YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK ARETHA FRANKLIN ATLANTIC

If you’d asked me what I thought of Aretha Franklin’s new album around the time it came out, I would have said it was a terrible disappointment, a hodge-podge of an. album which seemed organized primarily to clean the shelves at Atlantic Studios, rather like a housewife collects her leftovers before they spoil. But ask me now, after three or four weeks of almost daily listening and relistening — go ahead, ask me, and I’d have to tell you I love it. I couldn’t do without it. It remains a disappointment but when you’re expecting the heavens to open up, disappointments are inevitable. If all failures were this exciting, who would need successes?

The twelve songs here are drawn from at least four separate recording sessions, the first dating back almost one and a half years and the others strung out over a period of time that included her singles “You’re All I Need to Get By,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Spanish Harlem.” None of these songs appear on Young, Gifted and Black, presumably because they formed part of Aretha’s most recent non-album, her second collectio.n of Greatest Hits (eight of which were in the first collection, Aretha’s Gold). But their inclusion would hardly have changed the sharply uneven quality of the present album, only added some missing pieces to the strange puzzle of Aretha’s studio work over the nearly two years since Spirit in the Dark was released. Struggling with that puzzle is a great part of the annoyance of YG&B. Everything’s just thrown together here and a good deal of time is spent wondering what Aretha (and producers Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin) had in mind when she made “April Fools,” “The Long and Winding Road” or “Border Song.” Or trying to figure out why “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time” keep falling apart into distinctly good and distinctly bad pieces. Or remarking what a really weird song Aretha’s original “First Snow in Kokomo” is.

All these cuts make up side two of YG&B but if it at first seems pretty dismal, don’t let it put you off too much. Discussing her own work recently, Susan Sontag said she had a preference for art that is difficult (for instance: her latest film, Brother Carl which is not only strongly resistent to interpretation or analysis but often purposely hard to hear — the dialogue would fade out or be obscured by other sounds — and follow — key scenes revolved around letters we are never told the contents of), with the implication that the difficulty and the resultant struggle had its own rewards. Aretha Franklin’s work is not the sort of difficult art Sontag talks about (and creates): it’s not rigorous, hard or selfconscious; it’s not intentionally elusive. In fact, it’s all rather disconcertingly right there. Or is it? It took me weeks of listening to get into “Loving You Too Long” and “Didn’t I.” And I don’t think it’s simply because they were bad songs I finally talked myself into liking they aren’t bad; but they aren’t goodeither. They have something in common with the art Sontag prefers in that they are difficult to like on an immediate level but, given time, they open up like outrageous, bright blossoms. If the work is still not all that one might hope for, the flowering — the eventual discovery is exciting.

One of Aretha’s problems is that, with her continued dependence on cover work, she first must overcome our natural resistence to what is often a radically different version of a familiar work. Sometimes she does this with astonishing, ease — one touch and the song is hers completely. But in other instances, the changes she works can be awkward, disconcerting or just plain bad and you might have to hack your way through the thickets of her “interpretation” before you glimpse the brilliance of her singing. “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time,” for instance, is nothing like the Delphonics’ original which now sounds weak and hollow by comparison. Aretha begins with the same sort of measured phrasing but the bass and congas pattern that simmers behind her, and the very warmth of her voice (listen to the way she breathes out the end ofthe line, “Didn’t I do it, baby”) boils up within a few lines and Aretha is off, soaring. Or so it seems. Because when she gets to the chorus, “Didn’t I blow your mind this time/didn’t I,” a bunch of strings come whining in and an overly avid backing group sings, “Yes you did/yes you did/yes you did” in rising cries. No, Aretha, that just don’t do it. But with the next verse you forget all that “Yes you did” shit because Aretha handles every word with an almost frightening intensity. She not only understands and conveys the spite (“This time^I’m really leaving you, boy”) but the anguish of the song; it might give her satisfaction to deliver the final blow, but it hurts her too.

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It’s in the break, though, that the song takes on an extraordinary-: power. Aretha comes in on the piano, forceful as always, and the backing girls sing, tauntingly, “Didn’t I do it to ya,” which Aretha repeats immediately* overlapping slightly. The girls come back again, with more force, alternating with Aretha, each time almost overlapping, repeating the phrase or a variation (Didn’t I put it on ya”) and cutting it down until they build together like a series x>f punches. When this pattern is repeated after a short interval on piano, it is with even more force and ends with Aretha screaming, “Didn’t I, didn’t I, didn’t I” and breaking immediately into the next verse. The whole thing is almost a throwaway, but it’s one of the strangest, most stunning things I’ve heard Aretha or anyone do.

