ALAS, POOR SALMON, STING KNEW HIM WELL

ALAS, POOR SALMON, STING KNEW HIM WELL

RECORDS

THE POLICE Synchronicity (A&M)

Richard C. Walls

Possibly the worst thing about the Police are their reviews. From the favorable ones you’d gather that this trio is God’s own gift to the discriminating pop music fan, while from the few (but firm) detractors you get the picture of three new wave poseurs manipulatively using reggae and punk elements to serve their own emotionally chilly and ultimately banal music. So it’s always a little surprising to actually listen to the group and find a band which makes sophisticated and pleasurable music, music which spends most of its time transcending bassist/lead singer/ main songwriter Sting’s rather humdrum depressions.

Really, this Sting is some moody guy. Eight of the 10 songs on this record are his, and fully half of them are blatantly depressed—not particularly angry, but down and dejected. “Walking In Your Footsteps” is about the inevitable extinction of humankind (here compared to dinosaurs) via nuclear war—given the real possibility of this happening, the song is too mild by half; “O My God” is about the silence of God and the essential loneliness of the individual; “Synchonicity II” compares suburban angst fighting its way to the surface thru a sludge of lethargy to the laborious emergence of the famous Loch Ness monster (that’s right, and how you respond to this imaginative analogy will be more or less determined by how seriously you’re willing to take Sting’s grandiose glumness); “King Of Pain” delineates its title by comparing the first person narrator’s soul to no less than 13 grim if somewhat overwrought images (“a dead salmon frozen in a waterfall,” “a skeleton choking on a crust of bread,” etc.). As for the remaining four songs, “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and “Tea In The Sahara” are doomy cyphers, the former possibly about marriage, the latter open to a handful of interpretations, none of them exactly upbeat, while “Synchronicity I” is a trifle explaining the title concept and the monster hit “Every Breath You Take” is ostensibly a trite love song with its icy and obsessive core just barely concealed.

Now, none of these songs are particularly insightful, but then neither are any of them particularly stupid. And one wants to give Sting credit for trying not to be inane. Still, one recalls how elsewhere Sting has cornmented that the Clash have “14year-old intellects,” which sounds about right, but at least Strummer & Co. come on like pissed-off 14-yearolds, ready and willing to shake things up rather than just make fragmented little observations about the lack of niceness in the world... after awhile Sting’s passive suffering (the secret of his success?—it is a romantic image, unthreatening, properly victimized...) gets kinda tiresome. And, aside from the music, it’s pretty much the whole show, drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers compositional contributions having been limited to one novelty song apiece (namely Summers’s “Mother, with his Wild Man Fischer turning into Norman Bates vocal good for a yuk but mainly making one thankful that there weren’t any vocals on last year’s Summers/Fripp collaboration, and Copeland’s more successful “Miss Gradenko,” a cute distaff “Well Respected Man” as it might have come out of the U.S.S.R., which squeezes just enough into its two minute length).

Then there’s the music, which might just make the trip worth taking. . .this trio’s come a long way from the time when every song was made up of two riffs (albeit solid ones) and each song’s fade-out was a third of the song’s length. Now the ear candy factor is upped to include guitar smears, synthesizer leads, afrorhythms, in general a continuation of Ghost In The Machine’s aural enhancements applied here with more restraint than exuberance... something to listen to, enjoy even, while waiting for Sting-o to get some teeth into those laments. Verdict: limp but catchy (as opposed to catchy but limp) and grossly overrated. Which, of course, is not their fault.

STEVIE NICKS The Wild Heart (Modern Records)

Stevie Nicks has enough fairy dust surrounding her to make even the faintest of cynics gag. As a grown woman twirling around onstage like an oversized Thumbelina, presenting herself on album covers in “make believe” witchy woman robes, singing lyrics with enough “moon,” “bird” and “darkness” images to fill the next four generations of high school literary magazines, it’s not hard to figure her as little more than just a human doily.

But there’s something to this Stevie Nicks character beyond the intricately embroidered surface. No matter how ditzy her persona may seem, Nicks’s singing and melodies hit you straight on. Just when you’re about to make merciless fun of her, the dead earnestness of her voice stops you cold. She may not be a major brainiac or sister suffragette, but she’s still got something real.

