STYX Kilroy Was Here (A & M)

Meet The Premise. Rock ’n’ roll has been banned from this good green Earth by your usual bunch of hypocrites. Woe is everyone. Along comes Kilroy, the last of the great rock stars, to prove good is stronger than not-so-good. Toss in some half-an-entendre characters named Jonathan Chance (good guy) and Dr. Everett Righteous (bad guy) for extra staying power. Set the whole mess to music, or anything else halfway reasonable. Make it an album. Sell it to anyone stupid enough to regard -this as any more of a legitimate moral statement than a full-court press. Invest your earnings wisely.

Well, there’s your latest Styx boombah. Yeah, the old cockroach in the spaghetti, the aggravating little concept album. Even though this plot is so thin you’ll need a micrometer to measure it, Styx—everyone’s favorite imaginary band— manages to screw it up. There’s really no doubt that these clowns would be over their heads in a teacup, let alone trying to grapple with big-league issues like no mo’ rock. They’re so insecure about their socalled idea that they’ve included a written history of the Kilroy saga, just in case you have as little imagination as they do. Of course, if you really want to suffer, join the working press and get a gander at their promo efforts to justify this shocking waste of vinyl; e.g., “We want Kilroy Was Here to mean something.” Bold words, huh?

As for the bad news, much of the album is somewhat pleasant to listen to. In fact, if you can divorce your consciousness from what the men of Styx mistake for lyrics, you might actually enjoy some of the noise these very earnest musicians generate. This will happen, of coursd, on the first listen and then again when any six planets are in alignment, but what the hell. We’re not talking about Toto here.

To be more merciful than these fools deserve, consider the following. One, it’s an album a 12-yearold might enjoy. Two, it’s a quick REM-fix without going through the irksome mechanics of sleep. Three, James Young sings like a sappy Iggy Pop, which gives us insight into sappy to the second power. Four, any band that proposes to “start a rockin’ nation” at this late date deserves the Nobel Prize for Shamelessness. Five, the next Rush album’s gonna sound like a million bucks.

The Big Joke, of course, is that after listening to Kilroy, banning rock V roll not only sounds logical, but mandatory. 1, for one* anticipate the event with some relish.

RAMONES Subterranean Jungle (Sire)

x The Ramones have made such smart rock ’n’ roll for us for so long that we obviously owe ’em a whole two weeks’ vacation with pay by now, and Subterranean Jungle is it. Not that their new album abandons any of the post-gabba smarts that’ve made the Ramones America’s (uncrowned) Beatles for more years than David Lee Roth’§ been snorting peroxide, but Subterranean Jungle is just so relaxed as Ramones LP installments, go that it may even be as recklessly innocent as their first. couple albums were in their times.

The Ramones wanted the airwaves real bad by 1980 or so, and didn’t hesitate to say so in the twin blockbusters of End Of Th$ Century and Pleasant Dreams, albums so packed with pushy rock intelligence that not only did the targeted hall monitors of the airwaves largely ignore ’em, but even some fans sympathetic to the Ramones suffered data-overload blanRouts in confronting these records.

Subterranean Jungle relaxes the airwaves-assault, sporting a song collection that’s not uneven but rather just disarmingly random in structure. The breathless Ramoneian whoom-zoom programming’s pretty much intact, but somehow the individual cuts seem much more ready to leap out of their rhythm-crunch contexts than ever before. The glossy laissez-faire production by Ritchie Cordell and Glen Kolotkin (similar to Graham Gouldman’s on Pleasant Dreams) could contribute to that effect, but Subterranean Jungle is new for the band in other ways, too.

For starters, there are three whole cover versions, all placed at or near the beginnings of the sides: the Music Explosion’s “Little Bit O’ Soul,” the Chambers Bros.’ “Time Has Come Today” (suitably Ramoneadelicized, of course), and Bobby Dee Waxman’s “I Need Your Love.” Softened up by these diverse “outside” voices, the listener is ripe f° receive the most discrete internal Ramones yet. we didn’t pay much attention at the time, but Pleasant Dreams was the first Ramones record to reveal individual composer credits,} after all those other sets of theoretically group-penned tunes, and Subterranean Jungle’s looser structure really points up the difference between a (now-he’s) “Joe” Ramone song and a Dee Dee Ramone song. For the long-time Ramones fan, the effect feels as spooky as when the Doors went to individual credits on Soft Parade, and suddenly many of the “obviously” Morrisonian songs turned out to be Krieger’s, and vice-versa, while Manzarek’s weren’t anywhere at all.

