BOB DYLAN Blood On The Tracks (Columbia)

Bob Dylan is pussy-whipped. There are more general ways to state it, of course. You could say, for instance, that he has so idealized his vision of The Woman that he cherishes her potential infidelities and betrayals as much as her potential for salvation. But that is so much rodomontode. Baldly, put in the vernacular so it can’t be mistaken for something else, or avoided all together, he is pussy-whipped.

Planet Waves featured Dylan in the asylum of her charms, cuddled up away from the world, blissed-out on 2 AM feedings and the pleasures of the well-worn perambulator. Blood On The Tracks finds him huddled in the shelter of himself, alone, mulling over the consequences of what seems to him her cold-hearted departure. “1 know where to find you,” he sings with a whine that wishes it were a snarl, “in somebody’s room.” And again, “I’ve never gotten used to it, I’ve just learned to turn it off, either I’m too sensitive, or else I’m getting soft.”

I could sneer, but that wouldn’t be fair. It may be true that any man of a certain type might easily emulate those sentiments. If it is, then perhaps one has to be a similar man to perceive the possibility. Beyond that, however, Dylan states the case for contemporary knighthood and beknightedness so affectionately, with a touch of the old grace, that it is impossible not to admire the act if not the action or the actor. He used to sing in a way that made us love the best things about ourselves. Now, he sings songs that make us contemptuous of our most grievous faults.

And, of course, the music has its appeal. It is not inspired, it only fitfully - and then palely - recalls his past glories. Somehow that’s appropriate. The echoes of Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and Freewheeling from which these tunes are shaped haunt Dylan, as they haunt us all. When he attempted to demolish them in a blitzkrieg tour last winter, it hurt, though there was a certain genius in the demolition. Burning his bridges, he lit up a new landscape, changed because of the absence of the bridge and the addition of its charred skeleton. Destroying his past, he rescued his future.

Blood On The Tracks is safer.lt sounds as effortless as most studio rock, but underneath, you’re aware of the usual immense calculation. It avoids anything too unusual, stresses the 6dge of the common-place-for its effect. Dylan’s earlier music, beyond its wild surface, is calculated too, of course. But the intention, from Bob Dylan to John Wesley Harding, is to take us beyond that comfortable edge. We don’t have to leap into the abyss to hear it - that’s the cop out for staying away - but we have to gaze into it for a while.

Dylan wrote those songs quickly, but he never made them carelessly. And the music has always been the heart of the matter. When it worked, the words were secondary. Highway 61 and the best parts of Blonde on Blonde would have been impressive as instrumental works. (Except that the lead instrument is his always under-rated voice, which is the abyss staring back at us.)

Since then, his marksmanship has been off. Even here, where he’s not shooting blanks, it’s too hasty, as if he’s afraid to get too close to these songs, to spend too much time with them. (If he did. he might have to rewrite many of them, beginning with the longest.) The drumming alone, as someone once said of Grand Funk Railroad, is enough to send you up the wall. And the rest of it, despite the hints of past glories, isn’t spooky, like the earlier stuff. He pulls his punches.

„ The music is appropriate to the vision. Once, we saw in Dylan a man capable of killing rage, terrifying lust, scathing wit. Not only saw it, but heard it. The music was more than half of the effect. Now we can see in him the seeds of the Milquetoast and the Mitty, the man whose fantasies are more interesting than his real life, the man who, ultimately, blames it all on others. He is a bumbler, ineffectual (“I feel so exposed”), masochistic (“If you get close to her, kiss her once for me”), believing in Woman as his Rock of Ages. “Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”

We get our little songs to hum along with, we get our shared jokes (rhyming Honolulu with Ashtabula has some of the old nerve, at that), we get our rock and roll Dylan. Thrown back at us, because he is not the same man. I do. not have contempt for him, if only because I recognize in Dylan too many of my own weaknesses, and too many of everyone’s.

“Little red wagon, little red bike,” he sings near the end of this immensely long, immensely troubled and confused album, “I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like.” You’ll listen to this one, but you won’t be proud of it.

MARSHALLTUCKER BAND Where We All Belong (Capricorn)

Did Randy Newman have the mystic Tucks in mind when he went and dedicated that album to Good Old Boys? Maybe so. The temptation is still with most of us, I reckon, to interpret the South in broad generalities. And while there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, I still can’t suppress the notion that much of this new Southern Music is a homogeneous batch of cross-b^d roots. It’s not that it all sounds alike (it doesn’t; what does Hydra have in common with Mose Jones or White Witch?), but there does seem to be a certain conscious preoccupation with form common to plenty of Southern brands.

