On the road to Marin County

On the road to Marin County

BORDER LORD KRIS KRISTOFFERSON MONUMENT

Anybody who’s seen the movie Cisco Pike knows that Kris Kristofferson’s a pretty good actor. He’s likeable, charismatic in a way that sneaks up on you, and able to convey the proper emotions most of the time. His facial expressions don’t change too much, though, which suggests that he might be better on radio, as of course he is. A bitch of a lyricist with a deep sonorous voice capable of expressing regret, wry humor and philosophical jags of varying profundity and pretension, he acts his way through his songs, playing himself or the derelict troubador he once was or would like to be with enough authenticity to make you forget that he actually possesses about IV2 melodies.

In a sense Kristofferson is like a Jack Kerouac for the Seventies, laying out the American dream of romantic desolation with a subtlety whose limits are defined by the limitations of his subject matter and sensibility. He makes a bit too much of being down and out to be taken with total seriousness, and since he is at least partially a bohemian, or at least bound by his audience to remain hip, he can never apprehend the suburban respectability that is the flip side of standard C&W music’s theme of the barroom as nihilistic metaphor for society. So you get a real sense of redundance not only from his melodies but his subject matter, and the only way out would seem to be for him to promulgate the vision of idyllic connubial bliss Van Morrison is currently lying his ass off about. Which is really no answer at all.

Border Lord is a nice record, with three or four songs that can be moving if you’re in the mood for this thing or don’t mind being manipulated like an old Western of good vintage can manipulatively touch you, but anybody who entertained visions of an almost imperceptible loss of vitality when The Silver Tongued Devil and I, fine as it was, didn’t quite equal the first album, will not be any more surprised by the quality and durability of the material here than they will by the subject matter. This album hardly contains a “Help Me Make It Through The Night” or “For the Good Times,” much less a “Bobby McGee” or “Sunday Momin’ Cornin’ Down.” Hell, I don’t even hear a good bit of wry weltschmerz like “The Best of All Possible Worlds.” Jim Nabors and Jerry Vale will never record any of these songs, though some country artists may have a go at them.

Still, this is hardly Kristofferson’s Mud Slide Slim; he may well be more naive than complacent. Take a song like “Burden of Freedom,” whose Vocal is almost reminiscent in its deep scrapings of something on Alexander Spence’s Oar, though hardly as idiosyncratically obscure: “Voices behind me still/Bitterly damn me/ For seekin’ salvation they don’t understand.” Another man with Calvinist roots gnawing at him, dwelling almost more on them than the future or present state of passage. He doesn’t really know what to do with his freedom, or his suffering, except display them almost preeningly, wringing out every last pseudo-epiphany.

Take “Josie,” a song dealing with a young lad’s first fuck and romance (“She led me to some bridges I was burnin’ to cross”) and the obligatory “tragic” aftermath; in this case she ends up a hooker, “gettin’ back the bitter for the sweet.” Now, I understand this is serious stuff, but I just wish he would get a bit more humor into these songs a la “Best of All Possible Worlds”; even a gag about crabs, or the hooker telling the poor poetic soul not to worry about her (as in Never On Sunday), anything.

Kristofferson romanticises and mythologises the condition of separation, and does it all so neatly that you can predict many of the rhymes before you hear them, not with a gleeful sense of anticipation, but the simple knowledge of which cliche is next going to fit like a trestle into its place. (But it is a trestle.) “See the little girl lost/ Walkin’ through this world alone/ She ain’t lookin’ for a lover/ She’s just lookin’ for a home.” In rock ‘n’ roll and much country music, the band sound shores up the commonplace words, making them profound by their tonal freight and the very fact that they are commonplace. But here the sparsity of accompaniment on most songs directs our attention straight at the lyrics, leaving us with ,some nice sentiments and a set of stereotypes. In Kristofferson’s world, all the women are either floozies or lost angels-of-the-morning or lost Last Hopes. In any case all of them are lost (or left). And the men are mostly old or young derelicts spending their nights in bars and their mornings drearily contemplating the wrong turns they took (and the warm safe nuclearfamily world they don’t have) through the dented ironies of a hangover, while their afternoons find them yanking at the knots on their bags, slinging them over their shoulders and heading out down the road, just as Kristofferson does at the end of Cisco Pike.

All of that can be very appealing; the only trouble is that it doesn’t really lead anywhere, except through another glass of beer and back to the road. I’d much rather be on the road with Kristofferson than some hippie trying to get to Cambridge and waiting for groovy folk to come by and tum him on. But I can’t really see, basically, that one is necessarily any less stagnant than the other, or that Kristofferson is at the helm of the myth instead of vice versa. Or maybe it’s just that he doesn’t seem so much driven by the “devils” that populate his songs as he seems to be riding their horns from one truckstop ginmill to the next with just a bit too much comfort for my own.

