Psychedelic Punkitude Lives!!

NUGGETS

(Elektra)

I learned about golden oldie collections the hard way. I was all of eleven, and had finally managed to figure out what that noise coming over the radio meant. I�d bought my first single, (Bobby Rydell�s �I Wanna Thank You'" which made no sense to my parents, even though it seems perfectly impotent in retrospect), but it wasn�t enough. One small circle of plastic, and all you could do was play the song over and over again until you became sick of it. Albums didn�t particularly make it, either. They cost four times as much as a single, and only gave you a couple of hits and a lot of dead air in return.

One afternoon, the TV screen exploded with what seemed to be the answer: ��For a limited time, 72 golden oldies all in one great four album set...� Then a seemingly endless list of all the songs I�d ever wanted rolled across the music and I became an instant prisoner. I scraped and stole the amount they demanded for this miracle, mailed it to the specified address (a post office box in some faraway Midwestern place) and waited.

When the postman finally rang the bell some weeks later, I tore the package out of his hands and threw one of the records onto the battle-scarred stereo. Halfway through the first song, 1 was stunned speechless by a realization that stopped my smile in midformation. The songs each lasted for roughly a verse, and tfyey were mimeograph renditions by a bunch of people I�d never heard of. �A Hundred Pounds of Clay� was by Delbert Sims, �The Wanderer� by Rock Randall, �Uptown� by Ruby & the Tomatoes and so on. I could�ve sworn that Delbert, Rock and Ruby were all the same lame person. I carefully labelled the record �Amateur Hour Rejects� and cried for a week.

After that experience taught me the virtues of consumer cynicism, I remained unswayed by the TV�s frenzied come-ons. The state of the art improved with time — those that were composed of originals. said so, and those that weren�t tried to sneak a disclaimer by — but the sour taste in my mouth was activated every time the announcer jumped mouth-first into his slick and slimy salespitch. The recent Super Hits of Motown is a set worth breaking any personal discipline for, but exceptions were exceedingly few. The golden oldie records were still being compiled from the charts of 1963 when 1968 rolled around, and I assumed that l was forever out of their clutches.

But now we have a two-record set called Nuggets, really only a stepchild of those earlier compilations and different in practically every way that counts. First off, this one was assembled under the aegis of Elektra Records, not by some two-man operation in the back of a New Jersey deli. This means that it will most likely get radio airplay and media exposure, thus allowing you to watch your Star Trek reruns without fear of harassment You�ll be able to buy the album from your local record merchant, and inspect the merchandise prior to purchase if you so desire.

Upon inspection of the merchandise, you note that the packaging of Nuggets is also quite unlike any of those others. The cover is bright and alive with color, a welcome change from the flimsy unmarked cardboard you�ve by necessity become used to. All 27 cuts are annotated on the inner sleeve, transferring hard facts, obscure tidbits and even some choice gossip about the songs and the bands who performed them. Where we�ve been consistently subjected to mercenary hit-ormiss, the impression is that a good deal of thought and consideration went into this package.

That same consideration was extended to the music. Earlier collections randomly grabbed at hit singles for their face value in the TV blitz. Nuggets however, is the first set programmed for the post-AM audience: those of us who were reared on radio, but learned somewhere along the line that the best music didn�t always make the Top 40. Most all of these songs were initially released as singles, but you�ll not find a No. 1 in the lot. They were chosen as music, not as numbers on some forgotten sales report.

This is also the first album to be compiled according to a defined concept, in this instance, �Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968.� That concept is far from a straight-jacket — music is presented which spills over both sides of the time barrier — because the underlying concept is just good rock & roll. Good music that, by varying ways and means, helped effect the first major redefinition of American popular music since rock & roll became a way of life.

The term pyschedelic as it is applied here has very little to do with later connotations of wincing complexity and endless artistic ego. These songs are really singles at heart — few of them dare venture much beyond three minutes, and most are the product of a period when bands ruled supreme and singer/songwriters were still in picketlines — but with their free hand they were feeling out the winds of change. These qualities were often subtle and always unpolished, but there can be little doubt that without the Seeds, for example, there might never have been the Doors. On that level this album is as historically valid as it is musically entertaining.

One might expect an album that flaunts the label �psychedelic� to be overly concerned with music from San Francisco, but this is not so. Well over half these cuts are the work of Los Angeles or New York-area bands, which have always been the bastions of music industry activity. The relaxed psychedelic exploration which San Francisco boasted could never have come to be had the battle not already been waged in the nerve centers of New York and L.A., centers that only processed the need and willingness from the real source: your own hometown.

For those to whom a record collection is a �library,� there are plenty of gems previously unavailable on album. The Vagrants, a Long Island sensation featuring Leslie �West� Weinstein, contribute a fine white-stomp version of Otis Redding�s �Respect.� One of the rarest is Mouse�s �Public Execution,� a Dylanish bit of tequila folk-rock that had almost become a legend before this set exposed it as a reality. Mouse never got very far out of the South, but his influence has reached us by way of things like �Let It Out,� by the Hombres and some of the more natural stuff by the Box Tops.

The brightest nugget of them all might be �Moulty,� a non-hit by an alarmingly shaggy aggregation of rockers from Cape Cod called the Barbarians. It�s the tender and true story of how the band�s drummer attempts to find meaning in life with a hook where his left hand should have been, and rumor has it (a rumor supplied to the annotator by this writer) that the only member of the Barbarians to play on it was drummer Moulty. The backing musicians here are alleged to have been the Hawks, rechristened a couple of years later as the Band. (The full rumor is that after the Barbarians broke up, Moulty was busted and needed money for a trial lawyer. He put this single together to call attention to himself, and is even reported to have made a heartbreaking plea for monetary support over WMEX in Boston. But the single bombed and Moulty hasn�t been heard from since.)

A high percentage of the other material on Nuggets appeared on albums which have long since passed even from the bargain bins, and have so become as valuable to the collector as many of those which never made it to albums at all. (Some of them were even nuggets way before they reached this album, having been the cut on a one-shot LP.)

