We Got No Principles!!!

SCHOOL'S OUT ALICE COOPER WARNER BROS

As we all know, summer never lasts forever, and Alice was faced with the problem of rushing out a follow-up album before the leaves began to fall. The results, while as exciting in places as Killer, show a bit of strain.

Alice’s main suffering is that they always feel they have to make a big production out of everything, and each has to be bigger and more spectacular than the last. Which may make for fantastic concerts, but isn’t always the best thing for albums. Half of the songs here make it in a big way; some of the others are just okay, and * some are just totally pointless outside the context of the show, like movie soundtrack music without the movie. It’s not surprising that Alice would record jazz that sounds like Peter Gunn scores, or the “Walk on the-Wild Side” theme, or “Jet Song” from West Side Story (again), since all those things are their roots as surely as Chuck Berry for the Stones. But the contrivance

involved makes fitting all that into a rock’n’roll album a risky proposition; the final instrumental track, for instance, seems totally pointless without visual accompaniment.

Contrivance and the apparent compulsion to create a “story” also mar some of the other songs, making them self-consciously “teenage” and “high school” in exactly the same sense that weakened the MC5’s Back in the U.S.A. album. “Alma Mater” is really ludicrous unless you take it as a joke, because this is Alice Cooper, not Buddy Holly or Brian Wilson, burbling on about how he misses the old school gang, and sentiment wears even worse on Alice than it does on the MC5. He sounds better roaring “I’d trade a week’s worth of cigarettes for just a couple of lousy beers.” But even that is almost too self-conscious to be as compelling as it should be.

“School’s Out” is an absolute masterpiece, because it promulgates the kind of anarchic response most of the rest of the album fails to incite. To hear it come on the radio is to lunge for the dial and turn it all the way up. “Luney Tune” may be1 the best thing here, not because it s a great piece of theatre but because it’s a great rock’n’roll song, with pounding drums and lines like “I slipped into my jeans/Lookin’ hard and feelin’ mean ... I’m swimmin’ in blood/ Like a rat on a sewer flood.”

This kind of macho/punk presentation is essential to the Alice Cooper process of ditching the drag image, but they didn’t quite take it all the way. The queen number was just a manifestation of their infatuation with outrage and gimmick as devices to draw attention to themselves; they’re attempting to get rid of the manifestation rather than the root. The gimmickry is perfectly valid onstage, capable — in their capable handsof generating excitement and entertainment. Their strength on record, however, lies in themselves as a band and in their songs as self-contained expressions. Their reliance on imposed therhe and extraneous instrumentation can only dilute that strength. Alice Cooper’s goal at this point should not be to create a Cecil B. Demille epic, but simply to make an album where every song stands on its own, laid out by a get-down, five man street gang who carry guitars instead of switchblades. They are all they need.

In the meantime, School’s Out may not be a Killer, but it’s still one of the most playable albums of the summer. Nobody creates a masterpiece every time out. When most superstars seemingly feel it would betray a lack of proper arrogance to put out more than one album a year, it’s a delight that Alice Cooper is still cruising at top speed.

Just wait till they run him for president.

Ben Edmonds and Lester Bangs

CHAMELEON FRANKIE VALLI THE FOUR SEASONS OWEST

Even then, ten years ago or more, the Four Seasons looked old, distant. The Mills Brothers, maybe. What’s amazing is that they haven’t aged. Not a bit. Sure, they sweat more, but they’re all Italian, so that’s okay.

In all those years, they never put out a decent album, except maybe their various collections of hits. Because they had hit after hit after hit, a fact which is a real tribute to their music; they sure didn’t get famous op the strength of their personalities. There was something distasteful, unsanitary about them, as if they sang through used condoms.

Their singles were unique, instantly identifiable, with the drums mixed way up, the voices meeting, mixing, separating, the strange embarassed Phil Spector-ish production, and that gravelly-mouse falsetto that was to influence the historic Newbeats and even the Beach Boys. So it was pretty sad when they suddenly couldn’t get it up anymore, when that falsetto turned limp and watery, and they had to resort to cheap tricks like “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” to get into the charts. They were turning into a white Little Anthony and the Imperials, a contradiction in terms, and a dubious venture at best.

