Joe Ely; Lubbock Calling

The West Texas plains have produced a lot of honkytonk heroes. Joe Ely fits in just fine.
(published in SPIN)

Sitting around of a late Sunday afternoon at Joe Ely’s place, the talk turns back to Lubbock one more time. Maybe it always will. The creek has settled down after this last week’s rain flooded it out against the field, the road between Austin and the ranch is open again, and Jimmie Gilmore’s here to bring back the microphones he borrowed for his show last night at the Broken Spoke. Butch Hancock came along for the ride and they’re both sitting over close by the fire where it’s good and warm.

Another reason they’re here is this theater guy from San Francisco wants the whole bunch of them, all the notorious Lubbock expatriates –– Joe and Sharon Ely, Butch and Jimmie and Jo Carol Pierce, Terry and Jo Harvey Allen and all –– to write and act in this play he’s planning on producing if he can come up with some funding. Which is an interesting concept and everything –– maybe a little loose in the joints, but that’s about right too. It sounds like maybe he’s figuring on getting his funding by busting into some art council’s secret hidden vault–– something about "accurate determinations of currently outstanding grant-in-aid-assessments" –– but that’s okay. If it happens to fall together, that’s just fine. If it doesn’t, nobody’ll hold it against him. They’ve already gone back to telling Lubbock stories again anyway, starting with the Lubbock Lights.

Now the Lubbock Lights were famous UFOs that swung low over the Hub City back in 1957, back when flying saucer fever was pitched way up high. “I have kind of like a little theory, you know? Sharon Ely says. “One of the things that was happenign during that time was there was a lot of of honkytonks up in West Texas, and country music on the weekends, and everybody up there dances in a circle. I mean, I danced in a circle at the Cotton Club, and it causes a frenzy of heat and energy, and I think these Lubbock Light things that were flying over West Texas have this way of detecting heat energy, you know? And ‘cause it’s so fun, they probably went down and saw all these circles of heat rising from all these honkytonks and they probably wondered ‘What the hell is goin’ on?’”

Good question. If it was country music and Texas two-stepping that put Lubbock on the interstellar roadmap, it must have been the Cotton Club that kept the saucers hovering overhead in a low circle. The Cotton Club had been the last stop in West Texas for the big touring Western Swing bands like Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys before they headed out for the coast, and it served the likes of Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams too. The original club burned down in what unquestionably was a burst of heat energy, but it was resurrected with futurific slumpblock architecture just in time for Elvis Presley and the flying saucer jockeys to show up. And through it all, spaceships or not, the Lubbock locals kept up their West Texas waltz, their enduring shuffle around the dance floor, counter-clockwise.

“Joe and I was talking about that particular time,” says Sharon. “The cotton was doin’ great, there was gamblers, there was railroads runnin’ –– there was a lot of energy coming though Lubbock. I mean, farmers were drivin’ Cadillacs! There were more Cadillacs sold in West Texas than in any place in the whole United States. It was a high-energy place.”

And that’s not even to mention Buddy Holly, Lubbocks’ most notable export besides Phillips 66 gasoline. And higher octane too. Holly had him a Cadillac of his own, pink with blue Naugahyde upholstery, and Joe Ely used to own one just exactly like it until the guy who was repainting it went crazy from too many paint fumes and wound up in a mental hospital and the Caddy just plain disappeared. Now Joe’s got a Honda station wagon he’s thinking of getting rid of. And a three-year-old daughter Marie Elena, named after Buddy Holly’s wife. Seems like there’s a trade-off for everything in life.

The San Francisco fellow has a theory abut the Lubbock Lights that dovetails neatly with Sharon’s. Oddly, maybe, but neatly. He reckons that it had a lot to do with the circular mounds the Plains Indians buil, and the fact that they too danced in a circle.

“And Stonehenge was a dance hall,” Butch adds helpfully. Butch has been showing his notebook around, cartoons and photographs and words all woven together into one lumpy life. Butch writes songs too; a lot of them have made real fine appearances on Joe Ely records, and he also has a real nicely evolved theory of his own about the wild winds that blow all the way down from the North Pole with no interruption at all until they hit Yellow House Canyon and dump raw unadulterated oddball energy right over top of Lubbock –– the wind’s own dominion, home of the dusty hurricane, the original wide open space. “Plus, it was Tornado Alley, so there was already this elemental cirucular thing going on.”

“Counter-clockwise,” Jimmy Gilmore notes. He can afford to be quiet. He sang at the Broken Spoke last night. The Broken Spoke is probably the closest thing to the Cotton Club that’s left in Austin and, well, let’s put it this way: if heaven looks a lot like Texas, the saints will spend Saturday night dancing at the Broken Spoke. In a circle, counter-clockwise. Jimmie’s songs have showed up on Joe Ely’s records too, including one that starts out “Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night?,” a line that cansing itself. He can afford to be quiet. “Counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere.”

“Like drains,” says Butch. “Dervishes dance counter-clockwise too.” So do West Texans. Always.

“I remember watching toilets before I went to Australia,” Joe says, stretching back, “made sure and flushed ‘em and remembered which way they went. And I got to Australia and the first thing I did was flush a commode. But their holes are square....”

Somebody or other starts speculating about the Lubbock Lights again, and how maybe what they were up to was they were out scouting around for Buddy Holly and maybe he didn’t actually die in that plane crash but got picked up by space folks. Of course that would mean that the outer space fellas got Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper as pure gravy. Anyway, somehow or other, this reminds Joe of a a little story about this cousin of his back in Lubbock who grew onions one year.

He didn’t know anything about onions, never grew any before this, but he went on ahead and planted onions. Got so all you could smell was onions. Since he hadn’t ever raised any onions before, he didn’t know where to sell ‘em when it came harvest time, so he picked and loaded ‘em all up and went to a Furr’s Supermarket in Lubbock. Maybe it was garlic and not onions –– anyway, he went to the manager, and the manager said, Sure, we’ll take a gallon or two. Well, he had a whole truckload of these garlics or onions, whichever, and after he’d drove around to supermarkets all over town and they each one took a gallon or two, he could see he wasn’t getting nowhere. Finally, he got so mad he just took it all home and dumped the whole load out in the middle of his field. They just set there and rotted and his neighbors got mad because it smelled so bad and he had to hire someone to come out and dig a hole to bury all these onions. Cost him five hundred bucks.

“Needless to say, there were no werewolves in Lubbock County that year,” Butch adds.

Fin de Seccion Numero Uno

Space Is His Place; or, The Toga Party of the Spheres

It's easy to be weird when you're an ancient Egyptian from Saturn but nobody's ever accused Sun Ra of not giving it his absolute best shot. A lot of your Afro-Saturnians take a somewhat low-profile approach to life on this dull orb, dressing as the rest of us dress (more or less), speaking as we speak, sticking mostly to the sidewalk, crossing on the green. After all, when in Rome, join the toga party. Not Sun Ra, though; never a believer in shining his light 'neath a bushel basket, for at least the last 25 years he's let his Supra-CosmoPsychic origins speak for themselves. Say it now and say it loud: I am heliocentric ectoplanetary form made flesh, and I AM PROUD!

As you can well imagine, keeping an Intergalactic Arkestra together for two and a half decades is no small task. Consider the difficulties of assembling such an outfit in the '50s, when the big bands were withering away and the roster of those bands playing Basie-derived sub-atomic squonk was even smaller than it is today; when the majority of Afro-Saturnians were still passing, and thus rather loath to assemble themselves on the bandstand wearing fish-scale gold skullcaps and beam-reflective silver capes, especially when the bandstand haberdashery of the day called for something sharp in a dark Continental suit and a one-stripe tie, with maybe an off-the-stand addition of a sports-car cap set a jaunty angle for class,dash, and panache.

This time, though, Sun Ra and the Arkestra were playing Berkeley Square. That the nightclub is considered primarily as a new pave/wunk rock outlet makes no diff to Sun Ra; the Anglo-Plutonians who occupy such places dress in a manner that clashes wonderfully with the Arkestra's raiment, and besides, Sun Ra's always considered himself something of a teen idol anyway. "When we was playin' over in Portugal, the place we was playin' at wasn't that full up and the teenagers come in over the fence. 'Cause they didn't have no money anyway. Over there if they don't like you, they th'ow corncobs at you. Didn't th'ow any at us." He's talking to this guy from a radio station wearing a white leather motorcycle jacket named Uncle Mark — the guy, not the jacket— and Sun Ra's road manager and some guy with a notebook and another guy with a knit cap jammed full of dreadlocks are all in the dressing-room with them, all of them listening as Sun Ra runs it down. There's a little boy with a shirt that says he's Superman curled up asleep inn the corner on a ledge. "That's why musicians should be on TV more," Sun Ra says, "the ones that are doing something, 'cause in Mexico every Sunday they got all types of music on TV, got musicians from all the different places there, all the sections of the country, I guess, and jazz — they don't play too much good jazz in Mexico, the musicians."

