ELVIS COSTELLO Armed Forces (Columbia)

Oh, I just don’t know where to begin...

...So how’s about a freeze frame click-click-clicking of El Fuss on all fours in his backyard nightshade garden extirpating thwarted concupiscence by the bushelful...Or him breast beating poor Bebe, every bruising lash sizzling with anger precipitated by evidence of the fuckin-place jogging (calisthenics practiced by mirror loving pseudo-sexual jocks of either (and all) gender(s) who see themselves rolling on the carpet with the handiest imitation of this year’s model, reveling in the selfserving zipless salvational pragmatism of Erica Jong-type behavorial guidance (pity the poor immoral grunt)...Or perhaps a still photo of a ceramic vase displaying an existential bouquet of oopsy-daisies tottering on the edge of our neo-hero’s mantelpiece, with a voice-over reading of Roethke’s My shadow pinned against a sweating wall—sub-captioned Welcome To Paradise’s Weeds And Wrecks. Well, nowthat I have begun...

Elvis Costello’s supposed (apparent?) misogynous tendencies mean less to me than 78 rpm,' have seemed too easy a reference, a tree top example of the personal heresy; 1 prefer to assume that in an attempt to define the anguish (artistic, of course) he awoke to daily, Elvis sought out an essay by Sartre and, was enlightened to the fact that woe is man. And being a fiendishly clever fellow and a cunning linguist of the first order, El swivel-lipped a slight trick of the tongue and parachuted it into an arena where labias and genitalmen alike, who had, by one bite or the other, been jarred (and pickled) by rejection and manipulation, could vinegar dance soul justifying virulence. And contemplate between vindictive affirmations of the recurring pain and futility of being human his cryptic and analogous messages regarding the heel-clicking little bubbers who aspire to become BigBubber, if only for wide sheet domination. Why, CozYespects goits and boils equally, and would no more abuse a candy little girl than I would poke a fire cracker up a cat’s ass and ligh| it (here kitty, kitty, kitty).

AH of which is rutted more in last year’s Farrah than this year’s aim.

Armed Forces (and I was initially suspicious as to why not Armed Farces, a more likely title I thought, and a good companion to Ernie Hummingway’s chronicle of an amputee ward, A Farewell To Arms) again finds ’Fuss buzzing at the window like a heat-maddened fly, his relentless camera lens snap shooting a wider and, me thinks, more penetrating angle. So, just like mommy used to do with the BandAids after you played butcher with yourself, let’s take the most prominent cuts first.

“Accidents Will Happen”: When you’re mournfully watching the bubbles at the bottom of the bottle from a Texas bar stool, this translates as, “Shit will happen,” but it’s the same difference. Whether you hit the drake with your fender or it ran into you (with its bill, it’s still a dead duck, no longer responsible for its actions, or lack thereof. This is more than a hapless shrug, however; rather an assertive ambiguity, or is that ambivalence? Somebody wakp up Freud and ask. Or maybe that guy in the beret could tell us. At any rate, the song piyots on, “|t’s the damage that we do and never know/ It’s the words we don’t say that scare me so.” Like, “Fuck, she was so quiet at supper tonight, I jiist know she’s gonna tell me in the morning that she’s packing—What did Ido to piss her off?” Unhealthy self-manipulation best brought to a head on conclusion by letting her walk and then, after taping over the numbers on your license plates, following her to a nice, deserted intersection where you put your foot to the floor and commit a little of what El sings of, “ hit and run. ” pee, you ’ll be sorry as hell, and your reputation will be screwed up a little, too, so that any fish rising out pf the smoke will demand a chaperone for the ride home. But, you won’t be the only victim and you do have a catchy and appropriately remorseful fade-out chorus to sing along with as you view the crime frohnf ever-lengthening distance (“I—I know what I’ve done”). Even if you don’t want to hear about it.

“Oliver’s Army”: Hey! Wouldn’t it be neat to get a job at the front line? Well, just wait a couple of minutes and it’ll be your front lawn. For you who can’t wait, or are in need of some occupational therapy, Corporal Costello offers a sbbversively infectious melody and some dapper Squadron hut-huttin’. from the At -tractiorls (who certainly are) that will have you marching in military dandiness, so proud of your shiny new rifle and haifid grenades. The clincher line, “And I would rather be anywhere else than here today,” only serves td infer the acute shortage of anywhere elses available today (and lets you in pn how Napoleon felt at Moscow, and how I felt in Denton last Saturday night vOheh that cop pulled me over for expired tags, me knowing what he was shortly to find out: that I was drunk and hadn’t had a current driver’s license in over 17 months).

“Party Girl”: Mr. Spleen waxes poignant? Well, throughout the album his focus is not as overtly harsh as previously. And this is the kind of love song that makes sense; it isn’t punitively wimpoid, not does it promise glpriously shared sunrises on the far side of eternity. The fella realizes the limitations of relationships (“1 would give you anything...! can give you anything, but time”), his own confused motives (“I don’t want to lock you up and say you’re mine/I don’t want tp lose you, and say, ‘Good-bye’”), the fact that the object of his passion is neither unique nor a fresh-faced angel (“a parfy girl....just like a million all over the world”). He even indulges in a line of hopeless fantasy (“Maybe someday we can go hiding from the world”), but sings with an a priori conviction of loss, as though he already knows the desperation of accepting any disguise of love too well, and is well-versed in the purity of pure despair. Which' is from where the song, in performance, is tellingly authored.

