THE BEAT GOES ON

THE BEAT GOES ON

Hots Off to the Hell's Angel’s

Does the “D.C.” following the name of the nation’s capital stand for “demo city”? It sure did on “National No Helmet Day,” when 400 bikers on their customized Triumphs, Harleys and BSAs roared up and down the streets of Washington D.C. This was no film, these were, the real things who terrorize and destroy small towns and B-movies. They drove sans helmets through the sightseeing area of downtown, tourists gawking, undercover cops snapping pictures and noting license numbers.

Finally the bikers regrouped at the Washington monument grounds. The demonstrators, by this time boozing it up next to their spiffy machines, want the Supreme Court to hear antihelmet cases. Each time a case reaches them, the bikers say, the Court refuses to hear it. Twenty state supreme courts have upheld helmet laws; Illinois’ supreme court held that its law was unconstitutional. Helmet laws, said spokesbiker Gary Zager of Hillcrest Heights, Md., are en-

forced in all but four states.

And what’s wrong with helmets? It’s an invasion of privacy, chorused five bikers simultaneously. Who are they to tell us what to wear? Helmets endanger motorcyclists’ necks, said one. It impairs your peripheral vision, said another — “hearing, too!” tossed in a third. “And the perspiration runs in your eyes,” chimed in a Georgia biker.

“What pisses me off,” organizer Zager told the press, “is Howard Cosell. Every time Evel Knievel makes a jufnp, it’s the same crap:

“Cosell: ‘Tell me Evel, I notice you always wear your helmet. Is there any reason for that?’

“Evel: ‘Why yes, anyorie who doesn’t wear a helmet is crazy!

“Well,” Zager motions, “I think anyone who jumps over the Snake River Canyon is crazy, and anyone who has to wear a helmet to do it is a sissy! ”

Mr. Knievel was not available for comment.

Tom Miller

Von Morrison Honks Off

Van Morrison recently premiered his new band — a trio — for two nights at the Lion’s Share, a little club around the corner from his just finished house in Marin County. The band consisted of friends John Allair on electric piano, organ, and keyboard bass, Steve Mitchell on drums and gongs, and an unknown bespectacled alto sax player by the name of Van Morrison. Morrison proved an adept saxophonist, in what may have been his debut on the instrument, as he riffed along with the keyboard and occasionally took off on longer solos that bore the mark of his own vocal phrasing with

maybe a touch of Coltrane here and there.

The repertoire was at least half instrumental with Van also picking up the harp periodically. The most unusual piece of the evening was a long, basically freeform jazz piece featuring Allair’s keyboards, Morrison’s alto, and Mitchell’s cymbals and gongs. Though maybe a bit surprised at the subdued, ethereal tone of the piece, the overflow crowd remained reverent throughout and finally received it enthusiastically.

But it was clear that the audience really wanted some of those vocals extraordinaire and as usual Van Morrison accomodated, interspersing straight rhythm ‘n’ blues like “Got My Mojo Workin’ ” arid Rock Me Baby” with some old pop standards tinted R&B like “My Funny Valentine” and “Since I Fell for You.” But Morrison didn’t really seem all that comfortable till the last numbers when he smoked into “Ain’t Nobody’s Business But Mine,” maybe a theme song for the reclusive star, and a long, rockin’ “Kansas City” as an encore. He walked off after an hour and a half with a modest “Thank-you.” The place, was in flames. As yet, no word on any tour or recording for the Morrison trio.

WHY IS THIS MAN FROWNING?

Because those little things cascading out of the jar aren't Mexican jumping beans of which he has the foremost collection in the Western hemisphere. They're drugs. And Frank Zappa doesn't like drugs. For some reasons why, turn to page 40.

BOY HOWDY BLASTS OFF

Into a whole new circuit. In a slight departure from the standard run of rock ruckus, CREEM is sponsoring a Formula Ford in races in the U.S. and Canada this summer. Despite minor malfunctions which kept the car from completing its first race at Waterford Hills, Michigan (described by Sterling Moss as the most challenging small road circuit in the world) the CREEM-team and Boy Howdy expect a winning year. More than 150,000 fans will get to see the vroomer in action during the coming season. Driver Don Southan and the CREEM car are entered in 18 events for the 1974 season, including the Road America Wisconsin June Sprints, the Mosport Toronto Bulova Championship, the Indy Raceway Park Nationals and the mid-Ohio Nationals.

Robert Duncan

Great Moments In TV

Program: Outer Limits , Station: Channel 56, Boston This afternoon’s episode s. concerns David McCallum as a scientist’s retarded assistant. But the high point comes, as

we might have known it would, during the half-way commercial break. A painter digs madly into his paint pots, flinging oils onto a semi-cretinous sketch. Still, the music in the background is interesting. An announcer informs us that he has designed an authentic postage stamp. The man’s name is Peter Max. The music keeps getting better, and as the scene changes — to a group of 5 prints by Mr. Max, which are available for a non-cosmic $6.98 — a hint of vocal creeps in. _ r-i

Then we realize what was so significant abouLthe juxtaposition of this hyperthyroid painter and the music. The song was Tommy James’ “Crystal Blue Persuasion.” Are we to infer anything about the artist from this?

