LOONEY TOONS

Ordinarily, we have to take for granted that you’ll sort out immediately a writer’s prejudices, his previous whereabouts and his talents. We’ve introduced so many relatively new figures in CREEM with this issue, though, that maybe someone needs to explain just who each of them is, and why what they’re doing is here rather than a 30 page photo spread on the Rolling Stones or something.

Most of them are old friends, or at the least friends of old friends, and it’s always nice to be able to talk up your friends, feed them a little ego salve along with the paucity of moo-lah you ain’t able to send them as often as you’d like, and generally let everybody in on the secret that me — and we — think that each of the following is pretty special.

Craig Karpel, for instance, who has appeared here three times previously, with articles on subjects as diverse as Jesus Christ Superstar, Howard Hughes and Das Hip Kapital (which maybe ain’t so diverse after all). Craig’s plumping for another candiate this time out. We’re not s’posed to let on, so let’s merely suggest that, having read it, you’ll be either amazed or appalled to know that the likes of Esquire, Playboy and the Village Voice also let this madman romp through their pages with a certain frequency. (Esquire even bequeathed him the title of Contributing Editor. For what’s it worth.) In between that, and writing a book on hip capitalism — he keeps telling us and his agent that he is working on one — Karpel also finds time to talk to folks such as you and I through the guise of articles and fantasies in The Realist, Win and CREEM. Nominally, he edits fantasy for the alternative press, I guess. I think. He stopped by the other day, and that’s what it looked like he was doing.

Tom Smucker, on the other hand, after being labelled “brilliant”by everyone who read his stuff in places like Fusion and The Age of Rock 2, among other elsewheres, pulled a long-term disappearing act into a Long Island radical commune/collective which disintegrated sometime late last year. In a way, his Beach Boys article is the result of that experience, among a lifetime of others.

Smucker is, unquestionably, one of the most finely styled, perceptive writers on rock and roll and allied subjects presently setting pen to paper. His recent article on Pat Boone (that’s right) for Fusion was probably near as good as this one. Hopefully, it’s also an indication that he’ll be around in the pages of magazines like CREEM for a while longer before he becomes whatever he becomes next.

Smucker was brought to our attention by the Dean of American Rock Critics, Robert Christgau, who used to do a column for the Village Voice called “Rock & Roll & .. . ” and who is now the rock critic for Newsday, th Long Island daily. Christgau is about to become a regular in CREEM, with the addition of what was the most important portion of “Rock & Roll and one of the few truly useful catalogues of contemporary music, the famous Consumer Guide. Grades and all, precisioned grilled. Just the place to start arguments from.

Christgau has also appeared in Eye, Cheetah, Esquire, The N. Y. Times and Fusion, where he does a monthly film column right now. He’s good at film but unbeatable at records. And, in case you’re wondering what this does to the regular Records section and to Rock-ARama, it doesn’t do anything but complement it. What The Dean has here, we think, is a chart — one that is witty and human and personal and also one you can argue with. More than we ever got from a Boss 40 Top Tune Survey, I’d say. It is also true that he listens to as much music as he says he does. It is also probably true (since no one can keep up with him long enough to really check him out) that he listens to everything he gets. It is also true that there are going to be times when either RC or CG or both will infuriate you.

And me (Do you really like Ellen Mcllwaine that well, Bob?)

Sandy Carroll has more sense. She avoids writing about records altogether. Instead, she writes about Food — not health food, not hamburgers, but Food. Which is sometimes, but hardly always, health food and/or hamburgers. Another perspective you may grow to hate — or love. Us, we just like to eat, even me, and I only weigh about 110 pounds soaking wet.

We discovered Sandy the right way: in Berkeley, where she had cooked dinner for a whole gang of us. I don’t remember the name of what she cooked, but I do remember that it was South American, that it consisted of several kinds of meat (sausages, I think, but it’s been a few months) and a sort of bean concoction, that it was topped by something that looked like granola but wasn’t and that it blew the mind not only of me but of Barry Kramer, of Greil Marcus and his wife Jenny, of Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise, of Hal Aigner. Of everyone, in fact, except her husband, Jon(who writes for us, too, you might remember, and edits the L.A. Times’ West Magazine). He burped.

Last but not least, is Simon Frith, author of a third new column. Simon, as you can guess from the title (Letter from Britiari), lives in Britian, where he teaches at a University. He’s written before, for most of the best of the British rock press, and for Rolling Stone (a review of the Small Faces’ Autumn Stone, a lengthy piece on Gene Vincent’s recordings). He lived in the States for a few years, studying at the University of California at Berkeley, where he discovered (as he notes in a lengthy piece we’ll hopefully publish sometime in the future) just what the differences between American and English rock and roll and their audiences are. Which is what he’s here for, mostly: to emphasize and clarify the differences.

I guess, in a way, I owe Simon a more private explanation of his criticism of my Faces piece, but this is really where it belongs. Don’t you think, though, Simon, that the idea of an American telling British rock bands they ought to come to terms with Britain is a little uh ... chauvinist? Or maybe, in alternative, Americans shouldn’t write about British rock bands. At any rate, I tried to see them (Faces especially) as exempted Americans.

Anyway, there you have it: CREEM’s First Annual Rock Critic’s Consumer Guide. See ya next month.