THE BAND Northern Lights-Southern Cross (Capitol)

A recent nation-wide telephone poll on Northern Lights-Southern Cross, the Band's first collection of new songs in four years, has produced a solid consensus. All respondents agree that the new album is the Band's best since Stage Fright, and probably their best since The Band. Representative comments include, "1 can't stop playing it," "My favorite song changes every time T hear it," "This is the way a Band record is supposed to sound," and "What's the last verse of 'Acadian Driftwood' about, anyway?" *

This consensus, however, includes only those who have listened to the record, and if the Billboard charts, which notch NL-SC in the

middle fifties after nearly a month in the stores, are any indication, said consensus excludes numerous people who heretofore found great pleasure in the Band's offerings, and who are now risking serious cultural deprivation for no good reason, This, to me at any rate, is understandable; l came late to the NL-SC consensus myself. When 1 first heard

this album 1 found the music flat an the lyrics obvious, and stayed wi the record more out of blind ho than curiosity. The album sounc inordinately modest. Bits 1 didn't — and still don't much cate though l don't hear them ^nyr — kept me away from the m Some chQruses ate sing("Forbidden Fruit," for one, t\ that now reminds me of some gone Coasters' B-side more than anything else); the words are often too literal or too vague to be very interesting. /'Hobo Jungle" is flatly sentimental: "And although nobody here really knows where they're going/At the same time, nobody's lost."

However, I must confess th^t the album is so good I'm even starting to like that.

I like the feel otNL-SC. It is music of great confidence. After so long without a really "new" album you'd expect the Band to be a little nervous; maybe they are, but they certainly don't sound it. Richard Manuel's singing is restrained yet right on the mark; Levon is typically off-thewall and sounding very pleased to be there. Rick Danko, though still troubled by the choke-in-the-thrdat mannerisms that began to affect his vocals around the time of "Stage Fright," is as convincing as he is emotional on the new "It Makes No Difference." But the real action takes place between the lines', in the playing. The rhythm section is lighter than in the past, but very firm; Robertson's solos open up the tunes without ever by-passing them. Best of all, there is the way in which in song after song the musicians break away once the singers have said their piece, and blithely take off, doubling back over the traces of the ■ tunes in a way that is unprecedented in the Band's recordings — or, for that matter, in their live shows. They sound as if they're aiming their music at each other, not, as on Cahoots, at a finished product. They're taking chances. ,

About Garth Hudson, who is in a word magnificent. He has never played with slich imagination, nor with such deceptive anonymity — I heard the album only when I began to hear him. Flaying organ (and less often synthesizer, though a lot of what sounds like synthesizer, or horns, or strings, is in fact just his organ), Hudson takes an ordinary melody or riff and makes magic out of it (there is that moment at the very end of "It Makes No Difference," when Hudson sneaks out of hiding, wraps the tune up with a shivery midnight hush, and steals the piece). At other times he seems to lead everyone else into possibilities in the songs that might otherwise have lain dormant. More often he is simply a presence, painting his tapestries in the background, letting a listener catch glimpses between the cracks left by the other musicians, until finally you see the tapestry whole.

Hudson uses a Lowrey organ ("souped-up," says Robertson) and makes it sound like an orchestra; this is not merely a technical accomplishments but mostly an emotional one. What Randy Newman got from a string section on his luminous and tragic "Louisiana 1927" Hudson gets on his own, on almost every song. No nuance escapes him — no shading of feeling, no matter how elusive, seems beyond him. j With supreme delicacy, he wraps his sound around the Band, enfolding their performance with a warmth of spirit (listen to him in the middle of "Jupiter Hollow" or all through "Rags & Bones") that may well prove to be what this album is best remembered for.

