Kick Out The Jams MC5

By Lester Bangs | April 5, 1969

Whoever thought when that dirty little quickie Wild in the Streets came out that it would leave such an
imprint on the culture? First the Doors (who were always headed in that direction anyway) grinding out that
famous "They-got-the-guns-but-we-got-the-numbers" march for the troops out there in Teenland, and now this
sweaty aggregation. Clearly this notion of violent, total youth revolution and takeover is an idea whose time has
come which speaks not well for the idea but ill for the time.
About a month ago the MC-5 received a cover article in Rolling Stone proclaiming them the New
Sensation, a group to break all barriers, kick out all jams, "total energy thing," etc. etc. etc. Never mind that they
came on like a bunch of 16 year old punks on a meth power trip these boys, so the line ran, could play their
guitars like John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders played sax!
Well, the album is out now and we can all judge for ourselves. For my money they come on more like
Blue Cheer than Trane and Sanders, but then my money has already gone for a copy of this ridiculous,
overbearing, pretentious album; and maybe that's the idea, isn't it?
The set, recorded live, starts out with an introduction by John Sinclair, "Minister of Information" for the
"White Panthers," if you can dig that. The speech itself stands midway between Wild in the Streets and Arthur
Brown. The song that follows it is anticlimactic. Musically the group is intentionally crude and aggressively raw.
Which can make for powerful music except when it is used to conceal a paucity of ideas, as it is here. Most of
the songs are barely distinguishable from each other in their primitive two-chord structures. You've heard all this
before from such notables as the Seeds, Blue Cheer, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and the Kingsmen. The
difference here, the difference which will sell several hundred thousand copies of this album, is in the hype, the
thick overlay of teenage-revolution and total-energy-thing which conceals these scrapyard vistas of cliches and
ugly noise.
"Kick Out the Jams" sounds like Barret Strong's "Money" as recorded by the Kingsmen. The lead on
"Come Together" is stolen note-for-note from the Who's "I Can See for Miles." "I Want You Right Now"
sounds exactly (down to the lyrics) like a song called "I Want You" by the Troggs, a British group who came on
with a similar sex-and-raw-sound image a couple of years ago (remember "Wild Thing"?) and promptly
disappeared into oblivion, where I imagine they are laughing at the MC-5.
The Velvet Underground The Velvet Underground Polydor
By Lester Bangs | May 17, 1969
The Velvet Underground are alive and well (which in itself may surprise some people) and everchanging. How do you define a group like this, who moved from "Heroin" to "Jesus" in two short-years? It is not
enough to say that they have one of the broadest ranges of any group extant; this should be apparent to anyone
who has listened closely to their three albums. The real question is what this music is about smack, meth,
deviate sex and drugdreams, or something deeper?
Their spiritual odyssey ranges from an early blast of sadomasochistic self-loathing called "I'm So
Fucked Up," through the furious nihilism of "Heroin" and the metaphysical quest implied in the words "I'm
searching for my mainline," to this album, which combines almost overpowering musical lyricism with deeply
yearning, compassionate lyrics to let us all know that they are finally "Beginning to See the Light."
Can this be that same bunch of junkie faggot sadomasochist speed freaks who roared their
anger and their pain in storms of screaming feedback and words spat out like strings of epithets? Yes. Yes, it can,
and this is perhaps the most important lesson the Velvet Underground: the power of the human soul to transcend
its darker levels.
The songs on this album are about equally divided between the subjects of love and freedom. So many
of them are about love, in fact, that one wonders if Lou Reed, the malevolent Burroughsian Death Dwarf who
had previously never written a complimentary song about anybody, has not himself fallen in love. The opening
song, "Candy Says," is about a young girl who would like to "know completely what the others so discreetly talk
about." The fact that this and about half the other tracks on the album are ballads marks another radical departure
for the Velvets. The next track is a deep throbbing thing in which he chides perhaps the same girl for her
confusion with a great chorus: "Lady be good/Do what you should/You know it'll be alright." John Cale's organ

work on this track is stark and spare and, as usual, brilliant this time as much for what he leaves out as what
he puts in.
Then there is "Some Kinda Love," a grooving Latiny thing, somewhat like Donovan but much more
earthy, and with words that will kill you: "Put the jelly on your shoulder/Let us do what you feel most/That from
which you recoil/Uh still makes your eyes moist."
Perhaps the greatest surprise here is "Jesus," a prayer no less. The yearning for the state of grace
reflected ther culminates in "I'm Set Free," a joyous hymn of liberation. The Velvets never seemed so beautifully
close to the Byrds before.
The album is unfortunately not without its weak "tracks though. "The Murder Mystery" is an eight
minute exercise in aural overload that annoys after a few listenings, and "Pale Blue Eyes" is a folky ballad that
never really gets off the ground either musically or lyrically. On the whole I didn't feel that this album matched
up to White Light/White Heat, but it will still go a long way toward convincing the unbelievers that the Velvet
Underground can write and play any kind of music they want to with equal brilliance.
Pretties for You Alice Copper
By Lester Bangs | July 12, 1969
Alice Cooper is a West Coast Zappa-sponsored group: two guitars, bass, drums and a vocalist who
doubles on harmonica. Echoes of 1967 psychedelia in the oscillators and distorted guitars. Showing here the
influence of the Mothers, here the first-wave San Francisco sound, there and almost everywhere the Beatles. But
their overall texture and the flow of randomly-selected runs interspersed by electronic gimmicks place them
closer to a certain rivulet in that deluge of pre-packaged groups which can be defined as marginal acidrock
(references: recent debut albums by Aorta and Touch). Droning fuzz leads overlaid by droning (or is it whining?)
Bee Gees vocal harmonies, and ponderous quasi-"baroque" organ wallowings a la Vanilla Fudge. Stereotyped
guitar solos, a great many of which seem to derive directly (and not surprisingly) from Ray Davies' great
fuzztone explosions on early Kinks hits like "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night."
Apocalyptic raveups patented by the Yardbirds. Spoken "poetry" or "trippy" declamations muttered halfcomprehensibly over "atonal" guitar gimmicks (dragging the pick across the strings below the bridge, etc.).
I'm not trying to denigrate Alice Cooper's abilities: within the context of their self-imposed limitations,
the album is listenable. But there is a way to do these things. I think simplicity and the imaginative use of the
cliche are at the essence of rock; but the cliches have to hit you in a certain way, with a certain conviction and
energy and timing, to get it on, to spark that certain internal combustion of good feeling and galvanized energies
that lifts you out of your seat irresistibly and starts you dancing, balling, just whooping, or whatever Black
Pearl is the most stunning recent realization of this. And it is this that is lacking in Alice Cooper's music.
Everything falls where it should, there are none of the gross, ugly, idiotic juxtapositions of the totally
incongruous found in much other studio-assembled art-rock. But neither is there any hint of life, spontaneity, joy,
rage, or any kind of authentic passion or conviction. As such, Alice Cooper's music is, for this reviewer at any
rate, totally dispensable.
Trout Mask Replica Captain Beefheart
By Lester Bangs | July 26, 1969
Captain Beefheart, the only true dadaist in rock, has been victimized repeatedly by public
incomprehension and critical authoritarianism. The tendency has been to chide C. B. and his Band as a
potentially acceptable blues band who were misled onto the paths of greedy trendy commercialism. What the
critics failed to see was that this was a band with a vision, that their music, difficult raucous and rough as it is,
proceeded from a unique and original consciousness.
This became dramatically apparent with their last album. Since their music derived as much from the
new free jazz and African chant rhythms as from Delta blues, the songs tended to be rattly and wayward,
clattering along on wierdly jabbering high-pitched guitars and sprung rhythms. But the total conception and its
execution was more in the nature of a tribal Pharoh Sanders Archie Shepp fire-exorcism than the ranting noise of
the Blue Cheer strain of groups.

Thus it's very gratifying to say that Captain Beefheart's new album is a total success, a brilliant,
stunning enlargement and clarification of his art. Which is not to say that it's in any sense slick, "artistic," or
easy. This is one of the few bands whose sound has actually gotten rawer as they've matured"a brilliant and
refreshing strategy. Again the rhythms and melodic textures jump all over the place (in the same way that Cecil
Taylor's do), Beefheart singing like a lonesome werewolf screaming and growling in the night. The songs clatter
about"given a superficial listening, they seem boring and repetitious. It's perhaps the addition of saxophones
(all played by the five men in the band) that first suggests what's really happening here and always has been
happening in this group's music.
On "Hair Pie: Bake One," for instance, the who group gets into a raucous wrangling horn dialog that
reveals a strong Albert Ayler influence. The music truly meshes, flows, and excites in a way that almost none of
the selfconscious, carefully crafted jazz-rock bullshit of the past year has done. And the reason for this is that
while many other groups have picked up on the trappings of the new jazz. Cap and the Magic Band are into its
essence, the white-hot stream of un-"cultured" energy, getting there with a minimum of strain to boot. This is the
key to their whole instrumental approach, from the drummer's whirling poly- and even a-rhythmic patterns
(compare them to Sonny Murray's on Ayler'sSpiritual Unity or Ed Blackwell's on Don Cherry's Symphony for
Improvisers), to the explosive, diffuse guitar lines, which (like Lou Reed's for the Velvet Underground or Gary
Peacock's bass playing on Spiritual Unity) stretch, tear, and distend the electric guitar's usual vocabulary with the
aim of extending that vocabulary past its present strictly patterned limitations"limitations that are as
tyrannically stultifying for the rock musician today as Charlie Parker's influence was for the jazzmen of the late
Fifties.
I mustn't forget the lyrics. You certainly won't; the album on a purely verbal level is an explosion of
maniacal free-association incantations, eschewing (with the authentic taste that assassignates standards of Taste)
solemn "poetic" pretensions and mundane, obvious monosyllabic mindlessness. Where, for instance, have you
heard lyrics like these: "Tits tits the blimp the blimp/The mother ship the mother ship/The brothers hid under the
hood/From the olimp the blimp ... all the people stir/'n' the girls' knees tremble/'n' run 'n' wave their hands/'n' run
their hands over the blimp the blimp ..."
The double record set costs as much as two regular albums, but unlike most of these superlong
superexpensive items it's really sustained, and worth the money, which is perhaps not so much to pay for 27
songs and what may well be the most unusual and challenging musical experience you'll have this year.
Concerto In B Goode Chuck Berry
By Lester Bangs | August 9, 1969
Master is back again, and this time he has come up with a record worthy of his reputation. So many
grit-jive geniuses Elvis, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley have turned stiff in their old age. That's why it's a
double delight to find Berry, the original poet and scribe of rock and roll, who in many life-worshiping ways
exceeded his Minnesota son-in-law, as fresh and as effortlessly committed today as he ever was.
The first side of this album includes four of his recent compositions. You won't get tired of them. They
don't relate to Sixties dope-balling, or the feel of police truncheons crunching into skull-bone but they do ring
true, and two of them exude the marvelous old Berry wit, something a great many of today's owl-faced
artrockers would do well to pick up on. Rock is an ailing form without its sense of humor, and Chuck Berry
defined a whole comic sensibility. He has not lost that gift: "It's Too Dark In Here" tells the story of a sheltered
chick who finds danger wherever her date takes her, from the party where "there's 'bout forty people dancing
under one dim light" to the back seat of the luckless swain's car ("So I drive her out the freeway into the country
air/She said I hope you ain't goin' park nowhere around here/ It's dark out there/Let's go back in town/ It's dark
out there").
Two of the numbers are slow, rolling blues vocals in Berry's great "Deep Feeling" style. Both are good
funky slow-stomps, sunk with that beautiful, unmistakably original blues feel (remember "Wee Wee Hours"?
"Worried Life Blues"?) which is one of Berry's trademarks. The harmonica player sounds like he's been listening
to Brian Jones and Keith Relf of the Yardbirds, meaning that he exudes not only technical proficiency but taste
and imagination. The double-tracked guitars wail and moan like two lonesome Texas banshees reeling in and out
of the historic American beerjoint night. That's mournful as the Berry of the yearning lament always was. It's the
Real Blues the purists are always yapping about.

The entirety of side two is given over to "Concerto in B Goode," an eighteen-minute flood of
instrumental interpolations on Johnny B. Goode and all of his relatives. For all the thematic and improvisatory
repetition, you can't help but dig it, because it's so happy, driving, and exuberant, everflowing with the spirit of
life joyously lived the essential spirit of our music. Dig that organ: Dave "Baby" Cortez lives again! Berry's
guitar lines are clear and clean, as amiable and enthusiastic and uncluttered as they were in his two-minute folk
epics of 1956 like "Jo Jo Gun." For a man who has always been derided by snobs as a "guitar mechanic," Berry
plays with a natural energy and sense of direction that one never finds in the solos of last year's crop of
overblown "jazz-rock" super-groups. On and on and on flows Chuck Berry, duckwalking his great Gibson guitar
down the cluttered corridors of rock history. I suspect he'll still be wailing wisely when the current crop of overpublicized Sensations have faded with their forerunners back into the obscure footnotes of the chronicle ofourart.
Preflyte The Byrds
By Lester Bangs | October 18, 1969
The Byrds came along at a time when American rock needed a shot in the arm which would raise the
music to the levels attained by the British groups and allow it to meet the emerging head culture. The Byrds did
it; but the subtlety and aversion to gimmick that is found in their music and in themselves doomed them as a
sleeper group, always popular and musically influential, but denied the superstardom conferred on more
pretentious, melodramatic personalities by an industry geared to the Image. That they have survived at all (in
whatever form, despite their own internal storms) is one of those joyous accidents for which we should all be
grateful.
This album was recorded in August, 1964, at the very beginning of the Byrds' career and prior to their
contract with Columbia. Slightly rough and sounding a bit dated, it still overflows with that unique unschmaltzy
beauty and lyricism that has been the Byrds' trademark. Four of the eleven songs appeared on Mr. Tambourine
Man, and they sound like less focused takes of something that later became masterful and transporting. But place
this music in perspective: suppose it had been released in late 1964. Aside from the first two or three albums by
the Beatles or the Stones, there was absolutely nothing out as good, as aurally visionary, as unpackaged as this.
By the time the Byrds were released to the public, several other groups the Yardbirds, the Kinks, the
Spoonful were working toward the same shift in the system, and few people realized what an innovation the
Byrds were, both spiritually and musically. They took the basic lessons of the Beatles and the Stones, filtered
them through Dylan and the less pretentious aspects of the folk scene, and came up with a big, new, visionary
sound. Propelled by the ringing grandeur of McGuinn's electric twelve-string and Hillman's incredibly advanced
bass playing, they created a stately, transcendent sound of magnificent brilliance, lifting listeners into bold new
realms of dream, turning the stoned hordes from preachy, flatulent "folk music" to the vibrant new and old
sounds of rock. And the Byrds' influence, in the years that followed, on everybody, from the Beatles to the Velvet
Underground, is simply an undiminishing fact of life.
Preflyte: an album marking the beginnings, but an album of fine and fascinating music as well. Gene
Clark's songs abound, and though Clark seemed for the most part a formula composer, all his songs had a certain
lovely feeling that seldom palled. Declasse influences like Johnny Rivers turned to lucid, beautifully methodical
harmonies in Clark's mind. "She Has a Way," for instance, utilized the "Spanish Harlem Incident" guitar lead and
early Beatles composition, but like everything else the Byrds have ever done, it glided effortlessly over the
puerility and crass, mindless imitation which dominated the scene in '64, to emerge as a shining, deeply felt piece
of music.
Preflyte recalls the inception of a genius outfit that has contributed more to rock than anyone else on
this side of the Atlantic. Even if you're not a hardcore Byrds freak, I hope you'll buy this album for that reason.
At this late date, they deserve all we can give them.
In A Silent Way Miles Davis
By Lester Bangs | November 15, 1969
This is the kind of album that gives you faith in the future of music. It is not rock and roll, but it's
nothing stereotyped as jazz either. All at once, it owes almost as much to the techniques developed by rock
improvisors in the last four years as to Davis' jazz background. It is part of a transcendental new music which

