CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

TV’81: Make Room For Doody

by Rick Johnson

The 1981-82 television season may well be remembered for decades to come as the year the networks dumped all the gimmicks, bucked all the trends and opted for the Total Desperation method of programming. Here are just a few of the viewing highlights you can expect this fall:

* Lots more people get shot!

* Two former football stars get their own shows!

* An epidemic of widowed fathers with ten-year-old sons!

* Tony Randall confirms that Felix was gay!

* A possible use for Elaine Joyce!

* Still no Chipmunks tour!

*The triumphant return of Tom Ewell!

You get all the above, a combination babyfood warmer/ chainsaw, two free spatulas and enough bankable names to stuff Montana. Any moderately successful male lead of the past 15 years is fair game in ’81. Apparently, somebody hollered “haul in them tuna, matey” and sooner than you can say sooner, everybody from Gabe Kaplan to Yoshio Yqda was back on the screen.

The network dodobrains are calling this a New Era, which is about as funny as a privately catered Emergency Room visit. You should can any expectations you may have right now, and get set to forget. As influential media critic Buckwheat once said, “We don’t expect it, we just want it!”

As far as prognostication goes, any worm could simply predict that all the Fall Crawl debuts will bomb. Since 80-90% of the new shows can be expected to achieve cancellation by the second commercial in any given season, said worm would rack up a smart .850 batting avg. Hello, Atlanta!

By the way, this worm predicts that all the new shows will bomb. Now me real big smart! But please use the award money on a gift sub to HBO, okay?

☆ ☆ ☆

Code Red (ABC): This one’s about as easy to take seriously as Libyan airspace. Lome Greene is a burned-out L. A. fire chief with a pair of pyronoid sons who spend most of their time trying to get L. A.’s first female firefighter to uncross their hoses.

Father Murphy (NBC): A gnawinspiring creation of Michael “I’m not insane!” Landon, this show’s got everything: a “rugged-butwarmhearted” cowboy who impersonates a priest, a black soot prospector, a little brat, a dog named Drugs and the mandatory “feisty-but-pretty” schoolmarm. Punchline: “So all the boys stayed after school to clean her erasers. ” Powers Of Matthew Star (NBC): Peter Barton plays a superpowered alien who can read minds like menus, give good telekinesis and disappear after a couple of weeks up against 60 Minutes. Jessica Novak (CBS): Now here’s a novelty. An actual, grownup woman gets the lead in a TV drama and it’s not strictly for aureola addicts. Helen Shaver portrays a TV reporter who keeps getting stuck with adorable human interest stories when she’d rather tackle important issues like the scandal of incomplete doorknob checking or the need for warning lights on Triumph albums.

Maggie (ABC): Erma Bombeck created this bizarre combination of Please Don’t Eat The Daisies and the never-aired spinoff from Shampoo, Snip. Punch line: Your mother sweeps dust bunnies in Hell.

Nashville Palace (NBC): Here’s the one program that’s almost as bad as having someone take away your Clorox for a month. The ’pone-brains behind HeeHaw launch this guaranteed bomb that’ll probably be cancelled after the first song. This week’s host' is Roy Clark, who will re-enact his monumental appearance on Odd Couple.

Bret Maverick (NBC): James Garner as you-know-who from you-know-what-show. Co-star is a female journalist/photog stolen from you-know.-where. The question is do you-know-why?

Fail Guy (ABC): This storyline is almost as bizarre a construct as a “perfect day.” Lee Majors is an unsuccessful stuntman turned parttime bounty hunter. I believe this is what Archie Bunker would call an eagle bleeder.

Love, Sidney (NBC): Here in scenic Macomb, our token duck pond is located next to a big cemetery. A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine took a loaf of used bread down to feed the beasts, a popular local activity.

Unfortunately, the quackies were nowhere to be found. So she said what-the-heck and fed the graves instead. From NBC’s own what-the-heck dept, comes this sitcom with Tony Randall as a gay artist who takes in an unwed mother and becomes part-time daddy to her illegitimate spawn.. Punchline: “So the guy said what-the-hell, let’s all take the morning train!”