“Two Little Hitlers”: “I face the music, I face the facts...Two Little Hitlers who’ll fight it out until, one Little Hitler does the other one’s will.” Not as time consuming as Ten Little Indians, but acidly perceptive and funny. Emotional fascism set to a quirky beat. My favorite line has got to be, “I called selective dating/ For some effective mating.” But the most cogent lyric in regard to rock ’n’ roll psychology is, “I need my head examined/I need my eyes excited.” Or maybe that’s world psychology.

The remainder of the menu here includes a chemistry class—if you’re ready for the final solution; the horror of experiencing what it feels like to be flushed down the tubes; a discourse on the multi-level effects of modern cybernetics that spits in the face of intentions, regardless of sex, creed, or color; a foray into corporate Darwinism ahd sinister ambition; and a steelbelted radial retread of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding” that could T)ave been truly hilarious, if Elvis had bothered to scowl the hokey recitation about “the children of the New Generation.” But he didn’t, so fuck him.

Grinding transitional gears, I do miss the pump-it-up organ and hundred percent tithe of ferocity that defined This Year’s Model tearing up my'mental rug. But, what with these, provocatively armed forces building up to maim and mangle, that seems trivial. The question you might ask yourselfconsidering the consequences, is: Just whose fingerprints are on my imagination?

Tex-Mex lives!

JOE “KING2-’ CARRASCO AND ELMOLINO ,, Tex-Mex Rock-Roll (Liszt)

by Billy Altman

Joe “King” Carrasco and El Molino’s debpt album is the kind of record that leaves you smiling up at the skies, humming a prayer of thanks to the great vinyl spirit for sending it your way. It’s a record that shakes those cynical “rock ’n\ roll is dead and I’m not even sure that I care” cobwebs right opt of your system as it merrily knocks you out of your seat. What this (album projects, more than anything else, is the simple notionof fun-fun. derived completely from natural sources. The hordesofyoung bands on the scene ftyese days who waste their own space (and ours) with bad music and whose only idea of fun comes from some aesthetic concern or intellectual conceit would do well to give a listen to this album. Because, for all the talk about putting the fun back in rock ’n’ roll, :Joe Carrasco’s record is one of the few that actually does so, and best of all, it doesn’t even try because it simply doesn’t have to.

One look at the cover is really all the information you need. Therq’s Joey with a crown on his head and an absolutely deranged smile on his face, as if the electric guitar in his hands had just show.n up as a Christmas present and it was all he ever wanted in his whole life. The entire record has that same feel to it—no holds barred, carefree1, innocent, un-adult-erate'd, dizzy, mindless, “U/hat do you mean, - letls go crazy? I already am crazy” i;pck ’n’ roll. This is the freshest sound I’Ve heard in years, a blend o,f New 'Orleans shuffle, rockabilly,country swing, rhythm blues and threechord fex-mex mambo that iS utterly relaxed pnd nonchalant as it breaks down any resistance you may have ancf it winds up being completely beside the point because you can tell that as far as Joey is concerned, it really waren’t no big deal at all; all this stuff has obviously been smokin’ its way through his, system since day uno just waitin’ for the chance to bust loose.

Most of the songs here are just not to Be believed, like the frantic “Mezcal Road” with its Sir Douglas farfisa (students of punk take note: about half of El Molino has played with the Mendecino man himsejf atx one time or another)! chaotic sax arrangement, ozoned trumpet solo and Joey’s lunatic “oy oy oy”s and “ai ai ai”s; “Halapena con Big Red,” a limbo rock er which quotes “Lacucaracha”/in its horn passages apd features such quintessential lyrics as “I love you like my seester” and “You can take away my wheels andmy color TV/Oh my little hot sauce you really do it to me.” The tex-mex border patrol stars on “Rock estaNoche,” filled with the lilting sounds of gently stroked marimbas backed by empty tequila bottles. The obligatory rest stops near the end of, both sides for slow dance'Songs reveal Joey’s ability to croon With the bestof ’em (kidcould pass for Jimmy Clanton in a blindfold test), and if you wanna go just plain bazoombas, then we’ll point you towards“Just A Mile Away,” with Ike Ritter’s Bobby Fuller Four lead guitar, the, “She’s About A Mover” organ and Joey’s wooly bully jfepd vocal/

Honorable mention should go to everyone in the band, but especially trumpeter Charlie MacBurney and sax man Enrico “Rocky” Morales who, between them, have the last 30 years of horn styles on call for every occasion. But out front, there’s Joe “King”, Carrasco who, the Xefoxed bio states, “was raised on records by Sam the Sham, Paul Revere and the Raiders and Buddy Holly. He hails from the west Texas metropolis of Dumas, where1 the citizens are called Ding Dong Daddies.” Need I say rriore?

(This record is available by sending $4.98 to: Lisa Records, P.O. Box 12233, Austin, TX 78704.)

