MOTT THE HOOPLE

The Hoople

(Columbia)

Right away I like this album. I like it because it’s Mott the Hoople, a band that could probably please me just by farting with the slightest degree of sincerity. After years of performing for an audience that almost seemed limited to those who already got their albums free, the situation is at last in the hands of the cash & carry crowd. Which is exactly where it should be. For the first time I don’t have to try and sell you on Mott the Hoople, and parties aren’t very much fun until somebody else shows up.

But this is also the first Mott album that they couldn’t make basically on their own time. It’s the first time that they’ve had to wrestle with the pressure of a demand for their product; recording deadlines, release dates that mechanically mesh with tour dates, having everybody from the janitor to the label president wondering where that next album is. Thinking three steps ahead of yourself is hard, a task made no easier when you’re also trying to work somebody new (guitarist Ariel Bender) into the present.

This might begin to explain why I get the feeling that The Hoople is the album where Mott’s stylization -catches up with them. Nearly every song on it makes reference, if not to a specific song, then to a specific time period in the band’s multi-faced past. The crescendo effect on “Through The Looking Glass” is kissing-cousin close to “Hymn For The Dudes”; the piano/organ dominance of “Alice” seems to hark back to more Dylanesque days (and is a lyrical bedmate of Ian Hunter’s previous New York songs, “Angel Of Eighth Avenue” and “Whizz Kid”); at first glance, “Trudi’s Song” seems like the ballad you’ll find once on every, Mott album.

But this line of criticism holds water only for those who’ve been part of the battle long enough to be able to see the strategy. Which really only means that The Hoople is a summation of the last five years; one final glance back down the runway in recognition of the fact that they’ve taken past directions about as far as they could go. To the latecomers (i.e. the majority of the people who’ll buy this record) it’ll just seem like good music.

Even when you’ve accepted that, though, there are still songs that leap from the surroundings and take you by the throat. “Marionette” is yet another “stardom is pain” expostulation, but is certainly the best and hopefully the last — word on the subject. You’ll be tempted to dub it “theatrical,” but it’s theatre like a horse stampede. It romps through its paces with both fists clenched — “Don’t gamble with my life/Or you won’t live to do it twice” - pushed ’till it dissolves with some assistance from sax impresario Andrew Mackay (of the ever-popular and dangerous Roxy Music). But “Crash Street Kids” churns up the most maniacal electrothrust on the entire album, with Ariel Bender and drummer Buffin absolutely searing an intro which is nearly everything this or any other rock & roll band should be. I’m hoping it’s a harbinger of things to come.

Though the preoccupation of The Hoople is with themselves, in the midst of the mirror lies a pretty clear picture of English Rock, circa 1974. “Golden Age Of Rock ’n’ Roll” might sound like any other standard reinactment of past sweat ’n’ glory, were it not for the band’s consistent personality imprint and a production that just gets better and better ^at giving an illusion of depth. “Pearl ’n’ Roy” is infectious pub-stomp filtered through “See My Baby Jive” (with another tip o’ the hat to Mr. Mackay), but the definitive Anglopop knockout is “Roll Away the Stone.” Though it’s been slightly altered from its English hit version (Bender dubbed another juitar figure over Mick Ralphs’ original track, and for reasons known only to Ian Hunter the same was done with the girl’s voice in the bridge), but the effect is the same: you can dance to it, sing to it, or play imaginary SRO concerts to it. Knock yourself out; they do.

The addition of Ariel Bender was an A plus move, though undoubtedly moreso than staunch Mick Ralphs fans will be able to admit at first. He’s undeniably an awkward guitarist, but his redemption lies in the fact that he’s not just playing a riff but straining for an idea. He may . start out on wobbly legs, but he usually overtakes the idea just in time to make it work. He’ll probably come off even better given raunchier surroundings; his guitar has that crazed drive that should be riding the crest of wave after energy wave.

Even though there’s very little here that’s breath takingly new, there’s even less that isn’t engaging enough to make that irrelevant. Once they’ve fully come to grips with their situation (as opposed to singing about coming to grips with it) - and with the regenerative shot that Ariel Bender’s already beginning to provide — you can bet that Mott the Hoople will give more heads the old 360 degree turnaround than even they’ve dreamed of. With The Hoople, they’ll have to settle for just being better than practically everybody else.

