THE BEAT GOES ON

THE BEAT GOES ON

Ring Around The (Album) Sleeve

NEW YORK - Ring around the collar! Ring around the collar! Sick of all those annoying commercials? Thinking of giving up TV for good in favor of the trusty old hypeless stereo? Well, brace yourself. Tentative plans are afoot on Madison Avenue to print ads on record album covers, or, alternately, to pay groups to include the picture of a product in the design of their album jacket. Oliver Berliner, the president of TelAudio Center, ecstatically estimates that 20 million LFs could net an extra $1.6 million with ads on their covers. With figures like that being tossed around, can the recession-'ttamaged recording industry resist the idea? Maybe next time The Who can sell out for real!

Grateful Dead's Last Words: "Get Into Plastics."

SAN FRANCISCO -"If we can't make good records," one member of the Grateful Dead family is reported to have said; "then we'll make good pyramids!" A crew of scientists is hard at work on a, revolutionary new system for preserving and retrieving sound. Replacing the vinyl disc and turntable will be one-inch four-sided plastic pyramids on which music will be recorded with a laser and played back with some other sort of optical device. The process is somewhat related to holography. Ron Rackow, president of the Dead's Round Records, says that the most expensive part of the system should be "a thirteen dollar piece of hardware," and the whole thing "might be on the streets in nine to fifteen months."

Robert Duncan

Grace Too Slick To Learn The Kung-Fu

SAN FRANCISCO -Everybody was kung-fu fighting, but to tell the truth, it wasn't even a little bit frightening. The scene was the Peppermint Tree, a nightclub catering to teenagers in San Francisco's gaudy North Beach Broadway district, just down the road from LIVE! ACTS OF LOVE!!

In fact, the Peppermint Tree is on the edge of Chinatown, and the clientele is heavily Oriental - Chinese and Filipino. Thus, when the club's owners decided to up-'date their dance contest, kung-fu fighting seemed a natural. Fueled by the danceable rhythms of City Lights, an above-average mostly yellow band, playing "Pick Up The Pieces" and judged by Ron Dong, of George Long's White Crane School of Kung Fu, local DJ Bill Holley of KYA, and an off-duty cop, the contest proved nothing more than that nobody really knew how to do the dance, although plenty of the people on the floor had obviously studied martial arts. One oriental couple, in particular, seemed to be taking out some pent-up hostility on each other.

When it was all over, Shanti Massey, an unemployed dancer and partnerless participant, and Lee Elefene, a martial arts student, split the $50 prize. And Grace Slick, who had been up on the floor earlier in the evening, slunk out the door un-noticed. Competition too hot, Gracie?

Ed Ward

Laid Back And Laid Off

"Quick! I'll give you fifty dollars if you have a comb, a lipstick, or a three-by-five inch slip of paper in your purse!" No, this is not the day that the carrots and onions in hippie costumes broke the bank on Let's Make A Deal. Actually, these are carrots and onions in hippie costumes who qualified for free Lynyrd Skynyrd tickets because they are all unemployed. Crowding the lobby of Detroit's Ford Auditorium, waving their unemployment cards, these lucky mortals are among the first American rock *n' roll welfare recipients. Now if they could only get a foot in the door at the food stamp office . . .

Hit Picking Goes Polygraph

LONDON - No more must record companies rely on tabulating regional sales and radio listeners phoning deejays in order to find and predict hits; Psychographic Research has brought technology to bear. When Big Tree Records wanted to know if Hot Chocolate's English hit, "Emma," would be a hit Stateside they sent the tape to Psycho wunderkind Tom Turicchi in Dallas. He attach-

ed electrodes to his subjects, and in what is basically a lie detector test, measured their unconscious emotional response to the song. It's destined for the top, he concluded, and the rest is history.

In the two years Turicchi has operated Psychographic Research he has attracted the interest and services of 23 of the 25 largest record companies. He has tested 1,200 records and claims 92 per cent accuracy in pinpointing hits.

Turicchi offers two services. He tests hit potential before a record is released, and also selects which song on an album should be released as a single and promoted. For its 40 radio station clients the organisation provides a rating of new releases each week.

The guinea pigs are" divided into four groups: teenagers, 18-24 year old males, 18-24 year old females, and the aged (in this case, anyone over 25). Responses of the eight subjects in each group are automatically registered by movement of a needle on graph paper. A catchy sec-

tion of a song - sex, deathand money are prime stimulants -and the line zooms upward. A jagged line indicates the listener was irritated. Afterwards, the subjects discuss their conscious reactions to the songs.

Responses in each category are carefully noted. When the 18-24 year old girls showed irritation to an implied reference to abortion in "Your're Having My Baby," Turicchi predicted it would be a hit, but advised

that radio play be at times when the 18-24 year old female audience would be smallest.

Turicchi* who holds a doctorate in musicology, developed the system while teaching classical music; he wanted to find out what music interested his class. After studying the effects of music on emotions he says he worked five years developing a statist tical model of the system.

