MARDI GRAS

CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL FANTASY

Halfway into the first cut on this album, I pulled out Hank Williams’ Greatest Hits and got ready to write a joint review while zooming in on all the parallels with The Last Picture Show. The second cut shot that down and I decided Stu Cook’s singing was forced and unsteady. In the middle of the third number, I realized Doug Clifford had written a song of rare subtlety and power and that his singing matched his writing. His next seemed to promise more than it delivered. Then I found myself in the midst of a song so overwhelming, so true and so unflinching I started to cry and would have called John Fogerty to thank him if his number was listed. I played it again and again and finally quit when I realized the song was stronger than I was. I went on to the next side into another of Clifford’s songs, digging his guitar and his three-part vocals and singing along even though I’d never heard it before. The next one featured Cook and seemed flat. Then “Hello, Mary Lou” and that irreplacable rockabilly guitar that’s the “Clearwater” of Creedence. Then Cook’s “Door to Door”, which is about selling cleaning fluid, I realized, and also seducing housewives, I think, and it made it. Then finally “Sweet Hitchiker” to close it out, with a disappearing act into fafniliarity, which struck me as a perfect ending.

It was not a great album, though there was greatness in it, and somehow that seems truer than to say it has great moments, but I was pleased with it anyway. It was a much more likeable album than Pendulum, which is the coolest and most consistent Creedence has ever made. This one had more personality and more life.

Creedence had made a decision to smash the dictatorship of John Fogerty and replace Genius with Equality, which should mean, according to theorists of revolution, from de Tocqueville to Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art. Pretty scary.

But, said Clifford, Cook and Fogerty, what if elitist art is implicitly dehumanizing?

This may sound very arcane, but it’s just my version of the idea that rock and roll is that art that anyone with a guitar or an idea and will to fame, money and satisfaction can make. Stiffer rules would have spared us the Dav6 Clark Five and also John Lennon. I think Creedence has embodied that idea right from the start (though Fogerty’s domination worked against it and ultimately threatened the band and his use of his own talents) and that it is the fact that this idea is still visible and credible when we listen to their music — as it is not visible when we listen to the Stones — that is the essence of the band.

After Creedence reconstituted itself, their first assumption was that the music had to be shared; the question of whose songs were best could not be controlling. If things had not been put on this basis, the band would have broken up, and this brings in a question the Genius vs. Equality dichotomy. I don’t think Fogerty could survive as an artist outside of this little band. I think that working with musicians who have known him for more than ten years, who represent, in some way, his roots and his history, keeps Fogerty in touch with himself and keeps, him honest, the way your roots, when you are in touch with them, act as a sort of conscience.

I think, as I usually do, that it comes down to politics. If the politics of rock and roll are based on the idea that rock and roll is public; that what makes it political is that it is shared; then the crucial political question is, what is shared? With Creedence this is a matter of the aesthetic of their music and the moral perceptions of their songs, and the idea they embody as a band. On the most direct level, there is something implicitly small-time about Creedence, something of the commonplace and the everyday, something that cannot absorb and reflect back the images of sex and stardom that seem to come so naturally to the Stones, Grand Funk or Sly Stone. This bothers Creedence, but I think it is what gives them their strength and what makes them unique.

Creedence’s disregard for musical trends — in fact, their seeming inability to incorporate them even if they wanted to - their insulation from other musicians and the general pop scene, their ability to make music that is like a reminder of something we already know but had almost forgotten, gives us music which is in the deepest sense commonplace, but which is less common than anything else. In the end, their music and the band itself seem obvious only after the fact and put us in touch with a part of ourselves of which we are only dimly aware, aware of it just to the extent that we can respond to its imagery, a part of ourselves that grows to the extent that we continue to listen.

This is what connects Fogerty, “The man of vision,” to Creedence as a band, the small time small town rock and roll band that can stay together indefinitely, because they have made it commercially, and I think that they are ultimately interested in the idea of the band itself, as a partnership that defines their vocation and which they understand to be the thing that makes everything else possible.

I know John Fogerty is not as sure of himself as Mick Jagger, partly because he is more introspective. He confronts both the angels and the demons of his own heart more directly, and allows himself no critical distance. When Jagger sings “Sympathy for the Devil” he is commenting on the statements in that song and;?n those who respond to them. When Fogerty sings “Proud Mary” or “Up Around the Bend” or “Some Day Never Comes” there is no distance between him and the song whatsoever; he is not commenting on anything, he is not even affirming anything, he is living it out. Outside of the band, Fogerty might become so unsteady, so cut off from something I can only call a sense of being at home, that he might exhibit the same depressing naivete as John Lennon or the artistic cannibalism of feeding off your own ideas and nothing else that has affected the Band lately.

