LOU REED Berlin (RCA)

“One of the things I’ve always wanted to do,” said Lou Reed when I interviewed him for CREEM last spring, “was introduce people to certain other people they wouldn’t normally meet, or if they did meet ’em would wanna get very safely away. People you’d hate to get trapped at a party with.”

In Berlin, Lou has finally realised his ambitions totally: this is the most disgustingly brilliant record of the year. There has always been a literary instinct behind Lou’s best writing — classics like “Sweet Jane” were four minute short stories with recognizable characters acting out their roles, manipulated for Lou’s amusement in a way he certainly considers Warholian. In Berlin, his first feature length presentation, the silhouettes have been filled in till they’re living, breathing monsters,

A concept album with no hit singles, but shy of the “rock opera” kiss of death, Lou refers to it as a film. So I guess it’s his attempt (in collaboration with meisterproducer Bob Ezrin) at Warhol Trash, and he acts his way through it, talking as much as he sings, while Ezrin’s settings are often reminiscent of classically-derived movie music.

What it really reminds me of, though, is the bastard progeny of a drunken flaccid tumble between Tennessee Williams and Hubert (Last Exit From Brooklyn) Selby, Jr. It brings all of Lou’s perennial themes — emasculation, sadistic misogyny, drug erosion, twisted emotionalism of numb detachment from “normal” emotions — to pinnacle.

It is also very funny — there’s at least one laugh in every song — but as in Transformer you have to doubt if the humor’s intentional. Transformer was a masterpiece at least partially by the way it proved that even perverts can be total saps — whining about being hit with flowers, etc. — and this album has almost as many risible non sequiturs as that did: the heroine gets up from a beating and says that it’s “no fun... a bum trip,” and the protagonist’s plaints draw a laugh just when they’re most’spiteful.

The story is simple: from a cabaret drooler on his first sold album, Lou has spun a timely fable of two speedfreaks who fall in love in Berlin. He calls her his “Germanic Queen,’’ but she belittles his virility and sleeps around so he beats her up. The Welfare Office, alerted to these carryings-on, takes her daughters away, which he merely sneers at. She slashes her wrists, and the climactic scene finds him wallowing in the suicide bed, declaring he’s not sorry at all.

It may be the grandest dreariness you ever heard. Bob Ezrin has gone all out with symphonic effects, and the assistance of Stevie Win wood, Jack Bruce, the fantastic drumming of Aynsley Dunbar and B.J. Wilson, and the unusually restrained guitar work of Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner fill in the coloring needed by Lou’s rancorous mutterings. Even singing about the joy of nascent love Lou already sounds broken, as if recalling from later welters, and his vocals make up in pure draggy drama what they’ve lost in oldtime whiptongues rhythmic edge.

Side one tends to drag a bit as Lou is constrained to try and express affection, although “Men of Good Fortune” establishes the protagonist’s hostile passivity: “Me, I don’t care about anything at all.” “How Do You Think It Feels,” featuring Queasy-vicious guitar and Lou’s serpentine voice reticulating so tight it cracks, describes the speed scene in musical terms leagues distant from “Sister Ray’s ” infinite fury. The mood of comedown staleness that overlays the whole album infuses even this one moment bf meth-rock - a rush frozen at the marrow.

But we get straight to the meat with ‘’Oh Jim’s” ominous bass hum and drums like a choked heartbeat slowing down. While the guitar screams, he flips and beats her, spitting jealous hysteria: “All your two-bit friends/ They’re shootin’ you up with pills/ I don’t dare just where it’s at... And when you’re filled up to here with hate/ Beat her black and blue and then get it straight,” breaking into a hilarious “Wild Side” parody “Do do, do do, do do,” which fades into monomaniac onebass-note guitar and Lou’s best singing of the album: “Oh Jim, how could you treat me this way?”

Now it gets really good. Side two is all welts and bruises and antipathy so total it becomes a sort of whimsy. Lou’s lush-slurred vocal on “They’re Taking Her Children Away” is reminiscent of Dylan at the apogee of charismatic weariness. Getting even more bitter than before the beating, he enumerates her transgressions with the supreme pettiness of the failed vindictive lover, effectively crumpling all sentimentality like a soggy cigarette butt: “They’re taking her children away/ Because they said she was not a..good mother/ Because she was making it with... cheap officers who would stand there and flirt in front of me/ The black air force sergeant was not the first one... the girlfriend from Paris/ The things that they did they didn’t have to ask us... Because of the things that she did in the streets/ The alleys and bars she couldn’t be beat/ That miserable rotten slut couldn’t turn anyone away...”

