NEW BEATS

NEW BEATS

Mason Ruffner • Young Fresh Fellows • Fuzzbox • Curiosity Killed The Cat Carmaig de Forest • Primitons

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Mason Ruffner moved from Fort Worth to New Orleans some 10 years ago. "I was looking for some inspiration,” he says—in fact, he was thinking about becoming a poet or a novelist before getting back into his first love, music. He played Bourbon Street clubs six hours a day and slowly built a reputation that eventually drew such admirers as Jimmy Page, Robbie Robertson and Bruce Springsteen.

Ruffner landed a record deal in the spring of 1985, and his debut disc, Mason Ruffner, was critically acclaimed but didn’t do much to dent the charts. Ruffner spent much time touring, including opening gigs for the Firm and the Hooters, before returning to the studio in late 1986 with roots enthusiast Dave Edmunds to produce Gypsy Blood, an album that assimilates Ruffner’s raw, honkytonk roots into a slicker, though no less powerful, modern sound.

“My first album is just a reflection of what I’d worked up to in bars for years,” Ruffner says, sitting backstage before an opening slot for the Beach Boys. “The sound wasn’t much different than what I played live. It was a big challenge and a big opportunity for me to work with Dave Edmunds and have the budget that we needed to make a good album,” he continues, “so I put myself under a lot of pressure to do my best.

“I think I progressed,” he adds. “Gypsy Blood is more me than the first one, where I was still searching for different things. It was just a combination of songs I used to sing in bars.”

As for Edmunds’s production, which includes a generally tasteful use of modern technology, Ruffner says, “There’s nothing taken away from any of the rawness or the edge or the haunting sound of whatever we’ve got going there. I think it’s just being enhanced.” In rock ’n’ roll, Ruffner notes, “there should be no rules. Anybody that says you can’t have synthesizers or strings in rock ’n’ roll is stupid, or they’re not using their intelligence, because there are no rules in this field of music: no ‘can’t or don’t do.’ ”

Gypsy Blood contains a rich sampling of Ruffner’s talents, from the Dylan-meetsHendrix howl of the title track and the tough anger of “Fightin’ Back” and “Ain’t Gonna Get It” to the rollicking honky-tonk of “Baby, I Don’t Care No More” and the unusual, fascinating cadence of “Distant Thunder.”

“That was the last song I wrote for the album,” Ruffner says, “and I haven’t really written a song since then. I think I was starting to get more of what I wanted to be with that song. I think I put poetry to music in that song, where the other ones are trying to tell a story or something. I hope it’s a future indication to the kind of songs I write, where it’s not necessarily important to find the meaning, but there’s a beauty or charisma, or something, coming out in the lyrics, and there’s a hook to it. I’m not looking for the baby-baby-baby type hook; I’m looking for some other kind of charisma.”

Ruffner is a serious student of his music; his discipline has a definitely spiritual content to it, and if there’s one word to describe him (besides the ever-present “lanky”)y it would be intense. He feels that quality and honesty are the most important elements an artist has to offer to his audience, with entertainment and, surprisingly, originality coming in second.

‘‘Being original is a nice added thing,” he says, ‘‘but what’s really important is just how good you are. Just rate me from one to 10, that’s all I really want to hear. I don’t want to write a lot of songs—I’d rather just write a few good ones. Most musicians want to be entertainers, not artists. Entertainment is not my number one goal.”

When he first started playing in bands in Fort Worth, he says, "I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror. We just went out there to try and get the girls and the booze and all that stuff. I was just another teenager. But then something serious started rising out of it; I discovered literature and poetry and a lot of those fake aspirations started dying out. I started seeing the phony side in me and I wanted to be the real thing.”

After that realization set in, he says, ‘‘I tried to make music; I quit trying to make it big. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have aspirations to make a record and get really noticed, but I felt like the only way to do it was just to be better than everybody else. Being good isn’t good enough anymore.”

To that end, Ruffner continues to listen to live tapes, always criticizing and, he says, competing musically with himself. He reads everything from French poets to Greek literature to the Bible, taking copious notes which he refers to when writing songs, always searching to get closer to what he considers “the real thing.” He is, however, aware of the humor in the tension between rock ’n’ roll’s spontaneous passion and his near-religious intensity. Is he a religious person?

“When something real bad happens,” he says, laughing. ‘‘I break up with a girl or something and I’ll start praying, reading my Bible. Then I get things squared away and forget about it. I can just see me when I get in real trouble—I’ll probably turn into a monk or something.”

