Chicago — The Consumer Electronics Show: thirty-five thousand over-weight, potential coronaries in white plastic shoes not believing for one minute that the people who buy the records are are the people who buy the record players. Circulating through this crotch rubbing, company man crush are several hundred Japanese, the men responsible for the technology that allows the rest of them to keep up on their time payments and fantasy-frustrations of scoring one of the hot pants honies who are spread out across the McCormick Place convention center handing out shopping bags, promotional literature, and an air of desperation. I spent four days wandering through this crowd, alternating between my suit and my bell-bottoms, trying to make contact, to find some common language which would allow me to tell these people that what they�re selling is the future. I didn�t have any luck. The fact is that the people who sell the communications equipment are totally devoid of the ability to communicate.

What their stereos, FM radios, video machines, and other equipment do is of no concern to the men who run the electronics industry in this country. They could give a shit thaLJhe two billion dollars spent on records lasTyear was spent by the people who read CREEM and the other, rock publications. They seem firmly convinced that record players are purchased by some forty to fifty year old segment of the population and if you try to tell them any different they snarl at you. W.C. Fields riffs, �Why doncha go out and play in the traffic, kid.