Fogerty might find that though he thought he was John Fogerty, Great Songwriter, he was in a deeper sense John Fogerty, Lead Guitarist for Creedence Clearwater and what would he do then? He might start reaching for things like “Cocteau, Van Gogh and Geronimo,” things that seem bigger than “Creedence” but in reality do not even exist.

A few more comments on the new album. Clifford has written a song, “Need Someone to Hold,” about an everyday but somehow inscrutable depression and it is familiar enough, but then he frames it with two lines that resound endlessly:

Didja hear about the war?

It comes on home.

What makes sense out of the blur of the everyday? This does. Ellen Willis wrote recently tliat “In rock, as in politics, there are no private worries.” Part of the function of rock and roll music is to make private worries public, or in the case of this song, to make personal worries political, and without trying to prove anything. The point of this song is not that all troops should be out of Viet Nam tomorrow. Its point is much deeper than that.

“Someday Never Comes” should be in the top ten when this is printed. The insistent drum taps that open the song and the dramatic count-down on the guitar that follows announce that this is it, this is the big one. No other song on the album makes such claims in its first notes and no other deserves to. You don’t have an opening like this too often, because few songs can live up to it. Think of the first notes of “Mr. Tambourine Man” or “The Weight” or the guitar that kicks off “Up Around the Bend.” It’s that time gain; but what is astounding is the depth of what follows.

First thing I remember

Was asking Poppa why

For there were many things

I didn’t know

And Daddy always smiled

And took me by the hand

Sayin’, Someday you’ll understand*

Fogerty gives great love to that simple “you’ll,” & love that will become a terrible irony as the song builds and catches the listener. Immediately Fogerty picks up the pace and slams the song home:

Well I’m here to tell you now

, Each and every mother’s son

You better learn it fast,

You better learn it young

‘Cause someday never comes *

The music is mdre like “Fortunate Son” than anything else, but nowhere near as brutal. Cook’s bass slides over the guitar lines with a deep and perfect sympathy, and Clifford’s drumming orders the song on the verses and pushes it like Charlie Watts on the choruses. The band is strong.

The song moves on. The father goes away, no reasons given. “Try to be a man” is all he has to say, “someday you’ll understand” is all the boy hears. Then the chorus is back again. It sounds no different, but there is a new bitterness, a resentment that is beginning to grow out of the love that is still hanging there on “You’ll... understand.”

That would be enough for most songwriters. Fogerty doesn’t stop; this man is incapable of lying, he simply tells the truth, and in this song are the hardest truths he has ever dealt with.

The singer has a son of his own; in a line that can break your heart, “He wasn’t even there.” Slowly you begin to understand that the singer, the first son, is being trapped by the ghost of his own father. The chorus comes back again, harder than ever, no longer as a way out, but as a sort of blasted hope.

You better learn it fast

You better learn it young

Someday never comes*

Now it is not the strength of the band that is remarkable, but its depth. And Fogerty closes the circle.

Think it was September

The year I went away

For there were many things

I didn’t know

And I still see him

standing there

Trying to be a man

I said, Someday you’ll be a man*

So finally the singer is his own father, his own song, and somehow, himself. He knows what is going to happen and his knowledge somehow makes it even more inevitable that he will recreate the gloom of his own past. If he fights against that in the choruses, stepping out of the prison of his own history for a moment, telling us not to buy anyone’s lies

You better learn it fast,

You better learn it young*

it’s not the answer, it’s just all there is to say. You can never really learn it. Finally, there is only so much of your own life that you can take control of. There are limits to everything, even slogans.

It is the ability to write and to perform material as difficult as this — difficult to conceive, let alone perform — that is at the core of what I’ve tried to say about roots as a conscience. Like everything else, that idea has its dark side, and this is it.

Greil Marcus

* © Greasy King Music

EAT A PEACH

ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND CAPRICORN

The Allman Brothers Band presents a dilemma: certainly they are exciting, perhaps moreso live than on record, and probably represent one of the finest concentrations of technical expertise in any surviving American band. On top of all that,''they’ve got soul aplenty, and know how to write moving songs as well as show off the nimbleness of their fingers. I know people who consider them the best band in the country, and while I can’t agree I can certainly see how someone could arrive at that opinion.

On the flip side of the raveup are some questions deriving from the whole matter of esthetics, and which may devolve to a matter of taste: for instance, how seriously as a musical force for the Seventies can we take a band like this (or J. Geils, for that matter), which relies for so much of its inspiration and output on blues readymades? I mean, do you really care if you ever hear another rendition of “Statesboro Blues” or “You Don’t Love Me?” Or do you think that the principle of delving endlessly into the muddy waters (sorry) of such material in search of the definitive blue note and funk slur may be basically just a crutch to conceal a lack of imagination? nation?

