Like a Bulldozer that learned to dance

Like a Bulldozer that learned to dance

HENDRIX IN THE WEST JIMI HENDRIX REPRISE

I don’t know if there is even anything to add to Jimi’s legend. You can build it up or tear it down but it remains almost intact, weathering heavy storms even so recently after his death.

Some of the reason it’s not much fun to write about Jimi lies in the fact that so much has already been said, but that’s not the only problem. There was a real schizophrenia .about the man, the difference between being a dazzling star (in the most positive sense of that word you can imagine) and another guitar player, even the best guitar player in the world.

Jimi’s guitar work mattered because he understood electric guitar and electricity better than anyone before or since. He had the kind of comprehension of his instrument that Robert Johnson had of his: he made it human, just as Johnson made blues the source and resolution of human agony. Jimi made technology sing, and he made it sing on his own terms, which matters even more.

They say that people didn’t begin to sit down at rock concerts until the first Experience tour, but that’s not quite accurate in implication. Sure the audience sat but it wasn’t out of any sense of drag; they sat in awe. He was a mesmerizing performer and you can see it in the movies. Sometimes you can evert see it in the stills. Jimi had all the 'moves, he’d studied with the masters so long he’d become one himself.

I think, in fact, that the music Jimi made live is often the best music that he ever did make. Live At Monterey can make you weep, not just because Hendrix is dead, but because when the man was on, as he is there, he was absolutely majestic in stature.

“Like A Rolling Stone” and “Wild Thing” from Monterey possess a totality of power that is rare in any medium. The force of their sound isn’t just in Jimi’s guitar, either; it’s the force and power that exists at the rim of rock, wherever the Champion of the Moment is tearing away at the edge of the limb.

This power is felt frequently on In the West. I don’t like “Red House,” because I’m not a Hendrix fan, per se. His guitarisms didn’t impress me very much; rather, they left me cold and unmoved. Jimi moved me most when he sang, and when the guitar sang, not when it talked. The Jimi Hendrix I remember and love was the Hendrix that made “All Along the Watchtower,” “Voodoo Chile,” “I Don’t Live Today” and “Little Wing.” When Jimi decided to rock, he could overwhelm you, and there was something comforting in the way that he did it.

Yet, even while being overwhelmed, you couldn’t help but be impressed by Jimi’s terrific sense of emergency. Some of the music on In the West is infused by so much urgency that it’s almost too swift to hear. What is really remarkable, though, is not just that it conveys this sense but that Jimi managed to make the kind of music he did so volatile it was liable to explode with the most subtle indication that the people making it were not in total control, and make it coherent and almost visible.

Even when he missed there was an excitement present you don’t find very often. I think “Red House” misses, and that “Blue Suede Shoes,” and “Lover Man,” do too. You can listen to them anyway, because the mark Jimi set was so high a little bit one way or the other wouldn’t really make anything unlistenable, just frustrating.

And when he succeeded! “Voodoo Chile” is among the half dozen best things Jimi ever recorded; it epitomized what he could do both as a vocalist and a guitarist. If the ending is a little cheap in retrospect, it reflected — when it was made — an honest concern for his audience.

The other song that impresses me most is “Little Wing,” perhaps the most poignant thing Jimi ever wrote. The guitar carries this, and it carries this because it can sing. It’s like a bulldozer that learned to dance; you are amazed that so much power can have so much grace.

Plus, of course, the added treat of “Johnny B. Goode.” Nothing waited, no “We’re gonna rock and roll you” banners. But when they do it, they do it good. Even a dancing bulldozer still has to bulldoze sometimes, after all.

If he wasn’t consistent — and he isn’t anymore consistent here than he ever was — Jimi Hendrix was occasionally able to explode into something that made listening to him worthwhile, something that very few other people have ever possessed. This is the reason why we keep listening to his music, and it’s as neat a summation of In the West, I think, as could be found.

Dave Marsh

BLUE OYSTER CULT COLUMBIA

About five years ago, I was one of a small group of people who were responsible for putting out a magazine called Crawdaddy! Back in those days, things were quite different from today. For one thing, there weren’t very many rock magazines. There was Hit Parader, and Mojo Navigator on the West Coast, and maybe Cheetah, and the usual teeny garbage, but mostly the only ones we took seriously were the stories in the back of Hit Parader and all of Mojo Navigator, which seemed to come from another world. So we felt pretty self-righteous about being the most intellectually sound rock publication in New York.

Naturally, with the dearth of rock magazines, there was a dearth of rock critics, a situation which, I reflect today, was ideal. Mainly the ones, we came into contact with were this guy Landau who lived in Boston and got us our hi-fi equipment cheap because his old man owned the company, and the Long Island Crew. I never made it out to Stony Brook, myself, but these people had a very highly-evolved scene going for themselves out there, with the first lightshow on the East Coast, avant-garde rock shows they produced themselves, featuring the East Coast debuts of such groups as the Doors, Moby Grape, and many others. They also had a rock band which everybody talked about but none of us had ever heard, called the Soft White Underbelly, who were apparently signed to Elektra. The Long Island Crew, consisting most vocally of Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer, would talk about how nice it was to have a rock band that someday they could produce and help write songs for, and for a while, I believe, Meltzer was their featured vocalist.

