BEE GEES

Spirits Having Flown

_ (RSO)_

by Richard C. Walls

When asked about his forthcoming novel he would on/y tell us that it was to be called "Look Both Ways" and that it was "sort of a seventies version of On The Road".

Albert Stone—-

"The Art oh Leo Cursky"

Dacron Review

I don't give a steaming shit about Bertrand Russell. I want my goddam pork chops! ' \

overheard in a

Toronto restaurant

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Martin Mull

I'll t>e reaching out...

Bee Gees

It's an odd feeling, reviewing an album after just having read that it's number four on Billboard's chart. It feels like pain looking for a wound— a little superfluous, maybe even depraved. To add to the discomfort is the fact that the Bee Gee's latest isn't exactly a ground swell of musical ideas and lyrical insights. It's impossible not to over-plummet the depths of this record, i

Having sufficiently copped out I can deal with the album on it's own terms. It is good dance music, no questions there. The spngs do all sound similar, at first, but 'there's enough persistent hooks and simple dopey love lyrics (especially dig "Lovq you inside and out/Forward and backward w^th my heart hanging out") to please you subliminally at least; i.e., you'll find yourself humming a song off the album hours, days, after you've filed it away under L for lame.

The thing that's.wrong with the album, the thing that bugs people who grudgingly allow that disco has its merits—the thing ybu tealiy have to ignore if you want to open up to the albbm a,nd accept it the way millions have already done, is that the falsetto doesn't work right. The idea of singing "falsetto here is right because it fits in perfectly with the schmaltzy exuberance that disco aims for. It's just that the Bee Gees don't do.it right. The singing lacks both enthusiasm and, sensuousness, the two things that falsetto is all about. On the opening cut, "Traggdy," the voice is so constricted that it sounds exactly like that little "help meeee, help meeee" voice at the end of The Fly. On the other cuts the voice doesn't.sound so unintentionally comic and it be: comes, eventually, pleasantly mechanical. Pleasant if you don't really listen to it. It's a quintessential soundtrack album, a great album to do things by. Perfect for dancing, exercising, eating, drinking, screwing. Fits almost everything except funerals. That the music which reaches most people is the music which is best when it's overheard rather than listened'to isn't a new insight. But it's worth keeping in mind when you listen to the five top songs on any given day and feel like you're missing the point. There usually isn't any point. )

So it's cold. So your Uncle Frank, who rajrely listens to any music at all, is still humming "Stayin' Alive." So the album's boring. So the majority of the people living in America like music that doesn't interfere with the business of living, music that you don't have to invest any feeling in, music that's safe. So most people don't have the time or money to pursue music anyway. So tell me something new.

CHEAP TRICK

At Budokan

(Epic)

Cheap Trick are encouraging evidence of a new fluidity beneath the rigid fragmentation of today's pop music scene; they're prototypes of the nouveau-ironic rock 'n' rollers who couldn't have emerged, let alone become mushrooming phenomena, as late as say, 1975. Cheap Trick hail from Illinois and Wisconsin, and thus seemed to come out of "nowhere", as outsiders fondly describe our shared Midwestern origins. In a little over two years, Cheap Trick have leaped into the forefront7 of the heavyweight-contender ranks, via three well-received studio LPaikan unstintingly energetic tour Schedule, and one of 1978's brightest AOR moments, the breathless "Surrender". -

Like all great 70's rock 'n' roll product, Cheap Trick are founded as much on flash packaging concepts as they are on authentic musical vitality, though Cheap Trick certainly aren't short in either department. Rick Nielsen has programmed himself as the perfect dip, costumed in his Sears cardigans, Chicago Cubs ballcaps, checkerboard guitar straps, and other aggressively uncouth attire, yet he's also obviously the focal lead guitarist of the group, e^s well as composer of most of the Cheap Trick tunes. I

Nielsen never hesitates in seeking the most ridiculous posgs he can find for himself on the record jackets, meanwhile allowing the conventionally photogenic Robin Zander and Tom Petersson the color-lavisValbum fronts to show off their undoubted glamour. But Nielsen thereby acquires glamour of his own by so studiously avoiding it, by making Zander and Petersson seem a little silly in their concentrated prettiness, yet they really are pretty...Cheap Trick's visual discord is a great galloping paradox, a flesh & blood rhetorical question thaLsums up much of the ennui of 70's rock: Q.: Why are Led Zeppelin so glamorous? A.: Because they're not.

