CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

Boy Howdy’s Guide To The 10 Rockin’est Video Games!

Rick Johnson

Turn on your television these days and what’s the first thing you see? Fish heads peeking out from birthday cakes? The origin of the trick funnel? More souplines? Besides all that, here, I’ll give you a hint: KEEE-BLAMMO! WACKA WACKA WACKA! POP POP KA-BLEEM!

That’s right, video games. The biggest fad since beating up mime critics, vid games and their manufacturers were just about to take over the world this past Xmas when their profits suddenly hit the floor like a frozen bunnyburger, shaking the entire industry.like the proverbial paddle wagging the beaver.

These small contests come in many forms from arcade games big as candy machines to play-at-home cartridges to silly tabletop models to little hand-held jobs.

All that’s very adorable, but let’s stick with the home carts. Kidpacked arcades are not the place to tackle these petite tussles. It may be true that, as Dr. Kent Boston once said, everything worth knowing, we know at age 12 (nine Pacific), but kiddies are to concentration what Accent is to slugs. Not to mention dropping endless quarters down the throat of a game that, by its very nature, cannot be won.

We don’t have the room (or inclination) to go into all the different systems here. If you want hardware poop, the place to go is CREEM’s newest offspring.

VIDIOT, “the magazine of video lunacy.” More on that later.

What we’ve got here is a quick rundown of the 10 most rockin’ ’n’ reelin’-est carts now available. Even if your motor control has abandoned you because it realized that the ship was sinking (like Vidiot Annene “ O” Kaye) I personally guarantee these games are more fun than digital clock staring or even flunking the Harvard Hypnotic Suggestibility Test.

Smurf-^Rescue In Gargamel’s Castle (Coleco)::In this game. You The Player (YTP hereafter) gets to be one of those revolting, chipmunk-lunged cartoon characters that look like some sort of sick Korean sex joke. The trick is to lead Smurf into the dangers he’s supposed to avoid.

Impale him on stalagmites! Encourage savage hawks to scratch out his eyeballs! Allow him to fall spread-legged on picket fences!

This is my kind of contest! Threshold (Tigervision):: I was seriously worried about the sanity of my fingers after only a few rounds of this one. Wave after wave of bizarre alien objects attack you from all directions. You should see some of these things: tumbling Chevy insignias, snapping headphones, anti-matter lampshades and a swarm of fuzzy, puddle-shaped frizz-balls that, for some reason, I’ve always thought of as the Go-Go’s. As usual, the object is to pummel. Violent? Video games?

Hey—they’re not half as violent as buttermilk commercials.

Journey’s Escape (Data Age)::In this bite-sized bout, the object is to get the guys in Jouney from a concert stage to a limo in eight minutes. Very funny—these mussels can’t even finish a song in eight minutes, much less negotiate a herd of blipping promoters,

groupies, paternity lawyers and other obstacles. Hate to be redundant, but, given the opportunity to cause their demise, who can resist? Pleez Lord, a game for Kurtis Blow, soon!

B-17 Bomber (Intellivision): :This is one of Mattel’s new “talking” carts. Your crew cues you in on the action: “Bandits, three o’clock! Fighters, six o’clock!” This is not Yassar Arafat’s Tuesday agenda. They’re warnings of incoming attack planes. But even more satisfying than shooting down fighters is dropping leaden death on your personally selected target. “Bombs away!” the guy yells in his best end-of-Dr. Strangelove voice. Casualties optional.

Demon Attack (Imagic): :In a recent scientific breakthrough, I discovered that you can blow away the first few waves of demons by merely sitting with your foot on the fire button. Don’t let that throw you, though—you’ll still need angelfingers for this hot action number where you battle multi-

colored flying apparitions with the approximate wingspan of Larry Hagman’s eyelashes.

Beany Bopper (20th Century): :This one really trims my foliage. You get these flying Beanies and a blunt object to “Bop” ’em with. Killing them is great therapy, even for the tough-inure. Crush enough Beany skulls and they’re replaced by Bouncing Orange Eyes which also invite violent death.

