Pieties for the people

Pieties for the people

AMERICA

WARNER BROTHERS

Why America? Their nascent legions of fans must understand intuitively, feeling this music’s pull on their lymph glands without needing or wanting to analyse it, but for those of us less than totally smitten by the omnipresent strains of “Horse With No Name,” it’s a knotty puzzle indeed. It’s easy to scream hype, of course; a friend of mine has actually deduced that since there were also new Neil Young and Crazy Horse albums due out at this time, the promulgation of a Youngish vocal called “Horse With No Name” was actually a dark Kinney plot to capitalize on that synchronicity. Somebody else assures me the song’s about heroin.

I don’t think it’s either that deviously complicated or that simple. There must be some reason why an almost unknown trio of expatriates would emerge from Britain without all that much hype, really, and three weeks later have the number one single and number two album (number one being Harvest) in the nation that; is their homeland and namesake. And it’s easy to write it off to the supposition that the audience for CSNY material is so large and voracious that people will accept any substitute, no matter how saccharine, to satisfy their craving. Especially since CSNY, aside from the fact that even they don’t know what incestuous configuration they’re going to work in next, have gotten so fat and slack that most of their spawn cut them at their own game. Redeye fared promisingly for a season, and I don’t think that anyone not an absolute Neil Young zealot could deny that “Horse With No Name” is certainly a better record, lyrically and every other way, than “Heart of Gold,” and a comparison of this album with Harvest brings the same conclusion.

There is also the matter of America not sounding, or not always at least, as much like the Pud Princess as it might seem. Just as often they sound like Bread without the backbeat, or like any three guys in mellow jam after hours in a college dorm. Music for pot parties. Perhaps the enormous popularity of this music derives from the fact that it’s much easier to play folk muzak after hours in the dorms without getting hassled than loud rock ‘n’ roll, or the fact that so many social gatherings have turned from acid jags and speed runs scored best by the abrasive ramblings of fuzztone blues to the kind of party where everybody sits around very quietly, lights dim, pensive and almost childlike in their “mellow little scenes,” as a friend once described it when I called him up and asked what was going on.

Which brings us to the heart of America’s appeal. Behind this thoroughly innocuous music, recorded under pristine conditions, which ranges from another child of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (“Riverside”) to bossaschmaltz (“Three Roses”), lies a set of attitudes, pieties and self-images common today to many college students and late-adolescents who certainly would not be able totally to get behind the gutting of an administration building, but do purchase “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life” posters and T-Shirts with perhaps the dove of peace on them which they wear to class along with the terriers bounding along behind them and chained to a rail for four to six fifty-minute stretches each day.

Aiid I submit that this album is the phenomenon which it is precisely because it delivers so well the little sentiments and homilies these people apply to their lives like they once tattooed transfers out of bubble gum wrappers on their arms. There is a definite set of assumptions, a world-view operating here, just as there is in Grand Funk’s music, and we should not ignore the implications. Perhaps the most basic mood is the sense of harrassment endemic to rock ‘n’ roll since its earliest days, except that where Eddie Cochran merely submitted to repression and the Who in “My Generation” responded with stuttering, strung-out nihilism, the nascent sense of the young as a People has given us music celebrating the fact that they have turned to each other for strength, sustenance, whatever. Mostly for succor; Grand Funk sang “Comfort Me,” and America sing “C’mon children get your heads back together . . . And you know we can make it ‘cause you know we’re alive.”

The only trouble is that this gesture of reassurance and unity tends to be a motion without any real thought or substance behind it, leaving exactly the sort of vacuum explored in the books of Ray Mungo and James Simon Kunen and songs like America’s “Here,” which says, “We are here with nothing to do today/ It’s something you can’t explain.”

So the first response is to turn to the most basic, organic things around for guidance, just as John Sinclair’s Rainbow Party organ The Sun does when it engages in diatribes about a revolutionary culture and music deriving its energy (and its dialectic) from the rays of the sun, and just as America do when they sing, just before the “Judy Blue Eyes” di-di-di-dido’s, “You take what you want and I’ll take the sunshine.”

It is when this music, and this sensibility, tries to deal with the actual dynamics of human interaction in this world that the myth really begins to break down. Since they don’t have the vision or the authority to explore anything more complex or revealing, America’s love songs tend to be trivial little dramas in everyday lives at the lowest common denominator of the youth culture: “I never found the time to see things quite through/I never found the time to give them to you.” The usual rationalization when something is as insubstantial as this is that it is just subtle, and if you don’t find more in it than the cold faces of the words, well, you’re just not sensitive enough to understand. But my question is why in god’s name anybody would want to be that sensitive if they intended to keep on living.

