NEW YORK DOLLS

(Mercury)

Personally, I don’t like the cover. The Dolls never wear that much make-up; it’s artificial-looking, gives the wrong impression. But this is the kind of band that gives the right impression by giving the wrong impression, starting with that two-strikes name -Dolls, and the straights fag-bait you while the gays straight-bait you and the hips trendy-bait you; New York, and the rest of the country puts up its dukes. To five young men from the outboroughs of Manhattan, such abuse is liable to feel... more or less the natural thing.

The cover’s chief virtue is its shockingpink-on-black-and-white classiness. For balance, the back cover is just pink, a typical Mercury schlockeroony - that hideous italic type and somebody misspelled “saxophone.” Also on the back is a photograph which is more like the real thing - all five Dolls looking scuzzy in their platforms and tight pants, standing in front of the Gem Spa on St. Mark’s Place. Gem’s is where kids from Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island tend to gravitate when they’re looking for a high time in the city. In Fillmore days it was freak central. Now it’s teen-age wasteland, a subway ride away, just like Warhol trash.

Subway music. Almost all the white people who raise children in Manhattan are at least moderately wealthy and arty; they bring up musicians like Janis Ian, Carly Simon, John Paul Hammond. Not the Dolls’ kind of people. In the tradition of Dion and Neil Sedaka and Neil Diamond and the ShangriLas, the Four Seasons and the Blues Project, even the Velvet Underground, they grew up in places like Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island. • There has never been a band — not even the Velvets - who have conveyed the oppressive close excitement th^it Manhattan holds for a half-formed human being the way the Dolls do. The careening screech of their music comes right out of the Cooper Union stop on the Lexington IRT. The music is ugly and raucous and funny; its drive and its style and its ambition are truly manic.

There are obvious analogues. -> first the Rolling Stones, then maybe the Velvets, the Stooges, Alice Cooper. People mention all four, which is fine. Nothing wrong with an analytic system - phylum rock, genus hard rock - as long as it is understood that the Dolls are their own animal. Their special genius is a mixture of early 60s pop-song savvy with late-60s heavy-metal anarchism. Most crucially, this means that the deficiencies of Johnny Thunder and Syl Sylvain are acknowledged and exploited rather than exhibited and indulged. Most guitarists invent one or two dynamite riffs and destroy them with repetition. David JoHansen, the Dolls’ guiding intelligence, takes those riffs and writes songs around them. It is typical of JoHansen’s. song intelligence that he has unearthed wonderful compositions by Bo Diddley and Leiber-Stoller (“Pills” and “Bad Detective,” and I bet you never heard of either) that sound as if he wrote them himself. Every one of the 10 originals on this record is memorable. What other 1973 rock album can make that claim?

Some cavils. There were fears that Todd Rundgren’s production would smooth the music out, but if anything he let the Dolls push too far in the other direction. JoHansen claims he is afflicted with terminal laryngitis, but he is capable of a kind of sweetness that would add an essential dimension of vulnerability to this album. “Bad Detective” should have been on this LP, leaving the Sonny Boy Williamson and the Shangri-Las medley for the next one. And it is my very sad duty to report that although the songs are festooned with clever little hoOks - not only those dynamite riffs, but quotes and intros and pauses, introjections and epilogues, whistles and moans and kisses — they are still raw enough to scare off the average AM programmere until he/she is instructed otherwise.

Those instructions will have to come from the kids 'of America - most adults really hate it, which is of course heartening. But the Dolls are so fine that even the adults will catch on if the Dolls can break out of New York, and the Dolls can. All good music - all good art, if you’ll pardon my French - is rooted in particulars and moves out from there. This is the most exciting hard rock band in the country and maybe the world right now, and it has room to get two or three times as good as it is. I know you don’t believe me yet, but listen to “Trash” and “Personality Crisis” and “Looking for a Kiss” two times and then tell me I’m wrong. I fucking dare you, kid.

Robert Christgau

THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND

Brothers and Sisters

(Capricorn)

I don’t care what anyone says; this is not the same Allman Brothers Band that used to blister sound systems from coast to coast. That band had Duane Allman and Berry Oakley in it and it was the smokin’est and, for my money the' best bunch of rockers America American has produced since the Crickets. Unfortunately, Allman and Oakley died.

All that out of the way, we can proceed to the matter, at hand: the present Allman Brothers Band. The group is now essentially Gregg Allman (organ and vocal), Dicky Betts (guitars and vocal), Lamar Williams (bass), Chuck Leavell (piano), and on drums Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny Johanson (a/k/a Jaimoe).

The band started work on Brothers and Bisters last fall and it originally was to have been completed by January. Two cuts, “Wasted Words” and “Ramblin’ Man,?’ were in the can when Oakley was killed last November, The album finally was released in August and there’s still confusion about the songs that were intended for it: six cuts are listed on the jacket; a seventh (Gregg’s “Early Morning Blues”) is listed on the sleeve; but in its place on the recdrd is the only non-Alim an Band composition here, “Jelly Jelly.” That would all suggest: a) a last-minute rush to get the thing out; b) a lack of interest somewhere; c)trouble somewhere.

No matter, Brothers and Sisters is, overall, a fine album. Taken on its own terms, that is. Gregg Allman is the champion of a certain kind of Southern singer: he manages to be simultaneously raucous, raw, lazy, slurring, and world-weary. Dicky Betts is one of the most facile rock guitar players around but he’s doomed to play in Duane’s shadow and the comparisons are inevitable. Betts, especially in “Jessica” (file only instrumental here) and “Jelly Jelly,” now and then manages to uphold the Allman standard of intense, burning guitar. In “Wasted Words,” he might be mistaken for Keith Richard.

“Ramblin’ Man” shows him to be in full control of a remarkably fluid Southern style that used to be the trademark of the Allmans. But there are other moments, perhaps too many of them, when things become disjointed. Especially in “Come and Go Blues,” the bridges are awkward (where Duane rammed his way through, Betts skirts around for the easiest way out) and runs are repeated almost to distraction and then - just in time - Betts finds a staccato burst of automatic fire to extricate himself. The same song (and bthers) shows that he and piano player Chuck Leavell are working against each other musically - there’s no interplay or exchange; they’re traveling different roads.

Maybe such comparisons are unfair; they’re going to be made, though, by a lot of people. The big distinction is, as Tony Glover once quoted Tom Dowd, that Duane could pull from each of the band just what he wanted. There’s obviously no one left to do that now. More’s the pity.