( VARIOUS ARTISTS No New York (Antijles)

Welcome to the unwave. I haven’t heard so much ferociously avantgarde and aggressively ugly music since Albert Ayler puked all over my brain back in—what?—’64. And like Ayler, who started at the end of his development and then started working his way backward (and eventually jumped into the Hudson River for a permanent swim), this music has no future. But it does have a vindictive present. It’s a nihilistic burnt-out last blast of mangled energy that scours the spirit. It’s cleansing power that is unreal— spend a few hours with this record and then everything sounds different.;

The spirit scourers are four New York underground rock groups— Contortions, Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, Mars, and D.N.A.— each represented by four selections, The lyrics of each group are textbook surrealistic (yes, there’s a, lyric sheet, printed in late-Beckett blocked paragraphs, and for some reason they’re on the inside of the record sleeve so you have to rip the! sleeve apart to get at ’em) and the music'of each group falls somewhere between Velvet Underground electric and Loft Jazz sound and silence seminars. But the lyrics (almost all of ’em unintelligiblewithout the lyric sheet) and the music (with it’s avant-garde Conventions) ain’t where the excitement lies on this album. It’s the uses of voice which give the record its apocalyptic ambience and each group its individual face.

And a bizarre (Collection of faces they are. Contortions is frorited by James Chance, whose vocals are unrelentingly jacked up to shouting level, the words of his exhortation' lost in his open-throated approach. The effect is numbing. The trio of Jerks are led by Lydia Lunch who plays a droning lead guitar and favors a whooping (as in whooOOPA) vocal inflection. Listening to her |is about as pleasant as being kicked in the stomach. Mars has your typical Martian chipmunks suspended' in jelly sound while D.N.A., the most conservative of the four, is somewhat reminiscent of Eno, who produced the album. It all amounts to a solid statement of no-ness which shakes the listener’s complacency and (this is important) gives you something new to think about. Still...what do they do for an encore?

If you’re intrepid enough to want to hear this stuff (a friend, 3/4 into the first side, complained that the music was painful—she wasn’t referring to any abstract reaction, she was grimacing), be advised that Antilles is a division of Island Records, which ain’t exactly Transamerica Corp. You’ll probably have to make a little effort to procure it, because there’s no way it’s going to come to you.

Richard C. Walls

PETER TOSH Bush Doctor/ (Rolling Stone)

Peter Tosh, as you recall, got to open for the Rolling Stones on their 78 U.S. tour, and H.M.S. Nigger lips himself joined Tosh on stage during his recent, crucial Saturday Night Live appearance. Now Peter Tosh is on American radio, at long last, thanks to Jagger’s duet with him on a spirited remake of the Temptations’ “Don’t Look Back.”

Do we really need all this uptown top-calculating by the Glomgold Twins to convince us how important an artist Peter Tosh really is? Well, mon, yah and nah. Reggae’s still a tenuous commodity in the States, even after ten years of being just on the verge of happening here. Bob Marley/s finally catching on locally, just as he seems to be entering an artistic decline in the outside world. But Jah will provide, and He seems fb have furnished one-time. Wailer Tq6h with enough creative integrity to keep on making superb albums, with or without the patronage of Babylon and its superstars..

Once the Stones-amulet of “Don’t Look Back” is taken care of, Bush Doctor settles into the intensely rhythmic, polemic groove of Tosh’s previous set, Equal Rights. The title track of the new set is Tosh’s obligatory annual petition for legalization of marijuana in Jamaica, a cause that’s beginning to seem humorous even to Peter, for all his dogged patience: “It can build up a failing economy/Eliminate the slavish mentality.”

Ironically, Tosh undercuts his own arguments for legalization in songs like “S^and Firm” and “Pick Myself Up,” which exhort his Jamaican brethren to tow the line oP Rasta existentialism, a dedicated, if oblique,. Protestant-ethic mode of life that would seem to be the antithesis fo the spliff-engorged existence he invites elsewhere. Tosh’s satire of the average Jamaican’s disregard for Anglo-American punctuality, in “Soon Come,” in fact, would seem to. indicate that he’s ready to move on from more thcln one of his Trenchtown roots by now. (Wait ’til Jagger & Richards expose Tosh to the South of France.)

“Creation” and “ ‘Moses’—the Prophets,” the respective, reverent side-closers, sound as Rastarighteous as ever, but Tosh’s reggae-inflected pronunciation of “Jah” sometimes strays dangerously close to that eternal fetish of the Babylonians, “Jive.” Is Peter Tosh, with all his kidding/not, kidding about marijuana legalization and Rasta diaspora, really our long-lost 50’s hipster existential Negro, decked out in dreadlocks for the new age? Yah, mon. Soon come. (And Bush Doctor is one of the best albums of 1978 and/or 1979, in the meantime.)

