Angels From Down Under

Angels From Down Under

THE BEAT GOES ON

NEW YORK-Wham, bam, thank you ma’am! Angel City grind out the kind of classic rock ’n’ roll set that leaves one shaking at New York’s Great Gildersleeves, a bar whare drunken surburban longhairs and neighborhood bikers usually soak up their nightly dosage of crotch-banging local heavymetal acts.

Tonight, even the regulars seem to feel the edge in-the music of this incredibly vital Australian quintet, booked rather foolishly into a room whose p.a. cap’t handle their onslaught. The cracking spreakers seem to irk everyone but the band, who wail through the problem with fervid intensity.

The sweaty set is a tribute to the talents of Australia’s most popular current band. Like almost anyone new these says, they are being lumped into the “new wave” without much thought as to their total sound. But the metal mongers at Gildersleeves seem to get the point—here’s a great new rock ’n’ roll band, unlimited by category of some silly trend typing.

“I think we’re a rock' ’n’ roll band,” says lead singer Doc Neeson in response to the issue. Curiously enough, his onstage demeanor gives Angel City a double-edged appeal. A whirling, punching, dancing androgyne who spews out lyrics with a neat snarl, Neeson seems to possess new wave energy with old wave antics and sex appeal t-both effective. Offstage he’s soft-spoken, smart, and quite mild-mannered, save for the most intense eyes one will ever stare into.

“Where people these days are talking about new wave, they’re generally implying an energy level. And in terms of our music, we really play full on—it’s a very ‘on’ live act. So yes, we’re new wave in that regard.

“But not like Elvis Costello, as much as I like him. But there is another new wave component in our thinking, which is being back down to earth again, rather than waiting two years like Steely Dan to bring out the next album. Well, that’s how they want to do it, that’s fine. They’ve become like studio bands, and we’re not that. We’re a live band...we sweat. On the records too.”

The core of Angel City (nee the Angels, until a U.S. album release forced them to change the name to avoid legal disputes with the useless U.S. band Angel) is Neeson and brother guitarist Rick and John Brewster. The three of them started out as an acoustic jug band (Neeson still confesses that “it’s just electric folk music as far as I’m concerned”) and on moving into electric rock ’n’ roll recruited the rhythm section of Buzz Bidstrup and Chris Bailey on drums and bass, respectively.

A groundswell of local rock acts in Australia set the tone for a small club scene in which Angel City developed a strong loyal following in their native Adelaide. They recorded their first disc through the help of producers Harry Vanda and George Young, the two ex-Easybeats now known as Flash and The Pan.

For the past two years the group has reaped the benefits of their hard work Down Under, sweeping Ram Magazine’s yearend polls and garnering a wide and now fanatical audience. One of the best rock videos I’ve seen yet is a simple live Angel City show in what looks like a large gym. The fierce intensity of both audience and band makes one wonder just how wrong our impressions of Australia might be.

“People are not aware of it here in America,’’ says Neeson of the Aussie rock scene. “They think Australia is Olivia-Newton -John, The Bee Gees and Little River Band, anchthat AC/DC are some sort of aberrance— some sort of freak thing that escaped. You folks don’t yet know about bands like Mental As Anything—“The Nips Are Getting Bigger” is their song. Another band, Flowers, is real good, and Midnight Oil. JoJo Zep’s a big band up from Melbourne—contemporaries of the Sports. There’s a whole thing going on there you just don’t know about here.

“There’s not a lot of product coming out of Australia yet, mind you. But here we are, and I think there’s going to be a lot of bands behind us.”

Interestingly enough, Neeson almost seems more interested in promoting the idea of Australian quality than really hyping his own band—not the usual r ’n’ r attitude. But there’s a reason why he’s so nationalistic, at least in musical terms.

“Five years ago we had a huge inferiority complex about Australian acts in Australia. They just weren’t considered equivalent to international acts*. The radio came down particularly hard on them.

• “But because of Australian acts building up followings and a whole circuit of places to play, there’s now..-.what is it?...confidence...for the kid$, that they’re going to see an act that’s as good as any international act. And that’s how they view Australian bands now.”.

