THE BEAT GOES ON

THE BEAT GOES ON

Be Real Kraut For Me, Baby!

CINCINNATI—The statuesque, light-brown-haired beauty strides purposefully past the expectant necklace of fans strung out along Vine Street, and disappears into Bogart’s front door with outside-world savoir faire. I can feel my German-ancestry racial unconscious (among other appendages) standing on end. Nico, the Madonna of the punk/new wave movement of the past 10 years, the living legend who couldn’t care less, has come to Cincinnati.

For reasons known only to herself. We hadn’t realized Nico was even touring the States, when she suddenly showed up listed for a humble Sunday evening on Bogart’s early-summer schedule, sandwiched between comprehensible-enough dates for the Jags and for Trillion. The sketchy radio spots for the show cited-one “Andy Warhol”—could it really be the same Nico, so many years after she’d exhausted the 15 minutes off* m* Warhol had offhandedly bestowed upon her?

And why Cincinnati? I wonder tonight. Does Nico remember—and wish to commemorate —the Velvet Underground’s still-reverberating stop here on their primeval tour of the American heartland in 1967? Or has her German blood-sense picked up on that new tingle in the antique term “Cincinnati”, as the city’s name has quickly mutated into a rock ’n’ rollusage synonym for the Gotterdammerung of the recent Whoconcert tragedy? Either way, Nico is here with us tonight. “Did you see her?” shoots through the line of eager ticketholders, like heroin through the veins of the mythical Velvet Underground fan, as Nico vanishes behind the door.

By the time we’re all installed at Bogart’s tables, some of the marquee-lit reverence of the sidewalk has dissipated. It’s clinking beer mugs as usual (a homey Kraut touch, of course), as a lone Nico roadie fiddles with the assortment of obscure-looking electronic gizmos littering the stage. I’m well beyond Ohio’s legal drinking age, but in another sense I’ve entered Bogart’s under false pretenses tonight, as I have to own up that after many years of searching, I still haven’t been able to come up with any of Nico’s four, long-deleted solo albums, not that my usual insistence on finding fine used copies of old LPs I want—just between you and me and Nico, we Germans have our little quirks— has helped much in this marbleindexed quest.

Except for my long-standing acquaintance with the first Velvet Underground album, my anticipation of what Nico will do here tonight is as much a blank page as it must be for those fraternity boys in front of us, already hooting and snorting in their beers. The roadie tunes the keyboards ever swirly-finer, burps a final vocal test into the microphone, and—and starts singing! Of course he’s never been Nico’s roadie, just his own, as it’s Cincinnati’s John “Eno” Bender, master of sequencing and phasing and all those worthwhile electronic terms.

Bender’s droning, mutedpulsation electronics, and oddman-out lyrics are undoubtedly framing a perfect blank-out introduction to Nico’s show, but the crowd is getting a bit restive. They don’t seem appeased even by Bender’s wonderful restatement of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” as a ponderous, Flying Lizards-like prose poem. As Teresa points out to me, tonight’s scene has become exactly like one of those ancient episodes of The Beverly Hilbillies or Petticoat Junction, when the salt-of-the-earth protagonists have blundered into a “beatnik coffee house”, and some cat with fake whiskers and beret is spouting fake-dada poetry, just so Jethro or Steve or whoever can feel superior and smug over his terminal bumpkinness for the twentieth time.

Another Ten G’s And They Could've Had Godzilla

TOKYO—Flash! Margaret Trudeau, the most utterly meaningless celebrity since any given Gabor sister, has finally been given a purpose in her life.

The management of a posh new disco in Tokyo’s internationally ignored Roppongi district has offered Ms. Trudeau $20,000 to make an appearance at their grand opening.

Her official duties, Recording to the contract, are to “sit and dance.” Dancing doesn’t appear to be a problem, but the estranged (some just say strange) wife of Big Moose Pierre Trudeau and former ickmate of Ron Woods had reportedly been taking sitting lessons from the reigning expert in that field, Orson Welles.

Hey, now that she’s got all that money, maybe she can finally afford a pair of underpants!