Lester Bangs

TOGETHER JESSE COLIN YOUNG WARNER BROTHERS/RACCOON

Of all the music coming out of Marin County, California, there hasn’t been a whole lot that’s very good at all. Musicians exposed to the delightful Marin County air tend to become so laid-back they can hardly stand up. This process takes some time, of course, and occasionally some good music results along the way. The most classic example of this process of degeneration, to my mind, has been Van Morrison, whose cutesy dreams of domesticity have spawned some of the most abysmally icky lyrics since the heyday of Rogers and Hart. Currently, he seems to be relegated to working without a band, and on the last occasion I saw him, he sang a song whose entire lyrics went something like “Went out to see the redwoods/Me and my little boy/The big trees all around us/Filled our hearts with joy.” Of course, terrible lyrics are perfectly excusable if they’re clothed in a good melody, but that is another department that Van seems to be losing interest in, as witness his last two albums.

Not all the bands in Marin County have given up the ghost — just most of them. One that hasn’t is a group that seems to be getting harder to think of as a band: the Youngbloods. Their Raccoon recording enterprise, only a year or so old, has already put out ten albums, ranging from Michael Hurley, who is so laid-back that his album has been known to paralyze listeners, to a whole bunch of horrible jazz attempts like Joe Bauer’s Moonset. Plus, of course, the Youngbloods’ albums, which have varied from unlistenable (Rock Festival) to pretty good (Ride The Wind).

The charm of the whole Raccoon operation has been in its homemade aura, its feeling of a letter from friends who have their troubles keeping it together but who succeed in spite of themselves sometimes. You get the feeling that each album is more or less tossed off to the publip without a second thought, and this attitude can be both commendable and dangerous. With the release of something like Crab Tunes And Noggins they run the risk of infuriating people to the degree that they’ll never buy another Youngbloods record again, and by asking folks to shell out five bucks or so for it, they add injury to insult. But when this homemade trip really works, the results are fantastic. While Van Morrison sweats blood to try and convince his audience of his authenticity, with the Youngbloods you can tell they’re authentic to begin with because they’re so incompetent so often.

But like I said, when the whole thing comes together, it really works. And it’s really come together on Jesse Colin Young’s first solo album since the days when he was recording. for Capitol, Together. Recorded “at home and in Raccoon Studio A,” it is delightfully unpretentious, subtle, and warm. As much as I realize that phrases like “mellow,” “organic,” and so on are cliches for this type of music, they really apply here.

Young uses his songs mainly as a vehicle for his voice, which is almost icy in its purity. The lyrics, as might be expected, are no great shakes, but he has written melodies that allow the interpretation to lie mainly in the singing. For instance, Chuck Berry fans might well be incensed by his handling of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” but Young’s interpretation reminded me that that song, like “Sweet Little Rock and Roller,” was written for Berry’s daughter and, like Young’s own “Sweet Little Child,” is no more necessarily a confession of crazed lust for nymphets than “Mr. Tambourine Man” is an LSD commercial. Some of the other non-originals on Together, get the same kind of outrageous treatment. I can’t think why he’d bother to record “Bom In Chicago,” except that the band has such a great time with it, and I defy anybody to drive a truck to his “Six Days On The Road.”

Still, that’s not to put down his interpretations, and those songs are more or less fillers between such wonderful original songs as “Good Times” with its great mellow horn background for Young to bounce his voice off of, and the title song, a beautiful vocal workout in the classic Youngbloods tradition. The masterpiece, though, is Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” the last song on the album. Jt starts out ordinarily enough, but soon builds to an exquisite duet between Jesse and an alto sax, in which he proves that he can sing quietly with more effect than some people get from wrenching their guts out. It’s an amazing song, nothing less.

Special mention should go to the band on Together, too, seeing as how it’s not the Youngbloods. Especially tasty is Scott Lawrence’s piano work, which is ideally suited to Young’s music in a way that made me think that it must have been Banana, his piano-playing cohort of all these years, because nobody else could follow him so well.

Together is an album that I find really satisfying, with an admirable amount of fine music. It’s fresh-sounding — everything sounds like it was done on the first take,, which, as a glance to the liner will prove, it wasn’t — and gives a totally new meaning to what I’ve always called Marin County LivingRoom Rock. Up till now, I’d thought it was nothing but a bunch of aimless jamming on acoustic instruments. Now I know that sometimes it can really be ... together.

Ed Ward

SAILIN'SHOES LITTLE FEAT WARNER

For all our pretense, biologists tell us that not only have our own little feet not physically adapted to the feel of cement under them, but the human body has yet to adjust to walking upright. Small wonder, then, that our heavy heads have trouble coping with the blur of their grotesque inventions . . . The occasion for these musings on metaphysics and metatarsals is the new album by Little Feat, better known as Tex Boogie and the Existentialists. For they have come up with a technically perfect, emotionally wasted soundtrack for what some people envision as the Great American Movie — the rock score to Angst On the Range, as co-directed by Preminger and Godard, screenplay by Fellini and Sartre, starring David Carradine, Groucho Marx and Steve Stills, co-featured with the Truffaut-Antonioni-Pete Fonda production of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Trucker, as played by Sirhan Sirhan, with Jane Wyatt as Dallas Price, John Prine as Dillon, and the Rolling Stones as the Buffalo Springfield.

