The Man Who Tried To See The Groundhogs

The Man Who Tried To See The Groundhogs

by Colman Andrews

Goldham Anders tried to see the Groundhogs. He tried hard. He tried with fiery spirit, with the full flood force of his blood-tides, with the lanky strong power of his mighty body, with the brilliant biting wit of his remarkable mind. Goldham Anders tried.

★ ★ ★

(The scene is a street*front listeningbooth at a large Hollywood record store. Crowded into the tiny chamber is a large counter, emblazoned with the bizarre legend “Juke-Box Jury ”. Behind it sits The Petit inquisitor. Before him, lashed to a Pennsylvania Dutch milking stool with chords of 1/4-ihch mylar recording tape, sits Goldham A nders, hard-drinking editor of a small .metropolitan monthly, lately turned Seeker After The Higher Groundhogs.)

INQUISITOR: They say you tried to see the Groundhogs, Anders. Is that true?

ANDERS: Damned straight. INQUISITOR: But you Tailed, did you not? “

ANDERS:///e shorts.) I did not fail. I was unfairly defeated by a large record company, by 250,000 screaming, mudcaked teenagers? and by The

Elements.

INQUISITOR: The Elements!

ANDERS: Yes. You know. Plutonium, radium, ilium, odium. All those things. But mostly fain.

INQUISITOR: It rained, eh?

ANDERS: In spades.

INQUISITOR: All right, Anders. Tell me about it.

★ ★ ★

The tale Anders told was an incredible ^one. His abduction by a leading West Coast company executive, armed only with a can-opener and the vivid spark of teen-age virility; the late-night flight to Foreign Places; his incarceration in a mid-town “hotel” where his strength was capped by a powerful air-conditioning system, and where he was watched ruthlessly by a seemingly never-ending squad of “room service waiters”. What horrors were these!

★ ★ ★

INQUISITOR: Would you describe to us, Mr. Anders, exactly what happened on the day you tried to see the Groundhogs?

ANDERS: Well .... they had kept me up late the night before c .. INQUISITOR: They?

ANDERS: The record company fellow and his lieutenant. They called him “Bruiser”. Then there was a writer who claimed to be from a major musicbusiness magazine. Records Whirl, or Recording Churls, or something like that. And a woman.

INQUISITOR: (His eyes flash.) \ A woman?

ANDERS: A woman.. My only moments of solace dyring the whole, gruelling experience. But, then, I suppose they had asked her to ; I. you know ... Work on me . ..

INQUISITOR: So they kept you up. ANDERS: Yes. It was terrible. They force-fed me with Chinese food. Red Chinese food, I’ll bet. And they poured vast quantities of alcoholic beverages down my unwilling throat. They were obviously trying to dissipate my wellknown strength. But I was firm. Even in. my drunken stupor, I did not lose sight of my goal. ‘I want to see the Ground^ hogs!’ I thundered, again and again. Until at last they locked me in my cell for the night.

★ ★ ★

Anders went on. It was not a pretty tale. The next morning, he had be^n bundled into an automobile (“Doubtless reftted,” he said, “under an assumed name.”) with the full complement of his tormentors, and they had set off, to see the Groundhogs. Or so he had been told. Their goal was supposedly the Pocono Raceway, in the ruggedly mountainous land of Pennsylvania (named eons ago, it is said, for photographer Irving Penn, or perhaps for the Penn Central Railway which, legend has it, runs through the place once in a while). The trip was to take 2Vz hours. In reality, it took more than twice that long. Thousands upon ', thousands of other pilgrims were trying to see the Groundhogs too. And they had to wait inline.

Finally, the" grim party arrived at a tacky, over-priced “motor lodge,’’ run by a disreputable character Anders described as “a gentleman of Italian persuasion”. They went to a second-story dungeon equipped with double beds, a bathroom door that wouldn’t lock, arid a television that played nothing but old German movies. “I knew then that they meant business,” he later recalled.

In this sorry property, Anders was forced to ingest the fumes from some strange-smelling incense. Then they were off. To the Raceway.

★ ★ ★

INQUISITOR: And then?

ANDERS: It was dreadful. One of them hit on the idea of wearing me down further by means of a forced march. The car was left a full. five miles from the Raceway site, from the Groundhogs I had so badly wanted to see. It was raining. Pouring,, in fact. For when it rains it pours, as is well known. Anyway, I was forced to trudge through the sludge, through the mud, through the driving rain. Five miles.

INQUISITOR: But did they trudge with you?

ANDERS: Ah, yes. But there was a difference. They had umbrellas. Raincoats. Plastic hats. Implements of that sort. And I was practically naked,to the winds and rain.

INQUISITOR: And what happened then?

ANDERS: We got to the site itself. Or almost there. We were practically swimming through a sea of mud, and through a sea of people, all of whom seemed to be fleeing in panic in the opposite direction. I was made to scale a barbedwire fence, then grope my way through a huge, dark tunnel, filled with vicious bikers and drug-crazed power-children. At last, I conquered these obstacles. I had run the course successfully. All their efforts had been in vain. Or so I thought. Then, I noticed them grouped around me. All four of them. Sadistic smiles twisted their cruel faces. “So you wanted to see the Groundhogs, eh, Anders?” one of them asked. I nodded energetically. “Ha!” they exclaimed in carefully-practiced unison. “Ha! And double-Ha! The Groundhogs ...” — I waited with ever-mounting horror, to hear the truth — “... the Groundhogs played an hour ago, while you were still trudging through the rain!”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 44.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 40.

