THEM FEATURING VAN MORRISON

Backtrackin'

(London)

Of all the groups to emerge from the British Isles mid-sixties pop explosion, Them possessed an atypical magic. For one thing, they were Irish, which few of their fans wised up to until Van Morrison went solo. And any band blessed with Van Morrison for a lead singer working within a band context would have to be some kind of powerhouse.

Morrison quickly distinguished Them from the competition. Before he left the group in 1966, Morrison had already given fair indication of his skills as a writer as well as a singer. Yet even at the outset, Them comprised a better than average bunch of raunch rockers, cast in the dirty-fingernails mold of the Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds.

“Gloria” remains the quintessential Them track, with Morrison’s pinched vocal growled over a roller-rink accompaniment (shades of “96 Tears” to come). This early edition of Them served as the prototype for countless bands across thevU.S. The guitar and organ licks were simple, and Morrison’s Howlin’Wolf rasp was easily imitated: his singing in fact lacked the depth and nuance he would later exploit so effectively.

Small matter. Morrison’s early vocals with Them made up in rough and tumble power whatever they lacked in finesse. Thus his shrill jump vocal on “Don’t Start Crying Now” launches an otherwise wobbly track, just as his singing on “Baby, Please Don’t Go” helps the razzmatazz lead guitar push that song into near greatness.

Despite Them’s initial success as a blues band, the group soon left the simplicities of “Gloria” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go” behind. They began drawing on a wider range of sources: the gospel-based style of Solomon

Burke and Garnett Mimms (both produced by Bert Berns, who became Van’s American producer); the folk-rock of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and .Tim Hardin; and the jazz-derived r ‘n’ b of the early Fifties.

The group’s broadened range further distinguished Them, but it hardly helped record sales. The band was never able to forge a fresh identity to help sell its musical departures. In spite of the economic disappointments, Them continued to outclass their British counterparts. Morrison’s reading of “I Put a Spell on You” handily eclipses the early Animals verson as well as Alan Price’s baroque overarranged hit. The band had by now added a tenor sax, which enhanced the song’s boozy feel, and Morrison himself showed a flair for phrasing and scat singing that put Eric Burdon and Price to shame.

Morrison’s composing developed apace with his singing. By the end of his tenure at Them’s helm, hd was writing increasingly oblique lyrics, and exploring rock as a vehicle for personal expression. The accompanying music reflected these changes: the jazz-rock blend characteristic of Morrison’s later work already informs Them’s “Hey Girl,” with its flute obligatos and swirling acoustic guitar.

Backtrackin’ collects ten heretofore scattered tracks, as a supplement to Parrot’s earlier two-record anthology Them Featuring Van Morrison. While it lacks the hits (“Gloria,” “Mystic Eyes,” “Here Comes the Night”), it does contain “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” “Don’t Start Cryin’ Now,” “I Put a Spell on You,” and “Hey Girl.”)

How does Morrison’s work with Them sound almost ten years later? Well, ragged and rough for sure; but also vital, occasionally compelling. There are some quaint first-flushof-psychedelia lyrics on the previously unreleased “Mighty Like a Rose,” but there is also plenty of straightforward singing throughout.

After enduring the pretensions of Morrison’s most recent work, Backtrackin’ serves as a useful reminder that rock wasn’t always so turgid, least of all for Van Morrison and Them.

VAN MORRISON Veedon Fleece (Warner Bros.)

Van Morrison, I’ve been thinking lately, is the intellectual’s Grateful Dead. They offer an amplified nirvana, fueled by chemicals; he offers the dark night, fueled by despair, self-pity, ennui. In either case it is easy to listen, but I’m beginning to wonder why anyone should want to.

I would like to find something nice to say about Hard Nose the Highway, his last studio work, but that would be silly. It was a bad record. This album is not. It is a boring one, and in a way, I think bad records are preferable. They at least require outrageous response. With records like this, one must be careful. A little too much, on one side or the other, and the album begins to sound interesting. That would be misleading.

Van Morrison found his blues early, stepping out into the unknown with TB Sheets and Astral Weeks while Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger were still messing around with Robert Johnson and Otis Redding, But, like other prodigies (Bob Dylan comes to mind, and if you think this album is dissipated and banal, wait till you hear Blood on the Tracks), Morrison’s early acheivements have not been sustained. “Wild Night” was the last song he wrote which I can still get worked up about, though “Listen to the Lion” and “St. Dominic’s Preview” have hints of something grand.

But Morrison’s problem is that, since St. Dominic’s'Preview, he’s just kept hinting. He listens to his heart, and responds by delivering that unnamed growl, but I think that his function, as an artist, might be simply to name those terrors of the heart. Or at least get closer than we mere pedestrian moralists and listeners are able. As it is, he bugs me, man. It’s as though Thpr Heyderhal had made it within ten miles of Tahiti, and dropped anchor. The pleasant moments on this record, which are several, cannot make up for the brilliant ones which might await us if Morrison had only had the nerve to continue.

