October 1970

Features

Parliafunkadelicment Thang

Geoffrey Jacques

When the Parliament-Funkadelic trample on stage, everything is suddenly transformed.

MAIL

John M. Woodruff

Dear Creem: I have to admit I was in for a surprise when instead of picking up Rolling Stone (as I am in a habit of doing [among other things]), I happened to buy CREEM! The last issue I can remember reading was back in the Winter. What a upsurge in great reading.

ROCK AND ROLL NEWS

There is a bootleg album out which most definitely must be heard. It’s called The Blues Legend by Robert Johnson and so far as we know, it’s only available in Britain. Johnson, whose main influences were Son House and Willie Brown, stands at the crossroads of blues; he sums up the entire tradition of rural blues and gives impetus to the developing urban blues.

New Mothers

Todd Everett

“I’d like to clean you boys up a bit and mold you. I believe I could make you as big as the Turtles.” --A NOTED L.A. DISC JOCKEY, quoted in the liner notes to Freak Out. “The present-day Turtle refuses to die!” -Howard Kaylan, August, 1970 Never caught without a surprise or two, Frank Zappa unveiled the most recent incarnation of his Mothers of Invention at Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Friday, August 21.

Brother Love Offed

NEW YORK—The ABC network of FM stations, long the bane of the progressive rock radio scene with its douse Love format, is making all sorts of moves in the right direction. They’ve hired Larry Yurdin, formerly head of the Alternative Media Project (CREEM, Vol. 2, No. 14) as national production director for the entire group of stations and are busy making plans to move towards more community orientation in several key areas.

Soft Rock in Motown

Tony Clarke is a member of The Moody Blues. He doesn’t perform with them. He hasn’t been with them right from the start and he isn’t in any of the group’s publicity photos. But he is part of the group. He produces their albums. So far Tony is best known within the music business as The Moody’s producer, but he was in the United States recently to put together an album with Rare Earth.

Iggy: “I had a dream”

The Stooges been here and gone.

Rebel Rousers Meet the Gods

Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers were a top British group when the Beatles were still beating around the back alleys of Hamburg — which means, of course, when being a “top British group” didn’t mean diddly-shit. At some vague point in history, Bennett tied up with Brian Epstein and, that not panning out, ended up with a new band that might have just enough British excess, with just enough Amerikan soul, to end up being the new Jeff Beck group or something like it.

Popping the Blues

Savoy Brown bopped back into Detroit, home of their greatest successes, sans lead singer Chris Youlden and with a new, back-to-the-blues format that lead guitarist Kim Simmonds described as “mellowed out.” Youlden left, according to Simmonds, because “he’s a songwriter, a beautiful songwriter and he needs a band to play his songs.

King Jim Faces 8 Months

MIAMI,FLA.—Jim Morrison, the king of orgasmic rock, has been convicted of two of the misdeameanors he was charged with, specifically, open profanity and indecent exposure here. Morrison will be sentenced October 23rd to a maximum of eight months in jail and a $515 fine.

Jimi Hendrix 1945-1970: May You Never Hear Surf Music Again

R. Meltzer

Creedence Clearwater Revival

CREEM: Are your convictions in the music as a person as opposed to being an artist? Is there politics that goes in there, as well as your music or is it your art before your politics? JOHN FOGERTY: The thing you said about politics in music we find that around a lot.

Looney Toons

Dave Marsh

There is a certain rage prerequisite to considering the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Alan Wilson. Of all the people we’ve lost (death-wise, if not jail-wise) these two deaths make the least sense. One can cope with the basically organic death of John Coltrane, as disheartening as his loss was, and despite the shock of Brian Jones’ death at least there was some question there as to whether or not the cause was drugs.

Leary on the Lam

Timothy Leary, righteous holy man and spreader of the LSD conspiracy across the face of crazed Amerika, has escaped from prison. Leary has been held in a minimum security prison in California at San Luis Obispo for the last seven months. Increasingly disillusioned with any hope of obtaining his rights from Amerikan justice, Leary finally became fed up and, on Saturday evening September 12th, he climbed a twelve foot chain link and barbed wire fence (just like the one at Gooselake) and made good his escape.

HELLO FOLKS! SO WHAT?

THE MAD PECK

The history of comic rip-offs is nearly as old as the history of comics tnemselves. Around the turn of the century the newspapers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were waging a fierce circulation war on the kiosks of New York. Each man would stop at nothing to out do the other.

John Dillinger into A Hasty Exit

The Legendary Comix Ripoff Ruse

Somewhere between Capp and the eight-pagers lie the comic parodies that crop up from time to time in college humor magazines. Although they are not always obvious tracings their visual appeal usually leaves something to be desired. They are often vulgar and occasionally bawdy but they never have the outright sexual frankness of the eight-pagers.

FEARLESS FOSDICK

AL CAPP

THE UNTHINKABLES IN WHO ARE THE BRAIN POLICE

Bill Elder

Lil Awrfin' FANNIE

PETER WOLF

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

The White Swallow

Russ Meyer unchained, Twenty-Century Fox saved from bankruptcy , Play boy’s “girlnext-door” ruse exposed, Myra Breckinridge for real and Los Angeles personified. Yes, all this and more, in over an hour of cinematic farce that, if it don’t send thrills and chills up your spinal column, will probably at least make you giggle a bit.

I Remember Ray

Lester Bangs

I saw Ray Charles singing “Eleanor Rigby” on the Glen Campbell Show the other night, and for a few moments his music held all the passionate intensity of old.

RECORDS

Dave Marsh

(When Johnny Winter and company traveled to Detroit to play at the Eastown and in the park in Ann Arbor and do the interview that we ran in Volume 2, No. 15 the conversation very naturally drifted to Johnny’s somewhat confused recording career.

REVIEW COMICS PRESENTS: FLAMIN GROOVIE GOOF