The Michigan Daily-Saturday, February 2, 19804-Page 5 MUSE LPs: an anti-nuclear waste By DENNIS HARVEY No Nukes - From the MUSE Concer- ' for a Non-Nuclear Future offers the most elaborate packaging job of an album set since Fleetwood Mac' Tusk - and that's a significant comparison, because the No Nukes LP's are, despite scattered moments of emotion and in- spiration, finally as disappointingly hollow as the Fleetwood Mac set, and the lavish trappings only make the let- down more complete. It's a particular pity, because while Tusk was in the end "ust another commercial product and he listener didn't really expect much more, the MUSE project was born out of unusually noble intentions. The five Madison Square Garden concerts last September presented at least the illusion of a re-emergence of the communal spirit: eighteen groups and artists devoting their time and talents solely to raise money for a cause that they presumably believed in. There may have been a few flaws in the picture (very mixed reviews, and the realization that most of the audience Wembers were just there for the music, and couldn't have cared less about the message), but the general idea had a reassuring aura of cooperation about it. For once, it seemed, star egos had taken a backseat to something of genuine importance. Well, so much for that particular illusion. Woodstock is dead, intentions aren't always enough, and the three- album MUSE set emerges as a sadly umbled, frustrating and even irrele- ant package. The presence of all those southern California music grads, all of them doing their damndest to spread good vibes and ressurect the '60's (led, for better or worse, by Jackson Browne, CS&N, Jessie Colin Young, Ma and Pa Taylor, Poco and the deathless Doobies), is nostalgic, but somewhat disconcerting. Doubtlessly the'r inten- tions were high, but the feeling of deja- vu renders the whole effort a little silly, especially when the set includes a fif- teen-page, slick-papered anti-nuke magazine that combines perfunctory propaganda articles with alarmingly idiotic True Confessions from the per- formers. Their naivete in stating their political convictions is so acute that it borders - no, it plungesright over the edge - on unintention comedy. * AIR TRAVEL WASHINGTO (AP)-Sixty-five per cent of all Americans over 18 years of age have flown on a commercial airliner, according to a survey done for the Air Transport Association. The 65 per cent figure represents 101 million people, a 7 per cent increase over 1977 when the last survey was made. The survey also found that while men account for the great majority of business trips-82 per cent-women ac- count for the majority of personal- pleasure trips-58 per cent. HERE'S THE stunning truth of the matter from discophile Chaka Khan: "Three Mile Island was my first glim- pse of the nuclear thing. I was in L.A. watching the news and seeing those really incredible shots of a little girl on a swing with huge towers in the background and people evacuating. It was obvious to me that nuclear power is a blatant, outright threat toward humanity." Wow-ee-wow. Says Rusty Young of Poco: ". . . . the people operating the plants scare me, too. I'm not sure they know what they're doing. I think we saw from Three Mile Island that if something goes wrong; we're in big trouble. Add the radioactive waste issue, and you've got some real problems. It sounds real 1984-ish to me." Carly Simon adds this major statement: "Which reactors scare me the most? All of them." Ray Parker Jr. of Raydio ominously offers, "Remember ex-President Nixon?" Well, that must explain a lot, though you may not be able to figure out just what it is. But the choicest comment of them all is from Bernice Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock: "In New York, when the sun is shining, you see everybody looking up. The sun gives us life, that's what it's supposed to do. So why not call on it now to give us some help. It has a good record. It just stays there." LIKE, MAN, that's really heavy stuff, and if they believe it, I guess we should. Are these performers as em- barrassingly inarticulate as their statements indicate? If not, why do they feel they have to shape their opinions into words intelligible to the average junior-high school student (maybe they think that's where most of their audience lies,) but ridiculous to any thinking adult? The worst songs on the six sides are all anti-nuke tunes, and they reflect the apparent difficulty the performers have in expressing a political stan- dpoint in anything but the most cliched and silly terms. Gil-Scott Heron's laid- back (to the point of being comatose) funk song "We Almost Lost Detroit" can hardly be taken seriously with lyrics like, "Yeah, but no one stops to think about the babies" and "What would Karen Silkwood say to you/I mean, if she was alive. . ."John Hall's idiotic mock-Caribbean melody "Plutonium is Forever" succeeds daz- zlingly in being even more pretentious and asinine in content that in its title. Another Hall expose, "Power,' is somewhat saved by an all-star ensem- ble performance. THE RIvST of the record ranges from the inept to the mediocre to the out- standing. As in a badly cast film (and it will be interesting to see if the project gels any better in the upcoming MUSE concert film), the conflicting interests and styles of the performers prevent the set from developing any kind of en- semble strength or overall tone. The communal flavor of the Woodstock albums is replaced by a gaudy variety- show atmosphere; it's all wildly uneven, with fine tracks lined back-to- back with disasters and a curious lack of good sound quality on many tracks. Whose bright idea was it to position Raydio's strong funk piece "You Can't Change That" and Chaka Khan's mechanical disco fun-house "Once You Get Started" right before one of James Taylor's sweetest acoustic ballads, "Captain Jim's Drunken Dream"? Without any care for assembling the tracks smoothly or for basic technical competence, the 28 songs are sub- merged in confusion. ,ONNig RAITT'S two songs, "Runaway" and "Angel from Mon- tgomery," are up to her usual standard - good, but not quite goodtenough. She remains caught in limbo between some sort of individuality and being another Linda Ronstadt