UNSUNG HEROES OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL by Nick Tosches (Scribners)

THE BEST OF COUNTRY MUSIC by John Morthland (Dolphin/Doubleday)

by Mitchell Cohen

Crisp, Texas; Mount Olive, Alabama; Locust Ridge, Tennessee; Binkly, Arkansas; Winchester, Virginia; Maud, Oklahoma. The names that tumble through these two books are the stops on the winding trail of American music, the mutant music of the disenfranchised rednecks, blacks, hillbillies, and outcasts of no particular category who made sounds that could curl the hair

on the back of your neck. Rhythm & blues, honky-tonk, rockabilly, western swing, jumpin’ jive, doowop: Nick Tosches and John Morthland tell how they were hatched on the fringes of polite society, about the characters that shaped this glorious noise.

Much of the contents of Unsung Heroes Of Rock ’n’ Roll appeared in these pages, but if you somehow missed Tosches’s profiles on your way to Backstage, here’s a chance to rectify your slovenly reading habits and get the lowdown on the men and women who made the whole shebang possible (and whose exploits in their personal lives make the cartoon carousings of Motley Crue look absolutely pathetic). Tosches convincingly refutes the usual line about rock ’n’ roll’s genesis—the “Freed named it, Elvis claimed it” theory— and gives overdue credit to the likes of Roy Brown, the Dominoes, Stick McGhee, the Treniers, and 20 more shouters, pickers, crooners and pounders who were rocking before Presley stepped into 706 Union Avenue. Tosches covered some of this ground in the “Loud Covenants” chapter of Country, but here the story is told in fuller, more salacious

The chapters (samples: “The Clovers: Absalom! Absalom! DooWah, Doo-Wah!,” “Wanda Jackson: Laced By Satan, Unlaced By The Lord,” “Louis Jordan: Hep And The Art Of Alto Sax Repair”) are brief, but filled with the essentials. Consider the glory that was Wanda Jackson (“not yet 20 years old, she sounded like she could fry eggs on her Gspot”), the ravings of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the smutty original of “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” the place of Nat King Cole and Louis Jordan in the scheme of things. Tosches bestows a certain lunatic dignity on the failures and suicides and hasbeens and smutpeddlers and shitkickers and drunkards and fornicators and one-hit-wonders who have been ill-served by official histories of the music.

He suggests an alternate telling of Johnny Ace’s tragic end, gets Jesse Stone to tell a chilling anecdote about working for a mob-run record company in Chicago, and ends the narrative portion of the book by offering a tale about what really happened to Elvis’s twin brother. Tosches’s brilliant, all-encompassing “chronology of the coming of rock ’n’ roll” (1945-1954) puts it all in linear perspective, and the sort-of helpful discography (no clues as to what’s in print) should get you on your way towards digging up this stuff. I’ve already sent away to Roundup Records in Cambridge for Ella Mae Morse’s Barrelhouse, Boogie And The Blues and an Aladdin sampler with Amos Milburn and Wynonie Harris.

Morthland has taken on a daunting task: the organization and evaluation of more than 60 years of country music, separating the essential from the useless. Country folk are so prolific, and the country shelves of even the best-stocked record stores are such a confusing maze, that The Best Of Country Music immediately becomes a necessity. Morthland has his biases—there are fewer albums recommended in the “countrypolitan” section than there are George Jones albums that get his seal of approval—but he backs them up, and consistently steers the reader in the right direction. When you’re picking records for a basic library, it’s hard to stay away from the greatest hits packages and boxed sets, but Morthland’s top 100 also contains such genuine classics as The Louvin Brothers’ haunting Tragic Songs Of Life, and Merle Haggard’s Someday We’ll Look Back, and there are 650 albums given “supplementary” status.

