CREEM HANGS THE OTHER ROCK MAGS OUT TO DRY!

Rock magazines—don’t ya just love ’em? I mean, where else can you read about punishable food at the US Fest, or Brian Wilson’s latest rude institutionalization? Yes indeedy, I l-u-v rock mags.

Sure I do. Right up there with burl walnut and tank farms. When you get right down to it, what good are they? Can they help you decide if your complexion is extinct yet? Lead you into a high-paying career as a tree surgeon’s hygienist?

No way! Besides the usual bald-faced lies, false accusations and politicky-licky that goes on with the record companies (In Bed City, conspiracy fans), they’re just plain full of it, technically speaking, that is. J «"

Single redeeming factor is FUN! Maybe not as much fun as a perfect day for bowand-arrow fishing or rock ’n’ roll itself (gag), but still pretty much a laff civil disobedience. Pretty pictures! Zany rock ’n’ roll gossip! Wacky features! And—silliest of all—record reviews they expect you, the unwitting dupe, to take seriously! As famed reviewerreviewer Felix The Cat once said, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ROCK MAGS

I’ll say brief.

Way, way back, when we were all just little wigglies in daddy’s codpiece, the only magazines to cover rock music in any way were the fans mags like 16 and Tiger Beat. Obviously written by large stuffed animals under the influence of kiddie rides, these rags looked a lot like they do “today.” Lots of juicy-goosey pix, obligatory lists of fax and I dunno, instructions for laminating your life or something.

This was OK for awhile, but you can only look at so many pictures of Keith Allison before pure googoo starts to dribble out your ears.

The first of the fan mags to go a little “serious” was Hit Parader, if you can believe that. Honest—countless sevens of young, impressionable hepsters like myself would run to the drugstore to check out “Granny’s Goosip” for the latest on John Sebastian and his girlfriend Laurie or any heavy personnel changes in Autosalvage.

About 40 minutes later, the shit really hit the stands in the form of Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy. Finally, we had actual intelligible articles, interviews, reviews and all that good stuff. More importantly, they appeared to make actual money doing this. Rock criticism was born, as are most things, by people who knew nuttin’ ’bout birthin’ babies.

Crawdaddy, in its early incarnation, was a very East Coast, inty-lectual sheet where college hippies like R. Meltzer, Sandy Pearlman and even members of the Blue Oyster Cult would babble endlessly about Apollo, Dionysius, and Jim Morrison, not to mention Meltzer’s famous “tongue” theory. Young people were certainly thinking back then, as Johnny Slash likes to say.

Rolling Stone started out on a very West Coast, laid back, rather irreverent track and promptly took on the importance of the castaways’ radio on Gilligan’s Island. Big on lefty politics and scathing reviews (all of which this dopey author bought 150%), the old issues now provide priceless, often hilarious insight into the Silly ’60s. Particularly riotous were Ralph J. Gleason’s columns, filled with heavy-sounding Dylan quotes along the lines of “ain’t it just like the rain?” and “you don’t need a weatherman to watch your parking meters.”

Another bright spot was Lester Bangs’s earliest reviews. His vicious, gorgeously unwarranted attack on the MC5’s first LP an issue or two after Stone had run an overwhelmingly favorable near-radical-puff-piece on the band—complete with steaming pix of the five guys with White Panther badges pinned on their bare chests—still stands as a monument in the history of biting the hand that feeds.

Others who were there: Mojo Navigator, Greg Shaw’s initial shot at waving his freak flag high; Hullabaloo, which floundered between fan mag and substance before changing its name to Circus; Teenset, ditto above, which evolved into Aum and promptly folded; Fusion, where this “writer” made his slimy debut—courtesy of Flo and Eddie— in 1972 (thanks for nothin’, guys!); Zygote and Changes, both Eastern-based nationals with hundreds of colorful pages and no ads that died young; Chicago’s wondrous Psyche Pscene; and some filthy offering by the name of CREEM, which appeared in 1969, a year we’d all be better off forgetting.

What else can you say about rock mags on the whole except that, like the flavor of Trident sugarless gum, they “continue to last.”

CIRCUS

How do we here at CREEM luv Circus? Let us count the ways!

No better place to start than the beginning, Front Pages, by Lisa Robinson. Great pic of Lisa wearing one of her renowned

facial “expressions.” Looks like she can’t decide what flavor of sno-cone to sit on.

