May 1984
CREEM
Send all your hot 'n' heavy love letters, vicious hate mail, warped comments, and tamper-proof food products to: MAIL Dept., CREEM Magazine P.O. Box P-1064 Birmingham, Ml 48012 ALTMAN STONED! I would just like to tell Billy Altman to go to hell!
Christgau Consumer Guide
ROBERT CHRISTGAU
"AVENGERS" (CD) These 14 cuts constitute the recorded output of a late-’70s San Fran punk band best remembered for “We Are The One,” the finest U.S. indie single of 1977, and a 1979 Steve Jones-produced EP. The notes extol their “breakthrough—however brief—into a vision of life expressing firsthand passion and revolt,” but to me Penelope Houston sounds like a valley girl with too much attitude.
Rock 'n' Roll News
Those touchy French immigration officials are at it again! Not satisfied with allowing Jerry Lewis into their country repeatedly, the Customs drudges tried to keep the dapper Boy George out! The trouble started when the willowy singer, clad tastefully in a full-length blue and silver kimono with a big kamikaze-ochre bow and delicate oriental eye makeup, presented his passport to the humorless frogs.
The Best Goes On
Laura Fissinger
NEW YORK—We’ve only got a little time here, so let’s go right for the trouble spot: After a recent Lauper set in New York, a well-worn rock observer summed her up as “good convertible music.” Singer/writer/big heart Cyndi is so much more than a Go-Go or a Josie Cotton; if the world doesn’t figure that out, Lauper’s devotees will be very upset.
Creem Profiles
HUEY LEWIS
(Pronounced “Boy Howdy!”)
ADAM ANT: SEX-PERSON WITHOUT A CAUSE!
John Mendelssohn
Adam Ant materialized in the lobby of a West Hollywood hotel that employs a lot of very stupid Englishwomen and offered me his hand.
SHOOT-OUT AT SESAME STREET: JONATHAN RICHMAN TALKS!
Bill Holdship
I hate it when my heroes get attacked. That’s why I screamed “Ignorance!” and threw a copy of Musician magazine across the room when this capsule review of Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers’ latest LP—Jonathan Sings!—appeared several months ago:
VAN HALEN '84
MONKEYS PAWED MY OBELISK
Edouard Dauphin
From The Journal Of A Dauphin: Friday, the 20th. Woke at dawn. Aftereffects of “controlled experiment” seem to be subsiding. Trembling has abated. Hair has resumed growing on arms. Walked about Chelsea for two hours, Ate at Joe’s. Home: watched Dream House.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Calendar
CALENDAR
Eleganza
INTRODUCING ANGELYNE
John Mendelssohn
Hollywood teems with lusters after fame, rock stars of tomorrow, would-be symbols of sex.
THE LORDS OF THE NEW CHURCH’S AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE
Mark J. Norton
It seems one thousand liqht years from ground zero I was drinking warm Budweiser in this fucking dump called C.B.G.B’s with Richard Blum a.k.a. Handsome Dick Manitoba, watching the second-ever Dead Boys in NYC set. They were still wearing platforms, had long hair, no bass playe’r, and sonically reminded this scribe of the ate/ great/ ong-amente Stooges.
STAYING AFTER GIRLSCHOOL
Richard Riegel
Girlschool members Kim McAuliffe and Gil Weston flash me quick smiles as we’re introduced in their road manager’s hotel room, and I’m relieved to note that both possess intact sets of choppers. All four Girlschool women have their mouths so resolutely stiffupperlip closed in the jacket and publicity photos for their new Play Dirty that I had half feared that they’d succumbed to the dread English Rockers Teeth Syndrome that’s felled so many of their male colleagues.
UP UP & AWAY IN MY BEAUTIFUL SPANDAU BALLET
Annene Kaye G.
IF WE WEREN’T ”AROUND, " WHAT WOULD BE? Think about your liver. Can you feel it? Does it ever hurt? What the heck is it doing in there? With a good imagination and a little Baudelaire, you can explain your spleen away— but trying to get comfortable with your liver is enough to give you an ulcer.
Creemedia
HEAVY METAL BLUNDER
The missus used to be married to a little asshole who produces comedy specials for cable television.
Prime Time
Richard C. Walls
FLOOPERS, BLEEP-UPS, AND POUNDERS: The various blooper specials did so well in the ratings that (what a coincidence!) two networks have simultaneously come up with weekly blooper shows. And both of them (less of a coincidence) are pretty awful.
Meadia COOL
Dave DiMartino
This revision of Preiss's '79 bio hit the stands about a month prior to Dennis Wilson's death, so timely it isn't. But authorized it is—which means sanitized, dry, approved-bycommittee and positive, always positive. Even when it shouldn't be.
O VIDEO, WHEREFORE THY ART?
Cynthia Rose
Welcome (the temperature dropped four degrees as I typed that word) to a moment in time when, thanks to cold, wet and economics, the nature of 'experience' in Britain has never been more vicarious. If you're frozen into position out in the U.S., eyes frosting over in front of MTV, you may feel we got nothing on you. But wait just a mo, bro.
CREEM DREEM
CRISTINA
Records
DISHPAN HYNDESIGHT
Jim Farber
I can't help myself—I am all aboil with excitement as I approach this review of the new Pretenders LP.
WITHOUT TEARS
Jeffrey Morgan
Despite John Lennon's popularity as both a 'Beatle' and a 'solo artist,' his collaborations with Yoko Ono were met with indifference (to say the least) by the general public. Which is a nice way of saying that hardly anyone cares about Yoko Ono other than as a widow and/or as the owner of half a billion dollars (and let's not forget that, prior to December of 1980, she didn't even have those dubious distinctions going for her.)
HIGH VAULTAGE
Richard C. Walls
The series title is a little constricting, not to mention overblown (though one expects a certain amount of rah-rah in these matters). The cover art sucks—blurry handcolored photos and faded shades of pink and green and grey give the records the look of instant bargain bin which, perhaps, is realistic.
ROCK • A • RAMA
Billy Altman
It's bands like the Replacements that make you wish there was some kind of rock 'n' roll Fresh Air Fund. Because if, at some point in the last five years, they'd have been staked to some lengthy free time of running amok in coastal metropolitan centers, they'd probably have long ago gotten the chance to ride the proverbial wave to some kind of success or notoriety, or both.
SOUNDS OF THE '60S
Steve Caraway
March of 1964—exactly 20 years ago— what were you doing? The Beatles had just completed their invasion of New York, and indeed, America, via the Ed Sullivan show. The Reverend Billy Graham had broken his long-standing strict rule of not watching television on the Sabbath just to see the Fab Four.
KISS & TELL
Jaan Uhelszki
Blond on Blond: We knew that those playful imps from Pasadena, Van Halen, had an unaccountable aversion to certain colors—you remember their unnatural abhorrance to the dread brown M&M—and of course it's common knowledge that David Lee wouldn't even bother to peel a backstage pass off any deb whose tresses even approached burnt sienna (you remember the brush he gave Christie Brinkley last year—and we're not talking about the kind with boar bristles).
Backstage
Backstage
Where the Stars Tank Up & Let Their Images Down