Not only are Morthland’s “best” sagely selected, and weighted towards the pantheon of the music (five artists—Elvis, Hag, Jones, Hank Williams and Jerry Lee Lewis— account for approximately 100 albums among them), but his writing is consistently insightful (Patsy Cline “created a pop-country continuum that was the white equivalent to Billie Holiday’s pop-blues fusion”) and evocative (on Jones’s Epic years: “as his annihilation grew increasingly imminent, his voice moved beyond pain into a realm where pain was the only given in life”). Morthland has no patience with bullshit, with the way

modern country has rounded the edges off, with the careless way that record companies have handled the legacies entrusted to them. He is, he admits, “sorta” a purist, so his choices don’t give with the current predelictions of the Country Music Association (he does give Ronnie Milsap “credit for being the only one in Nashville who consistently comes up with credible songs about happy marriages”). None of Alabama’s ersatz “Mountain Music” here.

While the book’s chapters do a first-rate job of tracing the evolution of the music, the genre subdivisions make for jumpy discussions of individual artists. To get the whole George Jones picture, you need to leap from “Honky-Tonk and Hillbilly boogie” to “The Nashvjlle Sound”; some Ricky Skaggs LPs are listed under “Bluegrass,” others in “Contemporary Country.” Still, Morthland’s essays on such figures as Jimmie Rodgers, Williams, Dolly Parton and Roger Miller are cogent, impassioned criticism, and as he states in his introduction, his rock and blues leanings lead to a perspective on country music that, while traditionbound, is anything but rigid (which makes the omission of such hybrids as Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music and the Byrds’ Sweetheart Of The Rodeo that much more surprising).

Like Tosches’s sketches, Morthland’s map of the choice spots in country music is also an attempt to clarify a past that’s been smudged over. These books may not hold all the keys to the highway of American music, but they do a hell of a job of picking the locks.

EAT MY CHUD

by Edouard Dauphin

The newspaper ad was intriguing. A photo of the Manhattan skyline with a manhole cover in the foreground. The sewer lid is being lifted off from underneath by reptilian claws. A line of ad copy reading: “They’re not staying down there, anymore!”

Nyet, boyo, we’re not talking about fans of Motley Crue surfacing from the depths they belong in, but something potentially even more diseased. Something called C.H.U.D., which may stand for “Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.” Or “Contaminated Hazardous Urban Deposits,” or maybe “Cinema Hawgs Unleash Doodoo.” In any case, The Dauph has never cared much for acronyms—-I’m still trying to find out what The T.A.M.I. Show meant.

Now Hollywood moviemakers are no strangers to gook from the bowels of the earth. Way back in 1964, The Slime People rose from the Los Angeles sewers to menace the local citizenry and, it is now believed, started the trend toward natural foods. 1972’s Raw Meat depicted a race of cannibals living beneath the London subway system; they bore a marked resemblance to real-life flesheaters currently riding the New York subway system. And let us not forget Alligator, a 1980 flick in which a three-foot long gator named Ramone hid in a Missouri sewer. The following year, Joey Ramone moved to a sewer. Coincidence? I hardly think so.

Which brings us to the Gramercy Theatre on East 23rd Street on a recent Friday night. The Dauphin alights from a gypsy cab for a 10 p.m. showing of C.H.U.D. It’s the night of the film’s premiere and the sidewalk out front is almost deserted. There are more people down the block in front of the actual manhole than there are outside the Gramercy waiting to buy tickets. Dauph begins to suspect the worst.

C.H.U.D. starts promisingly enough. A woman walking her dog in downtown Manhattan at night is dragged feet first into a sewer opening. Her dog is a goner too, causing one to wonder if maybe this is some new variation on the pooper scooper law—that Mayor Koch will stop at nothing.

Soon we are introduced to a young photographer, played by John Heard, who has been shooting pictures of derelicts living in subway tunnels. Lately, the ranks of these homeless souls have been getting thinned out, as we discover when we meet a soup kitchen preacher (Daniel Stern of Diner) who acts as though he stepped out of a heartwarming Frank Capra movie with a side detour through Easy Rider. C.H. U.D. is beginning to look like a very schizoid movie.

The plot thickens, or should we say congeals? Christopher Curry is the local police captain, named Bosch (as in Hieronymus, for anyone who wants to try and figure that one out), who has been downplaying the significance of the hobo disappearances—a sure sign that some official cover-up is going on. All credibility is severed midway through the picture when we discover, almost casually, that the lady with the pooch in the pre-credit sequence was Captain Bosch’s wife! Guess he thought all along she’d only gone out for a sandwich instead of becoming one.

