Their Ways Are Inscrutable

Their Ways Are Inscrutable

RECORDS

BAD COMPANY Bantin' Sky (Swan Song)

by Billy Altman

Funny how you hardly ever hear anyone running around screaming the praises of Bad Company. Just about anybody who takes their music seriously will usually take every opportunity to blast off at the mouth about their fave raves, yet Bad Company's name is curiously absent during most discussions of the top groups around. Their track record has been startlingly successful for the short amount of time that they've been together; each of their three albums has gone platinum and afew of their songs ("Feel Like Makin' Love" and "Can't Get Enough") are on just about every FM station's regular play list of oldies, and their tours consistently sell out. Most groups would give their eyeteeth to be in the position that Bad Company is in and many do, with relentless hype campaigns, tons of interviews and eight-month tpurs. Bad Company keeps the' lowest profile of any supergroup around but it hasn't hurt them one bit.

The lesson to be gleaned from Bad Company's story is that after all is said and done, a lot of people do like the magic to be in the music, where it's supposed to be. When the group started out, put together by survivors of different hard-working but flawed outfits, nobody was placing any bets on their chances. Sure, Paul Rodgers was a great singer and Mick Ralphs had as much to do with the rise of the Mott the Hoople underdog fan club as Ian Hunter did, but so what? Group break-ups and personnel changes have made rock bands of the '70s not all that different from sports teams—trying to put together the winning combination of the field/market. Their first album had no great lyrical statements, no turnyour-head-around guitar solos, just some incredibly solid and viable performances of solid, viable songs. And that has been the path that Bad Company has continued to take through their career. They have no great expectations to live up to and no image to keep up. They just get on with the business at hand, writing the best songs they can and playing them as well as they c£m. So simple, really, yet so simultaneously exceptional to the rules of the game as they now stand.

Burniri Sky, their latest album, keeps up the self-effacing stance: non descript black and white photo of the group back a ways from the camera and an inner sleeve with just a list of songs and production credits. The group's music has been changed ever so subtley during the past two years, most noticeably in the addition of Paul Rodgers' keyboard work; and three tracks'here even feature some sax and flute. The tone of the record is more along the softer side of Bad Company, with plenty of ballads for Rodgers to step out on. Simon Kirke's "Peace Of Mind" has Rodgers stepping into the R&B preacher's pulpit while piano and organ swirl around and there are even some nicely understated backup vocals creeping in near the end. Rodgers completely dominates "Passing Time" with his keyboard playing and there's scarcely a hint of guitar on this cut. Mick Ralphs' guitar playing is, as usual, succinct and to the point, piercing through the vocals on "Heartbeat" with an over-dubbed double lead and rocking mightily with a rhythm guitar solo on the Stones/Faces-ish "Man Needs Woman" and though it may not sound like a compliment to say that one hardly notices Simon Kirke and Boz Burrell at the bottom of things, it is meant as such, for they know where the strengths of the group's sound lies and they only couch and enhance and never get in the way.

The title track is the signature statement, taut and sparse, and both "Leaving You" and "Too Bad" make the most of the riff-rock approach that the band uses so effectively every now and then. The only bad cut is the seven minute "Master Of Ceremony," a throwaway jam that doesn't quite work as either a goof or a parody, but it's at the end of the album, almost like an afterthought, and is easily overlooked. Having a group like Bad Company around and doing well does a lot a good for this rock 'n' roll heart. Because in their own quiet way, they're one of the very best bands we have.

KRAFTWERK Trans-Europe Express

(Capitol) .

YEAH! A NEW KRAFTWERK ALBUM! The first one since their Radio Activity album that Lester Bangs used to rant and rave about because he not only liked the music, but was amazed that Kraftwerk made every single note of their music on machines. (Or if Kraftwerk had their way; music that machines i\nade Kraftwerk make!)

