WINGS

At The Speed Of Sound (Capitol)

Speed of Sound is the nadir. With one exception, "Time To Hide," which was written and sung by exMoody Blue Denny Laine, the songs here exist in an intellectual and emotional vacuum, which McCartney calls love. To paraphrase someone: With love like this, who needs hate?!? And, furthermore, he has the balls to get defensive about it in a tune called "Silly Love Son&lt"! "You think that people would have had enough of silly love songs," he Sings, "1 look around and see it isn't so...Here 1 go again." The chorus then starts up: "1 love you/1 love you..." Admittedly, love can be a wondrous and fulfilling thing, but it can also be other things that just aren't summed up by the repetition of the words "I love you."

For one thing, love can be tortuous. McCartney must know this now. The song that follows "Silly Love Songs" is Linda's debut as a lead vocalist. She cannot sing by any stretch. And Paul had to produce it (it's also his composition). Try though he may to bury her voicelessness in reverb and a rough,' early

"50s mix, he cannot make "Cook of the House" rise above the intolerable pain level. Now that effort was love — for Linda at least. Paul doesn't seem to care much about his listeners; they're the ones who have to shell out the money to listen to his sonic home movie.

The rest of the album — again, with Laine's song the exception — consists of the half-baked ideas that are becoming standard for McCartney. There are moments that are good; McCartney is so talented that intermittently he has to stumble into something we can like. (Frustrating, ain't it?) "Beware My Love" builds into a good hook, but falls flat because at this point in time, and especially in the context of this LP, a pained McCartney rings false. "Let "em In" has an intriguing melancholy about it that is never explained — basically Paul recites names throughout — and never resolved either lyrically or musically, in the end just kind of floating past us without impact. "The Note You Never Wrote" with Denny Laine singing (and sounding very much like Paul) likewise promises sweet melancholy but winds up sounding not much better than the most empty and contrived of, ironically,

the Moody Blues" epic narrative/ love songs. But Laine's "Time To Hide," while not any great moment in rock, is a solid, forthright rocker. Paul shouting "I must be wrong" on "Beware My Love" may be the album's high, but "Time To Hide" is a song you can count on throughout and maybe even return to. And I'm not being vindictive when I say that with a better producer than Paul, someone who really cared about punch, Laine might have even had a hit.

I'm talking about Wings mostly in terms of McCartney, I realize; and McCartney has been trying his best to give the appearance of a democracy within his band — everybody sings on Speed of Sound, most wrote for it. But in what musical democracy would Linda be tolerated, as fine a woman as she may be? And besides, judging by track records, McCartney is the Talent here. (Funny, however, that McCulloch in Thunderclap Newman and Laine in the Moody Blues ijsed to be so much better; is Paul catching?) I don't really care to speculate at this late date on what fame and fortune can do to talent; the point is, Paul McCartney continues to squander himself.

GRAND FUNK RAILROAD Born To Die (Capitol)

It was at a high school pool party in 1967 that I first heard the term "underground music" used in a meaningful context. Some friends of mine had been cruising the Indiana darkness earlier, fiddling with the radio dial and leaving a trail of snap tops so they could find their way home. As they were rounding one of those treacherous curves surrounded by the little white crosses, the State erects as subtle reminders of recent traffic fatalities on particularly deadly stretches, one of them hit that Little Rock station which has covered the Midwest with strange night-time sounds for years. In the midst of all this rural and psychological darkness "...came this weird underground music, you know, with the screeching guitars and that spooky organ...shit, we thought it was a train about to nail us! That's when I spotted the saucer..."

Saucers aside, Grand Funk have finally arrived at their own statement of exquisite American fatalism, that bummer negativism that so many rockers have been playing chicken with all these years but so few have come to terms with. The Allmans, the Doors and lately, Kiss come to mind,'but none of them arrived at this particular unmarked crossing as suddenly and with as much bitter impact as the title cut of Bom To Die.

