When In Doubt Kick Ass!

For any magazine to try to sum up a whole section of the country in a single issue, much less one article, would seem mighty presumptuous, The “South,” after all, consists of several regions wherein the customs vary: the Gulf Coast and Louisiana bayous, the Mississippi Delta, the Appalachians, etc, Nevertheless, we at CREEM are bored with glam, with rock chauvinism, with the narcissistic infatuation with being bored itself: we're excited about the music coming but of the South tight now, and plan to report on its vast and largely untapped resources extensively in ihe coming year. (Actually we were just looking for a new market to exploit after using up the trendies.)

So we sent some of our own down there, and they came back with a CREEM’s eye view of Southern mores and myths on several levels, along with a genuine love and respect for almost everyone they met while Carpetbagging. The following is the result of teir investigations, and while somewhat superficial can be taken as a mood elevator, an entry to parts of these States and a state of mind that's not nearly as alien as many Yankees mistakenly believe. Or, as one of our New York friends said on the phone the other day when we told him we were doing story on the Southern mentality: “I didn't know there was one. ” There is. There is also an abiding and unaffected warmth, and a raunch that can't be belied. Incidently, the title was a bit of quotable advice delivered to your editor in Grant's Lounge in Macon, Ga., one steamy night, and serves as a motto for the South in general. — Ed.

SOUTHERN SEX: Rhett and Scarlet Regained, Sort Of

A young lady of Gulf States extraction, whose identity will never be divulged here, had the following to say about the quality of Southern malehood:

think the psychology is incredible, because it’s rather perverse and really Romantic, Like they like the idea of fucking better than fucking. They like the kind of Clark Gable ala Rhett Butler sweep-her-off-her-feet scene.”

So it's all a big buildup with nothing behind it?

“Yeah, it’s like a real play. They’re into the movie of it. They only ball because that’s the way the movie ends.”

So you think physically they don’t get much satisfaction out of it?

“Well, they come, if that’s satisfaction, but I don’t think they’re into the sharing or the relating that’s there. They’re constantly playing a role, and that’s why they’re lousy lovers. It’s because they wanta be sure that they itake off their shirt right, and they say the right thing. I don’t think it’s that they’ve seen too many movies so much as the Southern upbringing. And the movies, and the books, and the way. their, parents feed them all this stuff about the movies and about the way love should be. I think they have the hardest time falling in love of anybody. Or even getting infatuated, really. It’s just that they feel that they should have a woman, so they seek out somebody they can tolerate.”

They like each other better than they like women?

Si “Oh yeah, a lot better. Hell, they like guns better than women.”

To what extent do you think this is a manifestation of repressed homosexuality ?

“To a large extent, I think homosexuality has two. main veins in the South, You run into people who are screaming queens or they’re closet cases.”

Do you think a lot of the men you’ve gone to bed with who feel obligated to pull a macho riff are closet cases?

"Yes, I do."

Are they real narcissistic about their bodies?

Either that or totally paranoid."

Afraid you’ll think they’ve got a pigeon Chest or something.

They'd tike to have a woman that they can chain to a bed, with just enough chain to reach the kitchen."

"Yeah they want the room dark, and they only want to make love at night, and they don’t ever want to make love, outdoors.”

Then there’s all sorts of peculiar fetishistic rituals.

“Limitations Really limitations. It’s gotta fit their mood. You can see why so many of them are closet cases; the South is such a psychologically sick scene, it’s all super-domineering mothers and really wimp... oid fathers who get pushed around. And yet all the men are taught by their fathers, who are nothing but jackasses, to worship women.” There seems to be a contradiction here. They worship women, and yet you have told me that they like guns better than women, and that they don’t want a romantic relationship with a woman, They want a woman sort of like as a nigger?

TOURISM & WELL BEING DEPT Things NOT To Do Down South

1. Don’t walk past a car full of rednecks and holler: “Hey, redneck! How’s your cool head? Hope you git it!”

2. Do not under any circumstances act like an effete snob. If you are one, to paraphrase the Staple Singers, repress yourself.

3. Don’t think just because the locals are getting loose you can just drool up and make indecent propositions to Southern ladyhood.

4. Don’t think, either, that just because you’re white and down South you can get away with walking into a black neighborhood and comporting yourself with less decorum than you would in Watts, Harlem or Inner Detroit.

“Yeah, like there’s one quote here that I can give you that’s really incredible, and you’ll hear it said not only by rednecks but hip guys etc. who are really chauvinists. And they say that they’d like to haye a woman that they can chain to a bed, with just enough chain to reach the kitchen; Anif that’s really a strange attitude. Andpf|rnean I’m not real heavy Women’s Lib or anything.”