There are, of course, several selections included that would inspire any radio maniac to cartwheels — �I Had Too Much to Dream� by the Electric Prunes, the Standells� �Dirty Water,� �Night Time� by the Strangeloves, �Lies� by the Knickerbockers and the Leaves� �Hey Joe� are only a few — but they�re not the standard numbers you�ll find in every other quickie hit package and under a thousand different covers since the original. Most of these �hits� never saw the inside of the upper ten, but clung tenaciously to the lower end of the Top 40 ladder. They�re the songs which weren�t played so often that you had to push another button when they came on. Hearing them now triggers a rush of nostalgia and, what�s best, the joy in these songs as music which once was and still is part of you. Music which you demanded be on charts already overcrowded with the gasping relics of your older brother�s culture, because it said something directly to you.

It�s to be expected that I have my personal favorites. �Don�t Look Back� by the Remains is a superb piece of rock & roll drive and jive, and the Seeds� �Pushin� Too Hard� made the Hall of Fame the first time I heard it in 1966. The only authentic underground (ie FM) development represented is the Blues Project, and their �No Time Like the Right Time� has got to be the finest single ever to come from a non-singles band. (They�ve even left on the fake audience applause which MGM used to dupe the album-buying public into believing that this studio track was part of a live recording at Carnegie Hall.) Gary Usher�s Sagittarius offers �My World Fell Down,� a heavily orchestrated popper which features some near-perfect Brian Wilson vocal cops and bullfight sound effects which (rumor has it, again) Usher �borrowed� from Wilson�s files.

The song which says it all for me, however, is �Open My Eyes� by Todd Rundgren�s ill-fated Nazz. This tune (actually released in 1969, but...) had the prettiness and precision that had suffocated music of the earlier era, but all the vicious drive and development of technique which marked the emerging era as well. The title alone best sums up what this set is all about.

I could fill many more pages with a blow-by-blow description of the course this album runs, but that would be to deprive you of the pleasure of rediscovery which is so much a part of Nuggets. You�ll soon enough spot your own favorites; chances are that there�s at least one cut on these four sides that came right out of your immediate neighborhood experience.

The track selection may be attributed largely to the dictate�s of one man�s taste — Lenny Kaye (who not only produced and programmed the set, but also took the time to smoke out the often-obscure information central to the excellence of his annotation) — and yet he maintained the workable truce between his sense of history and musical aesthetic which makes Nuggets both a commercial and artistic viability. He�s come pretty damn close to pleasing all of the people all of the time, and probably wound up pleasing himself most of all.

Now that I think about it, Elektra might be well advised to follow certain marketing procedures utilized by Nuggets' mercenary forebears. This album will likely do brisk business on the racks, serving those who seek out albums as part of their regulated infatuation with music. But there�s a tremendously underestimated segment of the American audience that responds to records (and most everything else) only through an intermediary stimulus: radio, or more to the point in this case, TV.

The �TV� albums all do well enough sales-wise to look most of the folks on the industry�s charts eye-to-eye. (They have to, to provide the means to swamp you with those ceaseless ads that drive you crazy.) There�s no reason to believe that Nuggets couldn�t bite off a sizeable chunk of that audience as well. It�s got enough hits to be a reasonable draw, and there�s a certain element in this audience that will buy such sets purely on reflex action. If the ads were handled with the same taste which went into the album packaging, there are probably enough people who would be attracted by the set�s one-of-a-kind air to make this breaking of new ground worthwhile.

Just imagine an ad for Nuggets blasting across the screen from all of those sleazy little UHF outlets that program a steady diet of reruns and wrestling matches. All the words that you�ve heard before somehow put differently, set against a track which features music by the Shadows of Knight, Blues Magoos and Amboy Dukes. Or better still, why not go out and dig up Sky Saxon (who�s given himself to Christ and Topanga Canyon these last couple of years), submit him to a bath and a shave, and then turn him loose on the cameras to mumble in his wonderful pre-Iggy sopor snarl about those �Sensational Sixties� ( a la National Iximpoon's Radio Dinner).

Though the Nuggets project was conceived in 1970, it took well over two years to bring it to fruition. A good portion of that time was devoted to tracking down and securing releases from the^ labels — some of which have changed hands numerous times — that had originally issued these sides. The major reason for the delay, however, was that the cultural atmosphere even a year ago would not have been suited for the release of this album. The recently increasing interest in �punk rock� and consequent depletion of bargain bin refuges arc indicative of an impending shift in at least part of the mainstream musical direction, as the end of one cycle forces us to look to our heritage for stop-over comfort. (The whole country-rock phenomenon was a similar grab for securely fastened roots, as we�d naturally exhausted the directions that took up, quite ironically, where the chronology of Nuggets leaves off.)

The success of Nuggets, however, will have meaning on a more immediate level. If this package is successful — and 1 have every confidence that it will be - it will set an important precedent from which other related ventures might develop. There�s a wealth of fine music out there that you�ve either forgotten about or Inever quite made the connection with, and such music need not be assigned a reference number and filed away in the back of your cluttered shelL Nuggets may remind you of your age, but it�ll certainly recharge your spirit, and that particular brand of medicine is most welcome as we brace ourselves for whatever era 1973 decides to open our eyes to.

Ben Edmonds

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ Nervous on the Road (United Artists)

Nervous on the Road continues in typical Brinsley fashion. It�s full of jumping good time rock songs, a little rockabilly, a shade of the Band (less than on Silver Pistol), some rhythm and blues and a little country.

The same weaknesses are there, too: a tendency to have lyrics with a couple of good phrases and not much more, a tendency to sound a little too derivative at times. Nonetheless, Brinsley still seem to me to be one of the few encouraging groups around at a particularly depressing time.

Brinsley Schwarz have their own myth of America. It is similar to the image of America the Stones have had, but tempered with what a decade of British rock expansion in the States has learned. Mostly, it�s expressed in the music, which is so thoroughly unBritish — unreserved, unpretentious, non-trendy — it�s astounding.