With all. the bender conviction of Vanilla Fudge playing Bloodrock's "D.O.A." as the climax to a suicide pact, they slip in there with a dimly smoking keyboard sound and trademark surly-sour vocals to set up Mark Farmer's story of a cousin's cycle splatter-death. Jimmy Ienner's ingenious remote control production plays off the martyrsaurus piano/bass riff against Farner's swerving-headlight guitar chording through five minutes of building anxiety and near-resolution to an icy repetition of the final lines: "But there's always that one thing/we never do count on/you was bom for it to happen to you." Then the vocals trail off to leave the piano on high, fading out like rain dripping off the shards of a smashed windshield.

If that one track isn't enough to make you want to immediately run off and mercurochrome your brain, there's plenty more ketoned gioom where that came from. With one exception, Don Brewer's tunes come from that same dank breeding ground of pessimism, although the engaging pop-metal-piano music and Dion of the Slag Heap vocals leave you wondering just how soon you should make out the will. Ditto for the rest of Famer's compositions which, although he gets more credits, are starting to make him look like the Fabian to Brewer's Dion (to whose Elvis?). In fact, as well as they're playing together these days, it's starting to look as though GFR aie splitting into two separate, if not necessarily rival camps. Maybe that's the one thing we never did count on.

Rick Johnson

JOAN BAEZ From Every Stage (A&M)

It is permissible to be pissed off at Joan Baez? She is in pain, both for herself and presumably for, to quote her favorite poet, "every hung up person in the whole wide universe," and she mourns lost causes and lost loves and lost youth and maybe a lost career, and it has made her start toting this sack of woe around like she was Dory Previn or somebody. There is some kind of dividing line between a performer — say, Bob Dylan — who can involve you in his concerns, and one — say, Dory Previn — who bleeds all over you so much that you want to say, "Hey, cool it, I've got troubles of my own." For me, Joan Baez has crossed over it.

Here she is in a live concert tworecord set, divided between acoustic and electric music. The voice is no longer quite the astonishing instrument it once was, and that unfortunately serves to throw into relief the rather prissy, schoolmarmishuse she too often makes of it. She leads Pete Seeger singalongs, sings about Russian and American political prisoners, dead race horses, makes, cute little asides about Indira Gandhi that amuse her far more, than her audiences, covers Dave Loggins" "Please Come To Boston" and Emmylou Harris" "Boulder to Birmingham" — the folkie equivalent of Andy Williams with his interminable albums of other people's hits — and sings her song to Dylan. And sings her Dylan songs.

Jesus, I hate myself for writing like this about someone whose music has given me so much pleasure for so long, but she had pride when she sang the songs I love, pride in herself and in her calling, and now she is just carting this self-abasement around, from town to town and year

to year, like Francois Truffaut's Adele H. Anybody who calls herself a madonna in public, even if the intent is ironic, doesn't need any charity from me.

She has taste enough to choose two of the finest songs Bob Dylan has written in recent years, "Forever Young" and "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" but her stiff, for• mal performances make me hungry to hear the originals. "Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan" — even an admancan be right. And she still shifts around and adds to these lyrics she supposedly loves.

Maybe she still should be singing about Mary Hamilton, after all. Years ago, on the liner notes to one of her albums, Dylan wrote about how he was converted to Joan Baez's music, and told of how he regarded her singing before hie changed his mind:

""I hate that kind a sound" said I The only beauty's ugly, man The crackin shakin sounds "re The only beauty I understand""

I'm beginning to think he was right the first time.

Joe Goldberg

THE STEVE GIBBONS BAND Any Road Up (MCA)

After more than a decade of American musicians looking eastward toward England for the latest trends in rock,the transatlantic cultural exchange may finally be reversing itself. Or so one might assume from the cover of the Steve Gibbons Band's debut album, with the five rangy SGs standing in uniform thumbs-in-belt menace, approximating as best they can the cracker cockiness of Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Duane-centered Allman Bros. Deja vu back to 1964 and the lately adolescent Eric Burdon grimacing in his best syphilis-rackedbluesman scowl. America, we are eternally yours.