Chet Flippo

BROWNSVILLE STATION

Yeah

(Big Tree)

CAPITAL CITY ROCKETS

(Elektra)

Three months prior to the Great Hippie Acid Revival (that’s right, it’s coming, ya rube - just note the clues: Watkins Glen, landslide interest in transcendental meditation, emerging popularity of Country Joe and also Dino Valente) these, two punk-rock albums are released. Not that it matters much. Punk rock peaked quite a while back, and nobody cared then either. Nevertheless, some dupes decided to jump on a dead bandwagon anyway and so you got two albums here that present two opposite approaches to rocking in the punk style.

Brownsville Station have always been a great group. They played at fanzine parties and rumbled in alleys and were just general all around good ole punks. They stole songs, they stole the show from Alice Cooper in Memphis once, and Cub Koda of the group even stole five bucks from Danny Oppenheimer of St. Louis, Mo. All this was before glitter, you understand.

And now they’ve released an album which is definitely their best work yet. I will go so far as to rank this album right up there with the cream of the punk crop (Raw and Alive by the Seeds, Back Door Men by the Shadows of Knight, Barry and the Remains’ tight album, etc.) It’s certainly the liveliest release in this vein since Nuggets. The record features their versions of such moronic classics as “Question of Temperature” (twice as fine as Balloon Farm) and “Love, Love, Love” (it makes Terry Knight and the Pack sound like the punk rock duds that they were) and even “Ba»efooti»’.” Also, both original tunes might have been stomping hits on the charts way back in ’66.

The Capital City Rockets, however, sound like artificial punk rockers. It’s like an obvious attempt to cash in on an established fad or something. They don’t sound rugged or sloppy like Brownsville Station cause they have that sanitary Elektra sound which works with the Wackers and Crabby Appleton but not legit punk rock. Actually, tho, the group’s only real claim to punk rock status is that their lead singer used to sing for the Music Explosion (personally I find their album called Little Bit O’ Soul on Laurie much more satisfying). Therefore, if you overlook that, then this album becomes a real rocker. “Breakfast in Bed,” the single release, parades outa your speakers like a comet for sure. Like, the whole album kicks even if it doesn’t go anywhere. Which is undoubtedly its problem - no flexibility and an almost intentional pull towards a more innocuous atmosphere.

Despite all that, there’s still the problem of what to do with punk rock. I’m sure if record companies leave it alone it’ll die a quiet death for at least five years or so. If not, then the punk rock trend could easily become the most nauseating since reggae. Meanwhile, get out your love beads, get into leather, and get with the Acid King. Now’s the time for ballrooms and yoga and black lights, and all the groovy vibes ain’t gonna come from Question Mark and the Mysterians, that’s for sure. Remember, Magical Mystery Tour is the album of the future.

Robot Hull

ERIC CLAPTON

Rainbow Concert

(RSO)

Here’s an interesting artifact: a perfectly lousy record which everybody will buy anyway in spite of the facts that

a) all of the songs have been recorded before, often several times, and the performances here are inferior generallly to all previous versions

b) the sound is terrible, muddy and out to bury even good solos in a way that makes even the live Ginger Baker’s Air Force album (and I liked that) sound like a Carpenters record, but it doesn’t make any difference because

c) all of the musicians performing on it are dead.

That’s right. Eric Clapton has been dead for at least two years, they keep him pickled to trot out on odd occasions and give him a bang of something to get those rubbery fingers moving over the frets in the same old patterns, a little slower now, a little slower each time out in fact. Every song here is rendered^ at a wonderfully plodding pace that makes you positively long for the amped-up excess of that old G.B. Air Force set. Sometimes I can even get off on this sort of stuff, because I’m a prurient schmecker dilettante just like lotsa other people. I like it when I think some cats went in and recorded an album so messed up they couldn’t see, I think it lends the product a sort of dissolute charisma even if they lose the beat and it all sounds like mush.

Attack of the Limeys

HERMAN'S HERMITS

XX (Their Greatest Hits)

THE ANIMALS

The Best of the Animals

(Abeko)

Now that the British Invasion has been officially declared a nostalgia area and fit to be revived by Richard Nader, Allen Klein, far-sighted businessman that he is, has released two double albums that should help pave the way for more re-releases of Angloid material. The two groups that Klein has chosen to open the door with are excellent choices, since they were at diametrically opposed ends of the British rock axis. The Animals and Eric Burden were, at their prime, filthier and less socially redeeming than the Rolling Stones, and Peter Noone and his gang were so wholesome that even your parents (especially Mummy) stayed in the room when Ed Sullivan introduced them.

.Of the two collections, the Hermits set wins on sheer hit power. Though I hated to admit that I liked them ’cause my sister and mother both loved ’em and who wants to agree with the female family members on anything when you’re 15 or less, I taped each and every Herman’s Hermits song off the radio with my trusty reel to reel (wouldn’ta been caught dead buying one of their records) and secretly listened to them and sang along and felt all neat and sweet.

And after all these years of psychedelia and metal, I still get a charge out of almost every track here. Starting off with “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daugher” (remember the lead guitarist stuffing his handkerchief under the bridge to get that dinky sound?), the hits just keep on cornin’. The band always managed, with producer Mickie Most’s help, to pick strictly “A” stuff to record. Gerry Goffin and Carole King (remember her?) wrote “I’m into Something Good” (whenever anyone got some action in summer camp we’d sing it to him next day). Graham Gouldman wrote a lot of hits for them - “No Milk Today” (“the bottle stands for love/a symbol of the dawn”??? What did that mean?), “Listen People” and “East West.” Punk idol P.F. Sloan and his co-Baggy Steve Barri even wrote some tunes for ’em. Peter Noone’s vocals were as cute as his looks, coyly playing the strain game with the high notes and shyly addressing the ballads; he could ham it up too, as witness “Henry VIII” and “Leaning on a Lamp.” All in all, it’s a goddam killer double set, and since my tape recorder broke a few years ago and I never got it fixed and I lost my Herman tapes anyway, I’m glad I got this record ’cause now I wOn’t have to try and dig up their singles which I still wouldn’t be caught dead buying even today. If you know what I mean.

The Animals collection, on the other hand, is a strange conglomerate of comfused blues, punk rock and wacko psychedelia. Whereas my folks adored Herman, they absolutely despised Eric Burdon. Mick Jagger was at least good looking - Eric had a thousand pock marks and all the makeup in the world didn’t help once the lights went on and the sweat started pouring. His voice sounded worn out right at the beginning of “House of the Rising Sun,” but that zitface never missed a note and he screamed so well I could see him turning red all over my black and white TV screen. Even though they dressed in suits, they still looked slimy, untrustworthy and vile. I loved them from the start.

Why has everybody forgotten about Hilton Valentine, I ask you? That sleazy snoid was the classiest guitarist in all of Great B., better than Keith Richards ’cause Keith at least knew some Chuck Berry riffs. Hilton knew nothing, sounded like he had no roots, and therefore could take a priceless solo on any song at any time. Best example is “Don’t Bring Me Down” (and why in God’s name isn’t that song on these records?), where they reach that great tongue after the intro and Hilt doesn’t know what on earth to do, so he turns on the fuzztone and just slides up and down the guitar neck. What a supreme rock V roll moment!