Their first new album in (what must be) years, Chameleon, tries to have a little something for everybody. Not surprisingly, the two songs that work best, “A New Beginning and You re A Song (That I Can’t Sing)” are right back to their old formula. “A New Beginning,” which both introduces and ends side one, mixes Moody Blues’ space and spaciousness with the beat and partial melody of their last really great single, “Opus 17 (Don’t You Worry About Me).” It’s solid, even listenable, but totally unconvincing. For one thing, their harmonies, always impeccable and greasy enough to slide together right, are falling apart. In an old interview, Frankie Vaili told about how he was singing with his father in their car when he was a little kid. When his father added a harmony to what he was doing,' Frankie thought it was so funny that he nearly fell out of the car laughing. It’s a good story, even if it doesn’t have a point, but it proves that not all great musicians are born! It takes training and these boys are out of training!

“You’re A Song (That I Can’t Sing)” has weak harmonies also, and an especially weak falsetto, but it’s a decent song; top 40 material if it were polished up a bit. The chorus features Frankie Valli’s voice at his strongest point here, and it really makes you long for “Dawn” and “Ragdoll” and all those fine hits.

The rest of the album is dreck. Solid, unlistenable dreck. There’s bits and pieces of Chicago, Carole King, Liza Minelli. I don’t know, Flip Wilson might be in there as well. It’s a drag, because it sounds as if they really tried, and they all sound sincere. They desperately want to be hip, and it just won’t work, but there’s nothing to be-embarassed about. Shit, Cat Stevens will be a hairdresser in ten years, what are these guys complaining about.

Brian Cullman

CHICAGO V CHICAGO COLUMBIA

In these days of wildly mutating cultural trends, it’s great that Blatz beer is still brewed the old-fashioned way by the same old-fashioned brewmasters who were around before Prohibition. " In these days of existential angst, it’s a fine comfort that George Simenon is still writing his Maigrette mysteries in the clean, spare style that has defined him for years. In these days of surrealistically permutating reality vectors, it comes as a mellow feeling in the center of one’s being to know that, placid and calm over the turbulence and ferment of the modern world, stands the royal family of Lichtenstein, passing on from one generation to the next the most stable form of government the world has ever known.

In these days of hick sophistication, however, it is NOT comforting to see a group as commercially popular as Chicago produce one album after another without even taking the trouble to change that moronic logc on their front covers, or to cease the interminable stream of posters so anonymous and elephantine that the most diehard Chicago fan will eventually run out of wall space and patience.

As for music, there’s got to be some way to inform these clowns that they don’t have to become the VW of the music industry to be assured of their audience.

Chicago V is as machine-tooled and devoid of personality as the rest of Chicago’s albums. No, I take that back. Chicago II and III did have some memorable songs, like “25 or 6 to 4.” Chicago V has nothing memorable. What it does have is the patented Chicago sound: orchestrated horns, extremely competent guitars, bass and percussion, well modulated voices, tuned to a style that is not rock, not jazz but rather massest-of-the-masses MOR.

The fact that this is the first single Chicago album, even though it is packaged in a double jacket (with two posters in one of the sleeves) might indicate the extent to which the record contains mere filler.

Rob Houghton

FOGHAT

BEARSVILLE

First song’s about a horny guy, second song’s about a drunk, third song’s about how his chick leaves him, fourth too, and wouldn’t ya know it, sixth too. The others (for all I know, since the beer came when I listened to them) are about chicks leavin’ them too, too, too. Only I know one of them was ol’ black Chuck’s “Maybelline,” ’cause Hank started doin’ a duck walk during the geetar break. Obviously, no deep messages on this album. No concern for mankind like on The Moody Blues Find A Cure for Cancer. Not even extraterrestrial bologna like David Bowie’s Why Don’t You Go To Outer Space and Take Your Helmet Off? No Wayne McGuire Aquarian “Jeebs Consciousness.” No JaggerRichards We Think Blacks Relate to Us message of unity. No nothin’. THAT’S RIGHT. NO MESSAGE.

