LED ZEPPELIN Houses of the Holy (Atlantic)

I’m listening to Jimmy Page’s overdubbed guitar on “The Song Remains The Same.” It opens the album with a terrific surge of power, an intricate careen that speaks a little of both the Byrds and the Who at their best, and volumes of Jimmy Page’s continuing vitality. When Robert Plant’s vocal enters after Page’s extended attack it’s an abrupt change of mood and tempo, but the contrast works, Plant’s lazy drawl playing off Page’s insistence: “I had a dream - crazy dream . . . Sing out Hare Hare, dance the Hoochie Coo .. .”

Robert Plant, the original hippie, has been responsible for all of Led Zeppelin’s lyrics, and his peacelove doves and mushy stairways are all over Houses of the Holy. This is the first Zep set where they made the mistake of printing the lyrics; if they hadn’t, we might have missed gems like “I got my flower, I got my power,” or prime Rowan Brothers stuff like “Hare Hare” and “Singing in the Sunshine, laughing in the rain ...”

That kind of stuff may bug you the first few playings if you bother to notice it, but that’s not what pulls this album down from being a true masterpiece like their last one. Plant’s just the easiest member to pick on, and Houses is as erratic as Zeppelin have been for most of their career. At its peaks it’s amazing, but even though the peaks predominate, the valleys are so unambitious you get exasperated.

The perfect cuts are “Song,” “Dancing Days,” “No Quarter” and “Over the Hills and Far Away." “Days” is built on another one of those angular, dissonant, truly disorienting Page riffs like the one employed in “Misty Mountain Hop.” It almost hurts, but you can’t get enough of it, and even if some of Plant’s lines are rather mawkish, the lyrics and the song’s blinding strut make it a crazed ’73 successor to “Dancing in the Streets” - a summer song!

“Over the Hills and Far Away” is simply fine, churning mainstay Zep expertise: a folky Page opening, a yearning vocal, a cinerama explosion. These boys breathe dynamics, and they’ve still got as fine and fierce a rhythm sense as any group on either side of the Atlantic. Just dig “The Crunge,” which may put you off at first because it sounds like Plant and the band indulging themselves in a little James Brown wank with tighten-up guitar. But Plant’s vocal has a genuine sense of humor, and when Page starts dragging those sproinging backwards riffs from underneath and counterposing them against all this mockblackface (there is such a thing) it all gets a bit more, ah, intellectual, even if the blabbing at the end is a bunch of foolishness.

So is “D’yer Maker” (foolishness, that is). It sounds like a halfassed attempt at reggae mushed into another one of those cutesy 50s routines. (Liner sez: “Whatever happened to Rosie and the Originals?” Well, if you must know, THEY HAD ONE HIT AND DIED THE MUNG FADE BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T SO HOT IN THE FIRST PLACE.) But it’s so fucking goofy you end up liking it in spite of (because of?) its very asininity. Which certainly can’t be said of “The Rain Song,” a truly undistinguished ballad that drags on for far too long. Page is impeccable as ever even when sounds like some “Laguna Sunrise” (Led Zeppelin influenced by Black Sabbath?) Plant is wimping all over himself, and the strings drift smoothshod over everybody til the whole song drowns in its own lymph.

So you can see why I’m tied up in knots and yodeling. Houses of the Holy is leagues from the perfect album Led Zepplein are capable of making, and I hate to skip cuts. But fuck it! 1973’s gonna be a big year for rock ’n’ roll bands, what with Iggy’s Stooges and the Blue Oyster Cult and this one already hammering all over the place. Led Zeppelin are supreme masters of the studio, which means that you’re constantly amazed that four guys are putting out such a vast range and sheer awesome size of sound. You can see their songs even while you’re hearing them in the best oldhat psychedelic sense. And since psychedelia is about due for a recycle anyway, even Plant’s love-in lyrics are okay by me. I expected a little more than this after waiting over a year, but I know that at least “Song” and “Dancing Days” are gonna be with me long after they finally get around to releasing their next one, and that’s enough.

Lester Bangs

JIMMY CLIFF & OTHERS: SOUNDTRACK The Harder They Come (Mango)

I seriously doubt that a better rock and roll movie than The Harder They Come will be made this year. It’s got everything going for it: good story, good acting, fantastic Jamaican scenery, lotsa sex dope ’n violence, and a score that just does not stop. It doesn’t even stop once you get it on your turntable — most of the people I know who saw the film have already worn out their first copies of the soundtrack album. You get to the end of side two and just flip it right over. And it’s been a while since any album’s done that to me.

Well, not actually. I’ve been listening to a lot of reggae in recent months, and there are a few albums that’ve been doing that. But I’ve been listening to so much reggae that I think I’ve got reggae in my jeggae, and ooh, does it feel good, mon!

Reggae, in case you haven’t heard yet, is a music native to the island of Jamaica and its inhabitants, whether they’re based in London, New York or wherever. It is characterized by this .. . weird beat.. . Kinda like a drunken frog with a broken back leg, 6r if it’s fast, this kind of tugging on the second beat. The bass does curlicues around the beat, somebody punctuates things on timbales, the guitar scratches a chord here and disappears, sometimes you hear an organ . . . And where it comes from is the shanty towns of Jamaica, described so well in the soundtrack album’s liner notes and so much better in the movie. From Jamaica, it moved into London and now it looks ripe to conquer the U.S.A.