E.T. (Atari):: Brand new from Warner Corn’s fave division (a little stock market humor there) this sprout-sport is a variation of the Smurf gameplan. YTP can personally cause the actual death of the twerpy intersteller Benji. Forget the stuff about helping him fix his goddamn phone. Drop him into caves! Land the spaceship on his face! Better yet, lead him into an ambush where he’ll be brutally vivisected by The Scientist and then thrown in prison by the FBI. Communist Mutants Fro -a Outer Space (Starpath).:: Actionwise, this goes from zero to boring in under five seconds. But the concept is as enduring as trashing ancient Aztec sky-drawings in your dune buggy. I mean, not just aliens. Not just alien mutants, but commie alien mutants! Beats licking the peephole any day.

Frogger :Parker Bros.):: According to a recent public service spot, a child can suffocate in only 10 minutes. What a great way to time yourself in one of the longer-playing sit-down clashes! Just pull up a child and in no time you get to eat bugs, fall off logs, jump on a bunch of lady frogs and get squashed by semis! Enough fun to kill a bam!

Alien (20th Century)::“Did the first person to eat an egg, ” asked dairy critic Larry Sons, “see where it came from?” Not in this spinoff from the SF flick, that’s for sure. In this dumb-but-likeable Pac-Man “borrow,” YTP must stomp c!1 the alien eggs in your spaceship. Pretend they’re the Humbard grandkids!

Now, I’m sure you’ll all want to check out our shiny new VIDIOT mag, which is rife with info delivered in the inimitable CREEM manner. It’s a veritable come-as-you-“are” party for some of your favorite CREEM writers, including J. Kordosh, Dave DiMartino and that talented young Johnson fellow the little campers call Ranger Rick. Be there or Joni Mitchell will start singing songs about how square you are!

Panic In The Year 4,999

ROCK’N’ROLL: -THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS Directed by Joe Layton

Quite a few organizations who appreciate good returns on their investments sunk a lot of money into the Broadway premiere of Rock’n ’ Roll: The First 5,000 Years—which just proves that Dick Clark and CBS Records aren’t immune to hundred^thousanddollar mistakes. The backers of this musical—which attempted to convey the scope, emotions and social/political backdrop for rock’s three-decad^s-long history—hoped that the show would duplicate Beatlemania’s rabid success. CBS had the soundtrack LP all laid out, and plans were afoot to take the show touring across America.

Apparently, there was at least one major problem. The thousands of theatre-goers needed to shell out up to $35 for each ticket never materialized. By no means was the bulk of the show that bad—in fact, except for the completely misguided, shallow ending, it was reasonably good. But mbst current rock fans can barely get together the $7.50 necessary for an album, or twice that amount for a Concert ticket. Vicarious recreations of legendary rock moments simply weren’t worth the price of admission. And possibly, rock’s older followers, who do have the

money to spend, might have been turned off by the loud volume of the cast’s authentic musicians. Adding to its difficulties, the show took a beating from both local theatre reviewers (who hate rock ’n’ roll) and the rock press*— who are stifled by the conventions of Broadway theatre.

So what did the rest of the nation miss by being deprived of Rock ’n’ Roll: The First 5,000 Years? A reasonably accurate, extremely well-executed and snazzily presented outline of how rock music affected American culture. Considering the unknown status of the cast, many of the 30 or so performers rendered tasteful homage to the rock classics, without seeming like cheap imitations. '

Starting with the dawn of the rock era, and passing through early r’n’b, folk-rock, the British invasion, Motown, psychedelia, soul, glitter, disco and punk, Rock ’n" Roll: The First 5,000 Years did offer several shining moments. In retrospect, the show’s producers and writers appeared more comfortable with the older (pre-punk) material, and approached those numbers with a fuller understanding. Carl Weaver’s portrayal of a poufed-up, pompadoured Little Richard was awe-inspiring, and Patrick Weathers offered an Elvis Presley sufficiently credible to not appear ghoulish—no mean feat.

When the music was tied to appropriate multi-screen backdrops—protest marches in tandem with Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” or screaming teenage masses of the early Beatle era—the show deftly recreated those lost years. Similarly, several very clever stage sets reminded viewers that rock ’n’ roll has often been hysterically funny music. The sight of “Cher” lowering her Rapunzel-ish tower of hair for “Sonny” to try and climb as they sang “I Got You Babe” instantaneously captured the warmth of that wonderfully ridiculous tune. Sometimes, a living tableau was an effective moodsetter. Using three identically dressed “Grace Slicks” to periodically flow apart and come together while performing “White Rabbit,” was a clever stylization of that song’s hallucinogenic properties.

