The Beat Goes On

The Beat Goes On

EDDIE JOBSON: THE CONCEPT OF HIS AFFECTIONS

NEW YORK—With a dossier the likes of Eddie Jobson, the next obvious step was to graduate from side-man to kingpin. And that’s exactly what happened—it just took a lot longer than planned. We’re talking about Eddie Jobson, accomplished keyboard player and violinist whose credits span 12 years.

Jobson never had much exposure to the press, mainly because he didn’t have much to say...until now. This past summer brought to light the efforts of a project that took three years to completethe Green album, featuring Jobson and his new band Zinc.

SIT IF YOU LOVE JESUS

URBANIA, ITALY—Roll over Jordache, and tell Calvin Klein the news: a Catholic priest here is earning heavenly amounts of moola—by manufacturing “Jesus Jeans.”

Originally begun as a remedy for Urbania’s rampant unemployment problem, Father Carrado Catani’s jeans factory earns a cool $4 million a year, after expenses.

Father Catani has used the profits to finance an orphanage, a nursery school, homes for the aged, summer camps for needy children and a music school.

Despite Father Catani’s charitable contributions, the church hierarchy got hot under their collars upon hearing his product’s brand name.

“I told them, ‘What’s wrong with that?’ ” Father Catani said. “Whatever makes the name of Jesus more popular among the youth must be good.”

“If Jesus Christ had come to Earth today,” he said, “He would certainly have worn jeans!”

Fine—but the question of celebrity endorsements remains unanswered. What about Mother Theresa?

Heather Joslyn

Eddie Jobson’s musical training began when he was seven years old and continued even after he turned down the Royal Academy of Music in favor of— you guessed it—good old rock ’n’ roll. The irony is that, prior to joining his first band Curved Air in 1972, his “Heavy 100” consisted of Tchaikovsky, Moliere and friends.

Recalls Eddie, “In the early ’60s my sisters joined a Beatles fan club. I pompously analyzed their music, concluding that I didn’t think much of them.” When the revelation of rock did strike, it went right for the jugular: “Led Zeppelin changed my mind,” he says. “They’re the all-time classic heavy rock band, so musically with it.”

Jobson continued his “get with it” crash course by hooking up with Bryan Ferry and Roxy music, during which time he contributed his talents to six of the group’s LPs. “If I learned anything from Roxy,” reflects Jobson, “it was presentation; they were so theatrical. I learned what it’s like being in a commercially acceptable band.”

Although he wrote for Roxy, the group’s style was already well established and, obviously, not his cup of tea: “I should have never written for them in the first place.”

Later “basic training” with Frank Zappa, the highly-lauded U.K. and Jethro Tull helped in eventually getting Zinc’s sound off the ground—by combining past performance with serious writing and, at last, defining his own style for the masses.

“The one thing I’ve learned,” he says philosophically, “is that you can’t rely on other people.” This is what Zinc is for Jobson: calculated and deliberately designed. “The beauty of it,” he says, “is that this group can stay around forever—the lead singer, keyboard player, violinist, writer, lyricist, producer and manager are all the same fellow. There’ll be no sound identities that can be lost.”

Although Eddie Jobson is the ringleader, the nucleus of Zinc, he has added a zesty flavoring to the group in the form of Michael Cuneo on lead guitar, drummer Michael Barsimanto and bassist Jerry Watts. He sounds like a proud new mother when he boasts, “This band will be very powerful, exciting and exceedingly musical.”

The making of the Green album (released earlier this year) seems more like a Cecil B. DeMille movie epic than a venture in vinyl—the record company’s press release reads: “Three years in the making!” Jobson considers the whole affair a grueling, fairly miserable experience, yet goes on to explain that it couldn’t have been any other way: “I went through so many changes making the record. I was constantly trying to learn as I went along. I was getting better at writing as I rewrote, singing as I kept resinging, producing and engineering and so on., .right down to hand-drawing the lettering on the album sleeve.”

