by STEVE SIMELS
RAMBLING ON WELL, there's nothing particularly earth shaking happening right this minute, pop-wise, and so I thought I'd just share with you the ramblings of my reasonably idle mind once again. It's too hot in this July heat wave for a think piece anyway.
To start off, a few predictions (and if I get all of them right, I'll be sure to say I told you so). First: Bruce Springsteen's third album, which I have heard most of in rough mixes and which will be available in the stores by the time you read this (I promise a full-scale review of it next month) will once and for all establish him as the artist of the decade. The record is as staggering a musical and lyrical advance for him as the last one was over the first, and what really impresses me about it is that it sounds like he still has room to grow.
Further, songs like Born to Run are going to prove as important to the Seventies (and with this record, for my money, they've finally arrived) as Satisfaction and Like a Rolling Stone were to the Sixties; Springsteen is going to reach that many people.
Second: Patti Smith, whose debut album will be out late in the winter, has an almost equal potential, and in some ways she's al most more interesting than Bruce, if only be cause she could be the first woman in rock to have an audience as broad as that of Dylan, Elvis, or (to go from the sublime to the ridiculous) Elton John, and without compromising her femininity one whit. Her appeal is probably going to cut both ways-that is, she'll be a sex symbol for both sexes the way Jagger is.
Beyond that, though, she's really terrific. She and her band are very strong-her one recording so far, a limited-edition single of Hey Joe with a lyric revised to include musings on Patty Hearst, is so powerful that you don't even notice the lack of drums-and she truly understands rock-and-roll (in much the same way Springsteen does). That is something we've never gotten from a woman before, and certainly not from any of the other so-called artists 'who have emerged thus far in the decade (the Bowies, the Bryan Ferrys--you name them). She's going to get an enormous hype, of course, and that may put some people off. And the fact that she's signed with Clive Davis and Arista Records worries me-
I'm afraid they'll try to clean up her act, turn her into some kind of assembly-line type like Melissa Manchester. But, with any luck, her debut album should be an absolute stunner.
Third: By the time this appears, the Bay (PART THREE) City Rollers will have either bombed out or taken our teenyboppers by storm; my guess is the former. The Rollers, who are currently the biggest thing in England since You Know Who, are planning to hit this country with precisely the kind of publicity machinery that Brian Epstein masterminded for the Fab Four--television saturation, the whole business--and there are those who are convinced the formula will work again. I doubt it, for a variety of reasons.
Drummer Henry Week: tasteful For one thing, American teenagers, even the really young ones, are far more sophisticated musically today than their English counterparts; besides, with rare exceptions, Americans have never been as pop crazy as the English (remember the Teddy Boys? The Mods? The Rockers? The Skinheads?) be cause they don't have to be. English kids need constant new and different sensations because their lives are so drab, their opportunities so limited: art school if they're lucky, rotten jobs if they're not. But this country, shortcomings and all, is just too big and affluent to support a climate for real pop mania. Anyway, if some one is going to fill that Osmonds/Partridge Family gap the Rollers are trying to squeeze into, I suspect it will be an American act that American kids can relate to; the Scots-plaid Rollers, with or without sporran, tam, and dagger, strike me as far too parochial a phenomenon to make a splash here. Incidentally, their record is absolutely worthless-very poorly done remakes of old Four Seasons and Phil Spector songs with vocals reminiscent of the most cloying moments of the Monkees' Davy Jones. In other words, whether they make it or not, they are no Beatles.
PROGNOSTICATIONS
Out of the way, and moving right along, I'd like to mention (briefly, believe me) that everything I said about the Stones' performances in the August issue should have been raised to the nth degree. I saw their closing night in New York, and it was-flat out-the greatest rock-and roll show I've ever witnessed. Ron Wood and Keith Richards were so good together it was frightening, Jagger was in top form, Bill and Charlie played like men possessed, and, in general, I've never heard music like that from anybody, including the Rolling Stones. I suggest we all send their management threatening letters if there isn't a live album fast.
Finally, I'd love to tell you some Brownsville Station stories, but most of the ones they told me are unprintable. I met the group at their New York hotel recently (after a local gig with Slade), and despite my well-known aversion to interviews, I found them the most charming, funny, and approachable rock people I've yet met. (Those who know them only through their TV appearances or such AM hits as Smoking in the Boys Room should try to find a copy of their now-deleted first album on Warner Brothers; it's a minor classic.) The band is a quartet again, and they're very interested in having people take them a bit more seriously as musicians; their latest album, which (sorry, guys) I personally don't care for, is a bit more mature than most of their others, and as it was the first they've ever made under the lack-of-pressure conditions bands dream about, the care involved in its production really shows. But no matter; as people, they are totally crackers and therefore absolute delights.
We talked a bit about their days as local sensations at the tail end of the great Detroit/John Sinclair hype. "We were really poor," guitarist Cub Koda told me, "and our manager would get us two offers for an evening; a hundred. dollars for a gig at a high school, or a freebie political benefit, and we used to say 'We'll take the hundred dollars and then go out and vote'." They confirmed some rumors (yes, they assured me. the MC 5 were really as great a band as Michigan residents still insist) and debunked some of the legends that have followed them around (they were not, as one rock journal reported, ever beaten up in a parking lot by a Detroit band called the Frut, supposedly the worst group in the history of rock and proud of it). Best of all (from my point of view, anyway), they read STEREO REVIEW. Drummer Henry Weck won my simple heart immediately when he quoted from some of my reviews, and it turns out we have similar musical heroes (he adores Ray Davies and Procol Harum's B. J. Wilson).
But the big surprise came when I asked the band if there was any professional ambition they would like to see realized. Their answer? To make a record with-are you ready ?--the remaining members of the Benny Goodman Quartet. Just imagine-this raucous, high energy rock band nurses a secret desire to jam with Goodman, Teddy Wilson, and Lionel Hampton. It just goes to show, as Chuck Berry so sentiently observed some years back, that you never can tell.
Also see:
NEW PRODUCTS: A roundup of the latest in high-fidelity equipment
GOING ON RECORD, JAMES GOODFRIEND
Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)