It’s touches like this, jumping out of what remains an only partly successful song, that finally make almost all her work here irresistible. Who else could begin a version of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” saying/ singing, “You hurt my feelings askin’ me that. Don’t ask me that no more, baby,” and make' it sound not only convincing but right? Even if the rest of the cut overreaches for effects, with some more aggressive chorus work, Aretha’s opening declaration wraps it up for me. And despite an often excessively bright arrangement (I do like the string cascades at the end) Bacharach-David’s “April Fdols” is clinched when Aretha yells, “I don’t care! true love has found us now.” Unfortunately, “Border Song,” Elton John’s ponderous song that seems to touch on everything without saying anything, has no appealing qualities and even the fast pick-up at the end of “The Long and Winding Road” isn’t enough to pull it out of the mush.

That leaves “First Snow in Kokomo,” Aretha’s only original song on side two. “Kokomo” is a seemingly inconsequential song — its lyrics deal with a few friends, a few gestures, seen at a moment in the past and in the present y that is filled with such warmth and, well, tenderness that it takes on the feeling of an entry in a private journal. It’s the sort of personal song one wouldn’t expect from Aretha and all the more pleasing for that reason. With little more than Aretha’s piano and Cornell Dupree’s guitar, “Kokomo” has a muted, dreamy sound, like being inside during a snowstorm, watching the drifts, everything' kinda muffled. Very strange and strangely moving.

I’ve often had doubts about Aretha as a lyricist, but clearly what she lacks in cleverness and polish she makes up for in feeling and directness. In “Day Dreaming” she takes an idea that many songwriters would consider obvious, trite, and she makes it into one of her most beautiful images: “When he’s lonesome and feelin’ love-starved/I’ll be there to feed him.” The simplicity — innocence really — of the lyrics (“He’s the kind of guy that you give your every thing:/your trust/ your heart/share all of your love/ till death do you part”) is worked perfectly into an unusual structure that’s elaborate Without being too obvious. The sound is movie dream sequence supreme, plus drums and an especially lovely flute (a guest appearance by Hubert Laws). “Rock Steady” hardly needs a description. It’s one of Aretha’s very best dance songs with the sort of lyrics that make the genre great: “Just move your hips with a feelin’ from side to side/ Sit yourself down in your car and take a ride.” What it is, indeed. The fourth Franklin original, “All the Kings Horses,” is less effective, if only because it seems to be trying too hard. It’s only here that you notice she doesn’t \levelop an idea much beyond one repeated verse and chorus and the construction is too frail to support her emotional vocal.

“Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You Baby)” a blend of melancholy and euphoria' taken from Lulu’s limited repertoire, is one of the most successful cuts here. Aretha finishes it off with a wonderfully joyous build — “You know I’m craaaayzy baby” — although the music sometimes seems to be on top of her instead of in the background. “Brand New Me” isn’t as satisfying, even if intensely felt. I suppose it shouldn’t, but it does bother me that Aretha gets the lyrics wrong (in two places: “Now the joke is on you/it happens somehow* with you” instead of “Now the jokes sound new/and the laughter does too” and “see it all with a brand new light” >• rhymes with “skies”? — instead of “with brand new eyes” — improvisations should at least make sense) and the drift-off ending is dumb. Finally, the title track, Nina Simone’s “Young, Qifted and Black,” is done here as a spiritual which is fitting. The stark beginning, just Aretha and chorus with piano, is magnificent. A held pause, then the strong re-entry of the piano separates the introduction from the upbeat celebration of the rest of the song. “Young, gifted and black,” Aretha sings, shouts, preaches, “it’s a mighty sweet thing, yes it is now.”

A word about the band: It is, as usual, great, so great it is at times amazing. At its best, the instrumentation is held to a small group — often Cornell Dupree, guitar; Bernard Purdie, drums; Chuck Rainey, bass; plus either Donny Hathaway or Billy Preston on organ but with too many variations to mention y and they are always flawless. The stuff layered in on top of that, especially strings, is sometimes questionable. Although some of their work, as noted, was a little heavy-handed, I don’t blame the backing girls on various sessions, The Sweet Inspirations, The Sweethearts of Soul, Erma Franklin, Carolyn Franklin and others — but the producers and Aretha who should have been a little more subtle in applying their talents.