"Acadian driftwood, gypsy tailwind," runs the lovely chorus of "Acadian Driftwood," the centerpiece song of NL-SC — a tale of people who dream of northern lights as they bear a southern cross. The tune has to do with the Acadians, French settlers in the Eastern part of Nova Scotia, who were expelled from Canada after the British defeated the French on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. Acadia had perhaps the best farmland in Eastern Canada, and the British were not about to share the spoils; they herded the few thousand Acadians onto ships and sent them far enough to make sure they'd never come back. The ships went to New Orleans; the Acadians settled there, and became the CajunsThey preserved, to this day, their own language (though of course it changed, and today a fight is raging over the government attempts to keep Cajun instruction out of public schools), their own music,, and their own cooking — holding together and keeping apart, though a black Cajun culture, the Zydeco, grew up alongside the white. (Given that the French were forced to leave Acadia for America, it is neatly ironic that less than twenty years later Acadia was populated by Tory refugees from the American Revolution. There are virtually no French in Aqadia even now, but descendants of the Loyalists hold a sort of anti-Independence Day celebration every Fourth of July.)

The story Robertson has made out of thesfe events — all very lowkey, with a little martial piccolo from Garth Hudson, mournful and tough Cajun fiddle from Byron Berline, and beautiful singing from Manuel and Helm — is quite interesting.

After the battle, an Acadian family hears from relatives that life is better in the south, and not forced to leave but choosing to, they set out for America. They head out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, stopping at St. Pierre, a nearby island still under French dominion. They attempt a landing further down the coast, perhaps in Maine, but they are turned away. Finally they reach Louisiana — America, where they can. start over.

The only thing wrong is that they don't like it. They don't accept America, its weather or its government; they don't really make a new home. They don't make peace with the new land or with themselves. They spend their days working the sugar fields, noting the color of the trees and the feel of the land, with "winter in their blood," dreaming of the return they will never make. "Acadia, I am sick to my heart for my homeland," runs the last verse of the song sung by Manuel in Cajun, the shift from English to Cajun representing the shift from French to Cajun, and giving a listener a sense of how far their journey really took the Acadians, how much it changed them in spite of themselves. flAca-; dia, the snow cries tears in the sun/ You know I'm coming, Acadia...^teedle-um teedle-um teedle-oo," one last Cajun shout of joy as the tune fades out to Berline's fiddle, repeating the same pattern over and over again.

I doubt that Robertson would have written this song in this way when he was writing numbers for Big Pink or The Band; but today, the tale he is telling must say something about the strangeness the Band still feels, that they cannot evade nor transcend, as Canadians living in America (and what must Levon Helm have felt singing this song, a Southerner imagining himself, for a few moments, as an exile in a land he truly knew as home?). "Acadian Driftwood" (and what an image that is!) reflects the Band's story; it seems like an, autobiography concealed in history. As with Levon's performance of "The Night ^hey Drove Old Dixie Down," that is the kind of history the Band has a claim on, just as their versions of such stories have a claim to make on their listeners.

When I first heard this record1, and found it dull, the line that came to mind was from Crash Craddock's hit: "Ain't nothin' shakin' but the leaves on the trees." Listening now to Garth Hudson and the rest of the Band play their way across the album to the final tune, "Rags & Bones," a song that captures the Band's idea of what music is about and where it comes from as w^ell as anything could# I still think Crash Craddock's line sums up the recbrd — its success, not its failure. ''After a time with this music, it

doesn't matter if nothing's shaking but the leaves on the trees; that is, in fact, the point. When the leaves on this album shake, you hear them.

JOHN LENNON Shaved Fish (Apple)

Did y'ever notice how each df the former Beatles has enjoyed a successive season in thesun as the rock critics' fave Fab Four survivor?

To wit: John was the immediate most-likely-to-succeed choice during the Beatles' 1968-69 twilight, since everybody had always known that he was The Intellectual Beatle, and I.Q. (or what passed for it) was a hot item in those days. With theisoftening of the mind-expansion impulse into peace & love and p lot of other liberal axe-grinding around 1970-71, Maharishi Harrison got the nod. But then the revolution turned upon and devoured itself, and the punk reactionaries of 197374 nominated Ringo, since he was the least pretentious of the lot. Come 1974-75, and all the apologists preaching that pop music really should be as bland and innocuous as it already was, and smoothie Paul picked up all the marbles.