But that’s nothing in comparison to “The Bed,” where he reaches the nadir of misery with a half smile of withered irony and a kind of weird triumph, funereal pleasure in his vocal: “This is the place where our children were conceived/ And this is the place where she cut her wrists/ That odd and fateful night” - and here’s one of the album’s supreme chuckles, as he sings what sounds like a parody of a menthol cigarette commercial: “And I said oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what a feelin’... I never would have started if I’d known that it would end this way/ But funny thing, I’m not at all sad...”

Suddenly everything stops for a truly eerie, suspended moment, as the back choir filters through like a tangle of ghosts, followed by one of Ezrin’s most blatant classical cops: woodwinds in a lilting repetitive figure like doves rising, as the miserable bastard makes his final assessment of the wreckage of two lives: “I’m gonna stop wasting my time/ Somebody else would have broken both her arms.”

Has anyone in all of rock ever had such a vision of love? Well, yeah, all those old “My Boyfriend’s Back”. goingsteady whines were brimfull of cheap malice. But this is plain gutted. The real amorality all those other preening simps keep dancing around. The grandeur of utter vileness Lou always promised, his bass voice moaning like a warpo Johnny Cash with the full chorus flooding in like diseased angels behind him: “Sad song... saaad song.” It all mounts to that snowcap climax, precisely as cinematic as his conceit wills it, leaving you drained and befuddled.

I told you this album was a charmer. Interviewed recently, Lou said: “I haven’t been excited in years, but I’m excited about this.” If this is what gets him excited, he really is one of the most loveable kooks of our time. Because Lou tops himself with each album, exactly proportionate to the degree that he gets more wasted-sounding and resonates with bigger, more dunced-out non sequiturs as the absurdity of his vision of evil becomes more apparent. Just like Caroline said, it’s a bum trip, but it’s the most interesting bum trip on the boards.

My only reservation is that where Transformer brimmed with variety, the unrelieved gloom and dirgelike tempos of Berlin may be too much for even us most enthusiastic sickig partisans of Lou’s work to take. It’s depresso beyond depresso, and if that’s a kind of triumph, it’s also a real limitation. Any vision of unrelieved squalor — even one as brilliant as, say, Tennessee Williams’ - has gotta become self-parody after awhile, If Lou is as close to Williams as any writer in rock, we still gotta question where he can take it from here, and if he’s not ballooning into an ever more epically grotesque joke. In the meantime, get Berlin and treat yourself to the real goat’s head soup - this quagmire is le sleze de la sleze.

Lester Bangs

*AU lyrics © Dunbar Music, Inc., Oakfield Ave. Music Ltd.

LEON RUSSELL Hank Wilson's Back (Shelter)

Hi fellers and gals and welcome to the wonderful world of pre-fabricated music. That’s right, folks, that golden realm of sterility where rriuzak-ish minds and insipid instrumentalists meet and crank out records for all of us to buy. dooh, look, there goes Jethro Tull. Hmmm. Anyhow, TODAY’S trendy subject is synthetic country music and here to help us discuss the creation of totally unimaginative country and western-rock, is •Leon Rus... er, Hank Wilson, whose latest LP, Hank Wilson's Back is considered by some to be THE most laid-back, calculated and totally unexciting country package to come out in 1973.

HANK: Awww, shucks, it wuz nothin’. CREEM: Exactly. Now, tell us, Hank. How does it feel to be in the same musical category as, let’s say, John Fogerty and Jerry Garcia? HANK: Well, it’s an honor, of course, but to achieve such a high level of impotency took quite a bit of work.

CREEM: Would you care to elaborate, Hank? HANK: No, but I might be able to explain it, thpugh. Ya see, normally, when you make a record, the musicians you play with show some sort of emotion, feeling, when they perform. In making this record I tried not to capture any of that on tape. All I wanted was the pure music. The DEAD sound.

CREEM: And dead it is, Hank. Tell us, how did you go about picking the material?

HANK: Well, since the album is designed to appeal to folks who don’t know what REAL country music sbunds like, -1 tried to pick out stuff that might ring a bell with them. Hank Williams’ “Jumbalya” ahd “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” were such big hits in their day that even a cloistered nun would recognize them. Everyone remembers Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans.” And for the more sophisticated audience, I’ve thrown in Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene” to build up the monotony.

CREEM: Fascinating Hank. And how about the sound of the recording itself? The listener is treated to just the right amount of dobro, steel guitar and harmonica; yet one never feels that there is ever any real spontanaeity present. How was this achieved?

HANK: Well, we were all pretty damned bored at the sessions.

CREEM: I see that the entire album was recorded in only three days. Did you manage to keep everyone bored for the entire 72 hours by yourself?

