WINGS

Wings Over America

(Capitol)

He may be a sheepmauler, but Paul McCartney is no dinosaur.

Which, judging from the pathetic reptilian screechings and/or total silence emanating from three other notable corners these days, is more than you can say about the rest of the erstwhile Fab Four.

Paul has been on trial before a jury empaneled with a presumption of guilt ever since the demise of the aforementioned Four, a demise for which he was blamed. He's since been indicted on followup counts: workable marriage to a blonde Caucasian; gentlemanfarming; prettiness, pettiness and happiness; failure to scream primally at the chic moment; unauthorized commerical success; and an ethically dubious facility in understanding and following the evolution of the pop market that he, among others, helped to create.

I say he's been the Rubin Carter of rock "n" roll.

What is his offense? Writing songs about the loves of his life—his wife, his flocks, his fantasies? The way 1 see it, stepping out in L.A. bars with a Kotex on one's head, or performing on Elton John albums, are crimes graver by far than a little sodomizing of live lamb chops.

If Paulie actually needed vindication, Wings Over America would provide all the exculpatory evidence necessary. But since he doesn't, this three-record set will have to settle for being a first-class live album that both showcases the talents of a kick-ass band and .isums up the career-up-to-now of a tremendous popular musician.

That last adjective is perhaps the key to thi^ package, so be warned: Wings" set has been carefully constructed to offer something to all segments of its giant audience—new Wings fans, old Beatles fans, fans of McCartney the vaudevillian, soap operatic, rocking screamer, movie scorer. No way any one of you is going to be in love with the whole thing. But Paul-the-producer imposes structure on the diversity of his own material by organizing it into sides (see the White Album), eaph of the six coherent in its adherence to one of the McCartney genres. And with 30 songs, you're guaranteed at least a couple of sides to love. The rest of you can just like, or use as frisbees. Whatever gets you through the night.

Musicianship is the constant that holds it together. (Rest easy— neither Linda's keyboard work nor her background vocals offend—in fact, they're hardly noticeable.) Paul can still sing anything he wants to without any apparent effort, and there's simply no doubt that he's the right-est bassman in the business (and no slouch on piano or guitar either). Jimmy McCulloch's power guitar has the verge-of-feedback control of a Mick Taylor, only with balls. Denny Laine and Joe English do exactly what they're supposed to. Everybody sings, of course, and the voices balance nicely making for an overriding mood of honest enthusiasm.

Wings makes it clear that it considers itself a band band, not your garden variety aging-big-starcum-backup musicians. It shows its tightness in its flexibility, with McCartney, McCulloch and Laine trading off instrumental roles willy nilly throughout the performance. And while Paul is obviously the \ focus, McCulloch and Laine each do a bit of fronting. Each has a tune on side one, for starters, and Laine's "Go Now" is one of the album's most pleasant surprises.

The rampant eclecticism of the mostly McCartney material forbids any kind of blanket judgments about its quality! I know what, kind of McCartney songs I like—out who am I to call "Silly Love Songs" a piece of crap. I never turned the car radio off when it came on last summer and despite myself, I know all the words, so who's to say it doesn't possibly inspire religious ecstasy in some other hearts?

There is one obvious and annoying flaw in the whole production, however: too much audience track. I realize Paul is a man with a past, and attention must be paid, but in places there is more than a hint of the TV sitcom approach to*sound mixing.'"Live and Let Die" is the obnoxious blunder, with all its ooh's and aah's sounding like they're in all the wrong places to anyone who doesn't remember the laser spectacle which accompanied the song in concert.

Then, of course, there's the omission of some personal McCartney favorites—"Long Tall Sally," "Hey Jude," "Let It Be," "Admiral Halsey/Hands," maybe "Helter Skelter"...but these are just the ravings of yet another old, washed up Beatle fan.

Over America ultimately hangs together through Paul's taste, and on his integrity. Say what you will about his accomplishments over the last few years. I don't think he has a cynical bone in his body. And he refuses to coast on his obviously bankable artifact value. A veteran of veterans, he still does it like he means it, and 1 suspect he's still got a long way to go before all we'll be able to do is thank him for the memories.

