ALICE COOPER

Billion Dollar Babies

(Warner Bros.)

Quite simply, Billion Dollar Babies is the Sgt. Pepper of punkdom. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof, which in the end is probably just as acceptable to the army of millions that will buy any Alice Cooper album the moment it's released but can only barely remember who Paul McCartney once was.

Just look what they’ve got to occupy themselves with: that slick and slimy imitation snakeskin cover, the oversized Alice Cooper dollar bill that’ll be on more teenage bedroom walls than Bobby Orr and Rod McKuen posters combined, and a whole section of wallet-size punch-out photos of the boys at play, which gives way to a handsome color portrait of our heroes surrounded by 500,000 authentic big ones b/w a lyric sheet and listing of the credits. Oh, and there’s also a record.

The opulence of the packaging aside, the record itself is where the Sgt. Pepper analogy holds most substance. The theme of the record is teenage affluence, a projected world where “Dad gets his allowance from his sonny, the dealer,” and where we’re all gonna rock to the rules that President-elect Alice makes. Instead of taking their affluence as a tool for spme loftier task, they opt for the ultimate punk pose: they revel in that affluence as easily as one devours an imaginary chocolate cake. In some ways, the fact that the fantasy - at least for Alice Cooper - is now concrete reality may only be incidental. The key is the opening cut, which begins “Hello, hurray/ Let the show begin,” and the rest is only as serious as you feel like making it.

In a sense, this is the Coopers’ most overtly theatrical album. In the past, they’ve been plagued by the lost visual element when they attempted to commit their more “theatrical” pieces (like “Black Juju” or “Dead Babies”) to wax. But the thing about the material on Billion Dollar Babies is that it’s perhaps the first time that they ve consciously conceived of an album as a soundtrack for their live show, rather than just trying to record the show as an afterthought.

“Elected?' is the perfect example. When you hear it live, its simple chord patterns fill the room as powerfully as anything the Who have'given us recently. On record, however, an unnecessary horn section and awkward spoken interludes tend to cloud the picture.

■ Coining back to the song after seeing it live, your response is at least twice as strong. The same holds true for “Hello Hurray,” which is kinda flat on record but comes off live with all the Broadway majesty that they’ve ever dreamed of.

And, quite surprisingly considering the let-down that was School’s Out, there’s more that: even We old-line Alice Cooper jades can find comfort with* “Raped and. Freezing,” which chronicles a young and innocent hitchhiker’s sexyal misfortunes on the* road, fits their short ‘n’ sweet singles approach in :almost casual good form, as doesJ?‘No More Mr. Nice Guys,” wherein we find Alice lamenting about how he’s been made out a idnpnster by the press. There’s also “MaryAnn,” a little slice of two-minute nothingness -that lets Alice work the Paul McCartney imitations out of his system.

If a lot of this music seems only superficially satisfying - appealing on the surface, but doubtful in the hands of time — you’re probably right. But the thing that most critics are going to have to come to grips with is that, given Alice Cooper’s audience, such mundane concerns are of no consequence. Alice’s ^.udience isn’t into sustainance, they’re into NOW. If it feels good for now, who cares how deep it runs or how long it hangs .around? It’s like TV: the program lasts 60 .minutes, and then it’s time to change the , channel. Which might help to explain their JBHlion Dollar attitude toward affluence: it might disappear by tomorrow, so the only lining to dp is celebrate it while it’s here,

S >Muctr of file horror-show material (“I, Love ; the Dead,” “Sick Things” etc.) threatens to ^become almost a. parody of Alice’s trademark 'menace, dull musical frames oh which are i;hung self-oonsciously ghoulish sentiments. ?Y$t even these relative failures will be openly em.bra.ced by Alice’s audience, simply because ghoulishness, no matter how one-dimensipnaU is what that audience expects of Alice Cooper. And, perhaps rpore than anything else, Alice Cooper in 1973 is about giving the audience exactly what it wants.. Nothing more, nothing less. With Billion Dollar Babies, as with so many albums lately, the proof is not in the pudding at all, but in the number of spoons that dip into it.

Ben Edmonds

ELVIS

Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite (RCA)

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. (Columbia)

Elvis’ new album is great, but that’s not news; you only have tcT look at the pover, which is one of his two or three greatest-ever, 'to get the whole scene in one fell swoop. There he is, bouncing off Telstar to the whole fuckin’ planet at once.

Of course, that’s a bunch of baloney, because the concert Was months ago and we ain’t even been able to see it yet, but in the meantime, until NBC gets around to showing it, here’s the ultimate collector’s item.

It seems strange that a two-record set by America’s No. 1 Genius, etc. manages to jboast about the fact that all of eight new songs are wedged into the package. But that’s E.p. for ya. And who cares anyway, because only true Presley maniacs are gonna listen to it. I mean, I like “You Gave Me A Mountain,” “It’s Over” and especially “My Way” but if musical memories of “Steamroller Blues” and “Something” were what I wanted out of Elvis, I’d rather drive a truck.

No, the reason you want this record is because it’s so dool it makes you drool. Obviously, given the cover and concept of Aloha, there are only two moves left: a) an album recorded live in outer space and b) suicide, preferably of a public nature. Which he won’t do unless the Colonel tells him to, so you’ll have to settle for this piece of dreck. And grin a lot.

Bruce Springsteen has enough gall to actually commit suicide on stage of his own volition. Unlike Alice Cooper and David Bowie, who only yak about such stunts, Bruce would obviously come through all the way if given the opportunity. Unfortunately, his record company is trying to steal the scene by the usual act of ritual infanticide: i.e., claiming that Bruce is the Baby Bobby Dylan.

Well, hu//-shit, because Bruce Springsteen is really a throw-back all the way to the ’50s.

Springsteen is; like Bo Diddley, like Elvis, like Jerry Lee. His entire career is based upon a total disregard for taste and control on the most fundamental level. “Ain’t I a swell guy because I don’t smoke dope, I drink beer” is out the window, - Bruce is so cool he probably does still smoke dope, he probably even shoots a little speed now and then to keep it going. Also, since Asbury Park, New Jersey is obviously one of the half dozen scuzziest places in the Western Hemisphere, Springsteen is the obvious heir-apparent to the throne of Scuzz King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, as sobn as we stop being bamboozled by the klutz konsciousness inherent in our devotion to such pseudo-seamy vice-lords of pop as A.C., D.B., JLou Reed, and other nubile' wankers-off in the face of Total Trash Thrills.

Springsteen is possibly the only 'mart in America who could out talk a rock critic* even if he spotted the rock critic a hit .of speed, and he could do" it because he doesn’t give a shit how big a fool he makes of himself, he don’t spend his time making up all kinds of Fancy-ass phrases, he couldn’t pronounce Roget if you stuck a. .38 in his mduth and threatened to pull the trigger.

