SCRATCH 'N' SNIFF WITH THE GLIMMER TWINS

THE ROLLING STONES Undercover (Rolling Stones)

by Billy Altman

Yes, friends, here it is. My spanking new, right-out-of-the-bag copy of Undercover, the latest Rolling Stones album. And a fine piece of merchandise it appears to be. You know, this is, after all, the first Rolling Stones audience participation record since, well, Sticky Fingers, and we all know how good that package was, right? So I tell you what. Since I know that everyone out there is all paranoid about spoiling their copy of this LF—wouldn’t want yet another Velvet Underground cover without the banana peel, now would we?—1 will, during the course of this review, in the interests of science, carefully remove the seven stickers on my own personal Stones album while the record is playing at the rate of one sticker per every 1.43 songs. You folks at home just follow along as I go through the stickers; those of you in the studio audience just watch the monitors. Alright then, let’s get right to it, shall we?

OK. Our first sticker will be—let’s see—we’ll take the one right in the middle, covering the young lady’s midriff. (We’ve selected this particular one on the off-chance that the stickers don’t readily peel off and that way we’ll be able, if there’s a lot of tearing and shredding, to perhaps use an alternative measure for the, um, good parts, tee hee.) Alright, we’ve made it through the first track; that’s the single, correct? Not bad, I guess. Kinda ominous without being threatening. Think those revolutionaries are after Bianca? Only kidding, Mick, really. You sound great. Tell me, are we ever gonna know anymore if it’s Keith or Ron Wood or is it just going to be pit-ofquicksand mixes the whole rest of the way? No, really, just kidding. Oh, here comes the second song, “She Was Hot,” Is that the same girl who was so cold on Emotional Rescue? Sounds like it. Hey, here comes the 2:10 mark (boy, these tracks are long), so let’s give it a go. I’ll just get my fingernail under there and, hey, it’s coming! It’s cornin’ and...whoa Nellie! There’s nothing under there! You know what that means! Let’s check out those tits!

Wait, you’re right, made the rules, gotta wait again. Oh, “Tie You Up”? Fellas, I don’t mean to whine or anything, but we’ve had three songs and all you’ve got here is some rather tedious music and your basic sex, drugs and violence lyrics just like every bad Stones album (Black And Blue and Rescue come to mind quickly) seems to fall back on when the inspiration ain’t there. No matter, it’s BOOBS TIME! Let’s try Bill’s side...Damn, it ripped. Those sleazeballs, I knew that bare tummy was a bluff...wait, it’s moving now and... What the hell is this? A DOG?? What a bunch of sickos!

Whoops, that’s Keith singing, isn’t it? God, what an awful song. Check that, I’d put “Little T & A” out of my mind. So I guess “Wanna Hold You” is an improvement, if only by default. Hey, love those rhymes—“funny” with “money,” the “fun” with “one.” No wonder they keep singing the chorus over and over and over. (Sound of thumbs twiddling.) The side closer’s gotta be almost over by now, no? What? Five minutes long? Why? Reminds me of Dr. John’s Sun, Moon And Flerbs album. Actually, a lot of songs on Stones albums during the last 10 years reminds me of the Sun, Moon And Herbs album. Like that inane percussion war going on there from speaker to speaker. What on earth is that all about? Heck, get that snakeskin sticker over here. Ooooh, gross! No crotch, just stuff like that Mr. Goodbody guy that wears the “inner workings of man” outfit or those kits you got in high school. Oh well, so much for the sex part of the cover. Let’s try side two and the other stickers.

