OCTOBER 1987

CONTENTS

ROCK 'N' ROLL NEWS

Our Beer Desk reports that an ingenious series of ads promoting their longtime faves, the Replacements, recently appeared in what they call the "tip sheets” of this, the music industry. Seeing that the Mats are this month’s CREEM profile, and that the aforementioned ads bear a passing resemblance to that hallowed institution, Rock ’n’ Roll News is happy to reprint the tip sheet stuff for its sheer historicity, and other great reasons.

This Aerosmith Species

Chuck Eddy

Can’t say for sure whether an Aerosmith plate was on the table that first time I courted reefer madness back in Mike Murphy’s garage; coulda been Kiss or the Nuge, but as I recall Murph was especially into ’Smith, so it might as well have been them.

Creem Profiles

THE REPLACEMENTS

(Pronounced “Boy Howdy!”)

LETTERS

I just read the review of the soundtrack album from the film Athens, GAI Inside-Out. As producer of both the film and the album I have read many reviews of both running the gamut from very positive to extremely negative (with around 80% being positive and 20% negative).

NAME THAT SICKNESS

Bud Scoppa

The Cure are a squirelly, schizofrantic experiment that, for the most part, hits the nail right on the forehead with the release of this double LP set that'll no doubt raise, as well as shave, a few eyebrows amongst the legions out there in cynically-hip land.

INITIALLY COOL

Richard C. Walls!

My name is R.C. and I’m the bad rap reviewer/I cut down all these bums, I’m a reputation-skewer/You may think this is bullshit but I know I’m good/I’m the baddest rap reviewer in my neighborhood/And if this bragging bugs you I’m just staying true to form/’Cause if your rap ain’t boasting you're not keeping up the norm.

DATIN’ IS A THING THAT GROWN-UPS DO!

Rick Johnson

Motley Crue are truly a bunch of fun-lovin’ guys. They run around in outfits that’re about a grade short of bacon on the USDA scale. Their composite driving record puts them in a special category usually reserved for the deceased. And like the man said, when they’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

CONSUMER GUIDE

Robert Christgau

Maybe he’s lost touch so completely that he’s reduced to cannibalizing himself just when the market dictates the most drastic image shift of his chameleon career. But maybe this is just his way of melding two au courant concepts, Springsteenian rock and multi-producer crossover.

ROCK•A•RAMA

These goofballs can’t be relied on to keep their interview appointments and they’re no good with record-company politics, so it’s probably all for the best that I.R.S. has given up on them. Left to their own devices, however, the ’Tones have come up with a swingin’ slab that comes closer to capturing their party-hearty essence than anything else in their catalog.

Eleganza

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KIDS TODAY?

John Mendelssohn

There are lots of wide open spaces around where I live.

JOHN BARRY: The Man With The Golden Baton

Iman Lababedi

Composer and conductor John Barry has scored 12 of the 15 James Bond movies, which is an impressive part of a spectacular career. However, on the phone to London, I’m most interested in his association with the legendary jazz great Louis Armstrong.

Taking The Cure With ROBERT SMITH

Deborah Frost

Manhattan’s sumptuous St. Regis hotel, filled with people who look like C.E.O.s and deposed royalty and less fortunate souls yes-sir and yes-ma’am-ing them, is not where you’d expect to find a man who's made a career out of screaming sweet nothings like ”I will never be clean again!”

Elvis

L.L. Cool J Takes The Rap

Jon Young

Beats The Rap Raps It Up Raps Around The Clock Encourages Bad Puns

John Hiatt: "Have A Little Faith..."

Bill Holdship

John Hiatt is onstage at the Roxy in L.A.; just him and a piano. It’s part of this international convention A&M Records is holding to celebrate the company’s 25th anniversary, and Hiatt has just finished what will probably be a one-time-only set with guitarist Ry Cooder, bassist Nick Lowe and drummer Jim Keltner, the same stellar cast that backs him on his terrific and wonderful new LP, Bring The Family.

MARSHALL CRENSHAW Still Likes Girls And 11 Others

Laura Fissinger

Sorry, Aretha, but maybe there is such a thing as too much respect. Since his pop-heaven debut LP in 1983, Marshall Crenshaw has been bowed to by fans, praised by smitten critics, and treated by both like some sage or rock ’n’ roll demigod. That’s not so terrible—Marshall Crenshaw is one of the best pop-rockers in the known universe, past or present.

GENESIS, In Defense Of GENESIS

Chris Welch

“Because I’ve had solo success, people say I’ve suddenly got a stranglehold on the group, who want to make as much money as possible and are prepared to do whatever I say!” Phil Collins rolls his eyes to heaven and contorts his expressive face into a scowl.

Chris Isaak Has If All Backwards: This Ain't The Way Sinatra Did It

Bud Scoppa

Three teenagers stand by the backstage door of the Hollywood Palace. As the sun sets behind them, the kids—two girls and a boy—conduct a silent vigil, their eyes fixed on Vine Street. In their arms they clutch posters and album covers emblazoned with the puckishly handsome, fashionably photographed image of Chris Isaak—who has yet to show up for a soundcheck.

“I FEEL THE ROOM SWAYING”

J. Kordosh

Fresh from a trip over to England, where rock ’n’ roll was invented, the Replacements are back in the U.S.A. Sadly, they didn’t fare too well in England—that’s where Simple Minds’ live album rightfully entered the charts at #1—but maybe when they return they’ll be better and make lots of money.