The first thing she’s got is a full, identifiable character, which began to expand considerably with Bella Donna. On her Fleetwood Mac songs Stevie was a worthy contributor to the ensemble; an endearingly flakey foil to Christine McVie’s grounded, more mature tones and Lindsey Buckingham’s boyish pop turns. Yet, lifted into their own context on Bella Donna, Stevie’s songs added up to something new. It was 40 minutes of real soul-searching—an indulgence people may be willing to take from a straight A English student like Joni Mitchell, but from a Nail Polish major like Nicks? And though she’s never as eloquent or intelligent as Mitchell, Nicks is Usually as sympathetic. She may lose some people as she preens and poses in the role of the beautiful sufferer, all-too noticeably cherishing her view of herself as a romantic, fantasy figure visually, but the vulnerability in her quavering voice never seems like just a feigned tease for straight males who like their women willowy. Her insecurity is as real and glaring as her ego.

To be honest, this all came across with a bit more oomph on the first album. The Wild Heart certainly had its share of memorables, expecially “Stand Back,” the new Tom Petty duet, and the title track. But some of the melodies too closely follow the natural downward flow of her voice without developing much beyond that (odd for the normally popperfect Nicks). Sometimes the arrangements camouflage this, but there are a few dreary numbers, like “Beauty And the Beast”—too bad since this song has the most interesting lyrics, in which Stevie faces up to her own narcissism and tries to put it into perspective (even more directly than on “Bella Donna”).

Still, even on the less than irresistible tracks, Nicks’s affecting earnestness usually shines through. I can indeed understand why this earnestness, even in its catchiest forms, wouldn’t reach some. My smarter female friends are particularly turned off by the stereotypical female persona—woman enslaved to her heart. But Stevie Nicks needn’t be the strongest role model in the whole scheme of life. She effectively captures that shaky, hopelessly romantic part of true passion—something that affects us all on some level. And at least within that velvet-lined realm, Stevie Nicks sparkles like the dust all around her.

Jim Farber

FASTWAY (Columbia) ZEBRA (Atlantic)

What we have here is the 1983 rock ’n’ roll equivalent of the old fable about the wise men and elephant. Y’know, the one where a bunch of blind geezers check out different parts of the animal and come to wildly different conclusions about its size and shape. Well, substitute a Zeppelin for the elephant and these (and hundreds of other) bands for the wise men and you've got the general idea; Fastway and Zebra have evidently decided which aspects of the Zepsound they need and they’re currently attempting to make a career out

of recycling ’em for all they’re worth.

An effective blend of the old and new, Fastway may prove to be worth quite a lot. The instrumentalists are all vets and feature ex-Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley, the alreadydeparted ex-UFO bassist Pete Way, and guitarist Fast Eddie Clarke, late of Motorhead (who are still roaring, full speed ahead like they don’t even miss him). Clarke doesn’t have the range of a Jimmy Page but he’s still a fleet-fingered riff grinder of the first order and the band slams into these early Zeppish riffs just like they were meant to be.

The key here, though, is flaming redhead David King who wails and coos like he had a certain superstar’s vocal cords imPlanted in his throat. Is jt Robert or is it Janis or is it Memorex—you guess. Lyrically of the “ooh yeah, ooh ooh yeah” school, he makes up for his lack of originality and depth by sheer, overthe-top enthusiasm. Although this record’s success may have as much to do with timing as anything else—it was released between Robert Plant LPs and between Billy Squier LPs— it’s power is real, if almost totally borrowed.

Zebra also know how to borrow; the only thing about this album that’s actually theirs are the stripes. The Zep connection crops up on “Take Your Fingers From My Hair”—yet another clubfooted offspring of “Stairway To Heaven” — and whenever lead singer Randy Jackson reaches for a high note and comes down with a mangled lemon instead.

But Zebra know how to do more than just stomp around in Led boots. They also know how to overdub keyboards—there is an actual mellotron on this album—and sing nicely in harmony. I dunno, they just strike me as a bunch of nice, obedient guys who learned the tunes that people wanted ’em to play (a portfolio of Zep, Yes, Styx, etc.) so well that when it came time to write their own stuff, they couldn’t transcend their roots.

