DAVID BOWIE Station to Station (RCA)

It's tough having heroes. It's the hardest thing in the world. It's harder than being a hero. Heroes are generally expected to produce somethin0g or other to reconfirm their Mandarin-fingered clinch on the hotbuns of the bitch muse, which sometimes comes closer to resembling a set of clawmarks running down ctnd off the edge of a shale precipice. At sunset, even. And that's no office party, kiddo.

But hero-worshippers (fans) must live with the continually confirmed dread of hero-slippage and the humiliating personal compromises in your standards and plain good sense about, oh, two to three weeks after the new elpee masterwork first hits our, turntables.

A very great man (I think it was the Isley Brothers) once said that the real bottom line truism re life on this planet is that it is merely a process of sequential disappointments. So there's no reason even to romanticise your betrayals. Just paying dues, kid. I get burned, therefore I exist. No words in the history of the rock poetic genre, from Dylan to Bernie Tomlin, ever said it better than Sandy Posey's pithy catalog in "Born a Woman": "Bom to be stepped on, lied to, cheated and treated like dirt." And are we not all in some sense women, the niggers of the world according to contemporary social commentators (I tried to get a call through to Toynbee to confirm this like a good journalist but the bastard had the nerve to fucking die in the same week, my week!)?

Yes, we are. A great many David Bowie fans felt burned, turned into veritable women (de-virilized, as Pope Paul would have It) when David released Young Americans. Why? Because, interestingly enough, they thought David was trying to turn himself into a nigger. I was not, however, one of these people.

Now, as any faithful reader of this magazine is probably aware, David Bowie has never been my hero. I always thought all that Ziggy Stardust homo-from-Aldebaran business was a crock of shit, especially coming from a guy who wouldn't even get in a goddam airplane. I thought he wrote the absolute worst lyrics I had ever heard from a major pop figure with the exception of BernieTaupin; lines like "Time takes a cigarette and puts it in your mouth" and "screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo/like some cat from Japan," delivered with a face so straight it seemed like it would crack at a spontaneous word or gesture, seemed to me merely gauche. As for his music, he was as accomplished an eclectician (a.k.a. thief) as Elton John, which means that though occasionally deposited onstage after seemingly being dipped in vats of green slime and pursued by Venusian crab boys, he had Showbiz Pro written all over him. A facade as brittle as it was icy, which I guess means that it was bound to crack or thaw, and whatever real artistic potency lay beneath would have to stand or evaporate.

Crack Bowie did, in the last year or so, and the result was Young Americans. It was not an album beloved of trad Bowiephiles, but for somebody like your reviewer, who never put any chips on the , old chickenhead anyway, it was a perfectly acceptable piece of highly listenable product. More than that, in fact — it was a highly personal musical statement disguised as a shameless fling at the disco market, the drag perhaps utilized as an emotional red herring. Young Americans wasn't Bowie dilettanting around with soul music, it was the bridge between melancholy and outright depression, an honest statement from a deeply troubled, mentally shattered individual who even managed, for the most part, to skirt self-pity. Like many of his peers, Bowie has cracked — and for him it was good, because it made him cut the bullshit. Young Americans was his first human album since Hunky Dory, and in my opinion the best record he ever put out.

Till now. The first things to be said about Station to Station are that it sounds like he's got a real live band again (even if star guitarist Earl Slick did reportedly split between the sessions and the new tour), and that this is not a disco album either (though that's what the trades, and doubtless a lot of other people, are going to write it off as) but an honest attempt by a talented artist to take elements of rock, soul music, and' his own idiosyncratic and occasionally pompous showtune/camp predilections, and rework this seemingly contradictory melange of styles into something new and powerful that doesn't have to cop either futuristic attitudes or licks from Anthony Newley and the Velvet Underground because he's found his own voice at last.

This is the first Bowie album without a lyric sheet, and I'm glad, because aside from previously voiced reservations I've always agreed with Fats Domino that it's more fun to figure them out for yourself. The first line on the album is the worst: "The return of the thin white duke/ Throwing darts in lovers' eyes." Somehow, back in Rock Critics' Training School, when they told me about "pop poetry," 1 didn't and still don't think that they were talking about this, which is not only pretentious and mildly unpleasant, but I am currently wrestling with a terrible paranoia that this is Bowie talking, about himself, I have a nightmare vision in my mind of him opening the set in his new tour by striding out onstage slowly, with a pained look in his eyes and one spotlight following him, mouthing these words. And, quite frankly, that idea terrifies me. Because if it's true, it means he's still as big an idiot as he used to be and needs a little more cocaine to straighten him out.

