CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

DEPARTMENT

PROVING THEY EXISTED

THE KINKS KRONIKLES by John Mendelssohn (Quill)

THE KINKS:

THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY by Jon Savage (Faber & Faber)

J. Kordosh

"...I couldn’t keep from wondering how they [Ray and Dave Davies] sleep on their compromises at night."

—Marianna Fikes, in a letter to CREEM after attending a recent Kinks concert. Marianna, I don’t think I have to defend the Kinks’ kompromises, since very few of us noticed when

they were world-class (circa Something Else and Village Green). At least they’re earning some money nowadays. Need I add that you should picture yourself when you’re getting old? Or that “Arthur”—the song (in fact, the very idea), and not even the album—is almost certainly better than the sum total of their subsequent work?

I thought not.

Of course, Marianna, the Kinks are a sublime story. You know that. I know that. Messrs. Mendelssohn and Savage know that. Of the “Big Four” Britain sent us—that is, the Beatles, Stones, Kinks and Who—Davies & Co. are undoubtedly the most underrated (not to mention self-defeating) study in pathology available. Their history is so riddled with luck, genius, missing the (banana) boat, neurotic stand-offishness and sensationally embarrassing career moves that the canniest rock student would be hard-pressed to invent the Kinks. Which is a good reason for these biographies.

And even here, Marianna, I know you’ll share my delight at the endless quirks and ironies, as befits all things Kinkish. Mendelssohn—a long-time lonely voice (being responsible for the compilation and annotation of two fine albums, The Kihk Kronikles and The Great Lost Kinks Album, the liner notes on Arthur and the once-apt phrase, “God Save The Kinks”)—has written the “unauthorized and uncensored” story. He no longer has—nor wants—access to the band, Marianna. That’s sort of a clue. Savage, on the other hand, has written the “official” (i.e., censored, and by Raymond Douglas Davies) version. I’m sure you’ll join me in applauding Davies’s deletion of a reported 15 percent of the book, and hope you also stand in awe at his attempts to stop The Official Bio’s publication after approving the project himself. What could be more appropriate?

As befits this titantic battle of the bios, the respective authors have very different attitudes and styles. Mendelssohn is crisp, biased and funny. Savage is reporter-like, twisting himself into a pretzel to render a serious history— although, to be fair, we can insert Daviesian deletions with virtual certainty. (For example, Marianna, Savage goes so far as to not even mention Davies’s affair with Chrissie Hynde. That’s like writing the official history of syphilitic baseball heroes and pencilling out Babe Ruth.)

To get a better flavor of the different attitudes here, you might consider their handling of Preservation Act 2, an album I feel safe in describing as one of mankind’s most forgettable attempts at anything. Savage: “[a] double LP, which shows distinct signs of overambitiousness, strain and haste...” Mendelssohn: “...we’ll note the two good things about this otherwise disastrous album and move on to happier subjects.” Honest opinions, both, but point to Mr. Mendelssohn.

This isn’t to knock The Official Bio, however. For one thing, it’s laden with some great, heretoforeunavailable photos (whereas Kronikles has exactly 17 so-so pix in its 208 pages). And, if that’s not enough, it also includes a fine discography (better than Mendelsssohn’s) and more than a modicum of inside stuff—all sufficient reasons for you to buy the book, Marianna. Having the reluctant stamp of approval, Savage has done rather well, we suspect.

Kronikles stands out by flaunting its strong points, especially its personalization: e.g., ‘‘...The

world...doesn’t need another soporific rock biographer who keeps his facts straight.” And it certainly doesn’t. As you know, Marianna, Mendelssohn agonized over the Kinks during his formative critical years and was betrayed in the worst way—the Kinks got lousy. To his credit, Mendelssohn didn’t. He forthrightly (and correctly) makes observations like: “‘Celluloid Heroes’ [is] the single most overrated track in the Kinks’ long recording history;” “[They] could neither sing like the Beatles nor arrange for two guitars like Brian Jones and Keith Richards;” and “[By ignoring Village Green,] America hadn’t disgraced itself as ignominiously since snubbing Phil Spector’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High.’ ” Meanwhile, Savage, ever kind, notes that ‘‘Celluloid Heroes” has a “killer hook [?!]” that “finally forces Ray Davies to confront the un/reality of his own situation.” We know, of course, that it did nothing but launch him on a binge of whining.

