The Beat Goes On
FOLLOW THE WIND NEW YORK—Floridians Steven Katz and Lane Steinberg became friends during their senior year in high school, where they both took piano classes. A shared disgust in modern pop became a partnership they called the Wind. “Since the radio was invented there’s been a Top 40,” Katz explains.
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The Beat Goes On
DEPARTMENTS
FOLLOW THE WIND
NEW YORK—Floridians Steven Katz and Lane Steinberg became friends during their senior year in high school, where they both took piano classes. A shared disgust in modern pop became a partnership they called the Wind. “Since the radio was invented there’s been a Top 40,” Katz explains. “The original Top 40 was Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart, and jazz artists covered their stuff making jazz accessible. But now it’s gotten to the point where the stuff on the radio has no roots except in what else is on the radio right now.”
Steinberg concurs: “A lot of the stuff that’s out now has lost the warmth and diversity of older pop .music.”
By 1981, the Wind had added a drummer—and, after the usual apprenticeship in the local clubland, came in third at a University of Miami Battle of the Bands. In 1982, they selffinanced their debut LP, Where It’s At With The Wind, a nervous, sometimes brilliant, collection of 14 live staples. It melded such diverse elements as mod, power pop, classic pop (and—the new gods same as the old gods—the Beatles).
It got the Wind out of Florida, where they left their drummer, and into the wilds of New York. Lane found a job in a record store, Steve in a mailroom, and pooling their resources got the ubiquitous Mitch Easter to produce a disappointing EP, Guests Of The Staphs. A rather unmelodic, very Athens Ga. effort, only the cracker “House On Fire” was quite up to par.
Recently, they’ve added a drummer and manager to the staff and played in N.Y.’s hinterlands. Which is good news, because if the EP is less than great (Steve’s voice—a gorgeous baritone—seems at odds with the music at first), a recent demo is a revelation. From salsa to psychedelia, the demo shuffles and absorbs their previous work; particularly “The Finer Things In Life,” which might’ve come from the dB’s Repercussion. Yes, it’s that wonderful.
Iman Lababedi
SURVIVOR AT WORK
DETROIT—There’s bands and then there’s bands. There’s bands you don’t hear much about because nobody’s really all that interested in them. And these are some of the true American bands: hardworking, faceless, egoless, unspectacular musicians who mail personalized Xeroxed letters to their fans to keep them informed. Like Survivor.
Survivor’s a name everyone recognizes for their contribution to Rocky III—“Eye Of The Tiger”—which drummer Marc Droubay says was “obviously the most expensive video of all time.” He’s right—it was also Survivor’s first #1 hit. And their last. Their follow-up LP, Caught In The Game, was a flop. Lead singer David Bickler—he of the beret—left the group and was replaced by Jimi Jamison, ex of the EMI act Cobra. “I knew about Survivor just from that song [“Tiger”],” said Jimi. Not unlike the rest of us.
“At first, you can’t say anything bad about a break like that,” said Droubay. “But then, I think that in ’83 it hurt us, because people expected ‘Eye Of The Tiger II.’ ”
I know I did. “Eye Of The Tiger” was great—written in “about an hour” by Survivor’s tunesmiths Jim Peterik and Frank Sullivan—and plugged in the movie in place of Queen’s “Another One Bites
The Dust.” But it sent Survivor on a wayward path. “We went from playing clubs to playing ballparks and we weren’t ready for it,” Droubay said. “And we got our first live exposure with ‘Tiger,’ so we said: well, we’re gonna have to make an album with this kind of stuff. And people—I guess—would rather hear us doing more things like we’re doing now...hard pop, we’re not really hard rock.”
“I hope we can start headlining soon and make some real money,” added Jamison.
Meanwhile, fad-artists like— oh, Motley Crue—have surpassed them with great ease.
“It gets real frustrating sometimes when you see stuff like that,” said Jamison. “But you realize that I don’t think that kind of stuff is gonna be around a long time—it’s not something somebody’s gonna sit down and listen to in five years.”
Johnny Layton
MOODY BLUE
CHICAGO—It’d be stretching it too far to say Dave Graney of Australian group the Moodists sings like the late blues singer Howlin’ Wolf. But there is an echo of Wolf in the way Graney repeats a single line of song lyric over and over, changing his emphasis and intonation just a little each time around while the rest of the band grinds away at one of its characteristic primitive, distortion-drenched, two-chord guitar vamps.
On the Moodists’ LP, Thirsty’s Calling, Graney sounds mean and tough and nasty and a little bit like Jim Morrison. What a surprise to meet him in person and find he’s very much a friendly, soft-spoken guy who doesn’t mind sitting in a bar on a dreary, drizzly afternoon smoking cigs, drinking coffee, and relaxedly recounting the four-year history of his band to some journalist shmoe.
“When we put out our first single, ‘Gone Dead,’ that was a sort of blueprint for everything we have done and are going to do,” Graney says soberly. “It’s a very simple
song, two chords, with a lot of very strong rhythm and a lot of freedom for the singer and the guitars to do whatever they like. We just want to exploit the possibilities of that and refine it to an incredible degree.”
After that single and a sixsong EP, Engine Shudder, the Moodists left their native Melbourne, where they’d failed to win over much of the club
crowd. ‘‘Since we’ve left Australia our audience there has probably increased tenfold. We’ve been living in England for 13 months, not out of choice. That’s where our record company was.” Graney sighs a little. “We hadn’t ought to spend so much time in London...”
