July 1986
CONTENTS
LETTERS
Hey, Robert Christgau! I think it‘s time you go out and get a R-E-A-L job! Where do you get off in the April'86 issue betting if Finnish-American drummer David Uosikkinen of the Hooters dyes his hair or not. You’re supposed to talk about Nervous ,Night, not his hair!
ROCK 'N' ROLL NEWS
Not supporting their first CBS album, Dirty Work, will be the Rolling Stones, who've scotched their much-discussed U.S. tour for 1986. Mick Jagger—who’s spent considerable time recording and promoting his solo LP, She’s The Boss, as well as working on the single and video of “Dancing In The Streets” with David Bowie—may very well have hurt Keith Richards’s feelings in doing so.
OZZY DROPS THE BOMB
Sylvie Simmons
Some people collect plastic airline coffee stirrers. Ozzy Osbourne collects scandals. Or rather scandal—unlike the South East London garbage service—collects Ozzy, on a regular basis. New record, new scandal, here it comes, sniffing at his heels.
STANDING FIRM, Kinda
Harold DeMuir
Paul Rodgers, 36, and Jimmy Page, 42, have each spent a couple of decades, i.e. their entire adult lives, as professional musicians. As frontman with Free and Bad Company, Rodgers virtually defined the sound of hard-rock vocals in the 1970s and influenced a generation of singers.
Features
THINKING OF BABYLON, DREAMING OF PRINCE
J. Kordosh
To some, he is The Kid. To others he is The Minneapolis Genius. To others still, he’s That Guy Who Ripped Me Off On That Last Tour Playing Condensed Songs From That Crummy Movie, Purple Rain, Which He Also Ripped Me Off On, Come To Think Of It.
"See, me and Prince had a deal..."
J. Kordosh
(In the mid-’70s, Pepe Willie—a New York writer, musician and producer—went into the Cook House Studio in Minneapolis with two teenaged musicians, Andre Cymone and Prince Nelson. At the time, Willie was married to Nelson’s first cousin, Shantel Manderville.
Rock Magazines! Why They're So Good
John Mendelssohn
You know what’s interesting about the rock print medium nearly two-thirds of the way through the ’80s? That so much of it is aimed at what you'd imagine to be the least literate segment of the rock audience—that which believes that Metal Rules.
RECORDS
Jim Farber
Seven albums and one false retirement into the deal, and we pretty much expect cracked behavior from Prince. True to form, his eighth LP isn’t just a Parade, it’s a freakshow. It’s Prince’s strangest album yet, providing a march through 33-and-a-third genres-per-minute, from the last LP’s psychedel-ick leftovers to Euro-jazz to mariachi to movie muzak, picking up enough sub-genres along the way to cause a world hyphen shortage.
CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE
ROBERT CHRISTGAU
I’ve always felt guilty about ignoring Giorno’s self-promotions, which combine name avant-rockers with name artist-artists, so when this one led off with Husker Du and David Jo I listened forthwith. And found myself returning—to hear Giorno and his buddy Bill Burroughs.
45 REVELATIONS
KEN BARNES
Maintaining an alarming tradition of tardiness, the Single of the Month for this column was released (as an LP cut) about a year before the cover date on this issue. I’ve been hoping it would come out on a single, and in February this year it did—as a B-side.
ROCK • A • RAMA
Paquito’s the Cuban saxophonist who left the musical confines of his homeland for New York and the freedom to play jazz— and does he ever. This time out, he stretches the concept of Latin jazz past Bird to Benny Goodman and forward into the future with unorthodox instrumentation (harmonica and trombone) and strong performances all around.
FACING CHARLIE SEXTON
Dave DiMartino
Experience Charlie Sexton as I did: •Meeting Joe Ely in New York two years ago and hearing him rave about a little Texan punk who played guitar “like you wouldn’t believe.” •Hearing more and more about this same little punk from people whose opinions you respect very much—about a band called the Eager Beaver Boys, led by this Sexton kid, that howled, screamed, rocked and did all sorts of things that you’d like if you ever saw it, which you didn’t.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Calendar
CALENDAR
Depeche Mode’s Kinky Moods
David Keeps
What would you call a band that wears a lot of black leather, sings about “Masters And Servants” and claims that “God has a sick sense of humor”? And has a brilliant songwriter called Martin Gore who performed his first studio singing effort in the dark and the nude?