The beauty of it is that for all intents there is a recognizable brand of Southern Music, a synthetic derivative olinstrumental properties first bottled by the Grateful Dead (the lazy, concentric gait that characterizes everything Richard Betts gets his hands into) and fueled by its very own lyric mythology (subjects like ramblin’ men and reachin’ that elusive Arkansas line to spend one night with a true Southern woman). This late into the game, Southern Music has become a beautifully polished synthetic gem, its licks and lines traded like depth soundings across the Mississippi even by outfits above the Mason-Dixon. Truth is, though, the stuff rolls like rubies in the palms of natives like the Tuckers.

Half of Where We All Belong was recorded live, up in Milwaukee, before an intense crowd whose appetite for bonafide South salad must be powerful. They whoop for the lazy tease intro to the 11-minute “Everyday I Have The Blues” and cheer Toy Caldwell’s joint announcement of “24 Hours At A Time” and Charlie Daniels.

There are only four tunes to the live sides, “Ramblin’ ” and “24 Hours” (from the first and second alb_ums resp.) being the sharpest. And “24 Hours” just may be the MTB’s highest honeydew & magnolias moment, live or studio. It’s the quintessential Southern song, the perfection of the form maybe; grafted off of the Dead’s “Cold Rain And Snow,” it’s all about gettin’ back to Arkansas and sleepin’ in Houston and was probably penned under a full head of Spartansburg gold. So perfect is the form that once its perimeters have been established, like two minutes into its total 13, the band can stretch out and do everything; Tommy Caldwell wiggles off some pages from the Phil Lesh Songbook, the guitars and trombones belt out some contrapuntal “Lonely Bull” lines and there’s an endless instrumental coda. All saved by symmetry in the last two minutes when everybody pulls together, for one final vocal chorus to wrap it up. Beautiful.

The studio half is solid but basically it’s a refinement of a form which, as the live side demonstrates, has come pretty close to achieving perfection. “This Ol’ Cowboy” sports tfye requisite theme (“tyin’ up loose ends” in Dallas, “hittin’ the road again”) plus a brief Kenny Burrell tribute on the front end. “Where A Country Boy Belongs” comports itself well enough. Paul Hornsby’s piano sounding like Randy Newman’s at points, the lyrics aimed at “city slickers.”

Whether you choose to call it Southern Music, the New MOR or guitar muzak doesn’t matter. When somebody’s got as good a hold on a single style as the Tucks have, you’ve got to hand them a prize. This is great.

Gene Sculatti

JOHNCALE Fear (Island)

John Cale may be the most difficult “rock” artist to “get into” of all the weirdo crew with whom he is associated. From the days of the enigmatic Vintage Violence through his association with Warner’s as a staff producer to the present, which finds him in the company of various Roxy MusicEno-Island Records bizarros; Cale’s seemingly cold and distant music has held a certain fascination for his fans.

, I’m one of them, and I’m damned if I can say just what it is I see in Cale. His lyrics are as obtuse as you’ll find this side of Jethro Tull (or Ezra Pound), but his instrumental texturing and razorsharp ear for studio-induced subtleties draw me in every time. I suspect the fact that he writes songs that are sllloooooowww, which seem to take hours to complete a verse, catches that part of my attention that gets off on drones and pedal tones.

Fear is Cale’s first solo studio album since the rather tepid Paris 1919, and it’s a monster. At long last, he’s working with a backup band - Phil Manzanera, Archie Leggatt, Fred Frith and Eno - that has some personality and some working knowledge of Cale’s music. The results are spectacular: from the paranoiac frenzy of “Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend” to the stop-time romanticism of “Emily,” this is a varied, complex, and necessarily difficult album. There’s even Cale-ian humor on “The Man Who Couldn’t Afford To Orgy” (that’s a soft “g,” John - thought you’d like to know), where Cale’s wooden-voiced plaint that he is among those who can’t afford it alternates with Judy Mylon’s rather mechanical attempts to get him to get it on.

The most challenging stuff is the hard rock tunes on side two, “Gun” and “Momamma Scuba,” a couple of all-out screamers quite unlike anything Cale’s done since the Velvets. “Momamma Scuba” features a different backup band, including three slide guitarists scraping away in slow motion, guaranteed to make you feel like you’re peeling your skin off with a dull razor blade.

I keep having arribivalent feelings about recommending Cale to somebody who’s never heard him before. On the other hand, what the hell - I’ve got no scruples. After all, you don’t have to be seriously demented to like Cale - just have a taste for the unusual and extraordinary. And a healthy respect for fear.