Charles Nicholaus

BADFINGER Wish You Were Here (Warner Bros.)

Badfinger is imitation Raspberries, and Raspberries is' imitation Goofy Grape fruit drink, which is imitation Kool-Aid, and IMITATIONS ARE BETTER THAN THE REAL STUFF! True, true, when No Dice came out with them perfected Rubber Soul and Abbey Road Beatle formulaic pinnacles, it stood the world on its nose, and Badfinger was gonna be the next Beatles. That all finally got eclipsed by the faggots, and no more of them Beatle wiseguys like Hamlet, Gluesniffers Anonymous, Gello, and Electric Indian.

Lately, tho, them “Bingo with Ringo” chants been knocking down the walls of China even and so the band called Badfinger hereto having the distinctive honor of being better Beatle imitators than the Beatle boobs themselves decides to fores feed us with another masterpizza, and, chimps, no Monkees coulda done better. f‘Know One Knows” has the band on all fours grabbing a Rubettes trick and actually speaking Spanish over the

bubblegum marshmellow international melodic structure of the tune itself (quite breathtaking like on Four Seasons Call It a Nite where Frankie Valli sends his mommy a love letter in Italian while the other guys eat cheese and salami on rye). “Just a Chance” rips the album wide /)pen with one gigantic sneeze like happens-only once in a lifetime. More, more, more! Side two goes fof two songs that are medleys which actually work (it’s a first!). Even all the songs that sound like folk piss actually are loaded with production, soap lather, foam from a Tide wash, etc. Lotsa extra goodies that combine to make this album one worth filing.

Cept it’s gotta be pushed. They’re pushing albums like crazy on teevee these days (don’t need promo men no more). Even the fuckin Platters who will have their own show this year right opposite That’s My Mamma. Everybody getting on the tube, but with ad campaigns that are worse than promo buttons. So we got Badfinger on TV to push this really exciting album, and they be imitators of previous, formulas so that we give em GREAT ALL-TIME COMMERCIALS to use to plug their record. This includes that one where the black Satan turd throws the water from Kimbies onto poor unsuspecting housemaids, yeah, and where the girl gets her teeth stained red, and where Tom T. Hall picks ticks outa this dog’s ear, and all the auto accident ads, and them nasal drip plops where the green snot is graphically depicted on the screen. All blue ribbon winners, true highlights of a medium that continues to giye ya a headache with Brady Bunch re-runs and a new season that’s got everybody re-watching Star Trek for the umpteenth time, and as one industry reflects another, this new record by Badfinger ain’t half so bad when considered in that light.

Robot A. Hull

RINGO STARR

Goodnight Vienna

(Apple)

The most enthusastic Ringo Starr fan I ever saw was not at a concert, because I never saw Ringo when I should have and I couldn’t get into Bangladesh although I circled Madison Square Garden in my brother’s car the night of the show just to let them know I still cared. It was at a discount store in south St. Louis, where a jukebox had been placed graciously alongside the cut-out racks. He was a chubby little kid, with thick black-rimmed glasses, and he boogied around in a circle,

arms extended, fingers pointing upward. The song was “Back Off Boogaloo,” andhe knew all the words. So did I, but I fished through a pile of singles, got my copy of “Can’t Explain,” and left.

The next time I saw an 11 year old kid in a record store whose enthusiasm equalled his, it was over “Live and Let Die.” “You got that single?” cried the kid in a hurry. “Give it to me! Here’s my dollar! Paul McCartney, he’s my man!” I concluded that the Beatles were as big as ever, which I could have admitted after reading the sales charts, but didn’t want to.

But these kids were probably not typical album-buying consumers. I bet, for reasons of taste or economics, they only dug the singles. Judging from their reaction, they were satisfied with what they got.

Which is understandable, because Ringo puts, out a satisfactory sound, something between loud pre-novocaine dentist chair music and “Honey Don’t.” He recorded that Carl Perkins single on Beatles 65, and it was a good song for him. He sang slow and thick, seeming as loose and untrained as the sloppy drumming that was his trademark and the happy-to-be-here stage grin that associated him more with being a fan than a star. The other numbers he did with the Beatles coordinated perfectly with their singles magic. “Act Naturally,” “Yellow Submarine,” “With A Little Help From My Friends,” and “Lady,t Madonna” are testament to the longevity of this peoples’ loner who kicked pebbles along the river by himself being ‘This Boy” and, in general, underdogged his way into your heart way back in A Hard Day’s Night.

The singles he’s released solo have been hit and miss, most of them belonging somewhere near a dentist chair and only two, “It Don’t Come Easy” and “Back Off Boogaloo” surpassing his “Honey Don’t” cover.

