November 1969
ROCK & ROLL NEWS
The Rationals, who have put out two of the world’s best white rhythm and blues singles (I Need You and Respect) without ever having a hit, recently signed a contract with Bob Crewe’s Crewe Records, although Crewe will not be producing them. According to Larry Feldman, the Rats’ manager, an album is due within a month.
LETTERS
Dear CREEM WKNR—fm’s recent publicity stunt, the Paul MCartney death hype, is superficially no more than that; a gimmick, a hype, a shyster’s trick. However, beyound the obvious shuck, one finds a basic lack of understanding of the rock form as a media.
DEATH CITY COMIX
STEVE MACKAY
Features
The walrus was Paul?
Deday LaRene
Detroit is known for automobile factories, Greenfield Village, Grosse Pointe, Motown Records, sewage, Zug Island, drag racing, race riots, Bob-lo, salt mines, air pollution, Walter Reuther, pizza, Vernor’s ginger ale, Henry Ford, coney island hamburgers, bad teeth, the GM Tech Center, two-headed dogs, the Lions, the Tigers, the Red Wings, the Pistons, the MC5, blind pigs, cheap statues, and now, The Great Paul McCartney Death Hoax.
A Fiasco of the Black Arts
The Mike Quatro-Russ Gibb Black Arts Affair, co-sponsored by the recondite Mike Keener and WABX, drew over 14,000 people to Detroit’s Olympia Stadium on Halloween. The event was plagued by adversity from diverse areas; the fact that it was a disaster on all levels can hardly be ignored.
Rock & Roll Bootleggers & other strange people
Dave Marsh
It started off, as with a lot of other innovations, with Bob Dylan. The whole thing was very simple; somebody had ripped off a number of old (and not so old) tapes of Dylan singing his own tunes and marketed them, in disc form, as The Great White Wonder!, a two record set in an all-white package.
JOHNNY WINTER
Dave Marsh
He comes on stage, guitar slung low, all in black — ready to rip off some of the meanest, most aggressive, music imaginable. It’s blues, it’s rock, it hardly matters. The proportions of the man aren’t measured categorically. The past must’ve been intense, it must’ve have seared him .... a freak when that wasn’t stylish, when that was horrifying.
Records
Deday LaRene
Everybody knows that Motown has nothing to do with Detroit. The challenge that Motown presented to the prevailing axis of the music industry when Berry Gordy first set up shop was a challenge on the power structure’s own terms. The assumptions were the same; there was no new intellectual or moral stance.
TYRANNOSAURUS REX
Dave Marsh
Music has always been aligned with myth, fantasy and magic.
TRIBE
Dave Marsh
Yet another new musical direction has emerged from the Detroit rock scene in the Tribal Sinfonia. Combining basic rock with their soul and jazz experience, the Tribe has created an unquestionably powerful sound that impresses and antagonizes their listeners into a demand for more.
Chess Dies
Dave Marsh
Leonard Chess, with his brother Phil co-founder of Chess Records, died October 16. He was fifty two years old. Chess was a pioneer in the recording industry; under his and his brother’s guidance Chess produced some of the greatest blues and rhythm and blues artists of the 1950s.
Listen
Richard Walls
Avant-garde jazz has been surrounded by controversy the last eight years or so, most of it ridiculous. The central question tossing back and forth on this sea of controversy (what?) is usually “Is it music?” Very basic. Predictably one side says yes and the other side says no.
THE STRANGE RANGER
CALENDAR
MUSIC MOSTLY Sat, Nov. 1 Eastown Theatre 8041 Harper (& Vandyke) 571-5660. Spirit, Bloodwyn Pig and Taj Mahal with the Magic Veil Light Show. $5 . . . from 8:30 on. Cavern Main St., 3 blks. west of Sheldon Rd., Northville. 1-3494666. Maxx, Chip Stevens Blues Band & Toby Wessel Fox.