THE BEAT GOES ON

THE BEAT GOES ON

Deft Mutants In A Telephone Booth

DAYTON, OH —“Maximum Occupancy: 110” says the sign high up on the wall of the Walnut Hills Bar, and by a conservative estimate, I’d say at least 108 of said occupants are standing right in our laps. But we can’t complain; Teresa and I drove the 50 miles up here just to catch the last-gang-in-town rock ’n’ roll realities of Human Switchboard, and if it takes putting up with the sardine ambience of a neo-Caveman Club to do that, well, bring on the reality sandwiches.

Though they’re fellow Ohioans (from Kent, as in “4 dead in O-hi-o”), Human Switchboard were always just another intriguing-but-totally-anonymous, fine-print name in the back of the Village Voice for me, until I read a feature on ’em in N.Y. Rocker last month. Ah yes, we lonely-planet-boy Ohioians tend to find each other in the back pages of N.Y. papers; still, I had Midwest-rube faith that I wouldn’t need a trip to Hurrah to catch this suddenly-compelling band. Sure enough, a couple weeks later the Switchboard turned up scheduled to play in nearby Dayton. (As crazy-fortune an event as finding a sealed, unpeeled-banana copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico in the yard sale of the sweet little old couple you’ve lived next door to the last six years.)

Sitting in the Walnut Hills with Teresa on this boundless Saturday night, I feel like we’re living out some kinda vintage Kerouacian cooljazz prose fantasy from the early 50’s. The red neon “Walnut Hills” sign is fizzing away above the cozy dark riches of the mirrored bar, while all kinds of postpunks, weary hippies, pre-winos, etc., crowd in to grab the few seats left. Human Switchboard are still soundchecking the dim stage, trying to locate the source of a rasping electronic hum. Somebody finally denounces the pretty red neon as the culprit, but that’s no sweat for the Switchboard. They’ve already toiled many a season in the land where millions of kids go to bed r ’n’ r-hungry (dropping off to buzzless, sterile Steely Dan on their clock radios) every night of the week.

After a rousing, Ramoneseconomical set by Dayton’s own fab Dates, Human Switchboard inherit the tiny Hills stage. They’re dressed in buttondown shirts and slim cords and shitkickeresque shoes, as befits all us residents of 1981’s collegetown-beatnik global village. I read in N.Y. Rocker that H.S. male singer/guitarist/interviewee Bob Pfeiffer is “a Nordic Lou Reed,” and he has donned inscrutable shades for the stage, but as Unca Lou himself could be termed “the Jewish Bob Dylan” these days, leave us dispense with the free-association ethnicities.

Switchboard organist/female singer Myrna Marcarian, (almost) (but not quite) a Julie Kavner lookalike, is fortunate to be up there behind her keyboard so promptly. When she had squeezed thru the crowd to the standing-room-only ladies’ john for a last-minute pee or whatever, she was met with a “Welcome to the waiting line!” squeal from the civilian wimmen massed there ahead of her. Fortunately someone had verifified Marcarian as one of the actual PERFORMERS of this jampacked evening, and she was granted diplomatic washroom immunity in the grand old show-must-go-on tradition.

Tonight’s Human Switchboard also includes longtime drummer Ron Metz, and new bassist Steve Calabria, the latter dark-mustachioed and blackbereted, looks a lot like Che when he was still with the Good

Rats. Metz, reportedly a college graduate in private life, starts pounding out a choppy beat (©1966,Velvet Underground), and Human Switchboard are rushing into something called “Turn Up My Stereo.” Instantly it’s like the first time I heard MX-80 Sound—I had always dreamed of hearing a band just like this, but didn’t count on stumbling across them among the naked Midwestern realities of my stranded-in-the-jungle life.