There is also the matter of the worship of guitar players, which may be a bit more warranted in the case of the Allman Brothers than as cold a coalition as, say, Cream, but still is a rather disgusting phenomenon with distinctly unhealthy effects on the scene in general. When The Allman Brothers Live At the Fillmore East came out, some people reacted as if it were the ultimate power statement of the contemporary rock ’n’ roll band. Others listened with mild interest, conceding that there were certainly some blistering passages but that in the end all the openended guitar pyrotechnics were as excessive and hollow-marrowed as the messiest, most protracted spasms of Alvin Lee and Cactus. In fact, some would even go so far as myself and say that I actually prefer an orgiastic grossout like “Goin’ Home” on the Woodstock soundtrack to Duane Allman’s celebrated, very driving and much more technically respectable attacks. Because Alvin Lee seems somehow closer to the sense of fun and loon-lunging derision at the core of rock ’n’ roll; who wants to be respectable, anyway? The Allman Brothers acolytes would only sigh and respond with a weary, “Yes, but that’s just noise; this is jazz . . . ”

Well, I don’t mean to come on Jike any lofty expert on the subject of bebop, but they’re wrong. Eat a Peach, notwithstanding the absence of the late Duane on side one, is a perfectly standard, fairly predictable Allman Brothers album, which means that it’s wellplayed, enjoyable music with as much jamming as we’ve come to expect (meaning perhaps a bit too much) and a bit more eclection than previous albums. They sound every bit as good without Duane as they did with him, and every bit as excessive when it comes to guitar-ostentation too: “Les Brers in A Minor” stretches the limits of the soloists’ imaginations in much the same way that “Mountain Jam” does, even if it is about a fourth as long. “Mountain Jam”, taking off from Donovan’s “First There Is a Mountain,” is as long as John Coltrane’s “Evolution,” 36 minutes of riffing and rolling whose chasms are probably not as great as its heights, but God, the harmonic framework tjiese guys are working in is just too limited to support this kind of prolixity if they expect anybody to actually sit there and listen to it all. On the other hand, it makes great high-energy muzak, and that’s not a snide comment, just a reflection of the uses to which recorded sound is put today. The most telling factor that I could mention is that both songs'show a distinct Grateful Dead influence, or the Allmans have found themselves working at extending the boundaries of the rock ’n’ roll solo in much the same way as the Dead. Except that they’re not really extending anything, because so much of “Improvisation” of both groups depends on loping rushes up and down the scales and the tendency to abandon the pursuit of particular thematic ideas for the “cosmic” fixation on one handful of notes which will be played in various sequences whose organization is unimportant, often to “free-form” (i.e., static) rhythms. Check out the opening guitar statement in “Les Brers,” which almost sounds like a tune-up, for a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

The rest of the album (maybe a third of it, since “Mountain Jam” consumes two entire sides) features a series of originals, most of them based in the blues and all of them pleasant listening if seldom really compelling. I don’t hear a “Dreams” or “Revival” here, that’s for sure. “Melissa” sticks in the memory most persistently after a half-dozen listenings, something, somehow, but then rock ’n’ rollers hardly ever seem to muster as much passion when dealing with the lovers who have perhaps brought order and meaning to their lives as when they’re ranting into the darkness and striking out against those who’ve done them dirt. I mean, there are people who’ll tell you that “Tupelo Honey” has as much feeling as “Cypress Avenue,” but I don’t believe it.

There are also the seemingly obligatory blues standards (Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters this time), done, at least, with no blackface posturing or sexual conceits (i.e., they might be better if they were), and a short, lyrical guitar duet called “Little Martha” that sounds real sweet.

If it seems like I have deliberately avoided talking about Duane Allman in this review, I haven’t; I simply don’t think he was that important as an artist or a musician, his death was not a personal loss to me as, say, Eric Dolphy’s and Jim Morrison’s were or John McLaughlin’s might be. Musicians, heroes, and everyday people are going to keep dying all around us, steadily, and once the memorials have been read and tears shed by those who really have something to cry about (meaning that, for instance, I knew people who felt worse about Jimf Hendrix’s OD demise than they did about their own friends’), the musical-cultural necrophilia should not set in if we can help it. The Allman Brothers are doing just fine, and while I can’t say they’re the type of band of which obsessions and entire weltanschaungs are formed, I will always be glad to see another one of their records even though I presume that I will always know exactly how much to expect.

Lester Bangs

ROADWORK

EDGAR WINTER'S WHITE TRASH EPIC

It was one of those days. You know, Spring Fever and all that. Ben tumbled in from the Agitator laundromat grinning vacantly, mumbling something about Big John would be proud of him... A truly revolutionary act, even if he did eat the roach.

Worse, I knew that copy deadlihe was about to descend on me but still I was stalling. Everytime I put Roadwork on the turntable, I’d think of the day when Mike McLellan of White Trash came over to the house and was telling us about the plan that the band had to dress Edgar up as an Easter Bunny (pink eyes and all). Great! Eggy and the Easter Eggs! (Well, if we can’t have iggy.. •)

Still, I wouldn’t listen to the album. My last resolve was to go see the band at the Cinderella that weekend. That would certainly prod me into action. And they did, though not in the way I expected.