This is perhaps an obsessive review — cut-by-cut for god’s sake — but I haven’t been able to stop listening to the album for nearly a mpnth now. If Young, Gifted and Black were merely a great album, rich but predictable, with no outstanding unevenness,

I suspect it would have worn through some time ago. Great albums can be boring and Aretha is never boring. Oh Aretha! such splendid inconsistency.

Vince Aletti

TRAPPED BY A THING CALLED LOVE DENISE LA SALLE WESTBOUND

If this isn’t the best soul album this year, someone is going to have to come up with something really amazing. Denise La Salle is incredible: she writes her own material and it is right out of the mold that made black pop so amazing in the middle sixties. The influences are vintage Atlantic/Stax, and sometimes Motown, but the ambience is strictly ’70s.

Almost, every song on Trapped is a powerful statement about being a woman; La Salle’s sexual politics are not always the best but they are always straightforward, the situations she writes about have a ring of authenticity. If you’re a man you’re going to learn a lot. If you’re a woman, you may only be able to empathize, but you can do that. This is not (and this needs, to be emphasized, I think) a trendy record. I don’t even know if Denise La Salle knows the power she possesses. That doesn’t enter in. What matters is that she’s so powerful.

The music is supportive of everything Denise has to say because it’s so well made. Willie Mitchell, who does A1 Green, also produced Trapped and it occasionally has Green’s flair: the languid, almost reticent horn riffs, giving way to brief, direct guitar statements and a steady rhythm section that reminds most of the vintage Motown I spoke about above.

Miss La Salle’s voice is perfect for her material too. It is harsh and sometimes verges on crudity, without much polish, but the statements she is making would only be hindered by sophistication anyway.

Which is not to say that this record is unsophisticated. It isn’t. Its maturity is startling, perhaps more so because we don’t expect this from R&B and especially from popular R&B. Denise has had two hits, “Trapped By a Thing Called Love” and the current “Now Run and Tell That” and they are two of the most powerful statements on the album. They are valid hits and I don’t think either of them rely on their lyrics for their validity. The music is just overpowering, by itself.

Yet, when you seek comparison for the kind of thing that she writes about, you don’t go to black music. Like Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, and Joy of Cooking, Denise La Salle writes about mature situations, and she writes about them with a realism that is on occasion vicious just because it is so cuttingly accurate. Listen to “Now Run and Tell That”:

You said you were the greatest man alive

But I made up my mind I would cut you down to size

I’ll put something on your mind you’ll never forget

I got you walkin’ in a daze and you ain’t recovered yet

Hey hey Mr. Big Stuff, hey Romeo

You can tell the world I told you so

That I was gonna show you where it’s at

Right on! Now run and tell that!

Consider that this kind of thing is on AM radio, and with a band track that sounds like The Best of Sam And Dave. It isn’t really as vengeful as the partial lyric I’ve quoted sounds; it’s not kind, but the situation is so well developed, the argument she makes is so convincing, that its effect is to have you rooting for the singer’s success.

“Trapped By A Thing Called Love” is a little different. The situation is more tragic, because the singer is defeated. Out of her defeat, though, come some pretty important realizations:

He makes me cry — Lord I don’t wanna cry!

He makes me lie - when I don’t wanna lie

He calls me up and

I tell ’em to say I’m not in

Then I cry all night if he don’t call again

“Heartbreaker of the Year” is a combination of these two. The singer is beaten down by her lover, but she is almost vicious in her denunciation of what he has done:

You’re the best producer of this feeling in my heart

And you’ve given the best performance in an Oscar winning part

What is terrific about “Heartbreaker” is the Academy Award metaphor that runs all the way through it. This is a great statement not only about a specific situation, or a specific kind of person, who might perhaps be overdrawn, but about the romantic archetypes which we are given by Hollywood and the entertainment business as a whole.

Throughout the record, Ms. La Salle is ripped apart by these things. She holds herself in check as long as she can, she even owns up to liking part of what those romantic stereotypes deliver (in “The Deeper I Go The Better It Gets”) but she never rationalizes them. “Deeper” is a concise explanation of why everyone, male and female; attempting to deal with sexism hasn’t just given up fucking. It isn’t sex we’re fighting, the song seems to say, because that would be stupid: What we’re fighting, the rest of Trapped By A Thing Called Love replies, must, then, be our entrapment.