HANK: No, there was J.J. Cale. He helped a lot. You can always count on J.J. when the chips are down.

CREEM: Simply marvelous, Hank. Tell me, a lot of people.are talking about your vocals. I believe one critic called them. . . was it a "mutation?"

HANK: No, it was “an abortion,” “monotoned abortion” to be exact. My mother wrote that one.

CREEM: I think it was in that same review that a question was raised concerning the tedious way you prolong each one-syllable word into four or five syllables. Can you demonstrate this technique?

HANK: Sure thing. Let’s take the line “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” Now when a normal person sings it, it comes out: “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” But when you do this, yuh see...

CREEM: I don’t believe it, ladies and gentlemen, he’s placing an old Joe Cocker record into his mouth!

HANK:.. .this cutz off summa thee air heer. Now if yuh howald your nose like this... it cums out: “Ahm sowuh lowunsome 'ah coyuld kuryuh.”

CREEM: BRILLIANT! Hank! I’m sure I speak for all of the CREEM staff when I say that I’ve never seen anyone work so hard at contrived insipience in all my life.

HANK: Weyull. Ah tryuh. We evun tried to make the cover corny too. See the pitcher of me standing with my back towards the camera, with cowboy hat on and all? And how it says HANK’S BACK underneath it? Funny, huh? Do you know where I got that ideer from?

CREEM: No.

HANK: TV Guide. Steve Allen used it oncet. He had STEVE’S BACK written all over the backof his jacket.

CREEM: I thought I noticed some distinct TV Guide influence in the way you approached the music. Well, in closing, Hank, I’d just like to say that Hank Wilson’s Back is one of the best recorded cliches to hit the fan in a long time.

HANK: Well, I sure do ’predate that, but if you think this is somethin’ wait until you hear the next Grateful Dead album!

Ed Naha

STEVIE WONDER Innervisions (Tamla)

I wasn’t very impressed when Stevie played the songs from Innervisions live at the Newport Jazz Festival in July. When, later that month, his publicists blindfolded members of the press and played the album for them, I liked the album better — it is a great dance record, even if you’re temporarily disoriented by sightlessness — but there’s something questionable about devoting an entire piece to a joke that’s in questionable taste. So I held off.

But when Innervisions arrived in the stores last week, I couldn’t resist. Once on my turntable, it blossomed. Bad joke or not, this is a great record.

Stevie Wonder is not quite obsessed with his blindness, but in the last two years, since he has begun to write and produce all of his material away from Motown’s rigid mass production, he has become increasingly preoccupied with it. At 23, with a decade of hit-making under his belt, Stevie still seems to be trying to come to grips with the fact that I he is the world’s greatest blind rock star. It is something that is not entirely pleasant to observe — when you like a singer, you don’t like to think he’s thoroughly uncomfortable in the way he has to live — but there is also something resilient and tough-minded about it.

If anything, Stevie’s discomfort about his blindness has resulted in a more aggressive attitude. His question about the blindfold test probably would have been, “How did you like it?” — chances are he wouldn’t have meant only the record.

Whatever the implicit cruelty of blind jokes (even ones the blind-tell about themselves), Stevie is well aware of how to turn them to his own advantage — his last three albums have been called, Talking Book, Music of My Mind, and now Innervisions. But the album before those, the one he produced with his own money, the record that broke him out of Motown’s molding process was called Where I’m Coming From, and that may be more to the point.

Stevie grew up within the Motown process, but by now he has become too much his own man to be compared to anyone. Unlike Marvin Gaye, the other Motown rebel, Stevie is an originator. The obvious point of comparison, of course, is Ray Charles, who almost single-handedly invented soul. But Stevie has accomplished something broader than that. He has fused. the ballad style that Charles began with the hard-rock soul of Sly Stone. Stevie can do what neither Charles nor Sly is able to; he can sing ballads and psychedelic funk, play love songs on piano or switch to moog or wah-wah guitar for social consciousness soul.

If it is unfair, dr unsafe, to say that Innervisions is Stevie’s best album, it is accurate to say. that it reflects his maturation in a way that none of the others do. The songs aren’t better, and some of them are even built on riffs stolen from the earlier records, but the naive social rhetoric has been toned down. Malapropisms still creep in, of course — the country boy in “Living for the City” is “almost dead from breathing air pollution,” which is hardly the point — but they’re minor. “Living for the City” is perceptive, if mythic, biography; the protagonist comes to life, and creating believable characters is the most difficult job of the popular songwriter.

