THE BEAT GOES ON

THE BEAT GOES ON

Gato Barbieri’s Third World Shower

Argentinian-born tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri, wearing his friend, the black hat, sits back on the bed. His wife, Michelle — strongboned, intensely beautiful — sits in a chair nearby. Gato’s English is uncertain. Michelle’s is perfect; she translates for him when necessary. They speak to each other with great passion, without guile, in constantly alternating verses ofTtalian and of rapid, elegant Argentinian Spanish. (“Allende” is pronounced “Ah-z/?en«-day,” for instance.)

Gato has come to Los Angeles to play at the Hollywood Palladium, on a bill with John Klemmer and Alice Coltrane, as a part of a nationwide Impulse Records tour. His group includes, a stageful of American and South American musicians, some playing conventional instruments, some playing a panoply of exotica from Brazil, Argentina, efc. — drums and horns and harps and the like. His group creates deep, rich, Byzantine textures for him to play against, for him to rip out of; Gato himself grows more and more (musically) muscular, more passionate, more inflamed. He is hot.

I mention that I first heard him on stage at the Milan Jazz Festival in 1971. Michelle smiles. “You remember, Miles Davis played before us. When we came into the hall, and Gato saw all the amplifiers and musical instruments covering the stage, he turned to me and said ‘We are so poor.’ We had just our Third World musicians, with simple instruments. . .” (The groups that night, I recall, included, among others, Lonnie Liston Smith on piano and an elfin black Brazilian named NaNa on percussion, and there was, to say the obvious thing, nothing poor about the music they and Gato made.)

What about the “Third World,” though? Gato has now recorded in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janiero, making jazz drawn out of indigenous musical traditions. Will he attempt to do the same with other cultures of the Third World — In the Orient or in Africa, for instance? “No,” he replies. “I know South America very well. These other places. . . Well, I would not want to play in Africa, because other people — native Africans — should be doing, there, what I am doing in South America. Perhaps I will record in Puerto Rico, though.” And in Chicano or Puerto Ricano ghettos in the United States? “Yes, maybe. But in my way.”

The name of Barbieri is most well known today, of course, because he wrote the score for Last Tango in Paris. He and Bertolucci are old friends. Gato and Michelle love the cinema. (“Americans think TV is shit. For us, it’s like the cinematheque in Paris. . . all those wonderful old films...”) Gato wrote two songs {not the entire score, as his record company biography has it) for Bertolucci’s first feature, Before the Revolution. He has also scored a TV film for Pasolini, and recently wrote music for several Brazilian films. He likes writing film scores, and looks forward to doing more. He loVed Last Tango. “Lsaw it ten or fifteen times,” he says, “and that was before it was cut. It was about four hours long.”

When Bertolucci comes to the United States, Gato adds, about the first thing he does is to turn on the shower. “He loves all that water. Where he lives, in Rome,-there is very little water pressure. If you live a few stories above the street, the water that comes out of the faucet is just a trickle.”

Gato and Michelle lived in Rome for some years. They love it. “We are very nostalgic people,” Michelle says. “Right now, we are feeling especially nostalgic for Rome.” They went to Rome first in' 1962; Gato had studied music' at home in Buenos Aires, and had played jazz with a small local group and with a big band led by Lalo Schifrin. Opportunities for a jazzman were (and are) somewhat limited in South America, though, and Europe seemed like a good idea. The profusion of jazz festivals in Italy gave Gato a chance to hear other musicians, and to be heard. He made his first album, a recording of tenorpiano duets with the South African pianist, Dollar Brand, in Milan. In 1965, he met Don Cherry in Paris. He cut two albums with Cherry, Complete Communion and Symphony for Improvisers, and made another album under his own name for the ESP label. He has alsd appeared on records like the Carla Bley/Gary Burton Genuine Tong Funeral lp, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, and the Bley /Paul Haines Escalator Over the Hill project.

His own recent albums, first on Flying Dutchman and now on Impulse have been based increasingly heavily on the melodies and melodic concepts, and on the rhythms and actual instrumentation, of South America — hence the “Third World Music” appellation, and the kind of unspoken assumption which accompanies it: that Gato is “revolutionary,” in a political as well as a musical sense.

