ROXY MUSIC Stranded (Atlantic)

BRYAN FERRY These Foolish Things (Atco)

LISTEN! I bent your ears about Lou and the Velvet Underground, I tole ya to go buy Mott last year and aren't you glad! Damn straight. Well, I'm serving notice right now on everybody to go and wolf down the new albums by Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry.

Just try to imagine a lead singer who sounds like a low-warbling cross between Bowie, Lou Reed and Elvis, singing a wide crosscut of punk sneer overlaid with a broad swath of Victorian Romanticism and space noise with mean-ass guitar. Sound like a bit much? Well, that's what I thought at first too, I laughed, but these two albums have been my constant obsessions since I got British editions two months ago. Once you let them work their venal magic on your inner ear canals you'll know why I'm frothing.

Bryan Ferry has spewed out such a remade/remodeled set of diverse styles that you initially don't know how to take him. So take him as Bowie with guts, maybe, a true dude even though he likes to pose in melancholy pix as poor Byron bowed with victory at the pinnacle of ennui. One thing's certain: he's pulled his chops together from the sometimes strained excursions of the first two Roxy albums — available here on Warner Bros. — in which a multitude of idioms seemed sometimes to be pulling in every direction at once.

Take "Street Life," one of Stranded's two El Perfectos. Opens with tides of muted noise. then whomps ya with a perfect fuzz hook, organ echoing so off-key it covers all the bases, and Bryan shouting bitterly: "Wish everybody would leave me alone/ Don't alway call me on the telephone/ When I pick it up there's no one there/ So I walk outside just to take the air/ C'mon with me cruising down the street/ Who knows what you'd find, who you might meet. .. Now I'm blinded I can really see/ No more bright lights confusing me..." When you hear how he snarls out "Gotta take you dowwn!, " you know you're dealing with a whole new breed of fey badass.

Sound like your kind of meat? I thought so, and that's only the beginning. Just check "Mother of Pearl." After listening to this twisto masterpiece 5,000 times and cogitating on its cosmic import unending, I have discerned its meaning. This guy goes to a beat-"em-out party where smoky entities hover in the air and angry guitars slash through the sprawled bodies raking associations. Bryan growls through the murk; "Get •the picture? No, no no! Yeah! Walk a tight sideline! Have you a future? No, no no! Yeah..

But you gotta come down sooner or, and he does, into a morning after of scattered final insights: "Well I've been up all night pariy-time wasting it's too much fun/ Then I step back thinking of life's inner meaning and my latest fling/ It's the same old story.. " So where's the solution? Nowhere, schmuck. No love in the looking glass world, and every goddess is just a beddown. So turn to your heroes: "Every idol a bringdown, it gets you down." So he delves into the must of literary antiquity'-and trawls up even Nietzsche wanting: "Thus even Zarathustra, another time loser." O.K., so why don't you just Berlin slash your wrists? Because you're an old timer, that's why. Bryan Ferry is a Victorian Romantic and suddenly he sees this divine wraithlike faun-angel diaphanously rising from the wreckage of ideals: "I have been looking for something I've always wanted, but was never mine/ But now I've seen that something just out of reach glowing, very Holy Grail... this lady of a sacred world."

But can you ball her? No, this guy's head is so poetically twisted he can only find satisfaction in the unattainable, but you can score your own tete-a-tetes to this music and maybe that's enough. The rest of the album, like "Serenade" and "A Song To Europe," is even more Continentally trapped, but it's all for your pleasure. And the band is so good that... well, you'll find out.

The solo album is just one up on Pin-Ups. Instead of fixating his grasping nostalgias in a single era, Bryan culls Dylan, Smokey, the Stones, Beatles, Beach Boys, and even Lesley Gore, and brings something new and excitingly valid to each of them. The fact that he is usually singing against the melody helps a lot, almost as much as the most brilliant production job since Transformer. You have got to hear what this ironic-tongued limey does to "A " Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall," how he simultaneously sounds like Levi Stubbs and a rabid poof in "Loving You Is Sweeter," how he turns everything he touches to the total musical conception transcending eclecticism that has given me most hope in a year that already looks brighter for rock "n" roll than anything since 1968 kicked over and sped itself blind. ,

Only one minor criticism: Andy MacKay, who plays sax with Roxy as well as on Mott's "All The Way From Memphis!" and sounds like Albert Ayler cloned into big 50s honkers, is not featured as prominently on Stranded as on earlier Roxy.

