There's no tradition of rock humour in Britain (there's not much of one in America come to that—but we haven't even got a National Lampoon). In the 1950s Peter Sellers did a Stan Freberg job on British rock 'n' roll, and in the 1960s the Barron Knights provided a series of instant pastiches of their comrades of the British beat boom, but in the 1970s, as rock pomposity has reached new heights, deflators have been depressingly thin on the ground (otherwide Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull would never have got away with it). The task has been left to the almost single-handed efforts of one man—Neil Innes. Innes wrote and sang "I'm The Urban Spaceman" for the Bonzo Dog Band, and is the musician of the Monty Python team, but his flowering as a rock satirist was with Eric Idle on their British TV series, Rutland Weekend Television (several extracts from which have reached American screens one way or another). Week by week Innes took on a new target—Bernie Taupin and Elton John (with mammoth revolving glasses), Gary Glitter (with mammoth revolving paunch), the Ruttles (starring in A Hard Day's Rut), post-Dylan singer/songwriters ("I've suffered for my music, now it's your turn"), ecological country/rock ("I've got my hand up the skirt of mother nature.. .*'), folkies, discos, footballs, musicals. The parodies were precise, and tasty and it doesn't surprise me that Clive Davis has decided that Innes is a necessary part of Arista's plan to take over the rock world as we know it.

Still, it'll be interesting to see what Arista can do with such an English sensibility. Away from the violent zaniness of Monty Python, the sly put-downs of Eric Idle, Innes is a romantic singer/songwriter. His first solo album (How Sweet To Be An Idiot on UA—now deleted) was a charming and elegant collection of "serious" songs and his debut record for Arista, Taking Off, is not just a funny album. His targets are those of a generation of British hurhourists—middle class habits, suburbia, domestic bliss (Innes has an obsession with the flying ducks that supposedly adorn the wall of all respectable Britons) —but his approach is neither contemptuous nor detached. He seems, rather, to regret that he doesn't have the innocence of normality—he doesn't really believe in all these conventional cliches but, like Ray Davies* he wants to. There's a chasm between Innes's concerns and rock's usual indulgence in bohemian vices and this helps explain why such a friendly person can be so venomous in his assessments of his fellow musicians. It also helps to explain why up to now Neil Innes has tended to drop through a hole in the middle of the market. At the London party to launch his new career the assembled rock people ignored the -subtleties of the album and came to life only for the live parodies; Innes himself wandered around in his beret looking slightly puzzled. But he couldn't really blame us. We're so unused to rock humourists that when we get one what can we do but laugh?

Who Snuffed Lips McGee?

THE MAN WHO KILLED MICKJAGGER by David Littlejohn

(Little, Brown & Co.)_

Assuming Keith Richard wins his case and flies free, assuming the promoters come up with the proper venues, assuming Mick and the boys even feel like creaking up their bones to go out on the road again, this compact novel could very well talk 'em out of it forever. David Littlejohn is an impeccable writer, and of equal importance, he knows his rock 'n' roll. Put those two potentially opposing worlds together and watch them collide in The Man Who Killed Mick Jagger.

It's no great news to anyone attending concerts today that the potential for violence looms obvious and frequent. Firecrackers pop the way confetti used to fall. More than one player has left the field of action with blood dripping from his face, the victim of a beer can or wine bottle. Even the innocent tackle of a teen idol has resulted in demolished clothing, scratches and near suffocation.

But when theJdd watching the stage is Ronald Harrington, the time is California 1969, and the tour the one which would culminate in Altamont, this is a situation on a short fuse. Littlejohn stretches the wait into an agony of stress scenes, always flashing back to the past whenever the game's solution falls too close at hand. Back he thumps into the early 1960's, when Ronald Harrington was growing up a crew-cut kid at Berkeley, and the Stones were the lords of West London, "free to do what they want, any old time." It doesn't matter that Harrington finds himself at the Stones concert purely by accident—he immediately recognizes that their lavishness is the polar opposite to his empty groping.

