RUBINOOS: Theoretical Boys In Search Of The Summer Single

It is a perfect world: the date is anywhere between May 15 and June 28; you are fourteen years old, and the days are getting longer; school lets out at three, and at the clang of the bell, the heavy doors fling open and you stampede into the 76 degree afternoon; there are hours until dusk, tingly hours after nightfall, and the girls are on the verge of adorable compliance—in their smiles, boundless promise; all the transistor radios are tuned to WABC, and the song cheerfully blaring from each one is The Rubinoos' "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend": "Gonna make you love me before I'm done." Oh, yes. It is a moment to freeze, and savor.

And just might happen. To me, and maybe to you, "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," like any number of otner Rubinoo toons—"Failin' In Love," /"I Never Thought It Would Happen," "1-2-3-Forever," "Gorilla," "As Long As I'm With You" sounds like the summer single of dreams:, boyish, irrepressibly, full of hope and hooks, a true heir of "Please Please Me" and "Happy Together," a conversation with The Jelly Beans. So what's taking them so long? That question may be dealt with later (keep posted). For the moment—the moment being lunch in a Japanese restaurant on 56th Street— the question is one of exposure, audience, approach. To wit: why are these scrubbed poppers, whose slogan seems to be the tautology "it's no fun if it's no fun," doing reconnaissance for Elvis C.'s Army? Here it is, their first national tour, and the boys are opening for The Last Angry Man. Wotta match.

Jon Rubin, lead singer of the group, and Tommy Dunbar, chief writer and guitarist, find the pairing not at all odd. "You get people comparing us and Elvis," Jon says. "They go, 'Well, you guys are really incompatable. He pla^s a little louder than us, and probably has a little harder edge, but take his songs apart and our songs are written almost

exactly the same way. I mean, as far as verse, chorus, melody. He has this image, but he still writes pop tunes like 'Accidents Will Happen,' which has a great melody, or 'Alison'." And as if to prove that their rock minds do run on parallel tracks, who should walk into the Rock Garden but Elvis, The Attractions, et al. One difference: they look battle weary, and they're not smiling.

No doubt The Rubinoos won many friends as domic relief on this "Armed Funk Tour," and the fact that they were seen by so many people is good news itself. Still, the band has not totally eradicated a nagging problem: ' the bubblegum perplex. The night before,

at a Greenwich Village club packed with lottery winners there to see the Big C., The Rubinoos, for their encore, gave up midway through "Sugar Sugar" and changed gears into The Seeds' "Pushin' Too Hard." Which is to say that some people don't... quite.. . get the joke. Geez. But The Rubinoos are used to this, as Jon matter-of-factly relates:

"In 1974, Winterland opened its season with what they were calling The Soupds Of The City, when they were allowing local bands to play. Okay, well we were the opening act of the first show, which featured Jefferson Starship, Link Wray, Earth Quake and us. So we get up there and y/e've never played a 400-seater and hdre we are ip a 5000-seat hall. They're responding okay as we play our normal set, then we play 'Heartbeat, It's A Lovebeat' by The DeFranco Family and there are scattered boos. Not enough people knew it to roundly boo it. Finally we get to 'Sugar Sugar,' Jonathan Richman gets on stage and dances The Archie, and people go berserk. A couple more tunes, then we come to our last song, which medleys into 'The Pepsi Generation.' Okay. I was like pelted with fruit and cups and stuff. Backstage, we get five record deal offers. The press was phenomenal. It was the biggest boost to our career at that point."

"I was pelted with fruit and cups and stuff. Backstage we got five record,deal offers. -Jon Rubin"

song, TURN TO PAGE 61

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24

RUBINOOS

Out of disaster, triumph. They were signed to local Beserkley Records (to date: two albums, The Rubinoos and Back To The Drawing Board!, cameo appearances on Spitballs and Chartbusters, plus a side on a live import LP that Jon and Tommy violently disown), took up Sunday night residence at the Long Branch Saloon in Berkeley with Greg Kihni (this story, is in a lot of ways the flip side to my "Kihn-esthetic Responses" piece a few issues back, so if it's Beserkley/Branch anecdotes you need . . .), and actually had something of a hit single with a remake of Tommy James and the Shondells' "I Think We're Alone Now." The Rubinoos were a group to be reckoned with, if not to be taken seriously, which was all right, since they didn't either. Never have, not since the day Jon and Tommy found two mutual interests: music and misbehavior.

Jon: "We had the same math class, and every day we'd talk in class and get thrown out, so we'd sit in the nail and bullshit. This teacher, see, we hated her so,much, and she had a bjack injury and had to leave school. On the last day of school, the substitute teacher gave us two dollars and told us she never wanted to see us again."

Tommy: "Jon used to come over, and my sister had a big 45 collection, so we just used to sit there and play deejay all day. We'd play Del Shannon and Shangri-Las records and stuff like that and sorta laugh at them, right? We were like 12 and 13. We thought like this isn't really serious music, but we liked it anyway. Then we wanted to have a prom at our school and we decided to start a band that we threw together in two weeks and those were the songs we played, doing them as a joke, in a way."