Though there are some songs that are less successful — �I Like It Like That� is especially disappointing considering the excellent version I saw in London last summer — there isn�t anything here that is a total waste. There are even some surprises: �Surrender to the Rhythm� is not especially good until the last chorus, when the entire complexion is changed by a kind of group vocal that is an immediate throw-back to the mid-sixties. The second time you hear it, that�s what you�re waiting for, and the tension is perfect; �Home In My Hand� and �It�s Been So Long� both rockabilly themselves into your head immediately. The former is particularly skilled, evoking the successes of the Everly Bros, at the same time as it deflates the pretensions of the Dead and New Riders.

I still find it worthwhile to have bands around that don�t play anything but simple songs, doing a couple of other people�s tunes successfully and never bothering with jams or chest-pounding excesses. Brinsley Schwarz are about the last one left with any skill. In a time of Band Imitations and country-rock melanges from Canarsie to Cucamonga, they�re a welcome addition to the scene. To echo Simon Frith, why don't people in the States buy their records? It continues to mystify me, and most people with ears to hear them.

If there�s any room left for the old jeviewer�s cliche, anywhere, this is one case where it applies: buy this record^ You won�t be sorry, and you�ll probably discover a new British band that no one else in your school knows anything about.

Dave Marsh

YES

Closer to the Edge (Atlantic)

Yes have gotten a lot of ballyhoo in the past year, and right now they�re at a point where it would take the grossest sort of faux pas on their part to deny them stardom commensurate with that of Jethro Tull, say, or maybe even the Moody Blues.

In actual practice, of course, Yes are taking no chances whatsoever. Their rise to the status of mass obsession is as coldly methodical and clinically controlled as their music. That very quality which has always put me off from their �art� (and 1 don�t doubt for a minute that that is exactly what Yes think all this glossy contrivance is) is applied most fully to fueling the machine in which their myth and PR roll to us. Closer to the Edge, appearing hot on the heels of the frankly stunning (if you can abide that kind of artifice) Fragile album, is almost a casebook on Playing It Safe at the aprons of stardom. One extended, elaborately �complex� composition takes up all of side one, and side two clocks in at two lengthy and almost as portentious tracks. Shades of Thick Asa Brick.

Just like Jethro Tull, Yes are supremely facile manipulators of Art Rock at the highest level. Musically they never leave out even the kitchen sink: every song is so overarranged, so crammed with tangential little passages skittering off from the main course for no apparent reason, and the main course itself generally so pristine in its energetic vacuity, that you wish they�d call a recess and let you come up for air every five minutes or so. To say that this music bears a distinct lack of the organic, funky, earthy quality of, say, a Rolling Stones, is to euphemise Yes�s anal sterility to the point of making it seem like a reasonable alternative to all the self-conscious, studiedly down home drool which has been clogging the airwaves, rather than the linseed marinated dreck that it actually is.

The words, again like Jethro Tull�s, are invariably so pretentious, so quasi-weighty in their involuted pronouncements on the human condition and Contemporary Alienation, as well as so precningly overstuffed with the worst collegiate stereotypes of what�s �poetic,� as to make this stuff qualify as vintage kitsch in front. Rod McKuen meets Jim McGuinn.

1 realize that this album will almost certainly outsell all past Yes opuses, and that the group�s nascent legion of fans will spit and wank up contention over the utterly humorless way in which 1 have dismissed this best selling masterpiece of Supra Rock, but I�ve just gotta say that this stuff irritates me like almost nothing else I can think qf. It wouldn�t be so bad if band or audience or both had the sense to take all their puffery with a grain of salt, but I suspect Yes fans as a group to be as resolutely solemn and defensive about the portentious nature of their heroes� slick outpourings as Jethro Tull fans are over their boys.

And as for the band themselves, 1 already read an interview where they said in all frankness that they know they were the best band in the world. See what horrors a little training in �good�music can lead to? Did you ever wonder if, as he was tromping through that great smoggy organ solo early in �Sister Ray,��John Cale might have been thinking, �Right, Tex Mex. Here it is you little schmucks, lap it up.� And try to guage the contempt behind the goatish gleam in lan Anderson�s eye. And wonder when people are gonna get back to just having a good time.

Lester Bangs

THE PERSUASIONS Spread the Word (Capitol)

Hell, I�m not going to do a cut by cut analysis of this album. Suffice to say it�s good stuff. If you like the Persuasions� previous work, you�ll like this; if you�ve never heard the Persuasions, you ought to; and if you�ve heard the Persuasions and don�t like them, you must have a hole in your soul. Now the story...

The Persuasions have come a long way in the last few years, considering they really haven�t changed at all. They have managed, without any drastic overhauls in either their thinking or their sound, to become the most successful a cappella group in recording history. Of course that achievement comes with a major qualification: there is not a whole lot of competition. They are the only group of their kind to reach the mass rock audience at all, yet their previous records and all their tours have met with uniformly ecstatic acclaim in magazines and papers coast to coast.

The best tangible testimony to the inroads the Persuasions have made is the fact that they are known to the readers of Billboard, on whose charts their second album (Street Corner Symphony) resided for several weeks, and Esquire, who listed them in their recent �Heavy 100� personality parade. The charts are perfunctory and inescapable for anyone in the business of making and selling records, and success on those lists is, if not the goal for a struggling group, an invaluable asset. Making the �Heavy 100,� while it may not have a tremendous effect on record sales in the short run, indicates that guys like me (your snotty neighborhood rock critic) are also liking what they hear. All of which means that the Persuasions cannot be dismissed either as a rock novelty phenomenon or as cocktail lounge entertainers, although they do qualify as both.

There are a lot of reasons for their consistent progress. Breaking an act is a process in which there are many elements working at one time, from record company executives and promotion men to advertising firms and booking agents. All these ingredients have helped the Persuasions for sure, but there�s one basic factor that�s gotten them where they are: they are just about the hardest working group I have ever seen. The Persuasions (Jerry Lawson, Joseph Russell, Jimmy Hayes, Herbert Rhoad and Jayotis Washington) spend a large part of their lives on the road, playing two or three sets a night, five or six nights a week. And even when they do get back to New York City, they rarely have time to go and hang out at the street corners on which they first began singing together years ago, but, rather, find themselves in the studio working on their next record. This arduous schedule seems all the more incredible when you realize that the Persuasions have no amplifiers or instruments to ease the burden, using only their voices. They put more physical energy into each performance than your average rock band will expend in a month.