So if you want a nice, obedient AOR rock band to support, buy Zebra’s album. Just one thing, though. Keep It Off My Turntable Or I’ll Squeeze Yer Neck Till Blood Runs Down Yer Throat. Or something like that. Michael Davis

RICHARD THOMPSON Hand Of Kindness (Hannibal)

I’ve been Spending some time lately trying to figure out why I feel so unsympathetic toward Hand Of Kindness, the new LP from Richard Thompson, a founder of the fabled (but rather too long-lived) Fairport Convention and master of the Anglo/Fender folk guitar. My chief problem is that this is his first release in over a decade (excepting a UKonly instrumental independent) without now ex-wife Linda, with whom he made a string of superb records including 1982’s acclaimed Shoot Out The Lights. And, if that’s my chief problem, then I suppose I never really loved Richard’s music as such. In Fairport I loved the styles he explored and resuscitated and particularly the way he set off the late Sandy Denny’s gorgeous voice. It took me quite a few years to warm up to Henry The Human Fir;, Thompson’s 1972 solo effort, and that, truly, because I had been so moved by the Richard & Linda Series, particularly the exquisitely somber Pour Down Like Silver and the last for now, the aforementioned Shoot Out The Lights.

Thompson, you see, is a folkie, and his celebrated adventurous eclecticism is a folkie’s eclecticism. Only in the dark emotionalism of Linda’s singing—hers ranks with my alltime favorite female voices—in the powerful expression she brought to Richard’s songs, extending the meaning of his Own coded and quirky world view, in the vibrating sexual reversal she caused by singing them, only then did Thompson’s music transcend stylistic confines, charming, charmless or whatever. And her solos made interesting spaces on their records for his, both for his vaunted guitar and his Dylanesque baleful bleat. From the evidence of Hand Of Kindness, though, I miss her much more than he does.

Without Linda, eclecticism rules, deft and sometimes witty, but hardly alluring; guys’ stuff mostly, a kind of hybrid heavy metal morris dance. The first track, “Tear Stained Letter” sets the tone; jauntily feeling sorry for himself and guilelessly guiltless, he excoriates and mocks a distraught ex, playing like Rockin’ Richie and his Celtic Klezmorim. My standard for doing laundry in the street is “Wild Horses” but here we have something closer to an Eastern European “Already Gone”—low road all the way. And there’s lots more where that came from. “Two Left Feet” introduces Bon Temps Richard et ses Cajun Klezmorim, “The Wrong Heartbeat” reminds me of the pride of Denton, Texas, the Brave Combo, and the title track sounds—may Zoroaster strike me dead!—like Foreigner with a little Fairport jig jam at the fade. Throughout, Thompson relies far too much on unique instrumental arrangements and snazzy chops for impact and interest. This stuff may scandalize folkdancers or send them into ecstatic transports, but it’s a lot of diminishing returns to me.

There are two plainly beautiful songs on the record, “Devonside,” a lovely Byrds-like folk ballad (minus, of course, the essential harmonies), and “How I Wanted To;” an aching Thompson classic that actually attempts to illuminate (albeit onesidedly) a bit of recent personal history and features the yearning blue bagpipe guitar playing that no one like Richard Thompson can do. The saddest moment in a great sad song comes when you realize that the wrong half is singing it and it starts to pale before Pour Down Like Silver’s majestic “For Shame Of Doing Wrong.” As any jolly old tar could have told Richard, a well-tied knot, a well trimmed sail, and a ration of grog can never replace a great woman.

Jeff Nesin

FUN BOY THREE Waiting (Chrysalis)

Fun Boy Three look totally bummed out on the Cover of their second album, Waiting, and well they should, considering their depressing perspective on things political, social, and romantic. As members of the prime ska band, the Specials, and on the first, self-titled Fun Boy Three LP, Terry Hall, Neville Staples, and Lynval Golding—like so many English groups of the past several years—treated pop as an idiom sturdy enough to bear the weight of forthright denunciations of the various forms of injustice and malaise inherent in current (British) society. But ska is, first and foremost, dance music and thus provided an ironic (and ultimately hopeful?) framework for the Specials’ harsh commentaries, even as the demanding rhythmic thrust allowed no avoidance of their message. The churning rhythms that suffused the debut Fun Boy Three album, on the other hand, expressed an ominous bleakness—futility seemed just around the corner.