“Too Much Blood.” What’s this, some guy eating his girlfriend piece by piece? How big was that freezer, anyway? What’s that, Mick? You thought Texas Chainsaw Massacre was horrible? How’d you like to give Tobe Hooper a shot at this album sometime? Oh, it’s finally ending— almost six minutes for that one. Whew! This is work, folks. How ’bout the spider and web sticker now? Oh, no—ART! Forget that one. “Pretty Beat Up,” more violence, what’s the problem with these guys? I mean, he’s 40 already. What’s the problem? “Too Tough”; whoa, this actually resembles the Rolling Stones, as they once were oh, so long ago. I’ll take the TV set now. Ugh, more art. Could be Picasso. (Somebody say asshole out there? Now, now.) Home stretch, bear with us. “All The Way Down.” Hey, I actually like this song! What was that? “I was green, Mr. Cool, just a snotty little fool.. .like kids are now.” Strong stuff, Mick, you old geezer. OK, we’re undoing the logo on the bottom right corner and.. .more animals? What do these clowns have, fetishes? Last song (finally!)—“It Must Be Hell.” No argument there, Charlie.

You know, this is the first Stones album I can recall where even Watts sounds asleep. (Not good, fellas. Not at all.) Hey, the last sticker’s peeling away...and it’s the same thing underneath! How clever! You know, I think they made a big mistake titling this record Undercover. All things considered,I’d have called it by its more obvious name: Ripoff.

PAUL MCCARTNEY Pipes Of Peace (Columbia)

Uh oh.

Right there on the inside of the gatefold cover, before you even get the record out, you find this pithy aphorism: “In love all of life’s contradictions dissolve and disappear” —Rabindranath Tagore. Ah yes, the old love-as-lobotomy riff—spiritually, perhaps, a palliative for confused and timid souls, but creatively a one-way ticket to snoozeville. But let’s not be hasty. Last year’s Tug Of War, though inevitably overpraised in some quarters, was a solid and admirable effort coming after a decade of aimless fluff punctuated by the odd burst of transcendent pop. It was as though, after having squandered whatever symbolic heft an ex-Beatle could have carried into the ’70s to the point of threatening to become the eternal lightweight, McCartney’s response to Lennon’s death was to get, if not more serious, at least more responsible. Maybe he would, in the future, be less willing to waste his demonstrated talent so blithely (intimations of mortality, and all that).

So one approaches this album a little more hopefully than one approached, say, McCartney II. Which makes (and if you’re skimming, this is the part of the review yo.u’re looking for) it even more of a disappointment than it might have been.

Not that this is a total return to previous .bad form—no appealing melodies thrown away on song fragments here, or cutesy vocals over home doodlings—these are actual songs with the exception of a throwaway instrumental (“Hey, Hey”) allegedly co-starring bassist Stanley Clarke though it could just as well be anybody (although personnel are listed, no specific credits are given—Ringo’s thumping away here somewhere, as is Steve Gadd, Andy McKay and Eric Stewart have contributed something, and there’s always Linda, of course). No, it’s not structural flakiness that drags the album down this time, it’s—well, consider the two “peace” cuts on the album, the title song and the nominal sequel “Tug Of Peace.” On the former, McCartney sings “Help them to learn songs of joy instead of burn baby burn” and it’s significant that he has chosen an old Black Power slogan to represent warlike rhetoric rather than some more appropriate, though admittedly less dramatic, piece of ruling class cant like “peace through strength” or “reasonable deterrent” (though I know it’s hard to find a rhyme for deterrent”). That he has no doubt made this connection unwittingly is indicative of the lack of thought behind his simplistic approach. More to the point, the song is hopelessly inane with its love/peace/nirvana equation. Likewise, “Tug” assures us that “your troubles cease when you learn to play the pipes of peace,” a sentiment just abstract enough to be worthless. One hates to be too hard on songs about peace, even childlike ones about some generic peace in McCartneyland, but unfortunately these two songs do their part in propagating the popular myth that peace advocates are, for the most part, fuzzy-minded wimps (with friends like this, etc.).

Then there’s the two duets with Michael Jackson. “Say, Say, Say” has a decent little melody and forgettable lyrics (on the accompanying video Jackson appears as a delicate little fawn, matching McCartney cutefor-cute—had he used this persona for the “Billy Jean” video, the lyrics to that song would have been even more believable) while “The Man” has a good arrangement and cryptic lyrics which, given the evidence of the rest of the album, one does well not to bother reading anything into.

