RATT

Invasion Of Your Privacy (Atlantic)

MOTLEY CRUE Theatre Of Pain (Elektra)

by Richard C. Walls

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate what post-punk heavy metal is attempting to do—in an era of cultural retrenchment, revanchism and retreat, during a period when mainstream rock and pop is snoozy, sappy and safe as milk, at a time when a full three-quarters

of the Grammy presenters and winners come on like Herbalife salespersons, you gotta be thankful that somebody’s trying to keep rock scuzzy and disreputable (not to mention obnoxious and stupid and disgusting). But. These be hard times for would-be rebels—the rebel rules are so strict, the rebel route so predictable, what you sometimes end up with is just another flavor of timid conformity...

Take Ratt, for example. With a name like that you’d figure they’d be on the cutting edge—but their thrust, even more so on this second album than their first, is definitely mainstream. Instrumentally these guys are competent pros, slick and anonymous sounding, a fact emphasized this time out by having the group’s only individualistic tag, lead singer Stephen Pearcy’s punky wail, effectively blended and de-edged. Aside from the sound the band further hedges its bets by having Pearcy sing not about Satan and savage sex (though “Lay It Down” and “Give It AN” come close) but rather about love (granted that love, here, is a euphemism for sex, but a euphemism is still a sign of restraint). When not singing about love/sex the group resorts to that other hoary heavy metal device, the anthemic chant song—it matters not if the anthem is lame or vague or virtually meaningless, just so long as it pumps up the old audience participation. The prime example here is “What You Give Is What You Get,” a homily that wouldn’t be out of place on granny’s pillowcase. Wouldn’t keep her awake nights, either.

The Crue, on the other hand, might be outrageous, despicable and/or silly, but they’re only occasionally dull. True, they’ve toned down considerably from their “speed kills” debut Too Fast For Love but a ton of little “adjustments” in the studio (see “White Noise,” Village Voice, June 18, ’85 for the dirty details) can’t disguise the group’s basic trashiness. Unfortunately, their ever more marketable sound isn’t the only sign of a growing maturity (sometimes known as aging). No doubt the dues paid while maintaining the good life have something to do with it, but traces of reticence as well as remorse are starting to show up in Nikki Sixx’s inimitable lyrics. Really, “Save Our Souls” sounds positively depressed, while on the generic anthemic chant song “Raise Your Hand To Rock,” Vince Neil is made to warble about the good old days, always a bad sign. And speaking of anthemic, though they do eschew Ratt-like homilies, they manage to stoop to the type put Twisted Sister on the map, here called “Fight For Your Rights.” Like many another post’60s would-be rebel band, the Crue are effectively paralyzed by lingering memories of failed idealism, whether they’re conscious of it or not—they strike a rebel stance because it’s cool, but avoid specificity, ’cause it ain’t. From this habit of mind comes a song like “Fight” where you just know they haven’t a clue as to what rights they’re standing up for, or whom they’re supposed to fight. The standing up has become an end in itself—a decent enough way to kill another Saturday night.

Anyway, in the CREEM tradition of fairness and balance and padding it should be pointed out that “Big City Blues” is a strong opener built on unambiguous riffs (and klutzy tempo changes), “Louder Than Hell” has a healthy self-awareness of Metal’s cathartic value, and the cover of Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ In The Boy’s Room” isn’t nearly as bad as you’d expect—though the song is, I think, foolproof.

Details, details. Fans should be pleased. Signs of deterioration are still rather subtle. Two more albums before they really blow it. Which will save everybody the spectacle of watching Motley Crue evolve into something along the lines of, say, Jefferson Starship. Or Journey, even. I mean, they should live so long.

TALKING HEADS Little Creatures (Sire)

DAVID BYRNE Music For The Knee Plays (ECM)

Time has a tendency to round off sharp edges. Big rocks out in the desert get shaped by windblown particles of sand over millions of years; big rock stars get bombarded by all the things success can bring, so it’s no wonder most of ’em soften up a lot sooner. Fortunately, not all of ’em become clay gods or silly putty pigeons.

Not the Talking Heads, at least not yet. They’ve allowed themselves to be malleable in the past, but always on their own terms, and on Little Creatures, they continue to have control over their musical destiny. In a way, this album looks backwards and forwards at the same time; they could’ve called it More Songs About Babies And Movement, but that might’ve been giving too much away.