The fact is that Ringo isn’t very special as a musician, and singles shed the pretension that accompanies the last two Ringo albums, from ostentatious covers and inner booklets to the obligatory lyric sheet and an embarrassingly long list of employees. His greater-star friends, although they help him, tend to dominate, so that there are some very good things on Ringo and Goodnight Vienna — John Lennon’s “I’m the Greatest” is one — but they sound like the original artist and really^ aren’t Ringo’s works. Occasionally Ringo’s ingenuousness comes through and wins, as in his cover of corny Roger Miller’s “Husbands and Wives.”

But Ringo and Goodnight Vienna are like party albums. Everyone must want to play on a Ringo Starr album (or a Rolling Stones album, for that matter) to see what happens. Not much does. Those of us who confess to Ringo devotion have never said much about his first album, Sentimental Journey. When he. came out with Beaucoups of Blues, he earned some praise because by doing an album of country songs in Nashville (a new idea in 1970), he was setting boundaries, and that was good, because he has limitations. He’s trite and sentimental, and the only way he gets away with these bad habits is by associating with people who are experts at them like Harry Nilsson and the rising John Lennon. As long as he hangs around them, he will give us continued excuse to speak of him as a nice guy rather than as amusician from whom we’ve come to expect something. Maybe he’s that smart just because he’s so dumb. Oh well, I still love his singles, regardless of the fact that they are just as much a product of too many cooks as his albums. I never thought he’d do anything after the Beatles broke up, either, but he is faring at least as well as the geniuses with whom he keeps company.

Georgia Christgau

DEEP PURPLE Stormbringer (Warner Brothers)

A decent cover. A bit overstated, but good use of color. If the artist could mellow* his pallette just a bit, I think he could produce some fine landscapes.

Deep Purple is the No. 1 concert attraction in Japan. Others in the top 10 include Chicago and Cecil Taylor. Mai Waldron, too, although even jjazz fans in America only recognize the name hazily. What does “Deep Purple have in common with Cecil and Mai? Not a damn thing.

What does Deep Purple have in common with Chicago? Insipid competence.

I don’t believe I’ve listened to a Deep Purple album since Book of Taliesin, a psychedelic fave in my college dorm. I have never seen Deep Purple in concert. They played San Francisco last weekend, and the gigantic Cow Palace was packed. “There are lots of red freaks left in the suburbs,” Rico said. Rico is a stage manager for Bill Graham’s FM Productions, who put the concert on. Rico is also a prototypical San Francisco music snob. I decided I’d listen to the next Deep Purple album when it came out. Oddly enough, I found one in the store the next day. I took it home; After dinner, I sat down with a beer and put it on.

I don’t remember a thing about it. A thought occurred to me: 1 might have listened to all the other Deep Purple albums too. I just might not remember it.

1 just played it again, trying to pay strict attention to the music and lyrics. The music was a collection of readymades, cliches, if you will. The lyrics were even worse.

I felt like somebody was putting their mouth over my car and sucking my brains out.

Deep Purple plays. Stupid Music. Stupid Music is one of my favorite rock genres, something that, like all other musical and. indeed, artistic genres, contains both Good Stuff and Bad Stuff.

Deep Purple, considered in the context of Stupid Music, is Mediocre Stuff.

Please pass the Slade.

Ed Ward

GREGG ALLMAN The Gregg Allman Tour (Capricorn)

Those who saw and liked the live tour will like this album - those who saw and didn’t, won’t - and both probably for the same reasons.

On his own (with a 24 piece orchestra^ including strings, horns and vocal trio) — Gregg tends'towards a fuller, lusher and more ballady sound and style than in the work he does With the Brothers.

This album was recorded during his first solo tour in New York and New Jersey, and includes several tunes from his solo album, a few “standards” and a couple of new tracks.

The double set has about an hour and a quarter playing time — Cowboy (who opened the shows and also worked as part of Gregg’s band) do two numbers; “Where Can You , Go,” from their latest LPgets a stretched out funky treatment, with nice slide guitar by Tommy Talton.

On the other tracks Gregg is backed by regulars from the Capricorn stable — including Brother Chuck Leavell on piano, sax-man Randall Bramblett and Cowboy.

Two of the tunes fromsGregg’s studio LP grow a bit onstage - “Don’t Mess Up A Good Thing” has particularly nice sax work on it, while “Queen Of Hearts” gets even fatter and lusher sounding. “Stand Back,” from the Eat A Peach LP, uses horns to play the slide part that Duane did on the original track, in the middle break Talton slides in smoking.

“Feel So Bad” is a popping R&B classic, and showcases some nice slide work by Talton — he is so close to Duane’s feel and style it gets weird at times - makes you wonder if it’s on purpose or something that just happened by osmosis (Gregg did some session work on tunes of theirs).

“Dreams,” one of my all-time favorite Brothers tunes (from the very first album), gets a nice spacy echo-plexed treatment here; some of the intensity of the original is missing, but that’s balanced by the guitarpiano-string interfacings - a nice foggy feel to this midnight inside of the skull movie.

“Turn On Your Love Light” is the Bobby Bland classic number - it cooks along nicely. tho it suffers a bit in comparison to the way Bland used to do it onstage. But taken on its own, a good version of a favorite R&B standard.