Jimmy Cliff is the reggae-singing outlaw star of The Harder They Come, so naturally his music is featured in the soundtrack. Four of his very best songs (two repeated in what are known as “versions” which omit the vocal track so you can sing lead) are on this album, including the title song, which deserves to be a hit. In fact, once the movie starts getting around (as I write, it still hasn’t opened in San Francisco) I don’t see how anyone can stop it. The same goes for “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” which has already been a medium-sized hit for Desmond Dekker, but which Cliff does to perfection.

There are six numbers on the album by native Jamaican reggae stars, too. My own favorite for some time has been the mighty “Pressure Drop” by the Maytals. The scene in the movie that shows them recording “Sweet and Dandy” (also on the album) knocked me out: three short-cropped ebony heads weaving in front of the microphone, smiling beatifically, slowly, like a trio of tai chi masters, singing a song about a shanty-town wedding with lots of bottles of cola wine. The other Jamaican cuts - “Rivers of Babylon,” a double-edged song with Biblical imagery and wonderful harmony, an outlaw song, “Johnny Too Bad,” and a dance number with spoken repartee — called “Draw Your Brakes” — are just irresistable.

Yeah, there isn’t a bad cut on the whole album and you’ll like it even if you haven’t seen the movie. If you have, of course, you’ll love it.

Ed Ward

DR. JOHN The Right Place (Atlantic)

Pack up the voodoo, stash the gumbo, ‘cuz Dr. John has gone legit. Used to be a time when he w^s Numero Uno Witch Doctor. One day he slipped on a Dog Jowl mask, uttered some choice incantations, rounded up some excommunicated Holy Rollers and was on his way to the Wonderful World of the Weird. Dr. John the Nighttripper.

You could hear him hissin’ and raspin’ bout funky knuckle skins and gumbo-ya-ya. You might have seen him and his fallen angels j fading into the mists hootin’ and hollerin’ like ; a banshee choir. Then suddenly he gave it all I up. Some said a bolt of lightning struck him ' smack in the middle of his sacred chant for the Eighth Vision of Professor Longhair. Burnt five of his toenails clean off. The Doctor deemed it an ofnen from above. Said it was a sign for him to quit messin’ with the Rites of Night. Really put a scare into him. Swore he’d never tangle with Voodoo again.

Next day he dumped his whole bag of gris-gris into the mighty Mississippi and was singing real low “I Been Hoodood,” over and over again. Right away he stopped prescribing snakeoil stew and snailshell sandwiches. He set himself up in a nice little practice outside of town, just like Marcus Welby. He got real serious about the healing business.

What about all his disciples? What were they going to say when they found out he shucked the surreal? He couldn’t go back on his word. No Cajun worth his rice and red beans ever goes back on an Oath, else he’d get zapped clear into next Mardi Gras. So Dr. John had to try a little Hand is Quicker Than the Eye stunt. He had an album cover made up just like his other five; lightning bolts, creatures from the void, the whole eerie extravaganza. Then all his devoted disciples would buy his latest offering thinking they’d be in for another esoteric tidbit. Instead, they’d be sneaking into his office by the back door before they knew what hit ‘em. Pretty tricky, but they didn’t call Dr. John the Ju-Ju Prince of Rock for nothing.

He!s completely cleaned out his medicine cabinet. Cast out all the cryptic curatives: haunting, slinky lyrics, vague tuneless melodies, and aimless drumming. He restocked it with Motown lovetorn lyrics, a ricky-ticky second hand bar piano and easy, cheesy dancing music instead of chanting music.

Now you know what’s relieving your aches, and pains. Not some soundtrack from a Satanic Sex Ritual, but a homebrew cure concocted in a funky Creole soul kitchen. A surefire remedy from rock’s General Practitioner.

Jaan Uhelszki

THE BEST OF BREAD (Elsktra)

This is it, this is it, this is it! The wimps rule; there’s nodoubt about it. AM critters like Steely Dan and King Harvest and Christie and the Rowan Brothers and even your old standard favorites like the Hollies and the Guess Who have nothing, absolutely nuttin’, in comparison with this shimmering tribe. Bread beats em all.

Yet, it’s a shame that heavy-metal snobbery has overlooked such craftsmen. Like, if Uriah Heep or Argent or Nitzingcr gets a hit, it’s OK, but if Bread makes the top o’ the charts, it’s just yukky and “Commercial Bullshit.” Well, you fuckers, that ain’t so, cause Bread is entitled to a little fame and glory with all the hits they’ve.had under their belt. I don’t give a shit what people say - if a group has had several hits, well, then they must have something. That includes the Raiders, Peter and Gordon, the Archies; the Osmonds and the Royal Guardsmen. Even stuff by Crispian St. Peters and Sgt. Barry Sadler has some merit.

However, Bread ain’t simply novelty music or a brand of bubblegum humming. The lead vocalist can sing, the production is professional, but most important, the band rocks. I’m not kidding. The entire second side is the best collection of rock’n’roll fever since side one of The Best of the Guess Who or Slade Alive or Tyranny and Mutation. I swear I’ve listened to that side as much as twenty times in one day, and I ain’t played nothing that often since Exile on Main Street. The songs have all the breezy whiz of AM classics but they’re placed in the proper order and plenty enuf is going on to hold your attention. It’s like bats beating on your car windshield.

Agreed, tho, Bread can be fairly sappy at times. Side one combines all the mush appeal of syrupy Buffalo Springfield and the sugary tears of Helen Reddy, but this really shouldn’t prove too discouraging. I mean, the songs are still awfully goddamn pretty and they’re so catchy that you’ll find yourself singing along in no time. And even if the softies rarely get yer heart afluttering, well, the songs still contain enuf cliches to keep ya in stitches for months.