Karen Schlosberg

FELLOWSHIP

If nothing else, one has to admire the sheer verve of the Young Fresh Fellows. This is a band that, apart from coming up with one of the silliest names in all of rock ’n’ roll, actually takes pride in the fact that they include Chicago’s “Beginnings” in their live set. “I was totally into Chicago,” says lead singer and Ian Hunter lookalike Scott MacCaughey. “I loved their records to death,” adds guitar player Chuck Carroll. The affection stretches so far the band actually added the title “Chicago 19” to the spine of their new LP, The Men Who Loved Music.

The Chicago references are just one of the wacky elements of the Fellows, a band that seems to be a college radio mutant cross between Jonathan Rich man and the Beastie Boys. They hail from Seattle, where they slugged it out for a few years in obscurity recording their first two indie LPs, The Fabulous Sounds Of The Pacific Northwest and Topsy Turvey, in friend Conrad Uno’s basement and releasing them on Uno’s own Popllama label. But the records caught on with college radio and their latest disc finds them on Frontier/Popllama.

The band is also celebrating a recent successful tour opening up for the Replacements and getting rave reviews. The Replacements are, in fact, the Fellow’s biggest fans and, lately, lead Mat Paul Westerberg seems to want to talk more about the Fellows in interviews than his own band.

“We don’t totally understand why he likes us so much,” says MacCaughey, “but, hey, we love it.” Westerberg has even invited the Fellows to play at his upcoming wedding. “We plan a set of all mellow love songs,” says Carroll, “ ‘Muskrat Love’ and the like.”

The Fellows bring their sense of humor to the stage, making their shows events where one might hear anything from “Heart Of Gold” to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Still, though the band pokes fun at everyone, including themselves, what really fuels them are their originals by songwriter MacCaughey. The new LP features “Amy Grant,” a college radio hit about MacCaughey’s lust for the Christian singer. “We had to talk to our lawyers about that one,”

MacCaughey blithely notes. Better yet is “Beer Money,” (found only on the cassette of the new album) another college radio hit that pokes fun at all the sponsorship bands—and goes so far as to name names.

After Westerberg’s wedding, the band plans another East Coast tour and work on their fourth LP. And, though most of their success has been on the East Coast, they don’t plan on moving any time soon.

“We wouldn’t trade Seattle for anything,” says MacCaughey. “Bands are so stupid if they move to New York or L.A. For most of them that just means moving from a nice place in a nice city to living in a dive in a miserable city. Forget it.”

Charles R. Cross

FUZZBOX: GET UP AND USE THEM

Like Old Shep, late of this parish, rock music has gone where the good doggies go. It’s time to find your teenage kicks somewhere else, and, wow, have I got just the place for you. They’re four English women, they’re called We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Going To Use It, and they are the best: as in the greatest pop group in the world right now this second.

At New York’s Ritz, Fuzzbox’s bass is broken, as broken as Jo’s foot. It’s only the second song in the set and Jo looks bemused till Vicki saves the day with a vocal rendition of Presley’s tearjerker “Old Shep” and the rest of Fuzzbox breakout crying and cut up royal. Hard-nosed CREEM critic I. Lababedi is charmed.

Later, Fuzzbox plays their splendiforous, shocking and thorough rewrite of the aging hippie anthem “Spirit In The Sky”, and I’m not only charmed, I’m impressed. Soon comes a Fuzz original: “Shallow Girl,” maybe my fave track on their super, super eponymous debut LP. And I’m charmed, impressed and an absolute believer. Near the end they stand in line, kick up their feet (well, Jo doesn’t) and sing “High Hopes.” I’m laughing hysterically, shaking my head in wonder—and I’m firmly convinced that, in the realm of fun, Fuzzbox are the best band since Madness.

“I don’t understand it,” Magz tells me at a postconcert party. “I mean, I understood it before, but how could anyone have not liked that show?” Apparently, of three critics polled, only one (guess who?) loved them.

It’s a problem that started in England, where their youth, sex and the slanted quirkiness of songs such as “XX Sex” have Fuzzbox slated as exploitable pop novelty girls. That sort of rubbish should have been laid to rest with the LP (as great a debut as I’ve heard), but in this pop life, rife with misconceptions and blinkered sexist attitudes, this is nothing new.

