The Beat Goes On

The Beat Goes On

NICK CAVE’S IN!

DETROIT—So what’s the first thing that Nick Cave wants to know upon his arrival in Detroit?

He wants to know where all the murders are happening.

Seems we have a reputation for that sort of thing around here, and murder is definitely something Cave finds interesting. The themes of degradation and violent death wind their way through all his songs, as Cave’s detatched eye watches over the wicked and the dead, catching every detail.

“I don’t think that I am didactic,” Cave replies, when asked if his narrator is making any moral judgements on the squalor he depicts. “I don’t think that I’ve ever, ever tried to describe a situation and say ‘There, look at that, this is how sick the world is.’ Basically they’re just sorta like murder ballads—-they’re little tragedies in the classic sense.”

Cave’s been working this territory since his earliest days with the critically-acclaimed Birthday Party, but while that band finally threw itself apart in its barelycontrolled fury, Cave’s new solo LP From Her To Eternity shows him to be a master of restraint. Like a good horror film director, Cave seems to know that an ounce of tension is worth a pound of splatter.

“Yeah, I would hope so, and I certainly much prefer things like that. I think in many respects, lyrically and whatever, things aren’t as overstated. To me it seemed the obvious thing to do, to make a record like this, to have much more variety in the songwriting itself, in order to release me from that...‘ballast’ that I was chained to with the Birthday Party.”

If the live show of Cave and his band (which includes bass ace Barry Adamson of Magazine and demento-guitarist Blixa Bargeld of Einstruzende Neubauten) is any indication, Cave may have more than a little Birthday Party left in him.

In the meantime, his cover of Elvis’s “In The Ghetto” is already out and confounding expectations. For one thing, it’s done relatively straight (“It’s really sort of a nice version.”). It’s also unusual to hear covers of Vegasera Elvis, as opposed to his earlier glory days. But, true to form, Cav,e is drawn to the later period by an unflinching eye for tragedy.

“Elvis’s decline—which upset people so much—for me that period was when he just.. .rocketed. I think it’s just so incredibly, painfully intense in those shows. To me he seems so chronically aware of everything that’s going on—it’s like a nightmare. That one particular segment that he has to speak and he fucks up...”

“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

“...yeah. That’s just the most horrible 10 seconds of cinema I’ve ever seen. I just find that more captivating and stimulating to see that than the famous ‘Houng Dog’ film clip or whatever—I think he dances really well, but I don’t cream myself over it as I would over watching him in trouble.”

John Neilson

DON’T RAIN ON THEIR PARADE

ANN ARBOR, MI-“We’re more into Beethoven quartets than we are into ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ insists guitarist/vocalist Matthew Piucci of the Rain Parade. “We reject the notion that we’re involved with the ’60s. If you want to call us psychedelic, that we embrace, because it’s true.”

Sure it is. The Rain Parade’s debut LP last year offered some of the most dreamy and convincing post-’60s psychedelia to be gleaned from what has come to be known, for better or worse, as the Paisley Underground of new California bands.

On their new EP Explosions In The Glass Palace, the L.A. quartet (minus co-founding member David Roback, now of Clay Allison) further perpetrates their newly-begotten “head” music that is underscored with driving guitar leads straight from Neil Young’s Crazy Horse period and accented with baroque string embellishments that owe a few nods in the direction of the Left Banke.

“We love music that is mindexpanding,” Piucci explains. “All that matters is to transcend. You can put a label on anything, as people will do, and all that matters is whether a music will rise above whatever stereotype people are categorizing you in. You listen to Miles Davis and you say, ‘My God! I cannot get to this place any other way except through this guy.’ That’s what’s so great about artists like Miles—and I feel we carry on that tradition, of bringing people to a place they’re not going to get to in any other way. Anyone who can do that is great and that can happen in any particular musical style. That’s what we strive to do.”

Within the textures of its music, with melodic folk-rock tones that combine with elements of classical and Eastern influences, the Rain Parade does take the listener for an excursion to some ephemeral realm that suggests a wistful melancholia.

“We were all drawn together as a band, I think, because we could all create this place we could go to, like when you’re falling into daydreams,” adds Steven Roback, bass guitarist/vocalist and one of the band’s two main songwriters. “It’s a mood and a setting that’s more cinematic.”