You’re life an alternative to heavy stereotypic Women’s Liberation. You ’re doing what you want to do and having a good time... Do vou find that the men you 're with oftentimes have trouble getting it up?

“No, not really getting it up. But maybe getting into the sensuality of it.”

They’re real stiff.

“Yeah: They can get if up, I guess. If they ever can’t, it's because of a certain situation. Something .you said, or something they saw.”

You find that you have to mind your P’s and Q’s around them?

“Yeah, they’re kind of fragile. Their egos and psychology are fragile."

Essentially what you’re saying is that Southern men are a bunch of sissies.

“Yeah. They’re pussies. Oh, I know lots of Southern women who would say that. This is said all the time.”

What about Southern women, then? Are they frustrated?

“No, I think Southern women are a pretty loose bunch. Iffou - get real extremist cases in the South here} always, whether you’re talking about men, women, weather...” (Laughs.) “I think that if the women here are not very loose then you’re not ever going to see them because they’ll be so uptight that they’re in the bedroom With their door closed, probably beating off. But women for the most part here are a lot looser than they act; they have to act coy, you know, or else the men split, because it’s threatening to them. “I think women in the South are really united, even though it’s not Women’s Lib at all..."

They’re willing to play the game, became they know that they’re on top.

“Women here are very together as a group; I don’t find a lot of heavy competition here. When I go to the North I find a lot of competition and no warmth between women, and 1 imagine that their relationships with men must be even more screwed up. Because they depend on men, whereas the women here, if the relationship don’t go well, they just say fuck it. Here it’s a way of life, for the natives anyway, you’re brought up feeling that women should be very close, and there’s a lot of affection among women. And I’d say more so with the men too than up North. I didn’t see men up North hug each other, and men down here, non-gay men do all the time. I have never had an out-and-out sexual relationship with another woman.”

And yet you have told me that there are hip people quote unquote who think you ’re gay in Atlanta?

“Oh, yeah; They all think we’re gay. Because we’re very physical. When we go to shopping centers, oh, it’s-real heavy. We walk along arm in arm, or with our arms around

other or holding hands, we do that a lot low peoples’ minds because it’s the South and we don’t care. People just avert their eyes completely, they won’t look at you, they grab their children away from you, like ‘Susan, come here!’ yanking kids over to the side like they don’t want them, to stand dose to you or something. .

Nobody here’s .trying to get a reputation as a dyke; people just give you the reputation. Because they think it would be cool for you to be a dyke. It gives them something to be excited about it’s better than the soap operas. Everybody in the South needs something to talk about, gossip’s heavy. People have gossip sessions all the time, secret meetings we call them, where you have klan... clandestine group of people meet at this place and just gossip. And only the people that are invited to the session go, and they never tell anybody else that they go. What else is there to do? I don’t think gossip’s vicious, it’s entertaining, it’s a hell of a lot better than television.”

SOUTHERN SEX, Part 2: Tourist Trapping

Another young lady of our acquaintance, Nancy Alexander of Southfield. Mich., came back from her vacation in Florida with a report on the latest tines used by the local boys in hopes .of inveigling her into their hammocks. They were these.

1. “Gol-lee, you’re more fun than a hunnerd dollar whore!”

2. “I bet you don’t like niggers, do ya?”

3. "Gee, I could talk to you for a whole two hours!"

4. When she wouldn't come in his room: It'd only lake a minute!”

PHIL WALDEN: All In The Family

Phil Walden started booking bands into the fraternity dances while still a student at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. he thought, better than selling suits, Booking an act railed, Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, he had his head turned around by young lead singer Otis. Redding, and it wasn’t long after that that he began managing Redding’s career from an office they painted together in Macon’s Robert E. Lee Building. It was an association that was to continue through Redding’s superstardom to his death in 1967. Along the way Phil picked up Paragon Booking and two sheet mu sic comparties, and now he is the president of Capricorn Records, which has brought you the Allman Brothers among others and is a very modem and hip record, company but nevertheless every inch a Southern operation.

Phil has Chagall originals on his wall, and keeps a case of J&B Scotch in his office. He is a big, warm, voluble dnan, and sometimes in the afternoons he likes to sit around the office with visitors and talk and slug down the Scotch-and-waters, which he makes 50-50 and can drink more of than ten Brendan Behans. He mixed me one, we sat down, and as we talked I noticed that his face began to change shape, becoming squarer, more rubbery, almost froglike. But he never lost command, and he never does. We begad by talking about the Support Southern Music riff, which is a seen on buttons and stickers all over the South, and has become something akin to a religion among both fans and music business people down here.