Lisa asks the hard questions and takes the heat as it do simmer. Debby Harry to become pro wrestler? “Maybe,” sez Deb. “People like something to look at,” Lisa wrings out of tattoo-face Brian Setzer. This is my fave: Elton John will probably tour. Damn courageous journalism, if you ask me.

Circus’s features show the same kind of dedicated insight merely hinted at in Front Pages. Strokes of quick image polish, they’re as silly or trivial as anybody else’s but rarely fun.

* Loverboy’s Paul Dean—“hotel wrecking and bi-weekly drug busts aren’t his style,” sez Philip Bashe. What, tri-weekly? Paul clarifies: “I guess I really began to get intense about music zzzzzzz...”

"Duran Duran—“proverbial lads let loose in a toy factory” goes phrase-coiner Phil again. “Because we’re white,” moans Roger Taylor “everywhere we walked there were crowds of people staring at us.” Crowds of men, I bet. “It was very hard,” admits Rog. So pull up your underpants, moron!

"Rush—“Their Four Musical Phases.” Gimme a break!

*“Ozzy Promises Something Grim!” Oh,

God—the five musical phases of Rush?

A popular office pasttime around here is passing around Circus’s record review section and trying to guess what records they actually listened to when they “review” such and such an LP. You can do this with CREEM too, but ours are supposed to be funny sometimes. Aren’t they?

Mostly, it’s the same kind of flea bargaining as the feats. Check out these items from their boldly candid Album Buyer’s Guide: Prism—“Veteran Canadian band.” Uh...well, let’s try Dio:: “Vinnie Appice is the drummer.” Yeah, aren’t you leaving something out? Oh, here’s a depth-defying one—“Saxon (Epic)—Fourth U.S. album.” Makes ya wanna run out and buy all three, don’t it?

What else? Mmm...Drum Beat, by Carmine Appice (includes actual musical score of Neal Peart’s adventures in 7/8 time); Music Gear (this month: “the ins and outs of powered mixers”); Song Lyrics (they scooped Hit Parader on “Fall Of The Peacemakers”!)...

JESUS K. RIST! I almost forgot Back Pages, by Lou O’Neill, my own personal hero. From Lou’s mug shot on top (picture Coleco Pool’s terry chlorinater with lots of rodent hair stuck to it) to his pithy commentaries (“How dare James G. Watt call us ‘the wrong element’?”) (What you mean us, Lou?) to his little farewell fables, Lou is just plain... Lou!

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Particularly stinging are his infamous “blind” items, especially this recent-but-nowclassic gem: “An older actress who’s known for robbing the cradle is ready to marry a rock star less than half her age. Get this: he’s the one pushing for the nuptial, and there’ll be no pre-marital contract.”

No argument with your podunk cattiness, Lou baby, but is it really nice to imply such disrespectful things about Patricia Neal?

HIT PARADES!

From the September ’83 cover: LEP VS. MAIDEN!!!!!!! Damn!—why didn’t we think of that?

Well, we do all the time, actually. It’s an office joke—“Hey, Chauncey, what’ll we put on the cover this month?” “I dunno, Edgar. How about the Clash vs. Marilyn McCoo? The Village People vs. Pigmeat Markham? Marcia Brady vs. Buck Owens? The Toledo Mud Hens vs. Boy George?”

Gosh dam those nuts over there! Are they just kiddin’ us alf^Is the whole mag conceptual? Could be!

The department you can’t help but stumble over first is good ol’ We Read Your Mail. It’s a lot like our own mail dept., minus any wit or pee-zazz, that is. C’mon, we read your mail too! In fact, CREEM receives hate mail so ornery, we can find it in the dark!

Lots of good sections in this rag. The one that’s worth looking at is Celebrity Rate A Record, where a, ypu know, celebrity “rates” a, like, record! Check some of these out: The goofs in Molly Hatchet review Total Coelo: “Dave Hlubek (looking at picture sleeve): Is she squatting to take a leak? Danny Joe Brown: Fuck this cannibal shit!”

Or how about Phil Mogg’s stunning insight into Rick Springfield (“Soap to the balls.”) and Van Halen (“the hookers of rock”)? Nah, what 1 like is an honest, straightforward approach. Like with Krokus, whose Marc Storace spilled the critical beans on Kim Wilde—“I’m not into this fashion rock, but I’m really into her body.” Grant this man subpoena power today!