And they just keep on going and going, leaving one wondering how and why. The only feasible explanation is that they love their music and, amazingly, they believe just about everything they sing. That is hard to swallow, 1 know, especially in light of their increasing gospel orientation (every cut on this new album is either secularized gospel or spiritualized pop), but it is true. And that, when it comes right down to it, is why I love them so much. For, even as they walk the thin line between Esquire and Billboard, they tour the country in the firm belief that they are, indeed, spreading the word. Whew.

Gary Kenton

THE BEST OF OTIS REDDING (Atco)

Putting together greatest hits albums is a tricky business. Just picking singles that did well on the charts and stringing them together isn�t always a good idea, for several reasons. Tunes that sounded good over radio in' the context of other popular music may not sound so swell against each other. The prime example of this is Fats Domino: Have you ever tried to listen to 20 of his greatest one right after another? Also, the heights attained by songs on various charts do not necessarily reflect the relative merits ofthose songs. Often an artists� early songs end up lower on the charts than they should. Conversely, once the artist becomes established, even mediocre efforts may shoot up to the top. Finally, when an artist is doing well he/she may do more tunes on a single album than can possibly be released as singles before it�s time to release another album.

The people at Atlantic are aware of all this. The album is titled Best of Otis Redding and is, in this case, ninety nine and 44/100 percent true. Somebody musta sat down and listened to every Redding tune ever recorded until they knew them like the back of their hand. Then, they picked the best strictly on ear value and carefully arranged them in an order where each tune is very different from the preceding and following cuts. And believe me, that last part wasn�t easy.

There is no doubt that Otis will be remembered longest for his soul ballads because he was not only an excellent soul singer but an accomplished blues singer as well. With the exception of Solomon Burke and Percy Sledge, Otis had absolutely no competition with this type of song. Like all good blues singers he was able to infuse slow songs with vast amounts of feeling, using dramatic phrasing and intricately subtle vocal manipulations. The hardest task the.editor of The Best of Otis Redding had to face was deciding which of Otis� many excellent soul ballads to choose. Wisely, he/she chose to limit the amount to a couple, or at most three on a side. Wonderful as they are, listening to one heart-gripper after another would be like eating all 28 Howard Johnson�s ice cream flavors at a single sitting. Too much of a good thing, you know? Admittedly lots of peoples� esoteric favorites were excluded by this policy but the end result was worth it. �I�ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now),� �These Arms of Mine,� �Try A Little Tenderness� and �Pain In My Heart� are all enhanced by their settings (and set-ups). The ballad theme punctuates the first two sides and then slowly takes over on the remaining two, leading up to �The Dock of the Bay.� In light of his tragic death being the focal point of his career, the increasing sadness conveyed by the material gives the listener the feeling he/she is listening to a sequential biography, when in fact, that�s not strictly true.

Of the 25 cuts included, only 13 were chart singles. There were a lot of hot list singles that were passed over. Some, like �The Happy Song (Dumb Dumb),� �Amen� and �Papa�s Brand New Bag� made the top forty but were inferior to similar cuts on previous albums and singles. The remaining 12 cuts are some of Otis� best tunes from albums which for one reason or another were never released as singles or never made the popular charts. �A Change Is Gonna Come,� �Down In the Valley,� �My Girl� and'�Chain Gang� all display Otis� ability to take someone else�s tune and turn in a convincing rendition. �Just One More Day,� a live recording, was two minutes too long to have been a single, but no best of Otis Redding album would be complete without an example or two from his excellent live albums. As for the other non-singles cuts, they�re the glue that holds the whole presentation together. You might be able to mount a successful argument for/against the inclusion/exclusion of any particular cut, but you can�t find fault with any cut when it comes up. They found a song for every place and a place for every song.

But what about �Mr. Pitiful,� you may be asking, how dare they leave that one out. Not only was it one of his best early records, but it even managed to make the charts even though it came out before Aretha and The Stones brought Otis to everybody�s attention. Well, sad to say many of Otis� early tunes were not recorded in stereo, and that was one of them. Neither were �These Arms of Mine,� �That�s How Strong My Love Is,� and �Pain In My Heart,� but they had to have those so they got the original musicians to re-record their instrumental parts for us stereo fans. Pretty sneaky, huh. Even sneakier, they re-, placed the original mono version of �Fa-Fa-FaFa-Fa (Sad Song)� with the one from Otis Redding Live In Europe for which we�ve all been so grateful the past few years.

Well, that about covers it except for a few incidentals. They did remember to include �Tramp� by Otis and Carla Thomas from their album. Strangely enough, they managed to include at lea$t one tune from every one of Otis� albums except from The Immortal Otis Redding which everybody bought anyway. How�s that for completeness� I�m glad they were able to afford the computer time in order to work it all out so nicely. The only thing that could make this album better is a companion entitled Otis Redding For Collectors.

The Masked Marvel

THE PEOPLE'S VICTORY ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS Weltschmerzen (The People's Music Works)

THE PEOPLE'S VICTORY ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS The School

(The People's Music Works)

Once upon a time, some people in New York got fed up. Everything they�d seen the music biz touch seemed to turn to putresence. But they still had music in them, they still had the skills necessary to commit it to wax, and, most importantly, they had the energy to realize it. And so, in the summer of �67, they started recording an album called Weltschmerzen. And in order to keep things less messy, they decided to do it more or less anonymously. No stars. Or, as their letterhead states, �WE ARE ALL STARS.�

�There are over 150 people performing on both albums: 8 brass, 8 woodwinds, a children�s chorus of 15, 11 violins, 5 violas, 4 cellos, 3 bass, rhythm section, backing vocals, choir of 23 persons, a people�s chorus of about 50 persons, lead singers, percussion group including conga, eastern drums, finger cymbals, kettle drums, vibes, tambourines, hand claps. There are also accordians, harmonicas, wax whistles, a tap dancer who tapped in the studio on �The Songbird of the South,� some live bird sounds and some recorded ones including Carolina Wren, Mockingbird, Crow, the Atlantic Ocean taken at Rockaway Beach, and someone who was living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia recorded live sounds there and these can be heard on �Ballet for A Small Apartment,� jump ropers (beginning of Girls� Side on The School), the U.S.S. Constitution.

