November 1987
CONTENTS
ROCK ’N’ ROLL NEWS
Brian Ritchie of the Violent Femmes should have a solo album (The Blend) out on SST momentarily. Ritchie plays no bass on the album, but does sing and play guitar...In other SST doings, the Leaving Trains have released their second album for that label, this one titled Fuck—available on vinyl, cassette and CD, thank goodness...
WE HAVE... SIMPLE MINDS!
Craig Lee
Deja vu time. I’m sitting in the conference room on the A&M lot. I’m about to meet Mr. Simple Minds himself, Jim Kerr. I don’t know if I’m sitting in the same chair, but this is the exact same room where I met and talked with Kerr a few years ago. At that time the guy was this young Scottish upstart, brimming with excitement over his new album (New Gold Dream) and his new marriage (do we need to remind you the guy’s married to Chrissie Hynde?
LETTERS
“That’s what’s depressing about all this ‘new music’; it’s kind of hype... some of that stuff isn’t any fuckin’ good...I mean, like Husker Du doin’ The Mary Tyler Moore Theme.’ Why don’t they play ‘No Reply,’ y’know? Maybe I’m just old, but I’d rather hear a real song.”
RECORDS
Michael Davis
The longer the word “psychedelic” is used to describe music, the less meaning it has. Both of these bands have had the term pasted on their respective reputations and they’ve got about as much in common as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and yo’ mama.
45 REVELATIONS
Ken Barnes
The perfect pop record of 1987 has arrived. Actually, it arrived in mid-1986 in Australia, but it took me until 1987 to get hold of it, plus the album it’s on just came out in the U.S. (it should be a single here late in the year or even in 1988), so I say it’s the pop record of 1987 and let’s get to it.
ROCK • A • RAMA
Jon Young
A full decade after the exit of the King, the Elvis Presley hype machine madly continues to churn out repackages as if there were no tomorrow. In fact, these four new titles rank among the more intelligent recyclings, each providing a good starting point for budding Presleyphiles.
ELEGANZA
John Mendelssohn
In I’m With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie, her juicy memoirs of her days as Hollywood’s premiere groupie, M(is)s(.) Pamela (Miller) Des Barres, a gal after this column’s own heart, rarely neglects to tell the reader what she was wearing while she enjoyed this or that sexual or other activity with this or that late-’60s or early-’70s superstar.
Steve Earle: The Cosmopolitan Cowboy
Cynthia Rose
He’s a Texas-to-Nashville transplant and a balladeer with an articulate business sense. But, from the way he assembled his band to his strong reverence for songwriting craft, Steve Earle embodies some of country music’s more venerable traits.
Features
BRIDGE OVER ROGER WATERS
JIM FARBER
Theoretically, one shouldn’t meet Roger Waters.
CRUZADOS Time For Waiting
Bud Scoppa
Cruzados fit together so well, you’d think they were a product of central casting. There’s the riveting, reflective leader (Tito Larriva), the wisecracking, tough-guy drummer (Chalo Quintana), the steadfast bass player (Tony Marsico), and the enigmatic lead guitarist (Marshall Rohner).
U2 IN IRELAND: Aggressive Pacifists In A War-Torn Land
Andy Hughes
U2 are an Irish band. That may sound like an obvious statement about the biggest rock band in the world, but just because it’s obvious doesn’t make it any less vital. The fact that U2 are Irish is precisely what makes U2 what they are— the biggest rock band in the world.
CALENDAR
Features
20 YEARS OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
Bill Holdship
Despite poor sales when their LPs were released in the ’60s, the Velvet Underground were and are one of the most influential rock bands of all time.
JOHN CALE
Roy Trakin
Twenty years have passed since John Cale, along with Lou Reed, emerged with the Velvet Underground preaching a naked vision that had nothing in common with the era’s prevailing peace ’n’ love vibes. The Welsh madman, who came to America on a classical grant at the age of 21, has long since parted company with his original sidekick, embarking on a solo career that has encompassed producing (artists like Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Nico, Squeeze and the Police), A&R (discovering Jonathan Richman, among others), avant/classical collaborations (with Terry Riley and the Royal Philharmonic) and performing with his own rock groups.
NICO
John Neilson
To many people, the name Nico sounds naked or incomplete without the prefix “The Velvet Underground &... Over the years the image of the tall blonde model—one-time consort of Jim Morrison and Jackson Browne—has become inextricably linked with the Velvets’ legend, and her part in the Warhol circus has cast a shadow over everything she has done since.