No doubt Neeson knows Angel City’s quite good, but he’s a modest sort. But with their Australian confidence and success, the band is no doubt ready for their international impact. I wonder if Doc will be surprised if they turn out to be one of the best rock bands of the 80’s. I sure won’t be—they already sound like they are.

Black Slime Reaches Jersey

RIO GRANDE, N.J.-Eugene and Ona Buonocores had finally moved into their dream house. The all-modern, $62,000 split-level home, nestled away on scenic Teal Road in this unlikely Jersey suburb represented everything the Buonocores had ever dared hope for. That is, until the night they encountered...The Black Slime!

The damp, malodorous goo —bearing a disgusting scent similar to . David Gilmour’s hair—spread from the walls to the floor; from the. furniture to the Buonocores themselves. It seemed to come from nowhere and soon coated everything. Their doctor advised them to get out when Eugene developed respiratory problems, and they took off faster than you can say “Amityyille,” leaving behind all of their most cherished possessions, including an unopened package of Bozo brand hotdog buns and Ona’s new Knit-Wit craft set.

Firemen and health officials wearing gas masks have since entered the abandoned home to take siime samples which have completely stumped the police chemists. “They just walk through and shake their heads,” says Eugene wearily. Sounds like they must have been watching Dragnet.

While in the presence of two gigantic Atlantic Electric oil storage tanks containing 400,000 gallons of kerosene practically in the be-slimed couple’s backyard have aroused some suspicion, utility officials claim there is no connection. Yeah, sure—on the Coincidence Scale, this ranks right up there with Watergate and human evolution.

When asked if they thought it had anything to do with their names, both Eugene and Ona were baffled.

Rick Johnson

Rob Patterson

Amerika Eats Its Young: Tonio K. Digests The Foodchain

NEW YORK—“Label two, record two.” Tonio K. shakes his head, issues a resigned laugh, and plops down in an available seat. Arista Records has got him table-hopping at an album-preview party and even worse, he has to listento his new LP, Amerika (Cars, Guitars and Teenage Violence) in the same room with the media. Isn’t this dreadfully embarrassing, I wonder, and Tonio agrees that even the cardboard beak Tie’s got propped on hjis schnozz affords only partial protection from the assembled cynical hordes.

Yet the prospect of having cheese ball canapes deducted from his royalty statements is infinitely preferable to the bottom line that Epic insisted upon for his follow-up to the highly acclaimed surrealistic adventure, Life In The Foodchain. “It got to where they had a specific producer they wanted me to work with, and were insisting that I at least consider doing an acoustically-oriented album! And we finally said, ‘You must be high, y?u gotta be kidding.’” Consequently, the K. and his entourage of Jon Deviriari, Worthless Management, and Irving Azoff, owner of Full Moon Records, revved their engines and sped into the arms of Clive, who at least seems to have a sense of humor about Tonio, surely the wofld’s most unlikely Californian.

PROOF VAN HALEN LIVES IN DREAMWORLD 11

Unknown to haploss pawn* David Lae Roth and Michael Anthony, the years of steady eardrum aggravation have taken their toll I Yep, the pounding thuds these squeamish squareheads produce have been proven to affect Van Helen's hearing and vision, as these photos clearly show I Above, the giggly pair perceive themselves sitting next to a naked female fan when In fact, as thip lower, unretouched photo reveals, their "naked female fan" is actually Roth's twin brother Hymle i I Doctors report that these perceptual disorders will increase with time, until—as one doctor sadly put it—"these poor schmoes will think they're performing when they're actually going to the bathroom I” That the opposite would also be true was, of course, left unsaid.

“I like the weather,” he offers as a defense for residing in the land of easy go. “I just spend most of my time reading^ writing and sleeping. There’s nothin’ else out there that interests me. Just given my attitude, which is pretty obvious, and my whole bent, if I had grown up here in New York I really think I would be dead by now. ’Cause I was lucky enough to grow up on a fucking farm! I grew up 20 miles from nowhere in a 20-room house with no brothers or sisters until I was 12. So I’ve had these thoughts for as long as I can remember, haven’t been as articulate about them, but luckily I had them in California, where I could fall back on something, literally. I almost go crazy as it is.

“The California press doesn’t particularly like me. I think if started with that crack about Jackson Browne—(Who could forget “‘Fountain of Sorrow’ my ass, motherfucker, I hope you wind up in the ground” from “Hatred”)—and this time out, they either ignore me or say bad things about me. And I could tell ’em much worse shit than that!”