The Steve Gibbons Band are the latest expression of the anti-glitter reaction pervading contemporary British rock, a return to the pubrock basics popularized by Ducks Deluxe, Back Stretet Crawler, and, most

prominently, Bad Co. Like their fellow pubrockers, the Steve Gibbons Band display few influences from the rich British heavy metal legacy; their sound is — not surprisingly — more like America's own Southern Rock, with aggressive vocals, dominant, voluptuous twinguitar melodies, and spare but fluid rhythms.

Steve Gibbons himself, besides projecting instant badmutha visual clout with his absurdly Clint Eastwoodian basic blacks, possesses a vocal delivery as potently individual as Cocker or Morrison or Burdon or any of the other memorable British lead singers, although he also avoids sounding like any of them. His voice has a muturity that is deep and flexible, and it serves to redeem his songs from their largely pedestrian lyrics.

Gibbons seems to have sprung from the same impulses as fellow fossilrocker Alex Harvey: both sat out the glory days of their own contemporaries (the Beatles et. al.) in obscurity, and are coming on with redoubled intensity now that they finally have their chance. Gibbons has even enlisted one-time Move Trevor Burton as his bassist (Burton scowls better than his own boss), so Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood better hold on to their ruby slippers: the Steve Gibbons Band are out for chartbusting blood. It's a mighty long way down rock "n" roll, especially when you started out (as Gibbons did) in a band called the Uglies.

For all its musical intensity, Any Road Up carries added stimulus on its back cover, where a Monty Pythonesque detective novel (also titled Any Road Up, curiously enough) lies open to reveal obliquely bopping prose which not only puts Patti Smith's wildest midnight visions to shame, but also qontains the titles of each of the album's cuts. Happy hunting!

Richard Riegel

MARIA MULDAUR Sweet Harmony (Reprise) •

One of the people Maria Muldaur thanks on the back of her new LP is Mildred Bailey. I assume she means the Mildred Bailey who sang "Rockin" Chair," since that song is on the album, with vocal interpolations by its composer, Hoagy Carmichael. But Muldaur has always reminded me more of Lee Wiley, the part Cherokee who is probably, except for Billie Holiday, the best jazz singer we have ever had. It's a matter of vocal quality, and I mean that as a very high compliment, except that Muldaur can't get inside a song like Wiley could. She remains outside somehow, cold and remote, relying on a few vocal tricks — a break into falsetto like an urban Hank Williams — so that I always wind up respect-

ing her,: admiring the talent and craftsmanship but not being moved. Lee Wiley could break your heart.

Muldaur sings a few other old songs, arranged by the brilliant Benny Carter with accurate period flourishes. She's an archivist, closer to Leon Redbone than to Linda Ronstadt. And she has new songs by her house composers, Kate McGarrigle and Wendy Waldman, but they are nowhere near up to "The Work Song" or "Gringo in Mexico." I think Muldaur is buying brand names, and the product has declined. There is also a spiritual, as before, and a contemporary spiritual, as before. But none of them are up to what she did on her earlier records. The formula is starting to get a little stale. Muldaur would be perfect to sing a rare, lovely song like Hoagy Carmichael's "Baltimore Oriole." If she would do that, instead of making Neil Sedaka richer with an unnecessary cover of "Sad Eyes," I'd be standing in line when her next album comes out.

I understand she appeared at the Troubador in L.A. with a jazz band led by Benny Carter, singing a lot of fine old songs, and that the session was recorded. I hope it's her next LP, instead of another glossy; sleek, no-depth outing like this one.

Joe Goldberg

PARIS (Capitol) SCORPIONS Fly To Tike Rainbow (RCA)

What was the first heavy metal album? Zep's debut? Beck's Truth? Blue Cheer's Vincebus Eruptum? Whatever, it was a fair distance back and the perceptions of the form have varied widely over the years, from sheer noise at the outset through the stormbringers of the revolution phase in the late sixties to the power product of today. Sheeit, anyone with a sense of history and/ or a decently-functioning memory must be well past the point of saturation by now.

Fortunately, both for rock "n" roll and for duh industry in general, anyone heavily into rock has a poor to nil chance of having either memory or sense of history, so metal remains a viable musical force, at least on the market place. The way kids are discovering how "bad" Kiss and Ted Nugent are today reaffirms my faith in the endless roll; Paris and Scorpions may be arfiong the next batch of metal machines to make it.