Popular as he is the world over — and he is; most of Europe greets the Arkestra with the sort of welcome that America's cultural commissars reserve for visiting ballet troupes or noted French filmmaker/philosophers — Sun Ra refuses to restrict himself. After a recent swing through England and Scotland, some promoter apparently approached him with an exclusive offer that would have set the Arkestra to touring the length and breadth of the British Isles indefinitely. "Can't do that, 'cause we dealin' on a psycho-spiritual plane . . . can't be signin' up with one nation." And while he's on that plane, and before the No Smoking signs come on, there are some other things he'd like to accomplish. "I suppose there's such things as spiritual criminals," he tells Uncle Mark. "I'm trying to get them to let me be their lawyer, so I can talk to God for them."

Sun Ra is a pretty steady extemporizer, rolling right along, steady as a river with none of the rush. He takes his time, lets the pauses have their places, but the only thing that stops him dead full is when the fellow in the blue blazer and sandals comes in. He comes in on a glide — none too easy in so small a room, and he sweeps over to Sun Ra and gives hime a big wide hug. "You're lookin' good!" he says. "Lookin' good!"
Sun Ra nods and smiles, accepting his due. The fellow in the blazer has those hipster moves, those Love You Madly hipster moves you don't see much any more, graceful and direct. Smooth, like a knife slicing soft margarine on TV. He's telling Sun Ra about some woman they both know (or that he thinks Sun Ra knows, at least; if Sun Ra does know her, he doesn't seem too very interested in hearing about her) and about where the hipster is living. "I was living in the Village," he tells Sun Ra. "But now I'm out here."

"It can be nice here," says Sun Ra. "You got—"

"I don't think I'd want to live back there again. Oh, to visit, sure. To visit. But to live there again? Uh-uh."

Sun Ra is determined. "I'd like to live in Greece, there along the Adriatic, the Mediterranean. It's nice there, lots of sun—"

"Oh, the sun in Italy is just—"

"With them old temples and columns and—"

Superman stirs in the corner a little and goes back to sleep. The hipster in the blazer and the sandals shares a few more memories with Sun Ra, then he gets up to go. "Been wonderful seein' you again," he says. "You're lookin' great!"

Sun Ra gives him a benificent smile and a parting nod and gets back to his interview. He gets around to the suppression of creativity. "I saw a man with roller skates had a motor on 'em and the po-lice came over and made him stretch out and said 'You can't do that 'round here — you operatin' a motor vehicle . . .'"

My Separation From Cindy Crawford

from Vogue

My relationship with Cindy Crawford was not a long one, but while it lasted, we were very close. Maybe it wasn't the deepest of relationships — Cindy is deep, I'm not — but it was close. Perhaps too close. Maybe we meant too much to each other. You know how these things are.

I was staying at a friend's place and Cindy — I call her Cindy — lived in the same building. As it happened, I spent a terrific amount of time in the elevator that week. No sooner would I get to the ground floor and through the lobby than I'd remember something I'd forgotten upstairs and have to get back in the elevator and go get it and come back down again. Sometimes I'd remember something else I had to go back and get. I had a lot on my mind at the time.

It was tropical in Manhattan than month, and only the brave dared venture out before the sun was on the wane. My friend Theresa and I cabbed over from her place late Sunday afternoon, stopping off at the deli for some beer and juice and some of that potato salad you ladle into those plastic containers. And Cindy was there, radiant, over by the cracker and cookie section. It would be ungentlemanly of me to to speak of her purchases; let it suffice to say that nothing she bought had the least bit of a percentage of butterfat. That figure and that complexion may be God-given, but she attends to a healthy diet just the same. I find that so admirable.

It has been my experience that not all models are as fabulous-looking in person as they appear in photos. In person, Cindy is a goddess. I think I can speak objectively here, because this was before Cindy and I were truly close. Unequivocally, she is a goddess. She takes a lousy photograph comparatively. She looks a lot better in real life.

At last, with a heavy heart and a cold six-pack, I left the deli. Theresa, not always as good a friend as she might be, was sort of dragging me by the elbow. Trudging down the block toward the apartment, a block that seemed a thousand miles, fumbling and fumbling with keys to a doorway to happiness that could never be mine, I wept silently, inwardly, tearlessly. "Takes you forever just to open a simple door, doesn't it?" inquired Theresa.

Then it happened. Cindy was there. She had followed me! I held the door; she held the elevator for me. Theresa got in too. At first, none of us said a word. The silence was eminent, profound. It was bosky.

No one in all the rest of our species looks as good in a gray t-shirt as Cindy Crawford. Cindy Crawford was who those t-shirt inventor guys had in mind when they invented the t-shirt. She was sweating. I was sweating. We were both sweating. I guess Theresa was probably sweating, too. I didn't notice.

We didn't have much to say to one another then, Cindy and I. How could we? What is there to say at such times, arms full of groceries? "Would you push the button for the fifth floor for me?" Words only interfere with life, force powerful feelings into tiny categories. What Cindy and I had to say to each other was larger than words, and quieter too.

That little mole thing, by the way, is as cute as can be.

Selling Postcards of the Hanging

Al Green — Amazing Grace

After a dozen years of walking the road to heaven,
the Reverend Al Green raises a little hell.
by Bart Bull
(photography by Anton Corbijn)
published in SPIN

White. White teeth — white, white teeth — white tie, white shoes, white pants, white jacket. And in the buttonhole, a red, red rose. Yes, and Al Green is smiling, smiling. Smiling, grinning, glowing — white, white teeth — gleaming and beaming with joy and gold jewelry, glowing with love and happiness.

And Al Green is always beaming, always, even now. Even now. Even now, just a few slim moments before he'll be out on a Northern California concert stage and the seats will be filled with devout churchified ladies from Oakland and Richmond and San Francisco, big broad-boned black ladies and little black ladies with bones like birds, and yes, they well remember all those worldly songs Al Green used to sing back ten or fifteen years ago, "Let's Stay Together" and "Tired of Being Alone" and I'm Still In Love With You," all of those and all of the others. Yes, they remember. But no, they didn't come here tonight, not one of them, to hear Al Green sing those songs. Tonight they came to hear the man who left all that talk of worldly love behind him when he finally took up his calling, when he stopped fighting and surrendered his life and his music to the Lord. Tonight they are ready to hear the Reverend Al Green.

And tonight the Reverend Green is beaming and gleaming backstage, talking with old friends, laughing, laughing. And if the ladies of the audience had been here this afternoon to see the Reverend rehearse his band, they’d have seen him relaxed and laughing, beaming and gleaming and giggling and just having himself a wonderful time working the band through the evergreen glory of “Let’s Stay Together.” Wearing those glasses of his for the scholarly effect, the clear ones with the tiny, tiny pink roses embedded in the frames, and adjusting the singers’ harmonies, squeezing the horns down tighter, teaching the drummer that unbeatable trot, and preparing to sing, tonight, for the first time in all the nine years since he came to Jesus once and all, one of his old songs, his secular songs, his love songs. Yes, and singing, just for a quick little moment, “Let’s . . . let’s stay to-geth-er . . . loving you whether . . . whether . . . times are good or bad, happy or—” before he cut it short, and burst out laughing. Laughing.

And he’s laughing backstage now, just moments to go, slapping his knees and howling high and maybe even looking out of the corner of his eye just a little to see if everyone is appreciating him appreciating the joke. And they should, truly they should, because tonight is like some moment fallen loose from a history book, a page falling across time. Tonight Al Green will step back across a line he has crossed just once before, a line that won’t be crossed too many times.

Sam Cooke crossed this line one time, going the other way. He left the Soul Stirrers, left the mightiest gospel quartet of all , left it to become a big pop star. And he did too, became the biggest of black pop stars, became a manly black symbol of style and sophistication. Yes, but something was missing, something was wrong that he could not right. Didn’t matter how well his worldly career was going, didn’t matter what he did, and so he tried to come back over the line. He went onstage with the Soul Stirrers in Chicago, and first the good gospel folks were silent as the dead and after that they catcalled him right off the stage. Yes, and it wasn’t too many months later that Sam Cooke was shot dead in a Los Angeles auto court. What does it profit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul?

