VAN HALEN

Women And Children First

(Warner Bros.)

Up until now, it’s been relatively easy to ignore Van Halen, or to confuse them with Van Johnson. Their dubious remake of “You Really Got Me,” which was as unimaginably ridiculous as Sissy Spacek in a Loretta Lynn wig, struck Z’s into many a skeptical heart. Their fans, the ambulatory ones that is, look like rejects from the studio audience of Focusing On Toddlers. And as for this David Lee Roth character...well, his dressing room mirror is sb covered with his own smoochprints that he can hardly even see to admire himself anymore.

So if VH is that dumb, howcum their new album is such a smoker? I mean, hellfire and shee-it, if you pass this one up on bad rep alone, years from now you’ll feel an empty foolishness not unlike Ann Landers’ lifelong regret at not having taken Latin in high school as you fork over two bills to some zitty record collector for an old beat-up copy. Combining as they do the most endearing musical aspects of helicopter decapitations, clothes dryers full of hunting knives and your average hailstorm of frozen aluminum dinnerware sets striking a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, the little Dutch boys and their pals have cut through the facade of heavy metal manners and taken a bead on pure form bamalama.

Like all good things and airsickness, Women & Kids takes a little while to build up. Exactly 3:31 in fact, the time it takes “And The Cradle Will Rock” to be over with. It’s not crummy or something Ronnie Montrose would kick out of bed, but the real action starts with “Everybody Wants Some,” a tailcurler for sure with a guitar solo that sounds like a high speed Japanese commuter train derailing into a blackboard showroom.

Another ripper’s delight, “Fools,” sets the pick for “Romeo Delight,” which has about as much to do with old Bard-puss as Rupert Holmes (the next Bob Welch) does with the male gender. As inconceivably hot as Mr. French ramming a redhot crowbar up Buffy’s nose, the bambarh vibes carry over onto “Loss Of Control,” which takes off from the sound-effects opening of the second side like Rodan with a hotfoot and just as quickly vanishes.

Warning To Consumers: no one will be admitted during the last 10 minutes of this album, which are as shockingly distasteful as going to take a swig of Diet Pepsi and getting a mouthful of toenail clippings instead (this really happened). It sucks is what I’m getting at. Nothing but some acoustic guitar dribble and our friend wanglungs mewing through a tryout for Sopwith Camel.

What all this adds up to is one of those rare occasions that are worth

the full, price of admission even though you only get half a show. Especially if you have a tape recorder, NOT THAT I’M ADVOCATING THE UNAUTHORIZED DUPLICA TION OF SAID LP RECORD, JOE!

Just the good cuts!

WRECKLESS ERIC Big Smash! , (Stiff/Epic)

On Big Smash, Wreckless Eric combines the Dean Martin happygo-schmucky drunk of his stage persona with the “kick-me-I’m-Jew, ish” approach of Joan Rivers. In the song “Whole Wide World”, Wreckless’ mother informs him that there’s only one girl in the world for him and she’s probably stuck away in Tahiti. (Logical conclusion: Why not settle for the hag who reared you?). And on “Can I Be Your Hero?”, the singer asks the title question over and over again before the song ends with a rousing answer of “NO!!” Of course, this Portnoystyle self-deprecation is also selfregenerating—humor as defense; an endearing coping device and all that. For proof, take a listen to “There Isn’t Anything Else.” Now Eric’s voice may seem as fearfully death-obsessed as Woody Allen, but the music proves an alcoholic cure. Eric may always come up Dudley Moore short but he’s not cynical, just aware of “la condition humane” and has lowered his expectations accordingly (surfacing somewhere around the ninth circle of hell).

In rock ’n’ roll terms (finally!!), this makes for the strongest show of egalitarian elan since early Rod Stewart (way back before Rod had to ask if we thought he was sexy). Like early Stewart, Wreckless is simultaneously wise and innocent, sloppy and dignified. His Eliza Doolittle accent can be soft and cute (making all his loves seem like puppy love), and yet you’ve got all those leering snarls around the hooks.

The four sided Big Smash offers this dichotomy more strongly on its second album (released previously on Stiff as Whole Wide World). The new stuff (on sides one and two) is often less funny (his accent is not as wacked-out). But it’s more moving, especially on a song like “Broken Doll,” a ballad that wipes the smile off Eric’s face without making him seem like a traitor to humor (a tough move for someone whose wit already contains such sensitivity). Of the 25 tracks here there’s only about two or three that don’t burst unexpectedly from my lips at various hours of the day and night. (Things like the “Daytripper” allusion in “A Pop Song” don’t hurt none.) The older .stuff is recorded with'all the surface allure of moldy bread, but that’s okay for this kind of barroom pop. So make sure you go out and buy this thing cuz whatever they’re charging, it’s got to be a lot less than the price of getting really blitzed these days.

Jim Farber

BOBBV GO LOOP-Dc-LOOP, TCRRVGO IOOP-DC-U

ROBERT FRIPP I God Save The Queen

I Under Heavy Manners i

I (EG/Polydor)

TERRY RILEY Shri Camel

_(Columbia) _

By Michael Davis

1-2-3-4. 1-2-34. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3Ommmm.

The repetition of a musical phrase does strange things to the human mind and body. You know what happens when your favorite songs head into the chorus or main riff; you tap your foot harder or get up and dance or sing along or get so “into it” that you knock over your beer mug and generally make an ass out of yourself. But repetition of a pattern which gradually changes over an extended period of time can have the opposite effect, calming you down and relaxing you. Strange, right?

Now Fripp is aware of the way both kinds of repetition work. King Crimson’s early classic, “21st Century Schizoid Man,” was constructed around one of the heaviest riffs ever devised and as early as 1972, Fripp and Eno were working with tape loops, recording their duo LP’s, No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, apd evolving the technique that Robert now calls “Frippertronics,” and features on his new album. Without going into all the details, the technique involves recording sounds on a single tape loop going through two Revox tape machines; controlled properly, the patterns generated can sound very pleasing.

