Madmen across the water

Madmen across the water

STRAIGHT UP

BADFINGER

APPLE

Badfinger, bad fing ger [la. malfingus infected hang nail] 1. inflammation of metacarpal extremities brought about by prolonged exposure to lighted blowtorch 2. any finger severed more than three inches below the wrist. 3. a British rock group of little renown.

Back in gradeschool, all the real smart-ass types would begin their speeches and oral report assignments by quoting dictionaries. You know, like “My talk today is about octopuses. Webster has defined an octopi as a genus of two gilled cuttle-fishes etcetc.” Lately I’ve noticed this going on in rock and roll reviews. (Example: “Ozone-Ozone is defined as. . . ”) Never being one to ignore bandwagons, I thought I’d start this review that way. The fact that it is totally irrelevant to the matter at hand should in no way detract you from the continued reading of this short masterpiece.

Anyway, Badfinger are that group of four young British boys who owe what limited success they have thus far managed to finagle to their uncanny ability to sound like vintage middle period Beatles. Although they are now making semi-conscious attempts to rid themselves of this degrading identification, one still has the feeling that the boys are laughingly aware of just how it was that their small reputation was spread. The fact that they have titled songs on their last two albums “Love Me Do” and “Tell Me Why” is what allows me to render this (sure to be) highly controversial statement.

On Straight Up one can’t point a finger at any one song and say “Ha ha, Beatle rip off” like one could with the priceless “No Matter What” from the No Dice album. The big single smash on this album, -“Day After Day,” can’t really be called anything but a Badfinger, with the slight exception of a very All Things Must Pass guitar solo that I’m sure all you Big Hitbound fans are well familiar with.

As far as I’m concerned, this is all to bad. The only reason I was so intrigued with the group in the first place was because I enjoyed the exuberance of their Beatle rip-offs. On Straight Up, Badfinger have chosen to consolidate and show off their own sound, a curiously bland and unremarkable blend of guitars, drums, and nubile voices that really doesn’t go anywhere or in much of a blaze of hurry.

George Harrison, star of stage, screen and television, has produced four of the twelve cuts here, with the rest being done by Todd Rungren. The Harrison songs are without exception the stronger, being somehow full and more musical sounding. The Rungren numbers seem more common and forgetable.

As far as this observer is concerned, Badfinger would be better off doing twelve of the Beatles’ greatest hits and doing them without all this pretention of originality. So there.

Alan Niester

BRAIN CAPERS

MOTT THE HOOPLE

ATLANTIC

Mott the Hoople are a pack from Britain who have learned Bob Dylan’s classic period in much the same way that Badfinger learned the Beatles. Their first album contained the finest and most letter-perfect cops from Blonde on Blonde and floating tapes of that era since Procol Harum’s debut, but Mott cut Procol by not only rendering Dylan with as much finesse, maybe even a little too much more than the master showed at his best moments, but also by revealing a sense of humor that he would appreciate and which Procol seemed never to understand or consider. After the initial sonic shock, when you actually began to listen to the words, you suddenly realized that what they were singing was Sonny Bono’s “Laugh at Me.” English pub-crawlers doing a song by an ItalianAmerican pop studio genius in the style of the solidly Middle American genius he copped his current riffs from in 1965, when the original genius had matured to the point where he was no longer copping his licks from old blacks and hillbillies and wandering Wobblies and had brought his yawp to ponnacle. Ha!

The problem implicit in that stunning premiere was that it was already 1970, not 1965, arid they would either have to build from that into their own song, as Dylan did after digesting his heroes, or find an equally strong alternative approach, or try for the latter arid mire theiriselves in dreck as Badfinger have done. They almost paradiddled down the road to perdition, because the followup LP Mad Shadows was a bog of uninspired hteavy riffings, and Wildlife was in large part just plain lifeless.

Fortunately, they’ve pulled themselves up by the guitar-straps, sewn up the festering wounds of uncertainty, and marshalled their, energies for an album that not only recognizes the school they all went to together but also lights the way through a period of lusty growth towards the sure seizure of and by the real brilliance we’d hoped for all along.

What this album sounds like is a raunchy Third Generation Band who know every smash and zap in the arsenal playing with consciousness and humor much like the Band when they were the Hawks cooking with Bob in the basement on things like “Tell Me Mama” and “I Wanna Be Your Man” which were influenced, in another historical pretzel, as much by the Beatles and Stones as Mott are by Bobbie ‘n’ Robbie and their Bashin’ Bimbos. And Mott has melded this style and spirit perfectly with , the peculiar morbid thrust which has dominated British rock for the past couple of years, even if with at least tongues’ tips in their ruddy Limey cheeks. Atomic Rooster quivered in their mellotrons and posited that. “Death Walks Behind You,” but Mott the Hoople will settle for nothing less than the contention that “Death May Be Your Santa Claus.” May be; there is still a ray of hope, despite the fact that they do a rather defeated sounding version of Jesse ColinYoungblood’s “Darkness, Darkness,” which is only alleviated slightly by their perhaps unintentional burlesque on Dion’s dope-phillipic “Your Own Backyard”: “I started out drinkin’... ” Get back to where you once belonged, ya prodigal pud!

