THE BEAT GOES ON

THE BEAT GOES ON

The Devil & Miss M

Bette Midler a virgin! You bet, the original tacky lady stars as the Virgin Mary in the nativity spoof, The Divine Mr. J (See May's Film Fox). Well, the fur is beginning to fly around that saga of the Son of God... Seems Bette's manager Aaron Russo has charged the Detroit-based film company with misleading the public by billing his star so prominently. Russo said that Miss Midler filmed the sequence several years ago in the early stages of her career, and her total time on the camera is very short. Russo also added that The Divine Mr. T is nothing more than a "home movie" and probably won't be released.

Russo should be so lucky. Peter Alexander, the writer/ producer/ director of the film informed us that his movie will be out in May or June. Despite Alexander's statement, Aaron Russo claimed that the National Entertainment Corporation, the Detroit-based distributor of the film, offered to sell him the film for $75,000 to "avoid embarrassment to Bette." Stu Gorelick, the president of NEC, denied the charge.

Russo also stated that many film and . theatrical ventures have been proposed to Bette recently, and when they are certain they have the right property and the proper conditions, they'll make the commitment. Guess The Divine Mr. J was the wrong property and the improper conditions, but Bette certainly did make the commitment. All for $250.

Jaan Uhelszki

Older Than Jesus

The oldest melody ever composed was recently performed for the first time in 2300 years by Dr. Richard Crocker at the University of California at Berkeley. Playing a reconstructed Sumerian lyre, Crocker sung the Hurrian lyrics, which have only partially been translated but appear to deal with love among the Hurrian deities: The tune, described by observers as "low and plunking," spurred no immediate record contract offers for Crocker.

Fraud No. 1

Whom Bom Thank You Fans

Ron Silberstein, 17, a student at Southfleld-Lathrup High School, a suburban high school near Detroit, was angry. Very angry.

One recent Tuesday morning he cut classes and stood outside a tacky two-story Southfield office building, flapping his arms to keep warm.

"You see those letters," said Ron, poking a finger at a large felt "SL" emblem on his school jacket. "They stand for sucker-loser. I gave those guys cash yesterday."

The previous Sunday, April 7, two advertisements had run in the Detroit News announcing an Elton John concert and an Ike and Tina Turner appearance, both at Detroit's Olympia Stadium. Just send your money in to suite 209, 28475 Greenfield Road, the ads said. Sunday and Monday, thousands of fans sent in ticket orders, and on Monday, more went to the office in person..

Tuesday morning, however, a story in the Detroit Free Press said that the ads were fakes — there would be no such concerts. Federal, state and local officials began investigating what could prove to be the biggest and boldest rock concert flimflam attempt in anybody's memory.

NO BAZOOMAS FOR GRACE

She's lookin' everywhere, just finds hide *n' hair, lookin' for some pearly pears to call her own. When really, if you read our Slick feature a couple issues back and believe anybody that writes for this magazine, what the good lawdy gave 'er more than suffices. Here we see hdr nipping into her latest victim, Al Pepper, co-owner of brand spanking New York rock bistro The Bottom Line. Al don't mind it all; it beats being raked over by militant pincers from Christopher Street, liklp last week.

The fraud was discovered when a publicist called the Free Press and said he thought something was strange about the ads because his office had done P.R. for the last Elton John U.S. tour during last summer, and he | knew nothing about another tour in June. In fact, on the date in question, Elton would be in London recording a new album.

David Bendett, president of United States Theatrical Agency in Los Angeles, the Turners" bookers, said that a G. T. McGinnis had spoken with him about booking the act but that no contracts had been signed. A spokesperson at Olympia Stadium added that it was unusual for tickets to be sold through anything but a bonded box office.

Later that week, costal investigators arrested two men and charged them with mail fraud, a federal offense that carries a penalty of five years in prison, or a $1,000 fine, or both on each count. Because of the Free Press story, most of the mail was impounded before it was delivered; officials said that money already collected would be returned to the kids when their investigation was completed.