Clearly there are endless possibilities. They have tested commercials and recently opened a TV lab complex, which, Turicchi says, "Will add a whole new dimension to broadcast media."

About the only thing still left to chance is the magic.

Jonh Ingham

Rustic Of The Hour

"Ah never minded snakes atall. Used to have this little colorful one ah kept inside mah shirt and carried around with me. One day my daddy took a look at it and said, 'Damn, boy, that's a coral snake you got there!' I like to fainted."

The speaker is Paul Davis, and the regional drawl, the "ahs" and "mah's" on voice or paper, are not for effect on his part or mine. Paul Davis, up from Meridian, Mississippi and currently cracking the pop charts, is one of the most dyed-in-the-husk Deep Southerners around in a time when crackers are affecting the Confederate cracker stance. The lined, gnarly face, the long red hair and beard, the (to this speedrapping Yankee) incredibly laconic delivery of only what he feels he needs to say in a deep drawl - if he weren't so even and eyeball-to-eyeball sincere, you might almost mistake him for a parody of the most downhome singing sodbuster dreamed up by a daily paper columnist with a Faulkner hangover.

"Ride 'Em Cowboy" is Davis' first hit, having just slipped off the charts after shooting surprisingly high for a first entry by an unknown artist. Which is perhaps not so surprising after all when you consider how such a song ("I used to be the best they say at ridin' young wild horses for my pay... They used to tell me 'Ride 'em Cowboy, Don't let him throw you down, you can't make no money if you hit the ground.' " ) plays to the unconscious fears and yearnings within the national mood - a romantic, sentimental story of obsolescence on the most folk-mythic Old American level. Plus which just about any song in which the word "money" figures prominently would seem to have a fighting chance in today's pop market-this cat's out of work too, but he's heroically out of work. Though one doubts if Paul Davis was disingenuous enough to scheme it that way. "Whenever it comes on the radio," he says, "ah still have a little bit o' trouble believin' it's me."

Several Commercial Potentials

"Ven show biznez plays out, my boy," Alice's dad, Irving, used to say to him, "you can alvays come back to the beer distributorship." Here, in a photo taken several years ago during Alice's high school summer vaction stint at the warehouse, Alice keeps accounts while Irving taste tests. "My son," father was heard to remark to son at the time. "Oy, my son, that shirt! No, no, no!"

"Paul is such a natural," effuses Ilene Berns. "He is just so real, that we just don't see how he can miss." Ilene, of course, has a vested interest in Paul's reality and the commercial potency of same; widow of Bert Berns, who founded Bang Records and was the Spector looming behind the Latin-inflected sound embodied by such early Sixties hits as "Twist & Shout," "Hang on Sloopy" and Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl," Ilene has recently revived Bang with her husband and business partner Eddie Biscoe, setting up connubial and commercial shop in Atlanta, Ga. Previously Bang was semi-moribund, keeping Ilene and perhaps little more than a warehouse and pressing plant alive through the mind-boggling worldwide sales of endless repackages of early material by Neil Diamond, who began his career with Berns and Bang before going on to become a bellowing Artist (and you should just hear Neil on his first album, singing "Hanky Panky" for laughs and interrupting his own hopelessly offkey vocals to groan that his producer is a sadist for making him cover this piece of schlock 'n' roll).

Wear A Vest And They'll Never Know

After failing a battery of exams administered to every potential Scotland Yard exec, Keith Moon stared dejectedly into the misty English daylight, standing upside down. At least his glasses were on right.

Kiss One For Me

Flash! Exclusive photo! Mick Jagger's big lips stuck in Coca-Cola' can! Shown here at the moment it happened backstage at Led Zep's recent New York show are the ill-fated Mr. Jagger, Bianca, the lips' widow, and an unnamed black couple. According to police reports, it took a six-man crew of welders fifteen hours to remove the offending Coke can from what police describe as "the victim's humongous lips." Reached several days after the tragic accident which may seriously curtail his extra-musical activities, Jagger was tight-lipped.

Now the erstwhile empire known as Bang is recovering its legs if not its wings, not just yet, and Paul Davis is their golden boy, or at least brightest hope. They're building slowly and methodically as a small independent company in much the same way that Paul, in speech or song, refuses to waste a word, a gesture, even a significant glance. He is a real rustic, and bears watching in spite of the occasional banality (Southernwoman -I'm -alone -and -I'm -blue, - travelin' -down -that -dusty -highway) of his compositions. As for Bang, they are branching out of the Delta- they've just released an album by New York disk jockey turned naughty comic Don Imus. His specialty: creative scatological ethnic baiting.

Lester Bangs

Nico At The Altar

What'll those sharp promoters think of next? Nico and Tangerine Dream in the Rheims cathedral, where they used to crown French

kings in the 15th century. A perfect setting for Nico's funereal drone and the Dream's futuristic cave music. Shine & shadow & rampant pewsniffing, right? Firing up hash pipes with pages torn from prayer ' books! Fat Edgar Froese going down on icy labia at the High Altar!