Based on the composer revelations of these two latest Ramones albums, it now seems to me that Dee Dee could well be the “punk” conscience of the Ramones, something I’d never suspected while lead mouth Joey R. was Forest Hillsdrawling out all their lyrics for them. Big deal, yeah, but by seventh-album time it might be nice to start getting to know the lone-Ramone quirks better. The band’s two chief tunesmiths check in on Subterranean Jungle with what I take to be characteristic songs for them, Joe with the self-explanatory “Everytime I Eat Vegetables It Makes Me Think Of You” (pretty well fingering himself as the true author of all the Ramones songs about mental hospitals and neoNazism, the eternal East Berlins of Joe’s paranoiac-critical mind), and with the romance-isgotta-lie-justoutsidemy-lowerManhattan-windows optimism of “My-My Kind Of A Girl.”

While Dee Dee, undoubtedly one more classically-misunderstood bassist, contributes songs which are both slightly less upmarket and slightly more sensual than Joe’s. Dee Dee in effect self-parodies the whole Ramonesian proleburban ethic in “Outsider,” “Time Bomb,” and “Somebody Like Me” (“I am just a guy who likes to dress punk,’’ he claims in the latter), three exercises so slick you may not even notice Dee Dee’s stunning urbanlove poem, “In The Park,” so tumbling-melodic concise that it sounds almost Blakean next to say, Springsteen’s rococo romances. Quoth Dee Dee: “Like I am ^all messed up/When the fire flies glow.” Like that’s it, man, he’s got the real thing down for the .ages in one brief Ramonespeak couplet! Or check “Highest Trails Above,” where Dee Dee waxes poetidelic in an “airplane song” like those from the Who’s peak: “Sinking into the stars/Diving in for a swim.”

Like I am all messed up when Dee Dee Ramone starts to glow as a provocative lyricist, he’s not just the Pete Rose of rock ’n’ roll (evershorter haircuts notwithstanding), and I’m inspired enough to hop back to Pleasant Dreams and Dee Dee’s “You Sound Like You’re Sick,” a now-I-hear-its-brilliance song sti great it should be given 20 Grammies for its title alone. Which is not to say that I don’t love Johnny and Marky and, of course, Joe Ramone (still my man even if he’s gone superstar on us by sporting knee fabric in his 28 x 42 straightleg jeans these days) as much as ever. It’s just that it’s springtime in America, time to let your gabba be gabba all over again!

Richard Riegel

NICK LOWE The Abominable Showman (Columbia)

As the nastiness and gleeful perversity that was the undercurrent of Nick Lowe’s glib approach to pop starts to wear away, what we’ve left with are word-and-genre games. He’s undeniably clever at them, but it’s like the cleverness of a talk show host; Lowe seems amiable enough on The Abominable Showman, even to the point of letting his guests help set the tone (Paul Carrack’s Motown/soul inclinations affect-Noise To Go much as Dave Edmunds’ archivist-rocker personality contibuted to the shape of Rockpile), and he punctuates the proceedings with wit. But he has one eye on the studio clock, ready to shuffle his cards and get on to the next segment; eager to keep things rolling. He sounds disengaged.

Lowe’s pretty much stripped his pop of the impurities that brought Pure Pop For Now People to life, has abandoned the precise character delination and story-telling detail that made “I Knew The Bride” his greatest (maybe his only great) modernization of ’50s rock, and has become disarming to a fault. Slapdash dexterity is the point, not lasting imprint: the showman moves on fleet feet, and thaf s not all bad. Lowe can be offhand (“You are so okay,” he tells his long-distance lover on “Wish You Were Here”; for this she accepted the charges?) in an appealing way, his adeptness at stylistic hopscotch (some would call if melody-larceny) is always good for a few rounds of cite-the-source, and “Raging Eyes” and “Saint Beneath The Paint” are a couple of his supplest rockers since Seconds Of Pleasure.

So what’s the complaint? How can you get sore at a hacksmith who can knock off a piece of tin pan alley gee-whizzery (“How Can You Talk To An Angel”) and sing/ murmur it as though he were strolling through a Paramount backlot with visions of Audrey Hepburn floating through his moon-addled mind? Who can claim immunity to the craftsmanship of such lines as “a tart without a heart that’s what she ain’t/she can’t face the saint beneath the paint”? Who really cares that on “Wish You Were Here,” Lowe and Carrack are no Kendricks and Ruffin?

If I plead susceptibility to the likes of the tunes mentioned above, to the “Bring It On Home To Me” strings-and-pianov arrangement of “Paid The Price” (one of two nonLowe compositions), even to the chilly reggae “Cool Reaction,” that doesn’t mean I give Nick The Knife (aka Jesus Of Cool) carte blanche. Too much of The Abominable Showman (why don’t we just call him “Nickname” Lowe, like the hapless rookie Damur in Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, and be done with all this personamodeling?) is either too lazy—“We Want Action” and “Tanque-Rae” (a girl who’s intoxicating, I guess) start nowhere and go nowhere, and “a bit of feminine distraction” seems unduly coy a request even from so covert a letch as N.L.—or too strained. Nothing as awkward as last LP’s “Underneath my shirt, my heart hurts,” mind you, but nothing as savvy as “(I Love The Sound Of) Breaking Glass” either.