Nbw ain’t that a relief. All you get these days is meaning, meaning, meaning. If I wanted meaning I d groove with that 14 year old guru prefect in the news (who incidentally used to be a prostitute in Calcutta) or READ. No, I guess I wouldn’t go that far, in fact rip up this issue of CREEM and never buy another! Reading causes VD and other diseases.

Just why is this album so meaningless? Guess who Foghat is. Ees correcto, Tone Stevens, Roger Earl and Lonesome Dave are three-quarters of Foghat, and they all used to be in Savoy Brown who was always one of those sick, demented, skinny, drunk English bands, and after that w6re Warren Phillips and the Rockets (rock’n’roll revival cash-in — buy Parrot PAS-71044, you won’t be sorry!). Besides, Dave Edmunds produced the Foghat album, and he’s pretty meaningless in his own right. “I Hear You Knocking” is one of the all-time great meaningless songs. This album is topped off by having Todd Rundgren’s name on it, when we all know by now that he doesn’t really exist. All that adds up to one great album: the songs are rocky and fun and HAVE NO MESSAGE.

If you feel that this review leaves you with a sort of empty meaninglessness, maybe you should be reading books instead.

R. Evan Cirkiel

WIND OF CHANGE PETER FRAMPTON A&M

Some few months ago, one of the members of the CREEM review staff, in reviewing Humble Pie’s double live set, noted something to the effect that “Peter Framptons are plentiful, but Steve Marriotts only come along once a year or so.” This controversial statement naturally aroused heated argument around the old CREEM farmhouse, and subsequently a letter came in from a one Dave Johns of Raleigh, North Carolina, who regaled me on my review, noting that “now that Peter has left the Pie I think Steve is gonna start hurting for his haunting vocals and tasteful guitar.” To Mr. Dave Johns, the legion of Peter Frampton fans, and Mr. P.F. himself, may I offer my humblest apologies. I grovel at your rock-star toes. Your new solo album is a bitch of the highest calibre.

There is no wasted space on Wind of Change. The majority of the album is so tasteful, so cleanly professional and powerpacked, that I really wonder why news of Frampton’s talents hadn’t reached me sooner. Could it be that I am a prejudiced, nearsighted dupe, unable to recognize talent when I hear it? Or is it that Peter Frampton has been hiding his light under a barrel (or is it bushel?) all these years? Definitely the latter, I assure you. Being as how the subject in question has been tripping about in the rock and roll circus for at least five years now (in the big-time that is, what with the Herd and all) and that this is the first time he has ever been spot-lighted to an excessive degree, the problem of his still being basically a nonentity is entirely his own fault. But that all should change, starting right now.

One of the most amazing aspects of Wind of Change is Frampton’s vocal similarity to Stevie Winwood. A good deal of the material on the album has a real Winwood touch: high, plaintive vocals; moody, arresting melodies; and uncommon and imaginative lyrics. Both opening numbers, “Fig Tree Bay” and “Wind of Change” have this beautiful power, as does the six and a half minute extravaganza “All I Want To Be.”

The rest of the album makes up a pot-pourri of assorted delights. “Lady Lieright” has a neat little “Here Comes the Sun” guitar intro, and then builds into a deft, but not overcute little ditty with a marked calypso feel. And Frampton and friends (including, incidentally, Ringo, Mike Kellie, Andrew Bown and Billy Preston) do a rave-up version of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” that adds as much to the original as it otherwise might be expected to take away.

In all, this may be the finest album to emerge out of the whole “I’ll play on yours if you’ll play on mine” school of British poprockery this year. And until somebody writes me a letter challenging my opinion, that’s the way I’m gonna feel about it for the rest of the month.