But, says Gato, “We cannot make a revolution with music. Guns are more important for that. And it would even be presumptuous to say that music creates the conditions for revolution. But it can help — it can help the weaker people in our countries, because the strong don’t need help it can help to remind people that they should not be ashamed of their roots. They should be proud of their origins and of what they can become.”

“ ‘Do your own thing’,” adds Michelle, “is a very important concept for underdeveloped countries.”

Colman Andrews

The Complete Mardi Gras Primer

New Orleans — a party town without peer — annually hosts one solid week of rampant, unadulterated Bachanalia. It’s called Mardi Gras. Sort of an exercise in decadence. Streets knee-deep in Boones Farm Bottles. Better derelicts than Central Park

You can blame the Pope because it all started many moons ago. The whole scene just kinda mutated out of Lent, which is supposedly forty days and forty nights of fasting and abstinence for all the ‘ good Christian hypocrites. The cagey Cajuns, though, figured it was a good excuse to throw a party. After all, if you’ve gotta lay off fun and frolics for forty days and forty nights, you might as well go out with a bang. Right? Well, that’s the way the folks in Louisianna looked at it too. Consequently, right before Lent rolls around, the entire town goes out on a great big binge. Technically, Mardi Gras commences almost anytime after Christmas, but it really kicks into high gear for the last five days, gradually intensifying until the final gun signals Ash Wednesday .That’s when Lent officially takes effect.

Meanwhile, juice freaks from every walk of life flock to the annual celebration of the grape like salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Ranging in vocation from limp wrists to leathered bikers, the hobos, freaks, and other assorted derelicts put the Cajun capitol under a virtual state of seige, booking the hotels and motels solid, and closing down the YMCA.

Everybody quickly settles into the same approximate routine. Sleep off last night’s head, rise and shine in the late afternoon, start working on that night’s drunk, and then party .’til four in the morning.

For the final five nights, the city sponsors big parades which snake through the city using a different route every night to confuse the out-oftowners. Masquerading marching bands and majorettes interspersed by lavishly decorated floats carrying costumed cuties. The drunken throngs line the streets and as the floats pass by, the crowd is showered with strings of cheap plastic beads and chintzy tin doubloons. The beads are worthless, but the doubloons (minted in gold and silver plated plastic) are even more worthless.

And so it goes until Ash Wednesday, when the hung over migration begins in reverse. As the garbage is quickly and quietly gathered into gigantic piles, the juicers slowly head back toward whence they came. They have now experienced Mardi Gras,, probably the biggest drunk party ever held on a regular basis. And as they leave, the people who actually live and work in New Orleans can venture forth as the invasion ebbs because the people who actually live in New Orleans don’t go to Mardi Gras. . .

People kill each other to get the beads and doubloons. Smashed out of your skull, you suddenly find yourself scrounging in the gutter, fighting waves of hysterical twelve year olds in a maniacal effort to get your hands on a Worthless novelty item that retails for about seven and a half cents so you can throw ’em out when you get back home.

It’s a lotta fun. Really.

After the parade is over, the assembled multitude boogies on down to the fabled French Quarter. Most of the streets are cordoned off, and the trolleys and buses can’t penetrate the parades, so almost everyone winds up hoofing it down to Bourbon Street. The entire French Quarter is packed like the thickest concert you’ve ever had the displeasure to attend, and everyone walks around all night digging on the crazy scene, which is everyone walking around all night digging on the crazy scene. Vendors sell bottles of Strawberry Hill and Zapple from garbage cans full of ice for a dollar a shot, the topless/ bottomless clubs (G-strings & pasties) rip people off for their purient interests, camraderies are formed and dissolved in the flash of an eye. Insanity is the order of the day.

Roving Perverts Attack Star!

Talk about a damsel in distress! And not just any dame, buster: it's Anne Murray, sweet snowbird of the Canadian plains and greater Yourtown, USA. Nor your garden variety clutch of distress: how would you feel, Margo, if you stepped off the stage of your triumphant return to the Yourtown Troubador, where you'd just performed your new smasheroo "Theme From 'How To Be Your Own Best Friend,'" suddenly to be accosted by four leering old weirdos? The quartet, believe to be a local "garage" rock group trying to horn in on Annie's aura, have since disappeared. Although the guy on the left was arrested two days later for indecent exposure in a Farrell's Ice Cream parlor. Some people will do anything for publicity.