Yes, fans, the creatures beneath the streets like to eat people and lately they’ve really been having the munchies. Oh, a few homeless bums are OK for appetizers, but for an entree there’s nothing like a police captain’s wife, with maybe a poodle thrown in as a side dish. Now that’s the kind of grub that makes mealtime a pleasure!

But what has created these subterranean trenchermen? If you have to ask, chances are you’ve forgotten the basic axiom of monster movies: blame it on the Government. Years ago, horrifying creatures surfaced as a result of atomic testing. Now scaly mutants are crawling up through the sewer ducts because of toxic waste. Politicians come and go but B movie plots go on forever.

So does this flick. Much of the second half is taken up with Heard and Stern running, not too athletically, through the sewers, and Heard’s girlfriend, played by newcomer Kim Greist, fending off the virulent beasties who, when you finally get to see them, look like a cross between a Gremlin and a hyperactive Muppet.

With the film finally over, The Dauphin wanders out into the midnight street. As before, the pavement in front is empty. Down at the corner, a small crowd is still congregated around the real life manhole. Maybe these people know something. The Dauph hails another gypsy cab and caroms off into the night.

BARBIE STICKER ALBUM

(Topps Gum, Inc.)

“To most girls, Barbie appears as the ideal elder sister who manages to do all those wonderful things they can only dream of,” goes the introduction, and who can argue? This new sticker album—which does not include the 216 stickers in the set or batteries—is chock full o’ glamour, romance and fun. Picking out the neatest sticker is a tuffy, with the leading contenders including Barbie Rides A Big Horsie, Born To Be A Dancer, Barbie Is Particularly Concerned For The Pretty Seal Pups and my own personal favorite, Barbie Borrows A Baby (“How he enjoys his bottle!”). Multiple adorable pix are tempered with heavy philosophical musings such as, “Whatever lies in store will come sooner or later.” Barbie, you’re so much more than just a “special playmate” to meeeee.R.J.

This Month’s Media Cool was written by Bill Holdship, Rick Johnson and Richard C. Walls

CAREFUL, HE

MIGHT HEAR YOU

(20th Century Fox)

Two sisters (one warm and poor; one cold and rich) fighting for custody of their dead sister’s six-yearold son in 1930s Australia may not sound like a terribly fascinating premise for a movie, but this is without a doubt one of the best films I’ve seen (two times in four days) in recent years. Everything about it seems flawless, and Nicholas Gledhill is one of the most irresistible child actors to ever grace a screen, going way beyond the stereotyped American cuteness routine. It includes elements of Charles Dickens, gothic horror and/or romance films, Hitchcock and every great film that’s ever been shown through a child’s eyes, giving its biggest nod to Ingmar Bergman, though it’s not nearly as dark and the symbolism is less heavyhanded. The symbolism is so subtle, in fact, that it may not all hit you until the conclusionSJbut hit you it does, making it the type of thing you can see over and over again. The ugliness/horror in this story (much of it based on Marxist and Freudian theory) is often chilling, but love and beauty also radiate strongly—* because love is what this film is all about ii> the end. It’s been a long time since the effects of an adult world on an innocent have been this vividly and brilliantly portrayed. B.H.

ENERJETS

(Chilton Laboratories)

Here’s the very latest in enlightened abuse of the central nervous system. Enerjets lozenges ^/-constructed of caffeine, sugar, coffee flavor and mystery binders—are even more fun than sucking frozen Tab! Not only can you achieve a more consistent buzz, but it’s a lot easier on the zipper too. “For sports, office, factory, studies...” goes the label, nowhere mentioning their most valuable application: writing last second heavy metal stories by ear. “Restores mental alertness,” ha! First you have to achieve mental alertness! R.J.

THE 4th MAN

(Spectra)

If you only see one Dutch flick this week about a homosexual writer suffering from DTs and religious mania who, in a rare burst of hetero lust, becomes involved with a woman who, it turns out, has killed her first three husbands and he may be next, then this is the one to see. Stripped of its style it’s a hackneyed melodrama, but its style is compelling with touches of Bergman, Bunuel, Fassbinder and Friday The 13th. Excellent performance in the lead by Jeroen Krabbe who comes on like a cross between Ted Danson and a young Morris Ankrum (cf. Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, etc.). Enough sheer chutzpah here to dazzle anybody, including the whackedout suburban matron sitting behind me who turned to her companion toward the end of the film and said, with genuine awe in her voice, “This is terrible!” R.C.W.