The Basic Theory was that since machines were so cool because they were so efficient, they were better than people because machines don't make mistakes and faux pas-torial foul-ups like people do. But what was to become of people? That rubbery buffoonic lot—wasteful and wayward in anything and everything they tried to do. The principal solution would be for people to simplify their existence so they would only have one thing to worry about doing and probably mess up anyway. By cutting out all their extraneous functions and singling out the one thing that they could do as best they could, people would perhaps become almost as useful as machines. Even if only very small and primitive machines by machine standards.

Our personal solution came to a prompt conclusion: The one thing we did best was drink. With that particular proclivity, it was an easy task to eliminate all other activity. Dedication to drink! The wisdom of Bacchus and the wit of a warthog. We would all become virtual Xerox 2400's in the blink of an LED. Beer became the oil for our gears.

The more oil we consumed, the more our gaskets leaked and thirsted for even greater greasy maintenance. Our Wanderlust was soon replaced with Miller lust. We sought lubrication in ever stranger ways...One desired to dork a porpoise because that would be slick. (He's now a guard in a mental institution.) One's capacity overflowed; screws loosening to the point of attempted copulation with a hitchhiking dog. (He's recently married.) The rest of us terminated questionably better; our ever-mounting consumption proportionately increased our thirst until, more often than not, we would lay hopelessly disconnected in a pool of our own upchucked Quaker State upon video booth floors; peep show or prime time. We all tried hard, but we all failed.

' Yet what court could hold us culpable? After all, we were but people and people could not keep pace and compare with machines. Machines will always win. (Even John Henry died in the end.) Machines have won with Trans-Europe Express. Kraftwerlf have submitted themselves to the rule of the machines. And in that way Kraftwerk, and Kraftwerk alone, have triumphed. Air-Wreck Genheimer

NILS LOFGREN I Came To Dance

. _(A&M)_

Maybe Nils Lofgren always was sort of a dummy. But his heart was in the right place (on his sleeve), he was capable of inventing catchy rock licks ("White Lies" comes immediately to mind), and on at least two occasions he rescued Neil Young from terminal Topanga torpor. In other words, the kid was OK. A rock and roll contender for sure, with a crackling guitar style and a voice that cried tough; plaintive one minute, brash the next. He made one nearperfect LP, IN+1, the critics adored him and the general populace greeted him with the equivalent of a collective yawn. So when you hear I Came To Dance, at first you think: maybe he's kidding. Or: maybe this is some grand strategy, making a rotten LP so the press'll get off his back and his real-people audience'll increase proportionately. Or, ultimately and sadly: his dumminess has become his most prominent feature. When he was singing mostly about girls, it just seemed like appealing ingenuousness ("Have you ever lost a number?/It's like losing the world") or a pose of cockiness. It's all right to be an innocent about romance. Everybody is.

More than anything, I Came To Dance represents a loss of conviction, an abandoning of rock instinct to a plug-in formula. An integrated band, an obtrusive soul chorus, pompous horn and string arrangements, over-busy drumming, all push Lofgren in the direction of becoming a disco drone. He doesn't make it all the way—he's not that dumb—-but then, this isn't his Silk Degrees either. It's too confused and erratic a work,ytoo ambitious in the wrong ways. His best music seems an unforced extension of his personality; at his worst, which means most of this album, you feel a struggle for each image, hesitancy in the melodies. There's none of the irrepressible confidence that marked his records with Grin (hell, there isn't even a title on the album as good as "Love Or Else"). He's trying so hard, and; every track collapses under the pressure of some kind of exertion.

Take the title track, an assertion of artistic integrity and the joys of mindless, toe-tapping music, at face value or tongue-in-cheek. Either way, the remainder of the album makes the claim that he "ain't no philosopher" all the more ironic. The songs are way out of Lofgren's range. He has no talent for the story-song ("Happy Ending Kids"), or the extended metaphor ("Jealous Gun"), orthe contemplative voice ("To Be A Dreamer," "Home Is Where The Hurt Is"); when he enters those areas he becomes either too muddled or too obvious. Who wants to hear Nils Lofgren, perhaps the most archetypically teenage of rockers since Eddie Cochran, singing about killing off wildlife, or about his wife's sexual complaints, or about -his father sending him into the world with a dream, all in stilted language underscored by five back-up vocalists?