Ed Ward

KEVIN AYERS The Confessions of Dr. Dream (Island)

While I must confess to a predisposition to like just about anything under the Island logo, it seemingly being the last bastion of whatever could possiljly be avant-garde (a concept I’d just about given up on), and while any record with Nico even sweeping up after the sessions is sure to get my attention, I still must say that Ayers doesn’t make it.

I love Roxy and Eno and John Cale and I’d marry Nico if I thought I was pretty enough and she was warm enough, and anything remotely Velvets or Lou Reed influenced will get a close scrutiny on my turntable, so naturally I jumped right on the June 1,1974 album, which contained all of the above artists with the exception of Lou, including an absolutely cackling Eno and a whole side devoted to this newcomer Kevin Ayers.

Who is not Eno, or Nico, or Cale, or even Sterling Morrison, and especially is not Lou Reed even though he more than occasionally makes halfbrusque attempts to mate Lou’s-Velvet’s rhythms and gutter slur with a more European sort of moody cafe-dribble which drones somewhere in the neighborhood of what Lou was trying to do with the original version of “Berlin,” as well as what kind of Lotte Lenya flash in the parodistie pan Nico could have been if she didn’t have her own tundras to ford, not to mention the smackedout murk mumbles of Tim Buckley in his LorcaBlue Afternoon phase.

Ayers is livelier than most of the people he’s been influenced by, in fact he seems to have a certain wryness that is just short of ingratiating, but unfortunately seems to translate itself too often into the kind of sloppiness which suggests that he basically just doesn’t care, he’d rather be down at the bar singing toasts to the crumbling demimonde with his tongue so far in his cheek it’s tickling his earlobe. His music is plain dull most of the time, and unlike a true genius such as Eno (whose Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy is the first Big Move of ’75 and should be out in this country by the time you read this) he doesn’t have the imagination to funnel his influences into something truly compelling and personal.

Although he does have his moments. His side of June 1 was solid snooze, but the opening minutes of Dr. Dream’s title track are promisingly strange, as he and Nico weave phasing in and out of a sifting silt-tide of musical quicksand gasping at each other in the hopeless tumescence-thwarted void. (Nico must be the best bad lay on the planet; besides which, anybody that would set themselves to showing Iggy the ropes just has to be an angel of celestial suppletude.) (As for Kevin, I think he whacks off in his beermug.) Unfortunately this utterly mesmerizing musicalundertow is soon towecLstraight down into about a quarter hour of the lamest most predictable 1968 art-rock (mostly instrumental) perambulations, with Nico nowhere in sight. Left to sing on his own when he isn’t diddling with other noise vectors, Kevin is a stutterer coughing in a broom closet. And his songs are plain silly. Last year first Roxy and then especially Eno stunned me with the realization that it was indeed still possible to be “far out,” even if you were using hoary Velvet Underground riffs as a launching pad. Now most of these people are carrying that noblest of experiments even further (although Roxy appears to be teetering on the dowrislide of the kind of self-parody that made them an acquired taste in the first place, and Bryan Ferry’s camp which is not even low but more fitting to high school talent shows threatens to strangle him within the fortnight), Eno is taking the mastodon by the tusks and steering it straight into the future we need so desperately, Cale continues to acquit himself with elan, Nico’s return promises to plummet us all into arctic ecstacies ... all this action, and Kevin Ayers rides along on the coattails of people who may talk maddening paradox but really do care. Don’t be fooled; send him back to the old art-schoolers’ pub.

Lester Bangs

MILES DAVIS Get Up With It (Columbia)

Miles Davis keeps putting but these strange records at odd times, which seemingly have nothing at all to do with the way anybody else makes records, except that they wind up influencing what everybody else does, even if it takes a few years. First of all, they are usually two record sets, but they sell for the same price as a regular LP. There is as much as a half hour of music on a side (one track here times out at 32:07), proving that it can be done. Either no personnel is listed at all, or else several different personnels are given, usually reflecting different Davis working bands, giving the impression that Columbia has once again released whatever was lying around. The covers don’t help much, being either poor cartoQns or grotesque paintings of Easter Island figures, and the titles are no help at all. Electricity and overdubbing is employed, but the result sounds like a jam, or sometimes a rehearsal, when the tapes happened to be running.

And now here is Miles’ latest arcane twofer, called Get Up With It. Some of it is sensational, and some of it puts me to sleep. I think that Miles is really engaged in what might be called Zen record-making. He deliberately tried it once before, several years ago, and the result was an LP called Kind of Blue, which showed everyone what to play for the next few years until he made another LP called In A Silent Way. I think it is ifnportant to remember that Miles played with Charlie Parker when he was only nineteen, and the tempos were so fast that he wanted to quit every night, and Parker called tunes Miles didn’t know or at least hadn’t planned to play, and Miles was furious and got mad enough to become a master. Later, he employed a succession of people who were supposedly unable to play their instruments; people like Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones.