As you might have figured from, the alburn’s dual title, Fripp presents his music here in two different contexts. Side one was originally to be called Discotronics; funky bass and drum parts were overdubbed onto loops generated in live performances. “Under Heavy Manners” also features uncredited contributions by head Talker David Byrne, applying some radical vocal phrasing to Fripp’s shopping list of “isms.” It’s as interesting as the following “The Zero Of The Signi-

fied” is dull. True, you can dance to it but big-deal, you can dance to a lot of things, from eggbeaters to wishing machines (if you think pogoing to the Ramones at 78 r.p.m. is the ultimate, try getting down to a spin cycle).

Side A consists of pure Frippertronics and works a lot better. Blending together brief melodic fragments with his own patented fuzztone drones, he comes up with a music that is both technological and mechanical on one hand, yet individualistic and personal on the other. I’ll admit that I prefer his collaborations with Eno because of the richer mixture of sounds but there’s definitely something, to be said for this singular approach. Actually, this album would probably have had a lot more impact on me had it not coincided with the latest release by a real master of this sort of thing.

That man is Terry Riley. Back in the 60’s, Riley was a musical

pioneer, drawing from the Western classical tradition, jazz improvisors like John Coltrane, and Eastern sources to create long, drawn-out works based on repeated, overlapping melodies. He wasn’t alone in the field—working along similar lines were LaMonte Young, Philip Glass and Steve Reich—but Riley was the most influential of - the bunch, partly because his music had a lighter, more attractive air to it and partly because his records, In C and Rainbow In Curved Air, were released on Columbia, making them widely available. And I mean influential in the rock sphere as well as elsewhere; his mark is felt in the work of Eno, Cluster, and the sequencer-dependent electronic bands as well as mainstreamers like The Who—Townshend’s intro to “Baba O’Riley” is a direct nod to the man.

Shri Camel is Riley’s first American release in over ten years and is somewhat more Eastern-tinged than his earlier work, hardly a surprising development since he’s spend much of the past decade studying Indian ragas. It’s also one of the few records of recent years that has totally amazed me. On a technical level, I don’t understand at all how he can get so many sounds out of his modified organ at the same time, even with the digital delay units hooks up.

But on a more subjective level, this music simply gets me high; its buoyant, shifting textures bring out feelings of wonder and joy that rock hasn’t been able to inspire in me in a long time. My favorite rock ’n’ roll at the moment—Jam, Clash, Lydia Lunch—is tough stuff, music that acknowledges the difficult choices that each of us has to make to keep ourselves .together as Western Civilization goes through another cycle of (probably violent) change. Shri Camel floats above it all, a shining cloud dispensing hope that somehow all the contradictions can be solved and we can all eventually live in...

Harmony? I dunno. This repetition stuff can make you think weird thoughts. Whew.

HUMBLE PIE On To Victory

_ (Atco) _

Before there was 2-Tone Records, before the new wave was a tiny ripple, before even Jethro Tull there was Stevie Marriott—the original Cockney midget raver with a throat as raw as all 1$ & B. As the voice and front man of the Small Faces—welding soul vocals onto pop frames—he was a star of serious proportions in the U.K. by 1965. Autumn Stone and the cherished Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, both hard to track down today, are proof positive that his stardom was entirely justified. In 1968 he jumped ship to form a band with Peter Frampton, erstwhile heartthrob of the Herd (thereby making room in the Faces for Woody and Rod the Mod—ah history).

Thus Humble Pie: a band that trekked doggedly from one end of America to the other under the major league supervision of Dee Anthony and Frank Barsalona, until they had gained a formidable (in more ways than one) audience and lost their initial inspiration. All this was cast in concrete by a double live LP set, a souvenir for the growing hordes of witnesses to their slogging. Since Frampton left the band around the same time as the aforementioned inspiration, many have ascribed the Pie’s decline to his departure. A more accurate analysis is that a moderately interesting idea—soul inflected heavy English rock—can get tired on the road and onerous when it is frozen by the massive success of a live recording. As the people were packing in, the musical reasons for the venture were slipping away to be replaced only by economic opportunities and pressures. (A digression: it’s interesting to note that Frampton’s solo career, also directed by Anthony and Barsalona, followed precisely the same pattern as the Pie’s. Four earnest studio albums plus relentless touring equalled a hugely popular double live set leading to stultification and career coma. So much for Frampton’s farsighted sensitivity. One might also observe that the same two gents ran the same number on the J. Geils Band. They are just now showing signs of recovery.)

Meanwhile back in the oven the Pie was smokin’, which is invariably a sign of trouble ahead when you’re bakin’. As they laboriously rode the wave up onto the beach and into the (marking lot they did their best to tart up what was essentially the same show each time they took it out: tuxedos, lighted ramps and white runways, the Blackberries, horns, etc. Through all the remunerative stagnation and decline I never quite lost my taste for Stevie’s stage frenzy and, especially, his voice. When the Pie was burnt to a crisp and called it quits in 1975, Bad Company was already on the scene to fill the soulful white thud gap. Their career, arrogant and carefully plotted, is ten times more boring than Humble Pie’s ever was. And Bad Co.’s recalcitrance brought us Foreigner, about whom the less said the better. So why shouldn’t Marriott want another slice of platinum Pie? After all, it’s his recipe.

Actually, the reconstituted Humble Pie is potentially the best Pie ever, bringing new life and possibility to the original concept. Marriott and charter drummer Jerry Shirley have recruited Bob Tench (Beck, Hummingbird, Van Morrison) on guitar and vocals and imaginative N.Y. bassist Tony Hones. On To Victory, the album they’ve made together is full of promise—much of it unrealized as yet, but promise nonetheless — centered around adept and purposeful playing and, once again, Stevie’s indestructable voice. There are those who claimed that he’d burned out his pipes riding the boogie beast into the ground, but there’s nothing here but strong and gritty singing.

