BOOKS

BOOKS

CONFESSIONS OF A HOPE FIEND By Timothy Leary (Bantam)

Timothy Leary�s back in jail, so the time is about right to get the scoop on his free time, and revel in the details of his mystery-novel escape. Funnily enough, even someone who spends as much time looking over the non-stop outpourings of the radical/ underground/ alternative/ counter-cultural/ movement/ rock/ psychedelic press, can�t tell you just where Leary is incarcerated at present, but I suppose that is beside the point.

The narrative portions of Confessions of a Hope Fiend are partially taken from the earlier Jail Notes (Douglas -Grove) for the jail days, and are partly Tim�s version of what really happened, both with the Weatherpeople-engineered escape and during his months in Algeria, where he lived under virtual house arrest, courtesy of Eldridge Cleaver and his faction of the Black Panther Party.

But parts of the narrative sag, because Leary tends to go off into pseudoBeckett/ Burroughs tangents. Adding to the confusion is Leary�s insistence on referring to his wife, Rosemary, as She and Her. Always capitalized, but never personalized. Apparently, Rosemary has also recorded some of her impressions here, which tangles things so badly that at one point 1 was convinced that Leary had escaped from prison in drag — it was only Rosemary shopping for her costume, after all.

Despite those problems (and the implicit problem of sexism which the She/Her business raises), Confessions of a Hope Fiend isn�t a bad book. It is certainly less pollyanna and slightly more down-to-earth than anything Leary has done previously, and Leary�s attempts at rationalizing his turn away from non-violence toward a policy of self-defense make more sense here than his explanations have before. That doesn�t mean that this is any sort of primer of acid-politics, which is still the basic nature of Leary�s game, however. Nonetheless, it is worthy of the respect one should give to one of the most influential, and unjustly martyred, King Fools of history.

Dave Marsh

MAKING TRACKS: The Story of Atlantic Records By Charlie Gillett (Outerbridge & Lazard)

Charlie Gillett is the great rock and roll historian. His Sound of the City is the definitive chronicle of the rise of rock and roll in the �50s, and his work as a critic and interviewer always reveals a surprising amount of analytical depth couched among the maze of facts that he digs up with typically British zeal. (How do you think they filled the British Museum, anyhow?)

Making Tracks is Gillett�s second book in the U.S., though a third collection, which he edited, called Rock File (New English Library), made its appearance last winter in Britain. Rock File concerned itself exclusively with rock and its impact in Britain, and included a comprehensive listing of all British hits from about 1955 on. I mention it here because I wish someone would publish it in the U.S. — the writing is certainly good enough, encompassing work by Gillett, CREEM�s Simon Frith, and a number of other good British critics — and because, failing its American publication, Rock File would be an excellent investment for the American fan or collector.

Making Tracks brings Charlie�s fine eye for detail back to the United States. It is a strange book, because Atlantic Records is not necessarily a subject that very many people are interested in reading about. But it is also a fine book, and one which any reader of CREEM would, I presume, be fascinated by.

Gillett is best when he opens up the range of his inquiry, getting into early forms of record selling, making, promotion and distribution. The payola chapter alone, in which Dick Clark�s multiple ties to the hits American Bandstand created in the.�50s are fully exposed, in Clark�s own words, is Worth the price of admission. (And might, need I add, make the book a hot commercial property, since it looks like we might be in for Phase Two in the Payola Scare.)

Gillett is also good when he is profiling the people he met on his travels while doing research. Atlantic bosses Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun, soul mojo Mac Rebbenack (Dr. John to you) and, in the initial section of the book, Bobby Robinson of Harlem�s Fury Records are all well done.

But I tend to Jose interest in long descriptions of the making of records, and what they sound like, especially when the records are mostly tunes we�ve heard before. And, though this is really only a matter of taste, I wish more had been written about Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin and the white rock stars with which Atlantic became a truly large scale success.

I think Atlantic�s ties to the Warner Communication (Kinney) congolmerate should have been explored as deeply as the �50s payola scene was; such an investigation might have defused my suspicions in that arena, as the payola chapter did, but I think that a revelation or two about the workings of the most powerful music business Conglomerate is certainly in order.

Nonetheless, because Gillett is such a good writer, and because his analysis of what made the early music business tick is so fascinating (and, I suspect, correct) Making Tracks is wholeheartedly recommended to anyone who cares about rock. I only wish that there were more Charlie Gilletts around.

Dave Marsh

THE FALL OF AMERICA By Allen Ginsberg (City Lights)

Unfortunately, �The Fall of America� contains nothing as stirring as a �Howl� or �Kaddish.� What it does offer is a superb poem on Ginsberg�s sense of failure in returning to the country (�Ecougue�), some homoerotic verse that varies in quality from the touching �Neal�s Ashes� (Neal Cassady, that is) to the sadomasochistic, �Please Master,� and, unfortunately, much political poetry, which seems overworked and tedious.