The men arrested were George T. McGinnis, 47, who was apparently about to move into posh Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and Archie McIntosh, 26, of Detroit. Arraigned before a federal magistrate in Detroit, they were released on bail pending a preliminary hearing. McGinnis voluntarily surrendered; McIntosh was nabbed in suite 209, where he was counting receipts.

Bill Welt

Alcohol To Ashes

LA HONDA, CA - Glenn Moore walked into a bar in Redwood City, California, on a Wednesday night, when the bar was having their "All you can drink for a buck" night on beer, and four hours and two gallons of beer later he was dead. His friend Dan O'Rourke found him unconscious in his apartment and called the law, but Moore was D.O.A. at Kaiser Hospital in Redwood City. The San Mateo County Coroner's Office has yet to determine whether or not Moore's death was caused by trying to get a buzz off of California's notorious 3.2 swill.

Fraud No. 2

Dedicated To The One I Burn

A Hollywood agent and a woman vocalist were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for impersonating the Shirelles. The lid was lifted on the ruse that's been successful for the last five years when the phoney group was playing gigs in Phoenix and Omaha last June while the real Shirelles were appearing before 20,000 fans in an oldies show at Madison Square Garden.

Distance wasn't the only thing that separated the bogus group from the real thing. According to Lewis Harris, attorney for the real Shirelles, "The imitators fooled alot of people except that the Shirelles are black and sometimes the girls in the other group were MexicanAmericans."

Harris was quoted by Phillip Wechsler in the New York Daily News as saying "Alot of people really thought they were the real Shirelles, although many others said "They didn't sound as good as they used to." "

According to Wechsler, the indictment alleges that the non-Shirelles received $2,100 for three shows at Fort Monmouth and Fort Dix, New Jersey last March. Attorney Harris said that some night clubs that booked the imitators called him "to ask why the Shirelles were charging so little." He noted that the real Shirelles, whose string of hits in the sixties included "Dedicated to the One I Love," "Soldier Boy" and "Mama Said," make "substantially more than $700 a night."

The two persons named in the indictment were Charles W. Cascales, who runs a booking company called Hollywood International Talents, and Vessie Lee Simmons, lead singer of' the un-Shirelles. They wefe charged with conspiracy to defraud by mailing promotional literature to night clubs offering the Shirelles.

SIAMESE WEASELS UNEARTHED IN MANHATTAN!

Connected at the notochord,, Rick Wakeman and Sarah Kernochan have been joined since birth by Beethoven, Cecil Taylor, Fats Terminal and millions of other pounders of the old 88s. What makes these two extra-special is that they both look like Elliott Murphy, although Rick is trying for the CREEM Jim Dandy Mangrum Lookalike contest, and Sarah is definitely the toothsomer of the two.

Wayne Robins

NY Pulp Picks Up The Beat

As anyone interested in black music knows, the mass market rhythm & blues magazines in this country are the worst. Typically, they combine the dismal earnestness of junior high book reports with the blandly uncritical, casually ungrammatical assessments that used to fill the music trade papers. Depth? perception? even mere cleverness? Forget it. It's the fan magazine mentality at its most uninspired, interpreted by some of the dullest, most uptight writers this side (often, just this side) of literacy. (Not unexpectedly, though, the most readable magazines are those aimed at the really young fans. Even if you need a machete to cut throught the thickets of exlamation points, Right On! and Rock and Soul still have the kind of nutzy enthusiasm and snappy style that the other magazines apparently feel is beneath them.) The few really good black music critics tend to write for white media or black general interest magazines like Essence,' leaving the music papers" barren fields with hardly a bright spot.