Nevertheless, what most peons despise about Bread, I think, is their polish and flair for a certain amount of elaborate good taste in pop muzak construction. Yet, this I feel is Bread’s major ingredient and what really makes ’em so enjoyable. In short, it’s their attempts at attaining some sorta “normal” level of good taste which actually gives them their Tastelessness which is so admirable.

You can see the exact same thing in other groups, too. Certainly it’s this, quality which makes the Shocking Blue or the Merry-goRound so appealing. They don’t strive for anything but professional perfection either.

Furthermore, I admire the Bread culture which has erupted so suddenly in primarily the Southeastern section of this country. You sec the archetypal Bread fans with their boutique flairs and their $35 shirts and their straight, neatly-combed moptops and wide belts and polished boots and you just wanna squeeze em. Never mind that they listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears. It’s enuf that they dig pizza and have sufficient monopoly on the southern college music scene to get at least every jukebox m every burger joint to include at least 25 selection slots for Bread. Like, Bread is everywhere; you can’t ignore em. And hopefully, soon they’ll conquer the whole world and smother us all with their syrupy spit.

Robot Hull

DONOVAN Cosmic Wheels (Epic)

It’s easy to forget about Donovan, but without him Marc Bolan and T. Rex would never have discovered the effects of a wavering voice, the Stones would never have had their soft, “Lady Jane” side. He opened the doors for the Incredible String Band and for an entire show of minstrel singer-writers that’s currently headed by the ever-bearded Cat Stevens. But despite occasional effeteness and preciousnesS, no one was better than Donovan at his best: his In Concert album is sensational - his band texturing his songs superbly, his voice flowing all around the melodies with the control and phrasing of the finest jazz singers. And the Sunshine Superman and Mellow Yellow albums are almost as good, beautiful fusions of pyschedelic folk, optimistic pop, overflowing with enthusiasm, simple, catchy melodies and fine singing. You can listen to any of those albums now without the kind of sticky nostalgia that glues itself to Sgt. Pepper, early Airplane albums, etc. - they transcend the times that produced them (which his 2 record Gift From A Flower To A Garden sure doesn’t) and stand up as good records.

All of which makes his “comeback” album alarming, ludicrous and downright sappy. There’s a cutesy folkclub number about spacemen shitting in their pants that’s a hell of a lot more dated than “Car Car” from his first album, and a lot less funny than most Ben Colder or Homer & Jethro songs; “Maria Magenta,” a polka stolen from the Polish classic “Who Stole the Keeshka,” featuring such anal civilities as “enema, honey”; and a punky rocker, “Wild Witch Lady,” that makes Todd Rundgren sound absolutely fierce. Most of the album is that embarassing.

The problems are multiple; his voice is out of shape and uncomfortable, seldom moving with the songs. When it does, as on “Earth Sign Man,” the results are pretty good, but most of the'time he feels compelled to attack the songs to fight them with unfortunate screams or falsettos, or spar with them in quick rabbit punches. The three songs where he doesn’t do this and lets his voice take on the songs’ natural shape, “Cosmic Wheels,” “Earth Sign Man,” and “Appearances," also turn out to be the best songs. Which brings up the next problem - the songs just aren’t very good. They’re uncomfortably flat and listless, seemingly marking time and filling space; most are based around the same patterns that dominated his last (American) album, Open Road, though lacking the charm and enthusiasm that “Changes,” “People Used To” and “Celtic Rock” had. But there he was playing within a band and there was a sense of fun, a sense of spontaneity totally lacking here. The musicians on Cosmic Wheels are all good to excellent session musicians, but all seem totally insensitive to Donovan’s music and appear completely disinterested, while at the same time overpowering him, forcing him into rhythms and corners he can’t sing his way out of, and Donovan is not a strong enough producer to be able to cope with this. Lush as Mickey Most’s arrangements were, he DID have a feeling for what Donovan was doing and brought a singularity to each song he arranged, a distinctiveness badly needed here. A good producer would solve half the problems; the other half Donovan will have to solve, loosening up his voice, losing the selfconsciousness that’s permeated his writing, and hooking baok up to the rhythms that are a part of him.

Brian Cullman

GENE CLARK, CHRIS HILLMAN, DAVID CROSBY, MIKE CLARKE, ROGER McGUINN Byrds (Asylum)

Rock stars don't grow older, they just get maudlin dept....

What did you honestly expect - miracles? Just look at what you’re dealing with here. David Crosby, whose record for musical excess is second-to-none, and who should by now be considered a total buffoon were it not for a handful of fine songs he’s written sprinkled throughout his artistically dubious career. Then there’s Roger McGuinn, who has kept himself marginally together as a musician but sacrificed most of his integrity by dragging the “Byrds” moniker around with him, using competent but inferior musicians to hold some semblance of the old show on the road. Gene Clark has written a few good songs, but his continuing hillbilly folkiness has made him a rather wearisome figure, and he also insists on playing lousy harmonica, looks like he has no teeth, and judging from the cover photo needs a haircut. Mike Clark was only ever the drummer so he doesn’t matter too much; he’s just got plumper over the years. Finally there’s good old dependable Chris Hillman, “the man who’s never played on a bad record in his career.”

Up until now, that is. Because the immediate fruits of this Byrds reunion constitute some of the most instantly forgettable, depressingly mediocre music I’ve heard in ages, and make the actual coming-together a prime contender in the Most Bogus Events of the Seventies sweepstakes.