�We have not been able to make a living for even the Crow.�

from a communication from The People�s Music Works

Weltschmerzen took three years to complete. A cover was designed and a second album, The School, was started. It was finished this spring. Including the airfare fpr some of the featured performers, the food, drink, and so on provided for the big studio parties when the choruses were recorded, the pressing and everything, The School cost an estimated $12,000, although exact figures, naturally, are impossible to obtain.

The People�s Music Works then made up a little �best of� sampler, pressed it on bendable plastic just like those Time/Life Big Bands records you get in the mail, and sent it out to various people. I heard it, and wasted no time sending off for the records. When you hear it, I think you�ll do the same.

�1) With no distributors, promoters, posh company suites, the albums are less expensive to purchase; only $3.00 for one, $5.00 for two.

2) The music itself can have a freshness, vitality and difference of spirit which is not possible in the rigid confines of what is acceptable to the dead record industry.

3) And most important, we hope to help open up the stuffy/ sexist/ racist/ unwise/ demoralized/ gangsterized/ sterilized/ homogenized/ dehumanized frameup of the so-called music business.�.

statement from the sampler

The music is very different. Some Of it sounds like music you�ve heard before, some of it rocks, some of it doesn�t, some of it sounds like Van Dyke Parks gone mad, some of it sounds like any number of people acting quite sane. The School is the more commercial-sounding of the two, with cuts that wouldn�t sound too out-of-place on a courageous FM station, while Weltschmerzen is more tone-poem ambitious. Considering the music�s complexity, the man at the 16Ttrack acquitted himself beautifully on both discs.

Weltschmerzen (Memories) is aptly titled, at least for me. It evokes the period in which it was made, those days of optimism slowly eroding into something else. There is a heavy classical feel, something that all New York rock of the period had, especially noticeable in the title cut and the last cut, �The Sea, the Land and the Moon.� In between, there are little reminiscences of the various wars and peaces of the 20th century (�Vietnamese Lady,� �Goodbye to the War; Goodbye to the Violets�), a Beach Boys song that�s better than anything the Beach Boys ever did in the Smile era called �Rockaway Beach,� and some totally indescribable gems.

The School, like so many schools, has a Boy�s Side and a Girl�s Side, and it�s loaded with great stuff, including the �Ballet for a Small Apartment,� which has production that would make Phil Spector blanch, �Waiting at the Theatre,� whichhas Women�s Lib words that are anything but forced or rhetorical, but which make their point nevertheless; the nightmarish �Black Crow Country,� and �Did You Ever See A Lady Act That Way,� which as a rock journalist I cannot help but quote: �She had Rock and Roll in her soul/You could tell by her tight control/And I whispered sort of low/While she turned up her radio/ I said/ �Ooh you�re such a pretty so-and-so�/ She said/ �Who are you? Is this an interview/ Or is this just another filthy rendezvous?�/ Did You Ever See A Lady Act That Way?�*

All the music is wonder-full and wonderful, everybody I know who�s heard it, loves it, and the only thing remaining for me to tell you is how to get it for yourself. Send 25 cents for the sampler, $3.00 for one, $5.00 for two records, and 25 cents postage and handling to the People�s Music Works, 220-16 Hempstead Avenue, Queens Village, N.Y. 11429. Do it today so they can get busy making more records!

Yes, folks, the these people are right — the people�s music works.

EdWard

* People�s Music Works

HANK SNOW The Jimmie Rodgers Story Featuring Albert Fullam (RCA)

MERLE HAGGARD Same Train, A Different Time (Capitol)

Neither Merle Haggard nor Hank Snow is likely to appear in blackface anywhere, but Jimmie Rodgers did as an entertainer in the mid-1920s. Soon after that he became a detective in Asheville, North Carolina where the Blue Ridge Parkway now ends, finally in the summer of 1927 he recorded for the Victor Talking Machine Company, and for the next six years until his death he could do little wrong. RCA has released most all of the Rodgers material they have, and it has been assimilated into traditional country music. To say that Rodgers is merely an �influence� is akin to saying Abner Doubleday �influenced� baseball; he was the paramount stylist for decades. The natural and inevitable changes that popular music makes were alterations on his style, not new forms. It is not so hard even today to trace progressive country techniques backwards to the original mode from the Rodgers era. Two current C&W stars, Merle Haggard and Hank Snow, have paid tribute to this original art form in albums of solely Rodgers material. Haggard and Snow being mainstream traditional musicians themselves, the link is all the more obvious.

