SWEET DREAMS

Brian Connolly isn't exactly the kind of guy you picture comfying about the living room, patting kiddies on the head and making pleasant pigeon mouth. Coo coo coo. It's not likely he keeps his gold records well-polished and mounted above tiny amber spotlights like the portraits of recently departed relatives. He probably keeps them in rubber bodybags.

It's not that he's really menacing or anything, but there's little doubt that behind the deceptively blond hair lies a mind that thinks in meathooks. He projects a low-clearance presence onstage and off, and his vocals are threatening enough to send Susan Brownmiller types scurrying to the nearest karate class. How does he relax at home?

"I boot somebody's head in!"

Not that you could really blame the man. After twenty-odd years of the prerequisite scuddy neighborhoods, Mod/Rocker stab parties ("We were Mods when the Mods were winning and Rockers when the Rockers were winning") and a career spanning German disco stardom ("Ve vill haff yer autograph now"), English radio straightjacketing, massive critical abuse ("Aren't they always against you?") and a lack of acceptance with certain sectors of the public that led to Brian having his neck mashed-potatoed upon by an unappreciative pub-goer last year, he's understandably a bit detached from it all.

"When you're on the way up, you think twice about being bitter. Now that we're well on the way to success, we can afford to tell a few truths — it's not so much bitterness as truthfulness.

"All the experiences we've had together," he adds, "Aggression, spitefulness, hookers, dead end kids, all that sort of thing comes out in the music."

Like, say, the lyrics to "Sweet F.A.":

Well it's Friday night and I need a fight

And if she don't spread I'm gonna bust her head

The guy's gone mad 'cause his chick's been had

But what can he do when there's four of you *

"That's the way I think! But really, that's not all true. The four of us wouldn't fuck somebody else's bird." He splatters a laugh into his drink and the rest of the guys crack up.

"It doesn't have to be four. It could be two, or three. Or six."

Such talk from this walking commercial for fabric softener?

What d'ya expect, muscle duds, some kinda queerbait or something? Nope, the Sweet are just as big of jags as the rest of us. But after years of carting their auditory red light district of wind-shear riffs, Amtrak melodies, and claws-on-the-concrete rat rhythms around the world and back, they're still a textbook case of twisted image and mistaken identity.

With the possible exception of the late-coming Queen, no other group has their distinctive combination of pyramid vocals layered on a solid base of clinical drumming and a guitar that sounds like someone trying to scrape their way out of a grave with a rusty spoon. While Europe has finally caught on to the fact that they cause cows to give crooked milk, they still have about as much image over here as four amnesiacs that just wandered out of a soap opera.

"Ya wanna hear about our problems?" asks drummer Mick Tucker. He looks a lot like a Bill Wyman who was left near the space heater too long.

Their problems started with the ghost of Louis Pasteur that haunts British radio.

"Ya gotta please 'em all," explains Mick, "from six to sixty." The resulting homogenization makes the American Top Forty sound like an ESP Sampler in comparison. Once you've got a name over there, you're set for years unless you start advocating IRA bombing or violent child molestation. The trouble is, American radio programmers don't really take these acts seriously unless they're total puppy chow like the Bay City Rollers. Remember T. Rex, Slade and Suzi Quatro? Neither does anybody else.

This commercial syph was compounded by Sweet's involvement with pop kingpins and suspected Siamese twins Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, who wrote them a dozen or so hits up to and including "Ballroom Blitz" (which is over two years old) while relegating the band's more weighty originals to the B-sides.

IVe're basically a brain-damaged band.

"Nobody would turn the records over," says guitarist Andy Scott, the one with the molten leather pants and a glare that can bend psychics in two. Chihuahuas are not naturally attracted to him.

"They'd say, 'We can't put that stuff on the radio, it's too heavy! Why don't you boys do "Summertime Blues" or something?"'

Thus began the gap between the band's personal taste for pulp rivets and the public's perception of them as cute little Indians with popguns full of babyfood. The British press's notorious hatred for pop barids didn't help any either.