The omens were really all there from the beginning. Egomaniac Crosby was to be! the producer. No Dylan songs; we were to be treated instead to more contemporary material by stablemates Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Just look at that back cover shot of the boys leaned up on their bar stools, grinning at each other, looking laid back and unctuous. It makes you want to punch ’em in the nose. The old Byrds never smiled at each other on their album covers except for Mike Clarke on Notorious Byrd Brothers and that was because he was laughing at the joke of the horse symbolising Crosby, which was a pretty mean trick to pull and well in line with the group’s backstabbing capers.

The trouble really starts when you pull the record out of the sleeve. “Full Circle” is a Gene Clark opus compounding all that “life is but a circle game” oatmeal in a style so inoffensive it’s vaguely’offensive, complete with stumblebum vocal. McGuinn’s “Sweet Mary” is pure trash, faintly ethnic Olde English ballad, with McGuinn’s pained vocals upfront. His “Born to Rock ’n’ Roll” is even worse, totally aimless and lacking in drive, a lame excuse for a rock’n’roll song.

Side two is improved slightly by two infectious, lightweight Chris Hillman tunes which would have served for adequate filler on early Byrds albums. Hillman unfortunately seems obsessed with playing mandolin all through the record, until you want to smash it over his head and get him back to his amazing bass lines of yesteryear. Crosby’s two contributions are more dross, a horrendous bummer almost outgrossing “Almost Cut My Hair" called “Long Live the King" and a lame revamping of “Laughing" from his solo album.

Boy, I hute this record. This is the Byrds, for Christ’s sake, not Crazy Horse or Batdorf and Rodney or just any other bunch of buffoons. Everybody knows they don’t have any wild cards up their sleeves now, but do we really deserve such grotesquely maudlin disinterments as this? I’ll stick with my memories.

Nick Kent

JERRY LEE LEWIS THE SESSION IN LONDON (Mercury)

Jerry Lee is the latest to take the cure across the waters; this two record set, predictably too long, laced with the inevitable Little Richard medley and other well-known filler, is his best tor blues and rock fans since the raunch classic he cut with his sister Linda Gail. There is a welcome absence of the Nashville schlock that buried his last bid for the rock audience - no strings, no horns, and (almost) no girl singers.

Elegantly packaged, the set offers u beautiful picture of Jerry Lee mediating on his piano, and a lot of currently fashionable Intricate cut-out work. For some reason, however, the cardboard gives off the unmistakable odor of a dead skunk. I have no idea what, if anything, this might mean, but it’s not something to leave out.

The backing, straight-ahead stuff from second-level cats like Peter Frumpton, Rory Gallagher, and others too numerous to think about, is competent, automatic and homogenized. The personnel varies from cut to cut, but you’d never know it. The album comes off much better if you play a side here and a side there, because there just isn't enough musical variety to sustain four sides in a row. But Jerry Lee, as he is quick to remind anyone who will listen, goes on forever.

Jerry Lee Lewis appears here as a mature country bluesman. a southern rocker at once anarchic and satisfied, a mean and funny drunk whose demon has been contained, but not snuffed. He kicks off the album with “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” a standard that had an enormous impact on the early country rockers back in the pre-rock’n’roll fifties. Probably the first man to cut it was Malcolm Yelvington. a lost blues singer Sam Phillips recorded back in 1954. It may well have been the first r&b Jerry Lee ever sang, and his new version is appropriately manic. There is “Trouble In Mind,” which Jerry Lee turns into a strikingly personal statement, slowly sweeping his hand across the treble keys until he has taken everything the song has to give.

The distance Lewis has always maintained from his material - a sense that he is superior to any song he is given - is what allows him to make the music here his own. You can hear it on songs as disparate as the previously mawkish “Early Morning Rain,” John Fogerty’s “Bad Moon Rising,” or “Memphis.” The first turns into a long country slide, complete with classic fiddle by Lewis regular Kenny Lovelace. Jerry Lee seems to find the self-pity of the sOng hilarious - he knows how corny the key, loss-of-simpler-times line is (“You can’t jump a jet plane/ Like you can a freight train”) and he redeems it because he sounds too drunk to do either.

No man as steeped in country Calvinism as Jerry Lee could be surprised by the fatalism of “Bad Moon Rising,” so his version has a wholly different sort of tension than Fogerty’s. The song becomes a Sunday singalong, Carter Family style, as if it was the music of an old and closely knit community of folks who have seen a lot of bad moons and expect plenty more. That they can pass the feeling of the song around like a jug, until it is no longer scary but prosaic, at least means they’re all under the same moon. Beneath the surface of the performance, the song is tougher than ever.

“Memphis,” that queer and modest telephone plea for a lost number, is toughened up with a rage Chuck Berry could never show, as befits a man who once lost his career to a marriage and now has lost the marriage as well. She can go to hell, but the kids are his and nobody better forget it, especially that poor operator who’s been hounded for fifteen years and hasn’t found the number yet.

There is more good stuff especially an incredibly delicate “Pledging My Love” and “Movin’ On Down the Line,” a timeless Sun stomp better known as “Go, Go, Go,” but the best thing here for any rocker’s money is “Don’t Put No Headstone On My Grave (You Motherfuckers).” Defiant, rolling and rumbling, Bailing away with that treble sweep, Jerry Lee pushes into double-time and rocks right down to the last note: “Don’t put no head'stone on my grave!”

‘‘AH WANT A MONUMENT!”

That is the album’s classic moment, and that, sure as the Devil, is Jerry Lee Lewis.