Considering the time and learning process involved in a project like this, Jobson’s content...for now. “I think it’s one record I can be very proud of,” he confides, “but obviously there are things that aren’t going to be 100 percent. Out of the 30 albums I played on, there’s no one that I’m totally satisfied with.”

MARTY FELDMAN LIVES!

Men At Work's Colin Hay, seen here at work, looks alarmed! What could he possibly see up there in that wild black yonder? A bird? A plane? Superman? Edouard Dauphin's latest pet bat? Someone trying to fly in and give Hay a high Colinic (ha, ha)? A flying vegemite sandwich? Boy Howdy being used as a volleyball? The arrival of A Flock Of Seagulls? But wait a minute! The biggest question here may be: does anyone really care? Anyone, that is, other than the photographer we're paying for running this photo in CREEM? Aren't we devious in the ways we manage to finangle these pix into the magazine? The End!

The album took more time, considering he combined both career and cash to make it a reality. “I put everything on the line, both in terms of abilities and finances.” It wasn’t until he’d arrived at the final stages of production that he was able to hook up with a record label. Admits Jobson, “It was a time when the industry was at its lowest—-and also, not everyone was interested, because the album wasn’t ‘obvious’ enough, not ‘mainstream’ enough.”

The LP conjures up a potpourri of sounds and images (at times reminiscent of Yes), offering everything from the marriage of classical to rock to high energy and pulsating power rumbles, with a few melodic strains thrown in for good luck.

The concept of color, says a serious Jobson, is “Green represents what could be the force of ambition, which is closely related to the feeling of envy.” Get it? If not, check out his second album, slated for release next spring and followed by Zinc’s first-ever tour. The second project will bear the name of yet another color.

Don’t underestimate this impresario. He’ll be the first to admit he’s no rainbow chaser. And for someone who couldn’t spare the time when the Beatles were making a few waves of their own, Eddie Jobson’s making up for lost time very well, thank you.

TRASHING TO BE CLEVER!

Southside Johnny had some bad luck during the past several years. First, he gets dropped by his second record label. Next, he loses a good portion of his band to Little Steven & The Disciples Of Soul. But now John's fortune is back on the the upswing. First, he gets a new label. Next, he decideds to update his sound and get trendy with Nile Rodgers from Chic. If that's not enough, he's got part of the old Jukes back—-and staying in tune with recent trends, these guys have taken a cue from Boy George. We see here a photo of Southside with the new La Bamba and Miami Steve! "All that exercise we did with the Disciples Of Soul really paid off!" exclaimed the "boys"! Will small wonders ever cease?

Linda Barber Roach

NOBODY IN HERE BUT US EGGHEADS

FT. LAUDERDALE, FL-

Charlie Pickett hatched the Eggs in the waning days of 1979, following a quasi-religious experience brought on by extended exposure to punk rock in 1976-77. “Oh, you don’t have to be glamorous and slick and a skilled musician,” he remembers thinking after absorbing discs like Live At CBGB’s, “because this is better than the slick stuff.” Pickett likes the term “human music.”

The embryonic Eggs (only singer and guitarist Pickett remains in the current lineup, with ’81 recruits Galway, guitarist John Salton and bassist Dave Froshneider), pounded out early Stones, earlier R&B, and garage-cult classics from the Velvet Underground and Flamin’ Groovies songbooks. A few outings in local punk clubs gave Pickett another revelation: There was an audience for this raw noise in the land of Molly Hatchet!

“The first three or four concerts I was apprehensive that we would not be accepted by the punk rock crowd,” recalled Pickett, scratching his standard barber-shop-short hair. “But to the vast majority of the early punk rock crowd, it basically meant the same thing it meant to me. Punk rock is just good basic rock ’n’ roll with meaningful lyrics.”