My second favorite department is—you guessed it—Sports Challenge. July’s matchup, perhaps the heaviest since Lucy Ewing lost the Minute Wax Challenge, was Bowling For Dollars with K.K. Downing! “K.K. was so bad,” goes the text, “he didn’t even know which direction to roll his ball.” Same thing happens all the time with his “axe.”

Then there’s the biggie, HP’s original reason for being, the Song Index. “Words to the latest hit songs,” fluegelhorns the cover every month and—take it from me— you cannot consider you measly existence on the planet life until you’ve got the precise, inarguable words to modern epics such as Duran Duran’s sparkling “Hungry Like The Wolf” (“Do do do do do do do do do do”), the Thompson Twins unforgettable “Lies” (“Lies, lies, lies, yeah/ Lies, lies, lies, yeah”), or the single most important piece of music of the Twentieth Century, “My Bologna,” which I seem to have misplaced for now. Hey—it’s your loss!

Last department (but not least!) is the enigmatically entitled Record Reviews, by the Two Faces Of Roy Trakin. Now, in the interests of factual accuracy and journalistic integrity, this reporter compared Roy’s genius review of Quartet, by Ultravox, against his review of the same LP in our very own pages! To be totally scientific, I read them both at the same speed, and the inconsistencies fairly jumped out at me!

For example, in Hit Parader, he says “Quartet tries hard to be fashionable, exotic and alluring, but its influences are way too earthbound.” Then he turns right around and says “Quartet tries hard to be fashionable, exotic and alluring, but its influences are way too down-to-earth” in CREEM. Will ya make up your ever-lovin’ mind, Roy? Or how about his statement in HP that the album sounds like “synthetic decay,” while in CREEM he calls it “synthetic decay, at that”?! I mean, how can you believe anything the guy writes?

Hit Parader also has some features. Every time.

☆ ☆ ☆

16

16 magazine is the greatest thing since Prince Charles’s two-car airplane. If the other rock mags were half as much fun as 16, there’d be no need to even write this article. Not that there was one to start with.

I mean, dig this coverage, will ya?!

* “Rockers like Wendy O. Williams think Tommy [Shawl’s a super singer-musician and quite a hunk too!”

‘“Journey’s Steve Perry and Steve Smith: A Steve For Every Type!”

* Excerpts from the Ricky Schroder Fact File: “PETS: Busy Ricky has no time for them. WHAT SCARES HIM: the dark.”

‘Spot The Error: TOTO. That’s right, Toto itself is the error!

Truly great advertising too. Instead of boring record and guitar pick ads, you’ll find blurbs for Maybelline Kissing Gloss, London Nail Decals, and the touching “Train to BE A MODEL (or...just look like one)”.

Now, when you read CREEM and most of the others, you run into all kinds of objectionable material, not to mention pure filth. But in sweet, clean 16, the only obscene thing in the whole mag was a picture of Barry “Half A” Manilow with one feeler around Morgan Fairchild and the other clutching Pia Zadora! C’mon, I’m the guy who wore out his Pause button while watching Butterfly and The Seduction over and over, and what do I get? Stupid drawings of Toto with their noses missing. MUSICIAN

Are you nervous, tense, irritable? Can’t relax? Need a good night’s sleep, or just a refreshing catnap?

Try Musician! Now, I don’t wanna say it’s boring, but it rates a fun-level similar to that of certain house pets’ belief the flush toilet was invented strictly for their own decadent amusement. You pretty much have to be a muso to understand why anybody would be interested in this stuff, much less be interested yourself.

Like, The A to Z of Signal Processors? I naturally assumed it was about the secret sign-giving of the third base coach, that is, until I hit the goodies about parametric equalizers, ambience generators and hum frequency. The first two I dunno, but that last one 1 understand, and mine is pretty low. '

Or how about the D.l.Y. Revolution? What do you mean by that, Rosie? Debris In Yugoslavia? Deranged Insect Yodel? Drugz Iz Yahoo? More importantly, who gives a damn, not counting Richard Riegel? I rest my case.

’Course, it’s not all ground clutter like the •above. The “Police Report” in their June issue fairly bubbled over with playful repartee. Just listen to some examples of Sting’s rapier wit: “No comment (grins and nods vigorously)”; “I don’t know...I suppose...but../’; “Yeah, so what?”; “Yeah, yeah, you’re right!”; “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...YEAHYEAH YEAHYEAHYEAH!”; and my own fave comment, “(laughs)”.

Sting’s not the only Policer to shine. In Andy Summers’s studio diary, the blond Baudelaire lays prose like rubber, pops! “1 examine my arms for mosquito bites— good.” he pens. “Last night’s spraying with Off seems to have worked.” Kinda makes you want to throw out your Dickens, don’t it?

