The Best Goes On

The Best Goes On

CYNDI LAUPER HAS A GREAT PERSONALITY

NEW YORK—We’ve only got a little time here, so let’s go right for the trouble spot: After a recent Lauper set in New York, a well-worn rock observer summed her up as “good convertible music.” Singer/writer/big heart Cyndi is so much more than a Go-Go or a Josie Cotton; if the world doesn’t figure that out, Lauper’s devotees will be very upset. Lauper herself will go to her deathbed trying to figure out a way to make contact. People who really do drive convertibles worry about the vehicle, not the destination, right?

Admittedly, Lauper gives people plenty of cause for underestimating what she says and how she says it. Lauper first hit outside of her New York home base singing with a group called Blue Angel, which looked and sounded ’60s and, well, cute. She posed as a finger popping, circle-skirted chick, a sort of MTV Bernadette Peters with cupid’s bow mouth and big blue eyes and punked-out orange hair. Her singing voice has many tone qualities and textures and a wide range, but it also makes the Betty Boop squeak sound that’s so popular among female new wavers. So she got branded cute.

She’s So Unusual, Lauper’s solo debut, is not a cute record. It opens with a blistery version of the Brains’ classic “Money Changes Everything,” gritty enough to be mistaken for Marriane Faithfull. Next is a Robert Hazard number, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” where Lauper’s voice is as clear and strong and nimble as vintage Brenda Lee. And although the final result is great car music, both Lauper’s voice and the song’s lyrics contradict the breezy melody. Put the top down, buddy, the wind is getting nasty.

“Serious and silly on top of each other, that’s how I am,” says Lauper, whose speaking voice is as unpredictable as her singing voice. “I like things that really sneak and say something while you’re busy laughing.” As befitting a woman who wants to sneak up on people, Lauper has a checkered past. She went through the regulation difficulties of a creative childhood and then some (“some of the kids threw rocks at me for being so different”). Teachers would berate her for her clothing or “attitude” and then say, “I know what you are. I’ve got your number.” Did it hurt? “God, yes.”

Even a couple of art schools threw her out for sundry abberations, as did a class for “geniuses who couldn’t achieve.” She took singing lessons and worked at waitressing, hotwalking racehorses in Belmont Park, singing at a New York Japanese piano bar, clerking at an antique clothing store. “It’s given me a lot of insight to always be on the outside.” She lowers her voice to a whisper and tilts her head way over. “There’s a lot of us, aren’t there? You know those things that everyone knows exists but nobody really talks about? Boy, that really gets me. It’s like when you’re in a room with a person you know, and they won’t talk to you. Even though I don’t want to, my feet just go right over and I start talking to the person and put my arm around them. You know the person is hating every minute. I love that stuff. I guess I was born to be an irritant.” This one makes her pound the desk with her tiny fist, laughing. “Tell ’em I was born to irritate.”

Maybe Lauper’s biggest problem is the number of dim bulbs that have adopted looking like irritants and made it irritating in a way real irritants have never intended. East Village eccentrics, they call ’em in New York, or Valley Girls in chains from Woolworth’s. Lauper is genuinely weird, her different-ness is a real symptom of her need to express a hot soul in a cool world.

Who ever said rockers with heavy meaning can’t drive convertibles or wear ’50s skirts?

She’s right, there are a lot of us. Besides, people who own convertibles don’t like to be irritated.

Laura Fissinger

COUSIN ITT ROCKS OUT!

Goldum that Ian Gillan! He's been the vocal cords of so many different heavy metal outfits, he sometimes has trouble remembering just which group he's singing with on any given night. This is pretty damn embarrassing, as you can well imagine. Gillan's solution? He hides! Right onstage and everything! He thinks no one notices, and often they don't! In the picture at left, poor Ian—in the middle of performing the beloved "Behind The Wall Of Sleep" in concert with Black Sabbath—breaks into Deep Purple's oft-requested "Poor Elijah/Tribute To Robert Johnson"! Well, no problem! He just shakes his head and—kapowee—he's in hiding again! Pleez, dear Ian, come back to us soooooooooooonl

BUG TUSSLE BEWARE!