Although the misunderstood, superficial treatment of punk and new wave probably didn’t bother much of Rock ’n’ Roll: The First 5,000 Years’s audience (I doubt they even noticed it), for me, the show’s closing minutes punctured the entire performance’s framework. Sure, it’s easy to dress up a couple of guys in Devo suits, show spiky-haired leapers slam-dancing across a stage and 'conclude-, “this is new music.” However, this show aspired to go beyond the superficial trappings arid grasp the music’s underlying meaning. If so, the lack of “no future” type footage—of Britain’s job riots, for instance—and the absenpe of both the Clash and the Sex Pistols was inexcusable.

Perhaps Rock ’n’ Roll: The First 5,000 Years didn’t fold. Maybe it simply devolved.

Toby Goldstein

The Red Album, The White Album, And The Blue Album, Forever

AS I WRITE THIS LETTER: An American Generation Remembers The Beatles Ed. by Marc A. Catone (Greenfield)

The reverent Beatlemaniacs who contributed their candid confessions to this volume will be pleased to know that my response to their effort can be summed up in two of their beloved Beatles song titles: “I’m Down,” but on the other hand, “Let It Be.”

On first reading, As I Write This Letter seems much more solid as an unintentional study of obsessional neuroses than it does any kind of expression of the Beatles enduring rock’n’ roll vitality. Editor Marc Catone describes his own persistent Beatlemania aS'a “joyful affliction,” one he hoped to put into perspective by soliciting letters from fellow afflictees, through ads in Rolling Stone and other rock mags.

Catone received “great therapeutic value” via the overwhelming number of responses ;from his fellow Beatles obsessives, and he thus decided to publish the majority of the letters in this book, as a kind of permanent consciousness-raising session for Beatlemaniacs. Nearly all of these correspondents express the idea that the Beatles were the greatest thing that ever happened to rock ’n’ roll, if not to human culture in toto, but too many of these true believers proclaim their faith in prayermeeting-like testimonials distinguished by an almost universal humorlessness. Or, as one of these acolytes tells us, deadpan: “The Beatles wanted to meditate, and we went with them; they wanted Nehru suits, and so did we. Unfortunately, The Beatles got satisfaction from drugs, and many of us died.” Yeah, man, and them Nehru jackets can be deadly in the wrong hands, too...

You’d think that correspondent would have answered his own questions about the perils of overidolization’, but he remains loyal to the shining ideal of the Beatles, and he’s only typical of this book’s many blind-faith casualties: women who still dream of marrying a Beatle, and who thus can’t relate to the flesh & blood men around them; men whose belief in the present moment ended somewhere in the vicinity of the Beatles’ 1970 breakup, and who have existed in a wistful twilight ever since; and so many fans who confess to spending every spare cent on whatever repackaged Beatles records or other Fab Four memorabilia the merchandisers deign to dole out to them.

I know, I know, I know first-hand just how fascinating and seductive these ’60s myths can be, and I have my own pet fetishes from that explosive decade, but they don’t happen to include the Beatles.

Even though I was actually there, right in the heart of the mythic experience a lot of these correspondents (many born in 1960 or later) can only pray for, every night in their lonely Beatlesposter-plastered bedrooms: I WAS A TEENAGER WHEN THE BEATLES WERE YOUNG & NEW!

Right on, I’ve got trueblue Fab Four memories, too, first single and first album I ever bought were by the Beatles, my wife and I always reminisce how on our first date we went back to her apartment and played the then-brand new Rubber Soul, etc., etc. But my age also \ made me ripe for The Draft and a -• few other hea-vee upheavals of the ’60s, and I somehow escaped that decade withoutxarrying along the Beatles as the central fact of my (existence.

Permanent worship of past v rebellions is the best way to miss out on the new rebels coming down the road (same way the old Presley fans never knew what hit ’em when the Beatles arrived). Many of the As I Write This Letter contributors harrumph that they’ll just keep on playing their old Beatles records, if it’s a choice between them and “disco,” as though that were the only alternative to their well-worn Fab Fours. Don’t any of these ’50sand ’60s-born kids know about the vital r’n’r that’s come out of their own contemporaries, fer crissake, from the whole SexPistolsElvisCostelloRamonesClash exploding generation?!? Nope, seems that they, missed out on all that, they were off in their bedsitters, listening to that latest & greatest repackage compilation, Beatles’B-Sides Originally Released On the Capitol Orange & Yellow Swirl Label.

