CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

Gala History Rewrite!

THE ROLLING STONE RECORD GUIDE

Edited by Dave Marsh with John Swenson (Random House/Rolling Stone Press)

Disregard the sheer pomposity and egotism responsible for this book’s publication. Consider it only as the editors intended it, a permanent reference work that, as Dave Marsh has it, is “designed at least as much for the general reader as for the rock cultist.”

Take a look at this $8.95 masterwork and, if possible, ignore the back cover blurbs. All of them. Even: “The Guide is true to the spirit of Rolling Stone, the world’s most authoritative rock magazine: witty, opinionated and, above all, knowledgeable. ”

Take it all at face value. This is a catalog of contemporary records, mostofthem still in print, each of the almost 10,000 assigned one to five stars. Great idea, right? Best of afl, almost five pages of five-star LPs are listed in the back. Just clip them out , take a few thousand bucks to any well-stocked record store and you too can walk away with an indispensable, comprehensive collection that would, by definition, rival Dave Marsh’s.

Keep in mind the obvious altruism involved in this book’s publication as you read our own altruistic listings of errors, errors we found during the first 30 minutes of skimming through this -luxurious tome:

1) Mink DeVille is listed twice, once under “M” and once under “D,” and given different ratings respectively.

2) Marsh calls Them’s classic “Mystic Eyes” a “harmonica-driven instrumental”; , harmonica-driven it is, instrumental it isn’t.

3) Wildlife is referred toasMotttheJHoople’s “disastrous second album”; what happened to MadShadows?

4) Marsh calls Lothar& the Hand People’s Space Hymn their only album; it isn’t.

5) The two Rabbitt albums on Capricorn are attributed to John “Rabbit” Bundrick; instead, they’re the work of Trevor Rabin’s South African band Rabbitt, and have nothing to do with “southern funk. ” Unless you consider apartheid rhythmic,

Hey, how come there’s only one Jo Jo Gunne album reviewed? It says here there’s two other ones still in print I^And isn’t that guy in Gun's real name Paul, not Ben?

THE GUN

it The Gun / Epic 2646S

Unpolished, overly eager Sixties power trio ted by Adrian and Ben Curtis (read Gurvitz). Awkward strings and brass in spots. . (Now deleted.) —* c.w.

JO JO GUNNE X

★★★★ Jo Jo Gunne/ Aay. SD5B53

This band grew from the breakup of Spirit. Built around Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes, they released four auperh albums between 1972 and 1974, all uniformly excellent except for the second, which is now lliiete&-Miki Energy tromp. — A.N.

THE ROLLING STONE RECORD GUIDE BY DAVE MARSH WITH SWENSON (RANDOM HOUSE/ROLLING STONE PRESS)

BY THE MAD PECK & SUPER STEVE

6) Fever Tree’s one hit is noted as “ ‘Where Do You Go,’ popularly known as ‘SanFrancisco Girls’ ”; the hit was actually “Return of the Native.”

7) Marsh lists Twin Sons of Different Mothers as a collaborative effort by Tim Weisberg and Kenny Loggins; Loggins, however, had nothing to do with it. Dan Fogelberg did.

8) A Utopia LP on Kent Records is described as “Todd Rundgren’s idea of a joke”; Todd wasn’t laughing, though, as this dopey band wasn’t at afl related to his own Utopia.

9) Marsh says “Tell Her No” by the Zombies spawned the careers of Rod Argent and Russ Ballard; Ballard was never in the Zombies.

10) Robert Wyatt is said to have left Soft Machine after the band’s third album; actually he left after their fourth.

11) Half of the Wilde Flowers, notWildflower, later became Soft Machine; the other half continued and eventually became Caravan.

12) Marsh says Pacific Gas& Electric’s Getlt On was preceded by the band’s Columbia LPs; it wasn’t, it’s their first album.

13) The two sides of Pink Floyd’s Meddle are confused; furthermore its side-long “title track” is called “Echoes.”,

14) Michael Brown’s post-Stories band, the Beckies, supposedly had a lead singer who “sings high when he means it and like Bryan Ferry when he doesn’t”; actually the band had two different lead singers.

15) And Van Der Graaf Generator recorded four LP’sforU.S. Mercury, not three.