Alan Niester

WHITE WITCH CAPRICORN

A big part of punk rock is the Great American (or English, really) Teen Sublimation Riff. Everybody wants to get laid ‘twixt 12 and 20, thinks about it round the clock in fact, but most of their cogitation is neurotic energy-drain stuff, with the result that we get Two Major Punk Rock Schools. One overcompensates for teeneurosis with exaggerated displays of macho arrogance driven home by vengeful hard-on bass lines (Troggs being supreme archetype), while the other just freaks out, sublimating the whole thing into highly involved, murky drug-lyric double-entendres. Acid-ecstasy transcendingbody in-one-fell-spurt. Come-on-little-honey puff-this-joint-o’-mine and-you’ll-see-thingsdifferently - that kind of stuff.

Until recently, that is. That was mid-60’s trippy dippy wank-off, now times have changed and everybody’s blase about drugs; there’s gotta be something new to help keep these poor virgins from having to sing about fucking and blow it by revealing their rank inexperience. We can’t write ’em off, because they’re at least 40% of what rock’s all about. Only one in 10,000 has the nervy genious of Iggy or Jonathan of the Modern Lovers and is willing to sing about his adolescent hangups in a manner so painfully honest as to embarrass the piss out of half the audience.

Solution, dammit! Not bisexual or gay rock, because only Limeys can really bring that off and besides, these guys ain’t gay, they’re goofed up and stuck in between. Okay, I got it. Kozmik.Mystik Okkult Jujube Ragas. Mumbo jumbo Merlin mush. Look at the back cover of this album: now observe the dude standing on the left. It is ineluctable fact that beneath all that makeup, silk, Beelzebeads and hoodoo voodoo drag, lies a true dork. One look confirms it. He could be standing in a grey thin-lapeled suit on an Astronauts album a decade ago; or nervous under a brand-new Beatle pudding-powl halfway between then and now; or solemn in his Nehru jacket with a New Delhi Tourist Throwrug hanging on the wall behind him a year or two later; or sullenly spaced behind a Heavy blues guitar in 1968 ... well the great tradition never dies, but here he is now, made up like an acid transvestite, and not only is his masculinity not compromised a whit but he’s unmistakably that same dork, the one that used to sit in the seat right in front of you in Driver Training and fart all the time. The rest of the band is no different.

What do they sound like? Great! Grunge noise and mystikal studio abstractions, better than most of Black Oak’s stuff, vocals and organ and other things quite Deep Purple, and if you’ve got any sense of humor or no standards at all you’ll love ’em.

Lester Bangs

SPRING

UNITED ARTISTS

If the recent work of the Beach Boys makes Brian Wilson out to be the invisible man, then Spring puts him in the same position of control he used to occupy with the band. (Spring consisting of his wife and sister-in-law, he probably got very little argument.) The record is saturated with his presence as a producer, songwriter, arranger, singer and personality. Yet the beauty of Spring does not rest with Brian alone; it is a totality of effect which rises far above personality.

Neither of the girls is about to set Billie Holiday trembling in the heavens, but Brian realized this and so channeled their seemingly boundless spirit and energy to an end that never fails to be pleasant and satisfying. Like Spector, he plays them as one part in the process, molding the arrangement and voice into one unified flow. And while this album might not seem to be as “important” at face value as a Beach Boys album, it. moves at a pace that would no doubt leave the Beach Boys panting after the first turn.

Though Spring is no less produced, there is an almost spontaneous feel to this record, a joy in the simple release of what they’re doing that borders on pure innocence. How else can you explain why stuff like “Tennessee Waltz” and “Mama Said” (or, for that matter, even their reading of “Superstar”) can be so consistently delightful? It’s the kind of emotionally pure response that the Beach Boys used to foster. One song — “Good Time” — even uses a track the Beach Boys initially cut. Had the Beach Boys included their version on Carl and the Passions, it would have made a noticeable difference.

The appeal of a record as unassuming as this one is nearly impossible to convey. I’ll just say that Spring comes as close to creating universal music, in a grass roots sense, as anything I’ve recently heard. You’ll have to trust me.