They watch it on television. Score one for automation.

Jim Esposito

Fry In Hell, You Monsters !

In all our years as police reporters, we’d never seen anything like it. This crime so heinous, twisted and downright flakey that only a mind as diabolical as oh, maybe Norman Rockwell coulda thought of it. That’s right, these unspeakables beat up Santa Claus. And they didn’t even respect his public position enough to drag him in an alley for it, like any normally decorous hooligans woulda done. No, they hauled him right out onstage of a vast arena and kicked the poor old hoho’s ass in plain sight of umpteen thousand howling clockwork orangutans! And then to add debasement to debilitation they turned around and Hired him to submit to same every stop of a multi-state tour! Unfortunately, a combination of senility and internal injuries rendered the florid fatso posthumous only minutes before a show in Rubble, Arizona. A jury of local bounty hunters found the dastards guiltier’n distemper in spittin’ time, clapped' ’em in chains at a local baseball pool, where they are seen under heavy guard, awaiting execution by flying ants.

Putting On the Dogs: Fear & Purina at The Civic Center

If you think Lhasa Apso and Brussels Griffin are twobit heavies from out of old Fu Manchu movies, then you know absolutely nothin’ about fancy pooches and most likely never set foot in a dog show.

So who would get their kicks at a dog show? About five thousand old sots with outstanding physical and social defects, that’s who! As Ginny and I were walking up the steps to the Civic Center, we passed a wrinkled old man in a mustard colored Jordan Marsh semi-hip drip dry suit who was holding a bright orange Afghan hound on a leasfi. I stooped a bit to pet the mutt on our way in.

“Get your fucking hands off my dog!” I looked up and he said it again, louder.

That set the mood for the show and got us ready for all the main events.

I had visions of at least some grace and grandeur, of stands full of snappily dressed bowser fanciers slowly getting plastered on pocket flasks of Jack Daniels and paper cups of Gansett Beer while watching an arena full of powdered pooches go through their paces and parade around the ring -with all the dignity of those proud old elephants that lumber around circus rings, cooly giving you the eye and letting you know that, one way or another, they couldn’t give a shit. At $2.50 per person, I figured they’d have to do it up right, no shilly-shallying around — get the dogs out and get

moving. No such luck. Cheap bastards.

First off, after waiting about an hour to get tickets, we were ushered into Dog Hall. Just a big, dirty room with about seventy booths lining the sides and the middle where mostly fat, snot faced women sat selling every possible convenience for the well cared for dog: about thirty different kinds of doggie shampoos, raincoats, organic dog foods, dietary aids to help families who have overweight or pudgy hounds, combs, booties, nightgowns, pajamas, toe-rings, studs for the collar, monogrammed bath towels, vitamins, tail clips, plots of land in Doggie Heaven where your mutt gets lovingly, Christianly buried after he’s passed away or been put to sleep. In the center there’s a giant display of Pet’s Heart food, manned by a run-down, Ted Macklooking oaf who sits handing out free samples of a new product, Pet Yumm Yumms, munching on them mechanically while droning out: “If I like them, think how much your pet will! Try one. If you like them, think how much your pet will!”

Dog Hall was just an hors d’oevre for what was coming up next, cause it opened into the Dog Show itself! THERE IT WAS! One massive, sleazy room probably used for shriners’ conventions, roller derbies, Sunday bingo games, a giant linoleum-plated cavern of a place where ugly, deficient, deformed people roamed about, some with ugly dogs on leashes, some without, holding their wives or husbands menacingly, slinking about with dreadful leers. Everyone had an enormous, evident physical defect — teeth that protruded way past the lips, heads that caved in in the back, enlarged moles on their noses that prohibited glasses and made monocles the order of the day, the kind of obesity you dream about in cookbooks. You always hear that people look like their pets, it makes great afterdinner conversation, moron table talk, and it’s the kind of thing you probably heard everywhere at Norman Mailer’s birthday party, party.

“Ya ever notice how people look like the animals they keep?”

“How’s da kids, Fred?”

“Sure, I always said they should’ve closed Bruckner Blvd!!”