Little Feat’s music has roots (though they themselves, of course, are ambulatory). Although their closest sources are pretty obvious at times — early Crosby, Stills and Nash in “Easy to Slip” and “Got No Shadow,” vintange Band in “Trouble” and “Willin’ ” with liberal sprinklings of the Stones throughout, they take after them in a sort of lanky, natural way. They make exceptionally competent, engaging music, but for all their country rococo there isn’t one cut on this album that isn’t saturated with paranoia, angst or cosmic displacement. Of course, there’s humor, thank God — “Willin’ ” depends on it — and irony, but their cool virtuosity together with the weariness and confusion (even the inside cover photos show them gradually being enveloped in smoke) has to divert from an unreserved pleasure for all but the devotedly masochistic. “Easy to Slip,” with its ambivalent surrender to the purple haze of forgetfulness when “the whole world seems so cold today/ all the magic’s gone away” — a tone picked up and pounded at in “Cold Cold Cold,” an image-story of rockers on the road and its miasma of haze and hassle — develops quickly into the emblematic ultimate of world-weariness in “Trouble”: “ ’Cause your eyes are tired and your feet are too, and you wish the world was as tired as you.”

I’m not saying this record is not enjoyable or praiseworthy — the fact that it is unsettling does not necessarily detract from its musical merits, but it does keep me at a distance, one way or another. The bes*t songs, like “Willin’ ” (which, following “Tripe Face Boogie,” a paeon to fuck-it-all escapism, is tripe on the face of it but is so well done that it ends up being moving, even valiant) or “Salin’ Shoes” or “Texas Rose Cafe,” are either ambivalent on fairly dangerous territories, or committed to anachronisms. “Teenage Nervous Breakdown” has no core of conviction, really; though it seems to parody d put-down (a putdown which hasn’t really been active for years). The aura of paranoia, especially in “Cat Fever,” adds weight to the feeling that this might be as much a self-parody as anything, and that they just might not be too sure that rock ‘n’ roll isn’t bad for the body and bad for the soul.

Perhaps all this will clear up on further hearings, or be resolved in some future installment. For now, this record is still one small step for some intelligent musicians and one middle-sized step for intelligent music. And that’s no little feat. (It ain’t little faces either.)

William Kowinski

GREENHOUSE LEO KOTTKE CAPITOL

Way back when, I inserted myself into a college that was famed for its beatnik population, the better, I thought at the time, to hasten the process of becoming one myself. I assiduously cultivated the right friendships, and in almost no time I was being invited to parties where strange films were shown, odd discussions took place, and mostly a goodly quantity of marijuana was smoked. This last procedure was highly ritualized: first one had to stuff a towel under the door to make sure no fumes escaped into neighboring apartments, then one lit the incense, and then the music was chosen with great care — set and setting, y’know, The marijuana was then rolled into thin cigarettes, inserted into a chicken bone that had been hollowed out and usually was painted or carved, and smoked delicately.

The music chosen for these parties was • quite varied, excepting that these quiet, cerebral people seldom chose rock and roll. Indian music was big, because many of these folks studied it, and so was Balinese gamelan. Quiet, mellow Blue Note jazz got played, Carmina Burana enjoyed a vogue, and folksingers were popular among a certain set. But the only album you could count on absolutely everybody having was one with a cover edged in black that simply announced BLIND JOE DEATH. Nobody was sure who he was, except that he might have been somebody named John Fahey, whose name also appeared on the record. I would say that this album, and another one called, I believe, Death Chants, Breakdowns, and Military Waltzes, got played more than anything else, with the possible exception of Ravi Shankar’s Ragas and Talas album. Everybody loved it.

Everybody except me. I never voiced my opinion, of course, because some of these people had even taken LSD, and so must have been infinitely wiser than my young self, but John Fahey annoyed the fuck out of me. True, he was technically accomplished, but he had the irritating habit of setting up a complex musical situation that demanded to be resolved, and, instead of resolving it, he’d just strum a couple of irrelevant chords and set off in another direction. After a while, the cumulative tension of all those unresolved situations got to me, and I stopped listening to him. Other guitar wizards began appearing on the horizon — Robbie Basho, who was mostly pretension, Peter Walker, who announced the dawning of the age of raga even though it sounded more like noodling to my raga-experienced ears, Sandy Bull, who was tolerable, and even our own Sunny McGrath, who played pretty decent acid guitar at parties, but made his two records for Adelphi after he’d found Jesus and his style had deteriorated seriously.