Por the first time, Lofgren has blown his cover. After taking the Byrds' "Goin' Back" and the Yardbirds' "For Your Love" and giving them fine personal interpretations, and after his impassioned "Keith Don't Go" for the Stones' Mr. Richard, one would have predicted "Happy" to be a piece of cake, a closing track that might have on the last roll brought I Came To Dance to life. Instead, Lofgren muffs it, playing with a stop-start tempo that chokes off any momentum, and reading the lyric, including a reworked verse that out-Stones the Stones for explicitness, as though he were uncomfortable with it. The added voices only increase the sense of unfocused clutter.

It's all a shame, really, because with the right timing, with tireless touring and maybe the release of an official live album, Lofgren might have beaten Frampton to the post for A&M. He has the chops, the looks, the songs (everything on last year's Best of Grin assemblage is topflight material, and his solo albums, while uneven, contain outstanding tracks), and he's a live performer of considerable panache. I Came To Dance sounds desperate and defracted, and its concessions to someone's concept of the popular mood are self-defeating. No, sticking the word "dance" in an album title doesn't guarantee you an audience, not even in 1977.

Mitch Cohen

ELLIOTT MURPHY Just A Story From America ' (Columbia)

When 1 first put this record on the turntable, it spun and revolved just like any other vinyl tostada. The needle, just like always, ate its way through the intro grooves, scraping into the heart of the matter for posterity's sake (its presence to become more and more audible upon subsequent listenings). There was an apparent lack of suspense in the air; for this was just another experience in the incessant search for the Holy Golden Disc, a title awarded only to those records which lick the critic's ear and his inner being. Suddenly, as if there'd been a fatal blow to the nape of my neck, an awesome sound sent me jolting forward. The walls in the room cracked; the floor shifted beneath my feet. And then there was music...

Hark! The crowds are congregating downtown for a post-earthquake pep talk regarding this impressive Elliott Murphy release. "Thimblefulsof basrelief battles as glass fusion bass horns whisper switches turn on dying changing electric thunderclaps into dialects of liquid stabs," a mass of critical enthusiasts mumble meaninglessly. Could be they're killing this Murphy guy with overrap. Could be they don't know that his roots are intertwined with the poetic ooze of Blonde on Blonde. Could be that they've been steeped for so long in the strange faeces of tired-ass singer/ songwriters that they've become totally perplexed when something thermal comes along; consequently, they can only babble inanities.

HERE'S SOME STRAIGHT TALK: "Drive All -Night" is the tune which triggers an immediate allegiance to Murphy's style. It owes plenty to "Bom to Run," but it resembles "Telstar" even more (although Springsteen's song shared this similarity, too, Murphy incorporates its mood and pulsebeat). "Just a Story From America" bounces along with Van Dyke overtones, possessing the spontaneous allurement of chewing gum ads. You can hear Dylan faked real cleverly on "Rock Ballad," and "Think Too Hard" slaps the gut like the mummified Bowie used to do without batting an eye on Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust. Even the influence of John Cale's Vintage Violence becomes assimi lated into Murphy's diversity of tempos and sensibilities, especially on the chic "Anastasia." And "Caught Short in the Long Run" provides the appropriate conclusive sentimental moment, quite moving as it supplies the final perspective for the entire album (in this case, a word which evokes the craft of placing songs within a sensitive context).

Special bonus, of course, is always the lyrics, and Murphy's knack for composing fine lines makes his role as a bard even more inevitable. Peruse this light versification, why doncha: "I get embarrassed singing 'bout my love/It's like a steel fist hiding in a velvet glove/I don't want the world to turn it to/A grade B movie." Whaddaya expect from a troubadour who frequently alludes to Raymond Chandler and Ezra Pound?