Richard Riegel

BIG STAR / Third N (PVC) •

Growing up in Memphis back in ’67, I used to get tired of hearing the Box Top’s “The Letter” (#1 hit in the world that year) on the radio every second because djs felt obligated to redyntantly remind listeners that here, at last, was a hometown band that had hit the Big Time. (In Jhe eyes of Nehru-clad visionaries, Memphis’s Sun rockabilly and Stax soul—the untamed past—were irrelevant to'the expectations for a/ bright Sgt. Pepper future.) Fame’s a brief candle though, and soon the Box Tops were mere inserts in the annals of anthropop. That is, until 72 when thejr ex-vocalist Alex Chilton began making racket with Big Star, a name not meant as a cynical reference to the Box Tops’ instant stardom but simply referring to Memphis’ Big Star^supermarket chain, where as a teen I used to buy Hit Parader (which printed the lyrics to all the Box Tops’ hits).

Too much has been written about Big Star’s lack "of success. True, #1 Record and Radio City (now reissued) are infectious pop LPs, but they’re also rather uneven, their best moments on singles (i.e. “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” “September Gurls”). As for Alex Chilton, his cultism is worth examining, not only because his recent works, the Singer Not The Song EP and “Bangkok” 45* are well-crafted gems, but also because he’s still out there fighting for fresh sounds (despite a disbanded Big Star, whose influence is heard in the music of Sneakers/Chris Stanley and Memphis’ Scruffs). And it is Chilton that, after Big Star LPs became bulk items in cut-out bins, went back into the studio, undoubtedly depressed as hell, to record a third album, one that he often has called “strange”. “I don’t know how to connect it with the other two,” Chilton has remarked of the album, which was cut a few years ago and has only recentlys seen the official light of day. “It’s a totally weird thing.”

Personal albums can be a real pain (e.g. John Lennon screaming for his mom on Plastic Ono Band\ or Pete Tqwnshend accepting one note on Who Came First), bdt Chilton doesn’t expose himself so openly; instead, he chooses to hide behind every quirk—untuned guitars and spastic cadences—letting each sound conceal his troubled psyche. Sometimes, as Chilton’s persona takes over, Big Star’s 3rd sounds like the record is actually warped—the needle, as it dips, eating into a groove and then, as it bounces up, skipping into space. The album even seems to begin at the wrong speed with “Stroke It Noel,” a sagging melody that suddenly bursts into the flowery ebullience of the Left Banke. Fortunately by the second cut (“For You”), the speed accommodates warm sentiment smothered in baroque orchestration.

Surprisingly, 3rd never becomes bogged down with Chilton’s own bitterness. Each gray moment, like “Take Care” (about the anguish of partings) that ends side one, is always followed by a colorful frolic like “Jesus Christ,” the glorious epiphany that bfegins side two. Most-of the songs convey the serenity of solitude (esp. “Big Black Car”), evoking the lonesome moodiness of Alexander Spence’s Oar (perhaps the quietest, but quirkiest, personal LP of all time). But what causes Chilton’s work to finally congeal is not introspection but exploration—a search outside himself for a musical structure that will contain all emotional flux. Jf that seems like a contrived analysis, then listen to “Holocaust” on which an eerie synthesizer and a cello struggle to a dissonant death and a pianist, as silently as possible, diminishes a chord in the background while in the middle Chilton sings, “Your mother’s dead...you’re on your own...she’s in bed.” Next, play “Kanga Roo” with itstfandom drum swats, feedback, distortion, guitars strummed with clubs and fists, and listen to everything jump into place when Chilton-grunts, “Doin’ the..uh..cool jerk.” Concluding this twisted LP is “Thank You Friends,” a humble bow to those dedicated few who have shared an experience beyond the common rabble of techno-babble.

Since the LP’s songs were in the compositional stage when finally recorded, Big Star’s 3rd (or Alex Chilton’s 1st) is a sloppy surprise quite difficult to approach. Chilton’s genius was in allowing the songs to remain untouched, a decision that intentionally reflected his confused state. Because they tend to reveal little more than the artist’s mushrooming ego, personal albums usually make me sick. But this one just happens to be a haphazard masterpiece.

Robot A. Hull

THE JBOOMTOWN RATS A Tonic For The Troops (Columbia)

1 had expected to feel serious contempt for the Boomtown Rats before 1 ever heard them. It was a rare black glee withswhich I looked forward to ridiculing a band with at least one membet who seems to favor the wearing of pajamas in all public vepues, and which challenges even new v&ave’s aggressive gullibility with song titles (“I Never Loved Eva Braun,” “Me And Howard Hughes”) and would fit rigjnt into a TV sitcom or police beat episode featuring a videoland writerfs idea of a punk band. /^I indicationscalled for a malicious* documentation of the Monkee Principle’s emergence in nouvelle vague rock.

Then I made the mistake of listening, and Heard a tight young band . with plenty of chops, wit, a sense of self-parody based on obvious scholarly familiarity with rock ’n’ roll modes and poses past and present, and tremendous'ambition. (These guys have entertained more than casual delusions of Beatles.)

( One thing the Boomtown Rats are not, particularly, is new wave; In . fact, the most striking quality of the band and principal singer/composer Bob Geldof is of being still highly unformed, unsettled in approach. The result is a tendency towards 6 potpourri of other people’s rather commercial styles. You name it, it’s here. The more dangerous unas: sjmilated influences are 10 ec, many latter-day machinoid bands, and some very direct appropriation of earlier Bowie lyrical and musical preoccupations, t

The album,-opener, “Rat Pack,” and 1977’s “Joey’s On The Street Again,” are direct, transparent cops of Springsteen’s “Jungle Land,” Street Epic Schtick right down to the sax^refrains. They would make you cringe at the Rats’ naivete, except for a kind of charming arrogance that they betray!

