THE BEAT GOES ON

THE BEAT GOES ON

Next Up: The Naugahyde Harmonica

The US Department of Commerce has awarded, a $944,000 loan to the Estey Piano Company to manufacture a plastic piano, along with the guarantee of a $2,000,000 bank loan for the company as soon as production of the plunkers begins.

The Estey Company gets the loan because under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act, loans are available to companies and workers who’ve been hurt by imports resulting from recent cuts in tariffs. Thus, when tariff cuts made it easier to import wooden pianos, the American piano industry was put in a pinch. A plastic piano which could undersell the wooden variety was the obvious answer, sp you can start looking for them at your local music shop, right there in that spot in the window vacated by the electric sitar.

Why does the world need a plastic piano? Come on, Meade Lux! One good reason is that they nan be built to last longer in accordance with the latest technological advances, so Elton John’s fingerprints can be preserved in museums for a thousand years. Although the innovation may prove a thorn in the side and ultimate obsolescence for conceptual artists specializing in avant-garde piano wrecking.

Then again, maybe not. Keith Emerson only stabs his Old-hat axe; just imagine if he could take a blowtorch to it and turn it into a phosphorescent clot of waxen instant sculpture! Deep Purplean Jon Lord could chop, channel and paint his with Mylar, put roller skates on it and blast up the aisles! Leon Russell could pervert his into a pulpit with a hawgjowl lid, and Carole King could get one shaped like a baby stroller. Liberace could ... naww, that’s too cheap; he can keep his venerable candelabra.

Who says there’s no more musical revolution?, I want some cut glass bongos,

R. Wake man

Van Morrison In Berkeley

This was a rare show for Morrison; always a star in Berkeley, even in the Them days, he usually sticks to Marin County, where he lives. There was little publicity, which probably accounted for the scattered crowd that failed to fill half of the Community Theatre, a medium size-hall.

Alice Stuart and her little band Snake were first up. They’re a familiar gig on the local bar circuit, and effective, enough in that milieu; on a stage their limitations are more impressive than anything else. They play good small-time music for small good times, and they did not so much set the crowd up as set them back.

Vince Guraldi followed. God knows how long he’s been playing the Bay Area — I’d seen him seven years before and the only difference was that he looked twenty years younger this time: He doodled on his piano for close to an hour. The audience clapped a lot, because rock ‘n’ roll audiences in college towns respect jazz, even if they never listen to it. It was a bore, though; there was nothing in Guraldi’s music to grab onto — no violence, no pain, no delight, no aggression, no lust, no humor. It was smug.

So far the evening had been somewhat less lifelike than the comedian who-warms up the crowd for Elvis. The mood wasn’t down, just kind of dull. As Morrison and his band set up, I began to get the feeling that everybody was there not because they wanted to be but because they had nothing else to do.

There are few performers you can watch stand still, but Van is one of them. There are echoes of Brando and Dean in the way he carries himself, echoes of a tough kid in the stance of a genuinely strong man, who expects nothing from art audience and who must find little reality in anything they do give him. Not cynical, but something harder than that.

He opened with “St. Dominic’s Preview,” one of the strongest songs of the last few years. His voice was clear, even, and very deliberate^ he changed the words around from the recorded version, sharpening them. When he said his piece on Ireland, he sang: “I’m hoping that Joyce/ Has found his voice/ So he can tell you what to do.” A couple of lighter numbers smoothed out the first moments, setting up John Lee Hooker’s “Help Me,” with Van on harp. It was tough stuff. He went right into Muddy Waters’ “I Just Wanna Make Love To You,” and it cut to the bone. There are some white men who can not only sing the blues, but make something new out of them: Elvis, Dylan, Charlie Rich, and Van. Jagger sings about the blues. Something was happening.

Van had been playing in a dim blue light — not bright enough to see his face, but bright enough to see he had one. The Waters’ song stopped and Van ordered “the spotlight” out. Didn’t have his shades, he said. Not in LA, whatever that meant.