Strike Force (ABC): Robert Stack as commander of an L. A. police squad of itchy trigger fingers. A must for all you morgue-teasers out there. *

Shannon (CBS): Kojak’s expuppetwipe Kevin Dobson as one of the many widowed fathers with 10-year-old sons this season. Not to miss a trick, they’ve given him a zany housekeeper and have already filmed the obligatory impotence episode.

Best Of The West (ABC): Tom Ewell is back! Yes, the demands of the Tom Ewell Protection Agency have been silenced for now by casting him as an alcoholic veterinarian in this western sitcom. That’s Tom Ewell—the thinking man’s Tom Poston.

Today’s FBI (ABC): Mike “Mannix” Connors is a 20-year vet in this series “as boring and predictable as today’s headlines,” like the Dauph says. He bosses the usual heap of violence-crazed hotshots, including a woman agent who makes rude jokes about the pistol range.

Open All Night (ABC): Beer blurb star Bubbar Smith is the night manager of a 7/11-styled 24-hr. grape Slurpee stand. I wonder if it’ll be like the local all-nighter here, where—when the food gets old and moldy—they simply mark down the price!

King's Crossing (ABC): Just what the world needs—another soap from the Lorimar (Dallas) detergent dispenser. Bradford Dillman, owner of the face that almost looks like it belongs under a condom, stars along with the usual jockey-screwing heiresses and amnesia vets.

The Angie Dickinson Show (NBC): In Angela Lansbury’s public service spot about battered wives, she says that “every 18 minutes, a woman is physically abused by someone she loves.” In this reheated version of Police Woman, Angie Dickinson is that woman:

Mr. Merlin (CBS): Oh boy, here’s the same old boy-meetsreincarnate'd magician, boy-receives-supernatural-powers, boy-tries-to-make-Elaine-Joycevanish story line. Freddie Prinze died for this?

Devlin Connection (NBC): Rock Hudson—whose chief claim to fame was getting to drop depth charges on Susan Saint James’ torpedo tubes back before she became a complete idiot—returns to the tube as a widowed private detective. The twist—his son is more than 10-years-old!

Love That Bob!

CHRISTGAU’S RECORD GUIDE: ROCK ALBUMS OF THE SEVENTIES by Robert Christgau (Ticknor & Fields)

On July 10,1969, Christgau’s Consumer Guide was born, a professional obsession to be sure but also a handy formula for rock' n' roll fans, a convenience for its audience as well as for its author. The Consumer Guide was created out of frustration-Christgau had only 2,500 words per month in The Village Voice to contend with the ton of promotional records cluttering hi~ life. In 1972, Christgau was employed byNewsday, and his capsule-reviews for the Long Island daily began to be compiled at CREEM by editor Dave Marsh; consequently, when Christgau became the music editor for The Voice in 1974, CREEM chose to reprint his Consumer Guide.

Now it's hard to imagine an era without the Consumer Guide. So many imitations have emerged since Christgau's early column that the original value of the form seems almost obliterated. Today we're inundated with books, periodicals, graphs, lists, and whatnot telling us what to buy. The sense of discovery th~t's certainly a part of the experience of r6ck `n' roll is completely lost-the only surprise left is whatever exegesis reveals.

This is not Christgau's fault. He invented a good thing and knew it.. and so did everybody else. Besides his analytical abilities and critical acumen, Christgau has been blessed with foresight. It didn't take courage for Christgau to dub himself the Dean of American Rock Critics; it oqly took the knowledge that no one else would do it. More importantly, however, hard work was required to maintain the status of that self-proclaimed title.

Christgau has always made ita point to explain that he tries to listen to everything he receives in the mail (nearly 1,500 albums a year). He doesn't simply play a cut here and there either; he listens, sometimes several hours per album, actually worrying about what grade a particular record deserves. In short, Christgau has the uncanny knack of making listening to records seem like work. He struggles with the idea of rock criticism as labor, sometimes self-consciously, and you can practically see the beads of sweat on his brow.