But the Moodists have been treated pretty kindly by the
British press and public, so why his complaint? “There’s such a crazy notion of time there,” he says. “You can listen to records from 1982 made in England, and they sound like they were made in a bunker 20 years ago, they’re just so dated and stupid and frivolous and worthless. Like, a band that’s been going for 10 years in England, nobody pays them attention because if they haven’t had a hit in two years then they must be doing, something wrong. And the bands are so stupid that they usually think they’ve done something wrong. But there’s bands here in America that have been going for seven, eight years and they know they’ve got more worth than a color spread in some paper.”
The Moodists’ latest release, the 7-inch U.K. single ‘‘Enough Legs To Live On”/“Can’t Lose Her,” shows them developing an even more finely tuned sense of structure, tension, and dynamics. “Our fans in England seem to think it’s a bit too arty-farty. I like it a lot. It’s really relaxed and tuneful. It’s the first song we’ve ever done that has a rhythm change in it. Quite a departure.” Renaldo Migaldi
THE CREEM CHRONICLE: Where were you five years ago?
POT McCARTNEY!
Paul McCartney has just been deported from Japan after spending nine days in jail awaiting the outcome of his attempt to bring seven ounces of marijuana into the country.
RHINO BONANZA!
SANTA MONICA, CA.—By chance, I’ve caught Rhino Records co-founder Harold Bronson near the end of a long but eminently worthwhile endeavor. As he runs down the label’s upcoming releases— which range from a neverreleased Zombies session to the BBC, all the original Monkees albums, the Everly Brothers’ legendary Cadence LPs (taken from the original masters), the Golden Turkey Record Album and much more—he mentions the project that some of us has been wondering about for a long time.
The records of the Music Machine, influential Farfisa ’n’ fuzz grungers to the mid-tolate-’60s, weren’t around for ages—but thanks to Bronson’s work, The Best Of The Music Machine has taken its rightful place alongside The Best Of
The Nazz, The Best Of The Standells and The Best Of The Chocolate Watchband in the righteous Rhino catalogue of oldies, oddities and atrocities.
And that ain’t all. Two record retrospectives of the Shirelles, Dionne Warwick, and Gene Pitney as well As a Best Of The Spencer Davis Group featuring Steve Winwood’s earliest hits and a Best Of Sun picture disc including the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison, have
recently hit the stores, as well as an EP by SoCal phenom Julie Brown.
While Rhino reissues have occasionally coincided with contemporary hits—remember the Bobby Fuller Four LP coming out after the Clash’s cover of “I Fought The Law”?— Bronson maintains that they’re not capitalizing on a song’s current interest because it usually takes years to put together one of these packages. Most likely, it’s because Rhino repackages primarily music of the ’60s, which many groups of today are rediscovering as well.
“We like to keep things in print,” he notes proudly. “What we’re about is making available the great music of the past in a manner which makes sense. Unfortunately, a lot of records that are reissued are budgets—and they often have less songs and not much care is taken in the whole package. We’re the total opposite of that.”
Michael Davis
THE GUN CLUB LOADS UP
NEW YORK—Singer-guitarist Jeffrey Lee Pierce can’t stop playing a part, but he does admit that he’s one satisfied ghoul these days: “My problem in the past was being separate from the band. They were just the band, and I was a freakshow object.”
“Now we’re all a freakshow!” laughs Kid Congo (Brian to his mom) Powers.
Kid Congo’s presence in the band probably has a lot to do with Pierce’s happy state of mind, for it was the two of them who founded the Gun Club in Los Angeles four years ago. Pierce, a Blondie fan club president, and Powers, a Ramones fan club president, were “trying to come up with something that was so antieverything it would piss everyone else off.” But by the time sessions for 1981’s Fire Of Love rolled around, Powers had amicably departed to play guitar for the Cramps. Ward Dotson signed on to play his parts, with drummer Terry Graham and bassist Rob Ritter rounding out the lineup.
Pierce has little to say about the first Gun Club LP, except: “I can’t even remember making it. What can you say about a record that you cut for 2,500 bucks in 48 hours, on speed. It was just punk rock.” He gives 1982’s Miami much higher marks.
However, the Gun Club didn’t have a really strong lineup until The Las Vegas Story, when Pierce and Graham were bolstered by the return of Powers and the addition of bassist Partricia Morrison, like Graham, a former member of L.A. punk band the Bags.
So now they’re one big happy family (like the Addams Family), united by a contempt for the grotesqueries of contemporary society. Ask Pierce why Elvis Presley keeps cropping up in his songs, for example, and he says, “I hate Elvis. I want his head cut off and his brain taken out. He represents the Americana I hate: the good Olympic star, the good hamburger eater, the good beer drinker, the good pill popper.” Or consult the inner sleeve of The Las Vegas Story for a graphic tale of the gambling Capitol’s destruction by fire and the torture/murder of such beloved entertainers as Sammy Davis, Jr. and Lola Falana.
Summarizes Kid Congo, “We’re probably much harder to please than the average American. We admit we’re from the punk rock era. We’re out to make trouble.”
And enjoying it, too. “We’re having a great time,” smiles Pierce, lapsing into sincerity. “I’m very happy now that I didn’t drink or take drugs to the point of death during the making of Miami, when I was at my most depressed. Because since then, I’ve gotten to go on tour to Australia and Mexico, and do other wonderful things. And there’s so much more to be done!”
Like torching Vegas, maybe?
Jon Young