Through it all, rotund drummer Bpn E. Carlos perseveres as the emerging Coolest-Guy-in-Rock 'n' Roll. Bun's mastered that cool bea^ style we rea//y wanted from the 50's (definitely not Fonzie's uncool deusex-machinations), as he flails away at his kit, while he's still wearing his John Lennon-specs and his hippie mustache, and his totally neat sport coats, letting Rick Nielsen use & abuse his self-image so that it comes out irredeemably...cool!

Their ^^overwhelming coolness thus established for all time (including 198X Grammy-award evenings, when Rick Nielsen will be sharing the presenters' podium with Natalie Cole, Rick's cap brim now diamond-encrusted, but still flipped skyward*yahoo-style), Cheap Trick have yet to conquer as large a qhunk of the U.S. market as they'd like.

With a Kiss/Seger breakthrough live album thus essential to Cheap Trick's conquest of their home market, CBS took the next logical step of recording the album in Japan, that land of steadily-rising sons and daughters, acute rock fans who appreciated Deep Purple and'Kiss and the Runaways more (or sooner) than their own homeland fans did. Japan, which has inherited both the English sense of righteous industrialism cum social repression, and the American ideals of fast-food convenience plus deof fast-food convience plus democratic consumerism, is obviously further down the road of rock 'n' roll need than either of those weary Western nations. Cheap Trick are venerated in Japan as rofck 'n' roll roundeyes nothing short of the Fab Foiur (which they very well may be, by now).

The Tokyo-area kids' enthusiastic response to Cheap Trick's vi^jt last spring is well-documented on Cheap Trick At Budokan, a singlerecord, fast-paced set that quickly recaps the band's overnight career. At Budokan is a kind of greatestTiits primer for rockfans who haven't yet realized that songs like "Surrender" and "Clock Strikes Ten" and "Big Eyes" were monster hits, whether or not the radio stations recognized them as such.

The live versions of the previously-recorded songs are very close to their studio models, as Cheap Trick rock out with their unique combination of mod wit,and metallic urgency. "Lookout" and "Need Your Love", and a lively cover of Fats Domino's "Ain't That A Shame" (strange roots) are new for fans who already otyn the threp studio albums.

Also included is a nifty souvenir photo book, with bio£ (1 think) in Japanese, lyrics in both r'n'r languages, and numerous candid pix of the band during the Japanese tour. Among these last is a priceless photo that Reserves Guy Peellaert's definitive portraiture touch, when he finally works his way up rock history to Cheap Trick: Rick Nielsen, nun's-wimple-like towel hiding his Cubs cap, mysterious vampire teeth sprouting from his gums, races for a waiting limo, where the grinningly Mr. Moto-like Bun E. Carlos is holding the door for him, Just inches ahead of the, rabid Japteen hordes: C'est Cheap Trick!

Richard Riegel

A is for...

KEITH JARRETT

The Man You Love To Hate

The Sun Bear Concerts _ (ECM)

by Joe Goldberg

Here of late, everybody has been standing in line to stomp on Keith Jarrett.'He has beqn stomped on in The New York Times Magazine. He has been stomped on in Rolling Stone, twice. He has been stomped on in Horizon and in Musician and no doubt in tmagazines I haven't seen. The received opinion is that he's an insufferably pretentious shit who plays wonderful music. I beg to differ.

The one time I spoke to him, he was an insufferably pretentious shit, but I'm not so sure he plays wonderful music. He has played wonderful music; his solos on the Miles Davis Live-Evil set are astonishing. The irritating thing about him is that he's a fake. He seems unable to construct a spoken English sentence without using the word Artist. Artist is one ofthose words like genius or beauty or putlaw or poet. It only means something it someone else used it about you. Ail kinds of assholes call themselves Artists.