And from the instant the Reverend Green bounces up the steps to this Northern California stage, something is wrong, something isn’t working, some presence, some spirit, is missing. The ladies of the audience are patient but they’re ready too, waiting to be moved, to be shaken and stirred. Yes, and still something is missing, something is empty. Maybe Al Green’s mind is elsewhere, maybe deep in his heart Al Green knows he’s not supposed to mess with those old songs. He hasn’t touched one yet—not yet—but they’re so near at hand. All he has to do right now is call for “Let’s Stay Together” and he’ll have stepped back over that line again.

Those songs are so near at hand, and so are those good gospel-drenched ladies, the ones who have been with him in these years since he came to his calling. “You know,” he tells them, “there are two different kinds of love.” Smiling shyly, slyly, he’s scratching the back of his head and looking up at the lights. “Let’s not ever forget that. Let’s not ever forget that there are two kinds of love, that there’s God’s love and then there’s man’s love, the love of a man for his wife, the love of a wife for her husband. And that’s a righteous love too, because that’s why man and woman was created by God, for love and happiness, so that they would stay together.” And the band has just so very, very sweetly and so very, very softly eased on into a familiar little trot, has slipped into “Let’s Stay Together,” and even the sternest of the ladies can’t help but start to rock in the pews.

Yes, and even though it’s all falling in place for the Reverend Green to lean right back into the open arms of “Let’s Stay Together,” he carries on, he commences, he loosens his tie and continues to testify. A man’s love for a woman, a woman’s love for a man can be a righteous thing, but we all know that God knows when it is and when it is not. Can anyone out there tonight ever say that they have gone and fooled God? No, and it’s only a fool who thinks he can fool God, who thinks he can do any old thing he wants to do, who thinks he can escape from what’s right, from what’s righteous. Does anyone here know what I’m talking about here tonight?

Yes, and the band is still vamping on “Let’s Stay Together,” and before too many minutes the Reverend does grab that song up, goes ahead on and sings the thing but he can’t seem to find the spirit in it. It’s beautiful, it’s sleek as a cat, no one in the world can sing a song like Al Green, no one in all the world, but not this song, not tonight. No.

And it doesn’t matter what he does now, doesn’t matter if he stops and takes off his shoes to get a little more comfortable — he does — and it doesn’t matter if he throws those shoes, throws them deep into the cheap seats — he does—and it doesn’t matter if he sets himself down on the edge of the stage and dangles his stocking feet and lays back on the stage and starts to singing again. No, it doesn’t matter what he does, doesn’t matter that he goes on to sing “Precious Lord” or “He Is the Light,” doesn’t matter that he is Al Green, the Reverend Al Green, the sweetest, finest, greatest singer on God’s green earth, because tonight he isn’t moved, isn’t stirred. Because tonight he can’t find the spirit. And tonight the ladies are going home early.

On the following day, he’s scheduled for a morning taping of Soul Train, though by the time he arrives it’s late afternoon. He and Don Cornelius, the slowest-speaking host in show business, clasp all their hands together like old friends. There was a time when every Al Green song was a hit and every appearance he made on Soul Train was a gift. He sold 20 million records in the early ‘70s, with ten Top 10 hits. But it’s been more than 12 years since the last of those now, and there’s fair reason to believe Cornelius is simply offering an old friend a favor.

Still, if those hits linger in the memory of Don Cornelius, how much respect can be expected of the kids on this afternoon’s Soul Train? The Reverend Green has elected to wear the most conservative of navy blue suits today, in contrast to all the jangling spangled costumes around him; the only things the least bit flashy about him are his gold rings and perhaps the quiet pink roses of his boxy eyeglasses.

The kids dance to his lip-synched version of “You Brought the Sunshine,” — he may be the least interested lip-synch artist in pop music — but they dance to everything once the cameras are on. Everyone, the Reverend Green included, is standing in place so Don Cornelius can muff a few interview lines when out of nowhere a young guy, 17 or so, starts to sing. He sings the contagious little intro to “Let’s Stay Together,” Al Green’s very first No. 1 hit, and in the next instant everyone is singing too, swaying and clapping and urging the Reverend to join in. These kids were all looking forward to kindergarten when “Let’s Stay Together” was a hit, and there’s no telling how they know it but they all do, every word, every note. The Reverend doesn’t sing at all but simply soaks up the graceful sound of his own song. “I hope the tape’s rollin’,” he says, all smiles.

That very evening the Reverend Green is playing L.A.’s heavenly Wiltern Theater, a green-tiled monument to art deco architecture, a cathedral dedicated to man’s amusement, a glorious ornament. The Reverend James Cleveland, gospel music’s stout patriarch, is in the audience and with him are members of the Hawkins family, Oakland’s famed gospel household. In the audience too is Michael Jackson, surgically masked for secrecy, with the little surgically masked Emmanuel Lewis next to him. Alongside the stars and lesser music business scene-makers are the folks who fill the pews every Sunday, an audience with such very different matters on their minds. The Wiltern is lovely beyond compare, and the sound is marvelously bad, and neither matters a small bit when the Reverend Green walks into the light. Tonight when he reaches his right hand up into the air the Holy Ghost is there, lifts him up, raises him up. lifts him, and will not let him down.

And tonight he brings forth “Let’s Stay Together,” brings it forth in front of just as many church folks as were on hand last night, and he says all those same things he said last night, and tonight there is a glory in it. Yes, and tonight he goes past the glory of his old songs, mighty as they are, and he sings “Amazing Grace.” Just “Amazing Grace,” that simple old song that’s been done all to death and back again. Yes, and he is so filled with the spirit, and so much on fire, and so graceful, so grace-filled. Yes, and this is why people who don’t even faintly believe in Jesus find themselves with tears streaming when they stand back and watch gospel music, find their souls moving in step with their feet, find themselves stirred. Stirred.

And tonight the Reverend Al Green isn’t throwing out any shoes. No, tonight the Reverend is coming forth, is climbing down into the seats, is out among the flock. “It’s alright,” he tells the security ushers, “Ain’t no one gonna hurt me here,” and he laughs as he sings. He’s taken “Amazing Grace” and brought it down so very quiet, so very soft, and brought the audience along to higher ground. Any hand not clapping is raised high in the air, and all over the church — this is church now — the ladies have raised the holy shout, have found the sanctified bounce, have commenced to fall out, shivering, rattling, stiffening. And the Reverend passes through the crowd unmolested, hugging and shaking hands as he sings and delivering the spirit with every sound, every motion, every moment. “Was grace that brought me safe so far,” he sings, and the clapping is so many times louder than the band, “...and grace will lead me on.”

And on the day that follows, on Sunday afternoon, at a time when he would usually be finished with the morning services back home in Memphis and not yet ready to start the early evening Bible study, Reverend Green is quiet in his hotel room, quiet and still. A Bible is at hand and a guitar is in his lap. A little soft pass at the strings, a little soft smile. The sound stays and lingers like the last ripple in a small pond after a rock has skipped the surface and settled to the bottom. It sounds like The Belle Album.

Yes, but nothing else sounds like The Belle Album, not in the ten years since it came out, not ever. You could hear a man’s soul tearing itself in two, then knitting together again, larger and far finer. To make the record, Al Green had to part with his producer, his record company, his audience. He produced the album himself and played guitar, tart and crisp and clean guitar, guitar licks just like the ones he’s messing with this afternoon in his hotel, guitar licks that squeeze time and take you home. ‘Belle was Mary,” he says, watching his fingers where they rest on the strings.

And Mary, Mary Woodson, was a woman who was so very taken with the man Al Green was, she believed she couldn’t live without him. She was already married, although Al has always said that he really never knew it. She proposed marriage to him one night, to the man who sang “Let’s Stay Together,” who sang “Let’s Get Married” and “God Blessed Our Love” and so many songs, and after he turned her down he went and took a bath, She took a pot of boiling water—”lt wasn’t grits like they always say in all the stories, it was water boiling to fix grits”—and she threw it at him, scalded and burned and scarred him with it. Then she took her .38 pistol into the next room and there she died.

The water scarred his back but it may have saved his soul. “Belle,” he sings, “It’s you that I want but Him that I need..." and the guitar is a reflection, the words a calm confession. If the Lord is at the front of his life and at the back too, if Jesus is his All in All, his All and All, if He, if He, He, He . . . And words fail him, and the Spirit moves him, and his voice is triumphant. The storm has stilled, peace reigns. “It was Mary who told me first that I was going to be called,” he says, “that l would have a ministry of my own.” He pauses for a tiny sweet lick on his guitar, sweet and slim and pretty. “I laughed at her. She said I was called and I laughed at her and said ‘Who, me?’ “He laughs again just thinking about it a dozen years later. “She told me.”