I’m ready to pass up this overborrowing as the striving of a hot new band still charting its own eventual route. There are a lot of class performances here, catchy stuff (especially “Blind Date,” “Don’t Believe What You Read” and “Eva Braun”), and the zany use of chorus singers throughout is as much fun in itself as you can reasonably expect to have with a record. I

Just one pther reason to like the Boomtown Rats: They’relrish! ljusK about spilled my Tullamore Dew when I first heard that. Just think: If these guys have come along as well as this already, despite the handicap of their gruntlike ana slothful ethnic heritage, we can maybe expect to have some real live wires on our hands sometime soon'; Top o’ the mornin’.

Kevin Doyle

GOOD RATS Birth Comes To Us All (Passport)

So birth comes to us all. A real douey of a concept, for stire— makes you kinda stop and wonder, “Did I turn out the lights when I left?”

Let’s look at this from a different standpoint: is there Peppi Marchello after death? Or is life just so much do^pee on snow, melting in the sun, running down the sewer, tiny bubbles, bla, bla, etc.? Ask yourself .these questions sometime, my friend, and don’t forget to wipe. *

While all of these Big Ideas are knocking around our heads like wooden light bulbs, how ’bout a little music, like they play on game shows to distract the contestant while he’s trying to-concentrate. And talk about distractions, it’s Peppi and the Good Rats, a band whose sole claim to fame is that every copy of their long-vanished first album-was cut-out upon release. They shoot horses, don’t they? Collectors will pay their weight in Arpege for a copy of it; in fact, I sold mine to some dope in Germany for twenty-sevenbucks. Cost me thirty-nine cents. Blew the money on ,beer and pinball. Birth comes to us all.

Seeing as how these' fellas are all of Italian descent (not allowed to use WOP or DAGO anymore), you might expect some nice, juicy Young Rascals keyboard drool and lots of heavy breathing & awrightls. Bite the bitter adrenalin, kids, these average rats don’t even have an organ player. So they borrow webheads like Manfred Mann, like he’d really know which end of the spaghetti To start with. Worse yet, instead of “Too Many Fish In The-' Sea,” we get “Man On A Fish” (straddle them fins, cowboy!); instead of some slimy greaseball, uh, Neapolitan gentleman, down on his knees crying “babybabybaby,” we get “Birth Comes To Us All.” ’A concept, a goddam concept here in 1992 and there ain^t nuttin’ you dan do about it ’cept go hide behind your Vanilla Fudge albums.

But who cares, ’cause Peppi says it all in the closing moments of that barn-slapper of a title tune: “They pushed the spinach down your throat/And don’t forget the taters.” Don’t forget the taters. Did I mention the man’s a genius?

Rick Johnson

BRIAN ENO Music For Films (Antilles)

Subtlety. It’s not something particular endemic to rock ’n’ roll. But if an electronic tongue in the ear starts your nerve endings smokin’, you ain’t gonna worry about the method, are you?

Now Eno is a master of subtlety and he’s also a master (of a sort) of rock ’n’ roll but it seems that these days, he prefers To let loose the inevitable abrasions with others— Devo, Talking Heads, Bowie, etc. You know there was a time...fade to “Re-make/Re-model” cross cut with “Baby’s On Fire” and back...but it’s as if his most recent stuff is a reaction to the high life excesses exposed so brilliantly during his stay with Roxy Music.

So he’s concentrating on subtlety. On Before And After Science, he applied it to songs and came up with anbther ignored disc that came too close to perfection for comfort. But there was definitely some rock ’n’ roll on it—“Backwater” ancL’sKing’s Lead Hat” at a bare minimum— as well as a couple of brief instrumentals that would sound right at home on ttys album.

Music For Films is not rod* ’n’ roll. Nor is it like the metallic mantras that ooze out of his collaborations with Robert Fripp. Instead, there are eighteen separate snippets of sound, evocative atmospheres, many made with films in mind. Put together on one album, they can hejp you create your own music.

For instance, begin with a dazzling qqartz^crystal. Fade up to soft focus on a warm bed being made warmer. Soft sighs heard from beneath the covers are transformed into space meows somehow sensed through the windows of a 747. The, plane glides to earth, eventually disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle where you are seductively attacked by the stewardess in Jamaican chainsaw rhythm. She is easily eluded, however, and you swim to the surface just in time to see your purple-haired secretary teaching the switchboard nursery rhymes. The typewriter on her desk retorts with a funky clavinet imitation. You walk out the door and are immediately sizzled by a sunshower. When your eyes can focus again, you’re back at home, staring at your smiling turntable as the needle re-’ turns to play the side over again, refusing to reject the record.

But it doesn’t make sense, you ask? It’s not logical? It may even exacerbate, neurological irregularities: Snap, my synapses? Yeah, well, tough titty, bub. My livingroom is filling up with swimming women and I ain’t got time for you. If you want logic, go carouse with Kraftwerk. Later.

