NEW BEATS

NEW BEATS

DEPARTMENTS

To SLAM AND DIVE IN L.A.

This cartoon looks familiar. The Circle Jerks tear into their 97th song of the night. Skinheads and Mohicans become projectiles and battering rams. Haven’t seen this many bodies flying since the last terrorist attack. Ooh! A waxed spike of hair pokes out the eye of a shaved-headed gal. The orb rolls on the floor. Within seconds it is crunched by a jungle boot. Near the end of the set, a leather-jacketed lad emerges from the seething pit of slamdancers with a neat horizontal line of blood creasing his neck. He will brag about it tomorrow at middle school.

Laugh? I thought I’d yawn myself to a coma.

This L.A. punk relic creeps ever closer to the heavy metal sound they spoof on “American Heavy Metal Weekend.” No longer can this rigid buzzsaw ramalama shock. The Minutemen realized this. So did Meat Puppets and Husker Du. Witness their wondrous evolutions. Let’s just say that CJ music lacks nuance.

Lyrically, CJ pour on the sarcasm and broad humor. Sometimes it’s very effective (see “Killing For Jesus” and “Dude”). Attempts at pathos are rare and unsuccessful. Blame it on the utterly unmysterious nature of their music and Keith Morris’s corrosive voice, which only seems capable of expressing outrage and disgust. The show I saw a while back at Detroit’s Traxx had a monochromatic quality. Numbed by the uniform speed and unvarying song structures, I relied on the ritual cartoon and Keith Clark’s five-minute drum solo for entertainment. When the blood reached my ankles, I left.

Before this tiny chapter in the history of the decline of Western Civ, I talked with Morris (vocals), Clark, Greg Hetson (guitar) and Zander Schloss (bass). Regular-looking guys all. A couple could pass for, ahem, neo-metallers. Six years after conception, do the CJ feel trapped in an artistic straitjacket? All reply in unison: “Not at all!” Clark: “We choose what we want to do in all aspects.”

Yes, but do you ever desire to sound totally different? “We do,” Clark insists. “That’s why we did ‘Broken Heart For Snake’ (on Wonderful). We wanted to experiment with that Burt Bacharach style.” True, but one tender ballad is not exactly breaking away from the strictures of the patented Jerk din.

Hasn’t “punk” turned into the same kind of cartoon ritual that heavy metal has? Hasn’t it become just as conformist?

“Punk started as anti-establishment, antifashion—but you’re right, it has become a fashion,” croaks Morris in his MC5 T-shirt. He was Black Flag’s original singer. “As you can see, we’re not a part of that. We have a lot of heavy metal people that come to our shows, a lot of straight R.E.M., intellectualtype people. That’s what we want.”

The Jerks had a glittering cameo in the underground film success Repo Man as a shitty lounge band. They were hilarious. “Alex Cox (director/writer) had seen us and thought we were one of feis favorite bands,” says Morris. Schloss, who wasn’t in the band at the time, played a grocery clerk who gets in the path of a bullet.

Wonderful, the Jerks’ fourth LP, is their “most accessible but it’s by no means a commercial album with songs like ‘Making The Bombs’ and ‘Killing For Jesus,”’ Morris says. Agreed.

A potential single is the title cut. Its message is: be nice, polite and helpful to strangers; it’s a beautiful world. Do I detect sarcasm? The Jerks really mean it. “A lot of the kids at our shows are out there just to be violent,” Morris complains. “They don’t even care about the music.”

Looks like this cartoon’s going into syndication.

Dave Segal

"NEXT" “BIG” ‘THING”

Tony James loves movies. One look at the video for Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s “Love Missile F1-11” makes that fact abundantly clear. Therefore, in the interest of ^plaining Mr. James and his boodle of Brits who have become The Next Big Thing back home there, in the true spirit of the subject, we present the following mini-film script of a real life encounter.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE SPUTNIK KIND or

M, THE MAN BENEATH THE MAGENTA MUSHROOM CLOUD

Mild-mannered journalist, kinda preppielooking, dressed in reasonable business attire (briefcase, no tennis shoes, working tape recorder), enters veddy corporate conference room. Encounters tall man (Note to casting: look in basketball player size range) dressed in shocking pink rubber trousers and jacket, purple six-inch spike granny heels, sprouting magenta hair.

JOURNALIST

(Extends hand.) Hello.

TONY JAMES

(Looks up from garish magazine to reveal extremely blue eyes and no makeup, a typical rock star washed-out complexion.) Hello.

JOURNALIST

So why did you decide to form a rock group of people who couldn’t play an instrument?

TONY JAMES

You can always teach someone to play, you can’t teach them to have charisma.

JOURNALIST

Maybe you’ve got a point there. So how did you go about finding this la-di-da bunch?

TONY JAMES

If you made a movie of this, no one would believe it. But I swear it’s true. After Billy Idol (Editorial note: Tony James’s Credentials as a bass player include twangin ’ with Idol and Generation X) floated Off to America, I had to figure out what to do. I approached it from the viewpointWf the rock ’n’ roll fan that I am. Whatffere my wildest fantasies and how could I present them in the context of rock ’h’ roll? In all the great stories and great movies, you always find these talented people hanging out in coffee bars. So for two years, I hung out in coffee bars all over London, from Bromley to Soho, Richmond to Kensington, looking for a star.