The stage was completely dark. It seemed appropriate for Van — mercurial weirdness is part of his appeal, after all — and appropriate for the blues. But they , didn’t play any more blues. Next up was a throwaway version of “Listen to the Lion,” then a flat “Caravan.” Van announced the last number, which turned out to be “Misty.”

It was good. “As I wander through this garbage world alone,” Van muttered, seeming vaguely pissed at the audience. What were they supposed to do, after paying up to $5.50 (more than the Stones charged out here) for seven or eight short numbers? Rush >the stage? I was damned if I was going to clap for an encore and beg the Artist to come back and favor me with another pearl of Song.

There was a lot of emotion to the show; Van Morrison is incapable of breathing without emotion. But this time it was gratuitous, bitterness without a target that deserved it, an insult without any context that could make it real.

It began to seem that this man, who I am convinced has as much real talent, vision, and strength of will as anyone performing today, has less real contact with, and understanding of his audience when he is performing than Rod Stewart does when he is asleep. The inclusion of Guraldi, in a concert Van co-promoted, now made some sense, because Van was playing the same aloof, “professional” game that so many second-rate jazzmen have to play in order to feel their music has worth. But that role has never had anything to do with rock ‘n’ roll — or blues, for that matter.

One qf Van’s greatest powers is to disturb a listener, and, by the brilliance of his music, redeem that disturbance — make it worth something. This time he was merely irritating. And it’ll be awhile before I pay money to see him again.

Greil Marcus

Will George Carlin Go Blind?

Memo received by Bob Talbert, syndicated daily columnist for the Detroit Free Press (Talbert was trying to set up a phone interview with sometime funnyman George Carlin):

Bob:

Guess who called after you left? The class clown. My main man, George, your hippy dippy weatherman, Carlin!!! He says, if you don’t hate him and still want to do the interview ... “But I don’t know, man, because I’m not that much into the straight press anymore, but it’s cool, I mean I don’t have to do the interview, right? Bob can call me at this number: (213) 459-1330.” He swears he’ll be there around ten or so Thursday morning. We forgot to ascertain whether this would be 10 his time or our time. It’s cool, though, man.

L. DeV, 5:55 pm, Wed., Jan. 31 (Larry DeVine is Entertainment Editor of the Free Press.)

Memo to Lawrence DeVine, from Talbert:

Larry:

Well, I called the Carlin number you left. Called it at the prescribed time and a rather preoccupied Carlin answered. Not even a que pasa or a shit-piss-fuck. Just some mumbling about it being the wrong time for him to do an interview. I told nim I’d just finished listening to his Class Clown album and how much I enjoyed it, particularly the parts about making farts under the arm and making someone laugh in the cafeteria so hard the milk comes out of their nose. That’s great, Carlin says, ’cause my call just interrupted him from doing a body thing. “I’m in the bathroom — playing with the ol’ dong,thing,” he mumbled. I’m not sure, Larry, but I think I caused him “interruptus jackoffus,” as they say in high-class medical-sex books. Ah, what are these telephone interviews coming to? (Pun intended).

Talbert, 4:30 pm, Thurs., Feb. 1

Bob Talbert and John Weisman (Special to CREEM)

Everything You Don’t Want ur Children To Know About Four-tetter Words

The Conservative Book Club has got a hot number. The book that speaks the unspeakable, reveals the unprintable. This exposure has a host of horror stories that would curl the toes of the most progressive parent.

Gloria Lentz, a mother of three school age children, has taken it upon herself to unveil the lurid exploits of the SEXPUSHER, more commonly guised as sex-educators. In Raping Our Children (from Arlington House, “publishers for the silent majority”), Mrs. Lentz spares no facts — no matter how depraved. She names names, regardless of rank. And, oh yes, even pictures.

Imagine, sex education films posing as stag films for juveniles. Revolting.

A female school teacher appears nude

and masturbates in a sex education

film — the Liberals defend her.