Pfeiffer stands right up to his microphone, and phrases the tender, choppy snarl of the young Lou Reed (Who wouldn’t? If they only got the chance), meanwhile sproinging away at illegal-alien chords on his afterthought guitar. But every craggy menace of Pfeiffer’s sonic profile is simultaneously smoothed, blended, made even more sensually subversive by Myrna Marcarian’s all-consuming Farfisa caresses, and her continually startling, impossible sweet & husky voice forays among the Addams family of sounds Pfeiffer’s producing. Solid bass & drums—the given Mick & Keith have always leaped from—spoken here, too.

These Human Switchboard songs don’t so much build to climaxes as open on the heart of the climax itself, right into those orgasmic psychedelics-of-theflesh that come upon one on hidden midnights. The lyrics? Oh, simple boy-girl stuff, boys & girls together not so much as adversaries as co-driven intensities. You know. “Who’s Landing In My Hangar,” romantic stuff like that. Timeless themes.

Pfeiffer, especially, gets so wired by his Niagara-Falls-in-abarrel narrations that he completely collapses emotionally after each song, he sinks into relative incoherence as though he’d just finished a marathon grad record exam, while the instruments go silent and the faithful neon sizzle returns to our consciousness. Next song begins, and the ashen Pfeiffer shocks back into his ON mode, for every second he and the Switchboard need to get their song across' Last note played, Pfeiffer collapses again. His collegiate shirt is soaked with so much “Nordic” sweat by now that he could pass for a post-record collector Southside Johnny (again, the shades have it.). Pfeiffer appears headed for a sweaty nervus rex of a breakdown, right on stage, but he hangs on, and summons up the old intensity one more time after one more time, as Myrna Marcarian tosses him her timeless Farfisal lifeline to cling to. Which is undoubtedly a perfect for o‘ur goofy struggle with daily life out here in the Midwest.

PRESLEY CURSE RELENTLESS !

EXCLUSIVE SCOOP I: Industrial spy and super-photog Elmo P. Rossbaum snappad this racant shot of the massive security precautions RCA Records undertook last year while sending Elvis Aron Prosloy to every radio station, newspaper and carwash but CREEMI "I fust don't like those self-serving jerks,". Heidi Winkler, security overseer, admitted to Rossbaum. “If they want it, let ’em go out an a buy It 1" Later, Rossbaum, Winkler and the two security officers in the foreground were apprehended by authorities at a Memphis flea market with "copies of All This And World War II, honest 11" and then shot I If only thoy'd llstonodl I

And (this ain’t no Mudd Club, no C.B.G.B.’s) Dayton loves The Human Switchboard tonight; undaunted by all the favorable mentions the group have picked up in the Village Voice over the years, the Walnut Hills patrons apply the old reductio ad infinitum “it’s only rock ’n’ roll” aesthetic to Human Switchboard, and come up with a winner. Or, as Pfeiffer tells me later: “That’s why I like the Daytons—this kid comes up to me and says, ‘I like your band, man, it sounds like the Rolling Stones!’ I don’t think we sound like the Stones, but that’s better than him saying we suck because we don’t sound like McGuffey Lane [Ohio’s REO Speedwagon equivalent.]”

Human Switchboard make such excellent rock ’n’ roll, in fact, that it almost goes without saying (in these FM-diseased times) that they have no record contract at present. Together and recording since 1977, Human Switchboard have only two singles, an EP, a cut on Bomp’s Waves Vol. L and a privately-pressed, official-bootleg live LP behind them so far, and don’t bother searching for those in your neighborhood Peaches, as fantastic as they may be. Still, Human Switchboard have lived in Ohio long enough not to let a little thing like no exceptions stop them, so early this year they recorded a complete studio album, which is looking for a label even as I write this. Help support “cool rock” in the 80’s, you record execs...

Richard Riegel

Polka And The Abstract Truth

DENTON, TX—Fun is a rare attribute among most rock ’n’ roll bands these days; it’s as if having a good time were a disease, the contagion which might reveal our mortality. Rebelling against this current trend is an unusual band called Brave Combo, who have taken a very amusing, albeit courageous, approach in assailing arena-rock’s self-indulgent flatulence. Put simply, Brave Combo has revived the hitherto neglected genre of polka music.

