The Beat Goes On

The Beat Goes On

NOT JUST A "LOCAL BOY"

NEW YORK—Andy Fairweather-Low is sitting across the desk in an Island Records office, examining the album just handed him with a blend of shock and tenderness. “It does bring back memories,” he finally sighs, in the lilting Welsh accent of his Cardiff home. “That’s the famous Speakeasy before it burned down,” Andy points out, indicating the tapestried backdrop against which his semilegendary 1960s band, Amen Corner, are performing. The record, called Round Amen Corner, has been sitting in my collection since 1968, filed between “great lost groups” and “whatever happened to.”

Young, cute and screamable, Amen Corner became one of England’s top teen favorites, receiving the same kind of adulation as another hysteria-laden band, the Small Faces. Which is how Andy Fairweather-Low first came to know former Face Ronnie Lane, and was why, many years later, Andy had finally been given his chance to perform here, as the self-styled “lesser mortal” among the raft of Multiple Sclerosis Benefit superstars.

Admittedly, several times he comments about what a splendid introduction to American concert-goers the M.S. benefit has been for him. Readily, Andy indicates with delight the idea of sharing a stage with Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, a pair of Rolling Stones, and especially with Joe Cocker— who as a struggling singer in the steel town of Sheffield, knew very well the blueswailing success of Amen Corner and hoped he’d be as well-received some day.

Yet, at unguarded intervals, the ironies of Fairweather-Low’s peculiar situation rise to the surface. He places a special emphasis upon “earning my ticket” on the tour. “I work hard. Hopefully, if they don’t know who I am, they’ll know what I am.” His name and photograph were on the concert poster and program though not on the Rolling Stone cover of the tour “superstars”—the only slight Andy admits is hurtful. Most importantly, through this brief exposure to the U.S., he hopes to have begun setting a foundation for his own American tour— something which has eluded Fairweather-Low through several major-label solo releases and his most recent LP, Moments Of Madness, recorded over a year ago with the newlyformed Local Boys.

Though tour support for America remains distant until a long-awaited hit emerges from either this Local Boys album or a potential follow-up, Andy seems destined to remain visible—if shadowy—until his work is accepted with concessions. Far from acting the egotist when compliments are tendered about his remarkably taut singing style, Fairweather-Low is prouder of the pound note he earned at the first M.S. benefit at London’s Albert Hall. That iftas the first time a performance had ever made him a profit.

Toby Goldstein

CLARENCE CLEMONS: THE BIG MAN STRETCHES OUT

DETROIT—“ I’m working out and staying in shape. The better shape you’re in, the straighter your head is on. You’re in charge. In a day like we live in, you have to be in charge of yourself. If you let somebody else run your life, they will take advantage of you. You have to be responsible for yourself.”

Clarence Clemons has been taking charge, all right. Seeing that he’s got lots of time between Springsteen albums, the Big Man has been able to realize a longstanding ambition: fronting his own band. Though he’s got no intention of parting ways with Bruce and the E Streeters (“Bruce and I will be together forever”), Clarence relishes the opportunity to make Big Man music.

“Every person wants to do his own thing. Although I enjoy playing with Bruce, it’s still Bruce’s thing. Now I’m doing my own thing and it’s even more enjoyable. It’s like having your cake and eating it, too. I always say that I’m taking advantage of my schizophrenia.”

Clarence formed the Red Bank Rockers two years ago as the house band for his Red Bank, New Jersey, nightclub, Big Man’s West. The group started out as an 11-piece outfit which saw some touring, but Clarence took the band out of action and dismantled it when he found the “big band” approach inhibited his style.

“It was fun, but they kind of locked me into a groove that I didn’t want to be in. We started off with a big band because my first band was a big band like that. But it got where it was too Hkavy for me, so I cut it back to a smaller band and got rid of the horn section. David Landau and Johnny Bowen are the only two left out of the original line-up, so I call them the heart and soul of the Red Bank Rockers.”

With the Red Bank Rockers a reality and a secure position as the Boss’s celebrated sideman, you might think this guy’s ambitions had been amply fulfilled. It’s tempting to wax happilyever-after-like at this point, but a major question remains, one that Has been dogging the worn heels of Springsteen/E Street fans the world over.

Hey, Clarence, whadya think about the Sesame Street record, Born To Spell?

(Laughter) “I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve heard about it. I love it. It’s funny, you know, it’s great. You must be doing something right when they put out a thing like that for kids. I love kids and I love that whole thing because you’re dealing with the future when you’re dealing with kids. That’s how I am: a man of the future.”

