir Lord Baltimore. I went down to get the mail with Yoko�s caterwauling tearing through the bedroom screen halfway down the street, and thought: �If my neighbors played music like that, I�d have �em arrested!�

But I was starting to like it, and beginning to perceive that, near-impossible as it seemed for Yoko to hit a single note and hold it long, her very frenetic ranginess somehow brought her closer to the impossible note, the mystery song, the unknown tongue, between the quartertones, strived after by jazz musicians for years and with special intentness in the 60s, whence Reed and Cale�s feedback and Iggy�s yowl was leading.

The Plastic Ono Band album, first full set under her own name, was a stunningly pleasurable surprise. Only half the songs made it, but the ones that did were incredible. �Why� was a crazed gallop, banshee whinneys over scratchy John L. guitar mucho reminiscent of Lou Reed�s old style. �Greenfield Morning I Pulled an Empty Baby Carraige All Over the City� reminded me in its modal drones of the great Music of Bulgaria album on Nonesuch that somebody else is gonna buy one of these days if all of us that have it keep harping long enough, and �Paper Shoes� was one of the most intelligent uses of electronic cutup techniques I�d ever heard in a �pop� record. Most of the rest was unlistenable, and the practice tape with Ornette Coleman�s quartet again didn�t make it, but so what? Yoko had proven herself to be more than a screaming mimi. Something was most definitely happening here.

So I waited eagerly and got real excited when this album came put, and even called Up Capitol and pestered them for a copy when one didn�t arrive soon enough, but I must say after a couple of doggedly attentive listenings that it�s some kind of letdown. The rock �n� roll creature has stepped back at least far enough to give equal billing to the Artist, and frankly I think the Artist sucks. Also it�s four sides this time, which I�m afraid' is way, way too much. It wouldn�t be so bad if they�d devised a sacfull of new toons for her to exercise her tonsils on, but sides one and four bog down in two vocal jams, �Mind. Train� and �Fly,� that are really hard to listen to and so repetitious that it seems unlikely that the effort of repeated listenings would be repaid. I would like to think that Yoko (and, inevitably, John) knows what she is doing, but the extreme prolixity, fuck, the boringness of these two tracks suggests that Yoko the Avant-Garde Artist has overcome Yoko the musician once more. Maybe she thinks they�re �events� or something. And the Artist also surfaces in two brief interludes where Yoko flushes a toilet and answers the phone.

The rest of the album is a bit more interesting. Yoko makes a couple of attempts to sing in a more �conventional� manner than we�re used to hearing from her, one (�Mrs. Lennon�) startlingly successful and one (�Midsummer New York�) an utter disaster. �Mrs. Lennon� is a moody ballad and �Midsummer New York� a sort of blues, which suggests that with a bit of woodshedding Yoko might become the Edith Piaf of bizarro, but never the Janis Joplin. Which is just as well. Although I saw hej; singing an original called �Sisters, Sisters,� a simple little ditty, at the Free John Sinclair concert in Ann Arbor recently, and it was so godawful piercing and sharp I winced, so maybe she can only handle the balladics in the studio.

And maybe that�s just as well, because Yoko�s at her best when she�s just being atonal, far-out, belting out her primal yelps with some sense of timing and proportion.

Sisterhood is Powerful

There are parts of this album as close to the end of that incredible limb she straddled last time as she�s ever been, like the short version of Toronto�s �Don�t Worry Kyoko,� which really rocks, and the truly haunting and bizarre, in the way that music like Nico�s Marble Index is, �You.� Other times she settles for rather predictable modal scales backed by John�s guitar, but that sounds nice too or boring electronics of the echochamber brand that every two bit psychedelic rock group capitalized on 3 years ago (�Don�t Count the Waves�). Side 3 features something called the Joe Jones Tone Deaf Music Co., which is apparently an automatic percussion orchestra, providing random rambling backup; whatever it is, it complements yoko�s eerie vocalese excellently.

Fly gets better with repeated listenings, but somehow I still feel that Yoko failed to make a positive step forward from her last effort. Her excess needs discipline, and for all the erratic brilliance of some of her work I don�t think she and John can really tell an exciting experiment from a self-indulgence. They know they�re on the right track somehow, but they�re still groping in the dark in many ways, so they just scoop up the whole pile of tape and market it. That�s not the way to bring new ears to experimental music. As far as Yoko�s come already, I�d hate to see her lose her way now.