WHOREHOUSE MEADOW, AZ—Settlers caught up in the gold rush of the mid-1800s gave this sleepy little hamlet its rather fun-loving name, but current residents recently gave the town a new name in an effort to rehabilitate its image.

The town is now called Naughty Girl Meadow, a name that must have won out over some colorful nominees (Imagine the possibilities: Fallen Woman Meadow, Nymphomaniac Meadow, Brazen Hussy Meadow).

If this trend of renaming pioneer towns continues, the future of Toad Suck, Arkansas could be in jeopardy.

Heather Joslyn

PLAY THAT HARM0L0DICA!

NEW YORK-Tired of pop music that sits across the room and yawns at you? If your answer is an embarassed “Go away,” then brace yourself for a hybrid strain of music that gets up off the sofa, bounces across the linoleum and knocks you upside the head. I’m speaking of the stormy sounds of Jamaaladeen Tacuma—the bassist with his fingers on the pulse and his eye o.n your ears. So overloaded with electrofunckativity is Jamaaladeen that he splits his efforts between two groups: Cosmetic, his space-age dancefloor ensemble, and Jamaal, created to venture deep into uncharted musical territory. Cosmetic and Jamaal may be moving in two different musical directions, but they’re guided by the same creative beacon: a composer/performer/ arranger/manager named Jamaaladeen Tacuma.

Leading Cosmetic, Jamaaladeen works his Steinberger bodyless bass so hard the resultant dance/funk rhythms threaten seismic consequences. Razorsharp horn lines and an occasional guest vocalist frame these extra-long songs whose sheer single-mindedness breaks down any resistance to disco contagion. The three 12” singles released by Cosmetic are diverse, but tied together by electric rubber-band plunks from the Tacuma bass, tearing into the beat like in the old “Tiger Paws” ad. Cosmetic’s belligerent ex-, pansion of “dance music” formulae can’t be ignored, whether you like dancing in your head or thinking with your feet.

Jamaal, Tacuma’s “other band,” is featured on his debut LP, Show Stopper. The jazzier side of Jamaaladeen comes to the fore with Jamaal, which never sacrifices funkiness for instrumental intricacy. Half of the Jamaal tunes on the album are songs made out of two different melodies in two different rhythms placed one on top of the other. What might be a sonic jumble is never any less than stirring.

Elsewhere on Show Stopper, Tacuma teams up with jazzmasters Julius Hemphill and Olu Dara on the title cut, a relentlessly swinging new-bop number. Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, the opera star from the film Diva, sings on the disarmingly tranquil “Bird Of Paradise” accompanied by a bass, piano, harp and string quartet. JaVnaaladeen shuns all accompaniment for the freebassing of Ornette Coleman’s “Tacuma Song” and the album ends with “Sophisticated Us,” a compelling melody textured with an unusually menacing guitar synthesizer and the usually menacing James Blood Ulmer.

Jamaaladeen Tacuma grew up in Philadelphia as a prodigiously talented youngster named Rudy McDaniel. Of his earliest musical experiences, Tacuma recalls: “When I was coming up in Philadelphia, I used to go to this place called the Uptown Theater, which is where everybody used to come. James Brown, all the R&B artists...In high school I started listening to the more extreme sounds in jazz...” As a young bassist, Jamaaladeen toured with veteran organist Charles Earland before being hired by Ornette Coleman for his electric ensemble, Prime Time. Jamaaladeen says of his relationship with the legendary Ornette: “The relationship is kind of father-and-son, that’s first. In the sense that he’s an older person, he has a lot of wisdom, I think.. .The other side is the music. Just being with him has opened up a whole new concept in terms of music, which is a real natural concept.” The concept to which Tacuma refers is Ornette’s specific style of songwriting and playing called harmolodics. By way of a short explanation of harmolodics, Blood Ulmer’s preferred genre, Jamaaladeen says this: “Harmolodics mean when the melody and the rhythm and the time is all moving in the same direction, which to me is the most natural form of music... When you just think of music, you think of pure sound and rhythm.”