Andy Warhol speaks: "The '60s were Clutter. The '70s are vejy empty." By now, this obvious fact has been typeset and imprinted into everyone's brain. The best rock singer/songwriter, however, can utilize the present emptiness and create a maze around it. Just a Story From America succeeds in elegance as a labyrinthine collection of lyrical, metronomic breathing and refuses to be just another record.

Robot A. Hull

PETER GABRIEL

_(ATCO) _

1 was afraid of what might happen when Peter Gabriel made his debut outside of Genesis once I'd heard that he was hooking up with Bob Ezrin. Gabriel had provided not only a mixture of wit and wryness for Genesis but also the commanding theatrical characterizations; thus I feared that Ezrin would probably find ample ground for melodramatic meddling, throwing the balance further out of kilter than it was on the forceful but dramatically ponderous Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.

True to form, he did. There are indeed some well produced moments, but as usual, Mr. E—as an excess—the man who turned Alice Cooper into a blanded out billion dollar boobie and led Kiss as close to the brink of MOR as they ever dared to go—has gone too far. The combination of angular power chords and disco boogie drums on "Down The Dolce Vita" works, but the chunks of orchestral Sturm Und Drang surrounding it does not. The unusual "Moribund The Burgermeister" is a strange saga of the St. Vitus Dance plague of the Dark Ages, marred only by Ezrin's extremely aggressive crescendos.

Nevertheless, Gabriel has written material both stimulating and entertaining. "Modem Love" is a bracing march, anthemnic lament to the fate of romance in the modern world. "Solsbury Hill" is a compelling tale of alienation, a bit of Anglosized Paul Simon. "Slowburn" puts up an excellent struggle against Ezrin's /encroachments, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner's guitars singing alongside Gabriel.

Unlike Genesis, whose latest effort, Wind and Wuthering, plays it safe, Gabriel has chosen to experiment with a collectic elementand he shows promise of becomin' an artist of consequence. He may hit some pot holes along the way, but he certainly doesn't need Bob Ezrin to make his wrong turns for him. Jim Green

THE BAND Islands (Capitol)

Back in the fall, when The Band was out on tour for the first time in a long time, I sat in the audience watching them play for a crowd to whom they could do no wrong. Each and every song was greeted by thunderous applause and the general consensus was that The Band were magnificent. As for me, I felt pretty depressed at the end of the night. What I had seen in front of me was a group of men whose lifeblood had been slowly but surely drained out. It showed everywhere—Robbie Robertson dancing around the stage woodily, trying to generate some excitement; Richard Manuel nodding out at the piano whenever he wasn't singing; Rick Danko nervously twisting the melody line of "Stage Fright," apparently doing this to escape the boredom entailed at doing it for the thousandth time; Garth Hudson, well, he just stayed in the back and fiddled with his gadgets, oblivious as usual ta everything around him. Only goodtime Levon Helm, he of the Woodstock laid out club of music makers, seemed to be enjoying himself.

On the way home it occurred to me just why I had gone there in the first place. I guess I wanted to make sure that The Band was really as close to a collective death as I had been fearing they were for too many years. I had started noticing something wrong back around the time of Kahoots some five-and-a-half years ago. The Band had been one of my very favorite American groups and they meant a hell of a lot to a lot of us at the end of the '60s. That they emerged so fully grown right at the onset on Big Pink perhaps was a major factor in their rather quick downfall and their aura stretched out so far that it carried them along long after they'd run out erf things to say. Their tour with Dylan brought them back into the limelight, butit was strictly on a Remembrance Of Things Past. How odd it was that a group whose vision was so deeply embedded in heritage and history had finally itself become a relic, a very depressing piece of nostalgia. Sure enough, my suspicions of their state were not unfounded when they announced that they were giving up touring and all began to go their separate ways.