WE NEED MORE FROM ALL THESE GUYS. Till we get it, make these in your local discoterieas and, in the immortal words of James Brown ("Money Won't Change You"): Git It Git It Git It!

Lester Bangs

CAT STEVENS Buddha & the Chocolate Box (A&M)

1. Some of my best friends like Cat Stevens. There is the environmental reporter who published the sound magazine and the advertising man with the ukelele. There are the two daughters of Newsday's other music critic. And there is the rock critic I used to live with. We hadn't exchanged words in a year, but we did exchange top-10 lists and found seven albums identical, an almost eerie correspondence of taste. One of her other three was Cat's Tea for the Tillerman. When we talked again, she was apologetic. She said she knew it wasn't a good record. But somehow she was always playing it.

2. Cat's music has more spunk and verve than the music of any other singer-songwriter I dislike. My friend with the ukelele tells me it's so simple even he can play it, yet so idiosyncratic harmonically that no one else sounds at all similar. I like its rocking chunka beat, and its dissonances, and I acknowledge that Cat's singing sounds passionate even while imploring him to stop repeating syllables for automatic emphasis. I even admire how functional it is. But I can only regret that its function is to support Cat's lyrics.

3. The difference between an album you love and an album you hate is often one or two cuts. An inspired song that fulfills a fantasy you never knew you had can make you believe in a whole side of stuff that might seem suspect in another setting. And a song If that commits some deadly sin can drag its SSf innocent-sounding companions down to perdition.

4. For me, the evil song on Cat's new Vr album, Buddha and the Chocolate Box, is "Music": "There'd be no wars in the world/ 1^ If everybody joined in the band." This kind of lie is called a tautology; it is like saying § that there would be no hunger in the world if v everyone became an ice cream man. Even if it were permitted (how many ice cream women do you know?) everyone would not join in the band, £pr very good (albeit tragic) reasons, economic or psychological, or what-have-you, that are much like the reasons for war. In fact, a lot of people join the band fqr such reasons.

I bet if everybody joined the band Cat would enlist in the R.A.F.

5. In England, that green and pleasant land where reviews actually affect record sales, Cat's previous album, Foreigner, which he produced himself, was panned for obscurity and general aimlessness. The new album was produced by Paul Samwell-Smith and is straightforward to the point of banality.

6. A preponderance of Cat's fans are female, but they are not hard headed women, a type Cat once claimed to prefer. If they weter, they would realize that Cat conceives even the hard headed woman as an adjunct to her man — she takes him for himself and makes him to his best, as if those two were always identical. The "girl" in the song that follows, "Wild World," isn't hard headed, either; according to Cat, she gets by on just a smile. I wonder how Cat put up with her. Just a nice guy, I guess.

In a song on the new album, Cat or one of his henchmen marries a junkie he meets in a motel. She has the "best figure" of all the gash available there. She also has eyes so unusual that her husband spends "a thousand hours" gazing into them. He doesn't know what color they are.

7. If Cat loves trees so much (reference: "King of Trees") how come he designed a double-fold cover with cardboard innersleeve for this single LP?

8. Like so much of what he does, the pictograph Cat has drawn for the back of the new album is of quality, perhaps even a work of art. As a work of art, I am sure it will be open to many differing interpretations. Here is mine.

A small boy is inspired by an insect who seems to symbolize Cat to imagine a box of chocolates which seems to symbolize the album. He eats one of the imaginary chocolates and gets a toothache. Moral: The nourishment and pleasure are illusory, but the damage is real.

Robert Christgau

Courtesy of Newsday, Inc.

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND Unconditionally Guaranteed (Mercury)

From his throne as rock's most celebrated curiosity, Don Van Vliet has, through the years, provided anyone who cared to listen with some of the most amazing music ever recorded on the planet (known in Beefheartian circles as "God's golf ball"). The man is his art, he lives it and breathes it. From his very first album, Safe as Milk, right through his four album stint at Warner Bros, and up to the present with his first Mercury disk, he has continued to display a reckless amount of courage, presenting new facets of his seemingly boundless genius with each successive effort (the only two albums that are really similar are Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby, both done in his so-called "Dada" period). And though most of his cult followers like him because his music strikes me as being genuinely human. He just might be the only truly "sane" person on earth.