flushes categories away and, while using musical devices from all styles and cultures, is defined mainly by its
deep emotion and unaffected originality.
Miles has always gone his own way, a musician of strength and dignity who has never made the
compromise (so poisonous to jazz now) with "pop" fads. It is a testimony to his authenticity that he has never
worried about setting styles either, but continued his deeply felt experiment for two decades now. Albums like
Miles Ahead, Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain simply do not get old, and contain some of the most moving
experiences that any music has to offer. In his new album, the best he has made in some time, he turns to "space
music" and a reverent, timeless realm of pure song, the kind of music which comes along ever so often and stops
us momentarily, making us think that this perhaps is the core around which all of our wayward musical highways
have revolved, the primal yet futuristic and totally uncontrived sound which gives the deepest, most lasting
sustenance to our souls, the living contemporary definition of great art.
The songs are long jams with a minimum of preplanned structure. That they are so cohesive and
sustained is a testament to the experience and sensitivity of the musicians involved. Miles' lines are like shots of
distilled passion, the kind of evocative, liberating riffs that decades of strivers build their styles on. Aside from
Charles Mingus, there is no other musician alive today who communicates such a yearning, controlled intensity,
the transformation of life's inchoate passions and tensions into aural adventures that find a permanent place in
your consciousness and influence your basic definitions of music. And his sidemen also rise to the occasion,
most of them playing better than I have ever heard them before. Certainly Herbie Hancock (piano), Wayne
Shorter (tenor sax), and Joe Zawinul (organ) have never seemed so transported. The miracle of jazz is that a
great leader can bring merely competent musicians to incredible heights of inspiration ; Mingus has always
been famous for this, and Miles has increasingly proven himself a master of this incredibly delicate art.
The first side is taken up by a long jam called "Shhh/Peaceful." Tony Williams' cymbal-and-brush work
and the subtle arabesques of Zawinul's organ set a space trip, a mood of suspended time and infinite interior
vistas. But when Miles enters, the humanity and tenderness of his trumpet's soft cries are enough to bring you
tears. I've heard that when he was making this album, Miles had been listening to Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the
Family Stone, but the feeling here is closer to something like "2000 Light Years From Home" by the Stones. It is
space music, but with an overwhelmingly human component that makes it much more moving and enduring than
most of its rock counterparts.
Side two opens and closes with the best song on the album, a timeless trumpet prayer called "In a Silent
Way." There has always been something eternal and pure in Miles' music, and this piece captures that quality as
well as anything he's ever recorded. If, as I believe, Miles is an artist for the ages, then this piece will be among
those that stand through those vast tracks of time to remind future generations of the oneness of human
experience.
Between the two takes of "Silent Way" lies "It's About That Time," a terse, restrained space jam
somewhat reminiscent of the one on the first side but a bit sharper, allowing more of Miles' fierce blues ethos to
burn through. This is the one that might be connected to Miles' interest in Hendrix and Sly.
They say that jazz has become menopausal, and there is much truth in the statement. Rock too seems to
have suffered under a numbing plethora of standardized Sounds. But I believe there is a new music in the air, a
total art which knows no boundaries or categories, a new school run by geniuses indifferent to fashion. And I
also believe that the ineluctable power and honesty of their music shall prevail. Miles Davis is one of those
geniuses.
The Allman Brothers Band IIBy Lester Bangs | February 21, 1970
The Allman Brothers are a rather heavy white blues group out of Muscle Shoals. They look like the
post-teen punk band rehearsing next door, and there is little in their music that we haven't heard before. And both
they and their album are a gas.
For all the white blooze bands proliferating today, it's still inspiring when the real article comes along, a
white group who've transcended their schooling to produce a volatile blues-rock sound of pure energy,
inspiration and love. The Allmans have learned their lessons well, and they play with the same drive and
conviction as their mentors. When I first put this album on the driving instrumental that opens it began the clean,

ringing guitar riffs in "It's Not My Cross to Bear" made that battered 12-bar blues form seem fresh again. The
Allmans know what they're doing, and feel it deeply as well, and they communicate immediately.
One of the virtues of a simple, standardized form like the blues is that when played right it's such a
comfortable place to return to. The whole album is like that. You've been here a thousand times before, and it
feels like home instead of mind-numbing banality because the Allmans have mastered the form with rare
subtlety, and also because their blues keep you vibrating from one brilliant hardrock interpolation to the next.
That's why the album's pinnacle for me is "Dreams," a beautiful, aching lament in waltz-time. It begins
with softly pulsing organ and throaty, movingly understated vocal all about a man whose world is crumbling
because "I'm hung up/On Dreams." A familiar story, but the way it's written and delivered by the Allmans makes
it poignantly realistic and universal.
It might seem strange to apply the adjective "lovely" to a heavy-white-blues album, but that is what this
record so paradoxically is. Sometimes it sounds like what Led Zeppelin might have been if they weren't hung up
on gymnastics. Sometimes it sounds like the more-lyrical Louisiana cousins of Johnny Winter. But what it is
consistently is subtle, and honest, and moving.
Hot Rats Frank Zappa
By Lester Bangs | March 7, 1970
This recording brings together a set of mostly little-known talents that whale the tar out of every other informal
"jam" album released in rock and roll for the past two years. If Hot Rats is any indication of where Zappa is
headed on his own, we are in for some fiendish rides indeed.
In the past both Zappa's high-flown "serious music" and his greasy Fifties routines grew heavy-handed, but this
album suggests he may be off on a new and much more individual direction, inspired by Captain Beefheart, who
is featured prominently on Hot Rats and whose Trout Mask Replica set him several frontiers beyond anything
we've heard from Zappa. Beefheart is one of the true originals of our day, and his raffish dadaism is an excellent
tonic for a Zappa too often pre-occupied with polemics his influence shows clearly in much of this record,
whether he's actually performing or not.
The new Zappa has dumped both his Frankensteinian classicism and his pachuko-rock. He's into the new jazz
heavily; same as Beefheart. and applying all his technical savvy until the music sounds a far and purposely
ragged cry from the self-indulgence of the current crop of young white John Coltranes. Ian Underwood's reed
work in particular is far more advanced than anything he did with the Mothers.
The album's instrumental highlight comes on "The Gumbo Variations," spotlighting the wildest, most advanced
piece of Free-form electric violin playing I've ever heard (who is "Sugar Cane Harris"?), a slithery performance
that sings with the rusty purity that only the most corrosive music can muster.
Zappa himself has an extremely long guitar solo on "Willie the "Pimp," but as past numbers like "Invocation of
the Young Pumpkin" have shown, he's really not a jazz improvisor, and his repetitious and surprisingly simple
patterns get boring before he's half-way through. But those words! The wily Beefheart spirit strikes again: "I'm a
little pimp with my hair gassed back Man in a suit with a bow-tie neck/Wanna buy a grunt with a
third-party check/Standin' on the porch of the Lido hotel/Floozies in the lobby love the way I sell "
If you're eager for a first taste of Beefheart or interested in the new approaches to instrumental style and
improvisational technique being developed these days, this is as good a place to start as any; a good stepping
stone to folks like Ayler, Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor-the real titans these cats learned it from.
Morrison Hotel The Doors
By Lester Bangs | April 30, 1970
Morrison Hotel opens with a powerful blast of raw funk called "Roadhouse Blues." It features jagged
barrelhouse piano, fierce guitar, and one of the most convincing raunchy vocals Jim Morrison has ever recorded.
This angry hard rock is that at which the Doors have always excelled, and given us so seldom, and this track is
one of their very best ever, with brooding lyrics that ring chillingly, true: "I woke up this morning and I got
myself a beer/The future's uncertain and the end is always near."

From there on out, though, the road runs mainly downhill. It's really a shame, too, because somehow
one held high expectations for this album and wanted so badly to believe it would be good that one was afraid to
listen to it when it was finally released. The music bogs down in the kind of love mush and mechanical,
stereotyped rock arrangements that have marred so much of the Doors' past music. "Blue Sunday" and "Indian
Summer" are two more insipidly "lyrical" pieces crooned in Morrison's most saccharine Hoagy Carmichael style.
"Maggie M'Gill" is a monotonous progression in the vein of (but not nearly as interesting as) "Not to Touch the
Earth," and "You Make Me Real" is a thyroid burst of manufactured energy worthy of a thousand mediocre
groups.
Admittedly, these are the worst tracks, and the rest ranges from the merely listenable to the harsh
brilliance of "Roadhouse Blues" or the buoyant catchiness of "Land Ho!", a chanty that sets you rocking and
swaying on first listen and never fails to bring a smile every time it's repeated.
This could have been a fine album; but the unavoidable truth and this seems to be an insurmountable
problem for the Doors is that so much of it is out of the same extremely worn cloth as the songs on all their
other albums. It's impossible to judge it outside the context of the rest of their work. Robbie Kreiger's slithery
guitar, and Manzarek's carnival-calliope organ work and whorehouse piano are the perfect complement to
Morrison's rococo visions. But we've all been there before, not a few times, and their well of resources has
proven a standing lake which is slowly drying up. Perhaps if they recombined into a different group the brilliant
promise of the Doors' first album and sporadic songs since might begin to be fulfilled, but for now they can only
be truly recommended to those with a personal interest.
Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out The Rolling Stones
By Lester Bangs | September 4, 1970
As much as the recorded product, the rock and roll concert scene seems mighty unhealthy these days. I
hardly ever go to see name bands anymore myself, because most of them are so incredibly boring. Standards of
performance are very low, and those few artists with enough talent or interest to put on a credible show often end
up turning in performances so professionally, predictably competent that you walk out with the palest
satisfaction and few memories. In the past year I have watched Ten Years After stumble through a set equal parts
plodding monotone and splintered noise, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young invoke Woodstock to compensate for
boring everyone to tears, and the Band and Creedence Clearwater recite their albums to such perfection that I
fidgeted. I had to draw the line of most resistance when Led Zeppelin hit town last month for a 2-1/2 hour tourde-force. But I asked a friend with more fortitude how it was, and he raved: "Oh, shit. I took eight reds and just
sat there thinkin' the Zep was gonna play forever man, I felt so good!"
Into this depressing scene ripped the Rolling Stones barnstorming their way across America last fall for
a tour which left most audiences satisfied and well-nigh spent, but got reviews mixed and ultimately perplexed
because few of us were sure what to expect or, once the hysteria of the actual performance had drained away,
how to react. In 1965, caught up in a hurricane of bopper shrieks, we accepted the whole thing as sort of a
supernatural visitation, a cataclysmic experience of Wagnerian power that transcended music. In 1969 they were
expected to prove themselves as a stage act, but the force of their personalities and the tides of hype and our
expectations cancelled all our cynical reservations the moment Mick strode out and drawled hello to each home
town. There they were in the flesh, the Rolling Stones, ultimate personification of all our notions and fantasies
and hopes for rock and roll, and we were enthralled, but the nagging question that remained was whether the
show we had seen was really that brilliant, or if we had not been to some degree set up, pavlov'd by years of
absence and rock scribes and 45 minute delays into a kind of injection delirium in which a show which was
perfectly ordinary in terms of what the Stones might have been capable of would seem like some ultimate rock
apocalypse. Sure, the Stones put on what was almost undoubtedly the best show of the year, but did that say
more about their own involvement or about the almost uniform lameness of the competition? Some folks never
did decide.
Liver Than You'll Ever Be, appearing last spring, provided a partial answer. It was a good album, as live
rock albums go "Carol" and "Midnight Rambler" especially shone. Some people were enthralled by it, but I
found the musical interest of most of the songs mighty ephemeral, and in general preferred the clattering thunder
of Got Live If You Want It, which in terms of looseness, energy and general right-on shagginess could make a
fair bid for being the rock concert album of all time. There are more important things than playing on-beat and

on-key, and that fine line between slam-bang exorcism and unedifying noise is what would seem to make a great
live LP.
All of which is why Get Your Ya-Ya's Out is such an unfettered delight. This album, at last, proves the
fears of those who cared to fear groundless. More than just the soundtrack for a Rolling Stones concert, it's a
truly inspired session, as intimate an experience as sitting in while the Stones jam for sheer joy in the basement.
It proves once and for all that this band does not merely play the audience, it plays music whose essential
crudeness is so highly refined that it becomes a kind of absolute distillation of raunch, that element which seems
to be seeping out of Seventies rock at a disturbing rate. Where most live efforts seem almost embarrassing in
their posturings and excesses, and even The Who Live at Leeds held tinges of the Art Statement, Ya-Ya's at its
best just rocks and socks you right out of your chair. You can not only love it for what it is, you can like it for
what it isn't.
The set opens with a brief collage of MC introductions from all their tour stops, and then rolls right into
a solid, methodical "Jumpin' Jack Flash." Neither it nor the next three songs on side one quite match the energy
level reached in "Midnight Rambler" and sustained through all of side two, but subsequent playings reveal the
live "Jack Flash" to have a certain fierce precision which the studio single lacked and which makes the latter
sound almost plodding by comparison. Here the bottom is full and brooding and the group as a whole has a bite
as sharp as a pair of wire cutters.
Next comes Mick, teasing the little chickies: "Uh oh, I think I bust a button on mah trous-ahs ... you do'
want mah trousahs to fall down, now do ya?" I had a friend once who nearly provoked me to fisticuffs when he
remarked that Mick's appeal was "perverted." Now, the thing that strikes me here is how essentially positive and
even wholesome, in terms of what's in the wind in 1970, Mick's onstage stud-strut is. Jim Morrison makes like
The Flasher and screams "Love your brother!," Iggy practically turns the mike into a dildo, but Mick just flaps
his lips, grinds his hips and chortles: "This is me, honeys yearn!"
"Carol" is fine but definitely weaker than the version of Liver, and for me "Strange Stray Cat" and
"Love in Vain" provide the low points of the album, the former by a certain clutter and the latter by not being
that inspiring a vehicle in the first place.
But all traces of disinterest or disappointment skedaddle with the first swaggering chords of "Midnight
Rambler." Mick can hardly wait to get started, flinging out rippling harp riffs and muttering lyrics before the
others even begin, and certainly this great song made to be done live, has never been rendered with more purging
viciousness. Every riff in it is so pristinely simple, yet so directly and deliberately placed that its locomotive
rushes and icy invective take on more power the closer you come to learning them by heart. Let It Bleed's
version seemed sinuous, somehow cool and detached in its violence, like one of Norman Mailer's Fifties
hipsters. Here the song's celebratory rage comes bursting with a juggernaut wallop, Mick wrenching inchoate
nonverbal vocalisms from his throat in the stop-time middle section, the audience roaring back (one crazed cat
hollering "God damn!" in between), and the final frosting some wiry, lunging new riffs from Keith that build
magnifiicently to the crashing climax.
The second side opens with another great audience riff an insistent chick yells "'Paint It Black,' you
devils!" and the Stones answer with an airborne "Sympathy For the Devil" that beats the rather cut-and-dried
rendition on Beggar's Banquet all hollow, and spotlights a ringing Richard solo that's undoubtedly one of his best
on record.
From there on out the energy level of the proceedings seems to soar straight up. "Live With Me" is just
great ribald jive, but "Little Queenie" as done here is alltime classic Stones. Just strutting along, leering and
shuffling, the song has all the loose, lipsmacking glee its lyrics ever implied. This kind of gutty, almost offhand,
seemingly effortless funk is where the Stones have traditionally left all competitors in the dust, and here they
outdo themselves. I even think that this is one of those rare instances (most of the others are on their first album)
where they cut Chuck Berry with one of his own songs.
"Honky Tonk Women" is just a joy, after Liver's half-realized run-through and Joe Cocker's hack job,
gutbucket rock and roll flowing out fine and raucous as a river of beer, but "Street Fightin' Man" takes the show
out on a level of stratospheric intensity that simply rises above the rest of the album and sums it all up. Keith's
work here is a special delight, great surging riffs reminiscent of some of the best lines on the first Moby Grape
album, or the golden lead in Stevie Wonder's "I Was Made to Love Her." I don't think there's a song on Ya-Ya's
where the Stones didn't cut their original studio jobs, and this one leaps perhaps farthest ahead of all.