Greil Marcus

AMON DUUL II Wolf City (United Artists)

Ever read German rock mags like Muziek Express or Dutch ones like Popfoto? If you do, you’ll notice that besides the pictures of Alice Cooper", David Cassidy, whips and tits and chains and ,ass, there’s pictures of bands like Amon Duul II. Sound interesting? Sure it does, especially if you like music that expresses all the joy and good feelings of the Munich Olympics and combines it with a rhythmic undercurrent that sounds like nothing so much as the hissing of gas chambers. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Amon Duul II happens on a variety of levels, and I still haven’t gotten down to what they, really are, or how I really feel about them. On the one hand, they’re almost complete primitives technically; one could not say, for example, that John Winzierl is a good guitarist, In fact, I think the weird sounds he gets from his axe are more accidental than avant-^arde, which still doesn’t mean clover to an artichoke, ever since the pigs ate John Cage’s grandmother.

Then again, they use these synthesizers on top of their illiterately mixed and barely proficient instrumentation, which makes them sound like they could be the Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs of Saturn if they only had some decent material. Instead, they’ve got stuff like “Green Bubble Raincoated Man” or Joni Mitchell meets Eva Braun. “Surrounded by Stars” has some good eerie moments, Renate Knaup-Krotenschwaz again on lead vocals, but it still doesn’t compare to the unreleased tapes of Lotte Lenya singing with the Stooges, now rumored to be hidden in a tree trunk near the Paraguayan border.

Oh -yeah, there’s clear Jefferson Airplane associations too, and more than one critic has been suckered into calling Amon Duul II Germany’s Velvet Underground or some other nonsense. It’s all part of the vanity behind the phrase “rock critic’s music” — in other words, if it’s too obtuse fof the masses, then it must have higher critical meaning we can drench ourselves in, and keep it to ourselves.

Get off it. Even if this is the kind of music critics are supposed to convince themselves they like, Wolf City is boring. It’s not nearly as good as the occasional flashes of punk-rock Stravinsky on Amon Duul IPs Carnival in Babylon, and I’m afraid the band is in dire need of a producer like Bob Ezrin or Jack Richardson or even Richard Perry, to literally whip them into shape..

Meanwhile, the occasional infectious despondency and textures of decadence never really catch on. But. remember the sitar player’s name, A1 Sri A1 (known by his friends simply as Al) cause it’s a good name and don’t let anybody convince you there’s nothing more than a half-written Mark Spitz joke here, which I’d rather not hear the rest of.

Wayne Robins

STATUS QUO Piledriver (A&M)

Let me tell you about the Golden Hotel. Before the dopers came in and screwed it up y getting caught smoking up in the parking lot by the locals and made Frank the owner lose his entertainment license, the Golden Hotel was probably the best rock and roll bar in the entire hemisphere.

It was kind of dingy and barn-like, but the beer was alcoholic and they had a big enough dance-floor, and they didn’t care what kind of state you let yourself get into as long as you kept buying beer at a steady pace; and there was always lots of horny high school girls and bands that knew how to do nothing but rock and roll like crazy all night long.

Some of my greatest memories hinge on the Golden. Like the night Bangs and I got really plastered and could no longer subdue our savage passions to become rock stars. So as we knew the guys in the band we asked if we could go up on the stage and jam with them, ’cause a couple of other guys were doing just that with some of their own horns. So I got the guitar and Bangs got the cowbell. But it turned out that the guy who gave me the guitar knew I couldn’t play, so he unplugged it. But 1 went through all the motions anyway, leaning up against the wall with a smoke hanging Clapton-like from my lips (I don’t smoke, incidentally) and pretending I was really getting down. Bangs ,gave the first ever extended cowbell solo in the history of rock music. It was great. Nobody cared because the band just boogied around us for the whole five or ten minutes anyway.

What all this is about is, if Frank the owner ever gets his entertainment license back (which seems unlikely) Status Quo is the band he oughta have. English writer Nick Kent says Status Quo are the English Grand Funk, which I don’t really see. I think they’re even crasser. They’re a boogie band, and a good one. They don’t screw around with solos and such, they just tromp out rock and roll in the best chunky, together, boogie, foot-stomping, dance-to-it style. They’d be great at a sleazy bar like the Golden where music, alcohol and sex , (Lester met his current steady at the Golden, donchaknow) is all that anyone cares about. What Piledriver is great for is, even though the Golden ain’t what it used to be anymore (back to being an old-man bar again) now we can make our own Golden by playing this record and watering down bottled beer with half water so’s it tastes the same.

Songs like “Don’t Waste My Time,” a raucous outrageous no-holds-barred boogie, “O Baby,” a screamer with Humble Pieish overtones, or “Big Fat Mama,” which is as gross as it sounds, are all natural alkie-dancers, and they even do a seven-minute version of “Roadhouse Blues,” which is just perfect cause everybody knows the best .bar bands in the world gotta be familar sounding and borrow good stuff from other bands.

The only short-comings in the album are the slower numbers like “A Year” and “Unspoken Words” but I guess even they’re OK cause after you’ve picked up a nubile little princess some decade or so your junior, you gotta have a chance to squeeze her little bod in a slow grind, doncha?

Piledriver’s great. I just hope they don’t ever become stars (again?) and ruin it all.

Al Niester

JO JO GUNNE Bite Down Hard (Asylum)

Spirit, one of the most interesting and musically superior of American bands, seems Finally to have croaked for good. Randy California went off to waste his fecund imagination on Sgt. Twirly and His Wonderful Birdfuckers, or whatever that mess of selfindulgent cowflop was called, leaving John Locke and the chrome-dome drummer to the Staehely brothers and the vapid Feedback. But what of Mark Andes arid Jay Ferguson? Well, they put together Jo Jo Gunne, petitioned the shade of Moby Grape for guidance and came up with pne of the nicest rock and roll records of last year. Not exactly a precedent-shattering exploration of Music’s Undiscovered Fastnesses, but I don’t think that was the idea. Just R&R, see, no pretensions, no twenty-minute contrivances, just tough little numbers chockabloek with shrieking guitar, inane lyrics mostly about balling, lots of “wo yeah yeah wunh” vocals and steady-as-she-goes 4/4 backbeat. And what’s more, they’ve done it again, with (yas, yas) Bite Down Hard.

