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By Root 540 0

to that last one is I never liked Blind Faith in the first place, and marijuana makes everything sound like Fad Gadget and the Fall. These people are confusing nostalgia with taste, a not uncommon error these days. Ever since the advent of New Wave, it has been considered uncool, if not an outright admission of collapse in the face of future shock, to admit to liking anything recorded pre-1977 over the latest fab waxing from Blighty or your local garage. The editor of New York Rocker, for instance, writes to tell me that my stance reminds him of hoary old jazz critic Leonard Feather's cowlike intransigence in the face of Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz 20 years ago. I wrote him back: “Unfortunately, all that cowplop you tell your readers to run out and buy every month is not some ineluctable avant-garde that threatens everybody now but they’ll all look back in 10 or 20 years and realize how vital it was. It's a bunch of nothing that challenges no one.”

That's why I’d rather listen to Hank Williams or Beck, Bogert & Appice or Charlie Parker or the Royal Guardsmen. I have to say that the champions of the current New Wave “avant-garde” are largely trendies, and I can guarantee you there will be no Throbbing Gristle repackages from Japan in the year 2000. It's not even that big of a controversy right now, since most critics are afraid to put very much of this stuff down and 99.9 percent of the public is indifferent.

But listening to music recorded 20, 30 years ago is not living in the past, is not nostalgia. According to my dictionary, nostalgia is “homesickness … a longing for something far away or long ago or for former happy circumstances.” The truth is that the Sixties, not to mention the Fifties, sucked in the first place and you wouldn’t like it if you were back there in a time when people did things like informing you you were mentally ill or worse if you didn’t wanna take a toke on the doob. The Fifties was a time when you couldn’t walk down the street without bumping into some pissed-off frustrated repressed ugly cretin looking to beat the shit out of somebody (like you) because he wasn’t getting any from his girlfriend. No one in his right mind would want to return to either of those eras, which is why the lie in rosy confections like Grease and Beatlemania is despicable. But preferring Hank Williams or Charlie Parker or the Sun Sessions or the Velvet Underground to Squeeze and Rickie Lee Jones and the Go-Gos and the Psychedelic Furs is not nostalgia, it's good taste. Just like listening to Beck, Bogert & Appice or Clock DVA and the Fall are bad taste. So I’ll take my bad taste and you’re welcome to yours, and maybe someday something will actually happen again and then we’ll both be happy.

I know that by writing these columns I’ve put myself in danger of coming off as a crank. Why, an esteemed colleague in a crosstown publication even accused me of “crotchety nagging,” by which I take it he refers to the fact that I no longer support the doctrine of teenage hegemony (didn’t when I was a teenager, either), and think 99 percent of current music is worthless. But I suspect that some of my readers may have become cranks also. When was it: the day you let all those rock critics talk you into buying Strength Thru Oi, or the day you read your last exegesis on Elvis Costello's lyrics?

Vis a vis nostalgia, here are some capsule reviews of recent (mostly British) rock acts:

Bow Wow Wow: sounds like Sergio Mendez and Brazil ‘66 with

Burundi drum machine.

Fad Gadget: lousy imitation of the Doors.

Rip, Rig & Panic and Pigbag: crappy jazz-rock—or as a friend

said, “Remember when Savoy Brown had horns?”

Blurt: worthless sub-James Chance (no nasty edge) take on Sixties

Coltrane-Ayler-Shepp honk.

Blue Rondo a La Turk: unbelievably lame samba band.

Konk: two and a half minutes of 1957 Shorty Rogers rhythm track

outtakes with the melodies mixed out.

The Lounge Lizards: in which 1950s TV private-eye soundtracks

with all the heat sucked out are mistaken for bebop.

Fingerprintz: the Lounge Lizards go disco.