I never realized just how bad the soul magazines were until I saw a Latin music paper called Latin NY which, in little more than a year of monthly publication, is a model for all black publications to learn from. First, Latin NY has style and flash, thanks to the design team of Izzy Sanabria and Walter Velez who founded the paper and gave it its funky yet solidly functional look. As WE-2 Graphic Designs, Sanabria and Velez are responsible for the best Latin record covers and street posters around and their visual control of Latin NY extends to most of its ads. But the paper is much more than a graphic exercise — it's attracted a growing group of intelligent, enthusiastic and dedicated Latin writers — among them, poets Felipe Luciano, Jose Angel Figueroa and Pedro Pietri — who can do a lot more than re-hash press releases. Already, they've done' the sort of self-critical survey pieces (like a recent two-part investigation of the "Latin music crisis") and no-bullshit profiles (many of them by Latin music historian Max Salazar) that the soul magazines seem incapable of.

Latin NY. concentrates on the stars of Latin music — recent covers have featured Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto and Charlie Palmieri — but never lets itself get bogged down in a hype. The coverage isn't limited to new performers, new albums and recent concerts — in fact, if there's anything wrong with Latin NY, it's a tendency to investigate the roots of Latin music almost to the exclusion of its latest extensions. But the historical, perspective on music is more than balanced by the down-to-earth interests of the rest of the paper. There are columns on food, Latin writers, consumer and beauty tips and prison life; community news, advice to young women and items about Puerto Rican life and culture right this moment. The proofreading may leave something to be desired, but there's more spirit here than you're likely to find in any ten other magazines. (Subscriptions are $3.50 in New York, $4.50 elsewhere, from Latin NY 234 West 55 Street, New York 10019.)

Vince Aletti

WAY OVER YONDER, HUNEY, LIES... WHAT?

Heah's Graig and his lady pony boyin' home in the woods which are either just outside Macan GeeAy or a coca forest in Northern Peru. The question is, what is Greg pointing at and why? What is he saying to Lulubell? What's her response? What are the horses thinking? Best answer/playlet to this little conundrum wins a free copy of the latest Martin Mull album. Git t'it.

Henru Gross:

Not Freeze - Dried

Bearded, shaggy haired Henry Gross sits in a rather lavish room (one of many in A&M Records" New York complex) and tries not to look out of place. Carrying a battered guitar case into the carpeted office with him, he appears to be a bona fide "Mr. Typical" surrounded by garish walls laden with gigantic images of Rita Coolidge, the Carpenters, assorted gold records and other exercises in two dimensionality. At the ripe old age of twenty two and with a rock career that spans from the embryonic days of Sha Na Na, to gigs at the New Jersey Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, Gross is decidedly UN-two dimensional ' and,between bursts of fanatical homages to comedian Mel Brooks, does his best to prove just that.

"Have you heard the album?" he asks, genuinely concerned. The album in question is Henry's debut LP, a ten tuned opus highlighted by diverse rock rhythms and Henry's high pitched vocals. "I'm really happy with the way that turned out. It was almost as much fun as playing bar mitzvahs. No, bar mitzvahs were terrible. But more of that later. Hmmm. What I tried to do on the album was stay away from idioms. I'm interested in melodies in music, which is why I respect the Beatles and Paul Simon. They didn't take one or two ideas and stretch them into an album. They took ten different concepts and made ten different songs. That's one of the reasons people don't know how to deal with me. They all tell me I gotta be Marshall Tucker or Livingston Taylor. Can you imagine? Now that's much fun as playing a bar mitzvah."

One of the other reasons people don't know how to handle Henry is that he is often apt to lapse off into yiddish dialects and recite Brooks (or Woody Allen) routines word for word. Once this is done, he invariably falls back into basic interview but keeps the comedic motor running for quick escapes. "I guess you'll want to know when I first picked up a guitar," he says in a Groucho Marx stacatto. "As soon as I was old enough to cut classes. I played guitar when I was eleven. I started to play the piano once, but I couldn't carry it around with me. I got into "some really godawful groups, like the Auroras and the Herd ("the Stampede of Sound") and the Tactical Peace Force. I played at the World's Fair with one band in the New Jersey Pavillion and it started to rain. We almost were all electrocuted. .. except for the piano player, who found humor in the occasion."