Cut the spoken melodrama from “Living for the City” and you might have a hit single. The point of social rhetoric at Motown has always been mythic biography, which is why Diana Ross’ greatest, achievement is “Love Child” and the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” the most effective work they have ever done. “Living for the City” could do that for Stevie; it would allow him to assume a specific role as Ross and the Temptations and, to choose a non-Motown example, Sly Stone have done.

Black rock stars, like black movie stars, are carving out roles for themselves, stereotypes, if you will. But that is the way that lasting pop personalities are built: Sam Spade defined Bogart as much as Bogart defined Sam Spade.

And, even though he couldn’t have seen any of them, Stevie’s songs seem influenced by the advent of the black movie — like Priest, the protagonist of Superfly, Stevie’s “Misstra Know-It-All” is “a man with a plan.” And, like so many black movies, the song despises the hustler but finds much sympathy for him, too.

But unlike almost any other black artist, Stevie has a feeling for the questions of identity that plague black movies, and black music, a feeling that runs deeper than romance. The great question of blindness, of course, must also be one of identity: How do you define yourself in a visually oriented world?

Perhaps the answer is that you cannot. But, rather than resorting to the petulance and bitterness of his sighted white peers, Stevie — like the characters in his new single, “Higher Ground” - keeps on singing. It may not be a solution, but it’s the best option available. /

Dave Marsh

THE ZOMBIES (Parrot)

What with energy and talent slipping through the Seventies cross-eyed, the secondary stuff from days gone by suddenly seems at least as important as the numero uno, primary stuff released now, and re-issued or re-shuffled albums by groups like the Zombies (or Abeko’s recent Animals and Hermits sets) are as much cause for excitement as brand new LPs by David Bowie or John Lennon. If not more.

The Zombies first album is the perfect segue between Beatles 65 and Beach Boys Party (replacing Searchers Greatest Hits), a strange package of powder puff r V b and rock that escapes being nostalgia through the undisciplined energy of Rod Argent’s 12fingered piano and Colin Blunstone’s breathy, hopscotched vocals (filled with war whoops during the instrumentals and purely extemporaneous phrasing). What you’ll probably wind up buying the album for (aside from collectors who insist on owning every extant version of “Got My Mojo Workin’,” from Paul Butterfield’s to Gordon Lightfoot’s) are THE HITS: “She’s'Not There” and “Tell Her No,” not just because they were hits, but because they’re knockouts and because they seemingly appeared from nowhere. They had almost nothing to do with what was on the radio when they were released and almost nothing to do with what was pn the radio AFTER they were released; they jumped in and jumped out without ever being assimilated by the rest of pop-rock music, which is why those songs sound totally un-dated, as good as or better than when they were released. Like a handful of other songs (“Feel a Whole Lot Better” by the Byrds, “Just a Little” by the Beau Brummels, “Till the End of the Day” by the Kinks) they remain chunks of pure musical energy, not period pieces or jaunts down memory lane. So if you’re hung up about that sort of thing you’ll just let yourself forget what year or where in hell this album came from, buy it cause you’ve got to have it, and let the breathy, fresh and ever leftfield magic of the Zombies swirl you away.

Brain Cullman

SLADE Sladest (Reprisal

I picked this album up' at a dinner in the Trader Vic’s trough of the local Hilton, thrown by Warner Bruhs to announce they’d nabbed these skinheads. We all sat there whomping back the Mai Tais, and midway in the no-menu like-it-or-else -coolie catered exotique entree somebody started throwing the kantoneez slop on our plates around the table." I think it was a Warner’s PR jason that initiated it, but pretty soon there were mango pits and blowfish fillets flying everywhere. The meal ended in total chaos, then this truly outstanding and well met Wamoid suggested we go up and harrass the Masons, who were holding a convention on the third floor. So we elevated to the mezzanine, where cherubic hosts of baldpated sexagenarians in tuxes were escorting their quiet wives this way and that. So I just started going up to the oldie couples and random and, reaching out to gladhand them with unctuous smile on my face I would in tones of absolute Avon Calling mannerliness beam: “Eat a bowl of fuck!” Or, alternately, “Slit yer mudder’s tit, sir!” And then maybe give the gerry’s gleaming dome a friendly skweeze, as if to dust it off.

It was all great fun, and the next day the Warner stalwart called dp to apologize for his “obnoxious” behavior. We told him we wouldn’t hear of an apology, because in the face of all protocols and proprieties he had behaved in the true Slade spirit. These is rowdy lads, and right im the middle of the deadly dinner not 20 seconds before he started tossing pineapple puds around Slader Numbah One Noddy Holder, sitting just my left, sighed: “Why can’t we get in a fight for a change?”