By now, of course, John's back on top of the deck-, and isn't it about time? Oh, sure, I went through my own cold turkey of Lennon-withdrawal, especially on the day ecu 1972 when I saw him and Yoko patronize the hell out of Chuck Berry (his r'n'r better and supposed idol, for Chrissake) on the Phil Donahue Show. But life is short, and forgiveness eternal (I think George Harrison said that), and Shaved Fish's convenient stackingup, in rough chronological order, of all of John's post-Beatie musical phases, has given me a lot more perspective on the guy.

For one thing (and it's a big one), I'm not sure now that Lennon was ever all that committed in his espousdl of all those leftist platitudes of a few years back. The key to my unmasking of Big Bad John was rehearing "Instant Karmp!" with the lyric sheet in my lap. I'd always liked the song for its chunky rhythm and for what I took to be its "Positively Fourth Street" arrogant sarcasm. But I'm a notorious non-listener to lyrics (as my wife'll be glad to testify in any probate court in the land), and it wasn't until I sat down with this album that I discovered that "Instant Karma!" is actually some kind of neo-Christian universal-love exhortation.

Sure coulda fooled me, John, what with the beautiful sneer in your voice. Fact is, I've always liked Lennon precisely for the profound snottiness of his vocals (with better breaks all along the line, he could've made a fine protopunk in the Sky Saxon mold). But if the tone of "Instant Karma!" belies its literal lyrics, then what about "Imagine" and "Mind Games" and all of his other pep-rally dirges? If you listen to Lennon's voice rather than his lyrics in any of these ditties, you realize how supremely cynical they all are — which is also O.K. with all of us existential hacks. Happy Xmas, John, the war is over, and we love you once again.

So pick up Shaved Fish (a great set), and get the goods on John once and for all. A followup to this greatest hits rehash, you ask? Well, taking my cue from the enclosed "Woman Is the Nigger of the World," I asked the resident nigger of my household what she thought about of John's current activities. She said (pay attention, Apple) that she only hoped that John had-the presence of mind to record Yoko's labor-pain screams during their recent delivery, so that Yoko could put out her first "live" album. (No fair using natural childbirth.)

Richard Riegel

RINGO STARR Blasts From Yotur Past (Capitol)

It's hard to figure out just what constitutes the biggest detriment to a healthy music scene these days; the dearth of flesh & blood artists with something new to say or the sudden elevation of the mediocre into positions of popularity arid influence. If we tan pin the former condition on cautious record companies and constricted radio programming, it's easy to view the latter situation as some sort of corollary. We get Elton and Olivia, Reddy and Ringo in place of real Personalities because, packaged, proven and safe, these acts can be handled a lot easier. It expedites matters. „ *

Does Ringo exist apart from his records? Who cares? It's doubtful

the cutesy-pie tracks Richard Perry has turned into Ringo Records will ever move a listener to do anything more decisive than reach for the radio dial and that's what's so unnerving about these records. These cuts — this "No No Song," that thoughtless remake of "Only You," "Oh My My," "You're Sixteen" —. they're maddening only for their lack of personality, depth, emotional commitment. They're so insubstantial they're hardly fit objects to provoke boredom, much less concern and despair.

And Ringo's only an agent in all of this. It boils down to the skillful Perry, a true-bred Seventies producer whose commitment is always to make a "well-done" album. He'll always deliver, regardless of what/ who he's working with. Perry has made competent albums with Ringo, Barbra Streisand, Tiny Tim, Martha Reeves, Art Garfunkel; he's capable of making competent albums with Nancy Sinatra r Sal Mineo, Jack LaLanne or Uni, Roy and Al. Is there any way to communicate how Unnecessary, how non-vital "I'm the Greatest" or "Oh My My" is? '

Thought not.

DEEPPURPLE Come Taste The Band (Warner Bros.)

TOMMY BOLIN Teaser

, (Nemperor)

The Deep Purple story is basically one long etc. A winning formula band to the end, not even drastic changes in personnel can deter Jon Lord's flash commandoes from delivering the product on time. The Industrial Towel Service of rock. It's usually pretty good stuff too, a reliable mallet of carcinogenic riffs, beefcake vocals and bumper sticker lyrics that's about as subtle as jumping bail.'