Oh, the strain on those moral fibers. Ope youngster hides in his parents bedroom “to see if it’s true.” Another, a 12 year old from New Rochelle, fresh from his sex-education class, practices on his four year old sister.

In The Arena

by Wes Goodwin

Where, oh where did this dastardly disease begin, debasing our defenseless darlings?

Now that I look back on it all I guess it’s a bit stupid ... it’s only natural they should get ‘ideas,’ moans the sex education teacher.

The SCENE: Exam time. Twenty male students of the sex education class assemble for their finals. But the twenty students never get to class. Neither does the teacher. ‘I didn’t know what to do. They were coming at me naked ... excited.’ All twenty of the students had taken their exams — on her!

HOW SEX EDUCATION PROGRAMS STIMULATE PUPILS: SHOCKING EXAMPLES

Will those misdirected school marms show our siblings their “funny” ways? What are the games the kids are playing in the school room but not on the playground? What really does go on behind those closed doors of the little red school house?

Buy the book. So you too can aid brave Mother Lentz in her fight against those nasty, nasty perverts. At least it might give you a few new angles.

Jaan Uhelszki

Medieval court music was pretty gutless, no matter what the Pro Musica may claim, and when the kings wanted to have a really good time, they’d get rid of all their prissy, powdered minstrels, get royally drunk afyd call in someone who could cut really first-rate farts. A good fart is unbeatable. It’s a universal sign of peace and brotherhood, lightens any party or gathering and feels really good. It’s a private little orgasm that you share with those around you, and why it has never been fully accepted in rock remains an enigma. The eventuality of its general acceptance is unquestionable — if a.record of a dog barking “Jingle Bells” offkey can sell over a million copies, the sales potential of somebody farting “The Star Spangled Banner” is virtually limitless.

Farts, of course, were popular in blues and R&B for years, mostly confined to stage acts because of timid producers although Robert Peewee Rameses’ record “I Ate Beans and Pooped All Day” was a relatively big hit in the summer Of ’51. But mainstream rock and roll has always been suspicious of farts, strangely embarrassed by them, not realizing that a fart is a revolution in - and of itself; as a symbol of freedom ^ and spontaneity it has no peer anys where.

Their absence from rock may be partially based on the fact that their use so far has mostly been so poor as to frighten away potential farters. Captain Beefheart’s “Old Fart at Play” is a story about a character named The Old Fart, not the brilliant body music his fans had eagerly awaited, and ..Zappa’s electronic farts that occasionally surface on Lumpy Gravy and Uncle Meat are hesitant and sterile, they got no meat to them. Even the rude noises in the Jefferson Airplane’s “A Small Package of Some Value” turn out to be no more than the kids fooling about with their mouths.

One of the worst offenders in fart exaggeration is Leo Kottke, who claimed on his Takoma album that his voice sounded like geese farts. Excited by this, flocks of Audobon Society members and fart lovers the world over bought records of him singing and, without exception, were manically disappointed. (Geese tend to fart more than an octave above Kottke’s range and manage to sustain much longer than he does.)

About the only good example of a recorded fart appears in Tim Hardin 3: Live in Concert, a fine, fine album made even better by this inclusion. Tim starts the guitar intro to “Misty Roses” (“You all know this one,” he tells the audience as they nod their heads and clap approval), and begins to sing:

“You look to me . . like misty roses” and suddenly

BLAAAGHT!

The biggest, hairiest fart imaginable, drowning out the guitar, overpowering the band, recorded so well it fills both speakers EVEN THOUGH HIS ASS WASN’T MIKED (a possibility he should look into for future gigs). Not only does it save the song from getting too cute or artsy, the tremendous empathy it generates not only creates a gap in the song, but succeeds in filling that gap with itself, making the whole thing four, if not five dimensional. Its success is unique and unprecedented and should pave the way for scores of imaginative farters.