George Martin produced here, as last time, though with less felicitous results—in fact his touch is generally less noticeable excepting the string quartet hook of “Keep Under Cover” and the overblown symphonic climax of the album, “Through Our Love.” There is a genuinely funny moment on the record, a burst of what sounds like canned applause after an acoustic guitar solo on “Sweetest Little Show,” but one doesn’t know whether to credit Martin or McCartney.

And, speaking of unwitting, a random couplet (from “The Other Me”): “I wish that 1 could take it back/I’d like to make a different mood/And if you let me try again/I’ll have a better attitude.” The aesthetic philosophy behind these and other appallingly dumb lyrics found on the album is expressed on “Keep Under Cover” wherein Paul sings “What good is art, if it hurts your head?” And there you have it, folks. The man doesn’t like to think too hard—it gives him a headache. This revelation is followed by “might as well be in bed.” You said it, pal, not me.

Richard C. Walls

BLUE OYSTER CULT

The Revolution By Night (Columbia)

After the unmitigated tyranny and fascism of their first few albums (fascism, by the way, is the honest ideological manifestation of heavy metal’s greasy soul, no matter what anyone else tells ya), Blue Oyster Cult began to mutate, as did we all. Gone was most of the tyranny, the severity of intellect, some of the admittedly “in-crowd” humor, and the predeliction towards fantasy as chaos and chaos as a pretty nice way of life. Gone also was the biting, totalitarian noise they were so fond of playing and we were so fond of listening to.

Taking its place, like some rockin’ Andromeda Strain, was that little patch of musicality they’d explored on “The Last Days Of May”— y’know, that slick narrative metalease flecked with carbonated popisms, the kind of metalease that works so effectively in enhancing brooding tales of ghostly bikers swishing down an endless highway towards the end of the night, long oily hair resisting onrushing winds, dental necklace and pliers clattering in night terror visions of Barstow and San Bernadino, and all of those other etceteras of crunge folklore. Metalease cakes with whispery, growling vocals, screams of whimpering rage dusted with arid angst, and last but not least the hammer and tongs rhythm ’n’ lead work of Buck (dat Boogie Man hisself) D harm a.

So what about The Revolution By Night? Sounds awright by me. As a matter of fact I feel safe in saying let’s ignite the fizgigs of joy and dance in circles of danger, ’cause those boys from the sweet underside of the white underbelly, those stalkers of the rock forest, have once again given us leave to grab up the torches of velocity and render a few more cities on flame with rock ’n’ roll.

“Take Me Away” has the BOC sense of rowdy nobility that can send shivers up your spine. A nobility of noise that curls up in huge, cancerous energy balls at the base of your neck and screams, SCREAMS at you to say things you’re probably gonna be sorry for later. I like this song because it reminds me of, y’know, that noise, that bleating ya hear from the doom debutantes as they turn-turn-kick-turn into the bleeding face of inertia (gawd, I like it when I talk like that); it reminds me of that sense you got when you first learned the trick of picking up a tear gas canister and tossing it back, in a slow greyish white arc, at the blue meanies on the street in front of you; y’know it reminds me of VICTORY. C’mon take me away, I like rubber rooms, I like ice cube baths, I...

(He looks down at his wrist and gets fascinated as a vein slowly ceased up, a synapse fails momentarily and suddenly he can’t even remember his own name, but he does manage to remember the song that’s on incessantly poking its way through the headphones like a spring-loaded nail.) “Eyes On Fire” is a great follow up to “Burnin’ For You,” a love song like only BOC can give you a love song (heh heh).

(He looks into the mirror, into his ear, past the collected wax of a decade, and instead of a vein ceasing up, he hears a song penned by that noted harvester of eyes, R. Meltzer:) There’s another fine R. Meltzer song, too, called “Veins,” a song that gives us the first metal calypso/cha cha ever. A song that’d bring a smile to a stoned cockroach.