All has not been just dreamstates and forays into the frontal lobes for the Rain Parade, however. After a rather lukewarm response to their initial tour in support of the first record, the band realized that their stage presence was noticably lacking. “We had this aloof, stand-offish attitude toward our live shows then,” Piucci admits. “We feel a lot more responsible toward our audience these days.

“You don’t get there by taking drugs,” Piucci says of Rain Parade’s quest for the transcendental. “Look at Miles. He worked his ass off to get where he’s at now, absorbing everything he possibly could. He was a master, and he has to learn from the people before him.”

“That’s the tradition that we follow in. It’s not like we blew in here from a vacuum. You learn from what happens before you. Tradition is so important in music. These rock musicians will tell you that they just sat there in a room and felt a vibe and all, that’s bullshit. Nobody is inspired. People who are great, work. ”

Kevin Knapp

INXS BITE THE APPLE

CINCINNATI-All too often, the music biz operates like a branch of the United Parcel Service, abiding by the rules set forth in the UPS Yer Ass Handbook: 1) refuse any product that isn’t neatly packaged; 2) slap a label on anything else; and 3) ship it out to the unwashed hordes across the country in panel trucks (or radio stations) that all look (or sound) the same.

The Aussie band INXS has recently taken a roller coaster ride on the UPS mentality. It began with the group’s first American release, Shabooh, Shoobah, a peppy collection of oblique love songs, with a fiberglass production that buffed enough fulsome hooks to pierce the ears of many a listener.

“The Swing was done a year and a half after Shabooh Shoobah, ” explained keyboardist Andrew Farriss, hunched forward intently on a backstage couch in Cincinnati, where INXS had just opened for the Go-Go’s. “We learned a lot during that time, most of which we spent on the road. We saw what the world was like around us, what people were doing, and we put what we saw into our music.”

They obviously got an eyeful of the dancing in New York City. The Swing pushes the group’s rhythm section into the driver’s seat and distills the groove down to the perimeters of a back-alley dancefloor. Vocalist/lyricist Michael Hutchence delivers it all with an anthemic holler that is a far cry from the contemplative musings on Shabooh Shoobah.

But that’s the point, according to Farriss, who traces The Swing’s dance orientation back to the remixed versions of Shabooh Shoobah cuts that became the Dekadance EP, and to a backstage visit from Nile Rodgers after a show in Toronto. “We want to be known as a versatile band that is capable of changing all the time,” he said. “Music shouldn’t be pigeonholed. It’s the record companies who do that.”

Damn straight, and after Shabooh Shoobah you can bet the UPS machinery had backordered on their “AORsynth popdivision” labels, ready to market the six members of INXS along the lines of a Thompson Twins Times Two with a downunder twist. Instead, the band not only went “urban contemporary,” they chose “Original Sin” to be The Swing’s first single. It is an irresistable dance tune, produced by Rodgers, Mr. Chic himself, with Rodgers’s trademark chinka-chink guitar riff over a pop-in-glow shuffle. But the lyrics are commercial suicide, dealing with the tragedies of an interracial love affair. “Dream on white girl/dream on black boy”—whoa! The last time American radio touched that subject (and it was with a twentyfoot pole), little teenaged Janis Ian was mewing “Society’s Child” and the power was in flowers (or so it was said) and not in Reagan. “It is disappointing that the radio stations have misinterpreted the lyrics to ‘Original Sin,’ because it has done well in other countries,” Farriss lamented. Disappointing but unfortunately hardly surprising in the land of de free and the home of de brave, circa 1984.

Welcome to the roller coaster, boys.

Britt Robson

KINKY KOWBOYS & RUBBER ROBEO

NEW YORK—Have you ever gone out on a date for laughs and ended up in love? That’s the quickest way to explain what happened to a batch of Rhode Island artists who started, uh, fooling around with country music four years ago and now are whipped over it. Oh, they love rock ’n’ roll too, and synth pop, and folk rock, and God knows what else—it’s all there on their big time debut, Scenic Views. But the aching heart and sweet soul of country music is the real home on the range for Rubber Rodeo. Can a bunch of artsy hipsters really be happy doing a hicksville do-se-do? You bet your boots.

For singer. Trish Milliken and writer/guitarist/violinist/singer Bob Holmes, the dividing line never actually was between city and country. The line they got bugged by was the one between “high art” and “low art”—you know, Beethoven versus the Beach Boys, Shakespeare versus the shopping mall. “I think low art can express as much as high art,” says Milliken, who no longer wears her Dolly Parton wigs but looks like a purty country singer anyway. “It’s more true to life; it can express things we really feel in our lives.”

