THE BEAT GOES ON

THC BEAT Goes ON

Invasion Of The Surf Crazy Gains

CINCINNATI - It’s not a good night in the Queen City for Bruce Springsteen fans. Cousin Brucie’s protege, Southside Johnny Lyon, has cancelled his show at Bogart’s rock club because of illness, and now the less-thanimpressed-by-the-mystiqueof-The-Boss Good Rats have volunteered to fill the Asbury Jukes’ scheduled date.

Some stooge in the audience has persevered in his original plan of wearing his Bruce Springsteen T-shirt to the show, and the Good Rats immediately pick up on this gratuitous advertising of their competitor—guitarist Mickey Marchello stops in mid-lick to yell, “Hey! Hey, what’s that guy in the Springsteen shirt doing with his Thing?” The spotlight moves in on the embarrassed offender of front-row ethics, and big brother Peppi Marchello adds, “Whatsa matter, kid? You got ‘Springsteen’ tattooed on your pecker, too?”

Veterans to the 9th degree of these bar band scenes, the Good Rats seem hardly nonplussed by the small Tuesday night crowd in Bogart’s, but the Rats’ envy of Springsteen’s media-blitz of the past season is another kettle of anchovies. After ten years of intense rock ‘n’ rolling by these Long Island Italopunk emeriti, they’re only up to their third (!) album, the recently released Ratcity In Blue (on their own label, Ratcity, distributed by the equally obscure Platinum Record Co., Englewood, New Jersey 07631), and for all the brilliance of that LP, the Rats remain a lesser-known “New York band” than overnight emissions like the Ramones.

On Warner Bros. Records for their last go-round, the immortal Tasty, the Good Rats pulled off a mini-mediablitz of their own at the time (cf. CREEM, April 1974), but the record didn’t sell, the group was dropped by Warners, and subsequent publicity has been harder to come by than sealed copies of the Rats' Kapp album. Already 36, sportsman Peppi Marchello would probably gjve you even odds on the Good Rats’ eventual national popularity, but in the meantime, he and the band are laying out hard rock worthy of any ostensible superstars; whatever success the Good Rats do achieve will be through their own uncompromising sound and image.

So the Good Rats have everything a rock ‘n’ roll band could want except, of course, the basics: fame and wealth. But Peppi Marchello’s hardly worried: “‘Boardwalk Slasher'—This song is about Bruce Springsteen’s uncle (also named Bruce Springsteen, incidentally), arrested in 1924 for cutting up a chick on the Asbury Park boardwalk and selling her nipples to Arm & Hammer . . .7 “To Gerber, fuck it!” cuts in Mickey, as the Marx Brothers of the Seventies (no fake “Chicos” among these authentic Wops) roar on with their super rock ‘n’ roll.

Richard Riegel

Presenting Ms. Vacant Lot, 1976!

VICTORIA, TEX.—Beautician Linda Strelczyk stuffed 200 poptop beer tabs into her size 36EEE bikini bra while singing “Keep Your Finger Out of It: It Don’t Belong to You” to win the title of Ms. Vacant Lot during the July heat. Ms. Strelczyk, weighing in at a hefty 215 pounds, also shared first-place honors in the FLAB IS BEAUTIFUL contest at the two-day Armadillo Confab and Exposition.

This annual summer festival in this south Texas community also featured armadillo races, a jalapeno gobble, a Best All Around Person in the World contest (Ed McMahon did not win!), the Great Greased Body Slide, a belch-off, and a beer can smash in which contestants beat cans to smithereens with a wooden ping-pong paddle.

Ms. Strelczyk, who says her ambition is to be a beautiful alcoholic, shared the flab is beautiful title with Judy Lynn Borgaard, a 297 pound go-go dancer who claims she likes being fat because “it’s so terribly disgusting.”

Ms. Strelczyk was runnerup in last year’s Ms. Vacant Lot title but lost to a contestant who won the prize by stuffing 300 pennies in her mouth.

Robot A. Hull

Life On Mars Verified!

HOUSTON—News broke this month contradicting earlier reports that the planet Mars was incapable of sustaining life as we know it. The discovery was made when several groups of Martian natives began driving within camera range of the NASA Viking I spacecraft on shiny four-wheeled vehicles which strangely resembled General Motor's Cadillacs. Almost inaudible vocalizations were recorded and later deciphered as "HAY PECK HER WOULD, PAST DAT WALL TEAR MILL ON PEAS." No further Information was available at press time.