(Gregor Fernbacher woke up on his back. As the huge, leering shadows of California smirked down on him like some Valley Girl bitchin’ to be tied, his skin felt unusually tight ’n’ hard. He’d become a bug—no, he’d become (gulp) Dick Van Patten’s son! He suddenly had a craving for a thrill ride at a theme park. He suddenly wanted to have a cup of Coppertone No. 8. He suddenly wanted Brooke Shields’s phone number. He suddenly decided to say that) This first cut on side two is the Cult’s usual one-per-LP epic, this one called “Shadows Of California,” a song about highway life.

The rest of The Revolution By Night ain’t all that bad, though it also ain’t all that good. “Feel The Thunder” is that ghostly biker tale we spoke of earlier. “Let Go” is ignorable. So is “Dragon Lady” and “Lights Years Of Love.”

Can I go now?

Good.

Bye Bye.

Joe (Goo Goo Muck) Fernbacher

THE RAIN PARADE Emergency Third Rail Power Trip (Enigma)

GREEN ON RED Gravity Talks (Slash/Warner Bros.)

Well, the L.A.-based psychedelic garage band movement or the (ugh!) Paisley Underground or whatever you wanna call the loosely-knit bunch of bands who draw their inspiration from various mid-’60s sources is finally coming of age. That doesn’t mean that these people are in imminent danger of “growing up,” just that they’re putting out albums you can actually find instead of 45s on one-off labels or a tune or two on compilations. Along with the new EP by the Long Ryders, the new Three O’Clock LP and those soon-to-follow by the Bangles and Dream Syndicate, these two offerings help put this developing sound on the rock ’n’ roll map.

KEEP THE FAITH, BOBBY!

BOB DYLAN Infidels (Columbia)

by Jeff Nesin

From the beginning, which is now more than 20 years ago, Bob Dylan has adroitly deflected criticism with the suggestion that the disaffected were merely so many spurned lovers who did not really want to be friends with him, but only wanted to tie him down to their style, ideology, or whatever; witness the wounded folkies of 1965 and the wounded rockers of 1967. Obviously, true believers know that the ripeness is all. It was an effective point, made more so by Dylan’s astonishing, incisive, amphetamine-like momentum. For quite a while now, though, with stories of wife beating, born again Christianity and Judaism, and general mixed-up confusion, the argument—like his work—has lost its teeth and become rather perfunctory.

In fact, over the last 15 years everything about the man’s career and creativity have paled for me. Though a lot of honest folks have claimed they saw the old brilliance in New Morning, or later in Blood On The Tracks (and, no doubt, a lot of arriviste Christians had visions of impending sainthood for the baleful Minnesotan listening to Slow Train Coming), I missed it. I have seen something that actually moved me— as distinguished from something that reminded me of things I once cared about—only in the raw, uneven, and unpredictable Planet Waves and in the serious aspirations Dylan had for the Rolling Thunder tour. Even though it now turns out that Hurricane Carter wasn’t such a swell guy, the tour and the endless movie he made then seem to me Dylan’s last real attempt to make art. And that was eight years ago.

So how does one judge Bob Dylan today? Is Infidels, his long-awaited collaboration with Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, not forgetting Sly & Robbie, the best rhythm section money can buy, nor Mick Taylor, the only surviving ex-Rolling Stone (how’s that for an Adult Entertainment blockbuster?), to be judged by its salability, by its dressing for success in the marketplace? If so, then I already have. (See parenthesis above.)

If, however, Infidels is judged by the almost unparalleled standards of its creator’s (small c) work in the mid’60s then there are a few more items on the agenda. It seems, for example, that in embracing—consecutively—two of the West’s most rearguard theologies (evangelical Christianity and Hassidic Judaism), Dylan has lost the will to separate church and state. The inner sleeve pictures him climbing tenaciously upward in the holy land and Infidel’s eight songs are generously sprinkled with devotional imagery. Still, years of thin material and less than asanguine rumors hadn’t prepared me for the obvious: more than half the new sortgS are muddled neo-conservative tracts in Dylanesque drag.