But Jarrett might, just be one, after all. True artists are obsessed, and only have one or two stories to tell, which they keep approaching in various ways over and over again, rather like a dog compulsively covering over its own waste with dirt. For examples: Dostoievsky and Mark Rothko.

Jarrett makes a very big thing out of being a true improvisor; the music just flows through him, he says. He is the conduit; the audience, the hall,, the vibes, the ambience, all contribute to the Oneness of the situation, and out comes this mdsic through his fingers. An awful lot of the time, this inspiration results in blues or the standard 1-4-5 gospel progression, or lounge piano in-the-style-of Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and Chopin. Every time out, whenever he gets stuck (probably the • audience's fault, fpr not putting out enough), the golden flying fingers home in on what they know how to do, what they know sells.

Lenny Bruce once said that young guys gave copies of Khalil Gibran's The Prophet to girls hopirtg to get laid, and there was a book of poems called This Is My Beloved that served the same purpose, and I suspect that people use Jarrett for the same reason. He's a good act. He looks like he's fucking his piano, really being transported, even though he's usually just playing that same old gospel. His two and threerecord concert sets have sold amazingly well for jazz albums, like Ella Fitzgerald's Cole Porter and Gershwin sets and the MJQ used to do. Probably for the same reason. They don't require much attention, and they make you look hip.

This time Jarrett has put out a ten-record set, of music he felt like playing when he was in Japan in November, 1976. It lists for $75. If you live in a big city, you can probably get it for $49.50.1 got it for free, so I could listen to it while I was standing in line, waiting my turn to stomp on him.

Well, okay, here I go. There are masters who died without recording enough musk; to fill ten LPs in their whole lives. Charlie Christian, for one. Lennie Tristano, one of the wells Jarrett, goes to to fill up his bucket, for another (Cecil Taylor and Bill Evans are ports in storms, too). And Lowell Lewis never made a record at all.

The most annoying thing about this music is that it's so smug and self-satisfied, exactly like those "sensitive" songs Michael Franks keeps recording. Mahalia Jackson once told me why she disliked a particular \singer, and her remark could serve as Keith Jarrett's epitaph: "He always seems to be saying, 'Look what's going on here'."

ECM has provided a further service for reviewers, beyond coming up to their houses in Fruehauf trailer |trucks with this monster. They Have assembled a one-record volume of exqerpts from the Japanese concerts. It's gorgeous. They've separated the wheat from the chaff, taken the moments of true inspiration and removed the long treadipgwater sections that led up to them. Why they didn't take the next logical step and release it as an LP people could buy for less than $10 is . a mystery.

Probably Jarrett wanted if the other way. It's hipper. So is let-ting •people think he's an improvisor. So is letting people/ think he's a spade. r

MC GUINN, CLARK & HILLMAN

' ■ '' i: ■ (Capitol) ( : - h

Had records like "The World Turns All Around Her," "She Don't Care About Time," and "I Feel A Whole Lot Better" been products of your imagination, had you then* seen your hatchlings, the likes oP the Eagles, Firefall, C, S & N, reap the wealth and precious metals a dozen years after, then you too might allow yburselves to be lured to the Miami sun to try to recapture some glory. If Billy Joel can get a number one single by imitating P.F, Sloan ("Go ahead with your own life leave me alone." Give me a break!), anything is possible, isn't i(? 'Fraid not, guys. McGuinn, Clark & Hillman (wasn't "Bingo" Crosby invited? Were McG, C & H scared he'd screvfe them up with a '"Mind Gardens" just for spite?) is sad, sad, sad. Desperate. The next stop is selling "Eight Miles High" to Allegheny Airlines for pocket change and putting Some of the classy cover session photos in the scrapbook along with memories of The Rolling Thunder Revue and Manassas. A second album? I'd bet not. Then again, Souther, Hillman & Furay managed to eke out a pair (deuces), so maybe.