The album closes with “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” - here it seems a bit anti-climatic somehow ... but as the applause dies down and the audience files out, you can hear the PA playing “Little Martha,” Duane’s last tune of the Peach album ... the circle is unbroken.

All in all, a damn good live' album, with high spots far outnumbering lows. Gregg is mostly a vocalist here, with only occasional organ swells here and there but his band and the arrangements are right where they should be; Bramblett, Leavell and Talton all shine in different spaces.

Not the Allman Brothers but Gregg’s vision and sound here, well recorded and packaged. If either his solo LP or live gigs were to your taste you’ll be really pleased with this set.

Tony Glover

MICHAEL MANTLER No Answer

CARLA BLEY Tropic Appetites (Watt)

The Taylor-Burton of the avant-garde music set( have formed their own record label and on their first two offerings we find Mike taking on that grand old man of the dour yuk, Samuel Beckett (and doing a rather dismal job of it) w^hile his erstwhile mate Carla uses the poetry of the incredibly obscure P. Haines for her own outrageous ends. (And if you know why the record company is called Watt, then congratulations, and if you don’t then why should you care?)

Mating Beckett’s bone dry and deceptive prose with music seems a dubious idea at best and it’s an idea that Mantler, on No Answer seems incapable of developing. Instead of embellishing or translating into music Beckett’s peculiar mixture of hilarity and.frustration, as well as the underlying nuances that subtly (deceptively) shift the prose from hysteria to slyness, Mantler has opted for the much niche accessible aspect of Beckett’s cadence, monotony. It’s a monotony without the depth inherent in Beckett’s writing, the depth of the joke and the horror. Jack Bruce’s mostly drone-like readings and Carla Bley’s keyboard stabs and graces fail to supply the needed blood (in fairness it should be noted that Don Cherry makes a few spirited appearances, but they’re just brief .enough to point out what is lacking). It’s a shame the record fizzles because the meeting of such genuine talents is rare. What Beckett really deserves is an oratorio with more panache and less linear fidelity.

On the tenth hand, Ms. Bley’s Appetites is fantastic. Ostensibly the music is informed by the prosody of Paul Haines, whose off the rubber plant sense of humor has a tendency to cause reservations - but no matter, Bley’s orchestrations have enough compelling wit and warmth to make the record just short of brilliant. And there’s Gato Barbieri and Julie Tippett (Tippett?) contributing liberal. doses of their unflagging talents. Rave, rave. Really, there are only two other records in the world like this one and they’re both scored by Carla Bley - Gary Burton’s Genuine Tong Funeral and Charlie,Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. You should buy at least one of her records. It may not complete your collection but it’ll sure as hell get you out of that rut.

Richard C. Walls

DARYL HALL / JOHN OATES War Babies (Atlantic)

Imagine that! They write songs like Todd Rundgren. They play songs like Todd Rundgren. They even sing like him. And all he did on the record was produce, engineer, supervise, play lead guitar, sing background, and something labelled as “etc.” Amazing. It must be that they all come from Philly.

The fact is Hall and Oates’' War Babies really wouldn’t interest me if it weren’t so dominated by Todd. Speaking strictly in terms of the music, the album might be able to stand alone without the True Star. But it sure sounds like some of those nifty riffs and syncopations were shots in the ass from Todd. As really shows in the lyrics, these boys can get a bit self-indulgent and trite, hive of the ten tunes (all originals by Daryl Hall and John Oates) are about the burning out of musicians. I could see one, maybe - call it, “It’s not Easy Being Green and a Musician, Too” or “I was a Teenage Frankenstein and My Manager Ripped Me Off” - but five?! As some sort of sociological metaphor, it’s a bit over-used after five songs, and as a commentary on the music business, it becomes totally unnecessary. And these guys haven’t seen the half of it, cause they ain’t stars. I suppose you don’t have to be a star to burn out . . . Well, if Hall and Oates think they’re burnt out, it may be, and too bad. But there is some catchy imagery and vital, sometimes haunting music in places on this, their third album, and it’s obscured by their excesses and the egotism of their producer. Give them some time. I, for one, would like to see these war babies all growed up.

Robert Duncan

JETHRO TULL War Child (Chrysalis)

Somewhere along the line, Jethro Tull albums stopped being fun. Ian Anderson discovered more and more knobs in the studio and started turning them down.

Well, they’re a live band. That statement looks pretty shaky just hanging out there, but look at the 'facts. As more and more annual albums roll out, more and more people nod off like they’ve been shot with bull tranquilizers, and with every tour more and more people storm into the halls of public herding around the world just to tear their clothes, bite each other’s faces and go home with wet pants.

Each year this Jekyll/Hyde studio/live dilemma becomes more acute, more pronounced, and each year Anderson does his best to make it worst. “Fuck all these critics,” he snarls, then goes out and does his damnedest to come up with something they’ll like, only most gave up on him a couple epics ago.