Mark Andes has split, but unless you’re a groupie you’ll never notice. As on the other album, Ferguson wrote or collaborated on all the tunes, and his clear, strong vocals spearhead the show. Matthew Andes’ guitar wails and grinds away, and everybody leans in hard on the backup vocals. No point in blathering on about it: if you’re into the first album, you know what you’re getting; if they’re new to you, you can get a very good sense of what the music’s like by digging the snazzy cover art - clean, shiny chrome, not the rusted-out heavy metal of Black Oak Arkansas or the machine-tooled rhodium of Deep Purple. If you preferred Spirit at their hardest, if you pine for the great Grape, you’ll like it a lot. Jo Jo Gunne rocks out righteously, and that about covers it.

Gerrit Graham

JOHNNY WINTER Still Alive & Well (Columbia)

You bet he is. Johnny Winter’s comeback was never a very dubious proposition, because the man has always had a basic honesty that made him the epitome of the no-bullshit popstar. But honesty alone’s just a sap’s handshake and totally useless unless it’s got some teeth in it. Johnny Winter’s chops are up, which is the main reason why this album is such a pleasure to throw on and live with.

Still Alive & Well is such a damn good record, it burns and flows and absorbs when it should; it’s tight and absolutely professional even in its meanness. Like the trend now if you’re a once and future or old standby star is to release loose ended, sprawling, indulgently “personal” albums as if their very erratic slovenliness constituted some kind, of stark reflection of the changes, particularly chemical, the beleaguered artist has been going through. Still Alive & Well could have been a very pretentious, tiresome record, but it’s not. It’s the measured torrent of a champ who takes care of business and sees no need to turn his convalescence into a gimmick.

I mean, imagine the temptations the guy must have faced. He could have cranked out a rerun of The Progressive Blues Experiment (“Well, Johnny’s getting his head together, regaining the purity of his roots.”). Or he could have done a concept album: “I’ve had problems folks.. . yes, I too was jonesed, been to hell and back . . . but I gotta program that saved me, it might work for you too. Just write to S.O.S. - Stay Off Skag - P.O. Box .. .meanwhile, here’s my Delta Field Holler rendition of ‘Too Much Monkey Business’

But Johnny Winter proves here that he’s stronger than that. Kicking junk is nothing; kicking junk and not harping on it is real strength; kicking and then thrashing out a stomping stroll on party album with songs like Rick Derringer’s “Cheap Tequila” (“Wake up and be happy/ Just live for today/ Drown in cheap tequila/ And wash yourself away”) a Winter original called “Rock & Roll” that wears the name well and transcends banality just like Lou Reed’s classic did, even a great swaggering version of the Stones’ “Let It Bleed” (what a song choice, Johnny Winter is so cool. . . Yeah man, FUCK all these sobersided reformo creeps walking around with their tracks on their sleeves like Purple Hearts or something, let’s just get drunk and get down and kick out the walls til we can’t juke it up no more, and then we’ll take our rest in all good time, cause there’s plenty more where this came from.

Johnny Winter may have been off the boards for a while, but he ain’t old and he’s hardly tired. This album just might be his best ever; certainly it’s less tentative and more adventurous than the first on Columbia; better balanced away from guitar pyrotechnic overload than Second Winter; better produced and recorded and more all around exciting than Johnny Winter And. When he really gets going, like on “Rock & Roll,” Winter is one of the two or three primo skullfuck fretboard whiztop badasses around.

Do I really need to tell you that Derringer (who plays on three cuts) and the halfrealigned trio (old bass Randy Hobbs, new drummer Richard Hughes) are as tight and sure as ever? Do I need to explicate the technical and musical minutae track by track? Analyze the coupe inherent in such an interesting, visceral future-blues workout on a song as archetypally played-out as “Rock Me Baby”? Sheeit no! I’ll leave all that for you to. discover yourself. Rock critics oughta know when to trapshut and let it bleed on its own. Just remember that when you hear this album you’ll find it hard to believe Johnny Winter was ever actually away, you’ll get your kicks, and as long as either of you lives, you’ll never catch this Jackson selling Jesus pencils on the street.

Lester Bangs

THREE DOG NIGHT Around the World with Three Dog Night (Dunhill)

Like the press release says, these guys are an institution now and who can argue with such success? You just can’t fight city hall. How could anyone put down a group that grosses a cool $5'/a mill in one year, am I right? I mean, these are cold, hard facts as real as a rabbit punch: eight, count ’em, eight gold albums, six gold singles, powerful enough to fill entire stadia.

So it’s hard to not like them and this will undoubtedly be another goldie for the Dogs, despite the fact that to flesh it out enough for a double album they threw in (and these are the real, accurate names of the songs) three unbelievable mish-mashes called “Drum Solo,” “Organ Solo,” and “Jam.”

So help me. They even list authors for them and - get this, listen up - they’re the only three songs out of the 1 7 here that the Dogs wrote. Well, sure, they’re nice guys and top dollar at the BO so you can’t expect too much of ’em. As long as they can pick stuff by Hoyt Axton, Randy Newman, Lauro Nyro. and Nilsson and turn ’em into certified chart-toppers, why, there’s no need to write. No sir, these boys are right up there with James Taylor in my book as past masters of hypno-roek. I’ll bet you’re still humming “Black and White.”