Which leads Tonio to recall a recent meeting with certain Los Angeles heavyweights, one night at the Atomic Cafe. “1 was hanging out at the jukebox, talking to Bill Murray,” he fake-fawns, with a Steve Martinesque delivery. “He goes back and sits down at his table with Rohstadt, and as they were getting ready to leave he comes back and says, my friends would kinda like to meet you, and I’m goin’, what? So I’m talking to her and she said, ‘J.D. and Don and Jackson are constantly talking about your record, they love it, they’re giant Tonio K. fans.’ I went, ‘wait a minute, has Jackson heard “Hatred?”’ and she said, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ and I thought, ahhh, I’m gettin’ jerked off here. Later I came to find out that while she hadn’t heard the record, they did in fact like it a lot. Someone who supposedly was there when Browne first heard ‘Hatred’ said he almost fell off the couch when it came on. He mUsta picked up that it wasn’t a personal dig, it was about being that mellow. I’m not.”

No one is likely to be offended by the' looney tunes which comprise Amerika, whose title and open attitude are borrowed from Franz Kafka’s early 20th century novel of the same name. As for the subtitles, “it’s almost allegorical. This is a teenage country, America. It’s the 50’s image with the Ford and the guitar and all that, , but America strikes me as a very young and adolescent country who’s really fucking up into a violent era.

“That j-ord is my car. It’s a deathtrap. Plus, Im one of the worst drivers I’ve evqr known. So bad, that my latest exploit was to run down, in broad daylight, in a crosswalk, a pedestrian in Hollywood. I did. I looked to the left, nobody. Looked to the right. Thisis down Vine Street, the day we were mastering the record. Started my entrance into the intersection. The next thing I know (here’s this guy clambering around on my hood and my first thought is, what the fuck is this asshole doing on my hood? Then I realized I had just hit this fucker in the crosswalk! So I knocked him to his knees and I’m apparently getting my ass sued off.”

But Can They DoThe Hoochiekoo

NEW HAVEN, CT-Some wise funny once said that an infinite number of monkeys using an infinite number of typewriters would eventually,crank out the complete works of Shakespeare or even last week’s TV Guide if given the opportunity.

Possibly, but probably not in time for the December issue. Dr. William Bennett, a Yale University statistics expert, fed this idea to a computer in another fine demonstration of American educational priorities.

According to his calculations, a trillion monkeys typing 10 letters per second with no banana breaks would take a trillion times longer than the existence of the universe simply , to type out the phrase “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

Dr. Bennett is now engaged in calculations aimed at discovering how long it would take them to type a Beat Goes On item.

Rick Johnson

This was not a terrific start to a new decade, thinks Tonio, who wears a badge reading “skip the 80’s,” which he extracted from Clive Davis by threats. Actually , Tonio would be content to put his band on tour, sell some product, and hook the Worthless organization to foreign anchors, but what he’s being asked is to define his true place in society. The fqsttalker holds a long moment and replies, with feeling, “I hope someday, through my music, to convince all the peoples of the world, regardless of race, color or creed, to wear gloves,” Tonio K. silently rises from his seat, sneaks a' look at the office doorknob to make sure it isn’t turning from Out There, and slips into some future fantasy.

Toby Goldstein

5 YEARSAGO

Sure Thing, Cher

As the release date for the Allfnans’ next got ever closer, Dicky Betts decided that the ohly way things were gonna get finished up was if he just called up Gregg ^t Cher’s L.A. digs and rousted the ol’ boy home to Macon. Gregg came a runnin’ and it’s all wound up. Meanwhile Cher herself told a local L.A. TV interviewer that the Brothers were absolutely and unequivocably not gonna break UP-

The Rerun Report: Now It Can Be Told

HAMTRAMCK, MI - Every spring there’s a Strawberry Fesival in Hamtramck. This is pleasant time of the year...the promise of a world renewing itself beckons to the residents of that estimable town. Old acquaintances are seen again; new friends are made. Some people lie hear death in nearby hospitals. But they are Polish, and they have lived good, long, full lives.