So I think he is teachingclass in the studio, turning out Keith Jarretts and Herbie Hancocks and Billy Cobhams and Tony Williamses and John McLaughlins, and if it sounds unfinished, there could be one of two reasons for it. One is that he knows Columbia will release whatever he wants to release, and there aren’t five musicians in the country who could tell you if it’s good Miles or bad. But the only opinion that has ever made any difference to him is his own, so I would prefer to believe that he is dealing in the most basic way with the fact that jazz is an improvisational art of the moment, which is to ignore the tape. Musicians make jazz, technology makes records. The music was never intended to be permanent.

One half-hour side here is called “He Loved Him Madly.” The LP is dedicated, “For Duke.” Miles reveres Ellington, and there are times when, as Martin Williams says, he sounds like all the different Ellington trumpet players of the thirties, but the track doesn’t sound like Duke to me, or even Miles’idea of Duke. I read an interview with David Liebman, who plays flute on these records, in which he told about a day when Miles didn’t show up for a record date, and the rest of the band improvised a long, slow piece they called “The Legend Of the Blue Whale.” I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was that track, with Miles overdubbed. He doesn’t come in till about twenty minutes into the piece, and when he does he doesn’t sound like Ellington, he sounds like King Oliver.

As he always does. Whatever the surrounding decoration, he’s still playing that sparse, abstract blues solo of his.

There’s also a piece called “Maiysha,” with bossa nova guitars, and one called “Calypso Frelimo,” where Miles turns part of Sonny Rollins’

“St. Thomas” into an organ riff, and one called “Billy Preston,” which bears no relation to Billy Preston that I can fathom.

And there’s also a little four-minute gem called “Red China Blues.” It has a harmonica lead over

electric guitars, and sounds like Dylan with the Band or the Rolling Stones on a good night, and there’s a powerful Fender bass figure underneath.

I suspect that Miles took a few minutes off to in*

struct his juniors in the the proper Way to do that, and you will probably be hearing echoes of “Red China Blues” for the next five years, by which time Miles will be doing something else that Leonard Feather doesn’t think is jas.

Joe Goldberg

LINDA RONSTADT Heart Like A Wheel (Capitol)

I’ve never spent much time worrying about whether Linda Ronstadt would come out with another hit record. There are other women in rock who are more popular than she and I struggle with them because they work in a largely male industry and make it because they have largerthan-life talent and personality. But that kind of support just leaves tons of room in my head for Joni Mitchell. It used to leave room for Bette Midler before she escaped last year without even cutting a record. It’s always allowed for Aretha Franklin, and iixthe last year and a half Gladys Knight came in with three top singles and the Claudine soundtrack.

Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt and Maria Mul-

daur lead the up-and-coming interpreters. They make trouble for themselves, though, by spending their considerable talents in one second hand store where Lowell George is on sale and Eric Kaz love songs are going two for a record. They can’t help but compete for the same audience. Sometimes it seems as though they sound the same; then it starts mattering whether Bonnie Raitt’s hair is straight or curly, if Maria Muldaur looks 30 plus or the 20 year old tan beatnik she poses to be, or if the current glossy of Linda Ronstadt hides half her face and makes us wonder if she really is too fat.

They also compete for acclaim and popularity and respect, filling record collections with inconsistent albums and inspiring sympathetic rock critics to ridiculously self-conscious discussions about who really does do the best version of “Love Has No Pride.”

Trying to fill up the space in my head remembering the lyrics from JiFree Man in Paris,” I tell myself that my favorite unknown may someday reach Mitchell’s stature. Alice Stuart may make another album, Joyof Cooking will try again, Ann Peebles will be as big as Aretha Franklin one day. But record companies do not share my wish to propel a new woman songwriter into the limelight and meanwhile Janis Joplin is still dead and it would be nice if there were more protoypes in the making. So we’re back with the interpreters and the compromise that the next star-or-nothing album by Bonnie Raitt will not be produced by Jerry Rago-gravy.

But we’re in luck. We’re also left with Heart Like A Wheefl, and an educated guess that it will be a very popular album. Concentrated, slick and powerful, it should be played loud, even though months from now no one’s going to discover what this album really meant. Its arrangements arerarefully engineered to be as heavy and overloaded as the bellowing confidence of Ronstadt’s voice. What a voice! She sings nothing on this album as playfully as “Lovesick Blues,” but she never resigns herself to anything as dull as what she recorded for Don’t Cry Now, either.