Lester Bangs

women's love rights laura lee

WOMEN'S LOVE RIGHTS

LAURA LEE

HOT WAX

Laura may claim she�s �startin� a new movement today� but to tell you the truth she�s just following in the Holland Dozier Holland tradition of great female vocalists. I�d settle for that any day. The supposed topicality, of her music at this point may be as much a drawback as an asset: one would hate to see someone with this much talent have the same difficulty (labeled as a novelty act) that people like Lou Reed have gone through.

On the other hand, since Laura is firmly ensconced in that Martha Reeves-Diana Ross—Freda Payne-Gladys Knight tradition, maybe she can become the female equivalent of Johnny Taylor�s �Soul Philosopher.� With titles like �It�s Not What You Fall For It�s What You Stand For�, �Don�t Be Sorry Be Careful If You Can�t Be Good� and �Wedlock is a Padlock� she�s got it down.

It�s the songs that make the singer sometimes, and that is at least partially the case here: Laura can sing, she has a great voice, and a really impeccable sense of how to use it, but her tunes are just so ace they might pull her through anyhow. �Women�s Love Rights� was so good three people I live with bought copies of it, and it�s not even the best song here.

For my money, that honor goes to either �Don�t Be Sorry� which has a titular rhythm you won�t be able to believe until you�ve heard it, or �Since I Fell for You,� a cover of an old Lenny Welch hit that comes off great. It�s got a monologue in front of the singing that. is fine, and the band is amazing. At several points, the percussion punctuates so strongly that the cones in your speakers nearly leap out of themselves. And then the song is picked up and goes right on ... it�s things like that that make this an almost unbelievably produced, as well as performed, album.

Only on �That�s How Strong My Love Is� does the impact weaken and that is as much because both Solomon Burke�s and Mick Jagger�s versions are so incredible as because of any real weakness in Laura�s reading.

Almost all the other songs, though, have something special about them. �Love and Liberty� has a chorus that is achingly reminiscent of Martha and the Vandellas, �Two Lovely Pillows� has marvelous Smokeyesque lyricism (it�s �two lovely pillows on a king-sized bed,� you know) and �I Don�t Want Nothin� Old But Money� is the tailor-made vehicle for Miss Lee�s voice.

Of those ladies I�ve mentioned, I suppose Laura Lee is closest to my true favorite, Gladys Knight. Her gritty voice and the way she has of almost over-stating everything are both reminiscent of Gladys. And while she�s not about to do Miss Knight in as my secret Motown love, it is true that she is by far the most beautiful lady singer we have.

All of this radiates from Women�s Love Rights. The political joke may be temporary but I bet, and I sure as hell hope, that Laura Lee is going to be around for a long long while.

Dave Marsh

BONNIE RAITT

WARNER BROS.

She�s the best blues singer ever to come out of Radcliffe, and that�s no joke. She�s jammed with everybody from Son House to Junior Wells, who plays harp on this, her first album. With the help of Willie Murphy and Snaker Dave, blues buddies of John Koerner (Bonnie and Spider John live in Cambridge and occasionally jam together in a local bar), Bonnie Raitt put together a fine selection of hard and sweet blues, soul and smooth pop tunes, all in a few weeks of recording at a summer camp on Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota.

Bonnie has a voice that�s just fine and uses it not to sweeten everything to the same dull mush but really to expand the possibilities and accentuate the best qualities of every song and form. Her guitar is authoritative, and she plays slide like nobody�s business. Steve Stills� �Bluebird� is getting most of the airplay — personally, I think it�s the best version of the song since, and maybe including, the Springfield — but there�s quite a range: a Marvelletes tune, one by Paul Siebel, Koerner�s �I Ain�t Blue,� in addition to the bedrock blues of Robert Johnson and the woman Bonnie considers her biggest influence, Sippie Wallace.