Time passed, and I left Crawdaddy! as did everybody else who had been involved with it. Meltzer went on to heights of fame with the book we’d previewed in Crawdaddy #8 (I typed the entire issue, including Meltzer’s article — called “The Beatles, The Stones, and the Raunch Epistemology of Spydet Turner,” and it wasn’t until the third typing of it that I understood what it was about), called The Aesthetics of Rock. Pearlman, it developed, was spending more and more time with the band, which went from being the Soft White Underbelly to the Stalk-Forrest Group. Since the band was so inextricably bound to all these writer-types, a good deal of the rock writing that came out of New York was loaded with sly and not-so-sly references to it. What I mean is, the air was getting polluted with hype.

Elektra apparently dropped the group, and the one person I know who has heard the tapes they made (and, being Mojo-Navigator’s ex-editor, he was able to listen with an unprejudiced ear) says that they were terrific. It wasn’t Elektra’s first mistake, nor would it be their last, but it didn’t do the group much good, and they changed their name to the Blue Oyster Cult. I still refused to believe anything I heard about them. Critics’ bands tend to be over-cute, overloaded with in-jokes, and stuff like that.

Still, when I got the album in the mail, I put it on out of deference to my old buddies. And lemme tell you, what I heard knocked me clean out: Because, underneath it all, the Blue Oyster Cult are a great rock and roll band in the tradition of all the great New York City rock and roll bands — the Rascals, the Blues Project, Autosalvage, the Velvet Underground, the Magicians and many others. They exude a raw, nasty energy that might lead one to say that they are New York City’s MC5, although to the best of my knowledge they don’t hold near the spell over an audience that the 5 did, mostly because they are from New York, and New York audiences think they’re too sophisticated to fall for stuff like that.

There is really no doubt about this album. It’s the one we all would have made five years ago if we’d been able to actualize our fondest fantasies. And, just like we would have done in oqr fantasies, its main fault seems to be a tendency towards over-literacy in the lyrics. But that scarcely matters, because another rule has it that rock lyrics should be semiindecipherable.

The album’s highlights are so numerous that it’s hard to list them all. “Then Came The Last Days Of May” has the best lyrics, a chilling story of some kids murdered while buying dope, with a, last verse that lifts it to another level entirely. R. Meltzer himself shows up writing fantastic lyrics to “Stairway To The Stars,” and the band propells them along beautifully. “Before The Kiss, A Redcap” has a middle section that you can do the stroll to, believe it or not, and the overdubbed claps are right out of Geroge Martin’s Beatle Secrets (bravo, producers!). “Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll” doesn’t quite live up to its title (only the MC5 could carry off a song with that name, I think), but it’s still a great song, sounding sort of like Black Sabbath filtered through Autosalvage. “Redeemed,” the last song of the album, turns things around some by pretending to be a sweet countrystyle song, but you’ll notice that it isn’t, quite.

Whether the Blue Oyster Cult is this good in person I can’t say, but there is enough group cohesion on the album for me to think they might well be. This is the most auspicious high-energy debut album since the J. Geils Band’s, and one that I’ve played even more times than Geils’. It shows a good deal about where rock in this country has been and where it could go with a little luck. With a couple of good breaks and some decent exposure, the Blue Oyster Cult could become one of America’s greatest high-energy bands.

You could even help. Buy the album!

Ed Ward

PHASE THREE THE OSMONDS MGM

It came as no surprise when FAVE Magazine recently handed out its best of the year awards. Left unresolved was the question of who really is better since Michael Jackson and . Donny Osmond ended in a dead-heat for best male vocalist.

The real surprise happened this summer. With three consecutive singles in the “respectable” soft-soul area, the Jackson Five abandoned the pre-adolescent r&b field to their most brazen imitators. The Osmonds came up with a five-year-old Joe South song, took it to Muscle Shoals where Rick Hall and the Fame Gang produced and played their asses off on one of the best sounding singles of the year: “Yo-Yo.”

“Yo-Yo” is the best thing on the new Osmond album, Phase Three, but there are a number of other things here that are really worth listening to. “Down By the Lazy River” has been pulled as the latest single, and once again the production alone is worth about half of the three million copies it’s sure to sell. “He’s the Light of the World” is also getting airplay, and in many ways it’s better, with a real rhythmic fire, a good hook, and lyrics that make it a candidate for best AM Jesus song since “Oh Happy Day.”

Ballads like “Love Is” and “In the Rest of My Life” suffer from Donny’s wimpy tonsil exercises but whether they are that much weaker than some recent Michael Jackson cuts is almost debatable. “Don’t Panic” moves in the Osmond Vegas groove, while “Business” bypasses the Jacksons and gets down to an attempted steal of home with Sly Stone guarding the plate.