The Seventies may not have started with bright prospects for the future of rock, and so many hacks are
reciting the litany of doom that it's beginning to annoy like an inane survey hit. The form may be in trouble, and
we listeners may ourselves be in trouble, so jaded it gets harder each month to even hear what we're listening to.
But the Rolling Stones are most assuredly not in trouble, and are looking like an even greater force in the years
ahead than they have been. It's still too soon to tell, but I'm beginning to think Ya-Ya's just might be the best
album they ever made. I have no doubt that it's the best rock concert ever put on record. The Stones, alone
among their generation of groups, are not about to fall by the wayside. And as long as they continue to thrive this
way, the era of true rock and roll music will remain alive and kicking with them.
Black Sabbath Black Sabbath
By Lester Bangs | September 17, 1970
Mediocrity doesn't tutor greatness often when it is influential at all, its progeny usually achieve even
ranker nadirs. But in rock, one of whose founding principles is that glorious mistakes can open out into amazing
new styles, anything can happen. Thus the Cream phenomenon, which is far from dead even now. Although they
were essentially an egotistical group of lazy artisans who ified their considerable talents by swallowing their own
hype, raking in fistfulls of cash and flying by the unflattering light of day, they left a whole raft of studious
imitators who are setting sail, visions of superstardom dancing in their heads, to this day.
Gun and Black Sabbath are two recent additions to the troops, both from England, and they well typify
the paradoxes and possibilities inherent in serving time in such a school. This is Gun's second album, a distinct
improvement over the first, but it still suffers by the familiarity of its derivation. The leads are always powerful,
often overdubbed to escape the limitations of the trio format, sounding at times as if lead guitarist Adrian Curtis
has taken several Clapton riffs and set them whirling around each other compelling, but not quite new.
It's no accident that the best tracks are at least partially acoustic. "Oh, Lady You," for instance, is a
tender ballad of extreme simplicity, rather like the Beatles' "Long Long Long." In another refreshing touch, the
song is bounded by two short uptempo flamenco bridges that are just sanguinely appropriate.
But the real standout here is "Angeline," a sorrowful ballad with strings and some beautifully
melancholy piano work that sounds like the cat had been listening hard to old masters like "Las Vegas Tango" on
the great long-lost Individualism of Gil Evans album. The lyrics are especially poignant, handling the touchy
subject of a "straight" individual combing the underground in an anguished search for the girl he loves: "Look at
you/What a state you're in/What you been doing? / Where's that place you've been?" Not until the end of the
song do you realize that the man is not a lover but the father of the girl he's seeking, pleading to another young
runaway as if she were his own daughter. The theme could easily be used for a snide put-down of the old folks,
but the maturity of the handling here reveals Gun to have musical invention and lyrical insight only beginning to
emerge.
Over across the tracks in the industrial side of Cream country lie unskilled laborers like Black Sabbath,
which was hyped as a rockin' ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap, something like
England's answer to Coven. Well, they're not that bad, but that's about all the credit you can give them. The
whole album is a shuck despite the murky songtitles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge
paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or
anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichs that sound like the musicians learned them out of a book,
grinding on and on with dogged persistence. Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass
lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master's tiredest Cream days. They even
have discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other's musical
perimeters yet never quite finding synch just like Cream! But worse.
Led Zeppelin III Led Zeppelin
By Lester Bangs | November 26, 1970
I keep nursing this love-hate attitude toward Led Zeppelin. Partly from genuine interest and mostly
indefensible hopes, in part from the conviction that nobody that crass could be all that bad, I turn to each fresh
album expecting what? Certainly not subtle echoes of the monolithic Yardbirds, or authentic blues
experiments, or even much variety. Maybe it's just that they seem like the ultimate Seventies Calf of Gold.

The Zep, of all bands surviving, are today their music is as ephemeral as Marvel comix, and as vivid
as an old Technicolor cartoon. It doesn't challenge anybody's intelligence or sensibilities, relying instead on a pat
visceral impact that will insure absolute stardom for many moons to come. Their albums refine the crude public
tools of all dull white blues bands into something awesome in its very insensitive grossness, like a Cecil B.
DeMille epic. If I rely so much on visual and filmic metaphors, it's because they apply so exactly. I've never
made a Zep show, but friends (most of them the type, admittedly, who will listen- to anything so long's it's loud
and they're destroyed) describe a thunderous, near-undifferentiated tidal wave of sound that doesn't engross but
envelops to snuff any possible distraction.
Their third album deviates little from the track laid by the first two, even though they go acoustic on
several numbers. Most of the acoustic stuff sounds like standard Zep graded down decibelwise, and the heavy
blitzes could've been outtakes from Zeppelin II. In fact, when I first heard the album my main impression was
the consistent anonymity of most of the songs no one could mistake the band, but no gimmicks stand out with
any special outrageousness, as did the great, gleefully absurd Orangutang Plant-cum-wheezing guitar freak-out
that made "Whole Lotta Love" such a pulp classic. "Immigrant Song" comes closest, with its bulldozer rhythms
and Bobby Plant's double-tracked wordless vocal croonings echoing behind the main vocal like some cannibal
chorus wailing in the infernal light of a savage fertility rite. What's great about it, though, the Zep's special
genius, is that the whole effect is so utterly two-dimensional and unreal. You could play it, as I did, while
watching a pagan priestess performing the ritual dance of Ka before the flaming sacrificial altar in Fire Maidens
of Outer Space with the TV sound turned off. And believe me, the Zep made my blood throb to those jungle
rhythms even more frenziedly.
Unfortunately, precious little of Z III's remaining hysteria is as useful or as effectively melodramatic.
"Friends" has a fine bitter acoustic lead, but gives itself over almost entirely to monotonously shrill Plant breastbeatings. Rob, give a listen to Iggy Stooge.
"Celebration Day" and "Out On the Tiles" are production-line Zep churners that no fan could fault and
no one else could even hear without an effort. "Since I've Been Loving You" represents the obligatory slow and
lethally dull seven-minute blues jam, and "Hats Off to (Roy) Harper" dedicates a bottleneck-&-shimmering
echo-chamber vocal salad to a British minstrel who, I am told, leans more towards the music-hall tradition.
Much of the rest, after a couple of listenings to distinguish between songs, is not bad at all, because the
disc Zeppelin are at least creative enough to apply an occasional pleasing fillip to their uninspiring material, and
professional enough to keep all their recorded work relatively clean and clear you can hear all the parts,
which is more than you can say for many of their peers.
Finally I must mention a song called "That's the Way," because it's the first song they've ever done that
has truly moved me. Son of a gun, it's beautiful. Above a very simple and appropriately everyday acoustic riff,
Plant sings a touching picture of two youngsters who can no longer be playmates because one's parents and peers
disapprove of the other because of long hair and being generally from "the dark side of town." The vocal is
restrained for once in fact, Plant's intonations are as plaintively gentle as some of the Rascals' best ballad
work and a perfectly modulated electronic drone wails in the background like melancholy harbor scows as the
words fall soft as sooty snow: "And yesterday I saw you standing by the river / I read those tears that filled your
eyes / And all the fish that lay in dirty water dying / Had they got you hypnotized?" Beautiful, and strangely
enough Zep. As sage Berry declared eons ago, it shore goes to show you never can tell.
Chunga's Revenge Frank Zappa
By Lester Bangs | December 24, 1970
Frank Zappa is a genius. Right. Frank Zappa probably knows more about music than you and I and 3/4
of the other professional musicians in this country put together. Right. Frank Zappa has made an incredible
contribution towards broadening the scope of the average American kid's listening habits. Absolutely. Frank
Zappa has certain possibly dangerous Machiavellian, manipulative tendencies. Yeah, probably so, but so what?
Frank Zappa is a snob who underestimates his audience. Hmmm. Think so, huh?
After giving all credit where credit is due, we have to start asking some other questions. When Zappa
dissolved the Mothers, he explained that they were going to "wait for the audience to catch up" with them.
Whatever that meant at the time, it takes on increasing irony as the passing months bring new Zappa and old
Mothers. Uncle Meat was a good album, but not nearly as involving as the three that preceded it. I seriously

10

doubt if very many members of the Mothers' audience had trouble with bits like "God Bless America at the
Whiskey" and "Louie Louie at Albert Hall." And the jazz on there, "King Kong" and others, was good
about as significant a movement from Coltrane's shadow as the work of, say, Charles Lloyd. As for the
more "serious" material, I suppose you could say that it adds to the 20th Century Classical tradition without
borrowing too obviously from any one source, but without being worked into structures more pointedly
vernacular it loses its force interesting, but hardly compelling as both Edgar Varese and Little Richard are
compelling.
Most of the albums released since then have been insubstantial, even allowing for the fact that
something like Burnt Weenee Sandwich is something of a Mother's sampler. Hot Rats was brilliant, filled with
fine, strong solos most of which could easily stand beside the current work of some of the best jazzmen in
America, even if Zappa's guitar solos were carrying too few ideas through too many minutes, just as they had in
"Invocation of the Young Pumpkin."
Burnt Weenee Sandwich sounded to me like a collection of Hot Rats rejects and warmups, groping,
relatively simple and obvious improvisations which never really got off the ground. And Weasels Ripped My
Flesh didn't stand up very well, either
a couple of good songs, some lukewarm jazz (what a chance was blown when "Eric Dolphy Memorial
Barbecue" failed to communicate any of that great musician's ideas to people who were in grade school when he
died!), and some pointless, pretentious electronic noise. Lots of people gave these albums good reviews, and lots
of others bought and listened to them solemnly, I suspect in a dutiful spirit akin to: "Well, now Uncle Frank's
gonna sit us down again and teach us something else about that great wide world of music we don't know
anything about because we've been fucking off listening to rock 'n' roll all these years."
The fact is, though, that a lot of people are picking up on some very challenging music these days, the
likes of Pharoah Sanders and Miles Davis and Roland Kirk, and they are turning from those listening
experiences to things like Burnt Weenee Sandwich and coming away with a yawn. The public may not be quite
as ignorant or as debased in its tastes as Zappa possibly thinks, and I suspect a lot of them are going to be even
more let down by Chunga's Revenge than they were by the last two albums. It doesn't have the long boring solos,
but the grab-bag Weasels feeling remains.
Briefly, "Transylvania Boogie" is a melodramatic Spanish/Oriental guitar solo that sounds like a studio
man trying to combine the kind of scales and tonal colorings Gabor Szabo was into a few years ago with John
McLaughlin - type approach. It doesn't work.
The other instrumentals are pretty standard Zappa fare, except for the pleasant, moody "Twenty Small
Cigars" and some excellent guitar choruses that break up the boring drum solos in "The Nancy & Mary Music."
Most of the vocals are pale reflections of lodes Zappa's mined too often: greaser rock ("Would You Go All the
Way," "Sharleena"), the Absolutely Free look-at-all-those-drunk-businessmen - aren't - they - repulsive riff
("Rudy Wants To Buy Yez a Drink"), and why he would even consider recording something like "Road Ladies"
(a groupie song set to The World's Oldest Blues Riff: "Don'cha know it gets lonesome
When yer way out there on the road/etc") is beyond me. It would certainly never have made any of the
Mothers' first albums.
Zappa can go on putting out dull records like these indefinitely and always find somebody who'll buy
them, out of respect for his name if nothing else. And it is a name worthy of much respect. The original Mothers
of Invention were a significant force in the music of our time. But these diddlings are not only insignificant, not
only do they suggest that one genius is not at present working towards anything in particular, but they also smack
of a rather cynical condescending attitude towards a public that may be getting ready to pass Zappa by.

Yoko Ono and Plastic Ono Band

By Lester Bangs | March 4, 1971

11

Anyone performing avant-garde music is laying themselves open to a certain amount of hostility and
derision at the outset. And if that person also happens to be Yoko Ono, who has not only displayed a gift for
hyping herself with cloying "happenings" but also led poor John astray and been credited by more than one
Insider with "breaking up the Beatles," why, the barbs and jeers can only be expected to increase proportionately.
Not only do most people have no taste for the kind of far-out warbling Yoko specializes in; they probably
wouldn't give her the time of day if she looked like Paula Prentiss and sang like Aretha.
On the other hand, not much of her recorded product inspires any sympathy. What it mostly inspires is
irritation, even in hardened fans of free music and electronic noise. Two Virgins, Unfinished Music No. One, and
the distinctly uncatchy Peace jingles on Wedding Album were the ego-trips of two rich waifs adrift in the
musical revolutions of the Sixties, as if Saul Bellow had suddenly discovered the cut-ups of William Burroughs
and recruited Lenore Kandel to help him forge them in the void.
Dilettante garbage, simply. The electronic/collage stuff, like the radio bit and the silent grooves, was a
John Cage takeoff equaled by precocious teenagers with tape recorders everywhere, and the screaming had been
explored much more effectively by Abbey Lincoln in Max Roach's 1960 We Insist: Freedom Now Suite (ditto
Yoko's pre-/post-coital sighs) and Patty Waters in a weird 1965 ESP-Disk recording (a classic rendition of "Black
Is the Color of My True Love's Hair" which found her shrieking the word "black" through every possible
distention for 15 minutes).
It wasn't until the long freak-out on the back of the live Toronto LP that Yoko began to show some signs
that she was learning to control and direct her vocal spasms, and John finally evidenced a nascent understanding
of the Velvet Underground-type feedback discipline that would best underscore her histrionics. That record
began to be listenable, even exciting, and the version of "Don't Worry Kyoko" on the back of the "Cold Turkey"
single was even better.
Now Yoko finally has an album all her own out, and it bodes well for future experiments by the Murk
Twins along these lines. For one thing, Yoko has excellent backup this time: one track features an Ornette
Coleman quartet, and the rest find John, Ringo and bassist Klaus Voormann working out accompaniments that
are by turns as frenzied as Yoko herself and quite restrained. It always sounds thought-out, carefully arranged,
appropriate; and with Yoko's music that's saying something.
Another strong plus is that all the songs are kept relatively short, make distinct statements, and seldom
degenerate into the kind of pointless, prolix yammering that characterized her earlier work. In a way, the track
with Coleman is the weakest: Yoko is into her "Ohh, John!" riff, and Ornette's band is laying down the kind of a
rhythmic noodling that seldom finds them at their peaks. It was a rehearsal tape anyway; what would be really
nice would be to hear Yoko with new madmen the likes of Gato Barbieri and Mike Mantler.
The other tracks, however, are something else again. John's guitar is strong and sizzling, a crazed file
cutting through with some of the most eloquent distortions heard in a long time. He's really learning this
language now, and his singing high notes and guttural rhythms speak with the same authoritative voice he
showed with the Beatles. And when he suddenly shifts down from those flurries into an expertly abstracted
guitar line straight out of Chuck Berry (as in "Why"), it just takes your breath away.
There are also two experiments in electronics here: Side One closes with a haunting juxtaposition of
"Tomorrow Never Knows" guitar and vocal sounding like one of the modal choirs off the Music of Bulgaria
album electronically distorted; and "Paper Shoes" opens with tides of noise and railroad clacks, then moves into
a sequence where Yoko's voice, cut up by machine and melted into itself, flashes in weird echoes around the
trestles.
This one will grow on you. They haven't ironed out all the awkwardness yet, but this is the first J&Y
album that doesn't insult the intelligencein fact, in its dark confounding way, it's nearly as beautiful as John's
album. Give it a try, and at least a handful of listenings before your verdict. There's something happening here.
Mirror Man Beefheart
By Lester Bangs | April 1, 1971
Captain Beefheart still plays to a relatively minor following, but most of them believe, as I do, that he's
one of the four or five unqualified geniuses to rise from the hothouses of American music in the Sixties, an