A minor technical difficulty developed this time however* when founding guitarist Ritchie Blackmore decided to relocate his riff decoding machine in Rainbow and be his own Jon Lord. Enter Tommy Bolin of James Gang and Zephyr "fame." The re'ason for selecting him from any number of equally hotdog second-string axe jockeys is' unclear, although it could be because he's a dead ringer for bassist Glenn Hughes and has experience in looking conceited on album covers.

At any rate, Bolin is no threat to the memory of Blackmore. His playing on CTTB has all the personality of an empty parking place, following as it does the time-honored TM technique of repeating the same lines'over and over again until they start to sound like something different. While Blackmore often got high enough to do weather reconnaissance, Bolin just sloshes around like a barge taking on water.

The lack of kamikaze intrigue •doesn't seriously harm the album though, since there's not an overabundance of room for Trojan guitar .in Lord's current strategy. Standard D.P. rocket's predominate, with the customary Trac II /licks, vocal quarter-pounders and reluctant rhythm tease that bucks like a wheelchair with broken spokes. A couple ballads, occasional synthesizer misdemeanors, eto.> You get the picture? Yes, we see.

Bolin's solo album manages to acquit his guitar proficiency but it's definitely no chrome fish. Lacking in any sense of direction, Tommy and his traveling Celebrity Sweepstakes (including Jan Hammer, Jeff Porcaro,' Prairife Prince an& Dave Sanborn, name fans) play stylistic roulette with everything from windup snakes to heartfelt, Hell-OrBobby-Whitlock ballads.

The most successful cuts are those where the loose ends domino, like the chicken-reggae "People, People" ora jazzy instrumental, "Marching Powder," which gives Bolin the chance to display some fine Lee Harvey Oswald! rapid-fire guitar. Lowlights like the loungescent tango darts of "Savannah Woman" and puddle of a ballad "Dreamer" intrude regularly however, begging the question: would this musical Bizbag haye beep released if Bolin hadn't just signed on with a name band?

Do trout have eyelids?

NEIL YOUNG Zuma (Reprise)

I remember Neil Young and how much he meant to me in the Buffalo Springfield, cutting through their sweet melancholy harmonies, always a little hazy like L.A. smog (that was their special poetry), with his perfect, chillingly economical odes to getting wasted way too soon: "Burned," "Out of My Mind," "Mr. Soul," and the flat assertion in the middle of so much optimism that "Everybody's Wrong."

I loved him for that. It took a certain amount of guts, and in the long run he was right. But the long run has run its course, and now — well, let's just accept it as personality or style or something that all his solo 'career he played guitar like he had the wired shakes and sang in an increasingly pathetic and self-involved nasal whine that kept getting higherpitched and more ragged until it was as shaky as his hands. If you're going to make dissolution integral to your artistic statement you'd better have a pretty strong statement to make; you'd better have an inner strength that'll hold against the outer quavers.

. Neil Young doesn't. As ne made one plodding,'1 whining album of simplistic western-folkje washout doggerel after another I found him more and more difficult to take seriously, until last summer I was amazed at some of my friends, who stood jn wonderment at the "tremendous courage" Young displayed in "confronting the abyss" in Tonight's the Night. It was another stupid stumblebummer, rendered particularly ridiculous by lyrics that were sloppy and idiotic beyond the call of duty ("early in the morning 'bout the break of day/he used to sleep until the afternoon" — I mean, whaf a harrowing lifestyle) and pure stretches of professional patheticness so ostentatious it became its own brand of creepy narcissism ("Borrowed Tune"). The record was a joke, and I couldn't care less if the guy's friends were junkies — we all got friends who are junkies, they got their own problems* and this shit revealed nothing about or to them.