The summation of this comes at the end of the first side, with a truly great song called “Catch Me If You Can.” It is mostly out of the A1 Green mold, neo-Otis Redding music; as with Green, this song spunds like an extension of “Dock of the Bay” and it is absolutely scorching. The way La Salle sings it is evocative of Joy of Cooking’s best moments, those times when Terry Garthwaite begins to sing the way she might if freed from the restrictions of the band and left to her own devices. (This isn’t an idle comparison. My first thought about this song was that it sounded like what Joy of Cooking are trying to write.) But Joy fail, finally, by being over-subtle.

Denise La Salle’s greatest strength is that she is. very upfront about these problems. Maybe this is because her discussion of them isn’t necessarily conscious, isn’t informed by some knowledge of the situation sexual politics are in at the moment, but I don’t think so. Even if this is nothing but the voice of experience, it is the voice of an extremely intelligent and wise experience.

Time

Waits for nobody

No, I ain’t gonna wait

Because time and time again

I sat here alone

Watching the phone.

That never never rings

My tears were all in vain

So now baby I’m moving

Spaces

Moving

I’ve got myself together now

I’ve got myself together now

Catch me if you can — catch me at home

Love me if and when you can,

catch me alone

The way Denise wrote there lyrics down might not be anything like this, but I think it is significant that they work so well in this semi-free verse format. “I arrived in Memphis with just lyrics and melodic lines,” she says in the liner notes, “and this genius Willie Mitchell . . . gave new life to my words.” And Mitchell does deserve much of the credit.

The arrangements here all extremely sympathetic. The horns are flexible, they give with the softness of the music on “Catch Me If You Can” and the strings add a poignancy that is the creme de la creme of soul.

You’ve had your choice dear

Now there’s no turning back

That’s a natural fact

I’m in good company

In fact it’s great to be free

Of the ball and the chain

That made a prisoner of me

The second side is less intense, principally, I think, because most of the material here is not penned by Denise. The only song that emerges as a really powerful statement on the order of those on the first side is “It’s Too Late.”

Yes, the very same Carole King song. Yet it is completely different here, simply because after the harshness of the rest of the record (“Hung Up Strung Out” just about sums up Denise’ position of the subject of sex), it is almost an affectionate farewell. Carole. King’s version didn’t exactly mean this; it was sorrowful but it was not the sort of letter-ofleave-taking Denise La Salle makes it here. When she, sings “It’s Too Late,” you know she means it, but you also know that she would rather it were otherwise.

It is this sort of sensitivity that makes this, even given its harshness, such a wonderfully informative record. I’ve never learned more from mere music, and I mean that sincerely. Denise La Salle’s talent matters, not so much because she is a woman making statements about women in a time when that is significant as because she is a person who is engaged in a remarkable discovery of her own and others’ foibles. No one has ever done it better, and I mean that emphatically.

Dave Marsh

DIONNE DIONNE WARWICKE WARNER BROS.

Okay, I’m a sucker for sentimentality. I’ll fall into a tear-jerker trap everytime. That is if the trap is carefully laid. And I’ll tell you, Dionne Warwick(e) used to keep a pretty tight trap. But no more.

There were times when I would have literally sat up all night with Dionne Warwick, holding her handkerchief while she cried and sympathizing with her sad stories. I still would, if she were singing songs like “A House is Not a Home” and “Walk on By.” I had a kinship with Dionne’s plight. I could identify with the shaky stance of a woman in love. Listening to Dionne was just like having Peggy from up the street come over after school, so we could both lament teenage love long lost.

Yes, I confess, there are still times that “The moment I wake up/Before I put on my make-up . . .” I’m saying my “Hail Marys” and “Lord, let him love me’s.” But does Dionne?

No more “Messages to Michael,” no more “Don’t Make Me Over,” for you see, my friends, somebody already has. Out of the glitter machine steps Miss Give My Regards to Broadway, because I’m a Big Girl now. Yeah, that’s it: Dionne has grown up.

So does that mean goodbye to the themes of “tears and misery my life is shattered because he doesn’t love me anymore,” or on the naive side, “Yes, true love will find a way” (you know, the old through snow, through sleet, through dark of night routine)? No, it means somewhere on “The Way to San Jose,” Dionne lost her innocence, which in this case meant soulfulness.

