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By Root 482 0

the title affecting sales, but they knew they could count on people like me. I knew the record was a piece of shit but there was some part of me that lied to some other part of me and said just maybe somewhere down in there it mighta held some of that primal Stones grit, as well as revelations previously untapped concerning the present lay of the mores, indications of what we might be up to. Aw hell, okay, I paid six bucks for the damn thing partially because I thought, I actually believed, that when Mick sang “New York, get up, get out, get into something new” in “Dance (Part One)” on Emotional Rescue, then in “Dance (Part Two)” (ONLY available on SITS, of course) Mick was actually gonna tell us all what that something new might be. So now I can be officially stamped and certified: MORON. Or really just a sucker but that's just one of the Stones’ hooks. The Stones confess they sucked for most of the decade, but we sucked too, hey just one big happy family, except guess who sucked the bigger one? I tell ya, they got a million of ‘em, even allowing for energy crisis.

I bought “Bette Davis Eyes” too, just like you did. While I think it's a hideous little ditty and want my money back immediately so I can go buy a quart of Sunkist sodee-pop, still it's this hook business that's really got me down. Partially I must confess this is sour grapes, because I write songs and not long after I started a friend (and fellow rock critic, y’oughta see our Old School ties!) informed me that: “Your songs are just poems set to music. They don’t have any hooks.” And then he pulls out his copy of Elvis Costello's Armed Forces and slaps it on the turntable: “Now here's an example where every song has hooks all over the place.”

I listened. Still sounded like some limey gettin’ an F in Bruce Springsteen class and throwing a wildly inflated snit about it, sounding like Springsteen sounding like a real bad but slicked-up imitation of the Band, with maybe some Gary Lewis and the Playboys thrown in, pee-yew, which reaction I also had to the likes of Graham Parker, poor bleeder. So maybe you can just mark it down not only to sour grapes but also I got bad taste (never liked Layla, either, so that clinches it).

On the other hand, just maybe somewhere over the years I heard one hook too many, or the same hook recycled once too often. Maybe you did too. I have also been informed along the way that hooks could take all sorts of other forms besides a change in the music or a line in the lyrics, could be a special sigh, x-tree li’l rhythmic fillip, or even thrown-in whizzer tweezer buzzers for all I know. It's been known to work. And if you mentioned something like “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las, I would happily concede that there was a song with hooks aplenty that blew you out of the car. But what people mostly mean by hooks today is catchy licks that worked for the Beatles or whoever so why shouldn’t they work for us?

As for that one hook too many, I have not listened to the radio, of any sort, since “Band on the Run” was a hit and driving in my car I heard it for the 983rd time and got irritated for some reason and just turned off my radio and left it off in perpetuity. You are reading the words of a music critic who at this exact moment or any given time has absolutely no idea what the Top Ten albums and singles in this country are. Well, some idea—if I see Bruce Springsteen or REO Speedwagon release new LPs, I know they’ll be in there, although I don’t know what REO Speedwagon sounds like, or rather I wouldn’t recognize them if I heard them but do know what they sound like and say no thanks. The charts do pass my eyes occasionally, but when I try to scan them they turn immediately into a blur. Last time I was on top of them Southern Boogie was questionable re whether holding or starting to slip into regional guaranteed sales, so you can see I am hopelessly out of touch.

The real question, though, is does either of us want to know about it? Do you leave the radio on just out of habit? Do 90 percent of those songs mean anything to you? The