Rick Johnson

JOHNNY ROTTEN WISES UP!!

"The rock biz may be fun," admits former rock hero and current Dristan addict Johnny Lydon, “but good lord how it aggravates my post-nasal drip !" Lydon, who jogs five miles a day and enjoys health foods immensely, is seen here at his current favorite night spot, L.A.’s Vic Tanny Disco. “Glad I gave up those creepy Sex Pistols," says the much-in-demand nightclub singer, “never did like their attitude, anyway." Lydon's upcoming Addidas endorsement and appearance on ABC’s The Love Boat may signal a return to the basics for the elegant crooner. "Lately I've really enjoyed just getting down and boogieing," smiles the once-famous punk. “Now I just wanna relax in my Jacuzzi and get into selling real estate." Time may march on, readers, but Johnny Lydon keeps the faith !

Bender soon announces his set finished, to thunderously sarcastic applause, and not a few persons in the house are grimly convinced that Nico will soon more than justify the four bucks they plunked down for their ticket, with the first note to issue from her mysterious lips. At length Nico appears on stage. She’s still a commanding presence in her long brown hair, flowing blouse and pants, and leather boots, she’s still grinning a cryptic smile as she sits down to her Protestant-ethic harmonium. The television-parody feel of Bender’s set persists, as Nico’s accompanist, a balding Bill Murray-type, comes on stage carrying a simple electric stick.

They launch into their first song with Nordic dispatch, Nico’s powerful, dusky voice slicing through the spare moodiness of their electrified instruments with a startlingly icy jab. But her lyrics—as dolorous, heavy, and darkly-assented as they feel—aren’t readily accessible to us album-less, gapinghorde lumpenproles. Certainly Nico is performing something from one of her solo sets—but which? What? Who? Lyrical exegesis is not for the faint of heart tonight. As quickly as Nico gets the mid-song mood of her composition rolling, she cuts it off, and looks up from her harmonium with a shy smile of triumph.

Nico continues to pack off her songs in this intense but abrupt fashion all through the evening; apparently she’s favoring us with a goodly portion of her “greatest hits”, but only a few connoisseurs in the room have access to the master checklist. I’m indulging in the relative contrariness of enjoying Nico’s blank-out performance rhythms, even if I understand only random fragments of her English (or are they German?) lyrics. But some of the other marks in the club aren’t so charitably catholic in their musical tastes, by this time.

Some of the boozers, well into their third bender of the evening, so to speak, are clapping in an off-speed staccato to Nico’s rhythms, in attempt to rattle her frigid self-assurance. She just smiles at the shouts for “Femme Fatale,” and offers up another of her own enigmatic tunes, instead. People begin walking out on Nico, and perhaps as an “upbeat” concession (if those words exist in her multilingual vocabulary), she then performs the Doors’ “The End,” though even the late Jim Morrison might require a lyric sheet to recognize his brainchild within Nico’s uniquely personal anschluss of the song.

Having satisfied her goldenoldie quota for the evening, Nico returns to her own songs, to the ever-sparser audience’s fatal bemusement. One heckler tries another tactic: “Do a new song!” he yells. “What’S the name of it?” cooly inquires the imperturbable Nico. A few more songs of her choice, and Nico abandons the stage to her accompanist, who at once begins plucking his musical stick like a good ol’ Anglo-American guitar, and singing a passably sardonic version of James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good).”

Overwhelmingly roused by this funky capstone to a perversely rewarding evening of odd-music performances, we straggler loyalists begin clapping and shouting for the regal Nico. The summer soldiers thus weeded out with Teutonic efficiency, Nico returns to the stage, and obliges us precious few with her rather heartfelt reworking of “Deutchland Uber Alles”. The implied contrast (but astonishing similarity) between the last two songs, these twin bleats of racial chauvinism from Brother James and Mother Germania, is so crushingly brilliant I can hardly get up afterward.

One guy down in front is so strangled with worship of Nico that he begins clawing and grasping desperately toward her body, but his arm is too short, and it falls into a pleading, sinisterly-familiar salute. Nico fixes him with a mock-indignant scowl, and laughs drily: “I am naut a Nazi!”