And then, after I’d given up all hope, along came Leo Kottke’s first album on Takoma. Here was somebody who understood the guitar inside out, and who was not only possessed of a formidable technique, but also a musical imagination of a scope that all those other folks lacked. Kottke always found a novel and exciting way to extricate himself from whatever situation he would set up. His tunes were tuneful, his inventions inventive. I was ecstatic. Then I found a copy of his album on the Symposium label, on which there is a cut called “Easter And The Sargasso Sea,” in which he does something impossible with harmonics that I would be at some pains to attempt to describe. But, listening to that album, I realized yet another secret of the guitar that Kottke had conquered — that the strings are there solely so that the guitar itself can make a sound. Something happens inside the sound box that involves reverberation and echo and which results in the guitar having a sound of its own. And Kottke had tamed it, made it do jvhat it was he wanted it to do. And that’s no mean feat.

“Easter And The Sargasso Sea” isn’t on Greenhouse, but it scarcely matters. The album is solidly good, first-rate Leo Kottke material, unhampered by a supernumerary rhythm section or Kim Fowley’s well-intentioned but disastrous attempts at collaboration, both of which made Kottke s last album, Mudlark, something of a chore to get through. There are some real good vocals (despite everything, I like Kottke’s voice because it reminds me of Frank Sinatra, and you can say what you will, but Sinatra is not only a'good singer, but a good stylist, and the same can be said for Kottke), including three non-originals, one by Paul Siebel, one by somebody named A1 Gaylor called “Tiny Island” where Kottke really gets to sing, and one by San Francisco’s unknown genius songwriter Ron Nagle (whose Warner Brothers album, number WS 1902, title Bad Rice, you are hereby instructed to search out and buy). The songs, at best, serve as vehicles for the contrast between Kottke’s fluid, melodic vocals and the mad brew he’s stirring up with his fingers on the guitar, and none of them really stand out as songs.

The instrumentals, of course, do stand out. Each of them is finely wrought and well thought out, and on each of them the moan, the guitar’s inner voice, is evident. My par-" ticular favorites are “The Spanish Entomologist,” which he described as “a medley made up of a children’s song and my two favorite songs when I was a kid,” which were apparently “Jambalaya” and “Tumbling Tumbleweed^,” and his masterful reworking of “Lost John,” on which he has some crackerjack second guitar assistance from one Steve Gammell. He pays homage to his mentor Fahey with “In Christ There Is No East Or West” and “Last Steam Engine Train,” both of which are done to perfection.

If you’ve never heard Leo Kottke before, try and catch him live (he is a really fascinating performer, with a lot of good stage raps), and, failing that, get Greenhouse and hope that Symposium will make that first album available widely again.

Ed Ward

IN SEARCH OF SPACE HAWKWIND UNITED ARTISTS

Have you ever felt the urge to visit the distant reaches of the galaxy? I don’t mean in some freaked-out 2001 Pink Floyd acid trip, naw, forget that — it’s no fun to take the universe that solemnly, nobody cool wants to be the psychic mad scientist. Instead, imagine yourself Danny Dunn, Junior Space Cadet, making a run to the teenage stars. Maybe you don’t have enough imagination, but that’s OK because Hawkwind supplies that and all the visual aids you need. Inside this bizarre interlocking cover with pictures of strange figures in control rooms throbbing with unearthly lights comes a little booklet (it came in my copy anyway — they do sometimes deprive you peasants out there in Retail Land of these goodies) called “The Hawkwind Log.” (Every cadet worth his rocket insignia knows a starship must carry a log.) Inside are all kinds of nifty pix of star clusters and a lot of random quotes from scientific pamphlets. Also a generous serving of hogwash about chakras and mantras and plenty of mystical pieties, but you see the captain of the Starship Hawkwind is a crypto-Buddhist, chasing the Tao through space like Ahab’s whale.

You can even sneak into the captain’s cabin and read the log while you listen to the record, if you find that helps. You shouldn’t need much help though, with songs like “Master of the Universe”, which combines the swirling electronic gibberish sound effects of every 1957 science fietion flick from War of the Doom Zombies to Journey to the Center of Uranus with a melodramatic voice intoning “I am Master of the Universe”. Go on, don’t be ashamed to say it, every cadet does on his first trip out. Being in space does sort of give you that feeling anyway, especially if you’ve got one of these new modem souped-up jobs that can whisk you from here to Betelgeuse before you can say, “Warp factor eight, Mr. Sulu.”

But you should’ve realized you’d get caught reading the captain’s log, and now you must sit still for one of the old coot’s tiresome lectures, this one titled “We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago”. Man, you think if only those stupid hippies back in the 20th century hadn’t loaded the ancient teachings down with all this moralistic self-righteousness, and if only Captain Kilo hadn’t been raised in one of the last psychebiotic communes, I wouldn’t have to listen to this dreck today! But then, youth is always impatient with the foibles of the elderly. Just remember, all things must pass.

