May 1986

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

LETTERS

Hi! I’m a girl from Sweden and I’d like you to write to me! I’m 18 years old and I listen to all sorts of rock ’n’ roll music from the Beatles to Springsteen! Write to: Towe Soderberg Karlsgatan 27A 72214 Vastera Sweden BROKEN HEARTED AGAIN New Year’s Eve.

ROCK 'N' ROLL NEWS

Slated for broadcast July 3rd (the 15th anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death) is a three-hour radio special on the Doors. The retrospective—put together by entertainment consultant Lee Abrams and specialproducts radio producer Denny Somach— will feature old clips from radio newscasts, radio spots from the ’60s advertising Doors’ concerts and interviews with the surviving band members (Robbie Krieger, John Densmore and Ray Manzarek) as well as promoters, club owners, bouncers and others who knew the band.

THE ACADEMY IMPERILED: IS THIS THE DREAM?

Karen Schlosberg

Nick Laird-Clowes talks a mile a minute. Wearing a black leather jacket, black pants and a light shirt, his below-shoulder-length brown hair falling out from behind his ears constantly with the animation of his discussion that echoes in his mobile face and hands, he projects a decidedly different picture from the serious, near-wistful Nehru-jacketed figure on the cover of the Dream Academy’s first album.

TWISTED SISTER: SNIDER AS USUAL

Laura Fissinger

They have a new album out, their fourth, Come Out And Play. They’re on an 11 month world tour. So of course Twisted Sister talks to the press. Then again, Dee Snider doesn’t need reasons or excuses to talk; one imagines the man talks in his sleep.

PEACE, LOVE & THE CULT

Jim Farber

Pop culture is choking on its own vomit again. Everywhere you look, signs of psychedelia are being thrown-up in a mix with all of rock history since, creating the utter mish-mash we’ve come to think of as pop present. Take for example, the Cult—a good new British band who’ve regurgitated more than their fair share of psychedelic surfaces.

The Enterprising STARSHIP BEAM 'EM UP, BINKY

Barbara Pepe

MTV’s annual New Year’s Eve party has got this reputation as being the place to unveil next year’s big breakthrough artists. After all, it was here that Cyndi Lauper first told us what girls really wanted, and Duran Duran performed at the ball before there was money for videos in Rio and their lead singer got rich enough to almost drown in his own yacht.

'85 READERS POLL THE WINNERS THE READERS SPEAK! (Next Year They Fetch)

You pesky readers! The votes are in, and so are the checks. Thus, this year’s poll results. How do we feel about it? With our hands, stupid! But we’d also like to point out to you many faithful readers that 1985 was a SIGNIFICANT TURNING POINT in the history of CREEM readers—and, therefore, ALL OF ROCK ITSELF!

BONO: Making The Effort

Adrian Thrills

(For the edification of our always-concerned readers who might be wondering what the heck U2 have been doing of late, here’s the scoop: they’re recording a brand new album. Until that arrives, shall we content ourselves with a few words from lead singer Bono?

RECORDS

Roy Trakin

With the Go-Go’s gone-gone, none other than the Purple Prince has tapped these L.A. ladies as their gurl-group successors, pop division. To seal the coronation, Minneapolis’s King of Rock has helped crown the Bangles queens by providing them with the jaunty, “Raspberry Beret”-like nursery rhyme hop of “Manic Monday,” the first single from their second, and latest, LP, Different Light.

CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

ROBERT CHRISTGAU

TOMMY BANKHEAD AND THE BLUES ELDORADOS (Deep Morgan) After 35 years as a professional, Bankhead is as authentic as blues gets and his first album sounds that way. I can even hear the harp-only prison song as a set-opener. I can even imagine checking out this hunch at some East St. Louis joint next time I’m out that way.

45 REVELATIONS

KEN BARNES

One of the sacred songs of the serious “post-punk” crowd, the folks who keep their faces blank, their clothing black, and their music bleak, is “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, featuring the late Ian Curtis. Now, although I have no use for the gloom generation in general, don’t get me wrong—despite (or maybe even because of) Curtis’s dismal singing (no range, no pitch, very little musicality, period), “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is a great song.

ROCK • A • RAMA

Richard Riegel

Truth-in-packaging award: this album’s eight cuts are all covers of the songs of some of our favorite Noo Yawkers: Lou Reed, Richard Hell, Suicide, the Ramones, Patti Smith, the Velvets, and even a medley of Robert DeNiro’s Taxi Driver soliloquy with “New York, New York.”