Islands reflects all of the weariness that has earmarked The Band's efforts for so long. One assumes that they owed Capitol a speedyo album; it's hard to believe that they actually went in and recorded these tracks with any real conviction (a word that probably best describes their early, brilliant work). The only songs of any worth here are the title cut, an instrumental with fine keyboards by Hudson and some interesting horn parts, and "Knockin' Lost John," a 1929 Hard Times tale from Robbie Robertson that is a novelty success in that it's the loosest (in terms of vocals and arrangement) thing The Band has ever done. But when you come up against things like "Right As Rain," with Robertson so stuck for rhymes that he matches "rainbow" with "vertigo," or their version of "Georgia On My Mind" (everyone says it was done for Carter, but I think it's more for Ray Charles), with Richard Manuel's long-lost voice halting trying to make it through the song. You can almost hear the death knell sounding: We owe The Band a lot for those majestic times that they gave us and that's how I choose to remember them—for those good times. You can rest easy now, fellas. That big rockin' chair won't go nowhere.

Billy Altman

BACHMAN TURNER OVERDRIVE Freeways (Mercury)

On Freeways BTO at long last has recaptured the refreshing variety absent from all its releases since Not Fragile and has produced an effort free of the formulistic, mindless boogie which has lately seen them fall off the charts, threatening to become just another decaying exhibit in the museum of thud.

Maybe it was the realization that endless albums of endless three-chord drone has alienated all but their most loyal fans but here Randy Bachman has composed a series of tunes not in keepin' with his cliched persona.

"Down, Down", which is oishered in by a folkish acoustic guitar passage, waxes philosophical, discussing the singer's search fort he truth and his fear that disillusionment will accompany its discovery. "Easy Groove" is another tune of muted decibles, the fret board gliding and cultivated pluckin' of Randy and Blair Thornton showing technique which BTO as a unit has long been reluctant to lay on the public.

Stampers need not dispair, however, for the traditional BTO marches still have the familiar lyrical line with a bit too many lines to fit snuggly and the offsync rhyme patterns punctuated by the familiar bass drum of Rob Bachman and a dash of guitar distortion has not been forsaken. And although BTO has fooled with horns and strings before, the brass backup on the somewhat frantic "My Wheels Won't Turn", despite an unfortunate undermix, adds a welcome transfusion to the album's only potentially lame track. With their seventh album, BTO's limitations are still quite apparent—a drummer and bassist (C.F. Turner) of little more than time-keeping abilities, and melodic lines that are staid and go nowhere. Yet the shining virtue of Freeways is that for one of the first times on record, BTO has managed to overcome their inherent shortcomings to produce an LP of unexpected roundness.

Russell Shaw

CHEAP TRICK

_ (Epic)_

Her twisted eyes looked down at the cover— ah hah—the promise of loose destruction, her arm dangling at an awkward angle, she's ghost fenced, coughing and amazed, in a weekend haze, the guys on the cover of the album blemish her soul and make her blush like no others she's come across in—oh, so long.

She's congested and confused; is this a new supergroup^ Is this love? That guy on the far left looks like Ron Mael after he's been stung by a horde of killer bees, the one next to him looks like Mick Ronson, the "really" cute one is sufficiently hermaphroditic for current sexual deriguer, ana that one on the other end "is" Huntz Hall.

Cheap Trick. Her eye twitched. Produced by Jack Douglas, gotta be Aerosmith.mutated, can't be bad, eh!! Well it ain't, s'matter a fact its homage to the teenage winds of doom make it a prime candidate for the next big thing—this month, at least.

A bar band grinding out the night shift in countless pointless bars, Cheap Trick has an honestly refreshing sound, a hundred percent eclectic of course, but refreshing nonetheless. The songs are fraught with the usual first album inconsistencies but still manage to maintain an astounding level of proficiency. The fusion of the dreadnaught guitar mania linked with1 the impressionistic vocal gyrations of Robin Zander make for proper stylized rock convulsions....

She ran her white fingernail across the bridge of her nose, it made a little red welt, a bit of blood, but not much.

Yeah, she thought to herself, Cheap Trick made me wanna get back to the old feenmutilation days, especially when that frenzy of a song, "He's A Whore" comes on, it makes me feel all hot and nasty inside.

Slipping on her leopard skin chemise she walks to the bathroom looking for a razor's edge. She's bored.

