WINGS WEITED DOWN

When Patti Smith first came lurking out of the hallways of paralyzed slogans, her power rhymes and stark verbal movieolas were peacefully flawed sensations playing with the soul of some long forgotten American dangers. Her littered images grabbed the gaudy tremors of language and soaked them in a trilling human fog of mass attack hysteria. She was a dream Cleopatra who sent a shock wave of stammering energy right to the core of a Shanghaied generation who were (and still might be) amoebic boobs of boredom, nuncios of the nod, Rotwangs of why, aborigines of absent-mindedness. When she hit the right word lick, she made everyone count the goose bumps as they formed street corner bunds along arms long atrophied of nervous excitations. But that was in the beginning, and in all beginnings there are endings.

When Patti is good, she's great; when she's bad, she's boorish, and therein lies her contradiction, her genuflect to the grimace of art, her trothplight to the truancy of her age. When she is up on stagfe, and totally incensed by the feedback fantasy of words eons lost, words arranged so differently that they hit the spine in a cerise spark of racial memory, when Patti is making magic like that, she's like the cold chill only a city can give you—a sweet rhapsody in concrete—she's like nothing else in rockdom.

But like I said, that's when she's good. When she's bad, when the demons of danger have temporarily deserted her, she becomes lost in the slick mute pitch of heat sans luminosity; she becomes mistreated, misinformed and misanthropic. And lately she's become just another beast on the corner do wop a doin' her way down the strassa in an oblivious cover-up of cool and confusion. Right now, she is just another malihini caught up in the officialese of apocalypse, a sigh here find a sneer there, a moribund matron in search of her own peculiar shopping bag of lost moments.

Her search has apparently ended. Wave is a soggy shopping bag full of fragmented images, failed passions and fawning acquiescence to

the complacencies of success. Not even her coy, flensing feminine efficiency can save her from this cerecloth of cranium suspension and ergless excess. Things get so mournful on this LP that Patti becomes a holographic retranslation of Kris Kristofferson in A Star Is Born, the only difference being Kristofferson's amazing ability to say the word "now"; not even Patti can copy that massive three-lettered assault.,

Wave suffers not only from Patti's ineffectiveness and often overbearing insistence on a supposedly humorous childishness (exemplified by the title song, which comes off as simply a bad Melanie imitation), but also from an absolutely pedestrian production job by Todd Rundgren. And production is important to Patti Smith—on her first LP most of the production was set on her gaunt shoulders,and that record still stands the pressures of time. The production on Easter catapulted Patti into the textural realms she always strived for, and why she changed^ from Jimmy Iovine, who so subtly produced her voice that it projected the true sensual spirit of her subconscious innocence, to the cold calculation of Todd's mass production is beyond understanding. Iovine understood all the layered interactions between Patti's flights of verbal rage and her band's grow? ing maturity into a driving musical power; Todd didn't seem to care and it shows. v

The only tremulous flashes emerging from this shangri-la of de-sensitivity are "Citizen Ship," which almost mystically reshapes, but all too briefly reaffirms Patti's sneering bondage to the fortunes beckoning to us all from beyond the ever-encompassing mathematics of rhyme, rhythm and reason and, surprisingly enough, "So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star," which comes on as a jitterbug heart safari to the rigors, vigors and failures lounging around the monasteries of pure rock 'n' roll philosophy. And that's it. The rest of Wave is like a stagnant \ lagoon in search of a creature to justify its existence. Patti Smith has simply relegated herself to playing the somewhat foppish leading man to the sheopera that is rock,'n' roll. She has left hei'Self impeachable as the minister of defense with Wave and her tonvoy of language is surroundedby the smokies of arrogance, ego and sediment.

Frank Marino was the world's first test tube burnout. I mean, really, here's this dippy Canadian kid laying in a hospital bed suffering from a probable moose Overdose and all of a sudden, HJABOpM!, the soul of Jimi Hendrix—still spitting out the bigger chunks—flashes across the Atlantic and into little Franky's body faster than you can say Are You Experienced. Sure, happens all the time. In fact, the guy in the next bed got the spirit of a coffeebreak wagon operator from Provo, Utah. The fella turns to our hero and says, "Shee-it, Franky, if this soul was a fish, I'd throw it back in."