Which also don’t mean he’s any kind of John Prine “I grew up in white slums and baby itVcold outside” corpse. If Elvis is the Pope of Pop with the ultimate secular call^nd-response gospel show at hxs fingertips, Bruce Springsteen is like a Gnostic who spent three and a half years just slightly a.d. sitting on a rock in the middle of the desert, without eating so much as a breadcrust and came down jibjabbering, having not only seen the Lord but become him, if only for a warholian quarter-hour. He spews it.on out. .

St. Paul pulled the plug on them cats, but Bruce Springsteen don’t need to have Columbia do that to him. ThereV one crucial difference between him and Dylan, see. Bruce Springsteen’s no has-been.

Dave Marsh

THE MOVE

Split Ends

(United Artists)

When the Move were smashing helicopters and burning telephone booths onstage, my heart was thumping to the beat of “I Can Hear the Grass Grow,” and I knew that this was the group for me. They were exotic and inaccessible and penetrating, and they even hid in holes. You couldn’t ask for anything more.

About the time of Looking On, though, I just gave up on ’em. I never thought they’d go the singles route, so I glued ’em al( into their respective wheelchairs. But you all know the story, and you’ve all heard the promotion — THE MOVE ARE BACK! And they’re better than ever. I really can’t go down the list of cuts and explain which are my favorites, because I’ve favored a different one each of the last 400 listenings. Every cut is a masterpiece.

Certainly, however, you can accuse the Move of mimicry. Sometimes they go for the Beatles or Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis pr even the Beau Brummels. But not with any sense of versatility. Not like Kaleidoscope. More like gorillas stomping on a chain gang. Yeah, raw throats and soggy pricks.

* But to really appreciate the Move you need to know about their clobber technique. That’s the way they toss-ya around when a song begins to reach its peak. Like all of a sudden maybe some sorta new weirdo instrument trinkles outa your speakers and then everything; begins to ciash. You follow one vein but it only leads ya into a tangle, so ya blow your stack ’cause you can’t keep up and plow into the closest thing available. Maybe it’s your TV or your wife or your pet piranhas, but. you gotta destroy something! That’s why the Move got such a reputation for wrecking things onstage. Their music is frustrating; everything goes everywhere, and all instruments explode at once.

Don’t let any bullshitter convince ya that that means, it’s classical, though. That’s mittens. These guys know how to rock. They’d play havoc with a snapping turtle. That’s the musical reason that I like them. The nonmusical ones are:

1. They breathe hard on record, and you can hear it.

2. They look like shadows.

3. They’ve got elitist appeal only.

4. My dog howls when he hears ’em.

5. Their song titles are forgettable.

6. All four previous albums have had great covers.

7. They never went mod.

8.1 like tigers.

9. They sling Slade and spin tops.

10. They’re spooky.

Now they’re all split into pieces which is great for promotional purposes, but I’m a little skeptical. It may just be like punching out. Until they do, though, there’s this monstrous collection, which’ll skyrocket the world to a kapow tribal festival, banging your box and crushing your castles with tons of volume and fist fuls of energy!

Robot A. Hullaballoo

THE BLUE OYSTER CULT

Tyranny and Mutation

(Columbia)

The Blue Oyster Cult’s first album knocked a lot Of people for a loop last year, because it delivered so much the competition only promised: great original material, short taut takes, instrumental work much tighter than we’d heard in a long time of groaning deadassed excesses. I WANTED TO MOVE AND SO DID YOU, and so did the BOC and so they brought us out of the nod.

It was all so promising that you wondered if there was any way they could sustain and build on those strengths. But they did it! Tyranny and Mutation will blow you over like no record in recent memory.

One of the keys to BOC’s power is their endless unbridled energy. When most new bands are coming on like they got all eight clubfeet stuck in a tarpit and are too fuckin’ torpid from swamp fever anyway to do anything but bong out a few Sab chords and swat the tsetse flies, these jook savages come cycloning along and jolt you outa your chair, then flatten you against the wall and Jbash your brains out with laser whips, then smithereen your whole room, then take it to*an even more intense level... you feel like slinging all them worthless fuckin’ bogus so-called high energy albums out the window and tromping down the street with this one to start some trouble of your own!

You can’t ignore it, because as much as they’re about frenzy the BOC are about control. They’re obsessed with it to the point of fascism, and they got so much control steering the riptides of this record that you’re stunned. They’re cold when they want to be (absolutely implacable, like the early Lou Reed could be), never detached, and perhaps the most important thing about Tyranny and Mutation is that even more than their first album it shows that the BOC know how to cook.. That’s the mark of a truly great metal band: crackling overloads of pure violence, channeled expertly through all the technology at their disposal, bringing back one cut after another that’s as solidl^ musical as it’s vicious.

Most of the material is a clear advance over the first album. “The Red and the Black” ran there as “I’m On the Lamb But I Ain’t No Sheep,” but don’t get cynical, because tlje version here is so much bigger, more powerful and complex with deep crunching rhythms' and white light/white heat guitars leaping out and hurtling in every direction, that it could be a whole different song. “Hot Rails to Hell” is just as charged, with crazed lead guitar lines out of theJ finest moments of Alice Cooper and the Stooges, blistering changes and a lurid feel somewhere between AmericanInternational exploitation flicks and the phosphorescent fantasies of pre-Code comics.

The record has two sides: “The black” / tyranny/ methedrine, and “The Red / mutation / quaalude (at least that’s how producers Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman described it). What that means is not that the BOC are nodding out while grinding their teeth to stumps, but that they’ve found an almost perfect balance between cold blue steel and white fire, between distance and aggression.

There’s a diabolical, menacing strain running through all of it from the fantastic cover art to every song inside. It’s a deliberate attempt at a kind of ominous, sinister, almost Burroughsian mystification, coming from a strange zone somewhere between Alice, Black Sabbath, the Stooges and A Clockwork Orange, and you can take it as seriously as you want to, but it works. Just check the song titles. The BOC are often verbally obtuse and the words themselves indistinct, but they succeed regularly in flashing some chrome Orwellian/sleaze tabloid image at you and then whirling away. Two fine exceptions are “Baby Ice Dog,” with lyrics by poet Patti Smith that’re as phantasmal a transmutation of Mickey Spillane tough guy talk as the rest of her work; and “Teen Archer,” another great archetypal song from rock critic R. Meltzer, whose lyrics are brilliant (just check out “Stairway tb the Stars” on the first album), spare and slicing. They should record more of hisy songs, because his potential is enormous, fully on a par with that of the banditself.

If this review seems a bit overenthusiastic, even hyperbolic, it’s not from first impressions or because so much of the other stuff lately has been bad enough to make you grab at straws of brilliance. It’s because this record is every bit as good as I’ve said it is, as exciting and masterful as its peaks as people like Alice Cooper, the MC5, and even Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds have been at theirs.

Lester Bangs

THE KINKS

The Great Lost Kinks Album

(Reprise)

The Great Lost Kinks Album consists of fourteen tracks The Kinks cut between 1966 and 1969, none of them hitherto available on an American album. Written for T.V. and a movie, for kid brother Dave Davies’ solo record and anaborted Kinks LP, and as throwaway B-sides of singles, the songs nonetheless marvelously cohere to make this a real album and not merely an. assortment of unrelated curios. This of course says a lot for the organic consistency of The Kinks’ work; File TGLKA between Something Else and Village Green.