Unconditionally Guaranteed throws you off at first, since it's definitely the Captain's most low-keyed and subtle album to date. Beefheart singing love songs, you ask? Well, why not? He's got the voice to do anything, and if the Captain wants to croon, that's fine with me. And the Magic Band, with Rockette Morton returning tb bass (Roy Estrada has probably gone off to cheeseburger heaven) and Strictly Personal veteran Alex St. Claire back in the fold on rhythm guitar, plays magnificently behind their leader throughout. Special accolades, as usual, go out to Zoot Horn Rollo, not only the best guitarist over six foot five but maybe the best in the universe.

The key songs come in the middle of each side and they're both very simple but quite haunting. "Magic, Be" offers the Captain's philosophy of life: "Magicbe in magic/ Magic be in sunshine/ Magic be in moonlight/ Magic be in you and me/ Magic be in every hour/ Darlin" you're with me." "This is the Day" is quite simply one of the most touching songs I've ever heard in my life. Beefheart sings beautifully and Zoot Horn's long guitar solo is breathtaking in its sensitivity as he builds his riffs higher, and higher to a majestic climax. Just a goddamn lovely song.

There's a few blues numbers scattered about, like "Peaches" ("All of those peaches up in one tree, please won't you throw one down to me") and a good tongue-in-cheek number called "Happy Love Song" ("She said baby, how long is your song? I said baby, as long as you want"). Typical Beefheart fare is represented by "Sugar Bowl," a neat little singalong finger snapper, and "Upon the My-O-My," with the Captain out at sea, his boat out of control.

It must be said that the production is horrendous, especially when compared to the fantastic job that Ted Templeman did on the last album, Clear Spot. The vocals are often muddled and you have to listen close to catch all the nice guitar fills by Rollo and St. Claire. But that's really beside the point. No matter how many differtnt labels Captain Beefheart records for, he'll always have my unconditionally guaranteed seal of approval. Please buy his records before he gets bored with this hobby of his that we call music.

Billy Altman

NEW YORK DOLLS Too Much, Too Soon (Mercury)

So you think you're cool because you're from New York and you think you're-tough because you ride the subway and you've gotta stay in the vanguard at all costs and the Dolls are your band.

Good for you. I think you bite ass, because even though I wouldn't wanna be their mother the Dolls are my band too, at least on this record. And not meaning to run down all you scrapple chomps from back East, but I think your reasons for liking the Dolls are mostly probably pretty pretentious. Like they're the "joyous celebration" of NYC street living or such drool, and the real answer to ambidingsuck (or as Lenny Bruce said in watershed thesis on glitter: "Psychopathia sexualis, I'm in love with a horse that comes from Dallas"). All of which I claim is flat bushwah. The Dolls are a load of raggle clatter and they know it and spit it right back in your face whistling like twisto bastard TerryThomas progeny thru gapbuck front teeth: NYAAA! They ain't the Stones and they can't play for much past prattle but who gives a whackdoodle so stop making claims that'll blotch your mugs come uppance morn. Like for instance it is common knowledge that the Dolls deliver about one decent live performance in ten, which would be enough to make them the new Grateful Dead, except for the fact that they really are the band that nobody but the outcasts that donnow how long they're gonna last and assorted dilettantes can stand which of course makes them the new Grand Funk.

So what? They're learning fast, even though they still only know a couple of chords. Their first album was mostly about as plodding as any Grand Funk opus, and as a vocalist I still rate David Johansen on the level of David Peel. But I liked David Peel. I like unremitting gallfaced garbage and that's what the Dolls dish up and you can eat it or mealymouth psuedosocioyouthical truisms. Under the expert guidance of old Shangri-Las prodder Shadow Morton they've one-upped even their own teen slop wallow here with an unexpected and mostly fulfilled talent for sheer novelty records, especially in the vocal dept., and especially when it comes to cartoon stereotypic ethnic slurs. E.g., "Bad Detective" (Johansen as (ihink/nigger) and "Stranded in the Jungle," which Sha Na Na once told me they would never touch because it was "racist," wherein David does the most risibly raucous impersonation of Kingfish of the Mystic Knights of the Sea I've heard since Redd Foxx drowned in catarrh. Real slick it is too, first time I hear it on FM I refused to believe it wuzza Dolls and when the jock spilled all I then had to contend with the notion of these boys actually having an AM hit. Because it's time for a fullblown renaissance of novelty /junk records on the Shangs /"Please Mr. Custer" /"Jungle"/ Nervous Norvus/ Napoleon XXIII level, and the Dolls are leading the pack because this record is even more spirogyrating fulla wolf whistles, blats and honks and blares and sonic greenyhocks than the last one. It's like the Second Coming of Ling Ting Tong as Anna Mae Wong with her surname hanging out to doodle on 14 year old foreheads. You should be able to buy this album off the comic book page where they have see-thru nekkid specks and hand buzzers.