Lowe probably broke into a grin at ’ the contemplation of a song called “Time Wounds All Heels,” and who wouldn’t? Not Elvis Costello, not Tilbrook & Difford, not even (on a slow day with an LP track to fill and musicians already booked) Smokey Robinson. Once the platitude-inversion is set up, however, co-writers Lowe, Carlene Carter and Simon Climie let it sit there and coo over it, instead of coming up with a suitable song to put it in. Or take. “Man Of A Fool,” which comes on the heels of “Heels.” In order to get to the payoff/title, Lowe takes a songwriting equivalent of the Chisum Trail: “For every woman who ever made a fool of a man, there’s a woman made a...” Really not worth the trip, except for the scenery provided by Carrack’s organ playing. Then there’s “Chicken and Feathers.” She gets the former, he gets the latter, and has. to eat crow to boot.

Unlike Smokey’s method of twisting and varying common phrases, finding metaphors that expand his notions about romantic imbalance, lust,' or devotion, Lowe’s detachment keeps his songs from sticking, and his self-effacement as a singer tacks on more emotional distance. It’s qnly lines and licks, some pithier and catchier than others. You could say that you don’t turn to Nick Lowe for depth, and that’s true enough: he wants to be facile; it’s part of the scheme. That’s entertainment, and all that. No strenuous argument here, except to note that for Lowe, crueler is very often cooler.

Mitchell Cohen

MARIANNE FAITHFULL A Child’s Adventure (Island)

No, there’s not another “Why D’Ya Do It” on this album, so anyone looking for another anger fix will have to look elsewhere. “Why D’Ya’”s classic mix of bile and bitchiness in the face of betrayal helped make Broken English a comeback album with staying power, but it also led to the obvious question of “Whaddya gonna do for an encore?”

Making a comeback in rock ’n’ roll is rough, but it’s nothing compared to the fask of sustaining interest after that comeback is made. Familiarity undermines any underdog status an artist might have; people seem to get tired of you quicker the second time around. And the “determined survivor” persona gets old in a hurry if you don’t have something unique to say about your survival.

LOU REED Legendary Hearts (RCA)

Billy Altman

Although it might seem somewhat odd to bring up a word like maturity when discussing Lou Reed’s new album, Legendary Hearts—we are, after all/speaking here of the person who almost singlehandedly originated post-adolescent rock, and that was over 15 yearsago—there’s just no getting around the fact that the songs on this fine record find Reed’s vision of both himself and his surroundings entering what is, for lack of a better phrase, a new age. Last year’s The Blue Mask, signaled, perhaps above all else, an honest musical rededication; Reed’s collaboration with guitarist Robert Quine and bassist Fernando Saunders provided what was easily the most cohesive and sympathetic backdrop for Lou Reed songs-since, I guess, the demise of the Velvets.

But The Blue Mask also documented, at times almost painfully so, the extent to which the, gap between Reed’s opposing natures had widened. At one end was a newly affirmed romanticism and an increasing desire to become the suburban homebody, the “Average Guy” enamored of “Women” extolling the virtues'of “My House”; at the other, the fingernail-on-theblackboard street-related tensions of the title track, “Gun” and “Waves of Fear” reveled in the erotic fascination of life’s decadent, violent underbelly. Not that this was anything new for Lou Reed—you can go back, all the way back to square one, put “I’ll Be Your Mirror” under column A and “Venus In Furs” under column B and start tallying away. But in the main, it was the sound of the band that gave the record its calming unity'and in-, tertwined textures—this really could have been the work of two different writers, and no Lou Reed album had ever been that obviously schizoid and strangely without conflict while being so.

NOT JUST A TEMPORARY THING

Legendary Hearts certainly has its share of both conflict and confusion, but the great change that’s taken place (and this is where the notion of maturity enters the picture) is that Lou Reed has finally accepted the fact that each of his separate, seemingly warring, factions reside on the same side of the fence. This is not an acceptance without ongoing problems: “Make Up Mind” finds his questioning andindecisive about absolutely everything. “Right or left/Up or down/in or out/Straight or round/Love or lust/Rain or shine/I can’t seem to make up my poor mind,” he sings. Elsewhere, on songs like “The Last Shot” and “Bottoming Out,” Reed takes a good hard look at his self-abusive past, trying on the former, to explain the difficulties of staying out from underneath that bottle (“When you quit, ^ou quit, but you always wish you knew it was your last shot”) and on the latter trying to exorcise the repeated death wish feelings while out on a motorcycle.