JOURNALIST

So the criteria was looks only, huh. They didn’t have to play anything?

TONY JAMES

Right. After about two years of coffee, none of it decaffeinated, a guy rushes past the window of the bar, has on a great jacket, great haircut, loads of attitude. I run out and say, “I’m putting a band together, wanna join?” Turns out he’s a guitar player. Neil X. So now there are two of us sitting in coffee bars. About two more years go by, another bloke goes past. We rush out, “Can you play drums? No? Doesn’t matter, you’re in. Go ’round to my apartment and practice on the drum kit.”

JOURNALIST

I get the picture. So you collect five weirdlooking guys all together, one of whom is a fashion designer, then set up a boutique to sell your Sand costumes before you even become a band. Next you give them music lessons, and, uh, persuade EMI in England to part with four million pounds sterling to support you in the lifestyle to which every budding rock star expects to become accustomed.

TONY JAMES

Weeelll, things being what they are, figures do sometimes tend to get exaggerated. However, we did have our lawyer, Brian Carr (credit on the back of English record jacket reads “Feared Attorney”) who looks like Abraham Lincoln, make a considerable deal.

JOURNALIST

Uh huh. You talk about rock ’n’ roll of the ’90s, sputniks, bombs, films and the aesthetics of neon blue and shocking pink. He talks in similarly astronomical terms, only his apply to the money you’re going to have paid into your account.

TONY JAMES

It was a good investment. We’re already starting to recoup. The record (we’re refer-

ring here to the Georgio Moroder-produced single, “Love Missile F1-11 ” only, since the album is still a work in progress) went to number three on English charts and it’s number one on several European ones.

JOURNALIST

Right. Frankie Goes To Hollywod had a track record somewhere along those lines, so did the Sex Pistols. And we all know what happened when they came to America.

TONY JAMES

That’s why we’re trying to keep the media profile down here. Besides, when we play live, it’ll be interesting to watch. There’s total freedom in the group. Whatever we feel like playing, we do, so the songs come out different every time. If the guitarist doesn’t want to play, he doesn’t have to. It’s a surprise each night. We’ll either be incredible or we’ll be horrible, and I can live with those two extremes much more easily than I can with being mediocre. t CUUUUUUTTTTTT!!! This is a wrap.

So, film fans, you are hereby informed of your future. James, avec Sigs (attended, incidentally, by a road crew of voluptuous roadies in sexy costumes because he wants his representatives to be “aesthetically pleasing”) will create a nightly event in your town once the album’s finished, an event he anticipates to take oh, about five days or so. “I don’t want to spend all day in the studio, I’d rather go out to dinner,” he reasons. He’d also rather create videos, complete with a 60-second trailer to the video, and spend time writing a screenplay called “Action, Sex And Violence.” Hey, why not, if you’re going to live out your wildest fantasies? Besides, some of the stuff’s not too bad. And that, friends, is a truly happy ending for everybody.

Barbara Pepe

ARTS AND KRAFT

Karen Kraft’s four-octave voice has been described many ways: a powerhouse of sound, industrial strength, gravel in a whiskey bottle. John Hammond Sr., legendary discoverer of Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen, called it the best voice he’d heard since Bessie Smith. In the words of David Letterman, it’s just plain big.

Kraft, a 30-year-old native of Bryan, Texas, is currently putting together*1 her debut album under Hammond’s direction, and knocking ’em dead onstage in Austin, where she’s settled after stints on both coasts. Her singing career is something that’s been anticipated literally all her life. “They took me to a doctor when I was little, because when I cried it was so unnaturally loud that they thought something was really wrong with me. He looked at my throat and said that I had a fully matured vocal cords and larynx, or at least unbelievably large; and that I was going to be a hell of a singer if I was so inclined.” She was eight months old at the time.

Her childhood memories include belting out Elvis Presley songs as a four-year-old in the local high school auditorium, and auditioning for Sir Rudolph Bing of the Metropolitan Opera at eight. She spent her summers in Los Angeles studying voice, and at 19 toured America with an outfit called Head Over Heels. Later in New York, Carla Bley got her work on Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports LP; and she played clubs with Chris Spedding and Asbury Juke Rusty Cloud. Other gigs have included voiceovers for Ford, McDonald’s, and Polaroid and singing “Black Boys” in the movie version of Hair.

A friend arranged for her to meet Hammond. “I sang for him in his office on 57th Street with Rusty Cloud playing, and it was an awesome experience. Mr. Hammond is, above all, the world’s greatest audience. He responds to every nuance. When I finished he said all sorts of wonderful things like, 'You’re the best singer I’ve heard since Bessie Smith, where did you come from, where did this voice come from...’ I asked him one time if there was anything in particular he wanted me to listen to. He said, ‘I don’t want you to listen to any contemporary singer, you’ve got nothing to gain by that.’ He told me the only people he thought I should listen to were gospel singers ala Mahalia Jackson, who I’d already been listening to for years.”

Now she’s finally getting those distinctive pipes on vinyl, with a little help from Cloud and some of Austin’s finest musicians. But

how does a diminutive, blonde, one-time debutante explain being born with a sonic boom of a blues voice? “Somewhere out there, there’s a six-foot-tall, three-hundred-

pound black woman with a high, squeaky voice,” she surmises, “I got hers by mistake.”

Thomas Anderson