Actually, to people who’ve just discovered Talking Heads in the last couple of years, the sound of this record could come as quite a surprise. It’s as if the band turned over one of Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards which said, “Forget The Funk”; with the exception of a handful of thumb thumps on Tina’s bass, the Heads have mothballed their funk in favor of updating the sound they started out with.

That’s the sound of Chris and Jerry and David and Tina. Oh, there’s percussion assistance on most tracks and saxes and background vocalists on half of ’em but for the basics, you hear the basic four-piece band.

So on one level, Little Creatures signals a return to their early sound—but of course, there’s more to it than that. For instance, Caribbean rhythms sneak into almost every tune, lightening up the feel considerably. The backing vocals are used effectively to underline the hooks and...

Yeah, that’s right, hooks. Did I mention that David Byrne has learned to write and sing melodically and that this is his catchiest batch of material to date?* elbow-in-the ribs edginess is gone; the uneasy feelings that underlie “Give Me Back My Name” and “Walk It Down” are the exceptions, not the rules. Most of the rest of these songs are actually uplifting and I’m not just talking about the astral traveling tune.

So yes, the changes that the band have made are moving them in a pop direction but their pop doesn’t sound like anyone else’s. Their costumes on the back cover may make ’em look like they want to be the house band at Paisley Park, but they’re still the good ol’ Talking Heads.

It’s great that Byrne is so convincing a singer-songwriter on Little Creatures because he also obviously spent considerable time working on the music from The Knee Plays, short sections of Robert Wilson’s massive the CIVIL WarS extravaganza that may have dinosaured itself out of existence before even leaving its shell. Now, reviewing background music for a play I’ve never seen is kind of like writing about someone’s right hand or left nostril: you’re never gonna get the whole picture. Still, David’s music for The Catherine Wheel made for a good album and Music For The Knee Plays is being sold as such.

And as a record album, it makes a good coffee table. Ostensibly inspired by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, who put out a lively LP on Concord Jazz last year, this is even, moodless horn music over which Byrne occasionally intones some ironic non sequiturs. It may work OK in the context of the play, but how many times at home are you gonna wanna hear David Byrne trying out Laurie Anderson licks over neutered brass? I know I’m not.

Let’s put it this way: Given the recorded evidence, if I had to choose between seeing the Talking Heads, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band or the CIVIL WarS, there might be some discussion over the decision, but I would not be going to war.

Michael Davis

MARVIN GAYE Dream Of A Lifetime (Columbia)

Pretty strange dude this Marvin Gaye. What’s Goin’ On, indeed. Lived his last days inna free base daze, died in a hard-to-believe Oedipal nightmare. Caught his entire life between the Sacred and the Profane, struggling to reconcile Love of God and (Wo)Man. Battled to the end with his eccentric father over the love of his mother, who occupied a bedroom between the two in the house they all shared. David Ritz’s recent bio, Divided Soul, posits the notion that Marvin virtually asked his dad to kill him, terrified that suicide would keep him out of the Kingdom of Heaven. ’S no wonder his legacy is similarly poised ’tween the Sky Above and the Sleaze Below. Dream Of A Lifetime is a disturbing postscript to Marvin Gaye’s torment, not just a quickie designed to cash in on yet another rock ’n’ soul tragedy.

From the furor over its release, you’d think executive producer Larkin Arnold re-recorded these songs himself. Still, even though there are only two (not the four Arnold claims in the liner notes) recently-finished tracks here, the cumulative effect accurately reflects the schizoid state of its creator. Dream Of A Lifetime is almost certainly not the record Marvin Gaye would have wanted as his final statement; it doesn’t hesitate to show the man, aberrations and all.

The first side is where you’ll find the post-“Sexual Healing” stuff, the X-rated trilogy which shows Marvin to be in a strange, sad state, addicted to his own cocainefueled fantasies of bondage and domination. “Sanctified Lady” is of course Gaye’s magnum opus “Sanctified Pussy,” and, if there is any cosmetic work done on it, you can still hear some rather explicit repartee. “I’m looking for a sanctified pussy I can respect,” croons Marvin, summing up his own psychic dilemma with succinct salaciousness.