One of the weaknesses of political poetry is that it depends too much, at base, on shared allegiance between poet and reader. Nor can the dropping of radical names — Rubin, Leary, Cleaver, LeRoi Jones — sway one at all. I don�t want to get into a discussion of the relative merits of these individuals, but in retrospect, I feel they were all a part of what Dylan called, earlier, �the phony false alarm.�

Whether or not you disagree with Ginsberg�s political sentiments, it is nonetheless true that sentiment makes weak poetry.

Furthermore, although it is good to see that this kind of humanistic consciousness still exists, I grew tired of the paternalistic guru tone.

As before, Ginsberg uses the long, Whitman-esque line, but this time it is overcrowded with syllables and concepts. The effects aren�t delineated enough — it�s one thought after another, without much sinking in. The constant dropping of facts, quotes from newspapers, and so on, I just don�t find poetic.

It is possible that with time the complexity of this work will grow more accessible but the feeling lingers that fatigue with language and subject matter were too much a part of Ginsberg�s mood in The Fall of America.

Donald Jennings

THE BIG STASH by Ron Peters Curtis Books

Here�s a goodie and a culture/ethnic first: a hardbitten private dick novel in the Chandler-Spillane tradition, whose hero is (and don�t you forget it buddy!) a Polack.

America�s most joked about, least championed minority finally has it�s very own Philip Marlowe/Mike Hammer. Stash Koval is a troubleshooter in the tradition: he�s big and tough and mean and he means business, he pistol-whips the. yeggs and heaves �em through windows, he�s seen it all and got no money and a jaundiced eye for his troubles. Not so jaundiced as not to appreciate any! fine piece of tail pardiddling down the street, though.

But there�s a difference this time. He�s a fuckup. A stud and a pud. Clumsy, forgetful, late for life-and-death appointments. He busts his ass to please his rich eccentric uncle, hoping that when the old fart kicks off, he�ll inherit a fortune. He never gets it — in the course of this book (is there a series a-borning?) — but he takes plenty hard knocks trying. Meanwhile, he bumps into things and his shoelaces are always coming untied, usually in time for him to trip over them just when a sinister gang of International Rare Coin Thieves (that�s right) is closing in. Like it sez on the back, though, �a big, tough Polack might not have much polish, but he had more than enough Polish for any killer to put down.�

The book is so good you can read it in an hour. Put it by your bed at night, pick it up soon as you open your eyes in the morning, and it�ll give you a feeling of accomplishment knowing you�re starting the day with a whole novel under your belt. The plot ain�t so new, but Stash is cool as a spat.

If you�re male, you can really identify when he lucks out by finding a dame that�s as chronically late and accident-prone as he is — and she�s gorgeous besides.

As in all other areas of Western civilization, the era of private detective as invincible badass is at an end. Beginning with Stash Koval, the new breed of Mike Hammer will be human; so human that he may end up being a total embarrassment and a pain in the ass to anybody who remembers the genre�s golden era. But the genre�s getting dated anyway. It needs a new wrinkle, and The Big Stash is the first one in a long time.

So leave Raymond Chandler to the eggheads and get on down to the real shit. It�s as easy to finish as it is to start — and anybody could start a book which opens with: �The harem girls were being singularly inattentive.�

Lester Bangs

OFF THE WALL

WRITINGS AND DRAWINGS BY BOB DYLAN (Knopf): Tills pink, over-sized volume looks, like nothing so much as The Golden Book of Bob Dylan. It is worthless to everyone except libraries and assorted -ologists of course, but don�t let that stop you. Where else can you get an opportunity to investigate the entire contents of Bob�s bottom right hand desk drawer, previously untouched since January, 1970, when Dylan was doing research for the Self Portrait sessions.

THE ADVENTURES OF CHARLIE BATES by James D. Houston (Capra Press): CharlieBates is a man after our own heart. His life is dominated by automobiles, which alternately transport him to states of ecstasy and drive him totally mad. We suppose this will not mean as much if you didn�t learn to drive until you were in your 20s, or haven�t fought a continuing battle with the triumph of technology in our lifetime, but these stories are witty, humorous and wise in ways that little new fiction is. Order from: Capra Press, 631 State St., Santa Barbara, Ca. 93101. It�s $3.75, and tell �em CREEM sent ya.

JOURNAL OF RESISTANCE by Mikis Theodorakis (Coward, McCann, Geohegan): As all good little revolutionaries know by now, Theodorakis did the soundtrack for Z. What even the most excellent young scamps don�t recall is that Theodorakis was intimately involved in the events which provide the real-life frame for Z�s political metaphor, or that the composer had to smuggle the work out of Greece, where he was, at the time, living alternately underground and under house arrest. Journal of Resistance is the full story of that period, and it is quite, inspiring; Theodorakis is an engaging writer, and his struggle with outmoded European leftists has a striking American parallel. Recommended.