NEWS BEATS

NEWS BEATS

Paul Kelly & The Messengers, Royal Crescent Mob, Julie Brown, The Drbogs

AUSSIE GOSSIP

“I have this theory that Fats Domino invented ska music,” Paul Kelly says, struck either by a wave of brilliance or jetlag or, most likely, both. (Or perhaps a subconscious memory of Paul McCartney once expounding the same theory—Ed.) “You can hear it in his right hand. In the West Indies, they obviously would have been picking up New Orleans radio stations, so the guitarists in Jamaica must have picked up on Fats Domino’s right hand to get that short beat. Ever notice that?”

Perhaps it was Kelly’s undesired sobriety that led to this revelation. Tapping his fingernails—still caked with Australian dirt—on a tabletop, it’s clear that he’s disappointed. He and his band, the Messengers, have been in America less than 24 hours and they’ve already learned—the hard way—that' L.A. bars close at the unforgivably early hour of two a.m. But already he’s feeling better because he’s only a Tijuana taxi honk away from the office of his childhood idol, Herb Alpert. As fate would have it, Kelly’s latest album, Gossip, is on Alpert’s A&M Records.

Still, the ska comment is a bit odd coming from a man who fronts an aggressive rock band from Oz, draws comparisons to Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, quotes 19th century poets and has been called a “monotonal bard” himself. “That’s become a running joke between us,” grins Kelly as his keyboardist Peter Bull chuckles at the notion. “Using ‘Void le temps des assassins’ in a song is a bit pretentious, but it depends how you use it, how it fits.”

Kelly copped that line from French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and unexpectedly placed it in “The Execution,” Gossip’s most blazing guitar track. Clever, sometimes subliminal nods to Baudelaire, Cezanne, Howlin’ Wolf and even the Ronettes are hidden in Kelly’s songs, hinting that the soft-spoken guitarist is no chowderhead. “I’m not really trying to put artistic references into my songs, it just sneaks in. Songs are a completely different thing from literature. I try to write good dumb songs.”

Spike Jones he isn’t. There’s nothing dumb about any of the 15 tracks (17 on CD and 24 on the Australian version) on his incredibly literate and powerful U.S. debut. “Incident On South Dowling” is a harrowing tale of heroin addiction, “Before The Old Man Died” is a double-edged story of patricide/revolutionary overthrow, and “The Execution” is about an Apocalypse Nowstyled assassination. Is this guy obsessed with death or what?

“Yeah, that’s fair to say—I’m Irish,” he offers in a clear Aussie twang. “It’s a particularly Irish trait to be obsessed with failure and death. Also, it’s quite Australian because our biggest public holiday is in celebration of Gallipoli, which was a total military disaster.”

Similarly, Kelly treats his serious songs lightly by using lilting melodies and lively, hard arrangements as a counterpoint. If that weren’t the case, the suicide rate might have escalated alongside the rise of Gossip’s first single, “Darling It Hurts,” a scorching dance cut about a guy who discovers his gal’s a hooker.

“I love being schizophrenic! With sad lyrics you don’t necessarily have to do it in a minor key with a slow beat. That’s the thing about this band. A lot of the songs are sad songs, but the band is a rock ’n’ roll band, and rock ’n’ roll is fun to play.”

Kelly and company demonstrated just that this past fall on their tour with Crowded House. (“This is our second international tour,” he deadpans. “The first was New Zealand.”) Ironically, the six Caucasians who comprise the Messengers were originally called “the Coloured Girls”—you know, as in the Lou Reed line “And the colored girls go ‘Doo, doo doo...’ ’’—but Kelly didn’t want to explain the name for the rest of his life: missing the joke, rumors of racism had begun.

Not that he has anything against rumors, mind you. Quite the contrary. “The songs come from gossip, from talk. Things that are really important—life and death things—are actually mundane, everyday things. In the negative sense, gossip trivializes everything, but the strength of gossip is that it also equalizes your problems and crises. You’re just the same as everybody else. You’re part of someone else’s rumor.”

Rumor has it that you haven’t heard the last of Paul Kelly & The Messengers. Long live schizophrenia.