But that’s the lesser stuff. The real chomp into your viscera starts right at the top of side two, with “Sweet Angeline’s” clanging piano, upward-rippling Garth Hudsonesque organ, and basic guitar blast reminiscent of the Velvet Underground’s 6n “I’m Waiting For' My Man.” And those words’ll kill you:

Your kiss of burgundy And when it comes around No one knows where it’s goin’

But I can see Oh Angeline My Angeline*

Even better than that is “The Moon Upstairs,” a schizoid blast with some great Who-Stones guitar meat-cleaver action, and one of the most withering onslaughts of agressive paranoia since the halcyon days of Highway 61’s “Tombstone Blues”:

When my head is down and I’m called a clown By comedians who play The living stage and every page of worthless, meaningless things Well I swear to you before we’re through Yer gonna feel a heavy blow We ain’t bleeding you, we’re feeding you But you’re too fuckin’ slow!

For those of you who always laugh Let this be your epitaph! *

Merci bon dieu! Mea culpa! There are many here among us who say that life is but a joke. Luckily, for all the high obsessive force of their sound, Mott the Hoople are one of those rare British bands circa ’72 who dig the cosmic fact that a little wit is perfect leaven for the apocalypse. So they end Brain Capers, whose title itself is more confirmation of what I’ve said, with a two minute raveupfreakout complete with John Cale-ishly redundant piano crashings called “The Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception.” They stole the title from a poem by Jack Kerouac, but that’s okay because they did old Father Fuji justice, in fact their sound has a crazed phosphorescent vitality that belies the final words of Jack’s poem: “I wish I was free of that slaving meat-wheel/ And safe in heaven dead.” Not me, Dad; not with music like this around.

Lester Bangs

*©Irving Music, BMI

MANFRED MANN'S EARTH BAND POLYDOR

Manfred Mann’s strength, perhaps his only one, is as an interpreter. His jazzlike motions with Chapter Three — the group that was broken up so that he could form Earth Band - were, in context, excellent, but they did not command. They demanded, at once, too much and too little. “The Mighty Quinn,” and his stunning version of “Just Like A Woman” — which was never a hit here, though it should have been - are among the best pop covers of Dylan extant. Better, for my money, than the Byrds’, if not as good as the Band’s — who operate in a somewhat different arena, anyway.

“Please Mrs. Henry,” included here is another in this series (“If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” a hit in England, and “With God On Our Side, on his second album are the others) of Dylan songs, and it may well be the best ,yet. The material is not as strong as “Quinn” and “Woman”, but it is plenty good enough. And the treatment it is given -dynamic, noisy, alive, noisy - is perfect. The song is as good, if less “artistic,” than the version on the Basement Tape.

The beginning at once is vengeful and despondent — it carries these contradictory emotions just as they are, as contradictions. Mann lets them clash, so that the impact is immediate; coupled with the volume (this cut seems 50% louder than the rest of the album), the effect is raucous and crude, pushing the lyric (“I’m DOWN on my KNEES / And I ain’t got a DIME”) the way it was intended. The guitars clatter. The girls in the background nearly bump into them, then suddenly they meld. It is as though two cars, in the midst of a horrible freeway accident, were suddenly fused into a pop sculpture that is not beautiful but extremely interesting, arresting within its own aesthetic context. This sounds like a hit single (and it almost was),'and given the material (“Please Mrs. Henry,” which is not a brilliant Dylan song, is a fine rock tune for anyone else.), Manfred Mann will almost always come this close to visualizing rock’s aesthetic myth. If anything, “Mighty Quinn” sounds better four years later — better certainly than it did towards the end of its AM career when it had been worked nearly to death.

“Mighty Quinn,” in fact, does just what a pop singer should do with Dylan: it takes his version and finds the least common denominator. Mann’s organ, ever so quietly, but with a precision that makes the difference, plays the role of Robbie Robertson’s mathematical guitar playing: it divides each line, halving and sometimes quartering it. You don’t notice it, not for the first dozen playings, but when you finally catch it, its importance is obvious.

Mann did more than interpret Dylan, of course; his early albums, all of them deleted, and released in this country on Ascot, had a dozen fine interpretations. If “With God On Our Side” is sort of humorous now, it wasn’t then. But things like “My Little Red Book” and “Oh No! Not My Baby,” as well as the more casual British invasion standards are interpreted exquisitely. Almost no other British band but Manfred Mann could do this.

Thus, the other cuts of interest here are “Living Without You,” a Randy Newman standard and Dr. John’s “Jump Sturdy.”