Reincarnation is one really kooky business, you know. After all, Eric Burdon and Buddy Miles both said that they sucked up the spirit of Jimi too and who knows? Maybe Franky got / the "Purple Haze" Hendrix and Eric got the "Voodoo Chile" Hendrix and Buddy got the Hendrix that was fatter than a fruit stand when he was a teenager. (Uh oh, if Buddy reads that, my soul is gonna be up for random relocation, too. Won't the record companies be surprised?)

PATTI SMITH GROUP Wave (Arista)

FRANK MARINO & MAHOGANY RUSH Tales Of The Unexpected _(Columbia)_

Now there are those who say that comparing Mahogany Rush to Hendrix all the time isn't fair anymore. Well poo on them—duplicating Jimi's every waking sound is the whole point of Marino's career, hell, his life. So what if he tossed in a dink version of "Norwegian Wood" that sounds like baby spiders trying to blacktop a driveway. That's just to throw us off the track. The real stuff, like his autistically valid s "Sister Change," the dangling mole

traps of guitar that make up the title track or, oh my God, "Bottom Of The Barrel" (STOP ME BEFORE I KILL) is hairline Hendrix all the v way. Listening to it is almost as difficult as it is unrewarding.

Yikes!—I was just gohna wrap this up when there was a blinding flash of ectoplasmic lightning here in my cell. I tried to run, but my right leg's gone all numb, like it's not even -there, and I have a sudden urge to go to Las Vegas, and make fun of my own physical appearance. Wait, I'm starting to get the idea.., wouldn't you know it, I've just inherited the soul of Totie Fields! Arid I didn't even get to the part abouf Robin Trower yet.

Rick Johnson

THE ROCHES (Warner Bros.)

I was all set to blast this record higher than James and Carly's combined liquid assets, with maybe a John Hall nuclear accident or two thrown in for good-measure. The early articles on the Roches had been unlimited in their enthusiasm, but were couched in. such drearily orthodox feminism that I suspected « the group of being the Great White Hope of the senile-demented folkie scene.

Warner's pre-release promo sampler, which featured the Roches' apparently cutesy-poo musical autobio, "We", hardly assuaged my mounting hostility. I was ready with all the catch phrases about families going to seed, being reduced to dangerous levels of psychological incest, after too many generations of liberal inteliectualism; I was even going to take the Roche parents to task for naming their youngest1 daughter "Suzzy" (yep, short "u"), an affectation which seemed to bespeak a degeneracy more profound than any snotology the late Dead Boys ever essayed.

All of which may have been true, on its own ill-tempered level, but after I received the actual Roches LP, and played it through one time,

I discovered that I liked it awfully 'well for something that I was certain I hated. After another spin through, "Hammond Song" 's barbed harmonies were deeply embedded in my brainfiesh, and I realized that the whole Roches phenomenon was entitled to a little rethinking. By now, I'm all for the Roches.

Mind you, I've hated "folk" music I since the days of the hootenannies, ] even during the couple of years or 1 so in college when I tolerated the stuff for the sake of picking up cute Quaker "chicks" in coffee houses. The nicest aspect of The Roches is that it's beyond folk, that it's not really in any recognizable genre, exdept that of the Roche sisters being themselves, in an uncompromising fashion that would put many a record company-baiting punk group to shame.

The Roches is just these three sisters, playing their spare acoustic guitars, and spinning their even sparer songs, songs filled with charmingly wry lyrics, expressed in ragged, hit & run, piercing multipart harmonies. Producer Robert Fripp was persuaded by these tough-minded ladies to leave their occasibnal vocal lapses intact, as, modest touches of reality, hardly as the narcissistic indulgence Joni Mitchell, for instance, has made of her slurring.

"We" sounds better retroactively, after you've picked up on the earlier chapters of the Roches' story, in songs like "Mr. Sellack" and "Runs in the Family", and finally understood just why the Roches are so ingenuous and so cocky and so selfdeprecating, all at once, in their LP opener. And the Roches'"Damned Old Dog" is the Stooges'"I Wanna

Be Your Dog", no less, turned fully inside out, far beyond doggie submission,' but with a startlingly similar conclusion: "If 1 was a damned old dog/I wouldn't have to goddamn human be." The new wave hangs a left, and catches its own tail.