Now instead of being idolized and befriended by housewives and teenagers, Dionne is enshrined in the slick and shiny nightclubs from Los Angeles to Miami Beach. Not to mention celebrated by Merv, Johnny, and Dick.

But alas, Dionne’s soul strength has dropped down 32 points. But it’s okay. She’s got money, honey. Dark glassed fame and fortune for serenading the “Metrecal-forlunch-bunch.”

Dionne is posh. She’s polished, she tastefully executes a song, emulating just enough emotion to get the expected response. (Clap, clap, clap . . . For my next number.) It’s the conscious effort. Contrived, if you please. You really can’t knock it, because it does come off. If it didn’t, do you think you’d .find thirteen different poses of Dionne glossily staring down from the record shelves at K-Mart? She knows what the people want, and she delivers, gently socking it to their sentimentality.

Dionne is the Black addition to the Carpenters. She resides in the upper top forties (and that’s some pretty nice address). Above all Dionne has been a propagator of the happily-ever-after myth. In most of her songs, all the perplexing problems in the world are neatly tied up with heartstrings. True love cures all. Worse, Dionne’s been telling us that just because he’s your man, you gotta love him, respect him and baby, you’re his woman, so what else do you want?

It was this unquestionable privilege Dionne (with Bacharach and David) gave every man: to love us and leave us. We believed it for too long. It’s alright for Dionne to be the Keeper of the modern day love song and the bearer of the musical Valentine, but with Denise La Salle and Laura Lee and her .“Woman’s Love Rights,” there is finally an alternative to the female submission stuff Dionne has been dosing us with.

For all my indignation over Dionne’s sexual politics, I found one standout on the album. “My First Night Alone Without You.” This is. the song that says all the things “One Less Bell to Answer” failed to. in fact, this is the only time any emotion is spilled in this album. Dionne has the most mournful hum. Almost gospel. “There’s an aching in my head/from the bed I can’t get used to/it’s these little hours in the dark I dread/while I spend my first night alone without you.”

Unfortunately this song doesn’t speak for the bulk of the album. This is just a momentary slip back to character, for you see, Dionne Warwicke has traded in all her melancholy for that eensy e.

Jaan Uhelszki

STANDING OVATION GLADYS KNIGHT AND THE PIPS SOUL

Although I’ve been an off-and-on devotee of soul music for about seven years now, I somehow never managed to hear much of Gladys Knight and the Pips. I guess I just wrote them off as another minor Motown act and forgot about them, and boy was that a mistake. And, listening to Standing Ovation, I wonder how I could ever have done such a thing.

To begin with, there is Gladys Knight herself. This woman has a voice that I cannot believe, silken gravel, if you will — and she has it under control to an extent that should make her the envy of most of the up-andcoming young female soul singers. Then, we have the Pips, who, in the tradition of the great Motown groups like the Vandellas and the Miracles, serve as far more than a mere backup vocal group without being too upfront about it. Superb harmonists and colorists, their smooth interaction is the perfect complement to Miss Knight’s voice. Finally, and most important, is the material. Now, I know you’re not gonna believe this (unless you’ve already heard her do it), but there is a cut on this album called “Fire And Rain,” by this guy named James Taylor, and in spite of the fact that I’d heard this song by him, by Blood Sweat & Tears, and by countless country and pop artists, I never realized what a good song it was until I heard Gladys Knight and the Pips give life to it. And the same goes for “Help Me Make It Through The Night,” “He Ain’t Heavy,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” And those, friends, are just the filler cuts.

The rest of the album is drawn from the Jobete Music catalogue — that is, it’s written by Motown songwriters, and it’s mostly excellent. There is her recent hit “Make Me The Woman That You Go Home To,” which is not only a fine song, but one that allows Miss Knight to show off her voice to fine advantage, and this is followed by “Can You Give Me Love With A Guarantee,” the follow-up single, and one that is just as good. My favorite, though, is the tough “It Takes A Whole Lotta Man For A Woman Like Me,” written by Smokey Robinson and the Pips’ co-producer Johnny Bristol. In fact, it’s so tough that I can’t imagine any other singer trying it out and getting away with it.

Fellow newcomers to Gladys Knight and the Pips are hereby directed first to their Greatest Hits album, and second to this album. One listen and you’ll know why they called it Standing Ovation. Encore, please.