12

innovator whose instinctive idiomatic syntheses and wildly original approach to composition and improvisation
preview an era of profound changes in popular music. Statements like that would be extreme anywhere else, but
only Cap has managed to fuse the loose ends of rock, jazz and blues so effortlessly.
Because of all that, most people who will buy one of his albums at all would come close to buying
absolutely anything he took a notion to put out, no matter how bad the critics or grapevine said it was. Now, with
Decals just beginning to wear off, Mirror Man comes along and surprises us all. Recorded live in Los Angeles in
1965, it's strictly a fan's album, but those fans will find it an invaluable link in comprehending the man's stylistic
evolution, fitting neatly between Safe As Milk and the great AM "Bootleg Album" which went out to the press
and others too busy to listen to it. bore "Diddy Wah Diddy" and three other very early singles, and should have
been marketed.
Mirror Man is all of six years old, but sounds less dated than most other records, especially live sets,
from its period. Amazingly enough, the personnel listed here is substantially the same as that of Cap's current
group. Only Alex St. Claire Snouffer has wandered from the fold (you've gotta watch that "Antennae Jimmy
Simmons" character, because he's given to fabricating new noms du disque with each album). At the time of this
recording they were playing music with all the potential for the kind of free-flying excursions they're into now,
but just hadn't broken through yet. Thoroughly blues-based, the four songs on this album sound much like the
playing on Strictly Personal (released in 1968) stretched to extremes of prolixity usually unsuitable for records.
"Tarotplane" runs 19 minutes, the title track 15, and the other two are longer than most groups can sustain
interest on record even under the most carefully-planned studio conditions. None of them really build in intensity
or end up anyplace other than where they started, and would most likely prove intolerable to anyone already a bit
put off by Beefheart's work.
All that said, there are certain other factors favorable enough to justify the album's release and the real
enthusiasm with which some folks will greet it. One is that, no matter how excessive the time signatures, Captain
Beefheart in this "formative stage" was still more instrumentally adventurous and verbally inspired ("Automatic
Sam told Eveready Betty told Prestone Millie with the long black wavy mane...") than most band-leaders of
today. Sounding like a slice of unusually authentic Delta blues run through a clattering steeplechase of staggered
rhythms and wildly idiosyncratic vocals, this must have been mighty heady stuff in '65, and I imagine the
audiences were absolutely dumb-founded. Although it may sound better now than it did then, because
psychedelia generally seems to improve with age as it takes on a somewhat quaint charm we couldn't see in its
heyday. The extreme length of the songs diminishes that charm a bit here, but the album is still worth getting if
you like period pieces or vintage psychedelia or any kind of long blues jam. If all those millions settled for
Cream throttling "Spoonful" for 16 minutes, their attention spans shouldn't have any trouble with this, which is
not only better blues jamming but actually has more variety. On the other hand, anybody once galvanized with
the Beefheart vision, who did handstands to Trout Mask and whooped at the rafters when Decals finally arrived,
probably won't even notice the timings till the side's over.
Earth, Wind & Fire Earth, Wind & Fire
BY LESTER BANGS | June 24, 1971
Earth, Wind and Fire is a R&B tentet from Chicago with several vocalists, horn players that are polished
but not too much, and a heavy Sly influence. Which is no denigration, because Sly's riffs are showing up (in
sometimes peculiar contexts) in a large percentage of the albums appearing today, from Redbone to your latest
funky-bucolic rock band. Sly pacesetters like "Thank You" are written all over such songs as "C'Mon Children"
and "Moment of Truth." Which is not to say that they're not good listening. What they lack, though, is Sly's sense
of derision and irony. The lyrics, unwisely printed inside, are as preachy and lovepeace cloying as anything
Motown has done recently.
The Fifth Dimension also show up, in the smooth harmonies and intermittent lack of tension, and, to a
much lesser degree, the voices of East Harlem, in certain loose whoops that well up from the distance of primal
chaos to intrude on these facile surfaces. Leader Reese White is thoroughly a pro, with background citations a
yard long, and maybe that's why the hand he keeps on the reins is a bit heavy. Earth, Wind and Fire may become
vastly popular, though they will have to show more originality than is evidenced here if they do, but I'd like to
hear more of the burning sax solo cut so short in the last part of "Fan the Fire," or the great marimba work which
gurgles and flashes like Caribbean foam through the beginning and end of "Bad Tune." The joy there deserves
dilation.

13

Mandrill, another new R&B based group, have a lot more sass and youthfulness, and their music makes
it from juke jive to jazz riffs right out of some of the great albums Herbie Mann made in the early Sixties. This is
party music, and comes more out of Chicago and especially Santana than Sly. Unfortunately, it also derives
somewhat from the Chambers Brothers, so a suite called "Peace and Love" gobbles the second side, and while it
has real musical interest where its Chambers antecedent had none, it still suffers by the pompous lyrics and
general sense of pretension and ersatz gimmickry. But it works well enough that you don't really mind, and some
rippling flute streams early on and the humor and highball bop of the rest more than compensate. Besides, the
cover bears the proud face of one of old Willie B.'s very own purple-assed baboons, suitable for framing. What
more could we ask?
Jefferson Airplane Bark Album Review
Lester Bangs
Jefferson Airplane have been a subject of some contention ever since they abandoned their Summer of
Love posture for music that aspired at once to both topicality and a degree of experimentation. If you love them,
you know that they are one of the four or five most consistently vital American bands. If you hate them you're at
least partially justified on any rational man's terms, given the rather squishy politics and pretentiously inane
sense of humor. And if you're one of those unfortunate souls caught between the staunch Planeiacs and toothgrinding critics, then each new Airplane album is an exercise in manic depression, hamstrung between the fire of
the Kaukonen-Casady combination (one of the great lead/bass juxtapositions of all time, in the context of the
Airplane) and the bombastic excesses of the Slick-Kantner axis, who, after all, write most of the songs and have
increasingly stamped the group's identity with their own sensibilities, as Marty Balin receded, finally to hightail
it for good.
Bark, the first post-Balin album and first really new release in two years, has gotten some bad press and
provoked yawns even among some Airplane cognoscenti. Maybe it's just that people built their hopes up so high
that Bark could only prove anticlimactic. In fact, it's a fine album that may lack somewhat the musical
vehemence of earlier works, but largely checks as well the Kantner-Slick compulsion toward adrenaline
filibusters.
As usual, the actual music is delivered wrapped in some of the most dunder-headed drool that ever
served as a hip flack-pak. But once you've hacked your way through the thickets of excelsior, the music stands
out both from most recent releases and the Airplane's previous work. A cartoon trailer named "War Movie" is
Kantner's only real indulgence in the celebrated wheeze against the Big E, although similar themes appear in
terms more mature and both musically and lyrically restrained in the quietly powerful "When the Earth Moves
Again," and Grace wanks away at her own Righteous Indignariff with "Law Man," wherein a hapless flatfoot has
barged in just moments after Grace and Paul or whoever have finished balling and finds this hippie broad
Wagnerianly bawling those classically intimidating lines: "My old man's gun has never been fired but there's a
first time!" Say one for me, Grace!
The rest of the music mostly finds some graceful detour around such heavyhandedness, although "Pretty
As You Feel," by Joey Covington, Casady and Kaukonen, is a banal bit right out of 16 magazine enjoining their
own and ladies everywhere against polluting their pores with plastic goo. Some will call it sexist; I just call it
mawkish, which is all right because so is much of the best pop music from grooves immemorial, and besides the
purely musical part of it is just about as lovely as "Feel So Good" with its lyrics of perfect simplicity and fine
falsetto breaks at the ends of the lines.
This may be the most consciously un-stentorian Airplane album since Surrealistic Pillow, and even at its
most fatuous this new-found and distinctly relative humility gives us "Thunk," a near-acapella Covington opus
that's so absurd I can't resist it: it represents the Airplane's special brand of humor epitomized by "Juff Gleento"
and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich in Volunteers in the best possible way. Though not nearly so well as
Grace's "Never Argue With a German If You're Tired or European Song," an essay in something below Pig
German ("Sticken in mine haken ... fugen mine gas mit mine auss pucken") set to abstracted choral lappings,
which gasses the prurient gonads a lot better than that Ogden Nash trash about "Woman with a greasy heart
Automatic man" and just cries out for a Grammy.
If you ask me, Bark is the 'Plane's most magnuminious opus since After Bathing at Baxter's, and even if
its woof and whissshh ain't quite as supersonic as some of their other platters, it'll getcha there on time just like
an amyl nitrate TV Dinner garnished this time with a little Valium. And the zingy rush that Jorma's and Jack's

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reps rest on streams as strongly as ever just a bit below the surface of the music with a motion seconded in places
by the always judicious application of Papa John's sweet gypsy-blue fiddle.
Those three are the band's nexus of strength, and it should stand to reason that they would be at least as
invigorated on their own, but as we all know, it's reason's right to get falling-down drunk every so-so, so heed the
words of a non-paying auditor when I tell you to steer clear of the new Hot Tuna set. It may not be as
presumptuously vitiated in its cabaret blues as the first one, but unless you're just crying for some muzak so
mellow it's fucking work to hear it, First Pull Up. Then Pull Down ranks as prototype Dentist's Waiting Room
fare, or maybe, in line with the title, the Executive Washroom at a Consciousness III Corporate Enterprise. Stick
with the original accept no substitute.
Master of Reality Black Sabbath
By Lester Bangs | November 25, 1971
The second-generation rock audience (that is, those who went steady to "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and
got serious with Highway 62 Revisited) suffer mightily wrestling with the phenomenon represented by Grank
Funk and Black Sabbath. If nothing else, though, both Funk and Sabbath are for all their monotony at least
supremely consistent as opposed to schtick collectors with no personal vision like Deep Purple. And since
when is monotony so taboo in rock & roll, anyway? Rock has been some of the best of it too in large part
monotonous from the beginning, hypnotically so, as rightwingers would say. As far apart as they are, Black
Sabbath is only slightly more monotonous than James Taylor or Joni Mitchell, and any Stooges or MC5 fan who
disdains Black Sabbath is just bigoted.
The thing is that, like all the best rock & rollers since the Pleistocene era, Black Sabbath (and Grand
Funk) have a vision that informs their music with unity and direction and makes their simple structures more
than they might seem. Grand Funk's vision is one of universal brotherhood (as when they have spoken of taking
their millions to the White House with a list of demands), but Black Sabbath's, until Master of Reality anyway,
has concentrated relentlessly on the self-immolating underside of all the beatific Let's Get Together platitudes of
the counter culture.
Their first album found them still locked lyrically into the initial Spiritualist-Satanic hype and was filled
out mostly with jamming, while Paranoid reflected that theme only, in the great line in "War Pigs": "Generals
gathered in their masses Just like witches at black masses." The rest of the album dealt mostly with social
anomie in general, from the title track's picture of total disjuncture (rendered with authentic power too) to "Iron
Man's" picture of an unloved Golem in a hostile world, the stark picture of ultimate needle-freak breakdown
painted in the philippic "Hand of Doom," and finally the unique "Fairies Wear Boots": "I went walkin' late last
night Suddenly I got a fright/I looked in the window, was surprised what I saw/Fairies in boots dancin' with the
broads!"
Not all of this, incidentally, was rendered in La Brea sinks of lugubrious bass blasts several of the
songs had high wailing solos and interesting changes of tempo, and "Paranoid" really moved. If you took the
trouble to listen to the album all the way through.
Master of Reality both extends and modifies the trends on Paranoid. It has fewer songs, if you discount
the two short instrumental interludes, but it is not that the songs are longer than the first record the album is
shorter. The sound, with a couple of exceptions, has evolved little if at all. The thick, plodding, almost
arrhythmic steel wool curtains of sound the group is celebrated and reviled for only appear in their classical state
of excruciating slowness on two tracks, "Sweet Leaf" and "Lord of This World," and both break into driving
jams that are well worth the wait. Which itself is no problem once you stop thinking about how bored you are
and just let it filter down your innards like a good bottle of Romilar. Rock & roll has always been noise, and
Black Sabbath have boiled that noise to its resinous essence. Did you expect bones to be anything else but rigid?
The rest of the songs, while not exactly lilting, have all the drive and frenzy you could wish for in this
day and age. Thematically the group has mellowed a bit, and although the morbidity still shines rankly in almost
every song, the group seems to have taken its popularity and position seriously enough to begin offering some
answers to the dark cul-de-sacs of Paranoid. "Sweet Leaf," for instance, shows that Black Sabbath have the balls
to write a song celebrating grass this late date, and the double entendre, if you can even call it that, is much less
tortuous than it would have been in 1966, with an added touch of salvation from grosser potions: "My life was
empty forever on a down/Until you took me, showed me around ... Straight people don't know what you're
about..."