The fact is, Fuzzbox is as truthful as pop can be. They’re fun, not stupid, and the brittle wittiness and sharp insight all over the LP and their live performance is no fakery, no hype, no fucked-over industry feminism. Magz claims that, whik Fuzzbox want to be judged with the big boys, they’re politically motivated simply because they’re four women in a pop group. An oxymoron perhaps, but true.

Anyway, all four women are multiinstrumentalists and as adept musicians as anyone in X-Ray Specs ever were, so they shouldn’t worry about it. I think Fuzzbox are much better than Springsteen, U2 and Simple Minds put together and doubled.

I’m running out of room, not enough room to tell you about my wonderful interview with Fuzzbox. Who cares? Critical accumen be damned, get up and listen (closely) to Fuzzbox: this 30-year-old man sure got his teenage kicks.

Iman Lababedi

MEOWING FOR DOLLARS

England might have never lost the Empire if she’d only listened to her taxi drivers. Here it is, 5 a.m., my time. I’ve just stumbled through Customs and out to the transportation queue at London’s Heathrow. I don’t quite know where I’m going—whoever typed my itinerary up at Polygram Records hasn’t made it clear. I don’t quite know what I’m doing, either—only that Polygram is so eager to spend all of their new Bon Jovi dough that they’ve gone and signed up the trendiest groups in England and can’t wait to tell everybody about it. Why they don’t share the wealth with some good old American bands is a good question—given the weak state of the dollar, they’d probably get more for their money. What hath Jon wrought? Something called Curiosity Killed The Cat, for starters. As I arrive, their debut album is number one on the British charts. Which, other than the fact that they make little girls scream (something the record company hopes I and the other writers they’re flying over with a day’s notice will see for ourselves and return to tell our fellow Yanks what we’ve got here is the new Beatles! Or maybe just the new Duran Duran...) is pretty much all I know. But my taxi driver, who not only figures out where my hotel is, is most helpful when it comes to filling me in as to how Curiosity’s scaled the English charts.

“Curiosity Killed The Cat,” muses the middle-aged London cabbie. “Sure I’ve ’eard of ’em. That singer Ben’s been having an affair with Bob Geldof’s wife, Paula Yates. It’s been in ail the papers. Roight steamy it was, too!”

In the throes of jet lag, I see Def Jam Tshirts and the usual rainbow and spiked hairdos. But Curiosity—have more in common with the pages of GQ than the punks on the street. They don’t go for lipstick, leather, chains or hairspray (did true teen idols ever?). Their coifs are short and carefully clipped. They wear white socks, neat chinos and Levi’s 501 ’s, which, especially after Nick Kamen’s commercials, are the rage here, an expatriate friend explains over dinner. The Simon LeBon-ishly monickered singer, Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot, actually was a model Oust like last week’s Brit teen-throb, Kamen). His head is perpetually covered by a Greek fisherman’s cap, worn backwards. And the band’s name (and first song) flashed in front of him on a Lord Of The Rings video game. Is it any surprise he once played Boy George’s lips in a video?

Much of Curiosity’s appeal is due to the fact that, unlike your standard working class rock hero, Ben and most of the band—Julian, Nick and Miguel(!)—went to public (what we call private) school. Their original following consisted of other privileged twits nightclubbing and recreating a nostalgic version of the American ’60s with their 501 ’s, loafers, white socks and Jackie Wilson, Percy Sledge and Sam Cooke re-issues. They’ve been joined by younger and not-so-privileged twits, desperate for a new British teen pop sensation ever since George Michael’s abdication and Boy George’s fall from grace. What they’ve been given sounds like Georgie Fame updated with Chic bass lines and worked over with lots of horns, synth and girls by Boy George/Simply Red producer and Quincy Jones’s son-in-law, Stewart Levine.

