January 1972

CONTENTS

ROCK 'N' ROLL NEWS

Grand Funk’s new album, the just released E Pluribus Funk, is on the group’s own lable, Grand Funk Railroad. The label is designed, according to Capitol execs, as a “tribute” to the group, and doesn’t really mean anything: no other acts Will be appearing under the logo, for example.

Features

James Taylor: SUPERSTAR

William Kowinski

You say that nothing is real? Well here’s another clue for you all: James Taylor is.

Features

ALICE COOPER: ALL AMERICAN

Lester Bangs

A Horatio Alger story for the 1970s.

LOONEY TOONS

Dave maRSH

1971 has not been the best possible year. There hasn’t been an aura of sunshine in events—measured daily, weekly or monthly—this year at all. George Jackson murdered, then Attica. Jim Morrison dies. Then Gene Vincent, King Curtis, Duane Allman, Louis Armstrong. All of that is recent—the first six months blur.

Unto us a son is born Unto us a son is given

Ed Ward

A tale of Sceilig Mhichil.

Whiskey is the spirit of Christmas

Nick Tosches

The Yuletide season is perhaps the best time of the year to become a lush or Zagreus. Every one is celebrative and convivial and they won’t notice it until at least the second week of the new year that guy with the long white beard and the scythe getting trashed by the baby with the streamer hung o’er his shoulder and by then you ought to be depressed enuff by the new year not to care.

America: two ways of looking at it

John Kane

Moviegoing in New York is such a crazy, compulsive experience, with posh first run theatres clustered on the East side of the city, and warm, seedy revival houses dotting the West side, that a dedicated film buff can easily find himself mixing his movies into a wierd cinematic cocktail if he isn’t careful.

Complete coverage of the Palsy Telethon

Audie Murphy Jr.

That’s cerebral, there’s more than one kind. Jay Lee had the kind that just paralyzes half your face so it’s hard to talk and you drool a lot and it was only temporary and he doesn’t have it anymore. But even while he had it he was still able to go up to Clive Davis and sell Columbia Tom & Sharon and sell himself as a producer too.

The man who laughs has the terrible news

Arnie Passman

During a recent identity Christ is or isn’t, in which I copped out, silently, as usual, as the cosmic hyena, I thankfully received my copy of Paul Krassner’s book, How A Satirical Editor Became a Yippie Conspirator in Ten Easy Years. This is a collection of Paul’s writing from the first ten years of his Paine Full second American Revolution revelations, The Realist.

Bound to Rock

Tony Glover

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s another flood going on; this one of books about rock. Both bookstores and supermarkets carry many new books on the rock scene, some are great, some are bullshit. The main problem is to keep up with all that’s available — hence the following list.

Belfast Cowboy at the summit

Dave Marsh

Tupelo Honey is climactic, the summation of the style that Van Morrison began to develop with Moondance. His post-Astral Weeks music seems to me to be the finest of any single performer we have, the cyrstallization of sixties’ rhtyhm and blues into what it might have been had not the brilliant StaxMotown-Impressions work of that era been transferred to Las Vegas niteries and Slychedelic ballrooms.

Oh, Robbie. You’ve got to find a new blade...

Jon Carroll

Outside the window is the back yard, and beyond that is a large bush, I don’t know what kind of bush it is; it’s just an amiable bush that sits there being green. If it were winter, the leaves wouldn’t be there, and I could see the white building beyond it, and read the chiseled inscription above the door: THIRD CHURCH OF CHRIST SCIENTIST.

ROCK-A-RAMA

SWAMPWATER (RCA):: Didja ever wonder what the Byrds would sound like doing some of those good folk-rock tunes they never got around to recording? Well, here’s Swamp-water, former backup band for Linda Ronstadt and Arlo Guthrie, and not only do they do “One Note Man” (what ever happened to Paul Arnoldi, anyway?) and “Back On The Street Again,” but they do “Gentle Way of Lovin’ Me,” which they wrote.

Juke Box Jury

GREG SHAW

It’s a bonusburger month here in the CREEM singles dept. Trends shaping up, and examples pouring in from all over—one hardly knows where to begin. As good a place as any is the latest offering from a new production outfit called Far Out Productions, masterminded by Jerry Goldstein, one of the famed team Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer, also known as the Strangeloves, who produced Such killer groups as the McCoys and the Angels: “Soledad”/“Headin’ For Home” Eric Burdon & Jimmy Witherspoon (MGM K14296) Congratulations are in order for MGM, who’ve finally figured out what to.

THIRTY ONE WASTED YEARS XMAS BLUES

Bill BergeroN