The Beat Goes On

The Beat Goes On

COWBOYS AUS NEW YORK?

NEW YORK—Hey darlin’—how’s about a cozy I’il Drive-In studio— say, Mitch Easter’s, in WinstonSalem, N.C.? Hell, yeah! Let’s record one of them “Hoboken” bands (kin of The Bongos & The dB’s) by the name of Beat Rodeo. Sell the masters to German Zensor Records for foreign release in July ’84 (Staying Out Late With Beat Rodeo), then wait for a domestic deal and sign with I.R.S. in January of ’85.

There ya go—N.Y.C.-based Beat Rodeo’s thus far success in a nutshell, not to omit mention of goodly portions o’ the onstage “cutes” and catchy songwriting talent of leader Steve Almaas.

Much in the Country-Punk/ Rockin’ Billy bootsteps of Rank And File, the Violent Femmes, or even the Long Ryders, Beat (formerly Beatnik) Rodeo plays original material on record. Onstage, they cotton to covering songs by any bunch of ol’ guys (i.e. the Byrds) or any good ol’ boy (George Jones for one, Woody Guthrie for another).

Snappy dressers with a country flavor rather than full Nudie suits or what-all, Beat Rodeo is fleshed out with drummer Peter Moser, bassist Alan Greller, and lead guitarist Bill Schunk, Almaas’s closest musical collaborator in BR. They’re all good-looking guys, but Almaas is so perky one writer called him “Fred MacMurray’s fourth son.” Hmm. That makes REM’s Mike Mills the fifth son, dB Peter Holsapple the sixth and...Eno the third uncle?

In his 28 or so years, Steve s been around. Since ’79, he’s moved from Minneapolis, MN (Suicide Commandos) to Winston-Salem, NC (in the partly NY-based Crackers), to Hoboken, NJ (in the Bongos for a summer), to NYC (Beat Rodeo at last!). In his songs, Almaas takes the anxieties and insecurities of love and somehow always manages to serve ’em sunnyside up. Whatever torment and loneliness suffered in the songs are as aliens with large smileyface-button masks.

The tunes on Staying Out Late With Beat Rodeo really are catchy, the guitars pure and true, the sound definitely American. All four BR’s sing deft harmonies and leads (in live shows). Germany loves ’em, former New York Rocker editor Andy Schwartz manages ’em, and everyone from Dave Edmunds to the Everly Brothers have influenced ’em.

Next on the agenda: a re-mix, re-master, and a late Spring I.R.S. release of Staying Out Late With Beat Rodeo.

Warning: If you feel like cryin’ in your beer—get lost, bud!

L.E. Agnelli

HOOTERS, MON!

NEW YORK—Impressionable youths, uncover your ears—these Hooters can be mentioned in polite company. Consisting of Eric Bazilian, Rob Hyman, Andy King, John Lilley and David Uosikkinen, the hard-rocking Hooters offer you a dazzling dose of well-polished popcraft.

A pro-Hooters collaboration took place when pianist Hyman, guitarist Bazilian and producer-tobe Rick Chertoff all played together in a Philly band called Wax. Hyman and Bazilian maintained their partnership in a group by the name of Baby Grand.

After two disastrous Baby Grand albums, Hyman and Bazilian started the Hooters, which wasted little time in becoming one of Philadelphia’s hottest local acts. Amore was the Hooters’ invaluable indie EP, released at about the same time as the Chertoffproduced Cyndi Lauper album, on which Hyman and Bazilian were the principal musicians.

Nervous Night is the Hooters’ debut LP, crisply produced by Chertoff. An album’s worth of solid rockers is highlighted by the searing riffs of “Don’t Take My Car Out Tonight,” their thunderous cover of Love’s “She Comes In Colors” and their dub-rock epic, “All You Zombies,” which will be the first video and single.

The Hooters’ traditional showcloser, “Blood From A Stone,” relieves its built-up tension with some well-placed gunshots in the mix. “It was actually a cherry bomb we set off in the hallway of the Record Plant,’’explained Hyman. “Four in the morning. Our engineer was this total maniac-kid from Brooklyn...He had this cherry bomb, so we went out in the hallway, which was totally marble and glass—it was SO LOUD. We set up mikes in stereo and I’m amazed we didn’t blow the doors in...”