Did I hear somebody mention talent? Yeah, they got it; no neo-submachine classics on this "un like "Trash" and "Personality Crisis," but "Puss in Boots" is a rattle yammer right out of Top Cat with fine katzenjammer lyrics, "Chatterbox's" title tells the story, "Who Are The Mystery Girls" is a great throwaway and all the others sound just like "em except for the Robitussion sax break at the end of "Human Being" which is about the travails of being sensitive neath the skin of a fireplug so how can you miss.

Of the nonoriginals, some people don't like "Don't Start Me To Talkin" " — the Dolls doing blues? Naww, hell, this track is classic merely because it proves that the Dolls can grind out debased R&B stew with just as much elan as all those mid-Sixties chowderheads like the Pretty Things and Downliners Sect. Just listen to that wah-wah (sky above, mud below genre) harmonica stylization and you'll also hear how well these wanger clangers bed down neighborly with the Fugs of "Virgin Forest" album fame. Pure spew, sputter butter, everybody cornin" gon" see the mother of nothing before it rattles its bolts loose unto nova and time for a whole new line of zipgun soapbox derby gougemobiles.

Lester Bangs

WILLIE NELSON Phases and Stages (Atlantic)

Willie Nelson has made an extraordinary LP, one that I think will have appeal to rock fans who normally don't . care at all for country music. It's a devastatingly sad concept album about couples breaking up, an eternal circle Willie faces with weary resignation. He tells the woman's side of the story on one album side and the man's on the other. For him to assume both roles might sepm to you like playing with fire, but Nelson has obviously been there a few times before, and he's spent as much time listening as he has talking.

Aside from political/cultural considerations, the most commop criticism'of country music I've heard from rock fans is that it's too pat; that in their efforts to sing "correctly" country singers will place a distance between themselves and the words they're singing, sacrificing honest emotion in favor of mannerism and technique. No such problem with Willie. His parched voice has a remarkable range, and he's not afraid to let it follow the course of the lyrics, moaning and slurring like a bluesman, dragging words out till he's squeezed from them all the meaning they're capable of carrying, and then letting intonation take care of the rest. "No Love Around" is, I swear to God, a field holler.

Plus his images make so few words go such long ways. "Sister's Coming Home/Down at the Comer Beer Joint" tells a whole chapter of the story, from the time the woman throws in the towel to the point where her spirits are rising again, through the repetition of some five phrases.

Then there's the band. Willie recorded at Muscle Shoals, using some of the sessionmen there. Johnny Gimble, a veteran of the Bob Wills band, kicks in on fiddle. John Hughey, from Conway Twitty's band, plays a steel guitar that touches as deeply as Willie's own voice. Matching Hughey with Nelson is really a natural, and I'm surprised it wasn't done before. The swing numbers here bop along like crazy, and Nelson's tunes combine elements of Spanish guitar, blues and rock to make a wholly unique kind of country music.

"I Still Can't Believe You're Gone" is the clincher. Nelson conveys an emptiness and despair so vast you just know the guy can't sink any deeper. The guitar solo seconds that emotion, and the piece is wrapped in the kind of lush, swelling string arrangement usually reserved for the Mr. Pitifuls of soul music.

Nelson has long been known as an exceptionally gifted singer and songwriter, but he's sure taken his lumps in the studio up to now. To my ears, this marks the first time that the complete Willie Nelson has ever been captured for a whole album. If there's room in your collection for even a single country album, Phases and Stages should be the one.

John Morthland

STEELY DAN Pretzel Logic (ABC)

Steely Dan is about, among other things, connection. It's the 3,000-mile live wire buzzing between 60s New England school days and 70s Laurel Canyon Showbiz, steel handcuffs linking jazz with pop, the Archies with William Burroughs, a shifting patchwork of vindictiveness and tenderness. Connection on all levels, deliberate and wildly accidental. Just before Pretzel Logic was released a UCLA schedule announced a lecture by one Dr. Paul Pretzel. The subject, suicide. Pretzel logic.