The same contradictions haunt their tours. On stage, Anderson’s contempt for the downed-out little suckers who raided cookie jars and lied to be there is pitifully obvious, yet no one breaks his ass more on stage, night after night until he sometimes ends up in hospitals. So, what the hell’s wrong with this guy and what’s wrong with this album?

Well, - the guy, for all his pretentiousness, is a desperately sensitive kid with a universesized ego.

What’s wrong with the album? Well, a strong plus is the fact that it has songs on it, actual songs. This alone could make some people do backflips after the last two hourlong monsters.

But, ah, a few of the songs look curiously like Passion Play leftovers (some even mention Passion Play), which some fans can tell you may be the case, as P.P. was originally a double album of songs done right after Thick as a Brick and then discarded for various reasons.

Then there’s the lyrics. Anderson professes a love for ambiguity. So does Ron Zeigler. So, you get things like: “Scoff at the monkeys who live in their dark tents/Down by the waterhole drunk every Friday/Eating their nuts, saying their raisins for Sunday.” Which may not be bad when you look at some of the other things that can be understood all too well. There’s a line in “SeaLion” that proclaims “There is no business like the show we’re in,” then goes on to say: “The same old performance, in the same old way/It’s the same old story to this Passion Play/We’ll shoot the moon and hope to call the tune/ And make no pin cushion of this big balloon.” An alternate title could be “Tull in the Studio.”

Swell. So, their studio work is buried under safe-as-milk tidal waves of mushy orchestration, and the lyrics slap the faces of their fans. What’s the solution? Buy their bootlegs. They kick ass ten times better than anything they’ve done in the past 4 years, and the band doesn’t get a penny.

Clyde Hadlock

KISS

Hotter Than Hell (Casablanca)

Don’t let the album cover scare you. Go ahead. Tell them you’re buying it for your kid brother, but take it home and play with it yourself. This is your basic crude, neanderthal rock and roll; real old fashioned raunch. With a twist. These dudes can cook. I realize this won’t win me any awards for sophistication, but I got up and boogied around with it myself. I’m advising you to do the same. Just for old times.

Now 1 could quarrel with the lyrics, but after “Get it off! And get your grandma outta here!” (first Kiss) I reckon it’s no use. And it’s too loud for its own good, at times; when the raw voices and the scratchy guitars all get going full blast the distortion is deadly. And of couse, an album full, of earthquakes can grate on the nerves just a bit. It is an album of deliberately startling ferocity, designed to dumbfound. But I give it three days to wear thin. I have a feeling that once my ears adapt to it the. thrill may wear off. It’s as physically assaulting as that.

But godDAMN if it isn’t almost perfect for its purpose. At first cringe the stand-out has got to be Ace Frehley’s very articulate lead guitar work. It’s that old style fast fingering calculated to a “t” just to add to and not clutter up the tunes. He strikes just exactly when he should - real breath snatchers that sear right into the thick of things at precisely the right second. That’s satisfaction, my dears. All of side one is a glowing tribute to that prowess, but “Parasite” is the one that shot through me initially.

Of course, what really makes it all hang together is the solid wall of bass, drums, and razor sharp rhythm. Paul Stanley grinds out the chords with expertise and purpose. It’s a welcome flashback to the days before everyone wanted to be Eric Clapton or nothing, and it proves that rhythm guitar work is neither dull nor doomed to be forever in the background. All it takes is enough imagination and skill to make it stand out. And of couse, cooking along nicely and precisely together are drummer Peter Criss and bassist Gene Simmons, a heavy yet miraculously fluid duo. Relentless might be a good adjective to throw in at this point...

Side One is the winner, a dazzling collection of rockers, most notable among them the aforementioned “Parasite,” “Hotter Than Hell,” and “Rock and Roll, Let Me Go” which is really getting back to basics. I dare you to sit still.

The second side suffers for two reasons: a) because after side one anything would be anticlimactic, especially more of the same, and b) the songs aren’t as much fun.

And I have more reservations. But why grouse? I don’t get a chance to say good things very often, so I’ll be generous. Give it three chances. If after that you still don’t feel anything but deaf, there’s always your kid brother. But mind that you wrap it in brown paper first.

Cynthia Dagnal

RORY GALLAGHER Irish Tour '74. .. (Polydor)

Well, I’ve been playing this thing for about 3 days now, thinking of every conceivable way to say as many good things as I can about it ’cause I’ve always been fond of Rory, but

damn it, he sure did make it hard.

Here, watch me go out on this limb a minute: EVERY DOUBLE LIVE ALBUM EVER MADE, SHOULD COME WITH TABLETS OF NO-DOZE JAMMED INTO THE SPINDLE HOLES. Allman Bros, fans may submit their death threats to me c/o this magazine.

Rory’s an entertainer as well as performer, something one picks up occasionally after more than a few endless, spleen-jarring tours of everywhere. I think another reason I’m fond of him is because he has the sheer audacity to entertain and perform in these days of Halloween/summer stock/rectal rock by just showing up on stage with his guitar and band and a head full of alcohol and great God yes, singing and playing.