JONI MITCHELL Hejira (Asylum)

V Such insularity. Within the slow pace of Hejira is a road album, a collection of Joni Mitchell's musings on travel, but listening to the music alone you'd doubt she could traverse the living room in less than a week. However, as befits Mitchell's willful obfuscation, her way of avoiding in her music the portrayal of, as she terms it in "Song for

Sharon," "Love's...repetitious danger," it took me almost two weeks of steady listening to decide that this is a good album. I knew from the first that Hejira contained her most audacious lyrics—the preciseness of her imagery; is extraordinary and unobtrusive, the latter no small part of her achievement—but 1 sure didn't hear any catchy melodies, and I figured that if there weren't any of those, the album had to be too arty, too "literary;" not aimed at enough of the population to be popular music. But that was simpleminded. To take the last objection first, I was just plain wrong: Hejira is selling like hotcakes. As I write, it's more popular than either Abba or

Lou Reed. Still, Hejira is a rather cold, distancing record.

What is initially most distancing is the hardness of its sound. The music on many cuts consists only of a lead and a rhythm guitar, and some sort of percussion. The tempos are uniformly slow, lulling in their smoothness; even Mitchell's singing, always her most evocative and elaborately used instrument, seems held back by a resigned, weary tenseness.

On other albums, she sets down her thoughts;'"Help me/I think I'm falling/in love again." Hejira displays a Mitchell tired of spelling it out, "taking refuge in the roads" for a respite from the confessional./ Instead, she tells stories, and spends a lot of time getting them across; emotion is grafted onto narrative in the form of expressive detail: "Black Crow" is the most obvious example of this, the title creature an image of Mitchell as a lonely narcissist. Inevitably the tales concern men: a coarse boy named Coyote; "A

Strange Boy" who, ultimate oddity for old free-spirit Joni, "still lives with his family."

More significantly, there are two song-stories Mitchell tells to other women, "Amelia" and "Song for Sharon." This is yet another example of distancing the audience— placing a third person between her and us—but more interesting is the attention she directs toward Amelia and Sharon: even as she tells them about her man-troubles it's clear that it's them she cares about at the moment: The way Mitchell coos the name of "Amelia" and "Song for Sharon" are the most convincing and affecting songs on Hejira.

Ken-Tucker

THE ELVIN BISHOP BAND Hometown Boy Makes Good!

(Capricorn)

Ittook Elvin Bishop years to hit his groove, years in which he played every role from overbearing ham to dependable sideman to journeyman pro to hack. Now that he's hit it he's comfortable, and for good reason; it may be a well worn groove, but it's also plenty durable.

In other words, this album is notsignificantly different from the last ..couple he's released. Though it does make bows to, for example, disco, it is essentially good time white funk, a type of music that usually exists outside whatever the current trend is (though the Southern music connection definitely helps commercially in Elvin's case). Like much good rock "n" roll since the very beginning, it 1. is as disposable as yesterday's papers, and 2. bears up to repeated listenings.

The Bishop Band's touch is such that the two disco numbers ("Keep It Cool," a chant, and "P.C. Strut," an instrumental) go down as easy as the more typical fare. "Once In a Lifetime" and the gospel-based "Spend Some Time" are ballads that serve as followups to "Fooled Around and Fell in Love." "Twist and Shout", presented as a reggae, is successful despite some offputting vocals that try too hard to sound Jamaican and come off a bit tacky instead. But for me, the re^il gem is "Yes Sir," a sort of swing blues into which Elvin inserts a sort of heavy metal guitar solo; it is the most carefully and imaginatively arranged piece of music on the album, and I've been singing it to myself all week.

Ultimately, this is the music better listened to and enjoyed than written and read about. That means me and you—Elvin and company have already kept their end of the deal.

John Morthland

SLY& THE FAMILY STONE

Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back

_(Epic)

Sly's latest, packaged and promoted as a comeback album, is a throwback album, as musically flat as anything he's done. The message here (and each of his albums have a message weaving in and out) is an apology for past self-indulgence and a promise that we gonna be a dance band again which isn't a bad idea except that the best Sly can do is to imitate his conception circa "68 and cliches are cliches even if you did invent them yourself. I liked it better when he was self-indulgent or at least treading water (Small Talk) or playing the casual master (High On You). Any song from those two albums will stay with you longer than this turkey intoto—hell, I've listened to this record half a dozen times today and I still have to refer to the liner to remind myself of what I've heard. Like Hot Rocks, which won the Aw C'mon award for Strangest Move of the Year, this album is pretty sad and fans are warned.