Luckily for you the sermon is cut short by a red alert — a real outer space rock & roll emergency! Freddie the Friendly Computer is desperately trying to explain his malfunction as circuits overheat into the danger zone and his voice starts going faster and faster until it peaks off the deep end, pleading frantically, “adjust me, adjust me!!” There are tense minutes ahead as the crew work swiftly and bravely to repair the damage and you revel in the excitement of it all, power chords and churning guitars in your head along with the everpresent synthesizer noise.

But the day is saved of course and you spend the rest of the voyage perched before the big screen on the Bridge, daydreaming the light years away with fantasies of bold explorations and heroic achievements in quadrants where no man has gone before. And like every kid, your head is also full of rock & roll, for the most part (since after all you’re concentrating on other things) those same repetitive chords and distant muffled drums that have been identified with deep space ever since Pink Floyd first recorded thejn way back sometime in the last century on a song called ‘‘Interstellar Overdrive.” Nobody’s captured the romantic aspects of space travel any better in all the years since then, and besides the music does go awfully well with that cauldron of synthesizer stuff every startstruck junior cadet likes to pour into his head.

Side two (labeled side one but they mixed ’em up somehow) of the Hawkwind album provides 23 minutes of this, and if that’s enough for you (or so the old spacehands’ saying goes) you’re probably too much of a dreamer to ever make it through the Space Academy.

Final note to the weary record buyer: this album is exactly the same as their first one except that it didn’t have as many sound effects. Both provide good energetic background music. They new one is better if you’re getting into the Psychedelic Nostalgia movement, however — it even comes with a big beautiful art nouveau poster (copied from one of Mouse’s 1967 Avalon jobs, I think) that says — get this — “Love & Peace.” These guys don’t miss a trick.

Greg Shaw

ROCKPILE DAVE EDMUNDS MAM/LONDON

There is much talk about supermusicians, and it sometimes seems that all you have to do is get in on a couple of blues jams with the right people to be proclaimed one, but Dave Edmunds just may be the real thing. Though little recognized in this country, he is certainly one of the best guitarists ever to come out of England, prolific and individual in a myriad of styles.

And that, ironically, is where the trouble begins. Because Edmunds is basically a musician, as opposed to a writer or innovator, in the same way that Eric Clapton is, and his career up to now has seemed like one long search for the never-quite-found stylistic niche that will click and let him cruise free at last. He led a trio called Love Sculpture for awhile, who released two extraordinarily uneven albums in this country. The first, on Rare Earth, was called Blues Helping and consisted mainly of pleasant, acceptable standard British post-Cream blues jam fare, including a dull cover of Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again,” although two incredible tracks, an instrumental called “The Stumble” and a laser rendition of Slim Harpo’s “Shake Your Hips,” indicated unmistakably the power that Edmunds was capable of. The second album, Forms and Feelings (on Parrot), was even more perplexing in its attempts to be arty and its mediocre, muddily cross-generic attempts at composition. But it saved itself with a wailing arrangement of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” that was almost as good as the Stones’ and two stunning surprises: Bizet’s “Farandole” and Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” distended into an elevenminute amphetamine lashing that, sounded at times like Eric Clapton restored to his youth of “Slowhand” mania and at others like Alvin Lee played at 78 RPM. It was some of the fastest playing I had ever heard in my life, but also some of the most crazed, and it evidenced a profound understanding of the guitar’s facility for becoming a quintessentially metallic voice.

Shortly after that Edmunds broke up the group, purchased, an expensive recording studio and went into several months of musical meditation and experiment, during which, according to the hype in front of me, he worked his ass off to get an exact replication of that old Sun sound that used to come with ease via shitty equipment and dingy studios.

The first product of his hiatus was the enormous hit, “I Hear You Knocking,” an exercise in nostalgia that was saved only by its drollness and the fact that it was amped-up just enough. The second is this album, which I am beginning to like a lot even though I still have my reservations. The number one reservation is why in god’s name should anybody recording in the Seventies want to sound like soihe old vintage piece of static from 15 years ago when the brand-new forms of static, like Edmunds’ “Sabre Dance” spasms, are so much more interesting and fun?

Rockpile poses the problem graphically, almost painfully, without really coming to any kind of conclusion. At its worst it offers two Chuck Berry songs done down to the last note and inflection in rigorous imitation of the master’s versions. They’re nice and respectful, but so what? Then there is the almost-straight (the heavy infusions of guitar wizardry are most welcome) blues stuff, like “Hell of Pain” and Willie Dixon’s “Egg of the Hen,” which you almost can predict before ever hearing them. The almost is crucial, because they do have that extra something, the Edmunds touch of inspired musicianship, that makes them memorable and brings you back, just like Edmunds’ version of “I’m a Lover, Not a Fighter,” which is as good as the Kinks’ version if not surpassing it by the sheer intensity of its deep gutty guitar pulsations, and the rendition of Ron Davies’ “It Ain’t Easy,” with its fade-introduction of flashing Grateful Deadish riffings in a kozmic void of cloudy vocal drones, After Davies’, Mitch Ryder’s and Long John Baldry’s thorough exploitation of the song, I thought I’d never want to hear it again, but Edmunds actually manages to give it something new, and despite the lack of transcendent fire and ambition everywhere present that is what consistently saves this album.