The record sounds pretty much the way you’d expect late Humble Pie to sound—Public Image Ltd. (or Bonnie Raitt) they ain’t. Structurally it’s similar to, say, Thunderbox (distinguished primarily by its “Early Guccione” inner sleeve), containing a selection of original songs of varying merit filled in with soul covers. But On To Victory posesses real vitality—the band uses the Pie formula as a ground for coming together rather than as a rote exercise to keep from coming apart. Bob Tench’s singing may not project Marriott’s warmth (& pain), but it’s absolutely world class compared with Greg Ridley’s insufferable bleats. The twin rhythm guitar lineup works well, especially-on side one as “Fool For A Pretty Face,” the energetic single, and “You Soppy Pratt” (an absurd title for a wonderfully raspy and sweet song) lead off the record with impact and power that the othej cuts can’t match. Side two has all the covers: a fair to middling “Baby Don’t Do It” which probably won’t improve in the extended live “I Don’t Need No Dr.” version for which it’s doubtless destined; a dignified and respectful bow to Otis with “My Lover’s Prayer;” and a tasty New Orleans tune, “Over You,” with a vocal that Stevie must have recorded in a phone booth.

I don’t mean to make too much of the reappearance' of an artist whose best work to date was old business 10 years ago, but I’m a sucker for his voice and it sounds encouraging (and encouraged) in this setting. On To Victory is a satisfactory first record from serious pros feeling their way toward real partnership. I wish them well and, considering the alternatives, you should too.

Jeff Nesin

THE CRAMPS Songs The Lord Taught Us _(IRS.)_

Recorded at Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis and produced by Alex Chilton (the Box Tops’ former Big Star), Songs The Lord Taught Us fries the brain cells like nothing under God’s holy firmament. The album recalls every forgotten sleazy diner, every stinking bus terminal, every weather-beaten drive-in you’ve ever been in or dreamt of. It unleashes a noise so loud, so uncontrolled, so jittering and shivering with the nightmares of a thousand-and-one restless nights, that one may be moved to run in panic, switch on the lights, and cower in the nearest closet.

If the B-52’s seem attuned to the camp of Cat Women of-the Moon and other sci-fi trash, the Cramps have mastered the aesthetics of horror schlock (It’s Alive, Last House on the Left). With his twotone hair and a face that looks like it’s been gnawed on by rats, guitarist Bryan Gregory undoubtedly eats gore for breakfast. The band’s other guitarist, Poison Ivy (Rorschach), possesses a frigid-andfrizzly grace that bears a striking resemblance to a dead-and-buried Jane Fonda.

Along with their image, the Cramps’ musical carnage is explicitly concerned with horrific content. What could be more frightening than an album which begins with these lyrics—“Baby, I see you in my TV set/I cut; your head off and put it in my TV set/I use your eyeballs for dials on my TV set/I watch TV since I put you in my TV set...’? Or, consider the horror story of “Zombie Dance,” a ghastly event (unlike the B-52’s wild beach parties) where nobody moves.

Although they do have a grisly and gruesome ability to strike terror in our hearts, that isn’t the Cramps’ forte. What’s so captivating about this band is their willingness to junk everything (musical ability, the record’s mix, fame and fortune) in favor of the elusive shudder of primitive rock and roll. With the discernment of genuine trash aesthetes, they combine the sloppy ineptitude of a mid-’60s garage band with the mental derangement of an American rockabilly Dixiefryer. The intent of their commitment to garbage is quite clear: It is the only way to topple the current hegemony of art-rockers strangling us with their thin neckties and boring us to tears with their cleancut rhythms. Amidst the sound of flushing toilets and rumbling garbage trucks on “Garbageman,” the Cramps’ message manifests itself as plainly as the untuned guitar reveal the band’s impulsive nature. “You ain’t no punk, you punk!” rants vocalist Lux Interior, baring his fangs while foam collects around the corners of his mouth. “Ya wanna talk about the real junk?!”

Yet the Cramps ain’t just talking trash. Their album may not contain faithful renditions of the classics, but there’s a muddled nobility in what the band does choose to recreate. The material ranges from Dwight Pullen’s rockabilly obscurity, “Sunglasses After Dark,” to the Sonics’ deadly explosion, “Strychnine.” In between, the band bombards us with musical salutes to the immortals — Count Five (“I’m Cramped”), The Trashmen (“The Mad Daddy”), and Link Wray (every cut). The album even concludes with a spooky interpretation of Little Willie John’s “Fever,” dramatically transformed into the mumbojumbo of a pyromaniac.

On Songs The Lord Taught Us, the Cramps ask the profound question that we must fact to overcome our present spiritual malaise: “Louie, Louie, Louie, Loui-i-i...the bird*s the word, and do you know why?” Clearly the Cramps do, for not since the Hombres’ Let It Out has there truly been a more authentic expression of the American punk sensibility.

Robot A. Hull

GRACE SLICK Dreams (Grunt Records)

This reminds me of one of my favorite bands—The Bubble Puppy.

Slick, aborting legacy and liason w/the Starship Enterprise, surfaces in her debut solo-alb outing as Julie Andrews singing Mary Poppins and the subsequent sounds of music ’re no less inadequate than what you’d expect.

A Grace Slick renaissance. The aftermath of bad karma and cesspool Starship-consciousness finds new vinyl and new life. Title track waxes of vision and pronouncement.

“Oh I believe in magic and I believe in dreams until I heard the thunder rumble I saw the mountains crumble...”

Crumbling mtns. a plausible dream-adventure; hand-in-hand with the orchestrated musical-soundtrack-type skeleton reinforcing wafts and tufts of vocal line, “Dreams” manifests trump cards for th’ current chart realities of this -disc.