Ed Ward

I LOVE THE WAY YOU LOVE BETTY WRIGHT ALSTON

Sometime last spring, a single appeared called “I Love the Way You Love.” One of the people I live with bought it; she said, “This is the new Barbara Lewis,” and I laughed. I mention this with some chagrin,because I was wrong. Betty Wright is brilliant. She has a great voice, and when her material is good, she’s brilliant.

Even when her material is beneath her — listen to her second single, “Clean Up Woman” — she is capable of transcending it. “Clean Up Woman” is not, I don’t think, much of a song, but Betty turns in a great performance anyway. Her voice, and her performance in general, is what makes the song a hit — a million seller, by now.

Ms. Wright’s successes very precisely with her material — when it is strong, as with the great Jackson Five tune, “I Found that Guy,” and “I’m Gettin’ Tired Baby” as well as “I Love the Way You Love” — she is totally capable of handling it, shines through it, and the experience is colossal. When it is average — “Ain’t No Sunshine,” for example — she transcends it and makes it something much more than it could be otherwise.

This is an indication, I think, of great talent. Ms. Wright will probably make better records than this, maybe a lot of them. Aside from “I Love the Way You Love,” she really isn’t given anything here that challenges her, which is a shame. Given material and production comparable to Aretha Franklin’s, for example, she is capable of being just that good.

In the meantime, I Love the Way You Love is a more than auspicious beginning.

Dave Marsh

SILVER PISTOL BRINSLEY SCHWARZ UNITED ARTISTS

Brinsley Schwarz is one of a number of third generation bands which, for the most part, haven’t been detected yet. Some of them are even well-known — Mott the Hoople, the Faces — though some of them — Brinsley Schwarz and Nils Lofgren’s Grin — are just beginning to be. It’s my bet that most of them haven’t even recorded yet, though more of them are about to turn up.

Brinsley are among the best of these new rock bands, who are definitely not floating in the same stream as the Heavy Metal contingent: the Heavy Kidz are jammers, they are interested in expanding the music through experiments in form. What the 3G rock groups we’re dealing with hejre (they’re not exactly Heavy Metal, but more like real Rare Earth) are involved in is expanding the mythic characterizations involved in the three and four minijte rock songs that make up the body of music we are most familiar with.

I think that in order to deal with this properly, and put Brinsley Schwarz in their own context we need to backtrack a bit. We take you now to the year 1965:

LITTLE RICHARD vs. CHUCK BERRY: THE ULTIMATE ROCK RECORD THEY NEVER MADE

The two most influential people to come out of the 50’s rock spectrum, it is now clear, were Little Richard and Chuck Berry. It is almost tragic that they have never recorded together; the music they made would, of necessity, have been majestic, because it involved all the elements that make rock such a grand aesthetic matrix. (There are rumors of collaboration on “Louie, Louie,” but. .. )

Little Richard was rough and raucous; his songs were coarse and crude, his imagery simplistic and naive. Berry was an aristocrat, with an elegance of line in both his guitar playing and songwriting that was awe-inspiring in a far different manner than the vital but almost random jamming Richard did.

Neither was better than the other. Both were consummate masters of their respective forms, but the styles they set up were each so heavy that they never really cross-fertilized completely. The Beatles, the Stones and Dylan all have come very, very close to making this hybrid music come ture, and it is the rock and roll dream that some day the complete fusion of angry scat and lofty song will be fully realized. Indeed, the magic of the music is maintained this way; if anyone ever did make music of this sort, it’d just kill everyone who listened to it, including the people who made it. An album by Chuck Berry and Little Richard, I mean, would be absolutely LETHAL. It would have to be packaged in special wrappers, transported in specially liscensed vehicles, sold only to minors, something like that.

The tradition filtered down through everyone else: Buddy Holly, the Coasters, Drifters, Richie Valens, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent and so on. But Berry and Richard remain the archetypes. In the 60’s, as the second generation took shape, the same duality prevailed: the Yardbirds, polar, perhaps, to the Beatles, with Dylan and the Stones closest to pure fusion. The music was extended though, but it was extended toward, rather than away from the center: listen to Astral Weeks, which is very very close to the meeting we are thinking of.

Lou Reed metamorphosed: he had been operating from the little Richard branch of rock tradition (strange to talk of “tradition” after only fifteen years) with the aid of John Cale in the first two Velvet Underground albums, but somehow this changed and when Cale left, perhaps through some aesthetic disagreement such as I’m attempting to describe, Reed was pulled into the Barry vortex.

