Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [40]
I don’t blame Helen and the rest of womankind for being mad. All men but me are puds. What I’d like to see is an all-girl band that would sing lyrics like “I’ll cut your nuts off, you cretins,” and then jump into the audience and beat the shit out of the men there. Meanwhile, Helen's chops are up: she's no artist, she's a constant pulsation, 50,000 watts of Helen Reddy arcing into diffusion with a glow that touches every stucco nautilus in every housing project from here to Bobby Goldsboro's composite dream suburb. Helen is not merely heavy, Helen is not just a downy-necked sex object like Anne Murray—Helen is a beacon, the perfect Seventies incarnation of Miss Liberty herself in pantsuit and bowler crooning for America in a voice like the tenderest walls brushing together—the real velvet underground.
Creem, August 1974
5Back in the days when rockers and grown-ups were two separate and distinct creatures, Middle of the Road (MOR), also known as Easy Listening, also known as “Happy Housewives’ Music,” was the record-biz designation for soft, tuneful adult pop.
Grace Jones Beats Off
Where is Betty Davis now that we really need her? In case you don’t remember, this ex-wife of Miles put out some fairly kinky LPs about a half-decade ago, was dismissed by critics and public alike, and disappeared. Like Grace Jones, she had no talent, was on Island, and sold herself via her purported affinity for s&m; unlike Grace Jones, she wrote all her own lyrics and didn’t have a flattop. One of her more memorable slap-’em-ups was called “He Was a Big Freak” (“I used to beat him with a turquoise chain….”). As one of her album titles stated, she was truly a nasty gal, and would fit into the present schema perfectly; maybe she could even get Miles to come out of seclusion, lay down some trumpet or organ lines, invite some of the boys over, and then we’d have some real DOR.6
On the other hand, the case could be made that Grace Jones is really performing a supremely moral public service by revealing s&m for the banal and often faked little twist it is: here is Grace, on the cover of her new Warm Leatherette album, looking like an overstuffed easy chair with a turniphead sticking up from the top of it. Ah, you might say, but a turniphead with such blazingly evil dominatrix eyes! Faugh, say I, because I have been auditing turnipheads for quite some time and can’t be fooled: I see you in there, Gracie, do you want to come out and play?
The title song of this admittedly plucky little lady's new album almost threw me for a moment, I confess, because every time I used to hear the Normal's version all I could see was all those assholes dancing at the Mudd Club, where I first heard it, and all my hostilities would flare like the back of a porcupine's neck. Fortunately, Grace brings it all back home via the total blandness (not anomic deadness) of her singing, revealing how utterly silly it would indeed be to watch yourself burning to death in the rearview mirror of your wrecked sportscar, your puny little badass jacket just like everybody else's melting into your poptoney flesh as the handbrake penetrates your schtuplane. Also this “Let's make love before we die” business—even assuming these people could fuck under those (and no other?) conditions, one must wonder if all of them actually can and want to come that quick.
No, it's leather schmeather all the way, as a glance at some of the other songs covered here indicates—I mean I can even see the persecution if not assassination of Smokey Robinson