Meanwhile, y’got some other manifestations of reality that Mole People can frolic and flop to. The ethnic-flavored “El Diablo” (not german or kneegrowbut Spanish!) weaves gtr-classical Spanish textures around vocals that do the same. And “Full Moon Man” ’s a lunar love ballad of “summer breezes” and “fireside eyes” and freezing “seasons.” The melody splashes around and the images ripple in response to the sun and the moon.

The heavy-metal facsimile bears it’s thorns in Side A’s floweryessence. “Angel Of Night” pricks the malaise of continuity here w/ raucous outbursts of electricity and thunder-bolts. Supercharged missiles of bone-raw energy explode side-by-side w/wailings on th*

Mark WeiSs/Lynn Goldsmith, Inc.

chorus and it sounds no less awesome than Uriah Heep or Toto @ their most devastating.

Thruout both sides, Slick’s slick chirpings emote a down-home pitchfork-type hysteria and match well with crescendos of quiet and tasteful simplicity evident in even more abstract passages (“Garden Of Man,” “Do It The Hard Way”). Performances reach their summit With perspicacious (chart-viable) production and musicians of sympathetic ilk. A creed supportive of this star’s talent and imagination and sense of contemporary urgency.

Stellar sounds from the godmother of West Coast rock.

Gregg Turner

THE MOTORS Tenement Steps (Virgin)

When Andy McMaster and Nick Garvey left the great pub rock band Ducks Deluxe a few years back it was considered a death knell for the group that is often credited with kicking off the whole punk/new wave trend in England. The word was that Garvey wanted to play guitar and thought he was better than Martin Belmont, which may have drawn a few laughs at the time. The yucks stopped when the brain searing debut album of The Motors came out in 77, with Garvey and Bram Tchaikovsky churning out a lethal two guitar sound for what was one of the most undervalued records in a year when people started to think rock & roll had been invented all over again.

Some of those same people might listen to Tenement Steps, the new Motors album, and claim the group is trying to copy Talking Heads or something (sheesh). In fact the truth is far more bizarre: this is (sort of) an old-fashioned concept album , lushly produced and meticulously arranged while sticking to the razor’s edge hard rock sound that characterizes the band.

The title song and “Love and Loneliness” are pretty ambitious departures for these guys. McMaster’s synthesizer programs are the featured element, beautifully illuminating the songs’ lush melodic structures. Garvey’s guitar fills work expertly into the arrangements, and his vocals, which could have been kindly described in the past as the croakings of a frog being speared with sticks, sounds fairly smooth and expressive. The biggest difference this time around is the rhythm section, bassist Martin Ace and drummer Terry Williams. These two were the mainstays of Man, the Welsh rockers who gave Garvey and the other Ducks their start on the Christmas At the Patti album. At the same time the Ducks were Man’s roadies, so here Garvey brings the influence full circle. Ace and Williams add considerably to the record’s vital, jumping rock energy. The rhythmic bottom is so air tight that there are plenty of opportunities for fooling around in the arrangements, like on “Metropolis,” where dense, music-hall background vocals are used to good effect and Garvey ends up playing call response with an orchestra.

The record ends on-a hysterical note with the rocking, Kinks-like “Modern Man,” a daffy put down of some nameless groover who “knows the sexy way to take off his socks” and ends on a verse that summarizes the band’s Ducks-inspired contempt for modem convention, an, attitude likely to earn them a failing grade on the poseur-o-meter;

“He’s never sexist/If he ever begins/He goes to the men’s groups/ and confesses his sins.”

John Swenson

FRANK SINATRA Trilogy (Reprise)

“...the Beatles...created a new musical consciousness, so that

artists who just shortly before had seemed to be the personification of high musical standards—think of Frank Sinatra!—within a few years became ‘old fogeys’ when confronted with this new consciousness. The musical standards of the world of popular music demolished in the process were the symbols of the moral, social, and political standards of the bourgeois world which had created the old pop

music. Those standards were the real target of the new movement.”

Joachim Berendt The Jazz Book The wheels have turned at least once more since the above quote was written and the Beatles themselves are now well enshrined in fogeydom, but the basic premise remains true and goes some way in explaining why at least a third of this 3-record set is such a disaster —the only kind of contemporary pop songs that Frank Sinatra can comfortably adapt to his own style are those that already exist on the periphery of the immediate and relevant pop scene.

But start at the beginning:

The first record of this trilogy is titled “The Past” and sub-titled “Collectables of the Early Years.” On it are ten songs from the 30’s and 40’s, most of them previously unrecorded by Sinatra, all of them respectable and memorable standards. The tempos vary from upbeat to ballad, Billy May’s arrangements are square but solid, functional, never cloying or effusive and Sinatra sounds just fine—apparently in control of his deep and mellowed timbre. It’s a small pleasant gem, this first record, and in this season of Air’s “Lore,” Blythe’s “In The Tradition,” Shepp’s gospel set, and others, a set of reflections on and in traditional modes seems admirably hip^nd is satisfactorily realized.

The second record, tho, ain’t so nice. Titles “The Present” and subtitled “Some Very Good Years” it presents Sinatra grappling with somebody’s idea of contemporary pop—the sort of peripheral pap mentioned above, mostly meandering ballads—and sounding more than a little strained. His rendition of George Harrison’s “Something,” tho one of the better choices, is particularly poor. Don Costa’s arrangement totally diffuses the tight symmetry of the melody while Sinatra’s attempts to own the tune by inserting a few syncopated “Jacks”— as in “You’re asking me will my love grow/Well I don’t know /But you hang around Jack/It might show”—are unintentionally hilarious. Two of the 10 cuts, “Just The Way You Are” and “Theme From New York, New York” succeed on Sinatra’s terms, the first because the easy lyricism of Joel’s song fits Sinatra like a glove, the second because it’s a bit of a parody to begin with and would be hard to misinterpret, a quintessential show stopper without a show which begs for the sort of bravura performance that Sinatra delivers with good natured ease. The rest are forgettable songs from Peter Allen, Carol Bayer Sager, the Bergmans, Neil Diamond—a tedious cross section of current fluffmeisters at their fluffy worse (oh well...you expected “Wrong ’Em Boy-O’?) Rounding out the second record is a horrendously coy number called “That’s What God Looks Like.” One would assume that things couldn’t get sillier.