There’s enough material here to maybe stretch it across 2 satisfactory .sides, but to, stretch it across 4 leaves enough holes to run a moderately large locomotive through and just drag the existing entertainment down. One such hole is the fact that side four is “various after hours jam sessions.” Another term for this might be “studio.” Why the hell couldn’t they do it on a stage with one of those adoring hometown audiences?

Well, it’s true. A sizable amount of time on this particular set would answer the dreams of any insomniac. However, the whole album doesn’t deserve to be written off. “Cradle Rock,” the strongest and opening piece, is a fine showcase for Rory and his band, a bared-teeth rocker with some scorching slide and a frenzied, characteristically Gallagher pull-em-up ending punctuated with well-placed hysterical screams guaranteed to crank the boogieometer up more than a few notches.

' Ah well, Rory professes a preference to cut every third album or so live, so let’s hope in the next couple years he’ll be delivering to us the nice, live, high energy boot in the ass he owes us.

Clyde Hadlock

ELVIS

Having Fun With Elvis On Stage (RCA)

I really don’t believe this album exists -who the hell else would have the balls to put out 37:06 minutes of out-takes from live recordings, bill it as “a talking album only” and charge money for it???

However Elvis and his fans are laws unto themselves and apparently exist in the sort of universe where not only is this sort of thing not a rip-off, but actually gobbled up by the

faithful.

Now Elvis is no Will Rogers, and his raps are not particularly fascinating, except of course to those who want every word ever uttered, every drop of sweat, every scarf... etc., etc.

The high point of side one (other than a two or three minute straight-forward reminiscence about his early career) is when a chick demands “Gimmie a scarf!” - in the same kind of urgency usually associated with phrases like “This is a stickup,” or “Want a woman, honky?”

Thruout both sides there are a couple of running “gags” (which eventually make you gag); one is a song intro where Elvis intones, “Wellllll... well, well, well well-” as guitars follow his line and chicks scream. His average remark is along the line of - “Why you screamingI ain’t even done nothing yet?” Pretty snappy, right?

The other recurring event is a song cue “You know what I can’t do?” (Piano, drum riff) — followed by something like, “Remember what the next song is for one thing.”

However Elvis does show his humble sincerity when on three different occasions at three different locations, he tells the audience “You’re one of the best we ever played for.”

Many scarves are given away (each punctuated with a rim shot)— kisses bestowed, and karate leaps lept.

Actually I have nothing against this record, the people who want to buy it will treasure it I’m sure — I’m just bugged that I had to waste half an hour listening to the damn thing looking for sparks of interest. Cold as ashes. .

Tony Glover

NEIL MERRYWEATHER Space Rangers (Mercury)

RUSH

(Mercury)

First, there was English rock ’n roll! Then, there was Southern blues! Now, from Mercury Records, those swell folks who brought you Bachman-Turner Overdrive, we have Canadian heavy metal.

Canadian heavy metal? Maybe it hasn’t reached epidemic proportions as yet. but so far, it looks like BTO might very well become the Allman Brothers of the frozen north. They took Canadian heavy metal out of the closet. Now, Mercury is digging up some fresh blood.

Yes. I can hear it now. In a dingy tenement slum, just two miles from that shiny new skyscraper you always see on the labels of Mercury’s albums, the president of the comapny is having a meeting with all his A&R men. “The world wants Canadian heavy metal, I tell you!” he tells them. “I can feel it in my corns.” If Clive Davis would’ve had those corns, he’d still be president of Columbia. “We gave them BTO and they loved it! So now we give them the old one-two. Hit ’em high and low. Something old and something new. If they buy it, we’ll resign Uriah Heep and dress up Ken Hensley like Burton Cummings. It can’t fail! It just can’t fail!”

“Look,” says one guy. “I know just the group. A friend of mine went to a party once and talked to somebody who used to work with this other dude who balled this chick who said she caught the clap from a dynamite Canadian heavy metal band.”

“What a rush,” somebody mutters.

“Sign ’em up,” says the Prez.

“Wait a second,” says somebody elsq. “I got another one. You know what I read the other day? Remember that guy who used to back up that foxy blonde chick with the big tits in Penthouse?”

“Yea. Yea.”

“Well, he’s from Canada.”

“No shit!”

“Great,” Prez says. “Sign them up, too. 1 want some product on the market by tomorrow morning at nine o’clock - sharp.”

The hordes of A&R men scurry off in every direction. One group hops in a cab and drives to Los Angeles. The other packs up a dogsled with an inflatible igloo and, three copies of Jack London’s Call Of The Wild and set off across the frozen tundra, fighting blizzards all the way, asking eskimos if they’ve ever heard a good Canadian heavy metal band. Finally, they find one named Rush and haul ass back to Chicago, getting into the president’s office fifteen minutes late. The other group is already there with a test pressing of Space Rangers by Neil Merryweather.