Speaking of strange, along with the inexplicably apologetic nature of the album and the very explicable, tho torpid, return to AM form (a bid for AM bucks that, because of its torpor, has a good chance of hitting) —along with all that there's a piece of sanctimonious drool on the cover that's a real cypher. Written by Kenneth Gamble and addressed to Sly it says, in part "May almighty God give you strength to control your emotions"—sounds like God resorted to thorazine on this album. Also "May you profit from your mistakes" (no doubt another reference to this record) "and make the will of the Creator your life's goal. We can't wait "til you -come back to Philadelphia again." What Mr. Gamble probably doesn't realize is that if more people made the will of the Creator their life's goal then th£re wouldn't be any Philadelphia.

Okay, okay, I lied. The album's a masterpiece. Throbbing basses and slashing guitars and old jumble mumble in top form. This is probably the best album released this year and it's bound to get you off. If you're 12 years old and very slow.

Richard C. Walls

QUEEN

A Day At The Races (Elektra)

When Queen was first kicking around the airwaves, one was tempted to giggle at, and possibly even enjoy, their heavy metal meets the National Barbershop Quartet Society sound. "Liar" was lots of fun, especially if you were a devout Catholic and it generally appeared that Queen was well on its way to grabbing Jethro Tull's guilt ridden crown of thorns which lan Anderson had blown by showing his true colors once too often via Passion Play and Queen didn't appear to be too serious about all this stuff either. Of course, A Night At,The Opera screwed up that notion completely. A good friend of mine who sees AM radio's biggest value as motivator through pain—not so much that you want to drive with the radio on as wanting to get where you're going quicker so that you no longer have to have it on—just loves to throw "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the jukebox at bars because it used to help us all drink quicker so that we wouldn't care if it was on or not. With that album though Queen ceased to be a joke, trading reservations in the pew for a box at the Met. Uh, uh—that's where 1 get off fella—the Mothers of Invention's "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" was more than enough for me.

So here's A Day At The Races (what's next? Monkey Business, Room Service or Loue Happy?) and there's a terminal cuteness about this album that is, to be brutally frank, as sickening as Chastity Bono. Ladee-dah, "I'm A Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy," "You Take My Breath Away," (hubba-hubba) and, oh yes, "The Millionaire Waltz" (did you know that Freddie Mercury buys rare paintings in his spare time?). It does go on. Plenty of music hall bravura—Freddie Mercury as the King Sisters, except that Brian May is not Alvino Rey. Actually, Brian May hardly does much of anything on this album which means that unless you're a rock "n" roll pansy you're not going to like this record very much (obviously these guys never got their tickets to Suffragette City).

Now that they're such good buddies with us Yanks they think they can throw in a tune like "White Man" (two words; these clown have obviously never read R. Crumb), about the plight of the Indians. Personally, I'd rather have Mark Lindsay's remake of "Indian Reservation" or "Please Mr. Custer" than this piece of "w6're holier than you and besides it's not even our problem." But that's not the topper —the last track is "Teo Terriatte (Let Us Cling Together)" (cling, cling, as in static; somebody should have thrown a sheet of BounceJnto the final mix), with chorus in a foreign language, Japanese I think. Now on the cover of this mag it says "America's Only Rock "n" Roll Magazine" so if you want to do something for your country, cut out the last track and mail it to your Tokyo pen pal from high school who you never wrote back to, namely because you couldn't understand their English. Maybe he or she will appreciate it. In fact, why don't you mail them the whole album? And thank you for being an American.

Billy Altman

EAGLES Hotel California (Asylum)

Welcome to the Hotel California, land of brutally handsome, cruel dudes and terminally pretty female victims of life's ugly games. A place where no one is above superficiality, except perhaps the singer of the song, where everybody has everything and still isn't happy. Because to have everything is to be bored, and these residents are not only bored, they're terribly boring. This is one hell of a depressing album— happiness has become an unattainable, something man has invented to believe in, like god. It might not really even exist, but he'll spend a whole lifetime searching for it anyway.

Behold these morose, cynical multi-millionaires, warning us outat-the-limits strugglers that life at the top isn't what it's cracked up to be. It seems easy to be rich and sing about the demise of the rich. Doesn't make me feel any better—I'd trade places with them in two seconds. I mean if this is what life is all about anyway, I'd rather be wealthy and lonely than poor and lonely.