Cuz that’s what Slade’s all about. Ripping up the joint for real for once, tapdancing on the doorman’s spats, stuffing a bulbous gherkin up ya sainted mudda’s snooker. You wouldn’t sport so rude if you was out with Dionne Warwicke or even Elton John, but Slade are holler and hamhock, or in the words of one of their most silvertrain electrifying recent nonhits:

So you think i*ve got an evil mind Well 111 tell you honey I don’t know why! So you think my singing’s out of time Well it makes me money And / don’t know why! So c’mon feel the noize Go grab ’em boys! We get wild, wild, wild.. .!*

Got it? Dumped chunk-rumple into big stompingly anthemic hard rockin trojan horses from the most classic bins of rock armory. It kinda leads nowhere but into more closed-system hysteria, and it’s more than a little manufactured mania, but it hits fine and true. It’ll gallop you headfirst into sweetkooze and sproing you outa yer jadofado wheelchair like a lucky stiff reprieved at last from endless iceman cometh miasmas. Been a long bumjpg rage in Angleterre, but’s yet to really spliv U.S. cherry, so if you jump on the bandwagon with me and the rest of these reprobates mebbe it’ll come to pass yet and save these tine lads from dying the Stateside death a la Marc Bolan which shouldn’t happen to a Silas Mamer constipatee much less a pack o’ Limey louts who threw down shopwage just to dance like dinwiddies in the streets.

It’s almost Slade’s last chance to win us, and this album should do it if nuttin else because it’s the summun bukmun umyun culling of their tiashest stompers that’ve brickbatted straight to Numb One on them Aould Sod charts lo these last years. White heat killers like “Gudbuy t’ Jane,” “Skweeze Me Pleeze Me”, “Look Wot You Dun,” and the suprema “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” are self-explanatory and will make you feel it even in 1973. They’re gonna have a new one out pretty soon but specs dark whether these skabs or any band predicated so formulaic can long endure or top the tumescent rum run-' ning track flayers here gathered. Racing Form backs them all the way, so do I, so should you. And then you can tear up your , own colonial banquets like the only true beggars left.

Lester Bangs

MARIA MULDAUR Maria Muldaur (Reprise)

Lord knows, I wanted to like this album. I’ve been waiting for it long enough, ever since I saw young Maria D’Amato peering over the top of a fiddle in the Little Sandy Review and I fell in love. Then she went and married Geoff Muldaur, but it didn’t matter, because it was a partnership only the gods of music could have made. They were the high point of any Kweskin Jug Band performance, Geoff with “Viola Lee,” Maria with “I’m A Woman” and both of them with “That’s When I’ll Come Back To You.” The Jug Band broke up, and they did the spectacular Pottery Pie album together, following it with a somewhat less spectacular album called Sweet Potatoes. I’d heard that, due to marital troubles, that last album had been recorded under somewhat strained circumstances, and then I heard that Maria had gone solo and Geoff had gone to Butterfield’s Better Days band. Well, personal hassles are personal hassles - no reason why Geoff would play any worse guitar or Maria’s voice be any the less crystalline. Butterfield’s album was tremendous. Maria was being produced by Lenny Waronker and Joe Boyd. Wow. I waited.

The album came the other day. I don’t even much want to talk about it. From the ugly cover photo to the gaggle of studio sooperstars on the back to the thin, inconsequential music inside, to the terrible production job... I can just hold my head and ask - what went wrong? Maria’s voice has never sounded worse, every note seems to be a supreme effort to make, and the backup... A new band, practically, for each cut. Some of ’em are even good — “Any Old Time” is a great old Jimmie Rodgers song done up in tine style, and the only cut on the album I ever want to hear again; “Midnight On The Oasis” is pretty silly as a song, but has a great Amos Garret guitar solo. But much of the rest of it is so cluttered and overproduced as to be unlistenable. The one cut that cries out for schlocky production, Dan Hicks’ “Walkin’ One And Only,” is underproduced, and why in the world did they have Richard Greene attempt the hot violin solo when a) he suffers so terribly next to Hicks’ own violinist, Sid Page and b) Maria is — or was, anyhow — one of the hottest violinists around, as her Jug Band work attests. Is it because some producer thought that the only way to make Maria a star was tq surround her with all these nonentities and non-songs or — as is probably the case — was this thing her idea?

I don’t know. Little evidences of effort creep in here and there — Doctor John doesn’t do a bad job, for one — but this project reeks of overplanning and sublimating talent for something else. Aah, what the hell. This album’s gonna sell and get played on the radio. After all those years of being great, maybe Maria deserves to be rich and famous for a change. Maybe once she’s well on her way she can go back to being great.

