KILLER FROGS IN TRANSATLANTIC BLITZ

Allen Park, Mich., USA - April 1974 — A bunch of us are in the Allen Park Hockey Rink, supreme arena of this bratwurst burg, watching BTO break on thru to Cobo Hall while the sweat off the pubes condenses in the air, when out comes this bunch of funnynosed dark-complected guys outfitted in spangles crossbreed Arabian Nights and hey-mofo-I’m-a-rockstar. They set up and begin to play this odd swirling churn which sounds like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” with Joujouka stirred in, so being the steely lobed old cynics we are we retired to BTO’s dressing room to drink up all those Mormons’ beer.

Which is where, later, I first met Les Variations,, the world’s first FrenchMoroccan hard rock band. They return from their set bouncy with distinctly anti-gallic cheer, and assert themselves most ingenuously; “Alio, Lestair, I am Alain Tobaly, zees eez my brothair Marc who plays lead guitar, that’s our drummer Jacky Bitton and Jo Leb who zings, we love America and rock ‘n’ roll, ’ey man, you like Vats Domeeno?” Meanwhile the frosting on the cake is this semiportly guy about 40 years old standing in the corner in black trenchcoat and maitre’d’s pencil stasche; that’s Maurice Meiman, and he’s the main chef d’rhythm ‘n’ druse in this band, i.e. his oud (a traditional Moroccan instrument somewhat like a gutsier lute, formerly popularized here by Ahmed AbdulMalik) and violin serve up the real swirling Arabic drone which is principally what they’re referring to in calling their first album Moroccan Roll and what gives them promise of being the first group to take the wedding of eastern music to rock one modal noodle farther than the Velvets did with “Black Angel’s Death Song.”

They’re a motley clutch of frogs and excited as hell to be playing this third level sweatpit, and the star of the hour is bassist Jacques “Petit Pois” Grande. Jacques has been pulling yuks right and left trying to talk in a Michigan accent, which from his French gullet comes out something like a catarrhed Mexican trying to imitate Donald Duck. But now he is preoccupied not unnaturally with things carnal, importuning me, practically, shaking me by theshoulders: “Ze groopeez, Lestair, wair are ze groopeez?”

“Look man,” I diplomacize, “I don’t have to hassle with that shit, I got my old lady with me.” Who then gave me a look that could wither a barricuda, as I steered Jacques in the general direction of the poon pool. There was indeed a whole row of them up gainst yonder’s wall, poised on high school cafeteria scratched iron chairs with their legs crossed smoking cigarettes, casting appraising glances every whichaway like iguanas’ tongues uncurling in a rain forest. But en route poor Jacques’ eye got snagged by one of the CREEM girls, who is a classical looker but also happened to be accompanied: “Ah, Lezlee Brown, ze beeyootivul Lezlee, I love you but you are w.iz zee uddair buoy, oh, what can 1 do?” Wailing his heart out, jeez, now I understand Charles Aznavour as well as why they lost the war, but I tried to set him straight, pulling him aside and epithetting him upside the ear: “Look, you bimbo, they’re right Over there, now get to it while you’ve got the Chance!” “Oh no, I love Lezlee, but zhe doz not love mee, oh ... Meanwhile Leslie is giggling, the rest of the room is in an uproar, and I’m getting to like these guys.

New York City - May ’74 — I’m in New York for Mott the Hoople’s opening at the Uris Theatre on Broadway, when who do I spy in the lobby milling amongst the general scenemakers and rock critics who have fled Queen’s set but Les Variations. First up is manager Alain to greet me'-so effusively it’s almost embarrassing: “Lestair, my good friend, how ’ave you been, you look magnifique!,” meanwhile hugging me and pinching my cheeks, practically kissing me in a typical display of warmth that had the prominent homos in attendance just standing around laughing. And the thing about it was that it wasn’t hype, he was genuinely glad to see me, as were they all, like a pack of frogified Will Rogerses they were so full of openhearted excitement an4 affection simply at being in America that the poor sweet fools just went around hugging everybody in delight. Now if you’ve ever been to New York City you can imagine what an incongruous spectacle their ingenuousness made, and further how they managed to charm the hell out of the rock press and most of the other people they met here. I ran into Jacques and even though he had a moderately classy groupie on each arm the first words out of his mouth were: “Eez Lezlee Brown here?”

Paris, France - July ’74 — I’m sitting drunk on absinthe in the George V, one of the classiest hotels in this burg, having made my way clear across the' pond to catch Les Variations, who have by now become myfast friends even though I still haven’t seen ’em live and don’t much like their album, on their home turf. Paris would be a great city if you’d get rid of all the people, who are the deadest, coldest,, glummest, most maudlin clot of sad sacks I have ever witnessed in one place in my life. I had heard of their legendary hostility and antiamericanism, and was hoping at least for a winebottle upside the head and “Vietnam war pig!,” but no such luck. Instead we visit all the old and legendary avant-garde watering holes, La Coupole, Cafe Flore, and they’re full of drab and beaten souls who’re whiling away the days with sullenly intense discussions of the comparative merits of Samuel Beckett and Robbe-Grillet. We’re at Cafe Flore and I -ask Alain, “How come everybody here is so gloomy?”