The best non-oldie in the original Eggs’ repertoire was “If This Is Love, Can I Get My Money Back?,” penned by CP’s cousin, Mark Markham, who had a mid-’60s local hit with the punky “Back To Marlboro Country.” A hilarious rave-up chronicling the modern singleand-divorced scene, “If This Is Love” was Pickett’s second single. It also was: 1) the bestselling Florida independent 45 of the past few years, according to the best guess of Open Records, the label that releases Pickett’s vinyl from the back of Fort Lauderdale’s coolest record shop, 2) the most requested song on one Jupiter, FL radio station for four months, 3) once performed, by the grace of Kim Simmonds, before 2,500 puzzled Savoy Brown fans, when Simmonds invited Pickett to join the umpteenth version of Savoy B. onstage in West Palm Beach.

Fortunately, the Eggs have been coming up with great originals in the past couple of years, among them the darkly stirring “Phantom Train” (on the live LP and, in studio form, a highlight of an Open compilation) and the prophetic “Overtown,” performed by the Eggs months before the riots in Miami’s ghetto put Overtown on the national map. Expect “Overtown” to be on the next LP, a studio recording in the works now.

Pickett hopes the bulk of the second album will be original (his first LP, 82’s Live At The Button was two-thirds covers), but admits he isn’t the most prolific songwriter in town. He isn’t that thrilled with his voice, which sounds like a Lou Reed that never went to New Yawk or a Tom Verlaine from Hickory Holler. “I bellow like an elephant,” Pickett said, “but to control the sound of the band, you have to be the singer. I started to sing so no one could take the guitar playing from me.”

5 YEARS AGO

FOREVER IS A LONG TIME...

Former Faces drummer Kenney Jones “temporarily” fills the spot left vacant by the demise of Who drummer Keith Moon...

Pickett is being overly modest. His voice is fine, but the band is so hot it wouldn’t matter if he sang like Alfalfa.

Ask the British critics who have gone ga-ga over his records in NME, Melody Maker and Sounds, or the guy from Rolling Stone’s Record rag who called the Eggs “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band.” Ask the folks who caught the group’s East Coast tour last winter.

Or ask the several hundred perfectly sane denizens of West Palm Beach who flocked to see the Eggs when the band first played the oceanside burg. This following the aforementioned request-line mania in nearby Jupiter.

“We were about 10 feet out of the dressing room door, and people started absolutely screaming—nuts—and clutching our clothes,” Pickett grinned. “It was hard to get through the crowd. When we got onstage the whole volume level (of the audience) went three times higher.”

“It was...” He pauses, not wishing to brag. “It was gratifying.”

William H. Ashton

TIME FOR THE CHAMBERS BROTHERS

LOS ANGELES—“Hey, I’m flattered” says Joe Chambers, lead-singer/songwriter of the legendary Chambers Brothers. Co-author of the massive charthit of legend “Time Has Come Today,” the tall, good-looking, broodingly articulate Chambers reflects on past high-watermarks, present status (the band now enjoying a mounting resurgence of popularity) and an improbable sequence of events (three recent releases by three different bands of “Time” on vinyl w/in in the last year) the climax of which has Joe in a three-piece suit portraying the president of the U.S.A. in a Casey Movies (BOC, Black Sabbath, Aldo Nova, Romeo Void) rock-vid cover version by the Angry Samoans. This (off the Sams’ Back From Samoa LP), a more lobotomized recreation of the orig than either the Ramones’ (featured on their latest alb, Subterranean Jungle) or Wurm (Black Flag studio spinoff), speedraces an entire two and a half minutes in tribute by way of “Gloria” and the 13th Floor Elevators. Which is OK by Joe: “It’s fun to hear a band taking risks, being somewhat adventurous in adapting a tune years after its, uh, time.” The pandemic of “Time”-mania spurred April’s V. Voice to comment that the song’s rapidly “becoming the ‘Louie, Louie’ of hardcore”; for the record, here’s what the man says about the other attempts: “Wurm’s 7-inch [an EP on SST rec’ds] is real good too.” The Ramones? “He tries to sing like me, huh?