CREEM'S PROFILES

HOME: The Voodoochile Panhandle. AGE: Old enough to meaningfully testify. PROFESSION: Lone Star. HOBBIES: Keeping the Hendrix legacy alive, buying back his introduction to David Bowie, playing the real thang, shaving with a rare dexterity and acting as switchboard operator for the soul.

IT'S DELIGHTFUL, IT'S DELICIOUS, IT'S DIVINYLS

Billy Altman

Talk about doing your time on the road. Christina Amphlett, the smashing lead singer of Australia’s equally smashing group Divinyls is sitting in a Mexican restaurant on Manhattan’s upper west side, “reminiscing,” between sips of a marguerita, about an episode from her past that sounds like a scene from the imaginary screenplay for Midnight Express Meets Caged Heat.

CREEM MAY 1986

Sade Is A Group

Sylvie Simmons

Eight million copies the first album sold—Diamond Life, sultry pop, Martini-ad jazz, not really the stuff of eight million copies. Some of those eight million selling in Britain I can understand; stranger things—singing nuns, whistling cowboys, warbling castrato choir boys—have made it here to number one.

THE JESUS & MARY CHAIN Immaculate Conception?

Bill Holdship

Most early reaction to the Jesus & Mary Chain was not very favorable. An occasional New Musical Express writer would jump on their bandwagon, but NME regularly jumps on some bandwagon— and I stopped trusting their attempts at pop trend-making around the time of the new romantics, which later spared me the anguish of having to even consider Frankie Goes To Hollywood on any serious level.

CENTERSTAGE

Toby Goldstein

"I love this weather,” Joe Jackson was enthusiastically telling the enraptured audience of 400 or so, who were quietly drying out, the result of the first genuine downpour of the new year. "English blood is made up of rain, rain and beer,” Joe amiably concluded, before he got the OK-signal from producer David Kershenbaum, holed up outside in a mobile recording van, and launched into a regretful song, appropriately titled "Hometown.”

ELEGANZA

John Mendelssohn

Years ago, Robert Christgau wrote, “Never trust a group with a logo,” but that was only typical Chrisgauvian hyperbole. What you should never trust is a group with a logo that tries so hard to be clever that it can’t be read. Take Ratt’s, for example.

CREEMEDIA

Wayne King

Sun City has been viewed as the latest in a series of benefit records and events, but as Little Steven makes abundantly clear throughout the Sun City video, charity was not the motivation behind the project—raising consciousness was. Sun City marks a turning point in the ongoing struggle to keep rock relevant to itself and its audience.

DRIVE IN SATURDAY

Edouard Dauphin

Ten years ago, Ed Naha, a puckishly perverse writer who grew up watching monster movies in New Jersey, published Horrors From Screen To Scream, a neatly compiled encyclopedia of horror, fantasy and supernatural films, that, along with Michael Weldon’s indispensable Psychotronic Encyclopedia Of Film, has come to be fingertip reading for lost souls like myself, afflicted with an insatiable hunger for the weird, the unearthly, and the downright awful.

MEDIA COOL

David Keeps

(McGraw-Hill Paperbacks) With over 250 books about the quintessential quartet in existence, and not enough time to read them all, curious Beatle fans are forced to be discriminating. This is the authorized bio, first released in 1968.

CREEM SHOWCASE

Dan Hedges

The word is loud. Loud in concept. Loud in packaging. Even the clothes come equipped with a volume control. After years of constant touring (as much as 13 months at a stretch), Iron Maiden have pumped themselves up into one of heavy metal’s top arena attractions on both sides of the Atlantic.

VIDEO VIDEO

Billy Altman

Have you seen those ads that MTV has been running for itself on “regular” television lately? You know, the ones that feature the tag line “MTV— it’s not for everyone”? Well, watching the cable channel over the past few months, it seems that MTV certainly isn’t for everyone.

Clips

Martin Dio

Hell. By no means a tragic hero, Johnny Thunders couldn’t even be a tragic hero sandwich. Forget the fact that he comes across as a self-serving, racist twit, that he can’t really sing, that he knows one riff and played it to death years ago, and that there’s this unspoken—and absurd—implication here that if Johnny only “cleaned up” things would be great.

NEWBEATS

Richard Chon

When Natalie Merchant was 12, her mother had the family TV set disconnected. She laughs, recalling the moment. “We were all having D.T.’s. It was so strange; she’d leave the house and we’d get the TV out. But it worked eventually.” At that time, the singer’s family lived in a farm house located two miles from their nearest neighbors.

Backstage