Life is unfair, our President says. True. This album should be flowed to stand on its own merits without having "Backstage Pass" be compared,to "So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star," or "Stopping Traffic" to "Have You Seen Her Face." It's no fun having to do batjle with your past in order to be taken seriously in the present. Girls who were college sophomores in 1968 may still use Preflyte as a mood elevator, guys who were communications majors in 1968 may use "Turn! Turn! Turn!" as background for television documentaries, The Notorious B**d Brothers may find its way ori to more than a couple best-of-all-tim'e lists, but what does that have to do with McGuinn, Clark & Hillman? Everything. As much as The Crowd Roars has to do with Red Line 7000. And I've been avoiding a discussionof the music, haven't I?

The last B**d album that was any good had Gram Parsons and Clarence White on it, the last Roger McGuinn performance that was any good was on a song written by Tom Petty, Chris Hillman is a perennial second-stringer, and Gene Clark has the eccentricities of a pop genius without the'genius. The B**d reunion album on Asylum bit the bunny. So only I nostalgia, Younger Than Yesterday pangs, Rickenbacker reveries, and the absense of Crosby could have raised expectations for this trio's album. In a strange way; McG, C & H may have gotten what they wanted: a record that qould be slotted with ease on 1979 radio. The LP is right down the center of the plate, but there's nothing on the ball. No snap to the singings no mystery in the guitars, no ironic romance in the lyrics. The songs (only two by Roger, with one outside tune and the rest divided between Chris and Gene), as produced by Ron and Howard Albert, are unmemorable, uninspired, anonymous. This could 'be a Firefall album. Do you think that's something to crow about?

McGuinn, Clark & Hillman ..ijS polished, even down to the programming (starts with a "how can we pic) up the pieces" song—lower than stealing from Poco one cannot stoop—and ends with "Bye Bye Baby"), and "contemporary," and depressing. Hillman's "Stopping Traffic" doesn't just mix metaphors, it cuisinarts them, Clark's "Feelin' Higher" is Gosmic hot air, and McGuinn's "Bye Bye Baby" is more sexist nonsense with enough cliches to choke his belqved chestnut mare. That's what this album is about: democracy in action, with no member more inept than the other two. Sad, sad, sad. Pass on this, play "It Won't Be Wrong." You'll believe a band can fly.

Mitch Cohen

BROWNSVILLE

Air Special

. _ (Epic)

Cub Koda and Michael Lutz were punks before it mattered too much one way or the other. Brown$ville Station enjoyed a brief season of trendiness around 1972-73, when various rockwriters of the time picked up on and celebrated the band's basic, sanguine r'n'r energies. Brownsville S. capped pff their sojourn in the sun with the archetypal "Smokin' In The Boys' Room", a big hit at the end of 1973, but have barely been heard from since.

Albums like School Punks and Motor City Connection tried too hard to conceptualize that lusty high-school-boy formula that had (briefly) charmed the critics and the public, while the band's semi-hit with the bizarre rockabilly-naif/ talking-blooze/Stooges-guitar pastiche of "Martian Boogie" in 1977 seemed all the more astounding for the record's massive unprogrammability. Along the way, Koda had become (in a humorous reverse of the usual rockwriter-to-guitar-twanger midlife-crisis career switch) a fine rock critic, in his "Vinyl Junkie" column in the Gulcher fanzine.

So now it's 1979, with Brownsville (now officially minus the "Station") starting over again, on yet another new label. Although Brownsville's infinitely dues-honed rock 'n' r^oH chops remain as tough as ever on Air Special, there's a kind of grim seriousness to the whole undertaking (check oUt the group members' official portraits on the liner) th$t undercuts the old jerkoff jazzbo-ness that endeared the band to their small, but ultimately select, gang of lifetime followers.

Cub Koda probably 'envies the latter-day success of his Michigan contemporaries Bob Seger and Ted Nugent, especially as the Rock 'n' Roll Carnivore's lyrical ideas seem so illiterate next to Koda's; Nugent has just now withdrawn his wang dang from the eternal poontang long enough to notice the "weekend warriors" punk phenomenon Browpsville proclaimed in the early 70's. Brownsville have responded to Terrible Ted in kind, as Air Special features songs like "Waitin' For The Weekend," "Taste Of Your Love" (the Cubmaster's own continuing oral-genital obsessions), "Love Stealer," and "Never Say Die," triple-guitared by Koda, Lutz, [and Bruce Nazarian to cut the double-barreled guitar gonzo at his own game.