The best is saved for first and last: “Down Down Down” is a straight-ahead original in a Kinks-Berry-Moby Grape vein, and the great, disorderly version of “Outlaw Blues” is enough to make you wish Dylan would start popping his fingers, let the joice flow and get loose again. It should also be noted that except for the. bass and backing vocals of John Williams from Love Sculpture, and one or two riiusicians added on three tracks, Edmunds played all the instruments on this album, and it sounds like a big, raucous, fulltilt band. That again is a measure both of his genius and his predicament. Seemingly unable to find any exterior context into which he can fit, he engages in what must be Herculean efforts and actually succeeds in become his own band. It sounds fine, but it doesn’t seem to be headed in any particular direction in either personal or musical terms. So far, this man is a brilliant anomaly.

Lester Bangs

ONE YEAR COLIN BLUNSTONE EPIC

Last summer, after falling out of the rear end of a rapidly moving pick-up truck and consequently breaking various and sundry pieces of my framework, I discovered, during the leisure and boredom of my convalescence, a gorgeous album called Odessey and Oracle by the Zombies. I started every day, finished every day, and courageously endured every day to its gimpy little melodies and cute little songs. When I wasn’t within plugging-in range of an electric socket, I hummed portions of it out loud for the benefit of any and all passers-by who might be ignorant of its existence, to wit: “Goom goom goom pah., goom goom goom pah, it’s the tahm, of the season, dum dum dum ...” Every single song on the album pervaded and monopolized my consciousness for hours on end at one time or another. I did, and still do consider the whole thing one of the greatest examples of pure pop music ever waxed. And it’s becausp Odessey and Oracle, was so great that I find One Year by Colin Blunstone so disappointing.

Colin Blunstone, as you probably know, was the blue-school-blazer-and-Beano-Annual epitome of the British schoolboy turned rock star who sang in all of the Zomb’s old hits. He has one of those overtly innocent, somewhat high-pitched but wonderfully clear voices with just the slightest hint of a developing sore throat coming to it. After he quit the company of his fellow Zombies, he went into selling insurance of all things, while at the same time keeping his hand in by cutting a few singles under the name Neil MacArthur. After about a year of this general direction-^ lessness, he got back together with old friends Rod Argent and Chris White and cut a new album, which took about a year to finish, hence the title.

There are only three songs on the album which compare favpurably to the delightful allure of Odessey and Oracle. Not surprisingly, they’re the ones on which Colin is backed by Rod Argent’s group. One of them, “She Loves the Way They Love Her,” probably even transcends anything Colin has sung previously for pure bop quotient and accessibility. And two other great, hummable songs, “Caroline Goodbye” and Mike d’Abo’s “Mary Won’t You Please Warm My Bed,” are just about as fine.

Unfortunately, everything else here is just plain boring. The remainder of .the songs are pervaded by a totally over-arranged string section that’s a blot on the whole album. Why the strings were given so much prominence is beyond me. On “Misty Roses,” for example, Colin gives the song a fairly traditional working through, and then the strings take over for a sort of quartet solo. At first I was reminded of the background music from particularly poignant bits of Bachelor Father. Later I surmised that either Blunstone or his arranger Chris Gunning had probably been listening to George Martin’s Yellow Submarine soundtrack too much. After the solo, Colin attempts to resurrect the song 'by including another verse of the chorus. It doesn’t work. The string break has robbed the song of all its continuity, and the attmpt to continue is disastrous.

In most instances the plush backing serves only to compete against Colin’s voice instead of enhancing it. This is most evident on “Though You ,Are Far Away”; while Colin drones away at an otherwise passable melody, the arrangement behind him builds until it eventually comes to saturate the song. What this and the rest of the dreck suggest is that Blunstone is attempting to be something he definitely isn’t — an artist. Colin Blunstone is at his best in pop songs, the easy-going kind of drivel we used to (still do, some of us, I guess) bop to in high school gymnasiums half a decade ago. Happy, melodious, easy-todance-to songs.

I suppose I may be open to the criticism that I haven’t really tried to involve myself in the album on its own terms, that I expected one kind of music, didn’t get it, and so haven’t really made an effort to reach an understanding of what the artist is trying to do. Not so.'I’ve tried to like it through countless playings, but it’s just too samey and overworked. It should be mentioned that quite a few old Zombies freaks are enamoured of this record; sadly, with the exception of three cuts, I am not one of them.