There are more, and shorter, songs here than on Countdown to Ecstasy, and while those maddening, fascinating references to private people, places and events still crop up, the overall feeling of the lyrics is significantly less obscure. The Dan evokes and suggests, yet the songs always feel complete and direct. The focus is soft, the production (by Gary Katz) thick. They seem confident that whatever you create out of what they suggest is going to hit the intended targets. The lushness of the music is tempered by their incomparable dry wit.

Though there's an uncharacteristic lack of import in some of the tunes ("Parker's Band," "With a Gun") and unexpected mellowness in others ("Any Major Dude Will Tell You/" "Rikki Don't Lose That Number"), it's the moments in which Walter Becker and Donald Fagan lash out from quicksand insecurity that remain the metallic heart of Steely Dan. "Through with Buzz" is one of the best. Here Fagan sings of a pal's absconding with his sweetheart. He claims, rather unconvincingly, "You know I'm cool, yes I feel alright," then must admit, "Except when I'm in my room and it's late at night." But a ray of hope lurches from the trembling soul — "Maybe he's a fairy..." (You know how it is when you just can't bear to think of another pair of hands on those familiar thighs...)

Another peak is "Charlie Freak," the story of a down-and-out denizen of the streets who sells his precious ring to our hero, then ODs on the drugs he buys with the windfall (chillingly described, short and sweet — "And while he signed his body died in fifteen ways"). The singer rushes to the morgue and returns the ring to the cold finger: "Yes, Jack, I gave it back, the ring I could not own." Go back, Jack, do it again. Connection. It's an evilly bouncy little tune and a stunning arrangement particularly when out of not where these jingling bells tumble in like an avalanche of ice cubes, sounding as cheery as the bells on the horses drawing Death's carriage.

The title track is an altered Steely Dan blues, slow and deliberate like "Takes a Lot to Laugh...", and Fagan sounds as if he's swallowing his soul. "Any Major Dude" would be great if nothing but the first line were sung:

Never seen you lookin" so bad, my funky one.

"East St. Louis Taodle-oo" is a Duke Ellington song. "Monkey in Your Soul" snarls, and "Night by Night" is what Traffic should sound like.

If some of the themes are minor, the music is always gripping. Ingenious, but blunt and powerful at groundlevel. As sensual and bracing as a hot-and-cold shower. Guitarists Jeff Baxter and Denny Diaz are the best dual instrumentalists since Ferrante and Teicher. Donald Fagen is mad and brilliant. Steely Dan is the best band in America (there are no Stooges as of this writing). Pretzel Logic is great. Connect.

Richard Cromelin

PROCOL HARUM

Exotic Birds and Fruit

(Chrysalis)

In the plush Grand Hotel, Procol Harum showed that they could smother, even with silken sheets. Exotic Birds and Fruit finds them going back to biting, kicking, and insidiously massaging parts of the brain that we're usually content to leave untouched. Musically, there aren't many surprises, but it's the best collection of new material they've let out since Broken Barricades consistent, solid, standard Procol fare that will reassure diehard fans who have been wafting patiently for the end of that rock-band-with-orchestra that peaked in Grand Hotel's suffocating baroqueisms. You can listen to EB&F more than once without feeling like a glutton.

Procol plugs back into the Home/Brok'en, Barricades, tradition, and occasionally stretches back for threads from days ,even farther past. The music is muscular but graceful, full of those shamelessly dramatic fcrescendos that make you want to pretend you're conducting a Wagner opera. While the disturbing magic of the early psychedecadent scenarios no longer abounds, Keith Reid's words, whether dealing with desolation and helplessness or the virtues of a fruit diet, are agile and telling.

It's the wholeness, the complete and harmonious relationship of words with music and of instruments within the music, that makes the album work so well. Gone is the feeling that they're merely fooling around with musical exercises; they're once more using sound to create vivid, vibrant pictures, dreamlike land and seascapes and jagged, surreal nightmares. Procol's strength has always been the creation, sustaining and intensifying of moods and atmospheres, and their return to that approach is both gratifying and entertaining.

While the group lost its chance to be a true force as rock "n" rollers per se when Robin Trower left to pursue the spirit of Hendrix, here they make some more than respectable stabs at uptempo stuff. "Nothing But the Truth," "Butterfly Boys" (that's the Chrysalis Records people — "playing with their toys, stinging like bees, itching like fleas... Give us a break"), and especially the Convoluted Lovecraft rhumba "Monsier R. Monde" are authoritatively churning and, amazingly (considering the massiveness of the instrumentation), boyncy numbers, rivalling such Procol high points as "Poor Mdhammed."