Only half the 20 tunes on the album are hits and they’re divvied up between the four sides and if you don’t skip around you’ll wind un hearing zilcherinos like their covers of “Around and Around” and “Talkin’ ‘bout You.” But the winners are there, like “It’s My Life” and “We Gotta Get Outta This Place,” both showcasing Chas Chandler’s nifty bass intros; “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” with its futuristic reggae rhythms and that unbelievable off-the-cuff “ ‘cause I love you”; and the first few hits of, Eric’s freakout phase: “When I Was Young,” “Help Me Girl” (Eric Burdon and strings?) and my personal pick “A Girl Named Sandoz”, about Eric’s experiences with those dreaded mind-altering drugs.

They also left out “San Franciscan Nights,” on which Eric bared his soul to the hippies and got laughed at, and “Sky Pilot,” that loveable deranged monolith of a song, but maybe those were too recent to be regarded as Invasion matter. ’Course things won’t really be complete until the Hullaballoos album gets re-released and then everybody over 25 will bleach their hairs blonde as a measure of solidarity. Lada Edmunds Jr., where are you now?

Billy Altman

The last time I saw Traffic they were all ghosts, and Steve Winwood in particular looked so wan and waxen with that glazed stare you wondered if he wasn’t gonna dematerialise before your very eyes, and about all Capaldi did was adjust Reebop Kwaku Baah’s mike and bash some tambourine; I dug hell out of it, till Chris Wood oozed off into one of those endless noodling sax solos. I thought about all those guys just drifting through their tour in a grey stone haze, diddling out this gunk and apprehending the ravenous screams of their fans thru some impossibly detached distance; it’s certainly something to identify with.

So I was all set to like this album. I didn’t believe any of that crap in the trades about what a colossally vibrant triumph this concert was; I knew it was a bunch of nothing, because none of these guys are capable of playing a really good concert anymore, but there is an appeal in that sort of cynicism if it’s handled with the proper sort of nihilistic

anti-flair. I liked Self Portrait too; it’s nice to hear somebody who doesn’t give two hoots in hell about what they’re doing.

But what a disappointment! It’s not bad enough to be pleasing. Everybody takes their solos in the assigned places with the same stirring spirit of ennui, but somehow even the boredom don’t have its usual charisma this time out — humdrum competence, I believe, is the operative phrase. Like when Traffic play they never really try, but still they manage *to radiate a sort of coldly mesmerising vibe that carries you off in dank wonder. There’s no vibe here. No nothing. Everybody is inspired by Clapton’s negative presence to middling apathy in awe of the master’s. It just plods. There’s no magic pallor, just dog dullness. Nevertheless, I know there’s no way to convince most of the prospective buyers of this, they’ll go out and drop their fin on this porridge anyway, and maybe because of that they’ll play it enough times to convince themselves they like it. Hell, last time that even happened to the guy who reviewed Dominoes in Concert, which was about as numb as this, for Rolling Stone: “Well, you gotta give it a few listens...” Well, I did. And it’s nothing you’d be able to hear often enough to rouse you to the point of turning it off. But neither is it anything that anyone but the most gone Claptonophiliac could find even grey eminence in, much less joy. Oh, well - I bet it’s got a real nifty rustic mausoleum cover, and any old vacuum can become comfortable if you doze in it long enough.

Lester Bangs

CHICAGO

Chicago VI

(Columbia)

Hey, you remember that ass-kicking Texas copy band that my associate Dr. Tarwater used to travel with and once wrote an especially vicious memoir about? The Triumphs, that’s right. Well, a night or two ago, who should give me a collect call but the good Dr. T. (telephoning from his present institution, where a life of dissolution has all but rendered him a gibbering idiot) and he babbled something about the “cosmic warp uniting the Triumphs and Chicago.” After I deciphered his all-but-meaningless garbage, the message was that I should give a listen to Chicago VI.

Chicago, you see, is one of those bands that I somehow never paid the proper attention to. They were there all along but I must’ve been someplace else because they never managed to intrude themselves into my attention. Although, I once kinda liked a song called “I’m A Man.”

Well, dear reader, I sat down with my Chicago VI and my Koss phones and a goodly amount of 1973 Gallo Chablis (an adequate year) and immersed myself in this here avunt-guard. A careful listening caused me to rip off the phones and send an urgent wire to Dr. T.: “Connection discerned. Reverse Charges.”

What he meant, or tried to, is that he an( I had been listening to Chicago, or Chicagos, in different forms for the past 15 years in Texas: that is to say, tight brass-laden bands with just enough novelty appeal to make a buck. Not a great deal of originality, but a lotta hustle. That’s why I approached Chicago with a great deal of curiosity and what might be termed an open mind. Here are some impartial findings:

1) “Just You ’N’ Me”: This seems to be the brass band formula: bland vocals, ho-hum music, tight brass arrangement. A lot of people like this.

2) “Darlin’ Dear”: A rocker, if you please. Someone here is ruining his voice. I’m tempted to hold A1 Kooper and his BS&T accountable for all this, but it’s not all his fault.

3) “Something in this City Changes People”: The patented Chicago treatment of a so-what song. It actually sounds tired which not many songs are able to do.

4) “What’s This World Cornin’ To”: A pseudo-black-message song. With the added bonus of an exercise in uncreative dissonance. I actually did have an open mind entering this business, dear friend.

5) “Jenny”: A real sleep-inducer. Here’s where the “cosmic connection” finally intruded itself. There have been at least two dozen bands doing this kind of song in at least two dozen country dance halls in Texas (and God knows where else) as well or better and, what’s more, they were doing it long before Chicago was but a twinkle in James William Guercio’s eye. The lamest drumming I’ve ever heard. This should be jazz-rock?

6) “Critic’s Choice”: Now we get somewhere. Chicago’s version of an angry reply to what must be critical critics. Piano plinking, followed by an imitation of the Lettermen, and they’re singing: “What do you want, I’ve given you everything I have... I have tried, can’t you see this is me?. f. What do you really know? You’re out of sight, you’re dynamite.” Well, yes... I applaud their intent; take out after the bastards that are ruining them for history: ignorant, evil, illintentioned creeps who don’t understand, these critics with their “musical observations and musical blasphemies.” “What do you mean,” asks Chicago. “Get a steady job,” advises Chicago. Yes, I question their qualifications, you know. I should advise them that it’s generally unwise to fire a broadside at critics in general because some of them might take it personally. Dr. T. himself warned me against that, so there’s no danger of it from this quarter. My only observation is that Chicago is more concerned with critical acclaim than with music. The latter, ordinarily, should precede the former.