IMPORTANT POINTS:

1) All of this was obtained through a totally random sampling. And there’s probably lots more good stuff like this throughoutthe book.

2) We’re not even discussing the ratings these albums gbt. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, etc.

3) The closest thing to a British counterpart this book’s got, Nick Logan & BobWoffinden’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock, is described as “a comprehensive volume.. .full erf errors.”

4) Future editions of Guide are apparently being planned.

5) A large portion of the above mistakes are by Dave Marsh, the... main editor? co-editor?

6) Some great ideas should remain great ideas.

Dave DiMartino

If It Looks Like A Hole & Smells Like A Hole...

HOLEVILLE

Play Written by Jeff Wanshel Music & Direction by Des McAnuff (Dodger Theater, Brooklyn Academy Of Music, New York)

Holeville is not a nice place to visit and you wouldn’t want to live there, either. A middle class, all-American neighborhood, it’s fraught with tenror and paranoia that are every bit as real as its garbage disposal units and microwave ovens. Especially when some of the violence-minded local boys come over to play,

And play they do in this rock ’n’ roll honor piece which could easily be subtitled Quid Pro Quo. See, the Quid family has just moved into Holeville and the neighborhood punks want to know what’s in it for them. Their idea of a community welcome is trashing the Quid kitchen, burning down the Quid house—with maybe a little decapitation on the side. Kind of like The Partridge Family meets The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—as a musical.

Deserving of having his pedal extremities removed, if not his head, is earnest Eagle Scout Gus Quid, the family’s tow-headed teenage nerd. Alone in the house, this jerk’s idea of a' good time is vacuuming the rug and waxing the linoleum. Grinning through his household chores, he insists “it keeps your mind off what’s in store.” It only delays the inevitable.

Gus’s father has disappeared and his netrotic mom is out shopping, along with Mr. Frisks, the family dog. Mom’s a cross between Lucille Ball and a deranged country western singer, while the pooch is an agreeable go-fer who only bitches a occasionally about the meager rewards of “ half a beef bone and some dirty old shoes.” He’splayed by Christopher Mumey, who should win Best Actor Of The Year In A Mutt’s Role paws down.

Enter the two punks—bent on destruction. Rich, the less threatening of the pair, dresses like Archie Andrews and actually offers to help Gus with his homewoik. His companion, Sal Video, is surly and unkempt—a scuzzy, slack-jawed dope given to sudden, menacing movements and ominous throw-away remarks. Asked what part of Holeville he’s from, he rolls his eyes and slurs the words “Mayhem Avenue. ”

“Drinking all night most of the year/Is bound to affect me severely,” * sings Sal (John Bottoms). But even massive doses of Boy Howdy! can’t account for the savage anger he and Rich feel for the neatly compartmentafized Quid way of fife. As if these two intruders aren’tenough, other faces begin appearing in the windows, staring sullenly in at Eagle Scout Gus, whose ingenuous smile is rapidly giving way to an expression of pure terror. Serves him right for liking housework.

So cleverly has the violent retribution scene been set up by playwright Wanshel and composer/director McAnuff, there’s almost no way it can five up to expectations. Still, the electrical appliances onstage at the Dodger receive a pretty good going-over. Which is to say: a portable television set kicked in, an egg beater jammed into the disposal, total havoc wreaked on a toaster and a radio immolated in the microwave oven. Reminded me of the CREEM editorial staff s last Tupperware party.

Withthe Quid home virtually a Smoldering shambles, all that remains is to wipe out the family itself, starting of course with Gus, followed by Mom and Mr. Frisks, who have just wandered in. Tied to a pole in the kitchen, Gus is serenaded by the loathsome Sal Video: “I’m not so noble/Most of the time I’m immobile/Sal be quick, Sal be nimble/I guess I’m pretty simple/But all I really want is to dance with you/ All I really want is to dance with ypu/One lasttime.” Charming fellow—like Fred Astaire with a switchblade.'

In case you thought Holeville was going to be a tragedy, help arrives in the nick of time in the person of the local police chief who happens to be the long lost Mr. Quid. His fellow police officers are the very rock ’n’ rolling “criminals and bums” we have seen lurking outside the windows, making cops and outlaws pretty much interchangeable. Author’s message perhaps?