("Hot Love" is the hit. "Violence (I'm Not the Only Boy)" is the registered smart song and the ..rest, well, it's a cheap trick. What more need be said?) Joe Fernbacher

IGGY POP Theldiot

, _(RCA)__

Let's see, 1977 minus 1973 is four; it's been four whole years since Iggy and the Stooges' milestone Raw Power was released. Four years can be an eternity among the accelerated passages of today's lifestyles, long enough to change cute toddlers,into sopored adolescents, or primeof-y our-life hippies into Eagles-aurhenticated premenopausals. Four years!

In fact, when I was watching The Bugs Bunny Hour with my own daughter yesterday, we saw a commercial for a motorcycle-noise attachment for kids' bikes called, inevitably enough, "Raw Powerrr." At this rate, even the commercialization of our once-vanguard Stooge fetishes seems old hat; our own ingrate children can flip these totems back to us as small change twice as quick.

A tough act to follow, and Iggy Pop doesn't try it—The Idiot takes up where the five or six albums that should have followed Raw Power (if the Ig could crank out product as readily as, say, Black Oak Arkansas) might have left off. Feel free to work thr;pugh your 'own transitions, meanwhile allowing Raw Power's isolated majesty to stand reconfirmed:

As the star of The Idiot (why risk being coopted by Mattel when Dostoevsky's still handy?), Iggy Pop seems more under David Bowie's manipulative thumb than ever before, a condition that can be taken as positive or negative, depending upon your own disposition whether England is a more with-it nation than Michigan. Personally, Iggy, I wouldn't take Bowie's word that "favor" is spelled with a "u"; that's exactly what he wants you to think he's doing for you.

Where Raw Power represented the final apotheosis of the Detroit-metal rock band, The Idiot puts Iggy right out in front as a kind of rarefied, continent-seasoned singersongwriter. The music, performed by the cryptic "Iggy Pop and his Band," is professional studio metal, with occasional German-electronic overtones. As such, it makes up in Bowieoid sophistication what it lacks of the Stooges' outre scrotum-grabbing pulsations. Again, it's all in what you want.

Within such total B&D to the music and production, the stranded-in-Europe Iggy Pop can get us a message only through his lyrics, and the message, not surprisingly, is nostalgia for the U.S.A. "DumDumBoys" is a sentimental eulogy for the lost Stooges and the innocent nullity of their Michigan origins.

"Mass Production" opens with accomplished Kraftwerkian industrial dronehonking, but just take a plunge into the lyrics and you're back inside the heartbreak din of Ford's River Rouge stamping plant: "Though I try to die/You put me back on the line." Or in the heartbroken "China Girl," where aging Jimmy Osterberg laments the days ("Visions of swastikas in my head") when dad a came so easily to his lips: "When I'd look at my China Girl/I could pretend that nothing really meant too much.'' - /

So there you have the key thematic cuts on The Idiot; to fill out his 12-incher, though, Iggy also did several worshipful parodies of his business associates (apparently Ig's petitioning for full membership on the Old Liars' Club). Among these parodies we find Lou Reed (the dry, sardonic posturing of "Funtime," or the watchingthe-soapers-from-the-plastic-slipcovered-womb-of-my-mom's-Oakfield-Ave.-living-room ambience of "Tiny Girls"); the obligatory bow & scrape to Bowie (the drohing, bright-white Kraut soul of "Nightclubbing"); and one more tribute to the late Jim Morrison, in the incestuous wetdream of "Sister Midnight" (so there's more to Iggy's repeated echoings of Morrison, more than just accumulated residue in the Elektra grooves).

As we conclude oUr Grand Tour of the watering holes where the finer tastemakers hang out, I can't help worrying (as a concerned Midwesterner) about the homesickness that expatriate Iggy Pop must be experiencing among the ruins of empire. We've already seen this Detroit Breakdown Syndrome in Suzi Quatro; let's all get together now and send 'em a case or two of Stroh's to mellow out with. Send contributions

Iggy Pop

c/o Diamond Doghouse

Bowie Mews

London, U.K.

Richard Riegel