Like most Kinks albums since 1966, this one is sad. Oh, some of the songs sound happy enough, but they’re wistful thinking, pathetically evanescent fantasies. There’s no getting away from pain, ugliness, and isolation, which a few tracks face squarely. ‘‘Where Did the Spring Go?” is an extremely ,upsetting song about an aging man who has gotten nothing from life but varicose veins. “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” is chilling. Although in his notes to the album • John Mendelsohn takes issue with my response to this song, I still feel in the vocal’s grating, paranoiac edge the fear and the menace of a cornered dog.

The music of TGLKA is a treat, and as always with The Kii>ks, the music’s cheerful energy qualifies Ray Davies’ melancholic lassitude. Most of these songs were recorded before The Kinks had utterly forgotten the primal riffs that originally made them famous, and here these Tiffs appear in the most unlikely places, in otherwise delicate contexts such as “Rosemary Rose” and “Misty Water.” This album contains some of The Kinks’ richest music, for it dates from a period when the band was most open to a great variety of musical influences. They had shucked, their early style and hadn’t settled on a new one, and in the interval they were free and loose. The best of Ray’s melodies here have an extraordinarily supple and almost improvisatory feel.

In his notes Mendelsohn rather querulously argues that The Great Lost Kinks Album is the last great Kinks album, that since moving to RCA the group has sadly deteriorated. Muswell Hillbillies is “clumsily heavy-handed and obvious/’ and on Everybody ’s in Showbiz Ray is “bitchily egocentric.” He is-no longer “sensitizing us” with his .“beautiful songs.”’ But MH is surely no more heavy-handed and obvious than earlier numbers such as “Powerman” and “Brainwashed” (one of Mendelsohn’s favorites), and Mendelsohn seems not to understand MH’s relation to Village Green. One a nostalgic reminiscence of an irrecoverable pastoral childhood, the other a depiction of an inescapable, squalid, urban adulthood, the two work together like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. As for the bitchy egocentricity of Showbiz, the charge pertains, if at all; to only four of the ten new songs on the* album, and these songs possess varying degrees of grim irony, mordant accuracy, and sheer humorousness which more'than make up for what ruins them for Mendelsohn. Moreover, Showbiz’s “Sittin’ in My Hotel” is as beautiful and sensitive a song as one could wish for.

If The Kinks have fallen off somewhat, it is in the quality of their music — Ray’s tunes and the band — not in the quality of Ray’s lyrics and sensibility. Mendelsohn chooses the wrong line of attack. But why should one feel called upon to malign The Kinks today in order to enjoy them as they were? TQLKA is excellent, and the next Kinks album probably will be too.

Ken Emerson

JOHN MARTYN

Solid Air

(Island)

In this age of specialization, where star musicians are,all pretty good at their particular -slice of the musical pie, the virtuosity, Warmth, and fluidity of John Martyn’s music is often staggering. You constantly look for hidden mirrors, sleights, of hand: no one can be THIS good and remain practically anonymous through six albums!

Apparently they can. Though he’s been helped in obscurity by the fact that his first two albums were never released in America, his last three were never advertised and only sparsely (albeit enthusiastically) reviewed, and until last month he’d never ever toured America. With this album and tour, things can’t help but change. For the last month he’s been in the unenviable position of opening concepts on the Traffic/Free tour, and so far, he alone with his guitar, his pickup, amplifier, and echo unit has outshone both bands and left audiences pretty bewildered; not only is he a fucking good solo performer, he’s also an incredible band! •

It’s not enough to say that in the strange grey region between rock, folk, and blues, he’s the best accoustiq guitarist currently performing. What it comes down to is that no one plays and uses a guitar the way he does. His style, though immensely varied, is most deeply rooted in the full chorded blues of Fred McDowell, the clean,. sharp percussiveness of Robbie Robertson’s lead lines, the rich Flamenco-like plucking of Baden Powell. He’s a master.

All this sound? as if if might be leading up to a review of a technically perfect and perfectly boring Arhoolie album by a musical scholar; nothing could be further from the truth. John Martyn is an innate musician, he surrounds himself with other equally gifted musicians, writes startingly beautiful songs, sings in a full, instantly recognizable voice, and takes the sort of Chances that established musicians balk at and unknown ones are scared of.

1 guess I should start with the bare essentials: John Martyn and guitar. “May You Never” is not only one of the best songs he’s ever written,, it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever heard. Beautiful andstark, it’s a song to a friend; really a benediction, a toast:

May you never lay your head down

Without a hand to hold

And may you never make your bed

Out in the cold.

May you never lose ybur temper

If you get into a barroom fight

And may you never lose your woman

Overnight.

The guitar, percussive, always in motion, shifts between a melody and a harmony with his voice. It’s carried off with such ease, such grace, that rather than the complex and formidable work that it is, it seems perfectly natural, .organic. That’s the beauty of this album; no matter how many different things John Martyn tries, each seems the natural, logical outgrowth of the music itself, there is never the sense of the artist showing off, throwing licks in to impress or dazzle. On the produced, textured songs, “Solid Air” and “Man In The Station,” among others, he seems to have fused the. best elements of current accoustic., melodic music with the decisiveness of rock, the looseness of jazz and experimental music the improvisational side of Chick Corea, the occasional liquid melodiousness of Terry Riley, the gentle spaciousness of Richard Abrams. A lot of credit here should go to the dazzling keyboard work of Free’s Rabbit (John Bundrick) represented far better here than on any of his own group’s records, and the always impeccable double bass playing of Pentangle’s ubiquitous Danny Thompson.

In short, I can’t think of a young, rising musician with more talent or imagination than John Martyn, and I don’t know of any better introduction to him than this album.

Brian Cullman

TERRY AND TONI

(Capitol)

Did you hear about those Berkeley Babes? The ones that used to be in Joy of Cooking. Voices that meshed just like a macrame headband. Well, they hit the road. Rumor has it Terry got sick of embroidering the ass of her old man’s jeans and Toni had suddenly developed an allergy to brown rice. So they decided to leave the mellow vibes of Berkeley in search of some action. Packed up their hand-made Tibetan thongs, their turquoise armbands, crafted on a Colorado commune and a six month supply of sugar frosted granola and set off on the highway... thumbs but.

“Geeze, only thirty-four rides and we’re already in Baker County, Tenn.,” exclaimed Toni.

“But, L don’t feel any vibrations from any place yet,” answered Terry.

“Yeah, but we gotta stop soon, I gotta pee,” pleaded Toni.

“Okay, this fuchia Firebird is stopping. We’ll get off at the next exit,” promised Terry.

“Where to ladies?” inquired the chunky fingered driver. I’m going as far as Nashville, you see I’m a travelling salesman and ...”

“That will be just groovey,” chorused the girls. They exchanged smiles of sudden illumination and slapped each other a full five.