Through a stroke of luck (Henry does not distinguish if it was a stroke for the bad or the good), Gross, at the age of 18 or so, became the guitarist for Sha Na NaT "The next thing I knew," he says crazily, "We were at Woodstock. It was all quite insane with the slicked hair and the pointy shoes. The shoes were incredible. . They'were Flagg Brothers... originals. I quit the band after two. years because I started to ego out a little. As soon as I left, they became a big hit. I guess you could say my story is a "rags to v rags" tale. You know, "I came to dis countree mitout a nickel. Now I gotta nickel." "

Henry drifted around homestate New York for awhile playing everything from coffeehouses to massive bar mitzvahs as part of a 20 piece orchestra. "It was like playing at Altamont every night," he fondly remembers. "There I was, playing polkas at the Schnapp affair." He took his songs to N.Y.C. where he met Terry Cashman and Tommy West; I was surprised when they said they'd listen and even more surprised when they liked what they heard. Two weeks later I was signed to'A&M."

The result of this fruitful union features everything from a rocking ode to a porno king ("You don't need no handsome face/fancy suits or resume/If your parts are all in place") to a poetic little ditty entitled "Fly Away" which offers the woman's point of view after a night with a not-so-memorable romantic fling. ("I was tired of hearing Rod Stewart singing "In the morning don't say you love me," " Henry says. "It was time that a woman got her chance to say something.")

Gross, who seems to get a charge out of doing the unexpected on cue, takes pleasure in saying something funny onstage; "I love to hear the audience laugh. It's the best feeling I've ever had. I like people to know that I'm not a rock lord and master, or a superstar asshole. I like them to know that I'm normal. Or as normal as they are. You can't write about everyday things if you're not an everyday person. I wish I was funnier though, so I could be a comedian."

Finishing off with a few perfunctory notes about hoping that success won't make him crazy and how important his family is, Henry dashes off for a date at Max's Kansas City. Upon arrival, Henry is told that the headliner has been taken off the bill because of illness and that he may have to be a little more entertaining than usual. Henry responds in the only manner he knows how. Calling his road manager up on stage, he has the spindly lad do a buck "n" swing dance whilst the Gross band fiddles away in high stepping furor. The audience loves it. The road manager, nearly collapsing, loves it. And Henry grins into the mike and says the whole thing is a "pisser of a good time."

Ed Naha

AERODYNAMICS MARCHES ON

In opposite directions, in fact. At the same time, what's more. All for the continued good health of the Sgt. Pepper tradition and Good Music, as you'll believe. The young lady pictured here is Ms. Geri Miller. You may not know who she is, but then she doesn't know you either. Too bad. Anyway, she'll only go out with you if you look and can shake 'em down exactly like Andy Warhol. Andy was Geri's date at a recent prominent party in New York City attended by absolutely nothing but the most up-to-the-minute in instant celebrities, my dear. So up-to-the-minute, in fa&t, that nobody outside of the room had ever heard of them. Andy was just there, in a purely politically motivated appearance, as Guest of Honor. Even Emmett Grogan, who was not present but sent a peacoat as a gesture, will know why when Andy runs for Mayor of NYC next year. Meanwhile Geri just says, "Oh yum, that li'l white-haired stud just keeps me wheezing for more! And could give you a few lessons, Mr. Todd Rundgren!" Geri's been around — she carried spare tubes for the Rolling Stones on their 1972 American Tour, she's been Cherry Vanilla's chauffeur, she's edited several of Arthur Kane's home movies — but neither she nor her many fans ever heard rumor of a more sparkling gala supper than the one pictured above, a quiet little exclusive gathering in honor of the world-famous Electric Light Orchestra. Gin and tranks were served with liver on the side, and Geri broke "everybody" up when, as shutterbugged here, she hopped a table-top and executed 3 hours and 48 minutes of her legendary "Pas de Un Commemmoree le mort de Jacques La Lanne." Notice the counter-spirals. Her real (before Andy) name is John Le Carre.