But I'm really not worried. Because you can always ignore the lyrics if you want, since this is one of the best guitar albums since Rock n Roll Animal, it has a wail and throb that won't let up and rolls roughshod over the words. So who gives a shit what "TVC 15" means, it's a great piece of rock 'n' roll. And when words do appear out of the instrumental propulsion like swimmers caught in a rip tide and not sure whether they wanna call for the lifeguard or just enjoy it, well, at those moments dear reader, I know you're not going to believe this but those words usually make sense! In fact, in (for Bowie) relatively simple, unconvoluted language, they bespeak a transition from the deep depression of the best of Young Americans (and here's a case of scientific proof that depression should never be knocked or avoided, it's a means to an end of division from self, a.k.a. remission) to a beautiful, swelling, intensely romantic melancholy in which the divided consciousness may not only have kissed and made up with itself but even managed to begin the leap towards recognizing that other human beings actually exist! And can be loved for something besides the extent to which they feed themselves to the artist's narcissism.

Specific examples of this remission are not hard to come by: "Blending sound, dredging the ocean/Lost in my circle [the dude — I'm perfectly serious about all this — admitting how fucked up his head was before in spite of all secular glories] ...there are you, drive like a demon/from station to station [could describe the compulsiveness and dissatisfaction of pursuit of randon depersonalized experience, be it sexual or otherwise...go ahead, tell me I'm full of shit or projecting, I don't care, this review isn't designed to sell albums]... it's not the sad effects of the cocaine/I'm thinking that it must be love/It's too late to be grateful/It's too late to be hateful/ It's too late to be late again [in other words I recognize personal fear, destruction and anguish', but I'm not blaming anything or anybody, and can even forgive myself — the main thing is that I got my baby and work to be done now]."

Which is something worth saying. "Golden Years" continues in this vein ("Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere," etc.), and the whistling's an especially nice touch, particularly since it comes off neither corny nor campy (same thing, in my. book). Nor do the ballads that end each side, where Bowie, who had just about convinced us all that he'd blown his voice for good on "Young Americans" (I always figured the vocal track was the one reason the single never made top ten), uses his limited apparatus with beautiful control, pulling off enormously lush, romantic performances ("Oh, I kneel and offer you my word on a wing") that will make your head swim with their richness rather than (as I'd've bet money on before) embarrassing the hell out of anybody within earshot. Lines like "Don't have to question everything in heaven or hell," along with the melodic mood that is their context, can be intensely moving according to your mood, and it doesn't even matter that "Wild is the Wind" is an old Dmitri Tiomkin movie theme — even if Bowie did it for camp reasons and to indulgea personal idiosyncrasy, it doesn't sound like he did, it sounds right with the rest of the album.

Which is' so impressive, such a great rocker and so promising of durability even exceeding Young Americans, that I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think that Bowie has finally produced his (first) masterpiece. To hell with Ziggy Stardust, which amounted to starring Judy Garland in The Reluctant Astronaut, fuck trying to be George Orwell and William Burroughs when you've only read half of Nova Express — this and Young Americans are the first albums he's made which don't sound like scams. Bowie has dropped his pretensions, or most of them at any rate, and in doing that I believe he's finally become an artist instead of a poseur, style collector and (admittedly always great, excepting Raw Power) producer. He'll still never have a shot at becoming my hero, because he's neither funny nor black enough, but I can hardly wait to hear what he's going to have to say next.

STEPHEN STILLS Live (Atlantic)

If nothing else, Atlantic records definitely gets the Beating The Dead Horse of the Month Award for bringing us this live album recorded TWO years ago by a performer who for all intents and purposes was put to sleep three years ago. I remember an interview with Stills way back

when he confessed that his strength was as a picker and not a thinker and that he didn't fancy himself tposwift as a songwriter. Stills did write some fine songs for the Buffalo Springfield but by the time CSN&Y arrived Steverino was down to such com1 plex rhymery as "sparrow/ marrow" and let's face it, any turkey who tries to pull off "life" and "strife" should break the quill and pour the ink down the drain before he can do any more literary damage.