Which brings us to the final, most disturbing aspect of this outlook and its music. It presupposes the innocence of itself and its audience, which tends to make its vision of society (and it always does insist on having a social vision; if it didn’t it wouldn’t be so offensive) extremely simplistic, and not only that, but it makes a perfect breeding ground for the most puerile kind of self-righteousness. So we end up with an absolutely Old Testament demonology which casts “our” people in raiment of absolute white beneath their coveralls marching forth with, not flowers any longer, what, America albums?, in their hands against the shadowy conglomerate of hoary polluters and warmongers. Black Sabbath took this fantasy to the vindictive end of the limb in “War Pigs,” depicting the old bureaucrats as supernatural ghouls, but at least Black Sabbath had the sense to turn their melodramatic ray on our own drug-dented culture, and beside I suspect that an awful lot more people take America a lot more seriously than Black Sabbath when the former sing lines like, “Get behind me Satan/ Quit ravishin’ the land/ Does it pay the children/ To make you understand?”

When you think about that, it makes you wonder just how innocuous this record is.

Lester Bangs

INCREDIBLE! LIVE! COUNTRY JOE! VANGUARD

Bullshit!

Of the songs on CSNY’s last album, Four Way Street, fully half are political in content. Nobody called it a political album though — possibly because they were embarrassed to be doing the funky chicken to “Ohio.” What if you saw her DEAD on the ground is not exactly a line you’d like to dance to. The hedonist aspect of rock is certainly strong, and any other intentions have to take that into account. Another reason why we might prefer not to talk about the political content is because that summer we didn’t hear the drumming, except with the old stereophonic paranoia hunched in the well-postered rooms, Free The Panthers buttons glowing in the simulated blacklight. CSNY’s good intentions failed, as did most other attempts to bring the politicized consciousness of spring 1970 to the constituency of white rock. There are complex reasons for that, probably, but the only one that Country Joe’s album suggest is that we’ve all gotten lazy and lame. There are between four and six songs on this solo, nonelectric, live at the Bitter End edition of C.J. that can be construed as political, which is about half. The rest are routine ballads. Which makes it a political cabaret act and about as exciting and informing as Mel Torme singing the score of “Victory at Sea” in the hat check room of the Copa on Wednesday afternoon.

Political sentiments have been expressed in folk, rock, and folk-rock, but there’s been no particular pattern. Some songs express pretty raw emotion, like “Ohio,” others are developed polemics on issues, like Dylan’s civil rights stuff, most are political commercials, which range from the sublime (“The Times They Are A-Changin’ ”) to the ridiculous (“Give Ireland Back to the Irish”). There’s satire, too, which nobody has done better than Country Joe and the Fish, and their greatest song, “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag.” That song combines all the other elements — it’s part of an emotional timeplace fix, it’s a clear expression of issues involved in the draft and Vietnam, and it’s a great commercial for resistance. (On a par with “Universal Soldier,” which was a great commercial for pacifism.) There’s another emphasis in political songs that dates from the Thirties in America, and is probably the dominant form in China and Vietnam — the songs of solidarity, that assume as well as encourage a particular awareness, action, or point of view. Country Joe leans towards that form in such songs here as “Free Some Day” and “Deep Down in Our Hearts.” But, at least in this context, such songs just don’t work. The solidarity is either on such a simple level that it’s virtually meaningless or else it just isn’t there. “Deep Down in Our Hearts” asserts that we love, in quick succession, the Pathet Lao, Viet Cong, Madame Binh, Angela Davis, Che Guevera and Chairman Mao, which is a lot of peole to love, especially when you don’t know them. The songs themselves aren’t exciting; even Joe can’t get too thrilled about them, on any level. “Here’s a song you can sing in the shower,” he says in introducing “Deep Down,” which borders on being cynical.

“Kiss My Ass” is about life in the army. It’s casualness and mundane ideas may be suited to the particular situation of a G.I. coffeehouse at 3 a.m. but it is certainly pallid as a recorded sequel to “Fixin’.” “Fixin’ ” was an emotionally powerful electric satire that had us high and kicking in a black humored chorus line up on the induction center steps — except that it helped many of us stay off those steps. It helped bring emotions and moral intelligence into a coalescence; it created psychic resistance. “Kiss My Ass” is merely a gripe song, sung like a sad sack’s complaint. Even worse, “Tricky Dicky” is just plain bland.