Paris has the better chance of the two because of their record company's support, their flexibility within the genre, and their names: Bob Welch from Fleetwood Mac, Glenn Cornick from Jethro Tull and Thom Mooney from Nazz (recently replaced by Hunt Sales from Rundgren). The album is mostly Welch's doing; he writes better-than-average songs, sings like a cross between Robert Plant and Peter Green (remember him?), and lays down a lot of guitar without doing much long-winded soloing.

In contrast,Ulrich Roth's solos are the only thing worth listening to from Scorpions; he's not exactly what you would call original but his screechnscream guitar occasionally rises to such heights of intensity that you forget what stiffs the rest of the band are. But as we all know from Grand Funk's early success, stiffness can be a virtue and F/y To The Rainbow has a much spacier cover than, say, On Time did. So work your way up the slag heap, gang; it may turn to gold any minute.

Michael Davis

PAVLOV'S DOG At The Sound Off The Bell (Columbia)

Even more than such Jesuit outfits as Angel andProcol Harum, Pavlov's Dog have become the epitome of Catholic Rock. Even when their songs aren't about guilt, they sound like they should be. With all the pharmaceutical instincts of funeral muzak, they concentrate mainly on framing their basically insubstantial material with dramatic mellotrons, cascading pianos and cavernous rhythms. Probably they like to think of their sound as "windswept."

A further problem is the vocal eccentricity of David Surkamp. He doesn't just accidentally sound like Marty Balin crooning through a ventriloqual parakeet, but consciously chases after his moods and phrasing, producing not so much copy as caricature. The Moody Blues interpreting "Miracles" becomes Anisette of Savage Rose squatting bareassed on an icicle.

Maybe this is the fault • of producers Krugman and Pearlman (of BOC and Dictators "fame") who, while making sure the trains run on time, seem to have sacrificed what little beat-mongering the band occasionally shows in favor of creating multi-plateaued epics. Basically simple ballads like "Gold Nuggets" are set in grand instrumental landscapes like a poor man's Electric Light Orchestra, and straight rockers like "She Came Shining" are smothered in fussy angelic needlepoint.

Still, the blame lies chiefly with the band itself. Poky playing aside, they still can't write a song with a good chorus (unless you find "Wildfire" soundalikes catchy) so it's not surprising that the producers try to beef it up with their huge erector set warehouses of studiotech.

Like the kid on TV said, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it catch fish.

Rick Johnson

PHOEBE SNOW Second Childhood (Columbia)

DORY PREVIN We're Children of Coincidence & Harpo Marx (Warner Bros.) BLOSSOM DEARIE Blossom Dearie 1975 (Daffodil)

Yes, Phoebe Snow has a voice supple and resilient enough to lasso a mustang from a helicopter and, yes, there's something appealingly vulnerable about her ugly-duckling looks (though it doesn't warrant all the poignancy the press is trying to pump into her predicament), but Second Childhood does not give evidence that the driven Snow is a major talent. Though the lyrics are intriguing (to read, anyway), the songs have a monotonous mellowness, the instrumentation is overly fastidious, with too many delicate electric-piano ripples, and, most importantly, there isn't the-emotional sway that we associate with the singers with whom Snow has been compared (Billie Holiday, among others). Despite all the love songs, it's a curiously chilled work — a high-toned makeout album.

Which would be OK except Snow's cioyingly mannered singing makes Second Childhood too irritating to relax, lean back, and casually enjoy. Her vocalizing is just too damn echoic. An example. One song opens With "If it has mystery, buy it." Not bad: terse, sharp. But Snow sings it "I-i-i-if-if it has mystery, by-yy-yy-yyy yit," arid the waveriness robs the line of its edge. As yet, Snow is not a great singer, she's a vocal contortionist, and in most of Second Childhood her voice sounds less like a silvery lasso and more like a glorified Slinky.