Ed Ward

POCO * Crazy Eyes (Epic)

One of these days someone in the right place at Columbia Records is gonna tell the Poco gang that no, they can’t come into the studio and play rock band anymore. Crazy Eyes, their latest, is but another in a long series of non-albums with a whole bunch of immensely forgettable songs. The word keeps cornin’ out before each new Poco release that “this one’s a distinct departure from their earlier albums” but when you come right down to it, the only thing they’ve departed from is being good, and that happened years ago.

I guess it all started with that retarded “jam” on their second album. Side one of that lp had some super stuff like Jim Messina’s “You Better Think Twice,” even a Hank Williams tune. But that Latino percussion thing just went on and on and on and Poco has never gotten over that identity crisis. It didn’t help much when Messina split because he was the real leader of the group and Paul Cotton, even though he is a fair guitarist, still sounds like an interim member after four years.

And Richie Furay, in addition to getting a lot uglier lately (they cut half of him off the bapk cover picture), is busy keeping up with his old cronies Stills and Young. He’s gotten so laid back that only two of the eight tracks here were written by him and one of them, the title track no less, is four years old!!! Maybe he’s trying to develop a Brain Wilson mystique or something.

Very little of this album rises above the usual Poco painted-on smile music we’ve learned to know and avoid. Even the presence of production ace Bob Ezrin on the “Crazy Eyes” song doesn’t make much of a difference. The only fun is that if you play it on a mono phonograph, you lose the banjo and dobro solos as they cancel each other out. Kind of a neat concept if you think about it.

There is one outstanding cut and that’s “Brass Buttons,” written by Gram Parsons. It’s weird — when I got this record he was alive, and now that he’s dead, the song sounds a lot different, like it was recorded after he had died. It’s got an eerie posthumous reverence about it the way Furay sings it and with Gram’s death being so mysterious and all, some people (I say some people; I’m just an observer mind you) just might wonder if the Poco folks might have known something in advance. Death Rock and all that...

Billy Altman

LYNYRD SKYNYRD (Sounds of the South)

This is probably going to wind up being the best debut album of 1973. It is the best as of this, early Fall, writing. But, apart from that, this is not one of those first albums where the reviewer says, “can’t wait to hear their next one for initial promise fulfilled.” There are no bum cuts; there is no perfection to be attained. In its own particular area of honk Lynyrd Skynyrd is supreme.

The area of honk occupied by Lynyrd Skynyrd is somewhere between the Stones and Allmans. But that only pronounces a slice of perspective, cause Lynyrd possesses more wit and joy than the decimated Allmans and more power pump whammo than the Stones. I haven’t heard Lynyrd live, but on the strength of this album I’d reckon they might be the world’s greatest rock V roll band sans prance.

Consider the current wisdom about first cuts on Stones’ albums, and let Lynyrd’s initial cut, “I Ain’t The One” (a rocking postmenstrual lament), educate you about how the hammer bone’s connected to the anvil bone’s connected to the stirrup, and vice versa. There are lots of Stone references in Lynyrd, but in true South poonk fashion it suffices not for them to holler, “goodbye, Ruby Tuesday,” but ’tis honked that, “Tuesday’s gone with the wind” (“Tuesday’s Gone”). And, entirely apart form the question of inital cuts, consider how the final cut “Freebird” builds from a nifty, but standard, freeload into a blizzard of slicing guitar licks.

Even where the lyrics are derivative, and not a little dumb (“Things Goin’ On”), the boys elaborate a musical commentary that is power beyond the area of quarrel, and if they want to preach that Johnny Walker Red is' poison whisky (“Poison Whisky”) (it is), or want to exercise A1 Kooper’s Northeastern myths (“Mississippi Kid”), they earn the right with crystal perfection like “Gimme Three Steps,” a manifesto for rational lovemaking.

It’s a strain to jump out here on a limb with statements like “hot shot stuff’ and “You won’t be sorry, Chuck,” cause apart from the internal strain you’re gonna think I’m a dumb bunny if you buy it and are not impressed. Ten seconds remaining in last quarter, and our team’s behind 67 to 66. But we got the ball. Ronnie passes to Robert and it’s dribble dribble honk honk for an apparent eternity, thence passeth he to Leon (2 seconds remaining); Leon’s jumpshot is swish perfect. And the Panama City Pirates have their first Triple-A championship in 20 years.

Buck Sanders

URIAH HEEP Sweet Freedom (Warner Brothers)

Heavy what?