Onstage, Curiosity aren’t nearly as polished as their record. (Then again, after God knows how many albums, Duran Duran still can’t cut it live...) They’re augmented by crack back-up singers, Average White Band’s ex-sax man, Molly Duncan, and a synth player who covered for much of the rhythm section, but were apparently too old and ugly to be given any light. Not that it mattered. Volpelierre-Pierrot, who dances like a very unfunky chicken (a fact that has been miraculously edited out of the band’s surprisingly likeable, lively videos, one of which was Andy Warhol’s last), is much spottier and spindlier than his very photogenic picture image. But from the balcony, he looks poutiiy sensual, like a young Yves Montand. He doesn’t sound like the young Yves Montand, or anyone else with a great deal of character, but what did this audience, mostly young grils who licked ice creams outside before the show, care? When he sings “Misfit,” a mishmosh about a “a crazy sheep noir,” a “sensitive child, running wild,” his husky but nonthreatening voice, a masculine relief from the falsetto queens of late, instantly buzzes their private adolescent crisis hotlines. Then there is his onstage foil, bass player Nick Thorp (whose mother’s a model), who looks like a nicer, blond Matt Dillon, bobbing away with nothing to do but tease and please the crowd since most of his bass work is augmented by the old pro in back. You can’t see the drummer (who played a bit part in An American Werewolf in London) or hear the guitar player, but if you’ve got their pix pinned to your wall, you already know they add up to a fab gorgeous foursome. As manias go, this one’s pretty tame. The screams are not deafening. The security guards pull fainting girls near the stage out of the audience and throw water on them. But their condition seems to be due to the heat and packed quarters.

In real life, these Curiosities have much to learn, too. Julian and Nick are affable chaps who eat baked potatoes and sniffle on the record company’s rooftop, wave to trendy labelmates Swing Out Sister! (next week’s number ones) who are politely posing for photos nearby, and confess to longhaired pasts listening to Jimi Hendrix and Blue Oyster Cult. Miguel doesn’t see why they should have to answer questions about things that everyone in England knew the answers to ages ago. But that’s England. And who’s everyone? How many records did they sell here? About 100,000. When you sell 100,000 records in America, one tries to explain, you’re not number one, you’re lucky if your record company renews your option. Ben and Miguel say they don’t care whether they’re successful in the States. They think the record company should make up a photo and an interview and hand it out to the press.

“There are a lot of things that shouldn’t be thrust on us,” sulks Ben. Chain smoking, tequila slammers and tours whose laminated stage passes encase a condom and the legend “Break In Case Of Emergency” are beginning to coarsen the baby smooth features that graced this winter’s teen mags. Or maybe this is not, as he sings in one of his harmless ditties, an “Ordinary Day,” but a very bad one.

Meanwhile, back in the States, most people say “Whaaaa?” when I tell them what and who I’ve been to see. No one knows what the “Curiosity Killed” on my new Tshirt stands for. Except Eric. He’s just back from England himself, where he hung out with a bunch of privileged twits. Small world isn’t it, some of them even know Monsieur V-P intimately.

“Oh yeah, Curiosity Killed The Cat,” he says. “That’s the guy who’s going out with Bob Geldof’s wife.”

Deborah Frost

D’EM COSMIC UKELELE BLUES

Carmaig de Forest doesn’t look like a subversive. He seems too nice, standing there with a scuffed-up ukelele hanging below his sweet smile and sharp crew cut. He’s a good American white boy if there ever was one.

Or that’s what the good ladies and gentlemen gathered for their high school reunion in conservative Ojai, California, must have thought a couple years back as Carmaig nervously went to the podium with his uke. It had been a solid hour or so of pleasant toasts, and now young Carmaig was to sing some nice little song to break up the action. “Tiny Bubbles,’’ maybe.

Instead, he strummed a few upbeat chords and started singing a little jingle of his own called “Hey Judas.” It starts out as a sort of tongue-in-cheek look at the ultimate fates of such bad guys as Judas, Hitler and Jim Jones, asking, “Whatcha doing down here?”

But the business community leaders began feeling a little warm and tense, as Carmaig and his instrument happily turned to the subject of John Hinckley’s afterlife options since taking a potshot at “a very popular President of the United States/Who was instituting policies based on greed and hate...”

He went on: “You just fired your gun, your bullets merely grazed him/He made jokes on the way to the hospital, you hardly even phased him...”

And just before the microphone cord was ripped from the wall: “I’m not sure that you’re damned, but it’s a damned shame you missed.”

Now sitting at a corner table in his Los Angeles apartment, which is relatively bare and white except for a few pieces of furniture and hundreds of newspapers and album covers scattered everywhere, Carmaig chuckles nervously about the incident at his reunion. “They were pretty upset.”

A couple of other songs on his recent debut album, I Shall Be Released, probably would have had the same effect that night. But despite song titles like “Big Business” and “Crack’s No Worse Than The Fascist Threat,” de Forest is more often dealing with the ridiculous anxiety and friction that inevitably plagues many interpersonal relationships. “I think basically what I’m after is emotional truth,” he says in a dry voice. “I’m not trying to be socially responsible.”