These are the mainstreams: the jamster and the songster. Some of us like jams better than songs: that’s why we listen to Grand Funk and Black Sabbath. Some of us like songs better than jams: that’s why we listen to the Faces and Creedence and the Band. These are transitional elements: Rod Stewart; the later MC5 (the originals operated out of the more cosmic, less earthy Richard tradition); T. Rex. Even such apparently Heavy Metal partisans as Alice Cooper are really only transitional figures into a new music that is that much closer to fusion with — not the cosmos, fuck that metaphysical horseshit — the meat and the soul. We demand a music that is as fully human as we are. That’s what we fucking demand and that’s what we’ll get. Some day.

We’re that much closer even now; we can listen to Creedence and the Faces, or Grand Funk and Black Sabbath or Van Morrison and Rod Stewart. Or Brinsley Schwarz, to get to the point. It’s not all pop, but it is — at least all the it’s we’ve mentioned here are — all rock. What we’re after is all-rock, and if there’s no one to give all-rock to us, then we’ll fucking be all-rock ourselves.

Bands like Brinsley Schwarz enter at the Chuck Berry end of the spectrum, but they are capable of swooning off into that vortex in the middle that keeps pulling us into the demand for all-rock as powerful as its audience.

The Berty stem is characterized by songs, not jams, like I said, and that means the •verbal delineation of myth. One of the things that matters most about this kind of rock is its power of characterization; you get people out of this sort of rock you can’t find anywhere else.

Brinsley do this, but only sometimes. It’s a shame they don’t cover more songs. For a band in the Berry tradition (look at the Stones) it’s no crime to cop other people’s material, in fact it’s sometimes even necessary. One of the things that is going to be crucial to Brinsley Schwarz’s success is developing a good, even a great, songwriter — or rather lyricist. Nick Lowe writes great, powerful music but his stories aren’t always that good. Sometimes they’re mere vignettes and vignettes work better in the Little Richard school.

Still, Silver Pistol is not a weak record; it often promises more than it delivers (“Silver Pistol,” the title tune, is absolutely infuriating because of this) but when it comes across, it does so with all the elegance and grace of the Master Hisself. Berry would be proud of “Ju Ju Man”:

Failin’ in love again

Failin’ in love again

We don’t care if we don’t ever do

Fall back out again

When Brinsley falls into something like that, they’ve got everything it takes. The'music is potent — Brinsley’s guitar swoops like Robbie Robertson’s, the organ thunders like Garth Hudson’s, the band is super-complex without being academic.

One of the things that lets you know this is a third generation group, in fact, is that they aren’t afraid of being trivial. In fact, they’re trivial almost all of the time, which means they’re a real rock and roll band. There are no silly allegories here (there’s a line about the JDL in “Silver Pistol" but Brinsley’s Jewish too . .. ) and the songs mostly just ride themselves out, with the group’s innate sense of when-it’s-over keeping everything in proportion.

That doesn’t make this an easy record, but that’s o.k. It took me twenty listenings or so to make any sense out of it at all (not that these playings weren’t enjoyable) but once it breaks through, it’s grand. Not a masterpiece because that would ruin everything.

Which is o.k., you know, Brinsley aren’t ready for a masterpiece yet. Meanwhile they gather their forces for another assault on the real question, which is fusion. (Fuck D. H. Lawrence, it’s fusion that matters, ‘cept in rock magazines.)

In fact, you could almost say that Brinsley Schwarz are the cream of new British rock groups.

Dave Marsh

KEEP THE FAITH BLACK OAK ARKANSAS ATCO

When Black Oak Arkansas’ first album was released, I made the mistake of listening to it one time and writing a fulsomely imagistic review while under the influence of amphetamines, praising it to the skies. About two months later a very good friend called me up long distance and said: “Well, Lester, I just bought the Black Oak Arkansas album on the basis of that review you wrote, and I just wanted to tell you that they suck!”

A few months ago I saw them on tour with Grand Funk, and while I felt that the lead singer’s twerpy attempts at Dr. Johnish mumbo-jumbo in a wretched pseudo-Captain Beefheart voice were godawful, the three guitarists and rhythm section were full, exciting, dense and driving all the way. By the time this album came out, however, I had become so sick of this wimp dubbed Dandy’s growly pullulations that I could hardly stand to listen to it and only half jokingly suggested to somebody that “I wish somebody would shoot that fuckin’ lead singer in that group.”