Ben Edmonds

BOB DYLAN & THE BAND Highway 61 Revisited Revisited (A Live Album)

Since writing the report on the Oakland Dylan-Band concerts which appeared in the last issue, my crafty brother Steve (whose efforts to beat the ticket-system were nothing short of heroic) hais provided me with a good, rough tape of one of the shows, which suggest a footnote both on the concerts and on the live album which is presumably set to follow.

First of all, the tape makes clear that just about everything good I had to say about the performances ought to be raised to the tenth power. The music was wilder than I remembered, and Dylan’s singing more exciting. Though musically very different, I haven’t the slightest doubt that what Dylan and the Band did in 1974 was as memorable as what Dylan and the Hawks did in ’65 — ’66; that a live album drawn from the tour should burn with all the force of the classic Live At Albert Hall (1966) bootleg, and carry with it an altogether new kind of humor and confidence. I wasn’t sure, writing about the concerts, if the music would come across on record — Dylan’s presence, and the Band’s, was part of it all, perhaps an essential part. The tape proves that I was wrong. The music is much more than I remembered; it is potent in ways I have not even hinted at. In a sense, it may be that Dylan’s presence, though part of the music, also overshadowed it.

It’s possible, though, that none of this will survive on vinyl; not if Dylan, Robertson, or whoever else will be involved in producing the live album give in to the natural temptation to tone down and refine what was in fact a brash, explosive performance. If you insist on getting perfect stereo separation when you record an earthquake, you may produce a more professional product, but it won’t sound like an earthquake. Too much precision, too much balance, mixing down the Band and mixing up Dylan — as Bob Johnston did on the Isle of Wight cuts — such things will take the life out of the music. So, a plea: go for the total sound, even if it means you have to leak tracks all over the studio; try and keep the momentum of the music; let some distortion and confusion bleed through the songs, as it did when they were played; master the album hot. If you have to put anything in front, make it the drums.

And don’t wait until Christmas.

Greil Marcus

HUMBLE PIE Thunderbox (A&M)

Yowsah. Yowsah. Yowsah. Cum mon brothahs and sistahs, letz all rock on wit dem blue eyed British soul brothas, de Humble Pies. Dese duys is sumptin else, you know what I mean? Dig where dese guys is cummin from. Dey is funky plus. Just take a look at dere album cover. It shows you a lovely young gal’s crotch through a keyhole. And when you open the record up, you get to see her whole body, all white and smooth. And she even got a nekkid friend with her. Slobber. Slobber. Now, ain’t dat funky? You bet it is.

And just lissen to that album. You remembah when Humble Pie used to be just a regular ol’ rock and roll band dat wuz fun to lissen to? Well, dey ain’t no more. Now dey is a soulful bunch of muthas with lead singer Steve Marriot rollin’ his eyes and torturing his tonsils screamin’ “ooooh oooh” all the time. Steve is rapidly losin’ his voice, but ya shure can’t notice it on this album, cause it’s covered with waves of voiceovers by de Blackberries who can scream “oooooh ooh” louder than Stevie can. Now ain’t dat funky? You bet it is.

And dose songs is sumptin else. Bless my soul. Hearing Steve tear into such intelligent numbahs as “Thunderbox,” “Groovin’ With Jesus” and “Oh La-De-Da” just sends my spine a tinglin’. (Either its dem songs dat does dat to me, or else I got a short in my stereo earphones!) So what if de band DOES sound kin of shiftless, lazy and unexciting. It’s worth it to hear Stevie (lawd, o lawd>preach such blooze lines at as as “I’m gonna lay somethin’ on ya concernin’ the MAN himself. .. ahh, groovin’ wit’ de man.” Now Stevie ain’t just talkin’ ’bout the pigs here, he’s talking ’bout GOD! And it’s nice to talk about God three seconds after you put down the whole female species with a chauvinistic piece of sheeeit like “Thunderbox.” (“Sheeza thunderbox, yeah, sheeza thunderbox. Yeasss she is.”) It kind of evens out the score. And just lissen to those stop and go rhythms. Chunka. Chunka. Chunk. And dat rinky dink roller skating rink organ playing. And how ’bout dat bump and grind drumming. Now, ain’t dat funky. You bet it is.