“You’re No Good,” “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” “Faithless Love,” and “Dark End of the Street” make the initial impact. Ronstadt has been in the business long enough to have a list of lovers as complicated as Joni Mitchell’s, and if she can’t write about them, she sings other people’s songs about perfidious relationships and the self-discovery incurred with flawless urgency. “Heart Like A Wheel,” the only song by a woman (Anna McGarrigle), closes the side appropriately with “It’s only love that can wreck a human being, and turn him inside out.” It should have been “her,” but I’m, how you say, bitching.

Side two doesn’t punch as hard as side one, but it does include “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You” and “When Will I Be Loved,” both terrific. “Willin’’ seems silly here - a love song sung by a male trucker? - but trucking songs are big in L.A. these days and Linda was probably willin to record whatever someone else told her to.

I was wrong to expect all women rock singers to have something going for them besides a great voice and great accompaniment. At least Heart Like A Wheel will keep the Kiki.Dees of the world in perspective.

Georgia Christgau

IRON BUTTERFLY Scorching Beauty (MCA)

The Iron Butts are back again and ugly as ever, the same jokers who practically invented Grand Funk and Bloodrock, gave Black Sabbath all that murky gloom to move in and made a drunken slobber into the record industry’s first platinum album. Looks like they’ve been hung to dry a bit too long though, and their unerring instinct for monolith tedium has been replaced with a starchy penchant for the merely boring. Another case of padlocked assholes.

Stretchmark number one is the gaping abscence of Doug Ingle’s overbearing organ, which used to sound like he was going at the keyboard with doorknobs in his hands. Now it’s just Howie Reitze’s watery fills and a tinny rec room sound. Add to that Ron Bushy’s pussy re-emergence as a sleep-in drummer who wouldn’t know a fifteen minute solo if it was played on his face and you can be sure there ain’t gonna be no more trippy dance music for the deformed in this cell, just a fewoffhand sleepwalks.

Once that hair’s off the brain, there are a couple decent 60s deportee numbers in the vein of a zillion other psychedelic losers like Travel Agency and T.I.M.E. The already dated “1975 Overture” has some bagpipe synthesizer and military school drumming that totters like a granite slinky. “Before You Go” could almost be a Kiss reject with the buzzing guitars until Bushy stumbles in. Erik Brann’s guitar playing reaches new heights of retardation and his vocals retain that fine zinc blackboard edge. The whole thing sounds like it was recorded at a strip mine.

Turn ’em upside down and they all look alike.

Rick Johnson

QUEEN Sheer Heart Attack (Elektra)

“British Rock In the Royal Tradition,” as the promo flyer in the first Queen LP proclaimed. After listening to that album, I decided that the “royal" business meant that Piince Charles had obtained his mum’s seal of approval on Queen as a safe 8-track to program in his Aston-Martin while squiring around those aristocratic birds he likes. Clearly Queen represented no threat to the Empire, as their debut LP was almost entirely devoid

of that invidious import, rock ‘n’ roll - no rabble would ever be roused by Queen.

Queen II vindicated my initial cynicism, as it absolutely wallowed in all that Spenserian Faerie Queene drivel Shakespeare obsoleted as far back as 1598. Queen’s recurrent liner-notes boast that “nobody played synthesizer” seemed more superfluous than ever on Queen II as their guitars were mixed into a fuzzy mash more boring than

anything Keith Emerson could ve done on a good synth.

The publication of like-minded sentiments by other reviewers must have given Queen enough of a sheer heart attack to wake up and die right, as that homely saying goes, as their new set represents a wrenching turnabout in style. The black and crimson Grand Funk graphics should’ve been a tipoff, as Queen is a band that loves trademarks. and you can bet that they didn’t give up that gold-leaf script “Queen” without good reson.

That reason is rock ‘n’ roll, which Queen have finally admitted into their universe. “Brighton Rock” (which is Side 1, Band 1, and thus a calculated critic-grabber anyway, but what the hell) rocks and rolls out better than all previous Queen tracks put together: Brian May’s speedofeedo guitar workout therein is actually hokey, but great in the context of Queen’s efforts heretofore.

More exciting to an old copymonger like me are the definite echoes of Mott the Hoople concealed in several of Sheer Heart Attack's songs. Like Mott, Queen seem to have a knack of summing up the angst and aspirations of the average English post-Beatles punk prole, which is what they probably are, too. “Tenement Funster” and “Stone Gold Crazy” and especially “Now I’m Here” capture the impulse, if not yet the wit, of Mott’s best songs. And I seem to recall that Mott also thrashed around on a lot of unevenly eclectic albums before finally clicking with All the Young Dudes, so Queen may earn their place in the sunburn yet.