Michael Davis

FABULOUS POODLES Mirror Stars - ■_(Epic)____

You figure that, when a satirical outfit noted for smart lyrics starts penning choruses in French, somebody’s desperate. Vraiment? Well, the Fab Poos turn some fancy French stylings on a poignant original called “Cherchez La Femme,” and lyricist John Parsons (titled Johnny Radium in the Brit press) has come up with a couplet that rhymes in The ^Language of Love. Femme and meme, that is. Can these intellectuals read Jean Valjean without Cliff Notes?

“The Fab PooS?” you ask, shunting aside for the moment the possibility of scribbling vocabulary words on your wrist. “That sounds like a scatological Telex code,” you scoff.

And you are so right, reader. But the Fab Poos are what the tastemakers at the record company call these scabrous bozos, and we must do same. For the tastemakers are housebrbken, and we are not. Still, we do it on the paper, and that’s something.

“Hey, they sound like the Kinks,” is one way out of this teleological cesspool. Or maybe Deaf School (a defunct Gay Rights Task Force I used to trumpet in appropriate magazines) at their most lovable. You can really hear the resonances on lines like, “They say my life is passing me by ,” (from the cute and catchy “Work Shy”) or “It?s three ’fore I start yawning” (from the same cuddly song). You see, it’s all rahther Ray Davies, without the sibling sadism. Which means that Messrs. Tony de Meur, Bobby Valentinp, Bryn B. Burrows and Richie C. Robertson (write me for their ages and pet peeves) are capable pf heartstring-jyanking a la “Everybpdy’s In Showbiz” with this simple recitation at the end of “B Movies”:

Victor Madden—Bruce Seaton Sam Kidd—Shirley Eaton

Sandra Dome—Gladys Henson Delphi Lawrence—Martin Benson

Now I’m not gonna pretend I recognize any name but “Shirley Eaton” (she got painted dead by Oddjob at the direction of Auric Goldfinger) but, as they say over at the Actor’s Studio, it’s a nice moment. And, if you’re into moments, then the Fabulous Poodles admittedly put out. However, if you crave harder kicks between your scatology and teleology (not to mention your ugly bookshelf speakers), then you'may be disappointed, oh listener. Adcfitional^ consumer warning to connoisseurs of kitsch:

Despite the promotional poodle poster with disgusting hint of dick, this band is no more tasteless than the average bear. As toy dogs, though, they write amusing melodies, roll over, play dead, and fetch.

Wesley Strick

SPITBALLS (Beserkley)

Well, um, yeah. Very nice. Democracy in action, and a unique approach to the oldies album as affirmation of rock aesthetic rather than as stalling motion, and it should send you back to Them Again and From The Beginning (volume one of The Miracles’ best), and 'it’s encouraging that someone has done a Bobby Fuller song other than the great “1 Fought The Law” That’s all well and good, as anybody’s mother might say, but Matthew King Kaufman, evfon with an assist from popmeister Kenny Laguna, isn’t Phil Spector, and even if he were, Spitballs isn’t a formulation of his rock theory and history but of the artists’, so. the line that individual anonymity is necessary for the LP to work just won’t hold water, especially since the one uttery unmistakeable voice among the dozen or so singers, Jonathan Richman, almost steals the show just because we know it’s Jonathan Richman and “Chapel Of Love” is such a pertinent (can we avoid the word “seminal”) influence on his later, persqnal exploration of love in the modern world. t

So why hide the fact that it’s ? Greg Kihn doing that imitationElvis (Ral Donner, etc.) imitation on “Life’s Too Short,” a regional (peaked in the 80s on the national charts in 1962) hit for the Lafayettes? Or’ that Jon Rubin’s lead vocal on “Just Like Me” makes the valuable connection of The Raiders to The'Rubinoos? And would it be helpful as a listener to be able to single out for praise the party responsible for digging up the raucous “Gino is a Coward” (Larry Lynch of Kihn’s band), or point an accusatory finger at the singers who do such a perfuncfory bar-band version of “Knock On Wood” (Sean Tyla and Earth quake’s John Doukas)?

The idea—most of the members of foilr Beserkley bands, The Rubinoos, Kihn’s, Modern Lovers and Earth Quake, plus Sean Tyla, get together in a studiq and play live, in unison, 15 oldies, each chosen by the person who sings or plays lead instrument on it—is totally in the Beserkley spirit of controlled chaos, and it’s a pleasurable LP with some very effective performances (Smokey Robinson’s “Way Over There” done in poignantly goofy manner by Asa Brebner*. Rubinoo Royce daring comparison with Van Morrison on “1 Can Only Give You Everything”), but too much of it is imitation or bland revision rather than valid re-interpretation. “Boris The Spider” is completely redundant, “Bad Moon Rising” can’t come within a first down of the original, and only some “Wipe Out” guitar saves “Batman” from closing the album op a waste note.

