THE TIME IS RIPE!

THE TIME IS RIPE!

ELEGANZA

by John Mendelssohn

I have the feeling that the time is ripe for some alert young group to bring back the look of the British Invasion. I have the feeling that if the tuneful, presentable Outfield, for instance, wore Cuban-heeled boots with dagger toes and matching suits comprising drainpipe trousers and velvet-collared coats instead of the putatively modish contemporary duds they do, they’d be the hottest thing in all of power pop as you read this.

The alert reader’ll groan, “But, John, hasn’t that been done, man?” In fact, it has. The Flamin’ Groovies did it in 1976, even adding Gretsch guitars, but their lead singer looked like the sort of kid his classmates regularly pantsed on principle in junior high, and their lead guitarist was only marginally less bald than an aubergine. The Pleasers, an English foursome, did it in 1978, and miniskirted girls with much eyeliner and ironed hair were seen frugging delightedly. But once you got past their image the group was less pleasing than it needed to be (their harmonies apparently stank), and the timing, which any record company A&R man will tell you is like ultra-super, super important, apparently wasn’t right.

If you’re going to do it, to paraphrase Wham!, do it right. Do it, that is, with the obvious affection and attentiveness to detail with which the Stray Cats reinvented the class rockabilly look in 1981. Be fresh-faced and clean-shaven. Have the bass guitarist play a violinshaped bass left-handed. Write tuneful, exuberant songs. When performing live, stand very close together, and bow in unison after each of them. Have two singers share the same microphone— with unmistakable delight. If one of them is much taller than the other, fire him or her. This is no time for sentimentality— we’re talking about your career here. When your bass guitarist complains about having to play a violin-shaped bass left-handed, tell him or her to shut up. Do so in some sort of cute accent. Have a homosexual manager.

I have the feeling that there are few things funnier in all the world than a magazine fashion layout. Consider, for example, Rolling Stone’s recent “Style Counselors” spread, in which such big, big favorites of all of us as Julian Lennon, Suzanne Vega, and Dream Academy and their record company mentors are depicted in what we’re supposed to believe are fashionable clothes.

The first thing we notice about these clothes is that dead is the only way we’d consider being caught in them, and that they’re preposterously expensive. Consider the baggy, short-sleeved cotton shirt that Dream Academy’s American “discoverer,” Michael Ostin, wears. You wouldn’t want to be seen in public with someone wearing this garment, for it looks exactly like the one my dad used to wear to wash the cars in the early ’60s, always to mom’s mortification. And yet we’re to believe that there are those who’d pay over $100 (I would leave that page on the bus) for it! Or how about Diana of New York’s Pipino Buccheri Salon having been credited with not only Julian Lennon’s hair, but Ahmet Ertegun’s as well? Ahmet Ertegun makes the aforementioned one in the Flamin’ Groovies look like the late Bob Marley!

I also have the feeling that it’s very funny when they mention and give the price of something that they don’t show, like the $34 cotton dolman-sleeved T-shirt Island Records’ Chris Blackwell may or may not be wearing under his unsightly $400 cotton hand-knit Joan Vass sweater. You can see about as much of the $34 cotton dolman-sleeved T-shirt as you can of Whitney Houston’s navel in the picture of her with Clive Davis, and Whitney Houston’s got her back to the camera!

“I needed someone to guide me and to tell me what to do,” Whit tells us in the caption accompanying the photograph, “to tell me when I’m right and when I’m wrong. That’s what Clive does.” So when Michael Weeks, who was called in to style the pair’s hair, apparently mused, “Lemme think...people thought it cute when Tina Turner’s hair looked really silly. So how’s about I make Whitney’s look just incredibly idiotic?” We have to assume that Clive replied, “Hey, Michael, go for it.”

Move with me now, though, from the ridiculous to the sublime. I have the feeling that no one who reads this column in (increasingly vain) hope of its saying something—anything—about rock fashion should be without a subscription to the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue.

Make no mistake—it’s taken an alarming turn for the worse in the past couple of months, as photographs of human models have come to supplant all but a handful of the renderings of impossibly small-nosed, thick-maned, long-necked, high-breasted, tiny-waisted, narrowhipped, and long-legged love goddesses that used to clutter every page.

My favorite part of one recent issue was a two-page spread comprising preposterously idealized renderings of such contemporary sexpots as Loni Anderson, Joan Collins, Morgan Fairchild, Jane Fonda and Tina Turner, all looking sensationally small-nosed, thickmaned, long-necked, high-breasted, tinywaisted, narrow-hipped, and long-legged in Frederick’s fashions that the reader was intended to believe would make Mrs. Cellulite-Plagued Housewife out there in Dullsville, USA look no less star-like herself.

Honestly now, how can anyone, especially anyone who savors excruciating puns, resist a catalogue in which every garment is named something like Rapt Attention Getter (surplice dress) or Sin-tillator (high-heeled sandals) or Banana A-peel (man’s decorated Gstring)? That’s trying to sell Farrah Fawcett “Angel” wigs nine years after the fact? That contains headlines like “PROBLEM: Extra pounds and no time to diet. SOLUTION: Cinch, smooth and slenderize”?

I’ve written for prestigious magazines and Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers, been quoted in the Wall St. Journal, praised in The New York Times Book Review, and named Critic of the Year by you, CREEM’s dozens and dozens of devoted subscribers. But I don’t think there’s anything I’m prouder of than having written copy for the Frederick’s catalogue in mid-’84. And in the end they didn’t even use any of it.