Dory 'Previn, the scourge of the

West, has no such problem since her voice is about as flexible as a Louisville slugger. Yet Children has a crass vitality which it makes it livelier entertainment than Snow's flow of vocal vanilla. Unlike Previn's other work, which was hilarious in its Ms. -magazine style of pyschodrama, this one doesn't spew up a lot of messy rage; instead, it has a self-satisfied tone and is at times almost giddily cheerful. The album's singly deadout loser is a lachrymose love song, introduced with portentous strings (very Judy Collins), in which she honors a man for the womanliness within him. "Joseph, Joseph, I love you when you're hard, but you know I love you when you're soft." Come on, now. Even Mary Magdalene would occasionally kick a guy out of bed for going soft... Previn redeems herself later on the album with a song called "The Owl and the Pussycat" in which the phrase "What a beautiful pussy, my dear" is repeated endlessly — the damn thing stayed in my head for days. If even Dory Previn can write a refrain which hooks you like "Starfucker" then you know sisterhood is truly powerful, or truly depraved, or something.

As for Blossom Dearie's latest eclair, the most jarring moment is when the gay-cabaret, darling sings on "I'm Hip" that she's into macrobiotics, "and as soon as I can, I intend to get irito narcotics." Her voice is so pert and candied that it's like hearing Sandy Duncan say, "Yeah,

I snort coke whenever I can get it." Otherwise, the album is a curiosity, given Dearie's cult following in the cabaret circuit. There is a girlish fragile jazziness which makes songs like "I'm Hip" and "Saving My Feeling for You" soothing listening, but it's a thin pleasure and after the third or fourth listen the needle is liable to go right through the grooves. Sweet and airy, Blossom Dearie 1975 is the perfect album for that cute boy down the street who goes to Halloween parties dressed as June Allyson.

James Wolcott

T-BONE WALKER Classics of Modern Blues (Blue Note)

As is btecoming commonplace in this exemplary Blue Note re-issue series, Pete Welding's liner notes say it all: "Everyone knows the music of

T-Bone Walker. Even if he's never actually heard one of T-Bone's recordings or seen him in person, anyone who's enjoyed the music of B.B., Albert, or Freddie King, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix, Albert Collins, Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, Mike Bloomfield, Earl Hooker, Doug Sahm, Johnny Winter, Jeff Beck or any of a host of other contemporary blues and blues-influenced guitar players has heard T-Bone as well."

He may or may not have been the first to actually use an electric guitar; he was definitely the first to popularize it. (He was also a key figure in other ways; his lyrics, for example, mingle the motifs and images of the ancient country bluesman with those of the modern, urban bluesman.) His soloing was a model of economy, yet thoroughly explosive and flashy; B.B. King is the only one who's even come close to capturing it. Though it didn't fully define TBone's style, he was best known for a loose, loping rhytnm that left plenty of room for his emotional bursts on guitar; a bank of horns and piano filled out the sound and Walker's mellow vocals provided a counter-tension.

This album displays Walker at his commercial, and probably his artistic, peak. Twenty-eight sides in one sitting may be too much for anyone except the blues devotee, but you can play any one side — hell, any one cut — and hear some of the most terse, dramatic, and volatile music on the market today. As TBone begins the set, "Sometimes I sing the blues/When I know I should be praying." Praise the lord and pass the electric guitar.

JohnMorthland

TANGERINE DREAM Richochet EDGAR FROESE Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (Virgin)

To get immediately as far into this argument as I can, I don't think that electricity or electronics are the Devil's tool. Basically, there is no difference between playing a wooden flute and a Moog, except that the sound is harder: both are man-made instruments designed to make sounds that a man can't make otherwise.

What brings me to these thoughts is two albums imported from England by Jem. Both feature a young musician named Edgar Froese, whom I have neither heard before nor heard of. On one album, on which he is pictured with an electric guitar, he is part of a trio with Chris Franke and Peter Baumann, employing Arps and Moogs, called Tangerine Dream. On the other, also synthesized, he plays all the instruments himself.