Yah suh, dese Humble Pie guys is sumptin else. You gotta hand it to ’em. Dey sure duz have a lot of gall cummin on like a bunch of real soul brothers when, in truth, they have all the soul of Wayne Newton, John Denver, Seals and Crofts and a bunch of other well known, black-oriented acts. But just lissen to -Steve sing his liddle heart out on “Rally With Ali.”

Now, ain’t dat silly? You bet it is.

Ed Naha

TED NUGENT & THE AMBOY DUKES Call of the Wild (Discreet)

This whole record is an exorcise in sonic inebriation - it’ll make pudding outta your grey stuff and then make you sup on it outta sheer meanness. Ted Nugent was always the acknowledged master of deiranged guitar madness. Ever since the first mutated strains of “Baby Please Don’t Go” totalled car radios back in the heyday of psychedelia he’s been heralded above all other axeoids. His name could always be heard over those of Larry Parypa, Ken Williams, Leigh Stephens, Jan Savage, Joe Kelley, and Mark Landon, and so could his guitar.

After wading through years of Upbeat, praying to his guitar on stage, twirling his manhood in public to get attention, and just plain old sonic dehydration, Ted has once again resurrected the essence of the Amboy Dukes, and once again they challenge for supremacy on the block. This time he’ll win because what the world needs now is sheer abandonment in the style only Ted Nugent can give.

“Call of the Wild" is a veritable conrucopia of terminal guitar singes and nihilistic consonance. No limp-muscled vegetarian, Ted and the Dukes speak to us about meat. Pussy meat, bird meat, dog meat, worm meat, sarcoid fantasies of the highest order, the guitar retranslated into an instrument of ultimate annihilation. The first cannibal rock ’n’ roll record ever conceived. Where Deliverance leaves off, Ted and the Dukes take up. It’s all nicely pictured on the back, cover photo: a shiny gold guitar set up right next to a sleek-looing high-powered rifle. On the table, meat and knives. The supreme statement of Detroit political play-acting.

From the first conflagrant buzz to the last fading musical quasar, Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes prove that they run the block. They’re just standing on the corner twirling their gold chains, hitching up the shoulders on their tattered zoot suits, bored, waiting for some strangers to happen alone so’s they can spit on ’em.

This is total somatogenic joy. Slash/spurt/ hurt — yum, yum. The best song to cuddle up with, by the way, is called “Rot Gut.” The rest of the LP is great too, so great in fact that I ate it the other day - vinyl vampirism is a reality: hotcha.

Joe Fernbacher

BARBRA STREISAND The Way We Were (Columbia)

To me, Barbra Streisand is something like Cecil Taylor. Both are worth listening to because both possess formidable technical skills and both have strong, bold, individualistic styles - but neither really fits comfortably into my own personal arrangement of musical furniture. Both require conscious effort, in other words; neither is worth much of a damn for background music. They are both artists that I feel I must listen to (and this presupposes a particular kind of mood, a particular kind of emotional and/or philosophical condition) and not just hear.

But, as long as I’m listening...

Streisand has great vocal power, of course, and she knows how to do a rather large number of things with her voice. On Carole King’s, “Being at War with Each Other,” for instance, she modulates with rapidity and calm sure-footedness between all sorts of modes of phrasing; she’s almost, at times, like

a slightly-too-serious, slightly-too-pure Sarah Vaughn. Her vaguely nasal clarity is extremely impressive, because it is both open and giving on one hand and vulnerable sounding on the other.

The finest thing, by far, on this album is Streisand’s reading of Paul Simon’s “Something So Right.” It’s probably, for a start, the single most believable song Streisand has ever recorded. It has, as a piece of material, all of the finest attributes of good songwriting - a sense of unforced marriage of words and music, a contextual stance that is both honest and ironical, a dashing independence from conventional schemes of rhyme and rhythm, etc. — and Streisand takes control of it so firmly and naturally that it sounds, from cultural appraisal, as thought she had written it herself. It would have been a great Gladys Knight song (Knight is the black Barbra Streisand, anyway), but the surprising thing is that Streisand actually does more with it vocally and dramatically than ever the formidalbe Ms. Knight could have done. It is a classic — great material interpreted superbly.