Not everyone plays the rules (Tommy Dunbar does his own “I Want Her So Bad,” recorded first by Psychotic Pineapple, which doesn’t really qualify, and John Doukas’ showcase of Roy Wood’s “Feel Too Good” is conspicuous by its four minute length), and some , records, like “Tejstar,” are simply untouchable, but Spitballs, the debut LP of what is promised as an on-going series, has got a eofnmendable lack of fussiness and enough enthusiastic rock ’n’ roll spirit to keep you attentive even when you can’t distinguish between Steve Wright and Qary Phillips.

Mitch Cohen

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD. Public Image (Warner Bros.)

Never mind the Sex Pistols, here’s the rotting corpse of Johnny Rotten, stinking to high heaven like some maggot brain from the Bryan Ferry School of Design. Rotten’s wild face is still frozen in the shape of his thunderingand shrieking period, his dead mouth fixed in a satanic smirk at those coiled in revulsion. But despite his savage appearance, Rotten is sinking fast in the morass of nihilism along with fellow cadavers in a thick black pool of sludge.

The Sex Pistols were a band obsessed with public reactions. They gambled to see how far they could go, scorning the adulation of media and fans. Therefore, having learned that it doesn’t pay to gob in the public eye, Rotten has dubbed his new band Public Image Ltd. Yet the shadows of the Sex Pistols, phantoms of the old anger and revolt,;, fall heavy upon his new enterprise.1

PIL’s first single, “Public Image,” was released in Sept. 78, wrapped in a newspaper like a fresh fish. “'You got what you wanted!” screams Rotten in the ponderous voice of a spoiled child who demands that he be Hstened to with undivided attention. With its erratic surges of hysteria echoing down,empty corridors, “Public Image” sounds like a powerful Pistols’ reject. And for making a nyah-nyah statement, the single is sufficient...but an entire album of catcalls is pure self-indulgence.

The sound of PIL moves forever and without progress across tabletops. On “Fodderstompf,” haunting groans from the tomb mingle with the shrillingfof a myriad of insects. With rhythms stolen from “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” this exercise in infant bawling —the words “We only wanted to be loved” repeated as an incantation— could be a song by Yoko Ono, her voice cracked and choked, whining for her Johnny. Intended as an attack against all the crap about punks being merely'misunderstood James Deans of the 70’s, “Fodderstompf” eventually degenerates into Popol Vuh barfing Magma bile.

On “Theme,” the band even digs its own grave as Mr. Rotten expresses over and/over, a desire to fcommit hari-kari. ‘T wish I could die,” he snarls, his teeth tight together biting his tongue in two. This death wish is chanted so interminably that, by the time the song had ended, I was wishing isomebody would oblige him. 1 -v v

Perhaps PIL is providing atonement for the sins of the Sex Pistols. On “Religion I,” Rotten attempts to expiate himself through terrible Jim Morrison/Patti Smith poetry. (Ah, Johnny, Johnny. What are a few mumbled words before God?) On “Religion II,” Rotten plays the part of the Antichrist, arguing with a Presence who could not even make a phantom indentation in the actual Earth. (His thoughts upon religion will scarcely give theologians cause for concern.) After Johnny Devil stopped hollering atheistic hoopdedoodle, to clear the air of heathep fumes, I played a Sanctified copy of God Bless Tiny Tim.

Johnny Rotten is not among the living anymore—he has sliced his umbilical cord with a razor.-“Public Image Ltd. would like to thank absolutely no boc/y” are the only credits listed on PIL’s LP. And hearing Rotten make music now is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting' in a language which he does not even need to understand.

Robot A. Hull

MITCH RYDER How I Spent My Vacation (Seeds & Stems)

Nothing could be rrfoch more excising in rock ’n’ roll than having Mitch Ryder back. Which he is.

For those of you who don’t remember, Mitch was the, prefoier white soul 'singer—a light James Brown with a great rock ’n’ roll band, the Detroit Wheels, behind him—in the Sixties. His several hits, including “Sock It To Me Baby’’ and the classic, all-time Top Ten “Jenny Take A Ride/Devil With A Blue Dress” medley, remain among the greatest go-wild party music ever Recorded. As a live performer, he was equally galvanizing, singing his guts out, screaming, sweating, every muscle in his neck straining, . hands upraised in supplication towards the microphone as he fell to his knees in a consumed heap: the essence of rock ’n’ roll. When the Murray the K Show came to my neighborhood RKO Theatre in 1965, though I 'had neyer before been to a rock ’n’ roll show (radio, in those days, being the primary rock ’n’ roll event), I was compelled to come out and see Mitch Ryder (skipping, in the process, his “Direct^Frofh England!” opening acts, the Who and Crearp who, I could tell from the photos outside, were just a bunch of limey “fags”). That show set standards in my appreciation of live music that were approached infrequently in the 14 years that followed.

But the British Invasion (including, alas, the Who and Cream) and hippie music eventually crowded Mitch Ry^er out of the spotlight . He briefly reappeared, with the reconstituted Detroit Wheels, as Detroit in the early Seventies, And, due to a record company failure, missed having another hit with his over-powering metallic version of Lou Reed’s “Rock ’n’ Roll.” (Before Lou became hopelessly fashionable.) At the tender age of 25, Mitch Ryder wa$ fed up— and fucked up and washed up, too, if you believed the rumors—and he literally disappeared. Even old friends were unable.to track him down.

