It’s hard to say exactly what makes a good, cooking band into a smash. There’s fine music everywhere, but it’s not just laying it out, it’s that little something extra that buzzes you when you hear it, on record or live, and flashes you when you see the group working out, that pushes their efforts one stomp over the line into instant relatability and persists in memory.

It’s magic.

All the obvious examples have it: Rod Stewart, the Stones, the Doors. The MC5 certainly have had it, and may still, and the Stooges exuded it (and will again). Grand Funk is the classic example of magic avalanching form to make all the difference. And when you do possess it, somebody somewhere is bound to notice sooner or later.

Dust is a hard-driving New York power trio who released a first album a few months ago, and will have a second one, tentatively titled Suicide, out soon. At first glance there may be nothing to distinguish them from their legions of scuffling guitar brethren, but from the first moment of exposure something remains with you, some crazy quality that, quite aside from their thunderous leads and histrionic singing, makes them more than an item, makes them an entity and defines them.

It could be their resolute tastelessness. The front cover of their first album was a charming portrait of three rotted corpses in various stages of decay hung in those Mexican catacombs where people of that nation unlucky enough to die too poor for regular graves are routinely stored upon kicking it out the door. The back jacket bore a photo of a dromedary crossing the Sahara, lead guitarish Richie Wise wearing a Powder Ridge Festival T-shirt, and such song titles as “Stone Woman,” “Loose Goose,” and “Love Me Hard.” The latter unequivocal injunction, in fact, came to emblazon a blood-red promotional T-shirt sent out by Buddha records.

But you’ve got to have more than tastelessness to become a staple sensation — if you didn’t, Arthur Brown would be a star today. And Dust are already starting to make waves. No sooner was the album released than it experienced an unforeseen breakout in, of all places, St. Louis, where, with no more than the usual application of hype, kids discovered the album and began to flood local radio stations with calls requesting it and especially “Love Me Hard,” which has since become the band’s first single.

Not surprisingly, they’ve become rather enamoured of that burg formerly renowned as the Gateway To The Golden West and birthplace of William Burroughs, and I made the trek to St. Louis recently to catch one of their concerts and see if I could discover in the process why both I and quite a few denizens of the teenage wasteland had found that extra, nigh-intangible something in this high-energy band.

It was a typical non-ballroom gig, in a vast concert hall with stage lights and seats and cops periodically clearing back the stageside mob who had flooded down even before Dust, the first band, went on. And a hefty turnout it was, too, even (?) accounting for the fact that King Crimson and Black Oak Arkansas were also on the bill. Dust went running on and launched into “Loose Goose,” bizarro-rockabilly raveup blasting cross the throng with that big, big sound which has by now become so common a bill of fare as to qualify as muzak; but with this band there is room and imperative to listen, even if the music is just about as bonesimple as it is possible to go. Certainly it’s their fresh, unfeigned intensity: maybe it’s the way Richie rocks back with the neck of his axe pointing skyward and then paradiddles over on his paisley clogs to stomp his fuzzbox for more echo, more wah-wah, not to camouflage a tired and barren imagination but to take his loud but almost too clear, too precise, not-quite-distortedenough attacks to a different level which is almost like a timewarp to 1967 psychedelia. Meanwhile Kenny Aaronson stands there as solemnly as bassists have perhaps unfortunately been expected to from time immemorial, looking in shag hair, delicate face and stylish clothes like a pretty English popstar, and that doesn’t hurt at all either, even if he is a bit too tall to fit the image completely. And Marc Bell is simply the perfect histrionic drummer, driving on and breaking sticks yet never indulging in too much flash even in his solo, sweating with an unopened can of Budweiser fprgotten by his stool till the end of the set.