Mr. Incandescent Lyricism goes on to describe such incredible sights as “This one guy, Tam, who has an incredible snore,” his “early ritual grunting,” and the “vast expanse of white” that radiates from his body. Uh huh.

The best of the rest of the humor can be located in the mystically-labeled Record Reviews. “I don’t even know if this is a Pink Floyd record,” admits Chip “Mr. Telephone Personality” Stem of The Final Cut. Awright! That’s the attitude, Chipper!

But then it’s Z-wads like the 199th useless update on Fairport Convention (which adds up to three times as many updates as there are or ever were Faiport Convention fans); the Men At Work review with the inevitable references to “perky flute lines”; or the everdreaded Mike Mantler piece that works in good ol’ sturm und drang. Ah, originality— that’s what I love in writing!

Wait a minute—I found some real humor! Didja see where Jock “Itch” Baird said Joan Jett’s newie is “said to resemble the Exile On Main Street Stones”? What’s she got, billiard balls in her mouth?

Oops, almost forgot their recent Ray Davies cover, which differed from CREEM’s Davies cover by about one molecule of an eyelash. Time for a little investigative reporting here. Let’s see, our cover was by our own ace shutterbutt, Robert Matheu. Theirs, on the other hand was by...uh...Robert Matheu. Bobby, you’re a bad, bad kitty! Next time use a pseudonym, will ya?

Hey, how’s this sound—Roy Trakin?!

TROUSER PRESS

You don’t have to be a record fanatic to enjoy Trouser Press, but it helps. In fact, you don’t have to be anything and probably aren’t!

The Trou is heavy on details and light on style. Really, if you Want fun, read CREEM. If you don’t, read CREEM anyway and go fuck yourself also!

Some pretty swell sections in this unfortunately-named journal. My fave is Don’t Believe A Word, a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not take-off with items like “All musical tastes are racist!” and “Pete Farndon died even though he had already left the Pretenders!”

Second favorite is...well, shucky darns,

I don’t have a second favorite! I’m even lying about the first one! But I do enjoy the monthly flexi-disc they send out to subscribers. Lucky them. Not only are all the acts worthless from a musical and/or FUN standpoint, but it looks like a sexually molested sea trout after it’s been through the U.S. Mail. You have to play it on a mimeograph machine.

Did I hear somebody ask about the wonderful Trouser Press interviews? No? Which article is this, anyway? Isn’t this the part where Loverboy tell me about their fave chocolate Sammies? Oh, sorry! That’s next month!

Getting back to the interviews, while they may not have the depth of the Rolling Stone IV or the good pictures on the back like the Playboy IV, they still contain small amounts of whoopee. Of course, any chat with Malcolm McLaren is funny. Get this—he sez MTV wouldn’t play his video because it was “too black.” Hey duckbrain, maybe you shoulda taken the lens cap off, huh?

Then there’s Mick Farren’s yawn-andgarden-food Surface Noise column. Mickfamed for his role as Pink Fairies precursordecided to hang it all up in the May ’83 issue, only to unretire in September. “At times,” he sputters, “the profession of rock critic seems marginally lower than that of pimp.” Wha’d’ya mean, at times?

I’d go on to cover Fax ’n’ Rumours, American Underground, Green Circles and the rest but, aw, heck—I retire!

ROLLING STONE

I dunno about you, but the editors of Rolling Stone have always reminded me of the subgenus of Army Ants that feed only on the larvae of social insects. So there I was (or “am”?), all set to rip ’em up one side and down the other, when suddenly—in a flash of illumination similar to the moment when I realized there existed people who didn’t know the lyrics to “Lather” by heart—it dawned on me that RS isn’t a music magazine anymore and doesn’t want to be either. After all, we’ve got Record to kick around now!

But what the hey, let’s take a peek anyhoo.

The most-read part of Rolling Stone has been and will always be Random Notes. Of course, it used to be as much fun as backwards-talking toucans. Nowadays, it’s snooze divan like Dylan beating up Christie Brinkley (somebody had to!), to the hot romance between L.A. Dodger dud Mike Marshall and chubette pustule Belinda “Shortened Up As If To Bunt” Carlisle. Plus pix of Marianne Faithfull’s flash wounds and Elton John’s butts.