The music is lovely, influenced heavily by Indian music, which leads I to a repetitiveness that sometimes goes on a little too long — as Martin Williams once wrote about John Coltrane * "one man's incantation is another man's boredom." The music tends toward ecstasy, with a lot of dancing-waters effects, reminiscent of the Russian composer Scriabin, who once spent a lot of time trying to invent an organ that would play colors instead of sounds. This psychedelic poet was active around seventy-five years ago, and in some ways, Froese seems to be where Scriabin was then. 1 don't see why so much effort is made in trying to make the electronic sounds come off like regular instruments. It's like Dr. Johnson's dog walking on its hind legs, or more like the hermit who went up into the mountains for twenty years and returned having invented the typewriter, unaware there already was one.

The only plus I can see in this is economic — Froese might not be able to afford all the copying and personnel necessary to play this music. It's sweet and a bit oldfashioned for all the technology involved, but it's lightly enjoyable, and there is certainly some very real musicianship involved. None of it, though, is capable of the emotion of a human voice.

Joe Goldberg

BILL WYMAN Stone Alone (Rolling Stones Records)

It isn't any fun being a minor character in your own dreams. Overshadowed fpr more than a decade by all of the Stones with the exception of the workmanlike nonchalance of Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman probably pictures himself as the George Harrison martyr-type of the group, bursting with all sorts of great ideas but unable to get them heard over the creative roar of a Jagger/Richards or Lennon/McCartney cabal. Actually, there's only one reason why the Wymans and Harrisons of this world never had much luck in getting their songs recorded by their respective groups: they just aren't good enough.

The unrelenting blandness of Wyman's second solo effort is more striking than any of the individual cuts. His vocals have a fading, inaudible quality even when mixed up, not unlike Ringo Starr minus his

engaging brownie breath. The players — including every last graduate of the Home For Unwed Guitarists, Class of "75 — are uniformly uninspired, having correctly gauged this project as a hardship post.

As for Wyman's material, I don't know where he thinks he's getting off with this stylistic roulette, but it's probably Tommy Bolin's stop. Each cut is a self-contained bionic genre, token styles including reggae, country, ruinous oldies retreads, Viva Zapata horn workouts, Louie Armstrong-frog-with-man-in-throat phlegm-flam, and a "greasy" R&B tune featuring Joe Walsh on "lowdown" slide guitar. Can't wait to hear him play "Lyin" Eyes."

And for a guy with the profile of a newly raised Spanish Galleon whose texture has been reduced to cardboard by centuries of tidal wear and tear, he's really got guts to get involved in a Pierre Laroche makeup job. Hate to be the one to tell you. Bill, but your pretty face is going to hell.

Rick Johnson

JOHNNY WINTER Captured Live (Blue Sky)

Listening to Johrtny Winter ripping out ten-notes-a-second riffs and blasting back and forth with guitarist Floyd Radford in a framework of goodies like "Bony Maronie" and "It's All Over Now," it's hard to understand why the old sprinter always seems to get forgotten when conversations and polls yturrt to the subject of the world's most blazing guitar hero. Roy Buchanan may be just as fast, but lacks the rock *n" roll spirit (I mean — turtle-neck sweaters and a goatee???) ; Clapton is potentially as good, but has grown lazy. Alvin Lee is as fast, but not as versatile, and Hendrix has been mysteriously silent of late. Page? Richard? Beck? Mere sluggards in comparison. So Winter still gets my nod as Guitar Concorde, and Captured Live is one of the best pure guitar jerk-offs in ages. His present band, with Radford on second lead, Randy Jo

Hobbs on bass, and Richard Hughes, drums, is young, enthusiastic, and seemingly oblivious to the fact that it's all been done before; they play with the kind of spunk and brashness usually reserved for street fights. Winter is Winter — sounding pretty much the same as always, and despite the fact that Johnny Winter And Live is now about five years old, Captured Live shows that while he hasn't lost anything over the years, he hasn't added much either (but that's no criticism). And h£ vocals are so gruff, tough and unique that he'd probably be a star even if he'd been born with no hands. Captured Live is a fun album, with a ten minute version of "Highway 61 Revisited," a thirteen minute rock-blues piece, "Sweet Papa John," and a couple of others. But the vocal choruses don't matter, usually being a minute or so at the beginning and end of each number, mere bread for the meat within. It's the kind of album to turn up loud, loud; loud, and guzzle a case of beer with.

Alan Niester