NEW BEATS

NEW BEATS

Do YOU WANT A MAN OF STEEL?

Backstage, after a show, Peter Case is talking baseball. The game is one of Case’s passions: he tells of his recent visit to Cooperstown and zealously endorses a book he’s been reading on the road, Philip Roth’s excellent “history” of the Patriot Baseball League, The Great American Novel. He says he’s got an almost-finished tune called “The Baseball Song,” which he plays after some urging. It’s fairly hilarious, being about an emigre from Cuba (“Where they don’t play pro ball no more”) who has long-ball power (“He hits ’em in the cheap seats where you can’t buy a beer”). The six or seven people backstage applaud, and Peter Case is pleased.

This is Case’s life now; he’s a folkie. And he simply loves to play, whether it’s in front of seven or 7,000. He travels our country, often quite alone, with his Gibson J45 and a handful of harmonicas, playing record stores and live radio shows and small clubs and, every so often, opening outdoor concerts for Jackson Browne. And having a helluva good time.

Case is the former leader of L.A.’s ill-fated Plimsouls, who—despite two fine albums— faded after 1983’s Everywhere At Once. When asked if people remember him from the band, the myopic 32-year-old laughs, “Not a whole bunch; I hope not.”

Undoubtedly he hopes they’re buying Peter Case, his solo album. Produced by TBone Burnett—excuse me, the credits read J. Henry Burnett—the album’s a twangin’ pleaser, from the fuck-rock-’n’-roll “Steel Strings” to “Icewater” (where Case laid his own lyrics on a scorching Lightning Hopkins song “called ‘Tell Me Mama’ or Tell Me, Pretty Mama’ or something”) to the ominous “Walk In The Woods,” a walk from which kids and young lovers never return, and a song Case says took him about five minutes to write.

As to what turned Case into a solo/acoustic musician, perhaps nothing sums it up as well as his own description of “Steel Strings”: “I think, originally, you get in this band and all you want to do is make a record or get a gig—you really don’t know any better. So you sign this record contract and everybody goes out and celebrates at a hamburger joint. Then you go out on tour, you tour for about six years, you come back and you haven’t made any money because a bunch of different managers, people like that, took off with the money and other people just ‘lost’ some. And you’re back in town, the I.R.S. calls you up because it looks like you made a bunch of money because you had this big record out, but actually you were lucky if you had enough to pay your rent. They want to repossess your car, and the thing about your car is you moved it somewhere, but it doesn’t run because you can’t get it fixed. You’re waiting to get another gig to get enough money to do that. So, finally, at the end of the whole thing, your life is completely screwed up.” Much laughter.

This from a man who describes Peter Case as “my most hopeful effort to date.”

At the same time he admits: “It’s actually like some sort of miracle that the record came out.” And it was. Contracted to Geffen from his band days, the company alter-

nately enthused and balked at releasing the LP. “More than half of the stuff was finished in the first month,” says Case. “Back in May of 1985 or something, man.”

Now, the company is behind him—but what the hell, they’re also behind his wife, Victoria Williams, who co-wrote a couple of songs on the album and is about to record her own LP for Geffen. Williams and Case have, on occasion, gone onstage with Warren Klein (ex of The Fraternity Of Man) and Gurf Morlix (both play on Peter Case) as The Incredible Strung-Out Band. “It didn’t catch on in a big way,” Case admits, adding he might like to try it again. But, aside from some European dates with Williams, he expects to be onstage alone, plying his tunes of baseball and JFK and small town mass murder.

“I just wanted to put more of what I really loved into the music I was playing,” he says. “Learn how to play the things I really love and how to play for people. And, as I got more into that, I began to realize that every career decision I’ve ever made has been completely wrong.” More laughter.

From the album and his live show, it’s pretty clear Case has made at least one exemplary career decision. He recalls reading the newspaper when he was in Ft. Worth, recording his album: “There was this headline that Bruce Springsteen’s passed along this rock ’n’ roll lifestyle to a new generation, y’know? And all we gotta say is ‘Thanks.’ Thank you, thank you, thank you. The rock ’n’ roll lifestyle is just so horrible, man.”

Have fun.

John Kordosh

JEAN BEAUVOIR: THE DUDE JAMS, MAN

After gaining notoriety as a member of the Plasmatics, Jean Beauvoir needed to get away from things: from thrash metal white noise, from exploding Cadillacs and televisions, from chainsaws...from civilization as we know it. So he went to Sweden.

“It’s totally away from everything,” says Beauvoir. “I have a little place where it’s quiet and relaxing, where it’s not fast. I can isolate myself there. There’s like one radio station and two television channels and I haven’t watched those in a year. There’s no influence, nothing, and that really let me find myself.”

It also let Beauvoir, whose appearance hardly suggests the retiring, blend-into-thewoodwork type he actually is, find time to compose, produce and record entirely solo an album which he delivered ready-made to Columbia Records, Drums Along The Mohawk. But only after playing a mean game of contractual Chinese checkers did Beauvoir, who has also worked with a diverse cast ranging from the Ramones to Kiss to Little Steven Van Zandt to Nona Hendryx to Gary U.S. Bonds, finally find his own name etched in vinyl.