The lights go on over the stunned crowd, and we longingly watch the imperious, stillsmiling Nico walk toward her dressing room. Teresa and I file out behind two college girls who seem more than a little mystified by their strange evening out on the town; as one concludes to the other,”...and this is only the third time I’ve been here.”

Richard Riegel

LOU REED REMEMBERS WOODSTOCK!!

"Ya know, punks," Lou told a stunned audience in New York, "you're probably too young to know what this means! It means peace, man, and love your brother. Hey, I can remember a time when my hair was down to my waist, man, and me an' the guys would get inta the van and just groove on life! But no, you punks wouldn't remember that, would ya? Nah, just keep on wearin' your black leather jackets and funny clothes and never think about the future. You're no good anyway!” After the show, Reed was seen smiling as he entered his VW bus. "Hey man," a nearby witness later exclaimed, "he just asked me if I had any papers!!"

Eric Carmen Talks Turkey

NEW YORK—Eric Carmen is finally all by himself—without a manager, a band, or a steady flame. Yet he’s happy, and he’s just made the best album of his solo career.

I didn’t expect to be so charmed by him. Though I found the Raspberries delightful, Eric’s solo career had left me with numerous lingering doubts as he received the Clive Davis “grooming and hyping for stardom” routine. There seem to be some good reasons why that didn’t work.

“I’ve made enough money as a writer so that I don’t have to do anything else,” explains Eric. “I like performing, and I want to perform, but only if it’s done right. There are various and sundry other things I’d like to do, but I don’t have to.

“When people say ‘You’ve gotta go on the road to promote your record and you have to play tastemaker clubs,’ you find out that these places are these slimy little bars in wherever that I was playing eight to ten years ago. You’ve got a 10 watt p.a. system that is the house p.a... You realize, hey, I don’t have to do this anymore.

“I have no desire to go onstage and have people walk away and say: ‘Eric Carmen— he was pretty good, 'I want them to say ‘I hated him—he sucked,’ or ‘That was the greatest act I ever saw.'

“This new album was basically written with the idea of touring in mind, because basically I’d like to tour again [Eric hasn’t played in the States in three years]. Now I’m ready to go ahead and say: ‘yes, I want to play.’”

Claiming he “hates” his last LP—Change of Heart—Eric sees this album as “a total return to...okay, fuck the company, fuck the business, fuck disco, fuck everything...I’m going to do what I would like to do now. I like to play rock ’n’ roll, so I will write a rock ’n’ roll album, and if rock ’n’ roll is in vogue, wonderful. If not...

“I wrote the album last summer. At that time disco was big, and everything was saying ‘Rock ’n’ roll? You’re crazy!!' Essentially all I did was return to what I was doing 10 years ago with this album. Hopefully the songs are a little more sophisticated, but it’s essentially the same kind of thing. ”

What’s gotten in the way of Eric’s music is “never ending stream of asshole managers” since the days of the Raspberries. “They just couldn’t seem to ever quite pull it together, get a concert together right with a soundcheck...

“Oh yeah, You’ll have a soundcheck...promise ya’, you’ll definitely have one,”’ mimics Eric in perfect reassuring managerial jive. “So I go onstage and the piano pick-up falls into the piano because they didn’t have enough time to set it properly. Thanks...it’s great.”

Tired of L.A. session players, Eric tried on this album to put together a band-like unit, all of whose players were not native or firmly adopted Angelenos. “I’m not a big fan of that place,” he says of L.A. “I recorded there only because I kept having managers who said ‘You gotta come out here—this is where the business is.’ I mean, I like Cleveland, Ohio, it’s a great rock ’n’ roll town. I grew up there...there’s a lot of good rock ’n’ roll being played there and always has been. Basically I’m an East Coast, Midwest kinda guy.

“I go out to California and just...the people drive me nuts there. Nobody does any business. They come in at 10 or 11, work for an hour, take a two-hour lunch, they come back and leave at four to go play handball, y’ know. Like get outta here, let’s do some work! I worked in New York until 1975, and the only reason I went out there was managers saying ‘It’s all happening here!’