To sum it up, Marianna, I’d like to—perhaps oddly—endorse both books. As a long-time fan, I guarantee that The Kinks Kronikles is hep, indeed, and that The Official Biography is—if not zesty reading—as good an official bio as we’ll likely ever see. Let’s not forget those great pictures, either.

Buy them both. Big Sky’s too high to see, and compromise is the subject at hand.

TOO MUCH TO DREAM

Edouard Dauphin

Several years ago, when The Dauph was compelled to visit Los Angeles for a brief spell, an actress friend there offered to put him up at her home. Over the long distance phone, she gave her address as 10050 Cielo Drive. The address sounded vaguely familiar. After he hung up, The Dauph realized it was the house where the followers qf Charles Manson had committed mass murder in 1969. I stayed at the Beverly Wilshire instead.

Just a perverse little anecdote? Maybe. But the actress in question was one of the stars of Last House On The Left, Wes Craven’s cult horror classic of 1972, arguably the film that set in motion a whole skein of ultragore mutilation pictures that led to the coining of the term “Splatter” to pinpoint this particular sub-genre. You may recall Last House also for its ad campaign which features the advice: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating: ‘it’s only a movie...only a movie.’” Wes Craven pictures are a little, shall we say, different, and so are the people who work in them.

Take, as another example, Michael Berryman. Bald, hulking and with an extra layer of cartilage over his brow to give him the look of a man with a cauliflower forehead, Berryman was hard to miss as a cannibalistic backwoods mutant in Craven’s 1977 feature, The Hills Have Eyes. He also turned up in the director’s Deadly Blessing, four years later, as a Hittite farmhand fond of brutalizing young women while he bellowed that he was an incubus.

Yes, director Craven works with the fibers from which nightmares are woven. And his current flick, A Nightmare On Elm Street, tackles the cause and effect syndrome head-on, examining the subject of bad dreams even while it lays the groundwork for the nightmares you will have after you go home from the theatre and try to sleep. The girl from Cielo Drive isn’t in this film. Neither is Michael Berryman. But are you ready to meet Fred Krueger?

Fred, played by actor Robert Englund under about as much makeup as Boy George would use in a year, is a slouch-hatted derelict who might pass for just a thug-like bum except for his interesting approach to fingernail maintenance. See, Fred’s cuticles just grew and grew, turning into razor-sharp knives that extend for more than a foot off each finger. We’re talking weird here—I mean this geek gets his manicures at Acme Hardware.

Fred Krueger lives in the dreams of a group of teenagers who live in a nameless suburb in what could be Yourtown. At first, each kid thinks they are the only ones having nightmares about Fred mutilating them with his steely caress—but pretty soon they realize that his nocturnal visits are widespread. Still, they are just amused until Tina, a blonde airhead, is horrendously slaughtered in her sleep, spinning upward from her bed in a whirlwind of tattered flesh and bloody sheets that makes a similar levitation stunt by Linda Blair in The Exorcist look like little more than some slightly excessive break dancing.

Tina’s timely demise while in the throes of a nightmare breaks a basic tenet of dream psychology, the axiom that though you may be threatened by death in your sleep, you cannot actually die. With that maxim neatly—or in this case rather nauseatingly—disposed of, Craven focuses on the remaining teenagers who appear ripe for Fred Krueger’s stainless steel plucking. Chief among them is Nancy Thompson, played by attractive and very believable newcomer Heather Langenkamp. For a while, the picture boils down to: Can she stay awake and therefore avoid a gruesome meeting with Fred Krueger or will someone inadvertently play her a Billy Squier record and dispatch her off to dreamland?

