The Beat Goes On

The Beat Goes On

DEPARTMENTS

TUESDAY’S CHILDREN

NEW YORK—We know, we know. The letters we choose to print in the front of CREEM are from people awaiting release papers from places with barbed wire and bad food. But you normals out there also write to us, and the question you most often ask is none of your damn business, thankyouverymuch. The second most popular question is “How the heck do you heebers pick what bands to cover?” Be still, you grumblers. Here come the answers, and excuses.

1)Prenatal hype: We get pounds of albums from major labels mailed to us every week (if you had to sit through most of them you wouldn’t feel jealous). Once in a while we get sent advance cassette tapes before the actual LPs are sucked into their shrink wrap. That’s a brickbat hint that the record company wants to get the star-making machinery rolling real bad. If the tape comes with lots of press clips, bio material spiffy and full-color (expensive) pictures and booklets (like ’til tuesday’s tape did) then we know that the machinery is going to crunch us if we don’t do a story (or at least a Boy Howdy spread). It helps, of course, if the music is good, which ’til tuesday’s is.

2)A strange angle: In the case of Boston’s ’til tuesday, the strange angle in the story was obvious the first time we saw the fullcolor pix. Lead singer/bassist/ writer Aimee Mann we spotted in her blonde glory right away—but who was the dishy redhead with the rattlesnake cheekbones and drop-dead stare? Turned out that the dish is ace guitarist Robert Holmes, who, much to his ongoing dismay, has been getting mistaken for a female since puberty made his gender a relevant issue. Mann remembers with an affectionate laugh that when she met Robert, she just thought “he was real good-looking. Then I found out people think he’s a girl all the time. He used to paint houses to make money, and even in his short hair and painter’s cap people would say ‘oh, how cute, a girl painter.’ If he’d put on a suit people would say ‘oh, how cute, a girl in a suit.’

3)A big sheewwwww: MTV also had cameras buzzing for that night’s concert. The concert started on time, which was confirmation that this was a major event. For a band just two years and one album old, ’til tuesday did pretty OK. They could use more variation of melody and song mood (“cool, distant and sadly wise” is just a little too common an attitude these days), but the band’s jazz/pop instrumental skills are striking, and Aimee the Edible really does have that Certain Something.

Laura Fissinger

THE RETURN OF NEIL INNES

NEW YORK—If it’s hip to be a cult figure, then Neil Innes is very hip indeed. He’s a familiar face in his native England, known for his BBC-TV series, The Innes Book Of Records, and as a musical aidede-camp to Monty Python, his following in the U.S. is limited to a handful of diehard fans of the late, lamented Bonzo Dog Band.

Innes first became involved in what he refers to as “America’s greatest export—show biz!” in 1966, when he joined several fellow students to form the Bonzo Dog Band. According to Innes, “Our music flowed from the fact that we all went to art school in one of the most pretentious decades of the century. The group was an anarchic event.” Bonzo fans may have been few, but they included such prominent figures as Paul McCartney (who produced the group’s only hit single, Innes’s “I’m The Urban Spaceman” under the pseudonym Apollo C. Vermouth in 1968), John Lennon (who slipped them anonymously into Magical Mystery Tour singing “Death Cab For Cutie”) and Keith Moon. The Bonzos were also featured occasionally on Do Not Adjust Your Set, a trailblazing series of British TV shows starring members of what was about to become Monty Python.

After 1972, when Innes and cohort Viv Stanshall put out the last of five Bonzo LPs, Let’s Make Up And Be Friendly, Innes collaborated with Pythoner Eric Idle on Rutland Weekend Television, a priceless series relating the goings-on in a fictitious British blue-collar town. It was from a sketch in this series that the idea for The Rutles, the great docuparody of the Beatles, was born.

Innes did not recently come to the States merely to play the Bottom Line and show off his hats. He came in the hopes of finding an American network (most likely PBS) to distribute an edited version of the Innes Book Of Records shows, and selling a new 13-part series of Fairy Tales he has concocted with Pythoner Terry Jones. He’d eventually like to become a full-time TV and film director, but music remains his forte; after videotaping his one-man show, he might put together another band. The prospects for widespread commercial success may never be that great for a balding British vaudevillian/musicologist. But one can only wish him luck...and join the cult.

Gary Kenton

COLE COMMOTION

DETROIT—As a youth in Glasgow, Scotland, Lloyd Cole was obsessed with American music, literature and movies. It only seemed natural, then, that American symbols of glamour and romance would figure predominantly in his own music when he formed the Commotions with several college chums two years ago. Rattlesnakes, one of the best debut LPs so far this year, includes references to novelists like Norman Mailer, movie stars like Grace Kelly and even American musical icons like Arthur Lee—while the band’s music has been compared to the likes of the Byrds, Television (interestingly, the Commotions cover that band’s “Glory” on a British B-side), the Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan.