Bonnie signed with Warners because they guaranteed her complete artistic control, certainly unusual for a first album. It was undoubtedly more fun playing with the people she wanted to play with, and it comes through. She put off signing with anyone for awhile, due to her awareness of the ripoffs and bringdowns of the business. She feels she went into it clear headed now, and says she wants to use her growing influence to help the older blues singers she traveled with and to bring down the prices of records and concerts. We�ve all heard that before from various people, but there�s a better than usual chance that this Mighty Tight Woman might do something. She�s touring now with Randy Newman.

Bonnie Raitt is really great.

William Kowinski

GONNA TAKE A MIRACLE

LAURA NYRO AND LABELLE

COLUMBIA

Laura Nyro�s previous work has been characterized by highly dramatic, unexpected vocal movement — an almost operatic style juxtaposing a rising scream with a low husky whisper, a tumbling run of stacatto syllables with a sudden hushed standstill — which, combined with an equally idiosyncratic, sometimes over-ripe orchestration, gave her songs a baroque texture. Her songs were very personal, often obscurely poetic, using words for their sounds and allusive qualities more than their precise �meanings� with results that ranged from brilliant to merely clever to dreadful. She performed alone at the piano, a dark-eyed New York madonna dressed like a cheap Fellini whore, singing her funky arias with all the high drama of the silent screen. A lot of people thought all this was pretty annoying. But Nyro developed something of a cult — people who screamed �I love you� at concerts as well as a number of more reserved fans like myself. I�ve never found Nyro�s style completely defensible but that�s ok; whose is? Yes, the drama gets a little too thick at times and the songs too self-consciously poetic and ingrown, but especially after an overexposure to these fresh country air folks, Nyro�s heavily perfumed citysounas are a welcome shot of urban reality.

Nyro�s new album isn�t a complete departure from her former sytle but it�s different enough to attract a lot of people who had always found her too mannered. Here she devotes herself to eleven oldies in a more or less straightforward fashion With more or less success. The drama is toned down and the rollercoaster ride of her own compositions is for the most part abandoned in homage to the original soul and inspiration. The album was produced by the Gamble & Huff team whose distinctive r&b style has been laid on Jerry Butler, Dusty Springfield, Archie Bell & the Drells, Wilson Pickett and many others with uniformly fine results. What they�ve done on Gonna Take a Miracle I couldn�t say. None of the songs are from their large repertoire and I listened in vain for snatches of their familiar sound. Apparently the Gamble-Huff style book was put aside for Miss Nyro, who certainly provided her own arrangements (although no one is credited). Instead, they�ve built a tight, refined — but not unnecessarily so — showcase, neatly disappearing in the process. Even Labelle (nee Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles) play a rather non-distinctive role on many cuts; it is after all a Laura Nyro album and Patti has the kind of voice that, unrestrained, could trample right over practically anyone.

But even the star is somewhat self-effacing here, as befits an hommage to one�s spiritual roots. She isn�t rigidly true to the originals but neither does she impose on them the more baroque elements of her own style. Only in �You Really Got a Hold on Me� does she depart from the spirit of the original — and with particularly unfortunate results. One of Smokey Robinson�s deepest, most exquisite compositions, the song is interpreted here with an upbeat which seems merely inappropriate until it reaches its tacked-on finale: a big, churning upsweep in which Laura and the girls harmonize on the repeated line, �Hold me baby and don�t turn me loose cause I love (love love) you.� Of all the songs here, this is the one I�ve always felt closest to, so its neo-Ed Sullivan arrangement is a heavy disappointment.

Martha and the Vandellas are apparently a favorite of Laura�s, and she�s included three of the group�s songs on the album. �Jimmy Mack,� a song I�ve always felt was a little too dull for Martha, is given such superb treatment here that it surpasses the original. Hot piano, Labelle woo-ing like crazy in the background, handclapping and Nyro at her richest and most robust in the lead. The other Martha and the Vandellas numbers are less satisfying: �Nowhere to Run� runs on to no good effect, losing its shape toward the end in spite of some tasty harmonizing; and �Dancing in the Street� is coupled with �Monkey Time� for an interesting, well-controlled package that is somehow - not entirely siiccesslul — the patchwork at the end, while approximating Nyro�s own songs in its dramatic movement, doesn�t quite hold together (in performance, however, this combination is dynamite, its irregularities not so obtrusive, the slight shrillness of the recording unnoticed).