PROUD TO LIKE BRYAN

Jim Feldman

Bryan Adams sure is cute. And sexy. Onstage at Madison Square Garden, he’s the rock ’n’ rolling (yeah, I’ve read the bio) all-American (wet) dream in the flesh, grey T-shirt, and old jeans rolled up at the cuffs. I guess I should point out that in a recent issue of this hallowed rag, Richard Riegel also described Adams as all-American—but on the downside: “in a displayed-at-the-checkout sense."

TECH TALK

Billy Cioffi

Few recording artists in the last decade have experienced the enormous success and subsequent fall from grace Peter Frampton has. If ever a pop artist suffered a classic case of backlash from both the record buying public and the critical media, Frampton is a textbook case.

NEW GEAR

The XG-1m is essentially a MIDI controller that a guitarist can play. The neck is fretswitched, has no strings on the fretboard and the strings on the body are touch-sensitive for the same attack control as found on touch-sensitive keyboards.

ON WORSHIPPING GIRLS

Iman Lababedi

Julie Burchill’s Girls On Film starts with a lie: men are worshipped in all walks of life, but women are worshipped only for their acting in movies. This statement is so hapless and self-loathing as to be beyond reasonable discourse. I worship the ground Simone De Beauvoir walked on, would love to have been an adult in the '50s solely for the chance to talk with Hannah Arendt, firmly believe Emily Bronte was one of the greatest people who ever lived, and have more than an affected liking for Billie Holliday.

DAVE MARSH ON ‘GLORY DAYS’

Comparing Glory Days to Born to Run.

“BUT DON’T YOU MISNAME IT...”

Chuck Eddy

Unless you count the supercool fact that it’s named after a Def Leppard song, there ain’t a whole lotta laffs in Rolling Stone’s latest rock-history text Rock Of Ages, which is a shame; rock-scribing’s always more credible when it at least tries to connect to the excitement the music’s been known to provide, but the trio of well-respected vet scholars who contribute a chronological 200-pages-or-so each here are too self-serious to climb down from their pseudo-objective third-person lecterns (and, in ’60s-chronicler Geoffrey Stokes’s case, ditch the uppity foreign-phrasedropping and hokey technical jargonese) and clue us in on why this garbage really matters to them.

MEDIA COOL

This is a fine summer rock ’n’ roll movie—all the “working class hero” elements are there in the proper places, though they almost seem like cliches at this point in time—but it’s really less memorable than the two most recent classics of the genre, American Hot Wax and The Buddy Holly Story.

SCREEN BEAT

Billy Altman

Let me tell you—your faithful “Screen Beat” reporter was about as psyched as a writer could be for this month’s column. A chance to discuss something actually controversial? To comment on the philosophical debate about the right of the artist to express him or herself as opposed to societal concerns over moral ethics and the possible exceeding of the boundaries of good taste?

WARREN ZEVON: Buy This Magazine Because Of Him!

Sylvie Simmons

Warren Zevon has perfected the art of squirming without perceptible movement.

BYE BYE BYRDIE

Jeff Tamarkin

Let’s just get this part out of the way, since it’s gonna come up anyway and maybe you’re one of the ones who got pissed off at ’em for doing it: the Long Ryders did that Miller Beer commercial because they needed the money. And they ain’t sorry they did.

SEE WESTY RUN

Moira McCormick

From the fertile almost-headwaters of the mighty Mississippi, a region also known as Minneapolis, comes yet another entry in the thoughtful thrash category: Run Westy Run. Three brothers, two guitars, one whomping good sound. The Westy’s unadorned, not too tight, just tuff enuff approach to this thing we call rock ’n’ roll invites comparisons to fellow Twin Cities bashers like the Replacements, Husker Du and Soul Asylum, but as the boys themselves will assure you, “Nobody in the band really looks to those groups as influences, y’know.”

HIP TO BE SQUARE

Jeff Tamarkin

If, as Huey boy says, it’s hip to be square, then meet the hippest Squares of all. The Washington Squares—Lauren Agnelli, Tom Goodkind and Bruce Paskow—are neobeatniks from that quaint bohemian mecca, Greenwich Village. They wear sunglasses and strum acoustic guitars.

WILDE IN THE STREETS

Vicki Arkoff

“MCA’s tactics toward my career have changed markedly over the last six months,” Kim Wilde casually analyses during a marketing meeting... er, a discussion. Wilde is a hitmaker, you see. Not an artist. Not even a singing sensation. She sets her sights on the top of the charts, and by golly, she gets there.

COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

Steve Appleford

The angry, pumped-up sound of Jane’s Addiction began less than two years ago, when singer Perry Farrell walked away from PSI-COM, the dissonant gloom ’n’ doom combo he was fronting at the time. Although PSI-COM had an independent record that was slowly climbing the college radio charts, the atmosphere surrounding the band had grown much too weird for Farrell.

GRAZING IN GRACELAND

Roy Trakin

Hugh Masakela hasn’t been back to South Africa since he left his homeland 27 years ago to study trumpet in London and New York, but he still feels the pull of those roots.

Backstage

BACKSTAGE

Where the Stars Tank Up & Let Their Images Down