Kevin Knapp

HEARTFIXERS w/BAR-B-QUE SAUCE

ATLANTA— People are jammed inside the Harvest Moon Saloon. It’s become a typical occurence everytime the Heartfixers play the Atlanta club. Everyone is straining to get closer to the stage (and the bar) as one guy is trying to make his way through the crowd towards the exit. Finally out the front door, guitarist Tinsley Ellis—with the help of modern electronics—lets loose with a fiery guitar solo for those out in the parking lot. It’s an odd sight, viewing through large picture windows the blues band’s rhythm section onstage while watching Ellis’s sidewalk showmanship outside.

It’s antics like that, and duckwalking across bars throughout the southeast, that have gained the Heartfixers a strong following from the Mississippi to the Mason-Dixon. Yet if it was all down to gimmicks, it’s doubtful this quartet would’ve survived the three years they have in the land of Jack Daniels and Rebel flags.

No, there’s a musical side to the Heartfixers steeped in tradition and an alliance with the old masters. While Ellis draws from various blues, hard rock and country outfits, bassist Jim Bullard has held down the bottom with Big Mama Thornton, George “Hamilton” Smith and Eddie Hinton, while Mike McCauley has played drums for the rock ’n’ bluesman Piano Red, among others. But, as Ellis attests in the Saloon’s back office later on, it’s their singer, “Chicago” Bob Nelson (who has toured the world with Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Earl Hooker), who sets them apart from the rest of the blue wave, including the Nighthawks and the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

“We’ve got a real blues voice in the band,” Ellis grins. “Bob’s real, there’s something about the way black people sing, especially him, it sounds like he’s got a bunch of bar-b-que sauce in his throat or something, whiskey and bar-b-que. It’s something that nobody can sound like and to me that gives us an edge.”

In addition to playing,live, the group has set out to establish themselves on vinyl. Last year they released The Heartfixers LP on Southland Records, Atlanta’s oldest label. Primarily an output for jazz and traditional blues recordings, the Heartfixers’ album is their largest selling record to date. That distinction drew the attention of Atlanta’s Landslide Records, a more aggressive company with releases by the Brains and the Late Bronze Age, which signed the Heartfixers and immediately set out to record a “live” album by the group. The result is The Heartfixers Live At The Moonshadow, an LP which captures the energy of their urban blues.

It all sounds fine. But why would a guitarist, just out of college and living in an area that spawned the likes of The B-52’s, Pylon, R.E.M. and the Brains, want to put together a blues band?

“I really feel close to that scene, it’s real energetic,” Ellis acknowledges, “but I got into Creedence Clearwater when I was growing up. That and Johnny Rivers was the stuff I really liked, Tony Joe White. So then I delved into it a little deeper and got into the roots of that, like Slim Harpo and Freddie King. Buddy Guy—he’s a real wild man. That’s the way I like to approach the blues, not so much from a serious point of view, but from something modern and vibrant.”

Tony Paris

ALCATRAZZTHE CONCEPT!

LOS ANGELES—Alcatrazz. A fine name for a heavy band. Visions of toughness, Clint Eastwood, bars, Clint Eastwood, implacability, Clint Eastwood. Better than Graham Crackers anyway, one of a hundred names suggested by Graham Bonnet’s Japanese fan club (it’s massive; they call him “Glaham,” and they’ve already make the Alcatrazz debut album gold in the East); Graham Bonnet being “one of the best singers in the world,” according to Michael Schenker, and the man who, put this L.A. based bunch together.

Bonnet’s the only Brit in the line-up, which features one Swede—20 year old Yngwie Malmsteen, the young guitar hero who’s inspired YNGWIE IS GOD graffiti all over town—j and three Americans—Jan Uvena, former Alice Cooper drummer, chosen from an illustrious field of contenders including Aynsley Dunbar, Cozy Powell, and exIron Maiden basher Clive Burr; and the former keyboardist and bassist with AOR hit band New England, Jimmy Waldo and Gary Shea, who arrived as a package in search of something “heavier.” Graham turned down offers from Ted Nugent and UFO to form this band. They recorded their debut album almost exactly a year to the date since the singer was unceremoniously booted from Michael Schenker’s band after reportedly opening his pants and flashing at a British audience, and dragging on a shadow guitarist hidden in the wings.

“It was a very drunken night,” Bonnet, a good-looking, amiable bloke, father of twins and damn good singer, tells the tale. “I heard a lot of stories after that about me flashing my cock and taking my bum out and all kinds of strange things. It’s like when you tell a story in that party game and pass it along down the line it changes,” Graham insists, “and by the time it gets to the end it’s a different story. People told me what they were saying—that I pissed on the audience, that I said Michael didn’t play guitar on the album and that it was a guitar roadie who was playing. Stupid things! And they made me sound like some kind of real weirdo.