Consider the effort he put into this book. Initially, his plan had been to compile (with revisions and additions, of course) his consumer reviews written during the 70's. "I ended up putting in 14 hours a day, seven days a week, between February and July of 1980," he writes in the Introduction."...I hadn't realized I'd have to write two-thirds of the book from scratch."

His industry and devotion to duty have paid off. Christ gau's Record Guide gives us a thorough map of the '70s ("a much misunderstood musical decade" is the basic assumption): a complete assessment of its vinyl art and debris. intelligent evaluations of its underrated artists (as well as deflations of the egocentric.stylists), and a vast library toward which to aim. Christgau achieves hisgoal primarily by never swaying from his central purpose: to resurrect the supposedly lifeless 70's.

To Christgau, rock 'n' roll in the 60's had a cultural impact which was forced into a subcultural existence in the 70's because "rock industrialists capitalized on the national mood to reduce potent music to an often reactionary species of entertainment." This method of capitalization was the phonograph album, rising not only in popularity but also growing as a form, as a judged work of art. "Heroic failed album artist-artists with a half an hour in them rather than three minutesare a legacy of the days of expanded consciousness that flurished in the era of corporate rock, with its habitual faith in venture capital. The worthwhile LP that neither portends the ripening of a long and honorable career nor sells diddley-squat is more a feature of the 70's than the 60's." Christgau, then, chose to tackle a seemingly insurmountable task, the cataloguing of these 70's artifacts in terms of aesthetic pleasures. That meant playing the damn things (both good and bad alike), a chore for which I'm grateful Mr. Christgau has spent over 10 years of his lifetime, saving me many idle moments and countless decisions. In particular, I'd like to thank him for figuring out all those James Brown LPs on Polydor, for exploring the idiosyncracies of Parliament Funkadelic, and for inventing the monthly "Pazz & Jop Product Report" which appears in The Voice (a critical rate-a-record game that's the logical extension of the Consumer Guide).

Certainly, without the slightest hesitation, I recommend Christgau's book both as an illuminating reference work and as an enjoyable read. The only supposition I found worth quibblingoverwasthisone: "Rock 'n' roll's first quarter century produced well under a thousand excellent albums. Close to two-thirds of them appeared during its last and least romantic decade." In his essential library of the 50's and 60's at the end of the book, Christgau includes only 25 LPs from the 50's and 75 from the 60's. Most of these are best-ofs because "great albums-as-albums were rare before 1967." That may or may not be the case; at any rate, it's difficult to prove. More likely, Chnstgau makes this statement because he possesses a greater working knowledge of 70's albums than those of the previous two decades. A Date With Elvis, The "Chirping" Crickets, the first albums by Bo Diddley and Howlin' Wolfthese are records just as magnificent as the Clash's imported debut and just as slapped together. The 50's and 60's were loaded with such gems, perhaps long buried, but worth digging for nevertheless.

Finally, his thought-provoking criticisms aside, what elevates Christgau's opinions above those of the average rock pundit is his snappy, almost folksy, wit. It isn't humility that motivates him to •suggest that the buyers' guide become "a great bathroom book"it's the willingness to perceive himself as a fan, as a member of an audience he dares not neglect. As a result, Christgau masters the one-liners (e.g., about the Climax Blues Band: "Did you quit yet? Did you quit yet?"), drawing upon everyday experience in order to bring any highbrow flights of fancy back down to earth.

So, even if only for economical reasons, I willcontinuefaithfullyto read Mr. Christgau's opinions. (The RecordGuide, for example, helped me rid my apartment of 200 dead-dog albums, i.e. below B-.)ln fact, I'm downright counting on him. I'm hoping he'll dofor the 80's what he did for the 70's. It'll sure save me heaps of work.

Robert A. Hull