White Trash, or whatever the name of the new. band is, stunk. Edgar put on a vocal gymnastic contest with the Rick Derringer look-alike guitar player. (Incidentally, it is rumored that they hired him solely for his resemblance to Mr. D.) I was crushed, especially since White Trash had previously been one of my all-time favorite rock ‘n’ roll bands.

Seeking reassurance, when I got home I dusted off the old Sears Medalist Electric, put on the record and unfolded the cover. Fourteen full-color photos of Edgar and his friends and family, not to mention the Organic Director’s name printed, obviously, in blue.

In the .pics, the band look like everyday glittery, studded and velveted rock stars. It’s a ruse. Listen to this album, and you know they’re (still) Greaser-Party-Crashing types. You know those rowdy, romping, hard-riding hoods that used to wobble drunkenly into those high school hops and then turn them loose. And Roadwork is their portable whoopee-maker.

White Trash will make you lose your cool (“If you feel like letting it out, hot damn letit-out!”) coming on fast and hot, because the thrills are quick and cheap, showing you a good time just like the bar band you alwaysknew they were.

It holds up on all the Rockability tests but one. It’s sufficiently danceable that it was hard for me to sit still long enough to type this properly. And as for the Rock Cliche Check, there are enough “rock on childs,” “get downs,” and “put your hands together, I wanna hear you say yeah,” to fill a rock dictionary. And the music is all just as familiar and just as much fun, with one exception. Now, Edgar, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about “Tobacco Road.” Seventeen minutes and thirteen seconds! I thought we agreed on sockin’ it to ‘em, not showin’ it off. I thought you had all that pent up quasi-jazz stuff out of your system.

Tobacco Road” features Edgar in his famous onstage gargling act; this is only surpassed by The Voice Used As A Musical Instrument Stunt. (They used to call it scat, but it never sounded like this.) In fact, Edgar sometimes even mimics a hummingbird orgasm perfectly.

All in all, I’d say that this is the best one and a half record set since Second Winter.

Jaan Uhelszki

SATURATE BEFORE USING JACKSON BROWNE ASYLUM

Mythically, Jackson Browne emerged from an article in Cheetah (the magazine of rock, when Crawdaddy! was the ’zine of roll) in late ’67 or early ’68, along with Tim Buckley and Steve Noonan. Sort of the Orange County Three — Buckley was good, they said, and had a couple records out you could listen to to prove it, and Noonan was better. (He wasn’t.) And Jackson Browne was not only the youngest of this trio who’d grown up and gone to High School in Southern California together, he was the best.

Well, the other two were mostly a flash in the pan, Buckley smug and then lethargized terribly, Noonan merely obscure and inconsequential. Jackson never did get his record out in the ensuing years, though I used to hear about tapes he’d made and Nico recorded three songs on her first album, Chelsea Girl.

Two of those songs were among the three best songs on the album. The third was Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” and they were somehow of a piece with, that; Nico took all of them a little bit too seriously, but there you are. That’s Nico.

“There Days” and “Somewhere There’s A Feather” were nice, full of whimsy and wit, not quite your typical folk-song/art-song schmaltz of the period (or this one, either). Even lucidly bitter, which is where the Dylan comes in, I guess. “Somewhere There’s A Feather” had a nice couplet that stuck in my mind:

Somehow you must live up to

the precedent you’ve set

You need not hope

for answers yet.

But the years passed and no Jackson Browne yet. When David Geffen announced Asylum’s formation, one of the first acts he proclaimed was Jackson, but I didn’t take it very seriously. I mean, I didn’t think there’d ever be a record, actually, and by that time, I didn’t figure I’d like it much.

I was wrong, really wrong. Saturate ain’t a rock and roll record, by a long shot, but when it is good, it’s as good as Van Morrison when he’s on. “Doctor My Eyes,” the single, which looks to be a hit, maybe, is really fine, and it does rock, with some of that same jittery semi-reggae funk that made “Mother and Child Reunion” such a pleasure. Jesse Davis has a nice guitar figure in the middle and it even sounds better on the radio than it does at home, which means it should be a single, I guess.

“Rock Me On the Water” has a catchy chorus, too, and would make a nice follow up. Most of the other songs aren’t this good, but they’re all good, and not just plainsong for the seventies, either. I think that Browne was a little overcareful (that line from “Somewhere” might apply) but he does have a sense of humor, and that I can relate to. “Doctor My Eyes” is an interesting pun and “Song for Adam” has the gall to be about the original rock and roll duo.

Just a little more sense of adventure next time, and don’t take four years to do it, kid.

Dave Marsh