What has brought all these thoughts to the forefront on the songs on Legendary Hearts is the erqerging moral' edge evident throughout Reed’s observations here. Nowhere is it more clearly delineated that on the album’s centerpiece, “Home of the Brave,” where he must come to grips with the deep responsibilities of relationships and love—one must, after all, be brave to be home and, vice versa. Though the song runs through familiar Reed terrain—the cast of characters in the first few verses come straight from “Oh! Sweet Nothing” or “Walk On The Wild Side,” the twist comes at the end: “The stars are hiding in their clouds/The street lights are too bright/A man’s kicking a woman/ Who’s holding his leg tight/And I think suddenly of you/And blink my eyes in fright/And rush off to the home of the brave.” For Reed, love is obligation, not illusion. As he states on the title track, there are no Romeos to call upon. “No legendary love is coming from above,” he sings, “It’s in this room right now.” As always, Lou Reed is in it for some kind of keeps, and Legendary Hearts reflects a new commitment. The kind of commitment that could be indicative of an artist coming into a brand new kind of prime.

Marianne Faithfull does, but here she’s often a bit oblique about it and the music itself rarely adds much punch or focus. She uses a combination of her regular sidemen and the Compass Point All Stars, but without Sly & Robbie taking charge of the bottom the rhythms don’t rebound around like they ought to. Guitarist Barry Reynolds and keyboard player Wally Badarou help out with both the songwriting and production, but the results are kinda topheavy. The one time they hit a groove, on “The Blue Millionaire,” it comes off sounding like a tame remake of the one they gave Grace Jones on . “The Apple Stretching.”

The rest of the album consists of ballads, some strong, some so-so. The filler’s easily skipped over, but a song like “Falling From Grace” is more frustrating to deal with: the choruses are concerned with the ■packaging of beauty while the I verses detail the emotional turmoil f that results from it, but the damn song is played so perfunctorily, that it loses much of its potential impact.

More effective is “Running For Our Lives,” whose grace and honesty show the lie in most pop/ rock outlaw fantasies: “Running for our lives/At least we’re pretending we are/Running for our lives/We never get very, far.” “She’s Got A Problem” works equally well, an understated alcoholic’s lament, made all the more moving when you realize it was contributed by Marianne’s main man, Ben Brierley.

Overall then, this LP is kinda uneven, but the acoustic strengths of “Problem” and the preceding “Ireland” may point to a new direction for Faithfull. Hell, her roots are in folk music and her writing does lend itself to a direct approach, so why not? Hmmm. I wonder if Richard Thompson is looking for another female foil these days...

Michael Davis

RAY CHARLES Wish You Were Here Tonight (Columbia)

A lot of people who obviously don’t know better have been dismissing this record, Ray Charles’ first country LP since 1970, and only his second in 20 years, with a snide wave of the jejeune hand. No big deal. Ray has survived a lot worse than a couple of inches of ignorance in Rolling Stone...and is doing quite well, thank you. So, in point of fact, is Wish You Were Here Tonight.

Ray’s renewed southern strategy is already bearing interesting fruit. In March, at the Country Music Association’s 25th anniversary bash, a gushy orgy that featured everybody from rugged Ron Reagan beebling about the music of “good, God-fearing Americans” to Kenny Rogers to Minnie Pearl to Alabama to Willie Nelson, Ray Charles closed the show. Seated center stage at his piano, with a cast of thousands arrayed around him, Charles reconstructed “America the Beautiful” almost as dazzlingly as Marvin Gaye, CBS’ other major free agent signing, had refashioned our national anthem at the NBA All-Star game. As Buddy “Changes” Miles once mused, with the power of soul, anything is possible.

What is most immediately possible is that Ray Charles can be the rock upon which CBS could build a whole new wing of its country operation. The duet albums alone could movt petrochemicals for years to come: Ray & George Jones—Deep Feeling at the True Pang Saloon; Ray and Merle Haggard—Rich Insinuations. And, of course, the oft-suggested Ray meets Willie—In A Mellow Mood, followed by Our Favorite Things and Frank: We Love You Madly. Throw in a sentimental Christmas sampler and a sacred Sunday Super Session and CBS Nashville should be happy and busy through 1985. And it’s all strictly Kosher because Ray Charles was country when Barbara Mandrell wasn’t cool.

Wish You Were Here Tonight, the first domino to fall, proves beyond question that Ray Charles is not only one of the master singers on the planet, but that he can record his own voice brilliantly, too. Voices actually, since he also takes care of all the backing vocals on the album as well. Why pay the Anita Kerr Singers when you can do it better yourself? (I do miss Miss Marjjie Hendricks from time to' time/but then I’m a fan.)