WILL MARILLION CONQUER AMERICA?
Bill Holdship
It seemed strange that Capitol Records would spend lots of money to send me and other American journalists to England in early February to see Fish.
CENTERSTAGE
Toby Goldstein
If the Live Aid concerts go down as the music event of the century, their latest offshoot, Drive Aid, equally deserves its stature as non-event of the year. A lotta folks forked out $20 for tickets to the Radio City Music Hall happening (but not enough to sell out its 6,600 seats), and we presume that Chevrolet, the show’s sponsor, will indeed channel the proceeds to relieve African famine.
ROCK AND DROLL
John Mendelssohn
Charlie Singleton, much of whose exultant pop funk compares favorably to Prince’s, and Jermaine Stewart, who’d like to (and surely will) be very big with New Edition’s audience, both look like a million dollars on the covers of their recent Arista record albums.
Creem Profiles
DEE SNIDER
(Pronounced “Boy Howdy!”)
CREEMEDIA
Richard Riegel
Five years in the making, The Unheard Music is better and more coherent than anyone had a right to expect, with an elegaic tone that suggests it might have been called The Last Slamdance. It starts like the visual version of an in-depth Roiling Stone piece, with fine sound footage of John Doe and Exene plumbing the Hank Williams songbook, Billy Zoom working out on his clarinet and D. J. Bonebrake demonstrating polyrhythms in his kitchen to the beat of percolating coffee.
DRIVE-IN SATURDAY
Edouard Dauphin
“You are cordially invited to spend an evening with Roger Cobb and his friends. Don’t come alone!” The invitation to House was typical. Copy writers for horror movies must all be taking the same courses at The New School or something. Still, the request for The Dauph’s attendance could hardly be ignored.
MEDIA COOL
Most of the revelations in this well-researched, very readable book aren’t all that shocking— drug abuse, overblown egos and even Gilda’s bulimic problems were never that closely guarded —and nothing here reads as sensationalistic as Bob Wood-ward’s Belushi tome.
RUSS TITELMAN PRODUCES
Dan Hedges
You can sweat like Springsteen, pout and kick like the Wilson Sisters, solo like Eddie Van H.. and crank out songs that’ll give the Lennon-McCartney catalog a run for its money. But the secret in the studio usually lies with that extra set of ears, that outside viewpoint that can spell the difference between a hit and a dismal miss.
THEM'S FINE YOUNG CANNIBAL'S THERE!
Karen Schlosberg
“We’re the hip uncles, that’s what we’re going for,” says Roland Gift when asked to describe the Fine Young Cannibals’ image. “All the kids can come ’round and talk to us because we can listen with an objective ear. We treat them like human beings and not like sons or daughters.”
WATCH YOUR PARKING METERS
Billy Altman
We’ve been noticing something a bit curious lately, and that is that there seem to be fewer and fewer decent videos being done by bands these days, and more and more interesting, or at least watchable (wouldn’t want to appear irresponsibly optimistic, now would we?), videos being produced by and for solo artists.
CLIPS
So then it’s agreed? Robyn Hitchcock is the fabbest artist to hit these shores since the Beatles? No? Big deal. Like him, love him, or never heard of him before, former Soft Boy Hitchcock is a witty, engaging and highly melodic songwriter that everybody on this earth should hear at least once.
NEWBEATS
Sharon Liveten
Think of all those great rock ’n’ roll towns around the country: Akron, Ohio; Athens, Georgia and Austin, Texas. And those are just the A’s. Notice that New England doesn’t even have a representative in the Top 40. That’s about to change. It’s now possible to add New Haven, Connecticut to the list.
Backstage
Backstage
Where the Stars Tank Up & Let Their Images Down