Chet Flippo

CAT STEVENS

Foreigner

(A&M)

Something that always strikes me as funny about Cat Stevens records is that the people who own them are usually the kind that only have about five or six albums to their name anyway. And generally they’re college girls, ugly ones at that, and also the kind that read required text books from somebody else’s Sociology class for fun. They always got Teaser and the Firecat and never got a boyfriend. Soon as they get boyfriends (if ever) they trade in Cat for something “heavy” or “relevant” like Jethro Tull, but that’s another story.

I remember once last winter, I went to this party where a houseful' of first year (female) French majors lived. It was the worst day of the year, so bad I couldn’t even drive my car. Had to walk four miles in a goddamned blizzard. When I got there I didn’t even know if I still had hands or not cuz I’d long since lost all feeling. And you know what kind of wild. times I had when I got there? Cat Stevens, Pepsi, and Cheetos, for Christ sake. And I don’t even like Cheetos. Worst party I ever been to in my life. Woke up that morning figuring I might get laid, and all I got was frostbite and cheezy fingers.

Anyway, just so’s it wouldn’t be a total loss, I decided to ask the hostess just what was it about Cat Stevens that so intrigued her. (Incidentally, the hostess was five-six, business side of 180, hair that looked as if it had been styled by Bulldog Brower, and a complpxioh that hadn’t seen the. inside of a jar of Stridex in five years. Pure Heaven.)

“So lissen, bulbous little poon, just what is it about Cat Stevens you like so much anyway?”

“Why? Why? Why do I love Cat?”

“Yeah, and hurry up.”

“Well... he’s so... so... uh... poetic.”

“Poetic, huh.”

“And so... well. He’s lived such a hard life if you know what I mean. He’s been hurt, but he’s not... I mean, he’s very honest about it. I like that. I like honesty in a person. Do you like honesty in a person?”

(Me. Ignoring obvious attempt at flirtation.) “Think he’s good looking.”

“MMMM. He’s so... continental. ”,

“By the way, do you fool around?”

“Get lost.” ,

Well, that tells you a lot, huh? Poetic, Cat the Tortured Soul. All I know is, he’s been spinning the same damn poem around people’s ears for about three years now - the same big hurts and the same non-plussed melodies. And the same suckers fall for it every time. What Cat Stevens is doing is playing for the exact same people who screamed their eyes out for Herman and Paul in ’66. Not all of them, of course. Lots of them stopped screaming in grade eleven or twelve when they started getting laid. Cat’s audience are the ones who never did, and still need the surrogate.

Foreigner is the same stuff as ever, although perhaps a little fancier now. He dfevotes fully one side of the album to something called “The Foreigner Suite.” This is nothing but “Bitterblue” stretched over eighteen minutes with a few horns thrown in aimlessly to suggest progressive tendencies.

The other side has four more, shorter “Bitterblues,” all of course with a different title. And as an added bonus, you get a little painting of a polar bear on a big piece of heavy-duty cardboard. If you mount it on your wall, you won’t have to bother with the lyrics on the other side. Actually, it’s not a bad polar bear, proving Cat a man of many talents, but I can’t help thinking for the next album he’ll probably try to do a giraffe, and it too will end up looking like a polar bear.

Ah well, at least nobody can accuse Cat of not knowing his audience.

A1 Niester

DAVID RUFFIN

(Motown)

EDDIE KENDRICKS

People ... Hold On

(Tamla)

The politics of exile at Motown are a tricky business to predict. Sometimes groups will slip from sight, and just when you begin to really become frustrated, a new album hits the shelves, for no apparent reason other than orneriness. Martha Reeves and the Vandellas have fashioned a career on this practice. But what of the more loyal - or, most likely, the more contract-bound - the former leads with the successful groups, which are sustained by the trends while their individual ex-patriates are left to tend to their unique qualities on their own?

The Temptations, though remaining a key Motown group in spite of it all, have been fairly well emasculated by the losses of David Ruffin in 1968 and Eddie Kendricks in 1971., over artistic and financial hassles (whoever heard of anyone leaving Motown because of a shoddy cover art hassle?). Each were given the same short shrift when it came to recording on his own; producers were suddenly too busy; and neglect was the main point of interest on the subsequent product. Now Motown has suddenly released Ruffin’s third solo LP (almost four years after his last effort, a fitful duet with brother Jimmy, I Am My Brother’s Keeper). At first listening, it seemed disturbingly like its forerunners: either the production, driving but without focus, or the lyrics, trivial where they should be personal and powerful, cramped Ruffin when he tried to take off. But his attempts at flight grow on you. He transforms the rather dogmatic lyrical content (“A Common Man,” “The Rovin’ Kind”) into either a basic blues or gospel context. The phrasing, the control, especially the understanding in that genteel sandpaper voice (mirrored by the intelligent backup work of the stalwart Andantes) breaks on through. Bona fide magnificent cuts: “If Loving You Is Wrong,” Harold ^Melvin’s “I Miss You,” and “I’m Just a Mortal Man.” Here he soars.

Kendricks, though he has a more limited range, can be relatively easily shoehorned into contemporary style. The danger is that the conception rather than the man emerges dominant. People... Hold On departs from the more orchestrated Motown norm of his first album, All By Myself, and barely escapes the more psychedelicized Motown norm that the Temptations grapple with. The Young Senators, the tight, busy group doing the playing, rely on a blending of stark rhythm and percussion used by James Brown’s bands and early Sly and the Family Stone. At best, Eddie coaxes a great deal from the sparse proceedings; he sings looser and less affected than on his first album, “if You Let Me,”\ “Let Me Run Into Your Lonely Heart,” and “Eddie’s Love” have the off-center quality of live performances and some of the fascinating idiosyncracies that draw you back for a re-listen. “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” sustains itself through seven minutes by subtle shifts in timing and thrust that pale the efforts of many in the seemingly more accomplished realm of rock. The failures are bogged down* by their own pretensions. “Someday We’ll Have a Better World” is hardly a phrase worth repeating, and those involved show their consequent disinterest. Happily, though, Kendricks - like Ruffin - is able to dispense with the preconceptions, and just sing.