STERLING MORRISON
Thomas Anderson
Take a walk down Guadalupe Street in Austin, Texas and you’ll find record stores with the Velvet Underground’s albums among their selections, not to mention T-shirt shops where that familiar Warhol banana hangs alongside more recent R.E.M. and Violent Femmes designs.
MAUREEN TUCKER
Thomas Anderson
Maureen Tucker is probably the only person working for K-Mart who was once a member of the Velvet Underground. She has released two solo singles (one a duet with Jonathan Richman), spent six months recording an album in her living room, and has released a rockin’ EP which she cut with a hot band in a garage studio outside of Disney World, imagine what her employment application must have looked like:
LAMONTE YOUNG
John Neilson
There are two sides to the Velvet Underground—only one of which is rock ’n’ roll in the romantic tradition of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. If someone in a guitar pop band claims to be "into the Velvets,” and they show it by doing the three-chords-and-poetry thing, this is the Velvet Underground they are talking about.
DOUG YULE
Thomas Anderson
Doug Yule has gotten a bad rap. Even though in post-Velvet Underground years Lou Reed both recorded and toured with him, the story endures that he was the person who tried to usurp the band from Lou’s control, and was therefore responsible for the band’s breakup.
EVEN MORE MORE OF THE MONKEES!
J. Kordosh
A few months ago a friend of mine—a collector of the first order—played a tape that had come his way. It was the Monkees from a live performance in Japan circa 1968 and it was, in a word, incredible. Suffice it to say that anyone who ever thought the Monkees "couldn’t play” would—after hearing this tape—revise his or her opinion.
CENTERSTAGE
Roy Trakin
A scant two weeks before, I was walking up Seventh Avenue in NYC with my wife. We were in town for the New Music Seminar, and we passed by the PolyGram building where I used to work, between 51st and 52nd, just as a group of people were emerging from a nondescript Irish restaruant.
TECH TALK
Billy Cioffi
Carlos Alomar dedicates his LP, Dream Generator, "to all rhythm guitarists." In a musical world that, for the most part, is dominated by athletic exhibitions of tasteless fret meandering by moussed meatgrinders, Alomar is an enigmatic guitar hero.
NEW GEAR
Fostex Corporation has announced that the suggested retail price of their X-30 Multitracker has been reduced to $499. The unit is the company’s third generation of cassette/mixers designed specifically for the beginning recordist.
CREEMEDIA
John Mendelssohn
“I’d always thought I’d lived in a real important, interesting, fascinating place and time on the Sunset Strip in the ’60s, so I’d always known I was going to write this thing.” The speaker’s (Miss) Pamela (Miller) Des Barres, and the “thing” she was so certain she’d write is I’m With The Band, a memoir about her adventures as Hollywood’s most avid (and best-liked) groupie between the early days of Led Zeppelin and the waning days of glitter, wherein the reader learns what it’s like to be eaten by Mick Jagger, gently tricked into conferring a hand job to Captain Beefheart, rescued from Trimar abuse by Jim Morrison, and seduced and abandoned by Jimmy Page, to give just a few of the more luscious examples.
MEDIA COOL
J. Kordosh
This 1968 concert, a triumphant home-coming for the (then) newly world-class Doors, is ostensibly the only full-length color concert footage of the band in existence. Not only is the sound (particularly the vocals) sensational, the material (“Whiskey Song,” “Spanish Caravan,” “The Unknown Soldier,” “The End”) is surprisingly varied and undeniably hip.
THE MENNING O' THE UNIVERSE! ECHO, GOD & THE BUNNY MEN
Dave Segal
Echo & The Bunnymen aren’t innovators, They’re re-invigorators. When they started, a lot of critics compared them to the Doors, but one listen to Crocodiles revealed this link to be facile. Sure, Ian McCulloch’s voice vaguely echoed Morrison’s—and the band did recently cover “People Are Strange” with former Door Ray Manzarek producing, for the soundtrack of The Lost Boys—but McCulloch’s voice and guitar, along with the guitars of Will Sergeant, Les Pattinson’s bass and Pete DeFreitas’s drums often tap into a more primal vein of rock than even the Doors could muster.
NEW BEATS
Karen Schlosberg
Mason Ruffner moved from Fort Worth to New Orleans some 10 years ago. "I was looking for some inspiration,” he says—in fact, he was thinking about becoming a poet or a novelist before getting back into his first love, music. He played Bourbon Street clubs six hours a day and slowly built a reputation that eventually drew such admirers as Jimmy Page, Robbie Robertson and Bruce Springsteen.
Backstage
Backstage
Where the Stars Tank Up & Let Their Images Down