Land Of A Thousand Dances

Human Rhythm Ace (Hamilton F. Bohannon) has learned to speak. He’s come all the way from Newnan, Ga., to explain Disco. And he should know. Anybody whose last album is called Dance Your Ass Off, and who puts it out on Dakar, knows.

CREEM: Explain Disco.

HRA: Since you’re not familiar with it, let me try to explain it to you. The Disco music. Basically, you play this music in Discos. And people dance by it; usually it’s a fast tempo. It doesn’t stop all night long. They very seldom play a slow cut. It goes on for hours. And people seem to have a good time doin’ these things. That’s why I call my music “Happy Music.” ’Cause you got to be happy to dance four or five or six hours without stopping.

Human Rhythm Ace, known as Hamilton Frederick Bohannon to the Druids, is a drummer. He plays them like Lou Reed played amplifier on Metal Machine Music. They are related by marriage.

HRA: When you got something simple goin’ everybody can understand it. What I do, say, is write a guitar part, and it’s very syncopated. Off the beat, you know? So if I played drums off the beat like a lot of people do, it would come out sounding like multi-rhythms coming from all over. Sound like a bunch of junk.

Human Rhythm Ace has a degree in music. He got into college on a music scholarship. Rarely has he been photographed, and then only by James J. Kriegsman, Photographer of the Stars, and also of Miss Subways. (New York billboard commuternookie).

When Human Rhythm Ace started making Disco, there were no Discos.

CREEM: So what would - have made people buy Disco then, to listen to at home?

HRA: The flip sides of the early albums. They have a soft, easy flavor, and it’s not so loud that it bangs your ears up.

CREEM: What is the place for lyrics in what you do?

HRA: Lyrics? I’ll tell you. I’m not a gbod lyric writer. The lyrics I write are very simple and to the point. A lot of people, it takes them a whole song to explain what they’re talking about. I’m simple. I get straight to the facts. OK. I had a tune out called “South African Man.” It goes: “South African man, give me a helpin’ hand/ South African man, help me if you can/South African man, give me a helpin’ hand/South African man, help me wif de land.”

That’s all I said the whole record. That was it. That was the lyrics, but it said everything that could be said about the song. The same thing I talked about, they’re fighting about now. And that was two years ago. Now again, my lyrics are very simple, but they have something to say if you listen to them. I want to be simple, but I also want to be different. I want to be simple and different.

Ace used to work for Motown Records. He used to be the leader of their big road band. He quit Motown. So did a lot of other people. If Diana Ross was your dinner, you wouldn’t care either.

HRA: Motown. That’s very interesting to talk about, ’cause I had a good time there. I learned a lot of things there. I made a lot of money there. Motown was successful with Diana Ross and all the standup groups. So they never gave me a shot as far as recording me and just letting the record come out. They were not into instrumentalists. In fact, nobody really was at that time. The time just came for me to do my own thing.

Now these other acts. I don’t know why they left Motown. I got my ideas why. See, if I made the kind of money / was making at Motown, it means an act has gotta be making a lot of money. I’d make five grand, myself, in two weeks time. So they served themselves up. And you know how they did it? They bought Cadillacs. Diamond rings. They bought the girl Cadillacs. They bought this other girl an apartment building. They paid renf here for this lady. You know, stupid things like that. I know. I was there. I saw it happen.

Disco is rigorous. Diet is important.

HRA: I don’t smoke or drink. I don’t eat meats. I don’t think animals are meant to be eaten. Nothing with blood. I had a bullskin coat, and I got rid of that. I wear leather shoes, but you have to get along with them, or without them. I won’t kill insects. My wife has to do that, ’cause I won’t.”

Kevin Doyle

Human-Fly Shoes Perfected

After several decades of research and costly experimental development. Fly Squat, Inc. proudly announced the premier of a revolutionary line of platform boots. The "Fly Squat Slippers" are virtually identical to ordinary platform boots in every respect except for a unique ingredient in the sole which enables the wearer to hang upside down from ceilings or window ledges. Unfortunately, due to the unpredictability of the sticking ingredient, these boots won't be commercially available until late spring of next year. Apparently there is no way to tell when the boot's "holding power" will give out, sending the user crashing head first to the floor. Nonetheless, rock guitarist Johnny Winter cast all caution to the wind, choosing to incorporate the amazing effect of the boots into his stage act at a recent LA gig.