Ben Edmonds

CRAZED HIPSTERS FINNEGAN & WOOD BLUE THUMB

Back when I was a little kid, whenever my mother thought I was sick, she stuck a rectal thermometer into me. She was convinced that I’d bite a regular mouth kind in half, chew it up and eat it, so she’d take the big ugly kind and jam it right up my ass. So while it was in, to keep me from squirming or farting it out, she’d sing me this song:

I KNEW A MAN

NAMED MICHAEL FINNEGAN

HE HAD WHISKERS

ON HIS CHINNEGAN

ALONG CAME A WIND

AND BLEW THEM IN AGAIN

THAT’S THE STORY

OF MICHAEL FINNEGAN.

After she’d sung it three times, it was time to take the thermometer out of my ass and see how sick I was. Fond memories of childhood.

So, of course, I was pretty excited when I saw this album. I guess Finnegan was one of my childhood heros, ranking just below the old man who played knick knack on his thumb (if HE ever makes an album it’ll be a doozy!) The album cover is pretty evasive ... you can’t tell because of the distorted picture whether the wind blew his whiskers in again or simply carved away half his face, but that’s alright; there’s poetry in pictures sometimes. But not on this album. I mean on the record. This sure isn’t the Finnegan my mother sahg about! Probably some imposter who’s never even had a thermometer wedged up his ass, and his friend ain’t no better! They play piano & guitar. Great! Love is a beautiful thing. Maybe the guy who smashed the Pieta will do an album.

Brian Cullman

PINK MOON NICK DRAKE ISLAND

Nick Drake sails and sings, says “Sorry,” smiles (but slyly), poses shyly. Rustling, rippling, resonant, thick and sweet with atmosphere like one of Balthus’ rooms, his music whispers, then ensnares, like a shared confidence.

The short songs are sometimes grand riddles, obscure, unanswerable propositions. The title song, in its entirety, says “Saw it written and I saw it say/Pink moon is on its way/ None of you will stand so tall/ Pink moon gonna get you all/ And it’s a pink moon.” Can that be dealt with as poetry? As pretentious profundity? Or only as some sort of schoolboy’s disquieting secret vision (is he possessed)?

Another says, again in its entirety, “Knowthat I love you/Know that I don’t care/Know that I see you/Know I’m not there.” Who writes songs like that? Is it the ghost inside the boy? The boy’s spirit deep inside the grizzled wizard?

The longer songs do less with more words. They’re not awfully good as songs, most of them. There’s a lulling repetitiousness to a lot of what he sings. But no matter. That’s the point, in fact. His music is a triumph of style over sententiousness, of sound over sense. It’s not what he sings, or even — for that matter — how he sings. It’s that he sings at all, that he opens up this world to us at all.

His first two albums (“Bryter Layter” and “Five Leaves Left,” both on Island in England, and cannibalized into a single lp, “Nick Drake”, for American release on the same label) presented him in a more complex context — some orchestrations, some impressively personal guest stars (John Cale, Ray Warleigh, Dave Pegg, Richard Thompson, Chris McGregor, et al), a wider range of mood and craft. Here, it’s simply Drake and his own guitar and piano. He’s accurate and workmanlike with it; he never fails, he never really flashes. But he knows precisely what emotional limits to impose upon his self-accompaniment.

It’s seductive music. The voice is deep, firm, covert, and binding. He very nearly croons, god save us. (If Robert Plant is the Al Jolson of the rock generation, Drake is the Bing Crosby.) He very nearly croons his enigmatic, endearingly weak little songs, and always with the smirk of the all-seeing “I”.

He knows more about us than we know about him.

Colman Andrews

ELVIS: AS RECORDED AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN ELVIS PRESLEY RCA

"GARDEN PARTY" RICK NELSON DECCA

For the last six months I’ve spent more time listening to Elvis-Presley than I have to anyone else, to the point where my two year old daughter demands “The Train Song” several times a day; naturally, I was more than pleased to get a copy of his new live album, a whole performance start to finish. The LP was out within two weeks. Word on the concerts had been extraordinary. Strange then, that the document that seals their fate should be slightly less exciting than your average Johnny Carson show?