“A lot of Southerners," explained Phil, “are very proud of being... Southern. This doesn’t mean that they endorse Southern politics or politicians, although there has been a wind of change by people like Jimmy Carter."

It should be noted here that Phil Walden is good friends both with Jimmy Carter, new Governor who might be considered the John Lindsay of Georgia and invited Dylan out to the manse during his recent tour (Bob came), and Ronnie "Machine Gun" Thompson, Mayor of Macon who earned his unquestionably colorful nickname when he purchased with city funds not only a machine gun but a full-scale tank with the American flag painted on the side. Just keeping the niggers reminded.

"Southerners," continued Phil, "are very involved in neighborhoods, school spirit and such; this carries over through various phases of life. This group goes to high school, a lot of them attend the same college and settle in lake or beach homes in the same area; it might even be cliquish to a certain extent. And now with the political thing changing in the South, and Southern music getting more political, it just gives you a great sense of pride, going all the way from the street people to the record people. Now they see that the business community as such is honoring rock *n* roll, it's a major victory for the Southerner.

"Family life is very vital in the South. Maybe" it relates from rural days, when you lived out in the country you hoped you had a lot of brothers and sisters, because that's the only god-damn people you had to play with. You might have to walk Five miles to play with a kid. I know people that still play cards in country clubs together, they've been hangin' with the same little group since grammar school. Guy that went with a girl in grammar school and then married the girl after she got outa college. Why did 'e marry her, just because her family was friends of his family.

“I think the Allman Brothers are the beginning of a Southern renaissance. Because people are becoming more and more involved. Rather than fleeing the South as in the past, you’ll find creative people both black and white staying. And this is where the culture has always come from - literature, food, music, you name it,

“The people down here are also very direct. A redneck will tell you if he does not like you. He won’t wait till you, walk away, and then shoot you in the back. In fact, he’ll probably shoot you in the face. You know exactly where you stand with ’ini.

“There has been a tendency to stereotype Southerners, however. Every time in the old days when Time magazine would come down and want to talk about the race issue, they wouldn’t {go to a professor at the University of Georgia or something, they’d go down to a little town with a population of about 62, go to a filling station, say; ‘What-do you think about the race issue?’ ‘Ain’t no issue, I hate niggers, gon’ hate ’em always, kill ’em, that’s the only way to solve the problem.’ Then they go up North and go to Harvard, get some brilliant guy to make a statement,-and say, ‘Look at the difference, between the South and the North.’ ”

RIC HIRSCH / WET WILLIE: Violence In The Breeze

Ric Hirsch plays lead guitar in Wet Willie, one of the finer new bands to emerge from tile South. I cornered Ric in a Capricorn coop and pressed the only known Jewish lead guitarist in a Southern rock band for some local social-ethnic color. Do you, I gnarled, Support Southern Music?

“I don’t know why that came about,” dodged Ric. "It’s been around a long time. I heard Southern musicians saying that five years ago.”

It’s kinda like still fighting the Civil War in a way.

“Kinda like that, I'm a Johnny Reb, but I'm not real hard core, kill the niggers and all that stuff.”

You don’t seem as reactionary as most of the other people I’ve met down here. What in the hell’s the matter with you?

"I guess I'm just weird."

Mike Hyland, who handles public relations for Capricorn, was standing in the room, and I remarked to him that he’d once told me that all those Tennessee Williams/Erskine Caldwell stereotypes about the South were true. He looked a little nervous: “I said that?”

“It’s true to a point,” said Ric. “The people who would tend to be more in that bag are the real old Southern aristocrats, whose families have been here since the Civil War and things like that. I think it’s beautiful here. I like to just lay back and look at it. It’s really smooth, just sitting down feeling a breeze coming across the bay; it’s really peaceful, It’s not rapid, or fast-paced.”

I’ll never forget the time that CREEM publisher Barry Kramer, my co-editor Ben Edmonds and I spent two days in Macon, Ga., as guests of Mike and Capricorn. By the second day Barry was getting itchy, climbing the walls: "But what are we gonna do?"

SOUTHERN BEER: A Grand Old Flagon

When in the South, it is considered unpatriotic to drink any beer other than Pabst Blue Ribbon, or a mediocre subsidiary brand called Red, White & Blue. Although Jax is a local legend, and Schlitz is big with the frats. There is also a cheap Dixie Beer which doesn’t amount to much, and bourbon drinkers have been talking for years about a really sour mash called Rebel Yell (“Made Exclusively For the Deep South”).

