It has been a grim month for your faithful alphabetizes Rock and roll has been as boring as the Yankees, but life goes on and when Bobby Murcer came up representing the tying run in the ninth inning of the game that would determine whether the former Bronx Bombers would be over or under the .500 mark at the All-Star break — follow me? Well, to be honest, I’m not sure I’ve got the details straight, but it was something like that — / had already turned off the stereo for awhile and could give Bobby my full attention. Now, Bobby Murcer sure isn’t Mickey Mantle, or Yogi Berra, and sometimes I don’t even think he’s Bill Skowron, but he’s all we got and — this is a warning -it may just be that the same could be said of Elton John. I know I love “Rocket Man,” and Honkey Chateau does bear up under close listening, but he’s never been my man, and the one time I played it after rating, my friend Nadine Robinson told me she still couldn’t stand his voice, and I was embarassed. Who knows? Maybe old Reg, or whoever he really is, is just filling a vacuum.

But what a vacuum. Creeping fogeyism threatens the Consumer Guide. Did you ever get around to buying another copy of Something New when your boyfriend took the first one after you broke up? Maybe now’s the time. In truth, the two new records I’ve listened to voluntarily over the past two months are some ten-year-old Otis Spann tapes just released on Barnaby and “Exiles on Main Street, ” which I played 30 or 40 times before deciding I liked it. What’s worse? I wonder. A two-record rock album that requires as much exposure as a poem by Wallace Stevens, or solace from dependable, kitschy Elton John? The Yankees, by the way, finished below .500 at the All-Star break. But they beat the Red Sox yesterday, and the new Van Morrison sounds pretty good.