No, it is not strange. Elvis is the transcendental sun-king Ralph Waldo Emerson only dreamed about. He transcends his own talent to the point of dispensing with it all together. No one goes to hear Elvis. They go to see Elvis.

Perhaps it is the supreme Elvis gesture (the man needs his own categories, and it feels slightly off-balance to employ such a puny word as “man” — I really do like sun-king much better) to take the stage with a retinue of servants, singers, a band and an orchestra, to apply himself vaguely to the songs of his past and those of the present, to humble himself before material of the most awesome ickiness, to close with an act of love, but above all, to throw away the entire performance.

The whole album is a throwaway. While the stage show is a production just this side of Intolerance, the lp is tacky. Graphics are poor, the mixing — if it was mixed — is bad, the band plays most numbers super-fast, night club style, heavy on the flash drumming, and the horns are grotesquely out of tune. Elvis seems involved only when he is applying himself to songs that represent a show business tradition that perhaps is even bigger than he is, the tradition of the banality of opulence. It is no accident that his sacred songs remind one of Cecil B. DeMille. Is there something The Elvis is still reaching for, something that has eluded him even now ?

If there is, it’s his secret. I am beginning to think that perhaps his whole musical career, including those first brilliant sides on Sun, has been a throwaway — the truth may be that he never took any of it seriously, save in those months in 1969 when his comeback was uncertain and Elvis put a searing, desperate kind of life into a few of his TV performances that has no parallel in any of his other music. Some of that spilled over into From Elvis in Memphis, into his first live performances in Vegas, and then his nerves steadied and Elvis brought it all back home again.

I hear the same casual elan on the records Elvis cut in 1954 as I do on this one cut a month ago. I hear the same assumption of superiority — the same recognition of grace, might as well call it by its right name - a sense that he could never lose. His mother must have passed it to him as he fell asleep at night, for the first thing Elvis had to learn to transcend was his father’s failure. And he did.

In the end, his musical talent has been so vast it must have seemed demeaning to apply it.

When I say this new lp is a throw-away, or that Elvis’s whole career is, it’s no moral judgement. It is not thrown just anywhere, but at those who want it most, and as the most convincing reviews of the Garden concerts make clear, Elvis’s power to affect those who hear him is, if anything, greater than ever and has not much to do with nostalgia. The twenty songs on this record seem like an excuse for something to do up there on the stage, even “American Trilogy” which is so pretentious it makes “Onward Christian Soldiers” seem like bubblegum. If Elvis condescends to anyone, it must be to himself. It’s all a joke to him. He condescends in the sense that he knows he is worthy, but ultimately doesn’t care, or cannot quite figure out what it would mean to care.

I used to have typical rock-and-roller fantasies of Elvis on stage, now, fronting a band, singing “Mystery Train” as it should be sung and all that. I don’t anymore, even though he did that just three years ago for his TV Show and it worked to the point where I sometimes think the best music he ever made was cut that night. But I don’t have those fantasies anymore. If Elvis’s purpose in the scheme of things is to provide a moment of transcendence, then he, can hardly allow himself to be contained by the past; at the most he can barely refer to it. And it seems clear that anything less than an orchestra, a choir and pace Stu Werbin, perhaps a clip of the atom bomb exploding in place of the 2001 intro would be rather tacky of Elvis. Perhaps Phil Spector should produce him.

There is only one moment I really long for now, one epiphany that would somehow crystalize, the conundrum that summarizes our fate in its perfect impenetrability. Elvis would sing, rather slowly with eveything he has,

Once I held mountains

In the palm of my hand

And rivers that ran through every day

I must have been mad

I didn’t know what I had

Until I threw it all away

And then, with love in his heart, he would laugh.