He adds, “Most of my stuff has some kind of anger in it or resentment, and I think that reflects how I feel about the world, even if I’m just singing about a relationship.”

Carmaig’s biting sense of humor and clever wordplay—he’s sort of a wiseacre Lou Reed—makes whatever message he’s communicating that much more acceptable. Just as important is his solid rock ’n’ roll outfit, including producer-guitarist Alex Chilton, pushing him and his pumped-up ukelele along.

“There’s certainly just an element of fun,” de Forest smiles. “I have fun writing the songs. It’s really a kick to put something together like that. It’s a kick to play. It’s what I enjoy doing. Even being confrontative, and being assaultive and being disturbing— that’s all fun, too. It’s a gas, as a matter of fact.”

Steve Appleford

PRMTENACIOUS

The Primitons hail from Birmingham, Alabama, so as logic dictates, their first gig was at a Brooklyn chili ’n’ beer blast back in 1983. As a guest at that fete, I was thrust unsuspecting into Primitonia. I became transfixed by their flair for the rough-hewn pop-tune. I drank a lot of beer. I ate a lot of chili. I can’t stand chili. Well, the long and short of it is, after I saw the Primitons I got sick for three days. Coincidence, you say? Maybe yes, maybe no.

A group for which the “the” is optional, Primitons were bom when guitarist Mots Roden and drummer Leif Bondarenko dragged themselves from the polyester rubble of Birmingham, Alabama’s previous coolest band, Jim Bob & The Leisure Suits. In the past four years, the Primitons have gone through many of the 50 states, an unspecified amount of chili and a multiplicity of guitarists and bass players. “God, hundreds,” Leif says, enumerating Primitons past. “We’ll get everybody together for one reunion gig.”

Mots collaborates on Primiton lyrics with longtime friend Stephanie Truelove Wright. “I’ve been the invisible member. I add very complimentary ideas to his ideas,” she explains, adding with a sardonic Southern sweetness, “I’m shy. I don’t wanna be a star like Mots does.”

In the summer of ’85, Boston’s Throbbing Lobster label released the first Primitons EP, a pop potpourri of early Primitunes and older Jim Bob material. In ’86, their present label, What Goes On, released “Don’t Go Away,” a three-song 12” which served as a mere teaser to their first full-blown LP, Happy All The Time.

The album’s title cut is a Downy-soft pop beaut, with gentle vocals rising out of the mix like the ghosts of the Grassroots. (“It was gonna be about a retarded child,” Mots recalls, “but we changed it. Too depressing.”) “You Are Learning” sets a skittering hypno-riff to a country-lurch beat and “Deception” is a soulful buzz-rocker with a nasty guitar lick that dogs the chorus relentlessly.

Drawing on what Mots calls “a pretty hot subject” in Birmingham is (That’s Why I Forgive the) “Pope,” a dreamy, will o’ the wisp falsetto melody that smoothly transforms into a raw-knuckled rocker. “If he can forgive that guy for shooting him,” Mots reasons, “I can forgive him for causing all these babies to be born in Third World countries and not letting people have birth control and generally screwing up the world.”

The new Primitons recordings are increasingly divided between the hard-rocking and the more country-folk influenced. Still, as Leif Bondarenko puts it, “We’ve basically always wanted to rock— like Twisted Sister.” He reconsiders, laughing, “No, not like Twisted Sister.”

And so the Primitons continue to live in Birmingham as local legends. Looking a bit like a psychedelic lumberjack, barrelchested Mots Roden has little in common with the tousled hair and boyish good looks of his partner Leif. “I’m never gonna be on a major label,” Mots concludes. “I’m too big, I’m too fat, I’m too ugly, I’m too intimidating.”

“I love to go around Birmingham with Mots, because nobody knows what our relationship is,” Stephanie relates amusedly. “And they don’t know what he is. I always feel real safe with him on dark streets.”

When Mots attended a tiny pro-choice rally organized to meet a massive anti-abortion rally in Birmingham, his commitment to the issue wasn’t the only thing on his mind. "I did go to the rally and I did go to be on TV and I got on TV, OK,” he explains with a smile. “I admit it. It was totally self-serving.” The natural question is this: How low is too low for the Primitons to go in their ruthless quest for stardom?

“I think we’ll probably sink pretty low before it’s all over,” Mots observes sarcastically.

But would the Primitons appear in a magazine ad that said, “We’re the Primitons and we’re the NRA?”

“No, we’d never do something like that,” says Mots. Not so low at all.

Drew Wheeler