“It’s a gay bar,” he says.

I see, that makes sense, that all the old avant-garde watering holes would turn into places where old faggots hang out, except that it’s more than that, it’s' the French sense of clammily melodramatic gloom and defeat which comes from, among other excuses, taking it up the ass in two successive world wars. So I started trying to get ’em riled, yelling out things like “Do you realize that we’re surrounded by beatniks!” and “Is there an Existentialist in the house?” But it did no good, they just kept sitting there dying. I was beginning to wonder about this apparent contradiction between the open-endedly buoyant spirits of everybody in Les Variations and the suffocating, pretentious, ostentatious misery all around us, but then the answer may lie in the fact that Les Variations are mongrels, nomads, gypsies even. Yowza dey done come up de Mediterranean from their native Morocco, and they were the first rock group ever in France to break that country’s pop charts out of the stranglehold of traditionally bathetic ballads and thirdrate Elvis imitations like Johnny Hallyday.

Almost literally an overnight sensation, they have given French kids something to rally around besides whatever scrapings of America they can get their mitts on. And believe me, those kids are hot for what we got. For instance, did you know that in France there is a Robot A. Hull Fan Club? That’s right, and I even dredged myself up from the absinthe to take in a record store where they sell such things as bootleg disques of the Flamin’ Groovies (major cult over there), *Lou Reed (depicted with fangs on the cover), and a godawful jam between Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, .and Jim Morrison, who did not sing but played the drums (cover of this one a classic: skull ala Grateful Dead except with Hendrix fro and do-rag, and down in the lower left hand corner is an actual blood stain smeared on each copy of the album jacket). This same store also carries large stacks of dog-eared back issues of CREEM, going at undoubtedly astronomical prices, and the clientele of this establishment and numerous others like it, I learned, consists of a teenage French underground who call themselves Les Punques and do such things as wear black leather jackets, listen to old MC5 records and read CREEM.

It is out of this miasma of miscegenation that Les Variations have arisen like some brash beacon, first flashes of national pride as a stake in the rock dream, and it was in Paree’s storied sleaze palace the Olympia that I finally got to see them strut their stuff. I was up for it and more than ready to see a little bloodletting, being hep to the legendary hooliganism of Parisian audiences, who may like rock ‘n’ roll but only incidentally to coming to break the hall to pieces. Les Variations are somewhat' alienated by all this, being partisans of the pure musique as they are. Marc said: “I love the audience in America, because they can understand the music much more than in France. Here when you play they don’t under-, stand shit, they just come here to boogie, but not to boogie in the right way, just to break some beercans on the head of each other. When you just give them the rhythm it’s okay, but you can’t play anything soft or like that, but in America you can make them understand because they’re more cultured in the music.”

So Les Variations gave them the rhythm, Jo Leb shouting something that

TURN TO PAGE 76.

sounded like “Je suis un singer dans uri rock V roll band,” running to the apron of the stage, and edging back. Marc studiously avoided anything soft, tearing out riffs that reminded me most of the sorts of exchanges Fred Smith and Wayne Kramer used to get in the old MC5. Maurice just stood there, dignified and characteristically somewhat distant as befitting his seniority, sawing away at his violin in wriggling bellydancer soundtrack that somehow fits the rest of the band’s basic Stones moves in the same way the Roxy Music’s own churn managed to mate the Velvet Underground’s gutter slide with Euroclassical sonorities without emerging the idiot bastard son of Van Der Graf Generator. And the kids screamed and stormed precisely as per script.

In the several months since then Les Variations have produced a new album, a sort of concept number (a concept album, explained Jacques, is one where “all the songs run together... no break ... a little Tommy") which Marc calls “Our autobiography, about our youth in Morocco, and then when we grow up in France, and we go to Amereeca and rock and roll,” he says with unforced

enthusiasm, which is one reason this band may well make it over here. There have also been changes in the lineup, with the addition of keyboard palyer Jim Morris, and Jo Leb (who said to me last year, “I don’t want to be the star, I’m just a singer. In France people will try to take the singer and say ‘You’re stupid, I can make you star in six months if you stop to be in that band,’ and I say fuck off, f don’t wanna be on your system.”) leaving to make a solo album and a movie with Catherine Deneuve. He is being replaced by Robert Fitoussi, who may be hard for you to spell but’s a music biz name in France, was born in North Africa like the rest of the group, and sang on Yes keyboardist Vangelis Papathanassiou’s solo album Earth, as well as pulling off a string of hits worldwide under his own name including the number-one-inBrazil “Superman Superman.” But in the end it’s not personalities, or musical gimmicks (concept albums, heavily hyped Casbah-vibes) which will endear them to Yankee brats; it’s the same kind of unforced excitement which got to the critics, which a band such as Bachman-Turner Overdrive also have; it is perhaps their very ingenuousness which will make them stand out in any crowd at all. &