"They're all fuckin' dummies," claims Andy with the conviction of an axe murderer. "They didn't have any respect for us because we wouldn't put our balls on the line. But why should we when we didn't have what was commercial?"

So they coasted on the radio while at the same time breaking out the anthropodial pogo sticks on stage, totalling their habitually sold-out audiences with their own metal cartoons and decibel harmonies. Gradually, the audience caught up and started demanding the same stuff on vinyl.

Sweet were ready. "Blitz" was the final collaboration with Chinn/Chapman, a perfect combination of thalidomide scrape and that magnetic beat which ex-producer Phil Wainman borrowed from an old Sandy Nelson record.

Apparently the old doubledomes were no great loss — "Fox On The Run," with its endemic Sweet beat and Todd Rundgren - with - a - blindfold production was one of their biggest hits yet.

"It felt great to get away from 'em," says Brian, who felt he was the rnember under the biggest squeeze to fit the institutional atmosphere of old.

"Yeah, everytime they heard something raw," concludes bassist Steve Priest, "they'd sprinkle fairy dust on it."

The band is hoping that their live performances will put them across as much as anything, and if their date at Chicago's pit - and - the - pendulum Aragon ballroom is anything to go by, they haven't got too much to worry about once they get going.

The Aragon is your average subarctic noise reflector, complete with neo-PLO architecture and the blanketing odor of a year-damp loin-cloth. "Helter Skelter" scrawled in blood on the bathroom wall.

The audience was a regular human Mixmaster. There was the token handful of Garbo's, a few bucktoothed boys trading Johnny Benches, plus a mysterious contingent of old men with faces like crinkled paper cups. The real division, though, points out the split in the Sweet's image — teenies with fuzzy white sweaters filling the air with fragrant ghost orgasms and mangy metal freaks who looked like they'd just shot their way out of a concentration camp. The odor of pot fought it out with that of herbal shampoos.

After a quick set by Eric Carmen proved that nobody was there for love songs and several Bowie-is-coming announcements were greeted with about as much enthusiasm as a stained sink, a 10-9-8-7 etc. countdown flick started up in back of the drums, giving the room the feeling of a drive-in movie in the fog. This countdown was a little different, however. Between numbers these gorgeous, dripping Oui-magazine lips start sucking up a storm. First maybe a popsicle, then a steaming hotdog, then — no it couldn't be, could it? By the time they get to "one" your jeans feel like the inside ofabathingsuit.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 55.

Then huge vise notes lumber out of the speakers like elephants giving birth to hotels, and you realize that the band's snuck on ahd into "Hellraiser."

The vocals are a bit jagged at first, like,a trio of owls singing that meowmeow-meow-meow commercial. Engineers were seen frantically pouring Koolaid on the dials.

/'Ballrooms Blitz" is taken none too seriously. The drums go on for a minute or so before Brian finally steps back from the little girls lapping at his boots to inquire "Are you. ready, Steve?"

No reply. Brian looks pretty dumb just standing there and doesn't appear to be enjoying his role as the straight man one bit. He tries it again, with feeling.

"ARE YOU READY STEVE?!"

■ "Duh."

/ You half expect him to stomp over there and remove several parts of Steve's anatomy before it finally dicks and the Aragon is dutifully blitzed.

For the first time since Ginger Baker learned "Wipe Out," a drum solo is the highlight of the setMick doesn't just go at it like a bear-catching trout though, he,shoots it out with a perfectly synchronized split-screen film of himself. Two solos for the -price of one. He also displayed a genius for making tubular bells sound like kazoos. Applause, more matches.

Offstage, a wiped-out Andy Scott who looks as though he's trying to decide whether to fall down backwards or forwards spills the secret of Sweet's success:

"We're basically" a brain-damage band." '

"We gotta get back to New York," puts in Brian, "and get ourselves some sunshine."

That tells you as much as anything else about the Sweet. The kind of guys who go to New York for sunshine.

*©1974 Sweet Publishing Ltd.