In an airplane on the way home to Memphis, the Reverend Green claps his hands at the sight of the California coastline falling away beneath his window, gives the Lord a round of applause for some fine truly wonderful work. Smiling and thoughtful, the Reverend Green is reminded again of The Belle Album, of that same line from that same song, and of how much it meant. “That is the pivotal point right there. ‘It’s you that I want but it’s Him that I need.’ That was a statement that was given because it was given.”

Reverend Green is a man given to mild ways of amusing himself in moments of leisure — holding his red rayon scarf over his face and flicking its tassles across his nose, chewing mints, gum, and peppermint Life Savers, elbow-nudging a fellow passenger when a good conversational point is delivered. He has a tendency to view his own past as someone else’s, to see Al Green as though he were someone removed and remote from himself. “I don’t know why he cut that record,” he will say; “I don’t understand why, as much money as he had, I don’t know why he didn’t go to any studio he wanted. I don’t know what he was doin’, I really don’t understand. I think he did it out of the fact they told him it couldn’t he done, and they told him that if he did do it, they told him the album wasn’t gonna come out in the first place. I think it was a challenge for him more than anything else, and he did it in defiance. I think this is why he did it. I’m not sure. He did a lot of things I’m not sure why he did. I don’t know why. Just brought a 8-track studio down, just rolled it in there on some wheels and plugged it in—I don’t know why he done that. I don’t understand. But it does not go without Mary.”

Picking up an advance cassette of Soul Survivor, his newest album, he turns it over and over, admires the typed titles. “Now, this album relates to vintage Al Green because I don’t hear nothin’ else but Al Green, and him chankin’ on a guitar. If that ain’t Al Green, I don’t want to see it. That’s him for real, without all the make up and the glamour and the beauty. That’s him right there.” He raps on the cassette’s blank cover with his finger. “That is the very Al Green. Without all the cookies and candy. This is the very Al Green, right here in the overalls and bomber jacket, sittin’ here playin’ guitar on the floor.” Asked if he can find any hits inside this cassette, he smiles deeply and points to one and another and another after that. He points to every song but one, and then he includes that one too.

The music that Al Green made in the years before The Belle Album shows no sign of aging, no sign that a time will ever come when it won’t feel perfectly right, It’s pastoral music, always cool and sweet. Al was raised up in the country, on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, the son of a preacher. There is country in his music, there are Hank Williams and Willie Nelson songs on his old albums, but there isn’t one of his songs, not one of the hits that filled the dance floors through the first half of the ‘70s, that doesn’t somehow suggest just a trace of mud between the toes.

Reverend Green can’t help but laugh and laugh when he considers the wonder of his songwriting. “Cause if you start with ‘Call Me,’ for instance, you start with ‘What a beautiful time we had together.’ He spreads it out flat and simple. “ ‘Now it’s gettin’ late, and we must leave each other. But remember the times we had. And how right I tried to be. It’s all in a day’s work. Call me.’ “ And then he giggles and giggles like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

By Sunday, the Reverend Green is back in church, back at Full Gospel Tabernacle, just a mile or so down Elvis Presley Boulevard from Graceland. There is nothing monumental or magnificent about Full Gospel, although like everything else in Memphis, it has a portable Rent-a-Sign marquee out front, yellow, with black plastic letters listing the hours of worship services. There is a scroll painted on one of the walls behind the altar that says “Let God Be Magnified.” A painting in back shows lily-pure souls rising to Jesus from out of graveyards, from office buildings, from cars crashed on a freeway and driven into the water, and from a Volkswagen van that has been crushed in a collision with an 18-wheel tractor-trailer rig.
It’s gathering dark outside and windy cold when the six o’clock prayer meeting and Bible study class is close to commencing. The Reverend Green is sitting just off the altar with his guitar player’s Fender in his lap and the amp cranked up, and if this wasn’t Sunday evening in Full Gospel Tabernacle, you’d swear those were blues he was playing. He fingers a few of those mean, mean little obbligatos, those rippling arpeggios, laughs, and goes off to mess with the organ.

When all the ladies are in the pews, there can’t be more than 20 in attendance What is it that would make a man lay down a singing career that showed no sign of stopping, or even slowing down, a man who had thousands of women battling to grab the red roses he threw them from the stage—what would make a man lay it all down to pick up a Bible and preach a Sunday night meeting that is hard-pressed to total two dozen?

The Lord’s Prayer starts the meeting, and a hymn is lifted. Things are settling in—this will be a long night—when one of the ladies asks her pastor if maybe they can sing one more, one she needs to hear. Her mama’s health is failing, she feels like her mama may pass, and she’s worried and troubled in mind.

“Will you lead us?” the Reverend asks her.

The song’s motion is slow and it rolls along deep. She starts it and he joins it and the other ladies are there too, slow and deep. It’s graceful and mighty and the ladies lean on one another’s voices the way tall trees lean in the wind. Two choruses, three choruses, and then the Holy Spirit is joined, the Holy Ghost stirs the hymn, and the song grows too tall to go over, grows too low to get under. It speaks all language and the woman who called for it is sobbing, screaming, praising God, wiping her eyes with a yellow tissue. Another woman stands, so close to falling out, so close, and thanks her Jesus, thanks her Jesus. The Reverend is with them, and in this moment his voice, his wonderful voice, is one of many.

Springsteen Cases The Promised Land (Part One)

by Bart Bull (published in Sounds, 1975)

It's Wednesday,  no show tonight, and Bruce and his guitar player, a guy called Miami Steve Van Zandt, and another guy, remarkably and conveniently named R.M, who turns out to be road manager for something called Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, are all wandering around the Arizona State Fair, looking for something to do in Phoenix F. Arizona on their night off. Bruce was more than a little disappointed at only getting two encores at last night's show, and now . . . now there's this Hollywood business. It's getting to be a real drag. 

 "They got me going to California on Thursday after the show," he's grumbling, "to talk to some guy."    It sounds especially ominous the way he delivers it. " . . . some guy . . . " And then, even worse, to actually have to talk to him. Striding down the midway with his tough guy punk walk, the tough punk walk that fits him right in with every other tough guy punk who's cruising past the corn-dogs, sauntering beyond the all the flashing bulbs on all the Tilt-A-Whirls and the Swedish Bobsleds and the Haunted Houses of Horror, and Bruce is mostly and mainly distinguished by his distracted thoughtful look, and by the fact that there's a red-headed photographer scrambling over all kinds of obstacles to grab just the exact right perfect shot off this one particular tough-walking punk at the State Fair. 

 It's real late on a real slow week-night in those last final days when the State Fair has pretty much shot its wad (they've got to be losing money just by being open) and the carneys aren't hustling like they would if there was anything that vaguely resembled a crowd. It's empty, pretty much, and pretty much dead. Besides, Springsteen and R.M. and Miami Steve (Bruce never calls him Steve, and never even just shorthands it down to "Miami," it's always "MYYY-AMI-STE-Eee-EVE!") are spectacularly easy marks. You'd never guess they grew up within stumbling distance of the Asbury Park, New Jersey boardwalk. Matter of fact, Miami Steve even falls for that one where you try to toss ping-pong balls into glass ashtrays, with the ashtrays floating and spinning as they swirl around a blue-green plastic wading pool. A genuine sucker's shot, one that nobody ever wins, nobody ever, except maybe that long and lean lantern-jawed cowboy over there, the one with larceny in mind, that Cottonwood cowpoke who's looking surreptitiously side to side, waiting ultra-obviously until the carneys allegedly aren't looking — because, you know, they've never ever had any local Wednesday night cowboy attempt to put one over one 'em before — and then, leaning way, way, wa-a-ay over, and ever . . . so . . . gently . . . and — Da-amn! But eventually he somehow finally manages to actually slip one in, and then the carneys grab up a big giant stuffed St. Bernard and toss it back and forth among themselves, semi-bored, chanting "Anothah winnah! Anoth-ah win-nah!!" and big Tex is grinning his jaw so hard it looks like he actually believes he won a stuffed dog on the up-and-up square and so, to properly focus her attentions, he keeps a steady pumping motion of his elbow right directly into his cowgirl companion's ribs all the while.