No matter. Stephen has managed to survive solo albums, Manassas, the Steve Stills Band and he's still out there somewhere tonight makin' a buck or two. Yes, he plays a decent enough guitar, usually when he sticks to acoustic because for some reason excess does not grate as much on a Martin as on a Fender and there's plenty of the latter to be found on the electric side of this album — just try a minute or two of Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way," a definitively pedestrian treatment of a definitively pedestrian song.

Speaking of sidewalks, that's the only way to describe the acoustic side as Stills attempts not only Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" but also "Crossroads" and Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me" and I swear if I didn't know that this was a "professional" at work I'd think it was any guitar-toting collegetown panhandling street urchin. "Word Games" is a protest song that makes P. F. Sloan look like Walt Whitman and the only passable track on this sham is "Change Partners," which is after all the only good song Stills has written on this side of the decade. Personally, I'd rather try my luck with volume seventeen of Cream Live if I had a choice and the best choice Stills could make at this point in time is which trade school to go to before it's too late.

Billy Altman

BETTE MIDLER Songs for the New Depression (Atlantic)

Jon Landau's blisteringly hosfile review of Bette Midler's second album so jarred her th^t the production of the third became a tedium-filled epic of indecisiveness: producers came and went, scores of songs were offered and rejected, a proposed project with Paul Simon evaporated, a live album from her "Clams on the Half-Shefl Revue" never materialized...All that fitful activity had a battering effect, for beneath the sophisticated sheen, Midler III has been so brutally worked over that it evokes the famous Avedon photograph of Andy Warhol's scarred torso.

Which is to say that the stitches show. A boppity upbeat number ("Strangers in the Night"), a celebrity singalong ("Buckets of Rain," with Dylan at his 'most cloyingly whimsical), a couple of achingly lyrical torch songs, the obligatory reggae song — seemingly something for everyone. But because there's no driving spirit, no overarching design, Midler's life-is-agay-cabaret eclecticism consists of shiny components that never come together. The album was produced by Utopia's Moogy Klingman, and Rundgren and creyv play on several tracks, but there isn't the sort of careening rush that made the'eclecticism of A Wizard, A True Star so mind-blurringly energetic; each song on Songs is a set-piece, with Midler spotlighted at center stage, projecting into an empty, airless auditorium. It's a tasteful, elegant,

even delicate performance, but delicacy is not what Midler's best at — she needs her audience so that she can rowdily cut loose. Despite all the praise for her compassion and sensitivity, what her fans really revel in are her nasty asides, as when she says that "Cher is preggy by Greggy."

Well, ok; I never thought she was worth more than a few laughs. On her Tonight show appearances, Midler was amusingly flaky, and because Lnfever saw her during her legendary cabaret/Continental Baths days (I wasn't even in NY at the time), she was never more than a TV personality for me. A Jaye P. Morgan, say, or a Joan Rivers, or, more precisely, a bucket-breasted Woody Allen: Jewish, urban-smart, funny with wisecracks rather than jokes, and rather nervously insouciant. So the cascade of roses that greeted the arrival of her first album came as a mild mystery. That glittering mobile of boogie-woogie and Brecht seemed too calculatingly designed to show her range (as if she were saying, "See, I can be both Spirited and Serious"), and her virtuosity was as vacuous as Barbra Streisand's pathetic attempts to be contemporary. Midler's edge, was that unlike Streisand, she had a producer (Barry the beagle Manilow) who could give her contrivances a certain kinetic kick. As for the second album, well, it was a snowball that melted before it reached my turntable.

Yet the Legend of Bette persisted, and I can remember sitting at a rock symposium when one of my editors at the Village Voice ejaculated, "What I really respect about Bette Midler is her sense of anguish." I had no idea that he was talking about and did an incredulous - Oliver - Hardy - looking - at -Stan-Laurel double-take. Then in the New Republic Richard Poirier, who wrote the famous high-minded essay on the Beatles in the Partisan Review, compared the textural allusiveness of the Clams revue to Joyce's Ulysses, and though it was an intelligent, provocative argument (that mass culture work can have all the rich complexities of a work of high art), there's no way that Midler, pumping her way through Bowie's "Young Americans," could live up