"Who Do You Love" and "Down The Road Apiece" are the kind of masterful covers of early R&B that brought,Brownsville Station to critical notice in the first place, while the brief jazz guitaring of the semititle track, "Air Mail Special" (an old Benny Goodman tune), closes the album in an open-ended manner that allows for future changes in style. Almost incidental in placement and tone, "Air Mail Special" reminds us what accomplished jiveasses the Brownsville guys are way down deep, and Redeems some of the grimness of the preceding songs. (No B.S.)

Richard Riegel

ANGEL

Sinful

(Casablanca)

First item on the agenda today is to clear up all the confusion about the Punky Meadows Lip Farm. G.T. of Intense, Colo., writes, "Is there really such a place?" Yes there is, G.T., by a small Dakota bay near the ranch where they raise drive-up windows. P.U. of Albany, N.Y., wants to know, "Do any of the other Angels use this product?" Sure do, P.U., just take a look at their album covers. They all pucker like a bunch of piglets trying to whistle and shit at the same time. And X.O. of Fence, Okla., asks, "Can anyone purchase these fine lips?" Well, X., you can, but they're mighty expensive because of the big freeze this year. Nearly the entire crop chopped!

All lips aside, what's really important about Angel is this: can a person older than fifteen admit to liking their records without having the police constantly digging around in his crawlspace? Because I like these guys fhe way I used to like Styx before the latter band got hit by a speeding church. Their vocals are especially strong, with none of that thin squealing that sounds like the Emergency Room in a chipmunk hospital. And while sandhogs are sometimes called in to decipher Styx' arrangements, no one will ever be tempted to build a subway or a chicken coop on the charts from Sinful.

Thia is Angel's most pop-oriented LP yet, with the sole exception of Punky's "L.A. Lardy," a dull rocker that, like Mr. Greenjeans, is goodnatured but useless. Great moments in dew-envy include the solid AM Boston hooks in "Lovers Live On" and "Waited A Long Time," the great telepathic Braille guitar line that sharpens "You Can't Buy Love" and "A Riff Named Desire," which builds into the deadly "I'll Bring The Whole World To Your Door." Sorry, no C.O.D.!

And listen, if you think the whole idea of a Lip Farm is jaretty disgusting, you should see the fertilizer.

Rick Johnson

ROBERT GORDON

Rock Billy Boogie

(RCA)

"The past is a foreign country," the famous line goes, "they do things differently there." Robert -Gordon's albums are suitcases so plastered with travel stickers you can't see the leather. Much of the best music being made at the end of this decade has. the spirit of rockabilly—Rockpile's' excusions, for example—but Gordon't reactionary anachronisms look, three LPs down the line, like an entertaining cul de sac. What's the point of doing an archival job on minor gems along the lines of "I Just Found Out" or "Walk On By" when for,five or six bucks anyone can get the Burnette Brothers' originals or Rockabilly Rules O.K.?

Elvis Costello doing a straight, spare reading of "My Funny Valentine" (the perfect gift this past February 14 for anyone with a rock 'n' roll heart; thanks, angel) gives a key piece of information about the romantic ideals that formed a distinctive voice. When Robert Gordon turns the smoky "Am I Blue" into a piece of juke box jive, it's just another 50's device: rocking out a tin pan alley ballad. We don't learn anything more about him, whether he saw Hoagy Carmichael and Lauren Bacall dueting on the tune in To Have And Hque Not, wheth: er he buys or rejects (or buys and rejects, like E.C.) the sentiments expressed. Gordon's talent, such as it is, is reductionist; to mean more, it would have to expand, bring Fonzie into the modern world.