“My Drum,” believe it or not, is the Osmonds’ heavy move complete with Uriah Heepish guitar riffs. It’s the kind of sound bar-mitzvah bands must make nowadays when it’s time for the kids to dance, and what’s so terrible about that? Especially considering Donny would’ve been bar-mitzvah’d last year if he wasn’t such a goy.

They almost really blow it on “A Taste of Rhythm n Blues,” where whoever is singing lead (hint: Percy Sledge Osmond it ain’t) uses too many blackface touches like “y’all,” “yeah, yeah” and “got-to got-to.” The always adorable Donny pipes in with a few irresistible “just for good measures...” Nevertheless, the Rick Hall production is thoroughly professional while the Muscle Shoals boys keep the back-beat reasonable indeed.

In a way, you’ve got to hand it to the Osmonds. They’ve turned from mere thievery to clever and sometimes refreshing fakery, a tradition glorious as The Rock itself. At the same time, they’re not shy about their real ambition. With Michael Jackson now following Donny’s lead as a solo artist, the Osmonds aren’t concerned about the Jackson 5. Look at the cover of Phase Three. See the Vegas floodlights. See the Osmonds dressed in white fringe suits, open-chested V-necks, and those fringe-knit belts. Look at the. last guy on the right on the back cover of Phase Three and it’s downright scary. Now I don’t mean to frighten you, Elvis, but the Osmond Brothers want you!

Wayne Robbins

FRAGILE YES ATLANTIC

We might as well face it. When it comes to crowd pleasing, performance-oriented rock and roll, the British have us beat hands down. Where the English abound with highly personable groups that take it upon themselves to give absolutely smashing shows, American groups all to often adopt the solemn pose of Serious Musician, and insist upon forcing the audience into regarding their performances as some kind of woodenly “artistic” exercise.

Perhaps it’s just my viewpoint from this side of the Atlantic (Ocean, not the company). Maybe the British think their groups are just as prosaic as I see ours to be, but I don’t think that a random sampling of stars like Santana, Sly Stone, the Grateful Dead or Chicago can rate anywhere near such acts as the Faces, T Rex, Led Zeppelin, the Who or the Stones when it comes to pure Mike Todd showmanship. Perhaps it’s because American musicians operate out of a different tradition, or simply that English egos and extroversion run as much to body English as ostentatious musicianship. I realize there are American bands that believe in putting on real shows — Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids, the MC5, the Flamin Groovies, Alice Cooper — but for some reason these groups seldom reach the top echelon of the national market.

I have never seen Yes in concert, but from what I get from their new album, they are on the verge of joining the ranks of the other British bands as fully participating crowd pleasers. Fragile sounds almost like a scientific formula to get a crowd off its ass and moving in sympathetic rhythm to the show. They don’t try to mask a basic rock style under the cloak of blues, jazz, or avant-garde posturings. It’s all blatantly simple and out front. You get it all the first time around, and then come back and play it again and again just because it’s so much fun to get it from them. They tease you with classical riffs on piano, guitar, organ, or what have you, at the beginning or middle of songs, or by themselves, lending an air of fake erudition before striking out with a standard rock formula that you’ve heard a thousand times before.

Yes has planned this album with a fiendishly successful strategy.-They alternate short pieces that might or might not be interesting by themselves with long suites that can themselves be broken down into undigested bits of wildly divergent musical styles. It’s all flash; none of the pieces try to build into any kind of composition, but rather are strung together to keep one’s interest from one moment to the next. One of the short bits is the third movement from Brahams’ 4th Symphony in E Minor, which is pretty flashy in itself.

The long suites are “South Side Of The Sky,” and “Heart Of The Sunrise,” both of which are sustained and fun to listen to. “Roundabout,” which can be heard in a clumsily shortened version on A.M. radio is the natural hit on the record, and the one that sounds as if they had the most fun playing.

Yes will probably never do anything truly original, and most likely lack the inclination 2 to even try. I for one couldn’t care less — too much emphasis on originality when people talk about rock ‘n’ roll these days, anyway. They’re a damn good show band, producing a likeable, multitextured sound with beautiful facility, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they turned out to be the next across-the-pond Sensation.

Rob Houghton

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER COTILLION

There is a curious form of name dropping common to rock fandom which, for want of a better name, I’ll call the pre-recognition syndrome. It goes something like this. Say Arthur Mish and the Ozone Guppies are currently riding the crest of rock and roll stardom. You, aspiring bon-vivant that you are, find yourself in a bar talking to a nubile young delicacy who is very impressed with your new Cowboy shirt, just like the ones on the Poco album covers. “Gee,” she whimpers, “do you like music? I just adore those silly Ozone Guppies. Aren’t they just the grooviest bunch of far-outs you ever heard?”

“Posh,” you reply, “I been into the Ozone Guppies for years. Ever since they were called Freddy and the Dreamers. I been listening so long I’m sick of those dudes.” So saying, you sneer, order another drink, and prepare to change the subject.