The only thing that keeps me from welcoming them with open arms into my wax family is the way they look. This has got to be the shiftiest-eyed group in, musical history and it’s not just one or two of the gang, all of ’em got weird eyes. Probably comes from sniffing Ovaltine or oatmeal or something. The general impression is that they want to separate me from my hard-earned bucks. Would you buy a used song from these men?

Chet Flippo

ANDY BOVVN Sweet William (Mercury)

Andy Bown was lead singer in a group called the Herd, which was mostly heard from because Peter Frampton was their lead guitarist and Jinii Hendrix produced their first album. Andy has one other record. Gone To My Head, which has one fantastic cut, “P.S. Get Lost.” which says everything you need to know about his sensibility, for better or worse.

Bown has a really excellent rock vdice, capable of singing soft and hard stuff, but best with a sort of lilting rock/pop that has gotten less perceptive vocalists a fair share of hit records. This record probably doesn’t have any of those, but it does have two thoroughly successful songs and a number of others that sound fine.

The best cut is “Cold Chicago’s Got Me,” one of the most perceptive songs ever written about the perils of being an emergent recording star, and which you must hear if only for the wonderful lines:

Now I can hardly sing or play guitar

But if you want to take a chance

Don’t worry ’bout percentages

I’ll take a huge advance

Then there’s “Beautiful Morning,” which is about a love that will live forever or until the ecological destruction the singer considers imminent. Bown has a sort of wacky, engaging style, except when he gets serious about things, when he bdeomes ingenous and (I think) a little dishonest. He’s managed by Rod Stewart’s manager and maybe he should go .sit at the feet of the master to learn something about how to write about sexual encounters well.

In any event, for my money, Bown could become a top notch vocalist and songwriter, if he gets rid of some of the gush and poesy. He can rock, and he has guts, just when we need that sort of thing most. Hope he makes it.

Dave Marsh

OWN &THE BELMONTS Reunion - Live At Madison. Square Garden, 1972 • (Warner Bros.)

THE BELMONTS Cigars, Acapella, Candy (Buddah)

DION'S GREATEST HITS (Columbia)

Years ago, Mad ran a feature on “What Kind of Parents Will Today’s Teenagers Make?” It depicted a pair of graying, potbellied rockers in leathers, levis and ponytails spawning two ultra-clean whizkids who wore suits and glasses, who in turn grew up and produced a boy and girl of their own. These two of course turned out to be primecut JD punks stamped from the same frenchfry mold as gramps and grannie, on whose chopper they were seen riding tandem off into the sunset in the final panel.

While Mad’s prophecy waits to be fulfilled in somewhat convoluted form, what have we before us here? A pitiable reunion attempt and a throw-away comeback by a bunch of clods who, history tells us, thrived during the absolute nadir of U.S.A. rock & roll? Fast twin cutouts for survivors of the Beechnut Age, for the strutting peg-panted, collarlesscoated fop chumps and stoic eye-shaded and teased bouffant jellybabies of the late 50’s and early 60’s who don’t even rate rockhistory mention beside the primal gone cats and mamas of the dawn itself?

Not exactly. Two of these three albums carry as much gut stuff in the final analysis as the hilltop rockers, the swaggering suburb teens of the middle Sixties or whoever the current candidate for the world’s greatest rock group might be. And for the same reasons, too: they provided entertainment, with a minimum of concern and awareness and a maximum of teenage thrills, spills, riffs and nuance, for their audience, da people, Kids.

Just like Beach Boys Party, these three had to happen. Their importance lies not in any musical advances they make, but in the sheer fact that the loyal, that particular batch of kids, still hasn’t shaken the buzz they got when that kitchen portable first came across with the babbled beauty of “I Wonder Why,” the teen angst of “That’s My Desire” or Dion’s tongue-click glossolalia on “Runaround Sue.”

And this stuff wears extremely well. On Reunion, the original crew, a guitaring Dion out front, tears off a concert “Sue” that won’t quit, an appropriately blues-touched “Ruby Baby” and a relaxed, yet strong “I Wonder Why” that stands with its own special dignity alonside the original. The new Belments, on Cigars, Acapella, Candy, in the short unaccompanied run between “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “My Sweet Lord” bring up a dozen times the unanswerable query — why in hell haven’t there been, in the wake of the Wilsons, Seasons and Hollies, any white harmony outfits? Their “Desire” is all the more beautiful for its clarity and lack of instrumentation.

This is, after all, another central nerve of rock & roll noise, more human machine sound imbued with the timeless ethos, the spunk and splendor of Spector, Brian, that Cooper fella and the Big Tree-Bell singles. Totally recommended, Reunion for openers, Candy for the more sublime yet tasty second round. And before you even touch either of those, pick up a copy of Dion’s Greatest Hits (Columbia should have given more credit to the Belmonts) which includes all the great Laurie hits. Consume with gusto.

Gene Sculatti

JOHN CALE Paris 1919 (Warner Brothers)

John Cale, enigma. What in the world goes on inside that thick Welsh skull of his, anyway? I tried to find out once, did an interview for this publication. Warner’s flew Cale up to San Francisco, he rented a car and drove out to my place. Almost immediately, things went wrong. To begin with, the photographer who came along prated incessantly about cocaine and Cale is not exactly “heavily into drugs.” Lightly into ’em, even. 1 hadn’t done my homework . . . The encounter was disastrous, let’s leave it at that, and that’s why you never read any elucidary words about John Cale in CREEM. And, truth to tell, his then-current album, The Academy in Peril, was so enigmatic, so much like listening to a mobius strip or an egg, that I couldn’t find much to say about it.