“Nashville, that's where we shoulda been headed all the time.

The travelling salesman let them out on the outskirts. of Nashville, the land of tire irons and pedal steels.

“Maybe a little country will be good for our heads,” mused Terry.

“And I always heard a Tennessee twang would clear up my nasal conjestion,” said Toni.

So, with great expectation but little prospect they decided to stay. But since their granola was dwindling they found themselves waiting on tables at “Great Granny’s Grits”. In no time at all they were whistling “Dixie” and liking it. And Oh Lordy, what those truck drivers could do! But pretty soon they tired of the diner gig and longed for the kick they got outta making music for those shiny black discs. The next day, they sashayed into Cinderella Studios (We’ll make a princess out of any snuff queen), and told the ratted haired record exec they wanted to make music.

“We used to make rock and roll records in California,” they told him.

“All, that ain’t nuthin, Nashville cats been playin’ since they’s babies. Nashville cats git work before they’re two. It’s custom-made for every mother’s son to be a gitar picker in Nashville,” he answered. “And you know why, jus’ look over there.” he pointed to a Rek-o-kut. “Jus’ shove a 1.98 in the slot, wait fer the red buzzer and start yer singing.”

Having no choice since nobody had ever heard of Joy of Cooking, let alone rock and roll in these here parts, they decided to give Tammy and Lynn a run for their money.

Hot damn! They was singing trailer park music, straight from the Shiawassee State Fair Grandstand.

You tell me nuthin’ is a matter

And you’re just gettin’ fatter

And I feel life is-a-leavin’ us behind.

I’m a-takin’ down

the clothes line, honey

I’m a-throwin’ out the dirty dishes

and rollin’ up the carpets

on the floor.

You kin cook yer tv dinner

livin’ off yer race-track women

’cuz I don’t wanna live here anymore.

Now you turn the tv on

And before you know it,

the evening’s gone

and you’re ending up with

Johnnie Carson, not me.

Now lissen, some city slickers are gonna try and tell you that their songs reek of revolution, feminist gunk. But it ain’t so. This here is pickin’ music, and it comes natural to all the inhabitants of Hillybilly Heaven. Even if Toni & Terry are from Berkeley and think otherwise.

Jaan Uhelszki

LITTLE FEAT

Dixit Chicken

(Warners)

All right, world. This is Little Feat’s third album and I’m givin’ ya one more chance to recognize these guys for the brilliant rock and roll band they are. And if you don’t get the message tnis time, well, I couldn’t hardly blame the band if they gave up in disgust.

Because from the first moment I heard them, when the single of “Strawberry Flats” thundered out of my speakers and everyone in the room just stopped what they were doing to listen, I knew that Little Feat was a band to be reckoned with. The band’s nucleus - slide guitarist Lowell George, keyboard man Bill Payne, and Richie Hayward on drums - is one of the tightest units going these days, both live and bn record. Plus, George writes lyrics that show a really advanced sensibility of what’s going on around him. The fact that it goes on in Los Angeles gives them their unique flavor, and there have been times when I’ve thought that maybe one would have to experience L.A. to know what Little Feat is all-about. Certainly nobody else has rendered that city’s paranoid flamingopink and chromium soul any better: “Ain’t no peace, ain’t no love/ Milktoast Hitler/ Ain’t no velvet glove.” Where are you coming from when you write stuff like that! And the tension in music! When they want to scare you, they sure can, but they are also quite capable of take-off-your-shoes-and-boogie music.

In fact, Little Feat has got everything they need except record sales. I understand Warner Brothers isvplanning to go all out for Dixie Chicken, and I’m glad — it’s such a fine record that if it gets any exposure at all, it ought to sell. But I said that about the last two, too .. .

What’s on the album? Good stuff, folks, good stuff. From “Dixie Chicken,” the romping opener, to a mellow instrumental closer called “Lafayette' Railroad,” it’s all good stuff. There are big production numbers like Allen Toussaint’s “On Your Way Down,” sung with incredible urgency and fire, or the rollicking “Fat Man In The Bathtub,” which, with its mariachi-style synthesizer and surefire chorus (“I said Juanita/ Oh, torpedo/ What afe ya up to?”), could make a killer single, properly edited. Eerie paranoid numbers like “Kiss It Off” (could the milktoast in question be Nixon?) or Fred Tackett’s “Fool Yourself.” And lots of superlative playing, too — Lowell George, pardon the irreverence, could have showi? Duane Allman a whole lot,, methinks, and the new rhythm section of congas, bass, and drums is as tight and funky as any bandleader could ask for.

In short, what Dixie Chicken is is the best album yet by Los Angeles’ only rock and roll group (true - think about it), an album filled to overflowing with the stuff that makes me play an album over and over again, which I’ve been doing since Dixie Chicken strutted into my house. And why shouldn’t it strut? It’s got plenty, to be proud of!

Ed Ward

THE WAILERS

Catch a Fira

(Island)

Well I suppose it serves you - America -right. For five years some of the best music has been coming out of little studios in Jamaica, and you went right on ignoring it. You picked up “The Israelites” by Desmond Dekker, true, true, and Jimmy Cliffs “Wonderful World,” but not until Johnny Nash smoothed it down to UI Can See Clearly Now" did you start to take notice.

So the boss of Island Records, Chris Blackwell, figures if that’s what you like, take some more. And he serves you up with an LP by Bob Marley and the Wailers. Marley played on the Johnny Nash LP, wrote some of the numbers including the current hit, “Stir It Up,” and has been ‘around’ for more than ten years, making some nice records at times, influenced by the soft Curtis Mayfield sound. But this, ugh, you’re welcome to it.

If you missed out on Jamaican music under its various names of ska, rock steady, and reggae, and come to this in an attempt to catch up, wait a minute. This has as much to do with previous Jamaican music as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin' On had to do with the Motown Sound, or “It’s Now or Never” had to do with rock ‘n’ roll. No, leave this and go to look for those Shelter 45’s that Ed Ward wrote about in the March issue of CREEM, or better still get Island’s Soundtrack album of The Harder They Come, a film starring Jimmy Cliff which is a great film in every way and incidentally the best possible introduction to what reggae should sound like. Reggae is a deep beat ,and melodies you can’t forget, where Catch a Fire is a soft beat and guitar solos you heard before and were glad to have forgotten.

Charlie Gillett

SPARKS

A Woofer In Tweeter's Clothing

(Bearsville)

Time for total splits, crotches to the carpet and rosin on the bow, rock to break the suction and auf vee geaux ... Sparks is back! So get rid of that fabulous fake fur, unbutton your cuddly and mount up; little Russell carries a big, big roustabout mallet now. Coo, watch out for the high notes.