When Freddie Cannon sang “Way down yonder in New Orleans... with those beautiful queens," he wasn't talking about playing cards.

"Get laid back," said Ben, lighting a joint.

"But we did that yesterday!" Barry broaching hives.

"Well," smiled Ben, exhaling, "get laid back again."

Ana yet, I pressed kic eignt montns later, there seems to be a lot of violence in the South, or at least repressed violence. And there is certainly a mystique among Southern men about guns.

"There's violence in the North and everywhere else. I've had guns ever since I can remember, I don't know why you haven't. People just like to collect guns."

I don't mean they like to collect 'em, I mean they like to pack 'em.

"Well, there's a lot more rural areas, where people like to hunt, than you'd find up North in the cities. Just because somebody has a rifle on a rack in the back of their pickup truck don't mean they're gonna kill somebody ridin' by on a motorcycle."

SOUTHERN DOPE Better Than The Exorcist

It’s damn good. Our traveling correspondent, who ordinarily hates marijuana (paranoid), smoked it all the time he was there and reports that it was good enough that when he went to see The Exorcist on it, he kept closing his eyes, not in fear (everybody in the theatre was laughing at the movie; crackers have been playing checkers with the Devil for so long they’ve concluded he’s a bumpkin), but because he was more entertained by the geometric lightshow like Miro paintings under his eyelids.

As with many other matters in this zone of the country, however, one must mind one’s P’s and Q’s. Because in the South you can get busted for just talking about drugs in public. They’ll have to let you go if they can’t find any on you, but still not without a fine.

A friend of ours who works for the Allman Brothers and lives in a leafy glade just outside of Macon broke out his stash one night, then surprised us by going through an elaborate ritual of locking doors and pulling shades the like of which we had not seen since 1965. Why, we asked? “We’re paranoid down here,” he said. But then, he’s afraid of fags too.

Then again, you have to consider that Southerners have an inalienable right to their paranoia. Because just about everybody in the South is interested in what everybody else is doing. Little old ladies with nothing else to do, busy dying, sit in front of their picture windows all day scanning what they can through neighbor’s blinds and counting the cars that pass.

SOUTH BEND: Rx For The Blues

Club Three is a gay bar with drag show on Peachtree Street in Atlantal To get the flip wrist side of Southern macho culture, we ventured into the dressing room to meet some of the local talent. The gay men standing around upstairs in sport shirts resembled a fraternity house more than anything else, but Southern drag queens are wild, intensely emotional, kinetic. Perhaps it’s an excess of persecution, though they don’t think so, but they beat the petered-out ersatz bizarritude of their Northern sisters all hollow with such extravagant appellations as Skagnolia, Miss Kitty Litter, etc. Miss Kitty Litter did an act lip-syncing, a song called “Doctor, I Need a Prescription For the Blues” that outdid Iggy

terms of audience-rape: she came out dressed as a total scarlet slut with a bottle of blackberry brandy in her hand, flung herself across tables spilling drinks, and grabbing customers in the crotch, climaxed when she tore the top off a vial qf pill's’ and poured a couple dozen red capsules down her throat, die front of her dress, all over the floor upon which she collapsed at act’s end.

She was unfortunately unavailable for comment after the show, but-we did Catch Shawn, who is black and beautiful, sort of a t-v Gladys Knight. We began by asking her what differences she could see between being gay and/or drag in the-South and North:

None really. The difference Between New York and here is that they’re doing it just for the money. We do it because we enjoy it It’s not like you’re just standing there mouthing a record. I moved to Los Angeles from Kentucky, and it was just doing a job. Then I came here, and it’s a very refreshing energy to convey, to the audience. I find that people in the South are the warmest bunch of people I have ever met, and that helps, because you hate to work with an audience that’s rather bored. Here in Atlanta everybody seems to know each other, everybody’s your friend, you never meet a stranger.”

What happens when you run up against some of these real hard core rednecks? It must give you a great sense of power, because you must intimidate them.

“When I run up against somebody like that I try ray best to work around them, because they don’t really understand what we’re doing. We’re strange to them, but they’re strange to us. But I’ve met very few what you’d say rednecks since I’ve been in the South.”

But don’t you ever get on a power trip, because you might wanna ball them, arid they probably wanna ball you, but they’re afraid of you?

“No. It doesn’t make any difference.”

You go on the street in drag?