Now he's back with another cripj pie's constitutional, and it sounds like all the others, a little tighter than Tonight's the Night and hence less fraught with portent. Which is good, because it means I won't have to have arguments with my friends a1, bout whether it's Heavy and a statement from the depths or just more self-indulgent slop. It reveals once again that Neil has no insights to offer about women ("Well, i wonder who's with her tonight?/and i wonder who's holding her tight?/ but there's nothing i can say/to make him go away" — try sprinkling some blood on your tracks), about druggie alienation ("into paradise i • soared/unable to come down/for reasons i'd ignored/total Confusion/disillusion/new A things i'm krtowin'" — yeah, like that you rnight^ as well have cover art as shoddy as your music), about what else he can effectively steal from the Rolling Stones ("you're just a stupid girl/you really got a lot to learn"), and, perhaps most offensively, about whitje European immigrants and the people of color they walked over to lay the pavement on this continent. The centerpiece of Zuma is "Cortez the Killer," which says much the same about the Incas as "Southern Man" and "Alabama" said about Southern blacks—-that they sure made conveniently romantic human sacrifices for fhe white invaders/bosses: "And the women all were beautiful/and the men stood straight and strong/they offered their life in sacrifice/so that others could go on." Good show! Cortez? That dude was evil, man': "What a killer." What a summation. After-all this shit, it's no wonder Ronnie Van Zant didn't much 'care for Neil — I'm surprised the rednecks don't get together with groups dedicated to promoting black and Indian pride, form a coalition to have Neil tarred and feathered and ridden out of America on a rail. If not a fretboard; in his hands they're the same thing.

Lester Bangs

FATS WALLER The Complete Fats Waller Vol. 11934-35 (Bluebird)

'"The Entertainer" was not written by Robert Redford and Paul Newman, or even by Marvin Hamlisch, who got an Academy Award for it, but by a whorehouse piano player named Joplin who wanted to write opera. Which is a little heavy, in the manner of spiortswriters named Jimmy (Cannon, Breslin) but makes the point. Louis Armstrong, who is remembered by the younger set as a handkerchief-head who sang "Mack the Knife" and "Hello, | Dolly" changed jazz when he was a kid by the simple expedient of playing solos. Duke Ellington was a suaver conferencier than Cary Grant ever thought of being, led a dance band that worked over three hundred nights a year arid played an "Auld Lang Syne" that would make you cry, and was, when time permitted, a greater American composer than anyone with the probable exception of Charles Ives. Fats Waller, who this piece is supposed to be about, was the son of the minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church (a post later held by Adam Clayton Powell, husband of the jazz pianist Hazel Scott) 4and loved Bach and the organ. Instead, before he died of too much booze at thirty-nine (the stories ate charming; the. end was not) , he reinvented the stride piano style he had learned from James P. Johnson, wrote "Honeysuckle Rose," "Squeeze Me," "Jitterbug Waltz,"?#1 Ain't Misbehavin'', and acted the clown on hundreds of records. The Entertainer.: Maybe he liked it.

Most of the songs on this first Bluebird collection are novelties, throwaways. (An anxiety-alleviating note on the package says, "Fats Waller's piano solos will, all be released together in one package, rather .than being broken up throughout the > chronological series.") The ease and flow of his piano playing are so casual that they suggest he didn't much care about it. Fred Astaire danced like that. The mocking yocals contain asides that , undercut the pretensions of the songs — Burt Reynolds, with far less justification, picks the same method of letting us know his material is beneath him. There are some brilliant musicians in the small band known as His Rhythm — Bill Coleman, Rudy Powell, A1 Casey, Gene Sedric. There are some gems here — "Sweetie Pie#' "Louisiana Fairy Tale," "Then I'll Be Tired Of You" ,;but many of them would be long gone if Fats hadn't recorded them. That was Waller's strategy. He made the surface so charming you never looked behind it. The Entertainer. He managed to be remembered anyway.

Joe Goldberg

ANGEL

(Casablanca)

On gossamers of monometallic mesh the Angel alights and whispers in a quiet morphine haze: monotony!!! And why not monotony, it's much more physically erosive than ennui or malaise; monotony, unlike its cousin boredom (an All-American word if ever there was one), anaesthetizes the victim, causing all sorts of useless joys , to careen throughout the hardening arterial passageways. Which is simply to say that Angel, on this maiden voyage of theirs, drone on and on in a never ending swamp qf bionic blitzkriegs designed solely to disrupt molecular balances and cause flashback excitations. To say that Angel as a musical entity is derivative is to say that, exactly. That's precisely why I like 'em so much. They're. MOR metal refined to the slickness of motor oil. and they're monotonous.

