September 1984
CREEM
WHAT CLUB? Since you’re the only magazine who prints letters that aren’t even worth reading, I decided to write and join the club. Creem of the Crop Ukiah, CA AGE OLD INQUIRY I’m writing to you because writing is one of the only things I’m allowed to do right now.
Creem Profiles
STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN
(Pronounced “Boy Howdy!”)
Christgau Consumer Guide
ROBERT CHRISTGAU
"BANANARAMA" (London) The girl-group version of Tony Swain and Steve Jolley’s black harmony trio Imagination, Bananarama suffer from Swain-Jolley’s characteristically detached mix, which sounds dreamy when these lasses blend their voices in song.
Rock 'n' Roll News
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band dropped in for an unannounced concert at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park along with new guitarist, Nils Lofgren. Bruce opened the show with the classic “Thunder Road” and performed four cuts from his new album, including the title track, “Dancing In The Dark,” “My Hometown” and “Glory Days.”
The Beat Goes On
RJ Smith
NEW YORK—Not only can Shannon wail on tunes like “Give Me Tonight” and “Let The Music Play,” but she knows her way around both the short and long tax forms and can calculate your gross income in mere seconds. Before putting out a solid album and a couple (so far) of amiable singles, before gigging in Europe and all over the states and at Disneyland and Disney world and on a New York TV show for the Italian government, Shannon knew she had a head for figures.
SOCK TO THE SOLAR PLEXUS
Cynthia Rose
Time for a few home truths: your “British Invasion” may not exactly constitute a Brain Drain for us, but the U.K. is certainly not Where It’s All Happening. To give you facts (rather than sales gimmicks), this is actually Where It’s All NOT Happening.
SONY Video 45: DURAN DURAN
GROWING UP ABSURD WITH THE THOMPSON TWINS
Sylvie Simmons
Scampering around in the British dancepop maze is a painful business at best. You wind up like the little white lab mouse that keeps bashing its head on the same old wall in search of a breadcrumb that's probably old and stale anyway; or worse yet, clean and white and tasteless, some insubstantial, artificial, scientific Wonderloaf that'll make you wither up and die if you don't throw up first.
NIGHT RANGER WANT TO MEET YOUR SISTER TOO!
Kevin Knapp
Let's get this straight. This article is NOT about a talking car. That may be in next month's issue, I don't know. But this is about Night Ranger, a band of people who sing and play instruments, make records and sell lots of them, stuff like that, but do not chase crooks down alleys or pump more carbon monoxide into California's dwindling atmosphere.
FeaturesCreemedia
PRINCE’S PURPLE RAIN: SCUSE ME WHILE I GET SOME POPCORN
J. Kordosh
Prince...it's a great name, isn't it?
PRINCE OF MINNEAPOLIS?
Greg Linder
MINNEAPOLIS—For starters, we're talking God or at least E.F. Hutton. You drop the name Prince in a lot of Minneapolis circles and suddenly you're reading from the Bible at a tent revival. It wasn't always that way. Here in separatist Minneapolis (probably the only city that would dub one of its black-settled suburbs Coon Rapids and let the name stand), Prince Rogers Nelson came from the northside—not exactly a ghetto, but a doomed side of the tracks considered Nowheresville by the tight-lipped white folks who roll through on the Freeway and never stop to smell the barbeque.
Creemedia
TRACEY ULLMAN MUST WORK
Karen Schlosberg
What's a nice girl like Tracey Ullman doing in the music business?
SLADE’S BOYZ FEEL THE NOIZE
Toby Goldstein
"You tell us we don't look any older, and we'll tell you, you don't look any older," offers Slade's bass guitarist, Jimmy Lea.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Calendar
CALENDAR
R.E.M. ON BROADWAY
Jeff Nesin
Tales of the oblique.
Eleganza
WHICH ONE IS MOTLEY?
John Mendelssohn
Terry Bozzio is one of the three or four most likable rock ’n’ roll musicians I’ve ever met, and the only one with his own recipe for pesto sauce.
Extension Chords
New Predicts ’84
Once again, CREEM is happy to present New Products, a semiregular column introducing some of the latest developments in musical instruments and technology as an aid to all the aspiring musicians and producers out there in Boy Howdy land.
CREEM DREEM
VINCE NEIL
BERLIN: SEX MUTANTS MAKE THEATRE OF THE HOT
Drew Wheeler
When given the choice between sex and celibacy, why are more and more people choosing cryogenics?
Creemedia
Rick Johnson
Although it originally aired "only" a little more than two thin decades ago, Leave It To Beaver takes us waaay back to a Motorcraft-tested world where ideals were cheap and they didn't even put nipples on the manikins. It was the pivotal drop in the post-hypnotic suggestion box of parents everywhere who wanted to grow adorable little semiaquatic rodents of their very own.
Prime Time
Richard C. Walls
NO JOKE: The question remains, is Andy Kaufman really dead? His peculiar demise, as reported by the media (and we’ve been told by the media so many times that suspicion of the media is rampant nowadays that one feels a little out of it if one isn’t suspicious), had all the earmarks of one of his little jokes since obviously 35-year-old non-smokers don’t usually die of lung cancer.
Media COOL
Keith Gordon
THE COMPLETE SPY by Robert McGarvey and Elsie Caitlin (Pedigee Books) If you’re one of those people who cried when they took The Man From U.N.C.L.E. off TV, if you own every book Ian Fleming wrote, and if you have wet dreams over James Bond’s sci-fi super-sleuth equipment, then The Complete Spy, a Sears wishbook for would-be secret agents, deserves a place on your coffee table.
Video Video
TOP OF THE WORLD, MA
Mick Farren
It’s hardly news that, in rock ’n’ roll, an ego as big as all outdoors has never done its owner any harm.
Records
LONG AS HE CAN SEE THE LIGHT
Jeff Nesin
A sense of pop currency is important, no, essential to the success of Born In The U.S.A.
Records
ELVIS’S STICKY WICKETS
Mitchell Cohen
It's almost Elvis Costello and the distractions this time out.
GET UP, STAND UP
Richard C. Walls
Frankly, I'm getting tired of albums that aren't saying anything. It's gotten so bad that last year when Sting offered some ultra-simple lines about A-bombs and dinosaurs some critics shamelessly gushed as if the guy had re-invented relevance or something.
45 REVELATIONS
Ken Barnes
Sometimes it's frustrating when you know you've found a classic record, but other people (reviewers) don't agree. The entire British press must have been in a royal snit when Bananarama's 'Rough Justice' (and the sumptuous album it's taken from) came out—not one good notice on a single that's patently smashing.
ROCK • A • RAMA
Richard Riegel
OLIVER NELSON WITH ERIC DOLPHY Straight Ahead (New Jazz) A reissue of an early '60s date with Dolphy wreaking meaningful havoc on Nelson's bluesy structures while Nelson himself improvises in a conceptually confident manner—though it's the different effects that the bluesy ranconteur and the free-associating speed-rapper have on each other which keep the record interesting (My Dinner With Eric?).
KISS & TELL
Jaan Uhelszki
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Rod Stewart was spotted making a late night call on former manager, Billy Gaff, who was oh-sounceremoniously dumped by Stewart a couple of years back. Yes, it looks like the couple have kissed and made up—but not renewed their vows—though Gaff has other things on his mind, namely wet nursing another flaxen-haired warbler's career.
Backstage
Backstage
Where the Stars Tank Up & Let Their Images Down