Alan Niester

HARVEST by

NEIL YOUNG

HALL OF FAME

BOB WILLS & TOMMY DUNCAN UNITED ARTISTS LEGENDARY MASTERS SERIES

BOB WILLS SPECIAL HARMONY

WESTERN SWING VARIOUS ARTISTS OLD TIMEY (ARHOOLIE)

You can change the name of an old song,

Re-arrange it and make it swing...

Tommy Duncan, “Time Changes Everything” ©Red River Songs, BMI

Western Swing is one of the most fascinating American musical hybrids in existence, combining as it does some of the best elements of pre-bluegrass mountain music, Dixieland jazz, big band swing, Western cowboy music, cajun fiddle tunes, and the Texas blues of the sort exemplified by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Jimmie Rodgers. It was never one of the most popular forms of popular music in this country, but more and more young musicians today are picking up on it — Commander Cody, for instance, would be lost without the heavy Western Swing elements in his music — and realizing it for the rich, exuberant, good-time music that it is.

Today, the man who almost singlehandedly invented Western Swing, Bob Wills, is confined to a Fort Worth nursing home, all but helpless as the result, of a series of crippling strokes he suffered in 1970, at the age of 65.1 don’t know if he’s aware of the legacy he has left with the youngsters — reporter Chet Flippo tried to reach him two years ago for Rolling Stone and was met with amused tolerance from those around Wills — but there is very little doubt in an awful lot of people’s minds that Bob Wills is one of the century’s underrecognized musical geniuses.

Wills’ records didn’t really blaze their way up the charts, even in his hey-day in the 30’s and 40’s, so it’s not surprising that there isn’t too much first-class stuff available to record buyers today. Still, he did manage to record some pretty excellent stuff, starting with his Columbia sessions in the mid-30’s and culminating with the Liberty sessions in the early 60’s, which have just been re-issued in United Artists’ Legendary Masters Series. During this time, the size of his band, the Texas Playboys, varied between 14 and 32 members, the main constants being Wills (fiddle and vocals), vocalist Tommy Duncan, steel guitar pioneer Leon McAuliffe, and saxophonist and trumpeter Zeb McNally and Everett Stover. Wills drove his band with an incredible amount of energy, and the complex arrangements, with three or four instruments taking ensemble solos just like Duke Ellington used to do, came out of hours of arduous drilling. Still, it sounds like they had fun doing it when you listen to these recordings. Wills sounded like he did, anyway, with his trademarked asides to the band — “Ah-hah, take it away, Leon,” and “Cmon, wake up over there, tag G ’n take it out.”

These three records trace the development of Western Swing (and, necessarily, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys) from the early days of the Lightcrust Doughboys, a band Mils founded and left before they got a chance to record, right down to the final sessions for Liberty. Western Swing is an anthology that includes some of Wills’ bluesier numbers, as well as stuff by Milton Brown and the Brownies, a Wills. spinoff that was pretty good. There are 16 cuts here, all of impeccable ^sound quality, which is remarkable, and, most importantly, of great entertainment value. Even the Flamin Groovies have copped a song off of this album — the Hackberry Ramblers’ “You Got To Hi-De-Hi.”

Bob Wills Special is the record that turned me on to Western Swing. It’s one of Columbia’s Harmony records; which means that it’s their budget line. Every one of the Texas Playboys big hits is here — the original instrumental version of “San Antonio Rose,” which fast became their theme song, “Take Me Back To Tulsa,” one of their most free-for-all recordings that is guaranteed to insinuate its way into your consciousness after one hearing, “Time Changes Everything,” the incredibly sentimental “The Convict And The Rose,” and, finally, “New San Antonio Rose,” with the vocal — their biggest hit, and one that was covered by (*G*A*S*P*) Bing Crosby, who can’t hold a candle to Tommy Duncan for vocal smoothness, in my book. All that and more for a buck ninety-eight or less — it should be a cornerstone of your country music collection.

Hall of Fame, like all the Legendary Masters, has superb graphics and wonderfully informative notes by Nitty Gritty Dirtbander John McEuen. All these sessions were in stereo, and the band was one of Wills’ biggest, so many of the songs here sound more glorious than ever. Unfortunately, by the time they did these sessions, the Playboys had been singing and playing some of these tunes for twenty five years, which is a hell of a long time. That’s why “San -Antonio Rose” gets such a perfunctory reading at almost triple its normal speed, and Tommy sounds like he’s about to fall asleep in the middle of “Time Changes Everything.” But there are also such goodies as “My Confession,” “Sittin’ On Top Of The World,” which has never sounded so good, “Bubbles In My Beer,” and the remarkable instrumentals “Playboy Medley” and “Blues in ‘A’.”