Rock "n" roll outlaws, hell—the Eagles are chicken hearts, "philosophical desperadoes," a complete contradiction in terms. They put down "Life in the Fast Lane" because it's so destructive, yet they live it just the same. They're so worried about losing themselves to the eccentricities of their success that they don't realize that it's already happened. "Hotel California" is the mirror, "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave." So check out their narcissistic selftribute, a fold-out photo of five of the most macho lady killers alive. Love us, we're tortured. It's the last resort. When these guys sing about god, I wonder who they think He is. Can you honestly search for a higher being when most of your time is taken up by setting yourself up to be worshipped?

The lyrical and real life double standard of the Eagles" music renders serious contemplation just about impossible and almost totally unnecessary. Like One of These Nights, Hotel California makes for perfect listening and that's it. Success formula song construction, the magnetic harmonies, even a dash of reggae for sophistication; Joe Walsh's debut on vinyl as a group member; the ultra-sincerity of Don Henley's voice on "The Last Resort." It all adds up to a platinum plus album with at least thre.e hit singles in the nest, just waiting to be hatched at regular three month intervals.

It's not hard to understand this love-hate relationship. What other group can you think of who can suck you away in a feverish preoccupation with the negative amidst a neatly disguised concept-as-hitsingle, or is that the other way around? Excuse me, I gotta turn up the radio, that's my favorite song, "Lyin" Eyes." Kris Nicholson

GEORGE HARRISON 33&1/3 (Dark Horse)

Among my local circle of acquaintances is an authentic Indian (complete with turban) who may or may not be the biggest bullshitter in either hemisphere. According to him, there is no poverty in India, simply "an illusion fostered by the media." He can't understand why his American spouse wishes to writhe on the floor before Lilias; in India, only the "very religious" practice yoga. And you'd expect Mr. Teeming Subcontinent to have a knockout collection of Ravi Shankar sides, right? Nope, his fave rave is none other than Cliff Richard (the Empire will out).

So how come this prominent Eurasian in the Bicentennial shades, one Geo. Harrison esq., is still trucking his white man's burden all the way to the bank? Well, the nirvana's always greener on the other side of the Himalayas, as another holy man once said, but isn't it about time George started living the soul-peace he claims to have found in his Eastern religions? Peter Townshend and Felix Cavaliere have at least granted us that much, even if their rock "n" roll immediacy has dropped off accordingly.

But 33&1/3 finds George Harrison as niggardly self-righteous as he was back in 1966 in "Taxman," which was less the political protest John Lennon might have made it as it was plain old William F. Buckley intellectualized greed: get your grubby hands off my money, you bloody bastards!

The tone-piece of 33&1/3 is, of course, the infectious "This Song," wherein Harrison snidely castigates Bright Tunes Publishing for beating him in court in their suit charging that Harrison had appropriated the note structure of their "He's So Fine" for his "My Sweet Lord." I can't blame Harrison for being angry at these quickbuck artists— instead of musicologists, the court should have called on a real expert, say Chuck Berry, who could've told "em authoritatively that rock "n" roll just happens to be the art of successful plagarization—but I'm not sure that replying in kind will faze Bright's cookies. I think George should've thrown them a real curve by writing a new tune entitled "He's So Fine," with totally different music and lyrics than the Chiffons" hit, and then dedicating it to his beloved Premavatar Paramahansa Yogananda.

As it is, the good grey yogi picks up a couple of hymns of consecration on 33&1/3: "Dear One" (complete with college-convocation organ to establish the proper note of gravity) , and "See Yourself," an additional proclamation of the gospel according to Billy Preston: "It's easier to tell a lie than it is to tell the truth." Right on, George; but which intent is the truth of "Learning How to Love You"—the ostensibly humble reverence of the lyrics, or that cheeky dedication of the song "to Herbie Alpert"? No hard feelings on leaving A&M, eh, dark horse of another color? Holding grudges is such a wordly vanity, after all.

Yet Harrison continues to undercut the smugness of his own religious deliverance with good old human (Western, even) fallibility: the aforementioned "Learning How to Love You" opens one verse with "While waiting on the Light," which immediately suggests an image of George stopped on Sunset Blvd. in his Rolls "motor car," experiencing divine illumination while staring at the red traffic light. So l?e it, welcome to the wonderful world of metaphor, George.