In any case, Holeville is a brisk, imaginative show. The music is buoyant, with traces of rockabilly and punk, delivered with good humor and style. The performances are uniformly good, the direction crisp, and the script itself sly and knowing. Holeville deserves a much wider audience. Maybe it’ll turn up soon on public television or Home Box Office. Or maybe a real-life Rich and a real-life Sal Video will turn up some night in your appliance-filled kitchen.

Just to help you with your homework.

Ed Reliefer

* Lyrics used by permission.

The Wide World Of Drags

THE BASKETBALL DIARIES

by Jim Carroll

(Bantam) ■ f • i

The topic of drug consumption has been chronicled throughout the ages by many different people in many different ways. There are songs: “Heroin,” “Eight Miles High,” “Sister Morphine,” “White Rabbit,” “Medicine Jar, ” “White Light/White Heat,” etc. There are rhovies: The Man With The Golden Arm, The Trip, Hatful of Rain, Panic in Needle Park, UplnSmoke, Stakeout onDope Street, etc. There are books: Naked Lunch, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Snowblind, Junky, Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and everything by Hunter Thompson.. .and of course there are the casualties who I won’t mention. You may feel the topic is redundant, what with everyone and his camel waxing poetic on their various chemical indulgences and abuses, but this young street hero Jim Carroll offers a unique perspective, that being the wide world of drugs as experienced by an athletic adolescent.

The Basketball Diaries was written between the fall of 1963 and the summer of 1966, when Carroll was between the ages of 13-15. The first chapters of the book were published in the Paris Review in the 60’s—and evidently he set the literary world on fire, as Kerouac said of the young poet: “At thirteen years of age, Jim Carroll writes better than 89 % of the novelists working today;” William Burroughs:'“He must be a bom writer,’’.and Patti Smith: “He has the same intellectual quality and bravado as Rimbaud...

Jim Carroll is one of America’s true poets...” \ Generally, it is the kiss of death to be blessed by the gods so quickly, equal I suppose to when a Steve Forbert gets hyped as “The New Dylan.” Not so with this guy, though.

Through his eyes we see a boy who loves basketball and drugs with equal passion, and speaks of both in the same sentence. Bizarre, to be sure, but a helluva lot easier to understand than Burroughs.

The book is basically a diary kept by a young Jim living in Manhattan. His developing skill at basketball leads him up and down Manhattan,* playing in youth leagues, summer leagues and school leagues. Throughout his travels from one end of the island to the other, he meets and deals with just about every mutated human subspecies—and in Manhattan, thatis a pretty wide field.

The meat of The Basketball Diaries however, involves Carroll’s drug adventures. Yeah, I know, junkie rap is junkie rap is junkie rap, but Jim Carroll transcends the obvious and delivers a novel that is alternately funny, sexual and horrifying—and that, my friend, makes for good reading. Throughout the book he raps on buying and taking drugs, whether they be pot, junk, ups and downs, hash or cough syrup (Lester Bangs take note), all the paranoia, the rip-offs, the highs, the lows, the ugliness and the beauty. This has all been written about before, but it is fresh through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old, who shot heroin before he smoked dope becuase he thought the evil weed was addictive. Thumbs up, Jim.

F.S. Jim Carroll has an album coming out on Rolling Stones Records, which I am patiently awaiting (hint, hint), and if this guy can break on through musically, the renaissance may truly be here.

Mark J. Norton

Music To Milk Coconuts By

Stranded: Rock And Roll For A Desert Island

Edited by Greil Marcus (Alfred A. Knopf)

Edited by Greil Marcus, a most influential rock scholar, this book is more aboutrock criticism than rock history. A collection of twenty essays, sandwiched between Marcus’ introduction and epilogue, it’s structured by a simple ploy: ask 20 writers what rock ’n’ roll record they’d take to a desert island. Studying their responses to this ancient dilemma, the reader is supposed to make the crossing from island-to-island, perhaps gaining insights into the lifelong dialogue between artists and their fans. Somehow, by exploring the writers’ various exegeses, pne is expected to become involved in reuniting the fragmental spirit of contemporary rock obsessiveness.