Miami Steve catches all the hoopla and decides, the perfect victim of the shill, that this has got to be his game. He plunks down his buck, gets his dozen ping-pong balls and commences tossing. The astonishing experience of watching ball after ball hit dead center and then bounce blithely right back out again begins to get to him, so he sort of sidles over to the blond kid in the ponytail and gets him to secretly slip him some of the balls that have rolled under the counter. It's a ploy that nets him maybe a couple of extra balls, but to no avail whatsoever.  He strikes out. Daunted but entirely undaunted, only just slightly dejected, he rushes and hustles to catch up with Bruce over at the video machines. The two of them start out with a duck hunting game, then they move over to "Anti-Aircraft," shooting down fighter planes as they jet across the screen to the sound of engines roaring and calamitous explosions. "We got it! This is our machine," chortles Miami Steve, a winner at last, yanking at his artillery controls. "This is our machine, Boss!" The Boss is leaning back grim-lipped and silent, trying to gun down the jet that just shot past Miami Steve. The game trailer attendant is eyeballing them impatiently —as soon as their last plane goes down with a sputtering spluttering buzz, he reaches up to lower the trailer's siding, which has been propped up to create a roof. Bruce and Miami Steve are searching their pockets for more quarters, entirely oblivious, but when the carney starts to lower the siding right down on top of them, Miami Steve stage-whispers, "I think they're trying to give us a message..." 

 Looking for a way out, winding around the fairgrounds, they break into two bunches. Miami Steve and the redheaded photographer are profoundly engaged in a philosophical discussion at a volume level right on the borderline between debate and armed combat. Springsteen, R.M., and the blond kid are lagging. "I kinda O.D.'ed on interviews," Springsteen says, scuffing his boot at an empty popcorn box. Within the week, he'll be on the cover of both Time and Newsweek simultaneously. "Everybody wants to spend all their time talkin' about what we're doin'.  All I want to do is do it, but it's gettin' harder and harder." His speaking voice is surprisingly identical to the pained Brando-esque voice on his recordings. It would sound affected if it didn't come so easily. Maybe it was an affectation back in some dim and obscure adolescence, when some skinny kid first tried it on in front of his friends, like a too-new leather jacket, unworn, unstained, with not a rip or a scratch. Now, nicely broken-in, nothing could fit more naturally. 

Both the two small groups pass by the flag-draped stage only just vacated by "Poncie Ponce — TV's Favorite Hawaiian cabdriver!" and "his Royal Hawaiian Revue." (Poncie Ponce was once a sort of sub-sidekick on "Surfside Six;" with a billing like that, you can't help but wonder who works out to be TV's least favorite Hawaiian cabdriver.) Outside the Exhibition Hall, where prize cattle and sheep are settling in for the night, there is a wooden box, painted as if to resemble an old fashioned red barn, but with a glass showcase in front. On the other side of the glass resides a chicken, a white hen who will, if a dime is shoved into the slot, begin to tap-dance. 

Miami Steve sees the sign over the miniature barn, "Dancing Chicken," and hollers back over his shoulder to Springsteen: "Hey, here's one of them chickens!" There is a metal floor beneath the bird, and when the dime drops, electricity is conducted, and the chicken hops and skips and jumps and does its best to keep from touching the hot-wired floor it must necessarily touch. And it dances.  

Springsteen swings his hands-in-pocket shuffling to steer by the chicken's cage, staring in silently. Concerned, perhaps, or maybe just reconciled, the bird stares back. No wisdom is exchanged. "Those poor chickens. In Jersey, it's against the law to do that." This, however, is Arizona; not every state is so enlightened. He jams his hands into his pockets even more fiercely, then begins to mumble to himself. Looking up at R.M., he says, "I don't think I wanna go. Mike keeps tellin' me I gotta go, but I'll just get on some plane and go there and meet this guy and then get back on some other plane. I don't think I'm gonna go." His boot heels are dragging hard against the fairgrounds. The chicken is still staring as he goes. Maybe it's waiting for the next dime to drop. "Okay with me," says R.M. "You're the Boss." (follow this link for more)

Aphorism Number Fourteen; (One of a Series; Collect 'em All

There's one universal, undeniable truth: We're all going out the same door.

Tracey Ullman: Just Being Herselves

by Bart Bull
(published in Vogue)

To get to Tracey Ullman's closet, you need to go through the bathroom. You don't really need to go through there, but she wants you to; it makes for a more colorful tour. The color is purplish, in fact, or lilac, sort of, or actually a turbo-charged neon mauve. "The man who lived here before was a Czechoslovakian plastic surgeon," she says, delivering the next line in the cigar-chewing gurgle of an elderly Las Vegas lounge comic, complete with perfectly-timed pause for the drummer's rim shot: "And if he does this to his house, what does he do to your body?" Ullman plans to have his remarkable upholstered toilet seat enshrined in a clear Lucite case and mounted on the wall.

She has fewer shoes than Imelda Marcos but they make a far more interesting mess at the bottom of her closet. She's down there now, flinging out Tony Lama cowboy boots and alarming French wedgies with rock star photo patches sewn to the heels and then this . . . this fairly restrained bustier. "Every girl has one of these Madonna bodice-type tops, these slaggy Stevie Nicks-type things. Though they look terribly sad on someone like me, who breast-fed a nine pound infant." She sweeps an unmatched pair of her daughter Mabel's Barbie dolls off the dressing table to clear more room and discovers a complicated sweater by her idol, her all-time absolute favorite, Jean Paul Gaultier. "My friend last night said it falls into every cardigan category. He said, 'You like it because you're not wearing one cardigan, you're wearing every cardigan.' But I do love it, because you wear it and people get frightened."

When it comes to Gaultier, it's impossible for her to keep from rhapsodizing, and she readily admits it. "He's the king for me. I just think he's brilliant, I really do. He still has an element of street about him as well. I went to his shop in Paris last summer — I'd never done any shopping in Paris until last year. I told my husband, 'Go bog off — I'm going shopping in Paris.' First time I'd ever had the money, I'm in Paris, and it was a truly debilitating experience. They were so rude to me. [Smarmy French accent, wreathed in Gauloise smoke]: 'What do you want, stupid British girl?'

"They were so rude — the only people who were nice were a couple of Japanese people who had just opened a shop and were desperate to sell gear. It was horrible. At one boutique, they practically spat at me. Until I got my Platinum American Express card out and said, 'Look! Look!'" She laughs uproariously at the sheer folly of it. "They didn't give a damn.

"It wasn't good fun at all shopping there. Then again, in Beverly Hills, the people who work for the top places are all like [pursed lips, dysfunctional adenoids]: 'Millie, seventy-two, I've worked in sales a long, long time . . . Oh, this is just beau-ti-ful! The colors this season are so gwargeous!'"

"Here's a bit of Christian Lacroix," and she yanks free a finely detailed glass-beaded top. "Had a skirt that went with it — it's here somewhere. I wore this to an awards show and the zipper burst as I went onstage.

"I love clothes," she declares from deep inside the closet, where the hangers are all clumped together. "I love fashion. I used to work in shops on the King's Road when I was sixteen. I was always one who saved up weeks for a decent skirt." Her head is buried deep in the closet again. "And always somewhere I have a leather miniskirt. I just bought another one, and I know it will be the last one of my life, 'cause I know I'm getting too ridiculously old to wear leather miniskirts. I put it on and I do look a bit tragic.

"I mean, I don't even keep my clothes in a very nice state or anything. I'm like a magpie; I'll wear anything unusual or bright. But when yousee these Beverly Hills women who pay twelve thousand dollars and they're sitting at one of those functions with their big freckly armpits hanging over the edge of their bustier— I'd like to bring Christian Lacroix to a Beverly Hills function. 'Don't look now, Christian, but there's a fat tart in one of your frocks.' 'Merde! '

"The Japanese gear, I haven't really gotten into that — the black, baggy, shapeless trousers with the big sort of platform shoes. I mean, some people spend like four thousand dollars they look like a bag of spanners. So they have to keep reminding you who designed it. [Voice of a schlumpf]: 'Djya like the jacket? It's by, uh, Matsudo, ya know?'"

She's back in the closet. "This is the first piece of Gaultier I ever bought," she says, cradling a charcoal shirt in both hands. [Elaborate stage whisper] "Cost me three hundred pounds. I couldn't believe i had a Gaultier shirt. It was like a dream. Always looked a bit strange on me, though.

"Here's my Tracey Ullman Show jacket." It's a perfect example of what fashionable Hollywood cameramen can be seen wearing in supermarkets. "Can you imagine if I wore that? [Dopey TV star]: 'Hey, that's ME! It's MY SHOW!'"