That’s the pre-recognition syndrome. Now, you ask, what has this to do with Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s new live smasheroo, Pictures at an Expedition er Exhibition? Well, it’s like this, see. A few years ago I was visiting my dear old Gran’ in Merrie Olde, and happened to pick up on a new smasheroo by this group called The Nice. Ever since, I’ve managed to pick up every subsequent album that Keith Emerson has had anything to do with. (Not so much ’cause I dig it all that much anymore, but just because I like to get whole sets of everything. A condition, I believe, carrying over from my bubble-gum card days.) Thus, since I’ve been into Emerson so long, take it from me, you heard one Emerson album, .you heard them all. If you don’t have any Emerson at all, pick up either this or Elegy, the last Nice album. Both show Emerson at his best. As for these other guys, Lake and Palmer, forget ’em, they’re no more important than Davison and Jackson were in The Nice. All Emerson really needs is Emerson.

“Now, man, lemme tell ya about this new band called Tucky Buzzard ...”

A1 Niester

LIQUID ACROBAT AS REGARDS THE AIR THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND ELEKTRA

Back in the beginning of BONZAI! pillinflicted mind-messing, guys and gals used to turn to the Incredible String Band for gentle guidance through the exploding cosmos of their manically stretching heads. Lucky kids they were, when you consider the alternatives — the Moody Blues, for instance, who ought to own up to what they’re really doing and record “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for their next super-mental disc. The String Band even in the old days were never really pushy, always had a nice sense of humor, and they pointed some undeserving kids in the-•right directions, like reading books (“You Know What You Could Be” on Layers of the Onion), that they probably never took. Far out. This is their latest reifying, dope-defying trip, Liquid Acrobat As Regards the Air, which is a great title and really sums up what the String Band is all about. Incredibly, so does the album. It’s a playful, moving, gently rocking, delightfully succinct and modestly cosmic panoply of eclectic music for the mind and body.

Sure, they haven’t changed much, they still got the old universal referentials (“If I could sing only one song/ (clap clap) I’d sing of you,” though I’ve never met the man) but the music is tighter, more fun, and their mysticism is never agressive or offensively gooey — it’s just their thing. “Death is unreal/that’s the way I feel/there’s more to be revealed...” That’s American, isn’t it? Although they are often a bit too positive about their verities, they are at least positive. Now, maybe this is insufficiently satanic for today’s pill poppers, washing down compressed rat poison and double-domed ground glass with their sugared kerosene, but allow a few modest contributions towards the new hope building fund, it’s a worthy cause. Their total image is of a gentle gypsy band, wistfully committed to reincarnation, romance and the I Ching, worldly wise in their travels but never stuck in one place long enough to get really vamped on.

The best stuff here is accessible and affecting, like “Evolution Rag,” a ricky-ticky, tricky-dicky circus song about the timeless illusionist who quietly outlasts the wailing of “our big, tough leader;” or “Adam and Eve,” a calypso version of creation, or the album’s most impressively compact rocker, “Painted Chariot.” Many of the songs have the same basic message: don’t let the transitory powers rule you, but “hear the old prayers, find the wise players” (an underlying ethic of I Ching, particularly No. 36, “Darkening of the Light”). An Elizabethan piper’s tune, a bit of madrigal-rock, and some authentic jigs allow the String Band to live up to their name with fiddle, mandolin and autoharp, but don’t be misled - there’s some fine electric guitar, bass and piano work too. The only long cut is the last, “Darling Belle,” a mosaic tale of love and war in the Old South that serves as a musical script for the kind of little plays the band is said to act out in concert. The emotional center of the record is in the simple music hall vocal and bouncy piano of “Cosmic Boy”: “And I shall dance for you/ the sweetest dance that I can do.” That’s all, and it’s fun. It’s not easy to recommend much that’s mystical these days, but the core of cosmically-informed innocence that the Incredible String Band persists in preserving is less supernatural than a reminder of another natural side of us — our lost third ear, where timeless knowledge is received as lyric vibration, and “gentle” is more than a word we heard when such things were being said.

William Kowinski

R.E.O. SPEEDWAGON EPIC

BULLANGUS MERCURY

As everybody knows, it all started with the blues. Old black men (except they were young and wild then), locked into feudal situations, and usually without the bread for Garrard turntables, Marshall amps or carsterebs, would sit out on their porches as that evenin’ sun sank into the delta and sing of their woes. Then it came up the river from New Orleans and hitchhiked and wetbacked from the farms to Chicago and other urban factory infernoes, and turned into R&B and then the Big Beat, and now they had amps and cars, even if they were still oppressed, so that’s what they sang about, or about not having the latter. Then lower-middle class white kids got ahold of it and turned it into rock ‘n’ roll. And through various windings and turnings of history that form evolved from drawing almost totally from black music to something that fed on itself as well, picking up dangerous degrees of self-consciousness along the way, and what with one begat after another we arrived lo at the Third Generation, which one must admit sounds a lot better than stapled handles like folk-rock, acid-rock, and the like. And even though some of them don’t seem to know it, the most exciting thing about the Third Generation is that it doesn’t have anything to do with getting worked to death on Colonel Sanders’ farm; it has to do with growing up, perhaps absurd but will all the pop and pap and creature comforts, in white suburbia, and responding to this situation with as much frustration and vigor as our idiomatic ancestors got out of being physically, visibly repressed.

