ARTS .. . _ Gi o & A)PI rrb, w.r, {. ,. The Michigan Daily Tuesday, March 3, 1981 Page 9 MAR TIN MULL Lounge lizard turned loose Muff krs! Our aOa 1159 w / By DENNIS HARVEY At a time when most comic folk are patting themselves on the back for their "outrageousness," Martin Mull's peculiar faux pas seems to be that he's just too weird for the masses. The Saturday Night Live crew and others have successfully pedalled their more juvenile yoks to the world market, while Mull's sublimely perverse sense of humor has stayed on the commercial fringe, not quite hitting it big. But you can see him in his best-suited environ- ment - the concert stage - this Friday at 8:00, at the Michigan Theatre. His concerts, Mull told the Daily . recently, "are built 'as much around music as anything else" - remember, he's the composer of "Fruit" and "I Haven't the Vegas Idea," among other favorites. The show is based on Mull's songs, patter, a backup band, playing with stage furniture - anything. "A NON-FORMAT, the format being that you get out there and be yourself," says Mull. "The technical word, I believe, for doing something else is *_'bullshit;' you've got Wayne Newton's act." But such integrity doesn't prevent this tour from being "in support of my ;bank account." Mull's career has ambled about through various media since around 1967, when he began pushing his umm unique talent as a composer and musician $ on various . innocent producers and bands, leading to and through seven albums to date. Fame arrived, somewhat, when he portrayed genial wife-beater Garth Gimble on Norman Lear's twisted syn- dicated soap Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. When Garth was skewered prematurely by an aluminum Christ- mas tree, Mull returned to play brother Barth in the summer series Fernwood 2 Night. THAT PROVIDED the blueprint for America 2 Night, an unnervingly ac- Mull says working with "the hip cast" - Tuesday Weld, Sally Kellerman, Christopher Lee, etc. - "was a riot," but the tone was depressingly changed when original director Gary Weiss (of Saturday Night Live short films) was replaced by TV-trained Bill Persky. "IT MIGHT HAVE fared better if it had been treated differently . .. it came out like a sit-com. And the publicity campaign killed it," Mull says. "They're showing it on airplanes now and people are walking out." But he says he's "Kinda proud of 'My Bodyguard,' a sleeper hit released last year in which Mull had a strictly sup- porting role. He'll soon be appearing as the villain in the uneagerly awaited Take This Job and Shove It film, featuring Charlie Rich, and in Robert Downey's 10 O'Clock High with Dr. John and Susan Anspatch. An announced Norman Lear comedy, Religion, "is a dead issue - it will never get beyond the form of a memo, with a contract for Fred ('Jerry Hub- bard') Willard and I to star in it. Lear has a remarkably short attention span." More promising is a 40-page treatment, written by Mull, that he is currently hauling from studio to studio. Martin Mull is an agreeably self- aware member of the current comic crop - lounge-lizard wit, blithely drawn to offensiveness. His act is great fun, mostly because it's so transparent - the maliciousness hits like paper arrows, striking home without any ill intent. You can be assured that Behind Mull's deliciously obscene happy-hour grin lurks anarchy of the most innocent kind. Amity SLSAT ~r. REVIEW PROGRAMS Call for Amity's free brochure on the exam of interest to you. pp COMEDIAN MARTIN MULL, pictured above, will be appearing this Friday night at the Michigan Theatre. You probably remember him as Barth Gim- ble, host of 'America 2 Night,' a late night Johnny-Carson-gone-wild talk show. Mull has also put out more than a half dozen records and appeared in several cheesy movies, but catch him live at what he does best - shooting off his wit at a crowd. Tickets are $8.50 and are available at the Michigan Theatre Box Office, Hudson's and all CTC ticket outlets. L Th' Fi1 Z E Op curate and flaky satire on inane talk shows, broadcast "live" from Fer- nwood, Ohio, and hosted by the sleekly malicious Barth and his foam-brained sidekick, Jerry Hubbard. According to Mull, the backstage scene was "like the Ted Mack Professional Hour - people would come in with a sketch, say 'I yodel,' and we would say, 'Love it'." After the cancellation of America 2 Pearl Harbour Pearl Harbour-'Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Too' (Warner Brothers) - On her first solo album minus The Ex- plosions, Pearl Harbour has proved beyond all doubt that she has a voice to contend with. It's not that the lusty strength of her vocals has increased since Pearl Harbour and the Explosions (in fact, that possibility is quite incon- ceivable), but that she has finally found the musical backing powerful enough to r eally showcase her impressive abilities. Since no musicians are listed, we must attribute the credit for the music on this album to Harbour and her producer, Mickey Gallagher (keyboard player for Ian Dury and the & Blockheads). What they have fashioned, beyond all reason, is the most ecstatic celebration of rockabilly since its demise as a popular trend. But they don't allow the -early rockabilly sound to interfere with the final product, a fate that befell Elvis' Get Happy in his almost clinical reproduc- tion of early soul music. Harbour and Gallagher are not afraid to embellish their rockabilly celebration with modern studio techniques. But at the same time, they never allow anything to interfere with the unmatchable strengths of that rockabilly sound. RIDING ABOVE the crunch-crunch pound-pound of instruments is Har- bour's rockabilly vibratto, gulping down the words like a female Robert Gordon. Only she's much hotter. In- stead of imitating the greats, Harbour Night, Mull continued appearing sporadically (n the tube, and launched a screen career that has not as yet merited being called a success - though he tends to be a distinctive presence in his films. He was agreeably off-the-wall in FM, but nothing else in it was. Much was expected of the southern Californian culture satire Serial, and xp lodes does their memory proud in her own style. A la the great female blues singers of 'yesteryear, Harbour ex- presses herself as a competent, con- fident woman who doesn't mind men, but isn't about to be bothered with anyone that gets in her way. And it's not just in the lyrics, either. Harbour's voice pulls no punches. As the instruments rail at each other in the dense mix, Harbour's voice is always on top, pushing them faster, harder. The two together - fantastic music and an amazing vocalist - are nothing short of unstoppable. This album just begs to be turned way up. This is one of those records that doesn't need to tell you to "Play Loud." You'll know. -Mark Dighton 'A 7l is There Life After Graduate School? Myth: An advanced technical degree will get you a job in industry that will keep you on the production line for years before you'll get a chance to do some real research. Fact: Fairchild's Central R&D Laboratories have re- search opportunities for new MS and PhD grad- uates NOW. At Fairchild's Central Research and Development Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, the atmosphere is charged with new ideas, new developments, and new expansion. Fairchild's increasing commitment to strong research programs is extending the frontiers of electronics technology in telecommunications, advanced VLSI circuit logic, processing systems, CCD image sensing, CAD technologies, and artificial intelligence. 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