But one would be wrong. The third record is titled “The Future,” subtitled “Reflections on the Future in Three Tenses” and it’s monumentally dumb. If it had'merely been pretentious it might have some merit but jeeze, Frank, this stuff is embarrassing. What it is is a suite of songs by Gordon Jenkins, vaguely biographical with wistful musings about outer space and romance and...what it’s like, it’s like a sequence from some forgotten Arthur Freed musical, a lavish interminable production number with dozens of sets and diaphanousgowned sprites acting as the chorus, going on and on without focus or wit. I’ve listened to it three times and I can’t imagine any condition, any circumstances under which I’d want to hear again.

Can a 64-year old pop icon find artistic satisfaction in today’s world? Judging from the first record of this set,'yes, from the second, only if he’s willing to go beyond the standard MOR fare and find some decent material, and from the third, only if he’s willing to avoid the kind of show biz jerk off that second-rate composers/arrangers are only too willing to supply for him. Meanwhile, only diehard fans will enjoy Trilogy, and even they wiH probably feel a little bit cheated.

Richard C. Walls

MX-80 SOUND Out Of The Tunnel _(Ralph) _

Did you see Breaking Away? Yeah, I admit that the bicycle-race climax got hokey in spots, but as a whole, it’s the finest film evocation of the reality of Midwestern life I’ve ever seen. That brief segment where we catch the postman trundling down Dave Stoller’s Bloomington, Indiana street, the hot summer light all shimmeringly, horrifyingly greengrey, in front of those blank white bungalows— that’s what it’s really like out here, that’s why all of us Dave Stoller types fire obsessed with fantasizing ourselves as Italians. We’ve got to do something to keep from screaming out loud.

The surreal-rocking MX-80 Sound resided in that same Bloomington, Indiana, for many more days and years of sensuous inertia than the visiting Breaking Away film crew could ever imagine, but MX-80 have never hesitated to scream (honk) (chord) their acute slices of Midwest life out loud. Never mind that MX-80 Sound contains a couple transplanted Easterners, nor that the band’s been relocated in San Francisco since 1978. The MX-80 guys are eternal Hoosiers, worthy chroniclers of the lights and Shadows of (Bobby) Knight land, of that psychic Mid-America so many of us call home, whatever our actual codes.

MX-80’s new Out of the Tunnel explodes with the plastic inevitability of Midwestern music of the spheres, post-Talking Heads pop that’s just as paranoiac and neurasthenic as David Byrne would re; quire, but that’s meanwhile conveyed through cheerfully sarcastic, Midwestern hospitality, fer crissake. MX-80 music that’s loud, raucous, sharp, dynamically intellectual, and always wonderfully fast—in a 1976 survey, three of the four present MX-80 mixmasters listed their favorite drug as “coffee.”

On my better days, I sometimes suspect that MX-80 vocalist/multiinstrumentalisi/self-contained promo man Rich Stim, a native New Yorker, is the actual player-to-benamed-later we Midwesterners received in return for shipping “our” Bob Dylan off to the N.Y.C. big leagues so many seasons ago. As a lyricist, Stim is a tireless cataloguer of bourgeois detail, of all the mundane usages of our daily “K-Tel Existence,” as Stim called it in an unrecorded song, Rich Stim is Rene Magritte with stereo headphones concealed in his bowler, permanently tuned in to every type of media bombardment known to man and/or beast, every crumb recorded with surreal exactitude for future recycling. Stim slings it all back with marvelously offhand fury, posing the goofiness of reality in half-spoken, rhetorical-throwaway verses, and then wailing it all back home in the choruses, via his careening vocals or his reckless, $100-deductible sax workouts.

Which is where guitarist Bruce Anderson comes in. Bruce is a birthright Hoosier, of all things, not to mention an aw-shucks, intense, unfailingly bohemian kinda guy, who would just as soon nuke your ears with his radioactive guitar fingers as look at you. Anderson’s pumping, grinding, supremely loud guitar rushes provide plenty of hooks for Stim to hand his barbed lyrics on, and the highly-combustible yin/yang of the StinYAnderson axis reminds me,of classic pop duos in the Pop/Williamson or Reed/ Cale class.

The “5th MX-80,” Rich’s wife, Andrea Ross Stim, is a guitar-flash and word-association expert every bit the peer of her old man, and she contributed four songs to Out of the Tunnel, including the brilliant love tune “Someday You’ll Be King”— presumably she dedicated the sentiments to Rich, but as he in turn sings the lyrics, the throne apparently reverts to Andrea. Is that liberation, or is that liberation?

“Not syndrums but twin drums” summed up the MX-80 rhythm section when Dave Mahoney and Jeff Armour would flail their kits in unison, but Armour departed the group before Out of the Tunnel, and Mahoney plays his drums that much harder on the new album, to preserve that crashing, rattling, eternally-crescendoed MX-80 rhythmic trademark. You figure I’m going to Bill Wyman Dale Sophiea —that veteran of countless StimAnderson chord changes—just because he’s a bassist? Yer right, Sophiea’s just enough of an unknown quantity to put out a solo album when no one’s looking. Provided, of course, that every aware household first makes Out of the Tunnel the pop smash it deserves to be.