“The reason I ran offstage that night is because my cock came out. See these jeans?” I didn’t look. I’m a married woman. OK, I gave a journalistic sidelong glance. They’re buttoned. “I wear these jeans with buttons now because of what happened with those other jeans. The zip came off here. I always find a problem with zippers, they always bust on me, I don’t know why, and I don’t wear underpants. So I thought ‘right, from now on I’m going to be real safe.’ I was going to do like this, trying to put it back in, and suddenly it became ‘he was shaking it.’ ”

Sent packing by MSG, he sat around for three months brooding, wondering if he’d ever work in rock ’n’ roll again. “I really did. Because I thought people would believe what they read in the papers—that I was some kind of alcoholic boozer that was over the top and taking drugs and a phantom flasher or whatever, though I’ve never fucked up like that onstage, ever.” And then he thought about doing a solo album. He hitched up with a new manager, who helped him track down the musicians—the New England twosome from a newspaper ad, Yngwie on the recommendation of L.A. heavy metal fans who’d heard him in the band Steeler, and Uvena after auditioning 50 drummers and kicking out Clive Burr after a week.

“The kind of music it is is very much in the Rainbow-Schenker vein,” says Graham; well, at least he’s consistent! “It’s probably more tuneful than both those bands, and probably more dynamic. The band is playing very much in that heavy metal—I hate the words ‘heavy metal’!—it’s got that HM back sound, and at the front it’s more melodic from me, the vocals. It’s not that horrible heavy metal. Some HM sounds like punk music, know what I mean? Really shitty and awful.

“This is kind of the thinking man’s heavy metal.”

The Alcatrazz album is nudging into the top 100 as I write. “This band is something very special,” Graham assures me as I make my escape. “We’re all musicians, basically, and I think if you’re a good musician you can play anything. I thought at first, no way this could work, but after a few weeks of rehearsing, the whole thing changed, and suddenly it just sounded right. This is a very strong band. Hopefully people will like it.”

Sylvie Simmons

TIME HAS COME TODAY

ANN ARBOR, MI —“I’d always considered us a pop band,” explains Michael Quercio, the Three O’clock’s cherubic lead singer. It’s another swingin’ Sunday at Joe’s Star Lounge. “But the only places we knew to play and where we knew the bands we could get on the bill were with these hardcore punk bands. That was what was happening in Southern California at that time.”

Guitarist Louis (nee Greg) Gutierrez, himself a veteran of the boots-and-bandana bunch with Youth Brigade, concurs.

“The South Bay where we’re fromwhich is like all the beach cities of Los Angeles County— • was like a scene in itself. We played with a lot of bands, the Minutemen, TSOL, the Descendents, 45 Grave, Redd Kross, Saccharine Trust, but (the audience) never once booed us or threw stuff at us. They didn’t know what to expect. We were very energetic and very youthful and they could relate to us in that way.

“One thing that I think freaked them out was that Mike sang with such a melodic pitch. It was very refreshing for a lot of people who were burned out on hardcore.”

These days, of course, So. Cal. is famous for more than just the thrashers. There’s a whole new brew of psychedelia being mixed up like a new batch of electric purple Kool-Aid, and the Three O’Clock—it’s the time they held practice—was there at the beginning.

“There was no underground pop or psychedelic scene as there is now,” Louis remembers. “We were playing as a band before the Dream Syndicate even got together. The Bangles were around and they were called the Colors then, playing outof-the-way dives, doing .mostly covers and stuff. It wasn’t until they got on a bill with the Unclaimed and us that the psychedelic scene started happening.”

All the same, the boys aren’t so sure about this Psychedelic Revival tag that some observers have hung about their unwilling necks like an ominous deadweight.

Louis: “I think that sucks. I’m not psychedelic. I don’t claim to be psychedelic, I don’t dress psychedelic and I don’t care about psychedelic. It may come off that way in our music sometimes because Mike’s lyrics are sometimes twisted in the way he writes them. But for myself, it offends me because I don’t think we’re a psychedelic band.”

But it’s not worth quibbling over, for the Three O’Clock are true pop aficionados: cover tunes include the Byrds’ “Feel A Whole Lot Better,” the Monkees’ “For Pete’s Sake,” the Easybeats’ “Sorry,” and the Beatles’ “I’m Down.” Their own material possesses a genuine feel that would do the Old Masters proud.

“I want us to come across like a Beatles or a Bee Gees record,” Mike states. “I just want to do it well.”

“As far as our songs go,” Louis adds, “we just like to experiment. We’re not doing anything new, by any means. Everything’s been done. What we do now is just what we like and what sounds good to our ears.”

What then from future Clockworks?

“Bigger and better pop songs,” says Mike. “Threeminute, fifty-second pop songs.”

Kevin Knapp