The word “polka” is Polish for woman, and the musical form originated as a Czech folk style around the 1840’s. In 1848, the enthusiasm for this music in Czechoslovakia reached an hysterical peak, resulting in a sort of “polkamania” (the title of Brave Combo’s initial two-record EP, released in ’79 and now out of print).

In a sense, the members of the band—Carl Finch, Tim Walsh, Lyle Atkinson, and Dave Cameron—are completely earnest about their love affair wih polka. Yet they do not aspire to the comatose efforts of Lawrence Welk and Frankie Yankovich (what they dub “dentist’s office polka”) but point to the true masters—A1 “Coco” Czelusniak, Larry Chesky, or Andrew Walters. These artists, and many others like them, were introduced to the Texas musicians via frequent pilgrimages to that old reliable historical trove, the 39d record bin. “Polka records were cheap,” says Finch, the band’s prime mover and sole promoteer. “So we always could buy several and then use the best of what we found.”

In another sense, however (and perhaps the sense that matters), Brave Combo is not above subverting the polka tradition. “Pink polka,” “nuclear polka,” and “acid Polka” are some of the silly terms dredged up to define the band’s sound, but they all skirt Brave Combo’s purpose: to offer a ray of hope, something positive, to a country awash in Muzak. (No one understands the phenomenon of piped-in drek better than Finch, having written his master’s thesis on the dreaded subject.)

Rest assured, these former students of jazz at North Texas State University realize that, if they were to perform only traditional polka, their music would ultimately become boring. Their audacious solution, then, is to “polkasize” whatever tumbles into their repertoire. This means anything from a medley of the Green Acres theme song and Herman’s Hermits’ “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter” to a beer-barrel version of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” to the masterful “Jimi Hendrix Polka” (Brave Combo’s crowning achievement: “Manic Depression,” “Third Stone From The Sun” and “Fire” strung together like psychedelic pearls). It’s no wonder that what emerges is pure zaniness without any overriding satirical pretensions; indeed, here’s a band unafraid to carve out a niche as a dance group, chasing the grand convivial tradition fostered by the Kingsmen, the Ramones, the B-52’s, and fellow Texans, Joe “King” Carrasco and the Crowns.

JETT FORSAKES TOURING FOR READING

"This Is great 11" Joan Jett confided on a warm spring day in Los Angeles. "I can sit here and read about myself instead of slogging all over doing one-nighters from Boogie, Iowa to Bad AxefMlchigan. My own Mustang, a warm spring day, a six of Bud, the Orioles/A's game on the box...I can read reviews of my record, reviews of the concerts i should be playing, interviews with me explaining why I won't perform. Star's Cars of me in my ride. Psychobiographies written by Rick Johnson listing all the reasons I should never perform. Now I have time to write him letters, the sonuvabltch. The |ov of performing? Forget It, |ack—I look cooler reading. My leather bracelets keep the sweat from ruining this CREEM DREEM of Rob Halford. Jeez, looklt those...hey, bud, whattya hanging around this park for, asking me questions? You want I should Invade your space? I need an audience, I'll go tour."

There is no vindictiveness behind the band’s humor, either —not a single smirk comes through on their debut album, Music for Squares, released on the aptly christened Four ( — polka) Dots label. Instead, Brave Combo seems to beam at the mere opportunity to ameliorate the feckless. Certainly any band that can miraculously transform “Perfidia” or “Hernando’s Hideaway” into disarming music deserves the highest honors.

When let loose, futhermore, Brave Combo can also interpret an entire spectrum of dance rhythms (rhumba, tango, chacha, waltz, limbo, bossa nova) as if the polka were only a pretext for a slew ?f surprises. During the summer of 1979; the band’s first major public exposure was a tour of Texas’ mental facilities, which perhaps sharpened their awareness of the need for such versatile histrionics.