Rick Nelson also played the Garden recently, at a conventional rock’n’roll revival, and he bombed as badly as anyone can. Coming off that disaster he recorded “Garden Party,” an understated, witty song that is probably the best thing he has done since his comeback began about three years ago. He sets the scene evenly, though he has the nerve to compare Dylan to Howard Hughes; eases into his own performance and then out of it: “It was time to leave.” No one wanted to hear him play. Chuck Berry, who had four records in the top ten between 1955 and 1965, got the cheers; Rick, who had 16, got booed. His band follows as quietly as the emotion Rick put into this song rises out of it and the kid who had all the breaks comes to terms with . his own failure. “If all I sang were memories,” he says, “I’d rather drive a truck.” Thus he ends with Elvis, just as he began, but “Garden Party” is worth a truckload of the lp that was recorded at one.

Greil Marcus

LET MY CHILDREN HEAR MUSIC CHARLIE MINGUS COLUMBIA CHARLES MINGUS PRESTIGE MINGUS, THE CANDID RECORDINGS BARNABY

Mingus writes louder than he plays. The writing I’m talking about is not just his written-down and not-written-down (or improvised) music, but his words as well — his songs and poems, his deftly-angry interviews, his recently-published autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, the “provocative essay” enclosed in his latest Ip for Columbia, etc. The playing I’m talking about is, more simply and quite literally, his playing. His bassplaying, specifically, as opposed, for instance, to his piano-playing.

He’s not what you’d call a flashy instrumentalist. But then the acoustic bass is not what you’d call a flashy instrument, is it now? (Maybe everybody else already knew it, but I had never stopped to think about the fact — until I read a recent dialogue between Ron Carter and Richard Davis — that most jazz bassists use instruments that are 100-200 years old; there’s something profanely exciting about that idea, for some reason.) I mean, there have been flashy bassists for a while — at least since the time of lovely, flashy, young Scotty La Faro — but Mingus is not one of them, nor does he claim to be.

He is an extremely melodic bassist, though, if you listen to him with some care. His lines have an empirical consistency to them; they make sense, and, though they’re not obvious, still they are accessible. He seems obscurantist only to the most bull-headed. Mingus is a mainstream bassist — solid, full, mindful and respectful of the lasting values of jazz history.

As a composer, he is energetic, eclectic, intricate; he’s an after-hours classicist, a sometimes-successful rharriagebroker between blues and church roots and the dissonances, tonal re-definitions, and rhythmic infractions of contemporary European composition. The pieces on his most recent (i.e., most recentlyrecorded) album, Let My Children Hear Music, span more than three decades. “The Chill of Death,” with Mingus reading his poem of the same name and with a clean, unforgivably uncredited alto solo, was penned in 1939; “The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers”was written for, but not performed at, the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival. The other pieces were apparently composed more recently, though previous influences are apparent.

The music is mostly orchestral and vaguely grand. At times, it’s what used to be called “chamber jazz” — especially the ten-melody fugue called “Don’t Be Afraid, the Clown’s Afraid Too.” There’s limited improvisation, in other words,, inside a fairly rigid set of constructs. Mingus has developed a style of writing so very much his own, so identifiable, that it sounds ... well, not exactly repetitious, but familiar at least, sometimes. A Mingus arrangement (he’s at his very best, I think, working with a medium-sized group), which might typically include some shamelessly Ellingtonian reed voicings, a flurry of growling trombone punctuations (part gutbucket and part avant-garde), a celestial Jolivet-like trumpet part, a fragmented marching-band kind of rhythmic base, and God knows what else, is as predictable today (in the sense of being identifiable) as are the once-inscrutable chordal audacities of Mr. Thelonious Sphere Monk.

The Prestige Charles Mingus set (two records for what ought to be the price of two records but what is in fact, in this day of inflated prices for just about everything, the price of one-and-a-fraction records) consists of Ips first issued as Chazz and The Charles Mingus Quintet Plus Max Roach on the Fantasy Debut label. They’re among the earliest recordings Mingus made under his own name, or rather with his own group. It’s terse, sinewy stuff, alive with bounce and bite, but not, alas, alive with too much stirring solo work. Trombonist Eddie Bert has an impressive range (Mingus studied trombone himself once, writes in a way that favors that instrument, and is nearly fanatical in his careful choice of technically proficient players), but a limited vocabulary of ideas. George Barrow, a careful, conscientious tenor-player, likewise seems hesitant to play too much of his own music. Mai Waldron (one of my own very favorite pianists, for what it’s worth) is a pure delight throughout, however, with his simple but hypnotic left-hand figures, his hard-working, inquisitive right-hand lines.

