Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [39]
Creem, September 1973
Helen Reddy:
Long Hard Climb
Amen are weasels. The only use they have for women is to get their rocks off, and half the time the only reason they wanna do that is to prove something. Which is why all women hold them in such utter contempt.
But everybody knows that. What everybody doesn’t know is the hot pulsating goodies Helen Reddy's got to offer up. Cum here woman, do your duty; drop them drawers and gimme some pooty! But no, this is one Boopsy won’t do the do—she's a holdout, she's not even a tease. Anne Murray was demure but carnal—Helen is downright prim at times.
But that's her genius. Clearly the world stage is now readyer’n ever for some kinda prim popstar. People who think in slow motion got Roberta Flack, fags got I forget who, drunken speedfreaks got Lou Reed, hippies and jigoros got all kindsa icons, but all the young ladies of the hands-off persuasion who are good and sick of all these big pigs leering and smacking over ‘em all the time have finally got a pop force of major magnitude to speak for them. And that's no small shekels, Bashkar.
In the first place everybody's too damn blatant today; the dildo-brandishing comicstrip superficiality of a Wayne County is a real bore. Grace Metalious said that the real sickness (which is what pop thrives on) is in the clean places, and it's still true today. MOR5 is more perverted than glitter ever dreamed of being because glitter is too upfront—it's like how s&m freaks don’t really dig each other: they want somebody who's NOT DIGGING IT! They want straights! Fresh meat! And the foursquare decks of Helen Reddy with enough bendo twisto English to satiate even the most jaded mugwump.
Take for instance Long Hard Climb's “The Old Fashioned Way” where Helen sings, “Just melt against my skin/And let me feel your heart”—obviously an emetically graphic depiction of Burroughs’ classic scene of terminal parasitic absorption as the two Venusian organisms schlup together in a slow froth of creeping green ooze like when you put salt on a snail.
But the real masterpiece here is “Leave Me Alone.” Guys have had all kindsa great hostility songs for years, from John Lee Hooker's “I’m Mad” to Lou's “Vicious,” but all women had to fall back on was masochistic laments like “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” or at best c&w you’re-cut-off sops like Loretta Lynn's “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind).” But this is a woman's song that goes all the way in the most basic terms: “Leave me alone, aww leave me alone….” Not since Dylan's pinnacles has there been such revivifying and totally irresistible rancor. I can see this tune being a hot number on jukeboxes in bars across the USA, as the stags smooth their shags furtively eyeing the always two babes just a few tables away (“Yours doesn’t look so good,” if one's really fat and ugly; “Well, which one do you want—makes no difference to me.” “The blonde.” “I thought you were gonna say that.”) So now besides just smirking “No” at these losers, the sisters have a blare of support to blast the brum-mels to cowering jelly under their own tables. It's the same kind of release from sexual suffocation expressed in the lines of her hit “Peaceful”: “No one bending over my shoulder/Nobody breathing in my ear!” This is a real woman's pop anthem, and not that queasily self-conscious sisters-unite pap set in a perfect marriage of watered-down Sousa and “Waltzing Matilda.”
Even when she's toeing the line Helen manages to get the irony in. “A Bit O.K.” is about