What can I say? The Tom Scott freeze-dried funk—the idiot albino grandchild of Delaney & Bonnie— of 33&1/3 is as thoroughly competent as always, and if you don't care for Harrison's didacticism, you can always toss away the lyric sheet; his pearls of wisdom aren't always so audible within the reverent mumblety-peg of his vocals. After all, wasn't there somebody who said that the ways of the East were supposed to be inscrutable?

Richard Riegel

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE _(Arista) :J§|f_

Anybody attempting to package the Best Of the Complete Works of the Not Ready for P.T. Poopers into two sides of smushed vinyl Would've had his head up his ass, righto, daddy-o? So instead, ya get a sampling of all the yoohoos in the cast with Don. Pardo breathing heavy between cuts. Sometimes it's funny stuff; lotsa times it ain't.

Let's say you bitch and shoot shit cause sketches like Jeopardy 1999 and I Love Asparagus were omitted (and all those other TeeWee parodies which is the maraschino cherry of Sat. Nite Live cuz nothing beats TV vs. TV: cept Godzilla vs. Smog Monster). And how come they didn't include Chevy Chase a.k.a Very White (steppin" out of his infamous musical role as keyboard player for Chameleon Church,>U^>' mate Spinach's main competition) chuckling along/ as Barry White, bullfrog spokesman for the overlynourished? And where's Belushi singing Little Piggy March's "1 Will Follow Him" during the Chinatown take-off?

But any gungho fan with a pen can list better momentsfrom Sat. Nite Live that should've been included in this spiffy collection so BE GRATEFUL FOR SMALL FAVORS, wiseguy. Cause fully intact you'll find enough cracks to keep you in belly-laffs for a month of Saturdays. Like, there's the ad for Fluckers jam in which brand names compete in registering levels of puke response in the consumer (also, ad for Spud beer, the nasty brew made from potatoes for the retardo populace). Course there's Chevy confronting Richard Pryor in the "Word Association" skit, already a staple classic for NBC, which used it during the Big Event Celebrartion of Fifty Glorious Years of Mindrot from the network that has given us Johnny Carson, Tom Snyder, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But the funniest cut on the doodah compilation "Chevy's Girls," easily the best girl group record of the Seventies. It took Laraine, Gilda, and Jane to out-Shangri-La-La every sexy Sixties female band from the Angels (not Charlie's) to Becky and the Lollipops. "Chevy's Girls" celebrates Chase's bumbjing character, of course, creating 'the ultimate lampoon of the male hustler. Goodee!

In one sweep at thirty-three & a third, this ain't a bad representation of the show itself. The record's only problem being not what is included or excluded but that it is simply not live. And that's exactly what makes Sat. Nite so extra, XX-TRA SPECIAL. As well as: Garrett Morris (does part-time shift on Radio Uganda), Dan Aykroyd (recently contracted to replace Mr. Coffee), Chevy Chase (the next McLean Stevenson), Jane Curtin (frustrated Search For Tomorrow addict), John Belushi (still trying to sell his thoroughly scratched, but autographed, copy of Disraeli Gears), Laraine Newman ("pluck me! pluck me!"), and Gilda Radner (CREEM's own pin-up pet), none of whom have ever appeared on Tattletales, Mike Douglas, or Cooking with Bernard (a claim to fame not made by many TV celebs). Robot A. Hull

VARIOUS ARTISTS Nuggets (Sire) i

It's kinda hard to believe at this point with everything from Fleetwood Mac to the Eagles putting us into a state of apathetic doldrums (radio's function now being merely to lead you into FM Snoozeland rather than to blast bolts of electrical impulses from your auto's AM dial), but from 1965-68 these gems were actual chartbusting records. I mean, you could really walk into Woolco or someplace, slap down your 68^, and purchase some of the craziest music ever produced on this here planet. Only Rockabilly and the British Invasion ever equaled the intensity of these local garage bands that sprouted from beneath the underground everywhere from Boston to San Diego. What's more, never has an American rock "n" roll form even approached the derangement of the late-great, sadly lamented Psychedelic Era.

Often accused of musical ineptitude, punk bands were denigrated to the lowest level in the rock "n" roll history. A band like the Leaves, that could only play three chords (but what chords!), were assumed to be musical midgets in comparison with the unfolding array of hippie bands like Country Joe, Big Brother, and J. Airplane. (Not to mention such progressive "artists" asTheBandorRodStewart.) And it still may take another dozen years before everybody realizes that it's not just the reliance upon three basic chords, but how you use them. For punk bands like the Standells or the Music Machine perfected the primitive art of simple chord usage, and kids were actually buying the records and watching the various exponents of the genre every week on Upbeat.