Aided by her boyfriend, Glen (Johnny Depp), Nancy decides on a daring plan. She will confront Fred Krueger in her nightmare, then attempt to drag him thrashing and slashing into the real world. Of course, to do that she has to wake up with the alarm clock, something The Dauph hasn’t been able to do for more than 15 years. ‘‘If Nancy doesn’t wake up screaming,” goes the ad copy, “she won’t wake up at all.” That turns out to be an understatement.

Floating around the edges of this devastating horror flick are a couple of semi-names who, though they’re supposed to be doing serious action, provide a strange kind of comic relief instead. Ronee Blakley—remember, she* went driveling in Nashville?—attempts to furnish some explanation of who Fred Krueger actually is in a voice that sounds like Muhammad Ali on Valium. And as Nancy’s father, we have ex-heartthrob of the 1950’s John Saxon, now balding and a bit out of breath, who fared much better in 1957’s Rock, Pretty Baby, where at least he got to play the guitar. So much for the oldsters— this film belongs to the teenagers.

See A Nightmare On Elm Street. It’s a Wes Craven shock feast that will have you begging for NoDoz—unless, of course, you’d like a hand-job from Fred Krueger.

LET’S READ!

ZIGGY STARDUST:

DAVID BOWIE 1972/1973 by Mick Rock (St. Martin’s Press) DAVID BOWIE’S SERIOUS MOONLIGHT by Chet Flippo & Denis O’Regan (Doubleday)

Barbara Pepe

In London all the bookshops are fatly stocked with volumes of rock ’n’ roll on any sort of subject— biographical and otherwise—that’s ever titillated an Englishman’s pulp interest. One subject, though, dominates all the rest, and that’s the life and times of one David Jones, a.k.a. Bowie. In fact, DB’s exploits, be they real or merely imagined, so consume music fans there that whole shelves are devoted to telling the tales. (The Beatles only rate half a shelf, if we’re doing comparisons here.) Now two more books—Ziggy Stardust: David Bowie 1972/1973 by Mick Rock, and David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight by Chet Flippo and Denis O’Regan—swell the collection. Interestingly enough, both provide intimate, authorized looks at the two most important tours in the man’s career.

Mick Rock was Bowie’s official photographer during the early days, starting back in Beckenham, just before David dyed his tresses shocking red and assumed the mask of Ziggy Stardust. It was Rock who was responsible for just about all the incredible images from that era—the shots of Ziggy/David with his saxophone, crouched at Mick Ronson’s Gstring (on the guitar, gutter minds!) or at parties with the likes of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, etc., etc. Those pictures—and over a hundred more that have lain dormant in Rock’s files for the past decade—are collected in his Ziggy Stardust tome.

While St. Martin’s has chintzed somewhat on the printing quality, especially in the black and white sections, Rock’s photos document that infamous rise and fall in all phases of action. Bowie’s seen behind the scenes, onstage, on the road, in public and in private. Rock ties his portraits together with some originally penned text, as well as excerpts from the interviews he did with David back when he doubled as a journalist for the English rock rags. It all makes one intriguing and neat package that goes far towards explaining the roots of today’s Bowie mania.

Chet Flippo tackles that subject in David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight, a chronology of the 1983 tour through 96 shows and 59 cities in Europe, North America, Asia and Hong Kong. Denis O’Regan toted the camera, coming up with some real pretty pictures. Unlike the Ziggy book, the publishers of this one invested quite a bit of dough into the color plates. The resultant volume is certainly more glossy than Rock’s, although the book comes closer to expressing David in David’s terms, meaning it relies on mood and feel rather than on explanation and detail, as does Serious Moonlight.

Overall, these two books are companion pieces, with Rock taking an historical perspective while Flippo and O’Regan provide an accurate portrait of the man behind the chameleon. Any Bowie fan worth his spiders from mars will demands both for the library.