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Unfortunately, the religious virus also rears its zealot head, in "After Forever," which is a great
Yardbirds-type arrangement nevertheless and despite its drubbing us over the head with "God is the only way to
love" it does have the great line "Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope?"
And besides, isn't all this Christian folderol just the flip side of the Luciferian creed they commenced
with and look back on balefully in "Lord of This World"? And for those of us, like me, who prefer the secular
side of Black Sabbath, there's "Solitude," a ballad as lovely as any out of England in the last year (with flute yet),
and "Children of the Grave": with "Revolution in their minds the children start to march Against the world they
have to live in Oh! The hate that's in their hearts They're tired of being pushed around and told just what to do.
They'll fight the world until they've won and love comes flowing through."
I'm not saying that either that or the arrangement it's set in is the new "My Generation," but it is a
rocking, churning addition to the long line of defiant, self-affirmative and certainly a little defensive songs that
goes right back to the earliest whap and wail of rock 'n' roll. It's naive, simplistic, repetitive, absolute doggerel
but in the tradition. Chuck Berry sang in more repressed times. "Don't bother us, leave us 'lone/Anyway we
almost grown." The Who stuttered "hope I die before I get old," but the MC5 wanted to "Kick Out the Jams" or
at least escape on a "Starship," and Black Sabbath have picked up the addled, quasi-politicized desperation of
growing up in these times exactly where they left off: "Freedom fighters sent out to the sun Escape from
brainwashed minds and pollution/Leave the earth to all its sin and hate/Find another world where freedom
waits."
The question now is not whether we can accept lines as obvious and juvenile as that from a rock & roll
record. They should be as palatable to anyone with a memory as the stereotypic two-and three-chord structures
of the songs. The only criterion is excitement, and Black Sabbath's got it. The real question is whether Black
Sabbath can grow and evolve, as a band like the MC5 has, so that there is a bit more variation in their sound
from album to album. And that's a question this group hasn't answered yet.
Hot Rocks, 1964-1971 The Rolling Stones
By Lester Bangs | December 20, 1971
It would be nice to be able to call it something like The Rolling Stones' Golden Decade, for the Stones
have been the most enduringly prolific highwire act of their time, both reflecting and surpassing the era with a
deadly accuracy that can make them seem more dangerous than they really are. But somehow this album merely
falls into that venerable Stones tradition of supra-throwaway albums, collections like December's Children and
Flowers that by their very slapdash cynicism validate themselves and charm us into feeling that they're as sure a
representation of the Stones ethos as brand-new and more unified efforts like Let It Bleed.
Hot Rocks (London 2PS 606-7) is even crasser than Flowers and Children, because it's the first Stones
album on which every track has been represented on albums previously released in this country. Some of them,
in fact, like "Let's Spend the Night Together," are on their fourth go-round. So in part Hot Rocks is, however
beautifully packaged, a purely mercenary item put together by the Stones' former record company to cash in on
the Christmas season and wring some more bucks out in the name of the Mod Princes they once owned.
As historical document of Greatest Hits culling, Hot Rocks takes almost no chances, and if the Stones or
London sometimes display an unexpected sense of what may be the band's most important statements (as in the
inclusion of "You Can't Always Get What You Want"), there is also much left out. The absence of "Lady Jane"
makes sense in the light of its being on three albums already and not that good in the first place, and
considerations of space make "Not Fade Away"'s freezeout seem reasonable until you reflect on how severely the
derivative but vital R&B (their best work, really, until Let It Bleed) of their first five albums has been underrepresented here. Maybe it's sensible to cut "The Last Time" in favor of its flip side "Play With Fire," but the
absence of "It's All Over Now" fairly glares at you.
Either "She's a Rainbow" or the great, roaring "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the
Shadow" would have been more fun than the always lame "As Tears Go By" and the socially incisive but
musically slight "Mother's Little Helper," both of which were included. And "We Love You," the brilliant "jailsingle" of the summer of '67 which may be the most musically adventurous thing the Stones have ever recorded,
has never been on an album released in this country (There are also the great B sides like "Who's Drivin' My
Plane," "Child of the Moon" and "Sad Day," but they deserve a different sort of album. Maybe someday they'll
get it.)

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So when we look past the magnificent cover depicting the Stones in their numerous roles as ragtag
rougues of Merrie Olde, Tangierian travellers, fashion plates, etc., what do we find? The evolution of a rock &
roll band from superlative interpreters of mostly borrowed R&B in a style that was never far from pop, to being
pop artists, philosophers and social commentators couching their vision and fantasies in a style that seldom gets
all that far away from R&B.
The Stones have never been far from Chuck Berry stylistically, and in the beginning he was as
predominant an influence as Ray Charles was for the early Eric Burdon and Joe Cocker. But the Berry-DiddleyJimmy Reed phase of the Stones' genesis is overlooked in favor of two songs deriving much more from the
traditions of uptown soul and pop. Nevertheless, "Time is on My Side" and "Heart of Stone" are vintage Stones,
with the arrogant persona that is largely the subject of the first half of their career and the first half of this album
already emerging unmistakably, and cemented in "Play With Fire," first entry in the Stones' continuing sometime
dalliance with the folk traditions of their native land. "As Tears Go By" derives from those traditions too, but in
much more cornball fashion, and one imagines the Stones could have only recorded it to prove they could carry
it off, Delsey tissue strings and all.
The crucial thread running through almost all of the Stones' early work, and much of what has followed,
is the tension in the alternation of themes of utter arrogance and disdain, and of the sense of ennui and frustration
deriving from living, however highly, in these desperate times. "Get Off Of My Cloud" brought the former
razzberry to a pinnacle of derisive noise that many, including Jagger himself, found excessive, while "I Can't Get
No Satisfaction" was, of course, the primal and perhaps still definitive statement of the latter condition. The
balancing of these two senses is at once the strength and limitation of the Stones: strength, because nothing is
more universal now than boredom and dissatisfaction and the Stones' particular brand of charismatic swagger
has been affected by more adolescents than any other posture of the generation: limitation, since yesterday's
outrageous strut is today's cornball signal to get the hook, and keeping a sure grasp on the shifting modes in
malaise o' the day is one of the most difficult feats for any artist to maintain in this fast-mutating era.
The Stones have maintained, of course, radiating a semblance of constant change while mainly just
reworking the most tried-and-true elements in their arsenal. Along the way, they've juiced up the process by
turning now and then from their narcissistic role to cast a caustic eye at the society around them, as in "Mother's
Little Helper," and borrowing whatever was handily trendy, from the sitar in "Paint It Black" to the Memphis
horns in "Brown Sugar" and Sticky Fingers, to garnish their basic sound. And, in "Let's Spend the Night
Together" they brought the stud role to a double-entendre whether the song is actually about sex or about
being too wired to make it and knowing that nothing needs to be proved anyway as brilliant as the utter sexist
dominance of "Under My Thumb" is devastating. "Let's Spend the Night Together" also represented the
apotheosis of noise evolved into an arrangement of perfect clarity and unorthodox form, and effortlessly pushing,
pulsating, almost mechanical sound that could go on forever.
It's on the second record of Hot Rocks, however, that the big thematic shift in the Stones' music
becomes unmistakable. Almost all of the previous songs had been in a more or less tangible sense
autobiographical, but now the ongoing persona ballooned into something at once stranger, more surrealistic and
yet perhaps more universal. "Jumping Jack Flash" was unmistakably Mick Jagger, but also a creature of myth, a
new mask to wear. "Sympathy For the Devil" cemented this process, of course, and helped give the Stones the
"bad-vibes" patina which led so many to lay the blame for Altamont solely at their feet.
Always theatrical, the Stones had found a way of molding their basic profile into and out of various
synonymous figures. We always sensed that they were basically lower-class street-punks who used to get out and
mix it up on Friday nights, even if it may not have been entirely true, but not until "Street Fighting Man" did
they take the trouble to play out the role in the most overt fashion possible, and what was even better was that the
time was ripe for them to do it in the fashionable context of revolution. They can hardly be blamed for not
following through politically, since, just like Dylan and most of the other giants in this business, they are
basteally involved in finding roles, playing them out and projecting them, and then moving on to new ones. And
at least they never pretended, as Lennon does today, to be doing more than that. Listening to "Midnight
Rambler" still gives me chills today, but I hardly think Mick Jagger thinks of himself as "a proud Black Panther."
So the Stones, beginning with Beggar's Banquet, moved into a strong new phase where they are
beginning to let their fantasies run free, and, if something like "Memo From Turner" from Performance is any
indication, Jagger may have even darker dreams than "Midnight Rambler" in store. Unhealthy, perhaps, but
undeniably pertinent.

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The other, and even more important, recent phase is the Stones' interest in songs, the kind of triumphs
hinted at in "Satisfaction" and "Mother's Little Helper," that deal in searingly explicit terms not just with sexual
conceits and power fantasies, but with the conditions under which all of us are living today. "Gimme Shelter"
and "You Can't Always Get What You Want" may be the two most crucial and enduring things ever laid on wax
by this band; certainly they demonstrated an unprecedented maturity, a view of the world as it is and a promise
that the Stones' most vital work may well lie ahead of them. And even the much maligned "Brown Sugar" is an
almost perfect crossbreed song in the new Stones vocabulary, combining a forceful picture of colonial racism
with another Jagger fantasy which has offended some people but strikes with undeniable power.
The direction of the Stones' future is clear, though perhaps less predictable than ever before. I doubt if
they'll ever stop writing songs like "Bitch" and "Live With Me" any more than they'll ever stop copping licks
from Chuck Berry. It doesn't matter. They are the most creative and self-sustaining rock & roll band in history,
and, despite what some observers say, not tired at all yet. "Gimme Shelter," "You Can't Always Get What You
Want," and "Brown Sugar" point the way, and if Jagger & Co. are perhaps the most decadent or even, in the
words of some, evil of our heroes, they also have the surest grasp of who we are and where we are going. The
Stones will not quail from reflecting it; it's up to us to do something about it.

Killer Alice Copper

By Lester Bangs | January 6, 1972
Like all the true rock superstars to rise in the Sixties, Alice Cooper is a consummate master of
imagemanipulation. He continually sees to it that new configurations are born in his studiedly outrageous stage
persona and the spirit-force of his sound, with the end in mind of putting both himself and his audience through a
steeplechase of changes and keeping everybody alert at gut-level. Whether the myth has much at all to do with
Alice Cooper the man behind the role is highly debatable, but even if it's mostly fiction it doesn't matter all that
much anyway. Alice is not that much more a self-invention and technician of forms and poses than Bob Dylan
has always been. And if you think that's a far-out comparison, just listen to "Be My Lover" or "Desperado" on
this album.
Killer (Warner Bros. 2567) is without a doubt the best Alice Cooper album yet and one of the finest rock
& roll records released in 1971. It brings all the elements of the band's approach to sound and texture to a totally
integrated pinnacle that fulfills all the promise of their erratic first two albums, and beats Love It To Death's
dalliance with Thirties flick "spooky" cornball riffs by the sheer sustained impact of its primal rock and roll jolt.
And it's necessary to emphasize those three bludgeoned-into-loam words because there has always been some
question of priorities in regard to this band, viz. whether they wanted most to rave up the wang dang doodle or
promulgate a kind of concentrated Ringling Brothers sideshow whose essential context and importance were
extramusical.
You remember these guys, how they set back straights and hips alike by wearing makeup and throwing
chickens to the mercy of the more illiberally aggressive sections of the audience. Well, I think the reaction to the
latter freaked even them (Alice Cooper) out, and the other night I saw a fine and rather mainstream sounding
Northern California band called the Wackers do an "Ooooh"-perfect rendition of the Beatles' "She Loves You"
from behind as much rouge and blue eyeshadow as Alice and the boys ever piled on. It gets harder to be avantoutrageous all the time, what with everybody so jaded and I even hear the next catch-phrase to drop from the
Max's dens of iniquity into the Newsweeks is "gay chauvinism," so what the fuck are you gonna do short of
copping a riff not even new when Gilles de Rais laid it down four or five centuries ago and taking to actually
disemboweling virgins and infants on stage?
Sing about dead babies, that's what. Alice's material, as opposed to his stage business, was never that
lurid in the past, but as the shock value of the live show has ebbed with the tides of history he has begun to think
about injecting or impregnating the songs with more weirdities, fetishes, decadence and degeneracy in the form
of archetypes derived from TV, pre-Wertham comic books, and the pages of paperback textbooks on deviation
authored by spurious PhD's and selling for two or three dollars in liquor stores in every suburb.
You can take all this seriously if you want to, but it was not for nothing that Alice told interviewers from
an underground paper in Texas that one of the things that turned him on the most was jacking off. Not that there's
anything wrong with jacking off, either; rock musicians, audiences and critics have been doing it over

18

themselves and each other for years. Alice Cooper is not half as depraved, fortunately or not, as he'd like you to
think he is, but he has brought the Hollywood manipulation of fantasies and attitudes to brilliant new levels of
cheerful cynicism. Some regard it as contemptuous, nihilistic exploitation and even accuse him of having a
vested interest in the status quo and the fucked-up nature of American life because its absurdity turns him on, but
I think he's one of the most upfront stars we've ever known and his using up of what was implicit in the appeal of
rock stars ever since the Fab Four first shook their pretty mops can only be healthy for all concerned.
And on another level he is talking about himself in all these songs, and more on this album than ever
before, because this album deals, by turns graphically and surrealistically, with how Al and confreres feel about
their sudden ICBM ascent from semiobscure weirdo band to the glamour and unreality of stardom. Kind of like
James Taylor in Mud Slide Slim, except that for all they sing about rage and aggression and death, these dudes
are feeling no perceivable angst, believe you me (which may be an ultimately lethal form of hubris). Where the
earlier "Caught in a Dream" had them "tryin' to catch a ride on a Cadillac," the very first thing Alice does here is
declare that he's got the whole fat world "Under My Wheels."
Like all of the material on the album, "Under My Wheels" is full-throttle, hard-driving rock & roll.
While not as wayward or dissonant as much other Alice Cooper material, it has a singleminded, straight-ahead
intensity reminiscent of the Stones' best singles, and it's a car song to boot, so it's inconceivable why it hasn't
become a hit. It even utilizes the current fashionable Delaney & Bonnie Stax- or Muscle-Shoals-derived sax
riffings.
If "Under My Wheels" is a Stones classic translated into Alice Cooper's obsession with machines and
technology, "Be My Lover" sets Stones-like lyrics dealing with a sexual situation to a bedrock guitar riff straight
from Lou Reed's "Sweet Jane." This may be the best vocal Alice's ever recorded, and Mike Bruce's words reflect
the strutting, smug feeling of the nascent Superstar perfectly: "And with a magnifyin' glance I just sorta look her
over/We have a drink or two, well maybe three/And then she starts tellin' me her life story."
Later there is a great moment hilariously reminiscent, whether intended as parody or not, of "Honky
Tonk Women": "I told her that I came from Detroit City/And I played guitar in a longhaired rock & roll band"
and here Glenn Buxton's guitar takes off in a great swooping flight set at reduced volume level so you don't quite
catch it at first "She asked me why the singer's name was Alice/And I said 'Listen baby, you really wouldn't
understand.'" The name and the self-conscious sense of charisma will recur later, when he throws in a "This is
Alice speakin'!," and even if you've never experienced the pandemonium of a live show you know that this man
is a hero to countless battalions of American kids, and he knows it too. And each song on this album finds him in
a different role in the endless movie he is projecting on them.
One of the strangest faces of his heroism is found in "Halo of Flies." The song begins with an
effectively mesmeric moog pulsation and a series of circumfluent guitar solos that remind me of movie soundtrack music somewhere between James Bond themes and old films about aristocratic chicanery in the courts of
Renaissance Europe. The first line of the song is "I've got the answers to all of your questions," and it moves
through a humorous sequence where the lyrics "daggers and contacts and bright shiny limos ... glimmering
nightgowns, poisonous cobras" are set to the melody of Rogers & Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things." to a
Spanish-sounding interlude where Alice might be parodying Rod Stewart: "And what a middle-Asian lady/She
really came as no surprise But I still did destroy her," but the next line is "And I will smash halo of flies."
Alice is creating absurd and outrageous collages of idiomatic borrowings combined with a distinctly
teen-age sense of the morbid. The song ends in a flurry of guitar-and-moog screams, and it is almost a relief to
come down from its rococo intricacies to "Desperado," which is nothing more nor less than a Hollywood
Western turned into a rock & roll song, as Love did with "Singing Cowboy," except that here Alice sounds more
than a little like Jim Morrison, which is supremely appropriate for lines like "I'm a killer and I'm a clown." And
some of the best stanzas in recent music appear in this song, just as effulgent Dmitri Tiompkinish violins stream
over the rhythms like a sunset: "You're as stiff as my smokin' barrel/You're as dead as the desert night/You're a
notch and I'm a legend/You're at peace and I must hide."
"You Drive Me Nervous" is a great addition to the august line of rock & roll songs and Alice Cooper
songs about frustration and anxiety, with some of the most searing double guitar work on the album and lyrics
that seem at first to be an extension of "Eighteen's" adolescence riff into a shriek at parents but reveal themselves
eventually to be a message to a confused and footloose lover: "You run upstate/Yer thrown in jail/Yer mama 'n'
papa comes up and sez: 'Honey we ain't for sale!'" The last line is spoken in a deep caricaturial voice, exactly
like Eddie Cochran's "I'd like to help ya son but you're too young to vote" in "Summertime Blues."