\ “You’re fifteen minutes late,” says the Prez.

"Yea. We know,” answers an A&R man. “We got attacked by a pack of hungry wolves. We jettisoned Tommy and made a run for it and luckily, we got away."

“It’s too bad we had to give them poor old Tom," another remarks.

'“Well,” the prez declares, “send his widow a Rod Stewart anthology, any Uriah Heep cut-outs we have laying around, and have Johnson forge Jerry Lee Lewis’ autograph on one of his London sessions albums and send that along, too. If she takes it hard, just tell her we’ll put a minute of silence on the next Bachman-Turner album. Now, let’s hear that album.”

They put the album on the turntable and turn the volume up to 8.7 on tlu\ Richter Scale. The groups sounds really hot. Classic three man heavy metal that distorts no matter how low you play it. Lead singer sounds close enough to Robert Plant to get called an imitator, but has enough of his own style to get away with it. Down to earth lyrics: none of this progressive shit. Tapes 'mixed so you really can’t tell if that rhythm is an overdubbed guitar or a bass. After only one song, all the flights have been grounded at O’Hare Airport and parts of Minneapolis are reduced

to rubble. The governor calls out the National Guard to prevent looting. The bomb squad knocks on the office door and asks the Mercury execs to please turn volume down while they evacuate the women and children.

“Okay,” says the president. “They make it. What’s their name?”

“It was such a rush to get here,” one A&Rer confides, “we didn’t even have time to think orre up.”

“Well, hurry it up,” the prez commands, “Now, let’s hear the other one.”

Neil Merryweather’s album is slapped on the turntable. They turn the volume down a little bit because somebody’s got relatives in Toledo. The music comes on and it’s weird, spacial shit. If Superman and Green Lantern ever got a group together, and they were really into Pink Floyd, this is what it would sound like. Merryweather is really into Stan-V® ley Kubrick type sounds. He does the weird-* est versions ever of “Sunshine Superman” and) “Eight Miles High.” Lots of heavy metal, guitars and wah-wahs and fuzz tones and synthesizers. Look for Neil Merryweather in Dell Comics. Everybody knows it’s good when NASA calls to say it’s classified and the Pentagon offers to produce if.

“Yea,” says the prez. “Get these down to the wax factory ex post hasto. Then get back here pronto. I’ve got another idea. Bahamian Rhythm & Blues,” he says dreamily. “Bahamian Rhythm & Blues.”

As the A&R men leave, the president is unlacing his shoes.

Jim Esposito

LOU REED

Lou Reed Sings Gilbert O'Sullivan (RCA)

The new Lou Reed album is, well... a new Lou Reed album. What more can you say? Lou Reed is Lou Refed, and each of his albums bears the distinctive stamp that is his alone. I must confess that I liked him better when he formed the acoustic duo with David Bowie — there will never be another song capable of moving the curtains deep in my aortas the way “Dogs Tired of Suburbia” or “Child Suffocates in Refrigerator” did - but you take what you can get, I guess, and you can get this new Lou Reed album if you’ve got the money. You can take it, too, as long as you don’t take it too seriously and don’t turn it up too loud ’cause the production, always a delicate matter with Lou, gets distorted that way and you’ll miss some of the muffled guitar chords mixed into the, background for mystery. Just take it out of here so I don’t have to look at it any more.

For the record, though, it’s the companion volume to Lou Reed Sings Gilbert and Sullivan, which came out just two months ago. Lou thought it would be rather cheeky to release a Gilbert O’Sullivan treasury hot on the heels of his workouts with selections from HMS Pinafore, Madame Butterfly and the

others. He refuses to do “Alone Again, Naturally” in spite of endless requests, because he feels that the song is immoral in that it contributes to a permissive cultural climate and a self-destructive ambience and syndroine which Lou does not wish to appear to support.

Instead he does some relatively obscure O’Sullivan material, songs like “Dog With No Tail From Soho,” “I Wish I Was a Goat,” “Wheah’s the Chowdah Mum?” and “Ha’Penny Hosannah,” the latter revealing both the composer’s and interpreter’s senses of humor more fully than anything we have seen from either of these gentlemen before. O’Sullivan’s lyrics tell a tale of a miserable blind toothless cripple hunchbacked hairlipped bandylegged hard of hearing psychologically maladjusted beggar who has a collapsed septum, hangnails, flat feet, six fingers on each hand and battle scars from his service in the First World War (he says they accepted him “because ai was jolly pretty a’ thai ol’ pa’triahtac sang sungin’,” and gave him a job as morale raising mascot for the 43rd brigade, in spite of all his infirmities, but a flying shrapnel hit him and left over 700 scars and concave valleys where his innards were scooped out by medics anyway, but he survived it all “baicause I’m nought the whiskai sun o’ Johnny Be Quick far nathin’!” whatever that means, these gimps all talk

drool), who learns to dance a sort of spastic modified jig because he’s got nothing to do while holding his cup out begging for pennies so he shuffles awhile until a beautiful 4’ 3” fairy princess from a good family comes along, falls in love with him, and they live happily ever after in a cottage on the 43rd floor of one of her father’s skyscrapers where she licks his wounds and rotates his joints every night. Lou introduces this song by explaining, “This song is about a guy a lot like me . I. well, to be perfectly honest (a quality I treasure above all others), it is about me ... so take it as my spiritual autobiography ghost written by another genius who won’t answer the door when I come to see him: Gilbert O’Sullivan.”