Okay. Record reviews start to get precious and self-aggrandizing when .they become too autobiographical, but the point of all this is that I have listened to the record some more, and while I still think Dandy is just about as obnoxious as he can be I’m starting to like it, and, not just for the instrumental work either.

I read a story once in the Atlantic Monthly where the faculty at Yale or someplace was meeting up with this bunch of student radicals led by Mark Rudd, and one professor was heard to remark, “Why, that Mark Rudd is so obnoxious I can’t stand to be in the same room with him,” and another professor, who sympathized a bit more with Rudd and the Ruddniki, said, “Yes, but you could have said the same thing about Tom Paine.” So I say the same thing about Dandy. There is a point where some things can become so obnoxious that they stop being mere dreck and become interesting, even enjoyable, and maybe totally because they are so obnoxious.

Eric Burdon is (was?) a good example of this. Certainly Eric has been since he switched from the straight blues of the early Animals to art rock one of the most pretentious, mawkish, ballooned burlesques of a singersongwriter in human history, not to mention an incredible racist. But, with the exception of his merely bar-band boring work with War, he has always managed to put together good bands, write interesting jongs and, more than that, be infinitely entertaining for precisely the bozo that he is.

Dandy doesn’t have Eric’s gift for brilliantly gauche social commentary, but he comes damn close. Keep the Faith (subtitled “The Teachings of Black Oak Arkansas”) continues and amplifies his juju-hosannah riff, and comes complete with ancient leather volumes of the Bible, Bhagavad Gita, “The Teachings of Buddha” and Hesse’s Siddhartha depicted on the cover, and if the music didn’t sound so much like the raunchier side of Springfield-Grape folkrock shot full of crank and turned into a crazy mechanical guitar loop, the lyrics would almost make you think it was 1967 again, what with lines like: “We’re just what you need/Good solid wood. We’re your power to make evil curl, together we’ll make and shape our new world. We’re God’s children so don’t forget, Paradise is just around the corner and we’ll get there yet. Then we’ll give ya all our love; we’ll try our best. For after all, our love is what we want to give.”

But it’s not 1967 at all, it’s, uh, it’s a new day so let a soul man come in and do the popcorn, I mean something new is blowing in the wind: “We’re your freedom, we’re your ^ son. We shine a'light for everyone. We’re your happiness, we’re your joy. Your Revolutionary All American Boys!”

Yes, the times they have a-changed. At the Free John Sinclair rally in Ann Arbor last December, John Lennon said, “So flower power didn’t work, so let’s try something new,” and when big John says it you know something’s going on. Black Oak Arkansas certainly don’t sing about dipple-dappled crystal leafvein patterns in the dewy spiderwebs of your mind — they sing about “Fever in my Mind”, and about earthquakes. In “The Big One’s Still Coming,” the hot shot of this album which has so much strychnine in it it’s like an acid flashback all by itself, Dandy takes the apocalyptic motif running through all of the songs here and turns it into a vision of imminent natural catastrophe: “We’re havin’ an earthquake/We’re goin’ insane./A California earthquake/Has been shakin’ our brains.” Fortunately, however, he also recognizes that all these seemingly horrific cataclysms and disasters can be turned around into something resembling a real cool time, if you think about it and exercise the proper karmic manipulations (“But mystic thoughts can only fly to another plane”), can be harnessed and ridden cross the crumbling spires, of Babylon to glory: “California earthquake/ Shakin’ our heads/Yea we’re havin’ an earthquake/On our water-beds.”

And that’s kind of how I feel about this album. It reminds me of the scene in Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three where the Commies in East Berlin torture and brainwash a captured spy by .strapping him in a chair and forcing him to listen to Brian Hyland’s “Itsie Bitsie Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” 789 times played at 78 RPM with the spindle through a hole punched in the record just a half-inch from the center, so it gives out with a mind-destroying back-and-forth whine, sort of like a wah-wah in fact. After listening to all the psychedelic, studio-artistic, electronic, filtered, altered, phased and played-backwards music of the past six or seven years, with Black Oak Arkansas and Dandy’s tattered tonsils capping it all, I think that T could tell my old high school civics teacher that I would be immune to at least this form of Communist brainwashing. I would probably tap my foot.

Lester Bangs