“It’s hard enough getting a deal and getting people to believe in you,” says the bemohawked self-contained band, “but it was especially hard coming from the Plasmatics, which wasn’t exactly the most musical band. When I left and tried to get a solo deal, people didn’t want to hear about it. They said, ‘Blow up a motorcycle, do anything, but don’t try to sing.’ We had no respect musically. But what happened was that I was signed to Virgin in Europe and I presented a finished product to CBS and they loved it. This (record deal) might not have happened otherwise.”

Not that CBS had much to worry about; Drums Along The Mohawk is hardly music to drive a caddy off a dock to. It’s safe, contempo-dance rock, keyboard-dominated and not provocative in the least. It is, however, well produced, has a bit o’ bite and a host o’ hooks, and managed to land at least one catchy ’nuff single on the charts in “Feel The Heat,” thanks to a play in Sly Stallone’s Cobra film.

All a very long way from the Plasmatics, yeah, but even further removed from the gig Beauvoir held prior to joining Wendy O. and her destructive friends. “I sang with the ’50s doo-wop group the Flamingos for awhile,” Beauvoir remembers with a chuckle. “I saw them and went backstage to tell them I liked them and then they called me. Their lead singer was leaving and they were looking for someone young to join, ’cause they were all like 50. So there I was, 16 years old, and a week later I was in a tuxedo twice my size singing ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ to middle-aged women. It was wild.”

Looking for something different after that, Beauvoir spotted an ad for a bass opening in the ’matics. “That was extreme,” he agrees in defining that band’s shtick. “But to me it was theatrical, not musical. I saw us as actors onstage. I was a character in a group. It was a lot of work being in that group: we rehearsed a lot. The band was actually pretty straight in what we did.”

When the band split up, the problems began. “Nobody figured I could play,” Beauvoir complains. But then Little Steven heard him “and he realized I could sing and play,” so Beauvoir joined Van Zandt’s Disciples of Soul, staying for two-and-a-half years. Beauvoir didn’t necessarily go for the political bent of Van Zandt’s songs—“I have different views of what music’s purposes are”—but, he says, “I supported Steven 100 percent in what he did.”

A series of outside collaborations after that climaxed with Beauvoir’s co-writing (“Bonzo Goes To Bitburg”) and producing for the Ramones (their latest LP, Animal Boy). “Maybe because I came from the Plasmatics we got along,” he says. “I understood what they were trying to do. The Ramones don’t want hits, they just want to sound like the Ramones.”

But by that time, Beauvoir wanted to sound like himself, so he returned to Sweden and finished his album at Abba’s studio there. It’s out, it’s selling, he’s happy, and he spent the summer touring with Eurythmics.

OK, so much for the music. Now, on to the important stuff: What’s with the hair, Jean?

“Oh, that,” he shrugs. “I mean, yeah, I guess a black guy with a blond Mohawk is kind of an abnormal thing. But I’ve had it for eight years and I wouldn’t even know what to do without it now. I decided not to put my picture on the album cover though, because I don’t wanna shove it down people’s throats; I don’t wanna be a fashion show and be forgotten in a year.”

Does it ever cause problems?

“No, it’s real easy to keep.”

No, I mean do you ever get beat up by rednecks or anything like that? “In Europe people don’t give you a hard time. They’ll only say something if they like the way you look. Only in America will they let you know if they don’t like it.”

Yeah, only in America.

Jeff Tamarkin

THE LEVEL MADE ME DO m

After several years of comfortable overseas success, the British pop-jazz-funkrock quartet Level 42 has finally cracked the stateside bigtime with the sleek car-radio single ‘‘Something About You,” from their seventh LP (and third U.S. release) World Machine.

Bassist/frontman Mark King (who began his musical life as a drummer) and brothers Boon and Phil Gould (guitarist and drummer/lyricist, respectively) met as teenagers on their native Isle of Wight, sharing a taste for American jazz and fusion discs. But the three didn’t play together until 1980, when they hooked up in London and formed Level 42 with keyboardist/vocalist Mike Lindup.

World Machine’s concise, tune-oriented pop approach is the result of a concerted effort to shift Level 42’s emphasis from techno-muso overkill to accessible songcraft. ‘‘We worked a lot more on the melodic and vocal side of it, which maybe we were guilty of not working so hard on in the past,” says Lindup. ‘‘We’re now thinking as songwriters, whereas before we thought as musicians who just happened to write songs.”

King admits that upgrading the combo’s commercial stock was a consideration in their recent self-reappraisal. ‘‘We all sat down together, and we decided that it would be nice to reach a much wider audience. And the way to achieve that was to come up with better songs, and records that would give us a chance in America, because for the last five years nobody in America had been interested in any of our stuff.

“I know that sounds very callous and calculated, but nobody can really sit down and write a hit record. All you can do is make records that could more obviously be hits. You have to do things that are perhaps more blatant, and yet you’ve got to do it in such a way that you can still look at yourself in the mirror. There are ways of doing it and keeping your credibility, and I think we did.”