Aside from explosives, the hallmark of the Hooters’ sound is the Hohner Melodica (known by the band simply as a “hooter”). The folksy nasal timbre of the hooter permeates their music, and seeing as how they even named the band in honor of this plastic keyboard instrument, my question was: have the Hooters worked out an endorsement deal?

“We’re working on it,” says Hyman. “We have some ideas we’re trying to get through to them. We are getting Melodicas at this point—we go through them pretty quickly in the show. They just go bad. They’re bad to begin with— they’re always out of tune. We've yet to find one that plays in tune.”

Drew Wheeler

THE GARAGE SALE

NEW YORK—Garage rock is coming back. Though it may be made by bands who practice in abandoned urban industrial lofts or clammy basements rather than in suburban garages, the sound, the attitude, even the outward trappings of clothes, types of instruments, and psychedelic graphic design, have been picked up by a generation of kids looking for a do-it-yourself thrill who were barely out of diapers when the original mid-’60s garage movement had its day.

Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation, released in 1972, remains the best definition of what garage rock was in its glory—the raw intensity, the teen cockiness, the fuzzedout intimations of acid travel that came to be called psychedelia. Nuggets was an inspiration and and reference point for the Wave of the ’70s.

Now we have a wave of bands who don’t just take the garage aesthetic as an inspiration, but rather are determined to recreate the whole thing as if the intervening 18 years had never happened.

It’s happening in a big—though self-contained and cultish—way, and bands play at various dives and draw large crowds. But a compilation tape just released by Reach Out International Records (ROIR) called Garage Sale reveals that the phenomenon is national. It’s happening in Chicago (the Crickle), in Wethersford, Connecticut (the Not Quite), San Diego (the Gravedigger V), in Minneapolis (The Addition).

Something is clearly up, and if more proof were needed it was supplied by an event called the Garage Safe, held at New York’s Irving Plaza in March to celebrate the release of the Garage Sale tape and to give the movement’s bands and audience a chance to celebrate themselves at one big blow-out.

On the bill were four of New York’s most popular garagists— the Fuzztones, the Vipers, the Cheepskates, and the Mosquitos. But the most impressive aspect of the event was the audience.

The place was packed, not with nostalgic oldsters looking to relive their lost youth, but with real kids, decked out in paisley, Carnaby street clothes and dolly-bird haircuts, and shades on everyone. A true teen movement happening right under our noses.

Shame about the music, most of which is too concerned with revivalism to really capture the brash confidence and flair of the original stuff. The Fuzztones and the Vipers seem typical of the movement in writing songs that are “OK” but standard-sounding, and too bound by the conventions of the genre, though they play them with energy and toughness.

The Mosquitos were the best band, taking the careful harmonies and penchant for tuneful hooks that characterized classic Merseybeat and combining them with the tempo and attack of the American sound. They write well, and sing effective harmonies that give their songs considerable lift.

Why is this stuff so popular? Why now? I asked Nick Divvens of the Boys From Nowhere, another band on the Garage Sale tape, who had driven in from Columbus, Ohio.

“It’s a reaction to overlyprogrammed music. The idea is, let’s get onstage and flop around and shout ourselves hoarse. That’s how rock ’n’ roll started.

“It has connections to mid-’50s punk, mid-’60s punk and mid-’70s punk. It’s a reemergence of the spirit that’s carried rock ’n’ roll.”

Well, not exactly. The new garage bands make a serious mistake. They are so busy looking back that they forget to look forward. Still, a scene that serves as a spawning ground for bands with as much promise as the Mosquitos or the Nomads is doing something right.

Richard Grabel

REALLY BIG SHOES

CHICAGO—When pop wonderboys Shoes first arrived on the scene in 1978, their rock ’n’ roll Cinderella story was right about at the glass slipper stage. A homemade gem of an album called Black Vinyl Shoes—recorded in guitarist Jeff Murphy’s living room—had attracted the attention of Elektra Records, which ended up bestowing upon them a major recording contract. A year later, Shoes’ first big-league release, Present Tense, was enjoying a brief spasm of radio popularity, in particular the haunting track “Too Late.”

But the clock struck 12 quicker than anybody expected. Shoes’ next two critically-praised releases were commerical duds. Their record company was indifferent, and it didn’t look like that situation would improve. They wanted out of the big time, so out they got.