Which is where I come in. Certain anti-social persons have complained that some of my record reviews are “ambiguous,” so I’m leaving no room for speculation this time: MX80 Sound are as crucial to America’s revolt into rock ’n’ roll style as the Ramones, and Out of the Tunnel is the best rock album of 1980, bar none. You can recheck that prediction with me on December 31, if you want, but unless Jim Morrison decides to come out of retirement before then, I expect to be voting MX-80 maximum points in all the year-end polls. (Sufficiently convinced fans who can’t find Out of the Tunnel at their corner K-Mart should send $6.plus $1 postage to Ralph Records, 444 Grove St., San Francisco, CA 94102.)

Richard Riegel

DARYL HALL Sacred Songs

(RCA)_

Let me tell you, science sure is amazing. I mean, this guy makes these tapes with guitars and whatall, loops them around and about, and the result is some unusual music (yeah) that is interesting or not, likeable or not, ambient or not— depending on, well, just depending; I keep thinking about Dark Shadows—and he names it after himself (why not?): Frippertronics. Suddenly, hooray, people are saying, “Art. Art.” Be that as it may, do you remember in John Waters’s Mondo Trasho (with, of course, Divine), whenever there’s any trouble—and there’s plenty—the Shangri-Las sing; “Oh no, oh no, oh no no no no,” looped again and again? That was fun, and so’s this, it’s all pretty stylish and maybe ahead of its time, and—

What? No, 1 know this isn’t a review of Robert Fripp’s new record, someone else is doing that. But I thought...Okay, this is a review of Daryl Hall’s solo album. Recorded in the summer of 1977, with Fripp producing, RCA wouldn’t release it until now. So who can be blamed for anticipating something tres daring? After all, Hall is quite stylish himself, and while he may not concern himself with ambience, he does zero in on attitude(s), not a dissimilar activity. AH in all, at the drop of the tone arm, one expected some BIG NEWS.

Oh no. Sacred Songs is fine to listen to and all, more nervous tension music, like X-Static, than blue-eyed soul. On the keyboards, Hall seems to have taken lessons fromLeon Russell, and he purposefully strains his voice to achieve a worldly-weary-wise John Lennonish tone. The best songs are “Something in 4/4 Time” which has harmonies as buoyant as those of the Beach Boys, a plus; “NYCNY,” an ever-appropriate tribute: “Well, it ain’t love/It ain’t art/It’s pressure/ pain in the heart that moves me;” and “Babs and Babs,” a strange

AngieCoqueran/Lyrin Goldsmith, InC.

mixture of a catchy Alan Price type tune and a lyric about two people named Babs who love each other. Or is it one person named Babs who loves herself?

My question is: What was the big deal? Frippertronics make(s?) only occasional appearances like, say, Groucho’s duck, and it’s (they’re?) a nifty change of pace. Sacred Songs is mostly a simple production and, even back in ’77, the duck would have been more surprising.

Jim Feldman

415 MUSIC (An Anthology of San Francisco Bands) _(415 Records)_

Y’edl remember San Francisco, don’t you? The immortal Dragnet ripoff starring Warner Anderson and Tom Tully— San Francisco Beat/The Lineup—started right there in that town where the Pistols broke up. Flower power and acidrock started there. So did the topless bathing suit craze, the worst daily newspaper of any major American city and a curious kind of provincialism that causes Friscans to summarily dismiss everything that didn’t originate in their smug fogbound burg. Which brings us to New Wave r&r; it didn’t originate there, but SF has had no qualms about taking the plunge (no swimming in Aquatic Park) into NW. In fact, this freshly minted anthology deftly documents SF’s indigenous new rock “scene” in livid detail.

Admittedly, that scene is now three years old. Which means, you don’t get to hear the Avengers, Nuns, Nuclear Valdez, Flintstone Trailers or Homo Milk. What you do get is a pop-oriented sampling of 11 Bay Area bands that turns out to be the best sleeper album in recent memory. What do I make it? Thusly. First listening, you realize Jack Casady (same guy) and his SVT get best track honors tied down with “Always Comes Back.” But then, while you’re polishing your baldpate or reading the neighborhood shopper, up come the Symptoms with “Simple Sabotage,” easily the ace aggro rocker here. Meanwhile, you’ve filed the Readymades’ title trace away as tepid theme music and you’ve written off the Mutants’ heavy metal powder burn as a real wound when the VIPs clobber you over the head with their superb post-Blondie deadpan (“She’s A Put On”). Subsequently, 391 (fronted by Bill Graham’s illegitimate son Jeff Olener) score an end run with the surprisingly subtle “Searchin’ For A Thrill,” the Donuts gal group rip it up in the amateur division and the Offs upset the whole rotting white reggae cart with an irreverent “I’ve Got The Handle” and you know something’s happening here, Mr. Jones (Jim built his last People’s Temple in Frisco).

So far, Times 5, Jo Allen & The Shapes and Sudden Fun fail to impress. But who knows what’ll happen? Fined breakdown, as oT this writing, shows Symptoms, VIPs, SVT and Offs way out front. Proving there’s still life in that toddlin’ Babylon by the bay that never naps. Plus, you get an authentic police radio report at the start of the LP, a sensaysh cover and a true sleeper LP that keeps on working. That in itself is getting harder to find these days, so when you find one, snatch it back and hold it. (To order: 595 Castro St., San Francisco, CA 94114.)

Gene “Dark Star” Sculatti

RODNEY CROWELL But What WiU The Neighbors Think _(Warner Bros.)__

You know how weird your radio can be early early Sunday morning, jammed with spooky-ass signals as ya creep down FM 407, dogged by tarantula clouds of chilled grey dawn through holy ghost mist ’n’ drizzle: vengeful screeds of fundamentalist hell-breathers who make Screamin’ Jay Hawkins seem like valium, gospel choirs membered with crazed Little Richards and Linda Joneses, staticy ancient blues waxing eerily evanescent, nasal hillbilly warble filled with grieving repentance for the sin of Eden’s Adam...