But then there’s this other side to John Cale, the side that puts out records like the incredible Vintage Violence, which I spent ample space raving about three years ago when it came out. In the time between that work and the current Cale masterwork, Paris 1919, he’s been moved out to scenic Burbank by Warner Brothers, for whom he scouts out talent and does production. So there’s not as much New York paranoia on Paris 1919 - it’s Los Angeles paranoia, or at the very least a shifting of modes . . .

Ech, said I upon looking at the cover. Paris 1919, huh? White linen suit, hair parted in the middle. This had better be good. Well, it was. Excellent, in fact. Cale pulls it off, the worldweariness, the reluctant shedding of the shell of the past, the eyes sharply tuned to absurdity and best of all, he does it without any pretentious references to the actual fact of Paris in 1919.

Plus it rocks out on half the cuts, and the remaining cuts are intensely beautiful in their quiet way. Help in cutting the instrumental tracks came from various members of Little Feat (and have you bought their ablum yet???) and Cale-’s no slouch either when it comes to constructing his own brand of eerily atmospheric music — music that really does seem to make an inordinate number of people I know think about the past, for some unexplained reason. Me, too, I hasten to add. Those viola, harmonium, and pedal steel tracks he lays down don’t really assert themselves, but you’d miss ’em if they weren’t there, lemme tell ya.

What’s good? Everything on the album. I play it at least once a day and it’s still growing on me. “Andalucia” is my current favorite cut with its many acoustic guitars giving it this lighter-than-air feeling that just knocks me out. “Half Past France” is another quiet number, a stunningly effective sort of musical novelette with fine, liquid guitar playing. The title cut is sort of Gilbert O’Sullivan-ish, but in a decidedly sinister way (“I’m the church and I’ve come/ To claim you with my iron drum/ La la la . . .”). *

It’s not fair to expect everybody to dig this record, I know, but it’s so different from the current crop that hopefully its reputation will spread by word of mouth. 1 don’t exactly hear any hit singles here (“Macbeth” maybe, or “Andalucia”) and, sadly, stuff this good rarely hits the airwaves, be they Modulated by Amplitude or Frequency. It’s a very literary record in its own way and it goes well while you’re reading Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (or V., which is closer in time). But hear it twice and you’ll run the risk of shocking people on the bus some afternoon by coming out with lines like “.. . .Elephants that sing to keep/ The cows that agriculture won’t allow/ Hanky Panky nohow . . .” But that’s okay, isn’t it?

Ed Ward

BLACK OAK ARKANSAS Raunch'n'Roll (Atco)

The sorta people who listen to Black Oak Arkansas are about the closest things to teenage I rankensteins in existence. They hide out in the hills of Tennessee and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and about the only other music they play is junk like Z.Z. Top or Chicken Shack. Their parents lock em in their rooms along with their black lites and beer can collections, and the only time they ever come out is to rehaul their transmission or watch Slingshit Theater. In short, they represent the southern hi-energy worthless skunis, fucked up on qualuudes with rotten teeth jostling around in their head.

So outta this sub-rubadubdub-kulture springs the likes of such bestial creeps like this group. And it’s enuf to make a normal platter collector cringe in embarassment - I mean, these guys is the worst mob of droolers ever immortalized in plastic. Don’t listen to critical whiz asses who say that this group is the NEXT ROLLING STONES because they ain’t. Nope, you dumbshits, BLACK OAK ARKANSAS IS THE NEXT MC5!!!

Now that ain’t really apparent from simply listening to this live rustling cuz this is just a mess of beans, combining the impromptu chatter of Lord Sutch and the spastic sputter of Joe Cocksucker and the hysterics of Kim Fowley and Monti Rock, but there’s no genuine taste of hard-core bimbamboom energy music. Mostly they just mess around and do tasteless stuff like the following (all of which can be heard on this fine disc):

1. Jim Dandy (the next Noddy Holder) rams a bean up his asshole and recites graffiti

2. there’s a scrub board solo which sounds like the Godz scraping the bottom qf the barrel

3. Harvey Jett does a Leigh Stephens imitation

4. they kill this obnoxious brat in the audience who keeps shouting, “Boogie, you slime shitters!”

Plus they do this amazing song called “Hot Rod” which has gotta be the filthiest song ever recorded. You can even imagine Jim Dandy’s prick vibrating like an oily eel as he pukes his words from his rectum and drains his very soul until he’s a dried huncher. In fact, it’s the most exciting song ever recorded live anywhere at any time on any label by any group.

The group does all their other standards like “Hot ’n’ Nasty” and “When Electricity Came to Arkansas,” but none of em swell and snarl as much as “Hot Rod’V But that still don’t keep it from being the best rock’n’roll album of all time. I really mean that. Don’t give me none of that shit about how great the first MC5 record is or even the Allman Bros, either'. This record is ten times as exciting.

The main reason for this is that Jim Dandy feels obligated to preach to his audience so he goes into these lengthy spews which are just hysterical. For instance, before “Mutants of The Monster,” he chops out something with crackers in his mouth, and it comes out like this:

Yeah you know our generation basically consists of you and I, and we are misfits of mankind.

Yes, cuz mankind has lost its mind which we freax have been desperately trying to find.

And tho they strove and they’re stronger, they simply ended up being a monster.

So since in the form of our fathers, I guess, we’re just mutants of this here monster.

Then the whole group starts growling at ya, and it’s kind hard not to piss in yer pants. Hell not even the kids who read BIG BOY COMIX are as dumb as Black Oak Arkansas.

Robot A. Hull