What we have here are two Third Generation stompdown noise bands that cook like a bitch. They’re about as original as a Detroit compact car, but it makes no difference at all. There are three or four new bands like this every season, and R.E.O. Speedwagon and Bullangus just happen to be two of the most exciting (on record, anyway) to come along with the turning of the year.

And all of this is not at all to say that all of these bands sound alike. For one thing, there are distinct geographical modes, and for another there’s the perennial fact that if you listen to something enough times its inevitable individuality will come through. R.E.O. Speedwagon are from Ohio, and while they bear signs of the influence of such established just-across-the-state-line monoliths as the MC5 and Grand Funk, they’ve got the conviction, the drive and, yes, energy to break on through to. their own plateau of manic jive. They’re fast and slashing and teen-topical in the best Detroit tradition, with socioexorcist raveups like “Anti-Establishment Man”, “Prison Women” and “Five Men Were Killed Today” (even if the last does have slight Byrds/Neil Young overtones), and contemporary enough to be morbid (no anemic R&Revivals here), as evidenced by “Dead At Last.” The guitars churn like threshing wheels, the piano clangs and reels and the organ peals with fervor, and there is not a plodding or muddily-produced track here (as opposed to Grand Funk’s earlier albums, which sounded like they were channeled through oatmeal). It’s frenetic music for a frenetic time, with the vitality to do more than topple into agonized bogs of fuzz. I don’t know if you could call this joyous music, in the sense that the early Yardbirds or Black Pearl could be joyous, but if the topicality of the lyrics is meant to be taken literally, then the contents of the grooves are reflective of rage for the light rather than downed-out mutterings.

Bullangus are from New York, generally rival Speedwagon in frenzy, and (I hope they won’t take this as racism) exhibit the same fortuitous blend of humor and explosive angst as an obscure and sometime-lamented New York all-wop band of a few years back called the Good Rats. Anybody who can bring off songs with titles like “Mother’s Favorite Lover (Margaret)’’ and “No Cream For the Maid,” keeping the humor intact and cutting loose and loud at the same time, has got to be all right. Not only that, they’ve listened to some of their counterparts across the water just enough to pick up a few handy pointers and flash licks without losing their identity. With their two-guitar, organ, bass, vocals and percussion line-up they come across at times as a less-pretentious homegrown version of Deep Purple. This album also has a great cover (the Trojan Bull) which, unfortunately, will probably induce about two people to buy it. I hope they don’t get lost in the scuffle. .

Lester Bangs

GEMINI SUITE JON LORD LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA PURPLE/CAPITOL

There hasn’t been anything really new in symphonic music for almost a generation, and yet ever since the very Day The Symphonic Tradition Died, well-intentioned artisans and conservatory cats of liberal bent have been trying to /revive it. As if that weren’t folly enough, ever since “Rhapsody in Blue” they’ve been trying to do it via liberal-todesperate injections of popular music and jazz. I don’t know who wrote the Negro Symphony that I saw in a bargain bin the other day, but we have certainly run the gauntlet, from Benny Goodman tootling solemnly on Stravinsky’s “Ebony Concerto,” to the whole abortive “Third Stream Jazz” movement promoted about a decade ago by John Lewis and Gunther Schuller and other people of the type that drool at the notion of Ornette Coleman playing with a string quartet (surprisingly enough, this was one of the few times it worked); Herbie Mann’s “Concerto Grosso in D Blues” (ouch); and then with the inspired eclecticism of ROCK!, Jesus Christ, Leonard Bernstein jamming with Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks! The rock opera! Keith Emerson and the Nice seguing Dylan’s “Country Pie” with Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 6!” Emerson, Lake and Palmer indian-wrestling Mussorgsky! And, of course, the ultimate conceit, Deep Purple performing organist Jon Lord’s “Concerto For Group and Orchestra” with “The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Conducted by Malcolm Arnold,” the latter august musical body proving upon further inspection mainly a mill for British movie soundtracks. ,

Which is only fitting, because almost every attempt to unit popular and classical music made from the pop side of the curtain has in fact drawn as much on the rich and hardy tradition of Hollywood soundtracks, pioneered by such great composers as Dmitri Tiompkin, Max Steiner and Miklos Rosza, as on all the Romanticist cliches in the symphonic woodshed that any music major is familiar with. If they don’t sound like Bible movies like King of Kings and Ben Hur, then they sound like Western soundtracks such as The Unforgiven and The Big Valley. Which is okay in terms of roots, too, it’s not as if all that crass soundstage mush were diluting the pure tradition of European music; the Roszas and Steiners and Tiompkins got all their stock riffs from the Romanticist schtickfolio too, proving that they went to school just like Jon Lord did.

Unlike them, Jon L. seems afflicted with an acute case of musical schizophrenia. It’s apparently not enough that he can rock his ass off in albums like Deep Purple in Rock and Fireball, no, he’s gotta keep going and trying to prove that all that rock ‘n’ roll stuff is just diddle and he knows the real shit and can lay it down with the best of those old studio hacks in albums like this one. Tsk.