The Candid re-issue album dates from 1960, and represents one of Mingus’ very strongest creative periods. His groups are simply unbelievable. The basic ensemble includes Dannie Richmond (the jazzman manque these days, but in those days more like a Connie Kay with balls) on drums; a reed section of Eric Dolphy, Charles McPherson, and Booker Ervin — three totally different players who knew how, nonetheless, to play out of one another superbly, with great creative elegance; trumpeters Ted Curson and Lonnie Hillyer; and the elusive Nico Bunick on piano. On one track, Paul Bley replaced Bunick, and on another, the trombones of Jimmy Knepper and Britt Woodman (now there’s a technical genius for you) are added. There’s also a quartet track, of Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather”, with Curson and Dolphy.

In a way, this is by far the strongest of the three releases, the most demonstrative of the solid skill with which Mingus composes and plays and sparks other men to play; it’s full of verve without flash, of excellence without flamboyance. One track, particularly, seems to crystallize (or is it “vinylize”?) this irrascible bassist’s strongest points. “MDM”, which is an intercourse between Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser”, Ellington’s “Main Stem”, and Mingus’ own “Fifty-First Street Blues”, is a classic of small-band writing, uniquely complementary solo playing, and great big bass lines, so right you have to listen twice to tell for sure they’re there.

Colman Andrews

ACE

BOB WEIR

WARNER BROTHERS

Following the release of the New Riders Of The Purple Sage with Jerry Garcia, the Vintage Dead albums, the second double live Dead package, the Jerry Garcia/Howard Wales LP, and the Jerry Garcia solo album, the question on the lips of rock critics, FM deejays, music biz nabobs, record store clerks, and just plain cognoscenti was “What will Bob ‘Ace’ Weir’s solo debut sound like?” Warner, Bros., not a conglomerate to disappoint the eager consumer, has now brought out the album, pithily titled Ace, and the answer to the question is at hand.

One thing Ace sounds like is the Grateful Dead, not surprising considering the whole group, with the exception of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, backs Weir up. Those who go in for catchy nicknames (Black Oak Arkansas and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band fans, for instance) need not be disappointed by the absence of the Dead’s fabled organist/soul man, however, as there are a couple of other snazzy monikers buried in the credits; besides the aforementioned “Ace” Weir, there’s William “Fairplay" Kreutzmann on drums and hornman Hadley “Snooky” Flowers. Jerry Garcia isn’t titled “Captain Trips” this time out, but I guess he doesn’t cotton to that handle these days.

Enough dallying amongst the fascinating liner credits, however (though we haven’t even mentioned Ed Bogus, who doesn’t need a nickname); let’s get down to what’s really important — the pictures. But unfortunately there aren’t many; a hyper-symbolic MouseDesign cover, cute enough, and one squeezeddown snapshot of Weir contemplating either a leaf, a tree toad, or (outside chance only) a miniscule leprechaun. So I guess that leaves the music, which is not nearly as diverting, being a more-or-less-as-expected ploddingly complex amalgam of various brands of country, rock, folk, goodtime, and improvisational components (not unlike, as posited above, the Grateful Dead). It’s instrumentally competent (for the most part), but crucially weighed down by Weir’s mediocre vocals, at best undistinguished.

As a whole, this isn’t a very enthralling album — it’s too amorphous to be relaxing or energizing or intriguing or anything except tedious. Recommended for hard-core Dead-isGod freaks only (and Lord knows there’s enough of ’em), who are also referred to the upcoming Dead Family solo treats Songs Of The Humpbacked Garcia, A Lot Lesh Rock And Roll, and Pig Pen With The Hadley Flowers Little Big Horn Ensemble Live At The Apollo (featuring the future hitbound “Can’t Get No Snooky”). They’re all yours, fans.

Ken Barnes