Vicki Arkoff

TUNA FUNK

It seems nobody in the Royal Crescent Mob really expected the favorable response that has greeted their debut LP, Omerta. And, actually, one could be forgiven for wondering whether a disc so unapologetically happy-sounding (a funk record without synthesizers, no less!) could ever find a niche in an age when wearing black and singing about suicide is considered cool. But there it is: when the needle hits the groove on side one, the first sound you hear is a nasty electronic hum coming from a messed-up guitar amp. So, naturally, you already realize this is going to be a great record, an unvarnished, unruly party on wax—no cute stuff, just a power trio playing funk (a thinking person’s Red Hot Chili Peppers, if you will) with a frontman mouthing streams of free-association jive about how love and tunafish don’t mix, and how this red telephone won’t ring.

They’re from Columbus, Ohio, formed in the fall of ’85. Before Omerta came out, they were basically just a bar band playing gigs in Columbus, Cincinatti and occasionally Louisville, with a few side trips to New York. Says singer David Ellison: “We’d been doing three sets a night up until we started touring. That’s why we know so many covers. In that area, you’re a bar band. The bar stays open till two, and they want the band on till two ’cause they’re selling liquor and that’s where they make their money. So you play three sets. We got real tight that way.”

The Mob began working on Omerta before their deal with the Celluloid label materialized. They recorded the LP under slightly unusual circumstances. Explains drummer Carlton Smith: “There was this music workshop, and they had this deal. You could record for free if you wanted to be guinea pigs for the students at the workshop. So we recorded a couple of songs, and we had a little bit of time left, on till two cause they’re selling liquor and that’s where they make their money. So you play three sets. We got real tight that way.”

The song was “Love And Tunafish.” “Actually, the words on that weren’t even set words at the time,” says Ellison. “That was done in one take in the studio, and, on the record, you hear cue signals all over it. It’s only because nobody in-the band knew what the heck we were doing. I mean, we just had five minutes of tape left, and we said, we’re gonna try this, and that’s what came out of it. The tape ran out at the end of it.”

Since the album’s release, the Mob has been touring pretty continuously. How do these guys like the change of direction their lives have taken? “I don’t think any of us knew what to expect,” says Ellison. “We’re just trying to figure out how you get the mildew smell out of the van right now.”

Renaldo Migaldi

PORKY PIG’S IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

“I mean, look at my house. It’s like Little House In The Valley. But there’s kooky things here, too—like Porky Pig with Jesus and the Virgin Mary out in the backyard.” Comic rocker Julie Brown is making a sweeping gesture that encompasses her entire backyard. “It all just co-exists, and I think that’s what a lot of my humor’s about,” she says. “It’s about how ludicrous it is being normal.”

Julie Brown knows of what she speaks. She may live in a perfectly normal California house, but everything seems just a little bit off-center. This is appropriate for the woman who stunned MTV audiences three years ago with “Homecoming Queen’s Got A Gun.” Brown, it seems, truly has a gift for making the familiar seem strange.

“I am the Valley girl,” states the woman with the picante sauce red hair. “I had sex with bands. I hitchhiked to the beach with five of my girlfriends in the summertime. I

DROOGIES, DON'T CRASH HERE...

What’s it going to be then, O me faithful Droogies? Four hip malchicks who, contrary to the countless jibes of mediocre comedians all over the world, do indeed make sonic journeys to another Stratocastersphere that pay royalties in six months to a year or three, which is how long it’s been since this particular pack of Droogs last laid waste to polyvinylchloride with Stone Cold World, issued on the band’s own Plug ’N’ Socket label and—somewhat incredibly—the foursome’s first album in a career that dates back 14 years.

Sad, but true, O me brothers, but seven years of bad luck before the Chesterfield Kings were first a gleam beneath Greg Prevost’s bangs, vocalist Ric Albin and his lifelong companion Roger Clay walked out of Rockin’ Ronnie Weiser’s House of Elvis/living room/recording studio having waxed perhaps the first American independent punk-rock single, a double A-sided cover of the Sonics’ baby boomer “He’s Waitin’ ” b/w a stoop-down, baby workout on the Shadows Of Knight’s dimestore Dylantaunt “Light Bulb Blues.” Bow down to ’em on Sunday for that alone.

A dozen years, seven bass players and eight drummers later, the Droogs catalog had expanded to another eight singles and an EP, including such leathercoated myndfryers as the snarling “Set My Love On You,” the snotty “Ahead Of My Time” (covered by the equally semi-legendary Psycotic Pineapple) and the soaring “Only Game In Town.” Copies of these were said to fetch $150 (American) on the international collector’s market until they were anthologized on a German import LP last year. S-ER-l-O-U-S psychodaisies will find the disc well worth the Deutschmarks.

