The Beat Goes On

The Beat Goes On

DEPARTMENTS

HOW BROWN WAS MY RAWHIDE?

SACRAMENTO, CA—Sacramento is not exactly a hothouse for the nurturing of Young Raw, Rock ’n’ Roll Talent. But consider, friend, all that frontier history lying around, glowing practically—inspiration for the asking. And God knows, if there’s anything a band needs to keep itself going nowadays, it might as well be the sort of pioneer spirit that’s got to haunt these parts thicker than the fur up a bear’s armpit.

Was it perhaps not this spirit that enabled True West— guitarist/songwriter Russell Tolman, vocalist Gavin Blair, lead guitarist Richard McGrath, bassplaying Kevin Staydohar and drummer Steve Packenham—to look beyond their inhospitable environs to “the people around the country who’d be interested” in what they wanted to do? To look beyond Sacramento, beyond ’Frisco beyond even the stone’sthrow-down-the-road U. of Cal at Davis where you can actually earn a degree in beer (no lie), and where in 1978 Tolman and old pal Blair joined forces with collegeradio colleague Steve Wynn and Kendra Smith to form “pretty much everybody’s first band,” the Suspects.

Steve and Kendra eventually toddled south to turn themselves into the Dream Syndicate, Tolman and Blair carried on to form, by 1982, True West, a name shamelessly swiped from a play by Sam Shepherd (Paris, Texas), who in turn had taken it from a magazine about the real-life doings of reallife inhabitants of the real-life (hence “True”) Old West. It’s a handle that fits the five like a pair of brand-new Tony Lamas. Not that they’re—shudder, brrr— cowpunks, or fixated on the past (buckskin or paisley), even though they do perform a song called “Ain’t No Hangman” (on their recent PVC/JEM LP, Drifters). No, it’s more that there’s a certain sweep to their sound redolent of wide, open spaces, and a certain last-chance edge to the lyrics that calls to mind the trailer-hitch wasteland of Shepherd’s plays.

Tolman rules neither Verlaine or a major label out of his band’s future, but either way, it’ll be on True West’s own terms and in their own time. Of possible interest from the English branch of Island records, he says, “You can hold your breath and say, ‘Oh, boy, this is going to be nice,’ but I’d rather just make records, and if there’s a label that wants to put them out, that’s fine.”

On their own terms. In their own time. And own town. “At a certain point,” says Tolman, “we were going to move to Los Angeles. But in some ways this has been better for us. There are thousands of bands from L.A., thousands of bands from New York. But if you’re from Sacramento, it’s a badge of honor, almost.”

Robert Lloyd

PENGUIN SERVED HERE

NEW YORK—To partake of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, you first need to find the Penguin Cafe. Cross the barren tundra of Eno’s ambient music, turn left at the Tangerine Dream electronic gardens, and click your heels together three times. You guessed it...

“The Penguin Cafe is a state of mind,” confirms sole proprietor Simon Jeffes, a genial, genteel Englishman in his mid-30s. “The music you hear there gives full play to the random element. Even though it makes some people nervous, you’ve got to have randomness in music, ’cause it’s the source of creativity.”

Believe it or don’t, anyone with a fear of eggheads needn’t panic. Even though Broadcasting From Home, the latest Penguin Cafe Orchestra LP, resembles warped classical music, Simon Jeffes has no intention of becoming a stuffed shirt. Indeed, this classicallytrained guitarist recalls that he abandoned formal instruction in the late ’60s because his tutors “were taking all the life out of the music and making it museum-like. Classical music can be very sexy when it’s handled right.”

In the early ’70s, Jeffes linked up with rookie producer and performer Rupert Hine, whose later credits would include the Fixx, Saga, and Howard Jones. Hine used Jeffes as arranger for various sessions, and suddenly the restless rebel had a lucrative pop music career to support his more offbeat pursuits. Since then, Jeffes has worked with the likes of David Sylvian, Twyla Tharp and Andre Gregory, and the Sex Pistols. That’s Simon’s string arrangement on Sid Vicious’s legendary rendition of “My Way.”

His first love, however, has always been the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, a concept he formulated during a bout with food poisoning back in 1972. In the course of three LPs and one mini-LP, Jef-

fes’s only rule has been that anything goes. Penguin Cafe music blends everything from African and Latin elements to British folk and Mozart, creating what he calls a “strong, sweet feeling.”

How would Jeffes himself describe what he does? “That’s tricky,” he pauses. “I call it warm music, rediscovered music of the heart—I don’t mean romantic, but music with real spirit. I describe it as new music sometimes, but it’s also ordinary. Anybody could listen to this and like it. The Penguin Cafe Orchestra is not just for intellectuals.