I mean, rock ’n’ roll history and its active bands are gonna go on, in any case, but it would be nice if a few more fans could invest themselves in the vital historical moment, just as the original Beatlemaniacs did, and as the As I Write This Letter writers pine for, beneath all their manic collecting. One of Catone’s correspondents almost gets it, “Rock will progress and move on to something else,” but then he backtracks to the inevitable The Way & The Light dogma of this collection, and blurts, “The Beatles and their fans are not sick, like the Elvis fans are.”

Maybe not “sick,” buddy, but I still can’t get it through my thick head how you Beatlemaniacs are essentially different from all those slightly older, beaten-By-life housewives who buy every expensive scrap they can get on Their Man Elvis, from Albert Goldman’s class-hatred rants, to those plaster busts and velvet paintings of The King that’re taking over the flea markets.

But, as I promised up above, I mean to let these Beatlemaniac folks and their relatively harmless neuroseslse, lemme just add that As 1 Write This Letter, large-format, fan artwork and all, retails for a whopping $24.95 (Greenfield Books, Box, 1808, Ann Arbor, MI 48106) a bargain at twice the price if you ’re into this stuff...

Richard Riegel

Prime Time

A Nutty Kinda Guy

Richard C. Walls

I dunno, I guess it was the thought of all that sensitivity so early in the morning (9 a.tn. in Detroit), having to cope with all that talk of vulnerability so soon after I’d had to abandon my warm bed. Or maybe it was the montage they’d been using to advertise the show, quick clips of secondary star types gesticulating with mid-confessional intensity, the most chilling clip being of a grim-looking Erik Estrada asserting that “it’s time to unload”— the thought of spending a half hour with Estrada and his dump truck of a mind gave me shudders, not of delight. Whatever the reason, I had no intention of watching Tom Cottle: Close Up. Possibly it could be traced back to poor toilet training or the time I nearly whipped my older sister to death with an extension cord when she played one too many Bobby Rydell records (slowly I turned...) but the thought of watching some wimpy nudzh of a shrink conduct a one-on-one interview show did not intrigue me. Until I found out he was going to have Jerry Lewis on.

Now there’s an intriguing person. My position in the great controversy as to whether Lewis is a comic genius, a rather heavy-handed down with a fatal streak of sentimentality, or an utterly boorish possibly psychopathic show-biz creation is that he’s been, at different times, all three. Even though the Lewis-Martin films leave me cold and the telethons have become unbearably sanctimonious and tacky (no wonder Lewis genuflects in the direction of religious pitchman Oral Roberts) still, there are some brilliant bits in the solo movies, particularly starting with The Bellboy (’60) and going thru The Patsy (’64). This was a period of uninhibited creation for Lewis, only hinted at before and merely echoed afterward. My favorite Lewis gag from this time is in The Errand Boy (’61—1 think this

is the one, they do tend to run together in the memory). Lewis, doing his schlemiel character, enters an emply elevator which quickly fills up to the bursting point, forcing him to stand with a total stranger who, for some reason, just stares at him coldly, implacably, unforgivingly. Trying to defuse this sudden forced intimacy. Lewis struggles to come up with some suitable line of small talk (you have to say something, right? But what can you possibly say?) finally offering, feebly, “That Lindbergh was really something, wasn’t he?” Though the bit is slightly surreal, it should be recognizable to anyone who’s ever had to grapple for the proper inanity to fit those apparently unavoidable mundaqe social situations that make up life in the big city. Because of routines like that one I’m willing to forgive Lewis any number of ghastly telethons, which I know I don’t have to'watch anyway (re: the telethons, there’s a long hilarious article by Harry Shearer in the May-June ’79 Film Comment detailing the events of the ’76 effort, the one where Sinatra brought Dino in for a drunken reunion—and yes, it’s the same Harry Shearer who spent a few seasons as a featured performer on SNL, the one who did a Snyder impression at least as good as Akroyd’s. And while you’re rifling through old Film Comments check out the July-Aug. ’75 issuefor a typically “serious” critique of Lewis’ directorial career by Jean-Pierre Coursodon, a dotty analysis full of howlers like “(Lewis) trusts the spectators’ intelligence to establish the required connections between images and supply the intermediary information he boldly skips over,” which is a comment of the distressingly patchwork quality of some of Lewis’ gag sequences—this is the great fallacy of partisan criticism, attributing omnipotence to the artist under consideration to the point where even obvious mistakes and lapses are viewed as intentional conceptual moves. Makes you wanna puke.

