NEW BEATS

NEW BEATS

ARE THE STARS OUT TONIGHT?

BIG DIPPER, CINDY LEE BERRYHILL, JOHN FRENCH, DON DIXON, RICHARD BARONE

Steve Michener, the bassist for Big Dipper, wanted to know what kind of �angle� I was going to take for my CREEM interview. It makes me nervous when my interviewees ask me questions—questions about who else I�ve interviewed or who else I write for. Pretty soon they�re asking me when my deadline is and I�m forced to shoot them.

What saved Steve Michener�s life is that I really don�t know what kind of �angle� to take for Big Dipper. They�ve already got too many angles—the rock angle, the pop angle, the noise angle. The way they jumble their genres into a rocking, rumbling mass, there�s angles galore. But forget the angles, you need a compass to locate Big Dipper.

Big Dipper entered the zodiac of weird indie pop bands in 1986, when Bill Goffrier, guitarist for Kansas legends the Embarrassment, joined forces with founding members of Volcano Suns, Steve Michener and Gary Waleik. With the addition of drummer Jeff Oliphant (Gary�s cousin, from speedmetal band XS), Big Dipper was born. And Big Dipper immediately headed into the studio to record their critically hailed Boo-Boo EP for Homestead Records.

It was an early, roughly-hewn disc, but Boo-Boo was no accident. �Loch Ness Monster� brings back shades of the Embarrassment, with its dogged echo-choruses; �What In The Sam Hill...?� is an angry, punkish, minor-key pounder with a stinging guitar line (which still resembles Sam The Sham a lot more than it does the Necros).

�The EP was nothing more than a demo tape,� says Steve, �A fluke.� The six-song demo was supposed to contain two songs from each of their songwriters—Bill, Steve and Gary. Unwittingly, their three styles merged to create the Big Dipper sound.

Heavens, the Big Dipper LP, is the first great testament to that three-sided waltz. This punctured pop potpourri ranges from the airplay-gathering �She�s Fetching� to the C&W roll of �Man O� War� and the odd harmonies of �Humason,� whose heartrending choruses hit an appropriately celestial note: �I�d give the stars to see what the matter was" Mission Of Burma�s violent pop is recalled by �Younger Bums,� and �When Men Were Trains� matches savage, slashing guitars with the absurdity of lines like �I remember when men were men/And women vyere trees. � Big Dipper�s loopy juxtaposition of styles and ideas was best summed up by Steve: �Every song is so mixed-up there�s no easy way to describe it.�

On the strength of Heavens, Big Dipper toured the East, South, and Midwest,

headlining and opening for such acts as Husker Du, Fishbone and the Pogues. Their manic set includes specially-Dipped covers of Gordon Lightfoot�s �Sundown,� Paul McCartney�s �Jet� and a fairly straight version of Tracey Ullman�s �They Don�t Know About Us.�

Big Dipper is one of the few bands on Homestead Records to get any airplay, and they stand every chance of being a �commercial� hit on what many believe to be a noise-mongering, generally unlistenable label. �We�re more the exception to the rule at Homestead. As long as people will listen to us without Homestead prejudicing them,� says Steve, adding amusedly, �and as long as Homestead doesn�t get the reputation of putting out pop records.�

Big Dipper�s target audience, as Bill explains, �are just looking for good songs and will accept them in whatever form they happen to come.� But does Big Dipper have an

image to project—I mean, what is the �angle� on Big Dipper after all?

�There�s no easy explanation/� says Gary. �People think we�re not overtly anything so we must be awkward white guys.�

�We�re not cool...� Steve begins.

�But we�re not uncool either...� Gary continues.

�Very subtle type of cool,� Bill clarifies further. �Really cool people can recognize it.�

Then Steve Michener addresses the true problem: �I think the thing is that we�re nice—that�s what hurts us.�

�Our idea of trashing a motel room,� Bill joins in, �is not to make the beds when we leave.�

�In fact, sometimes we replace the soap,� says Gary.

Good thing I like a constellation with a sense of humor.

Drew Wheeler

SHE�S GOT (ALMOST) EVERYTHING

EIGHTEEN REASONS WHY CINDY LEE BERRYHILL IS NEAT:

1.) Who�s Gonna Save The World?, her debut LP on Rhino, is really good.

2.) Even though she says she doesn�t know what rock �n� roll means these days— she classifies herself �in that shady area between rock, folk and jazz�—her record sounds more like rock �n� roll to me (thanks to melodic chord progressions) than a lot of current things that are supposed to be rock �n� roll. Go figure.

3.) She�s from that �earth mother�Vhippie mold—a rare breed these days—and pret-

ty darn attractive as a result.