But the album as a whole is sunk by a couple of little-league Rod McKuens named Alan and Marilyn Bergman. For the benefit of those who, quite -rightfully, don’t follow very much of contemporary “pop” music, the Bergmans are lyricists, and extremely wellknown and highly-respected ones, too. They are also unbearably dull, vapid and mawkish, embarrassingly hackneyed, and painfully ignorant of the legitimate wealth and beauty of the English language. They are the Walter Keanes of songwriting — questional masters of the most false and terrible artistic cliches, accorded baseless praise by the most critically incapable segments of our society.

What grating excess of the psychedelic era, for instance, ever dared to produce so meaningless and stilted lines as “. . , All the seasons and the times of your days / All the nickels and the dimes of your days / Let the reasons and the rhymes of your days/ All begin and Aid with me?” I mean, what is this shit??? What is it linguistically, emotionally, or poetically???

There are no rules for rhyme. A brilliant “pop” lyricist like Yin Harburg could take ‘ tough poetic chances” (as someone once wrote about James Merrill), and write lines like “Beans could get no keener/ Reception in a beanery. . ./ Bless our mountain greenery home” and get away with it through wit and stylistic perseverance, and a respect for the frivolous possibilities of the language. But these Bergman people have absolutely no concept of the way words work. These are the people who wrote a song called “The Windmills of Your Mind” two years after David Crosby had publicly apologized for “Mind Garden”!

Anyway, this Streisand kid is pretty damned good. I predict big things for her. Maybe next time, she ought to borrow producers like Gamble and Huff (as long as they don’t make, her do their songs) or Smokey Robinson (as long as he does make her do his songs) or Johnny Bristol or even one of those guys over at that Turkish record company, like Joel Dorn, Tom Dowd, Arif Mardin, or Jerry Wexler. This one was produced by Tommy LiPuma. Ho hum. ■

Colman Andrews

KISS

(Casablanca)

These are the reasons that Kiss,is more than just a “pfui” band: the drummer began on a Rootie Kazootie drum set (so sez the bio), they try to look like the Hello People, acrobatics is the name of their game and not glitter, their music is totally controlled, they got taste. ' *

Yeah, Kiss may paint themselves up to let you know they’re from New York but don’t let it scare you. They don’t shit onstage and then eat it or anything sick like that. Like, the way the album sounds it’s as if they took time to order the cuts properly and edit out any extraneous jive. Really, it sounds as if they even cared about their music (don’t snicker). Which is an amazing buy feven for six bucks.

For instance, there’s a song called “Love Theme From Kiss” which at first sounds like any other instrumental joke in the T-B6nes’ bag. On a Beefheart album, it would be called “Wet Frog.” On a Todd Rundgren disc, it’d be entitled “Shimmy Shimmy Coca-Cola.” But for Kiss, economy is what counts (more for yr money, you know) so that the theme song becomes as tolerable as Love Unlimited’s lovely “Love’s Theme.” So you can dance to it.

What’s more, there’s a brilliant song called “Black Diamond” at the end of the album which best exemplifies Kiss’ tastefulness. The song gently buds open with silent guitars frazzling the edges of the grooyes until two drumsticks click and the vocalist goes “Hit It!” Layers of tension pile up more and more between background vocals and Alice Cooper leads and then suddenly slow down very, very slo-w-l-y (it takes the song at least two minutes to end), in slow motion even, it caves in to set this sorta mood:

News Item... Litchfield, Conn., March 1 - Both of Barbara Gibbons’ legs were broken and her sexual organs injured, according to exhibits shown today at the murder trial of her son, Peter A. Reese, who is charged with slashing his 51 year old mother’s throat Sept. 1-8. Not implying that the group is sick or ^anything, but the song’s finale certainly con-/ jures up any idea of atrocity.