Though Infidels sounds like the real thing—he’s in fine voice and there are two splendid, bankable guitarists firing the tracks—it isn’t. “Man Of Peace” sees Satan lurking behind burning liberal bushes everywhere, and the fundamentalist “License To Kill” seems to find hellfire even in space: “Man has invented his doom/First step was touching the moon.” A song like “Neighborhood Bully,” a snarling defense of Begin & Sharon’s Israel, can only give real pleasure to Jeane Kirkpatrick with its repulsive caricature of poor and displaced people who don’t happen to see things Bob’s way. Things get even murkier and more unpleasant on “Union Dues,” a sleekly echoed track that only Mick Taylor makes palatable, when Dylan lashes out at capitalist greed in such a small-minded way that it’s finally unclear who he’s really sneering at. As he himself says in “Sweetheart Like You,” “Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.” Infidels is Dylan’s move to grand larceny, lifting huge chunks of his former dazzling self in hopes of commercial coronation.

I’d like to say I wish him well but, frankly, I don’t. The three almostlove songs here are written just well enough to keep Joe Cocker busy for another season (One of them, “Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight” might have been memorable at another time; for now it contains my favorite lyric on the LP: “Come over here from over there girl”), but there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off. Most of the tension—aside from a de Borchgrave vision of “international terrorism”—is resolved and the extraordinary fire has finally metamorphosed into an electric crock pot cooking perfect pot roast. Infidels is a little vague and misleading as a title. How about Verisimilitude, or maybe Yet Another Side Of Bob Dylan? Maybe we’ll still end up as infidels together, but for now I’ll have to go on without him and I don’t much care one way or the other. If anyone asks, tell ’em I just said good luck.

“Sound” may be a bit misleading, though, because although these bands have interconnections aplenty—Rain Parade guitarist Matthew Piucci plays on one song on the Green On Red LP, former Dream Syndicate bassist Kendra Smith sings on a Rain Parade track, etc.—they also have distinct styles of their own.

Rain Parade’s roots lie primarily in the Byrds of Younger Than Yesterday and The Notorious Byrd Brothers, the Beatles of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Their songs are sorta dreamy and inward-looking, an odd contrast to the brash, outgoing nature of most garage-rock—but then, this isnt usual stuff. Most effective when they stay within normal pop song confines—I'Look At Merri” would be twice as effective at halfthe lengths—the majority of their lyrics are concerned with dreamscapes and changing colors and how to cope with em. Whether they mean anything more than that psychedelics are once again sneaking into the suburbs I don’t know, but the album as a whole comes off better than, say, the debut LP by the Electric Prunes did way back when.

The Byrds also figure in the instrumental makeup of Green On Red, along with maybe the Sir Douglas Quintet and the Seeds (minus the fuzztones). Keyboard player Chris Cacavas is the main musician of note—neither he nor vocalist/songwriter Dan Stuart are any great shakes on the six-string— and he adds plenty of tasty touches to the record. Stuart’s contributions are kinda hit and miss. His halfsneet, half sarcastic chuckle of a voice works when the songs are up to par, but too often his streams of consciousness turn into dry creek beds before they get anywhere. “Blue Parade” and “Cheap Wine” show he can sometimes, effectively put together disquieting images and events, but overall the album’s about as spotty as your average 14-yearold’s face.

Come to think of it, though, those old albums by the Seeds or the Strawberry Alarm Clock weren’t exactly models of consistency, either. So the Rain Parade and Green On Red are at least living up to their predecessors; whether they can go beyond ’em or not is a question for another day.

Michael Davis

PAUL SIMON Hearts And Bones (Warner Bros.)

On Hearts And Bones, Paul Simon turns the basic philosophical pop question inside out. Instead of “Why do fools fall in love?” (or its variation, “Why must I be a teenager in love?”), he offers the inquiry, “Why do intelligent adults analyze themselves out (or very nearly out) of love?” Growing up in the ’50s, Simon had songs with words such as “eternally,” “sincerely” and “devotion,” and the do-wop harmonies with which they were sung, seep into his heart, and he wanted to climb that stairway. But being too thoughtful for his own good—the theme of this LP—he gets tangled up in all the intricacies and theoretical permutahons of modern affairs. He yearns for simplicity, but can’t help piling on layer after layer of complexity.