For variety, there's "Fresh Fruit," which display^ PH's new penchant for busking music. Cute and catchy, and if it's released as a single this summer could make Procol the Mungo Jerry of the 70s.

Procol Harum has never seemed so much a band as a music with a life of its own that has collected people to play it. While the band's lack of popstar personality divorces them from the mainstream of rock "n" roll excitement, the creation and development of that illusion will always rejnain a noteworth accomplishment. And the dream isn't over.

Richard Cromelin

MOUNTAIN

Twin Peaks

(Columbia/Windfall)

After all these years of reading these blandish, they-did-this-they did-that, this is good/this isn't good, I like this/ I don't like that reviews and even writing a number of them myself, I decided to interview an album. Remember, you saw it here first.

1 took both discs out of the two-record set and propped them up on the desk, letting them lean against the wall. Side 1 & 4 on the left, side 2 & 3 on the right. This is how it went:

C.H.: Hello.

Both: Hey.

C.H.: Feel like talking?

2 & 3: Sure,why not?

1 & 4: Yeah, O.K.

C. H.: So, how do you guys feel about being the new Mountain album?

1 & 4: What do you mean, "new"? Everything on us has been out twice if not three times; live, studio, Woodstock, you name it. But don't get me wrong, I mean it could be worse. I like Mountain.

2 & 3: Yeah, he's right. Like before I was made into this album I was a Blood, Sweat & Teats album. I've been recycled since the big vinyl shortage and all that. Nobody even bought me. Hell, they just took me off the shelf one day, loaded me into a crate with all these other albums and when I woke up I was this.

C.H.: God, are you serious?

2 & 3: Oh yeah, this energy thing affects us all.

C.H.: Jeeze, I didn't know it was that bad; I mean I read the papers and everything —

1 & 4: Hey listen, a good friend of mine was Raw Power, y'know the Stooges and all that, and one day they came and got him and the next day he was a Laura Nyro album!

jC.H.: Great wounds of God, no!

1 & 4: Yeah, it's all true. So like I was saying, it could be worse. These are the same tunes Mountain's been doing for how many years now? But what does it matter, they still kick ass, even without Laing and what's-hisname that guy you could never hear?

C.H.: Steve Knight. Yeah I agree; we used td call Steve Knight the most useless man on earth, but I still think Corky Laing's the heaviest drummer in the universe.

2 & 3: Yeah, I kinda wish he was on us. Were you surprised these guys got back together?

C.H.: Yeah, I sure was. I mean West, Bruce & Laing was such a joke, I went to see them when they first went on tour, and here they are playing "Sunshine of Your Love" like some neighborhood garage band. I sure was happy when Felix & Leslie got back together.

1 & 4: Yeah, me too. I like the way West screams like a pig being castrated whenever he forgets the words to a.song, or else just makes his guitar squeal. He didn't do too much of that around Bruce.

C.H.: I know what you mean. Nobody punishes a guitar like Leslie. Do you think the tunes on you guys are energetic enough?

2 & 3: Hell yes. Leslie just gets so damn crazy whenever he's on a stage, screaming and pulling up his pants and making faces and spinning those tuning pegs like the handle on a can opener — I think a lot of that comes through on this album, and hell, those Japanese audiences are just aching to get off on anything. Give them some music with real balls like this, and they're ready to tear each other's throats out with their teeth.

1 & 4: Say, you don't own us, do yoii?

CH: Well no, I borrowed you.

2 & 3: Are you giving us back?

C.H.: Yeah, probably tonight. Happy to get home?

1 & 4: Yeah, take us home tonight; I'm not spending another night next to that Jethro Tull album... always mumbles in his sleep about being God and how he never gets played enough...

2 & 3: Yeah, take us home.

C.H.: All right, in you go.

2 & 3: No, me on that side.

1 & 4: Steady as she goes, don't miss the paper liner.

C.H.: Thank you, fellas.

Both: Thank you.

Clyde Hadlock

WAR

War Live

(United Artists)

This is basic War, recorded Nov. 72, a handful of jerk and body bob riffs on which are hung the clean harp and horn improvs, the street comer vocal harmony slides and the nearly surreal but closer to the point vocals. War live sounds like War in the studio except they take more of their time doing it. I mean, a two-record set with a 20-minute version of "Get Down" and an 18-minute version of "Slippin" Into Darkness" is the sort of luxury only a very popular or very inventive group (War is both) can afford.