The Haggard two-record set came out a few years ago. Backed up by The Strangers, Merle shows the similarity between his own work and Rodgers� songs—there is a very obvious connection—soft voice, well-balanced back-up, and a familiarity with the subject matter. Merle does some twenty Rodgers songs, a good cross-section of the available material. There is no effort to imitate Rodgers, either here or on Hank Snow�s record, merely to present them as loose and easy-going a form as possible. Haggard attempts a half-hearted yodel, but it doesn�t come either clear or crisp as expected. When there is a wide-ranging melody however, he comes through best, as with �Hobo�s Meditation� or �Nobody Knows But Me.� The Strangers back-up of occasional brass, harp and honky-tonk piano .projects Haggard�s voice, which I suspect couldn�t do it on its own. Capitol was a bit pretentious trying to package this album portraying Merle as �the Jimmie Rodgers of our time,� complete with him posing in a classic Rodgers publicity shot position, leaning against a train-engine thumbs up, railroad clothes, bow-tie, and name stenciled against guitar frets. Drawing the parallel out like that was unnecessary; the real tribute will come in twenty years when a similar tribute to Merle fills up a couple of records. Hank Snow is much more at' ease with Jimmie Rodgers material. The ten songs on his Rodgers tribute are some of the best known, still popular when and wherever performed. Hank uses much more fiddle to bridge verses, more inflection in his voice to accent feeling, and a more direct, less fancy style than Haggard. From both albums you get a feeling of Rodgers� personality, but neither singer comes close to the feelings emoted by the narration on Snow�s album by an old old friend of Rodgers� from railroading days, Albert Fullam. In between most every song Fullam describes his relationship with Jimmie, short vignettes of Rodgers� life, recounts brief conversations, and in general gives a first-hand account of Jimmie Rodgers not as legend, blue-yodeler, or primary source of hillbilly music, but instead as a joker, one of the boys in the train crowd with friends and*a talent for singing. Fullam and Rodgers had an instant rapport on meeting, it seems, and began at once �wisin� off at each other,� he recalls. Fullam�s recollections are a fine example of the advantage of oral history; no book, scholarly, biographical or musical, could relate the simple nature of Rodgers� relations with trainmen as well as Fullam�s narration. It�s a good piece of social history to know, enhanced by the source and the subject.

So if you�re enthralled, excited by, merely following, or otherwise attracted by current trends in country music, you could gain a healthy perspective on the origins by picking up one of these records or a Jimmie Rodgers original. And keep in mind that Merle Haggard is the same age now as Jimmie Rodgers was when he died.

Tom Miller

B. B. KING Guess Who (ABC)

This is probably a good album, but I�ll never know for sure. The reason: I slipped it onto my trusty old turntable late at night and then dozed off during B.B.�s �Summer In the City.� I had left the bathroom window open, it being a stuffy night, and had inadvertently spilled a beer on the floor between the stereo and the ironing board. The aroma from the beer lured a horsefly in search of cheap suds. That fly, meanwhile, was being stalked by the cat, and she came in through the bathroom window. Cat chased fly around room (this is a careful reconstruction of events, inasmuch as I wasn�t conscious throughout much of the drama). Chase went on for some time, judging from beery catprints on walls. Fly cleverly landed on bureau, just out of reach of cat. In a desperate lunge, she rebounded off a bookcase and reached the edge of the bureau where she tried to climb what she thought was a handy rope. It was the cord from the steam iron. The latter, with the cat under it, crashed onto the ironing board. It teetered for a moment, then slowly toppled. The iron gouged a nice hole in Guess Who but the ironing board, ah, it landed squarely on the record arm and snapped it neatly in half. The cat wisely made tracks, but that damned horsefly is still buzzing insolently around the ceiling.

If this were an isolated incident, I wouldn�t think it unusual; but I once lost a tuner in a similar manner while playing the Lovin� Spoonful�s �Night Owl Blues.� Now I�m beginning to wonder whether flies are drawn by beer or by aesthetic imbalances.

Chet Flippo

CHEECH AND CHONG Big Bambu (Ode)

If grass were ever legalized and put on the open market, it would be a sure bet that Cheech and Chong would get into the business, (flooding the country with a brand of marijuana that would be weak, harsh to the throat, adulterated with corn starch and menthol, and so completely over-advertised that huge numbers of people would be suckered into buying it, only to wonder in the ensuing migraine why anyone ever bothered to legalize it in the first place.

Cheech and Chong have been trading on a sort of manufactured hipness for some time now, building up the reputation of being the first counter cultural comedy team ever to aim their barbs at Woodstock Nation. They identify, and have become identified with the rock and roll scene to the extent that they have geared their individual routines like hit singles to the top forty AM radio stations. They tour the same concert halls that rocked out six months ago to �American Pie� and David Cassidy, and have, in short, become the darlings of the Now Generation.

Cheech and Chong live have an act that is essentially a standard Las Vegas lounge routine, mixing in extemporaneous localized patter with their set skits, and only slightly altered in the substitution of coy Marijuana and Seconal humor for the fashionable whoopie cushion and booze comedy of Dean Martin and Fay McKay. I�ve seen Cheech and Chong twice, once in the Troubador in Los Angeles, and once in a similar establishment in San Diego, both times hearing them receive similar guffaws from packed houses so juiced that they could have gotten the same response by laying a well-amplified fart.

On record, Cheech and Chong put forth a reproduction of their stage skits, bolstered by recording techniques too similar to those of the Firesign Theatre not to be noticeable. There is a game show sketch on Big Bambu that is not only similar to an episode on the first Firesign Theatre album, but is also influenced by George Carlin�s latest record. For the rest, Big Bambu imitates commercials from Firesign, and enough burlesque hip jargon to impoverish the medium.

For all the airplay Big Bambu has been getting, the material seems too thin to justify the promotion. Cheech and Chong are also only average in their delivery and timing, often ruining what could be good lines. Big Bambu is really nothing more than an amiable, over-produced, over-promoted party record capable of nothing more than an occasional laugh or snicker. And in the way in which it has been promoted as the top comedy album of the year, it is a fraud. Cheech and Chong have said that in five years, they will be known as the Beatles of the comedy world, when actually they approximate the abilities of the Dave Clark Five. But with the publicity they have been getting, they just might be right, although any long term popularity will depend on whether they can bring a bit more originality into their humor. I for one would sincerely like to like them. I can only hope that before they work on their next album, they ask themselves if plagiarism is indeed the sincerest form of flattery.

Rob Houghton

ED SANDERS Beercans on the Moon (Reprise)

Like all beatnik geniuses, there are dozens of contradictions in Ed Sanders� public personality. He is easily the most brilliant of the beatniks, with the possible exception of William Burroughs, the only remaining one to successfully make the transitions the last two decades have demanded. His latest book, The Family, is one of the two finest works to come out of the counter-culture; only Emmett Grogan�s Ringolevio is competition.

But a lot of Beercans on the Moon seems simplistic Yippie stuff, left over from political campaigns long past. �Non Violent Direct Action?� Now? �Rock and roll people/ Gonna take over the world?� Still?