MIGHTY MINUTES

by Jim Hall

(Harmony)

An interesting, well-illustrated history of TV blurbs from Marky Maypo to Count Chocula; from “Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener” to “My baloney has a first name.” All the commercial greats are here, including Mr. Peanut, Poppin’ Fresh, the Lady in the Brylcreem Tube, “Snoozin’ ” Susan Anton, the Marlboro Man and Speedy Alka-Seltzer. Also includes actual storyboards like the original “Let’s get Mikey to try it,” a translation of the speed-lips Federal Express ads and tons more. Oot-fray, Oops-lay! R.J.

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

by Norman Mailer

(Random House)

Judged as a genre novel, murdermystery division, this is a total failure mainly because Mailer has neither the grace nor the inclination to neatly unite the strands of his very complex plot—besides, good mysteries appeal to our sense of logic and logic is the last thing on the minds of the mystical chumps who populate a Mailer novel. But judged as a series of audacious and foolish digressions (with much of the usual twaddle about machismo and latent homosexuality), it’s good unclean fun, though a little claustrophobic (everybody in the book talks like Mailer writes—even the hero’s goodhearted humble-folk father has a penchant for slightly off-center metaphors). And finally, any book that features two severed heads, a psychotic Viet Nam vet, a misplaced ’60s-type black power dude, and about a dozen amusing if sometimes baffling aphorisms can’t be all bad. Can it? R.C.W.

HOW TO BE ECSTATICALLY

HAPPY 24 HOURS A

DAY FOR THE REST

OF YOUR LIFE!

by Kent Boston M.D.

edited by Mark Shipper

(Boston & Shipper)

Both a satire on self-help books and a lascivious fantasy about the secret lives of the characters on Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Dick Van Dyke Show, this tacky trade paperback has enough dumb jokes to please any child of the tube. It also has some not-so-dumb jokes, a dead-on ear for the way sitcom characters talk, and a bizarre deadpan ending that makes one wonder if maybe Shipper might not be a serious guy underneath it all.R.C.W.

CLICHES A-Z

by Mick Farren

The other night I dozed off in front of MTV and, in that half world between sleep and consciousness when the TV still blares but you don’t understand a damn thing you’re hearing, a quite extraordinary dream came upon me. There was this rock ’n’ roll band who’d just finished an album and they’d been called into the record company offices to talk about their video.

“Hell no,” they told the record company, “we don’t want to make a video. We’re musicians, we deal with audio. We have quite enough on our hands doing that. We don’t want to get involved with making silly, three-minute movies.”

Ridiculous, of course. Everyone makes videos. If you want to get on in the rockbiz it’s an obligation, a duty. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have two visual concepts to rub together, it doesn’t even matter that your ego is tough enough to survive without seeing yourself impersonating Mad Max or Conan on national TV. It’s a matter of promotion. Bruce Springsteen does it. Bob Dylan does it. In fact, forget Bob Dylan. Frank Sinatra does it. Just be grateful that someone’s willing to finance you.

What was, as recently as a year ago, being hailed as a fusion of media that might well give birth to a whole new art form has now come down to little more than nonstop commercials for records. And with so many people doing so many commercials for so many records, there are areas where the ideas are being stretched extremely thin. When Peter Max, the undisputed king of ’60s schlock psychedelic graphics, is dragged out of a merciful retirement to create a video for Missing Persons, and Andy Warhol is directing the Cars, you have to suspect that the genre is in trouble. Tobe Hooper is at least marginally now. These guys are positively then.

It would also seem that, after even such a short life, the rock video is developing its own set of cast iron cliches.