Tell you something. There’s only about half a handful so-called heavy metal groups that’re capable and desirous of creating anything but a lucrative foothold for themselves in the charts for a year or two. Either they’re sincere and dumb and inept, like Bloodrock, or they’re cynical and they suck and they know it, like Deep Purple. How can you blame them for sneering when they knew that their fans just wanted that note hit over and over with the same grandstand flourish? So D. Purp made five albums that all sounded exactly the same and were written and recorded on studio allniters here and there tween tours which’s where the real money is. They wanted to get rich, and they did. Deep Purple were consummate businessmen, and put about as much feeling in their music as Bob Eubanks would, and even if you knew that it didn’t matter becuz the power of technology was bigger than the man. Hell, I was a Deep Purple fan for a coupla years, and I can tell you I didn’t mind one feeble whit when “Woman From Tokyo” except for its limpo middlesexion sounded almost note-for-note reprise of “Smoke On the Water.” They had a couple good songs like “Highway Star,” but in the main it was just the same grunge on and on, and me’n’ all their fans were content to marinate our lobes in whatever they dished out.

They’re fiscally set and disbanded now, but I don’t really mind, becuz I reached OD when I listened to the entireties of both their double live Made in Japan and Uriah Heep’s double live set in the same afternoon, and just got fed up forever.

Uriah Heep are the poor man’s Deep Purple, and I sure hope they’re good businessmen, because musically they’re so lamely pretentious they make Deep Purple look like the Rolling Stones. Deep Purp had it covered: metal, a sprig of Iimeoid blues, as much Third Stream glop as you could take. Mostly mediocre, but covered nonetheless. Uriah Heep got nothing covered but shrillness. Their first two albums were truly bad on anybody’s terms, just dullard garbage in spite of the gauche earnestness of Ken Hensley’s justfolks liner notes. Look at Yourself threw lotsa folks a curve because the title track and a couple others were genuinely exciting and bore up well under replays, tho parcelled amidst the. usual clodhoppin’ organ-ic dreck. But the strength of those songs became a formula that was run into the ground thru endless rethrashes like “Easy Living ” Demons & Wizards and The Magicians’s Birthday were Uriah Heap’s big two-album move for mass following thru establishing the identity that had always eluded them. They tried to paint themselves into something akin to the thinking man’s Black Sabbath, with Beelzebub and Broomhilda themes and production niceties where B.S. were just crudely effective oil derrick drive which coupled with their utter muddled sincerity was the source of their strength. And Deep Purple had a sense of humor. But Heep have no such saving graces to set ’em apart, althoughthey did pick up fans since more noise is never enough.

Sweet Freedom, tho less gimmicky than its predecessors, is nothing new. Heep do pull off a fair vocal harmony every once in awhile,' and Hensley’s organ is always astringent if never electrifying. They plod. Just set a beat, heavy bass riff, sparse or clog guitar, pumping charge-of-the-zouaves organ. All from the same formulas from the same manual they’ve followed without so much as a kitchen match for years. You might get off on it, since it has a certain momentum after all, but it’s boring as the new season’s crop of Saturday morning cartoons and that’s plain dke. Heep themselves know this, that’s why they make such dorked-out asses of themselves ^onstage. Plus which they’re all homely as muttonchop mongrels. So dump ’em. It’s way overdue.

Lester Bangs

LEFTY FRIZZELL Sings The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers (Columbia)

THE LOUVIN BROTHERS The Great Gospel Singing of the Louvin Brothers (Capitol)

You get into country music, like most other kinds of music, by degrees. You start out with something that really catches you and decide to investigate further. And after you start exploring, you see that there’s a whole lot out there. You go from the obvious to the less well-known. These two records are about as less-well-known as you can get these days, and they’re both real treasures.

Lefty Frizzell is still around, I guess. I’m not very familiar with him at all. What I’ve heard of him has been really pretty ordinary, so I’ve kind of ignored him, but up to this album, what I’ve heard of him has been recent stuff. His Jimmie Rodgers sides, though, were cut in 1951 and 1953, and show him to be one of the best interpreters of Rodgers’ songs ever. Rodgers is somebody who really needs interpretation, too, because his songs tend to be hard to listen to in the original, and because he did a lot of real terrible sentimental stuff which was popular in the twenties when he recorded it, but sounds merely maudlin to modem ears. His best stuff, as this record shows, was powerful, and while it contains some of the best of the sentimental songs, it also has searing performances of classics like “My Rough And Rowdy Ways,” “Never No More Blues,” “California Blues,” and Blue Yodels No. 2 and No. 6. Frizzell’s voice is clear and strong, the backing is typical of the early 50s, with some real hot dobro work, and, best of all, Frizzell only yodels on a couple of the songs. Even with somebody as great as Jimmie Rodgers doing it, yodelling can wear thin after a couple of odle ay hee’s.