The critics' choose; Stranded in the jungle with the New York Dolls, or—even worse—stranded in L.A. just I Ike Jackson Browne I

As “the effort to make that crossing, ” Stranded is partially a failure; it rarely captures a sense of rock ’n’ roll’s historical continuity or its magic or its encompassing, timeless embrace. Instead, the essays, read as a whole, undermine the book’s admirable intentions—they reinforce/almost justify, the insularity of rock’s present audie nee.

Yet it is not the records the writers choose (although these are embarrassing enough—few select an album released before 1970, nobody selects a 45) which create the problem; one can always allow for individual aesthetics. Rather, it’s the majority of the writers’ approach to Marcus’ setup; for, in general, they confront the question in the manner of Rousseau instead of Robinson Crusoe. In short, they avoid the issue, supplanting thought with personal confessions and elaborate fantasies that only their friends or psychiatrists would care to read.

A few of the writers get away with it because that’s the trademark of their style. In the book’s prologue, “The Sea’s Endless, Awful Rhythm & Me Without Even a Dirty Picture,” Nick Tosches cleverly sidesteps the whole problem with a humorous wink. Choosing Sticky Fingers, he writes: “There is something about the dullness of my choice that bothers me.” T osches also deserves credit for composing the funniest line in the entire collection, oddly enough, the first sentence of his chapter—“Call me Gilligan.”

Lester Bangs, of course, writing in his usual confessional style, makes Astral Weeks seem infinitely richer than perhaps it really is (which, incidentally, is the stunt any great critic should be able to perform). Like Goethe’s Werther, Bangs we£ps a thousand tears fight along with Van the Man, experiencing Morrison’s masterpiece as if it were the ultimate expression of human suffering.

Certainly there are writers in Stranded who do take a strict, utilitarian approach. Of these, only a few offer enlightening interpretations—Jim Miller on the Ronettes, Jay Cocks on Huey “Piano” Smith, Joe McEwen on Little Willie John, and Robert Christgau on the New York Dolls!

However, there are two essays employing the Crusoe methodology thqt remain virtually unreadable, aiming too high by stooping so low thatone wants to crawl under a jellyfish out of mortification for the authors. John Rockwell’s 30-page defense of Linda Ronstadt’s Liv ing in theU.S.A. is pompous, heaity-handed, and overblown; he interprets Ronstadt’s singing style largely in the terminology of classical music. Surely he could not have written this sentence with a straight face: “Any consideration of Linda Ronstadt has to start with her voice.”

Along similar lines of this excessiveness, Dave Marsh concocts a silly fantasy about an imaginary album filled solely with songs conducive to masturbatidri, Onan’s Greatest Hits (Wanker 0000). His “analysis” may seem cute to sonfiebody under twenty-years-old, but, compared to his stranded companions, Marsh comes off like an acne-infected Dennis trie Menace.

Despite its faults, Stranded is worth buying if only for two reasons. One is Langdon Winner's brilliant scrutinizatipn of Captain Beef heart’s Trout Mask Replica, a structural review of a work so awesome that it practically invents its own language. Unlike the other critics in Stranded, Winner understands the dilemma perfectly: that, being isolated forever from one’s former culture, one would want to play an extremely complex record (the aural equivalent of Finnegan’s Wake), one that creates alternate structures of perceptions and beliefs requiring a lifetime qf listenings.

The other is Greil Marcus’ “Treasure Island” v chapter which concludes the book. In contrast to the other Crusoes who share his book, Marcus avoids the issue by assuming responsibility for the rock ’n’ roll tradition; in short, his island is a well-stocked library of records. He cheats. But because he cheats, Stranded, overall, becomes a rewarding collection of insights. Marcus simply lists every record in his “stranded” library, supplying comments where he fdfels necessary. In this way, the historical continuity, even the magic, of rock ’n’ roll is bestowed upon a text sorely lacking a passion for traditionalism.

As it should, the book ends on a warm note. The last record in Marcus’ library is “Close the Book” by the Zurvans on End (release date unknown). It’s a good joke, and one worth remembering—indeed, close the book; records, ultimately, speak for themselves.

Robot A. Hull