Oh, he can sing, no doubt about that. And he knows his' stuff. He comprehends the nuances of 1950's grease in a way that eluded the Travolta/Newton-John manipulators until the combustable "You're The One That 1 Want." Nuances like clothing as emblem ("BlackjSlacks" — nobody writes songs about their wardrobe anymore), language as code, groin-grinding angst as emotional expressionism. It'd probably please Gordon to no end to know that without prior data, you could easily mistake "I Just Met A Memory," an original (with a charming whistle-break), for an obscure Jack Scott cut. There are clever touches all through the LP: the sound effects and Santo & Johnny riffs on "Wheel Of Fortune," the quit,essentially lame horn bridge on "It's Only Make Believe," the retaining of the cruddy grammar on "I Just Found Out."

1 Robert Gordon wants to be a real cool cat, daddy-o, but mostly his etch-a-sketching does not a blackboard jungle make. On the, less famous tracks, the e&rly country-pop crossover "Walk On By," "I Love My Baby," and even on "It's Only Make Believe," where he has to match coins with pre-honk Twitty and post-rhinestone Campbell, he could pass,as semi-convincing. But twice on Rock Billy Boogie he comes up tails on a crucial pitch. His tribute to Gene Vincent, "Tfte Catman," is a lackluster bead-chain of song titles, and any pretender attempting a faithful rendition of "Blue Christmas," let alone closing an album with it, is cruisin' for a critical bruisin'. Could be that Gordon's finding himself on RCA Victor, complete with the reclaimed-fromthe"-pound little Nipper, went to his flat-top. Sorry, Robert, you just ain't that tuff.

Mitch Cohen

THE JAM

All Mod Cons ,

'_(Polydor) _

I confess to having had my ownl im-modish expectationsregarding-1 the Jam, expectations centering on the wreckless vim and clatter best realized in songs like "In The City" and "AIJ Around The World." Their ingenuous neo-Mod pose was, if* erratic, ingratiating and kind of cute, like an anachronism in Pampers. But where the knife met the butter was in the hope that they would be able tb, without adversely effecting1 the raucous dynamics of their sapling roots, transcend premeditated boundaries, to share with their heroes not only mere stylistic similarities but also the capability to exceed, and redefine, expectations:

All Mod Cons strives to be an "ambitious" effort, but even given the benefit of the doubt it is naught but an object lesson in the stodginess of being earnest;'its lack of sensuality equivalent to the lack of sexuality of Dave Edmunds's tepid rockabilly 'tributes. The potential for comic instinct is almost totally : supressed and opportunities for Volatile, explosiveness are reduced to perfunctory commotion throughout.

Particularly, there are moments of grace. The verbatim version of ' "David Watts" derives conditional validation from "Billy Hunt," a pugnacious, wry ("No one pushes Billy Hunt around/Weil they do buF not for long") updating of Ray Davies' dole and simple lad. And "In The Crowd" is a perfect antidote to Dobie Gray's "In Crowd" its clutzin-the-supermarket line familiar to any claustrophobic who knows the anxiety that the press of a milling closet of flesh can produce.

On the other hand, there's "Down In A Tube Station At Midnight," which is as conviently bloodless as reruns of The FBI and the "apocalypse" of "A-Bomb In Wardour Street," where the Four Horsement would be named Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy and Bashful. Unless bitter parody, the drowsy and awkward sentimentality of "English Rose" qualifies Paul Weller as the composer to "contemporize" Eton's school song, and its flip side acoustical partner, "Fly," gives you pause to consider the whereabouts of Boris the Spider when you really need him unless, of .course, you prefer Weller's spin of ersatz eloquence. And finally, there's the contrived naivete of "The Place I Love," "I Can See For Miles" from a constricted vision.

Given the chance, All Mod Cons will most certainly waste your time, but perhaps sub-standards rule and you don't require something else to make you happy, Jack. It might do well to remember, however, that everyone gets fooled...again...and again...and again...

j. m. bridgewater

PETER HAMMILL

The Future Now

(Charisma)

This album, according to its accompanying bio, was written and recorded while the artist was "huddled in a corner with three layers of clothes on." Perhaps all those years 'of baring his soul have given him pneumonia.