War seems eclectic by nature as well as choice. All their borrowings and gear shiftings sound as if they were come by honestly and accomplished through love of music, no pretense. Pure virtuosity. Never sounds difficult. Jesus. I always thought they would fall over the edge sooner than later, that their graceful handling of so many diverse elements would crumble under the weight of repetition, or disappear as a result of tasteful abuse just leaving the j and bb riffs. But this record is proof that War is strong enough to balance their R & B, just plain B, rock and jazz trans-interplays as long as you like.

Still, it's not a very good album.

They're advertising this record on big posters on the sides of busses in Detroit, but I'm not impressed with it and War is generally, or finally, impressive. The problem here is that it's just too much of what's already been heard on their past records. Being recorded live doesn't enhance they; performance at all — they don't need it, they already sound that way. All that's extra is all that extra time allows like Tee Oskar's fierce harp solo on "Slippin" " or the lyric jokes on "Get Down" (there's also "The Cisco Kid" and "All Day Music," more or less the same as when they first appeared). In the context of what this group has done, the record is a superfluous shot. On the other hand, if you've been meaning to buy a War record and never got around to it then this is the one, the summation of their last few years.

Richard C. Walls

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

1969 Live

(Mercury)

Not 70 still 60 on the tail where its dirty. In schools 64 we used to sit around presupposing the high ass larks that would go down when the jocks would sport a big 69 on the back of their sports-aire. When it was 69 we didn't care nor remember neither. Life itself was dirty enough. We Were leaning over the jukebox cruci-fix pissing kisses farewell to flowers fables and the politics of speed and desire.

Lou Reed didnt seem hung up. Not on this set. The cross dont seem his true shape. The boy on this record was riding a wave — seeming in a state of suspended joy. Longing checked in some roadhouse like Steve McQueen in Baby the Rain Must Fall. Not Mick Jagger no muscular sailor just ONE caught in a warp in some lost town and rising. The Velvets winding up the Sixties laying one long clean rhythmic fart across the West called Live in Texas; with Lou Reed winking right in the eye of that fart. I mean these boys may been outa tune but they were solid IN TIME. Theres nowhere higher while youre still in the body physical than to embrace the moment' beautiful stranger. Fuck the future man the moment you are reading this is real. Perform. ing is pain is pure ecstatic cut with adrenaline paranoia and any white light one can shoot on stage.

Its true pain when you are up there and cant connect. Like the veins plugged and the stream aint flowing and-people are watching and you break down on your knees so desperate to bust the spleen to feel and roll in the white coils of the brain. And who beyond the performer is the most hungry for poetry in any form but the children the new masses and Lou Reed KNEW it — never played down back then — cause he knew that youth can eat the truth. Like it's all "I've Had It" by the Bell Notes only a whole higher ground another land of a thousand sensations in a land we try to leave when we age oh I see my friends they say man I gotta simmer down its too much pain but jesus let me rock back like peter pan I'd rather die-than not take it out on the line one more time another risk is bliss.

That s why I love this record so much. It goes beyond risk and hovers over like an electric moth. Theres no question no apologising there is just a trust a bond with time and god their relentlessly relaxed method of getting it on and over the land of strain. Like Rimbaud we rebel baptism but you know man needs water he needs to get clean keep washing over like a Moslem. Well this drowning is eternal and you dont have to track it lambkin you just lay back and let it pour over you. Dig it submit put your hands down your pants and play side C. "Ocean" is on arid the head cracks like intellectual egg spewing liquid gold (jewel juice) and Lou is so elegantly restrained. It nearly drives me crazy. The cymbal is so light and the way they stroll into "Pale Blue Eyes" not unlike Tim Hardin's "Misty Roses" the way it comes on like a Genet love song.

And I love the way Lou talks like a warm nigger or slow bastard from Philly that THING that reeks of old records like golden oldies. A chord so direct it eel fucks you in the heart. I write Smith Corona electric resting on a huge speaker pulsing "Heroin." It makes my fingers vibrate. Anything electric is worth it. We are the true children of Frankenstein we were raised on electricity. On the late show the way that white , light strobed his body over and over like sex and speed and all the flash it takes to make a man. "Heroin" moving on and in like a sob.