“A lot of music grabs you by the ears and throws you around the room. My music sits over there and just makes a sound. You find your way to it.” Simon Jeffes wholeheartedly recommends the Penguin Cafe Orchestra to CREEM readers, saying, “As long as they can still hear, they might love this music.”

Jon Young

THAT JOHN DEERE FACTOR

DALLAS—At age 18, Naomi Judd of Ashland, Kentucky, defaulted on her high school graduation: she was in a hospital giving birth to daughter Wynonna. Twenty years later, the same baby is her fulltime business partner and the Judds are country’s hottest pop crossover act.

Two number one country tunes (“Mama He’s Crazy” and “Why Not Me”) featuring their urbane family harmonies have brought the Judds a glut of official recognition, including the Country Music Horizon Award for 1984. Though their kind of rural resonates with bluegrass and gospel, it also embraces gutsier stuff: rockabilly, pop and a sexy Swing.

Their success, however, has spanned an astonishing spectrum. Not only did they snatch this year’s Group Country Vocal Grammy— they astonished both sides of the industry by contesting the Best New Artist Grammy against Corey Hart, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Sheila E...and Cyndi Lauper.

“Of course we never expected to win against Cyndi,” confesses Wynonna now, backstage at Texas’s Grapevine Opry, where the performances in Tender Mercies were filmed. “But the Grammies were a real serious, heavyduty thing for us...because we are so new.”

“Besides,” grins mama Naomi, I “I was dyin’to meet Huey Lewis.” I

The Judds are a dead ringer for I the familiar they-could-be-sisters I pair who plug “kind” detergents I and rejuvenating creams. But, like I their stardom, the role reversal I is a recent thing. There was deI finitely a time when mother Naomi I called all the family shots. Like I the moment after her 1968 divorI ce, when she moved Wynonna I and baby sis Ashley back from I seven years in California to tiny I Morrill, Kentucky.

Wynonna—now a self-posI sessed 20-year-old in black I pegged pants and a rocker’s I cowboy shirt says at first she hated I it. No Twinkies, no TV, no telephone or newspaper.

There was, however, a guitar. And with Mom singing along, the duo were soon searching out harmonies to assimilate. They found these in songs by the Delmore Brothers and their successors the Everly Brothers; in the Boswell sisters and their inheritors, the Andrews girls. Naomi liked the lonesome Appalachian laments of the Stanley Brothers. And Wynonna retained her West Coast taste for white blues and pop—as well as a love of down ’n’ dirty rockabilly.

One day Naomi and Wynonna were shopping a demo made on two K-Mart tape recorders; within a year they were #1 country artists. Now, 180 days of their 1985 calendar are already booked—and many tickets will attract a truly bizarre breed of crossover fan. “People come up to me all the time sayin’ stuff like ‘I just love you! I love Quiet Riot and the Judds.’ That’s a little weird.”

There may be some connection, however: neither Judd has ever had a music lesson. “I had to teach myself,” says Wynonna, “and Mom had never sung at all. Now, in the studio, she drives our producer crazy. ’Cause she just cannot sing anything written down.’'

Wynonna leans forward, one eye towards the Stage Door. “You know, I’ve had people tell me that even though they may not respond to our music, they respond to the fact we’re family. A lot of people have told me, ‘Hey, the reason I caught onto y’all was because you’re mother and daughter, you’re family...and that shows me mothers and daughters can stay in the same room for more than five minutes.”

Wynonna is giving the anxious face at the door a thumbs-up signal; Grapevine is out there waiting. Naomi catches her eye and gathers up lilac taffeta skirts. As she vanishes out the side entrance, Wynonna turns to flash a smile over her shoulder. ”We just have that blood thang,” she deadpans. “Stand by your Mom.”

Cynthia Rose

BRAGGING WITH BILLY!

CHICAGO—Color Billy Bragg shrewd, first of all, for coming up with a clean way out of the deadend oblivion he might have otherwise found himself stuck in as just another talented songwriter fronting just another British rock band. A couple of years ago, Billy ditched the band and stepped forth boldly into a sort of post-punk electric minstrelsy. Which is really just a pompous way of saying he goes onstage alone with an electric guitar and sings rock ’n’ roll.

The oddball approach has paid off. With his seven-song minialbum, Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy, and an excellent LP, Brewing Up With Billy Bragg, Bragg is a star in the U.K. and now he’s working on the States. Not bad, considering that his sound—imagine a guitar-toting 1978 cross between Joe Strummer and Paul Weller bereft of rhythm section—hardly seems the sort of thing to go over big in, say, dance clubs. Put simply, Billy Bragg has taken on the

entertainment establishment, and is winning on his own terms.