Just one week after this year’s festival, Hamtramck’s favorite sons, the Reruns, are playing right down the street at Detroit’s Bookie’s Club 870. Although the cancerous and bedridden ‘will be unable to attend the performance, their failing hearts will surely be with them. The ties of the Polish are strong and run deep.

And here they are: the Reruns. Now in the fourth year of their five-year plan, and with two smaczne/ singles under their belts, the boys are headlining the area’s most exclusive nightspot. With the possible exception of the Thunderbird Lanes. Can a bidding war, or a shot of vodka, be far away?

Of course not. Reruns bassist A1 Phife generously offers me some jalcohol and away we go. Cordiality is the byword backstage with the Reruns. We talk, generally in English, about their career, tonight’s show, and the Detroit scene in general.

The Reruns are a bit of an oddity in Detroit. /They dress more-or-less normally, they appear to haive no axes to grind, they write excellent material, and they are adept musicians. In other words, they’re lousy copy. They tell pie about their two junkets to New York, the first at Max’s (“good”), the second at Hurrah’s (“fair”) . I ask them why they don’t have more of a feel for Detroit’s streets and drummer George Ricardo tells me they’re going to cut up chunks of 1-94 and bring them on stage. I ask them what they think of local journalism student-cum-rock maven Kim McAuliffe, who had just run a feature on them in one of Detroit’s major dailies. “I liked her dad’s bathing stance,” quips guitarist and knowledgeablebaseball fan Kenny Haskell.

And so it goes, until showtime. As is de rigeur, it consists almost entirely of original material. The songwriting (and vocal) chores are handled by Haskell and fellow guitarist Dave Bodine. I note that literally every composition concerns the. boy/girl relationship, and it makf s me wonder if things are really that tough in Hamtramck. But, whatever motivates the Haskell/Bodine songwriting ethos, the Reruns are actually believable up there.Imagine listening to the following:

I’m working on you, honey And one of the^e days, I’m ' gonna get through

You, honey, I hope I get you one of these days. *

and ' not only suppressing a chuckle, but actually enjoying it. It looks like talent will out, even, occasionally, in pop music.

What holds these uncomplicated lyrics together is a certain melodic ingenousness and the pipes to deliver. Their better compositions—which are numerous—feature honest-to-God _ hooks. Who would’ve thought a bunch of young guys could really get the knack, all on their Polish own?

Where do they go from here? Their first single, ‘‘Since You Gotta Cheat” b/w “So So Alone” (write Tramick Music, P.O. Box 05161, Detroit, MI 48025) remains one of the strongest independent releases out of Detroit. Their second disc, “Bored To Tears” b/w “She Hates Me Now” (FTM Records, P.O. Box 638, Plymouth, MI 48170) suffers only in comparison of production quality. There’s a four-song demo in the can, with another single release planned, and one more New York swing planned for June.

’Copyright © 1979 Tramick Music ) i

Meanwhile, life will go on pretty much as usual in Hamtramck. Two years ago, the Reruns played the Strawberry Festival; now they are paid-infull members of Detroit’s unsigned elite. “You’ve been bored to tears for all these years, the least you could do was tell me,*” Haskell sings to some anonymous steady, but it might as well be directed at the record-buying public.

It’s painful to think of the countless good , people who must die before these guys start playing ball with the majors. You’re damned right we’ve been bored to tears. Give me a bidding war. Give me a shot of vodka.

J. Kordosh

Barabbas Versus Solar Power

BERKELEY, CA-So you thought those plastic dashboard crucifixes had no historical basis for glowing in the dark. Well, think again: on Good Friday last, over 200 theology students combined a re-enactment of Jesus’ path to Calvary with a protest of the University of California’s nuclear weapons research, according to the Berkeley Barb. The imaginative demonstration, which attempted to “equate the suffering of innocent victims of nuclear weapons research, development, and use with the trial, torture, and crucifixion of Jesus Christ” culminated in the pouring of human blood over a makeshift cross.

Although the Osmonds pointed out long ago that He’s the light of the world, theologiahs had failed to draw the obvious conclusions until the recent Californian protest. Now that there is some evidence that the Romans nuked the Lord, however, like-minded scholars are researching Jesus’ friendly relationships with whales, baby harp seals, and Jerry Brown.

J. Kordosh