The best song with the best taste, tho/is “Deuce” which is good and sloppy and pdnks up there with “Trash” ’n’ “Search and Destroy.” The first line is “Get off! And get yr grandma outa here!” (all other/Words are too jumbled or unforgettable), and then the intro of this guitar twitch that e^en the BOC would envy. Naturally the song repeats itself over and over since' it’s relying on such a catchy break, but the bar\a manages to keep monotony under control'even, which is more than can be said for bther more theatrical groups like Alice Cooper.

In short, the best thing about Kiss is not their gimmicks. Hell, you can’t even make fun of em. The ojuy thing worth mentioning is that they play damn good musip, fast and loud. Which is proof enough that they’re no mere bunion excavators or glitter globs.

Robot A. Hull

COMMANDER CODY AND HIS LOST PLANET AIRMEN Live From Deep in the Heart of Texas (Paramount)

After all this time, Commander Cody is still one of the few bands I go to see as often as I can. The boogie circuit has taken its toll on them in some ways, but there is still only one place where you can get this kind of music, and I still go to get it from them.

This is the album Cody’s hard-core rock ’n’ roll fans have been waiting for. It’s not that there’s no country music here — there is, and Bobby Black’s steel playing makes for the best individual performances on the record. But since it is a live album, the emphasis is on the rocking out.

Billy C. Farlow opens and closes the album with “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and “Mean Woman Blues.” In between is his best song ever, the potential hit single “Too Much Fun.” It’s Billy C. all right — out on the town, he gets thrown in jail for having too much fun, a charge he staunchly denies on the grounds that there is no such thing. Cody hisself grunts out “Riot in Cell Block No. 9,” and there’s two obscure revivals and one original written in the style of old rock ’n’ roll that are pretty much what we’ve come to expect from this band. By taking them . as straight (and whimsically) as they do everything else, they, keep these styles alive and current, just plain old good time music for your drinking and dancing pleasure. “I’m Cornin’ Home’’ was pure rockabilly whenJohnny Horton did it, and all Cody’s done is to speed it up even more.

To separate the would-be shitkickers from the truly cosmic cowboys, they’ve included a gen-you-wine cowboy song, “Sunset on the Sage,” which brings to the fore all the ironies they so like to bounce off each other. I mean, it sounds just like a real cowboy song, doesn’t it?' But really. .. two people whistling in harmony for the instrumental break? Just what is one supposed to make of that?

Black has since left the group, but he and Andy Stein on fiddle make a great team here. An audience well lubricated with beej^apd' ready to rock always brings out the best in Cody and that’s what they’ve got in Austin. They never have, and never will, make perfect music, but it’s the spirit and the total sound that prevails. This album has the spirit in abundance, and it may be Cody’s best blat and blare yet.

John Morthland

SILVERHEAD 16 and Savaged (MCA)

This group sounds like junior league Humble Pie/Deep Purple decibel blitz, but Melody Maker dubbed ’em the limeyland Dolls. They don’t have the Doll knack of three minute automobeat singles, but they have a surrogate David Johansen, and then some, in Michael Des Barfes. He’s a wasted little twerp with a car exhaust set of pipes that’s nigh-on approaching throat cancer. Furtherly, he can still be caught on the tube in To Sir With Love as a punk. Things ain’t changed — he’s still a punk! He does a neat Iggy impersonation complete with dog collar and bare chest, shrapnel-scarred from the legions of degeneroid lil groupies that jes love him so! He’s a bona fide Marquis, toot sweet, young sordid lurid and bored; he’s the kind of beefcake filling Dorian Gray. Could only have been invented by Oscar Wilde at his “Oscarest and Wildest,” and that spells Decadent-with-acapital D, Chester! They’re a band'that could only come from England, and for some people, that’s good enough.

