Arts
The Michigan Daily Wednesday, May 20, 1981 Page 9
X MARKS THE ROT
One good thing about L.A.
0 0 .
By RJ SMITH
Like members of other primitive
cultures, X traffics in familiar symbols
with fetishistic overtones. Check out
this Los Angeles band's stage set-up.
Abundant with little pop talismans that
merge strikingly with the group's
music (buttons, stickers, singer
Exene's letter jacket with "Society's
Outcasts" stitched on the back), the
visual impression provided is one of
lush ritualism. Exene and John Doe, on
bass, even have messages scrawled on
their hands and arms-which in context
seem a lot closer to the messages the
Mansonoids left behind on the walls of
their victim's rooms than, say, a list of
what they need to pick up at the grocery
store.
X are consumed with, baptized-by,
the ragged edge of California life. Their
terra firma is the sticky-sweet billow of
fatalism/romanticism that hangs over
their home town like a cloud of black
flag. Their show Monday evening at
East Lansing's Dooley's couldn't much
surprise us with their Calfornia
dreaming-their first album had
already done that. But what seemed
newly evident in East Lansing was the
band's zeal, the way they have sunk
their heels in for a long and intense
haul. The songs may be about decay but
the attitude sure isn't.
The show's material included most of
their first album, Los Angeles (the
guitar less Chuck Berry and more surf
punk than it is on vinyl), and chunks of
their just-released second, Wild Gift
(the punch sometimes more restrained
musically, it seemed, the Bukowski
kick of the lyrics tougher than ever).
The three people in front-John Doe,
Exene, and guitarist Billy Zoom-are a
virtual apotheosis - of some of the
greatest myths about California. Billy
Zoom simply stands legs akimbo the
entire show, flashing a single plastic
smile that relates the horror of hot fun
in the summertime- as a lifelong
avocation... nirvana that never ends.
John Doe pays the price for that life, ac-
ts it out as his gaunt frame jerks
laconically, the picture of every seedy
Sunset Strip smart-aleck who used to
read some Delmore Schwartz but now
engineers deals that never seem to
work out.
But the amazing thing about Exene
onstage is that it's as if she's never seen
better times. She has only a sliver of
conscience; mostly, she is a twirling
harbinger of bad news, not suffering
through hard times so much as
radiating them. "We're Desperate,"
first heard on the soundtrack album for
a movie about the Los Angeles punk
scene and done in an even-better ver-
sion Monday night, might just be a by-
rote bit of posturing if it weren't for
Exene's harrowing voices It validates
the song, just as she more than
validates the cultish onstage trappings.
Yeah, you could transpose some of
the faces of the Ann Arbor Dooley's
goon squad onto the carcasses at East
Lansing. But after the opening set by
The Subhumans, and after the dance
floor filled up with a mixture of college
types, everybody looked like a fan. No
less an authority than Exene said af-
terwards that the gig was one of the
best the group had played on their
current foray into the Midwest and the
South. Sometimes things don't fall into
place, they plunge with a vengeance.
Rising stars?
Bali, humbug!
Lounge Lizards are
a bunch of phonies!
The Lounge Lizards - 'The
Lounge Lizards'. The Lounge Lizar-
ds ain't no Marcel Duchamp, let me
tell you. You'll never catch them
giving up their 'art' to play forty
years' worth of chess. And the
Lounge Lizards ain't no Public
Image Ltd., either. You'll never
hear them tell you straight out that
they "wouldn't waste the effort on
entertainment." But I'll be damned
if their eponymous debut album
doesn't fit right into the anti-art
tradition of the Dadaists and post-
punk rock musicians.
A breakthrough like this has been
a long time in coming. Except for
Talking Heads, the first wave of
New York punk bands has fizzled
out. Half of the four bands featured
on Brian Eno's No New York com-
pilation (the second wave of NY
punk) have lost a lot of their original
force. The first of James Chance's
incarnations of the Contortions was
easily the most exciting. Eight-Eyed
Spy saw Lydia Lunch at her best;
her mest recent gig in Ann Arbor
with the Devil Dogs was. a great
disappointment.
Only Mars, D.N.A., and the lat-
ter's offshoot, the Lounge Lizards,
remain startling and fresh. But
guess what? They're all faking it!
That's right, faking it! Mars' latest
release, John Gavanti, is a fake
opera that makes mincemeat of
Mozart's Don Giovanni; D.N.A. is
now calling their atonal terror 'fake
heavy metal;' and those masters of
the Aesthetic of The Fake them-
selves, the Lounge Lizards, have
just released an album of fake jazz.
THERE'S ALWAYS been a cer-
tain amount of fakery in rock'n'roll.
But now, twenty-five long years
later, rock music, which was
originally a reaction against the
social and musical cliches of the 40s
and 50s, has itself become a cliche.
Distanced from it, experimental
groups like the Lounge Lizards can
dissect and analyze rock music just
like any other style.
Instrumentally, the band is very
similar to a 1950s jazz ensemble. The
bassist and drummer are accom-
plished jazz players, allowing them
to run through the changes
smoothly. Much of the sharply
satirical edge comes from the three
front men. The saxophone player,
John Lurie, makes up in ex-
pressiveness what he lacks in chops.
His instrumental voice walks a thin
line between the comic and the
demonic. The other two players,
guitarist .Arto Lindsay and
organist/pianist Evan Lurie, con-
tribute mostly white noise to the
color of the band.
Cleanly captured by producer Teo
Macero, The Lounge Lizards follows
the pace of their live shows, opening
with the driving "Incident on South
Street" and closing with the somber
"You Haunt Me." Along the way, the
band performs covers of a jazz stan-
dard ("Harlem Nocturne") and a
couple of Thelonius Monk tunes, as
well as many strong John Lurie
originals. Of late, the band seems to
be concentrating more heavily on
their playing, but the humor and the
horror of the seamy underside of Las
Vegas lounge acts still comes
'through forcefully. A very
promising .debut album from one of
New York's very best groups.
-Bill Brown
'Rising Stars of San Francisco'
(Warbride) Rising Stars of San Fran-
cisco is a compilation "featuring 12
new sounds on the street." Actually,
these 12 new sounds hail from 11 bands,
all working within the modern pop
idiom. There's nothing avant-garde
here, just straightforward attempts at
clever power pop.
On the whole, the collection is rather
mediocre. None of the songs stand out
as being particularly interesting,
though there are a few that are at least
successful..
"Wacs in Slacks" by Barry Beam is
one of the better tracks included. It's
a song about fashions and its
extremes. The multiple layers of
vocals are juxtaposed interestingly,
using a full dynamic range. "Take Her
Where the Boys Are'' is another high
point of the collection. Recorded by a
band called Eye Protection, it is an ex-
cellent example of the strengths of the
true power pop tradition - it's fun,
danceable, and short.
The bands that don't quite make it on
this compilation are those that attempt
to become stars by trying to sound just
like the already established stars. This
is not an uncommon or surprising oc-
currence, and doesn't seem to be really
worth going into here. I will go so far as
to say that I heard strains of the Cars,
the Pretenders and Blondie here, th-
ough.
From this collection, one could con-
clude that the San Francisco pop-rock
scene is pretty much void of anything
terrifically innovative or exciting. But
given the other interesting music that
has come out of San Francisco (i.e., the
Dead Kennedys, the Residents, etc.), I
am hoping that it's just poorly
represented here, and that we'll be
taken by surprise someday soon.
-Regina Myer
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