“I think we do borrow in the same way that most people do,” says Cole. “We might hear something and say, ‘That’s a good idea, we could do something like that.’ But we don’t say ‘That’s a good idea, let’s copy it.’ There’s a big difference. Certainly as far as things like guitars go, it’s obvious we’ve listened to groups like Television and the Byrds. I just think that’s a good way to use guitars. It’s like Norman Mailer saying that The Naked And The Dead was a combination of all his favorite novelists stuck into one book, and I think it’s a reasonable way to work within pop music as well. For instance, there’s a genre of song that was established by Bob Dylan, but it no longer belongs solely to him because other people have worked within that same genre since he first established it.

“As far as the literary and movie allusions are concerned, they’re there for the connotations these famous names suggest. For instance, Eva Marie Saint is a very fragile looking woman—and that’s why I chose her. Truman Capote, I think, is more famous for being a member of New York society than he is for being a novelist. So all those names are there for a reason. I think the references are similar to the way Morrissey of the Smiths is caught up with British films like Room At The Top or Look Back In Anger.”

The Commotions create a wistful, melancholic sound that blends perfectly with Cole’s lyrics of emotional desire, lost romance and broken hearts, best exemplified in lines like “I believe in love/I believe in anything/That’ll get me what I want/And up off my knees”—or songs like “2cv,” a sad post-relationship statement.

“It just comes naturally to me to write about emotional relationships, but it was not our intention for it to be melancholy,” he says. “There’s a lot of humor in there as well, which I hope helps to lighten it up. There is a kind of wistful irony throughout the LP, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that’s depressing.

“After this tour, we’re going to record a new LP as soon as we’ve had a rest—and as soon as we’ve written new material. We’ve got some new songs, but we’ve probably only got half an album right now. I wasn’t very prolific for a while there, but I’m working again and I’ve got one new song that’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written.

“I was pretty caught up in the whole Americana thing when I was writing the first LP, but I think the myth is presently in the process of being shattered.”

Bill Holdship

MARY JANE GIRLS CAN’T HELP IT

LOS ANGELES—Ah, the pleasures of pulchritude!! To be surrounded by two members of Rick James’s musical wet dream, the salacious Mary Jane Girls: lead singer JoJo and newest recruit Corvette (nee Yvette), the stunning 19-year-old daughter of R & B singer Patti Brooks. Along with leather queen Maxi, she of the knee-high, tiger-striped boots, and the sultry, sophisticated Candi, they form a potent hardbody quartet that’s climbed into the Pop 10 with the steamy come-hither croon of “In My House.”

“It’s not any metaphor I’m aware of,” explains JoJo, whose beaded cornrows make her Rick James’s female alter ego in the group. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not about that at all. It’s like guys always want you to come to their house. We’re just turning that around. We’re just being honest females. How many women have dreamt of doing the same thing? We’re taking that desire to its extreme.”

The Buffalo-born JoJo, who first met her musical mentor in an upstate record store, has nothing but praise for Rick James’s founding role in the Mary Jane Girls.

“He put the group together, produced and arranged the material,” she says. “The concept was totally his. He had sketches of how he wanted each girl to look, how he wanted us to dress.”

“He’s a very, very sensitive man,” echoes Corvette. “He’s not at all what people think of him. Sometimes, he’s shy and quiet. Then, he’ll be loud and boisterous. He’s got a good sense of humor. Often, he’ll have us on the floor.”

Oh...but what about those outfits?

“At first, I didn’t think I could do it...these girls are such great dancers, you know,” coos Corvette. “But it’s funny, once you get into your clothes and lock into your character, it comes out. After a while, it was easy. I just had to be around the others so they could teach me the ropes.”

Ropes? The relationship between the girls and Rick is strictly professional, right?

“Strictly,” says JoJo, who was an original member of the Mary Jane Girls when they started as back-up singers in Rick James’s Stone City Band in 1981. “We love him as a brother. Honestly. I wish I could give you some dirt. Corvette and I are the worst gossips in the group.

“You don’t find too many men anywhere, especially in the music busines that have the empathy to even care about what a woman thinks, let alone what she feels, but Rick James seems to have that.”

So you don’t mind being billed, say, as Rick James’s 3-D House of Slave Chicks? It’s all just some Little Annie Fanny cartoon, no?

“I prefer to call it serious fun,” explains JoJo. “Serious in the sense it’s a career and fun in the sense we’re doing things ladies don’t normally do. It’s part of being a woman. We wouldn’t go quite so far as nudity, though.”

“These are our alter egos, taken a little farther than usual,” adds Corvette. “Of course we don’t pad around the house like this.”

“This is liberating to me,” insists JoJo. “We’re not just pushing our sex. We have a record out that’s got music and singing on it, too. The only reason we get criticized is because we’re women. Men can do the same thing all day and night, and it’s fine. If the ERA is going to attack us, they should take a long look at the advertising community. Commercials are selling products with sex. That’s what I call exploitation.”

Roy Trakin