Silverhead tries to rock-o-rama, but sounds instead like two two-ton Chevies slamming each other head on down the turnpike. Electroid mutant chaos and live wired R & B light years removed from the Chitlin circuit, or even the Crawdaddy Club. If y’like that kind of stuff, it’s here in hot, steaming globs. If y’don’t then y’don’t care &. never did. They’ve got something here, but it needs a lot of polishing before it can cut close to Good. Needs a screwdriver and some lubrication motivation. Title track “16 and Savaged,” a mayhem anthem gotterdammerung of pubescent anger and frothing ala “Hope I die before I get old,” is the best thing on the album. “This Ain’t a Parody” has a catch chorus that makes you sing it over like the Village mongoloid. “Hello New York” is a stand-out raver, ditto “Rock Out, Claudette Rock Out,” ditto once over fer “Heavy Hammer.” “More Than Your Mouth Can Hold” is the title of the year — too bad Iggy didn’t write it, and record it as well. The rest of the lp is various stages of dirty funkola ho-hum, which is a vast improvement on their first disc which is nothing short of the Chinese Torture Garden. It’s a pretty fair effort, and with hope and prayers and a steamroller hype courtesy of B.P. Fallon, press person wizard, they may get to A-OK, arid riotous to boot.

Kathy Miller

MICHAEL FENNELLY v Lane Changer (Epic)

Thought he’s been a critic’s friend for years, it’s never seemed to do Michael Fennelly very much good. His first band -Millenium, a Gary Usher/Curt Boettcher production fantasy — got more advance notices than they could ever possibly live up to, and you all know the end of that particular road. Then it was Cfabby Appleton, a band that scribes everywhere were fool-certain was the kind of mainstream rock that America cried out for in 1970. But they were so mainstream that nobody noticed, and the group’s first-try hit (“Go Back”) wound up as their only accomplishment. And now Michael Fennelly’s back again.

Considering the track record, it might not seem advisable at this point for anyone in my position to be making any wild claims on Mr. Fennelly’s behalf. But he makes the kind of music that drives you to want to tell other people about it, and Lane Changer is even more that kind of a record than anything he’s done before.

Fennelly’s muscle has always been his ability to incorporate the best classic rock & .roll moves into a picture that looks like nobody but him. He wears his influences on his shirt-sleeve, but the nice thing about his eclecticism is that it effects his approach but never reaches the actual execution too conspicuously. You can hear the specifics if you listen hard enough, but he makes it much easier to see what he’s done with them.

As might be expected of such a synthesizer, the album covers all the bases and maybe even helps create a couple of new ones. His rockers have always been full-steaift, and songs like the title cut and “Won’t You Please Do That” could easily hold their own on any Led Zep or Humble Pie album. His slide playing is almost enough to restore my faith in the technique; he drives it like a bulldozer. But if you turn your back on this kid for a minute, you’re liable to find him sitting in the corner with an acoustic guitar doing it just as well. I don’t' relish the association necessarily, but the closest I can come is to say that Fennelly’s a thoroughly Americariized Marc Bolan of sorts. He’s got that same slightly innocent sensuality working for fiim that Bolan first projected, but it’s from the robust and assertive American tradition. AKA: he kicks ass.

One suggestion: as competent as Chris White’s production is, the producer best suited to Fennelly would have to be Jimmy Page. Page has mastered the kind of layered dimension that never seems to develop here, though in all fairness we should point out that it’s considerably harder to achieve when you’re relying on studio musicians. But Michael Fennelly’s potential for growth seems unlimited, and while Lane Changer is probably the most auspicious debut so far this year, I think we’ll find out soon enough that it’s merely a warm-up.

Ben Edmonds

SLADE

Stomp Your Hands, Clap Your Feet (Warner Bros.)

This has gotta be the most confusing album by a supergroup since Beatles 65. It don’t even sound like the same band that ripped pubs' apart on Slayed? and set babies on fire on Slade Alive. Sure, the energy is still in line, but the problem is that Slade thinks they gotta be songwriters, which is the last thing they oughta be!!

Nevertheless, here’s this,offbeat new record with a scrambled title that has tunes for Petula Clark, Crispian St. Peters, Billy J. Kramer, and other hasbeens. Lou Reed could’ve even done one of the songs (“Good Time Gals”) with lines in it like:

I wanted to suck your kandy

I wanted to smell your palms

I wanted to turn your

headlights on.

I mean, there’s such a variety of material here — drinking tunes, dream songs, melodies for Jan Murray — that the album don’t even come close to rock ’n’ roll. The only thing that does is their version of “Just Want A Little Bit,” which tickles and teases you in the same manner as when they tackled “Move Over.” Yet, still there’s not one earthquake like “I Won’t Let It ’Appen Agen” (their best song).

