Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [116]
In the several months since then Les Variations has produced a new album, a sort of concept number (a concept album, explains Jacques, is one where “all the songs run together… no break… a little Tommy”) which Marc calls “our autobiography, about our youth in Morocco, and then when we grow up in France, and we go to Amereeca and rock and roll.” There have also been changes in the lineup, with the addition of keyboard player Jim Morris, and Jo Leb (who said to me last year, “I don’t want to be the star, I’m just a singer. In France people will try to take the singer and say ‘You’re stupid, I can make you star in six months if you stop to be in that band,’ and I say fuck off, I don’t wanna be on your system.”) leaving to make a solo album and a movie with Catherine Deneuve. He is being replaced by Robert Fitoussi, who may be hard for you to spell but's a music biz name in France, was born in North Africa like the rest of the group, and sang on Yes keyboardist Vangelis Papa-thanassiou's solo album Earth, as well as pulling off a string of hits worldwide under his own name including the number-one-in-Brazil “Superman Superman.” But in the end it's not personalities, or musical gimmicks (concept albums, heavily hyped Casbah-vibes) which will endear them to Yankee brats; it's the same kind of unforced excitement which got to the critics, which a band such as Bachman-Turner Overdrive also has; it is perhaps their very ingenuousness which will make them stand out in any crowd at all.
Creem, February 1975
11At that time, a Creem writer.
Innocents in Babylon:
A Search for Jamaica
Featuring Bob Marley and
a Cast of Thousands
The first thing that should be established is that I was only in Jamaica for a week, and there is no way to compress Jamaica or its music scene into one week, or one article. So what you are about to get is just the surface, the shell. But I hope that if you look beneath this surface you may begin, as I am, to figure out a lot of what is going on in Jamaican music, and a little of the turmoil currently besetting Jamaican society.
I can’t say that this piece is really representative of that society, even from an outsider's viewpoint, because I never got out of Kingston, a bullet-pocked industrial metropolis not dissimilar to Detroit. Even though Jamaica is a country where 2 percent of the population has 80 percent of the money and the rest suffer some of the worst poverty in the world, it's also true that in Jamaica at its least urban the poor can live more comfortably than most other places in the world: build a simple house in the country, start a garden, grow food and herb, pick fruit off the trees, or go to the ocean and catch fish. The trouble begins when country people come into Kingston, lured by promises of a better life in the big city. They end up in slums like Trenchtown and Jones Town, living in shacks and incredible squalor. The result, of course, is crime and violence both “random” and “political.”
Out of all this, however, like oppressed black people in other places before them, they have created a vital indigenous musical form called reggae. Reggae has been intimately linked with the growing awareness on the part of western Caucasians of Rastafarianism, a primitive mystical-religious sect which has been around Jamaica for several decades now. The Rastafarians believe that Marcus Garvey, father of the Back to Africa movement, was a prophet who foresaw the coming of Jah, the Savior also promised in the Bible, a Savior who would lead all oppressed black people to their Promised Land. Garvey said the Savior was coming in 1927, and in