CENTERSTAGE

CENTERSTAGE

LE BEL AGED

PAT BENATAR Joe Louis Arena, Detroit _Feb. 15, 1986_

by Joanne Carnegie

There�s a place on Detroit�s west side called the Motor City Skating Center. Pat Benatar played there in December of 1979. She�d just released her first album, and maybe 300 people cared enough about it to show up. Six years later, on a wintry night at Detroit�s Joe Louis Arena—seating 20,000—no roller skates were in sight. Mostly couples were, with arms wrapped around each other, all there to hear Pat Benatar wallop out her long string of hit singles. And a long string it was: �Invincible,� �Love Is A Battlefield,� �Hell Is For Children,� �I Need A Lover,� and �Heartbreaker,� not to mention the hits from her latest, Seven The Hard Way—�Sex As A Weapon� and �Le Bel Age.�

After a three-year hiatus from performing and just three weeks into her tour, in Detroit Pat Benatar�s �comeback� seemed to be working. She was missed. Roses were thrown to her; she smiled, waved and told us, �It�s great to be back!�

Pat Benatar won Sex Object Of The Year in CREEM�s Readers Poll in 1980 and 1981—and although she still looks the sex kitten, these days we�re seeing the �86 version of Pat Benatar. She�s traded in the spandex/leopard look for a suede fringed jacket and baggy pants. During the show she�d thrown off her jacket to reveal a midriffed blouse, as fans screamed—mostly males, I hope. Pat sounds different, too. She�s come a long way since the first album and the skating rink. Her new songs sound much better than the old ones—on record, they�re better produced, in concert they�re much fuller. The old songs? Well, they sound dated. And even if the newer songs are slicker and more commercial, they�re still more appealing songs. As an artist, Benatar has grown—with age, marriage and motherhood.

Onstage, husband Neil Geraldo appeared to be having a good timesmoking his cigarette and wailing on the guitar, he seems to have gotten on the Springsteen muscle bandwagon lately, just like everyone else. Though he�s not a bad guitar player, he�s not really a great one, either. It�s wife Pat�s show, anyway.

The band was tight—and they should be, they�ve had enough time to practice.

It�s evident that after seven years, Benatar has long since escaped the initial but inevitable comparisons to Debbie Harry. Now she�s the yardstick against which all other female singers are compared—and if Detroit�s show as any indication, her future looks to be as strong as her voice. Like it or not, she�s become an institution.

For those who love Pat Benatar�s music—and I�m sure there are many— the show was worth seeing. And for those glitzy few who prefer navels to voices: you�ll have to wait until Mad Donna tours again. Or makes another movie. Or gets married again. Or...

EYEBALL TO EYEBALL

THE RESIDENTS The Ritz, New York Jan. 16, 1986

by Jeff Tamarkin

A guaranteed crowd-pleaser at most rock concerts is when the lead singer peels off his shirt to reveal his chest. At this one, the big thing was when the lead singer removed his eyeball to reveal his black stocking.

And if that sounds just a mite strange to you, you�re probably not too familiar with the Residents. But then, not too many people are. The San Francisco-viaShreveport, Louisiana quartet may have released over a dozen albums on independent Ralph Records in the past 13 years, but none has ever cracked the Top 200, and none has yet featured a photo of the band—if there even is a band. That question comes up only because they�ve never given their names either.

Sure, there was a band onstage at the Residents� first-ever New York concert, but was it the same gang responsible for the records? Who knows? Two of the troupe—women, one guesses—did nothing but dance and twist themselves into strange shapes all night, often playing around with sculptures best described as legs with legs. Behind them, two more Resis—men, perhaps—coerced Emulator synths into making otherworldly sounds, while one of them kept occupied bleating, blapping, and blurting the whiney, squirmy vocals. But there was still no way to determine if this was indeed the very same Residents who produced such LPs as Third Reich And Roll, Eskimo or that all-time multi-platinum classic, Duck Stab. And that�s all because of their eyeballs.

If you know nothing else about the Residents, you probably know their giant eyeballs. They wear �em where most people wear heads, and below those might be found tuxes or aluminum foil. Which is how they emerged here—resplendent eyeballs and all-white formals. But

something was amiss, something not kosher in Resiland.

Wherein lies the tail of the stolen eyeball. Seems that some pervert stole an eyeball at a prior concert, leaving one of the poor souls to find a new head. Which he did: a grey, larger-than-a-breadbasket skull. A brief memorial service was held for the dear, departed ball and then, formalities resolved, the group, augmented by English avant-guitarist Snakefinger—with a normal head and all—bleeped into �Semolina.� That�s a song.

To call the Residents� music unusual, weird, bizarre, etc., would be doing it an injustice—their sound is positively unlike anything else found in the common human musical language. Although they use conventional synths, the sounds they sample into them are not those found on your basic Depeche Mode record; the Residents often create their own instruments to get the noise they need, and then—from those elements—whip together their famous Top 40 compositions devoid of such properties as har-

mony, melody and traditional rhythm. Let�s just say you won�t be hearing them as background music on Miami Vice, OK?

At the Ritz, the Residents stuck to their greatest hits and a buncha covers, just like any other band. That the Resis� songs have titles like �Hello Skinny� and �Constantinople� is besides the point, and that their remakes of �Jailhouse Rock,� �I Got Rhythm� and �It�s A Man�s Man�s Man�s World� bore about as much resemblance to the originals as Madonna does to Root Boy Slim is to miss the point altogether. What the Residents do, among other things, is to take pop music by the neck and wring it till its tongue sticks out; they exaggerate rock�s cliches until they are shown up as the obscene jokes that they are. By finally agreeing to tour standard rock halls, and then ignoring or parodying standard rock concert procedure to absurd lengths, the Residents proved once again just how essential their perspective is in a world where A-Ha is considered �new music� while true creative geniuses/buffoons like the Residents are relegated to novelty status.