WE ARE ALL MARCUCCI

WE ARE ALL MARCUCCI

ELEGANZA

by

John Mendelssohn

In the bad old good old days, looks were everything. If your name were Fabian, for instance, and you looked every inch the pubescent dreamboat, it mattered not a whit to Bob Marcucci, later to inspire the major motion picture The Idolmaker, that you hadn’t the most exiguous trace of musical ability.

In all but the youngest reader’s lifetime, an album by plump, hairy, and famously balding Elton John entered the charts at number one, but we are still all Bob Marcucci at heart. We would much sooner see Duran Duran or Deborah Harry in our minds’ eyes than Molly Hatchet, say, or Phoebe Snow.

Don’t take Eleganza’s word for it, though. Take the Go-Go’s. When they were horrible porcine eyesores in flat-heeled shoes, only other horrible porcine eyesores in flatheeled shoes came to see them. But when they slimmed down and Belinda kicked off her dreadful go-go boots in favor of excellent spike heels, everyone from sea to shining sea suddenly agreed that they were the most fabulous thing to hit the airwaves since spray Velveeta.

Sometimes, though, looks don’t help at all. Consider the inexplicable case of Dwight Twilley, who not only looks a perfect matinee idol, but also writes good songs, sings like an angel (no one—not John Lennon—has ever sobbed more exquisitely) and evokes the magic of the Help-era Beatles more vividly than anyone in pop, including Marshall Crenshaw. And yet, the labels for which he recorded could hardly give his records away, and now he seems to be without one.

Speaking of Marshall Crenshaw, it was conjecture about how gigantically enormous he’d be if he didn’t look like an algebra teacher from a junior high school in Cedar Rapids that inspired this column. Thinking about Twilley, though, made that seem silly.

Sometimes good looks not only don’t help, but actually hinder. Don’t listen to Eleganza, though, but to Eleganza’s great, good, and ultra-longtime pal The Kiddo, for instance, who both makes fab demoes (especially when he includes one of Eleganza’s own compositions) and makes Rick Springfield look like someone the least popular girl in school wouldn’t go with to a drive-in on a moonless night, Simon LeBon like the kid in junior high into whose milk tougher kids spat when he wasn’t looking because he was such a hideous, contemptible spaz.

But instead of making him the idol of hundreds of millions, it’s only made the kingpins of the recording industry hesitant to sign him to the Big Deal he so abundantly warrants (especially when he includes lots of Eleganza-penned hits). They take one look at him, pronounce him Anudduh Frampton, and proclaim themselves grateful for his interest, but sorry to report that he doesn’t suit the needs of their talent rosters at this moment in time blah blah.

(Most of the kingpins-of the recording industry had their milk spat in in junior high school. God, you should have seen those at the party Capitol Records threw to announce its signing of Queen [can you imagine being proud of such a thing?]. The older half—the accountants and what-haveyou’s—still in those shirts with the ludicrous collars that reach halfway to the shoulders, their younger colleagues in shoulder length hair and jeans—grungy fucking blue dungaree jeans. At the extremely elegant China Club. What a heavy statement, man.)

In many ways it was a wonderful thing when Lesley Gore and the Rolling Stones trashed the traditional show-biz belief that pop singers had to be pretty. But as you know if you’ve been reading this column with the scrupulous attentiveness that no other section of this magazine demands— not the features on stupid heavy metal groups that repel a potential post-adolescent readership of incalculable immensity, not the advertisements for peculiar “new wave” sunglasses or guitars of dubious manufacture, not even the all-too-often-not-veryfunny photo captions—Eleganza believes that willful unattractiveness is an idea whose time has gone.

Speak of the devil. (Right on, some little heavy metal twerp somewhere excitedly exclaims.) As this is written, Cheap Trick are performing their latest hit on MTV, and Eleganza realizes why he’s never been able to muster much enthusiasm for them on stage or video—Rick Nielson’s fatally preoccupied with reminding us that no one laughs more loudly at his lack of good looks than he himself.

Eleganza wishes that things were as they used to be in the heydays of Elvis and the Beatles, when the best looks went with the best voices.

Musicians don’t always start fashion trends. The Who are but the first example that leaps to mind of a group that followed the sartorial lead of its audience. So how come the audience never gets its picture in Eleganza?

How come indeed? Having gotten his fave femme vocalist’s picture, and his wife’s, and even his pal Patricia’s in America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that dares to bill itself as such, Eleganza recognizes it to be high time that a few of the best-dressed of its hundreds of thousands of devoted readers be given a taste of the harsh light of fame.

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ELEGANZA

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For instance, Eleganza might see fit to depict San Francisco’s Patricia Rodriguez, an indefatigable writer of impassioned letters to the editor not only of America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such, but the editors of other magazines as well. Not content with looking like a million bucks herself in her geometric Courrege duds, Patricia’s coaxed adoring husband Peter into sharkskin suits, turtlenecks, and ID bracelets much like those one used to see on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Everywhere Patricia and Peter go, their fellow San Franciscans shout, “Hooray!”

Which is to say that if you’ll send Eleganza a photograph of yourself dressed to kill, looking like a million dollars, and all the other pimply hyperboles, you may open next month’s issue to find yourself where you might have expected Boy George or yet another shot of Mrs. Eleganza in black vinyl.

It’s fun! But be forewarned, heavy metal types: photographs of readers wearing sneers, pouts, 1974 haircuts, studded bracelets and chains and/or pouting, sneering, pointing accusatorily, or making the sign of the devil/Dio/Motley Crue at the camera will be discarded not only instant-ly, but without reservation.

As too, smug “new” wave types, will those of bespectacled runners-up-in-thehigh-school-science-fair types who believe that there can never be enough Devos. As too will those of aspiring arena rockers in little white Capezio shoes and hair that’s long in the back and short on the sides—as, perish the thought, MTV VJ Alan Hunter’s.

You’ve got to hand it to the MTV gang— every time you think you’ve finally figured out which is the most insufferable, another of them makes your flesh crawl even more grievously. My hats are off to Alan’s parents for having endured the shame of fostering such a charmless buffoon, for not strangling him in infancy. And there are only three living Americans, all of whom have gone out of their ways to do Eleganza dirt, I’d sooner see step on a land mine than Mark Goodman. Call me immoderate, but I just don’t believe that anyone that smug deserves to live.

Interviewed recently in San Francisco, Jello Biafra called MTV the worst thing to happen to pop music since Saturday Night Fever. It’s thinking like that that’s responsible for the name of Jel’s group, the Dead Kennedys, having been scrawled on the sides of buildings as far away as Rimini, Italy, the birthplace of Federico Fellini. Take Eleganza’s word for this. He saw it with his own eyes. ^