It was natural for them to be a sort of country cartoon in the beginning—necessity, actually. “We used some of that goofy cowboy talk and props because the music wasn’t always so good. And we just wanted the audience to have fun, one way or another,” Trish explains. Apparently they did—places like Max’s in New York hired them sight unseen, on the basis of a tape and the band’s blind faith. “We used to have picture contests,” Bob laughs. “We’d hand our cameras out to people in the audience and give prizes like Roy Rogers coloring books for the best picture at the end of the night. It never occurred to us that the camera might get stolen.” Or that the sincerity they were starting to pour into their songs might hot come through as clear as the funny stuff.

At first it didn’t—the critics mostly talked about Trish’s wigs and the cowpoke raps by Bob and the tongue-in-cheek hayride routines. Scenic Views is music, though, and Rubber Rodeo is getting to be more sweet than smartass. So what if the world never thought that the Talking Heads and Mel Tillis could make beautiful music together? What do they know about love, anyway?

Laura Fissinger

THE CREEM CHRONICLE: Where were you five years ago?

TURNING JAPANESE?

Blue Oyster Cult’s Eric Bloom threw bean sprouts to the wind and decided to prepare for the group’s Japanese tour by enrolling in the Evelyn Tse Tung speed reading course. He can now recite the entire history of Nagasaki in the native tongue of the land of the rising sun.

ROBIN’S REIGN: PHASE TWO

NEW YORK—In town to promote his current Secret Agent LP, Robin Gibb is adamant that, despite his past triumphs as a Bee Gee, he’s now craving recognition as a solo artist. “I’ll always be a Bee Gee,” he confesses, “but I’d like to think that as kids discover this record, they’ll see me as a new artist.”

By no means an outrageous demand^yet, in a business where attention is generally focused on the arrival of fresh talent, rather than the reemergence of previously established artists, Robin definitely has his work cut out. Let’s face it, the mere mention of the Gibb name tends to elicit instant flashbacks to the disco deluge of the mid-’70s, which was highlighted by the megasales success of the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. How cynics love to ridicule the white suit/gold chain image that was synonymous with the trio’s music.

“We weren’t visual at all in Saturday Night Fever, ” defends Robin. “It was the film that has

the white suits, not us. People had no right to put our songs dowri and call them cheap and stupid. Our music was totally serious, and I’m very proud of what we did. We were the first white group to do black-oriented music; we’ve always had #1 black records, which is still very hard for white bands.

“Although the groups might not like to admit it, I can hear the Bee Gees in a lot of the stuff that’s happening today. When I was recently in England, Frankie Goes To Hollywood had come on the charts with that song Two Tribes.’ Well, to me, the groove and the sound is the same as ‘Tragedy.’ But the kids think they’re doing something-for the first time. Some of our music was a hell of a lot funkier than the things that are out now.”

More, than half a decade has passed since it was overwhelmingly decreed that “Disco Sucked!”, but there can be no doubt that people still want to dance. Robin Gibb has observed the changes in dancefloor rhythms and, when he went in to record Secret Agent (his debut release through Mirage Records) earlier this year, he prudently enlisted the services of New York’s top dance producers, Mark Liffett and Chris Barbosa, the men behind Shannon’s recent “Let The Music Play” chart smash. Though Robin and twin brother Maurice Gibb have taken the overall production credit on the record, Liggett and Barbosa (who are listed as co-producers) were definitely responsible for giving the songs a very bright, ’80s dance flavor.

“I really like what’s happening in New York clubs-sfthat whole urban dance feel. Chris and Mark’s work appealed to me because they don’t overproduce. Their arrangements give a song time to breathe, without that total wall-to-wall production.”

The end result of several months’ work at Miami’s Criteria studios is an LP that boasts a fine selection of commercial dance tunes, such as “Robot,” “X-Ray Eyes” and the recent single “Boys Do Fall In Love.” Although there’s still a strong underlying pop element, it’s refreshing to note that Gibb wasn’t afraid to stretch out and experiment with the overall sound.

Asked to pinpoint the kind of audience he’s aiming for with Secret Agent, he concludes, “Well, I think it should appeal to both the black and white market. The music is definitely directed towards young kids though. I’m only 34 now and there are a lot of people making hit records who are older than me—Billy Joel’s 36, Elton’s 37 and even Rod Stewart is 39.”

Steve Gett