4.) She�s been writing this novel about a 25-year-old woman named Michelle, who ran away from home at the age of 15, and then �within a period of 24 hours, she suddenly becomes a Messiah. That�s her plight. She almost gets raped, but she says this stream of words and enlightens the guy instead. Her boyfriend goes from being a manager at Neiman-Marcus to a scientific genius who comes up with all these theories. Things like that happen.�

5.) After she had a bad gig opening for Chris Stamey at NYC�s now-defunct Folk City several years ago (she was on a Greyhound �just-me-and-my-guitar� tour), her friends decided to open their own club in the East Village. It�s called The Fort, and it�s become quite an underground scene. The club�s managed by Kirk Kelly, who wrote �This Administration� (about you-knowwho) for her record.

6.) She says stuff like �Art is hard to pinpoint. It�s like love.� And �What�s the difference between art and show biz, I wonder? I�ll have to think about that concept.� And �I�m mostly interested in personal politics. To me, big politics is just too confusing.�

7.) She�s never voted for a Republican.

8.) She admires Tom Waits, Van Morrison, Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello, the Pogues, the Replacements, Arthur C. Clarke and Vladimir Nabokov. Rain Dogs is one of her favorite LPs—and she�s only listened to it twice. (She doesn�t own a stereo.)

9.) As a teenager in her small, conservative hometown, she and a group of people started a theater company called the Dynamic Duck Performing Artists at a local pizza parlor. �It became like a vaudeville group—we had a big plywood showboat with Christmas tree lights on it (sings) �Down on the levee.. .�—and we became really known in the town as like these dirty people, you know.�

10.) She�s been compared to both Patti Smith and �Olive Oyl as a surfer girl.�

11.) She doesn�t care that she might get compared to Suzanne Vega (even though I think she�s better). Or that Rhino (the only company she sent a demo tape to) is primarily known as an oldies label. �I don�t think about it. I�m just happy to have a record, and I�m really looking forward to the next one already.�

12.) She used to play in an L.A. punk

band. They were all psychotics. �One guy tried to commit suicide.. .one guy had a sex change.. .the other guy decided he was the Messiah, and went totally out of his head.� They never played anywhere except a garage. �But we were real good in our garage.�

13.) She�s pretty.

14.) When I ask her definition of �making it,� she says, �Isn�t that something dirty, like sex? Making it with someone?� Er, I meant like success. �Oh! To buy a house. To buy my parents a business. (Her always-supportive folks are also musicians. They collect sheet music, and she wants to buy them a sheet music store.) Just to get better as an artist.�

15.) After she left the punk group, no Top 40 band she tried out for would hire her.

16.) There are better songs than the novelty �Damn, Wish I Was A Man� on Who�s Gonna Save The World? So when friends tell me tney�ve heard that song on the radio and that the Olive Oyl-like vocals kinda grate on them, I can say, �Well, she has a lot better songs than that.�

17.) She wrote her first song when she was 10. It was about the demise of the dinosaurs.

18.) One of Jonathan Richman�s best songs is called �I�m A Little Dinosaur.� For some reason, it all makes sense.

Bill Holdship

RETURN OF THE MAGIC DRUMMER

One of the least-noticed phenomena of 1987 was the participation of various exMagic Band members in several of the year�s tastier sonic morsels. Guitarist Gary Lucas was behind the board for Tim Berne�s Fulton Street Maul while guitarist (Jeff) Moris Tepper played on a few tracks from Tom Waits�s Frank�s Wild Years LP. But perhaps most impressive was the re-emergence of drummer/guitarist/vocalist John �Drumbo� French in two memorable collaborations with guitar explorer Henry Kaiser: Crazy Backwards Alphabet (with ex-Dixie Dregs bassist Andy West and drummer/vocalist Michael Maksymenko) on SST and Live, Love, Larf & Loaf (with Fred Frith and Richard Thompson) on Rhino.

French�s connection with the Captain goes all the way back to Lancaster, California. He drummed on all the early Beefheart albums, from Safe As Milk through The Spotlight Kid, and has worked with him a couple of times since, most notably on 1980�s Doc At The Radar Station. But he always was more than just the drummer. Don Van Vliet was (is?) an astonishing vocalist, a visionary songwriter, and a mean harp player, but his ideas often transcended his ability to communicate them to his band members. He needed exceptional collaborators to get the Magic working.

Perhaps French picked up his abilities from watching a teenaged Ry Cooder and co-producer Richard Perry pull together the impressive Safe As Milk from a batch of halffleshed-out arrangements and a box of lyric fragments. In any case, by the time of Trout Mask Replica, John was transcribing Van Vliet�s increasingly dense and angular material and teaching it to the band. In retrospect, Beefheart�s intuitive blend of bedrock blues, raucous rock and "new thing" jazz could only have held together at all by being organized from the bottom up.