“The only problem I come up against is people’s expectations,” he says. “I spent a good six months goin’ around with the Life’s A Riot tapes listening to people say to me, ‘Form a band. We like the songs. Form a band, come back in a year.’”

But Billy won’t do it. “I have too much to lose by forming a band. I have independence. Which a lot of bands don’t have. And it’s so much hassle forming a band. I wanted to experience the pain, the challenge, as most immediate, and playin’ solo seemed to be the best answer to that. It’s the reason you’ve heard of me. Because I do what I do, at a time when everybody else is going in the wrong direction, it gives me a high profile. I don’t have to do it with a wacky haircut, or incredibly interesting trousers, or lots of money spent.”

Though Billy could probably simplify his life even more by touring with an acoustic guitar, he chooses to stick with the electric. “The electric gives me an edge that an acoustic wouldn’t. Even if

I’m playin’ softly, it still gives me a cuttin’ edge to work on. If I’d’ve played acoustic, I’d a been stuck in the folk clubs. And folk music in England is a very discredited medium: bearded men singing very seriously with fingers in their ear whilst drinking gallons and gallons of ale. There’s something ’orrible about baring your soul to a loosely strung acoustic, y’know—I’d much rather write

songs and bash people over the ’ead.”

Even so, Billy Bragg gets intimate with his audiences, and sings about politics as well as unrequited love. His links to the ballsy, tough protest folksingers of the early ’60s are clear. In his live show, Bragg makes it explicit by singing the old labor union song “Which Side Are You On?”

“I learned it off an old Pete Seeger album. It’s about the Kentucky mining industry in 1947. British society is being divided between those who are with Margaret Thatcher and those who are against her. And it’s such a good rallying call for those of us who are against her, to get other people to make their minds up, to realize that they are involved in a class struggle.”

But Bragg doesn’t call himself a folksinger. “Whenever anybody asks me what sort of music am I, I always say I’m a punk rocker. Because all the ideals I had came from punk rock, the do-it-yourself thing. Punk rock was never to do with wacky haircuts and bondage trousers—that’s a lot of bullshit.”

Renaldo Migaldi

ODD MUSICAL DUO

New York—If Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark (OMD from here onward, thanks) were an animal, they reckon “we’d be a nocturnal creature, not because we’re nocturnal, but because we’re often heard but seldom seen. It’s never exactly been very easy to be in OMD.”

But then Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys, who made their debut as a duo seven years ago “because no one else would play with us,” have some kind of history. They met at Meol’s County Primary School (just spittin’ distance from Liverpool) when both “had to stand on the stage in the auditorium for being naughty boys.” (“That was our first time on stage together,” Paul chuckles.) Pleased to discover a mutual “wacky interest in music,” the pair sat around listening to Traffic, Eno and Neu and proceeded to make “bleeps and blops off whatever we could borrow, steal or make.” Equinox was formed with Andy on bass and Paul on altered radio parts and strips from Erector sets. Punk rolled through shortly thereafter and though the boys liked it, “it didn’t inspire us to get new haircuts.”

An independent release on thennew Factory Records (soon to be the home of Joy Division) led to their first hit “Electricity,” followed shortly thereafter by spritely ditties like “Enola Gay” and albums with creative titles like Architecture And Morality. Now they’re at our doorstep with new recruits Malcolm Holmes (drums), Martin Cooper (keyboards and sax) and two horn players, plus a pile of silly shirts and a brand spankin’ new American record deal.

Though they love our TV, they regard us Yanks with serious I bemusement—even though Paulie I married one. “Our U.S. fans,” they surmise, “are people who think they’re intelligent and know something about music, because you’d have to have searched to find our records.” OK, but what about those wildly patterned chemises? “All we wanted to do was appear to be really ordinary boys,” Andy explains. “So we dressed very soberly which looked preppy. We didn’t do all those things to give some nice personality cliche to the media so people began to think we were pretentious and aloof.”

Well perish the thought! “We are purveyors of a form of popular, i.e., junk culture,’’ Andy confesses, effectively punning the title of the new LP—that’s Junk Culture, folks—which features the rather lovely “Locomotion.” “Success is a nuisance,” our brunet buddy declares.

“That’s entirely self-inflicted,” Andy explains. “It’s got to the point that if I don’t really exert myself I I don’t feel like I’m involved. Yet I sometimes if I see myself on film I I think ‘What a nerd! Why don’t I you just stand still?’ Generally at I the beginning of every tour I overI dance myself and throw up.”

“But,” he fairly beams, “I’ve never done it on the audience yet.”

David Keeps