Besides Mott, Queen quote other illustrious Angloid predecessors on Sheer Heart Attack, from the Kinks’ rinkydink in “Killer Queen” to distinctly Whoish falsetto dementia on “Brighton Rock” and “She Makes Me (stormtrooper in stilettoes),” the latter a Madame Dominique scenario Lucifer’s Friend really oughta cover. Takes one to know one, after all.

Speaking of sexual alternatives, all you Anglophile rockers from Long Island to Burbank who’ve been getting penis (and-or clitoris) throbs over Queen drummer Rodger Taylor ever since those pix on the first album (he’s one divine shikse) may get your chance soon, as it says right here in “Now I’m Here” that Queen is “America’s new bride to be.” That’s fine with me, I may even buy ’em a toaster in honor of the nuptials if they keep playing stuff this promising.

Richard Riegel

THE BAKER GURVITZ ARMY The Baker Gurvitz Army . (Janus)

Huh? Yeah, you guessed who the Baker is. The old man’s back from Africa, after years of tinkling beer bottles together and tapping hollow teeth with spoons and blowing whistles in an attempt to broaden his technique (not to mention starting a new band every week. Remember the Ginger Baker Drum Choir? Remember Salt? Neither does he) he’s come back to us with just a double drum set and a guitarist, bassist and keyboardist, and he’s kicking ass again.

I don’t know who the hell the Gurvitz brothers are (Adrian on guitar and vocals, Paul on bass and vocals) or where he found them, and I don’t really care, now that I think of it. All I know is Adrian knows how to make a guitar bitch; Paul, though he’s the 827th best bass player on the planet, can drive right along with Ginger and Adrian, and Adrian can scream and sound hysterical at the slightest provocation, while riffing on into infinity.

Ginger still takes the opportunity to solo away right in the middle of a song, and the old man hasn’t lost it; it sounds as good (and the same) as anything he did with Cream. He sings whenever he wants to, writes songs like he used to: “Come on with me baby, I want to live again, life is hard, I’m gettin’ old, keep on trucking kids are neat,” and so on. I love it. He even does a song called “Mad Jack” that will stand right along side “Pressed Rat and Warthog.” It’s about a guy that keeps his tiger “Black, white and red,” only at the end of the story, the tiger turns out to be a lion.

Someone named John Norman B. Normal Mitchell (cute, huh?) adds some depth to the proceedings with some adequate keyboards, but he didn’t even get his picture on the back of the album along with Ginger and the Gurvitz’s. Ah well . . .

Anyway, I’m kind of glad he’s back with a simple, mainly guitar-bass-drums outfit again; I missed the guy. If this band folds in another week, I hope some noise-dedicated kiddies take note and pay him a visit, waving money and praise and a long list of bookings under his nose before he has a chance to dodge back to Africa and start rattling gourds full of pebbles again.

Clyde Hadlock

CECIL TAYLOR UNIT Spring Of †wo Blue-J’s (Unit Core)

Piano perforce or “cultivation of the acculturated” as Cecil says. What it (be)comes down to is dealing with improvisational Music. Dealing, here, being able to improvise listening. Participatory listening - Taylor supplies the Units and you supply the Structures and with your singularly particular ears the sounds are not captured but overheard. Or, even clearer I think, what you hear is not necessarily what he plays - which is often the case with music but which is more obviously the case with this music. Specifically, one note follows another, two three four or more are played in the same instant but not all notes are necessarily heard - while we’re creating the Structure of what was just heard, what is about to be played has already gone by. Which sounds like chaos, (someone off camera just yelled “Bullshit Noise”) to the listener not willing to participate. It happens rather quickly. You gotta loosen up your ears and overhear as much'as you can before you can even begin to get inside the feeling of this music.

What feeling? Taylor’s incredible speed invariably conjures the word “exhilaration” - but it’s not just the exhilaration of speedy abandonment (abandonment of song form, of chordal improvisation, etc.) Rather there are times when the listener connects directly with the force and direction of the improvisation of the player or players -this direct connection of intentions allows the listener to feel nothing less than the exhilaration of the creative process. Recently, when I was depressed because I found myself in a stituation over which I felt I had no control, I listened to this record and the joyous colors sounded darker, the jabbing cutting Units, took on a somber edge - but the exhilaration was still there. I’m not saying the record is a cure for depression, but it’s important to note that the feelings inherent in this music are consistent. This ain’t bullshit noise.

Side one of the record consists of solo piano and side two consists of a quartet with Cecil joined by Jimmy Lyons, alto sax; Sirone aka Norris Jones, bass; and Andrew Cyrille, drums. Information concerning this record as well as other fine new creations can be obtained from Unit Core, F.O. Box 3041, NYC, NY, 10001.