“Savage In The Sack” comes from sometime before Marvin’s comeback album, Midnight Love, but its S&M sentiments fit right in here, as Gaye plays the Supermasculine Sex Object of Soul On Ice, boasting how he’s “gettin’ bigger and bigger.” “Masochistic Beauty” makes “Some Girls” sound like a feminist tract, with Marvin doing his best Ian Dury impression, rapping that “I’ll rock you ’til you’re sore/Like a whore.”

Taken on their own, these three half-finished funk riffs might be interpreted as a shocking decline and fall of songwriting talent. Are they meant to be funny? I hope so. But side one closes with the soaring, aching plaint, “It’s Madness,” as Marvin begs his lover (or is it God?), “Give me back control of my mind...Only you can save me.” At least God doesn’t answer back, as he does on Prince’s latest. It is a frighteningly real request, though, and, even if it was recorded almost a decade before the other three songs, serves as a chilling apologia for their hedonistic objectifications.

The second side includes four songs recorded at various points in the ’70s and “entrusted to his Mother for safekeeping.” “Symphony,” a sort of “What’s Goin’ On” clone co-written with Smokey Robinson, is a trifle outdated with its string backing, but “Life’s Opera” is an amazing sevenminute plus song cycle that ends with Marvin doing for the “Lord’s Prayer” what he did for the national anthem at the NBA all-star game a few years ago. The title cut doses matters, and, as Marvin leans into the final verse, “I may cry with the past/But it’s easier to laugh about it/I thank God for my wonderful life,” you can’t help but be moved.

Marvin Gaye tried to escape his often-hellish existence through the purity of his music. When that perversity began to creep into the songs, you could feel the end coming. Dream Of A Lifetime captures the contradictions of Marvin Gaye’s life and work all too well.

Roy Trakin

THE BEACH BOYS (Caribou)

Say you’re at your high school reunion—a far-fetched thought, but bear with me for a moment— and some creep corners you by the onion dip, pokes you in the ribs, and starts into the same routine he gets into every time you see him: “Remember how much fun we use ta have? Those were the days, huh? Boy, if things could only be the way they were then, that’d be great, wouldn’t it? Well, wouldn’t it?” You might think: did I ever like this clown? Isn’t this jovial desperation kind of, well, pathetic?

Every time Mike Love struts across a stage, or Al Jardine steps up to a mike, or Bruce Johnston croons one of his insipid toy ballads, they come a little closer to destroying what residue of affection we have for today’s Beach Boys (’tho not for The Beach Boys Today, God knows: certain things are indestructible). For them to continue with Dennis Wilson gone, and Brian Wilson left with only a husk of his prodigious talent, is to parody and finally to mock what was truly wonderful about this group.

The Beach Boys isn’t a travesty, the way their other albums since the swell Beach Boys Love You have been. It sounds all right. Producer Steve Levine (this is the first time they’ve gone outside the organization for help in the studio) has found a synthesizer-based equivalent for what might be called the Sunflower/Surf’s Up texture, and the vocal harmonies are unassailable. But the project is unmoored, and it falls flat after its almost-ingenious opening number, co-sung and co-written, it pains me to say, by Mr. Love.

“Getcha Back” reverts to formula. Every time the Beach Boys try to restore their commercial status they revert to formula, playing on our memories (“Do It Again,” “It’s OK,” “Rock And Roll Music,” “Come Go With Me”). But this time the undercurrent is strong. As the Boys lay down a vocal bed echoing the Mystics’ “Hushabye” (cf. All Summer Long), Mike remembers his old sweetheart, and the time in his car when she “cried all night ’cuz we’d gone too far” (finally, the aftermath of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is revealed, and turned out to be post-coital remorse; perfect). In a burst of sentiment, he wonders whether, if they both left their current partners, they could recapture what they had. This menopausal melancholy is an ideal metaphor for the Beach Boys’ musical situation, and it’s gotten them back on the radio, which is all Mike really wanted anyhow.

O SOLO STINGO

STING

The Dream Of The Blue Turtles (A&M)

by

Richard Riegel

As I was strolling through a discount store the other day, I came across a display of “action figures” from the movie Dune, and there was our man Sting, reproduced in plastic complete with hawk nose and “poseable” limbs, all four-plus inches of him sealed in a clear bubble and hung

on a rack. Obviously I was aware Sting was one of the stars of Dune, but the full merchandising implications of his role didn’t hit me until I encountered this little Sting, virtually crucified right around the corner from the styrofoam coolers.