' A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing is absolutely depraved, manic, beano, and the sleeper of the year in the creative department. These nectareous swains shoulda been Beardsley’s house band and dripping with absinthe, what with doing everything from a prim vignette of sticky-summer-sodomy (“Angus Desire”) to straight-ahead S&M (“Whippings and Apologies”). Not your average gaggle of Cub Scouts, to be sure, but they noticed the same little girl stains we did climbing that slide at recess, the same tight scent, and they've translated all those prickly scenes and sweaty underthings into a music that is truly without precedent, a hot surrealist urge that seems as much a part of destiny as the fact that one in every twenty paraplegic patients who develop bedsores dies from them. Not only that, they’re from L.A. but they’re so trendy that lotsa bedazzled snappos are gonna think these peregrine prancers are English decado-fops which is probably just what Sparks wants. I mean, all the Pretty People sleaze about in London, don’t they? In leather-walled latency?

If you’ve never heard their first LP (Yeah, yeah, they used to be Halfnelson before repackaging) and learned to love its demoniac schizophrenia it’ll take you a while to figure out just what in sanitary napkin belts is happening, but try it anyway. A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing might be the first neoDada concept album; the theme is ultradecadence, not futuristic ultra-D as in Clockwork Orange but a kind of treacly, pre-warEurope-transposed-to-the-present type of decay. With humor. With a singer who sounds like a bloody daft eunuch Marlene Dietrich. The pianist looks like a clown Hitler. They have been known to do things to each other onstage. Sure, the Stones are decadent, but dumb. Alice Cooper has a snake but he drinks beer and watches Monty Hall like the rest of lis; David Bowie's only a Bi at best. These guys are singing about skipping school to put it to old Bessie at the stockyard!! These guys are doing a version of “Do Re Mi” which, aside from being the most delicious non sequitur of a painfully logical music year, rocks like a sonuvabitch! These guys do a song in exquisitely-enunciated French and another about a guy who hits other drivers with his car in an effort to get something more than “stripped-down thrills.” Not a single recognizable riff on the whole album, not a single hackneyed phrase, A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing is the weirdest fucking album of 1973 from America’s most advanced band, and it’s a shame. Sparks is too good to make it.

Dann DeWitt

FREE

Heartbreak er (Island)

Eric Falcon, local guppy for a major Memphis underground music radio station, Claims that Free is the most exciting group around. He feels that a rock’n’roll band ain’t topnotch Grade A material unless all their songs sound alike and you can go to sleep by 'em. He also maintains that Free should do the soundtrack for spy movies and that “All Right Now” is one of the best songs you can play when you’re fucking your girlfriend.

Eric is still quite a fanatic about this hotshit group called Free. Mostly he just drives around in his flashy Jaguar (which has the back seats ripped out, by the way, so as he can carry along his Fender amp to impress his buddies) and plays cassette tapes of all the Free records. He sez his primary role in Hfe is to turn everybody oij to Free. “They’re so goddamn heavy, you know,” he whines, “that their music just sucks me up into themselves. Man, I hear people say that they’re just a drab easy going band and that they don’t live up to the guts of groups like Slade or the Five Hot Dogs. But that’s why I like era. When ya hear a Free song, immediately, right then and there, you absolutely know it’s Free. Sure, they don’t have no terrific songwriting abilities, but who needs that shit anyway? I know that they don’t even hang loose, either. But why they’re so important to me is I really get off on phrasing.”

Last week, Eric went out and bought the new Free smackeroo and boy, was he ever happy. He played the whole album for three hours straight on his radio show, and ignored all complaints and threats from his listeners. “I just sat up there in the studio, ya know, and locked myself in with a case of Miller’s and just forgot that the rest of the world existed. Free does that to ya.”

When asked to compare Free’s new album with their other accomplishments, Eric got all1 hopped up and replied, “Well, first off you can’t really say that there’s ever been a perfect Free album. Except for Fire and Water. And I like Free At Last after that one, and then comes Tons of Sobs and then Highway and the other two I don’t listen to much. But this new one, like, I kinda enjoy it all the way through. It opens right up with this pushing, gut-pounding rouser called ‘Wishing Well’ which may be their best song ever. I like the line that blisters ya when Paul Rodgers shouts ‘Throw down yer gun/ You might shoot yourself/ Or is that what you’re trying to do?’ That’s got some sorta meaning, you know. Even the ballads on this record have meaning. But the typical Free grandiose style which creeps along until it crashes is still quite evident. I mean, right now at this very exact moment, I would venture to say that this is their second best album next to Fire and Water.”

Eric does not get tired of Free very easily. Everytime I go over to his apartment he’s got Free cooking on his tape deck. He has other albums, too ... Early Days by the Zombies, The Box Tops’ Greatest Hits and some Wishbone Ash. Around five albums altogether not counting his Free collection. Eric does not have a shag and he’s never been to New York. He hates hippie chicks. He does not know about the revolution. His life’s ambition is to make love to Betsy Palmer. Eric hates Pink' Floyd. In fact, Eric is just an all around swell guy.

Finally, I asked Eric if he thought Free would become as popular as, say, Grand Funk or the Rolling Stones. He stared into space for about half an hour arid then sipped his gin and remarked, “Who are they?”

With great guys like Eric Falcon around buying records, you sure the fuck don’t need rock critics.

Robot A. Hull

DR. HOOK & THE MEDICINE SHOW

Sloppy Seconds

(Columbia)

SHEL SILVERSTEIN

Freakin' at the Freakers Bali

(Columbia)

, . Hi, wanna have your nose rubbed in swill? Well you’re in luck if you do, palsy, because these two albums are the literal shit. Dr. Hook are this musically competent bunch of plain swine who may be just about to break big for reasons unpleasant to think about. Shel Silverstein ain’t breaking much but farts, at least on his current album, although he’s been around for quite awhile and, unlike Dr. Hook, ain’t just some pig(s) totally without redeeming merits. He is a pig, thpugh, just like they are; in fact, he writes almost all their songs for them, which is one thing (though not the only one) that makes him the biggest pig of all. I’ll tell why.

Silverstein is one muttfuck of a talented song-writer; if you don’t believe that, just go play Loretta Lynn’s “One’s On the Way,” which this chromedome puspeter actually was responsible for. It’s a country classic with sad, funny lyrics and reveals humanity and insight found nowhere on his current solo album. Now, nobody ever said any artist had to corset himself into being warm, human, touching, and deep all the time. In fact, all the world loves a happy jerkoff; if you don’t believe it, just watch Dr. Hook’s single of Shel’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone,” a rickety splintered hootenanny performed on a song about every punk musician’s fave fantasy, splay right up the charts^

Shel’s also an old buddy of Hugh Hefner’s, so maybe it’s only appropriate that the songs on Freakers Ball are such cutesy pudpulls that Playboy just ran a big spread of their lyrics with Silverstein cartoons attached. Anyway, S.S. fits into the H.H./P.Boy ethos perfectly, because both are constantly preoccupied with sex, and even manage to come off fairly clever ‘n’ facile in spite of the fact that neither ever touches sex on any level beyond that of some adolescent asshole playing with his peter, picking his nose, peeking thru a curtain at a porno flick and giggling. At least Silverstein doesn’t — his album doesn’t have any sobersided advice columns in it, it just has a lot of little peepee ditties about seeing “Polly in a Pomy,” chicks with thumbsucking fetishes, anti-clap commercials (“Don’t Give a Dose to the One You Love Most”), “liberated ladies” out of standard butch-dyke stereotypes, and how some lucky frat named Stacy Brown has two dicks instead of one so all the babes is after him (ain’t that just the most outrageous thing you ever heard1!).