In addition to tightening their musical focus, Level 42 altered their management situation with an eye towards the American market, trading original manager John Gould (Boon and Phil’s older brother) for the well-connected Paul Crockford, who also works with Tears For Fears. They also chose, to take a more active role in the making of their records, co-producing World Machine with their longtime studio cohort, keyboardist Wally Badarou.

‘‘He’s like a spiritual member of the band,” Lindup says of Badarou. ‘‘He’s written and played with us from our very first single in 1980. He’s always been there in our recording process, although he doesn’t play live with us—not yet, anyway.”

For their belated U.S. touring debut a few months back (which coincided with the Top 10 ascension of ‘‘Something About You”), Level 42, long a popular concert draw in Britain and Europe, went back to playing in clubs. “We’re playing the same venues here that we were playing in England four years ago,” says Lindup, “and we’ve had to prove ourselves all over again.”

“It was kind of a culture shock,” adds

King, “but I think it was good for us, because we really had to tighten our belts, and put up or shut up. Our audiences at home always get really crazy, but in America people didn’t really know anything about the band. They sort of sat there saying, ‘We’re waiting for “Something About You.” In the meantime, what are you gonna do?’

“We didn’t try to bullshit anybody. We just said, ‘Listen, we have seven albums out, and here’s an hour and a half’s worth of music from those seven albums. But we were so nervous that we managed to play an hour and a half’s worth of music in an hour and fifteen minutes.”

Though his speedy, thumb-slapping bass technique has won him respect from other musicians and awe from impressionable young air-guitarists, King (who released a solo album in 1984 and plans to record another soon) is more interested in writing

memorable songs than he is in being lionized for his instrumental prowess. ‘‘You might get a lot of attention as a player for a while, but there’s always gonna be someone else who’ll come along and take that attention away. But a great song is always gonna sound great. And if you’re a good musician—and this band has its fair share of them—then you want to do what’s best for the song.”

Harold DeMuir

ASK NOT WHAT

When a band calls itself Nu Shooz, the first thing you might want to do upon meeting them is check out their feet. This is what I did, anyway. If you’re wondering, guitarist and songwriter John Smith wore sneakers and wife/frontperson/singer Valerie Day, sandals. Neither wore socks, though. It was hot that day.

The second thing you do with Nu Shooz is ask them about their current tour. It’s going well, except for the heat, which I just mentioned (98 deg#ees), and, as it happened, the club they’d be playing at that night had—you guessed it—no A/C. Then you ask about their being married. Mistake. They don’t enjoy being asked about that. “The only problem with being married is that interviewers ask us about it too much,” John says. “Because we’re musicians and not just married. And it’s not the only writing angle. In fact, what’s really going on here is that we’ve had a band for seven years— and it’s beyond being married, because we like to keep that separate from our involvement in the music business. Val has her own last name, her own identity. We’re married, but we’re different people; we have different involvements in this project.”

Asking about Madonna is acceptable, since Val’s voice sounds a bit like hers, but you’ll want to avoid asking Nu Shooz about Prince. And Teena Marie. “Don’t ask me about Prince. Prince can get his own interview,” John says. “There’s all these bands imitating Prince. If you’ll notice, Nu Shooz has a certain style. It’s our own.”

Well, John, I’m afraid to ask—what is your style? “Urn, it’s us.” OK, anything else you might want to add to that? “It’s what comes out at the end of the chain. I’m sitting in the basement and I’m trying to be as funky as I can be. One magazine in England called our style ‘Hip-Hop-Latin-Noise-Pop.’”

Nu Shooz’s style of success came backwards. Sort of. John moved from L.A. to Oregon when he was 19, with three dollars in his pocket, and hooked up with Valerie—who was 15 at the time—and eventually wrote “I Can’t Wait.” That same song soon became big in Oregon and Washington’s dance clubs. Initially, though, record companies were skeptical of signing the band. “Besides, we didn’t have blue hair,” John figures. Radio airplay in Oregon helped get the single on a disco compilation that went out to 1,000 DJs. One ended up in Holland, where the track was remixed. It didn’t fare well there, but came back and went wild in New York.

Next came the Record Deal. “A delivery boy at Atlantic Records—he’s since been given an office—noticed the single selling like crazy, so he mentioned it to the record company. We came from there to becoming #1 on the dance charts, #1 on the black charts and then it started to go pop after all that. It got on the pop charts and we were just blown away. Somebody at the record company said ‘Well, I hope it doesn’t get stuck in the ’60s, where all the dance records get stuck,’ and so I was biting my nails through the ’60s, then the ’20s; we got to #11 and I didn’t care about #1, I just vyanted to go Top 10. So, then nine, and I said Thank you, I’ll be good.’”

Nu Shooz’s new video for “Point Of No Return” should be on MTV right about now. It features Val and John being swarmed by hundreds of pairs of shoes. It’s a cute little video. Next up is another album, but that won’t be ’til next year. They need time to collect their thoughts. After all this happened so fast. By the way, their first album is called Poolside—I should mention that.

One last question for John: does he like heavy metal?

Bingo! He loves Ozzy and Van Halen!

Glad I asked.

Joanne Carnegie