And its all past Lou just doesnt shoot anymore. And I dont know if hes dead center like he was in Texas 691 dont know where he is at all. It doesnt matter thisset stands in time like a Cartier gem. The only criticize I got is the eyes the cover eats shit. Music like this so black and white so 8 millimeter should have been wrapped in the perfect photograph — a Mapplethorpe still life: syringe and shades and black muscle tee. L.R. + V.U. 69 are akool creem oozing soothing mesmerising like hypnos scooping wind down pain mountain. This double set is completely worth it not a bad cut always with it. It will relax you help it all to make sense the Sixties ended in a sea of warm puke delicate enough to be called art. And it was LIVE man with a few scattered rounds of slack applause a product as perfect as the mutualated victim. Theres no difference between after the murder and apres the perfect perform. And if Lou dont remember how it felt to shell it out you will not soon forget how it feels to hear. When the musics over and you turn out the light its like.. .'coming down from a dream.

Patti Smith

BOZ SCAGGS — Slow Dancer (Columbia):: Here is Boz doing a Motown move and doing it so swell, smooth, and (shucks) terrific that: "I just gotta say/That I just wannta hear/ It/ Everyday/ (In every way, baby)."

MERLE HAGGARD - If We Make It Through December; The Best of Buck Owens Volume 5 (both Capitol):: Gomers, gomers all: yr. cuhtree blue cull, er, worker; yr. hippo; yr. punk; yr. pink (nascent punk); jest yr plain everybody Jim. Country music is to real emotion as "God I'm a worthless piece of shit" is to breathin". Merle, in recent albums had gone off the deep end of "gee, I must be an artist, so here I am to bore you," whereas Buck has made truck of simple product and a dumb look. But when Merle lays back to do a whole bunch of other folks" fine songs and Buck strips what's left after putrid from his ton of recents: look out Denver, "cause here comes Kansas City; highly recommended for genre freeeks. And besides which, the thought has just struck that if Buck had a mind to (listen) he could do heavy metal country and be (you got it, babe) the next big thing.

NATURAL FOUR; THE IMPRESSIONS -Finally Got Myself Together (both Curtom):: The Impressions have lept (leaped) (laped) Cooped) (???) far above their recent efforts with a vocal effect music merger that makes the album title solid and gives the O'Jays room to run. The Natural Four are a return to that same vocal pleasure pasture, with an appropriate tush tush to this "the man is after your ham" bullshit that has plagued the you-know-what kind of music in recent years.

War, Side 3. "Feets, I see you dancin"." Ref. me.

SAPO: (Bell):: For those who yearn after the Latin hustle but are not quite ready yet to make the earnest search for Bid Dadoo God, here's a power move. What was them other guys" names, anyway?

BIG STAR — Radio City (Ardent):: The next big thing has become the search for the Next Big Thing: The new musical anus. Well, I thinks it ain't gonna happen, but I've been wrong enough in the past to give myself only a 50-50 chance of being right now. But, if it does happen, it's natch that it'll be a group (or person) that hits directly on the simple vitality that is the real basic around which all this classy cull and niteclub 40 (with strings) hangs onto the label. Big Star gets back to this basic and is one of the best mid-60s bands yet, with even the essential elements of hard and fuzzy production. Don't look for no next big thing. Just look for some Mighty Fine Music that suits yourself and your friends.

GOLDIE ZELKOWITZ (Janus):: Once upon a time there was a blues/ jazz/ rock band called Ten Wheel Drive whose lead singer, Genya Ravan, spent most of her time trying to outshout her own horn section. Now operating under her real name and with a batch of musicians that includes ace horn man Trevor Lawrence, Goldie Genya still thinks she's back in 1969, fighting Janis Joplin for the scream queen of the universe title. Do we really need a new arrangement of Sam and Dave's "Hold On I'm Coming" or, for that matter, an old arrangement of the Allmans" "Whipping Post"? Oh, well 4 gay libbers will take heart in one song here, "Walkin" Walkin" ": "Bobbi's in reverse/ She's stopped wearing - skirts/ She's livin" with Stephanie/ Tony and Lou/ The Fire Island two/ On a ferry every holiday." Old rook singers never die. . . ^

BUNNY SIGLER - That's How Long I'll Be Loving You (Philadelphia):: I'm trying to think of the type of people that Bunny Sigler would ap'peal to. Old Jackie Wilson fans. Matt Monroe fans. The executive secretaries of the country's largest cereal companies. Norman Harris (co-producer). I'm sure the list is endless. I give the album a carrot, because it is soulful and Bunny's a cute name, Ijjp