It’s been three years since Shoes last put out a domestic record, but these guys are nothing if not persistent. Scour the import bins of your favorite store and you might turn up a copy of Silhouette, Shoes’ self-produced fifth album. Recently released in England on Demon Records, in France on New Rose, and in Germany on the Line label, the new disc is reportedly doing respectable European business; it’s also due for release on an as-yet-unnamed U.S. independent.

Silhouette was the first fulllength project to be realized in the band’s own 16-track studio Short Order Recorder, located in their home town of Zion, Illinois. Painstakingly constructed by the members of the band following their break with Elektra, Short Order not only provides the guys with their own unencroachable space, it helps keep the bills paid. Guitarists Jeff Murphy and Gary Klebe, who’ve developed into crack knob-twisters since their living room days, regularly produce and engineer local rocker’s demo projects. John Murphy, bassist and Jeff’s brother, applies his considerable graphics design talents upon request, turning out slick, professional packaging.

Shoes’ latest effort is a characteristically well-crafted pastiche of ’60s pop shadings, ’80s techno flashes, and big-beat dance rhythms, spread thick with their trademark three-part harmonies. Silhouette also marks a couple of major departures for the band—keyboards are in and longtime drummer Skip Meyer is out.

“We never had anything against keyboards,” Jeff says. “We just couldn’t afford them before.” And as for Meyer, the only non-writing member of Shoes, he just sort of drifted away. (John Murphy handled percussion on much of the album.)

Silhouette is a welcome return for Shoes. However, due to lengthly licensing procedures, it made its first appearance almost a year after the fact, having been completed last summer. Klebe and the brothers Murphy are now in the process of putting together material for another LP, which they hope to complete by fall. The guys are also looking into the possibilities of related projects, such as film scoring. “We still want Shoes to be successful,” says Jeff, “and it’s still the most important thing. But what that hopefully would do is free us up to get involved in some of these other areas.”

“There is a niche for us,” ventures John, “and I think it’s above cult status. We just want to get there before we’re too old to care.”

Moira McCormick

NO PANKS TO YOU

CHICAGO—I walked into the hotel lobby wondering if I suddenly would be confronted by a couple of exceedingly grim plainclothesed security guards speaking in exotic Eastern European accents. My ever-so-silly paranoia was sparked by the fact that the band I had come here to interview for CREEM was Lady Pank, a pop combo based in that seething hotbed of rock ’n’ roll innovation and adventurism: Warsaw, Poland. Having duly banished all thoughts of kielbasa and polka accordions from my cluttered brain, I wandered around the lobby looking for my interview subjects, reflecting on how it seemed oddly ironic—or, if you prefer, appropriate—that newspapers out on the street were at that very moment trumpeting the death of Soviet president Chernenko. “Will it come up in the conversation?” I asked myself somewhat jitterily.

Once the interview started, Borysewicz, who writes the group’s material along with lyricist Andrzej Mogielnicki, did most of the talking. Funny thing, though, about interviewing someone through an interpreter: it doesn’t exactly make for a whole lot of freewheeling repartee. Instead you just ask your question, then sit through a load of imcomprehensible gibberish before you get your answer.

Me: “What can you tell me about the Polish rock scene?”

Interpreter: “He says it is obviously very much different to here, but at the same time it’s almost the same. There are not so many clubs, right? It’s always down to who you know—your connections —to get the record deal, airplay, things like that.”

Me: “But how good are the bands?”

Interpreter: “He says they have this contest for unknown bands, and he was one of the jurors there. And he says he was quite surprised—he listened to something like 40 bands in one day, and the standard was quite high. That wasn t the case a few years ago.”

Me: “Do you have any desire to leave Poland?”

Interpreter: “He says they are a Polish band to start with. They want to stay home. They are free to travel. They’ve got Polish audiences they cannot neglect. They miss their families. You can’t just forget about what you have back there.”

In the planned economies of communist Europe, supply-anddemand means almost nothing, so when Lady Pank’s first Polish album came out in a pressing of 300,000 copies and sold out in a matter of days.

But now, Poland’s most popular rock band has a deal with MCA and an American LP called Drop Everything. The lyrics have been translated into English and are sung phonetically by Panasewicz in a thick—some might call it “charming”—Polish accent.

When I asked Boryzewicz what he thought of America, I got this from the interpreter: “He says he’s so comfortable here it’s like he wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

All of us at the table laughed at that one, and I thought to myself, “Gee, these Lady Pank guys seem really OK.” Too bad our country keeps missiles ready to blow them to smithereens, huh?

Renaldo Migaldi