No more cheap shots, I promise. Why should I bother when Peter does a better job himself: "But now I've stunned myself to silence/Exhausted all my inner rage...and behind the actor's !pose, heaven knows/if there's anyone left in there." Did I hear a chorus of "who cares" or was that just one loud collective yawn?

Peter Hammill has been around for a while. He spent several years tending Van der Graaf Generator, a terminally artsy, post-King Crimson English band that Bob Fripp occasionally lent hjs talents to (rumor has it that Hammill did the vocals on Fripp's soon-to-be-released solo LPj. But Van der Graaf at least had musicianship and production values to help cancel out Peter's strained histrionics; here, it's mostly the man himself, shivering in his studio, and it sounds like it.

The frustrating thing is that he's got some good ideas but more often than not they dissolve into wreckless rants rather than devek oping into sqngs you'd wanna hear more than once. Lines like "Excuse me while I suck your blood/Excuse me while I phone you/I've got every one of your records, man/Doe$n't that mean that I own you?" migtyt make it on top of a hard backbeat but just sound limp without one. Time after time, the anarchic anger of his lyrics is undermined by his tedious, unfocused musical compositions. Put^bluntly, Peter Hhmmill needs a band and a producer; as it is, The Future Now looks like no future at allRoll over, Syd Barrett.

Michael Davis

JOE ELY

Down On The Drag

(MCA)

This Texas boy is a comer. No, scratchy that. This modern day cowboy has arrived, the,only hitch bein' that the reception committee hasn't quite filled out yet. There are some on the bandwagon already, includin' a lot of critics who are doin' their hest to fill the ranks by kicking'up a big ruckus about Ely, but there are many more yet to come around. An' when they do, it'll be one of those cases where they'll wake up one day after hearing Ely on the radio or something an' get all excited an' think they've discovered something an' go to their local record store only to find that Ely had two albums previous to this one, an' both d^irn near as good as this new one to boot.

I hesitate to call Down On The Drag a masterpiece, not only 'cause you got to be careful about throwin' words like that around if .you want to stay in this record reviewin'business, but mainly because Joe Ely is too unassumin' and down to earth to be discussed in those kinda terms. Hailin' from Lubbock, Texas, (the same place Buddy, Holly was from) and influenced by the country outlaws (Willie and Waylon), straightjNashville C&W, the Texas western swing revival, Louisiana cajun, and a goodly amount of honest rWk 'n' roll, Ely didn't come up with his West Texas sound by deliberatin' about it, but by livin' the life and playin' the gigs. An' havin' a friend like Butch Hancock, a semigenius who writes some of Joe's most fetching songs, don't hurt any either.

Hancock's "Fools Fall In Love" kicks things off on a baleful note, startin' with the same premise, as Buddy Holly's "Love's Made A Fool Of You," but showin' the darker side of love's miseries. Butch also wrote the title song, a honky tonkin' tribute to. hangin' out; "In Another World," a rockin' protest from a guy whose girl is takin' him for a ride; and "Standin' At The Big Hotel," which, from what I'm told, is about an actual hotel that Butch started but is now run by Jerry Jeff Walker (I'm ,not sure about that, though).

But Ely is no slouch songwriter himself. My favorite song on the elpee is his ballad, "She Leaves You Where You Are," in which he likens the independent, elusive nature of life on the road to those same qualities in some of the women Jie's known. We can all identify with that, right? And the fatalistic "Time For Travelin' " is a perfect cross between traditional country and cajun, all cornin' together 'til it sounds pert' near a goddamn waltz.

But I don't want to go and spoil all the fun by goin' down and describin' every sorjg on the record. Just be assured that there ain't a clinker to be found on either side. With his band rockin' and rollin' behind him, Joe Ely serves up as fine a patch; work of honest American music as has come from any single voice in a long while. An' he does it alt as if he were a buddy, sittin' right across from you at the kitchen table, never talkin' down to ya or nothin'. He may not have no axe to grind, but he sure does a lotta cuttin' up.

Gary Kenton