Bob Wills and His Texax Playboys have faded into history now, but thanks to a few far-seeing record companies their music is still widely available. Anybody with even a passing interest in country music should get Special, and once you’re hooked, Hall of Fame should follow. Who knows? You might get interested enough to start your own Western Swing band. Cody did. Ah-hah, take it away ...

Ed Ward

QOT TO BE THERE MICHAEL JACKSON MOTOWN

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” Jeff chuckled, as I executed a rather stealthy sneak down the path to his door. “How’d you get that one past Mike [a mutual friend who worked the counter at our local Double Discount Records^?”

“Come on, man, I warina hear it before my old lady catches up and gets her hands on it!” The one time I knew real panic was when Jane threatened to retaliate against overextension of Motown on the record player. I could hear the sound of cracking vinyl.

“Okay, man.” Jeff said. “Hey, you’ll buy absolutely anything that’s labeled Motown, won’t you? I thought you were through after that last Diana Ross album.”

“Go on. I’m used to this musical underachiever trip. But I’m always willing to give ’em a second chance. And I’m consistent, right?” I was well-versed in rationalizing my bent for that large, impersonal, faceless, capitalist record company, as long as I could have its occasional flashes of brilliance every couple of months. “So can we play it? But I don’t have much time. I slipped away as Jane was asking about some tickets^but she won’t be long.”

“Sure, yeah.” He switched it on.

“Sounds good,” I said, just slightly getting his goat. “Uh, oh, he’s talking.” I smiled involuntarily.

“Sounds a little like Diana Ross.” Jeff’s tone was triumphantly apprehensive.

“ ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ — I hope they don’t screw this one up.” And a few bars later, “But they sure know how to build a driving sound. And the kid just sort of weaves in and out of it.” Little Michael was enjoying a critical reprieve he never would have expected.

The second track, “I Wanna Be Where You Are,” to my mind, was even better. I sat back and let the combination of the structural arrangement and Michael’s singing, one moment straining against the restrictions and the next forging ahead, fully in control of things, let it take me over. This was the kind of tension I really liked, I dug the paradox.

By the time we finished side one, the motif of the album had surfaced. “Got To Be There” was the main influence, harking back to the tremendous commercial success of the Five’s “I’ll Be There” (Motown’s bestselling single, incidentally, according to an insane survey of its top 150 I had gleaned from ancient Varietys and Billboards). So most of Jackson’s songs were of easy, soft-edged tempo, utilizing high, strident harpsichords, vibes, and guitars with a strong, steady 2/4 beat pand plenty of strings. He sang fronting a male chorus, playing off their quick ensemble choruses in a measured style, holding his notes longer, crooning as he never did on “I Want You Back” or “Never Can Say Goodbye.”

Jeff was especially not impressed by this 1 stylistic change. I’d never tried to convert him to my musical tastes, and I didn’t want to now. I got up and flipped the record, glancing up at the clock that wasn’t there.

When the album was about three-quarters over, I had picked me out some tracks worthy of further consideration, if I had the unlikely good fortune of getting it on the turntable again. Predictably, these, were some of the cuts Jeff most loudly objected to. I found it very hard to verbalize the special, individual things that made me like them. Such as “Ain’t No Sunshine,” with its counterpoints and phrasing and Jackson’s ability to turn the song into something of his own —

“Just like Diana Ross!” Jeff reiterated.

What about “ ‘I Wanna Be Where You Are?’ ” “Too marty soupy strings and flutes again.”

“ ‘Got to Be There?’ ” “I keep thinking he’s only 12 years old.”

“ ‘Rockin’ Robin?’ ” “That’s more his style!”

“‘Maria (You Were the Only One)?’ ” “Okay, but they ripped off the chorus from ‘You Keep Running Away.’ ”

“ ‘Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone?’ ” “Oh, no, he’s talking again.”

The album wound up with “You’ve Got a Friend” amid prefatory moaning from my skeptical cohort. I had begun to like it, was caught by it, even though I was well aware of Jeffs criticisms by that time. It was a com-, mercially-oriented album extraordinaire that made many commercial compromises. Some of the softer music (“In Our Own Small Way,” “Wings of My Love”) was more worthy of the Carpenters than the kid that had firedup “ABC.” It failed to inspire Jackson past his uncanny mimicry of older, set-in-theirways Motown singers, say the aforementioned Miss Ross. A few of the tunes were well-nigh unlistenable due to the pretensions Motown has built around its junior superstar. He should be out of his element singing such contrived material.

But I had no time to worry about that. I thought I heard Jeffs gate close. I forgot my musical philosophizing and replaced the record in its overstuffed, fan-club Motown sleeve.

At first I hadn’t noticed my friend’s very uncharacteristic expression, quite unlike him after auditioning a new Motown album. It was almost like awe. “Hey, with the right material —” he began. “You know . ..”

“Yeah?”

There was a quick, angry knock at the front door.

“The fuckin’ kid sure shines,” said Jeff.

Mark Vining