Barry Manilow

Fifth Reich Kitsch

I saw him at the Bottom Line in New York. For yahoos, the Bottom Line is the newest hot mutelite Gotham bistro, and Barry Manilow is the hottest new ice crearper ready to descend on tissue huaraches and make us all feel good. He’s got a chipmunk face with vanilla complexion, he used to be Bette Midler’s musical direc-

tor and he’s got a new Bell album and stage show which are so totally uplifting (C cups, insoles) that Barry possesses not just fans but people who believe in him.

For instance Toby Mamis. Toby is a carrot-friz kid who used to be a high school revolutionary. By 1971 he had graduated into rock journalism' and was writing reviews for CREEM which said things like “When [Graham] Nash realizes that people’s war will change „ the world, then he 11 be far out. A few months later he’d wormed himself past John & Yoko straight into the heart of record biz hype, and now he’s main man of a flackery mill called Famous Toby Mamis. So he calls me up one night trying to hype me on Catfish Hodge, and when I laugh in his face he says, “Come on, Lester, you know I wouldn’t hype anything I didn’t believe in!” 1

YOUR MONEY OR YOUR SQUANK

Here we see the latest rage in Angleterre hot 'n' trotting. This, woogies, is Alex Harvey. He's an odd duck with an even stranger show: in the present climactic sequence, he grabs a L'egg hose, pulls it over his noggin, and proceeds to rob the first three rows. You may think that's silly, but those getting tired of Jim Dandy Mangrum's gymnastics must certainly be pining for a new wrinkle by now; this is it.

“I know that?” I said, so he proceeds to reel off this long list of people beginning with J&Y and ending with Barry Manilow. I was incredulous. “Barry Manilow? You believe in the man that everybody from Ed Hood [NYC notorious epicenemaker] to [CREEM’s own] Jaan Uhelszki thinks is a joke?”

“B*ut lissen, lissen,” he wheedles. “I don’t get into it much, but the faggots love it! They eat it up!”

I don’t know how many faggots were at the Bottom Line that night; I didn’t take a poll of the audience. But I laughed incredulously all the way through Barry Manilow’s set, and even though I only heckled once and even that was a request (“Surabaya Johnny"), there was these two guys and a girl sitting at a table right in front of me. And I guess one of the guys was really pissed off because he didn’t have a date or something, because he kept 'glaring over his shoulder at me every time I laughed, till finally he was screwed halfway around in his chair, this clip-bearded postgraduate bunsitch with wire-rim glasses, keeping one eye on Barry Manilow and the other, beadily, on me.

Just one of the Barry JManilow shock troops, and they were out in force this night. Now just consider that Barry Manilow has a musical presentation which excepting the absence of a woman drummer and an oboe rivals the Carpenters’ for sheer pap appeal. He wears white suits, looks like a cartoon ferret (a wholesome one, though) with big eyes and smiles relentlessly flashing pearlies like a jack-in-the-box iceberg all through the set. He’s com-

DOLLED-OUT

Goddammit! After all the time and energy we've expended in the last year trying to convince you that the New York Dolls are the classic American badass band — not the mincing tooth fairies you might've been led to believe — and then they've gotta go and blow it all. This picture (taken on the sly at a high school prom in Guinea Woods, Long Island) tells the whole story. Thanks, guys.

pletely out of his mind, and so are his fans, because they’re sitting there rabidly applauding (and ready to roast the ass of anybody who doesn’t ride with the tide of) a long medley of TV commercial themes: “Dooooc-tor Pepper, oh yah yah. ..”

Sterile, sterile as Barry’s chrome smile, sterile as Pat Boone’s pogo, sterile as the only mouthwash that erases all traces of mung. But isn’t that what Pop Art’s all about, isn’t it fun, yah sure it is, and whether it’s Barry’s unfortunately not Ernest Gold inspired arrangement of Chopin’s Prelude in C Minor (retitled, with lyrics added of course, “Could It Be Magic”) or a little bit of relevance called “Sweetwater sJones,” everybody in this room is doggedly determined, teeth clamped like dex OD, to have a good time.

It is this ferocious pursuit

of happiness which makes Barry Manilow not just a putz but mildly unsettling as a sympton of one of the major viruses of our time. It is shrill, it is so dean it reeks, it is desperate. “You will LOVE ME or you will DIE!” “ENJOY, you insensitive scum, or we’ll slash your adam’s apples open!”