As the eye of the biggest popmusic media cyclone generated so far this year, the Roches undoubtedly will have appeared on Saturday Night Live by the time you read this. I'm afraid, though, that their record may,not fare so well on tne radio; it's too raw (if hardly ever raucous) for today's tunnel-auditory AOR programmers. So remember (& honor) uncompromising pop artists while you can: take Cheetah Chrome to lunch today, and pick up the Roches' LP on the way home.

Richard Riegel

This is what you'd call an impressive failure. There are a few traps here, seemingly unwittingly laid, a few monolithic mudpies that the mind is not encouraged to slide through so that after several listenings one tends to avoid certain cuts. As familiarity grows, one becomes less likely to want to. hear the album all the way through.

It's an impressive inconsistency, while there's a certain amount of neutral material here, songs of no particular fault or glQw, each side also has one song that's an inspirational rush—and each side's inspirational rush is followed by a song that's an inpenetrable bog. The rushes are "Stupid Man" (Reed/Nils Lofgren—eight of the album's nine cuts are collabora-

tions) and "Families" (Reed/Ellard Boles) while the bogs are "Disco Mystic" (Reed and four co-composers) and "The Bells" (Reed/ Marty Fogel). Which leaves five songs of neutral persuasion, but more on that in a minute.

On "Families" and "Man" Reed] asumes, respectively, the persona of errant son and neglectful father and the wedding of the quavering anxiousness of his voice to the poignant subject of familial reconciliation is never schmaltzy. In fact, the loping understatement of "Families" ' melody is exhilarating because it fits so perfectly'—less would have been bathos, more would have been foolish. Similarly, "Man" is delivered in a jauntily selfeffacing mood with the proper chord being struck between self-pity and self-hatred. Such tightrope acts are breathtaking.

And then there's the bogs. "Disco Mystic" is a slow funk riff with no' words except the title two while "The Bells" is a sound sludge epic with inconsequential words mixed so deeply in the ominous music that the effect is like Hieronymous Bosch with bad lighting. Reed may well consider himself a disco mystic here—don't the layers of sound and repetition that disco favors

often threaten to transport, to offer the mystical experience of an Eastern chant fed through unfathomable Western synthetic metal machines? But then there's always the Mantovani aspect of disco that puts me off, that leaves me wondering not where the art is but rather where's the artist. "Disco Mystic" and "The Bells" come across not so much as songs as they do projects. Who's doing what here and why should anyone care? The music drag$.

As for the neutral songs they're fun and wiry, songs that won't hurt or enhance Reed's reputation and are nice to hear once in a while. Like "I Want To Boogie With You," which is a piece of slow funk (again) that should have been called "I Wanna Boogie Wid Chu," and a little existential jive talk number called "All Through The Night" Stuff like that.

Richard C. Walls

Seems like a lotta you are taking your time figuring out that Thin Lizzy are a major band. Not that they've made it easy. Sure, "The Boys Are Back In Town" broke out fast and furious but the follow-ups fell down and there was always the question of where and when Brian Robertson would turn up ne.xt. And then when Live And Dangerous delivered the goods on twin power platters, you'd already OD'd on double-live sets and were out supporting Bostyx and Boreigner and lord knows who else. Even Toto. Really!

LOU REED The Bells (Arista)

THIN LIZZY Black Rose/A Rock Legend _(Warner Bros.)

Anyway, there's a new Lizzy LP and though it sounds like 24-track Fever, it sounds -good. Tony Visconti walks the line between bloody mayhem and Roy Thomas Baker; the sound is full but it's filled with four intense dudes, not just a lotta sound. The emotions come through intact; thanks, Tony.

You want details? Okay. Gary Moore's taken Brian Robertson's place but the crazed quotient don't drop an iota; just listen to that solo on "Toughest Street In Town." Also, Gary's presence means more variety in the writing, from the soothing salves of "My Sarah" to the Irish-history-as-seen-throughthe-eyes-of-a-fuzztone of the title track.