The question is, does Shel Silverstein have one! And if he does, has he ever used it for anything but yanking off at Barbi Benton? ’Cause look, Columbia’s advertising this album like this guy’s some awful titillating wierdo pervert you’d just love to have around because he does such cute things with his KY and his dildo, When in reality he’s just another mindless Biff Rose scribbling dipshit little songs that are too stupid to be even funny, even though they do work real hard at hitting all the trendy bases.

Dr. Hook and the Medicine show might well’ve all gone to college, but they’re determined to convince us all they’re justa buncha smelly ole backwoods bumpkins who can barely talk, much leSs read, but came to the big city anyway with a gap-toothed grin on their face, git-ars on their backs, a pocket fullagood pickin’ ‘n’ singin’ vibes an’ lotsa real brash boyish ambition. They want everybody in the world to know they useta fuck heffers, but now they got the hots for all them “little teenage blue-eyed groupies/ Who do anything we say” in spite of the fact that they’re all ugly cretins, as well as “a freaky old lady/ Named Cocaine Katy,” who sews up the rips they get in their jeans when they’re grabassin’ and sounds like a real groovy chick. I mean, even if they don’t make the cover of Rolling Stone, they sure got the lifestyle down.

Other highlights of Dr. Hook’s second hogtrough include the title song from Silverstein’s album, which is about a real big ostentatious druggznsexx party in L.A. that lotsa talented professional Deviates as well as a fair proportion of record biz folk in varying degrees of drag attended. Best of all, though, is “Get My Rocks Off,” which hears no voices on the street hut’s just Der Hook lead singer and most individually obnoxious bandmember Ray Sawyer wheezin’ away braggin’ how horny he is all the time .. *. sheeit, this ole sheepscrewer’s so all-fired loose he even lets on how he makes it with boy si What courage! Except I think he’s lying about that and all the rest of it too. I don’t think he makes it with nothin’ but knotholes.

In fairness to all these greasyfaced, goggle1 eyed, homely leerihg creeps, it must be skid that they also do some of Silverstein’s .“straighter” folkand C&W-tinged pop songs, performed in commercial so-so-fashion that’s real easy to take even though they don’t make you listen too hard. At least they ain’t.offensive like the rest of this shit, but Dr. Hook’s strongest suit is that their whole riff and attitude is so offensive it’s the most interesting thing about ’em, even if it does make you wish they’d all go off somewhere and jump in Grand. Guy Grand’s vat of shit and drown. At least their ugly antics, get a reaction, and if they followed ’em thru to the logical conclusion just described, hell, we’d put ’em on the cover of CREEM.

Lester Bangs

BOBSEGER *

Back in '72

(Palladium / Warners)

Bob Seger’s “Rosalje” is so strong it could break you in half. But it is the only song here that is close to what I feel Seger could be achieving though, and that’s a disappointment.

Seger is the only true singer/songwriter the Detroit. scene produced, unless you count Smokey Robinson. His mold has. been closer to Rod Stewart’s or Robbie Robertson’s or ; most appropriately —; an uncouth John Fogerty’s than it has been to the wheeze ’n’ whine school of composer/vocalism, but singer/spngwriter is what Seger is, nonetheless.

His latest album, Smokin’ OPs didn’t cut the mustard because most of the material was hackneyed — a Leon Russell tune, a Tim Hardin, and so on. But what I call his genius shone through on the “remake” of his greatest composition, “Heavy Music,” and in the supremely powerful band track on Chuck Berry’s “Let It Rock.” Michael Bruce’s guitar Carried the Song past versions by the Stones, the Animals and Detroit; I think it is possibly one of the two or three greatest white versions of Chuck Berry I’ve heard.

But two - songs an album isn’t much, especially when drily one of them is the auteur’s own. I chose the word “auteur” quite carefully since the rise of that theory (borrowed from film criticisiri) seems t'o be the stem of much of what is miserable in today’s rock. Seger has falleri hook, line'and siriker, for auteuristn’s central charlatanism — that the highest level of the’ body of an artist’s work is an expression of his or her own psyche. Thus, he writes ihawkish moans like “Turn the Page,” which (for all its good lines, and capable t vocal) is finally just another mewling piece of rock star self-pity.

I don’t mean to imply that one of the things that Seger has to work out in his music isn’t, his own personality; I just think that there are any number of more worthwhile things to think about while doing that. Incestuous autobiography as a dictum of French cinema turned it into an almost complete bore and, with a little luckZauteurism can do the same for rock. One is forced to wonder, Wamer/Reprise being the capital of the s/s set, if “It’s better in Burbank” doesn’t mean better for the .artist only. I’m much more interested in what an artist and I hold in common than I am in our points of divergence; where Bob Seger lets me down, and where too many formerly inspired s/s’s do, is in concentrating too much on insular, selfconscious considerations. What made “Heavy Musie” great was that I didn’t have to sort out any point-of-view; the point-of-view was only intelligible if you could dig* the title and the sound. After that, it was a one way ride, straight into the heart of rock.

Seger ottly accomplishes anything’so^ universal in one song here, “Rosalie,” which is one more than almost anyone else, still and alk

Rosalie Trembly might be the last Top 40 genius left. She programs the best pop music station anywhere, including LA, which is tough. The station is CKLW, and that it operates within a “Much More Music” format makes Rosalie’s triumph the more remarkable. CK is a wonderful amalgam of what is best about AM —30% of the music seems to be strong sou! stuff, and the rest is a healthy sprinkling of new and old rock, with only a little pop fluff. Besides, Rosalie breaks records, more than anyone in the nation, two years running. So when Seger sings:

She’s quite the mediator

A smoother operator

You will never see

She’ll see you later .

And no one dares disobey her

Openly

She knows music, knows music

Do ya see?

She’s got the power,

she’s got the tower

Queen Rosalie

he’s right on all counts. Does it seem strange that the most powerful voice in rock radio is a woman’s?

As everyone is beginning to realize once again, AM is where the action is. “Rosalie” is the kind of personal yet universal song we need more of. When iSeger sings that “ ... the music died/it burned my pride/But somehow I pulled through/Back in ’72,” he doesn’t have to be writing his own obituary. And he probably isn’t, since he has the power, too, to rise out of the Burbank tar pits and shine. One would hope he does it soon, rather than putzing around with inferior copies of other people’s inferior songs, and inversions of his own mythology. More egocentricity is the last thing the Rosalies of the world are going to put up with, and it’s the last thing any of us want or need.