Littlejohn's novel is most noteworthy as a true rock tale. This journalism professor isn't writing from an ivory tower, taking his facts from newspaper headlines. He's been there enough times to capture the feel and smell of a 20thousand-seat hall, to portray the mindless lure a band like the Stones can cast over a crowd, way up to the balcony seats. Littlejohn's research into the staging of a concert, the structure underneath a hall, is as flawless as his probe into the Rolling Stones' recorded history. Possibly the author knew he was venturing onto dangerous ground writing a novel so closely twined with rock. Too many other stories have proven to be either cheapo exploitation skin books, or so loaded with inaccuracies about the pop world that the aware reader immediately goes cold. Littlejohn avoided those traps, and probably the only person he's really got to watch out for is Mick Jagger himself.

There is no way that Jagger can dispassionately react to a book which carries his demise in its title. On the one hand, it's a ballsy move by Littlejohn, and certainly a great ploy to get a non-book reading rocker to plunk down $8.95. On the other, as Jagger must feel, a book which begins with that kind of title is a hell of a way to give people ideas, its conclusion upfront knowledge from page one. David Like The Man Who Killed Mick dagger's ending pages, there are no set clues, but think about what "Satisfaction" really means, and you'll come close to understanding why fact might be merging with fiction at any given moment.

Toby Goldstein

Special Triple Feature!

by Edouard Dauphin

Summer's here and the time is right for dancing in the street. Which is great

if you're one of those disco geeks and don't mind getting run over. This month we've got a triple feature for you and it'If probably have you reaching for your "Disco Duck" cassette by midnight.

The Car is about a demonically possessed automobile that runspeople over. It's a two-door sedan with a Lincoln Mark III chassis, dyno-tuned engine, locked rear end axle and gears, double air shocks, full roll cage and double bumpers front and rear for ramming. If this were a CREEM Star's Car, it would probably belong to The Damned.

The vehicle turns up suddenly in the sleepy and unpronounceable town of Santa Ynez. The residents of this Southwestern hamlet have never seen the likes of a hit and run car with no driver visible at the wheel. For a while, there is speculation that Paul Williams and Janis Ian are out for a joy ride.

The car kills quickly and indiscriminately. It cuts down a young hitchhiker, a couple of boring cyclists, a sheriff, some cops, and even takes aim at a group of children rehearsing for a school parade. If you drive the way I do, The Car is no laughing matter.

James Brolin, whose ears were enlarged for his recent appearance in Gable And Lombard, portrays a deputy sheriff who challenges the 5500 pound car to two out of three falls. He succeeds, but only with the help of an explosives team which is already looking forward to the sequel, entitled of course The Skateboard.

The commercial for our second feature goes: "There's only one thing wrong with the Davis baby—It's Alive. " Well, there's only one thing wrong with It's Alive. It got produced.

The Davis baby is a bloodthirsty, deformed infant that blasts out of its mother's womb, severs its own umbilical cord, murders a surgical team of five and crashes through a hole in the delivery room ceiling. How's that for coochi-coochi-coo?

The parents are only slightly alarmed. Mom says don't look at me. Dad pretends nothing has happened. He reports for work the next morning at his office in a public relations firm (not Howard Bloom) but he's already been fired. Seems some of his clients objected to the notion of a mutilating tot's father handling their public image. Especially when the kid resembles Iggy Pop.

Meanwhile, the tyke continues his killing ways. He slaughters a milkman, dispatches a pussy cat, maims a fox in short shorts and, true to his Iggy persona, crawls into a sewerto die. Watch for the sequel—Its Dead.

As a real estate goes, The House By The Lake is strictly summer rental. Brenda Vaccaro plays a stuck-up fashion model who accompanies a brash young dentist on a weekend trip to his private lakeside estate. He's hoping to get a closer look at her molars. She's wondering if you can stitch together a jumpsuit from dental floss.

During the ride out of town, she drag-races with a carful of drunken degenerates who look like Patti Smith's band. When she runs them off the road into a bog, they vow to get even. Later on, they turn up at the house and proceed to totally destroy everything in sight. Including the dentist! They gun him down like a dog. His last words are "See you in six months. "

Brenda senses that these characters mean business. So she retaliates by cutting one fellow's throat with a piece of glass, setting fire to a second creep, drowning a third in quicksand and crunching the bones of the group leader under a Jeep. The final victim dies horribly, mouthing the words "Women drivers."

Some weakling from the London Daily Telegraphists been widely quoted in ads for this movie as saying: "For the first time in 40 years of film-going, I wanted to run from the theatre in pure fright. " Which goes to show that people will do some funny things when they've got diarrhea.

Skip The House By The Lake and go jump in the lake instead!