More details. Phil Lynott's talents are splitting the seams as well. He's writing with more hooks now—just check out "Waiting For An Alibi" or "Do Anything You Want To." He even tackles funk and gets away with it, bruising it up but good on "S & M," complete with Jaggerjive mumblejumble and hi-hat hijinx from Brian Downey.

And I haven't even mentioned the great dynamics of "Got To Give It Up" or Scott Gorham's playing in general. But dammit, I shouldn't have to; if your local radio ain't rancid, you oughtta have a lot of this stuff memorized by now. But if your airwaves (and they are yours, y' know) are so antiseptic that they bypass stuff with this much crunch 'n' class, screw 'em,-buy it yourself, and say goodbye to those transistor blisters.

Michael Davis

"Hot Stuff' just isn't that terrific a record, no matter what the charts or current critical backlash dogma say, and it doesn't dp any good to I congratulate disco for incorporating the machine-like funk and sexist stupidity of hard rock £ la Foreigner. But speaking unkindly of Donna Summer nowadays opens you to charges of anti-disco racismand/or homophobia; at the same time, to

accept her whole is to ignore the fact that the merger of urban black taste and gay taste, when embraced as mass taste, is often the most Vegasy form of tacky entertainment (any minute now, the Village People are on their way to Harrah's lounge), and that Summer is as close tb Shirley Bassey as she is to Darlene Love (who never sang at the Oscars, just as Arlene Smith of The Chantels never made the cover of Newsweek). There is one side of Bad Girls that comes close to being great (the Euro-gurgle side), but the other three—rockdisco, disco-disco and soggy ballad —are strong evidence of the limited boundaries and possibilities of the genre and of Summer's vocal talents.

And yet despite the 75% of this music that fails to spark, the other 25% is so invigorating, such an earopening extension of girl-group sensibility, and so physically riveting, that it. makes you wonder if there isn't something worth preserving after all. Anyone who likes Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and the collected works of The Crystals and is unmoved by "Our Love" and "Lucky" probably is responding out of a stylistic prejudice. The lyrics aren't muth, but in sentiment ' and texture, these songs are what Ronnie Spector should sound-like in 1980; built on sizzling electronic squawks and chirps that tease and swoop down on you (the star is synthesizer programmer Dan Wyman), they represent a true space age romanticism, rockartoon music that kicks in. They take off from "I Feel Love" 's automatic eroticism, and that would seem to be the way to go for Summer and her producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte.

The rest is chaff, with "Hot Stuff" and the title track standing out more as not-bad songs bowing in the direction of rock than as cuts you'd want to hear again and again. At least Bad Girls doesn't slide into the repetitive, self-referential "dance" mode of this world's Gino Soccios, and the smug chicdom bordering on tyranny that goes with it, i.e., "Everybody here to-

night must boogie/There are no exceptions to the rule." "Must"?? "Rule"?!? Fuck you/ (And I like "Boogie Oogie Oogie.") Give me Smokey's "Going To A Go-Go." Only two of Bad Girls' 15 songs mention the word "dance" in noun, verb or adjective form, and one of those times is as sexual metaphor (as in "It's a lover's dance"). For all the "beats-per-minute" metronomosity—drummer Keith Forsey has the cushiest job in the music business—Sumrqer's LP does at least venture off the floor of 54 on occasion.

I suppose what I object to most about Donna Summer in particular and disco in general—more than the schlocky razzamattaz at its heart and the double-time grandfather's clock beat that dominates v-is the forced jollity that sounds more like tedious desperation; if songs like "Journey To The Centre Of Your Heart" (dig that "centre"— how civilized; too bad the words are simply psychedelic crap: "Wanna travel 'cross the borders of your mind") and "Walk Away" are party.music, then it's a pretty solemn, draggy party, and I'm glad I wasn't invited. Donna Summer looks fine in black lace (one of the funniest pop rumors of the 70's had Summer a female impersonator or transsexual) and has a perfectly listenable voice, but she doesn't laugh, or roar, or make you feel her desires or her wounds. Smooth segues are no substitute for real musical drama, and Bad Girls is mostly hot mixes and pink neon.