to such celestial praise. Certainly no performer, not Springsteen, not the Stones, not Patti Smith; has been so harmed by the praise of intellectuals as has Bette Midler — she's been so influenced (and hence imprisoned) by the cheers of critics that instead erf being just a glorified campy Ethel Merman, which is probably a role she would find comfortable, she feels that she's got to express the .Zeitgeist, Songs for the New Depression isn't an album title, it's an album statement, a declaration of intention that nothing inside the jacket confirms; it's comparable to trying to inject significance into Barbra Streisand's Lazy Afternoon by retitling the package, Songs for the Coming Entropy. On the Songs cover, Midler has painted over a poster of the Divine Miss M and it's not difficult to understand why. Pauline Kael has noted that Streisand has become as shrill as a queen imitating Streisand, and Midler's dilemma is kin but slightly different: there are now a half-dozen female impersonators who do ^'Bette Midler" better than Bette Midler does. If she doesn't break out, she'll be a prisoner in a mirrored maze of selfparody.

Yet I don't see any means of escape. Even her most ardent fans admit that her voice is eroding, and unless she has hidden reservoirs of talent it's difficult to imagine her as an actress or comedienne; unlike, say, Lily Tomlin, Midler speaks only in her own voice — Bette Midler is Bette Midler's only role. She can shift styles and poses but I think it'll be to disguise her confusions rather than to articulate a coherent vision. Even as a work of fragments Songs for the New Depression is uncompelling because none of the pieces demands relistening; none of the tracks is intriguing enough to be worth sussing out. In 1972, after a blazingly successful Bitter End engagement, one critic wrote:

"Bette Midler really is showbiz, easy to pa§s off as a minor-league camp queen.or a ringer for Barbra Streisand. Upon reflection, however, I prefer to think of her as the Beatles."

Upon reflection, she's hardly worth a Ringo.

James Wolcott

ELVIN BISHOP Struttin' My Stuff (Capricorn)

Starting out as a deader ringer for Bob Dylan than Mr. Z. himself (per the Cover of the first Paul Butterfield album), Elvin Bishop could have parlayed his physical resemblance into a better Next Dylan swandive than Elliott Murphy ever aquashoved down our maws. But Bishop has

never fantasized for a moment that he's anyone but his own Big El, and Struttin' My Stuff is so refreshingly free of identity crises as to be positively anachronistic.

Subsequent corporate tradeoffs notwithstanding, Capricorn's miraculous curative waters are still flowing from the eternal Atlantic fountainhead (Southern division), and Struttin' My Stuff has all the precise funk feel of a vintage Stax rouser. The music is purely and simply rhythm and blues, a format largely neglected by both major rock races here in the Bicentennial doldrums. Elvin and group dispense enough rhythmic chicka-chickas to satisfy any old R&B jade, but at the same time they forego the cosmic truths often parasitical to said chickachicka.

Struttin' My Stuff is resonant instead with cosmic guffaws, especially toward touring and groupies, the sturm and drang hobgoblins of practically every other boogierelated album of the season. Unlike B.T.O. or even Kiss, Bishop finds no moral dilemmas in the nightly assault of the groupies. To him it is both explosively funny, and great fun in the bargain, as his brilliantly sarcastic call & response with Mick-

ey Thomas on "Slick Titty Boom" testifies. "I Love the Life I Lead" sums up Bishop's joyous acceptance of the "hotels, mo-tels, rent-a-cars, drinking in airport bars," those sleazy rites of passage so threatening to more sensitive souls (Joni Mitchell take note).

Some fun, yeah, with those groupies, but Thomas's soulful vocal

and Bishop's snarling cracker geetar on "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" show that these ol' boys are no slouches in the emotional involvement dept, either. And "My Girl" is the best Motown remake since B.O.A.'s "Dancing in the Streets," different enough from the Tempts' original to be just as provocative.

Good, good music. Hummm, Maybe we should persuade Dylan to capitalize on his resemblance to Elvin Bishop...

Richard Riegel

EMMYLOU HARRIS Elite Hotel (Reprise)

No wonder Bob Dylan chose Emmylou Harris to sing with him on his Desire LP. Like Dylan and practically no one else, what Miss Harrisseems to be is in the quality of her voice; there's a whole personality there, capable of transforming the most banal material into a deeply moving experience.