Richard C. Walls

HELLO PEOPLE The Handsome Devils (ABC-Dunhill)

Goddamn am I disappointed! You see I heard this story about a Todd Rundgren concert in Central Park last summer. The story goes that the band split, leaving just Todd and his backup singers, the Hello People, on stage. Accompanied by piano, Todd went through a string of his hits with the Hello People singing all the instrumental parts. The punch-line to the story is that it sounded just like Todd’s records. And this comes from a highly reliable source.

Well, it was with some real excitement that I plopped this disc onto the turntable, and, unfortunately, it was with great relief that I took it off. Technically, as singers, Hello People are note perfect. But as featured performers, doing their own arrangements, they stink. When they’re doing backup they’ve got to stick to the featured artist’s stipulations, and they apparently can do anything he-she stipulates. But left to their own devices, they turn into a Las Vegas show group. Not even friend-producer Todd could do anything to save this undynamic, saccharine schlock. In fact, these four guys almost managed to make me dislike Todd’s show-stopper “Just One Victory.”

You should stay away from this if you’re looking for rock ‘n’ roll. Hello People might make it as nostalgia-yecch-rockers a la Sha-Na-Na if they stuck to stuff like Hank Ballard’s “Finger Poppin’ Time,” which is included here. And as a show band they’d be fine. But otherwise, forget this. And to think. I even ignored the fact that they always perform in white-face. Dummy.

Robert Duncan

MAN

Slow Motion (United Artists)

The back cover shows Deke, Terry, Ken, and Micky standing on the Staten Island Ferry, and that’s not right. They should be standing on the Sausalito Ferry, on their way to or from San Francisco (if they’ve gotta be on a ferry at all), and that’s because this Welsh (only semi-Welsh any more) quartet is the San Francisco band that Quicksilver, the Grape, the Airplane, and the rest never were. And, recently, San Francisco’s been paying them back by playing Man and Deke Leonard albums like they were local bands.

The Mah sound is a straight-ahead, hard charging rhythmic attack with Micky Jones’ inventive keyboards and Deke’s distinctive, raw-edged guitar playing supporting some enthusiastic vocalising. It’s full, rich, and, thanks to the fact that the band members are such excellent improvisers, always interesting.

And, even for Man, Slow Motion is a killer. If numbers like “Hard Way To Die,” “Day and Night” or the album’s masterpiece, “You Don’t Like Us,” with its super bottleneck hook don't

manage to break this band all across the country, my faith in America’s radio listeners (and programmers) will suffer yet another acute blow.

As might be expected, nothing takes the place of seeing Man do all this stuff in person, and hopefully a tour is about to happen as you read these words. Until then, you really owe it to yourself to pester your local FM station with requests for anything off Slow Motion.

Ed Ward

LEONARD COHEN New Skin For The Old Ceremony (Columbia)

We could try a serious, academic tack. He is a Poet, after all: Cohen’s use of the Metaphysical Conceit - his offer of hope in the forbidding landscape of his bleak, existential imagery -places him in the poetic tradition of a John Donne (cf. “The Flea,” “The Compass”). He here displays a mastery of eclecticism on a par with that associated with several more widely recognized pop artists, utilizing a variety of musical formats (Acker Bilk Jazz, coffee house folkmusic, Weill theatrics, et. al.). Through juxtaposition of profound imagery and whimsical music Cohen sustains that tension which is uniquely his ...

Or how about a sensitive outpouring, an intuitive response, a song as intricate and fragile as a spider-web played as a harp - “Many men have loved the bells you fasten to the rain." I reach, we touch, and touching share that final twist of irony, like a spasm of exquisite pain “and other forms of boredom advertised as poetry . ..”

But 1 want to make propaganda for the politics of Leonard Cohen and the Cultural Revolution. The Politics of Fame: The celebrity, as in the personal-political expose “Field Commander Cohen" (“wounded in the line of duty, parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties”): and the star (“the favorite singing millionaire, the patron saint of envy, the grocer of despair,” and “giving me head on the Unmade bed, while the limousines wait oq the street... That was called love for the workers in song . . ."). The Politics of Sex (“Take this longing from my tongue, all the useless things my hands have done”): and Sexual Politics (“Do you want to be the ditch around his tower... Do you want to give your blessing to his power"). Most important, the Politics of Struggle ("Why don’t you come on back to the war, let’s all get nervous.")

1 want tp sing the great unwritten hymn, my voice a rush of warm wind coming up from the desert. Forty days and forty nights. Forty years’ wandering, dancing with demons, wrestling with angels, the Beautiful Loser in quest of the Holy Grail. I hitchhiked across the country. Wheatfields and freight trains. A hobo with a guitar waved to me through the open boxcar door . . .