LACE UP, AMERICA!

IRON MAIDEN Piece Of Mind (Capitol)

Rick Johnson

The days of Iron Maiden are upon us.

In Tennessee, the explosion of an illegal fireworks factory disguised as a worm farm leaves several workers dead or injured. In New York, a new all-time record is set for most days a fetus remained living inside a clinically dead mother (87). And, as another sex ’n’ drugs scandal unfolds in Washington D.C., a junior congressman proclaims the nation is “going to hell on a toboggan.”

What can I add, but more ice!

Besides, arguing about it at this late date is like demanding “Why?” at a

swim meet. Because it’s there. Because a lot of people are walking around with one lace untied these days. Because, as local TV’s Mr. Food sez, whenever we think dill, we think DILLWEED!

And this here is Dillweed Nation, podners. Seriously now, listening to. these guys is not unlike being wooed by Butte (MT). No yodeling brakemen in this band, no sir. Look like a bunch of flunkouts from the baseball bat factory, expecially that creepy beak-eyed blonde. You couldn’t do much worse at a morgue, even a temporary one.

The music, though...hey, the music! It’s a least as fast as new Cascade’s patented sheeting action, if not quite up to the Maids’ previous velocity. That’s coz they’re starting to fancy things up a bit. Wouldn’t you know it? More syllables. More writhing backup vocals. More solo action. More urge to erase said solo action.

“To Tame A Land,” for example, not only weighs in over the dreaded seven-minute mark (bringing up jittery implications of ITT’s “Longer Distance”), but it has, like, sections and everything! Tempo changes, even! Plus the lyrics are all about Dune! A lot of good that did Face Dancer, right?

Speaking of lyrics, let’s all have a good laugh, shall we?! Now, sometimes it’s kinda hard trying to “catch” the words here at the CREEM office, what with the cool . crowd all the time hollering stuff like “Vanilla Fudge!,” “Uriah Heep!,” “The hippie movement and jazz!” or “Get a haircut, Reek!” Still, I’m positive I heard the word “minions” in there and I don’t know shit about fishing, not to mention the Book of Revelations.

Anyhoo, you hardcore Maiden freaks will want to know that Piece is still a pretty solid album in terms of Maiden, itself. The usual rock ’n’ roll launch-meat continues in a variety of forms, or rather, it appears different, as though Heavy Metal itself was an aluminum Xmas tree and Iron Maiden the cheap light-wheel bleeding colors on it. Not quite as fast or concise as usual, but—like Sea World—it just gets better!

But seriously, we can’t go on meeting like this.

Fun Boy Three continues to evoke gloom-and-doom on Waiting, but producer David Byrne’s knowing infusion of diverse stylistic elements results in a point of view that intermingles Jacques Brel-like, sorrowful detachment (for survival’s sake) with British ska’s directness and anger. The assortment of melodic styles here, Terry Hall’s cool vocals (the passion is firmly checked), the ,olio of dour instrumental embellishments (percussive rumbling, pained cello and trombone turns), none-toocheery backup vocals, and Byrne’s spatially distressing arrangements all suggest a music-hall revue, but a complex and deceptive one: you can’t just relax and enjoy the show. Not when the set pieces include “Things We Do,” a march through meaningless life (“Is there nothing inside?”), “The Tunnel Of Love,” a dire tango in which love is a life sentence, the suffocating “The Farm Yard Connection” (pot farming-asnecessity, police corruption-asreality), “Going Home,” which examines racism, and “The Pressure Of Life (Takes The Weight Off The Body),” a song about anorexia.