Fortunately, that's rarely necessary. In the country vein she prefers, and is beautifully suited for, Miss Harris has chosen well. In some respects, this album is like Linda Ronstadt's Prisoner in Disguise — the songs seem chosen to recapitulate a past success. Hence, there are some up-tempo novelties, and a lovely version of a Beatles song — this time it's "Here, There and Everywhere." Several of the tracks are live, and there's some achingly beautiful harmony singing. Three of Gram Parsons' sortgs are included. Miss Harris seems to feel it's one of her missions in life to spread the gospel about the late Gram Parsons, on whose Grievous Angel album she performed so beautifully. A nice gesture, and the songs are good, but I hope that crusade doesn't make Miss Harris limit herself. She shows here, especially on the two country laments "One of These Days" and "Sweet Dreams," that she's a clear, sweet singer with a haunting, delicate sensibility who can touch the emotions as very few performers around today can. She has the kind of honesty that can't be faked. I hope it makes her enormously successful. It ought to.

; Joe Goldberg

ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Fantasy)

Well, pretty soon it'll be Oscar time again and it's generally as! sumed that the clowns of the Academy will finally own up and plant the old statue in Jack Nicholson's palm and Jack'll probably look down at it and give that famous half-smile of his like during the amazing chicken salad speech in Five Easy Pieces and say "About fuckin' time" and maybe hand it over to Fred Astaire who he sat next to last year when both of them tried to slip underneath their chairs while Sammy Davis, Jr. did his tribute to Daddy Longlegs and you just knew that Fred wasn't gonna win after that and since it's-just like the movie moguls to bring you up just to knock you down, they just may ignore Jack one more time (in favor of oh, George Burns, since this is George's last hurrah, etc.) so they can Oscarize him sometime in the future for some junk role in line with the industry rule which states that all good actors receive Oscars for the movie after their best performance.

Not that Cuckoo's Nest is necessarily Jack's best. His best single line took place in The Shooting, a quickie psychological western in which

Jack plays Billy, the hired killer. He and Millie Perkins and Warren Oates and Will Hutchins are on the trail of Warren's twin brother (Jack and Millie to kill, Warren and Will to save). They're in the desert and there's not enough horses to go around so Jack takes Will's horse and leaves him to die with a sardonic grin and a parting line of "Your brain's gonna fry." Right up there with "Is this the end of Ricco?" and "Frankly, Scarlett..."

And how about Jack as Stoney, leader of a rock band in jolly San Francisco circa '67 in the legendary Psych-Out (a CREEM pat on the back if you can give .the name of Jack's combo) which was produced by Dick Clark whose only other movie production credit was Wild in the Streets (let's not count Dick's dramatic efforts in The Interns though, in passing, it should be noted that Michael Callan and Lou Christie could very well be twins). Anyway, Jack's ponytail was a nice touch, Susan Strasberg was an even nicer one, but Nicholson wound up being overshadowed by Bruce Dern who, as the Seeker, an LSD priest who lives in a garbage dump and wanders around the film like some crazed phantom in a white lab-coat, steals the whole flick. Jack's the guitarist and he's so cool he doesn't even try and fake any chords, just holds the guitar neck with one hand ,and bobs and weaves a lot during a sideways rendition of "Purple Haze" entitled "Ashbury Wednesday" (played in reality by a band called Boenzee Cryque which featured Rusty Young and George Grantham of later Poco fame — small world, ain't it?). Besides, Jack sure can sing, as evidenced by Tommy (best thing in that bomb, to be sure), great influence of Rex Harrison showing — love those Aspen commercials, Rex, what's Noel up to these days?

But this is a soundtrack and that's where Jack "Specks" Nitzsche comes in. Arranger for the Phil Spector orch, compadre of the Aftermath period Stones, honorary Neil Youngiaq and Crazy Horse mentor, not to mention his one screen appearance as leader of the band in the TAMI Show. Lotsa nice looney-bin muzak here, like "Medication Valse" and even a few cuts that sound like the Baja Marimba Band meeting the Lonely Surfer (Jack's unforgettable instrumental album of the early Sixties), and not only that but the Cuckoo's Nest theme features as lead instrument a i gpddam saw and that should be a first in cinema circles though I must admit that 1 Would like this record a whole lot more had they included Cheswick's stirring rendition of "I'm Popey e the Sailor Man. " C'est la vie.

Billy Altman