(At this pointy Anders collapses in hysterics the hopeless, irrepressible hysterics of a man who has seen his fondest dream smashed before his very eyes)

■ ★★★

A lesser man than Goldham Anders would probably have stayed on at the Raceway, having gone , through such trials and tortures to reach it. A lesser man would have stayed on, tq hear groups with names like the Faces, Black, Sabbath, Humble Pie, or the already* talked-about new ensemble, Ramatam. Why, it’s said that even that Dog group was there. A lesser man ...

Ah, but there’s nothing lesser about Goldham Anders. Summoning his last bit of strength, fighting back the bitter tears of disappointment, his powerpacked corpus struggling super-humanly to throw off the last vestiges of druginduced euphoria, he broke at last from his captors, and somehow — he does not remember how — he managed to find his way back to the Big City. Where he promptly stumbled into a neighborhood bistro called La Cote Basque, where he managed to gulp down a bottle of Laurent-Perrier Brut Rose, n.v., and to force himself to take several dozen revivifying Belon oysters as a medicinal aid. When an over-solicitous servitor tried to offer him an English pudding for dessert, he declaimed, with his last ounce of strength, “Goldham Anders is not a man to trifle with!” With that, he lapsed ipto unconsciousness. When he awoke, he found himself before the Petit Inquisitor. The charges against him were unknown, like all the best stuff is. (Anders has been revived, and, with his well-known Promethean intensity, is attempting to maintain his brilliant dialogue with his questioner.)

CONTINUED ON PAGE 78.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 44.

INQUISITOR: All right, Anders. It’s time to stop waffling on. The most important question of all is this: Why did you try to see the Groundhogs? ANDERS: Because I like the Groundhogs. A lot.

INQUISITOR: (He consults a sheaf of papers before him.) But Anders. In your dossier, it says that you don’t like rock music. Look at this statement: On February 18, 1972, you said, in front of witnesses, “Grand Funk Railroad makes me puke.’’ And, not long before, you had written “Black Sabbath is the Liebfraumilch of white rockers.” Hardly the sort of pronouncements one would expect from a man who really likes the Groundhogs, are they, Anders? ANDERS: But that’s where you’re wrong. You and everybody else. The Groundhogs aren’t like that. Sure, they play hard rock. Maybe even really hard rock. But they’re ... they’re different. And look at this: In August of this year, I wrote “The Groundhogs are the thinking man’s power group,” and “The Groundhogs are good,” and “they have rich, round, logical melodic lines to follow — sinuous interweavings in and but of the stirring business of clashing sounds that sometimes wells up from their carefully-chosen amplifiers.” Do those sound like the pronouncements of a man who doesn ’t like the Groundhogs? INQUISITOR: .No, Anders, they don’t. But I’m not convinced. Tell me more. And make it good.

★ ★ ★

Goldham Anders made it good. Seldom has the world heard a more articulate, reasoned, seasoned defense. He told of his mild interest in the group some years ago, when first he heard them, as a competent British blues-rock band. Then, of his subsequent overloading with British, blues-rock bands, and of how he forgot about the group, put them out of his mind. 1

Then, an album for Liberty called Thank Christ For the Bomb. Just one of a hundred records Anders had got that week. A superficial listen. Into the “maybe” stack, where it languished, forgotten, for a time. Then on the turntable again. Yeah. All right. Hey .... that’s not bad. What was it? he asked himself. What was that curious, crosscultural linkage he heard there? There was the attention paid to lyrics (not always the best, but always attentive and sometimes very fine indeed); these third generation groups weren’t usually into lyrics as lyrics, he remembered. And then the concept of Song. The concept of a musical piece as a unit of words and music, each feeding and binding the other. An organic wholeness ... It was like ... What was it like?

When the next album appeared (Split, on United Artists), it finally came to him. Perhaps it was the California landscapes on the jacket that jogged his memory. Yes, he said. The Groundhogs are an English San Francisco group. That’s what. An English San Francisco group? What did he mean by that?

He went on: There has been this sensitivity, he said. This awareness of the things of life as topics for thematic exploration, expansion, inversion. There is a way, without misusing the concept, of turning one’s own visions of experience back into complex, subtlystructured moments of experiential scenery for others. And other longwinded hogwash like that. It’s the kind of thing, Anders continued, that he usually associated with San Francisco groups — with the Dead and Quicksilver especially.

But there was more to it than that. And Who Will Save the World and Hogwash, the Groundhogs’ latest releases for United Artists, brought the more firmly to light. The Groundhogs are technically impassioned, thoroughly imbued with the sense and spirit of their tools. The three men (Pete Cruickshank on bass, Ken Pustelnik on drums, Tony McPhee on guitar, vocals, miellotron, and harmonium) — perhaps because they’ve been around for a goodly time, perhaps because they were so (comparatively) well-grounded in the potent simplicites of the blues, perhaps because they’ve got to where they are today slowly and carefully — show great respect for their instruments, and truly formidable knowledge of how to use them, within their idiom, to the utmost. They aren’t flashy nobodies, cowering behind mere techniques. They are intelligent, mature makers of strong, hard music, made all the more powerfully important by the additional happy fact of their great skills as players. Listen to them closely and the intense and complicated completeness of what they’re doing will out; don't listen to them closely, and chances are the sheer muscle with which they create their music will force you to come around

anyway. They are the Mighty Groundhogs.

So said Goldham Anders.