Still, this is Ed Sanders speaking, and even when the voice is anachronistic, it�s still powerful. When Sanders scores a direct hit (�Henry Kissinger,� �The Shredding Machine�) it is often devastating. Can Henry the K show his face in public again, after: �My name is Henry Kissinger/and I date Jill St. John ...�? Who can ever forget Dita Beard and �The Shredding Machine� and isn�t �Keep on truckin�, Jack Anderson/Keep on truckin�, take out the trash,� something we�ve all longed to tell him?

Some of the material here is a literal throwback: Ed hasn�t been involved with setting Blake to music since the Fugs� first (Broadside/ESP) album. Here he does �Albion Crags,� better than Ginsberg did his Blake songs, because Sanders understands the necessities of pop culture better than Ginsberg does. But still, an ecology song is an ecology song, and we have had a surfeit of them. None of Ed�s are particularly outstanding.

It�s sad but true that my appreciation of this album is probably dimmed by my adoration of the F'ugs� albums. One and all, those are magic works, not just filthy (they are), but also witty and some of the finest satire produced in the 60�s. If Beercans on the Moon has only glimpses of their wonderful sense of humor and language and gut politics, it is still worthwhile. I�ll look forward to Sanders� next album with glee, if a few more reservations. Ed Sanders is still the last of a breed, and it�s been heartening to grow up with him.

Dave Marsh

TIM BUCKLEY Greetings from L.A. (Straight)

It�s been about two years now since Tim Buckley has had an album out. There was a two-year gap following Goodbye and Hello, the second of his two arresting initial album achievements, which fianlly resulted in the release of an excruciatingly excessive and melodically barren LP called Happy Sad. This disaster was followed by three albums of varying coherence and spaciness in fairly quick succession, and then the second twoyear space of recorded inactivity and occasional rumors of Buckley�s experimentation with elements of quasi-musical glossolalia and similar outre pursuits. And now, at last, a new album, Greetings From L.A..

This LP is heralded as Buckley�s �rock�n� roll album. Well, everything from Edgar Winter to Emerson, Lake & Palmer is passed off as rock�n�roll these days, so maybe Tim can slip in there, too. He�s got the usual complement of L.A. sessioneers, gospel choristers and conga drummers, anyway; and his basic recipe is to take a nondescript funk riff, stir in all this truck, and beat it to death for up to seven minutes, winding up with egg all over his face and one of the most thoroughly

boring albupis yet recorded in the vinyl statistics ledgers. Repetition can be mesmerizing, as Rolling Stones and Question Mark & the Mysterians fans know full well, but it can also bore the daylights out of you — the instrumentals here lurch along for crypto-eternities while Buckley�s vocal histrionics and funky badass posturings strain both vour credulity and your patience. Not to put too fine a point upon it, the man has no more sense of economy than a Pentagon lobbyist. His glossalic fascination shows up in �Get On Top,� where a torrent of Tim-talking-in-tongues occupies center stage for the bulk of the song, provoking profound aural discomfiture all around.

Occasional tolerable segments surface (the strings arrangements in the last song), but the overall tedium is unrelieved. Buckley has never really fulfilled the promise of his first two albums, and the way things are going he probably never will. In his liner notes, he deposes that the new LP �sounds real great to rubdowns�; but (eschewing any �medium is the massage� jokes) Greetings From L.A. is more likely to rub all but the most devoted patrons the wrong way..

Ken Barnes

RICHIE HAVENS ON STAGE (Stormy Forest/MGM)

The kid asked me to help him write what he did on his summer vacation and I guess I started babbling on. Well, we wuz up at Effie�s folks� place. They got themselves� a little cottage in No Man�s Land. Jus� land, trees and water. Jeez I wuz sick of fishin�. A poker game with the guys, a few glasses of brew and a Red Sox game, that�s what I call a vacation. All this peace and quiet stuff wuz enuff to run a lesser man to ruin. Anyways, with no TV, no bowling, no nothin� I was on the muscle. That weekend it jus� so happened they wuz havin� this here thing they called a pot concert or something. I seen a sign in Gersey�s Grocery. Man, I wuz desperate for a little action, any action, so�s I asks the wife if we maybe shouldn�t check it out.

So there we are, Effie, me and the kid, two beach blankets, eight baloney sandwiches and a case of beer, and eight zillion scraggly assed characters. Scrawny broads that had this zombie stare like they wuz off to Zulu land or somethin�. And those guys, what a pack of fancy pants. But like I sez before it was either this or swattin� mosquitoes.

We sit down and watch the music. Wimpy hollerin� folksingers not worth much more than half a crock of shit Gimme some Dean Martin anytime. Them rock bands. Heavy metal they call �em. I�ll tell �em what heavy metal is. A day at the plant would cure them snots of this kinda music.

Finally after a coupla hours this big black guy comes out hauling a guitar and sweating bullets. He�s looking for the life of me like the guy who fought Patterson at the Rubber Bowl in �61.1 sez to Effie that he�s probably a body guard for one of those sissy assed singers. Nope. He struts out and sits on this bitty stool. I�m waitin� for him to topple it. Anyway, he starts singin�. Got a lot of bite in those song6. Man, he�s just chewing out all those folks that are down there listening. He makes sense. Like I�m listening and I hears him singing about stuff that happens to guys like me and youse. Like there�s this one about called �Younger Men Get Older.� That even gets to me sometimes. Jus� the other day McCloskey got canned at the plant, so�s they kin give his job to this smartass kid. Fifteen years on the line.

You remember that song �My Sweet Lord�? Yeah. One of them Beatles did it. When Ritchie sings it, everything gets real peaceful. Almost religious like. And you shoulda heard the one about the �San Francisco Bay Blues.� That really hurts, cuz he�s singing right from here. I mean I�d never bawl�d or nothin� but it gets to a guy. What�d Effie call it... sensitive she sez.