Memorial services will be held for Echo Parke, 29, noted artist, columnist and puppeteer, Thursday at the Sisters of Mercy Chapel in Forest Falls. She leaves her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Parke of Palos Verdes, her sister Elizabeth and her brother Griffith. This space is rented by the Jesuits.

Echo Parke

MONTROSE Paper Money (Warner Brothers)

Montrose seem to be the focal point for an everwidening network of incoherents for whom Edgar Winter is too wimpy, Aliqe Cooper is too teenage, and harder yankee dogs like Kiss or Hydra are too tuff. Anything Limey is, of course, unmentionable, and Focus and friends from beyond are strictly for troubledomes. Nope, it’s gotta be swept-back Stateside product, flashy but not albino, and a guaranteed replay on any metal detector.

Ronnie and gang have it all set up and then some with their solid redundo rhythm section, manic guitar banshees, electronic scribbling and purist’s sense of Iron Butterfly dynamics. Whether it’s beat mongering on an old crapnut like the smack slagging “Underground” or dabbling in the glacial Black Sabbathisms of “Dreamer,” they can stab riffs through your ears like a greased icepick. They can also take that hard-edged alloy fear and turn it around into Left Banke diffidence, as in “We’re Going Home,” where Ronnie sneaks up on the melody from behind playing glass knives and then clobbers it with a flash solo, only to be subdued in turn by a hovering mellotron that’s almost sharp, if you can say that about such a Hostess twinky-mannered instrument. That’s rightfully shoved aside by the title cut, which fades in with “I Want Candy” drums filtered through Carmine Appice and builds into a mammoth clunker topped with Mad Dog 20-20 bottleneck antics.

The only time the machine breaks down is when ambition overcomes substance. Their slowed down version of the Stones’ “Connection” is strictly for Marianne Faithful fans, with poignant acoustic guitars, sticky vocals, mellotron and some off-the-wall piano. It picks up a bit towards the end, but then so did Coats Head Soup. The other earsnore is the token instrumental, “Starliner," one of those whiny electronic turkeys that are better left to Ronnie’s old boss. But two duds do not an airball make, and neither of them interferes with the solid cloned riffing and spook sideshow on side two. Recommended for skull parties, twat vacuums, and kittens-in-the-dryer.

Rick Johnson

KINKY FRIEDMAN (ABC) ,

The Ballad of Kinky Friedman You’ve heard the tale of Jesse James, Of how he lived and died.

And the pair from whom

this poem’? purloined,

the legendary Bonnie and Clyde.

And the tombstones up on old Boot Hill

read like a criminals’ Who’s Who.

Now these they say

are more civilized times,

but we’ve our shareof outlaws too,

but by far the saddest,

most tragic tale

is of a little Texas Jew.

Now Kinky used to iron his hair so they’d not take him for a spade, With his western suits and his cowboy boots he thought he’d had it made.

He followed the straight and narrow:

Hank Williams, Charlie Pride;

but unlike the rebels who went before,

’twas on the stage, not the streets, l that Kinky Friedman died.

So Kinky became an outlaw, he quit ironing his hair, and he began shooting down the rednecks, saying: “GO ON, HATE ME! SEE IF 1 CARE! YOU’RE JUST SOME IGNORANT HILLBILLIES

MIX YOUR BUTT WITH A HOLE IN THE GROUND!

I’M TAKING OFF FOR BLUER SKIES, SCREW THESE ONE HORSE TOWNS"

And Kinky went off to New York City Where everyone’s a Jew.

And he let his hair grow Au Natural like he’d seen Bob Dylan do.

He even pressed his sarcasm in vinyl and with the Texas Jewboy band, he rode across the country laughing at rednecks all across the land.

But something just happened to Kinky. Nobody knows just what it was, but his humor, his music, and even his new-found self got all balled up behind his cause.

There were no more lonesome cowboy songs about lonesome whippoorwills and his redneck didn’t amuse some folks even farthest from the hills.

And Kinky Friedman panicked, he dropped everything and rah.

He fired the Texas Jewboys, then decided to make a stand.

Oh, Kinky tried the next time round but he’d forgotten his beginnings.

And nothing helped,

not even the aid

of Tompall Glaser, Willie Nelson

and the alligator: Waylon Jennings.

Just like the ones that lay on Boot Hill from those thrilling days of yore, he’s no lodger a threat to status quo or simple redneck mores.

His voice is just a whisper, his six gun no longer roars; for the mighty Kinky Friedman just isn’t funny anymore.

Barbara Fritchie

(I like him anyway, even if he’s not Moe Bandy. - Ed.)