Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [27]
But don’t you get a feeling of sterility?
Carl: “No, never. We’re working much too hard for that. We’ve taken time off to come back with a different show. We had about four tours prior to the layoff, and we needed time to rethink what we wanted to do. We also wanted our own record label [Manticore], we wanted to get things more businesslike. All these things take time. We’re really not into coming in and saturating a market and taking out the money.”
Ignoring for the moment that the reply was not an answer to the question, you may have noticed that these fellers speak most cogently when they speak as businessmen. There is absolutely nothing of the desperately egocentric “artist.” Their rap in this area reminded me more than anyone else of Dick Clark. So who would ever say that this band is sterile, that they’re not forever forging ahead? If you can’t have real quality, why not go for quantity on a Byzantine scale, why not be pompous if you’re successful at it? Who needs to feel anything when you can move with the flow of the current? Does NASA have a soul? Does it need one? Don’t you kinda admire it precisely for its sleek unfeeling lunar inhumanness? And since the only thing that really counts is the hardware, as these boys will almost admit, why bother with personalities in this story at all? Why not just publish an itemized list of the contents of their arsenal with accompanying charts and diagrams? So of course I asked ‘em: How much equipment you trundling around the country on your bearers’ heads? How many amps? I couldn’t even count ‘em, I said.
“It's got beyond my understanding as well,” admits Greg. “I don’t know the total capacity of it.”
Oh well, no matter. It's just good to see you extending yourselves; so many rock bands are so lazy. I really feel for you guys. And of course I want you to know how much all of us out here appreciate the way you’ve borne up under all that pressure to create such enduring masterpieces as “Benny the Bouncer.” But don’t worry, readers: they’ll be back before we know it with another mind-bolting album and sold-out tour to match. If they don’t blow a circuit or drool in one of their manifold sockets.
Creem, March 1974
C’mon Sugar,
Let's Go All-Nite Jukin’
with Wet Willie
1
Wet Willie,” from whence this passel o’ scragglers derived their handle, is a regionalism referring to an Alabamian practice of sucking on your finger and then shoving it up somebody's ear. It also means that dirty stuff you’re thinking right now.
2
The first time I saw Wet Willie I got excited as hell. You would too if you were in Macon, Georgia, whooping it up deep Friday night down at Grant's Lounge call of the wildest bar this side of the frontier. Ham-bones and grease are cruising through the air like your very lobes flow deep in the marrow of the Gulf Stream, and the Hatfield Clan (THC) have just gone off, looking in their combination jock and lipstick drag like one of Captain Beefheart's old crews and sounding like a damn good skillet bar band. Every slick black honker in town has just had his turn in the night's mighty tenor battle, and now the dazed stage is took by a bunch of high hop-steppin’ Suthun lads who don’t play no queer-bait but they jive as good as they want. Up front's a rangy-boned cussed-callow youth who looks just enough like Jagger without overdoing it a la Aerosmith; he's a real rawhide power swaggerin’ son of the soil and he commences to whoop out some of the hottest, nastiest, most needlin’ to the point harp heard since early Paul Butterfield, with the rest of the band cooking like ten Rastamaniacs straight behind him all the way. He limbers up the whole damn club with a good excursive and precisely economical few minutes of this Hohnerific, and then he throws back his head and commences to shout:
You're just hangin’out
At the local bar
And you’re wondering’
Who in the hell you are!
Are you a bum, or