Well, maybe that’s my radio and not yours, but the road seems a fairly typical one, varying mostly in the type of pasture, grass or concrete, that it rolls through. The sort of universal slow track home from an all-day Saturday night bereaved of the earthly joy the how dead Daisy Kelsay disavowed as she rolled her stem eyes towards celestial reward, where city slicks and country rubes alike may occasionally seek communion with their muse with some prayer for delivery from torpescence that’s worth a damn. Like maybe Gram Parsons’ “O Lord grant me vision, O Lord grant me speed.”

It’s a great deal more than unfortunate that Parsons, who possessed a vision of country music skilleted in the deep fat of gospel, r&b, c&w, and rock & roll—not countrystyled music, but music viscerally country—didn’t survive whatever burning bush he encountered out in that California desert. Erratic though he was, Parsons spun often exquisite pathos, taking his sense of damnation and making of it the (frently) inspirational (as George Jones currently takes the mundane and turns it sublime in “He Stopped Loving Her Today”), similar to and yet different from Hank Williams; a doomed passion dancin’ out a death quest he maybe didn’t want, but just couldn’t avoid.

Which brings us to Rodney Crowell, who some, with a right enough logic, perhaps initially brow-furrowed from his songwriting associatidn with Emmylou Harris, have compared to GP. Crowell’s no Parsons facsimile, however. Not imbrued with the grievous angel vulnerability of one who has seen his devil or his deep blue sea, offering more a sense of the hazardous than the tragic, Crowell’s work is neither haunted nor as haunting as the Waycross waifs but rather more smartly salubrious and confident, displaying the proficiency of a keen-minded craftsman.

Unfortunately, But What...is a step and a half to the hindside of the previous Ain’t Liuing Lonh Like This (containing recent hits by Waylon Jennings, the ambitious “I’m in the Jailhouse Now”/“Jailhouse Rock”/“I Fought the Law” title cut, and that eunuch barber shop quartet, The Oak Ridge Boys’ “Leavin’ Louisiana in the Broad Daylight”), a tasty but perfunctory country-rock set that sorely misses the contributions of fiddler/ mandolinist Ricky Skaggs (whose honky tonk bluegrass swing solo, Sweet Temptation, is a dandy). “Here Come the ’80s” and “It’s Only Rock ’n Rock” are sharp and of the same lean, taut rhythms as “Baby, Better Start Turnin’ Em Down” (a profligate warning I prefer to any of Costello’s—a song Roseanne Cash butchered on her husband-produced Right or Wrong), and “Ashes by Now,” sung with a budgeted soulfulness, is the sort of sorehearted prettiness Crowell is adept at penning. But Guy Clark is no Dallas Frazier (his “Heartbroke” covered here as Frazier’s “Elvira” was on Ain’t Liuing Long) and Keith Sykes (“Oh, What A Feeling”) ain’t likely to ever match “A Fool Such As I.” The rest of the LP is stuff you’d think more likely to appear on recent Gene Clark, J. D. Souther, Michael Nesmith, or Poco albums. Maybe even (Christ) Firefall.

Puttin’ the benedictory hay in the barn, neighbors, Rodney Crowell seems intent on being dadgum good; what one wishes is that he would adjust his goal towards becoming goddamn good. .

j. m. bridgewater

BRUCE WOOLLEY & THE CAMERA CLUB _(Columbia)_

One would think that with all die record company cutbacks and all, the days of new artists nabbing a record contract on the coattails of one hit single were gone forever. Wrong. Bruce Woolley landed a deal with Columbia and all he had was one British hit—and he didn’t even perform it!

Well, that could be a little harsh. “Video Killed the Radio Star” ain’t a bad song, even if The Buggies’ hit version beats Woolley’s for sheer space-age techno wizardry and disco danceabiKty. And at his best, Woolley approximates the David Bowie of Hunky Dory or Sparks circa Kimono My House, barely able to restrain himself from demonstrating. all the considerable cuteness he can muster on each song. Fans of the Bowie/Bryan Ferry/David Werner school erf camp crooners may even greet this guy as a truly significant artist. But at their most excessive, these aforementioned performers create stylish fluff as fey and insubstantial as a limp handshake, and Woolley recalls the worst of these models while rarely creating anything of his own that might belong in their league.

To his credit, Woolley never attempts to cancel even his most capricious concerns: On songs such as “English Garden” (“I felt the money and I had the looks/I got the cars and beautiful books”) and “Dancing With the Sporting Boys” (can’t you just picture those spoiled Brits in their prep-school rugby outfits?), he writes about the idle rich as if he’s had first hand experience. And when he sings “You Got Class,” a formidable rocker, he talks of class as if it were a tangible commodity one acquires by osmosis.

Woolley does, however, come down to earth periodically, most notably on the album’s finale, ‘You’re the Circus (I’m the Clown).” Resembling Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown” and Dave Davies’ “Death of a Clown” in subject and melancholy tone, it is by far Woolley’s best lyrical effort: “My life is open I’m a book you never read...I treated you like royalty' but never saw your crown/Baby you’re the circus and I’m the clown.” After that, one might do better to ignore the lyrics altogether, fixating instead on a couple of energetic pop-rockers, “Johnny,” a “Suffragette City”-like ditty about the groupie-star relationship, and “Flying Man,” an unabashed rip-off of Dave Clark 5’s “Glad All Over.”

No denying it, Woolley’s got talent. The songs are well constructed, the arrangements are nimble, and the sincerity is beyond question. But Woolley can’t quite pull it all off. He lacks Ferry’s sensuality, Bowie’s lyric edge or Russell Mael’s vocal acrobatics, leaving his primary weakness exposed: he’s got no soul. I shoulda known when my friend Molly told me about his new York stage performance: “he did the whole show in this big, puffy space suit, and he didn’t even sweat!”