Well, Malcolm Arnold is still waving his baton around (rumor has it that previous to becoming a symphonic conductor Malcolm put in several good years as a carnival barker), except this time he’s standing in front of the “London Symphony Orchestra.” And considering the state of the times, in which the symphony orchestra of a large Midwestern city will perform a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen consisting mainly of duckings and finger-snappings and choked squeals in front of the whole country on public television, well, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this time Lord and Arnold have got themselves the real McCoy, symphonyorchestra-wise. (After all, the piece was “commissioned by the BBC.”)

But it’s really the song, not the singer, that counts; and while it would be too easy to shaft this with a snide reference to “Son of Concerto for Group and Orchestra,” that is pretty much what it is. The title refers to youknow-what, and Lord says in his liner notes: “I composed the Suite during the first six months of 1970, each movement being ‘built’ around the musical personalities of the members of Deep Purple. However, during the period between the concert and this recording the music grew away from the initial concept and became to my mind not so much a composition for ‘Group and Orchestra,’ but, more simply, music for amplified instruments and an orchestra.”

Which means that, in between all the orchestral fiddle-faddle, what you get is what you see listed on the inside jacket:

SIDE ONE

1. Guitar

2. Piano

3. Drums

SIDE TWO

4. Vocals

5. Bass guitar

6. Organ

I can’t say that Lord’s two respective stints on organ and piano do much for me; he cooks like a Hell’s Kitchen hashslinger with Deep Purple when they’re in rock, but when it comes to this kind of flatulent, decorticated Rosemary Brown noodling I’m a Keith Emerson man myself. And the drum solo on “Drums” is just the standard exhibitionist poundings, except that instead of a Fillmore crowd a bowtied orchestra is thrashing around D. Purp’s Ian Paice. The “Vocals” section, successive solos followed by tradeoffs between Yvonne Elliman and Tony Ashton (Gemim — get it?), feature the kozmiklutzy lyrics common to this sort of thing (“Strange the things we say/Games we play”). Guitarist Albert Lee and Purple bassist Roger Glover get in some good licks, when the orchestra isn’t threatening to engulf them in Rocky Mountain-majestic brass, swooping strings and those goddam pounding typani that every budding Beethoven seems to deem essential to make the fullest possible use of his tonal palette.

Three final notes: Inside the jacket, each and every one of the 103 musicians present on the album (that’s right, I counted them, not with as much glee as a comstock counting the dirty words in a book on trial, but you can see how rock critics amuse themselves) is segregated into columns according to their Zodiacal sign — Capricorn alone claims no fewer than three first violinists! The second note is just to mention in passing that the outer cover of this album bears one of the wierdest sex fantasies that I have ever seen anywhere. The third note is a cliche, but a hunible one, humbly addressed to Jon Lord:

Get down.

Lester Bangs.

SCIENCE FICTION ORNETTE COLEMAN COLUMBIA

In his heart of hearts each person carries his own special song. That includes you, reader, and me.

The structure of the human being is such that each man or woman is born with a unique capacity for music — an harmonic telos, a personal set of melodies and an unduplicated rhythm which that person alone cap introduce into the world. No individual’s life is truly realized until this gift is discovered and given.

Barriers to its release are both numerous and powerful, for we build and rebuild the walls every day. This requires all our strength. We are tired and cannot play or sing. The music goes unheard.

The greatest barrier is fear, a fear expressed as emulation. Since the examples before us are so formidable, we forget to look beyond them. We do not play. We play like ...

... Like Bird, like Coltrane, like the Stones, like Dylan, like ... copying the notes of the great masters. There. I think I’ve finally got it. I’ve copied his every last nuance. We are now indistinguishable, me and him.

In this way the original relationship of the human being to the world and the world’s sound for him is totally erased. We strive for a musical identity and betray the one already there.

This is the reason there are so few originals — so few are in touch with the origin. And when an innovation does occur it soon becomes a tyranny. Something fresh, alive and vibrant becomes something crystallized, embalmed and routine — all through a mistaken emulation by those fleeing their own song.

Another magnificent barrier is the instrument itself. Cunning creatures, those instruments. They participate in the seduction, if we let them.

Am I wrong, or does this alto sax sound just like Parker? Say, this tenor reminds me of Trane. And when I play this guitar, I’d swear its Elmore James himself or maybe Clapton or somebody. With a little more practice, why, I could...

When the trap springs shut we call the sound “education” or “technique.” Clang! For this we spend great sums of money. We pay our jailers handsomely in elaborate selfdeception which obscures their role and our own. There is no bail and no parole.

Still, there remain a scant few in each generation who succeed in finding their own voice and translating it into a public sound. These are the souls lucky enough to penetrate the tyrannies and seductions and find the source. If we can put off our inherent desire to turn them into dictators, such persons can be the occasion for .great joy and insight.

One man of this kind if Ornette Coleman. Ornette has a tune, a harmony, a rhythm and a version of “how things sound” which informs everything he plays or composes. He is in possession of a music and has been faithful to it at every step.