Despite the high hopes of Noo Yawk's finest punkers and today's underground local bands like Pere Ubu and the Droogs, it seems safe to say that a group called the Chocolate Watch Band or the Electric Prunes would never even see the light of the pop charts during these dry, thirsty years of computerized monotony. The Blank Generation will never experience the impact of "Psychotic Reaction" streaking in jolts from transistor radios, lavished with the recognition of Top Forty status, in deep contrast with Motown or Jay and the Americans. It's a depressing sensation when you realize that the songs contained in Nuggets were -at one time popular and even played until their grooves were worn. Today's mass audience would only snicker and sneer and would appreciate the enthusiasm of punk rock only in the context of nostalgia.

In loving memory of the sounds of psychedelia, this fan has gone through three copies of the original Nuggets anthology on Elektra: therefore, this re-issue on Sire is welcome with a fond embrace. If you don't own this collection by now, oh well, hang your head in shame, and go sit in a comer with your Elton John records. If you already own it, keep listening, because whatever the next twenty years brings to the transformation of punk rock and its culture they will never erase the initial impact of having bands like the Seeds present in full maniacal force on the radio, forcing your parents to holler, "Turn that blankety-blank junk off!!"

Robot A. Hull

RORY GALLAGHER

Calling Card

(Chrysalis)

I file all my records alphabetically. A file my Rory Gallagher records under "G" for Gallagher. Even^if Ifiled my records under a system other than alphabetical, such as Good/Average/Disco, for example, Rory Gallagher would still be filed "under "G" but under this system it would be "G" for Good and not "G" for Gallagher. But then I like my Rory Gallagher records quite a bit and so I'd always be wasting time debating over whether to create a new classification for them such as "E" for Excellent or "Gr" for Great. You can see how complicated it all would become; So I file all my records alphabetically. BUT WHO CARES ANYWAY?

Well, no one should care, of course. The only point of the first paragraph was to recreate in your mind a fresh attitude of APATHY.

"WHY BOTHER," is What yopx mind will shout to itself if my first paragraph actually succeeded in instillingafreshattitude of APATHY.

Listen, I went to all this trouble to instill a fresh attitude of APATHY because that seems to be the attitude that everybody cops whenever anyone is discussing Rory Gallagher records, or indeed, the topic of Rory Gallagher in general. Exactly why no one seems to give a rat fuck about RoryGallagherisapuzzletome, but then that's the magic of mass APATHY; it defies reason.

It seems unreasonable to me that Rory Gallagher isn't a bigger rock star than he actually is. Rory Gallagher /was (asked to join the goddamn Rolling Stones, f'r crissake! The Greatest Rock "n" Roll Band In The World cared about Rory Gallagher, cared enough in fact, to ask him to join their band. I mean if the frickin" Rolling Stones can get that excited about Rory Gallagher then why can't you, Mr., Mrs., and Ms. John Q. Public?!

Perhaps instead of passing out swine flu shots the government should administer mass ear inspections to make sure everyone can actually hear all the incredibly scratchy blues licks that Rory Gallagher is picking. But even mass ear inspections may not be enough to break the wall of APATHY that imprisons Rory Gallagher "cause people have to want to listen before they can hear anything and it's the nature of APATHY that renders people want-less. Oh, poor poor, Rory Gallagher...better that people hate you than for you to face all this indifference. What a shame, Rory Gallagher, you can really play that guitar and your voice scrapes the soul with its just finished two pints of Jack Daniel's quality, but no one cares. No one cares. Rory Gallagher is probably crying over a bottle of Guinness Stout right this minute. He's so alone. And it won't even do any good for me to write about Rory Gallagher's shiny new disc full of hot blue licks. It yvon't do any good to write that the album starts with a patter of drum beats that will knock you back to 1953 Chicago. No one cares enough about Rory Gallagher to be knocked back, anyway, so I shouldn't even bother to draw an analogy between Rory Gallagher and J.B. Hutto, and say nice things like Rory Gallagher has taken the blues raunch guitar style to a new destination. Or that Rory Gallagher's composition, "Country Mile," chugs down the tracks like Aerosmith's "Train Kept A" Rollin" " never did.