The group stops the show cold— and chills your blood a bit, too—on three numbers: Their version of “Our Lips Are Sealed” (which Terry Hall co-wrote with Go-Go Jane Wiedlin) somberly posits love as a constant struggle that is, at best, bittersweet. The Go-Go’s soared with youthful, love-conquers-all optimism, but Fun Boy Three offers a stark explication of the rules of the game. “The More I See (The Less I Believe)” is a severe look at Northern Ireland that’s practically consumed by hopelessness. And “Well Fancy That!” is an account of a schoolboy’s trip to France with a male teacher who sexually attacks him. The story is all the more horrifying as the song is structured as a taut waltz, and Hall’s outwardly calm delivery is a feat of agonizing control.

“The More I See (The Less I Believe)” ends with the repeated phrase, “Does anybody know any jokes?”. The question is rhetorical; what could possibly be funny in a world as fucked-up as that described by Fun Boy Three? But asking it suggests at least a faint glimmer of hope—as do such unflinching expressions of outrage at the intolerable state of things as Waiting.

Jim Feldman

RICKIE LEE JONES Gir) At Her Volcano (Warner Bros.)

It seems apt that Rickie Lee Jones’s GiH At Her Volcano begins at a point near the end of her live set (“We love you!” says the first voice we hear emerge from the audience' hubbub): the record assumes that we already hold her in affectionate esteem, that she’s already won us

over. As someone who’s been taken with Jones’s’ literary-hepchick stance from the time I read the back cover of her debut LP, and with the slurred sexiness of her music, I’m probably as likely an admirer of this effort as anyone, but it’s a little like getting to a concert in time to hear the encores.

Let’s start with that opening cut, recorded on her last tour. There are a lot of reasons why Jones might want to try “Lush Life,” even though singers far better than she have stumbled over its dissolute cynicism and wandering melody; it gives her a chance to be brittle, and sloshed, and to run her tongue over tricky lyrics (“where one relaxes on the axis...”). But it all goes haywire. First the audience, which obviously doesn’t know “Lush Life” from One Life To Live, breaks the mood with cheers after the “tinged with the sadness of a great love for me” line, and actually argues with her when she gets to the pivotal “I was wrong” segue into the main melody. Any reasonable singer would have scrapped the idea of putting this live version on disc, but Jones plows on, interpolating her own words, thereby throwing off the tempo, and, at the end, dipping suddenly into a strange Sarah Vaughan impression.

Not every song on this 10” disc, comprised of live and studio cuts, mostly by composers other than Jones, is as badly executed as “Lush Life,” but the mini-album, by taking away Jones’s verbal dexterity, leaves us with Jones the ballad singer, and she tries to get too fancy with songs that don’t need the adornment. Her live “My Funny Valentine” has nice touches, but notes get extended with no comprehension of the words they happen to be in: if her lover “ohhhhpens” his mouth to speak as wide as her reading implies, she’s probably dating Ralph Kramden. Faring better are the two ’60s remakes: Jones becomes part of a singing group on a percolating “Under The Boardwalk” that owes a lot to Laura Nyro (who’s always lurked on the edges of Jones’s style), and despite some fluffs, she does a poignant, restrained “Walk Away Rene.” Filling out the disc are Tom Waits’s “Rainbow Sleeves” (carried over from the King Of Comedy soundtrack, and still pretty), “Hey Bub” (a song Jones wrote for Pirates that would have fit perfectly), and “So Long” (short, and drenched in violins).

In a full-page Billboard ad, Jones wrote at some length to explain that Volcano is “a diversion from my ‘regular’ art,” a “special project” that shouldn’t be mistaken for a third Rickie Lee Jones LP. As is usual with these holding actions, the record winds up revealing a good deal about the intentions of the artist, magnifying flaws as well as bringing strengths into sharp relief. Jones just feels freer here to indulge herself: she slips into something clingy, orders up a tall cool one, and pours out her heart to the first sympathetic ear. Only sometimes she sounds as though she’s passing provocative notes on cocktail napkins, and at others it’s as though she’s getting carried away, spilling Drambuie in your jap.

Mitchell Cohen

MITCH RYDER Never Kick A Sleeping Dog (Riva/Polygram)

The air in their motel room had managed to whistle in every highway stench and invite it for a party with no witching hour. Old beer and diesel fuel, noxious telegrams from some far-off factory. They decided to go into town, just to look for a reason to stay awake.