Her own closets revealed, Ullman can't resist invading her husband's. "these are the suits he buys now he's got a bit of money. These over here are the ones he used to buy off the back of the lorry. All men in England have to buy stolen suits. They can't bear to pay the retail price. And these" — she laughs even as she touches them — are his trendy shirts."

Mabel's closets are next. Ullman sweeps up a blue wool coat with wooden toggle buttons down the front. "I love this, her little Paddington Bear coat — so very British. She wore it once and threw up all down the front. You can still smell the vomit on it." She acquires a thoughtful, puzzled look. "So hard to remove the smell from designer wear, you know."

Aphorism Number Fifteen; (one of a series; collect 'em all)

Love the sinner; like the sin.
—Bart Bull

Nina Hagen — That kooky krautzer babe with the New Wave hooker wardrobe cranks up your chakras

by Bart Bull
(Published in SPIN)

You only get one guess who Nina Hagen's favorite star is. This is her loft (if the pot on the stove is any indication, we're all going to be having boiled potatoes a little later), and the walls are covered with souvenirs from the brilliant international career of someone truly special to Nina. You know — posters and photos and paintings of the really special people, icons of inspirational heroes, photos of lovers near the bed, pictures of dear friends taped to the refrigerator next to the kids' current fingerpainting triumphs. And here at Nina's place – her space – right in the heart of downtown Los Angeles' struggling but brave post-industrial art-loft district, the walls are plastered with posters and paintings and photos of Nina Hagen.

Here's a poster from a concert last summer in Germany – Nina as a pink-haired Jayne Mansfield in bazooming flashbulb ecstasy, from the cover of her latest album, Nina Hagen in Ekstasy. Up by the stairway is one from another show a few years back — Nina as Batgirl, pointed ears and all. Over there, an earlier shot, from the cover of her first American record — Nina in a black leather jacket with "Mein Kampf" stenciled over the pocket, a gilded coronet atop her head, and her lips painted into the elaborate exaggerated cupid's-bow kissyface of a Hamburg whore.

Up there, near where she's sitting meditating, the cover of her 1983 album Fearless is pinned — Nina hieroglyphing her limbs in danceclub semaphores, a gold tinsel Cleopatra wig, a black bra set strikingly against skin white and pasty enough to do the Pillsbury Doughboy proud, with a couple of graphic-arts arrows aimed at her image just so nobody misses the point. The other side of the album shows her as an ectoplasmic TV vision — Botticelli's Venus with bad reception — being sucked up into a flying saucer, but the biggest picture of Nina Hagen in the whole joint is a six-by-six-foot painting modeled after the cover of her Nunsexmonkrock album. It may be the single most restrained picture on any of her records, or on any of her walls. It may well be the most restrained Nina Hagen picture in existence. No startled eyebrows akimbo, no Little Egypt eyeliner, no Catwoman cape'n'cowl ensemble, no Mata Hari harem pants, no stiletto heels — just a humble woman in a Virgin Mary veil, her lips a little less bee-stung than usual, her look calm and placid, her baby Cosma Shiva in her arms. Madonna (not that one) und child. Except that in the painting's version of the record cover, Cosma Shiva is no longer the sweetly bewildered babe in arms with a built-on halo. Instead, the artist has transformed the swaddled infant into a maniacal Mad magazine cartoon baby with bulging eyeballs and dangerous grinning teeth. Halo's still there though.

Nina doesn't want anyone shooting photos of Cosma Shiva — it's OK if they take pictures of Nina herself up on the meditation pad but she's — Wait! Hold it! We're all going outside, all of us, up to the roof. All 25 or 30 of us, we're going to file through the kitchen, past the potatoes, up the stairs and out onto the rooftop. But she wants us all to be careful going out there, because we're each going to have to scrunch past the building's main electrical panel box to get out the door to the roof and she'd hate to have any of her flock get sent heavenward with a crisp crackle and a slender puff of smoke, hapless insects gotcha-ed by a bug-zapper. "There is this force," she explains, queen bee addressing a small troop of dim but willing drones, "EEE-lek-TRRI-I-I-zity! Do not touch it! So don't die and be very concentrating when you are crossing the exit of that roof." She'll join us there once she's checked the potatoes.

The Finish Line; The Death of Ascot Park Raceway

by Bart Bull

(published in Details)

Ever since the hot rodders of the 1930s began raising dust on the dry lakes of the Mojave Desert, Southern California has been the place where motors and Manifest Destiny meet. Ever since Clark Gable commissioned a custom rod that could smoke Gary Cooper's damn Duesenberg, ever since Big Daddy Roth and George Barris and Darryl Starbird created blown-and-injected objets d'art, ever since Mickey Thompson invented the slingshot dragster, Southern California has been home to more rodding and racing than anywhere else. And through it all, Ascot Park, a half-mile oval near Long Beach, has been the hub of dirt-track racing for the entire Southwest.

In the last few years, insurance costs have killed off most of the drag strips and soaring land values have finished off the speedways. When the sprint-car season ends this fall, and when the last trophy dash winner flings the final mud clod through the chicken wire into the grandstand as he power-drifts through Turn Four, it won't be just the usual acrid smell of racing fuel that makes race fans wipe their eyes. Ascot Park is going condo. Gentlemen, stop your engines.

The World Beyond Barbie; New York's Toy Fair

By Bart Bull
From the Washington Post

NEW YORK—It’s only appropriate and ever-so-cute that the little darlings from “Children’s Express” will ask the first official question to be entertained at the opening press conference of the 1987 American International Toy Fair. “Children’s Express” is that TV show where kids hold microphones in front of a video camera and ask questions just as dopey as real reporters’ questions, and little Albert Lin stands right up and asks, "What’s the current trend in war toys?”

Since his company manufactures GI Joe ("A Real American Hero"), Alan Hassenfeld of Hasbro is selected to handle this hot potato. (Hasbro also produces Mr. Potato Head, incidentally, and in the wake of the Cabbage Patch proliferation, Potato Head Kids.) “We do not consider GI Joe a war toy,” Hassenfeld announced. “GI Joe as a product has been a defender of peace.” Since he is, after all, impersonating a TV news person, Albert doesn’t bother to question this, or even burst into hearty guffaws.

Besides, toys are too big not to be taken seriously. The stats stack up like so many cubic tons of Silly Putty. Nearly 450 million Barbie dolls have been sold since 1959. The toy industry produces more than 150 million cars per year. Thirty-five million Cabbage Patch adoption papers have been signed since June 1983. If all the Golden Classic dominoes sold in 1984 were laid end to end, it would take nearly seven hours to drive by them at 55 mph. If the 6 billion Lego bricks produced each year were snapped end to end (the publicity handouts never mention how many billions of man-hours all of this laying and snapping is going to take), they would stretch around the Earth almost five times. More than I billion feet of Golden Books Video has been sold since 1985, equaling 50,000 full-length film versions of ‘Gone With the Wind.” Put together all the rolling stock Lionel produces in one year and you’d get a toy train 150 miles long. More than half a billion Duncan yo-yos have been sold in the United States since 1929. With 20 million fashion items sold annually, Mattel Toys is the largest manufacturer in the world of petite women’s wear. Parker Bros., having constructed more than 2.5 billion little green Monopoly houses since 1935, is the largest housing developer in the world.

You get the picture. Toys are big.

And not just big, but expensive. And not just expensive, but obnoxious. Consider, moms and dads, the advent of roller skates in the shape of pickup trucks and Corvettes that roar when they roll and make horrific brake screeches when they stop. Consider, dear parents, purple and orange rock star wigs, ectoplasm in cans, Laser Erector sets, Furrever Friends and Fluppy Dogs and Michael’s Pets (“They’re the only animals on the shelf/ Cool enough for Michael Jackson himself!") and WingDings and Softies and BabyTalk and Razzcals. Consider, dear bags of loose loot, My Little Pony’s pink plastic Pleasure Estate.

And not just big and expensive and obnoxious, hut cynical. “Are you going to see Mr. Gameshow and Janice Pennington?” asked one of the lovely hostesses who escort lonely buyers from installation—display is too modest a word—to installation. Janice Pennington is one of the Vanna-ettes from “The Price Is Right,” and Mr. Gameshow is Galoob’s animatronic quiz master. “They make a perfect pair,” the hostess says venomously, “they’re both plastic.” Mr. Gameshow’s real name is Gus Glitz, and he has severe Max Headroom damage. “I just had my teeth capped,” he Sajaks. “How do you like ‘em?” He has his own commercials, his own nasty patter and his own theme song: ‘Let’s all play the game/Gameshow from Galoob/Don't be such a rube..."