“When they played the [Hollywood] Palladium we got some comps to see the show; they dedicated ‘Time’ to us in one of the encores and that was a great feeling, particularly when the crowd erupted as the song broke...”

Willie and Joe Chambers recount an enduring trek through history. Together with brother Julius (a later edition), their synopsis of present, past (gospel origins dating back to 1954) and future points to “Time” somewhere in between as a fulcrum of see-saw ups and downs. “I was wandering around New York and the East Coast at some point in ’67 or therabouts—really lost. All these words seemed to materialize as fragments—‘thinkin’ about the subway’—I mean I probably was at the time. But it wasn’t until I heard Willie hammering at this amazing guitar-line downstairs, not until then that anything special happened. Then it hit!”

Hit translating in this case to lots of attention and big-buck corporate interest. Suddenly this club-circuit (perpetual residence at L.A.’s Ash Grove terminates) gospel group finds a well-carved niche in the burgeoning pantheon of ’60s psych-out and summer of love. “We were always pretty far-out,” adds Willie semi-seriously. “It was a strange transition, though. We’d play the Avalon [Ballroom] in San Francisco and these kids would come backstage with all sorts of weird shit—one handed me this gigantic mayonnaise jar filled to the top with LSD!

“We were riding high after ‘Time,’ ” he chuckles. “Had this two-story house in Los Angeles equipped with just about everythihg. When we’d take off for the east, always had a strong following back there, friends and other musicians would hang out. Alice Cooper, when they were called the Nazz, stuck around. Lots of others.”

Somehow in all of this, CBS rec’ds later decided the Chambers Brothers were not best suited for mass audience acceptance. That Willie and Joe and Brothers should find their respective roots, i.e. cultivate their pre-“Time” following “back down in the South” and along familiar, cliqued-out folk/gospel paths. Failure to follow “Time” with any sort of chart-bound clone intensified pressures and affected creative flow: “I was going crazy trying to come up with something, anything close. It just got harder and harder to do, almost an insurmountable job,” exclaims Joe in exasperated, neo-anguished tones. Meanwhile, the Brothers picked up momentum in and out of topdrawing shows, maybe the peak of which was .one particularly riveting performance secondseeded to the Doors at the Hollywood Bowl—the carpet swept under Jimbo Morrison to such an extent that James and Co. were forced to “huddle” backstage halfway through their set. “The whole night was a plug for Acoustic,” laughs Willie. “There were close to 50 pieces of Acoustic gear, amps, speakers—and we were allowed to use no more than a tenth of it. The Doors got the rest. So when we were finished and everyone was just goin’ nuts, absolutely crazy—the Doors couldn’t see to get it together. Four or five or six songs and they’re not getting half the response we got, so they all go into this football huddle behind the drum riser to sort of regroup, I guess. I’d never seen anything like it before—like a time-out for new strategy or something. I mean they were freaked! So they huddle, tryin’ I guess to pump up some adrenalin, and finally return, jumping into ‘Light My Fire,’ and the audience starts hurling sparklers and lit candles at ’em and the show was stopped right then and there.”

ONE EFFECT OF SARDINE ABUSE

GOSSENBLAGHEN, DENMARK—The latest accusation levelled at tight blue jeans is the possibility of them actually crippling the unwary wearer.

Case in point is that of an unnamed 18-year-old Dave who was tossed unconscious into a bathtub. Typical Danish fun, except this bathtub was full of water.

The victim spent 11 blissful hours in the drink, no doubt dreaming of dancing sardines. Meanwhile, the wet jeans gradually shrank, causing irreversible muscle damage to the dope’s right leg.

Dr. Bent “Fabric” Mathiesen, who treated the unfortunate still, reported that the man is “crippled for life,” almost as if he didn’t pass Driver’s Ed.

Too bad he wasn’t wearing a denim turtleneck.

