ROCK AND DROLL

ROCK AND DROLL

FLEGANZA

John Mendelssohn

Charlie Singleton, much of whose exultant pop funk compares favorably to Prince’s, and Jermaine Stewart, who’d like to (and surely will) be very big with New Edition’s audience, both look like a million dollars on the covers of their recent Arista record albums.

That alone wouldn’t get them into the first paragraph of the column that’s second in the hearts of the fashion-conscious rock-loving youth of America. But telling us in the liner copy not only who played on, recorded and produced their albums, but also who did their make-up and hair and designed their eye-pleasing duds did, as anyone can see. Jermaine even wants us to know where he likes to shop, though he neglects to specify which, if any, of the Jean-Paul Gautier, Yahji Yamamoto, Pour Gibo-Homme, Marithe Francois Girbaud of Paris or Claude Montana creations he wears on Frantic Romantic he actually bought at any of the several boutiques he lists.

Eleganza vigorously approves, for the stylist who prepares one to be photographed for his or her album cover surely has every bit as much to do with the album’s success or failure as its assistant engineers, say, who typically do nothing more than empty the first engineer’s ashtray, fetch him hoagies, and roll up dollar bills, or the mastering engineer, who’s apt only to add three dbs at 8,000 Khz, thus making the high-hat three percent more audible to listeners with stereo systems that cost over $11,299.95, not counting cassette deck.

(What does a producer do? Just watch Eddie Murray’s “Party All The Time” video and see for yourself. He delightedly embraces the recording artist when he or she arrives at the recording studio, and then says, “Better put your phones [rock slang for ‘headphones’] on, man.” Finally, he dances around delightedly in the “control room” while the artist sings, and then, when he can control his delight no longer, rushes into the studio to join in, right in the middle of a “take.” Jimmy lovine, Chris Thomas, Bob Clearmountain, all of your top modern producers work this way.)

Listing make-up and hair people reminds one that looking like a million dollars is no casual matter, but the result of long deliberation and extensive preparation. Don’t believe me, though. Believe your own eyes. Examine the before and after (make-up, styling, flattering lighting) photographs of Patti Hansen (more recently Mrs. Keith Richards) in Francesco Scavullo’s Women.

I might mention that, when I tried to trade the Charlie Singleton album (I’d taped it, you see) a few months ago at a record shop that buys and trades used records (Revolver Records in San Francisco, California, home of the Grateful Dead), it wouldn’t grant me a nickel’s credit for it. Thus are we reminded that the only critics with any clout are the promotion men and women who decide which records to push hard and tenaciously and the music or radio program directors who decide which promotion men and women to acquiesece to.

Van Halen look like the sort of creeps you’d encounter in a big city bus station at 2:30 on a weeknight in the photographs accompanying the recent article in this (and every other rock) magazine about their having replaced the unspeakable David Lee Roth with the unspeakable Sammy Hagar. As if looking a shameless slob weren’t bad enough, Hagar also told •Dave DiMartino (who always looks like tens of thousands of dollars), “I think Reagan is the coolest fucker we’ve had in office in a long time.”

On the basis of which, I’d like to nominate Sammy Hagar as the stupidest fucker in rock ’n’ roll today, and maybe ever.

Thinking Reagan so wonderfully cool, how is it that Sam’s disdainful of those who were offended by his ‘‘fuck”-laden between-song patter at his Farm Aid performance? Has he somehow failed to notice that Reagan, himself a sanctimonious old prig, is a great, great pal of morality nazi Jerry Falwell? Similarly, how can so avid an admirer of Ronald Reagan, that most avid proponent of law and order, write songs celebrating his refusal to obey such laws as that which limit the speed at which he may drive his Ferrari? (If you don’t like our American speed limit, Sammy, why don’t you move to East Germany, on whose autobahn you can drive as fast as your surfeit of male hormones apparently compels you to?)

What exactly is it about Reagan that strikes Sam as so cool? Is it his patronage of Nicaragua’s brutal Contras,. former henchmen of the ruthless tyrant Somoza, or his having been the host with the most to the likes of such other ruthless tyrants as Ferdinand Marcos, or his brazen disdain for th.e environment, or his administration’s having set the cause of racial equality back several years?

Considering that Sam himself is a real take-no-shit kind of guy, an old-fashioned, red-blooded man’s man with a surfeit of male hormones, my own guess is that it’s The Cool Fucker’s avowed eagerness to send other American’s sons to kill or be killed to bolster his reputation as The Tough President Who Doesn’t Take Shit From The Commies.

With all due respect for your prodigious musical gifts, Sammy, shut your stupid mouth before some impressionable teenager actually takes something you say seriously.

But wait! This column has something

nice to say about someone other than Charlie Singleton and Jermaine Stewart, and not only that, but about someone for whom it used to have only the fiercest disdain. The someone in question is MTV VJ Alan Hunter, who’s begun to impress this column as a toned-down version of the infinitely smarmy, bloodcurdlingly upbeat television host Monty Python’s Michael Palin used to play with such maniacal glee. I’ve begun to hope that Hunter, who used to seem so smug, but who’s come lately to strike me as appeallingly snide, may not have uttered an un-ironic syllable since they hired him, that he disdains MTV nearly as much as do those of us on the receiving end. Such being the case would go a long way toward explaining his scandalous out-of-itness at Live Aid, for instance.

Finally, let’s hand it to those zany British. They may not think a lot of things up by themselves, but they do wondrous things with ideas imported from America. As witness what they’ve done with Daryl Hall and John Oates’s idea of one member of a duo being conspicuously superfluous. Wham! carried the idea a little farther, as Andrew Ridgeley didn’t sing and played guitar parts that made Oates’s seem crucial in comparison. And now the Pet Shop Boys take the idea even farther, as the one who doesn’t do the hilarious Al Stewart impression spends the whole “West End Girls” video looking as though no one took the time to explain exactly what he was supposed to be doing back there. He neither pretends to play an instrument, that is, performs a dance step, nor even moves his lips, but only tags self-consciously along, the collaborator as fashion accessory! Once again we’re reminded that, however morose the British may look, and nobody looks moroser, that puckish sense of theirs always shines through in the end.