When In Doubt,

Show ’Em Girls

The bonding between sex and rock obviously needs no explaining, but it does start to appear that male musicians, particularly guitar players with unfashionably long hair, have absolutely nothing else on their minds. Short of an idea? Okay, fill the screen with model agency stereotypes acting out one of your more publicly acceptable sexual fantasies. In this field the current competition seems to center on how bizarre one can get before being banished to the grubby electronic outer limits of the public access cable channel—like Steve Albright’s and Beth B’s “Dominatrix.” Rod Stewart is hardly a contender; photographing the girl in the opposite apartment in “Infatuation” is Dudley Moore stuff. Billy Idol still seems to believe that he’s onto a winner delving deeper into the leather and latex underground, but I have my doubts that even “Flesh For Fantasy” can hold off the challenge of Jermaine Jackson’s female prison guards.

When In Doubt Show ’Em A Car

If they’re not thinking about sex, they’re demonstrating their cars (usually ’50s custom reconditioned jobs). The Great American 20th Century Music salutes the Great American 20th Century Fetish. Even Englishmen like Robert Plant do it, but I guess it’s something upon which I shouldn’t elaborate around people from Detroit.

When In Doubt Do What You Normally Do Only Do It Against A Really Weird Background

Nena performing on a NATO firing range, Ric Ocasek walking on water, the Police with 16,000 candles on a post-apocalypse garbage dump, Quiet Riot unable to afford an audience for their second Slade hit (do these guys have no shame at all?); it’s all very traditional, really, extending as it does through the Beatles movies all the way to Gene Kelly singin’ and dancin’ in the rain. Although traditional, it can become very labored and tedious. I’m getting quite tired of people singing either in deserts or derelict factories and I wonder why both Rod Stewart and Roger Daltrey feel the need to dance in front of op-art backdrops. Are they showing off their ’60s heritage?

The real test of this kind of thing is just how visual the performers are in their own right. No matter how elaborate they get, a bad mover can only look grandiosely stupid. The proof of this thesis can be found in PiL’s “Bad Life” in which, with only a bunch of smoke to back him up, Johnny Lydon totally makes the day by attempting to stuff himself into the lens of the camera.

When In Doubt Make Up A Dinky Little Story

This literally minded cliche is totally the fault of Michael Jackson. I know Pat Benatar did it first with “Love Is A Battlefield” but it was Jackson who pushed it over the edge. Not content with dancing up a West Side Story storm on “Beat It,” he had to go and turn “Thriller” into a 12-minute remake of Curse Of The Werewolf. Video directors perked up their ears. Here was a way to subjugate the musicians. Directors like stories, they understand stories. It also relegates the music to incidental background for something that is basically their idea. Love may be a battlefield, but making movies, even a humble music video, is frequently a clash of ego and often a triumph of will.

I can accept the literal, narrative storyline video in only the most limited of contexts. One way is when it at least parallels the plot or narrative of the song. Lou Reed’s “I Love You Suzanne” is a fine example: Neo-Edie Sedgwick swinger has a jeans commercial romance with the Godfather of Punk. It’s very much on a par with Billy Joel showing us all how to pick up Christie Brinkley when you’re only five feet tall, pudgy, and work in a gas station.

Story videos can also be redeemable if they’re sufficiently camp. In the context of MTV, Bette Midler and Mick Jagger provide a little hammy light relief with “Beast Of Burden” between the standard histrionics. What, however, does Elvis Costello think he’s doing with “Only Flame In Town”? I’ve spent many minutes trying to figure out what’s going on in this confused mini-epic and why the man who made “Everyday I Write The Book” and commissioned the swish computer graphics for “Accidents Will Happen” is involved in this nonsense. Restaurants, double dating and lady saxophone players—my best idea is that it’s supposed to be what happens in the aftermath of Love Connection.

As usual, I expect it to get worse before it gets better.

ZIGGY NO BIGGIE

DAVID BOWIE & THE SPIDERS FROM MARS Ziggy Stardust (RCA/Columbia Home Video)

Prior to its theatrical release last winter, D.A. Pennebaker’s 1973 documentary of David Bowie’s final Ziggy Stardust performance was shown once on ABC-TV’s In Concert during the fall of ’74. I thought it was the greatest thing at the time, and even taped the FM radio simulcast, cursing every time ABC bleeped out offensive words like “bitch” (Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back” was in the Top 10 that same week.), “wham bam” and “suicide.” But I was still thrilled just to have it, playing the tape repeatedly over the next several months.