This whole album is too damn casual. “Entertainment is My Business” is supposed to be a parody, but that aspect was lost on me as well as on the audience, who responded to Joe’s show-biz invitation to join in by clapping in mechanical doubletime. When he followed this with an out-and-out cabaret song, “Sweet Marie,” it was hard to know who he was kidding.

What this record says to me is if we’re going to figure out our politics and its relationship to our music, we’re going to have to get a bit more serious than Country Joe.

Bill Kowinski

MUSIC OF MY MIND STEVIE WONDER TAM LA

Experimentalism in soul music has never sat very well with me. In the days when — strange as it may seem today — I would pick up just about any rock album with a cut six minutes long or more, soul albums adhered more or less firmly to the three-minute-orunder rule, and so I would go to them with a different set of expectations. These were the roots, the groundrules, I thought, with which the other musicians were experimenting, like an alchemist making gold out of spring water, who had to return to the spring for the water whether he made gold from it or not.

Soon enough, though, I began seeing soul albums — studio albums, not live ones, where one would expect long cuts — with long, long cuts on them. The first one I investigated was Hot Buttered Soul. I thought it was an elaborate put-on. I still do. Then there was the Dells’ epic of “Stay In My Corner,” which I admired quite a bit — that was what the newfound freedom to stretch out was all about. And then, of course, came psychedelphia in the form of Motown’s freak out music, A classic example of this can be found on the Tempts’ recent Solid Rock album on a twelveminute cut called “Stop The War,” which features a vocal filtered out of recognizability and fed through a Leslie, and a whole gamut of “special effects.”

Recently, though, some experimentalism has surfaced in soul music that really works. The most notable and successful example has been Marvin Gaye’s exceptional What’s Going On, followed by Sly and the Family Stone’s novocain exegesis There’s A Riot Goin’ On and now Stevie Wonder’s Music Of My Mind. As with much experimental music, each is flawed in one way or another, but the point is that — in two cases, anyway — the experiment works.

Without going too deeply into a subject that has been covered far too well in these pages, and admitting that I’ve only listened to Sly’s album a half-dozen times, let me say that the reason I prefer the Motown albums over Sly’s is purely musical. In Gaye’s extended piece I find an admirable concern with melody, which — if you consider that Western music is made up solely of melody, harmony, and rhythm — is both a step forward and a couple of steps back for a genre of music that is increasingly caught up in harmonic and rhythmic stasis. Riot seems to be the furthest extension of those trends; basically there aren’t more than a couple of melodies on the album and certainly no harmony except the one note each song is built on, and the rhythms are so tight and involuted as to give you stomach cramps. On the other hand, Gaye’s piece is so loose, so laid-back, even, that it is in danger of flaring apart, and it is only his artistry that keeps it from dissolving into a bunch of merely pleasant sounds.

Somewhere in the middle of these two albums is Stevie Wonder’s new one. Basically a one-man operation in terms of instruments and production, it sounds enough like Sly to make one think he intended it that way, although I’m sure the two albums were created independently. The similarities come in the degree of odd texturing evident on both albums, with bits of sound surfacing here and there and disappearing almost instantly. Of course, this is the result of Stevie’s beginning to play around with synthesizers and finally having the studio to himself, and the product is an album that holds an amazing promise of what is to come.

After writing a sentence like that, though, I’m afraid I’ll have to say that Music Of My Mind really isn’t all that hot an album despite its promise. Like any ordinary mainstream soul album, it has its share of filler, and it even has one terrible cut, “Sweet Little Girl,” which sounds like something he might have done sloppy drunk.

But the good stuff! The album starts off with “Love Having You Around,” a tour de force that includes talking synthesizers and a lyrical, energetic vocal by Stevie that ranks with his best. It’s one of those melodies that sticks in your head for days once you’ve heard it, and if Motown can figure out how to edit it down from 7:21 they might well have a hit. That’s the problem with “Superwoman,” which is even longer — it’s a fine, melodic, mellow song, but one that just has to be eight minutes long in order to go through its various changes of mood, starting out with a gentle taunt at Mary who Wants to be a super woman, getting angrier and angrier by degrees but more and more confused as it does so. It’s a magnificent performance. Then there’s “Keep On Running” which is another potential hit, and the one cut that is most like Sly. It is basically a very simple idea, but Stevie plays with it, making it go through endless variations including a great false ending, and in the hands of someone less talented it would flop, which it certainly does not. Finishing out the album is “Evil,” a kind of anthem, and one of the most lyrical tunes on the record. Stevie sings it with his customary gusto.

This album has the feel of a first, tentative step into a new area of freedom for a major artist. From news leaking out of the studio, his next effort should be a marked improvement, and I, for one, can’t wait to hear it.