19

Alice knows from whence he comes (even if he seems to come from everywhere), and almost as if they
were consciously moving through the history of rock & roll, the next song is called "Yeah Yeah Yeah" and
despite another arrogant Stones-like role ("You can be my slave and I'll be the stranger") runs in its last half
through some harmonica and Springfield-Moby Grape type riffs reminiscent of folk-rock at its best. Followed of
course by psychedelia circa Chocolate Watch Band, a touch of Ray Davies in the vocal and certain words, and a
pervasive sense of general unwholesomeness in "Dead Babies." The key line is "Dead babies can take care of
themselves"; I find this song a little repulsive myself, but then maybe that's exactly the idea. Although if Alice
Cooper thinks the idea of dead babies is somehow cute, then he's ... he's ... he's succeeded, I guess, although
there are all kinds of motives and ways of offending people, some less justified than others. In any case, the
song's arrangement is incredible, an almost cinematic sound, with beautiful use of french horns a la "Penny
Lane." After that the only way to finish the album and the side's seeming rock cycle is with more Morrisonics
and some almost Procol Harumish organ work in the title song, which seems to have more in common texturally
with the material on side two of Love It To Death than most of Killer.
Alice Cooper has come a long way and used up a lot of gimmicks and poses to get to this stunner of an
album, but it was all worth it and at this point I can hardly wait for the next one. Love It To Death was still in the
Top 100 just before this one was released, and with the help of another hit single Killer should be even more of a
giant, because in every area of conception and plain instrumental and vocal tightness it excels. One thing is for
sure: this is a strong band, a vital band, and they are going to be around for a long, long time.
The Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot Beefheart
By Lester Bangs | March 30, 1972
"Said the Mama to the baby in the corn:/'You are my first-born/That shall hereon in be known/As the
Spotlight Kid.'" That's how the title song of this album begins, and one glance at the picture on the cover Cap
natty in Las Vegas jacket, with a knowing almost-smile on his face reveals a man with the self-understanding
and self-confidence to bill himself as a new-generational hero with no false pride.
And make no mistake, it is definitely to the new audience, the ones that teethed on feedback and boogie,
that Captain Beefheart belongs. He has been called everything in the past from a man wasting the clear ability to
be the world's greatest white blues singer, to an impossibly complex musician who may or may not be the real
avant-garde, but is certainly an elitist taste. While I have always held to the opinion that there's been nothing
playing on the face of the earth as far out as Beefheart for about 3 or 4 years now, I also recognize that his former
style was a bit beyond the attention span or interest of the average listener. Which is certainly not to slight mass
tastes, either; after all, why should things have to be as far out as possible all the time?
This album is Captain Beefheart's answer to that question. It is the most accessible thing he's recorded
since Safe As Milk (remember the single of "Diddy Wah Diddy"? Captain Beefheart makes hits!), and goes back
to his most primal roots for much of its inspiration, proving once and for all that not only is Captain Beefheart
almost certainly the supreme white blues singer of our era, but he knows how to take that gift and combine it
with his supra-blues musical vision sliced down to bone basics, and come up with vital, immediate, funky rock
'n' roll.
Its originality is almost complete, although the Captain is treading waters these days adjacent to those
where some of his mightiest contemporaries strut. For instance, for verbal and vocal mysterioso effects, he
sounds in some parts of this album even more like Doctor John than Sly Stone does on There's a Riot Goin' On.
Throughout, however, the Beefheart wit and genius manifest themselves. "I'm Gonna Booglarize Ya, Baby" is a
song riding in on a tense, edgy riff, telling a story about Vital Willy and Weepin' Milly driving around and
around in Will's car in the night (the first line is "The moon was a drip on a dark hood"), looking for a secluded
place to park. Finally, in desperation, Milly tells Willy that they can go to her house, and Beefheart comments:
"Tush! Tush! You lose your push/When you beat around the bush!"
While hints of eclecticism creep in at odd moments, it is blues and the raunchier forms of R&B which
lie at the heart of this album. "White Jam" opens with a Chinese-sounding marimba riff, like porcelain raindrops
breaking on a sill, then shifts with perfect organic logic into a sawing boogie with great understated harp and
high Beefheart falsetto. "When It Blows Its Stacks" is an ominous song built on a basic guitar riff worthy of
Mark Farner. With each chorus, the guitar builds from its initial simple advance to wirier, more complex backups
for Beefheart's stark, threatening vocal that seems to be about some angry god: "When it blows its stacks/He
don't pussyfoot around/Hide all the women ..."

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On side two Beefheart gets more deeply into something akin to traditional blues, especially with the last
three songs; the Captain has never sounded more like Howlin' Wolf than he does here, and he's always had
Wolf's growls and howls down to a point of virtual transcendence. The best thing on the album, wisely chosen
for a single b/w "Booglarize You," is "Click Clack." This is real train music, with trestles in the drums and
whistles in the guitar and harp: "One [train] goin'/And the other one comin' back," as Cap sings. The rhythm is
insistent and propulsive, in the great tradition of such songs as "Train Kept A Rollin' " and Lou Reed's "Train
Round the Bend." The mutated Chicago South Side harp heard throughout much of the album enters, the guitars
begin pushing at riffs' edges, and "Train was goin' up the track/You was leavin'/I could see you wavin' yer
handkerchief" is described in a hyponotically redundant guitar riff like the obsessive replay of an old memory.
There comes a time in the career of every pop musician who also happens to be a serious artist when he
realizes the need for a balance between the most intensely personal type of statement and music of mass appeal.
If he can strike that balance without compromising his integrity, he is probably a greater artist than even his
staunchest fans previously suspected, and with any exposure at all the public would pick up immediately on the
truth and beauty of what he is doing. With this album, Captain Beefheart has struck that balance with total
success, and I wouldn't be surprised if he were a major star a year from now. Though you may have been a great
shadow hovering over our music for half a decade now, Don, it can be said that in 1972 you've really arrived.
Machine Head Deep Purple
By Lester Bangs | May 25, 1972
I just don't understand, as Ann-Margret once sang, why an exciting band like Deep Purple, who
consistently hit the top of the charts in Merrie Olde and have taken Europe by storm, remain a comparatively
unknown quantity to American audiences. Especially when said audiences have wholeheartedly embraced bands
with similar musical aims and not one more ampere of excitement.
It's a shame, but Deep Purple themselves are at least partially to blame. Their first two American albums
on Tetragrammaton were mostly uninspired, despite some good cover versions of songs like "I'm So Glad" and
"Hush." The basic problem seemed to be that the group hadn't really learned to write yet, so the covers were the
best way to grow without losing the audience. Except that no self-respecting late-Sixties rock band wants to put
out an album with nothing but covers on it, so we were left with a bunch of boring originals, half of them
instrumental. When, that is, they weren't indulging in long "improvisational" forays such as their first album's
bolero rendition of "Hey Joe." Jon Lord was the main culprit here, having a background of extensive formal
keyboard training which tended to make his solos at least a bit Emersonic and at most positively pompous. The
pretentious side of Deep Purple found its fullest expression in their first album for Warner's, Concerto For Group
and Orchestra, written by Lord and performed with the aid of Malcolm Arnold and the "Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra."
It was an atrocity. A "movement" would begin with a few minutes of "symphonic" mush, then abruptly
the orchestra would stop and the band would start to play, build until you thought they were just about to really
start cooking, and then whoosh drowned in string sections again. A recent Lord-Arnold collaboration on
Capitol called Gemini Suite was just more of the same miscegenation.
Fortunately, the band has seemingly realized that that sort of thing can get out of hand, because their last
three albums have finally found a comfortably furious groove for them to work in, making them prime
contenders among the most searingly loud and heavy bands on both sides of the Atlantic. Deep Purple in Rock
was a dynamic, frenzied piece of work sounding not a little like the MC5 (anybody who thinks that all heavy
bands put out thudding slabs of "downer" music just hasn't gotten into Deep Purple). Fireball was more of the
same, if not quite as frantically effective. Machine Head bears strong similarities to both its immediate
predecessors, lying qualitatively somewhere in between the two.
And like both of them, though it delivers the Sound, the rushing, grating crunch of the hard attack, it has
its ups and downs compositionally. "Highway Star" is a great opening track, quite similar both structurally and
thematically to "Speed King" and "Fireball," the openers of the two previous albums. The pace is blistering,
almost too fast for comfort, with lyrics that take the primeval cargirl equation and turn it into something as
breathtakingly homicidal as Alice Cooper's "Under My Wheels": "Nobody gonna take my car/I'm gonna race it
to the ground/Nobody gonna beat my car/It's gonna break the speed of sound/Oooh it's a killing machine/It's got
everything ..."

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"Space Truckin'" is just as good, a sci-fi boogie that's the perfect answer to all the Kantnerian
pomposities and turns out to be the missing link between them and things like Wild Man Fischer's "Rocket
Rock" (lyrically) and the Doors' "Hello I Love You" (musically). Once again the lyrics are ace, and never let it be
said that Deep Purple don't have a sense of humor: "We had a lot of luck on Venus/We always have a ball on
Mars/Meeting all the groovy people ... We'd move to the Canaveral moonstop/And everyone would dance and
sway/We got music in our solar system/We're space truckin' round the stars."
In between those two Deep Purple classics lies nothing but good, hard, socking music, although some of
the lyrics may leave a bit to be desired. It says on the liner that "This album was written and recorded in
Montreux, Switzerland, between 6th and 21st December, 1971," and much of it sounds like it was conceived on
the fly, what with deathless lines like "You're lazy you just stay in bed/You don't want no money/You don't want
no bread." There's even trials getting Machine Head recorded: it seemed that some local arsonist burned down
the best recording studio in town but luckily the Rolling Stones' mobile unit was on hand to get the new D.
Purple out on schedule.
Frankly, I am not offended at all by the offhand nature of those songs. Rather than either condemn or
apologize for their triteness, I will merely refer you to the current issue of Who Put the Bomp magazine, where
Mark Shipper makes note of the fact that Sky Saxon wrote "Pushin' Too Hard" for the Seeds in ten minutes while
waiting for his girl to get out of a supermarket and comments that he'd rather not publish a review of any
album that contains a song that took longer than ten minutes to write.
Now, I can't be that much of a purist, because I'm sure that "Highway Star" and "Space Truckin'" took at
least 20 minutes each to compose, but I do know that this very banality is half the fun of rock 'n' roll. And I am
confident that I will love the next five Deep Purple albums madly so long as they sound exactly like these last
three.
Long John Silver Jefferson Airplane
By Lester Bangs | September 14, 1972
Well, here's another Jefferson Airplane album, and if you thought the last one had them baked into the
mold of an absolutely stereotypic Airplane Sound, you may not even care to hear Long John Silver. It's not that
they aren't capable of exciting music the fires that fused albums like Baxter's and Crown of Creation will burn
here, though the years have taken their toll. You can still get your rocks off on the Airplane, and those who
thought Bark a bit too low-key and eclectic will be happy to know that Long John Silver mostly consists of one
churning vat of fury after another. But the fury has gotten so predictable as to drive you to heights of frenzied
indifference. Jorma and Jack are still one of the best lead-bass teams in the business, and the Airplane
consistently delivers restless, fulminating songs because they're always mad about something. We can depend on
'em for that in this album alone they take on both Christianity and vegetarianism. But their rage and their
sarcasm are freelance, and the incredible gaucheness with which they sometimes put them over, combined with
Grace's and Paul's overbearing pretensions combine to make even the staunchest Airplane fan a bit leery by now.
The packaging of Long John Silver is the first tipoff that the Airplane have lost a lot of what can only be
called class. As elaborate as Bark, the box-jacket lies on the same level of puerility as Cheech and Chong's dope
jokes cornball and inane, and the music inside, in its very efforts at profundity, often comes off just as
mawkish.
Kantner himself has gotten into a rut, and it wouldn't even be so bad if he didn't try to tackle some vast
and weighty subject every time out. The night I got this album, I fell asleep on the couch while watching The
Dick Van Dyke Show and dreamed that Paul Kantner was Dick Van Dyke and that "Alexander the Medium," the
second to last cut here, was a plate piled high with rotting fish heads, and in every head the eye was staring at
me. I wish the cut was that compelling, instead of a typically dull Kantner social-mythic melodrama. Sounding
like one of the lesser tracks on Sunfighter, it is the longest song here, and reveals that instead of blasting off into
outer space in a wooden starship, the chosen People are going to be walking around under the sea.
"Twilight Double Leader" and "The Son of Jesus" are also super-predictable Kantner stuff. The latter is
an exercise in confused mythology calculated to be a mindblowing revelation: "Jesus had a son by Mary
Magdalene ..." Ah, shaddup.
And if the almost uniform dullness of the songs wasn't enough, Grace's singing seems to be slipping
drastically. The vocal in "Long John Silver" is off, strained more than usual (though Jack and Jorma are still