Of the Louvin Brothers I can tell you nothing. Charlie still performs, and nothing by him I’ve ever heard has stuck in my mind. Ira was killed in an auto accident in 1965. Sometime between the time they were born and the time Ira died, 'they recorded some of the finest white gospel music ever made, and in 1973 Capitol stuck ten gospel numbers on an album which I play continually. There are little sermonettes (“Satan Is Real”), a red-hot vocal workout in which the brothers trade syllables (“Make Him A Soldier”), one Everlylike number (“There Is A Bridge”), and lots and lots of mouthwatering Travis-style electric guitar picking. The entire album is amazing, the preaching is not at all obtrusive or obnoxious, and' if you like to pick and sing with friends, this’ll give you material to work on for months. The main thing that annoys me is the fact that there are only ten numbers on this album, and the liner notes are about as uninformative as they could be. But I’m going to look for more Louvin Brothers albums in my travels, you can bet on that!

Ed Ward

WAR Deliver the Word .(United Artists)

War is a people’s band, the black urban counterpart of Grand Funk’s white midwest. Like Funk, or the Grateful Dead, they have their fingers on the rhythmic pulse of their audience, enabling them to bring stadiums full of tens of thousands of people to their feet upon hitting their first note, and swirling that audience into a dancing frenzy.

On their own terms, they’re simply the best at what they do: presenting a unified organic combination of progressive r&b, rock, and a touch of latin jazz that leaves anyone in their realm — and that can mean anyone from Osibisa to yes, The Dead — two steps behind.

The ten plus minutes of “Gypsy Man” here show War at their peak. It opens with a slow swirl of sound effects (desert winds), building into electronic maximus over an insistent beat and finally, the hypnotic chorale, the inner city tribal incantations that make for turning up the radio dial and letting your foot hit the floor.

You know you’re home when Lee Oskar enters on harmonica. To my mind, Oskar is the best harp player in pop music, not because he’s loud or fast, but because he’s not: he knows there’s more to the instrument than a lot of high energy Little Walter licks, no matter how well they’re played.

“Gypsy Man” crosses the bridge from innovative r&b to the discotheque, where War are also tops. Both “Me and Baby Brother” (superficial similarity to “Cisco Kid”) and “Southern Part of Texas” are more distinctly in the funk groove that demands compactness and danceability, sort of like Kool and the Gang.

“H2 Overture” and “In Your Eyes,” the two opening cuts, are relatively laid-back, jazz referential pieces That allow one to drift off with whatever visions one wants to have. I’ve said it before, but it remains true: the first producer to get War to score a movie soundtrack will have half his film made.

My only problem with this worthy followup to the often brilliant World Is A Ghetto is in the title cut here, which meanders a bit much for me. The mood, and the lyric, evoke utter concrete despair: “Stuck in, this four cornered room, I gotta get out of this place.” If nothing else, it’s good to know War still knows where it all comes from.

But when I think of War, I think of 20,000 people standing, dancing and shouting "party! par-ty!” during their Shea Stadium set. Don’t let ’em scare you away.

Wayne Robins

THE MAN FROM THE EAST Soundtrack . ‘(Island)

The ads say that The Man from the East makes Hair look bald. Ha ha. But what it. actually is" is a rock-like, occasionally Japanese, cross-cultural, trans-medial musical stage production with dancers and highly made-up, greatly-mugging actors and with some traditional Japanese'musical instruments and some traditionally modern Anglo-American rock ’n’ roll musical instruments and weird noises and beats you can dance to and a lot of other stuff. And I haven?t seen the stage production itself yet, but the album is really pretty nice — sort of a nouveau-Japanese Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack album in a way, wherein you know that there’s basically a lot of pathos and bathos and bathhouse stuff going on, but nothing really screeches out at you or upsets you too much, even when you know that Pat Garrett’s gonna gun Billy down and/or that one of the numbers on The Man From the East is called “Memory of Hiroshima.”

Actually, that’s all very flip and manifestly unfair, This is really quite a serious, impressively beautiful album. Stomu Yamash’ta is a percussion virtuoso, who has recorded numerous contemporary classical works by highpowered modern composers and has also played quite respectably as a jazz drummer, and he’s also a writer of very good music in his own light. Do not, on any account, be scared into thinking that what the Red Buddha Theatre plays is sinuous, tinny, unemotional Oriental stuff. Japanese music influences much of the goings-on but does not overpower them. It’s a sort of extended rock, really, with very little plunking and tingling except occasionally.

I suspect that it would have been Head Music if there were still such a thing as Head Music, and that, instead, it is a superblyconceived and executed example of what I will hereby christen “The New MOR” — which is in the middle not because it is but because we are.

Colman Andrews