The album has two linked songs called “Think Too Much” (one swaying, one, with the Rodgers-Edwards Chic team edgy), and that was going to be its title when it was being planned as a Simon & Garfunkel LP. When he married Carrie Fisher, one suspects that it became apparent that it is possible to leap over doubts and get to the heart of the matter. So Simon tipped the balance. Love takes the match, two out of three falls. “Hearts And Bones,” an ’80s “America,” is about a couple on the road—“one and one-half wandering Jews” (Carrie, remember, is the daughter of Eddie “Oy, My Papa” Fishfi and Debbie “Tammy” Reynolds)—who almost throw it all away before entwining for better or for worse.

Simon is, as always, a meticulous writer; these songs are elegantly phrased and sculpted, the melodies as intricate as the lyrics. A few tracks,especially “Hearts And Bones,” “Train In The Distance” and “Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War,” unfold like short stories. “Train” begins, “She was beautiful as Southern skies the night he met her/She was married to someone/He was doggedly determined that he would get her,” and follows them through marriage, a child, a split, and a devastating concluding pronouncement: “The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and brains.”

It’s that heart/brain discussion that dominates the album. Simon ruminates, contemplates, knowing all along that it’s the head that becomes the hurdle. The allergies in the song of the same name are most likely psychosomatic (like Zuckerman’s ailment in Philip Roth’s new novel The' Anatomy; Lesson) ; “Think Too Much [a)” (the funky one) realizes that the attempt to mold a loved one can drive a wedge into a relationship. Introspection has always been Simon’s strength, and his stumbling block: it’s led to the best songs on Still Crazy After All These Years and the single “Slip Sliding Away,” and also to the mordant speculation (what if it all had ended with “Sounds Of Silence”?) of One Trick Pony. Here, there are think pieces about songwriting, automobiles, numbers (three of the weaker songs), about romantic tension and the emotional pull of music (the most exceptional).

“Rene And Georgette Magritte” is inspired: a fiction about the surrealist painter and his wife being seduced by “the deep forbidden music” of the Penguins, the Moonglows, the Orioles and the Five Satins (as the Harptones warble “Earth Angel... Sincerely...In The Chapel...” in the far corner of the track). And “The Late Great Johnny Ace” autobiographically connects two rock deaths a quarter-century apart, from J. Ace to J. Lennon, with a stopover in London in ’64. It was introduced by Simon & Garfunkel in Central Park, not far from the Dakota, and this version, with a Philip Glass coda that evokes the discordant experimentation of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” is more resonant by far.

As a grown-up in the 1980s, Simon can’t approach love or rock ’n’ roll with unambiguous spontaneity, no matter what the songs of the Moonglows may have said to him more than 25 years ago. But Simon, who briefly sang with the Mystics,, manages on Hearts And Bones to remain faithful, in his fashion, to the spirit that moved him. All he’s doing is adding amendments, subparagraphs and clauses to the 10 comL mandments of love.

Mitchell Cohen

YES 90125 (Atlantic)

Some record reviews are exercises in futility, and this is one of them. You’ll hate reading it, I hate writing it. I know you’ll hate reading it because only Yes fans will read it, and I hate this record. So you’ll hate this review. And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo. So screw the review, I’ll just answer the key questions you’ll be sending me.

QUESTION ONE: Why did you bother reviewing 90125 if you hate it? Nobody on the CREEM staff is a big Yes fan, and somebody had to do it. You would have been just as mad if we’d ignored it. Besides, I didn’t know I hated it ’til after I heard it.

QUESTION TWO: What do you know about Yes anyway? Same as most 30 year olds who like pop music. I lived with that band from the Yes Album in 1971 through Relayer in 1974, when both the band and me got distracted. Those albums were always on the stereos in dorm rooms and big houses where they threw parties with beer and dope—Yes was the band that played at our psychological senior prom. I knew up front I’d never like them, per se, but I’m not deaf—I heard the technical chops and the beauty. What facts do I know about Yes? I know that Jon Anderson didn’t like Rick Wakeman because (among other things) Wakeman eats meat and isn’t terribly' “spiritual.” Wakeman isn’t on 90125 and Anderson is. Steve Howe isn’t either, and he shoulda been. I know Chris Squire does great octaves on his bass.