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tusslin' strong as ever). By the time we reach the last cut, "Eat Starch Mom," Grace is just delivering a harangue,
although the backup is ferociously good and you can certainly dig the sentiments of a song which tells the
vegetarians that machines will eat them. In "Easter?," as in "Eat Starch," Grace continually lapses into spoken
sections of the most melodramatic sort, like: "I thought he said ... I could've sworn he said it was a sin." Alice
Cooper made stuff like this work in "The Ballad of Dwight Frye," but the element of burlesque saved all those
histrionics Grace is serious. "Ah, stupid Christian" comes off unbearably self-righteous even to somebody
who hates Christianity, and lines like "I think his [the Pope's] holy story is a mess" and "No more brains in the
Christian" are as topically pretentious as anything on the latest John and Yoko album.
Still, the album is not as bad as it might sound. The instrumental work is consistently fine, and Papa
John Creach is simply one of the most brilliant, subtle violinists alive. The main problem seems to be the
material the musicians are given to work with. There is not one true standout track on this album, and certainly
nothing on it as good as the best of Sunfighter or even Blows Against the Empire. Some essential spark is gone,
and what remains is a rote scream. But it is the most furious muzak available, and if you're really stoned it might
even seem as good as the old days.
Burning Love Elvis Presley
Not Rated
By Lester Bangs | January 4, 1973
That Elvis sure is a card! Just when you think he's cashed his last chip and sold so low he can't get no
crasser, he comes along with something like this and proves that he and Colonel Bogey are still one jump ahead
of the rest of us would-be Barnums. You gotta love him for it; it makes him matter, and even if that don't matter,
his exploi-expertise is his charm.
Since the Big EP had just cut his most gutsy single in a skunk's age, causing some fools to drool on spec
'bout how he just might be about to make that big authentic album well, if you were Elvis, what would you
do? Cater to these cretins who've missed your point for over a decade? No! You wouldn't make that album now
even if you'd had some hankerin' to, because they don't deserve it besides which you just feel like being ornery.
What you would do instead is take this monolithic taco and put it out as the centerpiece on a whole lazy
susan of the same old shit you been blurping out for years. In fact, you wouldn't even bother to record new same
old shit, you'd just put on a blindfold and take some darts and toss 'em at a few of yer old tripe faces, then you'd
take out your whittlin' shiv and slice out the cuts with the dart holes in 'em and sluice 'em right on down to RCA
Camden, the Victor empire's cheapo scrapyard, and sell the whole cuddly kaboodle for 2/3rds to half of what an
official new EP set on the mother label would cost. Takes smarts to make hay in muzak biz, Junior! Keep your
eye on that man.
But you! You don't have every Elvis album, so you got no excuse for passing up Burning Love and
Schlocko-plus, because I bet you're one of these hip dips who never bought a single Elvis soundtrack in all your
born days. In which case you don't know what you're missing some of the goofiest gruel this side of Kathryn
Kuhlman. It's like watching a really shitty cartoon on TV: You know that Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy eat
pud flakes, but you'll sit there and watch it anyway because you're sick and tired of all this never ending barrage
of significance pounding away at your prefrontals. Who but a snot-hip dud could resist Elvis prattling away at
the mandolin-dripping proto-quaeso sea chanty "I Love Only One Girl" ("... in every town/ The one I've got my
arms around." Bet Joe Dallesandro don't score that heavy!)
Or the soggy enchilada emoting of "Guadalajara" from Fun in Acapulco where Elvis tries out his Latin
accent while the rurales yip at him proving that even South of the Border and in foreign climes Elvis is always
good for a bellylaugh. "Santa Lucia" is more of the same, and rightly so, while "No More" is a wahine-melting
hula-samba from Blue Hawaii, and "Tender Feeling" is a limpoid makeout ballad from El's Ozark epic Kissin'
Cousins. Damn me to a turnip if this record don't overflow with more international and ethnic goodwill-byeclecticism than any platter since the Longines Symphonette used to placebo the Cold War by cramming 30second versions of folksongs from every nation on the globe into one two-record set. Fuck them protest kooks
Elvis' heart is in the right place and if you don't buy this album you're a Commie!
Besides, we gotta support RCA Camden and make sure it stays in business. This is the best album
they've released since TV Action Jazz! by Mundell Lowe and His All Stars and that came out in 1958, so their
history has been somewhat spotty, but given the people Papa Vic is signing today their future literally glitters:

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just image cheapo racks full of albums like Lou Reed's Golden Gutter, or David Bowie, the Moonlight and You.
The future's as bright for us as Elvis' past!
The Best of B.B. King
By Lester Bangs | March 29, 1973
In spite of 1972 being one of the stalest years in the history of popular music, the spate of reissues from all the
major record companies and countless minor ones picks up more speed all the time, and the results (uneven as
they are) are generally encouraging. All four of these albums represent attempts both at recapitulating the
contributions of three black titans and cashing in on the belated widespread recognition of those contributions.
Curtis Mayfield had a long string of hits with the Impressions but it took Super Fly to make him a household
name. Ray Charles may have been bigger in the late Fifties and early Sixties than he is now, but he was more
vital then, too. His earlier work deserves the endless repackaging. As for B.B. King, I can still remember the first
time I saw a couple of kids in a department store line, audibly opting to chance $3.50 on an album called Lucille
because some Limey speedfreaks had made it hip, and I'm sure that both they and I are glad they did, but B.B.
King's career didn't begin when the royalties began pouring in from flash guitar covers and he was invited to tour
with the Rolling Stones, so a thoughtful collection of vintage King is imperative.
Ray Charles doesn't have as many hits these days as he used to, but he's more renowned than ever before
anyway. He's become something of a national institution, like the Duke Ellington of R&B; even Pres Nixon has
made an official declaration of Charles fandom. But the Pres ain't exactly the type to do back-flips for "What'd I
Say" or "The Right Time," and Ray's been hacking his way ever deeper into the tissue veldts of MOR for a full
decade now. He still makes a good record every once in a while, but in his prime he was raunchy enough to split
your skull and rock you into fundamentalist frothing fits. He created rock 'n' roll as much as Berry or Little
Richard or anybody; he practically drew up the blue-prints for an entire era of gritty Stax R&B, and nobody ever
wrenched their way deeper into the soaring terror of the blues. If you want to hear him really rip the joint apart
and put it back together again with a cry, go back to those great Atlantic sides. The essence is on three albums:
The Genius of Ray Charles. The Genius Sings the Blues and The Greatest Ray Charles. Or, for a fantastic
overview, Atlantic's four-record compilation The Ray Charles Story.
Ray's move from Atlantic to ABC made him rich and, initially at least, the musical rewards were probably as
bountiful as ever and an idiomatic breakthrough besides. In search of a buck-grabbing formula, ABC sent him
through albums like The Genius Hits the Road ("Georgia on My Mind," "Mississippi Mud," "Carry Me Back to
Old Virginny" etc.), and miraculously he came up with brilliant, deeply soulful amalgams of gospel roots and
mainstream pop. But the real turning point was a record called Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music,
which was released about 12 years ago, at which time it promptly became the Number One album in America
and changed the face of the milder strains of radio pop as irrevocably as his early work had done for rock 'n' roll.
All through the Sixties the marriage of C&W to blues or bluesy euphemisms reigned, and whether you picked up
on Glenn Campbell or Lee Hazelwood or any one of the rest of the multitude exploiting this new form, it all
began with Ray Charles.
Ray himself exploited his innovation till the power of the original purveyor began to pale, and not everything on
All-Time Great Country & Western Hits is great. But enough of the prime is here to make it worthwhile,
especially if you haven't picked up any of the many previous Charles reissues. "I Can't Stop Loving You" was his
first big move at this amalgam, and it's still as tearfully puissant today as it was in 1961. Add the occasional
C&W standard rendered in R&B style fully as uncompromising as any early Charles (the boiling "You Are My
Sunshine" being the earliest and most potent example here), and you have a record as profound and essential as
anything out today.
Lots of people think the Super Fly soundtrack the best soul album of 1972, but those unfamiliar with the
Impressions owe it to themselves to discover what Curtis Mayfield was up to in the times before the most vital
expression of black music was almost forced to deal with heroin death. "Freddie's Dead" is already a Seventies
standard, and His Early Years with the Impressions is a fine reminder that Mayfield possessed a consistent gift
for creating hits destined to become classics all through his career. The vocal harmonies of the Impressions could
be as mellow a balm as anything by Smokey Robinson and, like Robinson, Mayfield was never saccharine.
In fact, this late rehearsing of his past achievements impresses you firmly, even if you missed it first time around,
with the fact that Mayfield was a groundbreaker in the nascent status of black popular music as a direct
expression of the changes in black consciousness. When "Keep On Pushing" was a hit it was fairly easy to find
shadings of meaning in its lyrics which formed as clear a link between the oldest gospel message and something

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far more topical, as it was to revel in the perfect evolutionary link between the purely musical freight carried out
of church and the AM soul stylings which reached their summit in the mid-Sixties.
"It's All Right" illuminates the same historic junction, and "We're A Winner" takes it out of the realm of
ambiguity, straight across the threshold of blatant backbeat radio anthem. Meanwhile, if you're only familiar with
things like "Gypsy Woman" in the eviscerated cover versions of white fluff-boys, get ready to be moved to the
shoals of your soul by a whole other, more masterful and authentic type of vocal dramatics.
Again, the packaging is pretty bland, and another caveat is that lots of this stuff has been observed in the original
albums selling for far less in bargain bins around the country (plus the fact that lots of those original packages
were a joy in their very crassness, like that great Keep On Pushing cover observed among Dylan's most
conspicuously prized possessions on the Bringin' It All Back Home jacket). But if Super Fly was your
introduction to Curtis, you'll want to make a point of picking this up before his pre-soundtrack solo albums,
which qualitatively fall way below both what preceded and followed them.
B.B. King has in his belated flush of success become almost as frustrating for the aficionado of the Real Shit as
Ray Charles. B.B. plays Vegas now, no fault there, and hits both the colleges and TV talk shows. So he's finally
out of the scuffle, at late long last. Unfortunately, his music has also gotten less interesting with each successive
album. Vintage King wasn't just something for punks to prove they could tell a good blues guitar solo from a bad
one; it was stark, evil stuff. Troubled and troubling.
The difference between these two B.B. albums is the difference between chills and chips, between hearing a raw
edge that makes Back in the Alley more than just a good colorful title, and satisfying your curiosity about how
B.B. King would work in the context of a standard Leon Russell Hollywood camp meeting.
And it's not just a matter of backalleys vs. proximity to pop-stars: There is just no way a cut from the legendary
Live at the Regal album, which molded countless Sixties guitarists and stands alongside things like James Brown
at the Apollo as one of the all-time classic in-person R&B disks, there is no way something like that is not gonna
shut down a pleasantly perfunctory session cut at Cook County Jail two or three years after Johnny Cash made it
both righteously hip and fiscally sound to jam for jailbirds.
Actually, the chronological distance between the two albums is not all that great. Back in the Alley begins in
1964 and leaves off just short of where The Best of B.B. King picks up, but the difference in mood and meat is
sufficient to make the choice clear, even if Best Of does have the incredible "The Thrill Is Gone." It's the fine
line between a man playing with total commitment to an audience he has probably had for years which can savor
his peaks and bear an off night, and a man playing for people who've been sold his legend and will love anything
because they know they're supposed to. But you don't have to be any kind of connoisseur to tell the difference.
Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ Bruce Springsteen
By Lester Bangs | July 5, 1973
Remember P.F. Sloan? Sure you do. It was back when every folk rocker worth his harmonica holder was flushed
with Dylan fever and seeing how many syllables he could cram into every involuted couplet. There was Tandyn
Almer, of "Along Comes Mary" fame ("The psychodramas and the traumas hung on the scars of the stars in the
bars and cars something like that), and David Blue had his own Highway 61 too, but absolutely none of 'em
could beat ol' P.F. He started out writing surf songs, but shook the world by the throat with his masterpieces "Eve
Of Destruction" and "Sins of a Family," and all his best material was just brimming with hate.
Boy howdy, the first thing the world needs is a P.F. Sloan for 1973, and you can start revving up yer adrenaline,
kids, because he's here in the person of Bruce Springsteen. Old Bruce makes a point of letting us know that he's
from one of the scuzziest, most useless and plain uninteresting sections of Jersey. He's been influenced a lot by
the Band, his arrangements tend to take on a Van Morrison tinge every now and then, and he sort of catarrhmumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth sorta like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing
down the back of his neck. It's a tuff combination, but it's only the beginning.
Because what makes Bruce totally unique and cosmically surfeiting is his words. Hot damn, what a passel o'
verbiage! He's got more of them crammed into this album than any other record released this year, but it's all
right because they all fit snug, it ain't like Harry Chapin tearing rightangle malapropisms out of his larynx.
What's more, each and every one of 'em has at least one other one here that it rhymes with. Some of 'em can
mean something socially or otherwise, but there's plenty of 'em that don't even pretend to, reveling in the joy of
utter crass showoff talent run amuck and totally out of control:

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"Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat/In the dumps with the mumps
as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat" begins the very first song, and after that things just keep getting
more breathtakingly complicated. You might think it's some kinda throwback, but it's really bracing as hell
because it's obvious that B.S. don't give a shit. He slingshoots his random rivets at you and you can catch as
many as you want or let 'em all clatter right off the wall which maybe's where they belong anyway. Bruce
Springsteen is a bold new talent with more than a mouthful to say, and one look at the pic on the back will tell
you he's got the glam to go places in this Gollywoodlawn world to boot. Watch for him; he's not the new John
Prine.
Bob Marley Kaya Album Review
Lester Bangs
Having seen Bob Marley on the cover of seemingly every magazine in America with a cannabis
giganticus planted in his mug finally puts you in mind of Robert De Niro's last words to Harvey Keitel's
dealer/pimp in Taxi Driver: "Suck on this!"
Island gave Marley the big push the only push any reggae artist really got beyond a guaranteed tax
write-off and now Marley and company are reaping the benefits of such monomaniacal zeal: Rastaman
Vibration, the worst album he ever made until this one, hit the Top Twenty, and last summer's Exodus finished in
Billboard's Top Hundred LPs of 1977.
My bitterness may seem misdirected, even out of proportion. It's just one man's opinion, you
understand, but for my money, Toots and the Maytals, who never got promoted properly, are the real heat waves
from a Stax/Volt kitchen, whereas Marley (on Island, at least) always struck me as so laid back that he seemed
almost MOR. Most white fans simply didn't agree. "Toots is a very old-fashioned performer," said one, and all
felt that Marley was certainly the prophet incarnate of the Rastafarian scripture: the primest cut of all. (I wonder
what that would make Winston "Burning Spear" Rodney? A revisionist?)
So, after becoming addicted to Toots and the Maytals, Burning Spear, et al., I dutifully went back to my
Marley records and even bought the early Trojan imports, but it was no good. There were some great songs
(which he kept recutting), but the delivery just seemed pallid. Rastaman Vibration was the last straw: an LP
obviously calculated to break Disco Bob into the American Kleenex radio market full force, complete with
chicklet vocal backups chirping, "Posi-tive!" and an opulent, palmthatch Tarzan-like press kit that would have
made serviceable shelter for Gilligan and the Captain. Exodus simply seemed schizoid, one side no better than
Rastaman Vibration outtakes, and the other a Rastafarian liturgy mouthing much righteousness but falling
leagues short of the corrosive militance that led ex-Wailer Peter Tosh's concurrently released Equal Rights to go
so far as to mention Palestinian guerrillas admiringly. (Tosh has just been dropped by Columbia.) Marley was
clearly trying to have it both ways, but broadcasting the politics of Armageddon/liberation while dishing up
potential Hall and Oates covers like "Waiting in Vain" is walking a mighty shaky tightrope. On Kaya, he falls
off. Guess to which side.
This is quite possibly the blandest set of reggae music I have ever heard, including all the Engelbertisms
of would-be crossover crooners like John Holt. It's pleasant enough if you just let it eddy along, but nothing on
the ten cuts pulls you in like the hypnotic undertow of Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey, haunts like the best from
The Harder They Come soundtrack or churns up the guts and heart like Toots and the Maytals. Musically, Kaya
is a succession of the most tepid reggae clichs, pristinely performed and recorded, every last bit of tourist bait
(down to the wood blocks) in place just like a Martin Denny record. Marley sings in a cheerful lilt light and
bouncy enough for panty-hose commercials. Four hundred years? Concrete jungles? Burning and looting? Pass
the Man Tan, Irma.
In the past, though his delivery arguably lacked the force and intensity he seemed capable of, Marley
always delivered concise, sometimes devastatingly understated, sometimes brilliant lyrical turns. Most of the
words on Kaya apparently deal with the simple beauties of vegetable matter, the sun and other aspects of the
insensate organic world, and how contented they make the singer feel. The placidity is so completely undisturbed
(except in one song of love lost and the last two cuts, which really don't say anything anyway) that Marley
comes off as downright smug.
Some sort of inverse racism must be involved if people can actually ascribe commitment, or even talent,
to verses like: "Excuse me while I light my spliff/Oh GOD I gotta take a lift/From reality I just can't drift/That's