Now, being monotonous isn't as easy as it sounds, especially if you're aesthetically monotonous. Lou Reed's got monotony down to a science, so do all the German bands like Kraftwerk and early Anrion Duul. which is why they're fast becoming viable avenues of musical escape: for those dehumanized by their own humanity. Nico is the rnarble priestess of monotony. And the one thipg that Angel succeeds at right off the wall is grinding repetitious monotony, the kind that moves concrete blocks . like laser beams, energy as a solid and all that physics do-dah. They've got titles, and cuts and all that, but you never notice them because your mind is caught yp in the drone, so much so that surgery could be performed pn your genitalia and you'd never even blink an eye, now THAT'S powerful music. This record is a hit because it plays to the teenage stare like no Other I've heard this year.'Oh yeah, there is one swath they call "On & On" that cuts anything Black Sabbath's ever attempted. Oh yeah (reprise), don't think this review is a shuck 'n' jive because it isn't, monotony is essential and should be given much more credit than it's already gotten; monotony is the real spice of life. Even this review is monotonous,

Joe Fembacher

TOM WAITS ^ Nighthawks at the Diner (Asylum)

Went to a press, party celebrating the publication of Ed Sander's Tales of Beatnik Glory; the room was filled with old beats (Burroughs, Ginsberg), neo-Beats (Patti Smith), rock Beats (Dave Marsh, Bob Christgau), and even a few deadbeats (names furnished upon request). Leaning against a post, looking like some punched-out bastard son of Victor McLagen was another neo-Beat, Tom Waits. Milky red eyes, slept-in clothes, a crooked smileit was 5:00 in the -afternoon but this guy had 2:00 AM in his heart. Being too young to have witnessed any mythic drunken-hard escapades-— Brendan Behan throwing bottles, Dylan Thomas falling off bar stools — I kept Waits in the corner of my eye in case some cataclysmic act of alcohpFinspired effrontery was committed.

None was. But the strategy proves more successful when applied to Nighthawks at the Diner, for, like Altman movie dialogue, Tom Waits should not be hdard but overheard. The set, recorded live In the studio (with an enthusiastic audience present), successfully conveys the nocturnal atmospherics of a

beer-and-poetry binge, but 70 minutes of smoky saloon scatting is simply too damn long. His chronicle of/slouching through the fog and rain-storms of bad times, what Waits calls in ;pne.number his "Emotional Weather Report," js richly detailed, ingeniously rhymed, but sometimes lurches dangerously towards Beat sentimentality. (And there's nothing more pathetic: think of Kerouac's last days, or Ginsberg in his current college-idol treks.) What redeems Waits is his twisted sense of humor — the comedy of tensions that comes from having heightened perceptions and being too wiped-oUtto act upon those perceptions. This gritty/ Fats Wallerish whimsy rescues Nighthawks from being a stretched-out bore of aging-hipster' melancholy, but doesn't lift the album very high above the domain of rock esoterica.

What it comes do.wn to is that unlike other Beat-influenced performers, Tom Waits just talks his way through and his songs (if they can be called that) don't connect with the body. His'energy is the energy of dissolution and on record there's nothing physically compelling. I wouldn't want Waits to pull hirqself together.(because that might make him sane) but he should leave his crowded diner booth every now and then, if only to stretch his legs.

James Wolcott

QUEEN

A Night At The Opera (Elektra)

Is this a Vaudeville concept album or what? A pilot Family Hour vehicle for Freddie Mercury? It sure isn't any night at the opera — it's more like a night attheRKO Orpheum Theatre, Davenport, Iowa (c.1907) except the performers have Esso haircuts and shag jumpsuits. You half expect a youthful Milton Berle to step out between tunes and tell jokes. Dancing girls squatted on feathers. Soggy, piss-stained peanut shells sticking to the bottoms of your shoes.

It just goes to show you what a hit single can do to a band. "Killer Queen" was a cute novelty, but to do half an album in that style is a bit much. Quaint Music Hall bits didn't get the Kinks, or the New Vaudeville Band for that matter, anywhere, and it isn't likely to find Queen a last-ing place in our no-track minds either.