“No. Atlanta is a more free city for drag; in Kentucky it’s against the law. Here you can get an entertainment card, and if I'm stopped I can say I work like this and have no other way of getting home, I’ve gone to gallery openings in drag. But in general my drag and the way I would dress in the street in the daytime are completely different.”

Does that bother you?

“Not at all.”

What do you think of the music of what you might call “gay-rock” artists such as Lou Reed, David Bowie and the Dolls?

“Who are they?”

TURN TO PAGE 80.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 29

THE BLACK STREET DUDE: Judgement Day Now

I met Cheechsitting on a cornerstone in the park of a. major Southern city. He was dressed sharp, passing time; I explained my purposes and asked him if he found that the “color bar” was still strong down there.

“The who?”

The color bar. Like is there still a lot of segregation ? Is it still as bad as it ever was?

“Yeah. You might find a black and white gettin’ together, but in general, speakin’ of the mass of people, they still prejudiced. Highly prejudiced.”

Is it still on the level of you gbtta step outa the way when they come by?

“No. It’s more hidden, most of it.”

Do you think there’s a lot of sexual elements in it?

“Sexual?”

You know, that they think you got bigger dicks and stuff.

“Yeah, that’s one of ’em right there, yeah.”

And going back to the plantations and like that.

“Yeah, sex got to do with it from that slavery point; they’s different colors of us over here now.”

Do you yourself feel hatred toward the average Southern white person?

“I respect a white man, he gotta respect me. Period. They’s all different races of people, and they can work together, but I don’t believe they can live together. You see where I’m cornin’ from?”

Yeah, if you put any diverse kinds of people together, so close together that they’re gonna rub up against each other and get irritated.

“Two poles attract. Black and white, they’re different, so they attract each other, but they’re both involved in the same evil stuck in America.”

Evil?

“Doin’ wrong. Not righteous. It’s not a ripoff, it’s just disrespect.”

I pick up a lot more race hatred where I live up North. Is it that they don’t hate each other as much down here, or just that they’re more polite?

“It’s more polite down here, but it’s in there. It’s just peoples’ nature. They don’t know why they hate, they just hate.”

Do you think it’s gonna get better or worse?

“Worse. Cause it shoulda been got better. Revolution ain’t gonna do nothin’, I don’t see no sense in that cause you all got all the artillery. God gon’ stop all that. You all can shoot guns and rockets, but you can’t shoot thunder, and rain and snow. I don’t believe no Jesus gon’ come and do it, or in no Judgement Day. This is Judgement Day here now. I ain’t gonna wait on my ass for Jesus to come back with a cane in his hand in a robe V everything.”

When you see these young Southern white hippie kids, do you ever feel like they’re ripping off your trip?

“My trip? What trip?”

The way you walk and talk and carry yourself. They imitate you; how does that make you feel?

“It’s not really an imitation; we are the ones that been doin’ the imitatin’, of white folks in America. When those slave captains brought the black folks over to America, they killed all the mothers and fathers and breeded the children like dogs. We had to take their last names. It’s like being born blind. If somebody raises you and puts just in your head \tfhat he wants to be there, you not gonna know yourself. We have been trained, but we have not been educated over here yet. And when you train somebody you train ’em to do something that’s not of their nature, just like you might train a lion to jump through a M loop.”

Do you feel like you’ve been trained to act like a jive street nigger? ,

“That takes up with culture, a person trying to be something and find themselves. Because they didn’t know theyselves. They don’t know where they goin’. Just pickin’ up what they can. They got to know who they is before they can really express what they wanna do.”

That’s really funny, because I know that with me and most of the white kids I know, we imitated you: our music, the way we talk, when I walk down the street I shuffle and move around like this, the way I dance, the way I might come on to a chick: “C’mere bitch! I want it!” And I picked it up listening to you.

“You know where the black man get the word ‘bitch’ from? We got it from y’all callin’ our slave women bitches. This is why a lot of that cursing and jive talk came about now, because the only weapon a black man had in that time was his tongue. And time went on and a lot of it’s the same thing happenin’ in a different fashion. A neo-slavery, like. There’s still house niggers and field niggers. Times have changed, but the emotions haven’t changed. I don’t believe none o’ this marchin’ around with signs and all that gonna change shit. A black man has just got to do for his self. And he can’t do that till he knows who he is. I studied a little history, J know who I am.’They don’ know who they is down here. For a man to respect another man, he first got to respect hisself, and to respect hisself he first got to know hisself. You don’t have this you still back in that field. The way things are gbin’ now, though, man, this is the end. Yeah, it’s gonna go on and on and on, bijt there’s gonha be a judgment. Always is. Right now.”