Mitch Cohen

FLASH AND THE PAN _(Epic)

That typical Driver's Ed. scare flick: Young Bob and Carol stumble drunkenly out of a party as their equally drunken host cautions them to forgodsake drive carefully. Bob grins, belches, weaves over to the car, waves Carol in, guns the engine, starts the windshield wipers, blinks the headlights. Cut. Out on the rainy highway, Carol giggles as Bob sings along with the car radio. He leans over for a sloppy smooch, lets go of the wheel...and,from a medium shot, we see the car swerve horribly out of lane. Blackout. The highway patrol arrives after dawn (better lighting) and as the cops grimly untangle the mangled bodies, the soundtrack offers a final fillip of pathos: The radio plays on unaware.

It ought to be playing Flash and the Pan, for the perfect touch of media-blitzed anomie. Flash and, the Pan is Harry Vanda and George Young's first project on their own since the Easybeats broke up ten years ago; in the interim, they've squandered their talents in writing and producing hits for AC/DC and other (snicker) Australian rockers.' While spewing out swill like "Love

Is in the Air" (for John Paul Young), however, Vanda and Young have attained the cynical satori peculiar to music-biz diehards. And they've channeled it into the songs oh Flash and the Pan.

The songs stake a position at the junction of Cool and Cold. Vanda and Young's specialty here is mockprofound doggerel ambiguity, as in "The Man Who Knew the Answer," "Walking in the Rairt" and "Hole in the Middle" ("Saw the fat man, saw the smoke/Cried a little, cracked a joke," etc.); they also pull off putons (cosmic slop in "First and Last," Flying Dutchman pretensions in "Down Among the Dead Men") and put-downs ("Man in the Middle," "Lady Killer"). If there's a sincere moment on the LP, it's probably the line in "Walking in the Rain" about "Looking at the Billboard also-rans."

But hey—you want sincerity, go watch Merv Griffin. For the rest of us, Flash and the Pan's song settings are good enough to put the art back in artificial. Because Vanda and Young are kneejerk hookwriters, the tunes are incorrigibly catchy, especially since most are in minor keys. The orchestration clinches it: lots of percussion and keyboards up front—only an occasional acoustic rhythm guitar— topped by George Young's electronically modulated monotone, as emotional as a telephone weather forecast. The songs rock even without guitars, and drummer Ray Arnott' (Vanda and Young play everything else) adds witty percussion gimmickry: rhumba cowbell on "Man in the Middle," echoey fingersnaps in "Walking in the Rain," Motown tambourine for "Hole in the Middle," a relentless clave in "Down Among the Dead Men." While Vanda and Young take on everything from a rewrite of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo ("The African Shuffle") to one M. James's Dr. Strangelove saga of a hungover Captain Black who mistakes a .weather balloon for "a rocket from China, a Russian plane" and accidentally blows up "California," they know that their role is to craft plastic pop novelties with a "Hole in the Middle." Floor it, Bob!

Jon Pareles

BE-BOP DELUXE The Best Of And The Rest Of Be-Bop Deluxe (Capitol)

BILL NELSON'S RED NOISE Sound-On-Sound _ (Harvest) _

O.K. Right. Bill Nelson. Be-Bop Deluxe. Science Fiction. Mmmmm. Calendar. Deadline. Cutup? History:

Had Bill Nelson been given his way, Drastic Plastic would have been a double album, selling for just over the price of a single one.

DONNA SUMMER Bad Girls (Casablanca)

The bad news, of course, is that Nelson's record company nixed the idea. The good news, however, is that Nelson had already recorded the extra album's worth of material before the axe came down—material which, along with the odd, reworked B-side, has finally found its way onto sides three and four of Be-Bop's posthumous Best Of/ Rest Of anthology.

Hmmmm. Anthology? Analogy:

Of course, for the avid Be-Bop collector, this is an indispensable album—a find not at all unlike buying a bootleg Who album, only to discover that one side of it contains a complete, unreleased set of Sell Ouftakes, replete with radio promos.