�I didn�t write any of the music on Trout Mask, � says French. �I only wrote it down and taught it to the other players. Don wrote all the music; I wrote a lot of my own drum parts. He needed an adviser so he and I came up with those arrangements together. The way I came out—putting them in that kind of order, having parts overlapping, stopping and going on to, the next section—we worked together on that.�

For his efforts, �Drumbo� received no credits whatsoever on Trout Mask Replica for either drumming or arranging. Similar social and business misadventures dogged his every return to the Magic Band, so he finally flicked it in for the last time in 1980, eventually scoring a weekend restaurant gig that allowed him to concentrate on his own music five days a week.

Then about two years ago, after Bill Harkleroad (a.k.a. Zoot Horn Rollo) gave French�s address to their mutual friend

Henry Kaiser, Henry dropped him a line about musical possibilities. French was initially enthusiastic, but when he found out that the CBA project was to include several Beef heart covers, he �just threw a fit.� The accomodating Kaiser agreed to drop the Van Vliet material in favor of a session�s worth of new tunes (a smart move, since the Little Feat-like �The Blood And The Ink� and the ingenious instrumental "We Are In Control?� are two of CBA's highlights).

Their collaborative juices flowing, Kaiser and French then teamed up with Fred Frith and Richard Thompson for three-and-a-half days of rehearsals, two concerts and a week�s worth of recording sessions. This brief, intensive period of work led to a greater group feeling than your basic Golden Palominos project, while throwing the artists involved back on their aesthetics, since they had neither the time nor the resources to overplan or overrefine the results.

�Richard just went in a booth and sang and played (though all the vocals were overdubbed later),� French recalls; �we just played right along and tried to do everything with as much of a live feel as possible.�

That live feel is personified in the solidbut-constantly-shifting rhythm bed provided by French, and the other musicians thrive on it. The modal mesh of guitars on �Tir Nan Darag� is breathtaking and the solos of both Thompson and Kaiser on the dramatic rock ballad, �Drowned Dog Black Night,� show both fretmen at the top of their respective games. When I mentioned that Thompson�s solo on the latter tune contains some of his best playing on record, French nods. �I�ve heard that comment before. I�ve listened to

a couple of his albums and seen a concert on video and his band plays real straight behind him. I mean, they all play great, but if you have people playing straight behind you, it doesn�t inspire you to try different things. I don�t know if that�s the way he wants it, or it�s just easier for him to work that way, or he just likes those people or what.

�We had fun working together; he told me to be as free as I wanted. He said, �Play like Elvin Jones if you want to,� and I said, �Well, that�s gonna be kind of hard on a slow ballad (laughing).�

"The only song that was put together in the studio was �Bird In God�s Garden,� � he continues, �which, in my opinion, is the best song on the album. I think it really drew the group together. It was more my style of drumming than any other song, and I got to sing with Richard on it, which was neat for me. It was a collaboration between Richard and Fred on the music and I think Henry was playing more like Henry Kaiser than he does on any other song.�

Because of Kaiser�s commitments around the world and Thompson�s signing with Capitol, don�t expect to see this short-lived supergroup visiting your town. But if schedules permit, it might happen someday. In the meantime, French is working on material for the next CBA album, as well as a solo project.

"I want to sing; I want to play the drums; and I want to perform,� French says. �I realized that this is what I was made to do; and I�m good at it—I do it differently than anybody else does it. Why shouldn�t I just go out there and do it?�

Michael Davis

BACK TO DE BRIAR PATCH

Don Dixon wears many hats—as a singer, songwriter and record producer—but don�t expect him to wear underpants. He�s fond of taking them off in public, especially if he can successfully encourage others to follow his lead. Once he even got 30 people to strip their briefs at the same time. In the words of the master himself, here�s how it�s done:

�First you pull one side of your underwear out of your pants and you snip it with a pair of scissors. Then you pull the other side out and snip it. Then you grab the back of �em and pull it right out. Works every time!�

Despite the undoubted value of his patented shorts-removal technique, Dixon�s got more important matters to occupy his time. For one thing, he�s twiddled the knobs for discs by R.E.M., the Smithereens, Guadalcanal Diary, Marti Jones (his love thang), Let�s Active, Wednesday Week, Marshall Crenshaw, Fetchin� Bones.. .ad nauseam. And if that�s not enough, he�s riding the wake of critical kudos for his own LP, the witty Romeo At Juilliard, a follow-up to the sprawlingly-titled Most Of The Girls Like To Dance But Only Some Of The Boys Like To. Rorpeo features 10 of Dixon�s very clever originals.