Can you imagine if there had been a similar set of action figures for Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid? Bob Dylan would’ve just shit if he thought people off the street could buy a plastic effigy of him and move the arms and legs around voodoo-doll fashion. But then maybe Sting, if he’s really as moody and depressed as popular legend makes him out, wouldn’t fancy becoming a household object either.

In fact, I’m pretty sure Sting wouldn’t go for that. Judging by his first solo album, The Dream Of The Blue Turtles, which is a welcome and probably deliberate retreat from all the superstar hysteria that had been building up around the Police the past few years. The Dream Of The Blue Turtles is such a modest, intelligent record that it restores my better judgments (of both Sting and the Police). It wipes the slate clean of all the times MTV and People have fawned over this guy.

Mr. Morose himself claims that Turtles is not a solo album, as a number of non-Sting persons perform on it (mostly black American and West Indian musicians—is Sting finally settling the Police’s “debt” to reggae?), but as he furnished all the songs and lead vocals it’s at least slightly more solo than any of the Sting conceptualized Police albums. And funny that I should mention “slate” up above, as the strongest cuts on Blue Turtles feature Sting in his mortarboard & angel wings schoolmaster role again, the one he filled so expertly in the best Police song ever, “Don’t Stand So Close To Me.”

Except that this time Sting-theinstructor is out to protect greater treasures than mere professional reputations and dewy hymens, he’s out to save Humanity Itself from its own baser instincts (in an unassuming way, of course). Blue Turtles kicks off with “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free” and “Love Is The Seventh Wave,” each of which celebrates a love which mutates from sensual into universal applications, in the course of the song.

By the third cut, “Russians,” Sting is more explicit about his message, essentially that old “Make love not war” chestnut, still as timely as ever. He desperately hopes the Russians “love their children too,” and will thus be able to resist taking up the challenges offered by bully-boy Reagan. “Children’s Crusade” flashes back to regret for the carnage of World War I, at least 15 years after Ray Davies made the same point on Arthur. But Sting also cops a nice metaphorical correlation between the poppies worn by the veterans of 1914, and the poppies absorbed more intimately into certain shell-shocked citizens of 1984, “fixing in doorways.”

Is that enough of Sting’s beloved depression for you? Well yeah, except for the miners’ lament, “We Work The Black Seam,” that opens Side Two, Blue Turtles gets a bit lighter from here on. “Shadows In The Rain” seems to be a new wavy Police song that didn’t get recorded earlier. “Consider Me Gone” is catchy filler from the Land of Significant Others, and the title cut is a brief, jazzy piece that would fit well in a mid-’60s “swinger” comedy. “Moon Over Bourbon Street” is Sting finally relaxing, as a vampire (here’s that Good Catholic Boy syndrome hard at work again) driven through the streets of New Orleans by Branford Marsalis’s avant-trad horns.

The album closer, “Fortress Around Your Heart” recapitulates the sentiments of “If You Love Somebody,” but it’s also rather obviously a Police song that would be on the new Police album if that was what Sting was making this year. “Fortress” has that same slow build and that triumphantly slapping release that Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland have performed so skillfully on our radios so often.

But I always come back to side one of The Dream Of The Blue Turtles and its suite of “message” songs—they’re not nearly aggressive enough to begin to solve the world’s problems, but their hummability has kept their sentiments subtly imprinted on my mind. Like Jimmy Carter, I’d vote for them again, in a many-timesremoved gesture of “punk” solidarity. Which is not to mention that since Dune was something less than a smash at the box office, those fully possible Sting figures might be as low as 57 cents by now. Remind me to stock up!

Nonetheless, even “Getcha Back” has an air of non-resolution, an incompleteness from which the entire LP suffers. Levine is expert at applying the polish—his work with Culture Club has given him practice in gussying up hooks— but the songs here just don’t stick. You may admire the overall tone of a track, or the flow of Carl Wilson’s voice, without anything locking in. It’s utterly right that for outside material the Beach Boys would go to Stevie Wonder and Boy George (Carl proves an adept stylistic mimic, especially of George’s caramel phrasing). Like Brian, these guys are melodisttexturalists first, as tuneful as all get-out. Problem is, their songs on The Beach Boys evaporate on exposure.