For the novice, though, the at-' traction lies in the previously released tracks. And, true to form, like on most greatest hits packages, the choices on Best Of/Rest Of are sewn together in random fashion, creating in the process a senseless aural collage. Watch it, you're beginning to lose it. In this case, the particularly offensive edits can be found on side two, wherein four tracks (three from Modern Music and one from Live! In The Air Age) are coat hanger aborted from their respective albums, strung up with piano wire and left to hang on meat hooks, much in the same way that key tracks on Changesonebowie and Walk On The Wild Side were.

Christ, now you've done it. Jesus. Better talk about the new album.

Meanwhile, back at the edge of the 80's, Bill Nelson has solidified his position as rock's number one Futurist with Sound-On-Sound, an album which fulfills the initial promise of technical and aesthetic integration in rock (tempered with a future sensibility), as previously embodied at the dawn of the 70's in the early work of David Bowie, Todd Rundgren and Roxy Music (and as currently investigated in various ways by various means and from various angles by the likes of Peter Gabriel, Robert Fripp, Larry Fast, Kraftwerk and Eno).

What? No. Too high school. Statement. Make a statement.

Sound-On-Sound qualifies unequivocally as the first true fullfledged album of the 80's: a prepunk, post-glitter pastiche of...of...

Concentrate... and should Bill Nelson's vision of things to come sound more than a little backdated to you, welcome yourself warmly to the future.

As Nelson himself says in "Revolt Into Style" (named after a somewhat obscure tome dealing with Pop Art in the 60's), "I know the time is almost 1984/It feels Nke 1965." Granted, it may not be the most eloquent line ever spawned by rock 'n' roll, but you can bet' your....Come on, you're almost finished...lie detector wristwatch it's one of the most powerfully perceptive.

I love technology, don't you?

That's it. Now sign your name.

Jeffrey "Speed" Morgan

The Holiday Inn where she had a reservation was but mere minutes down the dark summer interstate, but Sister Mary thought to herself, No surprises, who needs that? Besides, it was 3 a.m., she was hours late, and there was something about the way the "VACANCY" sign below the red-lit Evening Star Motel neon glare winked its message. The saints guide you, she reminded herself as she jiffied the exit aind rolled into the motel driveway.

The graveyard shift desk clerk, who had been in the badk office copying addresses from a Swingers Guide that had been left behind by a check-out, was a burly hunk of a brute, over six feet, around twoforty, with a rugged, weathered face matted with whisker stubble th£t didn't quite make a beard, and a huge chest snugly contained by a black t-shirt adorned with an im-

ression of a star-trooper whose battle goggles were shattered and filling with crimson. Although he registered Mary with genial deference, he couldn't help but notice her doe-brown eyes and sweet rosy cheeks, and found himself absently musing, as he handed her the room key, just what she might look like not buried in a habit. She's a nun, you horny asshole, he chided himself as Mary primly wished him a good night.

Rob had not long been back to, his prospector scribbling, however, when the switchboard lit up with a call. "Yes, I just checked in, and the air conditioner doesn't seem to be working." Mary's voice, which had been a soft fret, became damp with cold sweat bother. "I'm burning up; do you think you could come see about it?" Before you could say "Brides of Jesus," Rob was at her door.

Pausing to survey the nearly empty parking lot, Rob forced himself to remember that she was a holy sister; that the inculpation of his own state of (perpetual) sexual readiness had likely influenced his interpretation of her tone of voice; and that the air conditioner probably wasn't working. Thus cooled, he rapped with his knuckles for entry.

Good Sistgr Mary eased the door Open, shielding her body behind it as Rob stepped into the middle of the room. "No air, huh?" he asked, looking straight at the unit on the far wall. There was no response except for the shutting of the door. He turned to see Mary leaning against it with her arms folded behind her, clad only in a pair of black leather panties. His eyes skipped left breast to right, down, and then to her eyes, which were animal glowing with the fire of a woman who wanted no part of cooking'with Teflon—who wanted her skillet greezed dirty and licked clean. "How about it, stud?" she hissed with gutter seaminess. "I'll, uh, see what's wrong," Rob gulped, tripping as he groped for the thermostat.

"Ah, it hasn't been turned on," he assessed, looking over his shoulder, "but it oughta—" the words froze as he noticed the black leather hanging on the dborknob. Mary had spread herSelf atop the purple bed covers in prime Hustler style, so that her vertical smile was hoisted alluringly. "You ready to dish out the hot stuff?" she whispered with aching anxiety. Rob grinned, and nodded.