QUESTION THREE: What do you know about good music anyway, you_ (fill in expletive of choice)? Same as most people, at least. I know what I like. I like the Earth Wind & Fire horn parts in “Owner Of A Lonely Heart.” I know that the other song with funk, “City Of Love,” sounds like an aerobicize class for Volga boatmen, so I don’t like it as much. Its guitar solo is nasty and fun and actually has musical ideas in its head (which the rest of the LP really doesn’t, for the most part). I like it when music doesn’t act like a show-off; I know for a goddamn fact that putting more notes into a piece of music does not make that piece of music good. Yes still puts more notes in their music than they need.

QUESTION FOUR: You’re full of shit. Not a question, but entirely possible as a statement of fact. But so is this record—full of shit, that is. Especially the lyrics. They sound like they’re saying important things about the state of humanity but they’re not. They’re bad poetry by someone who thinks he writes good poetry. They’re arrogant and condescending to the listener, complicated for no good reason. Musically and lyrically, Yes confuses being complicated with being good. Surely you won’t make the same mistake with this review.

Laura Fissinger

HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS Sports (Chryslis)

The news is good. When CBS took over distribution chores for Chrysalis, Sports — ready to go over six months ago—found a comfortable shelf. While Huey Lewis reportedly fumed, CBS sat, as in fat. Finally, the Big Umbrella unfolded and Sports was released, as in wonders that never cease. And, like we say, the news is good.

As the third album, Sports sports considerable evidence that Lewis & Co. are as solid a band as we’ve got in these states. (Come to think of it, it would be decent evidence for a second or fourth album, too.) An affable blend of Stax/Volt, doo-wop and good old common sense, the guys deliver their music with what sounds like optimistic restraint. Confidence. What it comes down to is that H.L. & T.N. don’t shout at you, they simply make their point and then go on to the next song. Pretty weird, huh?

MAKE MINE MUSK!

DURAN DURAN Seven And The Ragged Tiger (Capitol)

by Rick “Rio” Johnson

Don’t know about you, but my own early inclination was to hate Duran Duran, to view them as so much baby-skirtface bait heavily treated with large doses of talentretardant. I’d look at ’em and think, if I was a girl, I’d rather look at Joe “Deli” Russo or even Sid Vicious’s baby pix than these pouting tweeters. But in reality, if I was a girl, I’d probably spend all my time standing naked in front of a mirror and gaping, “Hey, where’s my Lady Schick?”

So you can imagine why dealing with Duran Duran posed a dilemma for me not unlike that of the English scientist who first successfully mated ducks and geese: will they quack, or will they honk?

Especially since it dawned on me that DURAN DURAN ARE GREAT! The real thing! Better then hands-free phone calls and the Handy Magnetic Retriever combined! Don’t judge ’em by “Union Of The Snake.” Sure, it’s plenty likeable, but anything that enters the charts as high as that did must be viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Exhibit #\ for the prosecution, Your Honor: Lionel Richie.

Wake up and whiff the bitter Buf Puf, willya? The whole first side (five tunes worth) of this idiotically-named LP is hotter than the single. Particularly “New Moon” which bears an indecently catchy synth hook and truly fine harmonies (sounds like another hit for sure), and “The Reflex,” with a chorus so undeniably winning, it’s good enough to be awarded bragging rights to the state of Ohio, at least.

Want more proof, Baby Ruth? Then check out “The Cracks In The Pavement” for its groovy vocals, “Shadows On Your Side” (more good harmony), and “I Take The Dice” for its electronic castanets. There’s even an instrumental (how advanced can you get?) that’d make a perfect soundtrack to the recent eddytorial discussion of great-carmissing-jump-over-open-jacknifebridge-scenes in film history.

Just one minor complaint: most of the tracks are too long. Duran Duran’s musical attraction is real but tenuous. After about three minutes, you find yourself contemplating suicide rates of fire apparatus photographers or wondering just what exactly a Spacely Space Sprocket is. These guys should never give their listeners an opportunity for their minds to wander. Or to jaunt, stroll, tramp, ramble, or just plain skip out, for that matter.