The first single, “Born To Love Me,” a sweet “Shine On” kind of song, is the fourth best track on the record. The hot three conveniently precede it on side one: “3A Time,” a relaxed, whimsical Tony Joe White song, “I Wish You Were Here Tonight,” wherein Charles’ big voice demolishes the consensual constraints of the genre, and an old Merle Haggard hit, “Ain’t Your Memory Got No Pride At All,” which Ray punctuates with selections from his perfect catalog of gospel moans and shouts.

There are some very good songs on Wish You Were Here Tonight and there’s some extraordinary musical craftsmanship on display as well. But perhaps the best thing about this record is that there’s so much more where it came from. Here’s to new beginnings.

Jeff Nesin

ERIC CLAPTON Money And Cigarettes (Duck/Warner Brothers)^

Eric Clapton has not been seriously mistaken for Qod since 1974. But the onus of divinity is still on him like a Navy tattoo. That’s why very respectable records like Money And Cigarettes don’t seem quite as good—or as bad—as they actually are.

They seem better than they actually are because of the kids who’d rather see a used-to-be-God than one of the many hopelessly mortal. Names like Yardbirds, Cream, Blind Faith, Delaney and Derek are sacred pages from the volumes of volume; and so, of course, even Clapton’s so-what sold stuff has just got to be super-human.

They also seem worse than they actually are because they’re measured against something that Clapton never really was. What he was (and still is) is a link extraordinaire between rock and blues; the guitar innovator in rock’s expansionist period; the father of lead guitar, period; and an occasionally inspired singer/songwriter. That’s it. All in all, decidedly non-God.

Money And Cigarettes is not bad for a non-God. Those who should know are regarding it as Clapton’s best post -Layla work since 461 Ocean Boulevard.

Oh yes. Layla. That was God talking. Possession was taken of a fragile soul being bashed by heroin and an obsessive love of a lifetime. The Derek and the Dominos album happened while Eric himself simply hung on and survived. It’s probably the last thing against which Clapton’s career should be measured.

For blues fans, Money And Cigarettes will be a pleasure akin to front porches and cool breezes on a hot day. As it is _ always with Clapton’s best LPs, the treatment of the many good blues tunes is respectful, but' comfortable; you can almost smell the dirty ashtrays and swamps of old coffee. Dignity and uncomplicated wisdoms make some magic, as does the match of Cfapton and Ry Cooder. Dig these, especially: Johnny Otis’ “Crazy Country Hop,” R.G. Ford’s “Crosscut Saw” (“...ah baby draggin’ cross your leg”), and Sleepy John Estes’ “Everybody’s Oughta Make A Change.” Clapton’s sharpest blues original is “The Shape Your In”— only an ex-loadie could have made

such a perfect laissez-faire condemnation of slow death suicide. Yow. God would approve.

The record does have one stretch of transcendence, a ballad called “Pretty Girl.” Patti “Layla” Harrison Clapton must have crapped when she heard it. The song comes from “Bell Bottom Blues,” the English madrigal, the white English blues, and more love than one little mortal can hold. Just like he does every time it really counts, God comes along and makes sure that Eric Clapton can get it out before his heart explodes:

Laura Fissinger

JOURNEY Frontiers (Columbia)

There I was puttin’ the flivver of doom through its paces down on the local shakin’ street, thinking casually about the grand neatness of the nuclear dense pack theory and the inescapable “fact” of such beings as Andre the Giant and Mr. T, when suddenly the idea, for this review of the new Journey album, Frontiers, came loping into my consciousness like an amphetamine gazelle screaming for thorazine. (Was this a stroke of genius forming, or simply just a stroke? I couldn’t figure it out.) The idea was to start the review by explaining how I’d start the review—y’know the oP Citizen Kane (mirror) effect...

.. .After the flivver of doom cut a swath through a pool of dangerously agitated Oriental medical students, braking to a jerking halt in front of . my fave boozeteria, I realized that all of that intricate thinking had caused me to fall asleep at the wheel, momentarily evoking the hallucination tbjat I was the insoles of James Brown’s shoes on a “good” night, thereby causing to become my distractioned from the ever shifting tarmac of the shakin’ street. Shakin’ my head in time to the street, I further realize that NO, I was not in the flivver of doom after all, but instead h$d just fallen out of bed and gotten into a mild bondage scene with my headphones. What was the narcotic that almost put me into terminal nappyland? Yup, you guessed it, the new (rimshot) Journey LF, Frontiers. (God how 1 hate to write opening paragraphs.)