“I can handle L.A. only if I’m busy, and I only stay there when I have to. I’m one of those people who subscribes to the idea that you don’t have to be an asshole if you play an instrument. I suppose it would be greatly to my advantage to be a complete asshole—it’s good press. My idea of a great time is not sitting around smoking a joint and listening to my records and saying, ‘Gee, isn’t that great.’ After you’ve seen your umpteenth bowl of cocaine, y’know, it’s like, well, so what else is there in life?...please.”

Carmen did do a recent tour in Japan (“It was like Beatlemania,” he explains in mock Japanese) that was enjoyable and successful, but right now “I’m making desperate attempts to recreate a social life, which is something I’ve not had for many moons. That’s the problem of living on two coasts, going to Japan and Europe for a few weeks, a couple of weeks in New York. You end up having these wonderful situations where you meet someone and it’s like: ‘Hi, I’m going to be in town for another 16 hours. How about having a meaningful relationship...’”

Rob Patterson

ROTH ARRESTED FOR BEING JERK!!

"Look, you guys," insists stunned cutie-pie Dave Lee Roth, “it's one thing if I robbed a bank or shot somebody or somethin’, but I never heard of this sorta thing before!!” Weep while you can, Dave—Ohio's new Mandatory Creep Arrest program has been rounding up dummies just like you for weeks now, with proven success!! Smart Ohio lawmen claim with Roth's capture "a large percentage" of their work had been completed. "Just look at the geek," smirked a proud arresting officer, "here's one less dope-in-a-clown-suit who won't be bothering us for 10 more years!" Roth's legal problems were further compounded by his attorney, who refused to defend his client due to Roth's "legally tenuous" position. “I could get him off for murder in two hours," claimed the obviously shaken lawyer, "but this 'Being A Jerk' rap is just too tough!" Roth's cellmates at presstime include Ted Nugent, Billy Joel and Rob "Lifer" Halford, lead vocalist for Judas Priest and a "true lost cause," Roth later quipped.

Memo To Squeezo

LONDON—Gerry and the Holograms have an exciting new sound they don’t want you to hear.

The Emperor’s New Music, their stunning debut on Absurd records, consists of snatches of random recording studio static that sounds like a defective test pressing of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. You know, the one he eventually released.

A further clod in the chum is the fact that the helpful folks at Absurd have glued each record to its sleeve, making it impossible to pull the disc out without resorting to the bizarre steam ’n’ ream techniques used by Beatlecreeps in search of aButcher Cover. Too bad, because Gerry’s disc is personally “guaranteed to destroy your phonograph needle.”

Memo to Jimmy, Squeezo and the lads: Have a great gimmick for the next Zep LP, with much lower cost-to-unit ration than the Venetian blinds cover we discussed earlier...

Rick Johnson

Wait’ll You See His Spit-Ball

Here he is, sports fans, the first and last punk rock baseball player. Lowell Palmer’s the name, and one look at those daddeo shades and blank expression’ll tell you that Lowell was no ordinary hurler. After a meteoric minor league career that included stops at Eugene, Spartanburg and Tidewater (where he achieved a sparkling 18.00 ERA in 1966) Palmer broke in with the ’69 Phillies, for whom he lost eight of ten decisions. After being traded to the Chicago White Sox in the famous Don Bolte deal, Lowell went through several uniform changes before winding up his monumental career with San Diego in 1974. His 5-18 wonlost record and career homer are outshone only by the inscription on the back of his 1970 Topps baseball card: “Lowell’s hobby is raising pigeons.”

Rick Johnson

5 YEARS AGO

Proof It’s A Dog’s World!

Who should show up to see Patti Smith at the Bitter End but her longtime hero and guiding light, Bob Dylan. How did the unexpected visit affect the ethereal rock and roll poetess? “We circled around each other, shuffled our feet like two pet dogs, and then we suckled each other for awhile. And you now what—he really does have laser eyes,” Smith reverently revealed.