From the start, and to the present, The Rubinoos' taste in oldies has been clever and eclectic (they've performed "Walk Don't Run," The Cadillac's "Peek-A-Boo," "I Want To Hold Youx Hand," "Monkey Time," "Hold Me" by P.J. Proby, The Eternals' "Rockin' In The Jungle"), but as Tommy tells it, they didn't follow their instincts initially when it came to their own compositions. "Actually, we started out writing songs that were more like Jethro Tull-type, while doing 50's and 60's songs, and we'noticed that we weren't having near as much fun doing the songs we wrote as the covers. We were closet pop fans."

Once they decided to forge a style that reflected their sensibility, and with the Branch as a testing ground, The Rubinoos found a niche, carving out a territory not dissimilar from that of, oh, Raspberries, Stories, Pezband, Mod Frames, other neo-pop bands. Not bubblegum, exactly. Call it Dentynerock: snappy flavor is more like it. And yet, "We were ridiculed, told we'd grow out of it. Someone said that we started pur band really to make our friends

mad, and it worked. Our jazzier friends got embarrassed when we tried to get them to join us on Ricky Nelson's 'Lonesome Town.' 'Cause a lot of people would go, 'Yeah, you guys are all right, but like the songs you're playing are just sort of weird. Why do you do that?' "

Why? Fair question, gang, since as we all know, there has been multileveled resistance toward the kind of music The Rubinoos make. Under ideal circumstances, the quartet (Donn Spindt, drums, and Royse Ader, bass, fill out the line-up), would hit to all fields and formats, demographically and aesthetically speaking. The Tigqr Beat crowd, in particular, should be a natural. Be honest: wouldn't you rather see Jon Rubin than Leif Garrett put the make on Kristy McNichol? (I can picture it: The Rubinoos come to Pasadena, Audrey dares Buddy to sneak into their hotel room. Eyes lock, hands around waist, Jon sings "Promise Me" staring right in her face, she melts iri his arms, cut to Kate fretting in a print house dress. From upstairs, in Annie's room, we hear "Lightening Love Affair.")

This might be an appropriate place to note that there i^ another party sharing the tatsuta-age and tempura: a comely colleague, a pop crusader who has oft opined that groups like The Rubinoos are unfortunately up a time-warp creek, that budding girls of 1979 don't necessarily relate to records that sound like "Ask Me Why" 'while older record buyers might find such sentiments and harmonies overly frivolous. So it is her intention to get The Rubes in the teen mags, to show those kids what pop is about. To that end, she hands them a detailed questionnaire, which Jon and Tommy eye bertiusedly. Jon reads, " 'Do you have a car? Briefly describe your dream lady. What do you dojn your spare time? Are you into handcuffs?' "

"That's the most interesting stuff,'' Melani, our pop-wise interrogator, offers; "I haven't known what someone's waist is since 1964.1 never knew why I would need Paul McCartney's thigh measurement, but I always knew how many inches it was."

With a little luck, then, you may b^ seeing these angels with dirty sneakers peering at you from Teen Beat as you peruse the racks at your corner pharmacy. Other obstacles may not (umble easily. As filled with confidence as Rubin, and Dunbar are, they are not unaware that there are villains out there, that radio—both bands—is doing the tighten-up, that even in glorious San Francisco the market for live rock 'n' roll is dwindling in the wake of the dreaded disco. Of the first, Jon laments, "I was really bummed out because our progressive station in San

Francisco, KSAN, has gone"—here he searches for le mot juste—"fascist. They got rid of their whole library, they now have three categories of 'must plays' and that's it. Yellow, green and red, or whatever it is, and you have to play like ten yellows an hour, two reds and one green. And if you're not red, green, or yellow, forget it, except on Saturday and Sunday. For us it's okay, but for the Psychotic Pineapple it's not very good."

An even sorer point is the music that is "dominating my AM radio, and I\ have to listen to it. It was so depressing when 'Le Freak' got on the radio. Chic, you know. That sold more records than any other Atlantic single. More than Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, The Drifters, Sam & Dave. Good God, that's horrifying! Tell me that 'Le Freak' is close, I mean even one-millionth as good as 'Under The Boardwalk' or 'Try A Little Tenderness.' It's garbage. It's kind of discouraging, except for one thing. That disco is so fashionable, and fashions change really fast."

Meanwhile, waiting for the fever to subside, Jon, Tommy, Royse and Donn will go on doing the only thing they know how* to do, make spiffy popular music that conjures up the shining moments of adolescent exuberance. Or, as their raucous showcase piece puts it, "Rock And Roll Is Dead (And We Don't Care!)," a song open to conflicting interpretations, none of which the two interviewees will own up to.

"All I know," Tommy says, "is I get to jump up in the air during that song. That's the important thing."

Jon adds, "And I get to sing ugly background vocals, which I really like."

"The problem with Jon is he doesn't sing ugly nearly enough. His voice is just like a little bit too pure."

"I don't know what to do about it."