Dave Marsh

DEODATO

Prelude

(CTI)

“Also Sprach Zarathustra”, commonly referred to these days as “The Theme from 2001" and fuck you Richard Strauss, as arranged and conducted and partially performed by Eumir Deodato, is a great track in the same way that The Carpetbaggers was a great book and Lawrence -of Arabia was a great movie. In other words, they’re all junk, but they’re really beautifully produced junk. There come' moments in the popular arts (crafts?) to put it another way, in which slick, shallow, gimmicky professionalism really gets itself together, really joins together enough diverse (though obvious), exciting (though obvious), crowd-pleasing (because obvious) elements to produce something phenomenal. I really mean it. “Zarathustra” (Deodato version) is great. And it’s the kind of thing we’ll probably all be listening happily to for the next forty years. I mean, it doesn’t even get boring after the first half-dozen times, which Lawrence of Arabia sure does. (I’ll bet.)

What it is is a Creed Taylor production, and, for that one well-known nine-minute track, he’s just a hell of a \ producer, a masterful organizer and blender of elements. Then there’s the rest of (he album. The “Let’s Hip Up The Classics” approach doesn’t work nearly as well on ’’Prelude to Afternoon of a Faun”, but even that, coming as it does immediately after “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” isn’t exactly half-bad. The other three tracks are by Deodato himself (one is cowritten by drummer Billy Cobham), Deodato being a Brazilian-born (I think) pianist who made significant appearances on several, Bossa Nova-era lps and who looks like a cross between Tony Joe White and Tim Rose. His playing is certainly competent, and almost certainly no more than that. I can think of at least half a dozen Brazilian pianists who could blow him off a stage, in fact, with one hahd tied behind their back. One Deodato original, by the way, is called “Carly and Carole.” The prosecution rests.

There are plenty of talented people ori Prelude, though. Like, a rhythm section Of Billy CJobham, Stan Clarke, Ron Carter, Airto, and Ray Barretto — which rhythm section is most definitely one of the strongest things on “Zarathustra” and elsewhere. Hubert Laws is allowed, one typically lyrical and technically adept solo on “Faun,” and Jay Berliner (remember all that fast, absolutely clean, crystalline Spanish guitar on Astral Weeksl) struggles rhanfully against an overriding ensemble sound on another Deodato original, “Spirit of Summer.”

I suppose Deodato will probably record Gato Barbieri’s theme from Last Tango in Paris next. Too bad he wasn’t around a few years ago, though. I would have loved to have heard him, in the hands of Creed Taylor, tackle the theme from Lawrence of Arabia.

Colman Andrews

CURT BOETCHER

There's An I nnocent Face

(Elektra)

Remember last year when that Eagles record about the guy hitching rides in Arizona hit, how everybody was so stoked they began proclaiming it the Best Single of the Year and predicting the long overdue reinstatement of bonafide American AM pop? And remember how the Single of the Year subsequently seemed about as absorbing as an industrial safety film when the predictions came true on a wave of truly keen seven-inchers from the Hollies, Rasps, Lobo, Alice, Elvis and Elton?

It has taken this long, nearly a full third of the way into this otherwise clammy decade, for the spirit and sauce that allowed those records to be conceived, created and responded to, to breathe again and rise from beneath the stifling hand-sewn blanket of pastoral Cgo-rock and the assorted “tasteful” smuggisms these past five or six years have wrought. If no longer a pervasive influence (yet), at least poprock has been restored to the status of a visible and operable subgenre. Such a gaunche, flimsy, thoroughly likeable pastiche as “Crocodile Rock” wouldn’t even have been released, let alone reached numero uno a year or two ago, but the time for such capers (essentially the reuniting of post -Rubber Soul musical maturity with traditional commercial pop essence) has apparently arrived.

As has Curt Boetcher’s debut album, There’s An Innocent Face, and his rather remarkable single, “I, Love You More Each Day.” Lemme clue ya, these 156 seconds deserve the “hit” appellation regardless of fortune’s subsequent turns;,there’s tastee licks aplenty ,(off “My Sweet Lord’’and “Things We Said Today” both), sturdy adolescent vocalese matching that dutiful simp Lobo or the Carl Wilson of “Girl Don’t Tell Me,” accessible sentiment equaling the Raspberries’ best (“Just one girl/just one life to live with her...”), symmetrical readymade radio beauty sculpted out of pure ’67 Byrds multiform and archetypal Spectoraids (the fast sabredance of strings, castanets and insistent profundo percussion).,

Boetcher’s credentials are impeccable when it comes to the delectable brand of featherrock he’s championing on Innocent Face. He produced “Along Comes Mary” and “Cherish” and funneled his arranging prowess through a couple of elaborate art-rock projects (1968) called Millenium and Sagittarius (“My World Fell Down”) with Gary Usher.

The album plainly appears to be the dazzling fruition of all Boetcher’s previous efforts.. The essential fluff and sweet light are here, dressed in resilient high gloss melodies throughout, yet the lofty lyrics and Artistic ambitions that translated into excess in his earlier projects have been pruned off. What remains is joyous celebratory pop rock with all the trimmings.

Not surprisingly, the most enjoyable moments here are exquisite production pieces, orchestrated by Boetcher with Usher and Web Burrel. Curt’s vocal precision and highly imaginative arrangement make “Wufferton Frog” the unexpected sleeper, its Mooged kids chorus far surpassing the gooey grandeur of Dizzyland’s dandy “Small World” display, while the obvious ace, “Bobby California,” a genuinely insightful ‘commentary’ on the superstar psyche garbed out as a sort of Seventies version of “Long Tall Texan,” is surely the best Cal-rock entry since Albert Hammond and the best Mike Love song since “Do It Again.”

“She’ll Stay With You” is likewise excellent stuff (how about that 12-string outa the Beau Brummels instrumental “Woman” plus a chorus spinoff from the Beach Boys’ “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”) “Malachi Star” places Curt’s boy soprano somewhere between John Simon’s and the everlovin’ Lou Christie’s whilst toying with'the dreamwish of Gilbert O’Sullivan to have been a Pet Sounds collaborator, and “Lay Down” is transcendent puffery, definitely David Gates Meets Dennis Wilson.

Oh yeah, “Love Vou Yes I Do” is a crispy folk-focker which puts Derek’s “Cinnamon” riff to rear good use. I truly love the hell out of this record. I think you’ll like it.

Gene Sculatti

TRAFFIC

Shoot Out At the Fantasy Factory (Island)

They’re playing it on the FM progressive stations. It’s five o’clock in-the morning, and some snoring deejay is claiming that Stevie Winwood really has his head together. .Then he plays a cut by Johnny Maestro followed by well-Knowrt folkie, Kathy Colbume, and then into Colin Blunstone. And that’s the sound of a fizzie hissing thru the haze.

Rebop Kwaku Baah is in this group. And that about sums up this pastel cheesecake. ’Cause you listen, but the grooves seem frozen, and there’s some cut called “Roll Right Stones” that they play in all the record stpres, but it’s no thrill. It sound just like another cut on it called “(Sometimes) I Feel So Uninspired” which is a far cry from “Gimme Some Lovin’.” Which is a shame seing as how the first Traffic-gone-muzak record (with the edges of the jacket gnawed off) could at least slip ya into some sorta wet dream ooze.