They play hard and fast, with teethgritting intensity, adrenaline music to the core. Though the core may be in the word “hard,” because they bear down on their instruments with a ferocity that borders on destructiveness and somehow manages to stay in tune even though they don’t seem to give it much thought. But then, they don’t have to — “being in tune” is irrelevant to music like this. It’s the metal tarantella. Sometimes, in fact, you almost wish that Dust were a little more sloppy or random, because the tightness and precision of most of their work almost makes it too clear, too perfect, not miasmically deranged enough. You can hear every note most of the time, and while that’s great for a change, they don’t seem nearly as far into the esthetic of distortion as Grand Funk, say, or the Stooges. Their savagery is channeled into getting all those notes out and right on time, instead of neurotically giving vent to atonal shrieks. Dust’s immediate concern seems to be with being the best rock ‘n’ roll band, with the emphasis on the last word, possible, rather than some kind of psychodrama or sideshow. But one of the things that makes them interesting is that they do have the potential for those very qualities, even though they haven’t yet given full vent to it in their music.

The crowd, large as it was,seemed neither particularly inspired nor inspiring. They applauded enthusiastically, but nobody seemed especially inclined to, as the saying does go, boogie. Partially it must have been the density and the aspect of police paranoia (St. Louis is also the gateway to the South), and I am also sure that drugs were a large factor. Watching the first few rows, one was struck by the number of fixed stares, as if each person could only see the musician directly in his line of vision. Lots of little girls seemed to be staring at Kenny in his pastel yellow jacket, but I couldn’t really be sure if it was his across-the-pond demeanor or chemical stultification on the part of the audience.

No one could call Dust chemically stultified. Meeting them at the Holiday Inn after the show, I happened to ask as we were riding up the elevator, “You guys like to drink?” Immediately Richie started whooping about Scotch, and some bottles were duly sent for.

In the meantime, I got to know the band. Kenny Aaronson came running into the room, and the first words he said to me were a direct quote, quickly reeled off from the review of their first album I’d done for CREEM: “ ‘Zoom, varoom, amphetamine streaks up and down the scales!’ ” he chortled, and I said, “You must’ve read that review almost as many times as I did.”

We talked about music: Kenny’s bass hero is Jack Bruce, though fortunately he doesn’t play like him, and Richie said that the band’s musicians’-musicians fave was ELP and “my man, Keith Emerson!”

They’ve been in and out of several groups over the years, together and apart, and Dust originally was the end of a long chain of dues-paying bands, just turning into a real concept about a year ago. They don’t philosophise much about their music, which is refreshing — they prefer to live it, and have a good time in the process.

Marc, in fact, barely joined in our discussion of comparative musical tastes and various technical arcana, having already found himself a lovely St. Louie woman. The general conversation soon turned to the subject of getting laid, and there was talk of a party later on the same floor. First, though, the Scotch arrived, and I soon discovered that, far from being the whoop-up drinker he came on as, Richie was barely used to the stuff. He doesn’t use drugs, and apparently only drinks when outside New York. But he doesn’t need to; he manufactures it organic. One drink and he was up, bouncing on his feet and yelling and lunging nowhere in particular with even more animation than usual. I made the mistake of referring to the movie Clockwork Orange, which I had seen three times, and immediately he jumped out of his chair and began to regale me with a 20 minute description of the plot in minutest detail. And when we sat, watching Nixon land in China on the tube, Richie was not impressed with the regalia and solidarity of purpose presented by the Chinese people: “Look at ’em,” he snorted, “they’re like slaves!” Dust’s politics may not be the hippest, or most cognizant, but they are indelibly American.

And that’s the thing about the band that’s great: if Grand Funk are revered for being just three quintessential American kids with guitars and respect for their audience, Dust are essential Americans with guitars, talent and the best kind of naivete. It’s like the next day when, driving to the airport, Marc kept going on about the girl he’d met: “She was just a really nice girl, you know, it was good sex and good friends and, well, I just really liked her . . . Shit, I’ll probably never see her again ...”

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I laughed. “Fell in love, eh?”

“Yes, he did,” affirmed their manager. “He did, a little bit.” And it was true. And that kind of ingenuousness, even if it lacks the arrogance of the thoroughly assured, jaded superstar, is very close to the core of adolescent American rock ‘n’ roll.

It was cold that night in New York when I made it down to Bell Sound to witness the recording of Dust’s second single, so I stopped off and bought a gallon of wine. Up five flights in a creaky elevator, and into the usual studio scene: control board, couch down front, double glass between us and the musicians in various comers of a vast dark room, laying down the rhythm tracks with skill and the discipline necessary to play the same licks over and over, sometimes running through as many as 30 takes yet struggling somehow to keep the feeling fresh and alive.