Gary Kenton

JIMI HENDRIX Nine To The Universe _(Warner Bros:)_

Jimi Hendrix and his frangible canticles to the plenteous winds of planet love were mainstays in the psychedelic ferity of the ’60s and early 70s. His music not only soundtracked the peace grunts as they swept into the streets like enraged demon ants bathed in the alien mists of tear-gas, but also, documented the real grunts as they huddled together in drug-crazed jungle nightmares waiting for the big o-d to come leaping into their midst in a banshee wail of searing metal and torn flesh. Hendrix’s work made a magical connection which gave both of these cinematic pools a common ground. Inescapable and brittle, his music reached into the penetralia of America’s darkening heart and unearthed a new kind of existence filled with endless waves of energy. It also became immortal. Or so the corporate necromancers would have us believe.

More fusty tapes have been “discovered” and released containing Hendrix’s music than any other musician of his times. Albums like Crash Landing, and Midnight Lightning, which had Hendrix literally jamming from the grave, were nothing more than calculated attempts to accrue necrosimoleons/from a gullible public. Others like the imported Loose Ends, and War Heros contained music that was as close to the spirit of the man as anything he’d released during his lifetime. And it’s just this kind of irresponsible and arbitrary approach that has led many of the new generation of compotating mega-teens to dismiss Hendrix as “old” hippie music. It’s a shame. The little gits don’t know what they’re missing.

With the release of Nine to the Universe, v the soul of Hendrix is once again lolling around in the windy corridors of planet love, just waiting to strike out at futureshocked zombies lost in the moving death of disco and herniated heavy metal. The Shogun of sonics is finally ressurrected with fitting reverence. This record will be a joy not only to the mega-teen, but also the booboisie that are their parents, those leftover fleshpools of the ’60s whose only emotive hard-ons come when they recall those “wild” days of tear-gas battles and search and destroy, those times when they were first forced info the fast descriptions of reality and commitment. This record won’t make Frank Marino very happy.

It is with beamish pride that I say this album is a bolide in the fermament of the dawdling ’80s, racing back to the old ideals with barbaric fury. Nine to the Universe is a mote in the eyes of the melt-down of modern music, with toonographs like “Easy Blues” and “Drone Blues” showing the unfettered creative spark Hendrix possessed. He flows in between the rest of the instrumentation with a fleering you-can’tcatch-me attitude, his guitar a complete extension of his soul. Sonic, fables abound. Velocity is at hand.

Nine to the Universe is a monochrome to sonic pyromancy. It evokes ediolons of lost loves, lost prices, and lost emotions, and performs its task with a soulful strut and a nod to the gods of life. Soul music at its functional best.

Joe (Bantling) Fernbacher

, THE BEATLES Rarities

_(Capitol)_

Rarities is the first release in a planned trilogy of Beatle albums to be issued by Capitol over the next 12 months as part of a marketing strategy “to see if there’s any audience left for this kind of thing,” as one Capitol staffer recently put it.

During the latter part of this year, Capitol (which is not, despite rumors to the contrary, in the process of changing its name to the Advanced Institute for Recycled Recordings) will be releasing (in the best Hendrix tradition) the two follow-up albums to Rarities: Oddities and Casualties.

According to the Capitol staffer (who has asked to remain anonymous), Oddities will contain such, well oddities as a reggae version of “Hello Goodbye” and alternate takes of “Money” and “Come Together” with vocals by Allen Klein.

Casualties, aproposed two-record set, promises to be the most interesting of the three. One disc will contain such gems as a remixed quad version of “Revolution 9” as well as assorted outtakes from the Beatles’ Christmas records, while the second will house .previously unreleased recordings made by the Beatles between 1967 and 1969 while they were on LSD.

The strategy is that, shouldthese albums sell, other projects currently in the planning stage will also see the light of day. These include a complete Beatle cover version of Their Satanic Majesties Request (recorded late one night as a lark between sessions for Magical Mystery Tour) and an album of various Beatle songs especially remixed for discos. Explains the Capitol staffer: “Many DJs have expressed concern over the past couple of years that the Beatles never recorded a disco song, so we’re taking steps to rectify that situation by modifying numbers like “Get Back” and “Revolution” specifically for that purpose.

“In addition, don’t forget that we’ve. got the Christmas records themselves as well as all those Paulis-dead clues to work with.

“And then there’s the tapes from The Beatles’Rock V Roll Circus, a 1967 television project that very few people know about.

“So, with careful planning, I’d estimate thatf we’ll be able to continue unloading Beatle albums for at least the next 15 years, minimum.” ★ ★ ★

Alright, so a joke’s a joke, but this piece of dredge-dreck actually exists —and if I heard you say something about scraping the bottom of a barrel, you’re barking in the wrong league, boyo. What we’re talking about here is Grade A, Ed Gein-style | graverobbing.

The ironic thing is that there’s actually a few interesting items here, nonetheless. Of chief importance are two tracks from a George Martin/ Beatle mono mix of The Beatles, both of which are sufficiently different enough from the stereo mix to warrant some attention.

However, most of this stuff is the typical B-side scrape-up that you’d expect to adorn a seemingly less important compilation like the Beatles Again/Hey Jude album.

As it stands, though, the addition of several notes to “I Am The Walrus” and “Penny Lane” is just plain necroid null ’n’ void (and the inclusion of the uncropped-but-stillsilly “butcher” cover on the innersleeve does little to alleviate the ghoulish stench which pervades this album).

But then again, what else would you expect from a so-called Beatles “rarities” collection which (A)— justifies the inclusion of “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)” not because it contains a hot sax solo by Brian Jones and the talents of only two Beatles (John and Paul) but, rather, because (according to the liner notes) it “has never before been released on a U.S. album” and (B)—describes a two second studio outtake sound-snippet as being “not actually a song...’?

Where’s Dr. Winston O’Boogie when we really need him?

Jeffrey Morgan