. And that’s why I’m pouting. Spin-offs just don’t make it like the original group sound. That means Argent won’t never beat out the Zombies or Stories the Left Banke so why even bother. “I’m a Man” was the sound pirates make when they bust a skull, but this crap is just the whining of a lost asteroid.

That’s kinda sad even. Old heroes dying so young, I mean. Maybe Stevie just worked himself to death, I dunno. But it’s seedless, and those twinkly stars on the cover are just pinpricks. What a waste of time!

All that’s not actually fair, tho. ’Cause listening to this boring droll truffle is like working out a round jigsaw puzzle with lotsa, lotsa pieces. You just gotta keep bending around the frustration, somehow letting all the sap simmer into endust. You just can’t quit, and-the reason you’re so hooked is because the platter fits so fine and dandy on the record player. It just looks so clean whirling abound, the disc beaming with an inner sparkle, and it keeps on boomeranging into oblivion until you don’t even hear it anymore. That’s the tittytwister of the whole thing,

Which is what I can’t understand quite exactly. How can Traffic suck ya into its nozzle so easily? Why do I always keep playing this recofd over and over altho I don’t ever remember what’s on it?

Those are hutt-burning questions, and the answer probably lies in thfe fact that Traffic has been able to master the slow process of spiraling insect music. It’s those tiny sounds that really count. Like the stuff that’s recorded, out it’s beyond your ability to hear it. Like dog whistles and satellites beeping at each other. That’s really what tickles your antennae, and it’s dishonest hypnosis if you ask me.

Not that any of this in the slightest quirk resembles rock ‘n’ roll even vaguely. It’s not even marginal. But assholes buy this music, and somehow it soothes their pubes, and for some it’s even a spiritual experience.

But Traffic ain’t sensitive, and they gotta make a fast buck so they sneak silent whispers which sound pleasing to your unconscious eardrums into the waves of your pulse rays. So you get hooked. No fantasy. Just linked with technology, to one of the worst examples of of humdrum buzzing since Ricky Ricardo hitched his britches on I Love Lucy.

Robot A. Hull

LINDA LEWIS Lark

(Warner Bros.)

Linda Lewis is a 22-year-old Londoner of West Indian descent who has been singing with various English groups for the past five years. She is also a freak, whose vocal range extends from a gruff, cracked baritone through contralto, mezzosoprano, and soprano, and onwards and upwards to the empyrean. She is most comfortable singing a babyish soprano, so babyish that it makes Melanie sound like Big Mama Thornton, but she can effortlessly slide down to the rich and mellow tones of a Mary Wells, or belt out a chorus with the gutsy spunk of a Patti LaBelle. At one point she even passes for Mississippi John Hurt. Her acrobatics are such that at first Lark seems only an exercise in the grotesque^ But soon the queerness wears off, and suddenly you realize that this is a fine album by a gifted newcomer who may very well become a major talent.

What does Lark sound like? Imagine, if you can, a hybrid'of Mona Bone Jakon and Eli and the 13th Confession, with bits of Melanie ^nd Joni Mitchellthrown in for good measure. The light, airy delicacy of Lark is out of MBJ, which is understandable, since Caf Stevens’ drummer and keyboard player back Linda on many of the tracks. This is by and large a soft, even wispy album, the instrumentation at once simple and refined, and always exquisitely subdued, so that Linda’s voice and guitar are foremost. What saves Lark from insubstantiality, however, is Linda’s songwriting (she is responsible for all the numbers), which, like Laura Nyro’s, plays with solid R&B riffs, stringing them together like black pearls on a funky necklace. Her songs are always shifting, flitting from rhythm to rhythm, and her remarkable voice follow, the changes with a fluid grace. Linda’s imaginative use of multi-tracked vocal choruses, which comment on the lead vocal and sometimes provoke dialogues between Linda’s various voices, also recalls Laura Nyro. Melanie and Joni Mitchell may be heard in the more folky of her tunes. But Linda’s voice is so unique that all these influences seem'trivial and Lark sounds utterly original.

As if all this weren’t enough, Linda is no mean lyricist. At times she is tritely groovy (“Man, those mandalas really move my mind”) and at others gauche (“All I really want to taste/ Is a little of your cosmic waste”), but more often than not her words are vividly impressionistic and autobiographical. They may be a little too pixie for some people’s taste, and it is true that the album, both lyrically and musically, is a wee bit cloying, but give Linda time - she’ll acquire more depth. Don’t wait until then, however; Lark is too happy and delightful to pass up.

Ken Emerson

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Stravinsky's Head

Prokofiev's Head

Ravel's Head

Beethoven's Head

Mozart's Head

Bach's Head

Mahler's Head

The Musical Head

(London/ Orphic Egg Series)

You sit there like a good little boy, respectful, eyes downcast. Your ears pried open like an alligator’s mouth in some vintage cartoon, maybe Popeye with a stick, you anxiously lower the tone arm, stiffen the old upper lip, suck in yer gut and await “contrapuntal harmony,” “counterpoint,” “dynamics,” “arpeggios.” You try, goddammit. But in the middle of Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe,” you suddenly have the Kraft-cheesiest vision of Gail Storm (My Little Margie) friendly, white-haired Honeywell farting around in a sputtering yet somehow plaintive huff as usual and begin to realize that you’re gonna need a major debriefing (maybe even shock treatment) to really listen to this stuff, not to mention understand it. What a sublimely Seventies tragedy; our acne-scarred cerebra are so glutted with technomedia backwash at this point that there is no way we who were raised on Maypo and the Pelvis can honestly relate to this so-called classy music in the way it was intended to be heard.

Orphic Egg has put together this fab packet just for us, the infamous “Youth Market” and lemme tell ya, there’s some hot platters behind the junkadelic covers if your idea of a good time is peeling yourself after a sunburn. Essentially what you get is a grabbag of various composer’s hit singles, totally out of context of course, and performed by a series of different orchestras whose interpretations of the material range from the lame to the amputated. The only redeeming factor is that for a moderate price you can get yourself some music to play when yoUr parents show up, while you’re getting busted ... this collection ain’t gonna raise anybody’s blood pressure, and you’d be surprised at how simply marvelous this music sounds when you’re blasted on Bristol Cream after a motherchukker on the meadow.

If you’re a tried and true punk, though, the only thing you’ll get off on are some of the liner notes; they’re soup-goofy .and absolutely heartrending in their sincerity, especially Ed Ward’s. See, it’s like this: if you’re really into classical music and know your way around the flashies, well, you won’t even want to fan farts with these LPs. If you’re not into it, you probably still won’t be, but they’re good to have around anyway. You can always use em for dinner music if you don’t feel like eating, or for drawing near-perfect 12 inch circles. Or maybe you’d like to make a handsome mobile to hang in your den or rec room . . . the . possibilities are staggering. As Bones used to say on Star Trek: “I’m a doctor, not an engineer!”

Dann DeWitt