After the goods had been delivered (several times), Rob and Mary stood in farewell ^embrace. "You see," she said, rollin'g a finger into the cloth of his shirt, "you're a Judas priest and I'm an Iscariot nun." She patted him on the butt and guided him out the door, leaning against it after she closed it. Well, she thought to herself, that

wasn't any sissy world rockin'; maybe it'wasn't the vincebus erupturn I'd hoped for, and maybe I'm not throbbing as motorhead hard as I'd like, but (she audibly shuddered leafs of drowsy satisfaction) hell, Mary, evil fantasies are, hmmm, nice, but evil reality, oh yummm— praise the Lord, that's what I love abouf rock 'n' roll.

j. m. bridgewater

It's a dark, rainy evening. You are sitting in your candle-lit room with the 'one you love to touch at your side, but something is wrong, the object of your affection wants to go out for a beer.

What can you do? You could light a' fire inlhe fireplace...if you had One. You could open a bottle of vintage wine and impress him with your je ne sais quoi, or you could put on Duncan Browne's latest album The Wild Places.

Yes, boys and girls, even as you sit here reading this review, somebody, somewhere, is getting the action you crave simply by picking up the tone arm on their stereo and dropping it on to side one, track one. With a softness and sublety as comfortable as the beat of your own heart, the voice of experience sets the mood you've been looking for:

"La prima donna slipped into her leather/But she was restless, she knew it in her heart of hearts/She said 'tonight you'd better pull yourself together/Because tonight I'm going to pull myself apart'."

As Johnny Mathis's voice launched a thousand romances in the 50's, as Paul McCartney's love songs were background musit to a million love affairs in the 60's, as Elton John set the mood for the 70's, Duncan Browne is about to launch you into the 1980's/

Now don't misunderstand. Duncan is no wimp. He is a worldly-wise Britisher whose voice and style tell you he knows what he's talking about. His understated sultry lyrics and romantic reminiscences will disarm you, set a spell-binding mood and be exactly what you need for your most intimate moments, alone or with a friend.

Did someone ask: "Who the hell is Duncan Browne...and if he's so great how cum I never heard of him before?"

JUDAS PRIEST Hell Bent For Leather (Columbia)

DUNCAN BROWNE The Wild Places (Sire)

I'm glad you asked. At 32, Duncan Browne has made four excellent albums. For 11 years his career has been a slow, building thing. Remember, we're talking quality, not quantity.Duncan Browne's music goes straight to your groin. It affects your libido first and your brain second. He has a musical style that transcends labels or fads, because he has the kind of talent that never goes out of style.

Discovered and produced by Andrew Loog Oldham when he was 21, he Released his first album, Give Me Take You, on Immediate Records in 1968. At 24, he recorded his second album for Mickey Most's RAK Records, and had his only British chart single "Journey." In 1977, as a member of Metro, Duncan proved his flexibility by mastering a completely unique electric guitar sound and co-writing one of the best non-punk albums of that year.

So now you know. Duncan Browne makes music for those quiet moods. You snuggle up to your friend. Duncan whispers "Ooh lover set the wheels in motion...in the heat of the moment I just lose control." The candle goes out. The game, as they say, is now in your ballpark.

Janis Schact

INSIGHT: The first in a not necessarily continuing series of rethiriks by CREEM's esteemed panel of critics.

Shrink talks about dream-preuenience-anticipatory subconscious projections of the sleeping mind and stresses particular importance for cognition of "reticular mindspace extensions" and deeply-imbued symbols: "that you dreamed of biting an older woman 'clothed in the hide of your pet Weimaraner trick-or-treating for Halloween' connotates non-ludicrous perspectives for consideration..." The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes, Houghton Mifflin '76) speaks of dream-omens, how "the dream of the loss of one's cylinder seal portends the death of a son." All

too real. Reality manifests itself 4 days after submitting last ish's (CREEM, July) If You Knew Suzi... LP-critique ("...a piece of shit"). Subsequent NIGHTMARE, break-' down-consciousness, unravels threefold:

(1) driving LA-FrisCo Dawn-OfThe-Dead type bodie^ are scattered arbitrarily on either side of the high-1 way; personalized license plates, traffic northbound, all read: SUZI Q 6.

