The principal singer and keyboardist of the KBC Band, Marty Balin and Tim Gorman, look, respectively, like Vidal Sassoon after a rough week and the bank teller you see picking his nose behind the “Business” section of USA Today on the bus to work every morning. And after them, it’s all downhill.

Over on stage right, you’ve got a guitarist Mark "Slick” Aguilar, who has both one of the three or four worst haircuts in rock today and a moustache that somehow accentuates the haircut’s unsightliness. He is wearing an ugly sweater that does nothing to conceal his overweightness. And a short dangling earring.

At stage right, you’ve got a saxophonist Keith Crossan, who seems to have more gaps than teeth. In the middle, from the old Jefferson Airplane, you’ve got Jack Casady and the ludicrous Paul Kantner, both of whom—how can we be kind about this, especially now that the same’s been said of ourselves?—look their age, which must be pretty close to 50 by the time this is published, (it was my impression that the zany Casady, expecting the Age of Aquarius to last longer than he would, had gotten a headband tattoo in those zany ’60s. If this wasn’t a hoax, why the heck is it no longer visible?)

It’s this column’s own belief, we pause to note, that Paul Kantner’s the most ludicrous guy in rock ’n’ roll outside of heavy metal. It never thinks of him without thinking too of Rolling Stone’s entirely apt review of his first “solo” album. Blows Against The Empire. “Less ‘blows,’ ” the reviewer sniffed, “than flung handfuls of soggy oatmeal.” This column firmly believes him to be the worst songwriter in rock, his lyrics being strings of political slogans and sci-fi inanities and his music nearly non-existent—one doesn’t sing a Kantner song, but rather declaims it. But don’t take this column’s word for it. Instead, trust your own ears the next time you hear KBC’s most-played song, “America,” an orgy of overstatement and bluster.

Finally, behind and above the rest of the KBC Band, you’ve got Darrell Verdusco, who’s a wonderful drummer, the perpetrator of one fat, authoritative beat, but who you’d swear was a pro wrestler, what with his armfuls of greasy black curls, idiotic earring, and vast corpulence.

I’m pretty sure that, if you don’t count such Southern guitar armies as 38 Special—which we won’t, for the purpose of being able to say the following=r-there hasn’t been an uglier American rock ’n’ roil group since the early Mothers, who were striving with all their might for the effect (and at least two of whose members Verdusco looks exactly like). Behold the bitter fruits of having hired a bunch of sidemen solely on the basis of their torrid chops (that is, dexterity on their instruments), without any regard to how they’d look together onstage!

It is this column’s view, of course, that, to paraphrase Billy Crystal’s Fernando, it is as important to look good as to play good.

To look good, note with great care, isn’t necessarily to look like one of Duran Duran, but rather to look like one’s self. We are reminded of the very voguish Zen-via-sports concept of Staying Within One’s Self— whereby, for instance, a six-foot point guard won’t try to dunk over Manute Bol, but will conduct himself on the court in accordance with an understanding of his own limits. The second he sticks an earring of the sort he wore at the KBC gang’s MTV Spring Break show in his ear and asks his audience to perceive him as a rockstar, Mark “Slick” Aguilar gets out of himself, betrays his failure to perceive himself as an overweight guy with a bad haircut and a funny moustache.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule, as witness C.C. DeVille of the appalling Poison and Steve Stevens of Billy Idol having managed to pass themselves off as garden variety androgynous rockstars in spite of preposterous oversized snouts that you’d have thought would have doomed them to careers in something far from the public eye, like word processing, say, or chartered public accountancy.

We find Poison appalling because they’re the most conspicuous current embodiment of the idea that to be a rockstar is to be a misogynistic (don’t look it up: woman-hating) brat. But as depressed as we are by yet another group of this sort (Motley Crue and Kiss being others) having made it so big, we’re even more heartened by the megasuccess of Bon Jovi—yes, the selfsame Bon Jovi that as recently as 18 months ago we were referring to as a loathsome excrescence.

We changed our mind mostly because the group has so extensively overhauled its pose. Back in its loathsome excrescence days, they presented themselves, to paraphrase Gregg Turner’s wonderful review in these very pages, essentially as the owners of The Cocks That’ll Save The World. Now, of course, they deal most conspicuously (as in “Living On A Prayer”) in slightly shopworn Springsteenisms, in celebrations of the Bravery of the Working Class and so on. They wear actual smiles, rather than their former pouts or aren’t-we-bitchen smirks. And Jon Himself has vigorously and tirelessly repudiated his edict against nonsexbombs in their videos to the extent that we expect any day for them to release one in which he’ll yank a plain, under-made-up factory girl out of the audience to dance with him during the sax solo at the end.

As I do, you may well get the impression that the BJs apt to discard their Brucian world view and good vibes as casually as they might change their earrings. But we still find it terribly heartening that an act at least pretends its hearts are in the right place should have sold nine trillion copies of its latest album when it could so easily have been Ratt or Cinderella or another of the new crop of photogenic cocks-that’ll-savethe-world types instead.

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But back to Paul Kantner. Many years ago, after I vilified Jefferson Starship’s Burnout At Ground Zero, or whatever it was called, in the pages of a major metropolitan newspaper for being equal parts Foreigner imitations, Pink Floyd imitations, and Kantner’s most dizzyingly idiotic sci-fi stuff to that point, the group’s publicist—and his Significant Other of the time—phoned me. “The group considers this the best album of their 15-year career,” she informed me in a bruised voice. “Was it something personal that made you say those awful things about it?”

The band’s 15-year career indeed! Kantner, in fact, was the only remaining original member of the band, which had just hired Mickey Thomas and a bunch of longhaired journeymen named Moe. Such gall.

When I think of calls from record biz publicists, though, it’s Connie de Nave of whom I think with the greatest amusement, for when it comes to gall, none could compare.

One night in the early ’70s, she phones to try to persuade me to come see this new group called Mama Lion, whose only three claims to fame will be that lead singer Lynn Carey has enormous breasts and pretends to suckle a lion cub on the cover of the group’s debut album. “She’s a lot like Janis Joplin,” Con tells me, “except with better pipes.” At the time, this is roughly equivalent to a modern publicist phoning to describe a new client as “a lot like Bruce Springsteen, but with more passion and energy.”

“Hey,” I tell Con, “I don’t know, you know?”

She adopts a wounded tone. “John,” she says, “hey. You won’t drop by the Whiskey for 10 minutes for an old friend?” We had never even met. How could I say no?

The Whiskey’s SRO. Connie stands right in front of me. At one point, she steps backward, and impales my Converse-hightop-clad foot with her stiletto heel. She doesn’t say, “My God, are you all right, dear fellow? Let me buy you a cognac while the pain subsides.” Indeed, she doesn’t even say, “Oops, sorry.” Assuming that I’m just another of the riff-raff who’ve wandered in for a gawk at the Carey cleavage, what she says to her Old Friend is nothing at all.

And there are those who think being a rock critic’s easy.

Listen. What I said about Tim Gorman at the beginning? None of it was true, not a syllable. He’s a fine-looking guy, and probably a very nice one too. I owe him—and you, the reader—my sincere apologies. Sometimes I just don’t know what comes over me. But I have a theory.