The bar strip was a row of docile one-story rectangles with no one worth noticing either coming in or going out. They sat in the van for 20 minutes, twiddling the dial for radio stations that wouldn’t come in strong and then get fickle in the middle of a good tune.

Crackle, hiss; ning of the great rock singer, Mr. Devil with a Blue Dress, Mitch Ryder.” Crackle, music: “Jenny, Jenny, Jenny, won’t you come along with me?” She sat up and unpeeled her shoulders from the sticky vinyl. Goose bumps resurrected under the sweat. She grinned.

“And now, as a special treat to all you oldtimers out there who want to get current with a living legend, we’re going to do a non-stop spin of his new LR. Looks like ol’ Mitch is done with the booze and the boys and the little indie releases—he’s married, and this is a big-label deal, with John Cougar producing. So settle in, grab your brew and your baby and let’s do a buzz for the good new days.”

She wraggled out of the passenger side and hoisted up, one brown leg flexing the rest of her onto the van’s roof. Volume up. “B.I.G.T.I.M.E.” Yeah, rock out, into the party zone. “When You Were Mine,” by the guy who did “Little Red Corvette.” Good tune, but a little tidy for Mitch. Then a John Baldry song “A Thrill’s A Thrill,” Mitch and Marianne Faithfull(l) do like grit and spit, if you could only hear them better, dammit, and it isn’t these goddam van speakers, either. Is this some rockband album or is it a Mitch Ryder album?

She sighed and shifted her hair to the other shiny shoulder. Daydreamed through the next cut as she watched a hot number in red lean against a big galoot like he was a fence post. He grabbed her right under the tits, but the lady kept yawning, anyway. Solomon Burke’s “Cry To Me”. Ah, there’s that voice; “In the niiiight when there is none.” “The Thrill Of It All”—-not much of one ’til he sings a line or two by himself, and then a pretty good guitar solo. “Stand”— hoppin’ middle section but something here is too normal. She flipped over on her back and started to look for moving lights in the sky. Sing louder, Mitch, you’re good. “Rue De What?” Ow, bite it on the back. Some guy yelled at no one out on the lip of the road. What she caught of “Code Dancing” sounded like a good story but a so-so song. When that voice comes through, now there’s a party.

A hand appeared over the roof of the van with a can of the cool stuff. She held it against the back of her neck, then raised it up over her head before she cracked it open. “A toast to you, Ryder honey,” she laughed. The foam hissed on her knee like bacon in a pan. The beer tasted good with the salt from her skin. “I’m not gonna go to sleep yet, Mitch, Thanks.”

Laura Fissinger

THE VIOLENT FEMMES The Violent Femmes (Slash)

Romantic and sexual frustration have long been central themes in rock, and Gordon Gano—the Violent Femmes’ 20-year-old singer, songwriter and guitarist—seems -a perfect chronicler of adolescent anguish for the new age of teen psychosis. His songs by and large profile the concerns of your basic sensitive wimp, the clod who either never gets the girl or, once he has her, loses her. And yet, as the band’s name implies, things can get awfully messy along the way—especially when you’re as potentially demented as Gano shows he can be throughout this bizarre, fascinating debut LP.

If you took a lot of Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers (which inevitably means a little Lou Reed & the Velvets), some early Loudon Wainwright, and mixed in a dab of early Talking Heads (e.g., “Psycho Killer”) for good measure, you might come up with something that sounds a lot like this. The Femmes combine the romantic pathos and black humor of Richman’s first record vyith the scant acoustic approach of his later stuff, and the band is a genuine embodiment of Richman’s famous quote: “We have to learn to play with nothing, with our guitars broken, and it’s raining.” The combination of Gano’s low-key Velvet-ish guitar, Brian Ritchie’s mariachi bass (an instrument more likely to be used in a spaghetti western than a rock band), and Victor DeLorenzo’s junkyard drumset creates a uniquely invigorating sound, drawing on elements of folk, pop, jugband and blues, and tied together by the basic punk minimalist approach.