clone. An unnecessary all-star production reduces Taylor's "Honey Don't Leave L.A." to attractive but weightless fluff, though Carly and James are unexpectedly energetic on their standard duet, "Mockingbird." Ry Cpoder and Tom Petty do passably effective one-shots, but Nicolette Lar- son remains one of the most colorless singers around (backed by the Doobies, yet - Miss Banality meets the Bland Band), and "Lotta Love" remains perhaps the dullest song Neil Young ever penned. Sweet Honey in the Rock, a quartet of female soul singers, is the least-known act here, and judging from "A Woman," a kind of gospelly "I am Woman" ("Tote that barge and lift that bail/Don't you know world I can work like hell"), it's no surprise. "Get Together," with Jessie Colin Young making the unfortunate mistake of asking the audience to sing along (it's fun in concert, but a drag on the turntable), is nostalgic enough to get by. But Crosby, Stills and Nash's three songs ("You Don't Have to Cry," "Long Time Gone" and "Teach Your Children" - are an off-key disaster. The threesome sound so quavery and hoarse that their attempts verge on the pathetic. THE SET DOES have the novelty value of grouping together interesting combinations of artists on some cuts, and sometimes the "result is fine music as well as effective show-biz. Simon, Taylor and Graham Nash do an acceptably harmonic version of "The Times They Are a-Changin'," even if the sound quality on the track is fairly appalling. Jackson Browne and Nash do a beautiful turn on "The Crow on the Cradle," though Browne's "Before the Deluge" (perhaps the only anti-nuke song around of genuine musical merit) is weakly performed here. Another pleasure is Michael Mc- Donald's classic pop voice, which is combined with a half-dozen others on several cuts and always manages to emerge as the winner. THERE'S A rare sense of exhilaration in the Browne-Bruce Springsteen duet on "Stay." In fact, there exhilaration in just about everything Springsteen does, and there's no surprise in the fact that the two cuts he's involved with here - the other is the "Devil With the Blue Dress Medley" - make everything else on the six sides look flat by comparison. The medley may not equal the similar recordings on various Springsteen bootlegs, but it makes you jump, all right. For those ready to hang them- selves over the endless delay in the release of Bruce's latest, it just might be worth shelling out the bucks to pacify oneself with these two tracks. Despite its intentions, No Nukes is finally no more than an even more lavishly packaged ode to consumerism than Tusk. It offers lots and lots of pic- tures for you to look at while you play the six sides. Sadly, the sight of Carly Simon in a tight jumpsuit on the inner- sleeves is considerably more in- teresting than nearly anything on the enclosed discs. - US bri .u CORK 'ILED UP? take a [ig eak! bscribe today ,4-O558 Tobe Hooper's 1974 TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE A lyric poem in gore, a hymn to hysteria, a monument to mayhem. A regis- tered nurse will be in attendance but bring your own air bags. A cult film that tests the endurance of his fans. Short: Charles Brauerman's TELEVI- SIONLAND-a nostalgic evolution of television. Sun: THE ANDERSON PLATOON and MAN OF IRAN Mon: TRASH Tues: AN ACTOR'S REVENGE (Free at 8:00 only) Wed: HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER MOMEMW Join the arts page Have you ever attended a concert, play, or film only to awaken the following morning to read a review that seemed to be written by someone who went to a different show of the same name? If you've ever said "I could do that!" after disagreeing with an arts page review, it's time to put your typewriter where your mouth is. The Michigan Daily is looking for new staff writers. The only prerequisites are a specific interest in writing and a general interest in the arts (use your own definition). Beside the usual popular music-theater-film criticism, we have an urgent need for writers interested in classical music, the visual arts, and arts-oriented features. Thebottom line here is creativity; if you have some insight or a new approach to offer, the arts page could be your outlet. If you are interested, the first step is to prepare a sample of your writing. Length isn't important here; we just want something representative of your style and the subject matter you'd like to cover. Stop by the Student Publications Building at 420 Maynard any afternoon and ask for the arts editors. A KNOCK-OUT COMEDY CINEMA GUILD TONIGHT AT 7:00, 8:48 & 10:30 OLD ARCH. AUD. $1.50 rCINEMAII ~' presents -T II I PROVIDENCE (Alain Resnais, 1977) PROVIDENCE is Resnais' (Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime) newest film, complex and shifting, a story within a story. A famous novelist, suffering from a fatal illness, passes a terrible night hallucinating about various members of his family. Believing they all hate him, he drinks to ease his pain and twists this hatred into material for a new novel. With JOHN GIELGUD, DIRK BORARDE, ELLEN BURSTYN. (104 min) ANGELL HALL 7:00 & 9:00 $1.50 F J L. Tomorrow: FAR FROM VIETNAM The Ann Arbor Film Cooperat4ve Presents at MLB: $1.50 Saturday, February 2 SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (John Badham, 1977) 7 & 9-MLB 3 Disco dance king in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn takes steps toward grow- ing up. With no-holds barred language and a candid description of teenage sex, this film is a mixture of entertainment and raw situations. A right-on-the- target film with script by Norman Wexler (Joe, Serpico), with the ultimate disco score by the Bee Gees and David Shire. All shot on location, unques- tionably the best, steamiest disco scenes ever put on film. Starring JOHN TRAVOLTA and KAREN GORNEY. "Outstanding film!"-CUE. (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966) TOWN CURTAIN 7:00-MLB 4 A top-notch American physicist (PAUL NEWMAN) defects to East Berlin fol- lowed by his bewildered fiance (JULIE ANDREWS) who finds him involved in a complicated game of scientific intrigue. "A sophisticated statement on American Cold War attitudes." Includes an incredible scene in which Newman i r mU"i nm i- - EEIA\E EHI U t ... .. , .1 - M I U1