Ya know, that Havens, he�s tough. Heavy duty. It�s like him an� me are sharing a Bud over the back fence and he sez, �I�ve lived some, Buzz, and I wanna tell ya this is how I sees it, jus� to help you out.� Yeah, he�s a regular guy.

He sees it.

Buzz Uhelszki

FIVE DOLLAR SHOES (N eigh borhood/ Famous)

Amphetamine shriek, indeed. Alla da good clean fun of livin� in the big city, leastwise how it appears under the mythic writin� cap atop your local scribe, whose ass is firmly planted in tjie nourishing soil of the great midwest. Shelter of sorts, and just a kiss away too. So, �kiss my ass, buddy� could easily be the introductory appointment of this paragraph.

But �lick my shoe� — �gimme a spit shine, honey� — and �so�s your old man,� are the snappy lines that come readily to mind summin� up Five Dollar Shoes� music. But I refuse, in this instance to let my own particular brand of five dollar bullshit get in the way of the reality that confronts the record buying public here.

This is, at least, the second best Rolling Stones album of the past two years. It�s the best Rolling Stones album without horns. These guys are younger than the Stones and prettier and more U.S.of A. American, too. The lead singer, Mike Millius, phrases like a pleasantly warped version of Dylan and Lou Reed strained through a Jagger dicer — rollin� and tumblin� you better reckon.

-It�s when you look at the lyrics that you discover this is not just any Rolling Stojnes album: �Does she get you off?/ Oh, she�ll go all night/Will she do a dwarf?/ Yeah! and do him right/Will she leave him soft?/Oh no! She�s not one of those� (�Love Song�); �Mitzi! She�s on the corner /She swears the street gets so mean/But I love that girl all against the world/With just a large size listerine� (�Mitzi�). All and more fiends, in a virtually perfect first album.

�.. .with a brand new bunch of dead flowers/Someone�s knocking at your door ...� (�Let�s Leave Town�). Let�s.

Buck Sanders

P. F. SLOAN Raised on Records (Mums/Columbia)

P.F. Sloan was, of course, the man who wrote �Eve of Destruction,� the first �protest� hit to make Top Forty and, no matter what you thought of it, a pretty daring and portentous statement back in 1965 (and also the inspiration for a remarkable piece of reactionary drivel called �Dawn of Correction,� by the Spokesmen). �Eve of Destruction� was a bad song with cloying lyrics and forced rhymes that smacked of pure Dylan imitation. But some of the best records in rock and roll history have been utterly bad rip-off songs that nonetheless touched upon a central nerve. For all of its banal qualities, it was still a gas to turn up the radio and scream �My blood�s so mad feels like coagulatin�.�

Songwriter Sloan made his reputation with that song and it crucified him. Never mind that �Destruction� was important simply because it was played on radio and never mind that Sloan was to write some fine pop songs (�You Baby� and �Let Me Be�), he was laughed out of the then-budding hip music scene as a mini-Dylan, or, worse, an American (early) Donovan. Being hyped as one of the fathers of �Folk-rock� didn�t help once the audience lost its taste for that flavor. After a few albums of questionable merit, Sloan disappeared and took a back seat in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

One of the great ironies in recent history is a song called �P.F. Sloan,� written and sung (expertly) by Jim Webb, a guy who�s been kicked around himself and a long-time friend of Sloan. The song, on the Words and Music lp, is perhaps Webb�s masterwork, a delicate and sensitive lament as well as a terse and cutting put-down of hip smugness: �But you just kept on reading the Rolling Stone, while he continued singin� �). The song is about friendship and loss and despair and Nixon

coming and it�s a crime that it didn�t become a hit ^

But the greatest irony of all is that here in 1972, P.F. Sloan himself (looking astonishingly like Paul McCartney in �Let It Be�), has released an album that rings true to these tired and jaded ears.

Raised oh Records might be considered Sloan�s debut album because it has little to do with the three Dunhill lps he released in the mid-Sixties. It�s the statement of an artist who has grown through the years, who has changed, but who isn�t hesitant to deal with his past on his own terms. The songs here are performed in a style that blends folk, rock and light jazz, but overseen by Sloan�s original and unique musical perspective, a style that was, after all, the basis of �folk-rock.� That form has been refined and enlarged here so that Sloan is making his own brand of personal music, derivative, yes, but nonetheless possessing a singular identity of its own.

Like Rick Nelson, Sloan isn�t ashamed to look back. He does two of his early songs. One, �Let Me Be,� was a hit for the Turtles. Sloan slows down the pace considerably, but it still comes across as Sloan�s self-portrait: �Let me be/to think like I want to/That�s all I�m asking of you/I am what I am/And that�s all I ever can be.�

Unfortunately, the inclusion of �Sins of the Family (Fall on the Daughter)� is a mistake. It�s the worst cut on the album, no better than when it first appeared on Barry McGuire�s Eve of Destruction album. A moralistic narrative with excessive and mawkish lyrics, it�s an amateurish attempt at doing Another Side of Bob Dylan. A pity Sloan didn�t chose to do �Where Were You When I Needed You,� a hit for the Grassroots and one of the great songs from that period.

But most of Sloan�s new material is very good indeed. Either �Turn on the Light,� with its stuttering chorus that recalls Eddie Cochran�s �Teenage Nervous Breakdown,� or �Midnight Girl� would make a fantastic single.

But �Raised on Records� is the cut I keep coming back to, a song that tells his (and our) tale:

I was raised on records

Rock�n�roll radio

I was raised on records

And if it wasn't for the music

We might have said goodbye

A long long time ago

A grandiose rocking ballad, it features superb singing from Sloan, a wailing tenor sax by Jim Horn and impeccable back-up (in fact Sloan receives strong support throughout, particularly from Joe Osborn, Hal Blaine and Larry Knechtel).

Raised on Records is pleasing, enormously listenable album, one that wears well after several playings. It may not cause much fuss immediately, but my bet is that it�ll outlast a lot of these would-be singer/sbngwriter flashes. This time, put down the Rolling Stone and listen to P.F. Soan. You won�t be wasting your time.

He sure gets my vote for Comeback of the Year.

Michael J. Ferguson