June 1987

CONTENTS

ROCK 'N' ROLL NEWS

Lick This! We’re always happy when people take our good advice and shave their heads, so it’s a hearty Rock ’n’ Roll News congratulations to Alex Van Halen for doing just that. After Van Halen finished their most recent tour, the wisest V.H. brother followed up on a band agreement to submit to a feisty head-shavin’—an agreement his pals wimped out on, earning them our sincere scorn.

Features

Around The Clock With The PSYSCHEDELIC FURS

Sylvie Simmons

Show us your Billy Idol pose, Richard.

LETTERS

COOP FLOWN It was saddening to read Alice Cooper’s comments on music, especially how he was doing “heavy metal” versions of his old stuff on his current tour and that he was trying for a "Ratt"-like sound on his new album. In my opinion, his old songs are much better than anything Ratt and that type of “safe”sounding metal, with its pretty harmonies and buried vocals, have produced.

RECORDS

Michael Davis

If pop music (yeah) is the medium in which successive generations define “love” according to their desires and needs, then what were the Psychedelic Furs doing on their first album? Richard Butler’s voice snarled razor blades, his mouth full of soap commercials and useless mantras, a veritable optical sewer, in his own words.

CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

ROBERT CHRISTGAU

AFRIKA BAMBAATA AND FAMILY "Beware (The Funk Is Everywhere)” (Tommy Boy) Selected producers cut Bam’s electro leanings with the prescribed heavy guitars, and musically this tops the U.T.F.O. albums, say. But neither leader not followers give up the rhymes or reasons of a ranking m.c., and I’m grieved to report that only “Kick Out The Jams” overcomes the formlessness of personality his detractors have always charged him withߞit’s got Bill Laswell all over it.

45 REVELATIONS

KEN BARNES

A lot of people can’t appreciate a record like Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue” on purely ideological grounds. Some (you find this breed mostly in England) believe rock is a bloated, senile zombie, a crystallization of all that’s wrong with capitalism, and that only in black and Third World musics does genuine proletarian expression (the only valid music, it goes without saying) manifest itself.

ROCK • A • RAMA

Chuck Eddy

ADRIAN BELEW Desire Caught By The Tail (Island) This is the Adrian Belew record for those who’ve loved his guitar playing but might’ve had doubts about his singing and/or pop songwriting. Desire ... is all instrumental, ali Adrian, and he used his expansive sonic palette to come up with some of his neatest noises yet.

The World’s Boredest Man

John Mendelssohn

At the time this was written, many of your glossier magazines were ridiculing Bill Wyman for having been discovered to have kept a barely pubescent Brigitte Bardot lookalike several decades his junior as his personal boytoy. But it just wasn’t fair.

HUSKER DU, In Their Own Way

Mark Dery

“In Switzerland, they kept slammin’ the microphone into my face and throwing beer cans at us all night. So the next person that did it, I just put my foot right in his chest and pushed him about 12 feet across the floor. I said, 'Would you please turn the house lights on?,’ and they turned ’em on—and I just went out after the guy.

Clap For The Wolfmen Moonlighting with Los Lobos

Bill Holdship

There was this band from Detroit called White Lines. It was right at the height of the punk/“new wave” thing, and White Lines got a chance to play Bookie’s, the club that’s kinda legendary in Detroit for being the place where all the hip bands of that era played.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Calendar

CALENDAR

The Somewhat Singular Tale Of...BILLY VERA

John Kordosh

So there we sat in his living room in Hollywood on a nice sunny day, me and Billy Vera. Not much going on. Oh, I was drinking a Diet Pepsi and looking out the window at that new Honda I bought. Nice car. Billy had the #1 song in the country. He doesn’t have much furniture in his place, just a couch and a chair and a decades-old record player in the living room.

ROCK MAGAZINES: All Washed Up!

Rick Johnson

Looks like it’s that time of year again, cowpokes! Birdies tweet, bunnies hop and hopeful young lovers look for someone to come along and jump start their life. Ice fishing? Never happened. It’s also that time for CREEM to trot out its annual consumer’s guide to the rock press.

SHRIEKBACK The World's Second Best Pop Group With A Bald Singer

Dave Segal

“... Shriekback have opted to make a different kind of music—one which exalts human frailty and the harmonious mess of nature over the simplistic reductions of our crude Computers.”—liner notes to Big Night Music. This thing called Shriekback is a strange beast.

RAY DAVIES: Face To face With The Lost Decade Part Two

Iman Lababedi

“Iman, where are you from?” asked Davies. I’m Lebanese. “I played in Beirut around ’69, the time of Arthur. I met a girl named Hudda, and I became really friendly with her. Later I heard she died in the war. “When I was there, Beirut had the most amazing night life I’d ever seen.

PRAIRIE PRINCE, MIKE BAIRD & THE ART OF DRUMMING

Billy Cioffl

If ever there were two drummers who debunked the myth that percussionists are insensitive or tunnel-visioned skin pounders, both Mike Baird and Prairie Prince lay that false perception to rest. Prairie Prince is a founding (and continuing) member of the Tubes, one of the most underrated and creative groups of the last decade.

CENTERSTAGE

Bill Holdship

JOHN: This was not only the worst concert I’ve ever seen, it was actually the worst event I’ve ever been to. How do you feel about that? BILL: Well, I basically agree with you, though I don’t know that I’d take it so far as to say it’s the worst event ...

HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD

Edouard Dauphin

Ah, the life of a film critic. It appears glamorous, right? Private screenings Lavish press parties Beautiful starlets. Limousines to take you everywhere. And best of ail—free movies. Yes, but what kind of films are we talking about here?

ANTIBODIES KILLED MY BEARD

Richard C. Walls

COMMIE IRRESPONSIBLE: As I write this in early February, ABC has yet to unleash its 14 hours mini-series Amerika, though the hype is hot and heavy, with political hobbyists of all persuasions already lined up waving clubs and roses. A prediction: the show will have a mild success and a quick fade.

MEDIA COOL

Karen Schlosberg

LIGHT OF DAY (Tri-Star) Those expecting one long MTV video would be better off at the new Stallone flick, since director/writer Paul Schrader has crafted an emotional family drama centering on the relationships between brother and sister Joe and Patti Rasnick (Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett), their manipulative mother (Gena Rowlands) and ineffectual father (Jason Miller).

This Month In IV History WITH DR. OLDIE

Video Video

REAL VIDEOS FOR REAL PEOPLE

Billy Altman

While it’s true that here at “Video Video” central we do often tend to spend a sizeable portion of our allotted space giving the proverbial thumb-to-nose maneuver to various and sundry audio/visual travesties.

Creem Profiles

LEMMY KILMISTER

(Pronounced “Boy Howdy!’’)

NEW BEATS

Moira McCormick

ELY FOR YOU TO SAY You gotta hand it to Joe Ely. Here’s a guy who’s been kicking around the club circuit for the past, what, 20 years or more, consistently puts on one of the most murderous rock ’n’ roll shows you’ll ever see, yet has been laboring under the double-edged sword of that status called “cult” for lo these many moons—and isn’t even bitter about it.

Backstage

Backstage

Where the Stars Tank Up & Let Their Images Down