Cynicism sells this season, but the big buzzwords are “pets” and “power” and “price points” and “interactive.” Mattel is banking big on Captain Power And the Soldiers of the Future, and hedging its bets by syndicating a live- action television series (guess the title) to be distributed by the industry leader’s new TV syndication division. Beverly Cannady, manager of Mattel’s licensing division, told one of the trade magazines she’s confident that ‘Power On!” will be next season’s prepubescent battle cry, but failed to mention whether parents will be charged each time little Jimmy uses it.

Force III, Tech Force, Centurions with Power XTreme—it’s a rough universe out there and it calls for power, force, and more power. ‘Now more power for the Centurions heros.” “Now more power for the villains!” ‘But wait! Here’s even more power for the Centurions!”
As Axion’s Tech Force characters battle evildoers in a television show, the idea goes, their toy counterparts will charge around the living room floor firing laser lights, in response to inaudible signals sent via the cartoon’s sound track. Nolan Bushnell, creator of Tech Force, envisions moving the vidoo game off the screen and making it three-dimensional. “3-D is not when you put silly glasses on,” he said, “it’s when something runs over your left foot.”

Action for Children’s Television, a TV watchdog group based in Cambridge, Mass., filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission, asking the agency to stop the development of television-interactive toys, or to at least launch a public inquiry into the matter. Outside the Toy Fair, the War Resisters League waged a Stop War Toys Campaign, charging that such toys “desensitize” children to the “horrors” of war.

Frankly, it’s the male action figures who are responsible for the big power grab in today’s toy world (She-Ra, Princess of Power notwithstanding) and as little boys’ toys have gotten power hungry, little girls’ toys have achieved ur-wimpiness. The age of nonsexist toys is dead and buried. In booth after booth, sales reps can be heard assuring buyers, “Little girls love to comb and brush.”

If My Little Pony set standards for insipidity that made Care Bears seem profound, the cuddle-horses with silky plastic manes have just been left at the starting gate. The Fluppy Puppies have long hair, the Shimmers have long hair, the Fairy Tails have long hair, the Furrever Friends have long hair and Tail Topper attachable tail pieces. “I only hope I have a little boy,” said one nervous buyer.

Barbie has long hair too, of course, and so does her archrival, Jem. They’re both rockin’ like crazy these days, but Hasbro’s Jem has at least one innovative edge on her longer-lived nemesis: She has her own guitar. Her illustrations show her with microphone in hand just like Barbie the rocker. Each the very picture of the chick singer, just one step removed from retiring to the lounges of Las Vegas. But among the accessories to Jem's available accessories is the KJEM Rock On Guitar. Full-size, with built-in microphone and no strings at all, it’s actually an air guitar meant for posing in front of mirrors, but it’s a step. She-Ra would be proud, sort of.

Inadvertent or not, the grander installations seem perversely naive, It’s unnerving to come upon one designed to resemble some little tyke’s comfy, cozy bedroom and discover a full-scale adult woman model in jammies and booties cuddling Dozzzy, an interactive little nipper who’s murmuring “being in bed with you is better than having a birthday party.” Worse yet, a lot of spokesmodels who’ve been given interactive infants of one brand or another, and instructed to cuddle the dickens out of them, seem to have already moved past that stage and developed what can only be called an unhealthy affection.

In fact, so many toys on display can make any affection seem unhealthy. The hourly shows for Kenner’s Amazing Friends feature sweet, sweet little child actresses with pink ribbons in their hair who chat right along with toys Tricia & Tooner. “You’re my best friends,” they bubble. “I love you! Both of you!” And then they simulate a giggle.

Big Bird is chattering away with actual moving beak, and nearby a group of buyers and reps are settling down to debate the price of birdseed. ‘$49.99 for this item—this is ridiculous.” “Don’t matter,” the rep tells him. “You got no choice. You want the item, you got to pay the price.”
And behind him, soft and fuzzy and yellow and kind, Big Bird says, “I give the order and you do what I say.”

Aphorism Number Thirteen (One of a series; collect 'em all)

Nothing, but nothing, is as washed up as a rock star past her prime.

The Runaways (their first record reviewed)

published in Sounds

Rock'n'roll has always been the domain of the ignorant, the immature, the idiot. It's not, let's face it, the most advanced musical form around in terms of cerebral stimulation, but there's a certain undeniable satisfaction to be derived from a particularly brash bass line, a sudden Chuck Berry lick, from those damn dumb drums. Intellectuals can't rock. Or, as The Runaways might put it: Brains suck!

Noted Hollywood hypester Kim Fowley has gathered together these nubile young females, each absolutely guaranteed to be sixteen (one exception: the lead guitarist is an old maid of seventeen), each absolutely guaranteed to play her own instrument. He's been flooding the pop journals with juicy little tidbits, assembling an image for The Runaways as the girls in your history class who could never stay awake because they'd been out until three the night before. Sex! Drugs! Beer!

Fowley's publicity overkill is almost certain to result in the type of backlash that nearly swamped the careers of both Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith last year, with program directors, rock critics, radio deejays and the public lining up arm-in-arm cha-cha-chanting "Hype!" Which is kind of unfortunate because when all considerations of package and product and pimp are over, this is great strong rock'n'roll. Ok, so the album does sound like it was recorded in a galvanized garbage can (Fowley produced) and the playing is unspectacular but it works nevertheless. It takes a certain degree of naivetee to make rock'n'roll and The Runaways are nothing if not genuinely enthusiastically naive. The Who may have a hard time keeping a straight face while doing "My Generation" these days but when Cherie Currie shrieks "Her life was saved by rock'n'roll," (from Lou Reed's "Rock And Roll"), there's no doubt she believes it. It may be dumb, but so what?

Most of the album consists of single-sized punchers with titles like "Cherry Bomb," (the band's logo carries a cherry, just in case you missed the point), "Thunder," and "You Drive Me Wild," most of them underscored with orgasmic moans. The album's capper though, is a seven minute rock epic entitled "Dead End Justice" that, if nothing else, will put Springsteen's more dramatic yarns in a new light:
"Where am I?"
"You're in a cheap, rundown teenage jail, that's where!"
"Oh my God!"

Tom Waits — After A One Night Stand

"Tom may be a bit. . . ." and there were many long moments before he finished the sentence. The road manager — his name was John — had a molded golden eighth-note on a chain around his neck.

".... A bit cranky...." he said at last.

Out of the elevator, take a left, first door on the right. John held the door open. Tom Waits was piled up on the chair next to the bathroom door and a couple of the guys in the band were on the couch. It was sometime after one in the morning. Waits had just played two shows in front of two half-empty houses, and he had to pull his fingers out of the ropy lengths of his hair to shake hands. Then he headed for the bathroom.

While Waits was out of the room, I took inventory of the pile of stuff dumped in front of his chair. There were matchbooks and a couple of packs of cigarettes, an obscure brand, smaller than most, called Delicados. Phone numbers with and without names scrawled on scraps of paper. A torn-off piece of the Greater New Orleans Yellow Pages. Half-buried beneath was a silver-scaled hip-flask, the kind with curved sides to hide the bulge. It was all great material to toss in to a story about Tom Waits, and listing it helped keep me from dozing off to the lull of the musicians' voices from the couch. I hadn't been getting all that much sleep lately myself, and it was beginning to tell. I felt slow.

Earlier that day, I'd gotten a message from a woman, a photographer who wanted to do some photos of Tom Waits.. "I'm not into taking pictures of rock stars or anything," she told me. "it's just that Tom Waits . . . he seems different." So okay, I can understand that, but I had a photographer already. I told her I'd see how Waits was, and if he really wanted his picture taken, I'd give her a call back.

Waits came back into the room, sat down and pulled off his shirt. His face was younger than any of his photos seemed to reveal; he was obviously tired and restless and none too thrilled with the prospect of answering some guy's questions while another guy stared at him through a camera lens. You could feel it — anybody could have.

My first thought was to call it, call a halt to the whole thing right there, get the hell out, get gone, go home. Can't do that, though. You've hung on this long, gone this far, so you might as well try to get him to open up, give you enough quotes to throw a story together, and get out of here. Try and start a conversation with him.