Mark Vining

ZZ TOP

TresH ombres

(London)

Aww, cheezit! Here’s anutha buncha rubes with the Texas fever; I’m hoping for a spiney throb/ The Mighty King Ranch and wetbacks ’cross th’ Rio, and I get it. The centerfold makes ya do the old urp urp urp. There’s this seamy sort of jug on the far left, like Lucy and Ethel used to barter for een Meh-hee-ko while Reeky and Fred chumbled and huffed in the background, then we move to the right only to pick up on a bottle of Southern Select beer next to a glass of them drippin’ suds all slurpy and runny. Right in front of this kinetic little pastiche is one of the raunchier ears of corn this week, and then it’s jumptime again, straight up to a tricky little dish of mam bo peppers ready to carve they ’nishuls inna you trote, then a li’l jar o’ prairie dog-balls or tomatoes or something, a lemon, a lime, and a dish of salt for globbing tequila, a bowl of limp stringy stuff, and then it all gets harder. If ya squint, the main dish looks like the crushed, yet still-smiling head‘of an ape, with three cheese-covered egg rolls laid at a 30 degree angle across his puss... and the, side dish? Well, if ya catch it in just the right light it looks like the America’s Cup field is tacking at close quarters around a mountainous island'of flesh, noodles, and carrots. Lotsa this food has already been barfed all over the table; the fork’s bent outta shape and there’s one real titsy senorita por la revolution, all nipples and cartridge belts and Chiquita Banana-come-onna-my-hut-greengo, eh? It’s like a zoom-in on Zorro’s kitchen and good ol’ Sarge Garcia has just gone into convulsions, spouting half-chewed frijoles like a harpooned whale! Look at that picture long enough and yer gut’ll make a torso arrest and start coughing up credentials... but wait! Behind all that festering oozy foody and blown cookies! A radio!

HardNose:$oftOn

VAN MORRISON

Hard Nose the Highway

(Warner Brothers)

Van Morrison’s new album is an object lesson in Giving the People What They Deserve any way you look at it. If you think they deserve a ration of anguish to keep their molars bright, you can find it here if you read between the ferns. If you dream at night of infinite Gitcheegumee lapping panaceas to salve us all through the Seventies, Hard Nose will soft-on in seconds flat. If, even, you kinda feel that this prevalent public (and critical, yup yup) attitude of blanket acquiescence for the existential excreta of all these droll mulling popeye geniuses deserves finally to be rubbed in the used Kleenex of its own passivity by the overbearingly downy stroke of just one gross and sustained insult to your intelligent sensibilities - you got it right cheer.

But look where he’s been of late, it’s making him lazy. Last year Van parlayed a somewhat bluff hand with St. Dominic’s Preview, where amongst warmtoast expectables he retrenched a bit by throwing his nets across both the mosaics of Astral Weeks prosody and what burgeoned in our confusion as a potential whole new dreamscape of mysterious, starrily extensible musical and verbal possibility: “Listen to the Lion” and “Almost Independence Day.”

Nobody knows what those songs “mean,” because they don’t mean. They stand shimmering in the endless radiance of their opaque associations. Just maybe all that mystification was ultime profundity, and just as maybe it was hollow shuck of the diurn. They were standing, no “Baby Please Don’t Go” rushes or pumpkin punting moondances no more. This was Zen, Jack, and you could take it or slumber. But you had your doubts like crickets in the gut.

All things must pass, and V.M. may be passing fair but he’s possibly passing soon, and Hard Nose poses pretty passing itself off with perfect supine awkwardness. Just look at the cover: if bad pretentious social-significance amateur art is good enough for all those deepskulled bloods like Miles Davis and Ray Charles, Van will squat on the same embarrassing quad on the back here where his friend the painter manages to make him look like the spittin of Tommy Rettig in Old Yeller. He has nought but brown blots for pupils in honor of Ray and understandably, so since that means he can’t see all the. gauchely genuine lowlife strewn around him on this uglifact, i.e. ghetto jigs gnashing for Nat Hentoff while white floozies preen harlotically in the doors of dime-a-dance sintraps and the most cornball caricature of a goat-bearded Vietnamese Peasant this side of Mao’s pain1by-number kits squints his sliteyes skyward just waiting for some Yank in big silver bird to come toking along and turn him into a puke of scalded phosphorous. Behind this ashcan kindergarten diorama we see doves of peace and the moon, looming huge over the horizon, possibly symbolizing the imminent entropy of Van Morrison’s brain.

Van. has no shame, maybe because nobody’s told him yet what a spectacle he is really beginning to make of himself, so he takes this twilight buggy to the end of the limb. The entire second side of the new Van Morrison album is taken up with a sort of suite on the subject of falling leaves. This doggedly pastoral 20 minutes of brown study includes Joe Raposo’s “Green” (“It’s not easy bein’ green/ Having to spend each day the color of the leaves/ When I think it could be nicer bein’ red or yellow or gold /Or something much more colorful like that”), a truly drab update of “The Wild Mountain Thyme” where Van’s singing actually makes me yearn for the clarity and feeling of Joan Baez’ version, and “Autumn'Song,” idiotically convivial in its crayola catalog of falltime nature snacks (“leaves of brown”::“pitter patter rain”;;“glamour sun”::roasting chestnut^).

The first side is better, though maybe that’s just because the songs are shorter.' “Snow in San Anselmo” is the best thing on the album, in spite of shots of deer crossing the road right out of those slick picture magazines put out by the Chamber of Commerce. Van’s vocal is truly haunting, almost lending the words a wooly fragrance of “Almost Independence Day” they don’t begin to have. Later on he gets a little topical with a line about how the local speedfreaks sit up all night in the International House of Pancakes, and tries to cop himself a smidge of Bogart High Sierra macho with some insistence about “My waitress my waitress my waitress.” It’s all a lot of crap, but the musical bones of the song are fraught with sufficient lamentation to bring you back, esp ecially for the eerie shape-notes and a sudden moonstruck saxophone flight.

After that the wooze begins to overtake the ooze. “Warm Love” the single has dumb lyrics on a par with “Autumn Song,” but it’s shorter and catchier so you can abide gems like: “To the country I’m going/ Lay and I laugh in the sun/ You can bring your guitar I along/ We’ll sing some songs, we’ll have some I fun.”

The title cut is one of the few goodies here, I a bit of cuff doodling that works, but much more interesting is “The Great Deception,” where Van, with monumental pettiness and petulance clodhops drunkenly on his soapbox and delivers a 5 minute lecture to all the crass unappreciative creeps who didn’t wise up when John Lennon told them that genius was pain. How about “The plastic revolutionaries/ I Have you ever been down to Love City/ I Where they rip you off with smile/ And it I don’t take a gun,” Before this speil’s over he’ll I castigate a fork-tongueing power-to-the I people rockstar (who is obviously Sly Stone) I as well as the poor herd of stereotypic I hippies, but the real payoff comes when he j juxtaposes that stuff about the CaddyI vroomin star with: “Have you ever heard I about the great Rembrandt/... how he could | paint/ And he didn’t have enough money for I his brushes...”