Generally, the most successful cuts here are the �slow� ones. �Gonna Take a Miracle� (The Roy alettes), �Wind� (The Diablos), �The Bells� (The Originals), �Spanish Harlem� (Ben E. King) and �Desiree� (The Charts) (thanks, Lenny) are all no-shit beauties, more soulful than I could have imagined. �Desiree� is an infinitely echoed miniature (1:50) that seems to use Laura multi-tracked to back herself as she was accustomed to doing on her earlier albums; I�m not so sure about that final note but the rest is pure as a mountain pool. �Wind,� done almost a capella, is a sweetly hushed breeze, and �Spanish Harlem� beautifully delicate without giving up its earthiness (and where Aretha confused the song considerably by identifying herself with the rose, Laura clearly makes the rose a man �with eyes as black as coal� and I like that; men can be roses too). But �The Bells� is my favorite. Laura has an intensity and depth that carries the song farther than I thought it could be taken and Patti, especially, comes out front for a few phrases that just rip the song apart — that Laura holds her own without the slightest strain is quite a tribute to her own strength. Most revivals only make me want to return to the originals, but I had that impulse with none of these songs. That doesn�t mean that they�ve supplanted their models but that within themselves they�re entirely satisfying.

Someone just called and, hearing Gonna Take a Miracle on the record player, asked what I thought of it. Without thinking I said it was as good as anything I�ve heard this year. That may not be quite true but it was spontaneous and don�t make me stop to think of exceptions or qualifications just now.

Vince Aletti

KOKO TAYLOR CHESS

I spend a lot of my time avoiding listening to blues releases, mainly because I find the black man�s white imitators a lot closer to where I live in general and also because anything that drags is just liable to put me to sleep. But Koko Taylor! Jeee-sus!

No one seems to know much about her, except that she had a hit with the Willie Dixon-Howlin� Wolf smash �Wang Dang' Doodle� back in �66. Why it took this long to hear the rest of this stuff is incomprehensible.

I�ve always looked at Chicago blues as an exclusively male form; I can�t think of another great female blues singer in that whole scene. But here�s this sister just walloping the shit out of a dozen tunes that might make Wolf or Muddy cringe with envy. She screams and bellows and snorts like Wolf, she�s got the basso range to do it, and she can croon r�n�b like nobody since Little Eva and Shirley Ellis (who either copped her version of �Nitty Gritty� or else Koko wrote her own around the hit).

Peter Guralnick mentions Koko hanging around Chess� Chicago office when he was doing his excellent book, Feel Like Goin� Home, and I recall being disappointed that he didn�t say anything more. If she�s still scurrying around those streets, I hope it doesn�t last much longer.

She�s absolutely brilliant: �Wang Dang Doodle� will stand right up to Wolfs immortal version and �Insane Asylum� (another Dixon composition, as is most of the best stuff here) is an instant classic: �Tears spewed from my eyes,� groans the male voice, �The only woman I ever loved in all my life out here in a place and condition like this!� And then they join together, this amazing man and this fucking incredible woman pouring everything out, just rocking you back with the purity and the brilliance: �Save me, save me, save me, baby/Save me, save me, save me please/I don�t know how I�m made/But I�m so glad I love you still�. It�s like the answer to all the years of sexist torment that pimps like Ike Turner (or at least the role Ike Turner plays) have put all the Tinas through! Simply stunning and remarkable, with the best sense of drama in a pop tune since Bob Dylan�s �Just Like Tom Thumb�s Blues�.

Really, though there�s not a bad tune on here. When Dixon cranks out a great lyric (�Don�t Mess With the Messer,� �I Don�t Care Who Knows� or the remarkable �29 Ways�: �I got 29 ways to get in my baby�s door/And when he needs me bad I can find about two or three more,� as well as the two we�ve already mentioned), Koko is inevitably up to the task. And when the material is a little less ingenious, the grit of Koko�s tremendously powerful voice and the band (dig that sax!) carry it across anyhow.

Get this record and pitch your own Wang Dang Doodle.

Dave Marsh