Anyway, it’s not that Journey is a bad, or even dull, band; in fact, they’re usually just the opposite. Nor is Frontiers the canvas of lulled ’n’ dulledisms 1 painted it to be in those dreaded opening graphs. Instead, it has a certain originality which occasionally takes it above the usual metaloid yawns produced by the legions of coliseum plod rockers like REO Spuzzwagon, Ferrigner, Nutzinger, etc.

But it ain’t metal like so many people like to believe it to be, and I just wanted to get that straight out front. Metal has more purity of essence, more power and less slickness; Journey is a band that relies more on intensity of production and lyric than on the leatherette unconsciousness of most nouveau metal. Though I should point out that a few trad-metal bands, like Def Leppard, are beginning to cross over into Journey’s turf to explore the possibilities of that next big thing: pop metal.

Frontiers, then, is good enough to satiate the average pop-metal plodder. The song writing prowess of Steve Ferry is dominant here, especially on songs like “Rubicon” (my fave on the record) the title toon and “Edge of the Blade,” with his pop proclivities coming to on tracks like “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” and “After The Fall.” Coupled with the always intriguing playing of Neal (Hey—when-I-was19Ihadachoice-between-jojning-the-Stones-or-Santana) Schon and the keyboard work of ex-Baby Jonathan Cain, this album has a sneaky way of making you pay it some heed.

Of course that’s only if you’re a normal person and not a metal pilgrim in search of the sonic-jihad to end all sonic-jihads. Which, unfortunately, is what my lot in life is. So what’s a poor metalunatic to do when everybody starts to smell like adhesive tape, and he can’t think of any more ways to really want to hurt Boy George? Listen to the new Journey album, I suppose, and drift off into the sleep and dreams of the never satisfied. It’s either that or going out on a quest to find the Gspot of a mastadon.

Joe (We Think It Is A Vitamin

Deficiency) Fernbacher

ULTRAVOX "

Quartet

(Chrysalis)

All You Need Is Synth. Producer George Martin sez these guys are the most musical band he’s worked with since you-know-who. So, what’d you expect him to say... Cheap Trick? Me? I don’t like Midge Ure’s mustache or his muzick. And I’m not too crazy about reviewing a band’s record by saying, “But you have to see their video...” What IS an Ultrvox anyway? A vacuum cleaner? Or just a vacuum?

Ultravox has been around since 1977, when new wave was still called punk. On their very first album, they dressed up in vinyl and were produced by Brian Eno, two things which more than overshadowed the tongue-in-chic dole queue synthonics of such nu world ditties as “Satday Night In The City Of The Dead,” “I Want To Be A Machine,” “The Wild, The Beautiful & The Damned” and the notorious “My Sex.” U. Vox’s obsession with the mechanics of gloom und doom, though, diminished considerably when lead singer/robot manque John Foxx split and was replaced by Chinn/Chapman protege and bubble-gum crooner Midge Ure. In place of Foxx’s otherworldly diffidence, the group has substituted European decadence and old world taste. Now, instead of being truly offensive, Ultravox is just plain boring.

Quartet represents the latest move toward respectability. Connie Plank, the German producer at the helm for Ultravox’s last few records, has given way to George Martin, and the sound has gotten predictably homogenized. The straightedged minimalism and razor rhythms have been blunted with (ta-dah) lush orchestration and soaring electronic cliches. And you thought the legendary producer got all that studio stuff out of his system on Sergeant Pepper. Wrong, Moog breath.

While limey-come-latelys like Human League, Heaven 17, Yaz and Soft Cell have translated dancefloor (and video) recognition into chart success, Ultravox has been left out in the cold. Unlike those bands, Ultravox is more in the traditional progressive Anglo-artrock mold; the group’s roots may be in Bowie and Roxy, but their evanescent side now dominates the clipped mechanical one.

Quartet tries hard to be fashionable, exotic and alluring, but its influences are way too down-to-earth and mundane. “Reap The Wild Wind” is velveeta cheese Bowie— spreadable, but none too credible. “Serenade” starts out with some promising stereoized noodlings buzzing in your brain like mosquitoes, but the effect soon gives way to a syrupy, widescreen wash that is minimal only in terms of interest. “Hymn” offers one of the LP’s; more hummable melodies, though its lyrical paean to the Almighty isn’t even solemn enough to be ironic. If Ultravox still has a sense of humor, one would be hard-pressed to find it here.

Right now, Ultravox is caught in a bind. They can’t figure out whether they want to be Magazine, Joy Division, Visage or the Nouveau Beatles. Decadence is one thing, but what’s been happening to Ultravox’s music is more like decay. Synthetic decay, at that.