In true ’80s fashion, Gano is what Richman would have become had he truly flipped when the girl on the “Astral Plane” wouldn’t love him back. The lead-off track, “Blister In The Sun,” introduces a strung-out, drug-overloaded, neurotic schlep going through hormonal shock. By cut two, “Kiss Off,” our hero comes back down—but only momentarily, so as to delineate his many miseries as he pops pill after pill to the beat of the multiple pains he’s trying to alleviate. Which leads to the LP’s most dynamic track, “Add It Up,” a psycho-sexual epic (complete with Freudian mom references) wherein sexual frustration turns to anger, which leads to a gun, which leads to...Jodie Foster, call your office. Propelled by numerous hooks and Gano’s terrific couplets (“Words to memorize/Words hypnotize/Words make my mouth exercise/Words all

WE'RE ALL BOZOS ON THIS BUS

You Bought It...Yoii Name It

(Warner Bros.)

JOE WALSH

J. Kordosh

I was tossing around ways to break this to you and the best I can come up with is this: there is absolutely nothing wrong with Joe Walsh’s new album. No kidding. It’s a (Jesus, will they print this?) fine piece of work. As a person who owns a grand total of no Eagles LPs, I’m aghast and agape. You can call a cPw with no legs ground beef, but you can’t call Joe Walsh a chump, at least not on my time.

Why not? Well—forgetting that Walsh is a pro guitarist with the sense

to surround himself with suave musicos like Joe Vitale (drums), George Perry (bass) and Waddy Wachtel (guitar)—it turns out the fool’s aloof enough to lay down track after decent track. In fact, the main complaint here might be that the album is so fluid it’s a throwaway.

The fact is, however, that I can’t remember an LP as genuinely funny as You Bought It. Old White Joe kicks off your purchase with as dumb a title as “I Can Play That Rock & Roll.” Well, whaddaya gonna say? “No, you can’t?” “Which rock ’n’ roll?” “You wouldn’t kid us, Joe??” Which is where this whole beenthrough-the-tumtable-on-a-disc-withno-name begins to show its intentions. Cavalier Joe tosses out wisdom like Solomon on overtime: “Maybe it’s New Wave; I don’t know”... “When the critics try to analyze the latest trend, I just watch ’em come and go”.. .and the truly sublime “You can check Put any time you want, just call me Joe.” And all this, I beg to point out, to your absolute standard he can piay that rock ’n ’roll three-chord (or four, if you’re counting).

The truth is I don’t have enough space to quote every great lyric on this thing. On “The Worry Song” (talk about much-needed titles) he actually sings: “Takes a worried man to sing a worry song.” Not once, but twice. In a row! On “Told You So” he quips: “Some people hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.” And he did. The synth-fade on “Space Age Whiz Kids” goes: “Quar-ters, quar-ters, give me quar-ters.” No quarter from wit-heavy Joe, though: the man has the temerity to rhyme “election” with “rock & roll selection.” What Joe is trying to say, I believe, is “In yo’ face!” He not only doesn’t care, he doesn’t care that you know he doesn’t care and et cetera. These lyrics speaketh the truth; yea, heavy and snifter of whole wheat.

To top it off, practically everything else on this LP is funny, as in hahhah. “Class Of ’65,” which is possibly the best tune here, features a very good Beatles-type acoustic intro. It’s no coincidence Joe follows it up with the only HM number offered, “Shadows.” (Personally, I find it incredibly hard to dislike a song that starts: “I am standing in the middle of my shadow ”) More so, even the back-up vocals are timely and hilarious. They’d be a satire on the Eagles if the band of that name hadn’t already retired the trophy.

To sum it up, Joe Walsh is almost certainly a brainstorm killing time, and it’s hard to believe that anyone could dislike this disc. You should not only buy this album.. .you should hot only name this album...you should enjoy this album time and again. I believe I’ll call my copy Smeltzer.

fail the magic prize/Nothing I can say when I’m in your thighs”), the song is somehow simultaneously scary, witty and exciting, and irresistible all the way through.

As a whole, The Violent Femmes

deals with some of the worst things you can feel—hate, rejection, insecurity and alienation. And yet Gano has taken this negativity, said no to nihilism, put his heart On his sleeve, and molded it into something

that isn’t “dbwn” at all. In fact, this goofy, giddy record may make you laugh quite a bit. As Gordon Gano knows full well, laughing hurts a lot less than crying.

Bill Holdship