During the Lewis/Cottle encounter, a two-parter, Cottle was all I feared he would be—soft-

spokenly solicitous, anxious to commiserate with.the various tragedies that have comprised his guest’s life so far, he came on like a rather personable undertaker. His only faux pas was when he started the interview with that old wheeze about how many “Europeans” and “South Americans”(?!) think this nan is a “comic genius,” always embarrassing to heair mentioned in Lewis’ presence since it implies that only unfathomable foreigners can detect the hidden talents beneath the exterior of this imbecilic schmuck. Lewis responded by addressing the charges of schizophrenia (he musta read the Rolling Stone article) denying it, natch, while constantly referring to himself in the third person. This set the tone for the rest of the hour during which Lewis aided Cottle in his search for the poignant moment, but only up to a point. Lewis is a past trafficker in schmaltz but in an interview situation the thornier side of his personality intrudes, revealing an undercurrent of pugnacious hostility, of “I dare you not to be moved by this” and indeed at one point on the second show he said “I think of myself as an honest, good man—and I’m not going to allow anyone to say otherwise.” But then he is a comic, aggressive, hostile, somebody who knows the score—why are people always surprised and dismayed to fjnd out that the private Lewis is a surly, belligerent man? It’s that sense of outrage and discomfort that makes him a comedian, that he taps when he’s funny (which ain’t all that often lately).

Anyway, 1 was sufficiently curious about Cottle after that show to view others, wondering how he would handle personalities less willing to descend to the maudlin than Lewis. Not everyone is a sentimental fool at heart. Tony Randall, for example, repelled Cottle’s morbid insistence with ease, laughing heartily at the suggestions that some childhood trauma must still be causing him grievous pain. Also disgustingly healthy was porno star Harry Reems, a decade or so of celluloid schtupping apparently not having had any ill effects on his mental or physical person—except his eyes, which now appear to be permanently out of focus. The highpoint of the Reems session was when Cottle asked him “What would be the flavor of some of those vulnerabilities, Harry?”

Serves oP Harry right for bringih g up “vulnerability” in the first place since that’s one word that never fails to set Cottle’s little (perfectly in focus) eyes to dancing.

But the real classic of the series so far is the Erik Estrada interview which 1 managed to catch in re-run and which 1 recommend wholeheartedly if it ever comes to your sector. It is, in a word, wild.

I’ve never seen Cottle so intense, leaning forward with anticipation, saying “There’s hurt in your voice, what’s the hurt, Erik, where’s the hurt?” Estrada, who has a.chip on his shoulder the size of a dead moose, actually responded to Cottle’s concern and attempted to express the inexpressible, leading to this touching exchange: Estrada: “I’m tough to love.. .1 must be a bear to love.” Cottle (tenderly): “I don’t feel that.”

THERE’S MORE. “Is there an emptiness deep in you?” Cottle asked, possibly wondering about the source of Erik’s nobod y’s-inhere expression. “What’s ultimately going to feed you?” That’s what he said. Also, ’’what is it you tasted when you first became an actor?” (shoulda asked Reems that one). Funny, I can remember the questions better than I can the answers, but they’re so choice, so, as Leonard Pinth-Garnell used to say, unspeakably bad. I do remember Estrada saying “I put a piece of me out there and it fed me,” a dazzling image that managed to evoke both the worst of Wayne Dyer and John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Could £ou imagine David Letterman on this show? Cottle: “What’s your earliest memory, David?” Letterman: “I, uh..,it’s... well.-. .1 don’t think my mother really liked me” (sobs uncontrollably).

Cottle (gently): “I like you, David.” But that’ll never happen, ’cause Letterman’s late night and Cottle’s early morning, when the defenses are down and the brain is soft and one wants to prepare for the day with an unhibited round of self-satisfied weeping. Shee-it. W