(2) interim moments in SanFy involve "non-ludicrous perspectives" s.a. a 1963 Gibson Melody Maker (DiMarzio p.u.'s) and Fender Tele pulverized alongside copies of "48 Crash" and "Stumblin' In"; vague images of "male-singer" Chris Norman's face flash on-andoff...

(3) IN BED W/QUATRO, BUT NO ACTION, no wet dreamomens, cos she's engrossed in a plethora of 8x10 glossies of Robert Stigwood strewn all over the sheets and covers (cylinder seals??) which upon scrutiny turn out to be photos. of Lost In Space's BILLY MUMY (death of a son??)...

© MAD PECK STUDIOS IP7P

Shrink seems convinced of the need to "re-evaluate, re-explore" If You Knew Suzi. ..: A FINE ALBUM! YOU SHOULD PROBABLY BUY IT.

Gregg Turner

ELVIS PRESLEY Our Memories Of Elvis f (RCA)

WILLIE NELSON

Sweet Memories

_(RCA)_

We can now posit a suicidal mania sweeping the board-rooms of RCA, a huge and raptured postcoital depression. Why else Willie Nelson's Sweet Memories, one of ' the most useless reissue albums since Beethoven's Greatest Hits, sooty with second-string acolyte inanities best left forgotten ("Laugh with me, buddy/Jest with me, buddy/Don't let her get the best of me, buddy"), at a time when Willie's star rises crab-wise, movie-wise as well as recording-wise, to new heights? Seems a flat-out attempt to implode a nifty career. Similarly, RCA's new Elvis reissue—as loony

a concept as ever squirmed through the corporate entrails to make scat on turntables throughout the land.

Our Memories Of Elvis (not yours and mine, Varetta, but as the album sleeve tells us, Vernon's, the Colonel's; and RCA Records') is a collection of Elvis tunes from the 70's. But on the theory that less is more, I guess, background vocals, horns, and strings have disappeared in favor of "the pure Elvis without the additional accompaniment." This supposedly in response to the billions of fans who have yearned, over the years, to hear Elvis singing "just as he did in the recording studio." Please, daddy, let me hear him toss his lunch, just once.

The result is not just silly but, as with the Nelson album, equal parts informative and destructive. If you've never noticed how ditsy a songwriter Willie can be on an offday, this record will douche you with pure country drool. If Felton Jarvis' savvy for production has thus far concealed from you the fact that, through much of the 70's, Elvis was in rotten shape, his voice barely under control and his style nearly as baroque as his concert-gear, this outing in minimalist tinkering will enlighten you. Trouble is, neither album does its artist any justice.

Elvis actually pulled himself together enough to do some of his finest albums in the 70's—That's The Way It Is, Promised Land, and Elvis Today. Of these three records, only two cuts have been selected to go under the knife, both from 1975's Promised Land. They survive pretty well. The rest, lifted from albums released in '73, '74, '76 and '77, do not. Unless, as in Never Again, you're partial to Elvis' offkey growling, which in this new mix comes off crisp and ugly. The tunes are all ballads, and while it might have been interesting to hear the Jordanaires lifted from some of the early rockers or Voice lifted from T-R-O-U-B-L-E or J.D. Sumner and the Stamps lifted off practically anything, it serves little purpose to pull the production away from a ballad when the ballad has been recorded with production in mind in the first place and Elvis is struggling with his material in the second. What you wind up with is holes. Holes and winces.

So I figure RCA has a death-wish. They dig taking superstars and making them look like clowns. By now we should have had the MillionDollar Quartet negotiated and released and instead we get masochism, Elvis beating on himself from the grave. If, as rumored, RCA has no say in the matter and has to take' whatever hopscotch and gristle the Colonel dishes out to them, how do you explain the Willie album? To return to that metaphor, somebody out there is thinking through his sphincter, and at the same time trying to whistle.

Dallas Mayr

SUZI QUATRO If You Knew Suzi,.. (RSO)