The import of Brave Combo has usually been written about in jest. A journalist at The Daily Texan describes the band as symptomatic of the times, as “a diatribe against conformity and complacency.” This staid scribe even hears political rumblings within their music: “.. .its subtle irony —banal lyrics counterpointed with ebullient polka riffs—highlights a society sinking into a mire...With each accordian whirl, Brave Combo confronts listeners with the abuses of a staggeringly corrupt world.”

Nevertheless, there’s a bit of verisimilitude contained in this joke. With the rise of Reagan and neo-conservatism, Brave Combo has discovered a bold political strategy: sabotage the right-wing’s music. “Without polkas,” asks the intrepid reporter, “would there have been a Hitler, a Third Reich, much less a World War II?” With Brave Combo neutralizing those deadly polkas for fun and profit, maybe we can begin to dream of peaceful pleasures once again.

(Brave Combo’s Music For Squares is available for the bargain-basement price of $6.00, including postage, by writing to the band at P.O. Box 233, Denton, Texas 76201. If you’re a square, be there.)

Robert A. Hull

And Only Freddie Fender Is Safe!

NEW YORK-Unca Sam’s been grubbing for bucks ever since we kicked the pre-British Invasion British back to the island, but nobody’s ever come up with a truly equitable form of taxation. Until now, that is.

Julio Martinez, director of the New York State Division of Substance Abuse Services, has hatched a fund-raising scheme that can only be described as inspired: he wants to tax musicians for making money “on recordings that suggest drug use.”

“I want to tax them $1 for each and every time a record is sold and a song is aired on the radio,” sez the in-the-know official . Let’s see... one dollar... multiplied by a jillion.. .equals.

The crafty Martinez has even compiled an “enemies list” of chronic offenders just in case the Feds stopped listening when Chubby Checker broke. The list includes the Rolling Stones (Stones? Drugs?), Bob Dylan (Dylan? Anything?), and Paul Simon. Huh?? Seems the one-bridge pony qualifies on the basis of “his hit about smoking marijuana at a very early age.” What, he wrote it when he was seven? OK, Julio, I give up!... was it “Mother And Child Reunion?”

Others who “flagrantly promote dope” include Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead. C’mon, Hool, these guys barely promote records. How did he miss the Lemon Pipers?

Now, wouldn’t it be fun if the legislators got confused and levied a tax on dopes instead? But wait! It might accomplish the same purpose!

J. Kordosh

Mickey Mouse Disco Now A Reality!

IZMIR, TURKEY-We knew it all along, but just for the record, Camel-smoking scientists here have at last discovered a direct link between disco music and homosexuality.

Researchers at Aegean University cruelly exposed mice to hazardous disco wastes for “hours at a time, several days a week.” Very scientific.

The results? The mice all became Prince fans? Not quite, but they did demonstrate “homosexual traits.” The docs forgot to mention just exactly what those traits were, but it’s probably stuff like abnormal interest in keychains, the sudden development of strongly opinionated views on theatre, an ironic attitude towards mousetraps and they can’t change a flat tire.

The quacks also “expressed concern” that disco could have the same effect on humans. No kiddin’, guys! Where’ve you been the last ten years, in Turkey or something?

One important question remained unasked: how did they know the mice weren’t already gay!

Rick Johnson

5

Years Ago

Hands Across The Water

One fan may have had enough of silly love songs during a recent Paul McCartney & Wings concert in Cincinnati. A 20-year-old man from Columbus left the concert, which was held at the riverfront Coliseum, and was last seen running into the Ohio River. He was found by members of the Cincinnati Fire Department and pronounced dead.

THE (EVEN MORE) SECRET LIFE OF FREDDIE MERCURY 11

OK Freddie—we don't want to point any fingers or anything, but Is it really "mere coincidence" that your alter ego "Wendy O. Williams" was recently spotted in a New York gym, coyly posing as you might? That if one takes the "We Are The Champions" 45 and plays jt on 33 it sounds like "A Pig Is A Pig"? That you both wear funny clothes?...You got us, Freddiekins—but if you're going to your fave bar later, we're not going, got it?