While still a very young man, Tacuma was living in Paris and wrestling with Coleman’s harmolodic lessons. A man named Hassan Abdel Khalek worked at the bassist’s hotel and engaged him in long talks about the Moslem faith. A week after he returned to the U.S.A., the musician known as Rudy McDaniel converted to Islam and changed his name to Jamaaladeen Tacuma. He cites Islam’s forbiddance of drugs or alcohol as one means of keeping his industriousness and responsibility at high levels. Clearly, things are working out for a musician who recently bought a house in Philadelphia and can still support his five children.

Jamaaladeen is also a sharp businessman who works as his own manager—a feat that most musicians are incapable of. Tacuma comments: “If a person’s playing country and western and they’re successful at it, they’re sincere about it, fine.

If Mick Jagger is doing what he’s doing I think that’s fantastic. Because he’s very sincere about what he’s doing—he’s a businessman on top of it. To me that’s on a higher level than anything else. To someone who thinks that music is important’ thfy just play in the streets. He’s actually thinking about how you can make what you’re doing work, and to me that’s really important... You have the goods. For someone else it might be fabric, for me it’s music.” Obviously, Jamaaladeen is a practical cat the likes of which T.S. Eliot couldn’t dream.

Jamaaladeen Tacuma’s got the goods all right, goods that groove across musical barriers and into the unknown. The first LP from Cosmetic is currently in the works, as is the second Jamaal album, called Renaissance Man in honor of Paul Robeson. With his multiple talents as bassist, composer and businessman, the real renaissance man might just be Jamaaladeen himself.

Drew Wheeler

IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED...

These days it seems ya gotta have a gimmick to sell a record. But some people iust don't know when to call it quits. "The punk thing was really big," explain the zany songsters, "so we thought we'd give it a go. You know, shave our heads and all." Well, that didn't quite do the trick, so they tried the old returning-to-our-working-class-roots bit, boots and all. That didn't work either, but were they discouraged? Nooo. "We got this hot tip that the next big thing is gonna be androgyny. So we zipped over to the resale shop and zipped up some pretty dresses. Some people say we ripped off the Clash, some say Boy George. But we know who we are. We're...uh...we're..." Who Pre these guys, anyway?

WIRE TRAIN TO NOWHERE

SAN FRANCISCO—It was supposed to be just another rehearsal for Wire Train, but that all changed when a guy from the bar across the street relayed a phone message: There’s a big radio station party tonight. Wanna play?

After a few phone calls to the club and to the band’s soundman, they decided to do it. But there was still enough time to warm up a bit by running through a few songs from In A Chamber, Wife Train’s debut album on 415/Columbia Records, which they recorded last fall with producer David Kahne. Guitarists Kevin Hunter and Kurt Herr started the band three years ago when they were both at San Francisco State University. Hunter, with his sharp features and brooding look, is considered teen idol material by 16 magazine. Herr, with beret and goatee, looks like a troubled artist from San Franscisco’s beat past. Drummer Federic Gil-Sola, who moved here from Buenos Aires when he was 12, was a veteran of the city’s punk scene when he joined Wire Train (then called the Renegades) a year ago. Bassist Anders Rundblad auditioned for the band about the same time, but he’d just come from five years of playing rock ’n’ roll in Sweden.

With a nod from Gil-Sola, they slid into the easy pace of “Never,” Hunter’s song about

promises that can t be kept.

“Saturday belongs in silence/ Beside these rooms we sit and chatter endlessly, possessively/ And when she talks her words keep falling/And when she fights with me she fights with meaning and not me,” he sings.

“Never” was one of three or four songs Hunter once translated into French as a joke, but he liked it better that way, so he sings it in French on Wire Train’s European EP, which includes “Chamber Of Hellos” and a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul.”

