April 1985
CREEM Contents
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 THIS ONE GOES OUT TO COMMUNIST RUSSIA! Bonjour Editors de Creem, I’m not French, but I sure fooled you!
Christgau Consumer Guide
ROBERT CHRISTGAU
LAURIE ANDERSON “United States Live” (Warner Bros.) Taking a deep breath, I dutifully put on side one the moment the box arrived, and to my surprise raced through the rest almost consecutively. Then I was able to jump around— which I have, just about daily, ever since.
Rock 'n' Roll News
Splitsville! Jimmy Marinos— drummer and sometimes triller —has left the Romantics to form what this Bureau understands Will be a power trio, or somesuch. According to the Romantics’ publicist: “The band is not worried about this departure in any way.
Creem Profiles
JASON & THE SCORCHERS
(Pronounced “Boy Howdy!”)
The Beat Goes On
Iman Lababedi
FOLLOW THE WIND NEW YORK—Floridians Steven Katz and Lane Steinberg became friends during their senior year in high school, where they both took piano classes. A shared disgust in modern pop became a partnership they called the Wind. “Since the radio was invented there’s been a Top 40,” Katz explains.
BIG COUNTRY: Hoedown In Steeltown
Jon Young
If you ask me, this business of sincerity in rock is getting out of hand. Today, for every Van Halen or ZZ Top that’s dedicated to celebrating life’s immediate (make that superficial) pleasures, there seems to be a Bruce Springsteen or a U2 insisting we take a thoughtful look beneath the surface for deeper meanings.
A COUPLA WHITE GUYS SITTIN’ AROUND TALKING
Roy Trakin
“I don’t believe in obscurity for' its own sake. That’s something people hide behind. ” - Daryl Hall
Hey There Georgie Boy
Sylvie Simmons
It’s a tough life in today’s pop world. In these dark days of decreasing sales, with tight-fisted conservative little brats putting their pocket money into savingsand-loans instead of assuring the propagation of the limousine, stars are being forced into moonlighting to make ends meet.
Features
DAVID LEE ROTH: AND THE GLEEBY SHALL ROCK
Billy Altman
It’s been a pretty above-average week for Diamond Dave, even by official Party Animal standards.
THE JIMMY PAGE INTERVIEW PART I
Chris Welch
Page onstage 1985.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Calendar
Calendar
Eleganza
THE MARY HOPKINS TASTE TEST
John Mendelssohn
A couple of months ago, another magazine, one that doesn’t routinely make its writers coax, cajole, plead, and threaten to get money they’ve been owed for months and months and months, urged me to profile Sighin’ Cy Curnin.
1984: ONLY THE EMPIRE’S NEW CLOTHES?
Cynthia Rose
“Fashion” is such a reliably inaccurate index of what’s going on in a given site at a given time that our new 1984: The Fashion Yearbook (U.K. publisher: Zomba; available in the U.S. as Fashion ’85 from St. Martin’s) makes a perversely interesting read.
CREEM'S 1985 DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS
Rick Johnson
Pardon us, but may we interrupt your Coffee Pleasure for a moment, dear reader? No, this isn’t the last load call at your laundromat. Nothing that exciting. It’s just time once again for CREEM’s semi-annual Dubious Achievement Awards. What is a Dubious Achievement?
CREEMEDIA
J. Kordosh
"...I couldn’t keep from wondering how they [Ray and Dave Davies] sleep on their compromises at night." —Marianna Fikes, in a letter to CREEM after attending a recent Kinks concert. Marianna, I don’t think I have to defend the Kinks’ kompromises, since very few of us noticed when they were world-class (circa Something Else and Village Green).
MEDIA COOL
Richard Riegel
MAX MAVEN’S MIND GAMES (MCA Home Video) Laff Riot time! Through Max’s incredible telepathic power, once you stick this tape in your VCR...he can guess what you think! Make you choose numbers against your will! Do all sorts of things that actually can be done, thanks to the inclusion of string, blank index cards, pencils and material.
Video Video
SIX DEVELOPERS IN SEARCH OF A CHARACTER
Billy Altman
We’re often let in on what we are assured is some very privileged information concerning the conceptualization, production, and marketing of new videos.
HEADED FOR HOME
Mitchell Cohen
I have a better title, except Malamud already claimed it: The Natural. John Fogerty’s sound could never be pinned down to time or region; spring “Who’ll Stop The Rain” or “Lodi” on a panel of musicologists 30, 40 years from now and ask them to place it, and odds are there’ll be a lot of baffled head-scratching.
ROCK • A • RAMA
Michael Davis
JAMES BLOOD ULMER Part Time (Rough Trade) Now that Ulmer doesn’t have to deal with being “the next big thing,” he can concentrate on his music which, coincidentally or not, has been improving of late. Basically, he’s found the right band members: electric violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren Benbow are not only distinctive players in their own right but they listen so well, knowing when to lay back and when to cut loose.
45 REVELATIONS
Ken Barnes
It’s the April ’85 issue of CREEM, so what better time to indulge myself with a recap of the best singles of ’84? (Actually, thanks to advanced production and distribution techniques, my deadline for this column is December 28, 1984, so it is the right time for me to indulge myself.)
KISS & TELL
Jaan Uhelszki
April Showers Bring May Flowers: And all this time you thought Morrisey had the corner on flower power in the ’80s, when along comes the royal one, who really shows you how to toss the flora and fauna around a proscenium arch. Prince drove promoters crazy with his florist bills during his American tour—wherein he ran up a tab of $9,000 a night, which included 15,000 chrysanthemums and carnations per show in addition to an extravagant arrangement of exotic flowers flown in from Holland and Africa for his dressing room (plus mention other such essentials as a navy blue couch with an exotic bird design, a Queen Anne style chair and a baby grand piano— not to mention the candy machine for his hotel room— he’s trying to cut down)...Grace Jones worked up Roger Moore—on the set of the latest James Bond flick— when she refused to stop blaring the stereo in her dressing room (I can’t understand why he didn’t like the Repo Man soundtrack).
Backstage
Backstage
Where the Stars Tank Up & Let Their Images Down