R. Crumb:

Boy Howdy's Reluctant Father

SACRAMENTO — Maybe you thought CREEM’s Boy Howdy! logo came by immaculate conception? No, no— ’twasR. Crumb, creator of Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, Eggs Ackley, Honeybunch Kominsky; and all your faves, who did it in 1969. Two years after his perverted pen produced the cover art on Cheap Thrills, Crumb happened to be in Detroit sponging up inspiration for his Motor City comix.

“I knew some people on the paper [CREEM] and they said, ‘Why don’t you do a cover?”’ he recalled from his living room near Sacramento (“Just say I live in the Valley.”) “They gave me 25 bucks and I just put that ‘Boy Howdy!’ on there incidentally—but they’ve been harping it to death ever'since. That was when they first started and were still an underground newspaper. They redid it a little bit. ‘Boy Howdy!’ is an old slang expression from the Midwest. ‘Hey it sure is hot today!’ ‘Boy Howdy!’ It doesn’t mean anything. I completely put it on there as a total afterthought.” Did Crumb get a T-shirt?

“Nah, they didn’t give me nothing—I’m dead as far as they’re concerned. I see the paper once in a while down at J ohnny’s Liquors.” At this point. Crumb’s friend, cohab and collaborating cartoonist Aline Kominsky piped up:

“I want one of those!” she begged after Crumb refused to model the T-shirt we brought along.

"You like it, Aline?” he said incredulously. “God. Bad taste, girl.” Crumb’s taste pre-dates the 70s by 40 years. He even (gasp) hates rock.

“There was a lot of music before rock ‘n’ roll, you know,” he sermonized. “Good music before CREEM came along. I tried to get into rock. I went to the Avalon and Fillmore and dropped acid; I even bought all the records." Obviously, nothing worked. Maybe if Spike Jones had used a wah wah pedal . . .

Clark Peterson

5 YEBBSflfifl

Red China May Join Firesign Theatre

The Firesign Theatre announced that they are negotiating with the Chinese AllPeoples Opera for a concert tour. “There are 270 million Chinese who stand in an open field and sing the same song . . . We’re trying to rent the state of Nebraska for our kick-off concert,” said Firesign’s Phil Proctor.

Will The Real Redneck Please Stand Up

HOUSTON, TX.-If you drive a new pickup or a ’62 Impala with the doors wired up, listen to Willie Nelson or anything that comes on the country station, and get flatassed drunk every time you go honky tonkin’—then don’t sweat it, ’cause you’re a real redneck. However, if you drive an old pickup that’s fully restored, listen to J erry Jeff Walker or Michael Murphy, and wear cowboy hats to cocktail parties, well, yew better git yer ass riddy to be nailed.

All this survival info comes from James Lee, a dept, head at North Texas State and a redneck by birth, who’s doing something of a “study” on the subject, mostly down in the border bars that are ZZ Top’s stomping grounds. “You have the honest-to-God rednecks whose dress—which is now being affected by the young—has been worn by goat ropers in honky tonks for as long as I can remember,” he says, “and then you have the pseudo rednecks.”

The fake reds are ruining it for everybody. Sears prefaded jeans were bad enough, but “turquoise jewelry and an aspiration for boots by Charlie Dunn and hats from Texas Hatters” have left the real thing muttering into his CB about “hah so-sahty” and pinknecks. In Washington, they even have something called “hick chic.” Yuk.

The booze test is the best though. Pseudos always insist on Coors (“goose snot”) or Lone Star downed from foot-tall bottles called longnecks. while the real redneck drinks Jack straight or with Coke in a weaker moment.

He also drinks ANY kind of beer, saying rightfully, “It all comes out of the same horse."

Rick Johnson

Moon Mashes Tommy's Organ

The organ from the pinball Wizard scene in Ken Russell's Tommy was the prize in a Scottish radio station's contest to promote a Who concert in Glasgow. The winner had the option to do anything he wanted with the organ and the happy eleven-year-old who eventually won, decided to smash the mammoth Instrument on the condition that Who drummer Keith Moon share the honors. Moon was more than pleased to oblige.