Ed Ward

HELLBOUND TRAIN SAVOY BROWN PARROT

ALVIN LEE & CO. TEN YEARS AFTER DERAM

It’s easy to get down on British proto-or crypto-bluesbands. After all, why should a bunch of Limeys forsake their roots in favor of painstaking note-for-note imitations of old rotgutted black guys when the only reason they can sell it some times is because they have the flair to sing about being down and out in Dallas while dressed like absolute Yellow Book fops.

Seems to me that the essence and strength of the whole British blooz riff from the beginning is its absurdity, and those who’ve capitalized on that absurdity most fully have prospered and done the best stuff. There are exceptions, of course, like poor old John Mayall (watch for his new album, with one side about Bangla Desh and one about Ireland, called Mean Old World), and most of Savoy Brown’s product thus far has been a less than charming fusion of pained Muddy Waters vocal cops (or Mose Allison, when they want to mellow down easy), set to a particularly turgid brand of jazz-funk (or what they think is jazz and funk) and generally served with more solemnity and less (even unconscious) humor than Art Rock at its absolute nadirs of archness.

Ten Years After, on the other hand, after starting out with two rather straightforward sets utilizing bastardized New Orleans R&B vocalisms and nicely-done swing-bop solo stints on guitar and organ, seemingly woke up to the fact that what they were doing should be not only fun but funny, and at their best, like Cactus, they are gymnastic vaudeville par excellence. The only band who could possibly beat them at this is Cactus, but if “I’m sittin’ over here on Parchman Farm/ And all I did was shoot my arm” shows almost as much gall as Morrison’s “Poor Otis dead and gone/ Left me here to sing His song,” Ten Years After’s Woodstock heebie-jeebies on “Goin’ Home” was not only the best thing in the movie but worth the price of admission just to see Alvin Lee shoulder that monstrous watermelon and tote it off at the end of the set.

Both bands have new albums out that are worth picking up, but even allowing for the fact that TYA’s is some old stuff slapped together by London to string out a few more yards of green from the teens’ jeans, it must be admitted that Savoy Brown have made great strides; maybe it really is true that the tortoise always wins in affairs such as this. Having parted company with Chris Youlden, he of the omnipresent top hat and Muddyisms (there has been a rumor circulating for several years to the effect that Savoy Brown was a total bomb in America until some sharpie flack hit on the brilliant stroke of the top hat, after which they became true, recognizably exotic sons of the old Sod — who had long since succumbed to the ravages of Guinness Stout — and went on to their historic and present heights of popularity), Kim Simmonds has moulded the band into a tight, cooking crew, reminiscent a bit at times of a less profound (but also less redundant), more “common” (and what’s wrong with that?) Creedence, and even if “Troubled By These Days and Times” does exude the stalest brand of Leon Russellish neo-gospelisms, the rest of the material cooks with the unobtrusive perfection that makes or great party records, and “Hellhound Train” is an absolute brain-fry, nine minutes of formulaic obsession that sets off quietly ominous and builds midway into a searing guitar solo that wends straight up with methodical viciousness until you don’t see where it can go from the peak attained, and it doesn’t — it continues past the end of the band toward the record’s hub and only ends, in mid-note, when the needle finally rises from the groove gutter. I don’t much like that touch myself — if a group can’t figure out how to end a jam, they could at least have the decency to fade out — but both song and solo axe definitely the finest thing they’ve recorded since “You Need Love” on Getting To The Point, cutting the ersatz boogie suite on side two of A Step Further without doubt.

Ten Years After’s new-old release (it was recorded around the time of their classic Ssssh album, and may well be outtakes from that session) has exactly the opposite problem. Side one finds them leering and sizzling through a then-standard TYA set (1 speak in the past tense only because the initial Columbia album, impressed as record company officials may be with its technical “excellence,” seems sterile, pretentious and dull), including such archetypal Alvinisms as “The Sounds” and “Rock Your Mama,” and even a rip-up of “Standing at the Crossroads” that approaches the grossness of their historic. “I wanna ball you” fillip in “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” on Ssssh. But side two bogs down, surprisingly or no, precisely because of what should have been the classic exercise in TYA pandemonium, a 14:35 epic called “Boogie On.” Well, okay, you can’t expect a “Goin’ Home” every time — their 14 minute “I Can’t Keep from Cryin’ Sometimes” from the Isle of Wight festival, preserved on Columbia’s First Great Rock Festivals of the Seventies quickie, defined the problem that makes “Boogie On” such a bore: if you’re going to stretch a jam, especially a blues jam, to that length, this bit of going in with a minute or so of the lead vocal, then breaking off abruptly for a bass solo, followed by a drum solo, followed by the big lead guitar workout (the order doesn’t make any difference), followed by another short vocal and out, just makes for choppy, excessively predictable venue that may get festival crowds frothinjg in the aisles but falls flat on the record. Which was why Cream tended to be such a boring wankoff. The way to do these things is either make the song one big, impossibly hysterical guitar solo, or let all the musicians solo at once for 14 minutes. If they get in each other’s way, then maybe they’ll get into a brawl and end up smashing each other’s instruments, which is even better and one must admit a lot less calculated than Pete Townshend smithereening his axe or Jimi hauling out that can of lighter fluid (how did he get it in those skintight slacks?) and burning his at the moment most theatrically appropos.