Roy Trakin

CANNONBALL ADDERLEY QUINTET In San Francisco (Riverside)

CANNONBALL ADDERLEY The Sextet (Milestone)

As is so often the case, the height of the late Cannonball Adderley’s critical success predated by some years the height of his popular success—by the time his monster hit “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” crossed over in ’67 (a hit, not incidentally, built around Joe Zawinul’s funky electric piano rather than Cannonball’s bluesy bebop alto sax), most critics, as well as less obsessive members of the jazz cognoscenti, would agree that the best of Cannonball’s small group recordings had already happened, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, on the defunct (as of ’64) Riverside label. Not that the Riverside albums were obscure crit-picks—these recordings, many of them Live!, were as popular as jazz records got at that time. The group’s blend of funk tunes and straight ahead bebop played before a noisily receptive audience and garnished with Cannon’s droll introductory comments were among the hippest party records of their day. So, when “Mercy, etc.” finally hit the oldtimers nodded, barely tolerant, acknowledged that success was due but added in order to hear the real undiluted thang you had to track down and hear one of the rapidly disappearing Riverside dates. And now, thanks to Fantasy’s continuing effort to reissue every jazz recording they can claim ownership to (which includes the Riverside catalog), you can. Hear them, that is.

In San Francisco is part of an especially ambitious package, the reissue of 40 Original Jazz Classic LPs complete with their original cover art and liner notes—in this case a humorously formal portrait of the Brothers Adderley (Nat on cornet) and some sincere hype from the late Ralph J. Gleason (“might well cause the lame to walk and the halt to throw away their crutches” and so forth). Recorded at the Jazz Workshop in ’59, the group is Cannonball and Nat, soul specialist Bobby Timmons on piano, Sam Jones, bass, and Louis Hayes, drums. The scene is intimate and the audience enthused as a running commentary of “aw rights,” “uh huhs” nnd “yeahs” emerge from the unde^babble, approving the group’s more cogent rhythmic moves. From the opening cut, Timmons’s “This Here” (unhelpfully described as “a waltz that is simultaneously a shout and a chant”) thru the closer, an uninhibited up-tempo rendition of Oscar Pettiford’s “Bohemia After Dark,” the spirit never flags. This is largely “commercial” stuff but done with panache and without an ounce of detectable pandering—the commercially comes out of a compelling rhythmatism and gritty impolite blues feeling rather than the customary blanding out of the r’n’b factor. Add to this Cannonball’s prodigious technique, which allows him to effortlessly reel off rhythmically complex lines between the beats, and brother Nat’s sophisticated Milesian less-is-more approach, and you have a rare-inone-place combination of the intellecutally and emotionally (and physically) catalytic aspects of jazz... also, aside from a certain quaintness about “This Here” (funky jazz waltzes were definitely a circa ’60 phenomenon), the record sounds remarkably fresh.

The Sextet, recorded ’62-’63, is not a reissue but rather previously unissued concert material with almost the same group, a pre-cosmic Joe Zawinul replacing Timmons and Yusef Lateef being added on tenor and flute. These are not outtakes or rejects but cuts held back from release because they duplicate titles on other albums. Like In San Francisco, this one opens with “This Here” and closes with “Bohemia,” tho the blowing here is a bit more adventuresome (after all, by now they’d played these tunes a few hundred times and had to keep their own interest up—like I said, no pandering). Despite having been in the can for 20 years, this is prime Adderely and all the nice things I said about the other record apply here too (and these two albums must set some sort of record for the number of quotes inserted into a series of improvised solos, an indication of the playful wit abounding here— Cannonball works “I Feel Pretty” into both pf his “This Here” solos while Nat coolly places Rodgers and Hart’s “Lover” into his second; Timmons’ quote of “I’m Beginning To See The Light” is a highlight of his solo on Randy Weston’s “hiFly,” while Zawinul works in sosubtle-you’re-not-sure-you-heard-it quote from “Buttons And Bows,” no less, into his solo on Nat’s original composition “Never Say Yes”; during the coda of that same song Nat starts playing a quote that sound rather poignant until you realize it’s “Stars And Stripes Forever”; and on and on and on). No beatnik commie killjoy, howev, I will not force the issue from the standpoint of commercial overkill. Will, howev, raise the spectre of rock-roll overkill for the purpose of CAMOUFLAGE: P.T. was hiding much, as he had much to hide. Listen to “You’re So Clever,” for inst—no, don’t listen, just take my wd.—and you’ve got a Townshend who (vocally) is the Hanna-Barbera equivalent of simpy 3/4-late-period Dylan. “Melancholia”: he’s Lou Christie. “Bargain,” “Things Have Changed,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” etc.: Paul Simon!

Needless to say—so I won’t. But next time you feel the urge to indulge in the dread Chuck Mangione syndrome, i.e., you never really listen to jazz but you think you’ll try it out because you’re bored or curious or both, pass on the little guy with the funny hat and all those other currently popular watered-down pseudos—Benson, Washington, Jr. et. al.—and try one of these Adderley sides instead, currently available, easy to get. And if you don’t like ’em, then forget it. Just forget it.