Aw, gee! There is no justice on this bitch of I an earth. Oh well, childishly reactionary as it I is, it’s at least a temperamental (if not a I musical) improvement over all that rustic I cud-chewing. Maybe by this time next year I Van Morrison’ll be de-mellowed to the point | of cutting a whole album of ridiculous bile. I He could call it something like Mo Ostin is a 1 Lousy Bastard, or even Only the Trees AppreI ciateMe.

Lester Bangs I

OK, that picture pretty much says where these ZZ Top guys are at; they’re from Tex-ass with a T (sorry, fans... no albinos!) and never let ya forget it for a minute, which is kinda kicky at first but a total bore after one side. Christ, how many more schleps are gonna move on down that line, how many more righteous dudes, huh? The old line’s gettin’ crowded with these loudmowf guitar riff-bands of obvious technical ability and unfulfilled potential. Why don’t they write some songs or do Marlboro plugs or something. . |j anything but these scads of boozy bloozies that bring on the boogies that bring on the baggies. And speaking of baggies, remember the radio in that picture and all the Mexicali slop all over the place?

That slop holds the secret to ZZ Top and Tres Hombres! On closer inspection it becomes apparent that it has not been chewed and/or puked! This completely destroys the argument that ZZ Top (on the radio, silly) play so bad they make even tuff pokes spit up. Hullo, what’s this? That main dish... why, it’s not a crushed head at all! It’s the imprint of a head! Someone was listening to that radio, took a coupla slugs o’ food, and suddenly woke up with a snotfulla enchilada. ,. proving beyond a doubt that ZZ Top is a Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Dann DeWitt

MA'N

Be Good To Yourself At Least Once A Day

(United Artists)

There’s a lot to recommend this album. For one thing, once you slip the shrink-wrap off of it, there’s this incredible exploding map of Wales (Man’s home turf) showing the locations of the American air base, the town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllliantysiligogogoch, and various agents of the Free Welsh Army armed with sticks, pushing Wales away from, the mainland of England. Then, there’s the informative chart on the sleeve which shows you how Man evolved from various local Welsh bands, including Tom Jones’ earlier efforts.

But the main attraction, despite it all, is the music. What music! Four cuts is all, but they’re long, they’re rich, and they’re real, real good.

Man is a band which went from humble Welsh beginnings to moderate success on the British ‘‘underground” circuit to Germany, where they became one of the hottest things going. If you’ve heard any of the albums they did during this period, you may not be too interested in this one, but Be Good... is miles away from their previous Quicksilverian doodlings. It combines the multifaceted, mutating kind of arch-classicism that Yes and assorted spinoff bands make with the deep feeling and - dare I say it - funk of Booker T. and the M.G.’s at their best.

Because the songs are basically just springboards for collective improvisation. This sort of thing is usually handled by most British bands with a deadening sense of Art. It's difficult to do, they figure, so we gotta dress it up. Not Man. Sample lyrics: “I like to eat banannas/ Because they have no bone/ I smoke marijuana/ Because it gets me stoned.” Complex, huh?

In spite of the heavy reliance on the instrumentation, there aren’t any stars in Man. That’s the aspect that reminds me of Booker T.: everybody can do his job just fine, but the impact comes from the interaction of the musicians, not the soloing. Yeah, Man may sound similar, but in the end, they’re just the opposite of the Grateful Dead. It’s unlikely that you’ve ever heard anything like Man before. You’ve come close, perhaps, but never quite this close to it. They’re truly progressive musicians working in a rock context and having fun while they’re doing it. That’s quite an accomplishment these days. Check ’em out.

Ed Ward

JOSHUA RIFKIN

Piano Rags by Scott Joplin

(Nonesuch)

Scott Joplin, who died in 1917, is the surprise best-seller of the year. A man who died of syphilis in Manhattan State Hospital 56 years ago hitting the charts? Unheard of.

But here he is, leading a ragtime revival. Joplin, a black man, also led the ragtime craze that hit America in the 1890’s and lasted until the beginning of the First World War. Ragtime was a goodtime music that reached its height in the “sporting houses” (a/k/a bordellos) that flourished unashamedly in the era when America was unsure about labels for crime, sin, and pleasure. His music was more than a background for all three.

Joplin, who was born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1868, was one of the first (if not the first) to translate ragtime onto paper. He was not the inventor of ragtime, but its popularizer (much like the difference between bluegrass’ father, Bill Monroe, and its popularizer, Earl Scruggs).

While he was in Sedalia, Missouri, he frequented a club called the Maple Leaf and he immortalized it and ragtime with his first composed song, the “Maple Leaf Rag.” That one song did for ragtime what Babe Ruth did for baseball: knocked it out of the park and into livingrooms across America. Hearing the song today is still a fresh experience. “Maple Leaf Rag” brings to mind all of the adjectives that are out of fashion: charming, happy, irresistible, delightful. Sounds embarrassing, right? Well, give it a try. I can’t imagine, personally, a more welcome revival right now than that of ragtime, with its pervasive melodies and air of innocence mixed With a sense of timelessness. Joplin now (his interpreters, rather) has two other albums on the charts: Vol. II of this album on Nonesuch and The Red Back Book on Capitol. My personal favorite is this Vol. I issue, primarily because of “Maple Leaf Rag” and “Fig Leaf Rag.”

After he composed the latter (in 1908) he fell on rough days: ragtime was beginning to decline, his wife had left him, and Joplin tried, with no success, to compose operas. He moved to Harlem with a new wife and still tried to compose but the advanced stages of syphilis were beginning to erode his brain. He was moved into the Manhattan State Hospital and soon died. Joplin’s legacy, though, is a body of songs as welcome today as at the turn of the century.

Chet Flippo

CONWAY TWITTY/LORETTA LYNN

Louisiana Woman — Mississippi Man

(MCA)

MERLE HAGGARD AND THE STRANGERS

I Love Dixie Blues... So

I Recorded "Live” in New Orleans

(Capitol) •

The search for the most commercial mating of country and rock continues unabated, and it’s working both ways. In the wake of Kristofferson, the Young Turks with their songs of rural angst have been coming to Nashville in droves, and if their subject matter has not yet taken over, the style seemingly has. The beat has never been bigger in country music. Consider these two new albums.

You can’t get much more mainstream country than Conway and Loretta, artd for my money their three albums together have established them as the leading duet act around. Lead Me On remains my personal favorite, but I’ve got no complaints with this one either.

Loretta’s overwhelming successes of the past couple of years have brought some predictable results - most noticeably, increased stylization — but her voice is still as cool and pure as the proverbial mountain stream. As for ex-Elvis clone Conway, there’s two things you can be sure of getting on any record that bears his name: some of the finest medium tempo ballad singing on wax and the hair-raising steel guitar of John Hughey.