That’s the best song on the album; In fact, it’s the only good song on the album. The rest of them roundly eat dogshit. The harpsichord solo in “Ha’Penny Hosannah” doesn’t even redeem them. Nothing could. It’s not so much that they’re bad songs, or that Lou’s delivery is poor, as that all the material eats it, and Lou doesn’t do it justice by virtue of sounding a little fuzzy himself. But then, it was his idea to record the whole album through a silk brocade curtain “to get that late night royal drawing room sound,” as he said. But you should buy it anyway, because it’s got a picture of Margaret Rutherford on the cover.

Conway Leslie

BILLY SWAN - I Can Help (Monument):: The title song is the off-the-wall hit single of the year, no matter how old it sounds. But he’s thrown everything but the kitchen sink into the rest of the album, coming up with some sort of acid rockabilly that is definitely an acquired taste.

J.M.

RINGO STARR - Goodnight Vienna (Apple):: Give him an Elton John-Bemie Taupin song and Ed McMahon could be the ultimate 70s superstar.

M.J.

ROLLING STONES - It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (Rolling Stones): J. GEILS BAND -Nightmares (Atlantic):: It’s a real tribute to British perseverance that the Stones don’t sound any more tired or outdated then J. Geils. “Ain’t Too Proud to Get Lost” even moves a little, or is that Bad Company?

M.J.

ELTON JOHN - Greatest Hits (MCA):: John Lennon Plastic HorJo’s pal, Mister Softy never went to Venus, never did any fightin on Saturday night: anything he did he stole from somebody else. The real Elvis. It all sounds the same. Big round glasses and high heels, this sissy should have stayed on the farm. .

E.C.

THE ELECTRIC FLAG - The Band Kept Playing (Atlantic):: They should have quit.

E.C.

SUZI QUATRO - Quatro (Bell):: Hip Suzi all

in leather the Queen Stud takes her gigolos thru the motions of some more Motor City crud: wet dreams for some loser out in Omaha cause he saw her with her zipper down in some teen rag. That’s show biz.

E.C.

FOGHAT — Rock N Roll Outlaws (Bearsville):: Wanted for impersonating musicians. Dead or dead. No reward.

E.C.

FIRST CHOICE - The Player (Philly Groove):: This trio of women made their debut early in 1973 with a joyfully frenetic hit single and LP called “Armed and Extremely Dangerous” that conjured up visions of Martha And The Vandellas and the ShangriLas with a 70s musical consciousness, and this album is easily the best discotheque item the Philly Sound has spawned to date. Besides “The Player,” the girls introduce us to another shady street character, “Hustler Bill,” and totally flip the feet out with. “Guilty,” destined to be THE hot dance number this winter. Hats off to the soaring alto sax of Leno Zacfrery, sterling Norman Harris-Stan Watson production and the ever-present TSOP. Gloria Gaynor, move over - First Choice is back! ^

J.A.

HEAVY METAL KIDS (Atco):: The name was inevitable, just as it was in 1965 when Berry Gordy Jr. copyrighted the alreadycliched “Soul” as the title of his new label. Genuine children of heavy metal could be mightily innovative, but these bastard kids

are merely following the familiar route already tramped by Silverhead and scores of others. One of the H.M.K.’s is even doing a Michael Des Barres-by-Mick Jagger pout prance in the cover photo, so I guess that these guys haven’t heard of the ancient prophets David Bowie and Ian Hunter yet. A few good songs, but your stylus could do better. R.R.

MIKE McGEAR - McGear (Warner Bros.):: Paul McC’s bro, with Paulie providing 9 out of 10 songs, the mighty production, a mini photo for the cover, and even his wife for backup vocals. Mike sounds just about like Paul, so why’d he change his name? Semi-fab.

M.K.

ZINGERS FROM THE HOLLYWOOD SQUARES - Peter Marshall & Stars (Event):: If Kermit Schaffer had a way with those hilarious bloopers, then Why not Zingers? Almost literally a laugh a minute, provided by the most brilliant comedians of our time. Example:

P.M.:

“Don, you’ve been having trouble going to sleep. Are you probably a man or a woman?”

Don Knotts:

j “That’s what’s been keeping me awake at night.”

Silly enough to be mandatory.

M.K.

This month’s rockaramas were written by, John Morthland, Mark Jenkins, Eddie Cupps, James Allio, Michael Koehn, Richard Riegel, Gene Sculatti, Michael Davis and Elizabeth Hatch.