�The great thing about working on my own stuff is that I can be real, real subjective and real instinctive about it, because I don�t have to be the psychiatrist/overseer that you have to be when you�re producing somebody else,� he explains. "I have a lot of fun making my records.�

The record also has an unlikely reworking of �Cool� from West Side Story because Don believes it�s really a rock �n� roll song born in the wrong body. The guy�s weird.

�I grew up in the South, so at least I have that as an excuse,� he chuckles, keeping his impressive smile-per-minute ratio up to par. �I�m real proud and happy that I�ve got certain combinations in me from growin� up over a particular period of time. I remember coming out and workin� in California in December of 1969 and nobody really knew

much about a lot of the music I was brought up on. I musta seemed like an alien... never having surfed. I grew up in a town where there was still a lot of regional music, so I had a tremendous amount of input: country, R&B, Beatles and everybody else. But I really like all different kinds of music, so I try to keep myself from gettin� bored, and, in the process, it spreads out a little bit.�

The chunks of Memphis and New Orleans that simmer in Dixon�s musical gumbo explain the North Carolina-native�s Elvis Costello-meets-Louis Armstrong vociferations. Sort of. �That�s pretty much the way I�ve always sung,� he says, �ever since I made one of those records in a voice-booth when I was four and sang 'Tutti Frutti.� I sounded a little bit more like Darla from the Little

Rascals then.

In his post-Darla, pre-solo years, he spent a decade in a Raleigh/Durham band called Arrogance, singing such embarrassing lyrics as �Pretty woman, you know I�m missing your smell.� It�s the stuff of legends, and it�s made him a dyed-in-the-wool deity in parts of the South. "Ha! I hope not,� he laughs. �I mean, I try to be as fair as I can be with people, and when you try to treat people like human beings and realize that we�re all the same and that every human in the world has one good record in them, it�s real easy to not come off as some jerk.�

On second thought: �Well, I�m probably a jerk, but I don�t go out of my way to be one.�

Vicki Arkoff

HALO, DOLLY

Richard Barone has always brought a gentle, somewhat whimsical sensibility to the usually more hardened realms of rocking pop music. As the leader of the Bongos, he helped that band make music that, while rocking out with the best of them, could be suffused with a glow of wonderment, of imagined magic kingdoms.

Barone�s more quiet and contemplative side always cried out for a treatment outside the context of a rock band. With the Bongos currently in between record deals, waiting for the right situation, Barone saw his chance to do something different.

Cool Blue Halo, Barone�s new solo album, is the result of a project he began as a way of breaking out of the restrictions imposed by the usual rock-band instrumentation. The album, which was recorded live at New York�s Bottom Line, features Barone accompanied by acoustic guitar, cello and incidental percussion. It�s a setting that allows Barone�s very affecting voice to shine through, a setting that helps to reveal a world of emotional nuance in this poprocker�s sometimes mystifying songcraft.

One reviewer has called the result �rock chamber music,� but that misses the point somewhat. Chamber music is stultifyingly formal. The music on Cool Blue Halo, though quieter than your average rock band, is very much alive with spontaneity and feeling.

�With a rock band,� Barone muses as we sit in a Manhattan coffee shop, �the whole band is always being pulled by the need to keep up with the bass and drums. Which is really ridiculous if you�re the kind of songwriter I am, where the songs are really pulled by the emotion and the lyrics and the melody. I mean, the Bongos are a rock band, so that�s the way it is, but in this I wanted something different.

�I started with the idea of doing an acoustic record but doing it live, so I�d have a performance that would really go directly to the audience. The idea was to keep it stark; stark but lush. I wanted very few players but a really full sound.

�I did look for a jazzy kind of percussionist, because I didn�t want a constant

beat; I wanted accents. And I wanted a classical string player. I didn�t want someone who would be like Electric Light Orchestra rifting. I wanted it to have a classical kind of dynamics. And I wanted kind of a folk rock guitar player. So those three elements: jazz, classical and folk rock, that�s what I wanted.�

Cool Blue Halo has met with enough acclaim to encourage Barone to take the show on the road, as the opening act for Suzanne Vega. The experience of working with acoustic instruments in theatres is a big change from fronting a rock band.

�I�ve really gotten into the idea that my voice could really be heard, and that you

really have to tell a story up there. You can t get away with being half off the mike. I really have to focus and concentrate on what I�m singing, which is a very good sort of exercise for me.�

Meanwhile, the Bongos are still out there, playing dates, practicing with their new guitarist, Ivan Julian (formerly with Richard Hell�s Voidoids) and writing new songs.

�When the next Bongos record comes out I don�t want it to be lost,� Barone says. �My first concern is to make a great record. But then I don�t want to deliver it to a company that won�t know what to do with it. I want it to matter.�

Richard Grabel