Their material has traditional country music themes, stuff like “Our Conscience You and Me,” “As Good As a Lonely Girl Can Be,” and “For Heavens Sake,’,’ Heaven being the name of the little girl conceived to save a failing marriage. But while the typical country production is' more likely to go uptown by way of strings and horns, Conway and Loretta do it by emphasizing the rhythm section and Hughey’s virtuosity and by bringing the guitar a bit more up front, even to the point of using a fuzz guitar on the intro to their version of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love.” In doing so, they come up with a sound that rocks out even as/ it remains stone country. If you like boy-girl duets and are unsatisfied with the small number (mostly oldies) in the rock form, yo*f should investigate what’s in the country bins; And you need only hear once {he soaring vocals on “You Lay So Easy on My Mind” or the standard “Release Me” to be convinced that Conway and Loretta are about as good as you can get.

\ Merle is a different story entirely — on his new album, he and the Strangers sound in places (try “Nobody Knows I’m Hurtin’ ”) like a British blues band, and how do you like that! It’s not all that surprising, for what has made Haggard the most interesting and enjoyable of the mainstream country folk all along has been jiis willingness to try just about anything.

Here he’s working with a Dixieland horn section, linking that style explicity with his idol Jimmy Rodgers and implicitly with another hero of his, Bob Wills. It works well, and this album has a loose, rollicking flavor that you don’t find top often in country music today. “Everybody^ Had the Blues” is one of the sweetest, most memorable tunes he’s ever done. There’s also Haggard regulars like “Carolyn,” fine new weepers like “The Emptiest Arms in the World,” and a bow to Hank Williams in “LovesickBlues.” As an added bonus, Merle recites his own beatnik poem about “the birth of the Negro blues” as an introduction to the instrumental “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.”

Haggard’s really amazing. His earlier, autobiographical songs Would do proud any singersongwriter; his tribute albums have been right in the grooves; his later concern with just plain good songs as an entity unto themselves has resulted in solid LP’s of other people’s material; he’s one of the few in country music to put as much care into albums as singles. He’s never in one place too long, and with each new step he has moved on a stronger artist, rather than ever spreading himself thin. Too old to join the Young. Turks and too young to stick by the crotchety old-timers, he is extending all that is good in the country music tradition simply by staying on his own individual path.

I’m of the opinion that he did “Okie From Muskogee” mostly to draw attention to himself, so he could show his other stuff to everyone, including all you people out there in CREEMland. The perfunctory reading that song gets on this album, suggests he now regards it as his albatross, and I bet if you shot him full of sodium pentathol, he’d admit he disbelieves more of it than he believes.

But while we’re on the subject, Merle, I’ve got a suggestion. Since you do show interest in the pop audience, since you do like making tribute albums, and since your roots are in the Oklahoma dust bowl, why don’t you bring things full circle by cutting an album of Woody Guthrie songs?

John Morthland

THE GUESS WHO

No. 10 (RCA)

I was going to interview Burton Cummings a few weeks ago, but the poor boy had been worn out by the pressures of rock ’n rolling (or maybe just that Canadian weather) and contracted pneumonia, which I did not, though tempted, take personally. A pop star’s life, after all. Anyway, it’s probably just as well, as 1 had some unpleasant things I wanted to say to him. When you get down to it, you see, there have been almost as many different Guess Whos as there have been Savoy Browns, and so if someone, as I do, professes to be a fan of the band, it’s not unfair to qualify that by asking which one. The current ensemble, for example, has been responsible only for Artificial Paradise and this current effort, both of which are pretty depressing. It ain’t the Guess Who these days, it’s the Burton Cummings show, just as Procol Harum has become Brooker-Reid’s, and while I dearly love the old fatty, and while he is undoubtedly still the King of Punk, I tan’t help feeling that the thrill, in large measure, is gone.

The Guess Who’s singles-band reputation seems finally to have done them in, which is ironic in that they haven’t had a hit, or etfen tried to have one, in almost two years. It’s the old Beach Boys bind. People who put their commercial efforts down initially now profess to dig them for precisely the same crass x qualities that kept Rolling Stone from taking them seriously; and although the boys may deny it (cf from So Long Bannatyne: “Reviewers laugh at me, so i go out to see”) the critical, razzing hurt. Their response of late has been to consciously make FM albums, filled with long cuts and pointed displays of instrumental prowess. Sometimes this works - the live record was a certified killer, and last year’s Rode was creative, moving, and funny, as strong an album, I think, as any American band has ever produced.

But enough is enough. Their last two efforts have become increasingly cranky, selfindulgent and in-bred. No. 10 doesn’t ev^n have the benefit of an obnoxious epic like Artificial Paradise's show stopper about Burton’s show-biz shoes. Face it, the best thing about it is the promotional photo that went out with “Glamour Boy.” That photo had mqre to do with the Guess Who’s real virtues than any of their recent music, and it’s not surprising that it’s garnered them the most publicity they’ve gotten in ages.

The question is, will they learn from this and start making singles again? I certainly hope so. And incidentally, I hope you’re feeling better, Burton.

Steve Simels

TONY JOE WHITE

Homemade Ice Cfeam

(Warner Brothers)

Down in Louisiana, the heat is everywhere. You breathe, and the air breathes back at you. At night, you taste your lungs in your throat. And in the morning, to get that taste out of your mouth, you open a can of Dixie beef and shove some Tony Joe White on the stereo. This is great, laid back summer music replete with funky bossa novas, hints of drowning Fats Dominos, and enough primal growls to keep your bulldog pissing blood.

Tony Joe White just keeps on singing, and it don’tv matter that half the songs are just riffs or reworked versions of his old songs, his voice has so much intensity, even when he sounds like he’s almost asleep, and his guitarplaying has gotten so fine that you can listen to alternate takes all day long and never get bored. Like Junior Walker, when Tony Joe hits a note, it stays hit. Ain’t nobody else around could get away with putting a. Jesus and an ecology song on an album and still come off sounding tougher than John Wayne. Shit, he’ll sing about anything - trolls, eating chicken, watching TV, Dairy Queens — it don’t matter as long as it’s music.

And there’s some fine music on this record. Specially the title song, a superfine instrumental that’s a beautiful guitar and harmonica soundtrack for every tiny town in Southern Louisiana. It sums up Edgard and Oak Grove and branches dripping gray moss the way “Emperor of Wyoming” sums up acres of red desert viewed from an air-conditioned Olds, the way “Wig Warn” sums up parking lots in greater Long Island. “For Old Times Sake,” despite Kristoffersonesque lyrics and a melody borrowedi from “The Train I’m On,” turns into a' real pretty tear-jerker in its own right. And you get to hear Norbert Putnam laying down perfect old McCartney bass lines on “I Want Love (Tween You & Me).” If you like JJ Cale but wish he didn’t always sound like he was about to hiccough up a couple of frogs, this is the record to buy.