Nice talk, but it was more like a somnambulists' bunny hop. A barely reflexive crowd of long-haired Tom Posten types entrenched themselves in the Gallic gloom while T. Dream tuned up their knobs. With all the stage prescence of an underexposed photograph, they proceeded to make tropical insect noises with few side effects, gilding the damp atmosphere like an iron tissue. Ten years ago they would have been librarians.

After a brief delay Nico appeared with her pet harmonium, setting death to music as usual. She poured left and right and then into "The End," during which a curious priest was seen praying down an erection. Her Zwads have barely condensed when T. Dream return, chasing their horp-rimmed binaries down further blind alleys.

The next day angry parishioners, kneeling on broken wine bottles and finding piss in the holy water, demanded an exorcism. The mainman in the Archdiocese acknowledged the complaints, but insisted it could have been much worse. Besides, the concert provided lotsa bucks for the missionaries. All quiet on the western front.

Rick Johnson

Feet Ache? Relax...

JARRETTSVILLE: If your feet are turned around backwards and, well, you know, not even those ABNORMAL shops, the ones for tall and "robust" men, can help you, pay very close attention to this item: a Jarrettsville, Maryland Man is attempting to sell his latest patented invention, backward shoes (no, they're not for the unfortunate folk of the Third World). Cecil Slemp has come up with the idea of reversing the toe and the heel on shoes, and ft's a sure winner. Imagine:'you're wearing your P. R.F.C.'s (Puerto Rican Fence Climbers, remember?) and you want to, naturally, climb this fence and maybe get into the yards where they keep the subway trains at night so you can spray paint your personal monogram over several windows. Well, with these new shoes you can climb over that fence backwards and keep a watch out for any of the yard police who might not want you to practice your art in their vicinity. But, listen to this; Cecil had the idea that the military would dig this idea because the shoes would leave tracks indicating that the wearer was going in the opposite direction than he was really walking . . . Cecil, you're just too goddamn practical. (Thanx and a tip of the Boy Howdy tab-top to Earth News.)

Robert Duncan

Michael Nesmith Gets Transcendent

Thanks to America's greatest industry, nostalgia, the 60s are coming back to us in song. That means the resurfacing of such almost-forgoten faces as Janis Ian ("Baby I'm only society's child"), John Kay's Steppenwolf, Moby Grape, John Sebastian and Tiny Tim (notice that all those mentioned are American -the English artists never die, they ju$t hang-around). But the hottest rumor circulating last year concerned the alleged reforming (and subsequent tour) of tbe Monkees. When Bob Dylan's comeback was announced, people were seen shrugging their shoulders and saying "Dylan's OK, but he could never do a real protest song like the Monkees' 'Pleasant Valley Sunday' " (a no-holds barred indictment of the faceless, sterile and status seeking American middle-upper class).

Sad to say, it's not gonna happen. When Michael (he doesn't like being called "Mike," a sure sign of emotional maturity) Nesmith commented "For me, the regrouping of the Monkees has to be the great non-event of the century," I turned a whiter shade of pale. Seeing (and meeting!) Davy Jones before interviewing Nesmith had given me hope that Michael would officially say that the tour was definite, a CREEM exclusive. Hell, what

I got instead was a philosophical lecture by Professor Nesmith. It all started with an innocent question like "Whatcha been up to, besides vegetatin'?" And I got the following mouthful:

"I've been into spiritual and conscious awareness, and I've had many spiritual experiences over the past few years. I got-heavily into the contemplation of time and space, and to the nature of matter as energy and to the nature of energy as illusory. I ask you 'Is there a God?" I mean for years we've been saddled with western theology, and we get into a place where we instantly think of God in terms of white robes, golden gloves, holy water, etc. The contemplation of the infinite, of man's true nature, the science of being are all inbred within us; there's no reason religion should be surrounded by mystical hocus-pocus, or having to go to church, or 'do right or you'll.go to hell' because all of that is nonsense put out by the political arm of the Church, which is finding its death now. The answer to 'Is there a God?' is 'Who wants to know?' "

The Who's John Entwistle and CREEM's own Joan Uhelszki pretend that success does not go to one's head. Entwistle accepted 1st place in the 1974 Reader's

Poll for Best Reissue (A Quick One/SellOut) in Detroit. Boy Howdy reportedly chugged this can himself.

"Couldn't a been said better by Wild Man Fischer," I smartly remarked. Then I quickly asked, "Got any records coming, Michael?"

"Yes, I just finished a book with a soundtrack. It's a fairy tale, a metaphysical allegory on the imprisonment of the senses."

"Uh-huh, yeah, that sounds, err . .. interesting," I managed to babble. Collecting my composure again, I asked him how the Monkees' phenomenon looks in retrospect.

"A grapefruit . . . it looks like a grapefruit. Grapefruits all look the same, you know."

Finally, to my question of whether it * bothers him to know that he's still identified as the wool-hat wearing guitarist of the Monkees, a thoughtful Nesmith replied: "No, that would be like a flower being ashamed that it was ever a seed." That, my friends, almost made me cry.

Bob Fukuyama