Okay, it’s dull and stupid, and people have known it for years, BUT IT’S TRUE! Really true, and where there are about five hundred dogs and masters together it turns you around. It’s not every day you get to see lookalike, pants-suited, nasty dykes walking about with ugly, nasty pugs, fat fat men in tubby suits hauling puff-ball dogs behind them, rolling down the aisles like a private bowling lane, mousey old lady teachers with teeth the color of muted granola mincing left and right with web-footed chihuahuas, and greasy hand-me-down leather hoods with buck teeth and shades strutting by with oiled and greasy german shepherds smelling of gasoline and gas station bathrooms.

There’s dogs everywhere, shitting all over the floor, and running all around the room, there are ten or twelve old black porters armed with giant bags of sawdust which they lavishly sprinkle on any doggie mound they find — then leave it for the helpless feet of any and every passerby. Later, when the shit dries, they’ll sweep it up; for now, the important thing is to cover it so it won’t get in the news photos. The hall begins to smell. Dogshit, Kresge’s perfumes, stale cigarettes, and old lady sweat. Of all the smells, old lady sweat is by far the worst and most pungent, it clings to every motion, every breath, and imprints its reek on every memory, even while I’m writing this I have to go open the window to get rid of it.

It’s dangerous to have fantasies while you’re in a situation like that. Do these people really hate animals as much as it seems? Visions of armies of malign, malignant, malingering old lady teachers, finally owning, actually owning pupils that are theirs, all theirs to warp, to pamper and destroy as they choose, young, tender minds and bodies they can play with to their heart’s content. How can you see this type of stuff going on and not start rooting for killer mongrels who maul postmen, sexually attack bums and vagabonds, eat babies? There’s a strange and cruel animal-master war going on, and you can smell the concentrated sickness here in the hall, the hate,, the fear, the gross, perverse clamminess taking over the room. These people want to win, they can pull it off is by maniuplating and twisting a they can pull if off is by maniuplating and twisting a j bunch of hairy animals into giving them the recognition they can’t get any other way. No one’s here to have fun — bouffant-haired ladies are crying in corners, biting their nails, afraid that their pretty pups will let them down. A bleached-out blonde in a pasty red dress huddles in a corner stroking a dumb and bleached-out looking cockapoo, cooing to it:

Do it baby

Do it baby

Do it ba-by.

And that’s all there is. Scared and mean and nasty people and their pets, lurking through this dirty room. Thirty tiny cordoned-off areas are in the midst of all this, and that’s where the judging goes on. The dogs do nothing. A judge walks around and looks at each one, sticks a couple of fingers up its ass and picks it up, by the ass, a couple inches off the ground to check on the pooch’s posture. The best ass wins!!

A couple of bad-tempered scotties start yipping at the legs around them, nipping wildly at shoes. I remember an old Bunuel movie where a thief, being taken away by police, suddenly sees an old lady across the street walking a fancy-cut poodle. He madly breaks away from the cops, tears over across the street, and kicks the dog high up into the air, just like a hairy football. Then he runs back to the police and lets himself be taken off. I’ve always loved that guy, admired the shit out of him. After seeing a dog show, I’m only pissed that he didn’t boot the old lady too.

Brian Cullman

Well Well, What Have We Here?

In our never-ending crusade to provide our inestimable readers with a whole gallery of glamourous Pinups of the Stars, CREEM presents the very latest in mode o’ Divine Sleze. Cute as muggles, tacky as a popper fulla Strontium 90, these two drossful darlings are currently setting the entropically hip world of Final Solution Fashions aflame, dears, aflame. And we bet you can’t even guess who they are. The recently disengaged Siamese Twin presidents of the John McLaughlin Fan Club? Wrong. Lobotoadherents of the Avatar Jerry Collonna? Nope. Cheech & Chong, maybe? Bob & Ray? Lucy & Desi? Wrong, wrong, wrongo. It’s none other than (in no particular order) Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady of the famed, uh. v. Jefferson Airplane, that’s -who it is. Believe it. Oh, we forgot — Madasshonki Jorma K. and Diplodocus Jack Casady, if y’please. Now, you might think that all that’s manifested here is a long-repressed desire on the part of these two gents to be geeks in the circus. But be kind — it’s something far more outre than that. What it is is Guru Chic.

After all, any dope can shave his eyebrows.