Brian Cullman

JIMMY CLIFF

Unlimited

(Warner Brothers)

TOOTS & THE MAYTALS

Funky Kingston

(Dragon-Import)

Reggae is gonna make it. I know it. I know it with all the conviction of a religious convert, and I’ve been spreading the word. But I’m still wise in the ways of popular music, so believe what I say: I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen proof. The proof is in the people calling, writing, and showing up at the house to listen, and walking away, entranced. The proof is in the people who, once they’ve heard it, don’t argue with me when I tell them that the best record to be released this year is a reggae album.

I’m not even saying that reggae’s gonna make it this year, or even that by the time it does make it it’ll even be called reggae any more (a lotta people in Jamaica and England are calling it skank now). Reggae is like paperclips. Did you know that the human race did without paperclips as we now know them until 1920? But once the familiar oval shapes had been introduced, you wonder how business made it without them. A good idea cannot be stopped. And reggae holds together my faith in the future of popular music like paperclips hold together the things I write.

Unfortunately, the record which is going to change things so drastically is not Jimmy Cliffs new album. I say “unfortunately,” because the album is released on a major US label which is perfectly capable of doing a more than honorable job of promoting it, getting it into the stores, and keeping it in the public eye. But. I’m afraid Jimmy Cliff, in his mid-20s, is already a has-been, at least as a singer. He was. electrifying in the movie The Harder They Come, and both his acting and his songs held the picture together, but all those songs date from the same era jvhich produced his LP masterpiece, Wonderful World, Beautiful People (A&M SP 4251). Since then, he’s done a lot of work, but little of it has been reggae. A soul album cut in Muscle, Shoals, Another Cycle, was never released on these shores, and with good reason. And now, we’re asked to believe that Jimmy has returned to his roots and cut Unlimited.

Well, it’s not awful, I’ll give it that. It could have been, especially given Jimmy’s political proclivities these days, which make only slightly more sense than David Peel’s. One song, “On My Life,” is even pretty decent. But on the whole, it’s a very poor showing, with embarrasing lyrics on songs like “Commercialization” and “Poor Slave” completely overshadowing the fact that there is some really fine backup work being done. In fact, several of the songs aren’t even reggae and sound more like low-budget soul music.

Okay, I’m not going to dwell on it. I wasn’t counting on Jimmy Cliff anyway. I was counting on Toots and the Maytals.

And boy was I right! I’d been a fan of theirs since I first heard “54-46 Was My Number” and realizing that this guy was communicating, even in the few words I could catch, the absolute joy of being released from jail, and doing it in a catchy song that you could dance to. Then I heard “Pressure Drop” and I was a fan for life. Later I found out that they’d invented (or been the first to record, anyway) the word “reggae” in their song “Do The Reggay,” which was a bit hit for them in 1968. Their records all seemed to have the same what-the-hell ambience as the great New York black vocal group records I’d grown up on, in which there was always something “wrong” — an out-of-tune instrument, somebody blowing their solo - which was not only okay, but which, in some cases, made the record work. And anyone who could argue that “Toots” Hibbert is a bad singer must be deaf.

The one thing which seems to occur regularly in a Maytals record is Toots’ incredible scat-singing. He always sounds like he’s about to scream himself into the worst sore throat imaginable, and sometimes his singing is really hoarse, but he’s always there, singing, commenting, keeping up the most intense musical energy I’ve heard since James Brown’s golden era. Add to this the fact that Toots and the Maytals have managed to keep innovations in their music, incorporating the latest soul and reggae trends without changing the basic Maytals sound, and you’re ready — or as ready as you can be - for Funky Kingston.

When Shelter released' “Funky Kingston” on a single, it didn’t take me long to discover that it was an incredible, mind-blasting single, a record of the sort that has been absent from the airwaves far too long. The band comes in, piece by piece, with Toots exhorting them to “give it to me.” He gets it, and then he sings about it. Then most of the band drops out and comes back in piece by piece again, urged on by Toots, climaxing in a drum roll and a scream from Toots that would leave an ordinary mortal coughing up blood on the studio floor. And the last verse, make of it what you will, goes like this: “From east to west/ From north to south now/ A-cross America/ People keep on askin me for/ Funky Kingston/ But I ain’t got none/ Somebody take it away from me/ You gotta go and find yourself one/ Funky Kingston...” A sax solo which proves that King Curtis’ memory lives on, and the song is over. Why the soul stations, at very least, never picked up on this single I do not know. What it did was save, for me, at least, the longest, driest summer for popular music in recent memory. “Funky Kingston” is not a record you “hear” all at once - its subtleties keep on hitting you. The more you listen, the more you hear, the more you hear, the more you like, the more you like, the more you got to hear more, you dig? My copy of the single is grey with wear. *

The album is getting that way. The day I got it, I played it at a party and watched it sneak its way into the bodies of the people there. I had to answer the question “Why don’t they play this stuff on the radio” about fifteen times. Also “Where can I get one?” You can get one for $6.98 from CREEM Reader Service, P.O. Box P-1064, Birmingham, MI 48012. Or from you local imports dealer, who can write to Jem Records, P.O. Bo*x ,362, 3001 Hadley Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080.

In addition to “Funky Kingston” and possibly the best album cover of the year, th? album is loaded with great stuff. For one thing, with the exception of the two songs which close both sides, most of the numbers are four and five minutes long, giving Toots lots of time to play with and giving the band plenty of opportunities to stretch out. The songs range from “Louie Louie” (believe it, brother! and the best version since the original, too!) and a much longer “Funky Kingston” to a weird reworking of “Daddy’s Home,” here called “Daddy,” one of Toots’ Jamaican Song Festival winning numbers, “Pomps and Pride,” a hilarious song about a young man’s family trying to give him sex tips on the eve of his wedding, “Sit Right Down,” a reverent and joyous “Redemption Song,” and two numbers in a different style from the rest of the album, Ike Turner’s “I Can’t Believe” (an instant hit with a beautifully catchy call-and-response chorus) and “It Was Written Down,” which could well be a hymn.

Hey, it does not matter one whit that you can’t understand Toots some of the time. Really. The music says it all, and all you have to do is listen. Funky Kingston is the happiest, most listenable and danceable album to come down the pike this year, an album which, if some far-sighted American label picks up on it, could, unlike Jimmy Cliff’s pussyfooting, or the Waiters’ halfhearted tries or Johnny Nash’s watered-down stuff, actually spark the reggae fire in the US. $6.98 is a lot to ask anybody to spend On something that seems so far-fetched, but believe me, even if you don’t plan to buy another album all year, get Funky Kingston. It’s that good, but don’t take my word for it. Ask my friends, if you can catch ’em when they aren’t dancing...

Ed Ward