Many people now ask: Why doesn’t Ornette change or advance? Why has his music progressed so little in the last fifteen years? Wasn’t he the first? Didn’t all of the others have to follow him? And haven’t they all “gone beyond him” now?

What nonsense! If Ornette had it in the first place, how would novelty or progress be of any help? Progress is merely the last consolation for the perpetually unsatisfied, for those who need an external measurement of their worth. “We’ve gone beyond him” actually means “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Science Fiction is a moment in Ornette’s long-established musical vocation. It is an exceptionally fine moment — clear, precise, lyrical and unified around a set of interesting, tuneful notions. There are no spectacular, phony “breakthroughs” here, only a relaxed, lucid Ornette Coleman playing with superior accompaniment — Dewey Redman, Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, Bill Higgins. What’s new is the use of vocals and poetry by Asha Puthli and David Henderson, both very effective. Charlie Hayden’s bass work, both ensemble and solo, is simple absolute perfection, something we’ve come to expect from Mr. Haden.

Somewhere in manuscript is a book, The Harmolodic System, which Ornette has written explaining where he got his music and how it works. Hopefully, the book will soon find a publisher. It would be interesting to see the artist’s theory of his own work. For the time being, however, we can be satisfied that Ornette Colertian has done his best album in a long time and that he appears to be headed toward a period of extraordinary creativity.

Langdon Winner

I THINK I'LL WRITE A SONG PHILLIP GOODHAND — TAIT DJM

I’m feeling slightly diffident about this review, since it’s my first on one of these, whatchacallems, singer-songwriters. But I can’t let the fact that I object to an idiom in general keep me from praising a record I truly enjoy, so I’ll try to put my doubts behind me. See if you can’t bear with me as I venture into this alien terrain.

What first grabbed me was the fact that Goodhand-Tait once fronted a band back in the Merseybeat days (yes, he’s English) called the Stormsville Shakers. Furthermore, they got their name from the title of a Johnny & the Hurricanes album, so while I never heard ’em (they never recorded) I knew at least they had good taste. So I was curious about this album, but one of the last things I expected was a collection of songs combining the best qualities of Elton John, Randy Newman, Badfinger, Fleetwood Mac, and a lot of other eminences of contemporary rock technique that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Right, he doesn’t have a totally new sound. What is a totally new sound? Lol Coxhill? Mu? Dr. Hook’s Medicine Show? If so who needs it? This is the kind of record I like to hear. The guys in his band and the producer are all unknowns to me, but this is one of the nicest-produced, most flawlessly and pleasantly performed collections of music it’s been my pleasure to sit through lately. In this respect, also instrumentally in many spots, they remind me of Badfinger. Others like “Silverwing” sound like something off Future Games (which I liked). Elton intrudes through Phillip’s fine modern piano work, not dominating but adding nicely to the overall effect. And Randy Newman — J.J. Cale too, come to think of it — well, just listen to the sound of his voice. It’s got the same relaxed, almost gravely quality, although it’s different and unique. A very likeable voice, never strident like many of today's*stars. This guy’s a born singer.

And it’s a rock & roll voice too! His slow numbers, which include the title song and most of the others, are full of subtlety and empathy — dig what he does with Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” — as any good rock & roll voice should be, but unlike those who are stuck with that he can rock out too. “Medicine Man”, a Rod Stewart piano boogie rocker, is everything John Baldry would give up his cool facade to be, if only he could Phillip Goodhand-Tait, for that matter, is every inch the rediscovered talent we were led to believe Baldry was supposed to be. He is also everyting every one of these pianoplaying sensitivity types ought to be, which is honest and straightforward, eyes on the ultimate feeling and value of his music rather than his own navel.

You may have noticed my avoidance of the messages of his songs or the poetry of his lyrics. I have no doubt they’re there (anybody sensitive enough to make music like this must have something to say) but I’ll be damned if I’ll sit down and ponder the lyrics of any record. Put him on my car radio and then I’ll tell you what I think of his words — that’s the only way they were able to get me to listen to “American Pie”, you know. From what I’ve heard though, he seems to have as much to say as another favorite of mine, Nils Lofgren (also a sensitive type who knows how to make real music to back up his messages, and whose words are just reaching me now on about the tenth playing) and certainly as much as those others to whom he’ll be compared. I mean, I’m sure he has at least 100 things to say as profound as “country comfort and the truck is going home” or even “lay me down in sheets of gladness, you had a busy day today.” Does anybody really care, anyway?

I sure don’t. I don’t expect rock music to give me spiritual couselling, any more than I expect it to give me a fine arts education. After many listenings I do find that wellchosen lyrics can enhance a song, but if the music doesn’t do anything for me it’s a waste from the word go. Phillip Goodhand-Tait has that one licked, and as far as I’m concerned this is one record that’s only gonna sound better and better as time goes by. And the fact that I made that point without compromising my rock & roll aesthetics as I’d feared, only broadens the smile that hearing this album has put on my face. What more can I say?

