CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

DEPARTMENTS

POINTING AND LAUGHING

Ron Wood: The Works by Ron Wood with Bill German (Harper & Row)

by Richard C. Walls

Between the lines of the rambling, cheerily shallow, anecdotal text of this self-illustrated bio/ sketch, possibly buried somewhere in Ron Wood’s mind and incapable of being dredged up for articulation, there’s an interesting story. It’s the odyssey of a working class English boy destined to a life of petty crime or honest drudgery (or both), saved from his fate by an artistic temperament (so far not too original a story), turned on by both American rock ’n’ roll (and blues) as it was in its Golden Age of unselfconscious, non-industry mediated immediacy and by the other young English boys, working class and otherwise, who were responding to the rebellious and celebratory vibes of this music by creating something of their own (here the story starts to take on unique qualities), and who then becomes deeply involved with the musical revolution that changed pop and rock forever, (finally) spending the last 12 years as a key player in the long twilight of what was once considered the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. There’s all kinds of angles to this story which only its protagonist could accurately finesse. Like, how did it feel to go from being nobody living in Nowhere, to being Somebody, residing somewhere near the center of the Universe? To come out of a provincial tradition-laden backwater into a world of unprecedented sex, drug, and musical experimentation, having to reinvent the values that would hold one’s life together? What was it like to be near the forces that drove rock to the excesses it’s still pulling back from?

There are hints of this story in Wood’s reminiscences, particularly in the section of the book where he talks about his parents and his childhood (and talks is the word— the book seems to have been dictated, and probably transcribed and edited by Mr. German). Aside from that, the book is relentlessly upbeat and impenetrably banal. Wood’s story of life with the Stones is a series of embarrassingly flat-footed anecdotes of which the following is all too typical: “One time in Frankfurt Keith slipped on—what else—a frankfurter someone had thrown onstage. It was hilarious—more like the Flintstones than the Rolling Stones. Next thing I know, I turn around and Keith’s flat on his ass. We all laughed and pointed at him.”

Wood seems temperamentally incapable of speaking ill of anyone, a fine trait in a friend but a dubious one in somebody who’s presenting us a book for which we’re asked to fork over some bread—especially when that Mary Sunshine attitude is generalized to the point where every hint of discord, darkness or troublesome truth is (if even suggested) deflected. Here’s a guy who’s lived through a cultural revolution which not only left scars (which he admits to, vaguely) and madness, but dead bodies in its wake—and who has nothing to say about it. To wit, on Elvis: “He just needed a pal, that’s all.” On Keith Richards: “One of the sweetest men in the world.” On Mick Taylor: “He’s a lovely man.” On drugs: “There are some obvious rules. If you’re gonna shoot up, don’t be stupid enough to pop some pills at the same time. Don’t mix needles and pills or alcohol with pills. With booze, you don’t mix the grain either, like brandy and bourbon.”

So the guy’s a flake—so what about the pictures, the original Ron Wood drawings which are the ostensible reason for the book’s existence? Well, like the man himself, they’re functional. The pictures of Chuck Berry and Charlie Watts and John Belushi do indeed look like those luminaries. John Lennon and Mick Jagger he? hasn’t quite captured. There’s some nice domestic sketches, his folks, his kids, an ex-wife, nude, playing with herself (another symptom of the man’s essentially generous nature—thanks Woody!). Yeah, it’s great to have a hobby. Overall, though, the book is as disposable as they come—and with its hale and hearty scrappy survivor’s spunkiness, it’s going through the motions without noticing that the meanings have dried up (like the Stones, more often than not), a little depressing.

MONGOLOID VAMPIRES FLAUNT PARKING LAWS!

THE WEEKLY WORLD NEWS

by J. Kordosh

When the National Enquirer cleaned up its act—alas, many years ago—a void was created in supermarkets everywhere. And it was a big, big void. The Enquirer became glitzy and gossipy and, all in all, a harmless thing, so what was needed was something cheap. Something pandering. Something so outre as to defy sensibility.

What was needed was a pack of lies, when you get right down to it.

Enter the Weekly World News, available for 55c and conveniently located near the smokes, the small breath mints and the TV Guides where you pay for your beer and potato chips. To describe the WWN as an insult to human intelligence is to predicate that a headline like “Magician Saws Girl In Half By Mistake” insults all human intelligence. And that’s not something I’m ready to predicate, as there’s clearly a real need for the WWN, jlist as there was a real need for the human mom/frog baby version of the Enquirer. The whole thing is beyond camp and above pastiche—it is, in its way, the ultimate American media form.

Which is to say it’s a pack of lies.

But what a pack of lies! The Weekly World News invariably hones in on sickness, Bigfoot, ghosts, aliens and other mainstays, all the while half-cloaked as a newspaper. And in its way, it is a newspaper—it just happens to be a newspaper that’s laid out to command the attention of those whose reading level was arrested in the fourth grade, something like Hit Parader, and a newspaper written with truly enviable braggadocio. We won’t get into trivia like the quality of the paper it’s printed on, since that doesn’t exist, but all in all, it’s pretty cool.

Indeed, the WWN has considerable charm. The issue I’m looking at has a story called “New Miracle Pill Cures Everything.” Forget what it’s about—they’ll rerun it several times this year anyway—and groove on that headline. Pill... cures... everything. I mean, warts. Cancer of the head. The urge to write letters to the magazine you’re holding. Everything.

Sacre bleu, as the saying goes.

But the News doesn’t stop there—in fact, it doesn’t stop anywhere, as you probably hoped. Some other sample headlines: “Couple Hides In A Bomb Shelter 25 Yrs.,” “My Husband Came Back As A Parrot,” “Soviets Find Lost City On Mars,” and the beloved “Cruel Docs Rejoin Siamese Twins.” I think we can all get behind the news value of those stories, but it’s important to note the absence of celebrity here. Unlike the Enquirer, People, Us, et. al., the WWN generally goes for stuff that can happen to us common folk. I can see myself in “Family Vanishes In Carnival Fun House” without too much trouble. Things do •happen.

In this sense, the WWN is our friend, a media chum that clues us in on all the weird stuff we know is going on—stuff the New York Times and Newsweek and CBS News won’t tell us about. I suppose most trad analyses of a phenomenon like the WWN would make a stab at “What does the Weekly World News tell us about ourselves?,” but I can’t mess around with abject kneejerkism. I’ve just found out that mothers can give birth to 200-year-old babies.

I think I’ll call the wife.