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why I am staying with this riff." Unless Marley is just heaping contempt on his ever-credulous white audience
which seems unlikely since his Jamaican fans are expected to buy this stuff, too such lyrics place him subChocolate Watchband. There's also a song about how the rain is falling and how glad he is because that'll make
the dope crop grow. (Wonder if they have a Five-Year Plan?) Melanie Award: "When the morning gather the
rainbow/Want you to know, I am a rainbow too." Rhyming Dictionary op. cit.: "I wanna love you, and treat you
right/I wanna love you, every day and every night." Do these last lines make Bob Marley the Barry White of
Montego Bay, or perhaps mean, given the assassination attempts and general war ina Babylon, that he merely
wants to love the woman until the fear in him subsides? Probably the latter, considering the tall order placed in
"Misty Morning": "I want you to straighten out my today.../I want you to straighten out my tomorrow." Whatever
happened to Self-Determination Music? Oh well, gotta move with the times. There is one song intimating that
his woman left him because she couldn't take "the pressure around me," but considering the Rastas' well-known
stand on women in general and the probability of that picture of Marley toting a model around a Paris disco
having run in the Kingston Daily Gleaner, one must reserve the benefit of the doubt. Who wants to make the
beast with two backs with a walking target who can't keep his hands off the strange?
It has long been a theory of mine that marijuana should only be legalized for Third World peoples, since
ofays in general just can't handle it, becoming either paranoid, totally withdrawn or excruciatingly cosmic. When
was the last time you saw an Arab or a Thai giggling all over him-or herself about the pattern in your carpet, or
heard one of them say, "If I say anything weird, let me know, 'cause I'm stoned"? Yasir Arafat to the U.N.: "I
need some Korn Kurls and a Yoo Hoo before I can finish my speech. Don't any of you people ever get the
munchies?" If my theory is correct, then maybe we can blame Kaya on an accident of the bloodline, Marley's
father being white. Otherwise, we're just going to have to accept it: this man wants to be a superstar at all costs
and will sell out his music, his people, his religion and his politics to get there. I know Jesus was betrayed by a
kiss but a toke?
Wavelength Van Morrison
By Lester Bangs | November 16, 1978
Who has not been waiting for the next great Van Morrison LP? Whether you thought his last
masterpiece was Veedon Fleece or Tupelo Honey or even (what I think) Moondance, you certainly were never
prepared to write him off. Nobody's going to write him off because of Wavelength either, but it's obviously not
the album he is still destined to make.
Something comes clear here. Ever since Moondance, Van Morrison has staked his claim to the rare title
"poet," mostly on the basis of what amounts to a bunch of autumn leaves. Look at those records lying there
Tupelo Honey, Hard Nose the Highwaythe best as good as the worst, and all of 'em slowly turning brown. You
wanta kick 'em just like a pile of crumbly leaves? Well, go ahead and do it. And kick Van Morrison too. Because
he's a saint. Yeah, that's exactly why he needs the boot.
Morrison's got a beautiful obsession with something he can't quite state, and we've got a beautiful
obsession with Morrison. Which is fine for him, but what are we to do? We are to sing the chorus, that's what:
Dum derra dum dum diddy diddy dah dah
Dum derra dum dum diddy diddy dah dah
Dum derra dum dum diddy diddy dah dah
Dum derra dum dum diddy diddy dah dah
Dum derra dum dum diddy diddy dah dah
At least that's what it says on the lyric sheet.
And make no mistake, we're supposed to notice the lyric sheetthe only other Morrison LP that had
one was Hard Nose the Highway, itself a rather pointed statement regarding leaves and such. "Such": that's what
Van Morrison's interested inroamin' in the gloamin' and divers other top-hat autumnal falderal. Linden Arden
stole the highlights, but where did he take them? Way back home, that's where. Leaving us with another album of
furry-nosed nuzzlings in the fleece. But about this time, one begins to wonder: nowadays does this artist ever
come bearing anything other than said fleece? Naught.
Wavelength is a very nice record. I'm sure all the people at Warner Bros. are pleased with it. Ditto the
DJs. It probably would also be really groovy for somebody's idea of a wine-and-joints, Renaissance-fair garden
party. It makes a lovely sound, breaks no rules and keeps its grimy snout (or, rather, that of its maker) out of the

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dark places that mainstreams step correctly over. Rigid. The singer has a nifty little band here, what with Bobby
Tench, Peter Bardens from the original Them and even great googamoogah Garth Hudson sittin' in on various
instruments. Well, take me back to Orpheus Descending!
Because it's obvious that Morrison ain't playing out no dramas here. Nor has he been for some long
while now. Perhaps he is more interested in apprehending the exact configuration of an ace of sunlight and
presenting it to us. A lost or stolen moment in time, when meaning went rollin' by like the trains on the tracks,
like the breeze through a door. But the question is: DO WE CARE? Obviously the man is possessed, obviously
he is driven to seek some definition in the most mundane curbstone air, certainly he is a mystic whose light
shines for he and thee and all of us, but he flat-out refuses to say anything but the patently obvious and then calls
that poetrywhich it is.
So maybe we should knight Van Morrison poet-errant of the New Drowse. Meaning, don't ever ask him
what his beautiful obsession is actually about. Because if you do, he'll come out with embarrassing sludge like:
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it.
No, obviously we're far better off with a solid wall of dum derra dum dum diddies. Which actually
makes just as good sense as anything else being dished up these days. Still, though, it do confound how such a
monumental talent can mire himself in such twaddle, fine as some of it may be.
There is a kind of resolute silliness about a lot of the stuff Van Morrison's been doing for the last few
years: he wants to make records for cookouts, we keep probing for his bardic soul, and the whole mess is
ridiculous because he was actually only specific for one very tight stretch there, enclosing "T. B. Sheets" and
Astral Weeks. As for the resti.e., the main body of his workhe truly delights in the glancing perception and
all the filigree in the world. (But what kind of perverted universe reignsand what kind of bray-orbed, Fellinitrite monstrolas might issue forthwhen filigree becomes the body?) What, finally, are his beloved, infinitely
extensive out-choruses but filigree? The last half of "Madame George" may be the all-time tightrope act, but, on
Wavelength, he really gets down to it and dubs the endless out-choruses of "Santa Fe" a whole new song.
So I guess he has finally achieved what he maybe set out to do in the first place: make the edge the
center. The result, unfortunately, is a perfect bubble of smoked cheese. It'll do for the party, but it leaves certain
sorta primal questions so far from resolved thatwell, no, we never quite give up, do we? It is damn well
roundabout known that Van Morrison records about four times as much music as he releases. Some of these
great, edgy, eternity-shale, sax-bitten pieces leak out occasionally, and that's just fine. We're gonna deserve
something beautiful to listen to in our old age.
Pieces Of Eight Styx
By Lester Bangs | December 28, 1978
Styx is an arena band from the progressive school. Every gesture's writ huge to the point of flatulence,
their pomp is highly circumstantial (it's the only way to get the last row's attention) and around every chorus
lurks a whirring synthesizer, if not a pipe organ hauled in from a genuine cathedral. The strategy becomes
obvious: Dennis DeYoung's synthesizer (though sub-Rick Wakeman fluff all the way) is crucial because without
its bubblicious curlicues, Tommy Shaw's and James Young's guitar work would have to stand alone as more
played-out, heavy-metal plod and Jethro Tull Jr. acoustic jive. No one of these parts amounts to much on its own,
but when smeared together, each contributes to the kind of fantasy-land effects that groups like this run on.
Which at least makes Styx tight. Tight as a tissue.
Young, DeYoung and Shaw all compose, and while the music's nothing to speak of (if you've heard Yes
and Queen, you've heard it all), the lyrics are a little more interesting. It's not insignificant that only one of Pieces
of Eight's ten tunes is about loving somebody else and even that includes a line like "And as your surrogate
leader I'm bound in your search for the truth." Like an album-long suite based on Queen's "We Are the
Champions," what these songs say and what a lot of bands such as Styx have been saying for some time is
this: we are hot shit. Not just because we're badass guitar heroes, not because we've got soul or play so great, not
even because we're rock stars. No, we are hot shit because, beyond even the divine right of synthesizers, we are

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aristocracy, we are noble, we are kings. (If you don't believe it, look at all our money, not to mention our regal
vestments.)
This point of view is most explicitly expressed in "Lords of the Ring," which is no more offensive to
J.R.R. Tolkien (who might even deserve it) than any of the many monstrosities perpetrated in his name by other
groups: "And now the message is clear/For I became a lord this year." "Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)" looks
back to a time when his liege Tommy Shaw was actually on the unemployment line; even against "impossible
odds," he asserted then that he would work and win because "I've got the power and I've got the will. I'm not a
charity case." "I'm O.K." shows Styx basking in self-satisfaction at the end of their long struggle for upward
mobility, while both "Great White Hope" and the title track depict nothing less than a troubled ruling class: "I'm
just a prisoner in a king's disguise."
What's really interesting is not that such narcissistic slop should get recorded, but what must be going
on in the minds of the people who support it in such amazing numbers. Gall, nerve and ego have never been far
from great rock & roll. Yet there's a thin but crucial line between those qualities and what it takes to fill arenas
today: sheer self-aggrandizement on the most puerile level. If these are the champions, gimme the cripples.
The Bells Lou Reed
By Lester Bangs | June 14, 1979
Everybody always talks about the poor homeless orphan waifs, but what about the homeless fathers?
The time has come to call the fathers home from the stale curbstone shores. Sometimes they're bad and Take No
Prisoners. But who then do they finally hurt but themselves? And when they give of themselves, they reaffirm
what great art has always been: an act of love toward the whole human race. Then it becomes time to give at
least a little love back.
Lou Reed is a prick and a jerkoff who regularly commits the ultimate sin of treating his audience with
contempt. He's also a person with deep compassion for a great many other people about whom almost nobody
else gives a shit. I won't say who they are, because I don't want to get too schmaltzy, except to emphasize that
there's always been more to this than drugs and fashionable kinks, and to point out that suffering, loneliness and
psychic/spiritual exile are great levelers.
The Bells isn't merely Lou Reed's best solo LP, it's great art. Everybody made a fuss over Street Hassle,
but too many reviewers overlooked the fact that it was basically a sound album: brilliant layers of live and studio
work in a deep wash of bass-obsessive noise. Most of the songs were old, and not very good, with a lot of the
same old cheap shots.
The first indication that we've got something very different here is the no-bullshit cover art; the second,
a cursory listening to the lyrics. Immediately, one notes the absence of mirror shades, needles and S&M. Lou
Reed is walking naked for once, in a way that invites comparison with people like Charles Mingus, the Van
Morrison of "T.B. Sheets" and Astral Weeks, and the Rolling Stones of Exile on Main Street. The Bells is by
turns exhilarating ("Disco Mystic," an exercise in churning R&B that should be a hit single, if there's any
justice), almost unbearably poignant (all of the lyrics) and as vertiginous as a slow, dark whirlpool (the title
opus).
Throughout, the sound is dense, as dense as Street Hassle with at least double the content. When Reed
began to move toward jazz on Rock and Roll Heart, I just figured he was going to close his career with the same
shuck that people like Stanley Clarke used to open theirs. I underestimated him. There's a real band on this
record, and these musicians are giving us the only true jazz-rock fusion anybody's come up with since Miles
Davis' On the Corner period. They're often doing several interesting, unusual things at once: on cuts such as
"Stupid Man" and "Looking for Love," they swing with a vengeance. "City Lights" teems with little whistles,
bells and noises that buzz around each other like sad fireflies. And all through the LP, Reed plays the best guitar
anyone's heard from him in ages.
As for the lyrics well, people tend to forget that in numbers like "Candy Says," "Sunday Morning"
and "Oh! Sweet Nothing," Lou Reed wrote some of the most compassionate songs ever recorded. Though Reed's
given folks reason to forget, every lyric on The Bells offers cause for recollection. This album is about love and
dread and redemption through a strange commingling of the two. To have come close to spiritual or physical
death is ample reason to testify, but it's love that brings both fathers and children, artist and audience, back from
that cliff, and back from the gulf that can sometimes, in states of extreme pain, be mistaken for the blue

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empyrean ever. In "Stupid Man," someone who's been self-exiled too long, "living all alone by those still
waters," rushes home to his family, desperate not to have lost the affection of his little daughter. Like all of
Reed's people on this record, he's looking for love. A tune with that same title emphasizes how jet-set stars,
hustlers and kept professionals (and middle-American boys and girls) may be united by a common longing. It's a
nation of rock & roll hearts. "City Lights," one of three songs coauthored by Nils Lofgren, isn't only about
Charlie Chaplin but about a lost America, the implication being that, in these late modern times, all the lights in
the world might not be enough to bring us together.
On side two, everything coalesces in unmistakably personal terms. "Don't you feel so lonely/When it's
in the afternoon/And you gotta face it/All through the night/Don't it make you believe/That something's gonna
have to happen soon" is simply the story (perhaps too close for comfort) of most of the people any of us seem to
know right now. But later, "All through the Night" reveals itself as Lou Reed's version of Mick Jagger's "Shine a
Light." Reed sings:
My best friend Sally
She got sick
And I'm feelin' mighty ill myself
It happens all the time
All through the night
I went to St. Vincent's
And I'm watchin' the ceiling fall
Down on her body
As she's lyin' on the ground
And I said, "Oh babe
You gotta suffer with it babe
All through the night"
And I sat and cried
All through the night
And I said, "Oh Jesus...."
"Families" is most personal of all. A friend described this and certain other parts of The Bells as "the
gay outsider's occasional yearning for the straight life and its conventions," but that's inaccurate. "Perfect Day"
was Reed's maudlin streak, yet sexual preference really has nothing to do with the anguish behind such lines
from "Families" as:
And no no no no no I still haven't got married
And no no no there's no grandson planned here for you...
And no Daddy you're not a poor man anymore
And I hope you realize it before you die...
There's nothing here we have in common except our name...
And I don't think that I'll come home much anymore.
What Reed may not realize is that, through this very song, some reconciliation is effected, because he's
fulfilled a promise that very few of us are ever able to keep by finally being able to forgive and love in spite of
all the tragedies that go down in every family.
The title track is quintessential Seventies music, not Reed's "Radio Ethiopia" but his analogue to Miles
Davis' "He Loved Him Madly." A nine-minute mass in the void, "The Bells" is built around a three-note
descending bass tiff, synthesizer murk, piano notes falling like tears of mercury, and Don Cherry's and Marty
Fogel's horns. Cherry's trumpet and Fogel's tenor sax curl around the flames as slowly as a New Orleans funeral
procession, while low, toneless voices mutter ominously. And they're talking about you. All this builds through
looming dread to a poem:
As he fell down to his knees
After soaring through the air
With nothing to hold him there
It was really not so cute
To play without a parachute

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As he stood upon the ledge

Looking out he thought be saw a brook
And he hollered, "Look there are the bells"
And he said, "Now, here come the bells."
With "The Bells," more than in "Street Hassle," perhaps even more than in his work with the Velvet
Underground, Lou Reed achieves his oft-stated ambition to become a great writer, in the literary sense. More
than that I cannot say, except: Lou, as you were courageous enough to be our mirror, so in turn we'll be your
family. We promise to respect your privacy. (It's like what Tennessee Williams said to Dotson Rader when, as
described in Rader's Blood Dues, the latter made an anguished confession about wanting children. Williams just
touched the head of a young artist sitting nearby and said: "These are my children.") You gave us reason to think
there might still be meaning to be found in this world beyond all the nihilism, and thereby spawned and kept
alive a whole generation whose original parents may or may not have been worthy of them. If one is to be
haunted by ghosts, who's to say they're not specters of love pouring back from dead angels and living children?

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