Greg Shaw

TIME TO FLY DAVID POMERANZ DECCA

If I’d ever brought an album like this to high school, the kids would’ve called me a fairy and I’d probably have gotten beat up in the parking lot after classes. Kids, after all, don’t put their dimes in the jukebox to get pain and poetry. Or maybe it’s just that my high school days are too far away and we’ve all gotten a little older in the time between. Who knows?

David Pomeranz knows. He knows that his audience has reached a point where it’s not at all painful for them to view themselves as sophisticated, and that they’ll be willing to take something a little different if there’s just enough of what they know. So David’s got it all down cold — from BS&T to Cat Stevens — and he uses it all to paint a very appealing portrait of himself. And on top of that, he’s gotten some genuinely good musicians to play slicker than if they were drowning in Vitalis, arid the whole package is so note-perfect that you’d swear that it was conceived by a computter.

And 1 find myself kind of liking it, eVen though I vowed never to trust anyone that I was sure didn’t like rock and roll. David Pomeranz is almost pure show-biz, and I’m not at all afraid to own up to that part of me which will always respond to footlights and production. So David can come on with eOol supperclub jazz or piano outpourings of light swing or whatever he wants, simply because he can get away with it. I prefer the snappy songs (“First” and “A Fine Woman”, both of which are songs I’d love to hear on the radio), but none of the other tunes would ever give cause to be taken off, and there are times wheri it’s, nice to put oft a record which makes no grating mistakes.

His lyrics don’t have to mean anything at all. A phrase will pop and grab you every so Often, and the rest is as smooth as the music. And they sure look nice layed out oft the inner flap, just the kind of stuff which old crust like myself might even enjoy if we don’t watch ourselves. Like I said before, the kids would’ve called me a fairy if I’d ever brought an album like this to school. But my English teacher would’ve given me an A.

Benjie LaDesh

ALL THE GOOD TIMES NITTY GRITTY DIRT BAND UNITED ARTISTS

Dear Lord, if we gotta have countryrock bands, please make them as good of better than the Nitty Gritty Dirt hand. That's all for now, Lord, but l may be back soon. Amen.

1 first saw the NGDB in their country-rock incarnation a couple of years ago, when UA was really pouring it on for their Uncle Charlie album,, and their producer was pestering every writer I knew, myself included, to do interviews with them. They had a good stage act, going from traditional couy songs to what people refer to as “contemporary material,” which means soft-rock, to absolute worst parody/put-down of the fin I’ve ever seen, but never settling down to one thing very long. They whooshed on stage, whooshed around the stage, and then whooshed off stage faster than you could hardly comprehend, and I went away with the impression that they Weren’t half bad. UA kept up the hype at an astounding rate, even going so far as to send out an uncollated, blurry pile of press reprints (aparently their producer had pestered every writer in the whole country!) two inches thick that I still use for scratch paper.

Naturally, this does not predispose me, as a Writer, to any great affection for the NGDB.

Still, irt a moment of weakness, I admit I put on their new album, All The Good Times, and found myself liking it. I pick the record up, I take it Out of the sleeve, and I have this uneasy feeling, fight up until I start to play it, at which time I start to feel good. It’s happened a dozen times. And here’s what the problem is, at least for me:

Image.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has cultivated one of the most sickeningly cute images in rock today. They try so hard to look like 19th Century tintypes that they wind up looking like hippies from Colorado trying to look like 19 th Century tintypes. They appfoach what is basically happy, abandoned music With a solemnity and humorlessness that is painful indeed to bear. Fortunately, though, it only sometimes ruins the music they’re making.

That is why All The Good Times is an uneveh album. They start out With one of the most embarrasingly hokey bows towards the good ole days I’ve ever encountered. “Sixteen Tracks” is basically just “Mystery Train,” as Elvis did it, but made to sound like an old Sun record, which they tell you over and over again, when they’re not yelliftg out the name of old Sun stars. “Scotty Moore! Yeah! Bill Black!” Etcetera.

Or take their hideous rendering of “Jambalaya.” Despite the spelling, it comes out as “Jim-Bill-Aya,” and seems included mainly so they could get to say “bayou” somewhere on the album.

But the good stuff! Like Kenny O’Dell’s tribute to a Hollywood stunt man, “Slim Carter.” Or the way they blitz the Byrds and Jackson Browne on “Jamaica, Say. You Will.” Or the choppy, exciting rhythms on “Down In Texas.” Or the oddly haunting instrumental “Civil War Trilogy.” And more!

Let’s put it this way: When the NGDB are good, they knock the wind out of Poco, the Byrds, Clover, the Burritos, and all the rest of those bands. They perform exciting, well-arranged and thought out material that is ideally suited for AM, FM, and all that, and they are versatile and tasteful musicians. Their good stuff is good enough that you can ignore the bad stuff, even on an album. And their good stuff is good indeed.

Dear Lord, it's me again. I was just wondering if you could maybe do something about their image before they come out with that big jam album with Roy Acuff and Doc Watson and all those folks. I mean, I'm really gonna start liking them then, and I don't want to be embarrassed in front of my friends

Ed Ward