Why bother to write anything on Rory Gallagher's really funny song called "Secret Agent" about jealous/paranoid/lover type characters. No one will give a poop, probably not even jealous/paranoid/ lover type characters; Yeah, Rory Gallagher cries with more soul on "Edged In Blue" than Clapton ever did, but it seems that nobody cares. .not even Clapton. Rory Gallagher even finishes his album with a conjedy ntimber, (which may be an emerging trend in jt>ck albums; cf. Bob Seger's Night Moves), 'about getting drunk and pissing on your shoes while standing on your head. But what's the use, anyway?

When Rory Gallagher comes calling with his Calling Card, most people won't care enough to get up and open the door. Look, you may be filing this critic under "A" for Asshole, instead of "A" for Air-Wr^ck, but everybody has got to care about something and I happen to care about Rory Gallagher "cause he's more fun to care about than Guatamalian earthquake victims with their heads pinned under a ton of adobe and chicken feathers, or whatever.

Air-Wreck Genheimer

FRANK ZAPPA -Zoot Aliases (WarnerBros.)

Frank Zappa is the creeping terror. X the Unknown, That's Mr. Z. , who set himself up ages ago as the spokesman for the dawn of social correction (listen, Barry McGuire was just clowning around, and Sgt. Barry Sadler just happened to hate gooks, so what?) and told a whole generation of innocent babes (not yet exposed to warfare like Starsky and Hutch but still being fed on Star Trek and Joe Pyne) to TURN OFF THEIR TV SETS (that's what Freak Out was all about, a justification for Zappa's own paranoia, suggesting that the Brain Police were actually seeping out of the tube).

Just like with Richard Nixon, though, it's time to stop kicking Frankie Zzzzzz around. It's getting boring. His head is in another direction altogether since those early days of hippie propaganda. The cynicism is still apparent, but the music is no more a weak excuse for labored classical rips and free jazz atonality soup. In retrospect, there's nothing more hilarious than the sarcasm flaunted by the Mothers, and essentially Zappa has maintained that act all along.

With this in mind, Zoot Allures is a riot (well, ya know, in a perverted sense, like watching Lawrence Welk and thinking it's cute). "The Torture Never Stops" has gotta be the bumper sticker statement on Zappa's Mercedes (Honk for Zappa!) cause it has certainly been the theme of his last few records. On this doodle, the anguished moans and gasps of a woman being disassembled seems. to be the ribtickler. Anyway, the mood of a concentration camp does come across (similar to "The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny": hoo boy). "Friendly Little Fingers" is just Zappa's witty way of saying that he does a guitar solo with himself (song ends with a chorus of "Bringing in the Sheaves"). Followed by "Wonderful Wino" which is the tale of an alkie who eats the labels off wine bottles and craps on old ladies" lawns (satire? WHAT DEPTH!). "Zoot Allures" presents a restful pause. I wouldn't trade it for any Mancini record in the whole world. Another chuckle is "Ms. Pinky," Zappa's version of "Gloria" with explicit sex lyrics for hardcore porn addicts (Redd Foxx is still champ).

But it's on "Disco Box" where Zappa really lets loose his punches ("Leave his hair alone, but you can kiss his comb"). A novelty song like "Disco Duck" could never fathom the vacuum of a trendy dance scene because it uses the disco formula to its own advantage. In contrast, Zappa remains consistently offensive by fronting his attack with heavy-metal slices. Rarely has Zappa bitten his enemy so viciously; for those of you who despise DISKO DORKS, it's pure catharsis. Suddenly the Disco Scene is transformed into a Disco Wake, composed of shuffling lacqQered bodies with only a brainwashing pulse to keep them in motion. For Zappa, disco represents a masturbational fixation (the mindless bumps celebrating only the movements of pounding yr poodle). "Disco Boy, no one understands, but thank the Lord you still got hands/to do that jerking off that'll blot out your disco sorrow/it's disco love tonight." Ain't that sweet?

Zoot Allures is highly successful as a comedy album. Zappa's music is still about as exciting as a wet sponge, but he has found a new scapegoat. Television no longer seems to be the target of Zappa's satirical whip as much as the zombie wave of discophiliacs. In the final analysis, who, indeed, are the Brain Police? Barry White! Salsoul Orchestra! K.C. and the Sunshine Band! Silver Convention! Ooga Booga and his Average Honkie Band and the entire nauseous bunch!!! (Thanks for the tip, Franks Baby.) Robot A. Hull