The big question: How’s Brian? It’s off-putting that he shares songwriting credit with his shrink, especially when they come up with cappers such as “But I know I’d like to get a crack at your/And ya’ know I’d like to get a crack at your/Don’t ya’ know I’d like to get a crack at your love.” Is this variation on “I’d Love Just Once To See You” simply an unfortunate use of idiom, or a subconscious expression of id? (For a further report on Brian’s analytical progress, check out the single’s B-side, “Male Ego.”) Brian also contributes the croaky and creaky “I’m So Lonely,” and the utterly sweet “It’s Just A Matter Of Time,” closing the LP with a bow to the Moonglows.

Best left unscrutinized is “California Calling.” Suffice to say that it represents everything you can’t stand about Mike Love and Al Jardine. It’s like “Skeet Surfin’” from Top Secret!, only it isn’t funny. Not funny at all.

If they had any sense, Carl and Brian would turn over the Beach Boys trademark to Mike, Al and Bruce (for a few mil), then we could stop pretending that the Beach Boys are anything but a dim reminder of past glory. I’d be eager to hear an album by the Wilson Brothers, even if they had to bring a consulting psychiatrist along for the ride.

Mitchell Cohen

THAT’S AMORE

BRYAN FERRY Boys And Girls (Warner Bros.)

by

Jon Young

Some people scoff at silly love songs, but romance is a deadly serious business for Bryan Ferry. Pick a track, any track, on his hypnotic new Boys And Girls LP, and

you’ll turn up a description of amour better suited to a dangerous disease than pleasure. Either he’s sadly “outside looking in” or a “slave to love” who can’t escape the trap. Everyone’s had similar feelings at one time or another, of course, but Ferry must hold the record for nonstop preoccupation with fatal romance. He’s been wandering around in a fevered haze for over a decade!

It wasn’t always so. Back in the early days of Roxy Music, leader Ferry and band were a three-ring circus that both mocked and celebrated junk culture with incredible style. Like the Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, Roxy had a fab balance of cool postures and thinly veiled passion; you could choose to groove on the flash or dig into the emotions of the music. Ferry himself was a bizarre, almost scary hybrid of Sinatra-style pop guy and Presleyish wild boy, impossible to pin down for long.

Slowly, he began to strip away the gimmicks and tone down the sensationalism. By 1975’s “Love Is The Drug,” Ferry had his revised, “adult” persona ready to go: smooth, slightly sweaty, and perpetually in seach of a new affair of the heart. Allow for a decade’s aging and mellowing (though not too much), and that’s still pretty much the story in 1985. Boys And Girls finds Ferry alone at the end of the bar at closing time, clutching a smoldering cigarette and staring into a half-empty glass of Scotch as he reflects on the perils and rewards of the high life.

While the idea of the restless playboy is hardly new—you’ll find endless versions of the same character in old Hollywood movies—there’s no one better suited to it than Ferry. Still a slick crooner without peer, he deserves an Oscar for the dreamy “Windswept,” where he sighs, “Oh baby do it again and again” like a man devastated by desire. “Slave To Love” sends shivers up the spine, too, gently bopping to Ferry’s weary, knowing account of being “too young to reason/ too old to dream.” And so on. The almostrocking “Stone Woman” anticipates a new encounter, while the shimmering title cut portrays the game of love as a sad ritual. Betcha didn’t r.ealize there could be so many variations on a single theme.

The supporting cast, featuring such credible cats as David Gilmour, Mark Knopfler and Nile Rodgers, cushions the lovesick one with appropriately elegant textures, vaguely funky and always urbane. It does sound an awful lot like Avalon, the last Roxy album, which is probably something he should try to avoid the next time. And nonfans may complain that the songs on Boys And Girls tend to run together, thanks to similar melodies and a heavy use of midtempos. I figure that’s the whole point, though, since the LP is one long meditation on one of the few subjects that never goes out of style. (In fact, Ferry thinks the perfect relationship holds the key to the meaning of life itself, but we don’t have time to get into that here.)

What does it all have to do with rock ’n’ roll? Admittedly, anyone looking for fireworks will probably be asleep by the middle of side one. However, the obsessive edge that Ferry brings to his torch songs is a hallmark of great (dare I say it?) art. If Boys And Girls doesn’t seem like a slice of reality right away, wait ’til that old devil called love gets ahold of you. Then see if it doesn’t make sense.