So are we all straight here? Ha ha—“straight”—but you know what I mean. While I find my own 1-u-v of this record slightly shameful, like the time I intentionally watched Radio 1990 and—worse yet— enjoyed it. I do not hesitate to recommend Seven heartily to all fans of the group and the occasional normal person who’s got a taste for some yummy harmonies. Duran Duran may have the life expectancy of a minnow’s baby teeth, but they’re dangerous eyesores no more.

The disc is positively pus-filled with obvious and not-so-obvious hits. Among the former is “Heart And Soul,” already a radio favorite at this writing, and “The Heart Of Rock ’N’ Roll,” a blues-tinged statement complete with sax, harp and a slew of dih-dih-dih-dihs. Among the latter? It depends on your taste. I like the fairly-straight-blues “I Want A New Drug” (“One that won’t spill... won’t make me feel too bad, won’t made me feel too good”; praise Jesus, it’s a love song, no kidding). Other candidates include “Bad Is Bad,” which Huey sings like Randy Newman would sing if Randy Newman could sing an eensy bit better. Ditto for “If This Is It,” an intelligent lovers-split song. And double ditto for “You Crack Me Up,” in which the protaganist—an adult in name only—is fading fast (“You better ask yourself a question/Cause you can’t live like this for long/ You better listen to my suggestion/Before you wind up in somebody else’s song”). Mr. Lewis says that he’s singing about himself here; we’ve always felt there’s nothing like real life, too.

Sports might raise a few questions: Lewis has been quoted (regarding the CBS/Chrysalis deal) as saying the album is “a test case.. .they have to make sure that these records will sell as well as get airplay.” No sweat there.. .even as they exude normalcy and grown-upishness, record buyers everywhere are agreeing that these cats can play. At least, I hope they are. It’s good news week.

J. Kordosh

RAINBOW Bent Out Of Shape (Polydor)

Once upon a time, before the demons and wizards of Heavy Metal arrived on the rock landscape like a plague of hungry locusts, there lived a young guitarist named Ritchie Blackmore. It was the late ’60s, a time when you still had to have hit singles if you wanted to make it and when the predominant style was psychedelia. Blackmore’s group, Deep Purple, fit the psychedelic mode pretty well for the most part, but his rude, squealing bleats of guitar solos stood out pointedly from the group’s arrangements.

Deep Purple was a band of Byzantine excesses. Lead singer Ian Gillan’s hysterical screaming was right out of some Celtic nightmare, while keyboardist Jon Lord’s orchestral aspirations seem downright ludicrous in retrospect. Blackmore at the time was the odd man out, the fuming dissident so angered by his bandmate’s pretensions that he would come to blows with Lord arguing which was the better album, Machine Head or In Rock.

History has proven Blackmore’s instincts to be right. Yet when he decided to put together his own group, Rainbow, he deliberately left the harder edges of his guitar playing behind in favor of an AOR approach that resembled nothing so much as his old nemesis John Lord’s style. Rainbow has advanced from the unlistenable contours of its first couple of records to the point where they are now a slick, well-turned outfit playing balanced material that hardly hints at the previous heights of excess. Bent Out Of Shape makes canny use of another Deep Purple alumnus, bassist Roger Glover, whose playing meshes well with Blackmore on spunky tracks like “Drinking With The Devil” and “Street Of Dreams.” Glover has, of late, also been doubling as Rainbow’s producer, an important contribution in that he prevents Blackmore from worrying too much about the overall picture and allows him to concentrate instead on his guitar sound.

As a song like “Stranded” shows, the most drastic change in Blackmore’s musical conception is his playing itself. Gone are the swashbuckling solos that made him a legend. Now Ritchie takes thoughtful, structured leads that compress ideas he once would have taken extended choruses on into a few bars. It’s a far cry from the exultant fury of “Highway Star” but, after all, gas ain’t as cheap as it used to be.

John Swenson