Rick Johnson

Flashbacks aside, the legacy of the Chambers today connects with shows centering around Hollywood and the Bay Area. Quite impressive turnouts testify, to a rebound of interest; new fans witness a substantial mixture of psychedelic rave-up (they do an extended 15-minute-plus “Time” where everyone “just goes insane”) and hard-hitting gospel-tinged affectations of modern soul.

Time has come today for the Chambers Brothers; watch for it tomorrow—it’s still coming...

Gregg Turner

TUPELO SEX, HONEY

LOS ANGELES—An incandescent chainsaw named Elvis snuggles up to a sex ad floozie on the back, and on the front the title begs the musical question What Is It? What it is is the debut platter by L.A.’s latest mutant musicombo, Tupelo Chain Sex, a band of rockabilly radicals with the chops to pour it on straight, even though they prefer it with a twist.

Not your average strays, these cats are long, far gone, timeriding through the past, present and arguable future of what we call rock ’n’ roll. Imagine, if you will, King Presley as a Brit punker who digs Grandmaster Flash and late night TV commercials. The result? Whacked out be-boppity swingo and blues, fed through an echo chamber and the mind-warp processor of a two-time expatriate known simply as “Limey” Dave.

A brief history of one Dave Dahlson, in his own words: “Born in Santa Monica, CA, U.S.A., 1957. Left 1960. Grew up in England. When I was 14 I heard ‘Bloodshot Eyes’ by Wynonie Harris, a request from some girl in a massage parlor, to all the Teds and Rockers at some club in London. Went to a Ted club and was captivated, especially by the dancing, and got into it until my late teens. Went to art college in 1975 and a band called the Sex Pistols played there. Got into the atmosphere that evolved into punk. Published fanzine Don’t Flex, printed T-shirts and worked at Rocking Russian Design. Saw Levi (Dexter) and the Rockats, a band with the energy of punk doing strictly rockabilly which was unheard of... 1980 crashed my bike, used insurance money to get out of England, the rain and $90-a-week paychecks.

The Tupelos began with washboard and harmonica jams between Dahlson and Sim Cass in the summer of ’82. With “Tupelo” Jo Altruda (string bass) and J.J. Poskin (guitar, slide) they began performing in September, and after three gigs (resulting in two bannings, the third club closed down) they recorded What Is It? with drummer Willie Dred.

Of course, when I went to see them, Jo had a bout of mono, Sim had been deported to Australia and J.J. suddenly had to “fly to Seattle to see (his) parents.” Instead of sounding like the Cramps/PiL hybrid I’d been warned about, they had two percussionists, an electric bass and horn player Duff (now the full time Sex-sax) and sounded a lot more like a hardcore -meets-rap version of the English Beat.

But then you’d expect such surprises from an uncompromisingly original outfit, and the Tupes don’t disappoint. Limey Dave’s ingrained punk etiquette led to an amusing 10-minute onstage battle with the sound man (who yanked the plug five songs later, not an uncommon phenomenon, I’m told) and some wonderfully abusive political rap-lyrics that immediately divided the audience.

About that album. As you might’ve guessed, it’s a puree of styles, ranging from the blues shuffle of “Embryonic Baby” to the echO.D. of “Ginsu II” (“cakes come out like this-thisthis/But it can’t slice a watermelon-on-on) and the “Suzie Q” blooze guitar pickin’ on the epic “Rambunctious.” Well, here’s the rub: You’ll have to wait for the import release of the single “What Is It?/Embryonic Baby” since the original live-in-the-studio pressings have long since sold out. The entire LP may also be released (and imported) very, very soon as TCS re-enter the studio to wax a four cut EP—which may well include the classic “Elvis Meets E.T.”—to be titled Dub-In-Vouti (’splains Dave: “derived from Slim Gaillard’s live LP Opera In Vout; Slim played improvised jump swing.” In the meantime, the Chain gang will answer your requests—“include a stamped envelope” — at Disgraceland (where else?), 1553 Cassil Place, Hollywood, CA 90028.

David Keeps