Except the answers came back in words of one syllable or less. I was trying to draw him out somehow, trying to get him to say things I could quote him on but no dice. Time to try a new tack. "I'd like to talk about Kerouac," I told him. Obviously Waits had been influenced by Jack Kerouac, and one of the songs on his latest album, "Jack & Neal" was loosely biographical. Besides, Kerouac is about as close as I come to having a hero.

"Okay, so you wanna talk about Kerouac." He'd pulled a deeply worn brown leather jacket from the floor onto his lap and was lost in contemplation of its every wrinkle.

Dead end. Things were beginning to look a little grim. "Anything at all you want to talk about?"

Waits jumped all over that one. "No. No! That's your job. You're the journalist. I've just gotta stay here and answer the questions but you're the one that's gotta ask the questions."

I was tired. My feelings were hurt and I had no more use for this guy, no desire whatsoever to pull an interview out of the shambles. "Look, if you don't wanna do it, let's not do it." I slapped my notebook shut and stood up.

"Well, I don't want you to ask me what I want to be asked — I can do that all by myself." He pointed to my notebook. "You obviously came prepared with some questions but . . ."

"I came prepared with some questions but man, you know -- I'm not gonna. . . I don't want to sit here and beat my head against the wall." I don't know which one of us was glaring harder.

"Well, I'll . . . y'know, I'll answer your questions."

It got no better. I asked a long and vague and rambling question about his stage persona as opposed to her personal identity, the image of Tom Waits as a late night bar-crawler, and how it related to his actual life — something like that, probably even less coherent -— and now he thought I was calling him a drunk.

"I'm not a drunk," he said, sucking hard on his Delicado, then shooting smoke out the corner of his mouth. "I'm not a lush. I work real hard all year. If I was a drunk I don't think I'd have five albums out, I don't think I'd be able to stay on the road eight months out of the year." He was pissed.

"No, what I mean is—" I was trying to get things back on track. " .—do people expect you to be Tom Waits the hard-living bar room character, do they meet you and immediately try and drink you under the table?"

He waved his cigarette in the air, a little streak of smoke in the room. "That's a line in a song. What does—"

"And it's an old phrase. What I'm saying is do people expect you to be just like the characters you write about, do they react to you or do they react to your image?"

"I don't know. Are you reacting to me or are you reacting to my image?"

"Hey, I don't know — that's why I'm asking?"

"Do I look like a drunk?""

I nearly hesitated too long. It would have been so easy to say yes, to say yes and piss him off good and well and just get the hell out of there. With his hanked-off hair, his pale drawn face, his ragged black slacks and his battered black shoes, he could have blended right into the scenery on the corner of any metropolitan Tailspin Alley . . . but the clothes and the hair were matters of choice and the paleness of the face was plainly exhaustion, not alcohol. I hedged. "How should I know? What's a drunk look like?"

Waits dumped back in his chair." Look, why don't you ask me something about what I do, about writing songs or traveling on the road eight months out of the year. I've written a lot of songs." His voice was tight and pinched now, the coarse threads of his usual growl stretched taut. "Do you know anything about the tunes I've written, the . . ."

Up yours, Jack. "Yeah.. . ."

"They're not just about drunks. They're about murder and car wrecks and love and. . . and. . ." He sucked at his cigarette. "I write about a lotta different things."

Okay, all right, let's talk about the songs. That's only fair. "Okay, it seems as though your songs are all very American, very American subjects . . ."
"Which one?" he snarled. "Which song?"

"Your songs in general, your songwriting . . ."

"Which one?" We were glaring again. "Do you know 'em?"

"Yeah, I know 'em. It doesn't matter whether it's 'The Heart of Saturday Night' or 'Ol' '55' or . . ."

"That's two . . ."

". . . or 'Pasties And A G-String. -- look," I yelled. "What do you want? You want me to list all the titles."

He was memorizing the ceiling. "Yeah."

I shut the notebook again and reached down to pick up my tape recorder.

"I can do it." he said in a low voice, just less than a whisper.

"Yeah, well, you know, that's great. . . that's swell. . ."

"And if you can do it, we all have to do it." It was John, the road manager. He'd come back into the room without me noticing it, and now he was making a valiant effort to josh Tom along, to lighten things up. "We will all write the Tom Waits songbook on the blackboard." Then he left us.

"Listen," I said, "let's just call it."

Waits pushed his hand through his hair. "Look, I don't know what you want from me. I'm not a geek, I'm not a drunk, I'm a regular guy —"

"Hey, wait a minute, wait a—"

".—I take shits, I've got a girlfriend, I live in a hotel—"

" —minute, wait a minute. You know, I don't . . . Either I . . . Either I did a really poor job of explaining myself or you took it the wrong way. I don't know which but I wasn't saying any of that shit. I was just trying to find out if the whole thing about Tom Waits being certain things, being a person who spends all his time in bars and stuff, if that really fits."

"I go to bars, I do all kinds of things. I do everything that you do. Except maybe a little more. And a little more often." He rubbed at his nose. "I travel a great deal, all over the United States and, uh, I'm in a nightclub every night. I play bars, mainly, still play bars. And it's got its moments, you know, and then again, you know . . . some nights, it's a pain in the ass. I get pissed off, I get tired, I get . . . y'know. . ." His voice dropped off, still high-pitched and tight, just above a whisper. "Just a regular guy. . . Right now I'm pissed-off, I'm tired. . . We had two half-houses out there, with a lame promoter who's obviously—" here he pointed to his forehead "—operating with an unfurnished apartment. I mean, the guy seems like he must be about a quart low to me," he said bitterly. "He had a very lame sound department and a real antiseptic little environment here . . .

"You know, I'm tired. I been on the bus. I don't sleep. I just got up. I haven't had a night off in three weeks. I've been entertaining and talking to journalists and getting my picture taken and playing in nightclubs and it gets to be a little too much." His voice was beginning to sound like a record being played while someone slowed it down with their thumb.

"I'm on my way home. I can't wait to get home and just get twelve hours of sleep . . . some twelve-year-old scotch and a twelve-year-old girl. That's what I want."

I wasn't so pissed off any more. He was so obviously exhausted,. "Well, let's do one of two things then: Let's either start all over again and if I've been antagonistic, I'll cool out, or else let's just, you know, maybe we're better off just letting you get your sleep, whatever you prefer — but be honest."

"Alright . . . why'ntchya go out and come back in, and we'll start all over again. We'll shake hands, you can introduce yourself, tell me who you write for and all that." He looked over at the photographer. "You can just turn your back."

So I went out the door, shut it. There was reason to listen for the sound of the lock clicking but I opened the door again. Waits had his head turned away. "For Christssake what a fuckin' damn — " [big jolly fake voice] "— Oh, hel-lo....."

Things loosened considerably. Tom started unreeling tales about buying hundred-dollar cars and testing them out by driving them to Arizona. "I've broke down in Gila Bend, Buckeye, Tucson . . . uh. . . Camp Verde -- know that joint? Spent a night in Stanfield. On New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve. I went to a church, Pentecostal church, you know, holy rollers? And this old lady, Mrs. Anderson, put me up. I was in the back of this church -- it was real cold and, uh, my car was busted and I had it at the gas station and she had me come to this four-hour marathon New Year's Eve church service, so I could stay inside. And afterwards they took up a collection -- the whole church took up a collection and gave me all the money to get my car fixed so I could get out of town. About fifty bucks -- I got a new water pump."

"Yeah, I used to come here a lot -- but I haven't been here for a while. I think the last time I was here was two albums ago. That's why I was really disappointed that nobody showed up." He was scratching under his chin with a matchbook.

It wasn't twenty minutes later that we wrapped it up. We made our goodbyes, apologized back and forth for our initial fracas and then the phnotographer and I headed for the door. "Okay, you take it easy now," said Tom.

But as it turned out Waits and John the road manager came around the corner while Tim and I were still waiting for the elevator. "Looks like we're all going up together," said John nervously. I think he was concerned that Waits and I might start screaming at each other again.

No one said much as the elevator went down. No one says much in elevators anyway. I took one last look at Waits as he slumped back in the corner. He had his leather jacket on now and he'd acquired a matchstick between his teeth. It took us a moment to re-establish where we were when we got to the ground level but then we were all walking the same direction — me and the photographer to my car and Tom and John to the highway cruiser bus that was dieseling at the curb.

It was cold. I stuffed my hand into my pocket for my keys and pulled them out with a piece of paper that fell to the ground. As I bent to get it, I knew what it was, it was the phone number of the photographer who'd wanted me to ask permission so she could take pictures of Tom Waits too. I'd forgotten all about that.

"Later," called Waits, and the bus door closed.