Saving grease is the short collection of quotes they toss in each time called Loose Talk. “Oh, I hate TV!” mewls cinema butcherette Ali McGraw. “I never watch it. Most of what’s on it is trash.” Yeah, / saw Players last night too. Other winners: “It cannot get hot enough for the iceman”—Ed Spigler, Miami ice distributor; “I’m homeforever!”—guy on insurance commercial; “Like, it’s a foregone transfusion!”—punk in The Blob.

Another part of Stone I luv is the effervescent National Affairs section. I don’t wanna say they print BALD-FACED LIES and FALSE ACCUSATIONS, but the coverage is so slanted, you could make trick billiard shots on it. I particularly enjoyed their coverage of dark “horse” presidential candidate Dale Bumpers—you know, she sings with that crazy Missing People rock combo. Can’t see her getting the nomination, though. Maybe in ’92.

Most prominent of the features are the famed/dreaded Rolling Stone Interviews. They’ve had some good ones through the years—John and Yoko, Bob Hope, Kitten Anderson—as well as some stinkers. The recent Bowie interview was almost fascinating, a real accomplishment considering the inactive mode of a personality he possesses.

On the other hand, didja catch the one with Joan Baez, recently voted the person on Earth least likely to need the services of a biographer? Covered all the hot issues, including Gandhi, spitting and the long sought-after confession that she used to think she was the Virgin Mary. Sorry, Joan, that position has already been filled by Bill Ho’ship.

I hate their music material, especially the ouija-derived rating system. Four stars, two stars, no stars, 3.12178 stars—what’s that supposed to mean? Why not rate things by tire irons or little boys wearing dunce caps?

As for the reviews themselves—how many ways can you spell Snooze City? “This may be art rock’s crowning masterpiece,” snivels Kurt “Rear” Loder about The Final Cut. “A thrill of discovery, of being privy to art in progress,” writes David “Who Gives A” Fricke about Pete Townshend’s unconscionable rip-off, Scoop. Plus lotsa good poems to fill up the little spaces, expecially this masterpiece from the April 14, ’83 issue: “I laughed/till beer/came out my nose.”

Well, you know what they say about April being the cruelest month.

RECORD

Most of what 1, the hanging jury, said about Rolling Stone goes ditto for the Record. Especially the part where I said “I dunno.” Hey man—you look it up! Ya think I’ve got the time? Nah, I’m too busy “writing” this shit, remember?

One point in the Record’s favor—it’s picked up some of the spark and irreverence Stone lost way back when. “A New Boston Album In Our Lifetime?” asks the headline. Or how ’bout John “Eleganza” Mendelssohn’s super coverage of the US Fest? “For every good thing that might be said about the 1983 US Festival,” John understated, “at least 75,000 bad ones flock to mind...Behold the extent to which punk failed.” That John—always the josher!

Columnwise, you don’t want to pass up Dave Marsh’s American Grandstand. You want to avoid it entirely! Particularly galling (this time) was his column about Mike Love, “the kind of Eddie Haskell-prototype who pushed around people like Randy Newman and Brian Wilson (not me!) in the high school lunchroom.” C’mon Davey—the only reason you didn’t get pushed around was ’cause your center of gravity is already so close to the ground, it’d be like pushing around a mudpie!

In keeping with the somewhat less weighty tone, Record's interviews are— we’re all grown-ups here, I’ll just come right out and say it—lite. Forget the probing inquiries, here you get Q’s like “How so?;” “What prompted it?” and the big-big-biggie, “Wince in what respect?” Bowie, wag bag that he is, comes right back with zingers like “I’m debating that at the moment;” “...the...” and, of course, the beloved “(laughs).” Musta been pillow-talking with Sting again!

Whoa! The real action is in the Classified Ads! Quaaludes T-shirts! Lifetime guitar cords! I luv E. T. (Enormous Tits)! Cover up ug/y veins instantly! Join the Rock Friendship Club! Enlarge your pe—oops! Goddam that Kordosh, always leaving his chicken mags laying around all over the place.

Too bad the lightening process doesn’t carry over to the record reviews. And you know what? I DON’T CARE! I’m too fucking bored to look up anymore boring reviews to prove to you they’re boring! Unnerstand?! Just go through yourself and look for these telltale words and phrases: veritable, film noir, manque, doggerel, bitingly topical, the hippie movement and jazz, pirn, lek, The Piano Man, Del Mar, CA, good, bad and peephole. Got it?

Next thing you know, they’ll probably steal CREEM’s format!

(laughs) W