After a few more songs, they carried their gear out to the sidewalk. While Waiting for their ride to Wolfgang’s in North Beach, they were joined by Anita and Lula from the rehearsal studio across the hall. The girls, members of an all-girl rockabilly band, decided to go along for the ride. “Wait a minute,” said Rundblad. “1 want a picture.”

Finally unloaded and as ready as they’d ever be to go before the free-drinks-sipping crowd, the band’s two songwriters took a minute to talk about the group’s changes since their early days as the Renegades, when Hunter and Herr scored a Bay Area underground hit with “451,” when it was one of the only three songs they knew. Though they still get requests for “451” at every show, the two cringe at the thought of playing anything from that era. “When we started, it was just a matter of being able to play,” said Herr, who, by the way, didn’t play when he teamed up with Hunter. “We’ve gotten better and our music has changed. The old stuff just doesn’t hold up.”

“We’ve worked hard to have our own sound,” said Hunter. “Any time we’ve come up with something that sounded different from what was already out there, we’ve followed it up.”

Then it was time to go on. Starting off with “Slow Down,” they brought out each song from their album. Filled with hummable melodies over edgy, guitar-dominated rhythms subtle in their power, Wire Train’s music may not grab you at first, but it’ll stick with you after a few listens.

One of the best songs is “I Forget It All (When I See You),” a charging number punctuated by Rundblad’s cool bass runs. It was written and recorded at the last minute after the rest of In A Chamber was finished.

They ended the set with “Chamber Of Hellos,” on which Herr, obviously a quick learner, pulls fluid sitar-like guitar lines from somewhere up his sleeve. A half-an-hour later, the gear was back in the truck and only a few people were still huddled around the bar at Wolfgang’s, determined to consume as much free booze as their bodies could hold.The aforementioned Lula, all smiles, emerged from the stage door with a hundred or so helium-filled balloons in tow. She doggedly stuffed all but one—it escaped heading toward the Transamerica Pyramid—into the truck, and Hunter, who was sitting on his amp, was buried in the plastic sea of colors. “This is fun,” said Lula.

Dan Montgomery

WORL D A SAFER PLACE

CALIFORNIA—The aggressive intentions of the Soviet Union were foiled here recently when a sophisticated spying device was detected by red-blooded American Boy Scouts. The instrument? An orange-and-white buoy washed up on the beach.

Since the Russkies refused to play by the rules by not painting it red, how did the Junior Woodchucks know the big bobber was a tool of Moscow? Could it have been the words “Academy of Sciences” printed on it in Russian? Or was it the six-inch orange letters “USSR” high atop the buoy? Will we ever know?

No matter. U.S. Naval Intelligence was so pleased with their shrewd informers they gave ’em 200 bucks and a tour of a sub base as a reward. Hey, it beats rubles and a peek at the borscht farm! “We’re just glad we were able to do something to

help our country,” said one Scout. That’s the spirit, Sherlock. Now if they can only talk the Kremlin into 90-day warnings on surprise first strikes we’ll have it made.

J. Kordosh

HAPPY SNAILS TO YOU

WASHINGTON, D-C — The feds have struck another blow for Reaganomics here by shelling out over $102,000 to study the eating habits of snails.

The money was appropriated to the National Science Foundation to fund a continuing threeyear study of how limpets, a snail-like creature with a coneshaped shell, are able to obtain food from a variety of sources.

The bulk of the research takes NSF scientists to Australia and New Zealand, so that limpets may be observed in their natural habitat.

Despite the apparent urgency and seriousness of this seafood safari, Rep. Manuel Lujan Jr. (R.-NM) thinks there’s something fishy about the project.

“There might be a few people among 231 million Americans interested in the feeding mechanism and food preference of a limpet,” he said, ’’but projects of such limited interest should be funded by tax-exempt foundations, not by the taxpayer.”

Reports that Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and James Taylor are organizing a concert to benefit Limpets For Peace could not be confirmed.

Heather Joslyn