' You ever watch Stand Up and Cheer on TV? You should if you haven’t. It’s this show featuring the Johnny Mann Singers, a spiffysmocked and trousered Up With People type chorale stormtroop, chanting squeaky clean versions of the pop hits of the day while Johnny Mann, a sort of android Bert Parks, leads them on and smiles like a bulldozer. The whole thing is tied up in a patriotic Glad Bag, and ybu know it’s pure fascism. Well, Barry Manilow is the gay/ New York hip kitsch version

of Stand Up and Cheer. It’s like the seemingly amphetaminized gaiety of movies like Lucille Ball’s Mame. It’s like being told you can suck cock at Disney World. It’s death in an anti-depressant' capsule, and at its heart is the most perniciously insidious form of hate currently marketable. Or, as Barry says in his Elavil-flavorific rendition of Bette’s anthem, “You got to have freyyy-enhs. . .”

What a lie. For homophiles, Barry Manilow’s presentation is “gay” in the same sense as Carole King’s “You’ve gotta get up every morning with a smile on your face.” Now there's perversion for you. If I were gay, I think I’d rather be queer.

Lester Bangs

Killer Was Here

With the recording, industry doing its utmost to stamp out all bootleg action, Jerry Lee Lewis recently added his efforts to the crusade. Stopping for gas en route to a gig somewhere in the south, Jerry Lee spied a whole rack of bootleg tapes (which included a couple of his). When the station owner claimed not to know the distributor’s name — saying he showed up once a week and unloaded his illicit goods from the trunk of his car — Jerry Lee ripped the rack off the wall and proceeded to stomp it into dust. When the horrified owner inquired as to what he should tell the pirate the next time he came around, Jerry Lee growled, “Tell him the Killer was here.” The glitter mackerel who gather nightly at Max’s to sip sassy drinks and parry their impending fall into the realm of the faded and the suddenly gauche (“Gaucherie Don’t Have No Mercy” sang Blind Tangelo Do, and those words ring as true today as they did in 1941) have hid more than their share of country music in recent months. Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and a slew of lesser known Nashville types have successfully twang-strafed audiences upstairs at Max’s; none, however, has been as well received as David Allan Coe.

Joilhouse Rock

Columbia Records, producer Ron Bledsoe, assorted Music City luminaries, and Coe himself all feel that the ex-con from Ohio will soon be within whiffing distance of the stained panties of superstardom. Christ only knows why certain people think that a prison record adds two inches to the length of a gent’s bad thing, but given country music’s proven love for outlaws, real (Haggard, etc.) and imagined (Cash, Jennings, etc.), David Allan Coe may very well find himself fending them off with a rhinestoned number 5 before too long.

In 1949/at the wormy age of nine, Coe was confined to Stark Commonwealth for Boys in Albion, Michigan. From that time until the Summer of Love, 1967, he

never spent more than sixty days, on the street at a single tic, weaving his way in and out of various reformatories, jails and penitentiaries, and finally winding up on death row after murdering a fellow inmate who attempted to slip him the dick. During his eighteen years in the slams (a new country music record by the way, although Spade Cooley might have beaten it out if he hadn’t croaked in his cellX Coe occupied himself by writing songs and picking'guitar.

When he received a pardon in 1967, he headed for Nashville where, after two years of making the rounds, he mam aged to get a contract out of Shelby Singleton, who was at the time still hip-deep in

“Harper Valley P.T.A.” bucks. In 1969, SSS released Coe’s Penitentiary Blues lp. Another album, Requiem for a Harlequin, followed, but his career showed no signs of sprouting wings. And then, after a few years of scrounging out a living as a songwriter, Tanya Tucker, - Iowa’s holy oblation to Statutory Rape, happened along and cut his “Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone)?” Columbia Records was impressed enough to buy out the remainder of Coe’s fiveryear contract with SSS. His first album for Columbia, The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy, was released in May.

Today Coe is thirty-four years old. Well aware of those magick jailbird inches, he

crosses his two-tone tattooed arms across his' chest and grins. “I’m going to be a millionaire by the time I turn forty, I just know I am.”

Nick Tosches

Erratum

In the August issue Tube Whiz of the Month was mistakenly credited to Steve Rosen. The byline belongs to Rick Johnson. Also in the same issue, the illustrator credit to the Map of Hollywood was mistakenly left out. Our apologies go to Jon Van Hammersveld on that one. Finally, Boy Howdy was accidentally credited with the Terry Melcher review, which was actually written by Glenn O’Brien. Nobody’s perfect. ^

KISS BATALLIONS SMACK UP

Of all the tremendous and far-reaching cultural innovations which the rock sensation known as Kiss has wrought in our great land, certainly none can match the recent coast-to-coast Kissathon. Oh, it was indubitably a pink puzz: dozens of delirious couples smooching away like mad, for days on end, with an occasional break for a gulp of Big Mac and no showers. The mind indeed reels. What this magazine would like to know is, would any of the participants surviving this Olympic please get in touch and tell us when, if ever, you will be able to bear the intimate physical presence of another human being again.