It’s depressing, too, seeing how Slade is the only band around making tribal beat music for jocks, skinheads, Nazis, and Jumping Gene Simmons fans. It’s even possible that they may head in the direction of Freddie and the Dreamers and get every idiot in England doing the ‘Noddy’.

The only solution, then, is to combat the disease affecting Slade. Slade wants a hit single on the charts in America. The groovies listening to the radio in America only wanna hear Redbone, Terry Jacks, the Blue Swede, and Sister Janet Mead. To conquer a nation that feeds on flying saucer records and right-wing talkie phoots, Slade has to rely upon different sounds and gimmicks to create songs in various styles. They ain’t comical enough to pull it off like Dr. Hook or the Guess Who so they head in the direction of the dreaded Sgt. Pepper. This impulse, therefore, can be met head-on and smothered in only one way — torture!

That’s right. Slade has offended our ears so the time is ripe for cutting into them, too. A few proposals are:

make em watch 24 hours of Beat the Clock straight

they must drink only Kool-aid for a year

burn their Don Ho albums

tell their mommies on em

The secret is that they can’t be beaten or mutilated cause that’s exactly what they want and expect. The torture must be so powerful that it instantly restores them to their stupidity. They cannot be allowed to continue in their antics if they’re gonna keep on imitating Gerry and the Pacemakers!

Slade ain’t fizzled out yet, streakers, but this albums the genesis of a trend that must be stopped.. . noise which can’t be felt.

Robot A. Hull

EDDIE KENDRICKS Boogie Down (Tamla)

HERBIE MANN London Underground (Atlantic)

I like to nod out as well as the next schlep. Don’t use the number one lowest common denarcovator, but I certainly can dig sprawling around the house of an evening with my head full of nothing but low profile buzz and good downside sounds. Sometimes I even put on my early Lou Reed reflector aviator sunglasses, and pretend I’m the most wasted cat you ever saw, Jack. I make my old lady wear hers too, and sometimes we get our best nods to Anne Murray, which is no slur (so to speak) on Anne. And (along with the Fripp and Eno album, which is a whole different vein of drone and will be covered here next month) these two albums are some of the finest nodding zak I’ve drowsed to recently.

My methadone friends recommend Billie Holiday, and Transformer is always nice whether you’re vailed away or been up all night grinding your teeth, but one essential component of most good nod jams is at least a minimal amount of funk. Which is one thing Eddie Kendricks’ got more of than any fey fay. “Boogie Down” sounds better through headphones at 3 a.m. than it does on the car radio. The other prime element of this genre is utter repetition, which is what you get a cool shot of straight up the main lobe here: just that low rumbling piano, restrained brass, and this high Smokey/late-Marvin voice falsetting you down straight: “Goin’ downtown/ Gon’ mess around. . .” It’s safe as milk, you don’t even have to indulge nonexempt nostrums to cop this vicarious submarine thrill -1 as Eddie says, “I’m gonna whoop ya on a natural high.”

The rest of the album, though unpretentious, is not nearly so heavy, and some of it is downright unmemorable. Though maybe that’s because I fell asleep half way through side two.

Herbie Mann has been playing music that not even somnambulists could do the funky chicken to for years now, Charmin covers of pop pap shaming the memory of his Village Gate/ “Cornin’ Home Baby” days of glory. But in London Underground he’s back in the hipsy “Baby” funk groove full tilt, abetted by the considerable kick of the likes Of Mick Taylor and Aynsley Dunbar. Almost too much kick in fact for this jello skull, but “Bitch” will itch you on downstream just fast enough. Most of the remainder is boutique music, but what better place to nod — the entire environment is so pleasant, pale flat finish walls awash in lights of ersatz laidback chic. Nobody ever hurries through one of those places — they drift. Which is what this music .is for — you can drift in and out of attentive context at uriwill, it’s perfect because it’s circularly certain to flow on forever lulling consistent unlike certain other compozers. So mellow out, all you brothers and sisters with the ludovico seethes. You could sleep for a thousand years, come back and Herbie’d still be pudding jamming on the latest Stones song. Or, as someone once said to Tennessee Williams when he remarked that he’d slept through the Sixties: “You didn’t miss a thing.”

Lester Bangs