I sit and talk awhile with Marc and Kenny and Stanley, the Dust roadie who looks like he’s seven feet tall and is more than glad to see the wine. Marc has another cutie with him, and I am continually distracted from the ultimately numbing repetitions of studio procedure by the flash of legs reflected in the glass. Kenny, meanwhile, nods off even with the playback at earsplitting volume; they’ve been working on the new album, now three-fourths done, for a long time, and for this night at least exhaustion has begun to set in.

For everyone, that is, but Richie. Since the instrumental track is laid down, he takes the stage, alone in the studio, and suddenly I begin to see more of the magic the band had always hinted at before. Because Richie Wise is, in his soul of jive, the true definition of the rock ‘n’ roll madman. It’s just that he hasn’t quite loosened up enough to get the real picture, the configuration of this mania, into the act as yet. I’d thought in the hotel in St. Louis, listening to him recount Clockwork Orange, that it was merely alcohol. It wasn’t. Now, standing there with headphones on, sans juice or chemicals, experiencing the grueling process of recording and rerecqrding a vocal till the words become totally meaningless, Richie turns on, lets loose, gets down. He opens up with a few Iggyesque whoops and yowls, then looks at me as if I had just walked into the studio (I had been there four hours) and starts pointing and screaming in spasms: “Lester Bangs! Leeess-tah Baaaaaangs.!” — suddenly becoming a Southern mammy: “Lessss-tah! Lestuh!”

But that too is over as quickly as it began, and he launched into still another tirade, appropos of nothing in particular except that the man is a born loon. It’s the same impulse that causes Jerry Lee Lewis to play the piano with his feet, Chuck Berry to duck walk and Little Richard to do all the things he does. It’s rock ‘n’ roll as instant karma as instant St. Vitus Dance, the epilepsy of joy. Through countless takes Richie sweats and loosens up, and before the night is done he will have the vocal down, double-tracked, and sounding mighty. But the real show is between takes, when among gurgles, contortions and bouncing the headphones off the floor he improvises monologues about “Angel Hernandez and the Backfield, they took the first Trans-Venezuelan Rock Festival by storm,” and sings every old rock ‘n’ roll song from “It’s In His Kiss” to “Itsie-Bitsie-Teeny-WeenyYellow-Polka-Dot-Bikini” in outrageous burlesque.

By four AM the final mix had been put on the single. It sounded good; it could be a hit. But the thing that will really make Dust, that will separate them forever from the hosts of eager, energetic rock bands around the country, will be if the mania that I saw in the studio can be harnessed and put into the stage act and perhaps even the grooves of the records. And it will get there. It’s like this: there was a custodian in the studio, an old black guy who said he had been working there for years, and in the course of the evening he got rousingly, philosophically drunk on the wine that was going ’round. Finally the man got to feeling so good he just had to disrupt; he couldn’t leave it alone! So he started in on me: “What nationality are you?”

“Mongrel.” I was in pretty good shape myself.

“Nahh,” he laughed. “You look like a ...Mexican! Yeah, that’s it, you a Messigan! Don’ lie to me!” And for the next hour that was all I heard from him, until he started on on Marc and his girl, leering and smacking hip lips: “Why yes you two jes’ gotta be the cutest li’l couple I ever seen . . . Girl, you mean to tell me I ain’t seen you before?” (She had already told him that 35 times.)

People yelling and making a commotion are not the best candidates to sit in on recording sessions, and I believe that eventually the cat was bounced from the room. But the point of all this is that as obnoxious as he was undeniably being, there was an ulterior logic to his behavior, and you can’t just blame it all on drunkenness, as I’d tried to do in St. Louis. Joy with life, I’d call it. The ultimate appreciation of the fact of absurdity. So what you must do is this: you take all that humor, all that random disturbance, all that irrepressibility of spirit, compress it and distill it and make it 100% positive, and brother, that is rock ‘n’ roll — loose as a goose and twice as truthful.