How I Spent My Vacation is a somewhat,oblique documentation of what can only be called Mitch Ryder’s years in the wilderness (much of which was spent at manual labor in a Colorado warehouse) with all except one of the songs cowritten by the singer himself. While the album opens with a solid bassdriven rocker called “Tough Kid,” the material here is not typical Mitch Ryder by any means,, ranging as it does, from the aching acbustic ballad, “Passion’s Wheel,’’ to the 8!4 minute free-form jazz-blues epic, “Pofeter,” that closes the record. The lyrics deal mostly with love, including (1 think) the homosexual kind; hate, and alienation and, in general, share a bleak vision that bespeaks the trouble Mitch Ryder’s seen. The best all-around cut on thealbum is a tortured tour de force slow blues called “Freezin’ In Hell,” in which Mitch demonstrates once and for; all that his dramatic powers I as a vocalist are strong as ever.

As a songwriter, he is surprisingly good and is thoroughly committed to the idea of singing songs that have meaning to him. Unfortunately, he often undercuts his own vocal prowess by trying to get too meaningful. In the future, Mitch should realize that it would make him no less the artist were he to sometimes use other people’s material to make his statement; an impartial but sympathetic producer would probably help in this area. /

But if he wastes his talents on a few cuts here, it is nothing compared to the waste of having Mitch Ryder away from rock ’n’ roll for so long. For sure, he is a man who believes. (We’ll be seeing whether the tYiajor record labels do too.)

Robert Duncan

THE WEREWOLVES , Ship Of Fools _ (RCA)

My initial reaction to this album wasn’t exactly nuclear. To put it mildly, all I wanted to do was send a speeding silver bullet through its nervy hide. From a group with a name like the Werewolves, You’d expect a certain quotient of crinal, savage, sonic thrombosis, which is exactly what they projected on their first album. Unfortunately, it isn’t exactly what they project on this album. Their nppionic mycterism was seemingly a spector for an ensuing history of rabid raunch and plain old “rock alotys toomuchus.” They could have been the next Creedence Clearwater1, Revival (CCR)'(I hate abbreviations—hate ’em so much in fact that I stored wearing jockey shorts and switched to boxers), but they blew it by slipping into the famous “second album Syndrome,” also knovyn as the “arty effort syndrome.”

Bands usually bust their balls, trying to worm their way through the puke ’n’ slime of the bar band trenches and get signed to a fat recording contract. They get excited and play fheir rented souls off for that first big plunge into vinyl

i reality, but after a $hort while, there they are, sitting by the pool, able to afford such luxuries as Jack Daniels and women aVid Heinekens and women and reviews in the rock press apd women and women. And they also' begin to take themselves seriously. Wrong. As Lester Bangs once rrioaned, “Once you get competent,’ you’ve had it.” (I think he said,,it, and if he didn’t, then I think ! did. Whatever.) So here we have a good band that’s taken the pyce brick road into merehood instead of the 'glittering brick road of crotalic violence and bellowing nonsense. Nice bit of feeble-minded morcellation, aeh?

However, enough of this bavardage. Let’s stroke the armpiL Let’s talk about the record. Or rajher, let’s talk Sbout a friend of mine from my mournful college days, a friend named Skip. Skip used to be in a $ort of collective cum drug-web called Dope Wash, now just a memory. Skip and the other souls from Dope Wash were for sufe tied into the subcosmic mainline of American anykindacult'ureyou’dwannamention. Anyway, they all went the ways of age and drifted on into the realms; of what Kerouac called the Dharma Bums. I’ve only bumped into him orice or twice since those mistyeyed days of tear gas and roses—he was heavy into paddleball, playing life for its physical angle. Stay in shape and you’ll survive when it all goes pfft.

But the importance of this bit of psychoautobiographical reliquism comes a few years later. Being a moolvee of hootch and hoosegow glomography (in other wofds, a drunk), I happened upon Skip one night in a local juice academy when I couldn’t even remember what decade it was. Fade in bn two guys and .a dog at 3 bar. Guy 2: “Hey, what’s happenin’?” Guy 1 (aka me): “Just strokin’ along on that.thin red line...whaddya been up to?” Guy 2: “I’ve been living in the woods. I’m raising wolves. I got One of ’em with me right now.” Guy 1: “You mean that dog’s a\volf?” Guy 2: “Yeah, but don’t worry, just don’t make no sudden moves at me.” Guy 1: (Thinking to himself, “That’s a wolf and I need another drink. And I really need to make a sudden move ...right out of this place.”)

Npw, raising u/olves is much more effective than calling yourselves the Werewolves. And I guess'that’s the morological crux to this whole ver-, bal barcarole. Why namfe yourself a werewolf when you can raise one and be a real part of the pack. Like, if you’re gonna call yourselves the Werewolves, you’ve gotta hit that miracle lick, the essence of all that animal noise right off, and maintain it. On their first album, the Werewolves .were the Werewolves. On Ship Of Fools they’re only Larry Talbot. That’s it, in a nutshell.

Joe (where’s my pentagram?)

Fernbacher