Nonetheless, there are two new kazoo and keyboards ditties complete with'vocals sucked through a tin horn, sun & seashore lyrics and a vague air of reminiscing piano teachers. Poignancy at its cutest. In the same hardened artery is Brian May's ukelele debut on "Good Company" and his equally enthralling harp workout in the megalomaniacal "Love Of My Life, " where Mercury sounds like ode of those crooning eunuchs with bow-tie and greased hair parted down the middle that used to get nailed by rotten tomatoes in old movies. Splat.

But variety's the name of the game in Vaudeville, and Queen doesn't miss a trick. There's "Bohemian Rhapsody," a genuine miniopera with parts and everything and the usual boy-meets-girl, boy-losesgirl, boy-becomes-rock-critic story line. While this was a #1 single in England, don't bet your babushka it'lkencore here. The crypto-historic "'39" is a countryish song with big acoustic guitar offset by aquatic feedback escapism. The Ozark Mt. Daredevils Conquer The Martians. "Prophet's Song" is an eight minute East/West yangbang with Freddie singing acapella with himself and May/s stunning debut on toy koto.

All of this is (dressed up in nrtore fidgety studiotech than Kraftwerk Demonstrates Your New Microwave Oven. This approach worked well on their last couple of albums when there was some solid material to build on but now it's just pale electronic shadows, like watching color TV in the 50's before it was invented. Somebody should call the Science Police on these guys/.

Rick Johnson

KRIS KRISTOFFERSON Who's To Bless and Who's To Blame (Monument)

It's very possible Kris Kristofferson will never write another song as good as "Me and Bobby McGee" or "Help Me Make It Through The Night." He doesrt't even sing as well as he used to. The albums he's made with Rita Coolidge are so bland as to disappear before your ears; Steve 'n' Eydie with straw in their mouths. He^still only writes in a few meters, and deals with the same mysticmacho concerns: Kipling out west. Even reading the lyric sheet, I have no idea what some of these songs are about ("Who'da thought them Arabs woulda bought the U.S.A./ Just to give it to the Jews" is not what my paper, which is not the Jewish Daily Forward, tells me is going on). But I love to listen to his records, including this one. Is that what is meant by star quality?

Joe Goldberg

BRUBECK& DESMOND 1 1975: The Duets (Horizon)

A & M Records, the enormously successful L.A. pop company the Tijuana Brass built, has gone into the jazz business with a new subsidiary label. Harmony. The initial handsome, well-packaged, almost too-Qompletely annotated release includes a thoughtful Jim Hall live performance, the best music from theThad Jones-Mel Lewis band I've ever heard, and an album of duets by Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck.

The feeling is essentially a replay of the marvelous ten-inch Jazz at Storyville LP cut twenty years ago, with only a bass player as accompanimenQ and even includes two songs from that set: "You Go To My Head," and "Summer Song," which grew out of Brubeck's Storyville improvisation on "Over the Rainbow." Other songs from their best yearsNnclude "Alice in Wonderland," "These Foolish Things,". "Balcony Rock" and "Stardust."

Brubeck is surprisingly mellow, avoiding the rhythmic clumping that came to irritate almost everyone, and with no rhythm backing, his frequent delicacy here is a pleasant surprise. Paul Desmond, still playing his alto at least an octave above what anyone else can do, is perhaps the most lyrical jazz musician alive. Brubeck's intros let you know what the songs are right away, but you'd never find out from Desmond. He floats and glides over the music, subtle as a hummingbird, finding something new and fresh in these songs he has to have played thousands of times. He makes it sound so easy you might think nothing's going on. But plon't be fooled. Desmond is a natural, unclassifiable wonder.

The album is also graced by his Holden Caulfieldesque liner notes. He explains, for example, that the percussive'sounds on one track are made by hitting the saxophone keys without blowing into the horn: "I mention this mainly because in this day and age many unusual sounds are produced electronically and are pretty much taken for granted. Not so in this case; it's your straight medieval sound, batteries not included." He could probably sell me a buggy whip.

Joe Goldberg