Richard C. Walls

...AS IN DEMOGRAPHICS

PETE TOWNSHEND Scoop (Atco)

by Richard Meltzer OK. Let’s just get down to what this sorrowfil piece of junk, basically the demo version of what could conceivably ’ve made it to the Who’s version of Metamorphosis had enough of it gone beyond demos (only not that good), is good for: archaeology, of course. Answers two or three questions that did not previously have immediately accessible answers for bozos like you or me. Such as: how come the Who has always opted for overproduction in the guise of phonus-balonous “basic rock” production; why has Townshend the goddam auteur let Daltrey carry so much of the vocal burden when he himself coulda done it just as well; what has Peter been trying to hide, y’know under cover of nothing-to-hide/ heart-as-an-open-book. Maybe answers is the wrong word—“food f’r thought” is more like it—but that’s all you get peeking into any Tut tomb: suggestive b.s.

Suggested by the not-half-bad demo-level production on certain cuts that did end up on LP’s (“Circles,” “Squeezebox,” etc.): they never knew how to leave well enough alone, had to take viable preliminary mixes and spend lotsa time and money needlessly fleshing ’em out and making ’em “majestic.” Obviously lots of rockers have suffered from this malady—heck, that’s a big part of what the whole failed punk revolution was trying its darndest to transcend (& failed just as miserably at anyway)—so lemme get specific and characterize the Who’s particular brand of same: they were CONSPICUOUS STUDIO OVER-ACHIEVERS (i.e., fussy consummate “professionals”) who felt enough SELF-HATE AND PROFESSIONAL DOUBT to think they hadda erase all taint of garage-band technical prowess at the same time as making incredible ado of their hypothetical garageband sensibility. Needless to say, you can’t have it both ways, and especially not the double-both (y’know: down on the real and inherent, up on the fake or gratuitous).

And like there’s even some mixes here (“Initial Machine Experiments,” for instance, which Townshend obviously deemed so irrelevant even as playtime nada that he never even gave it a real working title) that’re more daring, more interesting—not by much but by some—than just about anything they ever mixed for release. Of course they’re also more sloppy, less commercial, far less demographically pigeon-hole-able—and I’d hafta be a heinous bohemian or something to challenge so-and-so’s mainstream Anglo-American getrich-or-something to burst orientation—but still, y’know, the fucking Who could’ve standed (stood?) to be an iota more vinylly multisonic...

I mean even “Magic Bus” (demo version) is really only a thinly veiled play on Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”—I’m speaking of duh music, y’know rhythms and stuff— but let’s just talk vocals f’r a while, clean up that whole mess, although before we even get to that lemme tell ya what as an archaeolog I have found lurking in Mr. T’s secret box under cover of not darkness but all that overblown hardrock claptrap which the Who were never able to deliver credibly to ME, altho’ maybe you’re more tolerant and maybe that was the goddam idea, i.e. they were rock ’n’ roll illusionists jus’ like Bette Midler and Bruce Springsteen to inevitably follow. Anyway:

PETE TOWNSHEND’S SECRET—Is that he is a sap, very sappy guy (musically speaking). Which is fine, swell, OK and who give a damn—like I cert’ly don’t, I’ve got fucking JOHNNY MATHIS records in my collection—but I guess you gotta go schiz if you’re rock-rollin’ for not just bigbucks but that elusive Hemingway ring in the sky called “male honor” or whatever crap it goes by. If you rock-roll you’re Elvis (the Pelvis), if you sap it up you’re Simon (the Sissy). Many have covered their ass in the former manner, but—gettin’ to vocals— few have had Roger Daltrey to play the stand-in whosis. Daltrey’s vocal ripoff range has never been anything to write home about—pseudo-Jagger, pseudo-Lennon/ McCartney, etc.—and other’n that you’d be hard put to call him an original stylist; even Petey can pull off sounding exactly like Roger— i.e. he’s mastered the same exact ripoff range (f’instance “Sunrise” on The Who Sell Out, a damn great song and the only time on LP any of ’em really let the sappiness totally hang out)—but it’s easier all around to just let Rog be the patsy for the soft-centered stuff, especially when Rog’s limited range limits the sapvision beyond what, judging from these demos, Peter himself could’ve feigned forever limitwise. To wit: if he sang all (or more of) the time with the Who, Peter’d have had to inevitably spill at least some of the beans, give exposure to the inevitable Simonisms, etc., all of which occurred to him in the first place just ’cause (a) he’s got more imagination than the rest of the band — including Keith—put together and (b) he’s no rock-roll robot, is as sensitive as you and/or me.

Lightweight bands should be lightweight, what’s wrong with lightweight?