On the other hand, you can’t ask for everything, and Alvin Lee and Cdmpany is still fully as good as any other TYA album except Sssh or maybe Undead. And Hellbound Train is the best Savoy Brown album. Led Zeppelin got nothing to worry about, they still rule the world (maybe all that black magic pays off), but Cactus had better start doing their homework. And except for their singles, Creedence can go jump off the levee.

Lester Bangs

COCHRAN WAYNE COCHRAN & THE C.C. RIDERS EPIC

When I first started thinking about this album, I sez to myself, “Why all this Blood Sweat & Tears bullshit?” Then I sez that Blood Sweat & Tears had the right idea with their name and all but just didn’t have the guts to carry it all off. So I assumes this is no

jazz-rpck anyway, so that blows that comparison. Then I sez what about Stax? Now there wuz a label. They had swell horns that blended. Or Sir Douglas. Or James Brown. Do I have the right idea? Is it all pf these with a little bit of Swamp Dogg thrown in to keep it from sounding like Edgar Winter?

Nope.

I’ll have to admit I like Wayne Cochran. His voice is True Grit. You want to roar back. Can Rednecks from Miami have soul? Ask Elvis. Ask Jerry Lee Lewis. Ask Wayne Cochran. From Miami to Las Vegas. The nightclub circuit. On the same bill with Tony Bennett. 'It’s a gamble but Cochran can cut it. He’s been knocking heads for years and no one’s ever bothered to' ask him whether he’s ever Smoked any dope. The Eternal Struggle. You see, the idea is to have a continuous party. The family that lives together can play together, can shine together, can starve together, but it’s all in the name of funk (with a capitol K) so go right ahead and do your best and jump sturdy. Never before (at least not since Duke Ellington or at least the Mothers of Invention) has there been such a pack of disciplined maniacs, able to move mountains with the skin of their teeth.

Wayne Cochran has had two other albums — High & Riding said Alive ’n’ Well — and this album is a notch below the first and miles above the last. All three kick. It’s just a matter of how they’re mixed. High & Riding was mixed like a budget cheapie record and it sounded so raunchy you ate leather for weeks. Alive ‘n’ Well — well — all you heard practically was Cochran’s voice, plus the musicians weren’t as good. Yet on the new record it’s a clean studio sound done with professional care and it’s more accessible for deadheads who like their music sterilized. But the musicians are too together to let that obstacle bog them down. Encouraged by Cochran’s bulldozer voice, they shovel coals and breed toads and there you have it.

And there are fringe benefits. Each song has a different rhythm, something fresh in these days of licketysplit snazz licks spewed forth by such and such blues group. You hear Archie Bell. You1 hear Otis Redding. You could hear Howard Tate if the production weren’t so bad. And the question that’s been nagging me ever since I heard this Florida processed goon is don’t he ever chew on lemons whole? The sore throat thing. ‘Cause goddam, sometimes he sounds as hoarse as Froggy. Or maybe it’s only nerves. Somebody pinch me. Mama come here quick and bring me that lickin’ stick.

Now we need some sort of classification, ‘cause that’s what keeps the world turning. Well, perhaps it’s a dance record. The kind they never play on American Bandstand. Or perhaps it’s a personal expression that after sweating our bladders raw in nightclub acts, well, now we’d like to do something like Dr. John. Record our roots. Either way they failed. I don’t dance and their roots were cap; tured best on the High & Riding album. However, a lot of thunder is captured by the engineers (through layers of gauze and cotton).

What are its virtues? Consider B.J. Thomas or Roy Orbison. How that when they are good they’re very very good, but when they’re bad they stink. Wayne Cochran is just as uneven. And he probably doesn’t even smell half as nice. You’ll like it. Just pretend you can’t stop dancin’.

Robot A. Hull