By the tyme these ageless wonders hammered out Stone Cold World, the rhythm section had solidified around the addition drove my VW through the science building of my high school. I was even a homecoming princess—I really was!”

And now, Julie Brown is Trapped In The Body Of A White Girl. In a backwards manner, Brown got herself signed to Sire Records (“Home Of Madonna. Now that I’m on the label, I’ll bet she’s scared!”) by selling a screenplay entitled Earth Girls Are Easy to Warner Brothers Films. Though the picture eventually ended up with DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, Sire decided they wanted to hang on to what they had. So what kind of background could turn this seemingly normal young girl into the rock comic of today? What kind of influences are hidden in her secret past?

“I wanted to be Gidget and have Moondoggie and go to the beach with my friends, have wienie roasts and dance in my bikini,” she explains. “I mean, isn’t that what you want to be when you watch of onetime Dream Syndicate hitman Dave Provost on bass and former Little Girls stickman Jon Gerlach on tubs. Produced by Earle Mankey, knob-twiddler to the likes of everyone from Helen Reddy to Concrete Blonde, the album showcased the Droogs’ new, streamlined moderne approach to punkadelic blues and pulled down enough college radio airplay to land the quartet its first European tour, where the Droogs’ live renditions of such thunderhead-on-the-horizon numbers as “A Change Is Gonna Come” and the title track inspired headlines that (translated from Swedish) read: “Throw yourself against the wall, Led Zeppelin!”

When Wall Street didn’t jump, the Droogs went to work on a follow-up, Kingdom Day, again produced by Earle Mankey at his world-famous New Voodoo Room, and the band’s first recording to be issued on anything resembling a major label, namely PVC records, tapes & compact discs.

On sonic evidence, it was worth the weight. From the spiraling guitarline and those movies? I know it’s profoundly affected me.

“Gidget and Barbie. Those were my major influences. I was very into Barbie when I was growing up—I had the dream house, the car and all the Barbie relatives. Skipper, Ken, Melanie, Todd, even Malibu Barbie. And the best thing is when you start to make your Barbie have sex. Of course, once you start making your Barbie have sex, you really stop being interested in Barbie.”

From there, Brown moved on to real boys. But it was her need to release tension that finally pushed her over the edge into comedy. After one semester as a science major in San Francisco, Brown packed it in and headed home to L.A. to study acting.

“When everyone started thinking they were Meryl Streep, that’s when I decided things were getting too serious. It was then that I started really concentrating on the humor.” Cinemascopic solos on “Stranger In The Rain” and the “Don’t Fear The Reaper” rendolence of “Webster Field” to the aciddipped, apocalyptic suburban scenarios of “Countdown To Zero” and the title tune, this album is as solid as the town of Bedrock itself.

If U2, R.E.M., the Smiths and Television rest comfortably alongside Them, the Yardbirds, the Lollipop Shoppe and the Chocolate Watch Band in your record collection, then put in the boot and grab the loot, for within this gag of broovies lie the secrets of the luniverse that have kept these flamin’ Droogies rockin’, rollin’, stompin’ ’n’ strollin’ on (stroll on) ’til your 19th Nervous Breakdown comes in colors like Marianne Faithfull in the throes of a psychedelic milk-chocolate bar orgasm somewhere between the “Star Spangled Banner” and the EBS test signal that tells us all what to do should kingdom come come Kingdom Day, O me brothers, I was cured.

Don Waller

After trying stand-up comedy as a solo act and as part of the Texas Chainsaw Relay Team improv group, Brown turned to music and finally found her niche. From then on, it was just a matter of refining her craft.

In the meantime, she also did some guest shots on TV shows, including The Jeffersons (“I played a punk with spiked hair”) and The Bob Newhart Show. When someone suggested she write a treatment for one of her songs, she added “screenwriter” and “movie star” to her list of credentials.

Though the forthcoming Earth Girls stars Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, Brown will be seen at the Curl Up & Dye Beauty Salon dispensing advice. Although she was originally slated to be the film’s star, Brown has adjusted to her supporting role concentrating on a new LP, as well as the songs she wrote for the movie’s soundtrack.

Holly Gleason