In any event, since lots of folks are trying to get back to basics, farting would seem to be a sure-fire musical alternative for those who can’t whistle or sing or hum, and being organic, it’s cheaper and much more biodegradable than any kazoo. Once perfected, farting is a hobby that can be enjoyed for the rest of your life. It’s like riding a bike —— once you learn how, you never forget. It’s unbeatable as a conversationfiller, and for those interested in verbal Tom Wolfe journalism, can be used as commas or dashes where appropriate. If it becomes as fashionable as it ought to be, cutting a well tempered fart at a concert could be as prestigious as srnoking fine Moroccan dope. Heads will turn and eyes will brighten. Some jokers may start lighting theirs, of course, forcing various states and theatres to enact strict anti-fart laws, but all to no avail. THE MAN CAN’T BUST OUR MUSIC!

Brian Cullman

Farting In RockPart II _

Le Petomane (1857-1945) Greatest Of Them All

Elvis Presley is commonlyacknowledged as. the king of rock and roll. Babe Ruth was basebands Sultan of Swat. In the world of chess, Bobby Fischer is the big numero uno. But if someone were to ask you who was the greatest personage in the history of farting, what would be your answer?

Chances are you’d have none. Because, as with most consciousnessraising forms of revolutionary art, farting has been subjected to a massive campaign .of smear and repression. Try as they may, however, the control addicts cannot suppress the legacy of the greatest fart artist of them all: Joseph Pujol, known professionally as Le Petomane.

By all normal standards, Joseph Pujol was a freak of nature. At an early age — and quite by accident -— he discovered that by certain muscular contractions he could take in extraordinary amounts of air or liquid through his anus. The expulsion of air produced a sound commonly referred to as “farting”, and Pujol found that his capabilities in this area were nothing short of astonishing. He could modulate the tone and pitch of his farts, producing a wide variance in both length and texture. Pujol worked long and hard to perfect his gift, and scattered performances for family and friends prompted him to pursue a professional course.

Taking the name Le Petomane (PETOMANE N.M. An anal emission of gas), he began touring the southern provinces of France, finally making his way to Paris and the famed Moulin Rouge. After a private audition for the club manager and a trial appearance that had the audience rolling in the aisles, he was signed to a multi-year contract.

Hi? act made maximum use of his “breathing arsehole,” performing artistic feats with his farts that have never been duplicated. He 'could simulate thunder, machine gun fire or cannons exploding. He smoked cigarettes through a holder placed in his rectum, and played the popular hits of the day on an anal flute. He even held singalongs to tunes he would play with no other instrument but his gas. To close the show, he would blow out a candle from a distanced two feet!

The response to his shows was incredible. One observer described the sdene thusly: “Someone would be stricken with a crazy laugh. In a moment people would be howling and^ staggering with laughter. Some would stand paralyzed, tears pouring down their cheeks, while others beat their heads and fell on the floor. Ladies would begin to suffocate in their tight corsets, and for this reason there were always a number of white-coated nurses in attendance.” His fame spread so rapidly that the King of Belgium traveled to Paris incognito to see the sensation. At his height, his box office receipts more than doubled those of Sarah Bernhardt.

The management of the Moulin Rouge, seeing the gold-mine potential in Le Petomane’s art, began demanding more shows of their star attraction, and raised the admission charge until it was well out of the economic reach of the common Parisian. Determined that his art should be accessable to all people, Le Petomane assembled his own presentation, a multi-act review which he called the Pompadour Theatre. Presented at a very minimal price, it was the first blow struck for self-determination farting!

The Moulin Rouge sued for breach of contract, and eventually won a substantial monetary settlement. Embittered by such legal entanglements and saddened by the loss of three sons at war, Le Petomane gave up performing and returned to civilian life. He died quietly in 1945, with little or no notice from the masses whp had propelled him to superstardom. But the memory of his accomplishments will live in the hearts and anuses of fart connoisseurs forever, and his inspiration is manifested everywhere. The next time you’re in a crowded subway or a spicy Mexican restaurant, open your nose and perk up your ears: Le Petomane will be there.