Because Ziggy/Bowie (it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began) was a genuine rock “hero” back then. Kids (searching for any hero—and Bowie was one of the only interesting things in rock at the time) really believed his “You’re not alone, just turn on with me, ’cause you’re wonderful, give me your hands!” jive (just witness the finale of this video). They ate up his “it’s OK to be mutated” message, while parents looked on in horror. (My mom after accidentally catching him in drag on Midnight Special’s The 1980 Floor Show that same year: “My God, Bill, that man is a queer!”) Songs like “All The Young Dudes” were definitive anthems for a new disillusioned youth culture in that time and place. And, of course, he was a perfect “visionary” for that transitional, post-“utopian” period in rock history: mysterious, secretive, paranoid, disenchanted with the real world—all merged with a decadent blend of romanticism and trash from rock’f rich past, including music which drew on elements ranging from ’50s ballads to soul, Tin Pan Alley pop and heavy metal.

It’s a cliche now to say he’s always been “ahead of his time,” but you really can hear and see a lot of the punk explosion prophesized in Ziggy’s character and tales. Yet even beyond the haircuts, androgeny and buzzsaw guitars, Ziggy’s main importance as “visionary” was in Bowie’s depiction of the rock hero/star as actor and master manipulator, creating a slightly cluttered slate on which his audience could complete their own illusions. And if you believe that a convincing rock .hero created on illusion (and “if I act like a star, I am a star” attitude) has little bearing on today’s music scene, you haven’t seen Purple Rain. Ziggy was real important all right, and that’s why, despite the brillance and “ahead of their time” qualities of LPs like Station To Station, Low and Scary Monsters, Ziggy Stardust still strikes me as Bowie’s most exciting moment.

Unfortunately, Ziggy is better in my memory and on vinyl than he is in this video. The picture does look much better than the grainy one seen on large screens several months ago, but the sound still leaves a lot to be desired. Pennebaker is highly regarded as a maker of rock documentaries, but a lot of the shooting here is pretty terrible, especially when he chooses to focus on the audience during the “wham bam, thank you, ma’am!” climax of “Suffragette City,” totally robbing the moment of its impact. And the numerous backstage scenes, depicting costume changes and incoherent chats, now seem extraneous, revealing only that Bowie’s ex-wife, Angie, came off as a real nitwit back then. (Where did she find that English accent?)

Watching Ziggy Stardust in 1984 also brings many negative aspects of the show itself to light. Despite the great material and Mick Ronson’s pyrotechnics (which definitely came off better in a live environment than they do on a TV screen), the Spiders From Mars were pretty much a second-rate live band—while Bowie only became a really good singer during the last several years. (Richard Butler once told me he thought it was with Scary Monsters, though I’d argue in favor of “Golden Years.”) A lot of the stage gimmickry seems badly dated today: the strobe-lit guitar solo on “Width Of A Circle” looks downright silly. The worst thing is that this version of Ziggy Stardust doesn’t include Jeff Beck’s guest appearance with the Spiders on “Love Me Do/Jean Genie” (seen in the ’74 In Concert presentation). This stunning moment could’ve easily replaced Bowie’s cover of Jacques Brel’s “My Death,” a long acoustic ballad that is yawn city and will undoubtedly have fingers pushing “fast forward” buttons on VCRs throughout the country.

Granted, there are some better moments in Ziggy Stardust. The aforementioned medley is pretty dynamic, as are the live renditions of “Moonage Daydream,” “Time,” “Width Of A Circle” (excluding the guitar solo) and “Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide.” And, of course, I’m partial to Bowie’s Lou Reed tribute on “White Light/White Heat.” These tunes alone may be worth the price of the tape for Bowie fanatics, who, if the ’83 tour was any indication, are constantly growing in number.

So there is a bit of contradiction here because I’m glad I have this tape, even though I doubt I’ll ever have much of a desire to watch its tainted nostalgia. As a rock film, it’s pretty poor, but as a historical document, it ain’t bad, i.e., it’s all we have. And as entertainment...well, if they’d have even released a live LP of this (with the Jeff Beck duet) in 1974, I’d probably have been ecstatic.

But that’s the breaks.

Bill Holdship